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University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”

Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit

from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich

since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.

In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.

Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.

individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).

In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.

As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.

I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.

When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”

(The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock

Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)

The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.

Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.

Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out

Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.

Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.

if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.

The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.

The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.

If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.

these documents define the American social compact—the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state—that define the American experiment.

Here’s the first pair, from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn’t to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 

Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic.

The letter contains the famous declaration that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But I’m more interested in the two preceding sentences:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself.

the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. 

Citizen and state both have obligations, and if either side fails, it imperils the republic.

We see this reality play out in American history.

The seeds for the first great American crisis were sown in the original Constitution itself. By failing to end slavery and by failing to extend the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from the oppression of state and local governments, the early American government flatly failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration, and we paid the price in blood.

our nation seethes again today

The response to John Adams’s warning is not to arm the government with more power but to equip citizens with more virtue.

Its politics are gripped by deep hatred and abiding animosity, and its culture groans under the weight of human despair. Hatred rules our politics; anxiety, depression, and loneliness dominate our culture.

Those many cultural critics who look at the United States of America and declare that “something is wrong” are exactly right

here’s the difference—unlike the days when we could point to a specific source of government oppression, such as slavery or Jim Crow, the American government (though highly imperfect) currently protects individual liberty and associational freedoms to a degree we’ve never seen in American history.

Even after the Civil War, the quick end of Union occupation of the Confederacy enabled the creation of an apartheid substate in the South. Once again, the government failed to live up the core principles of the founding. It is by God’s grace that the Jim Crow regime ended primarily as the result of one of the Civil Rights Movement—one of the great Christian justice movements in history—and not as the result of another convulsive civil conflict.

But what can the government do about friendlessness? About anxiety? What can the government do to make sure that we are not—in Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase—“bowling alone?

that challenge is compounded by the fact that the most engaged American citizens are its most angry partisans.

And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 

The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived.

They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

maybe it’s not so astonishing, because accumulating wealth and power is not and never was the path to meaning and purpose.

much of both the right and left postliberal impulse is related to the first of John Adams’s two key sentences. If we don’t have a government “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” then their solution is to increase the power of government. Arm it with more power. 

But when it comes to government, you’re never arming an “it,” you’re arming a “them”—a collection of human beings who suffer from all the same character defects and cultural maladies as the rest of us

As James Madison observed in Federalist 51 (the second-best Federalist Paper), “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Yet American postliberalism asks us to empower men and women who frequently don’t even pretend to be virtuous, who often glory in their vice, all for the “common good.” 

We still battle the legacy of past injustice and the present reality of lingering discrimination, but there’s just no comparison between the legal systems that destabilized America and the legal systems that exist today. 

how do we do that? The path past animosity and against despair can be as short and simple as the path from Twitter to the kitchen table

It’s shifting the focus from the infuriating thing you can’t control to the people you can love, to the institutions you can build.

in this present time, thanks to the steadily-expanding sphere of American liberty, we have more ability to unite—including for religious purposes—than at any time in American history. Yet we still bowl alone. We tweet alone. We rage alone, staring at screens and forming online tribes that provide an empty simulacrum of real relationships.

for all too many of us that feels empty, like our small actions are simply inadequate to address the giant concerns that dominate our minds

To do the big thing—to heal our land—we have to do the small things.

We need a frame shift. Do not think of doing the small things as abandoning the larger quest. See every family, every friendship, every healthy church, every functioning school board as indispensable to our continued American experiment. 

For those who think and obsess about politics, this shift from big to small is hard. It’s hard to think that how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT

When our crisis is one of hatred, anxiety, and despair, don’t look to politics to heal our hearts. Our government can’t contend with “human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.” Our social fabric is fraying. The social compact is crumbling. Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame. 

Ms. James’s filing argued that the company misstated the value of the properties to lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service. Many of the statements, the filing argued, were “generally inflated as part of a pattern to suggest that Mr. Trump’s net worth was higher than it otherwise would have appeared.”

After receiving the subpoenas, lawyers for Mr. Trump filed a federal lawsuit seeking to halt Ms. James’s civil investigation and to bar her office from participating in the district attorney’s criminal investigation.

Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she can sue Mr. Trump and his company but cannot file criminal charges. Her inquiry is running parallel to a criminal investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, which is examining some of the same conduct.

Ms. James already questioned another of Mr. Trump’s sons, Eric Trump, in October 2020. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself in response to more than 500 questions, the new court filing said.

“Three years later, she is now faced with the stark reality that she has no case,” the spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

A case could be hard to prove. Property valuations are often subjective, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers are likely to note that his lenders and insurers — sophisticated financial institutions that turned a profit off their relationship with the Trumps — did not rely on the company’s estimates.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office and the New York attorney general’s office are investigating whether Mr. Trump or his family business, the Trump Organization, engaged in criminal fraud by intentionally submitting false property values to potential lenders.

The Atlanta district attorney is conducting a criminal investigation of election interference in Georgia by Mr. Trump and his allies.

In 2015, for example, while seeking to refinance a loan on his 40 Wall Street tower in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Trump’s statement of financial condition estimated that the property was worth $735 million. Yet one lender concluded it was worth only $257 million.

Ms. James’s lawyers also argued that Mr. Trump submitted at least two misleading statements to the Internal Revenue Service, saying that he substantially overstated the value of land at both his Seven Springs Estate in Westchester County and his Los Angeles Golf Club. The value of Seven Springs, Ms. James said, had been boosted by counting the value of seven nonexistent mansions, said to be worth $61 million. Mr. Trump received tax deductions worth millions of dollars on both properties.

Mr. Weisselberg, the filing contends, also falsely told one of Mr. Trump’s insurance companies that the property valuations were based on assessments by professional appraisers, when that was not the case. In reality, “the valuations were prepared by Trump Organization staff,” the filing said.

"victory for the rule of law and American democracy"

Trump had mounted an intense effort to avoid such scrutiny and had already lost cases in district and appellate courts as part of a broad campaign of obstruction of the committee, which has included expansive executive privilege claims by ex-aides -- even some, like his populist political guru Steve Bannon, who were not serving White House officials at the time of the insurrection.

The Supreme Court did not rule on the key legal question of what happens when there is a dispute between a current and a former president on the scope of executive privilege -- a concept meant to ensure that advice to a commander in chief from subordinates can stay private. But it allowed to stand a ruling by the appellate court that found Trump had not demonstrated that his concerns for executive branch confidentiality should override "profound interests in disclosure" cited by Biden.

Wednesday's ruling, in which only conservative Justice Clarence Thomas signaled dissent, will also offer a new mark of legitimacy to the select committee, amid claims by pro-Trump Republicans that it is an illegally constituted witch hunt despite being voted into being by the House. It will also boost the committee's race against time as it tries to complete its work before a possible new Republican majority shuts it down.

The decision means that 700 documents -- including schedules, speech and call logs, and three pages of handwritten notes from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows -- can be transferred from the National Archives to the House committee, a process that was already underway Wednesday evening.

On Tuesday, CNN exclusively reported that the committee had subpoenaed and obtained phone number records from one of the ex-President's sons, Eric Trump, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is engaged to his brother, Donald Trump Jr. The committee is interested in investigating the level of coordination between Trump's team and organizers of the Washington rally at which the then-President told supporters who later moved to the Capitol to "fight like hell" to stop Congress from certifying Biden's election win.

it appears unlikely to meaningfully reshape the fraught politics of the insurrection. Swathes of the Republican Party, especially in the House, have done their best to whitewash Trump's role that day as he contemplates a possible comeback presidential bid in 2024.

There is no doubt, however, that Trump will be apoplectic that his three Supreme Court nominees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not publicly dissent from denying his bid to keep his West Wing records secret.

Trump has repeatedly slammed the Supreme Court for throwing out his false claims of election fraud, claiming he was a victim of a miscarriage of justice even though his delusional cases were also dismissed by multiple lower courts.

Throughout his presidency, Trump appeared to equate judicial and Cabinet nominations with an act of patronage, viewing those selected as owing him a debt that would be repaid by pursuing his interests rather than honoring the rule of law and the Constitution.

The gathering clouds around Trump would represent a grave legal and reputational risk to a normal politician, but given his talent for impunity, it's far from certain that they will slow his political aspirations.

Grassroots movements don’t have a great track record, he wrote. “

Some marchers went into party politics: One participant from Maine—a woman who’d never done anything political but vote before attending the Women’s March—went home and became the chair of the Maine Democratic Party. Only a fraction of the marchers kept taking their cues from the Women’s March organization itself. And that makes sense: The Women’s March encompassed an almost unbelievably broad array of concerns.

Some did run for office, and some won. The march itself encompassed a diverse coalition of interest groups and the convention that followed, in October 2017, hosted workshops on the messier aspects of political organizing.

The members of that group threw themselves into the fight against partisan gerrymandering and worked to pass a state ballot initiative for an independent redistricting commission. Now, the Michigan maps have been redrawn. Though it’s impossible to measure how much the Women’s March contributed to that outcome, it unquestionably played a part.

Change happens when people run for office, amass coalitions of interest groups, engage in the messy practice of politics.”

They were everywhere: at fashion shows, cutting in front of rank-and-file participants at events, on magazine covers that they complained were not distributed widely enough. They accepted awards, posed for glamorous photo shoots, and fought a two-year battle to trademark the phrase “women’s march,” which they eventually dropped.

Organizers of marches are rarely given such disproportionate credit for their events’ success. Seasoned activists know that power of a grassroots movement lies not in its branding or executive leadership structure, but in the people who show up and sustain it. And yet, the Women’s March foursome quickly claimed to speak for something far more decentralized and organic than their own narrative would suggest.

But the organizers of Women’s March didn’t get that memo. The nonprofit that grew around it treated its four leaders — Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, Bob Bland, and Linda Sarsour — as celebrities, the visionary trailblazers at the head of a cohesive political movement.

But the Women’s March organization didn’t do much to refocus all that attention on the thousands of local organizers and millions of marchers who gave the march its meaning.

So when Mallory and Perez drew criticism for their support of noted sexist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, it was no big stretch for critics to use the leaders of the Women’s March to smear the entire movement.

The groundswell of women looking for community and purpose after Trump’s election needed some guidance—literally, marching orders. They did not need a clique of unelected spokespeople.

They had come to the Women’s March not as a unified people following a leader with a specific set of demands, but as individuals with a variety of related grievances, wanting to express a broad feeling of dismay at the direction the country was headed.

Many of them were inspired to undertake a deeper political education and find their place in other movements, including the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020. In an alternate timeline, with no Women’s March to warm them up, would many of the white people at those Black Lives Matter marches have shown up at all?

The most memorable subsequent actions of the Women’s March—the groups that traveled to D.C. to beg their senators not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the marches in the streets to protest the end of Roe v. Wade in Texas—what did they accomplish?

Protests and marches reassure people that they’re neither alone in their anger or fear, nor crazy for being angry and fearful. They introduce demonstrators to new friends and networks of political activity. There’s nothing like the rush of standing in a chanting crowd, sweating or shivering with thousands of people who share one’s outrage, to revive flagging willpower.

I’m sure there are plenty of Women’s Marchers who heaved a sigh of relief and went “back to brunch” after Joe Biden took office, thinking the work was done. But I don’t think that’s the prevailing view among the people who first woke up to politics when Trump became president. They watched, as we all did, as right-wing rioters took the Capitol last Jan. 6. They’re witnessing the dissolution of a broad voting rights bill at the hands of two Democratic senators. They’re watching abortion rights disintegrate in Texas and across the South. And they’re living through the hottest years in recorded history, bracing for the next hurricane or forest fire, as the people with the power to save life on Earth as we know it look the other way.

In this moment, under those conditions, with five years of hindsight, the Women’s March looks nothing short of revolutionary.

and he refused.

Wednesday was like no day I can recall in the history of the court, opening as it did with a “joint statement” released by Gorsuch and Sotomayor in which the two announced that the “reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends.”

“I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench,” and further affirmed that Roberts would have no additional comment. In other words, everyone has clarified that Gorsuch refuses to mask, that Sotomayor cannot come to court, and that nobody has asked him to do otherwise, but also that there is nothing to see here, kindly move along.

as NPR stands behind its story, conservatives claim that NPR is lying, and liberals claim that the issue isn’t who said what, so much as one justice refusing to make the workplace safe for a colleague.

Mike Davis—a minor player in the push to confirm Donald Trump’s judges and, more importantly, a former clerk and current friend of Gorsuch. Davis criticized the NPR story on Fox News on Wednesday. He was quick to condemn Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post and Nina Totenberg at NPR for, he claimed, intentionally spreading misinformation to smear Gorsuch.

whether Gorsuch is a monster or a libertarian hero is kind of unknowable without more information and also kind of irrelevant. I just wanted the court to tell us what their public health rules were, and when, and if the justices declined to abide by their own rules, to explain why.

The Supreme Court spent a bunch of money to upgrade the air filtration system, and for months, all nine Justices sat through these oral arguments, eight of them without masks. It was not an issue. Justice Sotomayor wore a mask, the other eight didn’t. And so two Fridays ago for some reason, the science somehow changed for the two COVID [mandate] cases, and Gorsuch didn’t want to play along with that. He wasn’t going to play politics. So he continued to do what he did for the prior months and not wear his mask.

Gorsuch believes that to wear a mask in January if you were not wearing one in November is to “play politics,” rather to respond directly to the evolving situation that is the coronavirus pandemic. Which means, one must also infer, that Justices like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas are “playing politics” by wearing masks now when they didn’t do so before. This is deeply strange not just because it denies that “the science changed” around omicron (it did). It’s deeply strange in that he expressly links the change in the court’s masking policy to the public oral arguments in the vaccine-or-test cases, suggesting that the two are somehow related, rather than simply coinciding in time.

His argument, ostensibly on behalf of Gorsuch—that the decision of justices to don masks this month is all gratuitous virtue signaling about an imaginary spike in a pandemic that coincides with oral arguments on the topic—is actually one of the most damning things I’ve read all week. He isn’t saying Gorsuch wants to infect his colleague. He seems to be saying that, the science notwithstanding, masks don’t make a lick of difference and everyone aside from himself is buckling to the creeping evil of the Fauci state.

Imagine if everyone had simply put on a mask for a few weeks, not because the science was perfect, but out of respect for a colleague they loudly claim to adore.

Gorsuch still isn’t wearing a mask, and Sotomayor is still phoning in from the safety of her chambers. Call it “playing politics,” but in another time, demonstrating out of an abundance of caution some regard for your colleagues’ health—without being asked—would have merely been “leadership,” or “empathy,” or even “humility.”  That other time is long gone. We are all of us scorpions in a bottle now.

Then invest your remaining money in safe assets, i.e., TIPS — Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. This sets a floor to your living standard. Until you withdraw money from the stock market, you spend only the floor amount

As you withdraw from the market, invest the proceeds in TIPS, which gives you more safe assets, justifying a higher living-standard floor.

Taking dividends and safely investing them is an example of “upside investing.” The key thing is never spending out of a pool of funds that isn’t fully safe. This way your living-standard floor will only rise

ersions of “upside investing” are considered in “Risk Less and Prosper: Your Guide to Safer Investing” by Zvi Bodie and Rachelle Taqqu.

people who said owning a house is a good way to protect yourself from the vicissitudes of the markets. Is that true, and if so, why?

Absolutely. When you own your home you’re protected from rent increases. The shelter that the house provides is like an inflation-protected annuity you might buy from an insurance company.

The one big advantage, though, even if you must move, is that homes are real assets. As such, they should maintain their real value during periods, like now, of high inflation.

Wall Street’s focus is on probability, whereas economists focus on outcomes. Losing everything, not matter how low the probability, is not something an economist would ever entertain as part of a reasonable financial plan.

if you do lose, it can be disastrous. Suppose you are blindfolded and have two options — stay where you are (hold safe bonds) or toss a die (hold risky stock).

many readers said that there’s no reason for a long-term investor to shy away from stocks because they always go up in the long run, say, over 20 or 30 years. Your response?

Unfortunately, the history is far too short to provide statistical reliability about cumulative returns over independent 30-year holding periods.

This statement is wrong. There are several 30-year periods over which stocks barely rose in inflation-adjusted terms, and many 20-year periods in which they outright declined. Plus, we don’t have enough independent observations to go on.

the need to pass sweeping voting rights legislation favored by Democrats is “equally as consequential” as the debt limit vote,

Republicans used the filibuster to prevent action on major parts of the Democratic agenda.

thwarting legislation that Democrats say would counter efforts in Republican-controlled states to impose new voting restrictions.

he can pass an immigration overhaul, address prison reform and enact more ambitious climate change legislation.

will leave office with half his priorities unmet.

Democrats bring legislation to the floor that would benefit communities of color, and Republicans won’t even engage in a good-faith debate.”

They must act with urgency to get rid of the filibuster.”

likely to give Democratic activists some renewed hope that he will take on the filibuster.

which he said would surpass the Affordable Care Act in its scope and impact on American society.

But Mr. Biden needs the support of all 50 Senate Democrats and nearly every House Democrat.

Islington’s project is just one of many innovations by cities around the world to provide heat to residents and businesses while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving efficiency and saving people money.

Stockholm is also using heat from sewage, as well as tapping data centers and other sources to supply heat for much of the city.

If you can start to use a whole array of waste heat streams, you’re taking out a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions,

We don’t really need to burn gas at 1,000 degrees centigrade [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit] to get your bath to 30 degrees centigrade,” Dr. Gluyas added. “What we need to do is work with nature to optimize the use of heat.

The concept of district heating networks is not new and may, in fact, date from 14th-century France or even, some say, the Roman Empire

New York City has one of the world’s largest district systems to provide heat, cooling and, in some cases, even electricity to many buildings in Manhattan.

Though perhaps less wasteful than having a boiler in every single building, it is not the most efficient district heating system, as it was designed to heat a building on the coldest day of the year with all the windows open — partly a public health legacy of the 1918 pandemic.

But the innovation — which took more than five years to plan and build, and began operations in March 2020 — was to feed in heat from the Underground.

Typically, the hot air from the Underground is released into the air through stations and ventilation shafts. In this case, however, air is drawn from a ventilation shaft at an abandoned Underground station into an energy center where a series of heat transfers take place, eventually leading to delivery of the heat into the buildings in the network.

For our residents, locally, this is absolutely the right thing to do,” because it saves money in an area where many residents struggle to afford heat, Mr. Townsend said. “And this is a perfect solution for big cities across the world.

Heat from wastewater and sewage now provides about 70 percent of the space heating and hot water for the 43 buildings connected to the network, with the remaining 30 percent coming from natural gas, though the goal is to end that by 2030. The electricity powering the heat pumps is 97 percent zero-carbon, supplied by hydroelectric dams.

Every time we take a shower, do the dishes or do a load of laundry, the water is still hot when it goes down the drain,” said Ashley St. Clair, Vancouver’s senior renewable energy planner.“It’s flowing under our streets, and we’re already collecting it through the traditional infrastructure of wastewater pipes, and to be able to tap into that waste heat is really the ultimate circular economy.”

And it cannot come soon enough: This year alone, Vancouver has experienced several bouts of extreme weather, made more likely and intense because of climate change: heat domes, wildfires and catastrophic flooding, which recently cut the city off by road and rail from the rest of Canada. Having its own heat and hot water supply has been an additional benefit of the project, Ms. St. Clair said.

Stockholm, Mr. Rylander said, has particularly good connectivity to Northern Europe, Finland and Russia, which makes it attractive to data center companies, as does Sweden’s relatively clean power mix. However, they use biomass to produce a significant amount of heat and power, the renewable classification of which is debated by experts.

“If you establish a data center in a cold place like Sweden, it’s stupid to waste the heat, because heat has power and value in a cold country.”

“We’re very clear that we are an experiment, and we are doing the work that will enable others to benefit from it.”

the Great Resignation, it turns out, is largely an American phenomenon. European nations have been much more successful than we have at getting people back to work. In France, in particular, employment and labor force participation are now well above prepandemic levels. What explains this difference?

Europe, on the other hand, mainly relied on job retention schemes — government aid intended to keep people on employer payrolls even if they weren’t working at the moment.

where European labor support helped keep workers linked to their old jobs, facilitating a rapid return, U.S. policy allowed many of those links to be severed, making an employment recovery harder.

Perhaps one reason Europeans aren’t engaging in an American-style Great Resignation is that they don’t hate their jobs quite as much.

a significant number may have realized that low-paying jobs with lousy working conditions weren’t worth having

some jobs that are grueling and poorly paid here are less awful on the other side of the Atlantic. Famously, in Denmark McDonald’s pays more than $20 an hour and offers six weeks of paid vacation each year

the U.S. does stand out among wealthy countries for having a low minimum wage, for offering very little vacation time and for failing to offer parental and sick leave

“This communication elevates progress on renewable energy and efficiency to a matter of energy security,” said Lisa Fischer, a programme leader at E3G,  an independent climate change think tank. “This may transform politics – geopolitical interests will no longer come at the expense of climate policy, but climate policy as a response to geopolitical challenges.”

The strategy includes importing more gas from non-Russian suppliers, boosting volumes of biomethane and renewable hydrogen production and imports, and reducing the use of fossil fuels in homes, buildings and industry more quickly by increasing energy efficiency, renewables and electrification.

The European Union has said the answer to ensure greater energy resilience is to invest in renewables, while in the meantime diversifying gas supplies and boosting underground gas storage to at least 90 per cent across the EU by 1 October

Anthony Browne, Conservative chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Environment, said the Ukraine crisis had shown that net zero was a matter of the UK’s national security.

the UK is significantly less reliant on Russian fossil fuels than the European Union.  The EU imports 90 percent of its gas consumption, with Russia providing around 45 percent of those imports and some countries like Germany particularly reliant. Russia also accounts for around 25 percent of oil imports and 45 percent of coal imports.

The proposal is not a done deal, however, and will need to be implemented by European member states.“It is largely unclear whether they will do so and how such measures can be financed,” said Michael Pahle, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Pahle also said there is a risk that if scaled-up targets end up not being met, failure could be attributed to overly ambitious climate policy, rather than energy security.

In Russia in March, the four most-downloaded apps for both MacOS and Android were VPNs.

But the fifth most in-demand app was the encrypted messenger Telegram, probably the best available source of uncensored news about the war. I, for one, am using Telegram to access news from a wealth of Russian and Ukrainian sources. 

According to a poll taken in March, TV is the main source of information for 50% of Russians, and 45% trust it. But then that’s just what people living under an autocratic regime tell pollsters — not necessarily what they actually think.

even if the poll data reflect reality, there is a large age gap in TV viewing: Younger people watch little TV, and more than a quarter of adult Russians don’t watch it at all, instead relying on the internet for news. They are the ones who use VPNs to access independent news sources and subscribe to unfiltered Telegram channels. They also know that Google is a better search engine than Yandex.

Even Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, openly admits using a VPN to access the banned Western social networks: The official policy is that such use is not punishable. And indeed there have been no reprisals so far for using Facebook or Instagram, both declared “extremist” organizations. It’s extremely difficult for the secret police to track such use on a grand scale while VPNs remain legal.

And even if one assumes that a TV-only audience of older, technology-shy people really exists, it cannot be isolated from direct communication with other people whose horizons aren’t as limited.

older Russians are extremely cautious on the phone (and now also on Skype, WhatsApp, Telegram or any other means of remote communication). They will not endanger themselves by blabbing heresy — too many people suffered for it in the Soviet Union, a country that modern Russia increasingly resembles.

The surviving Soviets may not have their children’s technology smarts, but they beat them hands down in the kind of street smarts required for survival in a police state. They also have plenty of experience reading between propaganda lines. The assumption that these people, who laughed privately at the Soviet ideological fodder, have suddenly lost their ability to take state discourse with a bucketful of salt, seems less plausible to me than the idea that they’re reverting to oyster mode as their familiar environment returns.

Ordinary Germans did know what the Nazis were up to, research has shown. Even with that era’s relatively limited media and communications, the Nazis’ crimes were impossible to miss, no matter how one might have tried. They could, however, refuse to fess up to their knowledge; they could even convince themselves of their own ignorance. 

That, too, takes quite an effort, I realize as I read some fellow Russians’ social network posts or listen to Moscow acquaintances say things like “Not everything is black and white” or “We will never know the whole truth.” I have a sense that, if I press them, some might burst into tears or lash out at me in anger. The strain is ever-present, and I’m not sure whether it’s rooted in fear or an instinct for self-preservation: My own family struggles to cope with knowing that the Russian atrocities are being committed in our name, too.

It’s a burden we have to bear — probably for the rest of our lives. Those who will insist they’d been fooled by propaganda won’t be free of it. In these brutal weeks, only the openly, actively complicit are able to avoid the weight that’s bending Russians to the ground. 

With so many needs met, economists estimate China now has to invest about $9 to produce each dollar of GDP growth, up from less than $5 a decade ago, and a little over $3 in the 1990s.

Returns on assets by private firms have declined to 3.9% from 9.3% five years ago, according to Bert Hofman, head of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. State companies’ returns have retreated to 2.8% from 4.3%.

China’s labor force, meanwhile, is shrinking, and productivity growth is slowing. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, productivity gains contributed about a third of China’s GDP growth, Hofman’s analysis shows. That ratio has declined to less than one sixth in the past decade.

Changing that would require China’s government to undertake measures aimed at encouraging people to spend more and save less. That could include expanding China’s relatively meager social safety net with greater health and unemployment benefits.

Much of the debt was incurred by cities. Limited by Beijing in their ability to borrow directly to fund projects, they turned to off-balance sheet financing vehicles whose debts are expected to reach more than $9 trillion this year,

only about 20% of financing firms used by local governments to fund projects have enough cash reserves to meet their short-term debt obligations, including bonds owned by domestic and foreign investors.

The solution for many parts of the country has been to keep borrowing and building. Total debt, including that held by various levels of government and state-owned companies, climbed to nearly 300% of China’s GDP as of 2022, surpassing U.S. levels and up from less than 200% in 201

Household consumption makes up only about 38% of GDP in China, relatively unchanged in recent years, compared with around 68% in the U.S.,

The most obvious solution, economists say, would be for China to shift toward promoting consumer spending and service industries, which would help create a more balanced economy

i and some of his lieutenants remain suspicious of U.S.-style consumption, which they see as wasteful at a time when China’s focus should be on bolstering its industrial capabilities and girding for potential conflict with the West, people with knowledge of Beijing’

The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires.

A plan announced in late July to promote consumption was criticized by economists both in and outside China for lacking details. It suggested promoting sports and cultural events, and pushed for building more convenience stores in rural areas.

Instead, guided by a desire to strengthen political control, Xi’s leadership has doubled down on state intervention to make China an even bigger industrial power, strong in government-favored industries such as semiconductors, EVs and AI.

While foreign experts don’t doubt China can make headway in these areas, they alone aren’t enough to lift up the entire economy or create enough jobs for the millions of college graduate

a speech made by Xi six months earlier to senior officials, in which the leader emphasized the importance of focusing on long-term goals instead of pursuing Western-style material wealth. “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” Xi said in the speech. 

In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1.

A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.

Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,”

Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,”

what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?

Even Ericsson, the stubborn old goat, can sigh and mark the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”

Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His 26-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no-prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other

And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide

Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world.

As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.

As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized

None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal.

in the U.S., the world’s most advanced economy, something much more remarkable seems to be happening. American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?

what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men.

The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s job

With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success

Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women

Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true

Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city

The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class

The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions

“Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”

Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.

“Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”

In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.

Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation

Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.

The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits.

The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining.

Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time

The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.

women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980

About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast.

When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”

A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire,

The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical

Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable

Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities,

Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.

What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective,

Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational”

he aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences

Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life.

Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”

he association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.

To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools

emographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.

Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s

“We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” s

n a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

ne would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”

I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent.

the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers

As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”

“The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate.” But they don’t.

Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust.

Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.

it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs.

Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away.

realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established their careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to get to their own careers more quickly. They would be a campus of Tracy Flicks, except that they seemed neither especially brittle nor secretly falling apart.

Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, the gender gap pretty much disappears. But the story is not so simple. Wealthier students tend to go to elite private schools, and elite private schools live by their own rules.

Quietly, they’ve been opening up a new frontier in affirmative action, with boys playing the role of the underprivileged applicants needing an extra boost

among selective liberal-arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points

the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has voted to investigate what some academics have described as the “open secret” that private schools “are discriminating in admissions in order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance.”

To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.”

Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days

“Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”

the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up

identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire)

t’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.

movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys

In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs.

allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge.

Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.

his is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their familie

ncreasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are.

or all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage

he women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’

Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?

Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”

The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years.

Many of their mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college.

Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,”

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men

the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach.

The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.

Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack.

At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood,

the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980

I do ask you to believe that every person you meet has this moral essence, this quality of soul.

Because humans have souls, each one is of infinite value and dignity. Because humans have souls, each one is equal to all the others. We are not equal in physical strength or I.Q. or net worth, but we are radically equal at the level of who we essentially are.

Donald Trump, and Trumpism generally, is the embodiment of an ethos that covers up the soul. Or to be more precise, each is an ethos that deadens the soul under the reign of the ego.

It is the place where our moral yearnings come from, too. Most people yearn to lead good lives. When they act with a spirit of cooperation, their souls sing and they are happy.

when they feel their lives have no moral purpose, they experience a sickness of the soul — a sense of lostness, pain and self-contempt.

Hawks and cobras are not morally responsible for their actions; but humans, possessors of souls, are caught in a moral drama, either doing good or doing ill.

The soul is the name we can give to that part of our consciousness where moral life takes place. The soul is the place our moral sentiments flow from, the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty.

Trump, and Trumpism generally, represents a kind of nihilism that you might call amoral realism. This ethos is built around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

Might makes right. I’m justified in grabbing all that I can because if I don’t, the other guy will. People are selfish; deal with it.

This ethos — which is central to not only Trump’s approach to life, but also Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s — gives people a permission slip to be selfish.

In an amoral world, cruelty, dishonesty, vainglory and arrogance are valorized as survival skills.

In the mind of an amoral realist, life is not a moral drama; it’s a competition for power and gain, red in tooth and claw. Other people are not possessors of souls, of infinite dignity and worth; they are objects to be utilized.

Biden talks a lot about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism

At its deepest level, that struggle is between systems that put the dignity of individual souls at the center and systems that operate by the logic of dominance and submission.

The presidency, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

One of the hardest, soul-wearying parts of living through the Trump presidency was that we had to endure a steady downpour of lies, transgressions and demoralizing behavior

Say what you will about Biden, but he has generally put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect.

The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite.

the weird thing is the way that it infects attitudes on issues that don’t actually involve wokeism but are seen as woke-adjacent.

The now-classic example is the way hostility to mask mandates, which were mainly about protecting others, turned into highly partisan opposition to Covid vaccination, which is mainly about protecting yourself.

The same thing, I’d argue, applies to energy policy. At this point, investing in renewable energy is simply a good business proposition; Texas Republicans have had to abandon their own free-market, anti-regulation ideology in the effort to strangle wind and solar powe

But renewable energy is something environmentalists favor; it’s being promoted by the Biden administration. So in the minds of Texas right-wingers the wind has become woke, and wind power has become something to be fought even if it hurts business and costs the state both money and jobs.

with those often-invisible systems that we take for granted until they fail, such as the electrical grid or medical implants, pharmaceuticals and the blood supply.

It’s possible to see a future in which we are dependent on the perfect, continuous performance of air conditioning the way many people are dependent on lifesaving drugs, planes are dependent on air traffic control, and a colony on the moon or Mars would be dependent on perpetual sources of oxygen and water.

AC’s basic trajectory has been from a curiosity and luxury to an amenity to a necessity. It has changed how we live and where we live, and reconfigured our cities, houses, politics and identity. And now it is bound up with our hope for survival as a species.

Where would we be without it? Much of the South would be poorer than it is now, and isolated, with high mortality rates and lower educational achievement. There would be no skyscrapers in Atlanta, no high-rise apartment buildings in Dallas and Houston. In our hottest states, including the Sun Belt, public institutions, including universities, libraries and entertainment venues, would be fewer and more minimally developed.

Entertainment would still be seasonal. City theaters would close as temperatures rise, and music, drama and the movies would migrate outdoors. Many of the products we take for granted, including textiles and foodstuffs that rely on atmospheric controls or refrigeration, would be of far inferior quality and much more expensive.

Architecture would look very different, at least for those who could afford such niceties as higher ceilings, wider eaves and more sharply pitched roofs (all of which can passively cool a house). The picture window — a source not just of light but also of heat, and which can’t be opened for ventilation — would not be a key element of suburban design.

The ranch house, with thin walls and low ceilings, laid out in relentless grids across the Sun Belt since the 1950s and immortalized in the haunting photographs of Robert Adams, wouldn’t define the vernacular architecture of America.

The net migration from the South, which continued from the Civil War until around 1964 (when air conditioning was well established in the country’s hottest states), would be ongoing.

air conditioning increased political polarization, with an influx of Northern Republicans into the South, and a resorting of the Democrats into a northern, more progressive, urban party without a conservative Dixiecrat wing.

It may have also changed the way women conceive of feminism and liberation from patriarchy, from a model based on independence and working outside the home in the early 20th century to one structured around the supposed leisure offered by the modern, air-conditioned tract home in the middle of the century.

Less tangible are the poetic details of life before AC that are embedded in art and literature. Staying cool in hot weather was often a social experience, a collective lethargy that brought one closer to family and community

Throughout the history of mechanical ventilation and “comfort cooling,” there was resistance to innovation, with a vocal and determined “open air” movement that opposed mechanical ventilation in public schools.

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.

In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.

Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.

These difficulties for cities will not go away anytime soon. Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:

First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.

three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”

“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.

the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”

Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”

the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.

Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”

The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown.

The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.

Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.

Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,”

His answer:

Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.