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if we are agreed that Beijing looks set to stop the largest property boom in history without unleashing a systemic financial crisis, it is doing something truly remarkable. It is setting a new standard in economic policy.

Is this perhaps what policy looks like if it actually takes financial stability seriously? And if we look in the mirror, why aren’t we applauding more loudly?

Add to real estate the other domestic factor roiling the Chinese financial markets: Beijing’s remarkable humbling of China’s platform businesses, the second-largest cluster of big tech in the world. That too is without equivalent anywhere else.

Beijing’s aim is to ensure that gambling on big tech no longer produces monopolistic rents. Again, as a long-term policy aim, can one really disagree with that?

we have two dramatic and deliberate policy-induced shocks of the type for which there is no precedent in the West. Both inflict short-term pain with a view to longer-term social, economic and financial stability.

Ultimately political economy determines the conditions for long-run growth. So if you had to bet on a regime, which might actually have what it takes to break a political economy impasse, to humble vested interests and make a “big play” on structural change, which would it be? The United States, the EU or Xi’s China?

Beijing’s challenge right now is to manage the fall out from the two most dramatic development policies the world has ever seen, the one-child policy and China’s urbanisation, plus the historic challenge of big tech — less a problem specific to China than the local manifestation of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”.

no, Xi’s regime has not yet presented a fully convincing substitute plan. But, as Michael Pettis has forcefully argued, China has options. There is an entire range of policies that Beijing could put in place to substitute for the debt-fuelled infrastructure and housing boom.

demography is normally treated as a natural parameter for economic activity. But in China’s case the astonishing fact is that the sudden ageing of its workforce is also a policy-induced challenge. It is a legacy of the one-child policy — the most gigantic and coercive intervention in human reproduction ever undertaken.

China needs to spend heavily on renewable energy and power distribution to break its dependence on coal. If it needs more housing, it should be affordable. All of this would generate more balanced growth. 5 per cent? Perhaps not, but certainly healthier and more sustainable.

If it has not so far pursued an alternative growth model in a more determined fashion, some of the blame no doubt falls on the prejudices of the Beijing policy elite. But even more significant are surely the entrenched interests of the infrastructure-construction-local government-credit machine, in other words the kind of political economy factors that generally inhibit the implementation of good policy.

The problem is only too familiar in the West. In Europe and the US too, such interest group combinations hobble the search for new growth models. In the United States they put in doubt the possibility of the energy transition, the possibility of providing a healthcare system that is fit for purpose and any initiative on trade policy that involves widening market access.

First and foremost China needs a welfare state befitting of its economic development.

On balance, if you want to be part of history-making economic transformation, China is still the place to be. But it is undeniably shifting gear. And thanks to developments both inside and outside the country, investors will have to reckon with a much more complex picture of opportunity and risk. You are going to need to pick smart and follow the politics and geopolitics closely.

If on the other hand you want to invest in the green energy transition — the one big vision of economic development that the world has come up with right now — you simply have to have exposure to China, whether directly or indirectly by way of suppliers to China’s green energy sector. China is where the grand battle over the future of the climate is going to be fought. It will be a huge driver of innovation, capital accumulation and profit, the influence of which will be felt around the world.

it is one key area that both the Biden administration and the EU would like to “silo off” from other areas of conflict with China.

I worry that we may be too focused on the medium-term. Given the news out of Hong Kong and mainland China, Covid may yet come back to bite us.

Here too China is boxed in by its own success. It has successfully pursued a no-Covid policy, but due to the failing of the rest of the world, it has been left to do so in “one country”.

Until China finds some way to contain the risks, this is a story to watch. A dramatic Omicron surge across China would upend the entire narrative of the last two years, which is framed by Beijing success in containing the first wave.

Telegram videos and more. Ukrainian entrepreneurs are even hijacking their own apps to let Russians know what’s going on. While such efforts have mixed success, they demonstrate the ingenuity needed to win the information battle that’s as old as war itself.

Meanwhile, an organization called Squad303 built an online tool that lets people automatically send Russians texts, WhatsApp messages and emails. Some of the most effective strategies rely on old-school technologies. The use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, has skyrocketed in Russia since the war began. That may explain why the country’s telecom regulator has forced Google to delist thousands of URLs linked to VPN sites.

For Paulius Senūta, an advertising executive in Lithuania, the weapon of choice is the telephone. He recently launched “CallRussia,” a website that enables Russian speakers to cold-call random Russians based on a directory of 40 million phone numbers. Visitors to the site get a phone number along with a basic script developed by psychologists that advises callers to share their Russian connections and volunteer status before encouraging targets to hear what’s really going on. Suggested lines include “The only thing (Putin) seems to fear is information,” which then lets callers stress the need to put it “in the hands of Russians who know the truth and stand up to stop this war.” In its first eight days, Senūta says users from eastern Europe and elsewhere around the world placed nearly 100,000 calls to strangers in Russia.

“One thing is to call them and the other thing is how to talk with them,” says Senūta. As with any telemarketing call, the response from those on the receiving end has been mixed. While some have been receptive, others are angry at the interruption or suspicious that it’s a trick. “How do you speak to someone who has been in a different media environment?”

Terms like “war,” “invasion,” or “aggression” have been banned from coverage, punishable by fines of up to five million rubles (now roughly $52,000) or 15 years in prison. Says Kozlovsky: “It’s getting worse and worse.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger uploaded a lengthy video message to Russians via Telegram that included both Russian and English subtitles.) However, that it doesn’t mean it hurts to also try new things.

The question is whether Russians realize they’re being fed on a media diet of state-sponsored lies and criminalization of the truth. Dittmer believes many Russians are eager to know what’s really going on. So far, RSF’s “Truth Wins” campaign has been viewed more than 150,000 times in Russia. (Previous efforts by DDB and RSF in various countries have included embedding censored news in a virtual library within Minecraft and a playlist on Spotify.)

Censorship also cuts both ways. While Russian authorities have banned Facebook and Instagram as “extremist,” Western news outlets have in turn cut ties with state-controlled outlets because of Putin’s disinformation campaign. While pulling products and partnerships out of Russia may send a powerful message to the Kremlin, such isolation also risks leaving a bubble of disinformation intact. Luckily, “it’s pretty much impossible to censor effectively,” says RSF’s Dittmer, pointing to further efforts to use blockchain and gaming technology to spread news. “We can play the cat and mouse game with the internet censors in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

"This package is also focused on protecting people from volatile gas prices, and advancing clean transportation," Newsom said.Rebates like the ones Newsom is proposing take time to deliver, with the governor's office saying people could see the money by July.Rising fuel prices are a tricky policy issue for Newsom, who is trying to wean the state off fossil fuels. He has signed executive orders aimed at banning the sale of new gas-powered cars in the state by 2035 and halting all oil extraction by 2045.He has proposed a total of $10 billion in funding over six years to boost zero-emission vehicle production and build charging stations.

Newsom's plan must be approved by the Legislature, where Democrats dominate both the Assembly and the Senate. Democratic leaders, however, don't like the idea of giving money to rich people.They have been discussing their own rebate proposal, one that would give $200 rebates to every taxpayer and their children with taxable income less than $125,000 for single filers and $250,000 for joint filers. That means a family of five would get $1,000 while a single parent with two children would get $600.

A spokesperson for Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon called Newsom's idea "consistent with the Speaker's goal of providing targeted financial relief to Californians most in need" but stressed the idea is "in the very early stages."Newsom's plan is similar to a separate proposal floated last week by more moderate Democrats in the state Assembly that would give every taxpayer $400, regardless of income.

"People need relief now," said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher. "We've got now, like, four different competing plans amongst the Democrats. These guys are going to negotiate against themselves for weeks to months and who knows what we're going to get."

But Ukrainians never thought that the alliance and the allies were different."Zelenskyy told NATO that his country still needs more military equipment, specifically tanks and fighter jets, and chided them for not establishing a no-fly zone.

Biden has committed $2 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of his presidency, including an $800 million military package last week.

The NATO summit was followed by a meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations and an address to European Union leaders, the White House said.

The U.S. also said that international organizations and multilateral corporations should no longer conduct their activities with Russia in a business-as-usual manner, the second official said. “Our purpose here is to methodically remove the benefits and privileges Russia once enjoyed as a participant in the international economic order,” the official said.The new sanctions include 328 Duma members; Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s largest financial institution Sberbank and a Putin adviser since the 1990s; member of the Russian elite Gennady Timchenko, his companies and his family members; 17 board members of the Russian financial institution Sovcombank; and 48 large Russian defense state-owned enterprises

As the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II enters its second month, the discussions here could be among the most consequential of Biden’s presidency. When Biden was asked as he was leaving the White House for Brussels how likely he thought the threat of chemical warfare was, he said, “I think it’s a real threat.”  

“We are united in condemning the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression and in our support for Ukraine sovereignty and integrity," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of the meeting. The group would also discuss efforts to strengthen the military alliance's defenses in the short and the long term, he said.

Biden plans to travel to Poland on Friday to offer support as it deals with millions of refugees who are fleeing the conflict and to thank U.S. troops stationed there.

Biden also addressed the Russian people, telling them: "You, the Russian people, are not our enemy.""The American people stand with you and the brave people of Ukraine for peace," Biden said.

In an address from Warsaw Saturday, President Joe Biden made remarks seemingly directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. "For god's sake, this man cannot remain in power," Biden said.After the speech, the White House released a statement saying the president wasn't calling for a regime change.

"Vladimir Putin's aggression have cut you, the Russian people, off from the rest of the world, and it’s taking Russia back to the 19th century. This is not who you are," Biden said.Biden praised Ukrainian resistance, saying the U.S. stands with the people of Ukraine and will continue to support them.

This is a delayed but inescapable consequence of China’s birth trends from the era of the notorious one-child policy (1980-2015)

Beijing thus far has ignored this looming crisis because planners don’t prepare for things they don’t track. Officials don’t regard data on the family as relevant to statecraft or security. So statistics tally males and females—not uncles, sisters, cousins, widows.

We estimate past patterns and project trends through demographic modeling—simulations replicating China’s available population numbers—while “building” family trees consistent with those figures. We can approximate nationwide changes in China’s extended family networks in the past with reasonable validity and describe what lies ahead with fair confidence.

we are only now living through the era of “peak kin” in China. In terms of sheer numbers, Chinese networks of blood relatives were never nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century.

Because of dramatic postwar improvements in health and mortality, men and women in their 40s today have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960.

China’s “kin explosion” may be an important, heretofore unobserved factor in China’s remarkable economic performance since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

China is now on the cusp of a severe and unavoidable “kin crash,” driven by prolonged subreplacement fertility

China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese history.

A “kin famine” will thus unfold unforgivingly over the next 30 years—starting now. As it intensifies, the Chinese family—the most important institution protecting Chinese people against adversity in bad times and helping them seize opportunity in good times—will increasingly falter in both these crucial functions.

China’s withering of the family is set to collide with a tsunami of new social need from the country’s huge elderly population, whose ranks will more than double between 2020 and 2050

By 2050 living parents and in-laws will outnumber children for middle-aged Chinese men and women. Thus exigency may overturn basic familial arrangements that have long been taken for granted. The focus of the family in China will necessarily turn from the rearing of the young to the care of the old.

The reliability and durability of familial bonds of duty will be an increasingly critical question—perhaps even a matter of life and death for many, including frail and impecunious elders in the Chinese hinterlands

growing numbers of men in decades ahead will enter old age without spouses or children—the traditional sources of support for the elderly.

by 2050, 18% of China’s men in their 60s will have no living descendants, twice the fraction today.

who will look after these unfortunates?

Still worse than the macroeconomic implications of old-age dependency may be the effect of China’s family crisis on the so-called micro-foundations of the national economy—the little things that make markets work.

Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi networks, a distinctive form of special relationships and professional connections, have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. The proliferation of blood relatives was likely a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s phenomenal upswing.

the kin dearth may prove an economic depressant well beyond what current “head count” projections suggest.

China’s coming family revolution could easily conduce to a rise in personal risk aversion. Risk aversion may in turn dampen mobility, including migration.

Less migration means less urbanization, which means less growth—and possibly still more pessimism and risk aversion.

If the waning of the family requires China to build a huge social welfare state over the coming generation, as we surmise it will, Beijing would have that much less wherewithal for influencing events abroad through economic diplomacy and defense policy.

by 2050 at least half of China’s overall pool of male military-age manpower will be made up of only children. Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will presage lineage extinction for many Chinese families.

Autocracies are typically tolerant of casualties—but maybe not in the only-child China of today and the decades ahead.

Failure to contemplate the implications of the coming changes in Chinese family structure could prove a costly blind spot for the Communist Party. Blind spots expose governments to the risk of strategic surprise. The consequences of social, economic and political risks tend to be greatest when states aren’t prepared for them.

let’s shift from self-flagellation to prescription

The essence of the humanities’ failure, over the last generation but especially in the internet era, 0c 0cis a refusal to accept that a similar kind of separation is necessary for what the guardians of the liberal arts are trying to preserve.

The quest, understandably enough, has always been to sustain relevance and connection — to politics, to professional life, to whatever trends appear at the cutting edge of fashion, to the idea of progress

But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself (the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially) is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate

“The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.”

a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.

at the very least it would involve embracing an identity as the modern multiversity’s internal exiles — refusing any resentment of lavishly funded STEM buildings because that funding is corruption and your own calling is more esoteric and monastic, declining any claim to political relevance because what you’re offering is above and before the practical business of the world

It would mean banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths. It would mean cultivating a set of skills even less immediately useful to technocratic professional life than reading a dense 19th-century text — memorization and recitation, to your classmates if possible

“My first and biggest wish is that we had known early that Covid-19 was airborne,”

, “Once you’ve realized that, it informs an entirely different strategy for protection.” Masking, ventilation and air cleaning become key, as well as avoiding high-risk encounters with strangers, he says.

Instead of washing our produce and wearing hand-sewn cloth masks, we could have made sure to avoid superspreader events and worn more-effective N95 masks or their equivalent. “We could have made more of an effort to develop and distribute N95s to everyone,” says Dr. Volckens. “We could have had an Operation Warp Speed for masks.”

We didn’t realize how important clear, straight talk would be to maintaining public trust. If we had, we could have explained the biological nature of a virus and warned that Covid-19 would change in unpredictable ways.  

In the face of a pandemic, he says, the public needs an early basic and blunt lesson in virology

“The science is really important, but if you don’t get the trust and communication right, it can only take you so far,”

and mutates, and since we’ve never seen this particular virus before, we will need to take unprecedented actions and we will make mistakes, he says.

Since the public wasn’t prepared, “people weren’t able to pivot when the knowledge changed,”

By the time the vaccines became available, public trust had been eroded by myriad contradictory messages—about the usefulness of masks, the ways in which the virus could be spread, and whether the virus would have an end date.

, the absence of a single, trusted source of clear information meant that many people gave up on trying to stay current or dismissed the different points of advice as partisan and untrustworthy.

We didn’t know how difficult it would be to get the basic data needed to make good public-health and medical decisions. If we’d had the data, we could have more effectively allocated scarce resources

For much of the pandemic, doctors, epidemiologists, and state and local governments had no way to find out in real time how many people were contracting Covid-19, getting hospitalized and dying

Doctors didn’t know what medicines worked. Governors and mayors didn’t have the information they needed to know whether to require masks. School officials lacked the information needed to know whether it was safe to open schools.

people didn’t know whether it was OK to visit elderly relatives or go to a dinner party.

just months before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists released a white paper detailing the urgent need to modernize the nation’s public-health system still reliant on manual data collection methods—paper records, phone calls, spreadsheets and faxes.

While the U.K. and Israel were collecting and disseminating Covid case data promptly, in the U.S. the CDC couldn’t. It didn’t have a centralized health-data collection system like those countries did, but rather relied on voluntary reporting by underfunded state and local public-health systems and hospitals.

doctors and scientists say they had to depend on information from Israel, the U.K. and South Africa to understand the nature of new variants and the effectiveness of treatments and vaccines. They relied heavily on private data collection efforts such as a dashboard at Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center that tallied cases, deaths and vaccine rates globally.

With good data, Dr. Ranney says, she could have better managed staffing and taken steps to alleviate the strain on doctors and nurses by arranging child care for them.

To solve the data problem, Dr. Ranney says, we need to build a public-health system that can collect and disseminate data and acts like an electrical grid. The power company sees a storm coming and lines up repair crews.

If we’d known how damaging lockdowns would be to mental health, physical health and the economy, we could have taken a more strategic approach to closing businesses and keeping people at home.

t many doctors say they were crucial at the start of the pandemic to give doctors and hospitals a chance to figure out how to accommodate and treat the avalanche of very sick patients.

The measures reduced deaths, according to many studies—but at a steep cost.

The lockdowns didn’t have to be so harmful, some scientists say. They could have been more carefully tailored to protect the most vulnerable, such as those in nursing homes and retirement communities, and to minimize widespread disruption.

Lockdowns could, during Covid-19 surges, close places such as bars and restaurants where the virus is most likely to spread, while allowing other businesses to stay open with safety precautions like masking and ventilation in place.  

If England’s March 23, 2020, lockdown had begun one week earlier, the measure would have nearly halved the estimated 48,600 deaths in the first wave of England’s pandemic

If the lockdown had begun a week later, deaths in the same period would have more than doubled

The key isn’t to have the lockdowns last a long time, but that they are deployed earlier,

It is possible to avoid lockdowns altogether. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong—all countries experienced at handling disease outbreaks such as SARS in 2003 and MERS—avoided lockdowns by widespread masking, tracking the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing and quarantining infected individuals.

Had we known that even a mild case of Covid-19 could result in long Covid and other serious chronic health problems, we might have calculated our own personal risk differently and taken more care.

Early in the pandemic, public-health officials were clear: The people at increased risk for severe Covid-19 illness were older, immunocompromised, had chronic kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes or serious heart conditions

t had the unfortunate effect of giving a false sense of security to people who weren’t in those high-risk categories. Once case rates dropped, vaccines became available and fear of the virus wore off, many people let their guard down, ditching masks, spending time in crowded indoor places.

it has become clear that even people with mild cases of Covid-19 can develop long-term serious and debilitating diseases. Long Covid, whose symptoms include months of persistent fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches and brain fog, hasn’t been the virus’s only nasty surprise

In February 2022, a study found that, for at least a year, people who had Covid-19 had a substantially increased risk of heart disease—even people who were younger and had not been hospitalized

respiratory conditions.

Some scientists now suspect that Covid-19 might be capable of affecting nearly every organ system in the body. It may play a role in the activation of dormant viruses and latent autoimmune conditions people didn’t know they had

 A blood test, he says, would tell people if they are at higher risk of long Covid and whether they should have antivirals on hand to take right away should they contract Covid-19.

If the risks of long Covid had been known, would people have reacted differently, especially given the confusion over masks and lockdowns and variants? Perhaps. At the least, many people might not have assumed they were out of the woods just because they didn’t have any of the risk factors.

China-Russia relations are far from a “monolithic bloc,” Zhao Long, a scholar at China’s Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, wrote in a recent paper. “In Beijing’s vision, it never should become one.”

A long and sometimes violent history between Russia and China has left a legacy of distrust. A museum in Heihe is dedicated to what it depicts as centuries of aggressions by Russian soldiers against the Chinese

One exhibit depicts the killing of thousands of Chinese in the region by Russians in 1900. Over a loudspeaker, a narrator concludes that Russia-China relations were today peaceful, but that China must remain vigilant. “We can never forget this history,” the narrator said. “If you lag behind, you will get beaten.”  

Mr. Xi’s language during his Moscow visit will be closely parsed by Western officials and security analysts seeking to understand China’s intentions for Russia. The frayed ends of China-Russia economic ties are, by contrast, out in the open.

Another newly opened bridge, in Heihe, had been highly touted in Chinese state media. It didn’t appear last week to be an economic boon. On the China side of the bridge, two Russian truck drivers, hauling what appeared to be metal shelving, idled near a customs checkpoint. Trucks traveling from China to Russia crossed the bridge at a rate of roughly one every five minutes and even less frequently in the other direction.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, most China-Russia trade was settled in U.S. dollars or Euros, an arrangement upended by Western sanctions. Chinese companies now struggle to get paid. One survey by local central-bank officials of Chinese companies that trade with Russia found that after the invasion of Ukraine, 60% of them had suspended operations or were barely scraping by because of logistical and financial hurdles from the sanctions.

Russia’s growing dependency on the yuan makes Russia more vulnerable to Chinese actions should relations between the two countries falter

“Russian leaders like to emphasize the unprecedented strategic cooperation between the two countries,” Ms. Prokopenko wrote in February for the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Yet in reality, this cooperation makes Moscow increasingly dependent on Beijing.” 

Thus began the coddling of the populist mind

Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.

Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.

Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally

It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.

There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance

Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations

When nearly every renminbi borrowed is domestic — lent by a Chinese creditor to a Chinese borrower — it gives regulators a degree of control over debt problems that their Western counterparts can only dream of.

Even the makeup of China’s high debt levels has a silver lining for regulators. China’s aggregate ratio of debt to gross domestic product was almost 300 percent (or around $52 trillion) in September 2022, compared to 257 percent for the United States.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations

But less than 5 percent of China’s debt is external, amounting to $2.5 trillion, one-tenth of the U.S. level.

instead of introducing reforms to establish a healthy market-based economy in which inefficient businesses are allowed to fail, China’s Evergrande-style fixes — while defusing short-term crises — reward irresponsible behavior and perpetuate the excessive borrowing and wasteful use of funding that leads to recurring financial distress.

Soft landings may become harder to achieve. China faces perhaps its greatest array of economic challenges since it began reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s: high debt, an ailing real estate sector, a long-term economic slowdown, rising unemployment, an aging and shrinking population and worsening trade and diplomatic relations with the United States.

There is a very real risk that China could suffer the same fate as Japan, which is still struggling to emerge from an extended period of economic stagnation that began in the 1990s. Japan’s troubles were caused, in part, by a burst real estate bubble and financial-sector problems similar to what China is now facing.

China’s regulatory troubleshooters have proven the financial doomsayers wrong again and again. But their biggest test may yet lie ahead.

For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired.

As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.

We are reversing the globalization of the past 40 years, with the links in our geopolitical and economic network fraying. “Friendshoring,” or moving production to friendly countries, is a new term. The geopolitical forces behind deglobalization will amplify the stresses from climate change and demographics to lead to a frenzied competition for resources and consumers.

The problem here, and a problem broadly with complex and dynamic systems, is that the whole doesn’t look like the sum of the parts. If you have a lot of people running around, the overall picture can look different than what any one of those people is doing. Maybe in aggregate their actions jam the doorway; maybe in aggregate they create a stampede

if we can’t get a firm hold on pedestrian economic issues like inflation and recession — the prospects are not bright for getting our forecasts right for these existential forces.

The problem is that the models don’t work when our economy is weird. And that’s precisely when we most need them to work.

The fourth, artificial intelligence, is a wild card. But we already are seeing risks for work and privacy, and for frightening advances in warfare.

A key reason these models fail in times of crisis is that they can’t deal with a world filled with complexity or with surprising twists and turns.

Economics failed with the 2008 crisis because economic theory has established that it cannot predict such crises.

we are not a mechanical system. We are humans who innovate, change with our experiences, and at times game the system

Reflecting on the 1987 market crash, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman remarked on the difficulty facing economists by noting that subatomic particles don’t act based on what they think other subatomic particles are planning — but people do that.

What if economists can’t turn things around? This is a possibility because we are walking into a world unlike any we have seen. We can’t anticipate all the ways climate change might affect us or where our creativity will take us with A.I. Which brings us to what is called radical uncertainty, where we simply have no clue — where we are caught unaware by things we haven’t even thought of.

This possibility is not much on the minds of economists

How do we deal with risks we cannot even define? A good start is to move away from the economist’s palette of efficiency and rationality and instead look at examples of survival in worlds of radical uncertainty.

In our time savannas are turning to deserts. The alternative to the economist’s model is to take a coarse approach, to be more adaptable — leave some short-term fine tuning and optimization by the wayside

Our long term might look brighter if we act like cockroaches. An insect fine tuned for a jungle may dominate the cockroach in that environment. But once the world changes and the jungle disappears, it will as well.

I could argue—I would argue—that for a long while, conservative media was on balance a valuable, healthy constellation of institutions.Today that is no longer the case. There remain a handful of healthy conservative media institutions. The vast majority are toxic to public life.

You might ask the same question about Commentary magazine and Fox News that we started out asking about Luttig and Eastman: Why is one of them healthy and valuable while the other is pernicious and dangerous?

I wonder if part of the John Eastman story is the peril inherent in building alternative institutions: if withdrawing from the mainstream to set up explicitly parallel institutions inevitably leads to corruptions of those alternatives, while also impoverishing the mainstream by starving it of more diverse views.3

How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true?

respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views

the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.

The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,

Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.

The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.

Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.

the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:

election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete

The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”

understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.

Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”

Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.

“It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”

Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors

The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.

Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means

It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.

and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).

It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group

the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.

The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe

that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate

Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win

Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.

it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation

One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.

the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining

racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time

Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower

And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.

While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment

Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment

In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.

that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment

there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.

my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.

Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.

In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge

in illustrating how far the politics of labor have changed in Washington in recent decades, there was perhaps no better bellwether than Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a former business owner and self-described “extreme moderate.”

Mr. Hickenlooper conducted himself more respectfully and deferentially than most of his Democratic colleagues, applauding Mr. Schultz for “creating one of the most successful brands in American history” and declaring that “you know more about economics than I will ever know.” But in his questioning he aligned himself squarely with his party, pointing out that the rise of inequality in recent decades had coincided with the weakening of unions.

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.

original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.

Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics

The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)

“Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”

We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.

Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.

cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle

Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years

The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.

you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.

The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living

If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:

in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.

To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.

1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)

The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.

Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.

Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”

2. Askesis (“discipline”)

We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life

Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water

This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.

3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)

Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.

Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely

Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.

4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)

Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.

Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status

he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt

The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.

The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation.

Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely

White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered, whether familiar figures like Andrew Jackson or mostly forgotten magnates like J.W. Comer, a plantation owner who became, in the late 19th century, the architect of a vast, sadistic and extremely lucrative system of convict labor

Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”

the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief.

The federal government is a character here, too — sometimes in a central role, sometimes remote to the point of irrelevance, and all too often feckless in the defense of a more inclusive, affirmative model of freedom.

When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow.

Wallace, as Cowie makes clear, had bigger ambitions. Instinctively, he knew that his brand of politics had an audience anywhere that white Americans were under strain and looking for someone to blame. Wallace became the sneering face of the backlash against the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, against any law or court ruling or social program that aimed to include Black Americans more fully in our national life. Racism was central to his appeal, yet its common note was grievance; the common enemies were elites, the press and the federal government. “Being a Southerner is no longer geographic,” he declared in 1964, during the first of his four runs for the White House. “It’s a philosophy and an attitude.”

That attitude, we know, is pervasive now — a primal, animating principle of conservative politics. We hear it in conspiracy theories about the “deep state”; we see it in the actions of Republican officials like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who built a case for his re-election in 2022 by banning — in the name of “individual freedom” — classroom discussions of gender, sexuality and systemic racism.

In explaining how we got here, “Freedom’s Dominion” emphasizes race above economics, but this seems fitting. The fixation on the free market, so long a defining feature of the Republican Party, has loosened its hold; taxes and regulations do not boil the blood as they once did. In their place is a stew of resentments as raw as any since George Wallace stirred the pot.