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proponents insisted that funneling $1.9 trillion to American households and businesses wouldn’t unshackle a long-vanquished monster: inflation.

nflation prospects increasingly influenced political commentary and Wall Street trading.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is among those tracking the inflation threat. “There’s a very good chance you’re going to have a gangbuster economy for the rest of this year and easily into 2022, and the question is: Does that overheat everything?” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last week.

The United States and NATO, anxious about a major Russian troop buildup on Ukraine’s border, signaled strong support for the Kyiv government on Tuesday.

And in what was considered another message to Moscow, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in Germany on Tuesday that the United States would increase its military presence there by about 500 personnel and that it was scuttling plans introduced under President Donald J. Trump for a large troop reduction in Europe.

“The U.S. stands firmly behind the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told Mr. Kuleba.

“Getting Real About Coal and Climate.” It’s one thing for folks in Boston or New York City to cheer for President Biden’s promised 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. It’s quite another for coal miners to outline a climate policy they can live with that could end many of their jobs on the promise of an uncertain future.

United Mine Workers leadership — have shown both wisdom and courage in recognizing the road we must walk and telling us how we can get there together. Let’s hope that Washington hears them.

Paul Krugman’s characterization of hopes for bipartisan support for a carbon tax as “hopelessly naïve” is difficult to swallow for one who, like me, volunteers with Citizens’ Climate Lobby to push for carbon fee and dividend legislation. At the same time, Mr. Krugman admits that a price on carbon will prove necessary in the end, despite political obstacles.

Thanks to their ultralow fees and stellar long-term performance, these investment vehicles have soaked up more and more money since being developed by Vanguard’s Jack Bogle in the 1970s

as of 2016, investors worldwide were pulling more than $300 billion a year out of actively managed funds and pushing more than $500 billion a year into index funds. Some $11 trillion is now invested in index funds, up from $2 trillion a decade ago. And as of 2019, more money is invested in passive funds than in active funds in the United States.

Indexing has also gone small, very small. Although many financial institutions offer index funds to their clients, the Big Three control 80 or 90 percent of the market. The Harvard Law professor John Coates has argued that in the near future, just 12 management professionals—meaning a dozen people, not a dozen management committees or firms, mind you—will likely have “practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies.”

it is a huge debt-funded stimulus. Mr Biden’s plan is worth about 9% of pre-crisis GDP

first the evidence that today’s downturn might be more temporary hiatus than prolonged slump.

The number of non-farm jobs remains around 10m, or 6.3%, below its pre-pandemic peak—similar to the shortfall seen in 2010.

The House Republicans’ underlying argument is too jumbled and confusing even to be agreed with. It can only be absorbed. It is to be repeated, not to be analyzed. It is not even really an argument at all. It is a hypnotic litany, a creed of faith—a faith all the more compelling for defying sense and experience.

At Fox News, on talk radio, and on the web, American conservatives have built a communications system that effectively consolidates in-group identity. Much of the time, the talkers and listeners do not themselves understand what they are saying. They use key words and phrases as gang signs: badges of identity that are recognized without necessarily being understood.

This system of communication tightly bonds in-group members. That bond, in turn, exerts tremendous power over American politics.

The government hasn’t embraced MMT. But important elements of it are now accepted by much of the economic and financial establishment, with major implications for how the economy is run.

The most important claim of MMT is that a government need never default on debt issued in its own currency. The lesson of 2020 was that MMT is right.

“We got five or six trillion dollars of spending and tax cuts without anyone worrying about payfors, so that was a good thing,” says L. Randall Wray, an economics professor at Bard College in New York and a leading MMT academic. “In January [2020], MMT was a crazy idea, and then in March, it was, OK, we’re going to adopt MMT.”

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

Jack Bogle is ready to declare victory. Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves. This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Not even Warren Buffett has minted more millionaires than Jack Bogle has—and he did so not by helping them get lucky, but by teaching them how to earn the market’s long-run, average return without paying big fees to Wall Street.

“When the climate really gets bad, I’m not some statue out there. But when I get knots in my stomach, I say to myself, ‘Reread your books,’ ” he says. Mr. Bogle has written numerous advice books on investing, including 2007’s “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing,” which remains a perennial Amazon best seller—and all of them emphasize not trying to outguess the markets.

one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.

ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece

“How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk,’” said Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, speaking in an emotional finale of a speech in 1933 — a time when Turkey was still trying to forge a national identity out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The notion seemed simple enough: If you think you’re Turkish, then you are.

Of course, it’s not that straightforward. On the one hand, Article 66 of the 1982 Constitution defines a Turk as someone who feels the bonds and benefits of citizenship rather than in terms of ethnicity or race. On the other hand, Article 3 states that Turkish is the country’s sole official language, and Article 24 makes religious education compulsory. Throughout the document, as well as in political discourse and popular parlance, the notion of “Turkishness” is both ill-defined and staunchly defended.

Turkish officialdom has found it almost impossible to accept that non-Muslims like Armenians and Jews could be loyal to the state. But with non-Muslims accounting for just 0.5 percent Turkey’s population, discrimination against them has been, in effect, a minor issue. The real problem is the Kurds. They are Muslim, yes, but many insist on an identity of their own, and there are too many of them — 18 percent of the population, according to one estimate — to ignore.

Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The first element in this story is rising individualism

between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

The Story of Our Time

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family. Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too. And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day.

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Lafayette’s fate played a part in Washington’s decision to abandon plans that he had been formulating to free Mount Vernon’s slaves while he was president. It would have been a huge public statement of his disapproval of slavery. Washington decided American voters could not deal with such an explosive topic when they were already deeply divided between pro- and anti-French parties. But he remained determined to make this statement as soon as he thought it could be done without endangering the American union.

During Washington’s retirement years, an English visitor to Mount Vernon discussed slavery with him, off the record. The ex-president told him no man in the nation yearned to see black bondage disappear more than he did. “Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity,” he said. “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.”

The news of Washington’s death fell like a thunderclap from on high across the entire nation. The loss was so huge, so absolute, it seemed to alter everything, from the nation’s politics to its confidence in the future. The fact that Washington had emancipated his slaves dwindled to a blip in the context of these other anxieties. His act of emancipation excited little or no comment.

In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.

There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.

If families do not guarantee happiness, the relationships they create and cultivate nonetheless tend to be richer, more primal, and more permanent than purely voluntary forms of human community.

As Europe and Asia Hoard Cash, Economists See Echoes of Crisis

European and Asian investors have been rushing into the United States bond market, spurred by a global glut of savings that has reached record levels.

A growing number of economists are concerned that this flood of money may inflate the value of these securities well beyond what they are worth, potentially leading to a market bubble that eventually bursts.

Dow Closes Above 19000 for First Time

. It was Nov. 4 when the blue-chip index last closed below 18000. Since then, a rally following the U.S. presidential election has benefited, in particular, the shares of industrial companies and banks, bolstering the Dow.

In January, worries about slowing economic growth in China and its possible spillover effects sent the blue-chip index to its worst-ever five-day start to a year.

Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book

It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.

In Silicon Valley, where I live, the word “disruption” has an overwhelmingly positive valence: Thousands of smart, young people arrive here every year hoping to disrupt established ways of doing business — and become very rich in the process.

For almost everyone else, however, disruption is a bad thing. By nature, human beings prize stability and order. We learn to be adults by accumulating predictable habits, and we bond by memorializing our ancestors and traditions.

So it should not be surprising that in today’s globalized world, many people are upset that vast technological and social forces constantly disrupt established social practices, even if they are better off materially.