Hidden City

 

I know Seattle was around here, somewhere...

The final sunrise of 2025 never materialized, as a pretty thick morning fog had settled over the area. The annoying thing about these is that they're never consistent... within a half-mile it could seem completely clear.

Which Economy

It's a simple enough question:

I mean, have you SEEN the economy these new adults have graduated into?

And I understand the reason for asking it. It's a plea for understanding and grace to be extended to young people, who, having put in the time and effort to undertake a college education, now find themselves in a situation in which jobs, especially entry-level jobs, have become scarce. And I understand the invocations of "the economy" or "this economy," as way of explaining it. It's a simple shorthand for the position that the United States finds itself in now, with depressed demand for labor.

But hasn't this been the goal of "the economy" all along? The modern United States is very good, and has been for some time, at creating all of the goods and services that people are ready, willing and able to pay for without need of the entirety of its labor force. And while many people seem to value their own vocations quite highly, it doesn't take much to reveal that any number of them begrudge others theirs; if putting some number of people out of work is what it takes to feel wealthier, then so be it. Couple this with the understanding, expressed to me by a small number of people I know, that the demand for labor moves, but never really goes away, and one can see the dilemma that many people over the years have found themselves in; the fact that they can't find work that's valuable enough to support them, in a society that believes that there's enough valuable work for anyone who wants it.

Which leaves out the fact that the government has taken it upon itself to prevent labor from becoming scarce enough that employers are forced to raise wages (and thus, presumably, prices). And that means that somewhere in the area of one in twenty to one in twenty-five people who are actively engaged in looking for work (remember the Unemployment Rate is dependent on the Participation Rate).

For people in that 4 or 5 percent (which can be a few million people or so). every economy is a bad economy, simply due to the perception that government interventions or none, there's enough work out there for everyone who wants it. And this leaves people wondering both what's wrong with them, and what they need to in order to fix it.

And that leaves aside the efficiency gains that businesses chase as a matter of daily operations. Because every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar that isn't going to shareholders, some of whom can become quite upset about that fact.

So there are always going to be new adults who graduate into a world that's actively hostile to them making enough money in for the formal employment sector to support themselves, even in the "good" times. It's the nature of the beast. It's receiving a lot of attention right now, because the overall consume outlook doesn't seem rosy for anyone. But maybe the problem is that it's seen as actively bad for it to be rosy for everyone.

Virtual Camera

Racist AI fakes are now a business — and a political tool. You don't say...

At the end of the article, Axios quotes organizational psychologist Janice Gassam Asare as saying: "I would just encourage people to be a little bit more cautious when they see something on social media, and ask yourself, 'how do I know that this is actually real?'"

I felt that it was missing the "pretty please with sugar on top." This is, after all, an article that notes: "One user ID'd a video they shared as fake, but still encouraged others to share it because it justified their viewpoints about alleged SNAP fraud." If people care more about whether information validates their worldview than whether it's real, what good does it do to "encourage people to be a little bit more cautious?" That lack of "caution" is getting them precisely what they're looking for.

I wonder if Axios had informed Ms. Asare, when they asked her for her comments, that they already believed that people were deliberately sharing fictitious video narratives. Maybe they did, and maybe it wouldn't (or didn't) make any difference, but the general tenor of her comments, and the article as a whole, put the cart in front of the horse, as I see it.

Because the thing about "framing a guilty person," as the saying goes, is that it presupposes that the person is guilty. The only point behind framing them is that there otherwise isn't enough evidence to connect them to the crimes one believes that they're guilty of. When someone fakes and shares a "video [that] shows multiple Black women screaming and pounding on a door with the caption 'store under attack'," they're not doing so out a desire to tar innocent people; they're engaging in using fiction to tell what they understand is a truth, and the people they're likely to share it with already agree with their viewpoint. Because to do otherwise would be to invite pushback.

Racism is a fairly popular pastime in the United States, because at the base of it is a hierarchy of deserving. That existed long before generative automation. Faked video may facilitate its spread, but it was spreading just fine previously.

Riches for All

It is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. 

There will be universal high income.
Elon Musk

A bit of proof (if any were needed) that having a high net worth doesn't mean that someone understands how money works. Because the United States already has universal high income... it's all a matter of when one sets the baseline; even poor people can have pretty significant incomes by the standards of 1825, 1925 or even 1975.

But poverty isn't simply about one's access to money.

Whether Elon Musk is sincerely being utopian to the point of inanity is left as an exercise for the reader, but it's worth pointing out that he's not the only person who appears to have difficulty understanding how money operates in practice; I've come to the conclusion that the biggest obstacle that many people have to understanding Economics is a general inability to understand the role of money in the big picture. Part of this is simply that people just don't think about it all that often... it's not something that comes up regularly enough that most people really need to understand it. But I also think that the way money is dealt with in both news and entertainment media is also at work; mainly, I would guess, because it's easier to explain things in terms of dollars and cents.

Unreturned

I was listening to the Altruism After USAID episode of Slate Magazine's Money Talks podcast a few days ago, and the guest, NPR's Mary Childs made the point that in the wake of USAID halting disbursements to non-governmental organizations and the like, that the money being withheld couldn't be replaced by philanthropic organizations.

My first thought that this was a matter of will. After all, if the United States government was no longer paying to fight malaria, and instead giving the public tax cuts, nothing stops that selfsame public from deciding to donate the savings to charities and keep the programs funded. The Trump Administration and Elon Musk's DOGE operation targeted USAID because they understood that many Americans feel poor enough that they resent the government giving money to ameliorate the problems of people far away.

But a moment's further thought put that idea to bed. After all, the federal budget isn't balanced; it's propped up by some pretty serious borrowing from global capital markets. Of course, people expect that the United States is good for it, which is why the government can borrow at favorable rates, but it's debt all the same.

And that's really the part that private philanthropy cannot replace. No rational lender is going to loan a charity several millions (or perhaps even tens of thousands) of dollars to save lives in third-world countries. Because there's no profit in it. Not even China, which makes a big deal out of its investments in poor nations, is doing so out of generosity; they expect a positive return, and when nations start defaulting on payments, China is going to start claiming assets as collateral. Charities, more or less by definition, don't impose repayment terms that entail seizing what few assets poor nations still have.

Given the fact that the United States borrows simply to keep the lights on and doors open towards the end of the fiscal year, some amount of the funding that USAID was providing was in the form of money borrowed from elsewhere. Specifically because poor countries tend to be bad investments, for any number of reasons.

Perhaps it's time that this was more openly acknowledged. There's nothing wrong with the understanding that, as a wealthy nation, the United States has an obligation to alleviate poverty in other parts of the world. And it's true that many Americans overestimate (sometimes wildly) the amount of money that goes into such philanthropy, as a proportion of their annual taxes. Still, this is part of what representative government is all about; having to make the case to the people who will be, ultimately, footing the bill.