Will AI Make Us Think Less or Think Better?

July 26, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Holding two opposing thoughts in your mind at the same time is to experience “cognitive dissonance.”

Being of two minds about your beliefs, ideas or values can be stressful and some find it difficult to live with the uncertainty. However, others have argued that remaining curious and wanting to learn more about what’s behind a dissonance of thoughts is a positive sign—if you’re to believe these much quoted words from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

While I was stewing under the heat dome last week, I was struck by the extent of my cognitive dissonance about my soon-to-come, AI-driven world. I’m stressed about the imminence of devices that will put as many external brains as I can accommodate into the palm of my hand in about a year and a half.

As you know, I’ve expressed my awe as well as trepidation about this development several times before.

It’s cognitive dissonance for me (Luddite vs. Brave Pioneer) because of the consequences involved, because I fully agree with the observer who noted this week: “we’re not just building new tech, we’re rethinking the role of humans in systems.” Let me repeat that.

We’re not just building new tech, we’re rethinking the role of humans in systems.

One of the uncertain frontiers for AI-driven tools like ChatGPT is in our schools, those learning environments where student brains are still developing. An essay this week and a recent study make a strong (early) case for the disaster we might expect. When students use a tool like ChatGPT to write their papers and respond to class assignments, their critical-thinking and argument-assembly skills either never develop at all or quickly begin to atrophy.

At some point in the arc of my education and yours, pocket calculators became ubiquitous. I already knew how to add, subtract, multiply and divide, but no longer needed to do so manually. By the time that happened, my basic calculation skills were so brain-embedded that I could still do all of those things without my short-cut device. But what was it like for those who never embedded those aptitudes in the first place?

Given the sudden availability of AI-driven personal assistants, are today’s students at risk of never embedding or retaining how to think through, express and defend their ideas? How to construct arguments and anticipate rebuttals? How to find their commitments and form an opinion? Such devices could change their’s (and our) experience of being human.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday by Allysia Finley brings a fine point to these questions. She argues that in the brave new world where “smart computers” demand even smarter humans, tools like ChatGPT are effectively “dumbing us down” by enabling “cognitive offloading”—or allowing a readily available device to do our thinking for us. The risk (of course) is that we’ll end up with too many humans who can’t keep up with—let alone control—the increasingly intelligent computers that are just over the horizon.

The real danger is that excessive reliance on AI could spawn a generation of brainless young people unequipped for the jobs of the future because they have never learned to think creatively or critically…[However] workers will need to be able to use AI and, more important, they will need to come up with novel ideas about how to deploy it to solve problems. They will need to develop AI models, then probe and understand their limitations.

(I don’t know which dystopia fills Finley’s imagination, but in mine I’m seeing the helpless/mindless lounge-potato humans in the Pixar classic Wall-E instead of Arnold struggling to confront Skynet in The Terminator.)

A student brain continues to develop until he or she is in their mid-20s, “but like a muscle it needs to be exercised, stimulated and challenged to grow stronger.” Chatbots “can stunt this development by doing the mental work that builds the brain’s version of a computer cloud….”

Why commit information to memory when ChatGPT can provide answers at your fingertips? For one thing, the brain can’t draw connections between ideas that aren’t there. Nothing comes from nothing. Creativity also doesn’t happen unless the brain is engaged. Scientists have found that ‘Aha!’ moments occur spontaneously with a sudden burst of high-frequency electrical activity when the brain connects seemingly unrelated concepts.

With AI-driven devices in the palms of our hands, Finley worries that humanity will have fewer of those experiences going forward.

This week, Time Magazine reported on a new study from MIT’s Media Lab whose results so alarmed its lead investigator that she published its results despite the relatively small sample-size in her study and its lack of peer review.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and ‘consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.’ Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.” [emphasis mine]

The researchers also suggested that the use of AI-driven tools which rely on LLMs (or large language models) can harm learning, especially for users whose brains are still developing—because ”your brain does need to develop in a more analog way.”

Both the Op-ed and MIT study examined the use of ChatGPT without either supervision or guidance from those who know how to use these tools to enhance instead of merely “off-load” the learning experience. Both assume that this AI assistant was merely asked to respond to a particular assignment without further exchange between the human and the device. So while their alarm deserves our attention, more interactive and better supervised teaching tools are attempting to harness AI’s awesome power to enhance (as opposed to degrade) cognitive abilities.

For example, some other articles that I read this week describe how AI-driven tutors can not only increase highly valuable one-on-one learning experiences in the classroom but also enable students to learn far more than previously when interaction with such a “resource-full” device is tailored to their particular needs and learning styles.

The first encouraging story about AI tutors came from the World Economic Forum, writing about a Chinese program that aimed to find more qualified teachers, particularly in the countryside. As reported, some of the solution was provided by a company incongruously named Squirrel AI Learning.

This educational technology company tested students with a large adaptive model (LAM) learning system that “combines adaptive AI—which learns and adapts to new data—with education-specific multimodal models, which can process a wide range of inputs, including text, images and video.” With new student profile information in hand, Squirrel created lesson plans that comprised “the most suitable learning materials for each student” with the aid of those external inputs, including:

data from more than 24 million students and 10 billion learning behaviours, as well as ‘wisdom from the very best teachers from all over the world,’ according to founder Derek Haoyang Li….

With the enthusiasm of a pioneer, he told the Forum a year ago that he believes its AI tutor “could make humans 10 times smarter.”

Meanwhile a story in Forbes about a Harvard study was nearly as enthusiastic.

The researchers concluded that new AI models “may usher in a wave of adaptive [tutor] bots catering to [a] student’s individualized pace and preferred style of learning.” These tutoring models are engineered to include the best teaching practices and tactics, including:

proactively engaging the student in the learning process;
managing information overload;
supporting and promoting a growth mindset;
moving from basic to complex concepts, while preparing for future units;
giving the student timely, specific and accurate feedback and information;
while enabling the learner to set their own pace.

The study’s findings indicated that AI-tutored students “learned more than twice as much as when they engaged with the same content during [a] lecture…[with] “personalized pacing being a key driver of success.”

Moreover, giving students greater control over their learning experience through “personalized on-demand design”:

allowed them to ask as many questions as they wished and address their personal points of confusion in a short period of time. Self-pacing meant that students could spend more time on concepts they found challenging and move quickly through material they understood, leading to more efficient learning….

As reported by Fox News in March, a Texas private school’s use of AI tutors has rocketed their student test scores to the top 2% in the country. With bots furthering academic learning, teachers can spend their hands-on time with students providing “motivational and emotional support.” The school’s co-founder said: “That is really the magic in our model.”

While reading these AI-tutor stories, I realized that the new role for teachers in decades to come is not merely to motivate students and be supportive; our educators will also need to supervise, tweak and even design new tutorials. Like the algorithms that adapt while absorbing new data, they will need to continuously modify their interventions to meet the need of their students and maximize the educational benefits.

In other words, they will need to be even smarter than the machines.

Whether American teachers can surmount that tech-intensive hurdle is a question that will only be answered over time, but advances like the coming ubiquity of AI-tutors and the student performance gains that are likely to follow might encourage us to pay for greater tech proficiency on the part of teachers, to enable them to actually be “mechanics” and “inventors” whenever adaptive learning models like these are deployed.

As for my dissonance between the risks of over-reliance on large language models like ChatGPT and the promise of integrating adaptive learning models like AI-tutors in our classrooms, I guess I ended the week with enough optimism to believe that while some of our brainpower will be dissipated as the lazy among us forget how to think, far more in the generations that follow will become smarter than we ever imagined we could be.

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The photos in this week’s post were taken of Lomanstraat, a street in Amsterdam, during the spring, summer and fall. These trees weren’t pruned to grow at an angle, instead they grew naturally towards the limited band of light.

Here are this week’s comment(s), link(s) and image(s) regarding the state of our governance in light of new developments over this past few days.

1. With the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, our president’s penchant for overstatement (“obliteration”) and vanity (the NATO chief’s feeling he needed to call him “Daddy”) makes our country vulnerable to being strung along (when our leader acts like a 2-year old with no patience) as well as manipulated (by whichever foreign leader is the best “Trump whisperer”?). Do Russia or China (or Canada, for that matter) seem to you to be cowed into submission—or even cooperation—by these antics and proclivities? The risk is that little will be gained, and much will be lost in this kindergarden of foreign policy when Trump’s dust finally settles.

2. Besides his order to drop several bunker-busting bombs from American planes that had flown half-way around the world, another development of note this week came from the Supreme Court before it withdraws into its cone of silence for the next couple of months. It marked, of course, the high Court’s preventing any federal court in the future from entering an injunction (or stop order) regarding Trump’s executive actions that has nationwide effect.

Americans can still appeal to their local federal district court for (or against) an injunction in that jurisdiction, but another district court a few counties over can makes its own (and sometimes different) ruling about the same executive action. Commentators are in a lather, mostly because Trump’s next hair-brained executive order can’t be stopped nationwide by some plaintiff who finds a cooperative district court judge. For what it’s worth, I am less concerned than many of the bedwetters about this.

The SCOTUS ruling in CASA Inc. won’t materially advance Trump’s agenda as much as invite a chaos of conflicting lower court actions which will make the fate of his various proclamations as unclear as most of them are already. Months or years from now, each instance of conflicting lower court rulings will make their way to the Supreme Court—along the same path that nationwide injunctions get there now—and a final ruling. In the meantime, CASA inc. means more of the same uncertainty and confusion instead of giving a material boost to the Strongman’s power.

Here’s a link to CBS News coverage of the ruling for additional reactions.

3. This from the NYT editorial board yesterday about Trump’s big beautiful tax reduction bill and the explosion in new interest payments it will add to the national debt. (For the first time in American history, interest payments on the debt will be greater than any other national expenditure, except for Medicare, if this bill becomes law):

The expected increase in the debt is particularly absurd because the government would borrow much of the money from the same people who got the biggest tax cuts from the bill. Roughly half of the government’s debt typically is sold to American investors, and those investors are disproportionately affluent. When the government borrows from them rather than raising taxes, it is getting the same money from the same people on less favorable terms. Instead of taxing the rich, the government pays them interest.

4. Dictator Approved Statue appears without identifying its donor on the Capitol Mall this week. It’s not a sign of full-blown resistance, but it’s another sign of life from his opponents.

This post was adapted from my June 29, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Democrat’s Near-Fatal “Boys & Men” Problem

June 30, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, the ironies were hard to miss.

At exactly the same time that our president was yammering on about how Russia and Ukraine were “boys being boys” and still needed to fight it out before his peacemaking skills could save the day, he and “the world’s richest man” were devolving into their own dogfight, although in that instance it was harder to discern who’d be saving the day once the pair of them had exhausted themselves.

What this special military operation and schoolyard altercation superficially had in common were the assumptions that “this is just what boys do to one another when their emotions get the better of them,” that they’ll stop beating up on one another eventually, and that such periodic carnage is a pre-requisite for finally moving on.

In the dog-eat-dog world of Putin, Trump and Musk, that behavioral analysis crowded out other glosses on what’s really going on here. After Trump handed us this primer on masculine behavior, it was a further irony that Nate Silver (best known as the New York Times polling guru) gave us his own psychological insights about the boys & men who delivered the 2024 election to Trump and (more importantly) what the Democrats need to understand about this cohort going forward if they’re to have any chance of winning future elections,

Silver wants answers—and I do too—because any resistance to our Family Strongman is likely to fail as long as boys & men continue to view his alternatives more negatively. With Silver providing the statistical support, we’re finally able to probe deeper than the usual knee-jerk reactions to what everyone’s witnessed about “boys will be boys” this week.

Voters who happen to be boys or men are more likely than progressive critics to see that some quantum of aggressive risk-taking is just part of the male package, “a fact of life” instead of a deplorable choice. Because too many Democrats fail to accept boys & men “for who they are,” the party of Biden, Obama and Clinton has become more openly hostile to what it views as the “toxic” hot-wiring of half of the electorate.

So how deep is this problem and how should the Democrats reconstitute themselves to deal with it?

Before we get to Silver’s numbers (along with his and other’s interpretation of them), it’s probably worth recalling my post from February, “Too Many Boys & Men Are Failing to Launch,”where author Richard Reeves also approached the biases of today’s Democratic Party pretty directly:

“There was not really an alternative [to the Trump-Musk view of masculinity] put in front of them….In the final stages of the campaign, young men were being urged to vote for the Democrats if they love the women in their lives [which was essentially a pro-Choice argument], and that’s not good enough.

“It’s not to say that we don’t care about the other people in our lives, but you are essentially asking men to vote for Democrats because the Democrats stand for women. Well, that’s a flawed political strategy.”

But where Reeves flags part of the problem, Silver sarcastically observes that you can grasp the extent of the disconnect “by, y’know, actually looking at the polling data instead of relying on the stereotypes that Villagers [his name for Progressives] have about young men.”

At this point, I should probably repeat a prior disclaimer: that advocating for boys & men shouldn’t come at the expense of girls & women. There is no good reason that each of the sexes can’t thrive in a political context and in every other corner of American life. Unfortunately, advocacy for boys & men sometimes triggers misogynist resentments that are as unhelpful as blanket charges of toxicity.

So what’s really happening here? Silver relies on polling for the starting point of his analysis: that in the 2024 election, “essentially all of the decline that Harris experienced relative to Biden [in 2020] came from boys & men.”

It’s not that all boys & men rejected the Democratic candidate, just enough of them for Harris to lose the election. (And because none of the observations here have the precision of science, it is likely that at least some of Harris’s rejecters could abide neither a woman nor a black woman as their candidate.) But Silver argues there are two “mistakes”—involving the “personality traits” of boys & men—that also account for the sharp decline in this cohort’s support for Democrats.

Mistake #1 has Democrats “missing that young men take a more risk-on view of the economy.” Turned-off by a nanny-state with expensive safety nets for every conceivable limitation or burden, Silver argues that many boys & men see Democrats “as what in the poker world we’d call ‘nits’: neurotic, risk-adverse, sticklers for the rules, always up in everyone’s business.” In other words, many boys & men prefer self-reliance to systemic excuses; fewer rules and regulations instead of more of them; and having their governors leave them alone instead of constantly trying to improve things for them.

And when it comes to risk in particular, Silver writes:

In my research, I found that risk tolerance is something of an understudied personality trait, but the two truisms are that men generally have a higher risk tolerance than women and younger people are more risk-tolerant than older ones….

The messages Democrats are proposing tend to emphasize security — minimizing downside risk — above the opportunity to compete and maximizing upside outcomes…So when [the progressive] Villagers design messages to win back these young men, I suspect a lot will be lost in translation. Just being more chill, being wary of progressive-coded messages that seem to impede competition and risk-taking, and recognizing that gender is a touchier subject than race, could be better than hiring a bunch of influencers who are trying to start a political conversation these men aren’t really seeking out.

This recommendation goes some way towards explaining why so many boys & men preferred a “successful businessman” (Trump) or “outside-the-box entrepreneur (Musk) to someone like Harris, whose only jobs have been in government. Of course, whether enough of those trying to steer the Democratic Party in more productive directions can actually see these kinds of solutions through their stereotypes about boys & men remains unclear.

Mistake #2 that Democrats have been making delves even deeper into the personality traits that differentiate boys & men from girls & women, once again with supporting data that Silver gathered.

In news stories that have appeared in recent years, there has been the strong suggestion that boys & men are having as many mental health problems as girls & women due to social-media and smart-phone addictions. Silver (and his data) along with a related article which is delightfully entitled “According to Study, Young Men Are Not Mentally Ill Enough to Vote Democrat,” take issue with that premise.

Silver writes:

[T]he young men that Democrats have trouble with aren’t necessarily the ones who have been captured by the conservative ‘manosphere’ or who are looking for a helping hand. Rather, it’s those who report relatively high mental health and see Democrats as being too neurotic and perhaps constraining their opportunity to compete and reap the rewards of their work.

The underlying data points also tell him that “in the United States, higher self-reported mental health is strongly correlated with holding conservative political views.” [emphasis mine]

Silver graphs a long-standing mental health gap between boys & men, on the one hand, girls and women, on the other, over the past hundred years—with the gap widening measurably when you get to Milennials and Gen Z.

And on the correlation between being mentally healthy and having conservative views, Silver looked at the entire population regardless of sex.

The companion commentary with the provocative title is from OutKick.com, a sports, news, and entertainment website known for its “in depth coverage” on a range of topics. The site has a conservative bent and was recently acquired by Fox News. While I view Silver (and he seems to view himself) as “left-leaning,” there is no sunlight between conservative OutKick and Silver on the Democrat’s boys & men quandary.

Here’s the closing (free) advice from OutKick for Democrats who (given the condescending heights they inhabit) the site frankly doubts they’ll be able take:

“The Democrats don’t need to lean into fake machoism to regain support among young men. However, the party does need to pivot–dramatically.

“One idea: stop telling white straight young men that they are privileged and must atone for it. Stop trying to convince them to move out of the way for women, gay men, and trans people because it’s their turn.

“There are no turns in a meritocracy.

“Most importantly, stop trying to shame men for being men…

“A good rule of thumb: if your candidate is too self-important and beta to sit down with… Joe Rogan, don’t expect to perform well with Gen Z men.

“In other words, don’t expect the Democrat Party to address its disconnect with young men by 2028. Just look at the list of early Democratic frontrunners—from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Kamala Harris, from Gavin Newsom to Pete Buttigieg.

“Not exactly a quartet of people who young guys would want to sit and have a chat with, now is it?”

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Two parting notes before turning to the news stories that seemed most pertinent to being a good citizen this week:

There was a well-reported essay in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal about how boys & young men are discovering their roles and responsibilities as future providers, husbands and fathers in church-run community programs. I recommend “A Church’s Campaign to Teach Lost Boys How to Be Men.”

Finally, the image up top, which I call “Age of Kings,” was seen plastered on a Philadelphia street sign this week and posted on IG @streetsdept.

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This week’s links and images about how our Family Strongman is altering the checks and balances we use to govern ourselves begins with the little-known-until-recently IT company and government contractor called Palantir.

Among other things, Palantir products are data gatherers/organizers and threat-assessment tools. In recent days, the company has been accused by the New York Times and others of invading citizen privacy given the ways that its tools are being used by the current administration. My view: the reporting has been heavy on foreboding and light on facts thus far, but given Trump’s penchant for pursing enemies and the Supreme Court’s ruling this week that DOGE can have access to the Social Security Administration’s “non-anonymized” personal information (some say, to “curate detailed portraits of Americans based on government data”), the current administration’s use or misuse of Palantir’s tools should be monitored closely by all who take their Constitutional protections seriously.

1. You can gain some of the basic information about Palantir’s expanded work in this May 30 article in the New York Times(“Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans”) along with this multi-part tweet on X, posted by a former Palantir executive who argues that some of the Times reporting was either misleading or just plain wrong (Wendy Anderson’s rebuttal on X).

2. “Law Firms that Appeased Trump-and Angered Their Clients,” a lengthy article in the Wall Street Journal this week, chronicles the backlash to national law firms that struck deals with the president after he targeted them with executive orders because of cases they had brought against him, his administration or policies he favors in the past.

To date, nine major law firms have struck deals, while four others chose to fight. Regarding the fighters, courts have ruled that the executive orders involving three of the firms are “unconstitutional retaliation,” while a temporary order blocking Trump’s executive action has been entered on behalf of the fourth firm.

Clients are also pulling work from the firms that caved under pressure, “expressing concern” about whether these firms will be tough enough to stand up for them against adversaries “if they weren’t willing to stand up for themselves against Trump.” Tremendously lucrative books of business are involved.

Significantly, the article also reported that:

Trump remains interested in the [targeting] orders, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and his allies want to keep the threats of more executive orders on the table because they think it dissuades the best lawyers from representing critics of the administration.

3. “Judges Weigh Taking Control of Their Own Security Amid Threats” also appeared in the Journal this week, as threats to judges who have entered orders against the administration have continued to be made by the president, by his appointees and by his MAGA supporters.

Starting in April, some judges and their relatives received unsolicited pizza deliveries in the name of Daniel Anderl, the deceased son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas. Anderl was shot dead in 2020 at his parents’ home by a disgruntled litigant.

Judges described being fearful because anonymous people who threatened violence knew where they and their families live.

“One judge said the harassment caused them to weigh the integrity of their rulings against the safety of their family [members].”

As I said here a few weeks ago,, we know we are losing our democracy when citizens (including judges) start modifying their standard practices out of fear of retaliation by the president or his henchmen.

(Of course, Trump has already effectively compromised the independence of dozens of Republicans in Congress—the second of three “co-equal” branches of government—by threatening “to primary them” in upcoming elections if they dare to cross him.)

4. In Trump’s first five months in office, everyone watching has witnessed the on-again/off-again tariffs that turned an improving American economy into a skittish one; his appointment of incompetent (Pete Hegseth) and alarming (RFK Jr,) individuals to run significant arms of the government; our country’s failure to adequately support Ukraine and a world order that opposes one country’s invasion of another; family and personal use of the Oval Office for enrichment on an unprecedented scale; and this week, Trump’s social media hissy-fit exchanges with Musk.

Given the regime’s performance to date, how is America being viewed these days from outside our borders? How are adversaries like Russia, North Korea and China assessing Trump 2.0? I’m embarrassed to admit that the satirical on-line news blast The Onion may once again have gotten it exactly right.

This post was adapted from my June 8, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Great Design Invites Delight, Awe

June 4, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I replaced my iPhone this week. With my updated MacBook, they’re my two most essential devices. I realized that I interact with them more than with anyone else most days (except maybe Wally).

I’m startled to write this.

The new phone brought renewed wonderment (even awe) at what a personal device like this can do, how they respond to my touch, and how indispensable they’ve become. It’s almost as if they should have names. Almost.

Steve Jobs and his lead designer at Apple, Jony Ives, wanted to create elegantly companionable objects that we’d want to touch, look at and listen to.

My current laptop still has that original, brushed aluminum skin that feels soft to my fingertips. One of the new, suggested screen-savers on my new phone features a low earth satellite image of my corner of the globe changing from the blues of daylight to the light specs of dusk as the day unfolds into night. Details like these add up.

So I was more than intrigued to learn this week that the same Jony Ives who’d imagined these devices into existence with Jobs has just joined up with the man who might be Jobs’ tech-world successor to bring us what they hope to be our Third Core Device (alongside the MacBook and iPhone).

In a video announcement that is pretty relatable in its own right, Sam Altman (the progenitor of the AI-driven ChatGPT) and Ives tell us the story of how, over the past few years, they decided to combine their resources to create and market a pocket-size, screen-free, non-wearable device that–through the mustering of its AI capabilities–could become our first “contextually aware” desk-top device.

So while I’ll eventually get to my weekly update of Family Strongman developments (including a warning about the next phase of the current regime)—it was a great relief this week to imagine with Altman and Ives how they (as opposed to Trump) might also be seizing part of my future before too many more months have passed.

So back to the Jony & Sam origin-story video that entered so many of our feeds in recent days.

As is evident from the photo of Ives and Altman up-top, there seems to be some chemistry here, two “creative visualizers” sharing similar wave lengths, not unlike when Ives and Jobs were imagineering the iPhone, and both of them could “just about see it.”

(I did a visuali collaboration like this when I was just starting out. I had a play space for kids in mind and wanted to show others what it might look like because words could only take me and my listeners so far. Working with a collaborator “to see what I was seeing” was a powerful, deeply personal experience, and ultimately a highly practical one. Over several weeks, my visualizer made beautiful color drawings of what he’d heard me describe—and they became welcomed accompaniments for my show & tells when I took my business plan on the road. They also pointed towards what my imagined space might have looked like if we had been even more in sync.)

During their recent announcement, Ives and Altman seemed to be sharing the kind of strangely intimate, “never-seen-before (except by the two of us)” mind space that I’d gotten only a glimpse of.

In a way, their story begins with Jobs passing and continues with Ives leaving diverse roles Apple six years ago to begin a design-work-experiment in the Jackson Square section of San Francisco. Together with Australian industrial designer Marc Newson, both hired architects, graphic designers, writers and a cinematic special effects developer, all of whom were invited to work across three areas: work for the love of it (which they did without pay); work for some high-end clients (which paid the rent) ; and work for themselves (which included renovating a block’s worth of historical buildings into their new home).

Two years ago, Charlie (one of Ives’ 21-year-old twin sons) told him about ChatGPT. Following his son’s excitement over the chatbot to its source, Ives connected with Altman and so began Ives’ next partnership. In the video—which is at once promotional, anticipatory and destiny-drenched—Ives describes Altman, a longtime entrepreneur and founder of OpenAI, as “a rare visionary” who “shoulders incredible responsibility, but his curiosity, his humility remain utterly inspiring.” Altman describes Ives as “the deepest thinker of anyone I have ever met. What that leads him to be able to come up with is unmatched.” In a WSJ article about their new partnership, Ives is quoted as saying: “The way that we clicked, and the way that we’ve been able to work together, has been profound for me.”

Their brotherhood launched, and eighteen months ago Altman sent OpenAI’s chief product developer to work with Ives’ team of “subject matter experts” in hardware and software engineering, physics, and product manufacturing. Last fall, the two sides became excited about a specific device they were fabricating, and Altman started taking prototypes home to use. He told the Journal: that their goal is to release a new AI-driven device (that is, tens of millions of units) to the public by late next year.

Of course, their even larger goal is to realize more of the promise of human-directed artificial intelligence than has been realized to date. As Altman says in the video:

“[With AI] I’m [already] two or three times more productive as a scientist that I was before. I’m two or three times faster to find a cure for cancer than I was before, because I have this incredible external brain.” [emphasis added]

And despite regular cautions about the future of AI—including here, in “Will We Domesticate AI in Time?”—Ives speaks with almost childlike delight and wonder about what this new device might start bringing us at the video’s conclusion.

“I think this will be one of these moments of just an absolute embarrassment of riches, of what people go create for collective society. I am absolutely certain that we are literally on the brink of a new generation of technology that can make us our better selves.”

It’s a beautifully expansive thought for a sadly claustrophobic time.

Of course there’s more to this partnership and product announcement than the principals’ affection for each other and an eagerness to improve our lives with a new “family” of “AI companions” that can complement our phones, laptops and other screened devices.

But some of the story is also about their regrets and dissatisfactions with the tech-driven choices that we have today. For example, in the New York Times’ coverage of their new collaboration, Ives admits: “I shoulder a lot of the responsibility for what these things have brought us,” referring to the anxiety and distraction that come with being constantly connected to the computer-phone that he, almost as much as anyone, put in all of our pockets.

For his part, Altman focused on the information overload that technology without a gate-keeper assaults us with these days.

I don’t feel good about my relationship with technology right now. It feels a lot like being jostled on a crowded street in New York, or being bombarded with notifications and flashing lights in Las Vegas.

He told the Times that his goal was to leverage A.I. to help people make “better sense of the noise.”

Altman and Ives will also have to navigate a highly competitive environment if they’re to succeed. Facebook parent Meta, Google parent Alphabet, Snap and Apple all have their own approaches to AI devices in development. Farthest along in development seem to be wearable glassses. An article in Barrons at the time of the announcement mentions a now-defunct company that was started by two ex-Apple employees and where Altman had also been an investor to make a non-wearable device. Unable to overcome the technical challenges, the so-called Humane AI Pin was quickly undermined by performance glitches and scathing tech reviews.

Barrons also brought a whiff of high-brow dabbling to Ives own track record since he left Apple in 2019:

All of [it]’s work has been in the ultra-luxury class. So far, its product designs are a jacket that starts at $2,000, a $60,000 limited edition turntable, some work for Ferrari…a logo and emblem for King Charles… and a partnership with Airbnb.

Nevertheless, if Altman and Ives revolutionary device succeeds, it could change the way that AI has been delivered and experienced by early adopters of chatbots over the last two years. As the WSJ noted:

While Apple and Google have struggled to keep pace with AI innovations, many investors see the two companies—whose software runs nearly all the world’s smartphones—as the primary means through which billions of people will access AI tools and chatbots. Building a device is the only way OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies will be able to interact with consumers directly.

In other words, Altman and Ives could effectively by-pass both Apple and Google with their new device, and all of the recent press reports provide tantalizing clues about how it will deliver—for both better and worse.

Barrons reports that their new device will likely be cloud-based. Despite that advantage, it will also stop working when off-network and may be marred with “latency” (or delays in transmission) even when users are connected.

More groundbreakingly, both the Times and the Journal suggest that there will be something like sentience in the new device.

The Times authors say Altman and Ives could spur what is known as “ambient computing” or a technology that makes digital interactions both natural and unobtrusive, as when a device in the background adapts to your needs without needing your commands. “Rather than typing and taking photographs on smartphones,” they note, such devices “could process the world in real time, fielding questions and analyzing images and sounds in seamless ways.”

Meanwhile, the WSJ teases (or frightens) us with the possibility that “[t]he product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk”—in other words, more like a helpful companion or alter-ego than anything Silicon Valley has delivered to us before.

At least for now, I’m choosing to see these possibilities as closer to magical than to anything else.

_{A White House door-knob}

This week’s Family Strongman links, images and comments include more on the president’s greed and self-dealing, which regularly feed the gilded image that he has of himself.

They include moments that would be purely laughable if they did not also illustrate how Trump’s “art of the deal” is undermining America’s ability to negotiate in our country’s best interests with rivals like China and Russia.

And I’ll leave you this week with some haunting observations by NYT columnist M Gessen (who was born in the Soviet Union) on how difficult it can be to maintain the necessary level of public outrage and push-back to the cumulative actions of any authoritarian regime.

Here are this week’s Trump-related comments, links and images to help keep you on the frontlines:

1. In Vanity Fair, right before the 2016 election, it’s good to recall that fellow New Yorker Fran Lebowitz called Mr. Trump “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”

2. “As the Trumps Monetize the Presidency, Profits Outstrip Protest” includes New York Times reporter Peter Baker’s take on at least two of the reasons why the president and his family have faced less resistance and outrage than they normally would have–and each is Trump-engineered.

Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, F.B.I. and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.

As a result, while Democrats and other critics of Mr. Trump are increasingly trying to focus attention on the president’s activities, they have had a hard time gaining any traction without the usual mechanisms of official review. And at a time when Mr. Trump provokes a major news story every day or even every hour — more tariffs on allies, more retribution against enemies, more defiance of court orders — rarely does a single action stay in the headlines long enough to shape the national conversation.

3. After Trump repeatedly reverses course on tariff threats, the TACO meme—Trump Always Chickens Out—went viral on social media this week. While it’s the kind of humor that punctures his ego nicely by calling his staying-power into question, it’s also how he’s being viewed as a weakling in international disputes with adversaries like China and Russia that have significant consequences for American’s pocketbooks, at a minimum, and our national security, more broadly.

4. In “Beware: We are Entering a New Stage in the Trump Era,” A few days ago, M Gessen wrote about (a) the cruelties that have taken place in America over the last 5 months, such as the “gutting constitutional rights and civil protections,” chainsawing federal jobs without a efficiency plan, “brutal deportations,” “people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars,” attacks on universities and law firms; (b) how we’re wired as humans to eventually resign ourselves to harsh “realities” that we feel helpless to change; and (c) the consequences for our country when too many of us are “normalizing” Trump’s regime at a time when resistance to it is needed the most. In other words, Gessen fears that we’re almost becoming enervated by our opposition and alarm, and how dangerous that can be in a democracy that requires a certain level of citizen engagement.

For my part, I’m trying to both maintain “the threat level” and focus on “the next turn of the regime” by occasionally stepping down from the barricades, like when I’m feeling wonder and even awe at the possibility of a new, transformational and maybe even more humane devices that could enrich my life and work in ways I can barely imagine.

This post was adapted from my June 1, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Liberating Trump’s Good Instincts From the Rest

April 21, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Last week, I promised to write about what thoughtful and concerned citizens can do to confront the chaos and damage our president’s actions have caused in only three short months.

The first thing is to acknowledge that Trump is, in fact, our president. More than half of the Americans who voted last November chose him over Harris. Whether you like that result or not, you can’t buy into our system of government and also say: “He’s not my president.” A loyal opposition works with the reality that it’s got, while trying its best to turn today’s misadventures into tomorrow’s possibilities.

That better future continues by admitting that through either choice or neglect, all Americans own—in the sense of “having responsibility for”—the messes that we’re in today. However much the child in us wishes otherwise, it’s not for some other mommy or daddy to clean up.

That’s because anyone who has been paying attention, even once in awhile, could have seen much of this coming and done more to stop it before it got this far. After all, Trump has never stopped talking about his priorities, not even once! And if we needed it in writing, Project 2025 turned his wish-list into a widely-disseminated plan. It was just easier to say to ourselves: “that can never happen here,” while ignoring the millions of Americans who were hoping that it would, and the millions more who just wanted some alternative (any alternative) to a grandiose version of senility.

Marching further along, we can keep deploring how Trump is trying to secure the future but not (I think) some of the necessary changes that he also wants to make, indeed that millions of our neighbors feel are necessary too

Yes, it’s offensive watching a Family Strongman joyfully bully weaker parties (states like Canada, leaders like Zelensky, universities like Columbia) while extorting “whatever I can get” (as he’s said) in order to become richer and more indispensable himself. But, at the very same time, is he (along with the millions who voted for him) wrong about the drift of our universities towards “one correct point of view,” the need for America to fortify its soft power abroad “by also putting a fist in its velvet glove,” or how too many other nations have taken unfair advantage of our so-called “free trade” policies?

In other words, if we truly want to turn today’s lemon of a regime into tomorrow’s lemonade, we’ll be more likely to succeed by OWNING mistakes that continue to give Trump credibility with his non-MAGA base (like all those farmers on the brink of insolvency who still want to give his trade policies a chance), while SHOWING that we’re big enough to admit “where we got it wrong” before proposing better ways (than Trump’s vindictiveness, extortion and chaos) to fix some long, festering problems.

In other words, if Biden is the thesis and Trump the antithesis in an over-simplified hypothetical, the future will belong to those who admit the errors and find the truths in both administrations as we pursue a new way forward—or kind of synthesis.

I explored a variation on this theme in a pandemic post called “Higher Winds Are Coming,” at a time that’s (unfortunately) not that dissimilar to the one we’re in today. Confronting contagion, Trump and my trepidation about both, I recounted how I was trying to foster a mindset that was more like the one outlined in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” a book from 10 years before by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Instead of merely being defensive when confronting what feels like danger or chaos, Taleb urged us to play offense by using our agency to gain strength from what’s threatening us or our world view.

This is how Taleb introduces that proposal.

Some things [actually] benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile [which fears, to the point of paralysis, both risk and uncertainty]. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Acknowledging “the truth” in the position of someone you oppose, and then incorporating “the strength” of some of those insights into your own position, is (I think) much of what Taleb is talking about.

Doing so also robs, say the Family Strongman, of his ability to claim that only he sees “what’s really been going on” because none of his adversaries can admit, let alone agree with him about it.

The following graphic illustrates how the antifragile perspective incorporates some of the strength (or neutralizes some of the harm) of the surrounding chaos in one’s actions going forward.

What follows are 3 instances where some of the observers I admire most are trying to incorporate the strength in certain of Trump’s positions into their own, antifragile perspectives.

1. Trump’s Savaging of American Foreign Policy

My eyes don’t well up when I look at social media clips of compassionate pets, but it’s easy for me to get there when watching a short video of something like this [Ukrainians kneeling at roadsides to honor the passing of their war dead.] So I began the current Trump administration hanging onto every word he tossed around about Ukraine because I feared that America was about to abandon a brave nation on the frontline of a war (that’s also our war) against barbarity.

Unfortunately, my turmoil about this would have found a better outlet than worry if I’d spent more time examining what’s accurate in Trump’s views about this war and the role the U.S. has been playing in it.

Trump is right about Europe’s free-loading since the Cold War ended, and that we should have insisted from the start that every European country (except maybe Moldova and Georgia) play bigger military and financial roles in the defense of their own territory. Trump is also right that Biden’s foreign policy was embarrassingly weak-kneed–almost to the point of encouraging Russia–since Putin quickly learned we were never there to help the Ukrainians win, only to maintain a dehumanizing form of stalemate. So Trump’s saying “Too many lives have been lost [that didn’t have to be lost because of the last administration’s weakness]” also happens to be true.

Of course, none of Trump’s “truths” justify our abandoning Ukraine to Russian domination now, nor our wider retreat from projecting “soft” and “hard” power elsewhere, as the leader of a world-order the U.S. itself was instrumental in shaping. But admitting them alters (for the better) our foreign policies going forward: as in, building partnerships where the burdens of war are shared more equally and never entering a conflict like this in the first place if you’re not prepared to win because of the annihilating consequences for those who are doing the actual fighting.

Bret Stephens, a conservative, former-Republican columnist interviewed in the Times on Thursday indicated that his final “turning point” against Trump was the humiliation of President Zelensky in the Oval Office (“the most incredible kind of discourtesy”), a display that further emboldened Putin “to press the war harder” while revealing “a combination of malice and idiocy almost unique in American history.” Notwithstanding these damnations, Stephens went on to admit that:

those of us who are critics of Trump, who find him at some level vomitous, are better critics when we concede from time to time that he has accomplished something. That not everything is dreadful or idiotic. You have to keep your brain on. And I think that [turning it off]’s the danger for a lot of Trump critics….

Walter Russell Mead, an historian and a columnist at the Wall street Journal has also been more rigorous than most at seeing the valid points Trump has been making (instead of just those he’s been missing), something he did again on Tuesday:

Many critics of Team Trump’s approach bemoan what they see as the collapse of American soft power {like USAID, Voice of America radio, calling out dictators]. Our core advantage against powers like China and Russia, they argue, is our network of alliances, and these alliances depend on America’s reputation for rules-based, pro-democracy and free-trade policies. To lose that reputation through shortsighted, rash actions is to throw away vital assets that took decades of diplomacy to acquire.

They have a point, but so does Mr. Trump. Iron fists work better when sheathed in velvet gloves, but nothing is more useless than a velvet glove without an iron fist. America’s failure to match the growth in Chinese and Russian hard power under President Barack Obama eroded the foundations of world peace even as Mr. Obama electrified European audiences with inspiring speeches. The comforting illusion that soft power is an effective substitute for hard power contributed materially to the generational failures in Western security policy that left the world system so dangerously and so unnecessarily exposed to the ambitions of the revisionists.

Stephens and Mead both recognize that however alarming (or brain extinguishing) Trump’s statecraft might be sometimes, it is even more wrong-headed to offer perspectives on the future that deny what Trump gets right, “truths” that just might keep fewer supporters in his camp once they’re embraced by more of those who are outside of it.

2. Trump’s Vendetta Against Universities

Bret Stephens also challenged this vendetta in the course of his interview, noting how Trump “latched onto the issue of antisemitism on campus, which is real and which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent,” before vehemently objecting to how the president has:

turned a legitimate grievance — and specifically Jewish grievance — into a tool to undermine and potentially destroy a value, which I think is [also] a core Jewish value, which is the value of debate, dissent, reason, inquiry, criticism and so on….

[S]o there is a side of the Jewish population that’s sort of cheering Trump because he seems to have the same enemies, or many of the same enemies, that we do [Stephens is Jewish]. But the methods he’s using to oppose those enemies, we ought to fear.

Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president who also happens to be Jewish, said the following in a Times op-ed on April 3, before Harvard opposed Trump’s threat to block billions of dollars in research funds if the university failed to yield to his demands on “oversight.” Summers is unwavering in opposing Trump’s extortionist attack, but not before acknowledging some uncomfortable truths that the president also believes.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one-sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective, and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm with which they greeted micromanagement when they approved of the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized.

But the Trump administration is not acting in good faith in its purported antisemitism concerns, nor is it following the law in its approach to universities.

President Trump offered praise to a white-supremacist rally that included chants of ‘Jews will not replace us,’ publicly dined with Holocaust deniers, made common cause with Germany’s Nazi-descendant AfD party and invoked tropes about wealthy Jews. The true motivation behind his attack on universities is suggested by Vice President JD Vance’s declaration that the ‘universities are the enemy.’ Shakedown is the administration’s strategy as it has gone after law firms, federal judges, legislators who disagree with its edicts and traditionally independent arms of the government. [internal links disabled]

So of course, it’s shameful that the Family Strongman is using antisemitism as a pretext to stifle unwelcome dissent from the young and the restless before it even rises (like a tide) against him. But that doesn’t mean our greatest universities should get a “pass” when it comes to the selective intolerances they have fostered against anyone who deviates from “acceptable doctrine”—about Gaza or otherwise. An antifragile perspective about our universities needs to insist that they give themselves a full, internal housecleaning while Trump’s destabalizing assault is still fresh in their minds.

3. Two Things About Tariffs

The real “goods” and “bads” regarding Trump’s tariff barrage have gotten lost in the shuffle of the chaos of their announcement, their “on-again/off-again” nature, and the conflicting voices in the White House that have been “explaining” them to us. The speakers and the listeners all seem confused.

This story should have begun with an explanation about why tariffs are needed in the first place, and why this is a critical objective of the Trump’administration, particularly because of the risks of higher costs and damaged savings that nearly everyone has been either expecting or already experiencing. Moreover, this global tariff initiative was launched at a time when many Americans’ daily experience of their economy finally seemed to be improving in the three months following the election.

I believe that in light of our country’s need to re-shore certain essential manufacturing (the soup-to-nuts processing of rare earth metals comes to mind), some level of across-the-board tariffs and a re-calibrating with China are, in fact, necessary. (You might check out this excellent discussion [via a paywall-free link] between economist Oren Cass—a regular voice on this page—and Ross Duothat of the New York Times for Cass’s explanation). So once again, Trump has managed to conflate a policy move that’s sound at its core with horrible execution and even worse statements about his motivations.

Some of the worst damage may have been caused by how our Family Strongman managed to make a predatory China look good by comparison to nearly every other nation that has been impacted. Here’s Yaroslav Trofimov writing in the Journal last weekend:

Beijing’s message amid this crisis is that China represents the best hope for ‘win-win cooperation’ and global prosperity, in contrast with what the Chinese foreign ministry calls America’s ‘unilateral bullying practice.’ Countries around the world are skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions, but the language of respectful cooperation is far more appealing than Washington’s demands to pay tribute—as when Trump said this week that ‘countries are calling us up, kissing my ass’ to make a deal on tariffs.

Once again, he’s been sabotaging a perfectly good instinct with Godfather-inspired messaging. Among other things, an inherently more robust trade initiative would involve implementing more tailored protectionism in a far more respectful and collaborative way.

The bottom-line in this discussion is this. If the president’s critics want to succeed (and I thing we do), they can’t aim to throw the entire Trump-baby out with his fetid bathwater. He gets it right sometimes, and a legion of his supporters and “persuadables” instinctively sense the accuracy of his judgments when it comes to matters like foreign policy, universities and tariffs. As a result, his judgments, when valid, need to be built into any opposition’s plan for America.

A failure to do so will likely cause even the best among them to fail.

+ + +

What I’d call “A Gate to the Future” (as seen up top) is care of @miguelmarquezoutside. I’ll see you next week.

This post was adapted from my April 20, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Delivering the American Dream More Reliably

March 30, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about the dangers and “hallucinations” of AI as we test-drive our large language models. At the same time, we probably hear too little about how AI is helping us to advance our body of knowledge by processing huge volumes of data in previously unimagined ways. The benefits don’t always outweigh the risks, but sometimes they do—and in an unprecedented fashion.

I’m thinking today about how AI-driven assessments are starting to tell us whether social policy “fixes” that we implement today are actually achieving their intended results instead of speculating about their possible “pay offs” 10 or 20 years later. These new assessments can help us to determine “the returns on our investments” when we attempt to improve our society by (say) providing paternity leave for fathers, multiplying our social connections, or enhancing the stock of affordable housing in vibrant communities.

Artificial intelligence is already enabling us to identify and refine the variables for public policy success beforehand and to keep track of the resulting benefits in something that approaches real time.

I’ve written here several times about how too many of us are failing to achieve the American Dream. Straightforwardly, that’s whether our economy is affording our nation’s children the opportunity to do better economically than their parents over succeeding generations. For Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps, attaining that American Dream provides a “flourishing” that brings both us and our children psychic benefits (like pride and enhanced self-esteem) as well as greater prosperity and foreward momentum. We calculate the likelihood of its returns in measures of opportunity—from having many opportunites to improve ourselves to having almost none available at all.

Over the past 90 years, for millions in the U.S. (or nearly everyone whose family is not in the top 20 percent income-wise) the quest to attain the American Dream has been disappointing at best, soul-crushing at worst. Our inablity to reliably improve either our fortunes or those of the generations that succeed us unleashes a cascade of unfortunate consequences, such as widespread pessimism about the future, cynicism about our politics, an ever-widening gulf between economic “winners” and “losers,” a rise in “deaths of despair,” and a willingness to gamble on a leader who promises “a new golden age” but never reveals how anyone “who hasn’t gotten there already” will be able to reach it.

_{This is a chart, from a presentation at the Milken Institute by economist and Harvard professor Raj Chetty, includes income measures from tax returns for both parents and their children (both at age 30). Using AI tools, it tracks “the percent of children earning more than their parents” through the mid-1980’s. (The overall percentage has not improved between then and now.) Today, like in 1985, it is “essentially a 50/50 coin flip as to whether you are going to achieve the American Dream.” (A link that will enable a closer view of this chart, along with others included here, is provided below.)}

During the New Deal of the 1930s and Great Society of the 1960s, a raft of social programs was launched to give Americans “who worked hard and were willing to sacrifice for the sake of better tomorrows” greater opportunities to improve their circumstances and live to enjoy “the even greater success” of their children. Unfortunately, our prior attempts to engineer the “economic playing field” so that it delivers the American Dream more reliably have often been little better than “shots in the dark.”

For instance, many New Deal initiatives didn’t succeed until the economic engines of the Second World War kicked in. The “anti-poverty” programs of the Great Society bore fruit in some areas (such as voters’ rights) while causing unexpected consequences in others, like the weakening of low-income families when welfare checks effectively “replaced” fathers’ traditional roles as breadwinners. In those days, policymakers meant well but lacked the assessment tools to know whether their fixes were working until 10 or 20 years out, when they’d sometimes discover that the original problem persisted, or the collateral damage from the policy itself became evident.

Today, new policy-making tools are eliminating much of this guess-work. AI-driven data gathering, experimentation within different communities, and almost “real-time” assessments of progress have begun to transform the ways that new economic policies are developed and implemented. Raj Chetty, the teacher and economist pictured here, is at the forefront of this sea change.

I’m profiling his work today because of the results he, his team and his fellow-travelers in this big-data-driven space are beginning to achieve. But this work also injects a note of optimism into an increasingly pessimistic time. Policy delivery like Chetty’s points towards a future with greater economic promise than the majority of us can see today–when inflation persists, tariffs threaten even higher prices, and government safety nets are dismantled without apparent gains in efficiency. What Chetty calls his “Recipes for Social Mobility” (including his starting point for the chart (above) provide a methodical, evidence-based way to craft, implement and assess the durability of economic policies that could help to deliver the American Dream to millions of anxious families today.

In recent months, Chetty has been doing a kind of “road show” that profiles the early progress of his AI-driven approach. I heard a lecture of his on-line from New Haven three weeks ago, which led me to another talk that he gave during a 2024 conference held at the Milken Center for [yes] Advancing the American Dream in California. The slides and quotations today are from Chetty’s Milken Center presentation and can be given either a listen or a closer look via this link to it on YouTube.

After his first chart about “the fading American Dream,” Chetty presented an interactive U.S. map built upon meticulously assembled data that shows areas in the country where the children of low income parents have “greater” or “lesser” chances at upward social and economic mobility. Essentially, his team gathered income data on 20 million children born in the 1980’s to households earning $27k per year in order to determine how many of those children went on to earn more than their parents—adjusted for inflation—at age 35, localized to the parts of the country where they were living at the time.

_{Chetty’s Geography of Social Mobility chart.}

You’ll notice—somewhat surprisingly—that in this snapshot, kids of low-income parents enjoyed the greatest upward mobility in Dubuque, Iowa while actually losing the most ground compared with their parents in Charlotte, North Carolina over this time frame.

I had some additional reactions (beyond my amazement at the richness of the data painted here). For one thing, if I were on Chetty’s team, I would use colors other than “red” and “blue” to illustrate differences in upward mobility across the U.S. Using this color palette falls too easily (and unnecessarily) into our current Red and Blue state narratives, or exactly the kinds of prejudices that tying communities to actual data are trying to dispel.

While I watched Chetty talk about this slide, I also noticed you can scan a bar code that allows you to examine places that you might be curious about in closer detail (such as where you live) by putting in your zip code when prompted. When I did so, I already suspected that a child’s shot at upward mobility would be relatively low in my Philadelphia neighborhood, but was surprised to learn that it is far higher in many of the central Pennsylvania counties that have long been characterized as “a gun-loving, God-fearing slice of Alabama” between here and Pittsburgh.

While he spoke, Chetty highlighted “the microscopic views and comparisons” that a mapping tool like this allows, particularly when it confounds expectations. He describes, for example, how appalled Charlotte’s civic leaders were when learning about their “worst place finish” in this assessment and how it catalyzed new, similarly data-driven efforts to improve the prospects for that City’s children.

Chetty goes on to juxtapose this chart with an even more interesting one. At first glance one sees its similarities, but its differences are far more intriguing.

_{Contrasting places in the U.S. where there is Economic Opportunity (or Upward Mobility) with places where there are greater or lesser amounts of Economic Connectedness and the kind of Social Capital that it produces.}

The social capital that Chetty illustrates here is the same “commodity” that Bowling Alone’s Bob Putnam has been trying to build throughout his career, as described in my post a couple of weeks ago, “History Suggests that Better Days Could be Coming”. Putnam’s thesis goes like this: if you want to improve your community, state or nation, that drive begins by strengthening your in-person social connections, thereby increasing “the social capital” that’s available for spending when connected individuals wish to solve a problem or better their community’s circumstances.

At it’s simplest, Chetty’s comparison chart shows those places in America where people from different socio-economic backgrounds are more connected to one another, less connected and where there are greater or lesser accumulations of social capital as a result.

Chetty once again reminds us that localizing massive data sets in this manner allows those using these tools to dive even deeper into neighborhood, or even into street-by-street variations in both upward mobility and social capital.

In his “economic connectedness” map, social capital acrues from the amount of “cross-class interaction” that occurs between high and low income people in each county, town and neighborhood in the U.S. This relationship is key because Chetty’s team had already established that “the single strongest predictor of your chances of rising up is how connected you [or those most in need of “upward mobility”] are to higher income folks,” as opposed to living in a place where nearly everyone is on the same rung of the economic ladder.

To compile this chart, Chetty collaborated with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s “core data science team” to access the voluminous data the social network has gathered on the 72 million Americans who use the platform. He wanted to identify low-income users and determine how many “above median income friends” each one of them has, before breaking that aggregate snapshot down with his powerful mapping tool.

Connections across income classes produce opportunities “like getting a job referral, or an internship.” But Chetty also identified an “aspirational” component when members of different economic classes interact with one another on a regualr basis.

If you’ve never met somebody who went to college, you don’t think about that as a possibility for you. If you’re in a community where you’ve seen more people succeed in certain career pathways, that can change kid’s lives…

Once again, a few of my reactions to the comparisons these big-data snapshots invite.

_{A detailed view of the mid-Atlantic in general, and Philadelphia in particular, on Chetty’s mapping of Economic Connectedness.}

Despite Philadelphia’s “relatively weak” score on upward mobility, I was also not surprised that my part of the state ranks as “relatively strong” (or a medium shade of blue) when it comes to the social capital that’s produced by our economic connectedness. Among many other things, that means those of us in Southeastern Pennsylvania already have a relatively-strong foundation for driving greater upward mobility, along with more helpful data about our localized advantages and challenges as we dig deeper into our particular blocks on this map.

On the other hand, I found the social policy solution that Chetty profiled in his talk somewhat disappointing, although it seemed to me that the experimental template that gave rise to it would be a serviceable-enough incubator for additional policies going forward.

He describes at length a test study his team initiated in Seattle involving low income households with subsidized (formerly Title 8) housing vouchers. Their first discovery was that most voucher holders try to use them in their own communities, with little or no gain in economic connectedness. They then realized that while “real-estate brokers” are commonly used for finding places to live in higher income communities, their eqivalent is non-existent for those who want to get “the most bang for the buck” out of the $2500 credit in one of these housing vouchers.

Chetty’s team concluded that if a sponsor (e.g. a local government, for-profit or non-profit) wanted to build social capital for low-income households, it could spend what amounted to 2% of the value of each voucher to hire “brokers” to help low-income residents find housing in communities with greater economic connectedness than the uniformly impoverished neighborhoods where most of them lived.

This solution was affordable and it quickly built social capital for low income individuals, but even under the best of circumstances it is unlikely to impact enough households because of the limited amounts of affordable housing in most higher income communities, a fact that Chetty readily admits:

I don’t want to give the impression that I think the desegregation approach, moving people to different areas, is the only thing we should do. Obviously, that’s not going to be a scalable approach in and of itself.

But this demonstration of how to engineer a social policy illustrates the potential for modeling and testing reforms that can attract “smarter, evidence-driven investments” as mapping tools like these are refined and used by more policy makers.

Chetty’s Seattle experiment also puts a spotlight on social programs that increase economic connectedness. While the parents who were able to move from low income communities to mixed income neighborhoods surely had an opportunity to realize gains in social capital, it’s their children who stood to benefit the most from more diverse schools, better playgrounds and exposure to career options they might never have considered before.

What motivates Chetty, his team and his hosts at the Milken Institute the most are the opportunities that these AI-driven, data-rich tools will be presenting in the very near future to the millions who are pursuing the American Dream but failing to achieve it.

Twenty years ago, a civil rights organization that sought to open pathways towards college and upward mobility had, as its memorable motto: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

With a conclusion as obvious as that in mind, I’ll give Raj Chetty’s final presentation slide some of the last words here about assets that we’ve been wasting for far too long.

_{The box reads: “If women, minorities, and children from low income families invent at the same rate as high-income white men, the innovation rate in America wouild quadruple.“}

I guess I would prefer to make this slide more powerful still.

It’s true that we’re wasting many of our most valuable people-assets in the US. today, but “delivering the American Dream more reliably” is not the legacy of “high-income white men.” First off, many of our most successful innovators today aren’t “white” but are people of color, immigrants and their descendants (like Chetty himself). Moreover, this is an 80%-of-America size problem (or everyone who’s NOT in the top 20% income-wise) not a burden that’s only carried by previously marginalized communities. I believe that Chetty’s ground-breaking work will attract the base of support that it deserves if slides like this are imodified to reflect the true magnitude of our Lost Einsteins. So I don’t know how Chetty’s team quantified the “lost opportunities” highlighted here “as quadruple” the number of our current innovators, but I’d wager that’s an undercount.

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For those who are interested, I’ve written about our frustrated pursuit of the American Dream several times before. These posts include:

“The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility” (citing data that government management of the economy has caused our middle and lower classes to realize essentially the same income due to government transfer payments, arguing that perverse incentives such as “these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility”);
“Let’s Revitalize the American Dream” (citing a 2015 study that found the U.S. ranks “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger”); and
“America Needs a Rebranding Campaign” (If “equality of opportunity” is really our touchstone as a nation, then it “needs to infuse every brand touchpoint” of ours, including our “packaging, public relations, advertising, services, partnerships, social responsibility, HR & recruitment, loyalty programs, events & activations, user experience, sourcing & standards, and product portfolio.” In other words, America needs “to start walking the equality-of-opportunity walk,” instead of just talking about it.)

This post was adapted from my March 9, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.