This post is a response to a comment.

In 2023 roughly 8% of Chicago’s registered voters cast a primary ballot for Brandon Johnson for mayor and most primary voters chose someone else. He received a majority of the votes cast in the run-off election against an extremely unpopular incumbent and an individual cast as a Trump supporter.

A government can be validly elected and still rest on a very narrow base of participation. The rules worked. But it becomes harder to say the outcome represents a shared civic decision when so few take part.

In a democracy authority ultimately rests on the consent of the governed and consent is easier to infer when participation is broad. When participation narrows, elections begin to select leaders rather than express the public will.

I worked nearly 30 years as an election judge. Voters once approached the polls as if they were exercising power. You could see it in their postures, in conversation, in their anticipation. Today many arrive irritated or detached, as if the result exists elsewhere and they are only acknowledging it. I would call that discouragement.

Maybe ranked-choice voting would help by requiring broader coalitions, though it may also confuse some voters. Mandatory voting might raise participation, although countries that adopt it often later weaken it. I don’t know the answer, but a system in which fewer citizens feel they are choosing their government is moving away from what democracy is meant to be like.

I wanted to commend a post at Outside the Beltway to your attention. The post is about the impact of LLM AI on jobs in the United States. James’s observations are pretty quotidien (technology is improving rapidly, employment is increasing slowly, productivity rapidly, etc.). It’s the comments that are interesting. Most are the typical outright rejection and denial but there’s one, made by individual who comments here occasionally, that hits the nail squarely on the head:

It can generate code at the level of an intern, requiring large amounts of supervision. Typically, interns are useless on net, and the internship is just a months long job interview looking to see if the little rugrat can show signs of growing past that.

and

I worked at a startup decades ago, and quickly realized that what we were ostensibly doing was not the real goal — we weren’t really making a product, we were selling a dream to the investor class, telling them that we would be revolutionizing the internet and that they could get in on the ground floor. The actual users were just a means to an end, and their happiness was almost irrelevant, so long as a non-expert investor could look at it and think “yes, stupid peasants might like this.”

Here the dream is straightforward, and the dream of every C-suite executive: get rid of employees. It doesn’t have to be successful, it just has to be convincing to non-experts that long-term it will be successful. And even if all it does is make employees nervous and “grateful to have a job”… that’s part of the dream.

When I began working sixty years ago, big companies routinely and systematically trained new employees. That hasn’t been true for years. Today entry-level jobs exist primarily as training investments when they exist at all. Firms do not hire entry-level workers for productivity; they hire them to create future productive workers. If managers believe AI will replace that future worker, the rational action is to stop creating the positions now.

Other arguments are secondary at most. It doesn’t matter whether AI can do all jobs or, indeed, any jobs better than human beings in the near term. The point is what management believes and as long as managers believe that AI can do as good a job as a human employee, LLM AI will reduce the number of entry-level jobs created first, then higher level jobs.

That will be seen first where the largest number of entry-level jobs have been created, e.g. in South Asia. Entry-level technology jobs are already being disrupted in India, according to the India Times and Storyboard18:

Artificial Intelligence adoption is nudging India’s IT hiring in a new direction, slower at the entry level, steadier at the top, and sharper on skills.

A firm-level study by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), supported by OpenAI, finds that companies are moderating hiring, particularly for entry-level roles, even as mid- and senior-level employment remains largely stable.

This has happened multiple times in the past. Railroads massively overbuilt before profitability. MBA spreadsheet models drove layoffs in the 1980s before productivity gains existed.

The “title inflation” with which the technology sector will ensure that a significant number of jobs are eliminated. And it’s not just the technology sector. Any sector that has already experienced significant outsourcing including the financial sector will do the same thing. The number of associates being hired by large law firms will decline.

India is the canary in the coal mine.

Before it disappears into the memory hole I wanted to take note of WSJ London editor Jillian Kay Melchior’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. A NATO wargame in Estonia has revealed some serious deficiencies not just in NATO’s combined defense capabilities but in its institutional capacity to learn and adapt:

Russia and Ukraine have shown the world the future of warfare—and America and its allies aren’t ready for it. That’s the lesson of a major exercise that North Atlantic Treaty Organization members conducted in Estonia last May. What transpired during the exercise, with the details reported here for the first time, exposed serious tactical shortcomings and vulnerabilities in high-intensity drone combat.

The exercise, known as Hedgehog 2025, involved more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries who drilled alongside Ukrainian drone experts, including soldiers borrowed from the front line. It simulated a “contested and congested” battlefield with various kinds of drones, says Lt. Col. Arbo Probal, head of the unmanned systems program for the Estonian Defence Forces. “The aim was really to create friction, the stress for units, and the cognitive overload as soon as possible,” he says. That tests the soldiers’ ability to adapt under fire.

What the wargame reveals more than any single tactical failure is the widening gap between institutions that are operating under real evolutionary pressure and those that are not. Ukraine is learning under fire. Its feedback loop is measured in hours and days. Russia, whatever its other deficiencies, is subjected to the same brutal discipline. NATO, by contrast, is largely learning in simulations and conferences. Exercises are useful but they are not selection events. War is. Institutions that survive it adapt—or they disappear. We should assume that both Ukraine and Russia are adapting. The question is whether NATO’s collective defense structure can adapt at anything like the same speed without the benefit or the horror of actual battlefield experience.

Here’s the kernel of the piece:

A single team of some 10 Ukrainians, acting as the adversary, counterattacked the NATO forces. In about half a day they mock-destroyed 17 armored vehicles and conducted 30 “strikes” on other targets.

and

Overall, the results were “horrible” for NATO forces, says Mr. Hanniotti, who now works in the private sector as an unmanned systems expert. The adversary forces were “able to eliminate two battalions in a day,” so that “in an exercise sense, basically, they were not able to fight anymore after that.” The NATO side “didn’t even get our drone teams.”

We have very little experience operating in a drone-saturated battlespace against a near-peer adversary. Whether we are prepared is not something open sources can answer. A word to the wise is sufficient.

I hope our European allies were paying close attention. I may be wrong but the evidence suggests that they aren’t. I have identified articles in Slovakian and Romanian on the exercises but not in German or French. It is telling that coverage appears in countries that sit closer to Russia’s shadow while comparable discussion in German or French media is harder to find. There’s nothing like an imminent sentence of death to clarify the mind.

It’s just a few weeks until the Democratic primary and I’m struggling to decide which candidate running to replace Dick Durbin in the Senate I should vote for. The leading candidates are:

While each emphasizes different issues in tone, in Robin Kelly’s case gun control, the central planks of their campaigns overlap substantially: immigration abolitionism, Medicare for All, and opposition to Donald Trump. None has mentioned how how they will pay for “Medicare for All” beyond vague statements about making the “rich pay their fair share”.

Beyond that there is a significant emphasis on demographic representation as a campaign differentiator. Or, in Krishnamoorthi’s case, that he is an immigrant. Robin Kelly and Juliana Stratton are both black women. Mr. Krishnamoorthi also has the largest warchest, much of it from out-of-state donors. He’s been running ads for months and is considered the frontrunner.

This race is a wonderful example of why I reject the notion that the reason our politics are as they are is the voters. My choice is among three candidates all running on what are materially the same platforms. How is that the voters’ fault?

In multiple ads, both Mr. Krishnamoorthi and Lt. Gov. Stratton use the word “fight,” accompanied by footage of protest-style rallies. That rhetoric suggests an activist posture rather than a legislative one. I recognize these ads are not targeted at me. I think they are targeted at what they think are the median Democratic primary voters. If that is what consultants believe motivates the median Democratic primary voter, it is an interesting assumption. I am not persuaded it reflects the temperament of the median Illinois voter or even the median Illinois Democratic primary voter.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius takes note of some developments in the Middle East. I reflect on the developments he reports and draw a very different conclusion. Mr. Ignatius points to elements of a feud between the Saudis and the UAE:

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two drivers of modernization in the Middle East, should be rejoicing together these days. Iran is weak, its proxies are on the run, and an American armada approaches the Persian Gulf. But instead they have stumbled into an epic feud that could polarize the region.

When the quarrel detonated in late December, it seemed like a fight over strategy for resolving the forever war in Yemen. But it has since escalated into a social media battle in which Saudis have attacked the UAE as “Israel’s Trojan horse” and denounced the Abraham Accords, joined by the UAE in 2020, as “a political military alliance dressed in the garb of religion.”

After reporting on several aspects of the “feud” he observes:

For the Trump administration, which has close ties with both countries, the Saudi-UAE wrangle illustrates the difficulty of working with two headstrong regional powers at once. The administration is said to have offered to mediate, but both sides have balked, according to several knowledgeable officials. Because of the intense personal feelings, one official told me, “This is not something you mediate.”

with this point:

“The Saudis want obedience, or at least alignment with their regional policies,” said Jonny Gannon, a former senior CIA officer with decades of experience in the Middle East. “The Emiratis don’t want to be obedient. They want optionality.”

I think that Mr. Ignatius is operating under some shaky premises. Those are highlighted by his use of this phrase: “an Arab official”. And the United Arab Emirates is not an “it”; it is a “they”—a loose confederation of seven emirates, each with different histories, rules, goals, and objectives. Here’s his conclusion:

Family feuds come and go in the Middle East, as around the world. What concerns me about this quarrel is the growing attacks on the UAE because of its opening to Israel. No country has a bigger stake in stopping the spread of Islamic extremism than Saudi Arabia. In its seeming encouragement of vitriolic Saudi attacks on the UAE as a “Devil of the Arabs” that takes orders from Israel, the kingdom is playing with fire.

I understand why Mr. Ignatius uses the phrase “an Arab official.” He is protecting a source. But the phrase quietly implies a degree of common political perspective that does not exist. “Arab” is a linguistic designation, not a strategic one. A Saudi official and an Emirati official do not represent variations within a common bloc; they represent competing sovereign regimes with distinct ambitions.

My read of the “feud” is different from Mr. Ignatius’s. Mohammed bin Salman is less “modernizing” Saudi Arabia than consolidating power and asserting Saudi primacy among the Gulf states. UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed resists that not because the UAE is drifting toward liberal democracy, but because Abu Dhabi wants autonomy in regional strategy.

“Modernization” in the Gulf should not be confused with liberalization. Civil liberties remain tightly constrained and the religious and patronage networks that have long exported conservative Islamist ideas have not evaporated simply because senior leaders now speak the language of “tolerance” and “reform.”

Nor are Israel’s interests synonymous with America’s. Trade and diplomatic rapprochement are welcome, but they are also transactional and reversible especially when domestic legitimacy, regional rivalries, and succession politics are always in play.

That is why I’m wary of treating a Saudi-UAE rupture as a solvable “family feud.” The region’s alignments can shift quickly, for reasons outsiders only partly perceive. He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.

Nearly 20 years ago, I predicted that no street-legal, fully autonomous automobiles would be operating on the streets of American cities for the foreseeable future. That was received with scoffing by some of my readers. If Waymo is to be believed, nearly 20 years have now elapsed and the fine print tells the real story:

The Waymo Driver autonomously navigates tens of thousands of rider-only miles across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin daily. It can navigate common scenarios, like adhering to a crossing guard directing traffic, as well as more unique interactions like avoiding a swerving vehicle. As the Waymo Driver travels across town, it might contact fleet response for additional help.

Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.

or, in other words, Waymo’s robotaxi is not fully autonomous. If the system requires human judgment to resolve edge cases in real time, it is not fully autonomous. It is largely autonomous and that is a development to be applauded.

The irony of this is that what they’re actually doing is the right way: autonomous with human oversight. For decades I have said that I would joyfully accept fully autonomous vehicles in our streets if strict liability applied. That would align incentives properly. Waymo’s mistake is in advertising their robotaxis as “fully autonomous” rather than what they actually are.

The main open question is whether you trust operators potentially thousands of miles away to get Waymos in San Francisco out of tricky situations.

I only have one problem with the editors’ of the Washington Post’s joy over Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi’s overwhelming victory:

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won a mandate for her ambitious reform project after years of listless leadership in Tokyo. Her success is good news for America, and now Washington can help her succeed.

Takaichi supports a major military buildup in Japan. In addition to boosting defense spending to at least two percent of gross domestic product, she ran on expanding offensive military capabilities and lifting a ban on lethal weapon exports. The sweep of the victory, which gives her muscular majorities in parliament, might even allow Takaichi to repeal the pacifist clause written into Japan’s constitution after World War II.

Before we rejoice we might want to make up our minds. Either the United States intends to remain a global military hegemon with dependent allies or it intends to lead a coalition of capable, autonomous partners. We cannot pursue both simultaneously.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has pursued a policy of military supremacy. Strong allies were seen as an impediment to that hegemony and their autonomy was carefully contrained. For the last roughly ten years we have demanded in increasingly harsh tones that our allies spend 2% of GDP on defense. I have long thought that both policies were mistaken.

We should not demand military hegemony or that our allies spend some arbitrary amount or percent of GDP on defense. We should want strong allies with defined, dependable capabilities. Capabilities including anti-submarine warfare, air defense, sealift, munitions stockpiles, and independent logistics capacity matter far more than whether a country reaches an arbitrary spending threshold.

If Japan is to “shoulder more of the security burden for countering China”, that has certain implications. One is that we are abandoning our heretofore split-personality in policies. We don’t want to be global hegemon any more and we do need strong allies.

Another is that we cannot maintain an adverse balance of trade with China any longer. China uses that trade imbalance to strengthen its own military. A strategy that relies on allied military power while simultaneously financing the adversary’s rearmament through persistent trade imbalances is not merely incoherent but self-defeating.

We should also recognize that autonomous allies are equipped to pursue their own foreign policy interests. Takaichi’s mandate is driven as much by Japanese perceptions of China and North Korea as by American pressure.

I use the word “lie” in a very specific sense. I mean the knowing telling of an untruth with an intention to deceive. At RealClearPolitics J. Budziszewski considers why politicians lie so much these days. Dr. Budziszewski examines multiple reasons including

• Fewer consequences for lying
• Advances in the technology of lying
• Changes in motives for lying

Here’s a key snippet from his post:

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, in which huge numbers of people, on both sides of the spectrum, hold beliefs that are not just loopy, but harmful and contagious. In a recent book, I detail 30 of these delusions, but for the moment, let me focus on two that are especially relevant to political lying.

One concerns the nature of right and wrong: Sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing. We think that to make things come out right, of course we may lie. More and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better make them inexpressibly worse. We justify burning down neighborhoods “to advance racial justice.” We lie about political opponents “because they want to do bad things.” We give false testimony “because we just know” the accused person must deserve something bad. We unjustly penalize honest people “just to give others a chance.” We “solve the problem” of unwanted children by killing them all, telling ourselves that they aren’t really children unless we choose to believe that they are. We slaughter countless numbers so that no one will have a “poorer quality of life.” We lie about all of it.

The other concerns the nature of reality: Things are whatever we say they are. It’s easy to be indifferent to the facts if you think saying something makes it true. One day in a university course I teach, we were discussing the nature of marriage. Some students were puzzled: How could marriage have a nature? As one said, “We can define things however we want.”

Being human I lie occasionally. I try not to. To the best of my knowledge I have never lied on this site. From time to time I have posted something that was pointed out to be untrue and I generally acknowledge that.

Does Trump lie? Of course he does. As has every president in the history of the Republic, indeed, every politician. Does he lie more than other politicians? I think he does but that one is complicated. As I’ve pointed out in the past, it has been my observation that people who’ve been rich all their lives live in a different reality than I do, one shaped by their own wishes. That is one of the several reasons I have never voted for him. What looks like lying may sometimes be a refusal to acknowledge disconfirming reality but the effect on public trust is the same.

The notion that “truth is whatever works” is simply too post-modern for me. There is such a thing as objective reality and disprovability. I do not think that when something you believe or that’s worked for you is disproven that acknowledging that is a sign of weakness. Quite to the contrary, I think it’s a sign of strength. Many politicians these days seem to think otherwise. A politics that treats changing one’s mind as weakness cannot survive contact with reality for long.

I am always reminded of the remark made by Paul Samuelson (paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes), “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”.

A strict adherence to the facts can have a cost, not just for those found to have been mistaken (or lying) but for those who point it out. Continuing to support a politician who you know to have lied to you whom you would otherwise support makes you complicit in his lies. A society that tolerates lying eventually loses the ability to distinguish innocence from guilt. We should keep in mind George Bernard Shaw’s observation:

Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

One of the memorable things in our trip to New York City to see our beloved dog, Jack, compete in the Westminster Kennel Club Show was that we travelled with some dear friends. We have known them for 50 years—since they were in college. I cannot say how grateful I am to them. Thanks to the husband of the pair being a multi-generational member of a club with reciprocity with New York’s Union League Club we were able to have a room there for our stay. A picture of our room is at the top of this post.

The club has a strict dress code so I wore slacks and a jacket (no jeans) the entire time I was there. It’s reasonably convenient to the Javits Center and Madison Square Garden where the dog show was held.

We did a lot of walking—twelve miles the first day, eleven the second. I probably should have taken pictures of the snow and trash piled on the sidewalks, a strange sight for a Chicagoan. Chicago is prepared for snow and, consequently, has it hauled away. That is not apparently the case in New York.