Moody’s Mark Zandi has an op-ed in the Washington Post which, shall we say, casts doubt on the unemployment rate:

The unemployment rate has historically been the go-to barometer for the economy’s performance. At just over 4 percent, unemployment remains low, and it has edged only a bit higher since the start of the year. Taken at face value, the economy is doing just fine.

But it’s not. If the labor force had increased this year at the pace it did last year, the unemployment rate would be headed toward 5 percent. Of course, low unemployment is great, but only if it is due to lots of new jobs, not an evaporating labor force.

And the labor force, which includes all those working and looking for work, is sounding the recession alarm bell. It has flatlined so far this year. Compare this with last year, when the labor force grew by well over 1 million workers, or the year before, when it increased by almost 2.5 million. Without more workers, it is tough for the economy to grow: A recession is more likely.

The labor force participation rate (LFPR) is the lowest it’s been since 1977. His explanation is the “severe restrictions on immigration”.

This time last year, the foreign-born labor force expanded at an extraordinary 5 percent yearly pace, translating into more than 1.5 million additional workers every year. In recent months, it has declined. The native-born labor force has picked up, but not enough to fill the void left by fleeing immigrants.

I think it’s more than that. I think that a number of factors including artificial intelligence, uncertainty about the effects of tariffs, etc. have caused businesses to hold back on hiring for the last seven or eight months.

Note, too, that the average private sector hourly wages have remained more or less flat since February 2025:

That doesn’t suggest businesses striving to hire workers who are unavailable. It suggests reluctance to pay more. And that doesn’t take the declining LFPR into account. A declining LFPR and wages that barely keep up with the rate of inflation are not good signs.

Quite a few people are speculating on the 1-on-1 between President Trump and Russian President Putin that starts tomorrow. Rather than speculating or linking to the speculations of others, let’s weigh in ourselves.

What will be the outcome of tomorrow’s meeting?

1. Trump will completely “cave in” to Putin
2. Not much
3. Not much but President Trump will declare it a complete victory
4. Trump and Putin will agree to divide Ukraine
5. Putin will propose “geopolitical armistice” (basically, spheres of influence) and Trump won’t reject it outright
6. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Ukraine
7. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms favorable to Russia (pretty much the same as A or C above)
8. Trump and Putin will agree to an end to the war in Ukraine on terms somewhere in between favorable to Ukraine and favorable to Russia
9. Something else

I think the most likely outcome is C. I think that E is an outside possibility. I think that H would put Zelensky in a bind.

Please weigh in with your prediction in comments.

Yascha Mounk, taking note of the results of the recent “Understanding America Study”, posted the chart above and ruminated on it:

Decades of research have demonstrated that some of these traits are highly predictive of life outcomes; in particular, conscientiousness (“the tendency to be organized, responsible, and hardworking”) predicts everything from greater professional success to a lower likelihood of getting divorced. Extroversion (a tendency to be “outgoing, gregarious, sociable, and openly expressive”), is associated with better mental health, broader social networks, and greater life satisfaction. Meanwhile, neuroticism (understood as a propensity toward anxiety, emotional instability, and negative emotion) is strongly correlated with negative outcomes, such as higher rates of depression, lower life satisfaction, and poorer overall mental health.

He blames the Internet:

The internet was supposed to make us realize how much we have in common with those who are very different from us. It was supposed to make it easier to find romantic partners and friends. And all of that was supposed to turn us into better versions of ourselves.

The truth has turned out to be radically, and depressingly, different.

Despite making communication virtually costless to the average consumer, the internet has inspired a worldwide return to identity and tribalism.

While the development and pervasiveness of the Internet may be one among several factors I don’t believe it’s the sole factor and maybe not even the definitive factor.

In looking at the chart above I would point out that the three lines correspond to differing generational cohorts, e.g. Baby Boomers (“Age 60+”), Generation X (“40-59”), and Millennials and Generation Z (“16-39”). My interpretation of the chart would be that the Red Liners are aping and magnifying the divergence of their Light Blue Line parents from the old Dark Blue Liners.

If I had to encompass that divergence in a single word I think it would be “solipsism” and if I had to pick a single force it would be Sesame Street. To the best of my knowledge Sesame Street was the first educational program to introduce the style, pace, and tone of TV advertising to children’s television programming. Maybe an even better word would be “consumerism”. Only the very youngest Baby Boomers grew up watching Sesame Street but the majority of Gen X, Millennials, and Zoomers did.

At Reason Jonathan Adler writes about a study conducted by a couple of Northwestern psych profs which started out to be about psychology but ended up by being about something quite different:

Northwestern University researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman report in an op-ed on the results of a series of interviews they conducted with undergraduates.

Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.

These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.

The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.

Practicing dissimulation to pass a course isn’t new. I faced the same thing myself 60 years ago. I declined to lie to the professor and received a lower grade in the class as a consequence. But the scale is troubling:

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

In other words not only are they learning dissimulation rather than critical thinking in college, they are cultivating it as a habit. Kant taught that lying is immoral because it denies the fundamental worth of others. Over a century ago George Bernard Shaw observed “the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else”.

Clearly, we are transitioning from a society in which many, particularly the well-educated, believed you could trust other people to one in which even the well-educated cannot trust their fellow citizens. That has profound policy implications.

When I read this report by Ben Coxworth at New Atlas:

Instead of going to the time and trouble of designing and building tiny robots from scratch, some scientists are now turning existing insects into remote-control cyborgs. A new “assembly line” could help, by converting cockroaches into cyborgs far faster than can be done by hand.

Putting it simply, cyborg insects typically consist of a large-ish insect – often a Madagascar hissing cockroach – that has been equipped with a small electronic backpack. Remotely controlled electrodes in that backpack stimulate body parts such as the insect’s antennae or eyes, causing it to start and stop walking, and turn left or right.

My immediate reaction to this was now imagine millions of these things on a battlefield.

I think that Mark Summerlin’s Wall Street Journal op-ed is fine as far as it goes. Here’s the opening:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers for May and June have been extensively revised, from 291,000 down to 33,000 jobs added over those two months. Had the revised numbers been reported in real time, the Federal Open Market Committee could have cut interest rates at both the June and July meetings.

The Federal Open Market Committee is worried about inflation, but the economy faces two more-pressing problems: weak hiring and high mortgage rates. If the economy were to fall into recession, it would take at least four years to repair the damage.

Inflation isn’t a serious problem right now, running under 3%. Because the FOMC can neither control nor measure inflation with precision, the range from 1% to 3% should be considered on target. Long-term inflation break-evens—the bond market’s best guess of future inflation—remain glued at 2.3%.

Yes, the FOMC must be cautious about cutting so fast or so deep that longer-term rates rise. But mortgage rates near 7% have left the housing market weak, and financial markets will always provide clues to guide monetary decisions. The FOMC’s policy rate is sitting more than 50 basis points above the two-year Treasury bond rate, creating an inversion at the front end of the Treasury curve. This means that a 50-basis-point “catch up” cut wouldn’t upset the long end of the curve, as the market is already expecting such a reduction.

It’s in the next section that he begins to get into the weeds. Here’s the meat of it:

More important than even fiscal policy is the enormous change from the AI revolution. Companies are starting to achieve real efficiency gains from AI, which means that worker productivity is going to accelerate in 2026. When productivity accelerates, the economy expands faster and inflation falls, which could allow lower interest rates and cause a resurgence in the housing market.

This piece by Aki Ito at Business Insider comes closer to telling things how they are:

In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had a blunt message for his 350,000 corporate employees: There were going to be fewer of them in the near future, thanks to the “efficiency gains” he expected from AI. The proclamation generated big headlines and an uproar from staff. But it struck me as merely honest. He was acknowledging something that pretty much every CEO who sits atop a large white-collar workforce is quietly hoping to achieve sooner or later.

After all, Jassy hasn’t been the only executive to hint at a future of lower headcount. The head of JPMorgan’s consumer and community business predicted in May that AI will reduce the number of employees in its operations division by 10%. That same month, the CEO of Klarna said that the company’s investments in AI has already driven the company’s headcount to shrink by 40%. And the CEO of Ford — a company that employs tens of thousands of white-collar professionals — declared that AI will wipe out “literally half” of all white-collar jobs. Meanwhile, Kian Katanforoosh, the CEO and founder of the software startup Workera, tells me that he never wants to have much more than the 80 or so employees he has today, no matter how successful his business ends up becoming. “I truly believe we can go super super far without growing more,” he says. “I’m an engineer. I don’t want to have to manage so many people if I don’t need to.”

It’s not like CEOs ever enjoyed shelling out for the salaries or navigating the personnel headaches that come with the sprawling bureaucracies they employ. But for more than a century, armies of office workers were a necessary cost of doing business. To grow from tiny upstarts into titans of industry, companies needed an ever-multiplying number of HR reps, accountants, marketers, engineers, analysts, and project managers.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whom I think that however well-informed he may be on generative AI is hopelessly naive, predicted the first billion dollar company built on an artificial intelligence platform with only a single employee. And who will provide the billion in revenue? Other billionaires? That’s the opposite of Henry Ford’s idea of paying his workers enough to buy the automobiles they were producing in his factories. Don’t worry, he cheerfully continues. gAI will create new good-paying jobs we can’t even imagine.

Google’s former chief business officer, Mo Gawdat, quoted at PC Gamer has other ideas:

The AI industry has something of a stock line about its technology replacing existing careers: AI will simultaneously create new jobs we can’t even imagine, and people will start working in those fields. But Gawdat doesn’t buy that line, and in straightforward language calls the whole idea “100% crap” (thanks, Windows Central).

For the foreseeable future the jobs we can be confident will not be replaced by artificial intelligence, however better a job gAI might do, will be those of people who have the power to prevent it. That includes Fortune 500 CEOs.

The title of the op-ed with which this post began is “No Help Wanted, No Economic Growth”. What if that’s the new normal? I don’t believe that Mo Gawdat’s vision of a socialist paradise will be the outcome if for no other reason than those who still have jobs and incomes won’t pay for it. And the elected officials who also have power and don’t want their own jobs to be replaced by AI won’t vote for it.

The challenge that I would give to those who envision “new jobs we can’t even imagine” is to predict a date certain by which those jobs will begin to be created in numbers that exceed the number of jobs being lost. I don’t think they will take that challenge. I don’t think they can.

Somewhat to my surprise I found myself in agreement with quite a bit in Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It takes him quit a bit of meandering but he finally gets around to the real point of his op-ed:

France, the U.K., Canada and Australia should adopt, and the U.S. should embrace, a time-bound, conditions-based path toward recognizing a Palestinian state. Start and end points are a must, because no one will accept an endless process. Palestinians need a clear and near horizon for political self-determination.

Recognition should also be conditions-based. While Palestinians have a right to self-determination, with that right comes responsibility. No one should expect Israel to accept a Palestinian state that is led by Hamas or other terrorists, that is militarized or has independent armed militias, that aligns with Iran or others that reject Israel’s right to exist, that educates and preaches hatred of Jews or Israel, or that, unreformed, becomes a failed state.

Then, after more meandering:

Israelis can’t operate under the illusion that Palestinians will accept being a non-people without national rights. Palestinians, meanwhile, can’t hold on to their vision of a Palestine that runs “from the river to the sea.” Seven million Israeli Jews, two million Israeli Arabs and some five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are rooted in the same region. No one is going anywhere, whatever the delusions of extremists on both sides.

There are some niggling little questions that remain. The available polling data suggests that the preponderance of Palestinians think that Hamas should continue to govern Gaza; Hamas is more popular than the PLO among many Palestinians. Furthermore, the percentage of Israelis who support ethnically cleansing (whatever euphemism is used for it) Palestinians from Gaza and even the West Bank is rising not declining. What if the principles reject Mr. Blinken’s conditions? What then?

Megan McArdle uses her Washington Post column to critique President Trump’s remarks on crime in Washington, DC. On the one hand, she rejects deploying the National Guard:

I make a point of agreeing with President Donald Trump whenever he is right about something, and I’m afraid he is right that in D.C., crime and disorder is a major problem. It is not as big a problem as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, “somewhat less of a problem than it was” is not really very good news.

This does not justify Trump’s harebrained scheme to deploy the National Guard to patrol the streets, an idea that marries sinister overtones with very limited effectiveness. Nor is the problem likely to be solved by federalizing D.C. law enforcement and prosecutions, as he suggested at a Monday news conference. But Trump’s critics will not talk him out of these plans by conjuring the specter of a fascist takeover, nor by arguing that he shouldn’t be worried about crime, because after all, look how much it’s fallen!

On the other hand, pooh-poohing DC crime is no solution:

D.C. had 187 homicides in 2024, or about 27 for every 100,000 residents. That is, to be sure, a massive 32 percent drop from the 273 people who were killed in 2023, but that probably wasn’t much comfort to those 187 people or their grieving families. And it’s horrific compared with Boston, which had 3.7 homicides per 100,000 residents during that same time frame, New York City (4.7) or Los Angeles (7.1). Even a further reduction in 2025 — year-to-date homicides have fallen 12 percent compared with the same period last year — won’t bring those numbers anywhere near where they should be. This is the capital city of our country. We ought to be able to do at least as well as other major cities.

Unfortunately, her proposals—increasing the number of police officers and prosecutors—are ill-considered. The reason is simple: the issues producing crime are cultural ones, social issues rather than lack of enforcement.

I remember the old days when libertarian Megan was posting as “Jane Galt” on her own site. I wonder what younger Megan would have thought of today’s Megan’s proposals?

Let’s compare Japan’s old capital, Kyoto, with DC. Kyoto has (PDF) about 300 police officers per 100,000 population; DC has twice as many per capita. Boston, which she cites approvingly, has fewer police officers. If you consider the sizes of the police forces of Chicago, New York, etc. and their respective crime rates, you arrive at a disquieting realization: there is no causal relationship between how many police officers there are and the crime rate. That’s completely consistent with a study I’ve been citing for more than twenty years (of Omaha) which found no material difference between a high police presence and a low one in different areas of the city that were similar in population and demographics.

I haven’t bothered to do the research on the number of prosecutors but I’m willing to bet a shiny new time that the results are similar with prosecutors as those for police officers.

I also don’t agree with the views of our mayor (possibly the least popular mayor in the country) that the way to reduce crime is more summer programs for young people.

My own view is that enforcing the laws, all laws, is one of the keys to reducing crime but it’s not nearly enough. I would suggest that the number of single parent households headed by women are lower in Boston than they are in DC but that the number of gang members per 100K population is higher. The effort should be directed at reducing the influence of gangs and producing conditions under which families will remain intact.

One of the many questions I don’t see anyone having an answer for is how Palestine will function as a country without one of two things happening. Either

1. The country will consist of the West Bank only and will be landlocked or
2. Hamas will retain control of Gaza.

Given a choice between unconditional victory for Israel and unconditional victory for Hamas, IMO the answer is clear. Israeli victory would be better for the United States. Given a choice between unconditional Israeli victory and a Gaza from which Hamas has has been eradicated, I don’t believe the choice is nearly as clear.