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.

I can’t say they’ve been a deluge but they’ve certainly been a constant “drip, drip, drip”. Articles about the weaknesses of generative artificial intelligence from a business perspective that is. I’ve saved at least twenty articles over the last two weeks on just that subject.

There’s no doubt that the Magnificent Seven technology companies are using AI as an opportunity to cut their development head count. The total appears to be around 50,000 so far this year and around 100,000 last year. The question that’s not being answered is how they’ll make money from gAI (other than be reducing head count)?

IMO that’s particularly true of Google. Using AI to summarize search results has resulted in a dramatic decline in “click-throughs”. There are reports that “click-throughs” have declined by as much as 40%. For Google that’s the rough equivalent of sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

In the mean time they’re spending enormous sums on AI.

Keep in mind that it took Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon a decade or more before they figured out workable business models.

There’s one thing that I don’t think that Fred Bauer recognizes in his op-ed about Congressional redistricting at the Washington Post:

While the GOP might temporarily benefit from a fresh round of redistricting, Republicans from a handful of Democratic trifecta states (such as California) might be more vulnerable, and some centrist Republican House members have expressed uncertainty about escalating the war. The mixed incentives of various factions (Democrats to block Republican gerrymanders, and tipping-point Republicans to save themselves in Democratic states) could theoretically give Kiley’s bill a path to passage, though it would face a steep climb if it were to survive the House. If the president opposed the bill, it would almost certainly fail to get the 60 votes needed in the Senate. And the president surely will oppose it if he sees it as blocking redistricting that would help Republicans.

However, maybe the deadlock over redistricting could be an opening for bigger reforms. Few observers see the House as a well-functioning body. The loss of swing districts has made it increasingly sclerotic and internally polarized. The average size of congressional districts is nearing 800,000 residents, distancing members of the supposed people’s house from the people.

The tensions over redistricting could help forge a deal to resolve some of the underlying drivers of this legislative dysfunction. Congress could not only ban future mid-decade redistricting in a reapportionment package but also expand the House. This would allow for a one-time round of redistricting leading up to the midterms and give everyone — from California to Texas — another bite at the apple before the 2030 Census.

I can’t imagine any sitting Congresman voting to reduce his or her own perceived influence or the likelihood of she or he being re-elected. From their points of view that’s no compromise—it’s a suicide pact.

For the reasons Mr. Bauer provides I think it’s unlikely that Congress will act to stop states from doing midterm redistricting but that’s the most I would expect from Congress.

As is typical at this time of year both the news and opinion pieces are even duller and more repetitive than usual. When most of the local news broadcasts are devoted to the weather in Milwaukee you know things are slow.

Maybe I’ll just start writing posts without a connecting lead-in from the news or opinion sections.

It’s not just that so many people are taking their final summer vacations before school starts—seemingly the entire continent of Europe will be on vacation until next week.

There’s a certain amount of commentary on President Trump’s announced confab with Russian President Putin, much of it focused on how much the author of any given piece dislikes Trump. The one thing I hear no one talking about is a plan for Ukraine to prevail in its war with Russia without demanding that we provide arms we don’t have to Ukraine, Ukraine field troops they don’t have, or we begin World War III.

In her Washington Post column Heather Long takes note of a development in the U. S. economy:

The top 10 percent of earners now drive about half of spending, according to Moody’s, up from 36 percent three decades ago. These people will determine if the U.S. economy avoids a recession. These are households earning $250,000 or more, and they are largely doing just fine, buoyed by strong stock-market gains, mansions and rental properties that have shot up in value in recent years, and a rebound in business dealmaking. The wealthy continue to spend on lavish vacations, parties and events, and that masks the strain that many middle-class and moderate-income families are experiencing.

The “K-shaped” economy is back, where there’s a clear divergence between how the top and the bottom are faring. Businesses understand this. It’s why credit card companies have introduced even more exclusive credit cards this summer with higher fees, all-inclusive resorts are debuting $1,000-a-night experiences, and luxury car brands such as Porsche and Aston Martin have been among the first automakers to raise prices, because their clientele is less likely to push back. Any company that can is trying to go “upmarket” as much as possible in this environment.

I think the implications of this go far beyond the risks of tariffs to consumption on the part of those earning $170,000 per year or more which is the focus of Ms. Long’s column. It means that the upper middle class aren’t saving or investing at the rates they should be. It means that we need a rebalancing of the economy towards greater production and less consumption as I’ve been contending for some time.

It also supports another point I’ve been making for some time: tax policy needs to be more focused than at present. Simply cutting the tax rates of the top 10% of income earners isn’t encouraging them to save or invest as much as needs to be the case. It’s encouraging them to consume.

I don’t know enough about Texas politics, state laws, or its Congressional districts to make an intelligent comment about the plan to redistrict Texas’s Congressional districts. I think that most of what we’re hearing is just political posturing.

As I’ve said before I think that Congressional districts should be compact and within county and municipal boundaries. I would support amending the Constitution to that effect. I don’t believe there is any prospect of that short of a Constitutional convention which would be risky.

I also think that Congress should pass a law prohibiting redistricting other than following a decennial census. It’s my understanding that such a law is making its way through the House.

Just for amusement here’s the Illinois 4th Congressional District:

Its original purpose was to ensure that Chicago would elect a Hispanic representative. Such contortions were deemed necessary following the 1990 census but that’s certainly not the case anymore. I’m not sure what purpose is actually served by it now.