John Q

The US is one big grift these days: the Trump Administration, traditional and social media, corporations, crypto, financial markets are all selling some kind of spurious promise. It’s hard to pick the most egregious example. But for me, it’s hard to go past Tesla. Having lost its dominant position in the electric car market, the company ought to be on the edge of delisting. Instead, its current market capitalisation is $US1.33 trillion ($A 2 trillion). Shareholders have just agreed on an incentive deal with Elon Musk, premised on the claim that he can take that number to $8.5 trillion.

Having failed with the Cybertruck and robotaxis, Tesla’s value depends almost entirely on the projected success of the Optimus humanoid robot. There’s a strong case that Optimus will be outperformed by rivals like Unitree But the bigger question is: why build a humanoid robot at all?

[click to continue…]

107 years ago*, the guns fell silent on the Western Front, marking a temporary and partial end to the Great War which began in 1914, and has continued, in one form or another, ever since. I once hoped that I would live to see a peaceful world, but that hope has faded away.

• As several readers noted, my arithmetic was off – this seems to be happening to me a bit lately. Fixed now. Also, while it was 11 Nov in Australia when I wrote it, it was 10 Nov in the US where our servers are located.

(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions)

The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.

The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.

The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.

Rickover described their characteristics as follows:

1. It is simple.

2. It is small.

3. It is cheap.

4. It is light.

5. It can be built very quickly.

6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

But these characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.
[click to continue…]

I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started using OpenAI’s Deep Research as a tool.

A typical interaction starts with me asking a question like “Did theorists of the demographic transition expect an eventual equilibrium with stable population”. Deep Research produces a fairly lengthy answer (mostly “Yes” in this case) and based on past interactions, produces references in a format suitable for my bibliographic software (Bookends for Mac, my longstanding favourite, uses .ris). To guard against hallucinations, I get DOI and ISBN codes and locate the references immediately. Then I check the abstracts (for journal articles) or reviews (for books) to confirm that the summary is reasonably accurate.

A few thoughts about this.

[click to continue…]

Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction is a relatively unfamilar mode of writing for me, so critique (on style and structure rather than plausibility) is most welcome.
[click to continue…]

A book review from Inside Story: After The Spike by Spears and Geruso

The most striking observation in Dean Spears and Michael Geruso’s new book, After the Spike, is summed up by the cover illustration, which shows a world population rising rapidly to its current eight billion before declining to pre-modern levels and eventually to zero. As the authors observe, this is the inevitable implication of the hypothesis that fertility levels will remain below replacement level indefinitely into the future.

[click to continue…]

… as long as they are healthy, well fed and well educated

Much of the panic about falling birth rates can be dispelled once we realise that (barring catastrophe) there will almost certainly be more people alive in 2100 than there were in 2000. But what about the distant future? Dean Spears, co-author of After the Spike has kindly provided me with projections showing that with likely declines in fertility the world population will decline by half each century after 2100, reaching one billion around 2400. Would that be too few to sustain a modern civilisation ?

We can answer this pretty easily from past experience. In the second half of 20th century, the modern economy consisted of the member countries of the Organization For Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Originally including the countries of Western Europe and North America, and soon extended to include Australia and Japan, the OECD countries were responsible for the great majority of the global industrial economy, including manufacturing, modern services, and technological innovation.

Except for some purchases of raw materials from the “Global South”, produced by a relatively small part of the labour force, the OECD, taken as a whole, was self-sufficient in nearly everything required for a modern economy. So, the population of the OECD in the second half of last century provides an upper bound to the number of humans needed to sustain such an economy. That number did not reach one billion until 1980.

[click to continue…]

The New York Times recently published a letter from me responding to a guest essay (op-ed) by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, with whom I’ve been engaging on the question of pro-natalism. As a colleague who had such a letter published a few years ago observed, this will probably get more readers than any journal article I’ve ever written. The text is over the fold

[click to continue…]

Have they changed, or just become their worst selves

While Trump is unpopular with a majority of Americans, his support among Republicans remains solid. That’s despite blatant corruption, fascist policies and a failure to deliver any of the economic benefits he promised. Faced with this depressing fact, the standard New York Times response has been to send an intrepid reporter to “Trump Country” (rural Kentucky or Midwestern diners) to find out what is going on.

But it would be far more instructive to send them to Long Island, where Trump won both counties in 2024. Long Island voters have given solid support to Republicans at all levels. Even as he was crushingly defeated in New York as a whole, Mitt Romney got close to half the vote in Suffolk and Nassau counties. Trump did a few percentage points better in 2024, winning both. But he would have gone nowhere if not for the solid support of Romney voters

This doesn’t fit at all with the usual stories about Trump voters. The residents of Long Island are not the “left-behinds” routinely described in explanations of Trump’s appeal. The average income is over $100 000 and unemployment rates have long been around 3 per cent. Like most New Yorkers, Long Islanders have been beneficiaries of the globalised economy of which Romney was a symbol. And, if you were to believe Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind they did so because they valued honor, loyalty and purity, qualities Trump routinely trashes.

Democrats from Hillary Clinton on assumed that these contradictions would lead suburban Republicans to abandon Trump in numbers large enough to offset any losses of Democrats attracted by Trump’s racism and misogyny. Evidently this is not the case. Not only have the Republicans who once voted for Romney maintained their support for Trump but they have preferred him to any Republican alternative. And, with few exceptions, they have embraced Trump’s racist and fascist policies, even as he approaches outright Nazism.

What has happened here? Has Trump, as Walter Olson suggests, radicalised his followers leading them to support positions they would once have rejected? Or has he simply allowed them to reveal themselves (or at least their worst selves) as the racists and fascists they always were?

[click to continue…]

I’ve held off posting this in the hope of coming up with some kind of positive response, but I haven’t got one.

When I wrote back in November 2024 that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompi there was still plenty of room for people to disagree. But (with the exception of an announced state of emergency) it’s turned out far worse than I thought possible.

Opposition politicians and judges have been arrested for doing their jobs, and many more have been threatened. The limited resistance of the courts has been effectively halted by the Supreme Court’s decision ending nationwide injunctions. University leaders have been forced to comply or quit. The press has been cowed into submission by the threat of litigation or harm to corporate owners. Political assassinations are laughed about and will soon become routine. With the use of troops to suppress peaceful protests, and the open support of Trump and his followers, more deaths are inevitable, quite possibly on a scale not seen since the Civil War.

The idea that this process might be stopped by a free and fair election in 2026 or 2028 is absurdly optimistic. Unless age catches up with him, Trump will appoint himself as President for life, just as Xi and Putin have done.

None of this is, or at least ought to be, news. Yet the political implications are still being discussed in the familiar terms of US party politics: swing voters, the centre ground, mobilisation versus moderation, rehashes of the 2024 election and so on. Having given up hope, I have no interest in these debates. Instead, I want to consider the implications for the idea of democracy.

[click to continue…]

Pro-natalism (the idea that people, or rather, women, should have more babies than they choose to do at present) has become an established orthodoxy,[1]. The central claim is that, unless something changes soon, human populations both global and national, are going to decline rapidly, with a lot of negative consequences. This is simply not true, on any plausible assumptions about fertility[2]

There’s no need for me to do any calculations here. For many decades he Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has been producing population projections for the world, and individual countries, under a variety of scenarios. One finding is unambiguous. Short of a drastic decline in fertility, far beyond what we are now seeing there will be more people on Earth at the end of this century than there were at the beginning

[click to continue…]

Back in 2022, after my first encounter with ChatGPT, I suggested that it was likely to wipe out large categories of “bullshit jobs”, but unlikely to create mass unemployment. In retrospect, that was probably an overestimate of the likely impact. But three years later, it seems as if an update might be appropriate.

In the last three years, I have found a few uses for LLM technology. First, I use a product called Rewind, which transcribes the content of Zoom meetings and produces a summary (you may want to check local law on this). Also, I have replaced Google with Kagi, a search engine which will, if presented with a question, produced a detailed answer with links to references, most of which are similar to those I would have found on an extensive Google search, avoiding ads and promotions. Except in the sense that anything on the Internet may be wrong, the results aren’t subject to the hallucinations for which ChatGPT is infamous.

Put high-quality search and accurate summarization together and you have the technology for a literature survey. And that’s what OpenAI now offers as DeepResearch I’ve tried it a few times, and it’s as good as I would expect from a competent research assistant or a standard consultant’s report. If I were asked to do a report on a topic with which I had limited familiarity, I would certainly check out what DeepResearch had to say.

Update The Trump regime has been stopped, or at least stalled, on all three fronts discussed below. In particular, the Hegseth-Noem report on the Insurrection Act seems to have been quietly buried. That doesn’t mean US democracy is safe by any means, but at least it has some chance of survival. More on this at my Substack

Back in November, when I concluded that Trump’s dictatorship was a fait accompli lots of readers thought I was going over the top. In retrospect, and with one exception, I was hopelessly over-optimistic. I imagined a trajectory similar to Orban’s Hungary, with a gradual squeeze on political opposition and civil society, playing out over years and multiple terms in office,.

The reality has been massively worse, both in terms of speed and scope. Threats of conquest against friendly countries, masked thugs abducting people from the street, shakedowns of property from enemies of the state, concentration camps outside the reach of the legal system, all happening at a pace more comparable to Germany in 1933 than to the examples I had in mind.

[click to continue…]

Thanks to James Wimberley for prompting me to write this, and alerting me to the data on China’s emissions

Most of the news these days is bad, and that’s true of the climate. Even as climatic disasters worsen, the Trump regime is doing its best to dismantle US and global efforts to decarbonize our energy systems. But there is still some surprisingly good news.

First, China’s emissions from coal-fired electricity appear to have peaked. Thermal power generation fell 5.8 per cent in January and February this year, relative to 2024. The only times this has happened previously were during the Covid lockdowns and in the aftermath of the GFC. On this occasion, total power demand fell by 1.5 per cent due to a warm winter, but the big decline in coal was due to increased solar generation. 

And China’s solar industry keeps on growing on all fronts. China added another 277 GW of PV last year, more than all the capacity installed in the world up to 2015. Recorded exports were 236GW, another record. Since production was estimated at more than 600 GW, it seems likely there are some unrecorded installations.

All this is happening even though new coal-fired power stations are still being built, largely for political rather than economic reasons. It seems likely that these plants will see limited operation as solar power (augmented with storage) meets more and more demand.

Second, the great AI boom in electricity demand has turned out to be a mirage, at least so far. This isn’t always obvious from the breathless tone of coverage. For example, this story leads with the claim that “Electricity consumption by data centers will more than double by 2030”, but leaves the reader to calculate that this implies an increase of just 1.5% in global demand. 

Notably, Microsoft which was one of the leading promoters of claims about electricity demand is now scaling back its investments. And large numbers of data centres in China are apparently idle

Even Trump is helping in perverse ways. His policies are already reducing projections of US economic growth, which will accelerate the decline of coal-fired power in particular. His attempts to defy economic reality by keeping coal plants open are unlikely to have much effect in this context.

And coal is on the way out in many other countries. Finland just closed its last coal-fired powerand even laggards like Poland are making progress

The picture is less promising with the transition to electric vehicles, which has slowed in most places. But once we complete the transition to solar, wind and storage, electricity will be massively cheaper. And once again, China is a bright sport, with electrics taking 25 per cent of the market in 2024, and new vehicles becoming cheaper and cheaper. BYD is now offering an electric car in Australia for less than $A30 000 (a bit under $20 000 US).

As I argued a year ago, the irresistible force of ultra-cheap solar PV will overcome the seemingly immovable barriers in its way.

Note Links got lost in copying from my Substack. You can find them here