And just like with health insurance, Americans probably tend to get mad at the consumer-facing company who actually charges them money, rather than at the shadowy suppliers who are billing the consumer-facing company — or at external forces like supply shocks. Indeed, grocery stores have become less popular as prices have gone up, even though the stores aren’t profiting much:

As Ezra Klein and the Abundance folks like to point out, at some point you actually have to make stuff work in order to make the voters like you. Getting Americans mad at an undeserving target like grocery stores might win you a couple of elections in the short term, but in the long term, you have to actually address reality; if you fail to bring down food prices, people are going to feel betrayed and get mad at you for failing to keep your promises.

Donald Trump is finding that out now. He campaigned on the idea that kicking out immigrants would bring down prices. Now ICE is rampaging through American communities and rounding people up for “Alligator Alcatraz”, but prices aren’t going down, or even slowing. As a result, inflation has gone from one of Trump’s strongest issues to one of his weakest:

Studies show that the obesity and diabetes medication also reduces heart attacks, cancer risk, migraines, and memory loss. How is that even possible? And at what point should we all be on it?

GLP-1s—technically known as glucagon like peptide 1 receptor agonists—seem to curb alcohol, cocaine, and tobacco use among addicts. They prevent strokes, heart attacks, chronic kidney disease, sleep apnea, and Parkinson’s disease. They’re associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including pancreatic cancer and multiple myeloma. Arthritic patients on the drugs experienced relief from knee pain that was “on par with opioid drugs.” A small study found that they reduce migraine headaches by 50 percent. And emerging research suggests they might even slow the rate of memory loss among people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

1. Are we sure GLP-1 drugs are this good?

2. How can one drug do everything?

 So, should we all be on GLP-1s?

Most people probably don’t think of Brazil as a leader in financial innovation. But Brazil’s political economy is clearly very different from ours — for example, they actually put former presidents who try to overturn elections on trial. And the interest groups whose power, for now at least, makes a U.S. digital currency impossible appear to have much less sway there. Brazil is, in fact, planning to create a CBDC. As a first step, back in 2020 it introduced Pix, a digital payment system run by the central bank.

As I understand it, Pix is sort of like a publicly run version of Zelle, the payment system operated by a consortium of U.S. private banks. But Pix is much easier to use. And while Zelle is big, Pix has become simply huge, used by a reported 93 percent of Brazilian adults. It appears to be rapidly displacing both cash and cards:

Pix transactions take place almost instantaneously.

Transaction costs are low.

The actual central failing of Biden-era climate and energy policy is that having won the prioritization war and successfully convinced Democrats to put a huge sum of money into clean energy rather than deficit reduction, poverty reduction, or health care, the climate movement completely refused to actually embrace the investment-led strategy. They pocketed enormous amounts of spending, then pushed Democrats to use every regulatory means at their disposal to curtail fossil fuel use and fossil fuel production. At the same time, they refused to embrace the kind of regulatory changes that would complement the IRA’s spending priorities.

But my point is this: In the Biden Era, an investment-led approach to emissions reduction won the lion’s share of new spending, spending that could have gone to other progressive causes or been put toward tax cuts or deficit reduction to pander to the electorate.

President Trump, speaking during an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, has announced a shift in his administration’s position on the war in Ukraine, and America’s support for the defence of Ukraine. As reported in the New York Times:

President Trump said on Monday that he would help Europe speed more weapons to Ukraine and warned Russia that if it did not agree to a peace deal within 50 days, he would impose a new round of punishing sanctions.

About time.

Trump has been led down the garden path by Putin in seeking a peace deal for the entirety of his second administration. This has not only probably prolonged the war, it has seen Putin escalate his ground and aerial assaults against Ukraine. While the Russian 2025 summer offensive is showing minimal gains for continued high casualties, Russia has significantly stepped up the scale of its aerial attacks against Ukrainian cities in the past few months. This has resulted in casualties, suffering and misery for Ukrainian civilians in many cities across Ukraine.

This hateful regime wants to exhaust us and convince us that victory will be theirs. We have the individual and collective power to prove them wrong.

It’s my belief based on many times in our history when the reality was bleak and the light was hard to find. But the Confederacy did lose, slavery was abolished, Hitler and the thousand-year-Reich did die by suicide in a bunker, Joseph McCarthy’s attack on Americans as communists ended with shame and his death from alcoholism at 48, John Lewis did not give up the dream of civil rights after a bloody beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Throughout our 249-year-old democratic project, Americans have forged ahead and refused to accept that the promise of freedom and justice cannot be realized and must be abandoned.

All this gives me hope. All this reminds me not to get overwhelmed by the daily madness. It doesn’t mean ignoring the tragedies and the ongoing nightmare. Rather it gives me hope that the fight is worth it and we can’t allow ourselves to indulge in the feeling that our democracy is finished.

Part of our task right now is to recognize that hope is a discipline, a way of grasping what’s at stake. This requires looking to the past and envisioning the future to strengthen our capacity to manage the present. Some days that task will be harder than others, but I beseech you to build that muscle and hold tightly to hope.

On June 1 I published what I said would be the first of two primers on rising inequality. But I kept finding more things that I felt needed saying, so it turned into a six-part story arc.

The good news is that I believe that I’ve finished that story arc, at least for now, with the last two posts. Part V showed how predatory financialization has helped create extreme wealth. Part VI examined how wealth is converted into political power. And that was supposed to be it, for now.

But given the topics of those last two primers, it seemed to me that I should close out with an in-the-moment case study: A discussion of the rise of the crypto industry, which can be seen as a sort of hyper-powered example of predatory finance, influence-buying and corruption.

Beyond the paywall, I’ll discuss the following:

1. The (strange) economics of cryptocurrency

2. Crypto as a form of predatory finance

3. How crypto drives inequality

4. How the crypto industry has corrupted our politics

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Martin Wolf discuss Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” the impact it will have on Trump’s supporters, and whether the United States is facing a looming economic crisis.

Now, obviously, American corporations are genuinely strong in certain sectors. I’m not saying this is identical to Japan in the 1980s. But if you look at standard measures of value relative to underlying earnings, the American stock market today is as highly valued as at any point since the 1880s—as high as in 1929, as high as in 1999. Despite all the problems we’ve discussed, nothing seems to affect these valuations. The implicit assumption is that the American corporate sector—and above all the tech sector, which plays such a dominant role—will go on extracting ever-greater monopoly profits indefinitely, and that those profits will sustain these market valuations. All I can say is: given the politics in America, the global political response to America, and the attacks on the rule of law, on research, and so forth, I find that story very difficult to believe. It seems to be a story people are clinging to because it has played out well in recent decades.

But I would be very surprised if, 20 or 30 years from now, we still saw this phenomenon. Maybe that’s partly because the idea that AI will generate limitless profit booms for the tech sector will turn out to be just as exaggerated as the internet bubble in the late 1990s. There may be perfectly good reasons why the profits from AI will accrue largely to users, and those users will be everywhere, not just in the United States. Meanwhile, the companies investing zillions in building these extremely expensive AI models may not see much of a return. That’s completely consistent, by the way, with what has happened in every major technological revolution in the past, from railways onward.

What should U.S. foreign and national security policyBefore look like when sanity returns in 2029?

2. Drive a stake deep through the heart of American Exceptionalism. In fact, let’s take advantage of the fact that our policies are going to require a big reset to do a complete attitude make-over for the U.S.. Dominating the world, arguing that there is one set of rules for everyone else and another for us, considering anyone who competes with us to be an enemy has got to go. Let’s try to lead by example. Let’s recognize that we are part of a global community and that a key element of leadership within that community is persuading others to follow…but that another key element is not feeling like we need to get involved everywhere or have the last word on everything. Let’s have clearly defined U.S. national interests but recognize that partnership rather than bullying is a better way to advance them.
3. That’s going to mean not just promoting core U.S. values (the ones this administration has dropped—like democracy and the rule of law, a respect for human rights, etc.) but actually walking the talk. If we want an international community in which the rule of law is used to promote fairness and reduce conflict, we have to agree to be bound by those laws. Yes, that means accepting the decisions of international organizations. It means joining the International Criminal Court and being bound by its decisions. It means recognizing that the best and lowest cost way of preserving our sovereignty and reducing international conflict is by…gulp…actually ceding a little national sovereignty upward to international organizations. It’s an investment that may be hard for some nationalists and other troglodytes to swallow but it leads to a better path for international harmony and dispute resolution than all the ways we have tried so far.

Elon Musk might be one of the most unconventional figures to hit politics in years — but now, with his new party, he’s become just another in a long line of wealthy techies convinced they can do politics better than the professionals.

Over the weekend, a frustrated Musk announced that he was establishing the “America Party” in response to the passage of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which he has reviled as exacerbating the national deficit. The party’s policy ideas are thin on the ground so far, but he’s indicated it will promote responsible budgeting, gun rights, and cryptocurrency.

If the story of other tech-fueled parties is any indication, it could well survive a while — but struggle for any real traction with American voters.

How prevalent is the gerontocracy?

Over the past decade, the number of workers over the age of 65 has increased by 33%. That means if you’re eligible to cash a social security check, you’re part of the fastest growing age cohort in the American workforce. Some workers are doing this out of financial necessity, but wealthy workers have also steadily remained in the workforce longer. Look at the pinnacle of the labor market, and you’ll see that society’s elite is graying:

• Business: Starting in 2008, the average age of an S&P 500 CEO has increased from 54 to 59 years old. Nearly 17.8% of Fortune 500 CEOs are over 65. The average age of a board chair in the US is the second oldest in the world.
• Law: In the last ten years, the number of lawyers over the age of 65 has increased by 50%, and that group now comprises over 14% of all active lawyers. That’s twice the percentage of workers over 65 in the rest of the workforce.
• Academia: In 2017, the average college president was reported to be 62, 10 years older than the average in 1990. The number of tenured faculty over 65 doubled between 2000 and 2010.
• Scientific research: Recent data on research investigators at the NIH is scarce, but the average age rose from 39 in 1980 to 51 in 2008. And the average age investigators receive their first grant was 36 in 1990, but had risen to nearly 45 by 2016.

The word “liberal” has been so thoroughly mangled by American political discourse that it now means everything and nothing. Republicans use it as an epithet for anyone who disagrees with them. Democrats embrace it as a badge of progressive virtue. Cable news hosts deploy it as a tribal marker. Political consultants focus-group it to death. And through all this semantic chaos, we’ve lost sight of something crucial: liberalism isn’t a political position—it’s the philosophical foundation that makes political positions possible.

This confusion isn’t just academic. We’re living through a moment when the basic framework of liberal democracy is under systematic assault from forces that understand exactly what they’re attacking. While we argue about whether being “liberal” means supporting higher taxes or transgender rights, oligarchs are constructing parallel systems designed to make democratic accountability obsolete. While we debate the proper scope of government, they’re building infrastructure that operates beyond government entirely.

Liberal democracy isn’t just majority rule—it’s majority rule constrained by constitutional principles that protect the conditions of democratic reasoning itself. The architecture has several essential components:

Ranked Choice Voting freed up New Yorkers to pick the candidates they really like. An exit poll shows all demographics liked and understood RCV

In an exciting race in which Ranked Choice Voting really showed its worth, Zohran Mamdani soundly defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor on June 24. In the nation’s largest city, Mamdani held a decisive lead in first rankings, 43.5 percent to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent, and once the RCV tabulation was applied on July 1, Mamdani widened his primary night lead, picking up another 12.5 points to Cuomo’s 7.5 points from voters’ second through fifth rankings.

The news media all said Cuomo was “unstoppable,” aided by at least one $25 million PAC war chest, stuffed full by billionaire backers and corporations on top of his standard campaign haul. As far as the celebrity-focused reporting was concerned, the narrative was the famous, albeit disgraced, former governor versus a bunch of random progressives and assorted wanna-be’s. But then something amazing started to happen — a combination of dedicated, inspired campaigning by certain candidates, listening and connecting with everyday people — within the space and possibility opened up by RCV. Voter turnout was the highest for a mayoral race since 1989, with over a million voters ranking their ballots.

As Mamdani’s campaign started catching fire, many of those seeking a Cuomo coronation started to get nervous and complain about the voter-empowering RCV system that might stand in the way of their steamroller. Why? Because in NYC’s old-style elections, the powerful can rely on big fields of similar candidates to argue with each other, split the vote and rain on the parade of upstarts. But Ranked Choice Voting flipped the script.

Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values and emotional states.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs – interspersed with photos of a family picnic – with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

Social media platforms are bringing massive changes to how people get their news and how they communicate and behave. For example, the “endless scroll” is a design feature that aims to keep users scrolling and never reaching the bottom of a page where they might decide to pause.

I’m a political scientist who researches aspects of technology that support democracy and social cohesion, and I’ve observed how the design of social media platforms affects them.

Democracy is in crisis globally, and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimize their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats, and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control.

There are alternatives, however. Some companies design online platforms to defend democratic values.

Optimized for profit

A handful of tech billionaires dominate the global information ecosystem. Without public accountability or oversight, they determine what news shows up on your feed and what data they collect and share.

Social media companies say they are in the business of connecting people, but they make most of their money as data brokers and advertising firms. Time spent on platforms translates to profit. The more time you spend online, the more ads you see and the more data they can collect from you.

This ad-based business model demands designs that encourage endless scrolling, social comparison and emotional engagement. Platforms routinely claim they merely reflect user behavior, yet internal documents and whistleblower accounts have shown that toxic content often gets a boost because it captures people’s attention.

Tech companies design platforms based on extensive psychological research. Examples include flashing notifications that make your phone jump and squeak, colorful rewards when others like your posts, and algorithms that push out the most emotional content to stimulate your most base emotions of anger, shame or glee.

Optimizing designs for user engagement undermines mental health and society. Social media sites favor hype and scandal over factual accuracy, and public manipulation over designing for safety, privacy and user agency. The resulting prevalence of polarizing false and deceptive information is corrosive to democracy.

Many analysts identified these problems nearly a decade ago. But now there is a new threat: Some tech executives are looking to capture political power to advance a new era of techno-autocracy.

Optimized for political power

A techno-autocracy is a political system where an authoritarian government uses technology to control its population. Techno-autocrats spread disinformation and propaganda, using fear tactics to demonize others and distract from corruption. They leverage massive amounts of data, artificial intelligence and surveillance to censor opponents.

For example, China uses technology to monitor and surveil its population with public cameras. Chinese platforms like WeChat and Weibo automatically scan, block or delete messages and posts for sensitive words like “freedom of speech.” Russia promotes domestic platforms like VK that are closely monitored and partly owned by state-linked entities that use it to promote political propaganda.

Over a decade ago, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and now Vice President JD Vance, began aligning with far-right political philosophers like Curtis Yarvin. They argue that democracy impedes innovation, favoring concentrated decision-making in corporate-controlled mini-states governed through surveillance. Embracing this philosophy of techno-autocracy, they moved from funding and designing the internet to reshaping government.

Techno-autocrats weaponize social media platforms as part of their plan to dismantle democratic institutions.

The political capture of both X and Meta also have consequences for global security. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg removed barriers to right-wing propaganda and openly endorsed President Donald Trump’s agenda. Musk changed X’s algorithm to highlight right-wing content, including Russian propaganda.

Designing tech for democracy

Recognizing the power that platform design has on society, some companies are designing new civic participation platforms that support rather than undermine society’s access to verified information and places for public deliberation. These platforms offer design features that big tech companies could adopt for improving democratic engagement that can help counter techno-autocracy.

In 2014, a group of technologists founded Pol.is, an open-source technology for hosting public deliberation that leverages data science. Pol.is enables participants to propose and vote on policy ideas using what they call “computational democracy.” The Pol.is design avoids personal attacks by having no “reply” button. It offers no flashy newsfeed, and it uses algorithms that identify areas of agreement and disagreement to help people make sense of a diversity of opinions. A prompt question asks for people to offer ideas and vote up or down on other ideas. People participate anonymously, helping to keep the focus on the issues and not the people.

Taiwan used the Pol.is platform to enable mass civic engagement in the 2014 democracy movement. The U.K. government’s Collective Intelligence Lab used the platform to generate public discussion and generate new policy proposals on climate and health care policies. In Finland, a public foundation called Sitra uses Pol.is in its “What do you think, Finland?” public dialogues.

Barcelona, Spain, designed a new participatory democracy platform called Decidim in 2017. Now used throughout Spain and Europe, Decidim enables citizens to collaboratively propose, debate and decide on public policies and budgets through transparent digital processes.

Nobel Peace Laureate Maria Ressa founded Rappler Communities in 2023, a social network in the Philippines that combines journalism, community and technology. It aims to restore trust in institutions by providing safe spaces for exchanging ideas and connecting with neighbors, journalists and civil society groups. Rappler Communities offers the public data privacy and portability, meaning you can take your information – like photos, contacts or messages – from one app or platform and transfer it to another. These design features are not available on the major social media platforms.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is an advanced stage of a disease that took hold long ago.

Donald Trump has done away with much of the Reaganite conservative ideology that defined the Republican party of my youth. But one Reagan tradition remains in place: Every time the GOP finds itself in control of both Congress and the Presidency, they pass a giant tax cut. Bush did this in 2001, Trump did this in 2017, and now Trump is about to do it once again in 2025. Trump’s rather ludicrously titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act is, first and foremost, a tax cut bill. The Economist tallied up the numbers on the version of the OBBBA that just passed the Senate, and found that tax cuts dominated everything else in terms of their impact on the government’s finances.

All of this means that the U.S. has to both raise taxes and cut spending in order to maintain solvency and keep interest costs down.1 The Medicaid cuts that the Republicans are enacting are cruel, but unless our government comes up with some way to control health costs much more effectively than ever before, something along those general lines will eventually be necessary. There just isn’t much else that the government spends a lot of money on; defense spending has been cut to the bone, even as foreign threats proliferate.

The way to make that bargain seem fair was always to tax the rich. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton hiked taxes on the rich, and managed to raise federal revenue from 16.7% of GDP in 1992 to 19% of GDP by 1998. 2.3% of GDP might not sound like a lot, but today that would be $690 billion a year, or $6.9 trillion over a decade. The rich didn’t even get particularly mad about this. And it ended up making Clinton’s fiscal austerity a lot more palatable to the masses, because people knew the rich were paying their fair share to help bring the deficit down.

Back in May, I wrote a piece titled Will Congress Legalize Mark Zuckerberg As Your Therapist?, pointing at a piece of legislation included in Trump’s flagship tax bill that would bar states from regulating artificial intelligence and automated decision-making systems. Such legislation could stop attempts to ensure that therapy chatbots disclose they are not human, or blocking rent-fixing algorithms, or rules that mandate health providers allow customers to talk to human beings in customer service, or prohibitions against the use of AI models to advertise to gambling addicts. But mostly, it was a bill to ensure that no one would block big tech players from doing whatever it is they want to do.

Well we got some good news. Last night, that provision was stripped out of the bill by a 99-1 vote. It was killed by a combination of the Democratic caucus and Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn and Josh Hawley, and Trump advisor Steve Bannon.

So what do we learn from this episode? First, we need public financing of elections. It’s become increasingly clear that financial dependencies make it almost impossible to make good policy. There were probably two dozen Republican Senators who would have opposed this provision openly if they didn’t have to rely solely on corporate funds for elections. In truth, this provision never should have been proposed in the first place, let alone have a bitter fight waged to block it. But the financing for elections creates awful incentives.

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.”

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.

The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

• Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
• A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today’s college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
• A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.

Communities Act Best When They Perceive Clearly

To meet this challenge, we need more than new media models. We need new ways of being together. This essay proposes a reorientation: from journalism as product to signal as relationship, from centralized broadcasting to decentralized coordination, and from consumer media logic to Power With information infrastructures. Drawing from the theory of Coordination as Power, and using human swarm intelligence as a generative model, we explore the concept of Civic Signal Hubs: modular, community-driven systems that support visibility, coherence, and mutual accountability without reproducing hierarchies. These hubs are not technological solutions, though technology may assist them. They are cultural practices made visible.

The Civic Signal Hub: A Pattern for Emergence

If Power With is the missing ingredient in our information systems, then the Civic Signal Hub is a pattern for reintroducing it. A Civic Signal Hub is not a singular technology or a physical space, but a living, adaptive structure. It exists wherever people come together to share, interpret, and act upon local signals in a way that sustains mutual visibility and collective agency. Unlike legacy media organizations or content platforms, a Civic Signal Hub is not designed to broadcast from the center. It is designed to weave from the margins, allowing coordination to emerge through a distributed network of relationships.

To bring the idea of a Civic Signal Hub into practice, we must move from metaphor to structure. Although each hub will necessarily reflect the distinct needs, culture, and rhythms of its locality, there are core components that make the model function. These elements are not rigid requirements. They are dynamic functions that, when present in some form, allow the flow of Power With coordination to emerge and sustain itself. Think of them less as a checklist and more as a constellation: loosely held, deeply interconnected, and adaptable to change.