9/19/2023 0 Comments Social questions nytimes![]() Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office expects that deficits will average 6.1% of GDP. Over the past 50 years, the annual federal deficit has averaged about 3.5% of GDP. That’s because we’re now manacled by debt.ĭuring the Trump administration, the debt increased by roughly $7.8 trillion, and during the Biden administration, it has increased by about $3.7 trillion. But the United States may not be able to mobilize that kind of response in the future. When COVID hit, the United States successfully pivoted and threw trillions of dollars at that problem. We’re going to need governments that are able to pivot quickly and throw tidal waves of money at suddenly emerging problems, from technologically driven mass unemployment to war in the Pacific. This is a period of radical uncertainty, a period in which predictions are likely to be wrong and midrange plans are likely to become obsolete. We’re living in the first stages of what my colleague Thomas Friedman a few years ago called “the age of acceleration,” an age of both stunning advances and horrific dislocations. This will produce a remorseless technological competition that will turbocharge developments in biotech, energy, chip manufacturing, trade flows, political alliances and many other spheres. Another cause is the emerging cold war with China. AI will produce pervasive breakthroughs and threats that none of us can now predict. The first cause is artificial intelligence. The information age is accelerating and growing more disruptive. Computers and TikTok are nice, but they haven’t produced the kind of society-altering transformations we saw during the other two civilizational turning points. Until a few years ago, the information age seemed like the least consequential of the three. ![]() ![]() Writing in Tablet magazine this week, the scholar and columnist Walter Russell Mead notes that there have been three periods of transformational change over the course of human history: the Neolithic period, which brought about settled farming, writing and the birth of cities the Industrial Revolution, which gave us factories, mass production and cars and the information age. Today, its main purpose is to prepare the nation for a period of accelerating and explosive change. If you ask me now what the Biden administration is for, my answer would be different. The Biden policies were more than worth it. But things would have been immeasurably worse if the struggling places were left to founder in the same economic mire. ![]() Yes, the nation is still bitterly divided. ![]()
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