Everyone should benefit from AI

Plus “Thunderball,” price controls, and liberalism & the limits of politics

The actor and director Rob Reiner passed away this week, tragically, only to be eulogized by wildly inappropriate commentary from Donald Trump — a powerful reminder that the Orange Man is Bad.

The most famous scene from one of Reiner’s best known films, “A Few Good Men,” very effectively dramatizes one of the core disputes between the liberal and conservative worldviews. Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessep makes a strong case that the liberal sheep can only survive because their walls are guarded by tough men like him.

One issue here, of course, is that the conservative belief in the empowered strongman as the guarantor of civilization against the forces of barbarism is asking us to have a lot of faith in the strongman’s probity.

In the film, whatever you think of Jessep, there’s no suggestion that he was acting out of venal orders. The “code red” was not a shakedown or an extortion racket. But obviously untrammeled power of the sort that Jessep claims for himself could be used in corrupt, self-interested, or petty and egomaniacal ways. What makes the Trump experience so insane to me is that he simultaneously very openly claims Jessep-like superiority over the supposedly naïve liberals while also very clearly being a person with zero honor, integrity, decency, or basic self-discipline. The kind of guy who would dunk on a murder victim who was also a beloved filmmaker.

With that, let’s do some questions.

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Julia: You mentioned reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography and the Poirot mysteries. Why do you think a bestselling author like Christie isn’t normally taught in grade school? I’m still annoyed by being assigned Tuck Everlasting.

I think there’s maybe a sense that she’s too murder-y for kids? But I don’t really get it. They should assign fun books.

Sasha Gusev: If the voters want lower nominal prices, why not give them what they want with well-articulated, targeted price controls? This seems much less harmful than other popular but economically foolish desires the Democrats are willing to compromise on (immigration and trade).

The main reason is that targeted price controls won’t reduce nominal prices.

This was my point about the stadium beer. Even if all goes well with forcing down the price of beer, you’re just putting upward pressure on the price of tickets. In other cases you’ll get bigger problems, like price controls on beef leading to beef shortages at the supermarket. I think it’s fine to rail against extortionate prices and promise to crack down on this or that, but inflation really is a macroeconomic phenomenon and it needs macro solutions.

Jared Francis: Matt Bruenig has argued for a Social Wealth Fund that pays a universal dividend to citizens—as a way to tackle wealth inequality directly. As we see more openness to populist economic ideas, do you see potential for a primary candidate to adopt this platform? It seems like ‘a guaranteed check in the mail from American corporate profits’ would be an easy sell to voters. Is this an opportunity, for the 2028 field? What are potential objections from the political center?

This is an idea that I think has always had a lot of appeal but also some obvious problems in the form of “where does the money come from?”

In the case of Alaska, the money comes originally from the state’s oil wealth, and I think it’s a very smart way to handle natural resource wealth. But America as a whole can’t finance a large wealth fund in that way. There are possible answers to the question, but they are all politically and economically challenging.

And yet here we are potentially on the verge of an artificial intelligence revolution that promises to simultaneously unleash massive amounts of new wealth while also potentially radically devaluing human labor.