U.S. Steel on Friday announced it will continue some operations at a plant in Granite City, Ill., reversing its decision a few weeks earlier to all but close the facility. The change of heart occurred after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had a word with U.S. Steel Chief Executive Dave Burritt, the Journal reported at the weekend. Mr. Lutnick told Mr. Burritt that the Administration would invoke its authority under the “golden share” arrangement to block the plant closure.
Don’t bother looking for a business justification for this government interference. U.S. Steel had idled the two blast furnaces in the plant, in 2019 and 2023, and now its 800 workers process steel produced elsewhere. Speaking of those workers, the company had said it would keep them on at least until 2027 to perform maintenance on the facility in case it needed that capacity again in the future.
The point instead is political. Nippon’s proposed deal for U.S. Steel became a campaign issue during last year’s Presidential election. When Mr. Trump finally approved the acquisition this summer, the Administration billed the golden share and other strictures as matters of national security, by which Mr. Trump seemed to mean ensuring production capacity would remain in the U.S.
But now that voters know the golden share exists, no politician will want to be the guy who doesn’t use it to “save” jobs. Even if this comes at the expense of investments by the same company, and jobs, elsewhere in America.
Nathan Punwani’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:
Regarding “AI Wins the Google Antitrust Suit” (Review & Outlook, Sept. 4): The decision in favor of the search engine is a testament to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s insight about the evolutionary nature of capitalism. As he wrote in “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy”: “Every successful corner may spell monopoly for the moment.” Yet technological change upends whole industries, creating new, previously unimaginable services and “goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization.” Each dislodges the monopoly position of incumbent firms wedded to the old ways of doing things.
Judge Amit P. Mehta added that thanks to AI, other “companies already are in a better position, both financially and technologically, to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades.” Capitalism’s “perennial gale of creative destruction,” as Schumpeter put it, is the most pro-competitive force—more so than any government regulator.
Speaking of creative destruction, here’s Arnold Kling on AI. Three slices:
The most remarkable aspect of LLMs is not their ability to simulate intelligence, but their capacity to amplify human creativity at unprecedented scales. By understanding natural language, these models have transformed from tools that require specialized expertise to collaborative partners that can work alongside anyone who can articulate ideas. The results are nothing short of revolutionary: Software engineers report significant productivity gains, writers are producing books in weeks rather than months or years, and scientists are discovering new materials and medicines at rates that would have been impossible even a few years ago.
The secret lies in what scientists call “the adjacent possible” — the realm of what’s just within reach, the next logical combinations or steps that become conceivable once certain building blocks are in place. Human creativity has always operated in this space. The Beatles’ early hits emerged from combining the harmonies of the Everly Brothers with the cadences of Chuck Berry’s rhythm and blues. The iPhone represented the adjacent possible of touchscreen technology, mobile processors, and internet connectivity. Each creative breakthrough builds on existing elements, recombining them in ways that seem obvious only in retrospect.
LLMs have dramatically expanded what lies in the adjacent possible for creative professionals. Consider the software engineer who can now sketch out a complex application in natural language and watch as the AI generates working code, complete with error handling and optimization. What once required months of painstaking programming can now be accomplished in hours. The productivity gains are so dramatic that some developers describe the experience as having a team of junior programmers working at superhuman speed, never tiring, never making transcription errors, and always available to iterate on ideas. Unlike a human team of coders, in which each additional person makes communication more difficult (to the point where the cost of keeping some employees up to speed exceeds the benefit of the work they do), a team of one software engineer working with Claude or ChatGPT only has to discuss project requirements with a single AI partner.
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The implications extend beyond individual productivity gains. We might be witnessing the emergence of entirely new creative forms that were previously impossible. Interactive educational experiences represent just one example. We can imagine AI-powered creative tools that enable real-time collaboration between human creativity and machine capability, generating new forms of art, entertainment, and communication that neither humans nor machines could produce alone.
A question still looms over this creative revolution, however: Will AI remain a complement to human creativity, or will it eventually substitute for it? If creativity truly involves exploring the adjacent possible, AI systems might eventually match or exceed human creative capabilities. After all, they can explore vastly more combinations, consider more variables, and iterate more rapidly than human creators. They don’t suffer creative blocks or fatigue. As these systems become more sophisticated, the line between AI-assisted creativity and AI-generated creativity might blur beyond recognition.
This possibility raises profound questions about the nature of creativity itself. If an AI system can generate a compelling novel, a beautiful painting, or a breakthrough scientific hypothesis, what does that say about human uniqueness? The answer might be that creativity has always been about intelligent recombination of existing elements. If this is the case, machines might indeed become as creative as humans — or perhaps even more so.
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AI’s widespread deployment could yield massive social and economic transformations, but we must keep in mind that we have not endowed computers with intelligence, and are unlikely to do so in the near future. The jobs of today and tomorrow will still need humans — their conceptual thinking, prudential judgment, contextual understanding, and emotional depth. Adapting well to the era of AI will require putting its character in context, and approaching its future with the humility to understand that no one can reliably predict what’s coming.
I knew that I was right, partly because I understood the basics of science and partly because I had already read some epidemiologists’ skeptical comments about lockdowns. What I didn’t know was how right I was. There was a well-established understanding in the literature by epidemiologist D.A. Henderson (no relation) and others that non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the pandemic were not worthwhile. This was partly because NPIs couldn’t do much to stop the spread of a coronavirus, but mainly because the negative effects on people’s physical and mental health, their economic well-being, and children’s development, would be huge.
That message comes across loud and clear in the new book In Covid’s Wake, by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. The authors thoroughly cover the issues: laying out the well-known problems with NPIs, discussing the ways that federal public health officials Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Frances Collins suppressed information about COVID, providing the receipts on how experts who had bought into the earlier scientific consensus against NPIs did a quick U‑turn and castigated those who stuck with the consensus, showing how Fauci and others tried to suppress the idea that the pandemic stemmed from a lab leak in China, and documenting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) literally changing its definition of “herd immunity” to exclude the possibility that anything other than a vaccine can create it. These are only some of the highlights of this excellent book.
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Macedo and Lee also document the harsh response to the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), published October 4, 2020. Its lead author was Dr. Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a biostatistician and epidemiologist. The other two authors were Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University and epidemiologist who is also an expert in modeling infectious diseases, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School who is also a physician and health economist. Bhattacharya, who has since become a friend, told me that that statement was one of the least controversial things he had ever co-authored.
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The power that governments in the United States and most of the rest of the world exerted on people’s lives because of the virus was horrendous. Governments ignored some relatively well thought out ideas of public health experts that went against lockdowns and other coercive measures based on a few mathematical models and, presumably, a lot of fear. Some of those same public health experts then turned on a dime, advocating coercive measures and even denouncing other experts who disagreed.
Youyou Zhou, León Krauze, and David Bier discuss Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee. Here’s one of Bier’s remarks:
Like so much of Trump’s agenda, it’s about power. This administration is quite explicit in its goal to control the economy and the actions, and even speech, of businesses. Trump wants every company to grovel at his feet for an exception, waiver, etc. And that’s what’ll end up happening if courts don’t shut it down quickly.
Nick Gillespie explains “why the Charlie Kirk memorial might spell the end of Trump and MAGA.” Two slices:
Sunday’s massive, televised memorial service for Charlie Kirk contained grace notes that were simply breathtaking to behold. “That young man…I forgive him,” said Kirk’s widow Erika, speaking of alleged killer Tyler Robinson. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”
Yet such a profound expression of grief and forgiveness was overwhelmed by the crassly political messaging voiced by speakers such as President Donald Trump, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and media hypeman Tucker Carlson. By using the occasion to score cheap partisan points and indulge in weird personal obsessions, they managed to drag the service into Idiocracy meets The Hunger Games territory. Indeed, far from being the launching pad for “the storm” and the “awaken[ing]” of the “dragon” that Miller prophesied, Sunday’s event may well represent the high-water mark of Trump’s final term and the crescendo of MAGA more broadly as the negative and unpopular effects of his policies become unmistakable.
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On the economy—arguably the most important issue for any president—59 percent are unhappy. “Brace yourself,” cautions George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen at The Free Press. “Here comes stagflation,” the defining condition of the 1970s’ economic malaise, which denotes simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment. He predicts inflation pushing up to 4 percent and unemployment hitting 7 percent over the next year and a half. Though low by ’70s standards, those would discombobulate further the 75 percent of Americans (and 51 percent of Republicans!) who already believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.
