Broadsheet

NHC Atlantic Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)

Updated 2023-05-29 23:10:26

NHC Eastern North Pacific Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)

Updated 2023-05-29 23:08:56

[Sponsor] Sky Guide

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce

Updated 2023-05-29 19:42:06

GDP projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Change in Real GDP¹
Projection Date	2023	2024	2025
Mar 2023	0.0 to 0.8	1.0 to 1.5	1.7 to 2.1

GDP projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Change in Real GDP¹

Projection Date

2023

2024

2025

Mar 2023

0.0 to 0.8

1.0 to 1.5

1.7 to 2.1

Unemployment projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Unemployment Rate²
Projection Date	2023	2024	2025
Mar 2023	4.0 to 4.7	4.3 to 4.9	4.3 to 4.8

Unemployment projections of Federal Reserve Governors and Reserve Bank presidents, Unemployment Rate²

Projection Date

2023

2024

2025

Mar 2023

4.0 to 4.7

4.3 to 4.9

4.3 to 4.8

It feels a bit strange to type these words, but over the last three years I became a lot more optimistic about U.S. politics. Covid relief bills in 2020 showed that Congress could take effective, bipartisan action in an emergency. The bipartisanship continued under Biden, with the infrastructure bill and (more importantly) the CHIPS Act. Meanwhile, the 2022 midterms weren’t characterized by an angry backlash “wave”. On foreign policy too, there was an unusual amount of accord — the GOP leadership remains steadfastly supportive of Ukraine, while Biden and the Dems have agreed on the need to resist growing Chinese power.

The recent fight over the debt ceiling, however, seems more like a return to the pointless obstructionism and grandstanding that characterized politics in the 2010s. There was absolutely zero reason for the House GOP leadership to use the debt ceiling — they could have just forced a deal through the normal appropriations process. Few people actually believed that the country’s leaders would let the U.S. default on its sovereign debt due to a random minor budget fight — I certainly didn’t. So the net effect of using this tactic seems to have been to make the U.S. look like a dysfunctional clown show in front of our allies, at a time when we need to be projecting an image of dependability.

Anyway, it appears the crisis is over — or at least, close to being over — with the announcement of a deal between the Biden administration and the House GOP leadership. The main elements of the deal appear to be:

A freeze on non-defense discretionary spending in 2024 and a 1% increase in 2025
A 3% increase in defense spending
Expanding work requirements for SNAP (food stamps) and some smaller welfare programs
Resumption of student debt payments (though no alteration to Biden’s debt relief plan)
Reducing IRS funding
Clawing back unused Covid relief money
Some very minor changes on permitting

Remember that because inflation is still running at over 4%, a 1% increase in nominal spending actually represents a modest cut. In fact, if inflation doesn’t fall further in the next year, even the 3% increase in defense spending will represent a cut in real terms.

Now, if you forced me to have an optimistic take on this deal, it would be something along the lines of:

Yay, the U.S. won’t have a sovereign default over absolutely nothing! (A fairly low bar, but OK.)
Across-the-board restraints in nominal spending are actually a good way to cut spending (in fact I suggested this earlier).
The House GOP had initially demanded large cuts in nominal spending, which would have been pretty destabilizing to a lot of essential programs (research, infrastructure, etc.). These demands might have been just an initial negotiating tactic, or their absence might speak to Biden’s negotiating ability, but anyway it’s good that they didn’t make it into the deal.
Clawing back unused Covid funds and resuming student debt payments are both good moves. The pandemic is over, and these are emergency measures that are no longer needed.
SNAP benefits will have expanded work requirements, but there will be expanded access for veterans and the homeless, which is good.
Any progress at all on permitting reform is good.

But as I said, that’s what I would write if you held an armed quadcopter drone to my head and forced me to have an optimistic take. In fact, I’m free to have whatever take I want, and honestly this whole episode has deflated some of my budding optimism about the effectiveness of the American political system.

First of all, it doesn’t include any tax increases. In fact, the House GOP apparently originally wanted to include tax cuts in the deal, which if you ask me is pretty crazy to include in a package of measures designed to limit the federal debt. Thankfully there aren’t any explicit tax cuts in the deal, but in practice the partial defunding of the IRS could make it harder to collect on existing taxes, and will thus raise the deficit. In any case, taxes are an important part of austerity, and without them, the power of this deal to limit government borrowing will be greatly reduced.

Second, the overall spending cuts will be modest. Only about 27% of our federal spending is classified as “discretionary”; about 65% is “mandatory” spending, which only means that it doesn’t go through the appropriations process. (The remainder is interest on the debt.) The spending restraint in this deal will affect only the “discretionary” portion, leaving the “mandatory” majority untouched. Here’s what we include in “mandatory” spending:

The obvious thing to cut here would be Biden’s student loan cancellation, which is included here as a $482 billion charge — almost 2% of GDP. But that was left untouched. It would also be possible to slow the growth of government health benefits like Medicare; this is politically very difficult to do, but will be increasingly unavoidable in the years to come.

A third problem with the deal is that because the discretionary spending freeze is pretty indiscriminate, it could scuttle attempts to revitalize federal research spending. Here’s Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute:

Whatever the exact details, it seems pretty likely that the big increase in federal spending on science and innovation isn’t going to happen as set out in the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act passed last year. Now things won’t be as bad as if the bill passed by House Republicans—it would reduce discretionary spending by more than $3.5 trillion over the coming decade—were to actually happen. In that case, according to science budget analyst Matt Hourihan, federal science investment would decline by 19 percent, or $442 billion, through 2033 versus a baseline scenario in which spending increases with inflation.

That’s really bad news for the nascent attempt to shore up America’s technological competitiveness vis-a-vis the hard-charging China. Once again, the U.S. government is proving more adept at promising big sums of money than at actually delivering tangible results. Hopefully science and technology funding will get carved out of the spending restraint in the final deal; there are things worth spending a lot more money on, and this is one of them.

A fourth problem with the deal is the work requirements for SNAP. It’s not a huge change — the age limit for work requirements will reportedly be raised from 50 to 54 — but that will be enough to kick a number of needy people off the program. That’s the finding of Gray et al. (2020):

Work requirements are common in many U.S. safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals…[W]e find that work requirements reduce SNAP participation by 52 percent. Very low-income and homeless adults are disproportionately screened out. We statistically rule out employment increases of more than 2 percentage points.

Americans really, really love work requirements for welfare programs; this has been true since the time of FDR. People argue back and forth about the overall effectiveness of these requirements in actually getting people to work, but it seems unlikely that making 54-year-olds work for their food stamps will have much of an incentive effect; if “not being poor enough to need food stamps” isn’t already enough of an incentive to go get a job, it’s unlikely that the threat of having your food stamps revoked will suddenly change your calculus. And indeed, this is exactly what Gray et al. find. So really, this is just kicking a bunch of middle-aged people off of food stamps — a little bit of cruelty for a paltry bit of government savings.

But perhaps the most underwhelming aspect of the debt ceiling deal is that it had a chance to address America’s inability to build critical infrastructure…and it didn’t take that chance. Here’s the White House’s explanation of what the bill does:

Streamlining the agency process for submitting environmental review might represent a very modest increase in state capacity. But as Alec Stapp, Joshua Siegel, and many others have pointed out, this doesn’t include either a limitation on people’s ability to sue projects to make them do more NEPA reviews, or deadlines limiting how long those reviews can take. Those were the two major items that advocates of permitting reform have sought; without either, this deal will mainly be window dressing.

And as for giving electricity transmission special treatment in the NEPA process (as we currently give some types of fossil fuel infrastructure), this was dropped altogether in favor of a study — no actual policy! — of one narrow aspect of the issue:

Remember that without a lot more transmission, it will be impossible to complete the transition to green energy, and the Inflation Reduction Act will largely be an exercise in futility.

Apparently House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised to work with Biden on permitting reform in a separate bill, so hopefully that will pan out. But the fact that it was cut from the debt ceiling deal just makes that deal even more ineffectual.

In other words, the debt ceiling deal has a little bit of positive, a little bit of negative, and a whole lot of disappointing “meh”. Normally, a bill like that would be nothing to write home about; I probably wouldn’t even bother with a blog post, even on a slow news week. But what frustrates me about this nothingburger of a result is how incredibly costly it was to produce. The House GOP went through months of dramatic, high-stakes negotiations, forced the administration to consider the Fourteenth Amendment and the trillion dollar coin, got the media talking seriously about the prospect of a U.S. sovereign default, and made America look like a dysfunctional circus in front of our allies at a time when China is looking for any excuse to declare that the West is failing…and all that for a little bit of discretionary spending restraint, a few added work requirements for food stamps, and a little defunding of the IRS? Seriously?? It’s like if a guy walked into a restaurant with a ticking bomb demanding to blow everyone up if he didn’t get a free peppermint!

Look, I try to stay optimistic. This isn’t a bad deal, and I still hold out hope that now that McCarthy has convinced the GOP base that he’s just as much of a tough guy as Republicans were in the days of yore, he can get back to creating the same kind of actually useful bipartisan legislation that we saw in Biden’s first two years. But this whole debt ceiling saga really just has me rubbing my face in my hands.

Subscribe now

w/e 2023-05-28

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)

Updated 2023-05-28 18:11:35

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted the future. It was a disturbing forecast, and everybody paid attention.

People saw his book Future Shock everywhere. I was just a freshman in high school, but even I bought a copy (the purple version). And clearly I wasn’t alone—Clark Drugstore in my hometown had them piled high in the front of the store.

The book sold at least six million copies and maybe a lot more (Toffler’s website claims 15 million). It was reviewed, translated, and discussed endlessly. Future Shock turned Toffler—previously a freelance writer with an English degree from NYU—into a tech guru applauded by a devoted global audience.

Toffler showed up on the couch next to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Other talk show hosts (Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, etc.) invited him to their couches too. CBS featured Toffler alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller as trusted guides to the future. Playboy magazine gave him a thousand dollar award just for being so smart.

Toffler parlayed this pop culture stardom into a wide range of follow-up projects and businesses, from consulting to professorships. When he died in 2016, at age 87, obituaries praised Alvin Toffler as “the most influential futurist of the 20th century.”

But did he deserve this notoriety and praise?

The Honest Broker is a reader-supported guide to music, books, media & culture. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.

Subscribe now

Future Shock is a 500 page book, but the premise is simple: Things are changing too damn fast.

Toffler opens an early chapter by telling the story of Ricky Gallant, a youngster in Eastern Canada who died of old age at just eleven. He was only a kid, but already suffered from “senility, hardened arteries, baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin. In effect, Ricky was an old man when he died.”

Toffler didn’t actually say that this was going to happen to all of us. But I’m sure more than a few readers of Future Shock ran to the mirror, trying to assess the tech-driven damage in their own faces.

“The future invades our lives,” he claims on page one. Our bodies and minds can’t cope with this. Future shock is a “real sickness,” he insists. “It is the disease of change.”

As if to prove this, Toffler’s publisher released the paperback edition of Future Shock with six different covers—each one a different color. The concept was brilliant. Not only did Future Shock say that things were constantly changing, but every time you saw somebody reading it, the book itself had changed.

Of course, if you really believed Future Shock was a disease, why would you aggravate it with a stunt like this? But nobody asked questions like that. Maybe they were too busy looking in the mirror for “baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin.”

Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but technological change was the main focus of his musings. When the New York Times reviewed his book, it announced in the opening sentence that “Technology is both hero and villain of Future Shock.”

During his brief stint at Fortune magazine, Toffler often wrote about tech, and warned about “information overload.” The implication was that human beings are a kind of data storage medium—and they’re running out of disk space.

It’s not clear that Toffler invented either of those terms—“future shock” or “information overload.” Back in 1963, the former phrase had shown up in a talk delivered to a group of educators by Charles Weingartner and Neil Postman. They defined “future shock” as the “social paralysis induced by rapid technological change.” Two years later, Toffler published an article in Horizon magazine entitled “The Future as a Way of Life,” which showcased some of the key points.

Here Toffler announced the arrival of this new affliction. Future shock was the inevitable result of a “second industrial revolution” sweeping the world. “But it was “bigger, deeper, and more important” than the previous industrial revolution. Here, too, he looks at technology as a threat.

Toffler points out that there were now 15,000 academic journals, publishing maybe a “million significant papers in them each year.” Who could keep up with all this progress? (Of course, that assumes that the contents of 15,000 academic journals represent progress—but that’s a different discussion.)

I find it curious that Toffler spoke so much about technological change, and so little about sociological change. When he published Future Shock in 1970, the US had just experienced a tumultuous decade, but the disruptions weren’t coming from machines. The real sources of shock were the people themselves, the masses were unleashed.

Instead of Future Shock, Toffler should have written a book called Future Numbness or Future Couch Potato. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.

The real forces of change in that era were the sexual revolution, liberation from censorship, the rise of alternative lifestyles, vocal protests, and the overturning of inherited values of all sorts. But Toffler looked for disruptive change elsewhere, and pointed at “air travel and space flight, television, the development of nuclear energy, the invention of the computer, the discovery of DNA with its possibilities for the control of evolution,” and other trends of that sort.

You might think that Toffler, writing in 1965, would focus on the assassination of the President or the Civil Rights movement. But instead he devotes more attention to attempts to detect radio signals from Jupiter.

But does the existence of space travel really put us in a state of shock? Is air travel a danger to our psyches and organisms?

And what about television? I have a friend who can’t fall asleep unless the TV is on in his bedroom. To my mind, that provides a much better metaphor for consumer technology. It doesn’t shock us—not at all.

It numbs us.

As I look back on Future Shock with the benefit of 50 years of hindsight, I see this everywhere in his book. Things turned out the exact opposite of what Toffler anticipated. Instead of Future Shock, he should have written a book called Future Numbness or Future Couch Potato. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.

People today aren’t put into shock by all their tech devices. They are numbed and hypnotized. They’re addicted and won’t put them down. These folks haven’t been invaded by the future. If these machines are the future, they can’t get enough of it.

It’s the past that people have lost. They don’t care about it. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to understand it.

We live in cities that embody thousands of years of human labor, ingenuity, and imagination. Perhaps this might be shocking and anxiety-provoking if people thought about it—and especially if they focused on how fragile all this is. History tells of other cultures that created amazing technologies and then collapsed. Thinking about that might actually cause some real shock.

But that’s not how the dominant mindset right now views city life or digital devices—or any other legacy of the past. The reality is that people don’t think about much of anything at all, because technology turns them into passive receptors.

Nobody is “invaded by the future.” The citizenry is entirely absorbed by the present moment—to the exclusion of everything else.

Just watch them on the street or subway with their devices, and see that empty look on their faces. Like zombies in those horror films, they might have had a real life once, long ago, but they’ve forgotten what it’s like.

“It’s the past that people have lost. They don’t care about it. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to understand it.”

And what about information overload? That has to be true, no?

Ah, the reality on the street is much different. As I noted in my recent article on “The State of the Culture, 2023” people sip that information with a very narrow straw.

Your data stream is like a morphine drip at the hospital. And with the same result—you want to make sure you’re always hooked to the machine that provides the drip.

TikTok and Instagram, for example, can be described in many ways. But “information overload” or “future shock”aren’t the words I’d use. Consumers have become very skilled at blocking out information—maybe too skilled. That’s what happens when your interactions with the real world are reduced to 10 or 20 second video snippets.

Nobody is overloaded with information not in the year 2023. Not even students—or especially not students.

If we turn away from technology for a moment, and look instead at culture, we absolutely do not find rapid change. We see the exact opposite.

Movie studios keep releasing the same stories with the same characters. The hottest Hollywood star at the Cannes festival this year was Harrison Ford, age 80. Last year it was comparative youngster Tom Cruise, age 60. Both showed up to pitch sequels in which they played the same character they originated four decades ago.

Musical genres don’t change much from year to year, or even from decade to decade. A recent survey found that the most popular song has been the same for three years.

Many of the biggest names in commercial music are the same ones who were popular when Toffler peddled his Future Shock concept back in the 1970s. For example, here’s what a search engine told me when I asked about the bestselling rock artists in the year 2023.

So even if tech devices are evolving rapidly—and I’m not entirely convinced of that—the culture is stagnating. It needs more change, not less.

Yet Toffler was correct about one thing. People are getting sick.

Rates of depression are up. Suicide rates are up. Self-harm and eating disorders and mental illness are rising everywhere. Drugs kill millions of individuals—and it’s not always illegal drugs. Addictions of all sorts plague society, and ‘recovery’ programs of all sorts are big business. And so is ‘anger management’—a vocation that didn’t even exist in Toffler’s day. People can’t control their anger, and lash out at the slightest things. Violence is at a high point; tolerance at a low point.

Toffler saw something of this sort coming—in fact, he probably underestimated it. If you look through the index to his book, you won’t find suicide, depression, addiction, or other such topics. But you will find numerous references to the “nervous system” or “pace of life” or “adaptation.”

He clearly envisioned an anxious world on the go. People would travel in space ships. We would be operating complicated machines like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. But that’s not the world we live in now.

People aren’t flying in spaceships. (Well, a few billionaires do that, but there are no tickets for us.) In fact, people are barely interested in getting a driver’s license nowadays. Hey, there’s so much entertainment just sitting at home with that tiny screen.

That’s what Toffler missed. The future came and it didn’t shock us with its complexity. They simplified everything so we can manage by swiping left or right, or just clicking on a button.

It’s “information underload” nowadays—and huge corporations work to deliver it. They ensure that our digital lives have no shocks or surprises. Their algorithms are designed to deliver today something almost identical to what they gave us yesterday. And tomorrow will be no different.

As a result, the future has fallen from view, replaced by a sense of stasis. And so has the past, which ought to be a resource but has become so weightless that it might as well not exist at all. All this is causing real sicknesses, and we don’t need to invent new names for them. They’ve been around a while, only now they’re much worse and afflicting more people.

In a situation like this, we ought to reverse Alvin Toffler’s advice. We need more change, not less. And it ought to be centered on the areas of greatest numbness and disconnectedness. I’m talking about the culture itself, not the technology.

This isn’t the place to spell out the necessary agenda—that’s a huge issue beyond our scope here. But I can tell you one thing. The kind of change we need isn’t going to happen on an app.

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Monday, August 3, 2015

Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Comments

Related Stories

The Honest Broker is a reader-supported guide to music, books, media & culture. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support my work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.

Instead of Future Shock, Toffler should have written a book called Future Numbness or Future Couch Potato. That would have hit the mark with a bullseye.

“It’s the past that people have lost. They don’t care about it. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to understand it.”

Comments

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories