AI Vs Jobs, China Trade Truths And Dictator Economics

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In the 80s and 90s, it took about 8 years of work to afford a home. Since then, the number has climbed to about 10 years - a significant and concerning drop in affordability, but not a catastrophic drop. A breakdown by the Economic Innovation Group shows that mortgages are about as affordable as they ever were, but down payments have gotten less affordable:

Source: Ben Glasner

While the drop in housing affordability over the past half century is certainly a problem, it's not the kind of crisis that Bernie paints it as. Using silly charts in service of alarmist narratives ultimately just weakens trust in your movement - or at least, it should.

3. Personalist dictatorships are probably bad for the economy

The three most powerful countries in the world are now all ruled by strongmen. In China, Xi Jinping has subdued all rivals, and concentrated what used to be a dispersed bureaucratic oligarchy under his own personal rule .

In Russia, Putin is effectively an emperor. The US is still officially a democracy, but democratic norms and institutions are eroding rapidly, and in April a majority of Americans called Trump a“dictator.”

The question is what effect these personalistic regimes will have on the economy. China's growth over the past four decades pretty much proves that democracy isn't necessary for a strong or even dominant economy. But there's a difference between countries ruled by a single strongman, and countries ruled by a system of elite institutions that distribute power among a number of oligarchs.

A new paper by Blattman, Gehlbach, and Yu shows that personalist regimes tend to experience lower economic growth than either democracies or autocracies with more distributed power. The difference isn't huge, but you can see it on a graph:

Source: Blattman, Gehlbach, & Yu (2025)

It's not clear which direction the causation runs here; it could be that countries with bad economies tend to turn to strongmen to save them. But Blattman et al. test for this using variables that tend to predict regime transitions, and they don't find any change. That implies that personalist regimes actually make mistakes that slow down economic growth.

Xi, Putin, and Trump certainly don't exactly seem to be violating that rule of thumb. China's growth has slowed relentlessly under Xi, and his industrial policy seems to be simply driving Chinese companies into unprofitability rather than extricating the country from its economic slump . Putin's war in Ukraine is slowly crushing the life out of the Russian economy, while Trump's tariffs continue to wear down the resilient US economy.

The trend toward strongmen is a bad one.

4. Will AI save us from the social media trolls?

Does it ever seem like modern political discourse is dominated by crazy idiots? Well, that's because it is. In a new paper entitled“Dark personalities in the digital arena: how psychopathy and narcissism shape online political participation”, Ahmed and Masood find that your intuition isn't wrong:

Almost everyone blames recent political trends on their chosen enemy group, but the real culprit is social media, which has elevated the worst people in our society to positions of influence from which they were previously shut out.

What force can defeat the terrible power of social media and its armies of crazy idiots? In my Fourth of July post , I expressed hope that AI algorithms could be harnessed to defeat the hordes of humanity's worst:

Of course, that solution would depend on the willingness of platform owners like Elon Musk to unleash algorithms in the service of moderation and reasonability. That seems a bit like wishful thinking, I admit.

But there's another possibility, which is that AI itself will simply naturally drive humans off of social media, by generating infinite amounts of slop. A new paper by Campante et al. finds evidence that AI-generated images nudge news consumers toward more trustworthy human-gatekept media:

A similar effect might happen with AI agents, which are already flooding social media with trash commentary . As X and other social media companies lose the battle against the bot swarms, human users may stop relying on those feeds for their window on the world. The psychopaths and attention-seekers might simply get drowned out in the automated cacophony.

That would be a weird end to the age of mass social media, but honestly, it's not the worst ending I could think of.

5. No, China isn't just selling stuff to America through third countries

The American and Chinese economies continue to decouple. Even though Trump keeps“pausing” his tariffs on China, China is selling less and less to America:

Source: Bloomberg via Noahpion

But you'll notice that China's exports to Europe and Southeast Asia are still growing strongly. This has led some commentators to claim that China is simply shipping its good through third-party countries, avoiding tariffs (or the threat of tariffs) by essentially just slapping a different“made in” label on stuff that was actually made in China.

Those claims are wrong. You can see that they're wrong by looking at the actual products that China is selling to countries in Southeast Asia (the region usually accused of transshipping Chinese goods to the US.), versus the products it used to sell to the US. The two sets of products don't match up very well, meaning that only a modest portion of Chinese trade with Southeast Asia could reflect diversion of trade from the US Gerard DiPippo did this exercise :

In fact, this is an upper bound. Many of the countries being accused of transshipping Chinese goods - Mexico, Vietnam, etc. - have their own industries as well , which export a lot to the US. Increased US imports from those countries are likely to at least partially - or perhaps mostly - be locally made goods.

All this goes to show that you can't draw conclusions about decoupling just from macro data.

6. The rise of the power trad couples

There are a number of popular ideas out there about who marries whom. One is that rich men primarily want physically attractive wives and don't care about social status, education, and so on. Another is that power couples tend to be dual earners.

In fact, both of these stereotypes are wrong. As Lyman Stone shows in a post for the Institute for Family Studies , rich men tend to marry highly educated, high-earning women who become housewives after marriage. Here are some charts:

Source: Lyman Stone