Ever since President Biden signed the CHIPS Act last year to help rebuild American prosperity by stimulating the domestic computer chip industry, various economic commentators and editorial boards have been fretting about the implications of the fact that the law requires companies receiving public support to create good jobs and provide childcare facilities. Such rules, they argue, dilute the purity of the concept of just giving money to chip makers. A Bloomberg editorial even claimed the CHIPS Act was already “racing towards failure” due to the attached requirements — despite already having spurred billions of dollars of new investments and created tens of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile, the people responsible for actually getting chip factories up and running are anguishing over how they’re going to find enough workers to do the construction and manufacturing jobs that need doing. But somehow nobody manages to connect the dots: the people expressing concern about training technicians, inspiring engineers, and recruiting a quality workforce never seem to appreciate that maybe providing good jobs that offer childcare is a key to growing the workforce they need to recruit. And the people expressing concern about how the policy aims to build prosperity broadly never seem to think about how maybe supporting healthy families and prosperous communities is actually the whole point of economic policy. 

Make it make sense.

As was widely reported, total debt held by U.S. households hit $17 trillion in the last quarter, up $2.7 trillion over the past few years. And yes those are big numbers, but once you get into the trillions, numbers stop having much intuitive meaning, so reporting on these figures mostly communicates that wow that’s a lot of money that sure sounds vaguely menacing. But in fact when households take on a manageable amount of debt to invest in their economic future — like a mortgage — it’s generally more of a cause for celebration than concern. Higher wages are certainly preferable to increased borrowing, but as long as jobs are abundant, incomes continue to grow, and delinquencies are low, there’s little reason to be concerned about a modest uptick in consumer debt… unless you trade in scary-big numbers and intimidatingly-sloped charts so you can be ready to blame consumer spending for any negative economic impacts of corporate concentration, excess greed, and income inequality.

A wave of cultural anguish has erupted over the the purported power of ChatGPT, as corporate executives at places like Buzzfeed and CNET boast about the potential of new generative AI tools to cut their costs, while professional writers worry over the possibility of being replaced by the adoption of these tools. It’s a bit jarring amidst all this hand-wringing to recall just how differently most commentators assessed the impact of automation on factory workers, whose concerns were largely dismissed as the death-rattles of dinosaurs who really ought to stop whining, go back to school, and get a better job. The radically different degree of angst about the potential loss of white collar jobs versus the actual loss of blue collar jobs is a good reminder that automation is deployed and assessed based on power, not efficiency. So it’s a delight to take the next step and consider how writer Hamilton Nolan points out on his Substack that there’s one big job uniquely suited to displacement by artificial intelligence: ”one that consists of measurable tasks that can be learned—allocation of capital, creation and execution of market strategy, selection of candidates for top roles—and one that costs the company a shitload of money. In other words: executives.” Nothing personal CEOs, but business is business, right?

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