The Year of Bad Vibes

Plus: Crime, inflation, college crazies, and more…

LIZ WOLFE

Inflation was not OK: This was the year that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell just kept hiking those interest rates higher in hopes of taming inflation. This noticeably cooled the housing market. Other economic indicators—unemployment rate, consumer spending—remained OK. But for everyday Americans, basic essentials remained tougher to afford, even as inflation got a little less stubborn and began to show signs of slowing its upward trajectory.

At this point, it feels like inflated grocery bills are warranting fewer headlines, maybe because Americans have adjusted to this as a new, terrible normal. Much of this stemmed from pandemic-era spending, under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that free market economists warned would result in this dismal economic doom. Repeat after me: The bill always comes due.

In many cases, fears of technological disruption—AI taking over screenwriting, electric vehicles replacing combustible-engine cars—and demands that such change be thwarted were wrapped into union complaints.

Meanwhile, minimum wages crept higher and higher—$19.08 an hour in West Hollywood!—so look forward to that having an effect on the labor market (specifically: which jobs get automated away and at what rate) in the future.

The cities were not OK: My own city, New York, faced some high-profile vigilante justice in a subway killing of a mentally deranged homeless man that went viral. Washington, D.C.’s homicide rate is at its worst since 1997. A federal government memo sent in August told employees in San Francisco to work remotely due to increased crime concerns near the Department of Health and Human Services office there. “Population drain persists in big cities,” reads an Axios headline that kind of says it all.

The presidential administration was not OK: Joe Biden blamed large corporations for inflation—continually peddling the myth that, well, actually, we’re being charged higher prices because these CEOs suddenly discovered greed. He issued a mostly pointless executive order on AI. He tried to crack down on menthols. He forced “Buy American” provisions into useless infrastructure projects. He authorized a looooottttt more government spending. He tried to buy young voters by attempting mass student loan forgiveness. He turned 81.

The other guy was not OK either: Donald Trump, who remains the highest polling Republican presidential contender, is staring down 91 (!) felony counts over two federal districts and two state courts right now. He has his New York state fraud trial, his Manhattan defamation/sexual assault proceedings, another Manhattan case (this one for hush money payments), the Department of Justice’s Mar-a-Lago documents case about HIS BOXES, and the Fulton County, Georgia, stolen-election racketeering case. Oh, and the Department of Justice’s election-subversion case as well. He’s bleeding lawyers. He’s skipping debates. He’s talking about deadly lemonade (OK, that one was fake, but seems plausible, and I kind of wish he’d gone there). He’s really not OK. And he would bring all kinds of awful policies if elected for a second term. And will he end up serving as president from prison? It’s not as far off of a possibility as I had hoped. Disturbing.

The election was not OK: The rest of the Republican field, which is all polling terribly, seems to broadly agree that we need to…wage war on Mexican cartels (?) and ban TikTok.

The kids were not OK: The terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and killed 1,200 civilians in the single bloodiest day in Israeli history. Children were burnt. Men were decapitated. Young women were attacked, in crop tops, at a music festival, by Hamas militants paragliding in from the sky.

American college students somehow thought now would be a great time to use the paragliders in poster art and re-up the decolonizer talk to advocate for Palestine to be freed, “from the river to the sea.” (Many of them don’t know which river or which sea is being discussed, mind you, which is yet another indication of the quality of education they’re receiving.)

At the Sydney Opera House, young pro-Palestine protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” At least one young woman raised an image of a swastika in Times Square. Journalists got in on it too:

Including those in the upper echelons of academia—professors at Cornell said they were “exhilarated” upon hearing news of October 7, Harvard’s student groups declared Israel entirely responsible for Hamas’ terrorist attack, and the University of Pennsylvania came under fire for speech double standards on hosting a literary conference, extending invitations to speakers who had made antisemitic comments in the past.

The discourse was not OK:

Intelligence, all around: OpenAI launched ChatGPT-4 and became, truly, a household name. Meta’s Llama launched (February) to compete with it, as did Google’s Bard (March), as did Elon Musk’s Grok (November), as did Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 (November), as did Google’s Gemini (earlier this month). May the best LLM win.

But it wasn’t just the large language models that advanced and competed with each other; AI applications had a massive year, more broadly. Whether used for fraud prevention or lung cancer detection or drug discovery, artificial intelligence is just beginning to transform how all kinds of industries function.

In 2023, the multiplanetary future got a little closer. NASA continued to recede in prominence as private space companies made massive strides. “The last decade has exceeded my expectations largely because of SpaceX,” former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told Ars Technica last year. And the Federal Aviation Administration continued to do a nice job getting out of private space firms’ way.

Here on Earth, some cities (Austin) and states (California, possibly Hawaii) finally started listening to YIMBYs (“yes in my backyard”) a bit and began to…actually build more and loosen up zoning.

And those college-kid dunces I just mentioned? Well, donors started to pull a ton of funding for these elite universities and a bunch of college presidents got lambasted in a congressional hearing. The wokeness fever looks like it’s breaking.

And tougher economic times in some industries—tech world layoffs, for example—also meant the shuttering of DEI and ESG initiatives. In a lot of realms, people are getting back to business at long last.

THAT INCLUDES ME. I came back from maternity leave in January and wrote a piece on how having my son has changed me and why more women ought to get pregnant young (stereotypical girl move, I know). I launched a show called Just Asking Questions with Zach Weissmueller (PLEASE watch us and suggest any guests you’d like to see come on). I made a video essay for Reason that tore RFK Jr. apart—and got a lot of hate—then went on comedian Dave Smith’s show to discuss it…which promptly got taken down by the fine censors at YouTube (rude of them). I escaped Brooklyn and moved to Queens. And I inherited this newsletter, with this community of wonderful readers.

If you’ve waded through all the dismal news up until this point, I hereby commend you. Thank you for reading Reason Roundup, from the bottom of my heart. Statists may continue to try to screw things up for us all, but I have hope for 2024 and all the wonderful things happening far outside central planners’ grasps.

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