In one scenario, low energy prices lead to a lot of slack. At the margin, people don’t need to be so careful about how they deploy their AIs. Right now, for instance, I don’t pay extra for using my current LLMs more. So I am willing to play around with them a lot without worrying about whether any single use is going to achieve some concrete useful end. The result is some silliness, some jokes and more indulgence of my random obsessions, in addition to help with my history and economics questions.

I call this the AI Future With Slack.

It is not clear how long the system can operate like this. As more institutions work with generative AI, demands on those services will increase. AI companies will have to invest more to meet the growing demand for computing power. AI services will also lose their initial venture-capital-funded runways and be forced to make a profit. Over the long term, each use of generative AI will cost a noticeable amount of money.

I call this the AI Future Without Slack.

Both AI usage and global economic growth will significantly boost the demand for energy, and thus energy prices. Using the vast computing powers of AI could mean significantly higher energy costs.

Of course, there are many different variables that figure into energy costs, ranging from the future of nuclear fusion, battery technologies and numerous regulatory decisions. Energy will continue to be relatively cheap for households (that is, voters) and will get relatively expensive for business-owned AIs.

To the extent there is a lot of slack, AIs themselves will create wild products of the imagination, especially as they improve in computing power and skill. AIs will sing to each other, write for each other, talk to each other — as they already do — trade with each other, and come up with further alternatives we humans have not yet pondered. Evolutionary pressures within AI’s cultural worlds will determine which of these practices spread.

If you own some rights flowing to AI usage, you might just turn them on and let them “do their thing.” Many people may give their AIs initial instructions for their culture-building: “Take your inspiration from 1960s hippies,” for example, or “try some Victorian poetry.” But most of the work will be done by the AIs themselves. These productions might quickly become far more numerous than human-directed ones.

With a lot of slack, expect more movies and video, which consume a lot of computational energy. With less slack, text and poetry will be relatively cheaper and thus more plentiful.

In other words: In the not-too-distant future, what kind of culture the world produces could depend on the price of electricity.

It remains to be seen how much humans will be interested. Perhaps some AI productions will fascinate us, but most are likely to bore us, just as few people sit around listening to whale songs. But even if the AI culture skeptics are largely correct, the sheer volume will make an impact, especially when combined with evolutionary refinement and more human-directed efforts.

With high energy prices, AI production will more likely fit into popular culture modes, if only to pay the bills. With lower energy prices, there will be more room for the avant-garde, for better or worse. Perhaps we would learn a lot more about the possibilities for 12-tone rows in music.

A weirder scenario is that AIs bid for the cultural products of humans, perhaps paying with crypto. But will they be able to tolerate our incessant noodling and narcissism? There might even be a columnist or two who makes a living writing for AIs, if only to give them a better idea of what we humans are thinking.

The possibilities are limitless, and we are just beginning to wrap our minds around them. The truth is, we are on the verge of one of the most significant cultural revolutions the world has ever seen.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

Not everything is political, of course, but everything has a politics, including the professions. Knowing which kinds of partisans tend to dominate which sectors can help you manage expectations not only as you go about your own life, but also as you try to understand trends in the broader economy.

Evidence from campaign contributions, for example, indicates that some professions are more right- or left-leaning than others. And more recent research shows that partisanship matters for inventors too, first in the choice to become one and then about what to make.

The data show that oil workers and petroleum engineers are more likely to give to Republican candidates, while professional environmentalists, librarians and bartenders are more likely to support Democrats. Given disputes over climate change, the breakdown in the fossil-fuel sector may be obvious — but what explains the Republican lean of truck drivers, farmers and urologists, or the Democratic lean of pediatricians and bartenders?

Causality undoubtedly runs both ways. If you are a bartender, you might be younger and rank somewhat higher in the personality trait of openness. Those traits are correlated with support for Democrats. So it’s not necessarily the case that working as a bartender causes you to evolve into a Democrat, or that Democratic loyalties per se push you into bartending jobs.

In other cases, the profession itself may influence political leanings. Many small-businesspeople are sensitive about the taxes they pay, since often they do not have the cash flow or profit margins of larger corporations. So business owners and insurance agents lean more Republican, and some of that relationship may be causal. Academics lean Democratic, and some of that inclination may come from the perception that Democrats support science and the academy more. Academics also work in environments less concerned with such traditional business constraints as accountability, profit and loss.

It turns out that partisanship matters for inventors, too. A study released last month shows that the modal or typical inventor in 2020 was Republican, accounting for 37% of the database of more than 250,000 U.S. inventors, with Democrats making up 34% and independents 30%. In part, this may stem from the desire of many inventors to become small-business owners.

And yet inventors have become more Democratic and less Republican since 2019, perhaps because educational polarization means that more educated people are trending in the Democratic direction. Furthermore, those shifts are strongest in Democratic-leaning states such as Washington.

The partisan views of inventors are also correlated with what they invent. Republicans are more likely to develop innovations for guns (the patent category is called “blasting weapons”), while Democrats are more likely to get new patents related to climate change. These kinds of partisan effects are much stronger when the relevant work is done in teams, which is becoming more important. So invention may well become more partisan.

How should partisans view all this research? Well, conservatives who worry about the liberal domination of academia can console themselves that they have one area where they still hold sway — coming up with new and patentable ideas. Some people might gladly give up a bigger presence in academia for a greater hand in invention.

At the same time, it is widely believed that patents can be a misleading measure of some kinds of innovation. Tech firms may well take out patents, but their actual competitive advantage comes from network effects, talent, the ability to maintain and revise their software, and other factors.

Employees of major tech firms tend to be left-leaning and Democratic, as might be expected. It could be that Democrats are leading newer, more innovative fields, and leaving the older, more patent-heavy ones to Republicans. If that’s the case, then the Democratic ideological ascendancy is stronger than it looks.

But there is another way to look at it. In the economy of the future, would you rather be developing the next generation of guns, or of artificial intelligence? I know which field I would prefer. Perhaps we should ask the AIs.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

It’s not just Canada — Ireland, New Zealand and the U.K. are seeing historically high levels of immigration as well. How long will citizens of these countries continue to accept this trend? Who exactly benefits, and how? Why hasn’t the backlash been stronger?

After all, immigrants do not bring an immediate economic boom. When New Zealand closed its borders during COVID, for example, output did not fall, and the post-pandemic resumption of immigration did not cause a noticeable boost. In the U.K., meanwhile, economic stagnation has accompanied a wave of immigration. Whatever the benefits of the migrant arrivals may be, they lie in the more distant future, which does not help its political popularity now.

And yet, for all the cultural and economic adjustments immigration may require, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, for many countries, high rates of immigration are simply flat-out necessary.

In Canada, for instance, the current fertility rate is about 1.33 children per woman, the lowest on record, and it probably would have been lower yet without recent immigrant arrivals. Canada’s geography also argues for more immigration. It is likely to have much more usable territory, due to global warming, so a much larger population is feasible. If Canada wants to maintain a reasonable balance of power with the U.S., and have the resources to develop and protect its Arctic and Arctic-adjacent areas, it needs a commensurately large population and economy.

In general, Canada — like Ireland, where the fertility rate is about 1.77, higher than in Canada but still below replacement — faces a choice: Either take in migrants or depopulate. Perhaps one reason voters are tolerating such high migration rates is an intuitive fear of living in an empty, stagnant country. Voters tend to want their country to be able to project influence and defend its interests.

Economic debates about immigration typically focus on the wage effects on domestic workers, and there the impact of immigration is often neutral or marginal. But the more important effects of immigration may be more impressionistic: how it affects people’s views of their own country and what it’s like to live there, as well as its global reputation.

In this sense, Canada is ahead of much of the rest of the world in seeing the importance of these factors and turning it into actionable policy. It is willing to give up some of its present cultural identity to achieve a brighter cultural and political future.

This trade-off is much better than it looks at first. For one thing, birth rates for native-born citizens may fall further than they have already. If a country wants to preserve its national culture, it may be better off allowing more migration now, when there is still a critical mass of native-born citizens to ease assimilation.

To put the point more generally: Whatever costs there might be to immigration, successful nations will have to deal with them sooner or later. And the sooner they do, the better off they will be. The choice is not so much between more immigration and less immigration, but rather a lot of immigration now or a lot later.

One of the most common criticisms of immigrants is that they push up real estate prices. Yet there is a home-grown explanation: Stringent regulations on building make it difficult for the supply of housing to respond when demand increases.

My argument is not that there aren’t short-run transition costs to high levels of immigration — especially in housing, where Canada is seeing some now. In the long term, however, more immigration is better for a country than less. To me, the question is not so much why Canada and similar countries are allowing so much immigration. It is how long voters in these countries will allow this experiment to continue.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

And yet none of this has happened. Both inflation and unemployment are headed in the right direction, and most economists expect the U.S. to avoid a recession in 2024. Economists have yet to figure out why things went so well, but it is already clear that a reckoning is due.

As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said recently: “So many economists were saying there’s no way for inflation to get back to normal without it entailing a period of high unemployment, [or] a recession. And a year ago, I think many economists were saying a recession was inevitable. I’ve never felt there was a solid intellectual basis for making such a prediction.”

Economist Christina Romer (often with co-authors) has provided some of the most persuasive evidence that negative monetary policy shocks induce recessions in output and employment. Her work has been especially influential — worthy of a Nobel Prize, in my opinion — because it does not rely on a complicated mathematical model of the economy, and it had been accepted on a bipartisan basis. Paul Krugman has been predicting for most of this year that the recent disinflation would not cause a recession, and he deserves credit for getting this right. Yet he is less keen to tell us that for many years he trumpeted the predictive virtues of old-style Keynesian macroeconomics, using models that predict disinflation will lead to a loss in output and employment.

Krugman has lately further explained his position — complete with unironic headline — suggesting that the untangling of broken supply chains had helped lower the rate of inflation. That point, too, is correct. He didn’t mention that there also has been a massive negative shock to aggregate demand: High rates of M2 growth became slightly negative rates of M2 growth. Fiscal policy peaked and then retreated. The Fed raised interest rates from near-zero levels to the range of 5%, and fairly rapidly. It also sent every possible signal that it was going to be tight with monetary conditions.

And yet a recession did not come.

There is a reason that so many economists had been predicting a recession — and it is not because they are out of touch, or repeating talking points from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. They predicted a recession because that is what experts such as Yellen, Krugman, Romer and many others had been teaching for decades. I do not myself presume to have any immunity from the general confusion here, as all along I thought there was a reasonable chance of a recession.

The solution here is not to sweep past doctrine under the rug; it’s to be more forthright. Macroeconomists very often don’t know what is going on, and that holds true for all the different styles and flavors of macro.

The one theory that might at least partly explain recent events — that of a credible disinflation based on rational expectations — had fallen out of favor with economists, most of all the Keynesians. This approach still is receiving very little credit, even though it has the Nobel prizes of Robert E. Lucas and Thomas Sargent to support it.

Most of all, it’s important to acknowledge how politicized macroeconomics has become. There are a bunch of economists going around right now saying they were right about how the U.S. would avoid a recession this year. A deeper look, however, reveals a much longer and less favorable story.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

PEPFAR is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush in 2003. Overseen by the State Department, the program provides treatment for HIV-AIDS and derivative maladies (such as tuberculosis) through training, medical infrastructure, support for orphans and vulnerable children, and, most important, antiretroviral drugs.

By some estimates, the program has saved 25 million lives over the last two decades, spending about $90 billion for treatments that many Africans otherwise could not have afforded or gotten access to. Not only has PEPFAR saved African lives (in a very cost-effective way, I might add), it’s also improved the quality of life for many Africans and helped the economies of many African nations. The burnishing of America’s reputation is a bonus.

So why is PEPFAR, which typically has had bipartisan support, in danger? Some Republicans say that parts of the program encourage abortion, while some Democrats are worried about reinserting some anti-abortion provisions in PEPFAR that date from the presidency of Donald Trump. (The abortion fears of the Republicans are not supported by the evidence. Note also that PEPFAR does provide some instruction in abstinence.)

As my former Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith has argued, U.S. state capacity has actually had some triumphs recently. PEPFAR is one. Operation Warp Speed, which produced COVID vaccines with astonishing speed, is another. America has not lost its ability to pull off big projects.

What does it mean that two of the most successful policies of the last 20 years have originated with Republican administrations? Or that two of the people most associated with these initiatives — Condoleezza Rice (PEPFAR) and Jared Kushner (OWS) — have never received proper recognition for their efforts?

At the same time, the Republican Party has been responsible for besmirching the reputations of both PEPFAR and OWS. Suspicion of globalization, foreign aid and foreigners themselves has been on the rise, making it difficult to talk about the achievements of these programs. The conservative Heritage Foundation, rather than take credit for Republican achievements, published a study last spring attacking PEPFAR. Anti-vaccine sentiment in the Republican Party is now so strong that many of its candidates view support of OWS as a political liability.

One result of this dysfunction is that the U.S. cannot properly discuss or address the trade-offs involved with globalization, which has become a dirty word. No doubt globalization has had its failures in recent times, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. But globalization has also had major successes, and both PEPFAR and OWS show that the US can create programs that not only help Americans but also bring huge benefits for the entire world. What we need is a true cost-benefit analysis of globalization, yet we seem unable even to have a rational debate about it.

A final lesson from PEPFAR: Foreign aid, as a government program, may be underrated. Many foreign-aid investments have proved ineffective, and some have cemented corruption in the receiving countries. But the biggest successes are significant, and perhaps foreign aid is improving in quality because the receiving countries are now better able to put it to good use. It may be that critics of foreign aid were correct a decade and a half ago, but are less so today.

As for PEPFAR, I expect the program will continue in some form or another, albeit with some reputational damage. I do not expect much serious reckoning with the deeper lessons of its success. They are too uncomfortable. So PEPFAR is likely to remain relatively unknown, and underappreciated, for at least five more years. Perhaps the silver lining is that being out of the limelight sometimes allows a program to flourish.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the Marginal Revolution blog.

In all, the proceedings restored my faith in one of my favorite maxims: Sincerity is the most underrated motive in politics. The hearings themselves send the signal that it is OK to talk and even speculate about this topic — and may even help us get closer to the truth.

That is not to say that I believed everything I heard. I do not think that the U.S. government has the remains of alien spacecraft, for example, including some alien bodies, as claimed by retired Air Force Major David Grusch. But the rest of the evidence was presented in a suitably serious and persuasive manner. It is clear, at least to me, that there is no conspiracy, and the U.S. government is itself puzzled by the data about unidentified anomalous phenomena.

The most notable claim from the hearings, including from former F-18 Navy pilot Ryan Graves, is that there have been repeated sightings of highly unusual craft over eight years or more — confirmed by a mix of consistent radar, infrared and eyewitness data. These craft, some of which take the shape of a sphere encompassing a cube, can both hover and move very fast without any visible signs of propulsion.

Of course, there will always be people who lie, suffer from delusions or are otherwise unreliable. But none of these claims is news to those of us who have been following the UAP debate, and it is striking that none of the elected officials in the room challenged the Graves claims. (There was, in contrast, pushback against Grusch’s claims.)

Members of Congress, to the extent they desire, have independent access to military and intelligence sources. They also have political ambitions, if only to be reelected. So the mere fact of their participation in these hearings shows that UFOs/UAPs are now being taken seriously as an issue.

The Pentagon issued a statement claiming it holds no alien bodies, but it did nothing to contradict the statements of Graves (or others with similar claims, outside the hearings). More broadly, there have been no signs of anyone with eyewitness experience asserting that Graves and the other pilots are unreliable.

As is so often the case, the most notable events are those that did not happen. The most serious claims from the hearings survived unscathed: those about inexplicable phenomena and possible national-security threats, not the hypotheses about alien craft or visits.

The U.S. military is a huge bureaucracy that is programmed to respond to potential national-security threats. If so many insiders believe that the U.S. does not control its own airspace, and in the proximity of its own military equipment, that is a crisis of sorts, even if those insiders are misunderstanding the data.

If you listen to the beginning of the hearings, you will hear a good articulation of the position that possible national-security and aviation-safety threats cannot go forever uninvestigated. It is striking how often the discussion turned to national security.

Every now and then, it’s appropriate to take the government literally.

I suspect that, from here on out, this topic will become more popular — and somewhat less respectable. A few years ago, UAPs were an issue on which a few people “in the know” could speculate, secure in the knowledge they weren’t going to receive much publicity or pushback. As the chatter increases, the issue will become more prominent, but at the same time a lot of smart observers will dismiss the whole thing because they heard that someone testified before Congress about seeing dead aliens.

I am well aware that many people may conclude that some U.S. officials, or some parts of the U.S. government, have gone absolutely crazy. But even under that dismissive interpretation, it is likely that there will be further surprises.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution.

I am reluctant to hand out advice, if only because a) I don’t even know these people, and b) a proper answer is usually context-specific. Nonetheless, I think there are two pieces of advice that are appropriate for almost everybody, in response to almost any question. Here they are. Maybe I should just send all future requests for advice a link to this column.

The first piece of advice stems from what has been dubbed in Silicon Valley “the small group theory.” It goes like this: When working on any kind of problem, task or question, embed yourself in a small group of peers with broadly similar concerns.

The group will give you ideas, feedback and help keep you focused on the issue at hand. The personalities and framings of the other group members will make the issue seem more vivid. Membership in the informal small group may also make you more willing to help its other members, which in turn may boost your morale and performance. After all, there are few problems you are better off facing alone.

The small group can be as formal or informal as you like: friends hanging out after high school, an official support network that meets regularly (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous), a team in the workplace, or artists sharing a studio. No, you shouldn’t ally yourself with a group of bank robbers, but still this is almost always good advice.

If you are wondering what “small group theory” is, I would define it roughly as follows: Important achievements stem from people working together in small groups, typically of their immediate peers. The hypothesis holds for ancient Greek philosophy, the Florentine Renaissance, German mathematics, Silicon Valley and the Beatles, among many other success stories, both large and small.

The small group theory may sound trivial, but in job and fellowship interviews I often ask people which small groups they work in, and what their role is in those groups. Many people are flummoxed by the question, and it appears they haven’t thought about the issue much as they should.

The second near-universal piece of advice is this: Get mentors.

A mentor is someone who knows significantly more about an area than you do, with greater real-world experience to boot, and who channels that knowledge into a leadership role.

Mentorship can be general or specialized. I have had classical-music mentors, art-market mentors, country-specific mentors when I lived in Germany and New Zealand, foreign-language mentors, chess mentors, economics mentors, philosophy mentors, writing mentors and friendly mentors to help with the basic emotional issues of life. I’ve tried to find mentors for just about everything. Sometimes the relationship lasts only a week or a month, other times for years.

Aside from providing teaching and advice, the mentor, like the small group, helps make an issue or idea more vivid: A living, breathing exemplar of success stands before you. The mentor makes a discipline feel more real and the prospect of success more realistic.

As a corollary, in addition to trying to find mentors, you should be willing to become a mentor yourself. Even if you do not have advanced understanding in some particular area, almost certainly there is someone who knows less than you do and who could use assistance. Being a mentor also helps you understand how to learn and appreciate your own mentors.

A mentor doesn’t have to be older than you, and in fact some of your mentors probably should be younger, especially since technologies are starting to change more rapidly. If you are 50 years old, the idea of an 18-year-old crypto mentor isn’t crazy. If the metaverse turns into a reality, don’t look to the graybeards for tutelage.

The relative dearth of male-to-female mentorships is one of the major factors holding women back from greater career success. This form of implicit but not necessarily intentional discrimination deserves wider discussion.

So there you have it: small groups and mentors. And if you don’t agree, well … I know a small group for advice-giving that might like a word with you.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.”

At the most basic level, intertemporal substitution means shifting an action or event to a more appropriate or advantageous time. A classic example from economics is that people will shop more when there are sales.

Now consider a more complex pandemic example. Before the vaccines came along, it made great sense to enforce masking norms. If infections could be shifted into the future, an eventually vaccinated citizenry would be much better protected.

There is a less obvious corollary: Those same mask norms make less sense when large numbers of people are vaccinated. Masking still will push infections further into the future, but if the vaccines become marginally less effective over time, as some data suggest, people may be slightly worse off later on (they’ll also be a bit older). The upshot is that the case for masking is less strong, even if you still think it is a good idea overall.

Still, many people prefer to abide by fixed rules and principles. Once they learn them and lecture others about them, they are unlikely to change their minds. “Masking is good!” is a simple precept. “Exactly how good masking is depends on how much safer the near future will be!” is not. Yet the latter statement is how the economist is trained to think.

Another approach is to keep masking for a very long time — until there are much better treatments once again, the virus has evolved to become less dangerous, or some other set of safety-improving changes has set in. But what if there is no proverbial cavalry coming over the hill? People will instead need to institute and adapt to whatever long-term living conditions they prefer, along with the concomitant risks. Denmark, one of the better governed and better-vaccinated nations during the pandemic, has decided exactly that and has announced a return to normalcy.

According to intertemporal substitution, lockdowns make the most sense right before major safety improvements, such as vaccines or extra hospital capacity. In practice, however, that is precisely when an impatient citizenry might demand an end to them.

Intertemporal substitution also helps explain why some people were relatively happy during the pandemic and others weren’t. If you didn’t go to the theater for two years, are you willing or able to go twice as much for two years? If you do not have that kind of flexibility, you probably suffered more than average.

Citizens take intertemporal substitution into account more than public health authorities like to admit. Say it has been a few weeks since your third dose (which hasn’t diminished in potency yet), and you feel relatively protected against the delta variant. But you worry that more dangerous variants are coming next year. You might go out and take some “disproportionate” risks. For you, it’s probably not going to be much safer anytime soon, and you don’t wish to spend the rest of your life in a closet. Behavior that might appear foolhardy isn’t, necessarily.

This way of thinking goes against the approach of public health authorities, who tend to emphasize clear-cut restrictions for broad classes of people (fully vaccinated, not vaccinated, immunocompromised, etc.). But the reality is that people will take their pleasures when they can, especially if they expect the risk of those pleasures to be rising.

Some of the consequences of intertemporal substitution are a bit ghastly, and you won’t find many people willing to even talk about them.

For example: Say you are immunocompromised, and you either can’t or won’t get vaccinated. You might be justly mad about all the unvaccinated knuckleheads running around, getting COVID, and possibly infecting you. At the same time, you wish to minimize your required degree of intertemporal substitution.

So if you are (perhaps correctly) afraid to go out very much, you are better off if those same knuckleheads acquire natural immunity more quickly. Yes, it would be better if they got vaccinated. But barring that, a quick pandemic may be easier for you to manage than a long, drawn-out pandemic, which would require heroic amounts of intertemporal substitution.

Speaking of which: As I write this I am in Northern Ireland, and it is early in the morning, when the shops and museums are closed. Did I mention it is raining?

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.”

It is easy enough to find anecdotal evidence in support of it. Numerous foundations that arose from the fortunes of right-leaning founders, such as Pew or Ford or Hewlett, have morphed into left-wing institutions. I can’t think of a major foundation that came from a left-wing founder and then moved to the right. In the broader sweep of American history, universities have not been explicitly left-wing — but they are today.

And the law is not necessarily confined to nonprofit institutions, which are vulnerable to capture by left-leaning educated elites. This doesn’t explain the advent of “Woke Capital” — corporations pushing for explicitly Democratic or left-leaning policies, such as voting reform in Georgia. America’s professional sports leagues have to varying degrees endorsed conceptions of racial politics closer to that of the Democratic Party.

Therein lies a clue as to the nature of the ideological shift. Those same sports leagues are not in every way woke. Football, for instance, remains a violent sport, imposing injuries on many relatively disadvantaged young men, while the NBA allows itself to be bullied by China on issues of human rights.

One possibility is that institutions respond to whichever groups make the biggest stink about a given issue. On many political issues, the left cares more than the right, and so those left-wing preferences end up imprinted not only on public opinion-sensitive nonprofits but also on profit-maximizing corporations. Yet when it comes to statements about Hong Kong, China cares a great deal and most Americans do not, and so the NBA responds to that pressure.

Additional forces strengthen Conquest’s Second Law. Educational polarization increasingly characterizes U.S. politics, with more educated Americans more likely to vote Democratic. Those same Americans are also likely to run nonprofits or major corporations, which would partially explain the ideological migration of those institutions.

There are, of course, numerous U.S. institutions that have maintained or even extended a largely right-wing slant, including many police forces, significant parts of the military, and many Protestant Evangelical churches. Those institutions tend to have lower educational requirements, and so they are not always so influential in the media, compared to many left-wing institutions.

Furthermore, the military and police are supposed to keep out of politics, and so their slant to the right is less noticeable, although no less real. The left is simply more prominent in mass media, so Conquest’s Second Law appears to be truer than it really is. (Note that by definition the law excludes explicitly right-wing media.)

Left-wing views, at least on some issues, might have more of a “least common denominator” element than do many right-wing views. On average, the intellectual right is more likely to insist on biological differences between men and women, whereas the intellectual left is more likely to insist on equality of capabilities. No matter your view, the left approach is easier to incorporate into mission statements, company slogans, and corporate human-resource policies. Egalitarian slogans require less explanation, are less likely to get an institution into trouble with the law, and are more compatible with a desire to attract a broad range of workers and customers.

So as nonprofit institutions have become larger and big business has risen in relative importance, those trends also will instantiate Conquest’s Law. As large organizations adopt a more egalitarian tone in their rhetoric, explicit right-wing views will tend to become less prominent in those organizations.

The common thread to these explanations is that left-wing views find it easier to win in spheres of reporting, talk and rhetoric — and that those tendencies strengthen over time.

It follows that, if Conquest’s Second Law is true, societies are more right-wing than they appear. Furthermore, it is the intelligentsia itself that is most likely to deluded about this, living as it does in the world of statements and proclamations. It is destined to be repeatedly surprised at how “barbarian” American society is.

There is also a significant strand of right-wing thought, most notably in opposition to Marxism, that stresses the immutable realities of human nature, and that people change only so much in response to their environments. So all that left-wing talk doesn’t have to result in an entirely left-wing society.

Conservatives thus should be able to take some comfort in Conquest’s Second Law. They may find the discourse suffocating at times. But there is more to life than just talk — and that, for liberals as well as conservatives, should be counted as one of life’s saving graces.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.”

I have observed a growing divergence of perceptions for what is essentially a mundane scientific and medical device. As I resume my in-person social life, I have been struck by how often the question arises: “So which vaccine did you get?”

My survey of the cultural vaccine landscape in the U.S. includes the four major vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Pfizer, distributed by one of the largest U.S. pharmaceutical firms, is the establishment vaccine. Since it initially had a significant “cold chain” requirement, it was given out at established institutions such as big hospitals and public-health centers with large freezers. It is plentiful, highly effective and largely uncontroversial.

Moderna — the very name suggests something new — is the intellectual vaccine. The company had no product or major revenue source until the vaccine itself, so it is harder to link Moderna to “Big Pharma,” which gives it a kind of anti-establishment vibe. Note also that the last three letters of Moderna are “rna,” referring to the mRNA technology that makes the vaccine work. It is the vaccine for people in the know.

Moderna was also, for a while anyway, the American vaccine. It was available primarily in the U.S. at a time when Pfizer was being handed out liberally in the U.K. and Israel. As a recipient of two Moderna doses myself, I feel just a wee bit special for this reason. You had to be an American to get my vaccine. Yes, the European Union had also approved it, but it failed to procure it in a timely manner. So the availability of Moderna reflects the greater wealth and efficiency of the U.S.

Then there are the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

AstraZeneca, for better or worse — mostly worse — has become the forbidden vaccine, or at least the exotic vaccine. It has not received an emergency-use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and maybe never will, in part because it has been associated with some incidents of blood clotting in women. Yet for most people it is entirely safe and effective.

If you got it, you can claim to be daring and cosmopolitan, since you were and maybe still are living abroad. Just as a character in a Henry James novel might have superior knowledge of Venice, you know things about the world that most Americans don’t.

That leaves Johnson & Johnson, whose place in the cultural vaccine landscape is shifting. At first, getting the J&J shot showed you were serious but also nonchalant about the pandemic: One and done. It was something you could do on your lunch hour, a bit like running to the CVS to buy extra shampoo. Getting the J&J vaccine was just taking care of business.

The brand itself — best known for baby powder — suggests something normal, not panicky. Eventually, J&J became a socially responsible version of a subtle form of COVID denialism. You weren’t making a big deal of things, but at the same time you were ensuring you were not endangering your loved ones.

All that changed last week, when the FDA recommended that the use of the J&J vaccine be suspended following the development of blood clots in a few (very few) recipients. Its reputation probably will never recover, even if use is resumed soon, as currently seems likely.

So J&J may evolve into the outlaw vaccine: Not outright prohibited in the U.S., like the AstraZeneca, but like that vaccine associated with toughness and daring. Maybe, if more men and fewer women take it, it will become the manly vaccine.

Of course, Americans don’t always have much choice about which vaccine they get, unless they are willing to wait or engage in costly travel, so it’s not as if everyone can decide which team they want to join. Even more fundamentally, it is not clear that these distinctions do us any good.

The more culturally complicated the vaccine decision, the easier it will be to find reasons not to get a vaccine. As it currently stands, more than 40% of Republicans say they do not wish to be vaccinated, and Black Americans are hesitant as well. To the extent vaccines turn into markers for a cultural club, vaccine hesitancy may persist.

It might be better, all things considered, if vaccines were viewed more like paper clips — that is, a useful and even necessary product entirely shorn of cultural significance. Few people refuse to deploy paper clips in order to “own the libs” or because they do not trust the establishment. They are just a way to hold two pieces of paper together.

To be clear, the primary blame here lies with those who hesitate to get vaccinated. But behind big mistakes are many small ones — and we vaccinated Americans, with our all-too-human tendency to create hierarchies for everything, are surely contributing to the mess.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.”