Editor's Note

JG, our once-reliable correspondent from Passadumkeag, Maine (pop. 356), reports she is moving to Greenland. “My friends warned me that the winters are even colder than in my hometown,” she writes. “But, as I understand it, that problem is solving itself.”

Well, good luck, JG; do drop us a note from Qaanaaq (pop. 598). Meanwhile, warm your mind, if not your body, with this dazzling issue of the Review.

Brad DeLong, an economist at UC Berkeley, winnows the wheat from the chaff in his contemplation of artificial intelligence. “Make no mistake,” he writes. “AI technology is the Next Big Thing, likely to disrupt business (and society) in ways predictable and not. It is also, on balance almost surely a Good Thing, offering the prospect of rapid productivity change and a path toward dramatic improvements in services ranging from medicine to education. But the journey from here to there will be littered with roadkill.”

Talk about contrasts. Where DeLong is cautiously optimistic about AI, futurist Ray Kurzweil is counting the days until we reach nirvana. In his review of Kurzweil’s latest hosanna, Edward Tenner at the Smithsonian Institution argues that Kurzweil’s “most valuable contribution may be as a counterweight to the gloomy studies of contemporary culture and politics in an era of anti-rational populism. Indeed, Kurzweil’s near certainty that technology is poised to save us from ourselves may be the brightest light in a dreary firmament.”

Three powerhouse economists at Brookings, Wendy Edelberg, Benjamin Harris and Louise Sheiner, game out the likely consequences of U.S. budget deficits extending beyond the horizon. “While the debt will surely exact a cost on future generations,” they write, “these costs will likely not be of crisis proportions. That’s not to say a fiscal crisis isn’t possible. But any such crisis would likely follow from political missteps. Unfortunately, such political missteps seem more likely today than in the past.”

Bill Gale, Oliver Hall and John Sabelhaus of Brookings (this does seem to be the Brooking issue of the Review) do the math on the vast transfer of wealth in America as the baby boomers age out. “The coming decades present both a challenge and an opportunity,” they write. “Without reform, we risk seeing the largest untaxed transfer of wealth in American history, exacerbating existing economic inequalities and stifling economic mobility. Thoughtful reform of the tax system could help address fiscal needs even as it promoted greater economic mobility, efficiency and opportunity.”

Andy Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College, wonders whether Los Angeles can again beat the curse that has left Olympic venues from Montreal to Athens to Tokyo in financial ruin. Zimbalist is cautiously optimistic. “It’s not quite time for chicken-counting, though,” he acknowledges. “Casey Wasserman, the experienced sports executive who chairs LA28, has likened the complexity of hosting the Olympics to hosting seven Super Bowl games a day for 17 consecutive days.”

Lawson Mansell at the Niskanen Center offers an analysis of what might be called supply- side health care policy. “In the past half century, politicians have responded to popular discontent with health care by expanding access without coming to terms with constraints on efficiency,” he writes. “The good news is that strengthening the supply side could transform health care by introducing more provider competition and giving patients more affordable options. The bad news is that failure to redirect our efforts toward supply-side reform will mean ever-greater pressure from demand that will raise prices and invite the sorts of distortions that are inevitable in rationing services.”

Aravind Boddupalli of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center writes about an irritation for the middle class that has become a scourge on the poor. Fines and fees increasingly used by local government to fill budget holes amount to “scattershot punishments whose impact spreads well beyond the responsible individuals,” he explains. “Gilding this poisonous lily, research suggests that fines and fees can even induce offenses instead of deterring them.”

I couldn’t decide on what book to excerpt in this issue. So I picked two: Diane Coyle’s The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters and John Kay’s The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong. They write on very different topics. What all of them share is a lucidity rare in really, really accomplished economists.

Happy perusing. — Peter Passell