There has never been a time when more people had an “excuse” for being rude at an airport.

During the recent TSA government shutdown, some airports, including Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, experienced screening lines that on some days reached more than six hours.

During the showdown, my wife and I flew home through Atlanta. Thanks to a real-time Reddit thread, we found the fastest line and didn’t encounter anything close to a six-hour wait.

While no one was happy, travelers accepted their plight stoically and civilly.

Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport in the world, handling close to 300,000 passengers daily. A miraculous mixture of cooperation and specialization makes that possible. Most of the over 2,000 arrivals and departures are on time. A wide variety of food choices are available while you wait, and the purposeful faces of humanity hustle past each other, with no one being jostled.

Civility was the order of the day. Despite the hardships at the airport, only occasional miscreants tried to cut in line. Few acted like entitled boors.

F.A. Hayek explained how a healthy society functions when individuals submit to the “discipline of abstract rules.” These rules, which we may not even be able to articulate, create an environment where people can form expectations and cooperate with others.

Even when meeting strangers, we rely on shared abstract rules. Hayek explored how, when traveling to another part of our own country, “Though we have never before seen the people… their modes of conduct and their moral and aesthetic values will be familiar to us.”

Civility is a pillar of freedom. Hayek warned, “Coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and tradition have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.”

In totalitarian societies, order is accepted as the product of a “deliberate arrangement” and, in Hayek’s words, “must rest on a relation of command and obedience.”

In a tribal society, norms of honesty and human regard don’t apply to those outside the tribe. Without coercion, people would not remain civil for long while standing in line with strangers for six hours at an airport.

As political tribalism grows, norms of mutual regard that make shared life possible shrink. Seeing others as objects that serve our ends overtakes the mindset of seeing people as real as we are.

What will happen in America as us-versus-them tribalism grows? One poll showed that 80 percent of college students would not room with someone who voted differently from them. 

A crisis of civility is also a crisis of freedom. Is a crisis of civility coming our way? 

What Adam Smith Understood

Adam Smith opened The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a challenge to beliefs some hold about human nature. However selfish we suppose people to be, he wrote, there are “some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Activating empathy requires a disciplined willingness to see the world from somewhere other than the center of our own concerns.

Smith’s mechanism for this was the “impartial spectator” — that internalized judge we can learn to consult, who evaluates our conduct not from the vantage of our own interests but from the position of a disinterested observer. “We can never survey our own sentiments and motives,” Smith explained. He continued, “We can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.”

To maintain freedom, the inner work of civility is required.

Smith understood what was at stake if we failed to do this work. “Society,” he noted, “cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another.”

Justice [not injuring others], he argued, is “the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice.” Remove it, and “the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms.” But justice does not generate itself. It depends on habits of mutual regard, whose automatic responses toward strangers carry at least the minimum of respect that social life requires.

Civilization progresses or regresses, Smith believed, depending on our adherence to those habits and our willingness to tame what he called “the great division of our affections” — the selfish side that, left unchecked, will always treat other people as props in one’s own story of me.

At the airport, the number of people thinking, “Don’t you know how important I am?” is still largely limited to members of Congress.

Civility Is Not Politeness

Most of us use “manners” and “civility” as though they mean the same thing. Alexandra Hudson wants us to understand what that confusion is costing us.

In The Soul of Civility, Hudson draws a clear line between the two. 

Civility is something deeper than manners. Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Buber, Hudson sees it as a disposition to see other human beings inherently worthy of respect. Manners, she writes, are “the form, the technique, of an act, but civility is more.” Without the inner disposition, politeness is a performance. With it, even blunt speech and action can remain genuinely civil. 

A poll shows that 80 percent of college students self-censor out of fear of offending. Freedom is not maintained by people fitting in.

Civility—not agreement—is what we owe one another as participants in a shared society. With civility, we recognize that the person across from us — in the TSA line, in the comment section, in the meeting room — is a genuine human being and not an obstacle, irrelevant, or merely a means to our end.

When we fail to make that recognition habitual, we reveal what Adam Smith understood: Social fabric is far more fragile than we imagine and would tear without our everyday moral exertions.

Hudson puts it plainly. Civility “promotes social and political freedom by empowering us to keep the expressions of our baser, self-interested instincts in check instead of relying on external forces, such as government mandates, to do so.”

Habits of self-governance are demonstrated by the small daily acts of deference, patience, and mutual recognition. Authoritarianism and totalitarianism arise when self-governance weakens and is replaced by compliance.

With precision, Hudson identifies the root of the problem: The “outsized self-love of human beings continues to be the preeminent threat to social concord today.” The antidote to that self-love is not a regulation. It is civility “tempering our self-love out of respect for others, but also so that our social natures can flourish.”

We can stand in a TSA line, seething at the traveler in front of us who is struggling to find their boarding pass. Yet, despite an external polite performance, our every sigh makes it obvious that we regard this fellow traveler as an obstacle.

The alternative is to recognize that he is probably as stressed as we are and as likely to see everyone else as the problem. We can, in Smith’s language, view the scene from a distance. From that distance, our irritation becomes harder to justify, and the humanity of the fellow traveler harder to ignore.

It is in those smallest of daily encounters that civility is strengthened, and freedom is renewed.

Inflation surged in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.9 percent last month — triple February’s 0.3 percent pace and the largest monthly increase since early in the pandemic. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation jumped to 3.3 percent from 2.4 percent, reversing months of steady disinflation in a single report.

But strip out food and energy, and the picture looks entirely different. Core inflation rose just 0.2 percent in March, unchanged from February. Year-over-year, it edged up only slightly to 2.6 percent. In other words, the broad price pressures that keep Fed officials up at night barely moved.

The culprit is no mystery: energy. The energy index surged 10.9 percent in March — the largest monthly increase since September 2005 — and gasoline prices jumped 21.2 percent, a record monthly increase, as the conflict with Iran and the disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices sharply higher. Shelter, which accounts for about a third of the index, rose a modest 0.3 percent. Food prices were flat, with a small decline in groceries offset by a small increase in restaurant prices.

Within core categories, the gains were concentrated in a handful of volatile items: airline fares jumped 2.7 percent, apparel rose 1.0 percent, and transportation services increased 0.6 percent. Working in the other direction, medical care fell 0.2 percent after a 0.5 percent increase in February, personal care declined 0.5 percent, and used cars and trucks dropped 0.4 percent for the second straight month. On balance, the decliners roughly offset the gainers, which is why core inflation held steady.

The three-month trend makes the headline–core divergence even starker. Over January through March, headline CPI averaged 0.47 percent per month — equivalent to a 5.6 percent annualized rate, well above the 3.3 percent year-over-year figure. But virtually all of that acceleration comes from March’s energy spike. Core CPI over the same three months averaged just 0.23 percent per month, or about 2.8 percent annualized — barely above its 2.6 percent year-over-year pace. The underlying trend, in short, has not changed much.

Although the Federal Reserve officially targets the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI) rather than the CPI, the distinction between headline and core is especially important this month. An energy-driven price spike, however dramatic, is not the kind of broad-based inflation that would warrant a policy response. Markets seem to agree: the CME Group’s FedWatch tool now indicates that the Fed will almost certainly hold rates steady at its meeting later this month.

The latest labor market data reinforce the case for patience. March payrolls rebounded by 178,000 after February’s revised 133,000 decline, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.3 percent. But perhaps more telling is what happened to wages: year-over-year earnings growth slowed to 3.5 percent, the weakest reading since May 2021. That suggests the nominal spending pressures that drive sustained inflation are easing, even as a geopolitical shock temporarily distorts the headline numbers.

The Fed can afford to look through the March energy spike. Core inflation is well-behaved, wage growth is moderating, and the 0.9 percent headline reading is a reflection of what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz, not in the domestic economy. The real question is whether elevated energy costs linger long enough to raise inflation expectations. If they do, the calculus changes. But for now, the data suggest the Fed should hold steady.

For a nation that dominates the seas, the United States now faces a critical crossroads. Its commercial shipyards — once the envy of the world — have fallen into near collapse. 

The Trump administration’s 2026 Maritime Action Plan aims to reverse this decline with sweeping fees on foreign-built ships and subsidies to revive domestic production and rebuild the maritime industrial base.

Yet rather than confronting the structural causes of decline, Washington has turned to familiar tools: protectionism, subsidies, and penalties on foreign competition. America’s shipbuilding troubles did not begin with foreign rivals — and they will not be solved by taxing them. Without addressing the industry’s underlying weaknesses, the plan risks raising costs, distorting trade, and ultimately burdening American consumers and businesses.

The Hidden Costs of the Maritime Action Plan

At the center of the Maritime Action Plan is a sweeping fee regime targeting foreign-built ships, aimed at redirecting demand to US shipyards and countering foreign competition — particularly from China. Under this plan, cargo arriving at US ports on foreign-built vessels would be subject to fees ranging from 1 to 25 cents per kilogram. 

Though seemingly modest, these fees quickly become substantial given the scale of modern shipping. A one-cent fee would add about $375,000 to a typical 5,000-TEU containership call; at 25 cents, the cost would jump to approximately $9.4 million — costs that would severely disrupt shipping economics.

Tanker shipping would face similar pressures. An Aframax crude tanker could incur around $700,000 per port call at one cent per kilogram and up to $17.5 million at the high end. These costs would not be borne by shipowners. They would flow through charter contracts to importers and ultimately to consumers, particularly through higher fuel prices. Car carriers would face similar pass-through effects, with higher shipping costs ultimately reflected in vehicle prices.

Scaled nationwide, the impact becomes substantial. The fees could add roughly $2.1 billion annually to containerized imports at the low end and more than $52 billion at the high end — effectively a tax on global trade that raises landed costs across the economy. Because the charges are weight-based, they ignore value and strategic importance, creating uneven effects across industries. Ultimately, the costs would be passed on to consumers, without addressing the underlying causes of America’s maritime decline.

The deeper problem is that global shipping is deeply interconnected. China, for instance, now sits at the center of the industry. Its shipyards produce more than half of the world’s ships, account for more than 70 percent of new container orders, and make up nearly 30 percent of the active fleet. Major global carriers — responsible for over 80 percent of US imports — also rely heavily on Chinese-built vessels. The policy would therefore disrupt not just foreign competitors, but the backbone of US trade itself.

The damage wouldn’t stop at rising prices, either. Major shipping lines have already warned that widespread port penalties could lead them to reduce stops at smaller American ports, focusing service on larger gateways or rerouting cargo through Canada and Mexico before it reaches the US by rail or truck. The main targets would be small and mid-sized port communities, dockworkers, truckers, and warehouse workers — the very groups these policies aim to protect.

Why a US Shipbuilding Comeback Won’t Happen

The Maritime Action Plan also seeks to increase the share of international trade carried on US-built, US-flagged, and US-crewed vessels — effectively extending Jones Act logic to global trade. Yet this ambition collides with industrial reality. US shipyards accounted for less than 0.3 percent of global output over the past decade, falling to just 0.04 percent in 2024. Production of large cargo ships has averaged fewer than three per year, and the United States has not built an LNG tanker in more than four decades. The Government Accountability Office has described the sector as experiencing near total collapse.

The gap with international competitors is stark. A large commercial vessel built in the United States can cost up to $250 million — roughly five times a comparable foreign-built vessel. Oil tankers priced at about $47 million internationally can exceed $220 million in US yards, while operating a US-flagged ship costs more than $11 million annually, compared with roughly $2.6 million for foreign-flagged vessels. Construction timelines are equally uncompetitive: recent US-built containerships have taken up to 40 months to complete, versus less than six months in South Korea.

Scale presents another obstacle. The plan envisions about 25 ships per year over a decade. By comparison, China delivered an average of 832 commercial ships annually from 2022 to 2024, compared with 259 in Japan and 214 in South Korea. Even at full implementation, US output would remain too small to achieve economies of scale or meaningful competitiveness.

The industry’s decline is structural, not temporary — and far too deep to be reversed by mandates or subsidies alone. Labor shortages remain a central obstacle. Shipbuilding requires a stable, highly skilled workforce, yet US yards struggle to hire and retain workers. The Philadelphia shipyard — often seen as central to any revival — has reportedly faced turnover approaching 100 percent, while other yards report similar shortages. Although countries such as South Korea and Japan have relied on foreign labor to ease workforce constraints, such an approach sits uneasily with current US immigration policy.

Infrastructure poses another challenge. Much of the US shipbuilding infrastructure dates back to World War II, leaving American yards far behind global competitors in automation and productivity. High input costs — driven by steel tariffs and a weakened supplier base — further erode competitiveness. These constraints underscore a broader reality: America’s shipbuilding decline is structural, not due to foreign competition, and protectionism cannot reverse it. Reviving American shipbuilding will require confronting these realities — not repeating a century of failed protectionist policies.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell recently emphasized that the US economy remains resilient, in large part due to a labor market holding steady, despite growing uncertainty. The direct words Powell used to describe the current situation were a kind of “zero employment growth equilibrium.” There is limited hiring, yes, but also limited layoffs. When combined with persistently low jobless claims, policymakers seem to be of the opinion that conditions remain stable, even strong, in toto. On paper, we rest very near full employment. Unfortunately, this is only part of the story. Upon digging, the labor market shows signs of strain. 

Hiring has markedly slowed, and recent data and surveys point to noticeably weaker hiring conditions compared with the last decade. Some reports show outright job losses along with rising unemployment, challenging the notion of continued strength. Yet layoffs remain subdued, and even jobless claims are staying low, signaling that firms are holding onto their workers. This “low-hire, low-fire” labor market appears stable, but it lacks forward momentum. What we appear to have is an economy that is neither collapsing nor improving — drifting, not growing. 

And so we reach this strange purported equilibrium. Labor markets are not collapsing, but they are not advancing with any force, either. This stability is stagnant. Powell did add that this stagnation “does have a feel of downside risk, and it’s not kind of a really comfortable balance,” but alarm bells are not ringing in DC yet. When looking at employment data, this strange picture emerges. Here, then, we see the limits of employment data, like the concept of full employment. 

Investopedia explains full employment like this: “Full employment exists when all willing and available skilled and unskilled labor is being used.” This is not to say that the unemployment rate is truly zero percent, but it is meant as a theoretical goal. Some people will be willfully unemployed for various reasons. A laid-off mechanical engineer will take some time to look for new jobs in his field before considering other lines of work. The nurse who quits due to understaffing will not necessarily jump into the same situation at a different hospital, but might hold out for a better work environment. Excluding these individuals, the rate should reach zero percent. Often, full employment is defined as an unemployment rate sitting between four and six percent. The US unemployment rate for February was 4.4 percent, falling within the full employment range. Here we see one source of “optimism” for Washington. 

As is often the case, this indicator cannot capture the uneven, localized, and shifting nature of real work. In practice, the labor market is a process that cannot be captured in a single snapshot. Workers search, firms adjust, industries expand and contract, and skill levels increase and decrease. At any given moment, some sectors are growing while others decline. The same applies to regions. These details are often smoothed over by aggregates. This means that telling us where the average stands does not indicate how the system itself functions on the ground. A stable national picture can hide underlying volatility. Balance in the aggregate may in reality be nothing but a series of offsetting imbalances. 

For example, consider underemployment. A man desiring full-time work settling for part-time hours is still employed. A college graduate working retail despite a degree suited for investment analysis is still technically employed, despite underutilization of his skillset. These distinctions matter for economic well-being, despite hardly registering in headline statistics. 

Even the data themselves can be misleading. Employment figures are often revised, sometimes drastically. Many times these revisions show weaker job creation than originally reported, changing the narrative from strength to concern. Recent revisions from the Bureau of Labor Statistics have erased hundreds of thousands of previously reported jobs — in some cases, completely flipping growth months into contraction months. None of this is helpful nor is it a good reason for optimism. 

Likewise, structural forces reshape labor demand. Technological changes and the ability to switch jobs affect the market in ways not so quickly detectable. The goal is not mere employment but good matches between employers and employees to maximize value creation. People remaining in a job because it is increasingly difficult to switch does not signal health. When necessary reallocation is not happening, we lose out on potential growth and rising efficiency, even if unemployment figures remain stable. 

When just looking at unemployment figures, it is easy for a policymaker to confuse full capacity with true economic vitality. This misreading has its consequences. Policymakers, equipped with the specious belief that they can beneficently direct the economy, might focus on restricting demand so as to avoid inflation. Or they might defer to current policies that are actually weakening the economy, but only in a less obvious way (or in such a way as to only become manifest months later in a “revision”).

With all this in mind, we must be careful how we choose to measure economic health. All national statistics provide somewhat useful summaries, but cannot replace dispersed, local knowledge embedded in actual market activities. The economy does not employ “labor” in the abstract, but rather it employs specific people, with specific skills, in specific places, at specific times, for specific reasons. When this complexity gets reduced to a single number like the unemployment rate, we lose clarity for the sake of a simplistic metric. 

An economy can appear to be fully employed on paper while being less dynamic, less accessible, and less resilient in practice. Headlines might read “strong” or “stable”, but the economy is more than aggregate figures. It is a web of individual choices and adjustments, and those adjustments are real and important, but not fully captured in a headline number.

In my home and as a foster parent, reading is a constant. In the first days and weeks of a new placement, when everything is unfamiliar and a little uncertain, asking a small child, “Would you like to read a book?” is one of the easiest ways to begin building trust. It’s quiet, predictable, and comforting — and it doesn’t require much conversation when words are still hard to find.

Over time, you also learn which books children return to again and again. To no one’s surprise, the crowd favorites tend to be the classics.

At this point, I can recite Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches almost from memory. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom often plays in the background of my mind whether I want it to or not. And every so often, we pull another Seuss classic off the shelf that captures the imagination of children and adults alike: The Lorax.

It’s easy to see why the book endures. The illustrations are delightful, full of Seuss’s strange and charming creatures — the Brown Bar-ba-loots, the Swomee-Swans, and the Humming-Fish. The rhymes are playful and memorable. The setting is whimsical and a little mysterious. Children are drawn in by the story long before they realize that it is meant to carry a moral lesson.

And of course, it does.

Dr. Seuss — Theodor Geisel — was deeply influenced by environmental concerns that were gaining prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Lorax, published in 1971, reflects that moment in American culture. The story is often interpreted as a cautionary tale about business and industrial growth, with the Once-ler representing greedy capitalism and the Lorax speaking “for the trees.”

Many readers come away with the message that industry, profit, and environmental stewardship are fundamentally at odds.

But reading the book again — especially after you’ve read it a few dozen times aloud — raises an interesting question: is that actually what the story shows?

The Once-ler’s famous line captures the supposed villainy of business:

“Business is business! And business must grow!”

Yet the story that unfolds afterward doesn’t really depict the normal functioning of business at all. Instead, it describes something much closer to what economists call the tragedy of the commons.

The Once-ler begins by harvesting Truffula Trees to produce a product called the Thneed. At first, the operation is small. But when the Thneed becomes popular, production rapidly expands. Factories are built, more trees are cut, and the ecosystem begins to deteriorate. Eventually the animals leave, the air and water are polluted, and the forest disappears entirely.

But here’s the crucial detail: once the Truffula Trees are gone, the Once-ler’s business collapses.

In other words, destroying the environment destroys the enterprise that depends on it.

That outcome is not the triumph of profit over stewardship — it is the failure of stewardship. The Once-ler consumes the very resource his livelihood requires.

In a functioning system of responsible ownership and long-term incentives, that kind of behavior makes little sense. A logger who owns a forest plants new trees. A rancher who depends on grasslands manages grazing carefully. A fisherman whose income depends on future catches has every reason to preserve the fish population.

Successful businesses typically protect the resources that sustain them. Their survival depends on it.

The tragedy of the commons occurs when resources are treated as if they belong to no one — or to everyone at once — so that no one bears responsibility for their long-term care. In those situations, individuals are incentivized to extract as much as possible before someone else does. The result is predictable: overuse, depletion, and collapse.

Seen through that lens, The Lorax reads less like a critique of business itself and more like a cautionary tale about short-sighted resource use.

The Once-ler doesn’t fail because markets exist. He fails because he behaves foolishly. He harvests without replenishing. He expands without considering limits. And by the time he recognizes the consequences, it is too late.

What makes the story so powerful is that moment of realization. The Once-ler looks out over the barren landscape and admits the truth: without the trees, there is no business left to run.

In other words, destroying the forest wasn’t profitable — it was suicidal.

That’s why economists often point to property rights and ownership as the solution to the tragedy of the commons. When someone truly owns a resource — whether it’s a forest, a fishery, or farmland — they have every incentive to preserve it. Their livelihood tomorrow depends on how they care for it today.

Loggers invest in planting new forests. Ranchers carefully look after the health of their herds and grazing land. Farmers reinvest in seeds and soils. Long-term thinking and stewardship aren’t the enemy of business; these are the foundations of successful enterprise.

In that sense, the real lesson of The Lorax isn’t that “business is bad.” It’s that bad stewardship is bad business.

Healthy markets reward those who think long-term — those who protect the resources that make production possible in the first place. Ownership ties prosperity to responsibility. When people bear both the benefits and the costs of their decisions, they have strong incentives to manage the world wisely.

That’s a lesson worth remembering — whether you’re running a company, managing a forest, or simply reading bedtime stories with a small child who asks for “just one more book.” And judging by how often The Lorax comes off our shelf, it’s a lesson that still resonates.

Writing during the Great Depression in 1930, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) pushed back against what he called a “bad attack of economic pessimism.” In his famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he predicted that within one hundred years, rising productivity and compounding growth would usher in a new era of leisure, marked by 15-hour work weeks and plenty of time left over to pursue passion projects.

In a strange sense, he worried that leisure itself might prove the harder adjustment. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes wrote, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”

Today, AI is on the cusp of realizing Keynes’s seemingly dystopian vision. It’s worth asking, as he did in 1930, whether techno-pessimism is warranted. His fear was that the increase of “technical efficiency” (what we might today call productivity) would be so great that government would need to step in to help displaced workers find meaning in a fully automated world.

Those concerns follow the same logic as today’s growing fears that AI will displace work and disrupt society — fears that are fueling heavy-handed approaches to AI governance that could hamper this life-enhancing technology for decades.

For example, Anthropic’s own CEO has predicted that AI could drive unemployment to 20 percent. World-renowned scholars join with tech investors calling the coming age of AI “nothing short of civilizational.”

New television shows like Apple TV’s acclaimed series Pluribus posit a potential future in which humans join a “hive mind,” conjuring themes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people prefer to sacrifice their agency in pursuit of perpetual bliss. Critics have drawn parallels between the show’s omniscient hive and the modern lure of AI, with some cultural figures like Joe Rogan musing about the potential integration of AI with human bodies, or “the gentle singularity,” to use Sam Altman’s phrasing.  

Cultural anxieties around AI are real. But, similar to the furor around past breakthrough technologies like the printing press, they are misdirected and often overblown.

Throughout history, new innovations have expanded the scope and scale of what it means to “work,” creating new roles in vibrant industries. The steam engine, for example, moved workers from farms to factories and accelerated wages in the process. The internet sparked new industries in digital sales and advertising. AI holds the same promise of creative disruption, but only if we foster the conditions that enable it to thrive.

A survey of 6,000 chief executives across four countries found that they expect AI to reduce employment by only 0.7 percent over the next three years. An analysis of over 12,000 European firms reported that AI adoption increases worker productivity and has little measurable impact on employment levels. More telling still: industries more exposed to AI have experienced greater wage gains than less-exposed ones, a sign that AI is complementing labor rather than substituting for it.

Rather than take a back seat, workers want to harness AI through new skills and tools that allow them to practice greater judgement, creativity, and human connection in their everyday work — traits that AI still sorely lacks. One MIT study found that low-skilled workers stand to gain even more than their more experienced counterparts, another sign that generative AI empowers America’s workforce and can narrow critical skills gaps.

But let’s consider what companies are already doing on the AI frontier. Zach Stauber, a support agent manager at Salesforce, oversees a fleet of AI agents handling customer support, sales, and marketing tasks. Not only have AI agent managers like Stauber kept their roles alongside these tools, but they have also become vastly more productive and, in many cases, found greater meaning in their work.

The emerging position of the “agent manager” fits a pattern that creative destruction has woven throughout history: Work becomes both more productive and more meaningful, as new roles blossom across industries that were once on the edge of stagnation.

To cite another example, hospitals report that physicians equipped with AI spend less time on charting and more time with patients. Schools document AI tutors accelerating literacy gains. New startups are hiring to build around AI’s capabilities rather than retreating from them.

Despite this reframing, there are serious counterarguments to consider.

The economist William Baumol (1922-2017) observed that productivity gains tend to cluster in manufacturing sectors, while service industries like education and healthcare grow more expensive relative to everything else. For instance, a string quartet takes the same four musicians and 45 minutes it did in Beethoven’s time. That explanation could explain why college tuition and hospital bills keep outpacing inflation even as consumer electronics get cheaper every year.

While concerns of AI widening this “Baumol gap” make sense on their face, they fail under deeper inspection. AI has the unique ability to seep into practically every field, including ones that have yet to be discovered. Think AI tutors and planners, who are liberating teachers from hundreds of hours preparing lesson plans. Or the AI legal research assistant, who frees up more time for attorneys to spend with clients or take on new ones.

But can an AI-driven workforce make us happier, not just more productive?

According to Arthur Brooks, the answer is yes. “AI … has freed us from a huge amount of our most tedious, quotidian complicated problems,” he writes, “for example, what we need to do to support our families, but certainly wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to.”

AI, in other words, doesn’t replace our capacity to reason or think. It grants us more time to explore the questions that make life worth living.

That’s not to say that AI can’t unravel society in destructive ways. AI-steered social media algorithms are causing measurable harm to younger generations worldwide. Those dangers deserve serious attention. But they shouldn’t unilaterally govern our response to technology that could unleash unimaginable spurts of economic growth and prosperity.

Keynes made his prediction during the height of the Great Depression, when Americans were rightly pessimistic about their future. But Keynes struck an optimistic tone based on economic deduction. He believed that abundance would eventually shrink the “economic problem” down to a specialist concern rather than civilization’s main preoccupation.

According to this line of thinking, he quipped, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!”

In no uncertain terms, AI is this century’s greatest technological breakthrough. If we want to usher in Keynes’ era of abundance, we must clear the runway for AI to transform our everyday lives — and do so without fear.