Thus (reportedly) spake Steve Jobs in the late 1990s. It was a take on the role of corporations that would become decidedly out of consensus within a few short years, although Jobs seemed to stick with it. “Some people have said that I shouldn’t get involved politically because probably half our customers are Republicans,” he asserted in 2004. “There are more Democrats than Mac users, so I’m going to just stay away from all that political stuff.”

Fast forward two decades, as Apple brings a new captain to the helm of perhaps the world’s most recognizable brand. As Tim Cook departs, new CEO John Ternus, former senior VP of hardware engineering, has a chance to take the company back to the Jobs principle of corporate political neutrality. Getting there, however, is going to require undoing a good bit that’s happened in recent years against the spirit of that principle.

Where is Apple at when it comes to political signaling? The company doesn’t seem to be at Target or Bud Light levels of aisle-chasing. But there is also no denying that the brand isn’t perceived as neutral. While the company has had amazing nonpolitical moments (more on that later), it has also been part of a phenomenon we’ve witnessed with many, many companies in recent years: corporate partnerships that started one way and ended another. Many began as ostensible risk mitigation and gradually morphed into sources of risk themselves.

Two glaring examples stand out. One, particularly in light of the DOJ’s recent indictment, is the company’s previous support for the legal nonprofit known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Apple dropped a $1 million donation to the SPLC in 2017, and then-CEO Tim Cook furthered the move by announcing donation matches to the organization. This isn’t hindsight bias, either. The SPLC has been dropping credibility as a neutral source (and gaining credibility as a corrupt left-wing activist outfit) for years, with the indictment being the latest in a long line of public controversies. Right now, we’re in a moment where many major companies, including Salesforce and Texas Instruments, are backing away from any relationship with the SPLC. To put it nicely, right now it’s decidedly unclear whose pockets SPLC donation money is actually ending up in — and Apple would do well to consider this as a moment to reestablish political neutrality in its charitable contributions.

The second, and more concerning, example is Apple’s current platinum-tier corporate partnership with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). At the risk of getting too mixed up in acronyms, HRC is one of the leading purveyors of gender ideology in corporate America. Getting a perfect score on the organization’s Corporate Equality Index indicates that a company likely covers highly controversial medical interventions, including hormone regimens and gender transition surgery. Apple gets that perfect score — and the company’s not merely scoring high on activist rating systems but funding the activists outright. It doesn’t signal neutrality, particularly when 65 percent of Fortune 500 companies have cut ties with the HRC, many of them concerned over the group’s increasing politicization and association with the wildly controversial dictates of gender ideology, particularly with regard to children. What started as an activist group urging nondiscrimination protections (something no serious investor or company would oppose) has gradually morphed into a radical activism organization demanding something different. Apple would do well to realize this devolution and reconsider the partnership.

For what it’s worth, there are also signs that the company is at least listening to serious presentations of the concerns. In response to shareholder engagement from Bowyer Research, on behalf of the Christian nonprofit American Family Association, the company announced implementation of stronger anti-CSAM protocols and age limit enforcement in its App Store — a win delivered for the sake of thousands of innocent iPad and iPhone-using children. The company reportedly removed ESG modifiers from its executive compensation, another step toward neutrality we’re also seeing at other major brands like Goldman Sachs. The balance of voices at Apple’s annual shareholder meetings, once entirely slanted to the ESG and DEI-aligned left, is now shifting to reflect a real investor base that may be much closer to Jobs’ 50/50 estimation than many corporate activists ever realized.

This is an opportunity, with a fresh face at the head of the Apple brand, to reclaim that perception as a company that cares about phones and processors, not partisan signaling. There’s trust to be rebuilt, a fact that we’ve explained to the ~100 companies we’ve engaged with this season on behalf of investors. For Apple, we’ve asked for answers about membership in net zero activist coalitions, controversial charitable partnerships, and other incidents like delisting religious apps in its Chinese App Store to appease the CCP. As privacy and free speech concerns swirl around the EU’s Digital Services Act, it remains to be seen what part Apple will play there. But trust, and a reputation for political neutrality, can be rebuilt — and it’s crucial that CEO Ternus sees that opportunity.

One of the most heartwarming Apple moments in recent years came in late 2024 when the company advertised a hearing-impaired father having his life changed by Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 technology. This is Apple at its best. The company does not need to chase applause from political activists. Its technology has brought untold good to the world, and its mission of innovation and thinking differently to solve challenges is a noble one. The free enterprise system rewards companies that meet the world’s genuine needs, from assisting the disabled to creating one of the most widely adopted tech ecosystems on Earth. As it happens, Apple is a firm that does both of those things. 

Apple doesn’t need DEI initiatives to make its mission good for humanity. It already is. Getting rid of the political clouds that obscure that mission is a bright path forward, a move of genuine cultural and business leadership, and a vindication of Jobs’ belief that “in strong companies, the best ideas win.”

The so-called “AI race” is propelling stock markets to new highs even as geopolitical turbulence rattles investors. Artificial intelligence may prove to be the rare technological revolution capable of generating real growth despite the headwinds of tariffs and misguided industrial policy. Yet the data centers powering this next generation of innovation have become a flashpoint for public anxiety. Maine has outright banned new large data center construction, and average Americans are increasingly convinced that these facilities are to blame for rising electricity bills. 

The statewide data, however, tell a different story. Newly published research finds no meaningful link between the number of data centers in a state and its electricity prices and points instead to a far less glamorous culprit: bad state energy policy. 

A March 2026 study from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) examined whether data centers are responsible for rising electricity prices across the United States. The answer, based on state-level data, is no. Across all 50 states, there is no statistically significant relationship between the number of data centers and electricity prices. The top ten data center states averaged 14.46 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, virtually identical to the 14.39 cents average across all other states.  

Perhaps the study’s most counterintuitive finding is its strongest: states where electricity sales grew faster actually paid less for electricity. High-growth states averaged a 20 percent price increase from 2015 to 2025, while low-growth states averaged nearly double that at 39.4 percent. Unlike most goods, electricity is priced by spreading high fixed costs like transmission lines, generation capacity, and long-term contracts across every kilowatt-hour consumed, meaning the more power that flows through the grid, the cheaper each unit becomes in the long run. Data centers, by driving demand up, actually spread fixed grid costs across more kilowatt-hours, which results in a per-unit rate decrease for everyone. 

So why are so many Americans convinced otherwise?  

Because in the short run, at the local level, the story is more complicated. A Bloomberg analysis of wholesale electricity prices across 25,000 grid nodes found that prices have risen as much as 267 percent since 2020 in areas near major data center clusters. More than 70 percent of nodes recording price increases were located within 50 miles of significant data center activity.  

In these regions, data centers create a surge in demand on local grids. When transmission capacity is constrained and new generation has not yet come online, prices spike. Those higher wholesale costs can then filter into retail bills, at least in the short run, and local consumers bear the brunt of this regional electricity demand.  

The discrepancy in these two studies indicates a timing problem. The long-run economics favor more demand, but the short-run reality is that infrastructure takes years to build, and consumers near data center hubs can be left paying for that gap. The IER study measures retail prices averaged across entire states; Bloomberg measured wholesale prices at specific grid nodes near data center hubs.  

State averages mask local effects. Northern Virginia’s price pressure gets diluted when blended with rural Appalachia, for example. Both findings can be simultaneously true: data centers are not driving broad statewide price divergences, but they can create localized grid strain where infrastructure and regulatory frameworks have failed to keep pace with demand. 

That distinction matters enormously for policy. Concentrated price spikes are not evidence that data centers are inherently incompatible with affordable electricity; they are evidence that grid infrastructure and cost allocation rules haven’t kept up. Oregon’s POWER Act, which requires large electricity users to bear the costs of infrastructure built specifically for them, is a model worth watching. By creating a separate rate class for data centers and requiring long-term contracts so they pay for the grid upgrades they demand, the law moves closer to a core market principle — prices that reflect true costs. However, it still relies on regulators rather than competitive markets to set those prices. These are targeted, incremental steps toward aligning prices with actual costs, far preferable to blunt restrictions that distort markets and stifle investment. 

The deeper problem, as a growing body of research makes clear, is state energy policy itself. A Charles River Associates report found that rate increases are heavily driven by local regulatory conditions, particularly policy environments in California and the Northeast. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study identified renewables portfolio standards, particularly in states with costly incremental renewable supplies, as a consistent driver of rate increases. The common thread is that electricity prices are fundamentally a product of institutional design, not data center headcounts. 

America is not going to win the AI race by making it harder to build the infrastructure AI requires. The moment calls for the opposite instinct: streamlining permitting for new generation and transmission, updating interconnection queues, ensuring large electricity users pay for their full cost to the grid, and getting out of the way of the demand growth that tends to lower per-unit costs over time. The appropriate response to rising electricity costs near data center hubs is to reduce barriers to grid expansion and allow energy supply to scale alongside demand, preserving both affordability and competitiveness. 

I got my start a couple of decades ago working as a bagger at our local grocery store — the same one from which my Mom just retired after a 25-year career. Grocery supply chains are complex and the logistics are tenuous. And despite what you might have heard, the profit margin Industry consultants predict the store will lose at least $300,000 annually in perpetuity. s are paper thin, around 1.4 percent. 

That’s why it struck me as foolish when I read New York City Mayor Mamdani’s had recently proposed a $30 million municipal grocery store to battle the alleged greed and profit-seeking in the grocery industry.

As is often the case with large public projects — California’s high-speed rail system being a well-known example, still unfinished after years and billions spent — the costs tend to spiral. Mamdani’s proposed grocery tops $3,000 per square foot, roughly four times what private chains typically spend, and includes highly implausible revenue projections. Supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis points out that he could open ten stores with the $70 million Mamdani plans to spend on five. These are serious criticisms, but they miss the deeper problem.

The real issue here is that Mamdani’s team is attempting something that cannot, by its very nature, be done well, regardless of who attempts it or how carefully they plan. Municipal grocery retailing fails for structural and incentive reasons baked into the very nature of what grocery stores do and how political institutions work. 

Who Decides the Price of Groceries? 

Let’s start with the knowledge problem.

Consider what grocery retailing requires. A store manager must decide which products to stock, in what quantities, at what prices, and in what configurations. These decisions depend on knowledge that is highly localized, tacit, and constantly shifting based on the preferences and financial constraints of local customers. Which neighborhoods prefer bone-in chicken thighs versus boneless breasts? When does demand for cilantro spike? How much shelf space should go to gluten-free products? What price point makes a rotisserie chicken an impulse purchase rather than a considered one?

Economist Friedrich Hayek spent much of his career explaining why this kind of knowledge cannot be centralized. This is because, among other reasons, the tacit and local knowledge needed here exists in fragments, dispersed among millions of people, often in forms they cannot articulate. A shopper doesn’t know why she reaches for one brand over another. A produce manager can’t fully explain how he knows the lettuce shipment won’t last the weekend. Private, for-profit grocery stores translate this knowledge, aggregate dispersed information about supply and demand, into prices, profits, and losses. Profits signal that a store is meeting local needs efficiently, and losses signal the opposite. Market feedback is immediate, granular, and unforgiving. A grocery store chain that overprices staples will see customers defect to competitors within days; a store that underprices them may sell out but struggle to afford replacements.

Now consider Mamdani’s proposal, in which the city owns the building and subsidizes operations with a private operator that manages the day-to-day and with “New Yorkers [picking] up the tab for construction, rent and property taxes,” as city officials explained. 

This arrangement severs the feedback loop that makes grocery retailing work. When taxpayer funds cover losses, those losses no longer provide a price signal for whether a store is serving customers well. Fixing prices and stock removes the discipline that punishes the grocer’s failures and rewards his efficiency. Poorly managed stores with inadequate stocks aren’t just possible, they’re virtually guaranteed.

The city’s own predictions claim that to recoup the $30 million construction cost in six years, the 9,000-square-foot store would need to generate $50 million in annual sales. That’s more than double what Food Bazaar — the highest-grossing chain in the city — averages per location, and Food Bazaar stores are typically much larger. City planners arrived at that number by working backward from a political goal, and not, as they should, from market dynamics and customer preferences. They simply planned what they wanted, and assumed the necessary sales to offset the costs would somehow materialize. 

Municipal Grocery Stores Don’t Work – Except for Politicians

If municipal grocery stores are such a bad idea, why do they keep getting proposed? Part of the answer lies in what economists call rational ignorance. For most voters, understanding the grocery business in detail would require substantial time and effort — time better spent on their own work and families. The expected benefit of gaining all that extra knowledge, from any individual voter’s perspective, is approximately zero. One vote will not determine whether the policy passes, so there’s no personal return to becoming informed. The policy sounds appealing, and there’s little obvious cost to being wrong (though, the ultimate tax burden imposed by Mamdani’s agenda might make New Yorkers’ ignorance quite costly indeed).

Similarly, policymakers face conflicting incentives. Public choice theory, pioneered by James Buchanan, asks us to apply the same assumptions to politics that we apply to markets: namely that people respond to incentives, pursue their own interests, and face constraints. And from this perspective, Mamdani’s $70 million grocery initiative makes perfect sense. The benefits are concentrated and visible, with a sparkling media rollout on one of the Mayor’s key campaign issues, and five shiny new grocery stores bearing the mayor’s political fingerprints. The costs, by contrast, are diffuse and largely invisible, spread across all city taxpayers and absorbed into the general budget. When the stores lose $300,000 annually, as consultants predict, most voters will never connect the dots between their tax burden and the underperforming stores.

Empty Promises Now, Empty Shelves Tomorrow

Mamdani’s grocery store will fail. Even if shoppers save a dollar over Food Bazaar, that pound of apples will include appropriated tax dollars, food waste, labor distortions, and a thousand other costs that will make it wildly more expensive than the sticker would indicate. The real price is far more expensive than a market competitor’s, even if the shelf price doesn’t show it.

The price of apples is a secret language, the communication of a billion bits of dispersed, organic, intuitive knowledge of costs, trade-offs, and alternatives. All that information, over time and geography, quietly working away in the minds of Washington apple growers and migrant fruit pickers, beekeepers and cider makers, interstate truck drivers and NYC shelf stockers, is infused into the price sticker on a pound of apples in a market-driven grocery store. And Mamdani, like hubristic dreamers before him, thinks he can wipe all that away, slap on a price that looks like success to the voters, and hide all the rest in your tax bill.

The zeal of the convert can be a terrifying force to behold. An acolyte convinced of their own prior heresy will often be a more thorough inquisitor than the native-born believer. This dynamic may help explain why It’s on You by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein is so shrill and devoid of self-awareness.

Having been leading researchers in behavioral psychology and economics who sought to manipulate individuals into ostensibly healthier and smarter choices — the world of “nudge” theory — they are doing a righteous penance by exposing the flaws of their former discipline. They have now decided that only government dictates can be relied upon to improve everything from retirement savings to climate change, and they are on a crusade to expose anyone who believes voluntary action by human beings can be useful for, well, anything.

As the authors recount, the popularity of luring people into making the decisions that policymakers think best, rather than outright coercing them, really took off with the success of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Sunstein would later hold an influential policy role as President Obama’s Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the chief White House overseer of proposed new federal regulations.

The idea of government officials nudging the human cattle into their government-approved chutes was soon all over the news. It was also popular in academia and in dedicated nudge policy units and working groups in governments worldwide. The authors describe having done extensive work in the area, both experimentally and by offering specific advice to policymakers. Nudge-adjacent proposals proliferated in the late 2000s and early 2010s, including ideas like changing restaurant menus to discourage gluttony and offering gamified incentives to encourage saving for retirement, exercising, and medication adherence.

But the success of nudge behavioralism, after a first flush of success, yielded disappointing long-term results. Upon wider reading and investigation, Chater and Loewenstein grew so disenchanted with their own specialty that they turned against it entirely with the vengeance of the betrayed. They now attack nudge interventions as not just ineffective but actively harmful, in part because people who are concerned about societal problems can be seduced by the supposed effectiveness of nudges, thus eroding support for more aggressive interventions.

And their preferred alternative is a bold one indeed. They claim that the major problems of the day can only be solved by flushing away any pretense of voluntary inducement and going full speed ahead on banning (or mandating) the behaviors and outcomes they want abolished (or to see more of). They now consider it absurd and unjust to expect anyone in America to actually manage how many calories they eat, decide how their retirement nest egg is invested, or pick which health plan they pay for.

Everything must be federally mandated to ensure the just outcomes that the co-authors have already helpfully decided upon. Liberating Americans from the tyranny of making their own choices will leave them, readers are helpfully reminded, with ample leisure time for hobbies and entertainment.

The number of things that would be directly regulated under the plan laid out in It’s on You would be bracingly broad. Under this technocratic utopia, the government would decide which health care plan you will have, how much and under what conditions you are allowed to gamble, how you interact with social media, what vehicle you are allowed to drive, how much you save for retirement, the THC content of the cannabis you consume, and how often you are allowed to fly. That is, if the exigencies of climate change can be strained to allow you the luxury of flying at all. But don’t worry — agoraphobes might be able to cash in their tradable flight allowances on an exchange, if there are enough credits to go around. 

 Your diet would, of course, also be regulated from multiple angles. “Ultraprocessed” foods would certainly be, shall we say, discouraged. Sugary drinks would come in for greater regulation, though it’s possible they would only have their sweeteners watered down rather than forbidden entirely. The authors also ominously refer, several times, to the problematic effects that meat consumption has on both human health and the global climate. Readers can safely assume that the future Chatenstein republic will not be known for its world-class steakhouses. 

Cataloguing and refuting all of their flawed assumptions and policy proposals would require an entire shelf of additional books, so broad is their self-assigned remit to remake modern society. Suffice it to say that they seem to have a soft spot for every left-wing hobby horse and pet theory of the last half-century, from Malthusian environmentalism and single-payer health care to banning gasoline-powered vehicles and a reflexive “everything is better in Europe” anti-patriotism so common among semester-abroad undergraduates. 

Their ideological obsession with everything about life in the US being secretly terrible does occasionally lead them astray in a way that should certainly have been caught by fact-checkers. In an attempt to prove that the American health care system is scandalously underperforming, they claim that “the maternal death rate—the number of women who die each year as a result of complications from childbirth—is on average 4.5 per 100,000 live births in comparable countries, but it is 23.8 per 100,000 live births in the US—over five times higher.” This is not true, and something only the most highly motivated partisan would believe without attempting to verify.

The confusion that led to such statistics being published in the first place was covered, among other places, in a March 2024 Washington Post article fittingly titled “Study says U.S. maternal death rate crisis is really a case of bad data.” Reporters Sabrina Malhi and Dan Keating explain that “Data classification errors have inflated U.S. maternal death rates for two decades.” The 2003 re-design of a commonly used form meant that “…deaths of people 70 or older were mistakenly classified as having been pregnant. Deaths from cancer and other causes also were counted as maternal deaths if the box was checked.” The Post writers reported that according to Cande Ananth, chief of epidemiology and biostatistics at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, “U.S. maternal mortality is actually comparable to that of Canada and Britain.”

That may seem like a troubling enough data error, but Chater and Loewenstein’s worst ideas are inspired by climate alarmism. Readers familiar with the world of energy and environmental economics need only be told of the praise heaped on figures like Naomi Oreskes, Michael Mann, and Bill McKibben to realize that the authors are representing the furthest fringe of the intellectual world. These are people who consider the incremental environmental changes related to modern greenhouse gas emissions to be a planetary emergency requiring the most extreme possible government takeover of society — a responsibility they and others in the climate activist movement are all too eager to award to themselves.

Writing at a time when the environmental activist movement is unraveling around the world and even policymakers in the European Union are watering down or backing away from climate-inspired policies, the authors write as if everyone who is not currently employed by ExxonMobil is pining for the goal of net-zero degrowth. Yet it is likely that enthusiasm for the “wrenching transformation of society” famously called for by Al Gore has never been less salient or politically viable than at any point since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. In case the authors haven’t noticed, President Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to climate change has been replaced by President Trump’s energy dominance agenda. 

But so impenetrable is the epistemic bubble in which they apparently find themselves that they think that no one who is “thoughtful and well-informed” (to use one of their favorite phrases) could possibly disagree with any of their pronouncements. Only the baleful influence of special interests and corporate lobbying could possibly be responsible for anyone wanting to make their own consumer decisions about the most important parts of their life. Anyone or any group who stands in opposition to them is either venal (because of greed) or deluded to the point of false consciousness.

As self-serving and detached from reality as this rhetorical pose is, it is structurally necessary for their argument. Why, after all, could economic policies that supposedly only benefit the richest 1 percent of society be perpetuated in a country with a democratic political system? How could it be that large numbers of their fellow citizens support oil and gas development, or oppose a government takeover of health care, or want to keep firearms legal, if — as the authors suggest — such things are so obviously wrong? Only a mass mind-numbing on the scale of hundreds of millions of human beings could be responsible. The alternative — that a large portion of US voters simply think they’re wrong about these topics — seems never to have occurred to either writer. 

The book does include, if only by accident, a few reasonable policy proposals, such as cutting federal agricultural subsidies and eliminating various targeted tax provisions the authors consider to be loopholes. But in total, It’s on You presents an alarming and deeply illiberal vision of the future in which no decision is too small or too personal to be left to individual choice. A world run by Chater and Loewenstein might allow for you to choose your own clothes or select your own music, but pretty much anything else will be chosen for you without even the disingenuous pretense of trying to nudge you toward the approved outcome first. 

Worst of all, the authors also don’t seem to be aware of any meaningful limits to their anti-libertarian paternalism. After all, if we don’t trust ordinary Americans to choose their own vehicles or play high-limit slot machines, why would we allow them to vote and serve on juries? Surely anyone who is so infantilized that they can’t select their own snack foods shouldn’t be trusted to raise children and live unsupervised in their own homes. This view is especially ironic given the authors’ frequent insistence that their theory is the best way to advance, buttress, and defend democracy in America. If democratic governance has friends like these, I’d hate to read a book by its enemies.

The Federal Reserve held its target range for the federal funds rate at 3.5 to 3.75 percent on Wednesday, a decision markets had fully priced in. Governor Stephen Miran dissented in favor of a cut. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, and Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan dissented from the easing bias preserved in the statement. The eight-to-four vote marked the most divided Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) decision since October 1992. 

At the post-meeting press conference, Chair Jerome Powell reported total PCE prices were expected to have risen 3.5 percent over the 12 months ending in March, “boosted by the significant rise in global oil prices” tied to the conflict in the Middle East. Core PCE was expected to rise 3.2 percent, which he attributed to tariffs. The increases were confirmed by today’s PCE data release. 

To put these figures in context, the median committee member projected PCE inflation of 2.7 percent for 2026 at the March FOMC meeting. The annualized pace so far this year is around 4 percent, well above the median member’s projection and inconsistent with the Committee’s expected disinflationary path.

Powell described an economy “expanding at a solid pace,” a labor market little changed at 4.3 percent unemployment, and inflation that has “moved up and is elevated.” Consumer spending is resilient. Business investment is brisk. Slower job growth, Powell said, reflects lower immigration and labor-force participation, not collapsing demand. In short: this is not an economy that requires further easing.

The conflicting dissents reflect deep divisions at the FOMC. Miran’s view, that policy remains too tight, is most consistent with a model in which inflation is largely driven by transitory supply shocks. Hammack, Kashkari, and Logan, in contrast, believe that policy is too loose, and that signaling further easing risks compounding an inflation problem the data already show. Their view, by contrast, suggests inflation is largely driven not by supply shocks, but persistent excess nominal spending. FOMC members are not arguing about timing. They hold fundamentally different views about the drivers of inflation today.

Tariffs and oil shocks change relative prices. They do not, by themselves, sustain inflation. A tariff raises the price of imported goods relative to domestic ones; an oil shock raises the price of energy and energy-intensive goods and services relative to everything else. These shocks push the price level up, as output falls relative to trend. But the effect diminishes as output recovers. Supply shocks may have a permanent effect on the level of prices. But they only have a temporary effect on the rate of inflation.

Sustained inflation requires persistent growth in nominal spending. It is a monetary phenomenon. A sequence of supposedly one-time shocks cannot indefinitely explain inflation that has been above target for four years. Either past shocks should already have rolled off, or monetary policy is doing something the FOMC has yet to acknowledge.

The disagreement is understandable given the saliency of recent events. The economy has been hit by a series of supply shocks over the last year or so, with the ongoing conflict in the Middle East being the most recent. But the Fed has also failed to bring nominal spending back down to a level consistent with its longer run inflation target following the surge in inflation in 2021 and 2022. 

Fed officials must determine the extent to which today’s above-target inflation is due to those supply shocks and whether demand will moderate on its own if the Fed holds rates steady. That’s no easy task, and there is plenty of scope for disagreement. For now, markets are pricing in fewer rate cuts than the median FOMC member projected back in March.

Wednesday’s press conference is almost certainly Powell’s last as chair. His term ends on May 15. Kevin Warsh, who advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday morning, is positioned to succeed him following confirmation from the Senate. 

Tradition dictates a departing Fed chair step down rather than staying on for the remainder of his or her term as governor. But Powell announced he intends to remain on the Board, citing what he called “unprecedented” legal pressure on the Fed’s independence. 

Powell’s decision to stay may pose a problem for Warsh, who wants to reform the institution. But the bigger, more-pressing problem relates to the scope of disagreement among FOMC members. Some members think the ongoing inflation is supply-driven. Other members think it is demand-driven. He will need more than a little luck to generate consensus.

Chicago Public Schools has struck a deal with the city’s teachers’ union that turns students into political props. On May 1, a regular school day, children will participate in rallies and civic lessons before being bused to a union rally at Union Park. The agreement promises no retaliation for participants and for joint lobbying in Springfield.

This deal does nothing to advance education. It simply enables the union to use children as pawns to demand more money from the very taxpayers funding the system.

The choice of May 1 is no coincidence. May Day has long been celebrated as a labor and communist holiday (and perhaps it’s a warning cry for a reason). The mask slips when the union schedules its political action on this date. Chicago Public Schools will provide the buses and the time. Taxpayers will foot the bill for the union to lobby against them, using their own children as the foot soldiers in the effort to extract more government funding.

The agreement exposes the cozy relationship between the union and the school district. The Chicago Teachers Union deploys its money and political muscle to handpick candidates for office. The union then pressures the school board, stacked with union allies, to do its bidding. The result is a district that serves the interests of adult employees far more than it serves students.

Other Chicago schools will be empty on May 1 for a related reason. Consider Frederick Douglass Academy High School. The school is 97 percent empty. It enrolls just 27 students in a building with capacity for over 1,000. It employs 28 staff members, creating a roughly one-to-one staff-to-student ratio. Despite tiny class sizes that would be the envy of any educator, not a single child at Douglass Academy is proficient in math or reading. The district spends more than $90,000 per student in operational funding alone at the school. The outcomes remain abysmal.

The dysfunction extends far beyond one building. Chicago has 80 public schools where not a single child is proficient in math. Another 145 standalone public schools are more than 50 percent empty. These statistics reveal a system bloated with underutilized facilities and excess staff. Yet the union’s solution remains the same: pour in even more taxpayer dollars.

Chicago Public Schools desperately needs competition. School choice would empower parents and force the district to improve. Instead, the union successfully killed the state’s Invest in Kids scholarship program. That program helped more than 9,000 low-income children attend the school that best fit their needs.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union president sends her own son to a private school after she called school choice “racist.” The hypocrisy could not be clearer. Union leaders want options for their own families while denying them to the low-income families the union claims to champion.

The latest antics will only make the Chicago Teachers Union’s brand more toxic among Chicago voters. A recent poll found that just 27.5 percent of Chicago voters hold a favorable view of the union. More than half, 53.6 percent, view the union unfavorably. That yields a net favorability rating of negative 26 points.

Half of voters say they are less likely to support a candidate who takes money from the union. In the most recent primary elections, most of the union’s endorsed candidates in contested races lost. Some politicians avoided bragging about their CTU endorsements altogether.

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman famously said, “The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.” In an open market, dissatisfied families can vote with their feet and take their money elsewhere. But when it comes to a monopoly like the government school system, children are trapped in failing institutions with no recourse. 

Union President Stacy Davis Gates has been remarkably candid about the union’s priorities. As president, she’s admitted that the organization engages in political activity so that “Black women can maintain a standard of living” and “have the ability to sustain life without a husband.” There was no mention of improving student achievement. The union’s focus remains on preserving a jobs program for adults. 

The numbers confirm the union’s priorities. Chicago public school enrollment has dropped 10 percent since 2019. Over the same period, the district has increased staffing by 20 percent. While families vote with their feet and leave the system, the bureaucracy grows.

The Chicago Teachers Union is also under congressional investigation for failing to provide its own members with financial audits for five years in a row. The union’s own members, with help from the Liberty Justice Center, had to sue to force transparency. The organization that claims moral authority to shape Chicago’s education policy cannot even manage basic financial accountability for the teachers it represents.

Parents and taxpayers in Chicago have had enough of the union’s tactics. The deal to hijack the school calendar for political gain will accelerate the backlash. The district cannot continue to operate as a jobs program for adults while students fall further behind. The solution lies in breaking the monopoly. School choice would introduce competition, empower families, and finally put the needs of children first.

The union’s influence runs deep in Chicago politics, but the public is waking up to the costs. Families see empty schools draining resources while proficiency rates hover near zero. Taxpayers watch their dollars fund rallies instead of reading lessons.

The pattern is unmistakable. The Chicago Teachers Union prioritizes power and paychecks over results. School choice offers the only real path forward. Parents deserve the freedom to choose schools that deliver, not just buildings that employ union members. Until competition arrives, expect more days like May 1, where the union commandeers the classroom for its own ends.

Historian, former Republican senator, and former college president Ben Sasse is dying of pancreatic cancer. 

In a recent and profoundly moving interview, Sasse, who recently turned 54, offered wisdom on maintaining personal autonomy in our digital age. Sasse argued that technological advances such as smartphones “allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we actually live, the places where we break bread, the people who are living next door to us, the people that you can physically touch and hug, the small platoons of real community.”

Sasse predicts that as a consequence, even more “human addictions and distractions” are coming. His honesty about his own “misprioritization” helps provide space to confront our own “regrets” before the clock runs out.

Sasse is no Luddite, but he predicts that the future “grand divide” in society will not be by class but “about intentionality and what you do with your affections and these supertools.” 

The divide he envisions is not between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, or left and right, but between those who govern their own attention and those who have surrendered it. 

“Hell” on earth, he warns, will be experienced by those “who agree to outsource [their] attention and affections to somebody else’s algorithm.”

Sasse warned that our temptation to let these tools pull us into an “eternal now, now, now, now, now, now slot machine of dopamine hits is super dangerous.” Artificial intelligence (AI), he predicts, will be transformative for those who bring genuine intentionality to it and devastating for those who don’t.

Freedom is more than the absence of authoritarian edicts that conflict with individuals’ ability to pursue their own ends. Sasse argues that a free society requires “communitarian thickness” to provide the “self-restraints” necessary for us to use technology’s tools rather than be used by them. If we lose the capacity to govern our attention and our passions, we lose the capacity for self-governance.

In his Pensées, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal made one of the most profound single-sentence observations in history: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” 

Today, for many, sitting quietly in a room alone is virtually impossible. When we are stripped of distractions, our internal dialogue often runs wild, and we seek an immediate escape from the noise, leading to our addictions. In the modern era, as Sasse and many others have pointed out, escape is always in our pockets. 

In his “Moral Letter 7,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca argued that prolonged exposure to crowds degrades our moral character, even when we believe ourselves resistant to its influence. He wrote, “Do you ask what you should avoid more than anything else? A crowd. It is not yet safe for you to trust yourself to one.”

Seneca was writing from experience, including his service in Nero’s court:

I’ll freely admit my own weakness in this regard. Never do I return home with the character I had when I left; always there is something I had settled before that is now stirred up again, something I had gotten rid of that has returned.

Seneca was not a misanthrope, nor was he advocating withdrawing from the world. He was observing how the values and beliefs of those around us gradually reshape what seems normal to us.

At least Seneca could leave the crowd and go home. Too often, we allow the digital crowd to follow us home. 

Philosopher Matthew B. Crawford and computer science professor Cal Newport have sounded Seneca’s alarm in today’s digital age.

In his book Digital Minimalism, Newport explores the erosion of autonomy caused by our use of technology. He explains that we have allowed technology and social media “to control more and more of how we spend our time, how we feel, and how we behave.”

Crawford observes in his book The World Beyond Your Head that “Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will.”

They can include social media companies, government agencies, and pharmaceutical and other companies that compete for our attention. Many of us may think we are beyond such influence, but Crawford warns that our “preferences” are not always “expressing a welling-up of the authentic self.” Satisfying our preferences may give us a false sense of assurance that our freedom is intact.

Crawford observes, “To attend to anything in a sustained way requires actively excluding all the other things that grab at our attention. It requires, if not ruthlessness toward oneself, a capacity for self-regulation.”

Let’s be clear about what’s at stake. Without the capacity for what Sasse calls “intentionality,” and what Crawford calls “self-regulation,” the individual becomes too weak to sustain liberty and too distracted to notice when it is being taken away.

When our attention is fragmented, we lose the capacity for what Newport calls “deep work.” Newport defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Cultivating this depth requires sustained attention and active resistance to the urge to seek easier, shallower work. Shallow efforts, such as compulsive email checking, create little new value and are easily replicated. 

If you are concerned about losing your job to AI, the answer is deep work. 

Newport advocates “a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.” Newport doesn’t believe that “people who struggle with the online part of their lives are… weak-willed or stupid.” As a path to change, recognizing what our current habits cost us is more effective than relying on willpower. 

Crawford argues that genuine agency arises:

not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.

A craftsman is constantly discovering what doesn’t work. A social media warrior is constantly proclaiming. In the digital world, people offer angry opinions without reckoning with the limits of their knowledge. 

Newport argues, “The craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world.”

Crawford himself learned motorcycle repair. He understands that a craftsman’s discipline seems “to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.” Crawford continues:

He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. 

Our digital cries for validation are a poor substitute for the deep pride generated by handicraft or deep work. 

As we shift our attention away from the noise of the digital world, Crawford argues, we experience “feelings of wonder and gratitude — in light of which manufactured realities are revealed as pale counterfeits, and lose some of their grip on us.”

Ben Sasse, facing the end of his life, genuinely knows this. The question is whether we will learn it in time to choose differently.