Imagine a parallel universe where, with the stroke of a pen, President Trump declares an end to the ill-conceived trade war that, while it intensified sharply in April 2025, started in 2017. Not only are the existing duties on steel, aluminum, semiconductors, consumer goods, and countless other imports rescinded, but the administration also explicitly disavows the threat of future tariffs. In an instant, a fog of uncertainty that hangs over the US economy for years vanishes. For thousands of businesses — from family-owned manufacturers in the Midwest to sprawling multinationals with global supply chains — the abrupt shift is transformative.

A New Horizon of Certainty

The first and most immediate effect is psychological: firms that have been paralyzed by uncertainty suddenly see a clear horizon. Projects that sit mothballed — factory expansions, product launches, acquisitions — spring back to life. Capital expenditure budgets, which are padded with contingencies for unpredictable tariff costs, are redirected into tangible investments. CFOs no longer devote boardroom hours to hedging strategies and pricing contingencies; instead, they plan growth with confidence.

Hiring surges. With the removal of tariff-induced costs, margins fatten, and businesses put idle plans into action. A Texas auto-parts maker, once forced to pay a 20 percent surcharge on imported aluminum, now opens a second plant. A Midwestern agricultural-equipment manufacturer that shelves its design for a next-generation harvester rehires engineers to get the project rolling. Technology companies, once squeezed between tariff costs and price-sensitive consumers, accelerate R&D spending and greenlight acquisitions that consolidate their competitive positions.

Supply Chains Realign

Tariffs force many companies to build inefficient, defensive supply chains. Firms reroute imports through third countries or scramble to find suboptimal domestic substitutes. With tariffs gone, supply chains realign on the basis of cost and quality rather than politics. Container traffic through major ports like Long Beach and Savannah spikes, while logistics companies report volumes reminiscent of pre-tariff highs. Freight forwarders, trucking firms, and rail operators all feel the downstream effects of renewed activity.

Inventory positioning sees rapid restrategizing. Where, starting earlier this year, companies stockpiled vast amounts of goods to hedge against possible tariff hikes or retaliatory duties, now they return to leaner, just-in-time models. This frees up working capital for expansion. The elimination of uncertainty — something businesses value almost more than favorable regulation itself — creates efficiencies across the system.

Consumers Regain Confidence

The parallel-universe tariff rollback quickly reverberates through consumer markets. Prices of goods that quietly creep higher — appliances, apparel, electronics — begin to ease. Retailers, once forced to pass higher import costs along to shoppers, now find breathing room to discount and promote. Households, feeling the combined effect of lower prices and rising job opportunities, loosen their wallets. Consumer confidence indexes register sharp upticks, echoing levels not seen in years. A small measure of deflation, the actual decline of prices rather than their deceleration (disinflation), enters the US economy.

Financial markets respond in kind. Equity analysts upgrade earnings forecasts, citing restored margins and reduced input costs. The stock prices of retailers, automakers, and manufacturers jump, while capital-goods and logistics firms trade at premiums reflecting renewed investment. Bond yields rise modestly, reflecting expectations of stronger growth. Even the dollar firms up, as global investors interpret the tariff withdrawal as a sign of restored policy rationality.

Productivity Growth

Beyond the immediate uplift in spending and hiring, the tariff rollback opens the door to longer-term gains. Tariffs function as a tax on productivity: firms spend time and money dodging duties, redesigning supply chains, and lobbying for exemptions rather than innovating. With those distractions gone, resources flow back into efficiency-enhancing investments.

Higher capital expenditures translate into a more modern capital stock: upgraded machinery, cleaner energy systems, better software. The productivity boost that follows is not dramatic in a single quarter, but over time it compounds. Economists projecting GDP growth see their models nudge upward as capital deepening accelerates and labor markets tighten. The virtuous cycle of investment, hiring, and spending reinforces itself.

Global Ripples

The world economy, too, feels the aftershocks. Exporting nations that see their trade with the US fall off — Vietnam, Mexico, Germany, South Korea, and others — suddenly enjoy revitalized access to the world’s largest consumer market. Supply relationships stabilize, and retaliatory tariffs imposed on American goods quietly drop. Farmers, who are squeezed by trade disputes, find foreign demand returning. Energy exports — oil, gas, coal — regain lost markets.

Global institutions like the WTO, which have drifted to the sidelines, are once again treated as forums for dispute resolution rather than ignored. Investor confidence abroad strengthens, and multinational corporations, no longer deterred by the threat of sudden tariffs, expand their US-based operations.

The Parallel Universe Lesson

Of course, this universe is hypothetical. In reality, tariffs remain a prominent feature of American trade policy, and the uncertainty they generate continues to ripple through the economy. But the exercise demonstrates just how powerful a single act of deregulation can be. By eliminating tariffs and withdrawing threats of new ones, the administration sets off a cascade of positive effects: higher investment, faster hiring, stronger growth, and renewed global confidence in US economic leadership.

It is worth stressing that nothing in this parallel universe is beyond reach. The tools required to unleash this growth spurt already exist, sitting unused in the hands of policymakers. With a single declaration, the administration lifts the burden of tariffs and lets markets, businesses, and consumers do what they do best: allocate resources, generate wealth, and drive prosperity.

Perhaps a better term for this exercise would be a gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment of the sort often undertaken in physics and philosophy. If others indulge the fantasy that government intervention and the suppression of exchange makes everyone richer, I figure I can take my turn too. For now, it remains an exercise in imagination — but it is one well within the capacity of the current administration to make real.

On October 26, half of Argentina’s representatives and one-third of senators will face voters at the ballot box. This is, on its own, fortunately unexceptional. Indeed, Argentina has been a solid democracy since 1983, when the last generals left the presidential palace.

Nonetheless, these midterm elections represent an existential challenge for Argentina. They are, de facto, a referendum on the economic reforms of President Javier Milei. Milei, who was inaugurated on December 10, 2023, had flamboyantly promised to take a chainsaw to public spending, to tame an inflation rate nearing 300 percent per year, and to set the economy back on the path of growth. As realistic as he is idealistic, Milei promised 18 months of suffering and austerity measures to fix a country that had been ravaged by Perónism. Where does Argentina stand?

A Bit of History

Before looking at contemporary Argentina, it makes sense to offer a bit of historical context. Argentina was the forgotten backwater of the Spanish empire in the Americas; it lacked gold or a local population to be enslaved. After independence in 1816, Argentina suffered through a half-century of pendulum swings between dictatorships and civil wars — neither of which is favorable to economic growth. In 1860, Argentina adopted an almost verbatim translation of the US Constitution of 1787. Miraculous growth ensued. By 1910, Argentina was the eighth richest country in the world, a living laboratory for the economic theories of Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Douglass North. Economic liberty, defense of contracts, freedoms of speech and religion — in sum, Argentina thrived under institutions that favored entrepreneurship and industrialization. Alas, Argentina didn’t quite have rule of law, but a ruling oligarchy with weak institutional safeguards. The first military coup came in 1930. There would be another 10 throughout the twentieth century, with a total of six military dictatorships (half the time, the military would simply evict the president and hold fresh elections).

The key factor for understanding the last century in Argentina is Perónism, a corporatism imported from Mussolini’s Italy, and given an Argentine flavor by Colonel (and future president) Juan Domingo Perón. Redistribution of wealth to buy friends and votes, populism, a corporatist balance of the country’s interest groups with an interventionist state as arbiter, five-year economic plans, and heavy regulation — these formed the new constitutional order. The eighth richest country in the world in 1910, Argentina suffered through a century of chronic hyperinflation, routine monetization of budget deficits, and economic crises — and fell to the rank of 68^th richest country in the world today. Argentina has also garnered the dubious honor of being the IMF’s greatest debtor (it now owes $57 billion). Despite the obvious economic damage, the Perónist instinct dies hard; in the decade before Milei’s election, the Perónists doubled down on their policies. Intervention after intervention, regulation, redistribution, all took their toll. The poverty rate, which had fallen to 20 percent in 1993, hit a high of 58 percent before settling at 45 percent in 2023. The debt-spending was financed by printing money to feed friends and clients; hyperinflation, which had been tamed in the 1990s, returned, and rose to almost 300 percent per annum by 2023. Worst of all, the Perónists systematically destroyed the country’s institutional checks and balances.

Milei was elected in 2023, with a mandate to solve the economic consequences of Perónism. But the Perónists remain powerful: they hold 108 seats (of 257) in the lower house and 33 (of 72) in the Senate, along with 16 governor’s mansions (out of 23 provinces). This past September, the Perónist candidate won 47 percent of the votes in the Buenos Aires province gubernatorial election (against 33 percent for Milei’s party). To be sure, this province has long been a stronghold of Perónism… but this still represents a challenge to Milei’s reforms.

Halfway Through Milei’s Term, Where Is Argentina?

On December 10, 2023, Javier Milei inherited an economic and institutional disaster. He has — of course! — not been able fully to fix a century of interventionist damage in the span of two short years. But, 22 months into his presidency, where does Argentina stand?

Because he lacks a congressional majority, Milei has had to impose reforms by emergency decree. Such decrees, according to the Argentine constitution, are valid for one year, and must have the consent of one the two legislative chambers.

Milei was thus able to cut public spending, notably by reducing the number of cabinet agencies by half, from 18 to 9. By taking a chainsaw to government spending, Milei eliminated the budget deficit, a chronic feature of Perónist Argentina. Public debt, which had reached 155 percent of GDP in 2023, has now fallen to 83 percent.

Perónism’s fiscal profligacy had dire monetary consequences, because the budget deficit was routinely monetized by the central bank, which had effectively become an arm of the Treasury. Milei inherited an annual inflation rate of 294 percent — which he has reduced to 34 percent (this would be unthinkable in the US, but is quite healthy by Argentine standards).

As a good economist (and economics professor), Milei has not focused exclusively on macroeconomics. He has also attacked microeconomic impediments, by removing the heaps of regulation that blocked growth and suffocated the economy. By emergency decree, Milei removed import controls and price controls. Notably, the real estate market was paralyzed by rent controls, mandatory three-year leases, and the inability to sign a lease using dollars (or any currency but the Argentine peso). One does not need a doctorate in economics to predict that the sad combination of regulation and hyperinflation would erode supply, as landlords faced the very real possibility of evaporated rents. Since Milei suspended rent controls, the price of rental housing in Argentina has fallen by 30 percent, and housing supply has increased by 212 percent.

Argentina’s risk premium has tumbled dramatically, and foreign investment has returned. After years of recession, economic growth is now at an enviable 6.3 percent. The middle class has surged, in two years, from 23 percent to 39 percent of the population. The 45 percent poverty rate Milei inherited from the Perónists temporarily rose to over 50 percent — Milei had indeed promised the pains of austerity — but has already fallen to 31 percent.

This is but a summary of Milei’s success.

There’s One More Thing

Unfortunately, there is one glaring omission in Milei’s reforms. 

He has allowed contracts to be signed in foreign currency and cryptocurrency. He has also imposed an amnesty for depositing the dollars that had been hidden in mattresses because of currency controls and the past freezing of dollar-denominated accounts. These are steps in the right direction. But he has not crossed the last Rubicon: the complete abolition of Argentina’s central bank — even though he had promised to wield his terrible swift chainsaw on it too. Closing the bank would have gotten rid of chronic hyperinflation, and opened the door to dollarization (which already exists de facto), or even currency competition, to replace the monetary cash cow.

Beyond the immediate economic benefit of taming and preventing hyperinflation, shutting down the central bank would represent the final nail in the coffin of Perónism. Indeed, all the good that Milei has brought to Argentina over the past two years could evaporate with one simple law or presidential decree if the Perónists return to power. Argentina would then relapse back into its perennial bad habits, with favors and votes purchased by redistribution, and budget deficits financed by the monetary printing press — in sum, a return to the predatory state of Perónism. Economist Emilio Ocampo (who had offered his services as the last president of Argentina’s central bank) explains that closing the central bank is the only method for Milei to show credible commitment to his reforms, and the only way to end the profligacy of Perónism.

These midterm elections are not merely a political footnote in the history of a troubled country. They are a veritable existential struggle between two forces. On one side, we have intervention, privilege, and a poverty that is as absurd as it is preventable. On the other, there is hope, progress, freedom, and prosperity.

President Donald Trump and his fellow economic nationalists never tire of insisting that ordinary Americans have been harmed by free trade. Mr. Trump sounded this theme in his first inauguration speech, when he alleged that “for many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry…. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon…. One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.”

A more recent appearance of this theme is in his administration’s brief to the US Supreme Court in support of the “Liberation Day” tariffs — a brief that reads in part as if it were dictated by Mr. Trump himself. That brief declares baldly that “without tariffs, we are a poor nation.” Because tariff rates generally fell for the 80 years prior to Mr. Trump’s first term in office, it follows from the president’s logic that Americans have been made poorer over those years — and especially since the mid-1970s when the United States began running what will soon be a half-century-long uninterrupted string of annual trade deficits.

Here at The Daily Economy and elsewhere, serious researchers have long and repeatedly offered straightforward evidence against this Trumpian thesis. For example, inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP is today at an all-time high, as are real wages. Also today at, or very near, their all-time highs are US industrial production, industrial capacity, and exports.

The rate of unemployment is quite low.

These facts alone suffice to discredit assertions that crafty foreigners have taken advantage of unpatriotic or weak officials in Washington to inflict economic depredations on ordinary Americans.

Yet no matter how unambiguous the data, or how frequently they are repeated, they seem unable to unseat the myth that Americans have been impoverished by free trade. Perhaps these data are too abstract, too ethereal, too academic.

So to assess the trend of American living standards over the past several decades, let’s look instead at data that are more concrete.

Ordinary Enrichments

1. Life Expectancy

Start with what is perhaps the single most important feature of living standards, namely, the amount of time we live to enjoy those standards. Life expectancy has risen. Life expectancy today is three percent longer than in 2000, five percent longer than in 1990, eight percent longer than in 1980, 12 percent longer than in 1970, and 13 percent longer than in 1960.

In light of this happy trend it’s no surprise that the percentage of the US population who are age 100 and older is today (2020) 78 percent larger than in 2000, twice as large as in 1990, 4.2 times larger than in 1980, 6.3 times larger than in 1970, and 8.3 times larger than in 1960.

Because life expectancy rises when wealth increases, Americans’ rising living standards are not only themselves a component of wealth, they also reflect Americans’ rising wealth.

2. Housing

Today, the average floor size of a new single-family home is 2,408 square feet. The floor size of this home is 6.3 percent larger than that of a new single-family home in 2000 (the year before China joined the World Trade Organization). It’s 16 percent larger than in 1990 (four years before the North American Free Trade Agreement was launched), 38 percent larger than in 1980 (five years after America last ran an annual trade surplus), 61 percent larger than in 1970, and 90 percent larger than in 1960.

This positive trend is even more impressive when accounting for the fall in the number of people who live in the average American household. Today, each resident of that household has 11 percent more square feet of living space than did a resident of an average new single-family home in 2000, 22 percent more space than in 1990, 53 percent more space than in 1980, 102 percent more space than in 1970, and 149 percent more space than in 1960.

I’m unable to find reliable data on the cubic footage of the average American home, and of how this measure has changed over time. (If you know of a source of such data, please share that source with me.) I’m willing to bet (literally!) that the average US home today not only has more square footage than it did in the past — say, in 1975 — but also more cubic footage.

Some of this increase in living space might be due to land-use restrictions that promote the building of single-family homes and discourage the building of multiple-family complexes. But because living space is a desirable good, the demand for which increases as people become wealthier, undoubtedly, some of this increase in living space reflects ordinary Americans’ increased prosperity. (Keep in mind also, however, that insofar as land-use restrictions result in the building of fewer houses, these restrictions make per-person housing occupancy higher than it would otherwise be.)

3. Automobiles

What about personal transportation? Today, just eight percent of US households own no automobile, while 59 percent own two or more automobiles. These figures are much better than in the past. In 2000, nine percent owned no car, and 57 percent owned two or more. In 1980, 13 percent of households were automobile-less, while 52 percent had two or more. In 1970, almost one in five US households (18 percent) owned no automobile, while only 35 percent owned two or more vehicles.

4. Groceries

Supermarkets today carry many more items than they did in the past. Estimates vary, but supermarkets now carry roughly 32,000 different items (with some estimates being over 40,000 items, and some even as high as 50,000), while in 1975 the number was around 9,000.

Innovation and Everything Else

One could go on, of course. Almost needless to say – but I’ll say it nevertheless – in 1975 almost no one owned a personal computer, and absolutely no one owned a smartphone. There was no Internet for ordinary people. Commercial air travel (which was still heavily regulated) was a luxury. Automobiles had no backup cameras, navigation screens, or keyless features. There was no streaming music. Most Americans had a choice of a whopping four broadcast television channels – and all television was low-def. Coffee quality was poor and the selection of beer was minuscule. There was no LASIK surgery. And luggage was true to its name: unable to roll, it had to be lugged. This list could be greatly extended.

There is simply no truth to the countless claims that Americans have been economically impoverished over the past few decades by freer trade and globalization.

Despite having brains that weigh less than a paperclip, bees seem to understand Economics 101. A single worker, beating its wings hundreds of times per second, can visit thousands of flowers per day to gather scarce resources of pollen and nectar for conversion into a valuable output — honey.

In this way, bees not only maintain their kind but create a surplus of honey that, in 2023, generated almost $9 billion of value for the global economy. That’s not even counting the spillover benefits bees create by pollinating crops.

Such success merits a case study, one in which democratic socialists, such as New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, might learn a lesson about economic efficiency.

At the 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America (virtual) Winter Conference, Mamdani told viewers that “it is socialism that we are fighting for…for every single person in this country and in this world.” That’s the socialist side of Mamdani. The democratic side comes in the presentation. He states with friendly winsomeness ideas that could have come from the mouth of Lenin or Marx (this is the same conference at which Mamdani spoke of “the end goal of seizing the means of production”). A smile never seems far from his face.

At times, the conference segment felt like a Bolshevik tent revival. One speaker called the audience “comrades” unironically. Discussion painted the human race in black and white, good and evil. Movements opposing boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning in the name of Palestine, for instance, were casually labeled “horrific” by Mamdani himself.

Among such dyed-in-the-neurons believers, textbook arguments for the capitalist system are unlikely to gain a fair hearing. A lesson from bees is worth a shot.

Unfortunately, the first lesson a socialist might take is one of collectivism. Individual workers own no honey, after all. It is a communal resource controlled by the hive’s governing hierarchy. But this insight is as banal as it is obvious. One might as well argue that bees demonstrate we should live under a matriarchal monarchy.

Looking closer at bee behavior reveals a more profound lesson.

Like on human farms, the workday starts early. When the weather is good, workers leave the hive around sunrise, fanning out for miles to forage for nectar and pollen. Individual bees not only possess a good memory for where they find it, but when they return to the hive, they dance, drawing the attention of other workers.

The “round dance” follows a simple, circular pattern to communicate the location of nearby food sources. The “waggle dance,” on the other hand, is more complex, done in a figure-eight pattern combined with a straight “waggle run.” Through multiple circuits, first in one direction, then the other, the dancing, waggling worker demonstrates how to find a far-off food source it has discovered. And the bigger the source, the more frenetic the dance.

It’s a little like in 1984 when Walmart achieved eight-percent pre-tax profit and the 65-year-old founder Sam Walton did the Hula on Wall Street, wearing a grass skirt and multiple leis, to make good on a wager with employees. The ratio of his business skills to dancing skills turned out to be remarkably large. At any rate, the bees’ dances are something more serious, honey being a matter of life and death for their hive.

The economic lesson is this. Because their survival depends on honey, bees know how to produce it efficiently. Information about how to find the inputs (nectar and pollen), for example, is processed at the level of individuals. The queen, being tended by underlings while killing off rivals, knows she has no business telling workers how to do their jobs. They are the entrepreneurs of the hive. They risk predators as they seek out fertile gathering grounds. Back at the hive, their dances compete for the attention of other bees, and operate like price signals in a market economy, directing investment of capital and effort (worker bees) into more profitable areas while discouraging it from less profitable areas.

In this way, the allocative order of a bee economy emerges dynamically from bottom-up agency rather than top-down planning. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith detailed a similar emergent order in human economies which operate on the principles of free markets and individual initiative. And three centuries of economic history since then have validated that these economies create the greatest collective wealth.

But unlike bees, humans face the possibility of this wealth-creating and freedom-promoting system being hijacked and thrown out by collectivist politicians. Their speeches, like Mamdani’s at the Young Socialists conference, are more about leveraging grievances than spreading understanding. Voiced with a scowl or a smile, they are equally dangerous to anyone who loves individual freedom.

American kids’ ability to focus is under a full-frontal assault, and it should be taken seriously as a national threat.

Attacks come from all sides: dopamine triggers and flashy apps, streaming services and immersive games, TikTok reels and endless doomscrolling.

Everybody’s talking about falling test scores and America’s ability to keep up with the rest of the world (especially the East) in its academic performance. But no amount of reform is worth a lick if kids can’t focus long enough to read a book.

To do anything of lasting value in life, one needs to be able to focus on their work. To understand anything complex, one needs to be able to focus on a train of logic. To think deeply and agentically about the course of one’s life … you get the idea.

To build a great country, you need a population that at a minimum can focus on something longer than a commercial.

Our civic system depends on it — our children-turned-adults will need to think in order to be informed stewards of a nation. And our changing economy demands it: in a world where mediocre work will increasingly be encroached on by AI, deeply focused work will likely be the thing that keeps people employed.

So: focus is important. But what do we do?

At first glance, this problem is neatly bundled under the broader debate about kids and screens. Pro-screen parents (and pundits) argue that kids need access to screens to keep up with the rest of the world; that they’ll be behind if they’re not digital natives, and that their friends have screens, so denying them access would equate to the destruction of their social lives.

Anti-screen parents (and pundits) clap back that kids having access to screens is bad for their mental health; that kids can be exposed to all sorts of inappropriate and dangerous things via screens (adult content, exploitation, and grooming, with a whole alphabet of inappropriate hedonisms in between); and that kids deserve to have a childhood, unplugged as nature intended.

These are all good and valid points, and are all compelling reasons why parents should think twice about screen access. But on the issue of focus, it isn’t just screens, and it isn’t all forms of screens. 

Screens indeed appear to be taking a (sizeable) toll: studies show that higher screen exposure at 18 months can predict a toddler’s worse ability to focus at 22 months, and that kids ages 6-10 with over two hours of screen time a day have more attention deficits. Increased screen time (especially that with fast-paced content, like flashy games and social media reels) is associated with an inability to sustain concentration and hyperactivity symptoms.

None of this is exactly a surprise. It’s intuitive that spending all day on screens reduces our ability to focus. Most of us have experienced it ourselves — the simultaneously pleasant and ominous feeling of the doomscroll slowly eroding away our brain cells, carrying them off into the algorithmic river, like rain stealing midwestern soil into the Big Muddy.

But nothing in kids’ lives builds the muscle of focus, either, as an antidote against the erosion caused by fast-cut content. Even classrooms with their 45-minute periods and interrupting bells are at odds with true focus: 45 minutes is only enough time for shallow, cursory productivity. It gives the illusion of being productive, but it’s not true focus. It’s not enough space to build the deep work muscle Cal Newport made famous in his requiem on focus and productivity.

Those 45-minute classes are the “deeply focused” pinnacle of a kid’s day. They’re good training for a lifetime spent in busywork — the middle-manager’s day of infinite meetings and a hydra of Slack messages. But they’re not very good training for the focus muscle.

To be able to focus, kids need to spend time simultaneously building their muscle for focus and avoiding things that atrophy it again — like getting fit by working out and avoiding empty calories. It’s a double-edged sword.

The enemy here, as you may begin to see, is less in the medium (classrooms? screens?), and more in the span (30-second videos? 45-minute periods?). The screens are less the devil himself, more his preferred medium of access.

Saying “screen time is destroying kids’ ability to focus” is like saying “grocery stores are making people fat.” Some of the things sold in grocery stores can make people fat (most things in the middle aisles are bad for one’s waistline if not consumed moderately). But if you shop around the edges, you can spend your whole life eating from the grocery store and be healthy and lean. 

In the same way, a lot of the cheap, empty-calorie content in the middle aisles of the internet will destroy kids’ (and adults’) ability to focus. It’s bad for you. But the stuff around the edges is actually nutrient-dense and muscle-building. You can use it (and should use it) and still have a healthy and vital focus muscle.

Not all screen time is created equal. FaceTiming Grandma, who lives two states away, is a fantastic use of screen time. Watching YouTube shorts is not. A four-year-old learning to write by using an iPad to text her friend is a virtuous use of screen time. Cocomelon is… probably not.

The nuance that gets lost in the anti-screens argument is that screens can be immensely good for kids. Screens are the access portal for extremely valuable things. For example, the AI platform developed by Alpha School, TimeBack, lets kids move through their Common Core materials at their own pace — which results in them often moving two or three (or more) times faster than public school kids.

The entire platform is screen-based, and it’s hard to argue with its utility and virtue.

The problem isn’t even platform-specific. Khan Academy was originally hosted on YouTube; thousands upon thousands of academic lectures and interviews still are. But YouTube also hosts chintzy, flashy, thirty-second shorts that can suck the unsuspecting into a spiral of intravenous dopamine shots and psychological despair.

It’s funny how human nature is omnipersistent, how in Homer’s allegory of the sirens luring sailors into the smothering depths he could have been describing our relationship with our screens, just 2500 years too early. The ocean was not bad; the sirens were. So too are the platforms and the demons who live within them.

Ray Girn (career Montessorian and serial school founder) has repeatedly said that he’d rather have his children watch a ninety-minute Disney movie than spend ninety minutes on social media. The latter gives them quick, unrelated dopamine hits; the former is a ninety-minute exercise in focus. Movies have long character arcs and plot twists to keep track of. They’re still entertainment, but they engage a valuable part of the brain.

By this standard, a ninety-minute movie is also measurably better than ninety minutes spent watching fifteen-minute episodes of a kids’ show — because it demands a longer window of focus. It builds the muscle.

Kids need to know how to focus, because they’ll rely on that skill for the rest of their lives. The modern world, more than ever, requires a strong muscle: everything is fighting to grab hold of your attention, while the persistent truth — that the types of effort that lead to an abundant life require focus — remains unbroken.

Even being a social media content creator requires focus (the number one thing kids now say they want to be when they grow up, replacing “astronaut” as the twenty-first century pinnacle of childhood dreaming). Making videos that go viral requires a lot more attention than just watching them. You have to ideate, film (often complicated sequences), edit, and refine.

Focus is a muscle. Cheap calories atrophy it, deliberate exercise strengthens it, and our kids need to build it. In the same way we encourage sports and PE to tone the body, so too do we need to encourage long blocks of focus to tone the mind. Kids need to read books, spend hours in free play, listen to long lectures. They need to replace the metaphorical pop song with the metaphorical symphony. They need long blocks of time, not constant interruptions.

We can reform the education system all we want, but it will only be worth something if kids’ minds are strong enough to take advantage of it.