“Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”

And, you know, creating a version of Google for students that doesn't incorporate AI is just incompatible with their plans to recruit young customers too hard to do.

This from the same company that cannot produce a genAI product that doesn't easily facilitate cheating. Guided Learning is supposed to get students to Learn Stuff rather than just using a cheatbot (spoiler alert: it's still just a cheatbot).

But Google, the folks who previously declared internally that its school products were intended to create a pipeline of future users, really really really really REALLY want to put AI in front of the 70 million future users sitting in schools. They have just had a "negative cash flow quarter" thanks to massive AI spending. That is further exacerbated by the discovery that this AI-incorporated search that they want to force on students actually makes less money than the old approach.

Look, if you are of a Certain Age, you might still harbor the quaint notion that Google's main business is running a search engine. It is not; the New Google's (the post "Don't Be Evil" Google) main business is advertising. But we tend to be sensitive about the idea of turning over young minds and eyeballs to advertisers, so it has been useful for Google to wear its Ed Tech mask when approaching schools.

Only the Ed Tech mask won't cover up AI, and educators and parents and even students have been pretty clear that they'd rather not give children unfettered access to AI products. 

This is a hell of a bold move for Google, considering that there are plenty of other search engines in the world.

I expect that many other tech companies will be whipping up a counter-Google education campaigns by end of business today.  I can only hope that this piece of evil thuggery will blow up in Google's piggy corporate faces, and I certainly intend to share with my own local school district how I think they should respond. 

I will vote today. I always vote; I am what political operatives call a super-voter, a person who has voted in every election he was ever eligible to vote in, and therefore can be counted on to vote next time, so aiming a megaphone of electioneering at him might not be a waste of time. Today, I only vote in three races, and none of them have any great significance because it would be a huge shock and surprise if they didn't go the way they are expected to go. Josh Shapiro seems hard to beat, and my state and US House members-- well, in my area, if Jesus registered as a Democrat and ran against a drowned rat registered as a Republican, I would not bet against the rat.

Anyway, I will still vote, because that's what good citizens do-- they vote. No matter what. No matter the outcome.

But I won't vote until after I pick up the Board of Directors from school, because they always vote with me. Not in the actual election. But in my county, someone decided years ago to start offering ballots to children.

The children vote on issues like favorite type of cookie or best pet or best way to spend vacation. They vote on a special ballot, hand it in, and in a week or so, the local newspaper/website will publish the results. 

One actual result of this is that the Board knows what an election is, how it the voting place is laid out, how one approaches it, waits one's turn, signs your name, marks a ballot-- the whole business. When the day comes that they can vote in the real election, it will be exciting, but it will also be familiar and unintimidating.

Yes, their teachers sometimes run election simulations. But this gives kids exposure to the real thing, the whole business of voting. No mystery. No fear.

And as a bonus, thanks to some of my former colleagues, some high school students are spending the day as volunteers at polling places.

The cost of this Young Voter Education Program is minimal. There's some non-zero number of man-hours used to tabulate. There's the copier paper used to make the ballots. That's about it. 

So my hat's off today to county officials who hit on a simple but effective method of educating the next generation of voters about how the process works and helping them prepare for the day when they can try to execute their obligations as US citizens. 

Economists are frequently accused of being advocates for unfettered and unregulated laissez-faire markets, but anyone who has ever taken a basic introductory economics class knows that this caricature is untrue. The basic intro econ class does spend time on explaining what markets do well. It also spends considerable time on the category of “market failures” where markets often do not do so well, including externalities like pollution, investment in public goods, poverty and inequality, provision of information, encouraging competition rather than monopoly, and other categories. But as Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman point out in “Against laissez-faire democracy” (Economics & Philosophy 2026, pp. 1–17), many of these conceptual problems arise, albeit in different forms, in democratic elections as well. Thus, arguments in favor of rules and regulations to govern the operation of economic markets are also aguments for rules and regulations to govern elections. For example, they write:

“First, good governance itself suffers from public good problems.” For economists a “public good” is something where just about everyone benefits, but it is hard to charge the beneficiaries individually, and so the good is often underprovided. Examples would incluede scientific knowledge, national defense, and highways. For voting, the public good would be voters who take sufficient time and energy to become well-informed about issues and candidates, because society as a whole would benefit from them making such efforts.

“Second, voting clearly suffers from information and asymmetric information problems. For one, empirical work on voter knowledge overwhelmingly finds that many to most voters are ignorant, not merely of the specific social scientific knowledge needed to form policy opinions, but of the most basic political information, such as general social trends, how their government works, what parties and candidates propose to do and who their incumbent election officials are and what they did while in office … While most voters have low information, most politicians and government officers have high information. Just as auto mechanics, used car salespeople, medical doctors, dentists, roofing inspectors, and other market agents could use their differential knowledge to exploit or defraud consumers, political parties and candidates could use their differential knowledge to exploit or defraud voters. For instance, since voters are generally incompetent to engage in retrospective voting, politicians are liberated to make campaign promises they do not intend to keep. … Relatedly and more generally, principal-agent problems occur in democratic elections as well. In governments, realistically, politicians, bureaucrats, and other have a significant independence and only limited and attenuated oversight from voters. Just as the president of a company or the Gen-Ed committee of a university can use their appointed power for self-promotion, so can elected government agents. …”

“It’s an open question whether political competition would be most efficient if it mimicked competitive markets, or whether instead less than fully competitive political competition is best. Nevertheless, in many places, political competition is high constrained. For instance, in the United States, thanks to first-past-the-postvoting, only two parties have any real chance of winning any election. Further, government itself is by nature overwhelming monopolistic. All things equal, in markets, we expect reduced competition to lead to lower quality and higher prices; reduced competition between suppliers usually benefits suppliers at the expense of consumers. We should expect this applies to politics as well. If we think of the parties and candidates as suppliers and voters as buyers/consumers, then the party duopoly and government monopoly should reduce quality and increase costs. It should tend to benefit suppliers (elected officials and government agents) at the expense of consumers (voters).”

“Finally, democracies also suffer from obvious externality problems. Indeed, this is the key difference between markets and politics. Market decisions are usually and mostly internalized; negative externalities are seen as an anomaly to be corrected. Political decisions are by nature public. For instance, about 37% of the eligible voting public, and 26% of the entire population of the UK voted in favour of Brexit, but the effects of Brexit are borne by everyone else, including losing voters, eligible voters who abstained, children and other citizens ineligible to vote, future generations, and foreigners.” Similarly, an existing renter can vote for rent control, without bearing costs of future renters who will be unable find an apartment.

What sort of regulation of voting and democracy do the authors have in mind? Their tone is deliberately non-radical and experimental here–more about possible policies to be considered rather than hard-edged advocacy. They write:

Consider the problem of public goods. The standard market ‘fix’ is to tax, compel, or provide subsidies to ensure provision. The democratic analogue, which would preserve equality, would be to create participatory incentives, such as stipends for voting or taxes and penalties for non-voting. It could include some sort of reward (or penalty) system for engaging with low-burden information deliveries, such as nonpartisan voter guides.

With regard to information asymmetries, the standard market fix is to have mandatory disclosure and labelling laws – such as nutrition and ingredients lists on food – as well as licensing providers (e.g., medical doctors). Governments could require standardized,i ndependently audited candidate disclosures. Governments could require public registration of campaign promises, which are then monitored and fact-checked by independent boards. Access to public debates and public funding of campaigns could depend on compliance with transparency rules. The standard fix for principal-agent problems is to require and monitor fiduciary duties with third-party auditing. Here, the democratic analogue would be to have public promise trackers with sanctions for deceptive claims, such as fines or media scorecards. Public performance scorecards – such as promise-keeping – could determine eligibility for public campaign funding.

The standard fix for problems of bounded and limited rationality is to control the choice architecture and change the default rules. The democratic analogue would be neutral language and uniform ballot designs. Questions and candidates should be listed in randomized order with plain-language summaries. There could be automatic delivery of voter guides and automatic voter registration with opt-out clauses. Ballots could quiz citizens of their preferred policies and map them onto the registered policy-platforms of parties and candidates.

The standard fix for problems of externalities is to impose Pigouvian taxes, quotas and caps, or pollution and emissions standards. The democratic analogue might to be to have narrow output safeguards for certain democratic decisions. This could include requiring supermajorities for some decisions, judicial review for others, or subjecting some democratic decisions to independent expert review with some sort of veto capability that could later be overturned with a supermajority. The standard fix for problems of limited competition is to impose antitrust rules and to ensure platform neutrality. The democratic analogue would be to have great ballot access equalization, and more transparent and neutral inclusion rules for
debates.

An obvious concern about rules and regulations to govern elections is that they are likely to be captured by special interests or political parties. Would Democrats favor a set of rules to be run and monitored by minions of President Trump? Would Republicans have favored a set of rule to be run and monitored by minions of President Biden? But as the authors point out, there’s a kicker here. If you are not willing to consider trust rules and regulations to facilitate elections, because of concerns over how they will be implemented, then you should have similar concerns over how government run and implement economic regulations as well. The authors write about the idea of regulating democracy: “Note that the burden here, as with market regulation, is not to show that regulation will decisively solve all problems, but rather than it will perform adequately, with the benefits exceeding the costs. (We doubt most readers think that market regulation must be perfect and problem-free to be justified. They should apply this same standard here.)”

The post The Challenges of Laissez-Faire Democracy first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Martin Luther King Jr., considered alongside Abraham Lincoln one of this country’s greatest orators and an even greater humanitarian, had a dream. Donald Trump, who can’t string three words together without slurring syllables, insulting his audiences, and giving new meaning to the word “obscenity,” had a grudge. They went to the same place, the Lincoln Memorial, and stood overlooking the Reflecting Pool, and they told the world what was on their minds.

Martin Luther King’s mind in 1963 was consumed with the travails of those who arose in the morning and struggled to earn enough money to feed their families, who lived lives beset by the stain and strain of racism, and who nevertheless endured and endeavored to maintain dignity and faith in the possibilities of democracy.

Donald Trump’s mind, what remains of it, was consumed with perceived crimes against himself by persons who are not sufficiently in his thrall, who appear unready to do what he tells them to do with their lives and vote the way he tells them to vote. In a speech today at the reflecting pool, Trump held up pictures of the algae bloom that sprang to life immediately after his own “pool guy” he assigned to the task without competitive bidding, applied a sealant to the bottom of the reflecting pool that Trump himself had specified. Trump had a young aide at his side who had a look on his face that said he wanted to be anywhere in the world except where he found himself today. The aide displayed photos chosen by Trump that told a story he had also chosen, of vandals that did damage to the reflecting pool that his own Parks Service had disavowed and that a federal judge had ruled didn’t happen.

The speech was supposed to be his closing remarks the day before American citizens go to the polls to vote in the midterm elections. Trump had spent the month of October crisscrossing the United States speaking at ill-attended rallies to get out the vote for House and Senate candidates who should not have needed his support, and for many of whom his presence in their states and districts was unwanted. Trump’s speech today was intended to put an exclamation point on the MAGA movement he has spent 10 years building.

It took him 23 minutes of whining and complaining and bragging and lying about his over-budget, disaster-prone work on the reflecting pool to get around to talking about tomorrow’s election. He made his empty promise of a $5,000 bribe for every American adult if Republicans win their elections. He bragged that he had “given this a very strong shot,” but whined that “for some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms.” He called Democrats “extreme” and “dangerous,” of course.

Then he went back to talking about the reflecting pool and the triumphal arch he wants to build a few hundred yards away that will dwarf the Lincoln Memorial and cast long shadows over the graves of veterans in Arlington National Cemetery. Naturally, he mentioned the “championship” golf course he wants to build in a park along the Potomac River where several public courses and a miniature golf course already exist and will have to be torn down if lawsuits fail to stop his plans.

I find myself utterly confounded by the task of trying to capture in the English language how utterly bizarre Trump’s speech was today. There have been so many speeches, so many lies, so much butchering of history and rectitude and moral decency and the democratic ideal that mere words seem sadly inadequate. The photo above captures some but not all of the madness.

Absurd? Insane?

He’s our president. He is so proud of the millions of dollars he wasted on that reflecting pool, he is considering naming it after himself.

He wants your vote. You know what to do.

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Tuesday night is going to be a very bad night for the regime. So is Wednesday. And Thursday, and every day for the next couple of weeks, as the ballots are counted and seat after seat flips from red to blue. Sometimes it will be a purple or light red seat. Sometimes it will be a seat Republicans gerrymandered that they thought was safe. All too often, it’s going to be a deep red seat in a deep red state that was supposed to be safe. Nowhere is safe.

Republicans are going to lose control of the Senate. They’re going to lose control of the House. When the dust settles, Democrats will pick up several state trifectas, and Republicans will lose their iron grip on several others. Trump knows this is coming, and nothing he can do will stop it. In fact, he is the specific reason for it.

I’m going to pause a minute to ask you, very politely, to support this newsletter. These are dark times, and I write to help you cope with the evil permeating our country. I will never lie to you about how dangerous our world is. I will never sugarcoat what is happening. I will also never surrender to doomerism because I know that fascism always fails. If my writing informs, infuriates, or entertains (and preferably all three), please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today (or maybe next week!). For just $5 a month or $50 a year, you will keep this newsletter going until the last fascist flees to Russia.

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For two years, Trump has done nothing but make himself and his billionaire buddies rich while stripping public services from Americans who need them the most, including his own voters. Especially his own voters. It’s known that Republicans despise their own base but, holy shit, in all the time I’ve been writing about American politics, I have NEVER seen such open loathing for the average Republican voter. I hate those ignorant, racist motherfuckers with a burning passion and, still, I’m pretty sure Donald Trump and his regime of Nazi fucks hate them even more. It’s impressive and impressively suicidal.

Since waddling back into the Oval Office, the Treasonous Toddler-in-Chief has made everything more expensive. Housing. Clothes. Groceries. Electronics. Cars. Toys. Literally everything costs more now while he spends billions of OUR money on vanity projects that no one gives a fuck about. A ballroom. A golf course. An arch. Slapping cheap gold plating and his dick name on everything he can.

Trump has also made billions, literal billions and bragged about how rich he’s getting. Wages are falling behind inflation. Job creation has dried up. Millions are going hungry. But Donald Trump wants you to know, frequently wants you to know, just how rich he and his fellow billionaires are getting.

Democratic early voting is through the roof while Republican turnout is sharply down in almost every state. I’m not talking about mail-in voting. Actual, in-person voting. Of course, Republicans could suddenly pour out of the woodwork to vote on Tuesday buuuuut…why? What have Republicans given them to vote for? More war in the Middle East? Persistent inflation? The largest economic bubble in history that is strangling the rest of the economy? A bubble we all know is going to pop soon and will somehow “need” a trillion-dollar bailout while the rest of us are told to fuck off? Rural hospitals closed? School lunches cut? Massive increases to healthcare costs?

Truly, we may never learn the mystery of why Republicans are about to get absolutely fucking destroyed all across the nation. Destroyed in numbers so large and indisputable that all of the regime’s plans to overturn the results will be laughed out of even Trump-friendly courts.

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Trump knows it’s coming. So do the rest of the filthy fascists in his regime. They are not planning for two years of compromise and working with Democrats for the good of the country. They are planning to run the country by executive order, much like they’ve been doing already:

Senior officials, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and budget director Russell Vought, have been working with the ‌White House Counsel’s Office since April to identify executive actions on immigration, tariffs, housing costs, and federal spending that Trump could pursue without congressional approval, said the three people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The difference, of course, is that without a Republican Congress to rubber-stamp or look the other way, ruling like an emperor becomes much more difficult. The Supreme Court will naturally sign off on as much of the regime’s agenda as possible. But they can only write so many blank checks. Everything else will be tied up for weeks and months in the regular court system. A court system, it should be noted, that is beyond tired of the regime’s bullshit.

This is really important. While the six most corrupt justices in American history will roll over for almost anything put in front of them by the regime, regular judges, including not a small number of judges appointed by Trump, are increasingly telling the regime to go fuck itself. The reason for this is that the regime got rid of all of the real lawyers, and the ones that are left are very VERY bad at their jobs as well as incredibly arrogant. Walking into a judge’s courtroom, again, even a Trump judge, and effectively telling them, “Fuck you, we do whatever we want!” is a really good way to piss off a judge. Pissed-off judges have a habit of pushing back. Hard.

Maybe the regime should have thought of that over these last two years. Too fucking late now. Now, everything the fascist little shitstains want to do moves forward at a crawl, and they can’t afford that. They had two years to overthrow democracy, and they failed. They fucked around. Now comes the find-out part.

The thing to remember after this is that we will no longer be dealing with a government. Hell, it won’t even be a wannabe authoritarian regime. Not really. The next two years will be a combination of pure kleptocracy and systemic sabotage. Everyone in the regime will be looking to fill their pockets with whatever is not nailed to the floor and set whatever is left on fire.

The goal will be to loot the country and leave behind a smoking husk for Democratic President 2029. The idea is that if everything is on fire, like, for instance, the country is in the middle of a dangerous war and an economic crisis with its institutions completely hollowed out and dysfunctional, Democrats will be too busy dealing with the multiple crises to come after the criminals of the regime. And by the time any kind of stability is restored, the public, with its notoriously short attention span, will have no appetite for accountability. Hell, if Republicans and their fascist collaborators at the New York fucking Times and the rest of the legacy press play their cards right, they could even convince the public to vote Republicans back into power!

It worked in 2010; just two years after Republicans left the country in ruins, the GOP won a huge midterm victory. It worked again in 2016. 2022 (barely). And again in 2024. Sure, Republicans had to spend billions and lean on Russia and China for election interference, but so what? Spend a few billion to make hundreds of billions. The return on investment is fantastic!

Our job will be to walk and chew gum at the same time. While we are repairing/restoring/replacing/reimagining everything the fascist fuckwads have ransacked and ruined, we have to also, without delay, drag them kicking and screaming (and preferably bleeding) before a tribunal. Even as we are dealing with the worst economic crisis in a century and white nationalist riots and RFK Jr.’s epidemic legacy, we have to hold trials that will make Nuremberg look like a pleasant Q&A session. So many regime rapists, murderers, and thieves have to go to prison that the rest will live out their miserable lives in terror that the next knock on their door will be the consequences for “just following orders.”

All of that starts Tuesday night as the blue wave sweeps over the country, washing out the Nazi filth. The midterm massacre is here. And Trump knows it. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists and their enablers in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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