Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of a bursting AI investment bubble is pretty scary, especially to those of us approaching retirement. The recent boom in private capital spending seems to be the major thing propping up the US economy. The short-term stimulus effect is fairly obvious, but the question is whether the longer-term productivity effects the markets seem to be expecting are going to show up before the markets lose patience.

Most hopeful story: A carbon price is still a very good idea, even if propaganda has pushed this idea out of the headlines we see on a daily basis. About 30% of the world’s carbon emissions have a price on them, which is more than I would have thought. Several comprehensive academic analyses suggest the carbon price should be in the range of $100-165 per metric ton. Only a few countries are at this level, but the fact that many countries actually have the legal and administrative mechanism for a carbon price in place seems hopeful to me. It proves that when we are being led to believe these policies are politically impossible in the United States, this is in fact just effective propaganda. Political winds can and do shift, particularly when a crisis becomes obvious (I am not hoping for one), and the rational policy options are waiting in the wings.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I encountered a proposal called “targeted sufficiency“: “a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, a large shift in consumption from material to immaterial sectors (education/health), and a substantial change in food habits, allowing for a strict deforestation ban and a gradual return of global forest cover to the 1900 level…global convergence of all countries to 60k Euros 2025 PPP in per capita GDP by 2100”.