We already see this with many affluent people of retirement age, who choose to continue to work because they find it rewarding in a psychological sense rather than the need for added income. It is not that AI is going to make some jobs obsolete in the way the electric light bulb destroyed the business of most candle makers, but AI eventually will destroy almost every job that now exists. New but unknown jobs will emerge - in the same way that thousands of textile mill workers’ jobs disappeared, but many more jobs were created using computer software. The AI explosion has been causing me to rethink what I have been doing. I have been writing this weekly column for more than 20 years because I enjoy expressing my opinions on economics, politics, history, foreign policy and science to a broader audience. Many of the things we do in life are the results of unplanned opportunities or accidents. Most teenagers give some thought as to the future they would like to have - being a star athlete, scientist or whatever. Some lucky people find a passion early on (such as medicine) that is financially rewarding and keeps them intellectually stimulated well into their later years. Others flounder around for years, never finding a comfortable role. And some of us go through life always looking for new challenges and willing to take risks. As one who has had a variety of careers (in academia, government, public policy, international economic development, building new businesses, etc.) I have decided to take some time to rethink what I want to do and how best to make a contribution.

A colleague, who is a fine economist, had been doing work on monetary issues and mentioned to me that by using ChatGPT he was able to improve and speed up his work product. So I decided to give it a try, and I asked ChatGPT to “write a 700-word essay about Richard Rahn’s views on taxing capital gains.” The result was astounding. Within seconds, the computer wrote a very fine essay, correctly presenting my arguments and those of critics, all drawn from the many papers and articles I have written on the topic over more than four decades. I then asked it to write an essay about my work regarding the size of government and economic growth. Again, within seconds, I was presented with an excellent essay ? perhaps better and more complete than I could write now ? even though it was all based on things I had written over the years. After experimenting further with ChatGPT, I concluded that it is useful and reasonably accurate in dealing with questions and topics where there are many papers for it to draw from (such as the problem with capital gains taxes or the optimum size of government), and almost useless and not very accurate in dealing with topics that have limited source material, such as the biographies of people who are not famous. Wikipedia is much more useful for such inquiries. Many companies are developing specific-use as well as general-use AI programs and tools, and as a result, AI’s usefulness and accuracy are growing at an exponential rate and probably will continue to do so for years to come. Elon Musk and others have argued that eventually, AI and robots will be able to do almost all jobs, so increasingly, people will “go to work” only out of the pleasure they get from a job rather than as a financial necessity.

Now we have many young men, untethered by school or a job, and most importantly, an intact family, who are living on welfare. The labor force participation rate for women is, on average, about 12 points lower than for men, and the rate for Black men is, on average, about 4 points lower than for white men. Yet the labor force participation for Black women is about 3 points higher than for White women. This probably reflects the fact that marriage rates for Black women are lower than for White women, which means that more of them need to support themselves. Back in 1973, George Gilder (who has written important and bestselling books on economics and technology) wrote Sexual Suicide, in which he correctly foresaw and predicted the breakdown of the family and what would happen to young men who were no longer under the control of a mother or strong father who lived with them, or a wife. While women tend to be stabilizing and civilizing, young men under no one’s control are often highly destructive to both society and themselves. Future advances promise to cure almost all diseases and even reverse aging. The productivity advances brought about by chemistry and robots are on the verge of providing enough to eliminate hunger and human drudgery. There is an undereducated and undisciplined portion of the population that is benefiting from many of the advances of the technological revolution but contributing almost nothing of value to it. If these destructive and dysfunctional parts of the population are allowed to grow, they may well bring down the golden city on the hill.

Robots are rapidly taking over many tasks that people thought impossible for a machine to do ? including written content that appears in newspapers and elsewhere. Think about jobs that you had in the past that can or soon will be done by machines. All of that miserable work was automated long ago. Much manufacturing, like auto assembly, has long been automated, and transportation is becoming increasingly automated by self-driving trucks and passenger vehicles. With each wave of machines replacing people, there are always claims that there will be no jobs in the future ? yet new jobs always appear. In England, in 1811, a rebellion began of textile workers ? known as Luddites ? who feared the new textile factories were destroying their jobs. Over time, the name has come to mean a person opposed to labor-saving new technologies. The U.S. is faced with a curious situation where there is a so-called labor shortage, yet the labor force participation rate has been falling since March 2000 after having risen for most of the previous 30 years. There is no labor shortage; there is merely a shortage of people with the requisite skills willing to work for the wages businesses are offering. Many people are choosing leisure over work because the financial benefits they receive from not working exceed the after-tax benefits and the loss of freedom from having a regular job. Traditionally, about 90% of men aged 25 to 54 were in the labor force. Teenagers and young adults still in school have always had lower labor force participation rates than adults.

Marriage is on the decline everywhere. The institution seems destined to go the way of the dodo. Now, barely 50% of adults live with a spouse ― the lowest percentage ever recorded. In 1960, 45% of adults 18 to 24 (prime childbearing years) were married. By 2016, that figure had fallen to 6%, and with it our fertility rate, which is well below replacement level. Even more than open borders, the left has a vested interest in the disappearance of marriage and the family. Married couples are more future-oriented. They think about the impact of policies not just on their own lives but those of their children and grandchildren. That makes them naturally more conservative. The left’s war on marriage and the family started with Karl Marx, who considered marriage legalized prostitution and slavery for women. In 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx called for the abolition of the family. From Marxism-Leninism to cultural Marxism, the left has always viewed marriage and the family as chief obstacles to the revolution. The bond between husband and wife undercuts loyalty to the collective. Marriage affects everything. Married couples are healthier, happier, safer and more prosperous than their single counterparts. They also create the best environment for raising children. The woke mob hates marriage and the family for the same reason Lenin did: because they provide an alternative to the all-encompassing state. The future of civilization depends on fighting for marriage. To do that effectively, we must first understand that its decline isn’t accidental but carefully orchestrated to advance the revolution.

Russia views the Middle East as a key element in its new foreign policy. First, Syria is home to a critical Russian navy warm-water port. Second, Iran is a key conduit for Russian trade and arms. With Russia’s economy under severe Western sanctions, Moscow needs every trading partner it can get. Third, these proxies allow Moscow to operate in the Middle East and complicate American plans. Fourth, Russia has the largest Muslim population in Europe. By being involved in this region, Moscow believes it can mitigate any potential terrorist threats from within its own territory. Russia needs access to the region, and Iran and Syria make such access possible. If the regime of either country were overthrown by the West, Russia would lose a significant amount of access, and its foreign policy would be seriously damaged. As long as Moscow believes that it will not benefit from a regional war in the Mideast between its proxies and the West, Iran will stay its hand. No matter what is done to Iran, so long as Russia induces Iran to stay in its hands, Tehran likely will resist its urge for revenge. This is because Russia and Iran need each other to survive. Of course, these calculations can change. But for now, Iran is being restrained. The danger is that neither Israeli nor American deterrence is really holding Iran back. It is only the whims of the mercurial Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and his siloviki. Once Moscow feels it can afford to let its proxy run rampant, that is when Iran will initiate a war against Israel. But the restraint that Russia is imposing on Iran has the salutary effect of allowing a real cease-fire to occur between Israel and Hamas.

The leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh’s death was part of a larger hit allegedly orchestrated by the Israelis targeting key leaders of Hamas, the Lebanese Shiite terror organization Hezbollah and even senior leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. All of these were indirect shots at the leadership of Iran, which is itself in a shadow war with the predominantly Jewish democracy of Israel. The geopolitical chessboard was set for a massive retaliation by Iran and its terrorist proxies, directed not only against Israel but also against American targets in nearby Iraq and Syria (where the U.S. military has maintained small outposts since the end of the Iraq War). Indeed, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told an uneasy world that “revenge is our duty,” adding that the “terrorist occupiers would regret their cowardly action.” Iran then went about flagrantly moving missiles and drones into attack position. Its Houthi proxies in Yemen did the same. Hezbollah appeared to be on the brink of hitting Israel. And then … nothing. No one, neither the Israelis nor the U.S. Navy, is the reason for Iran’s reluctance to retaliate in the way that they’ve promised. Instead, one nation in the world is restraining the Iranians: Russia. In an era where Moscow is the great villain, for various reasons, Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his regime have taken it upon themselves to quietly rein in their irate Iranian proxy. The Russians have spent this time essentially building a layered defense around Iran to degrade the ability of Israel (and the U.S. military) to threaten Iran with airstrikes. But Russia has been restraining Iran for a while.

The world is in a dramatic energy transition. But it isn’t the one progressives want it to be. Despite hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars spent on wind and solar power, less than 10% of our energy comes from green sources. The real energy transition is toward natural gas. Natural gas is now less expensive than water. This natural gas revolution has happened because of modern drilling technologies, including horizontal drilling and fracking. That technology keeps getting better and will continue to keep the price low for decades to come. Meanwhile, natural gas has all the attributes of a wonder fuel. It is abundant, clean-burning, reliable and cheap. The United States has at least 200 years’ worth of natural gas. Environmentalists should celebrate the natural gas revolution: It is by far the largest reason that carbon dioxide emissions have fallen dramatically in the United States and that our air is cleaner today than ever in 100 years. At the same time, we’ve found that windmills and solar panels are far from the clean energy that we had hoped it would be. We have graveyards of retired toxic plastic and steel wind turbines that must be buried in landfills or dumped in the ocean. As we transition to more electric vehicles and hybrids, natural gas is the obvious source of electricity to power those batteries. So why is the climate change industrial complex against natural gas when it is the long-term solution (combined with nuclear power) to the world’s energy needs? Progressives are afraid of gas because they’ve bet on the wrong horse and have foolishly invested hundreds of billions of dollars of their own and taxpayer money in these unproductive technologies.

Mr. Putin also withdrew from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. The Russian president might not have planned it this way, because he clearly expected Ukraine’s government to topple quickly when his forces showed up in early 2022. Now Mr. Putin has emerged as the midwife for this century’s axis of tyranny. Together, these four rogue states constitute a wickedly challenging and exponentially growing threat to U.S. national security. They may be long-term strategic rivals, but their partnership will endure for at least as long as Mr. Putin is trapped in his losing war in Ukraine. And that’s just one more reason why it’s imperative that Ukraine get all the support it needs to defeat Russia. China, Iran and North Korea need to swallow some serious buyer’s remorse over their decision to take up with Russia. NATO, under U.S. leadership, must ensure Ukraine triumphs and recovers all the territory Russia illegally annexed by force. The U.S. is spending a tiny fraction (roughly 5%) of its defense budget in an effort to cut the Russian army down to size. Ukraine is on the front lines defending Europe and the rights of free people everywhere. The Biden administration can thank Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his courageous nation for awakening the West and NATO from their post-Cold War slumber. But let’s also be clear about the horrific consequences to the global economy and our national security if we fail to take advantage of this last best chance to defeat the Kremlin and break apart this century’s axis of tyranny.

Russia is reportedly on the verge of sending its sophisticated SA-22 air defense system to Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy terrorist group in Lebanon, and has reportedly provided Iran with advanced military equipment, including helicopters and air defense. Iranian pilots have been training on the Russia Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jet, in anticipation of receiving the aircraft. Russia and Iran have also discussed producing drones together at sites inside Russia. Demonstrating his deepening alliance with the Hermit Kingdom, Mr. Putin held a summit with Kim Jong Un in Russia’s far east in September. Rather than reprise the moderately productive role Russia played in the now-defunct Six-Party Talks, Russia today is actively helping Pyongyang evade sanctions and providing Mr. Kim’s military with dual-use satellite technology that could speed up the development of more long-range nuclear weapons capable of hitting the U.S. In March, Chinese President Xi Jinping also made a highly productive visit to Russia designed to ensure continued access to cheap Russian oil and gas, support for China’s aggressive military provocations against Taiwan, and diplomatic backup for the preposterous claim that Beijing is a “near Arctic state,” with a legitimate say in what happens at the frozen top of the world. With Mr. Putin in a weakened state, Moscow has also accepted without protest or counteraction China’s steady economic and military encroachment on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia. Mr. Putin has also undermined global security by pulling Russia out of international nuclear arms control agreements, including the New START pact and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.