Nexus

By Yuval Noah Harari

Prognosis Apocalyptic Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari Random House, 528 pages, $35 BOOKSHELF | By Dominic Green RFK Jr. Would Have Made JFK Proud When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, five of his siblings issued a statement denouncing him: “Our brother Bobby’s decision . . . is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” Among the values they cited was “a shared vision of a brighter future” defined by “economic promise.” But when it comes to economic policy, Mr. Trump is much better aligned with the values of President John F. Kennedy than Kamala Harris is. In December 1962, speaking at the Economic Club of New York, JFK said that the “federal government’s most useful role” was “to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures” by cutting “the fetters which hold back private spending.” He committed “to an across-the[1]board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes.” Kennedy believed tax cuts for everyone would generate economic growth benefiting everyone, once famously noting that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” He argued that tax cuts enable those in lower brackets to increase consumer demand by spending “their additional take-home pay” while making it possible for “those in the middle and upper brackets... to invest more capital” to meet that demand. He believed corporate tax rates “must also be cut to increase incentives and the availability of investment capital.” On deficits, Kennedy noted that while it was “paradoxical” that the “soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run” is to cut tax rates, “the purpose of cutting rates now is not to in[1]cur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.” Congress passed Kennedy’s tax cuts three months after his assassination, and they delivered both the promised economic growth and increased tax revenue. Ms. Harris proposes to increase the top marginal income tax rate from 37% to 39.6% and on capital gains from 23.8% to 33% (including the Obama Care surtax). She also proposes to tax wealthy Americans’ unrealized capital gains—a levy with potentially devastating economic impact that failed when it was tried in Europe. She would increase the federal corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. Mr. Trump told the Economic Club of New York last week that he would make permanent the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which reduced rates for every bracket. He would further reduce the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 15%. He would also leave the tax rate on long-term capital gains at the current 23.8% and wouldn’t tax unrealized gains. Which approach better reflects President Kennedy’s economic values? The question answers itself. Pro-growth tax policies work, and JFK’s confidence in the American private sector to generate economic growth has always proved to be well-founded. RFK Jr. does the Kennedys proud, even if some of them won’t admit it. Mr. Puzder, a former CEO of CKE Restaurants, is a senior fellow at America First Policy Institute and Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. By Andy Puzder President Kennedy’s economic policies put him closer to Trump than Harris. OPINION Groucho Marx said there are two types of people in this world: “those who think people can be divided up into two types, and those who don’t.” In “Nexus,” the Israeli historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harari divides us into a naive and populist type and another type that he prefers but does not name. This omission is not surprising. The opposite of naive and populist might be wise and pluralist, but it might also be cynical and elitist. Who would admit to that? Mr. Harari is the author of the bestselling “Sapiens,” a history of our species written with an eye on present anxieties about our future. “Nexus,” a history of our society as a series of information networks and a warning about artificial intelligence, uses a similar recipe. A dollop of historical anecdote is seasoned with a pinch of social science and a spoonful of speculation, topped with a soggy crust of prescription, and lightly dusted with premonitions of the apocalypse that will overcome us if we refuse a second serving. “Nexus” goes down easily, but it isn’t as nourishing as it claims. Much of it leaves a sour taste. Like the Victorian novel and Caesar’s Gaul, “Nexus” divides into three parts. The first part describes the development of complex societies through the creation and control of information networks. The second argues that the digital network is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from the print network that created modern democratic societies. The third presents the AI apocalypse. An “alien” information network gone rogue, Mr. Harari warns, could “supercharge existing human conflicts,” leading to an “AI arms race” and a digital Cold War, with rival powers divided by a Silicon Curtain of chips and code. Information, Mr. Harari writes, creates a “social nexus” among its users. The “twin pillars” of society are bureaucracy, which creates power by centralizing information, and mythology, which creates power by controlling the dispersal of “stories” and “brands.” Societies cohere around stories such as the Bible and communism and “personality cults” and brands such as Jesus and Stalin. Religion is a fiction that stamps “superhuman legitimacy” on the social order. All “true believers” are delusional. Anyone who calls a religion “a true representation of reality” is “lying.” Mr. Harari is scathing about Judaism and Christianity but hardly criticizes Islam. In this much, he is not naive. Mythologies of religion, history and ideology, Mr. Harari believes, exploit our naive tendency to mistake all information as “an attempt to represent reality.” When the attempt is convincing, the naive “call it truth.” Mr. Harari agrees that “truth is an accurate representation of reality” but argues that only “objective facts” such as scientific data are true. “Subjective facts” based on “beliefs and feelings” cannot be true. The collaborative cacophony of “intersubjective reality,” the darkling plain of social and political contention where all our minds meet, also cannot be fully true. Digitizing our naivety has, Mr. Harari believes, made us uncontrollable and incorrigible. “Nexus” is most interesting, and most flawed, when it examines our current situation. Digital networks overwhelm us with information, but computers can only create “order,” not “truth” or “wisdom.” AI might take over without developing human-style consciousness: “Intelligence is enough.” The nexus of machine-learning, algorithmic “user engagement” and human nature could mean that “large-scale democracies may not survive the rise of computer technology.” The “main split” in 20th-century information was between closed, pseudo-infallible “totalitarian” systems and open, self-correcting “democratic” systems. As Mr. Harari’s third section describes, after the flood of digital information, the split will be between humans and machines. The machines will still be fallible. Will they allow us to correct them? Though “we aren’t sure” why the “democratic information network is breaking down,” Mr. Harari nevertheless argues that “social media algorithms” play such a “divisive” role that free speech has become a naive luxury, unaffordable in the age of AI. He “strongly disagrees” with Louis Brandeis’s opinion in Whitney v. California (1927) that the best way to combat false speech is with more speech. The survival of democracy requires “regulatory institutions” that will “vet algorithms,” counter “conspiracy theories” and prevent the rise of “charismatic leaders.” Mr. Harari never mentions the First Amendment, but “Nexus” amounts to a sustained argument for its suppression. Unfortunately, his grasp of poli[1]tics is tenuous and hyperbolic. He seems to believe that populism was invented with the iPhone rather than being a recurring bug that appears when democratic operating systems become corrupted or fail to update their software. He consistently con[1]fuses democracy (a method of gauging opinion with a long history) with liberalism (a mostly Anglo-American legal philosophy with a short history). He defines democracy as “an ongoing conversation between diverse information nodes,” but the open[1]ness of the conversation and the independence of its nodes derive from liberalism’s rights of individual privacy and speech. Yet “liberalism” appears nowhere in “Nexus.” Mr. Harari isn’t much concerned with liberty and justice either. In “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” (1795-96), Friedrich Schiller divided poetry between two modes. The naive mode is ancient and assumes that language is a window into reality. The sentimental mode belongs to our “artificial age” and sees language as a mirror to our inner turmoil. As a reflection of our troubled age of transition, “Nexus” is a mirror to the unease of our experts and elites. It divides people into the cognitively unfit and the informationally pure and proposes we divide power over speech accordingly. Call me naive, but Mr. Harari’s technocratic TED-talking is not the way to save democracy. It is the royal road to tyranny.