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The best writers don’t only keep you engaged with a gripping tale. They will, under the guise of that compelling narrative, teach you more about human motivation that lies at the base of everything in politics, business and life itself.

Fiction engages the emotions as well as the intellect in a way very little nonfiction can. The ease with which stories become embedded in the memory also gives a novelist the edge. We are much more likely to remember a narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end than a list of valuable instructions. While I can barely remember a page from my undergraduate textbooks, I can still recount stories I learned as a child.

The good novel exploits the virtues of storytelling to capture a truth. I doubt there is as good a nonfiction book that conveys the reality of the life, economics and politics of New York in the 1980s as well as Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” You can read as many guides to living your best life as you wish, but I defy you to find a better account of the travails of love, happiness, faith and morals as Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.” Histories of the Cold War are fine, but nothing portrays the moral ambiguities and complexities of geopolitics as effectively as John le Carré’s novels of the age. (Though not his later ones, where the espionage-era paranoia that had entered his soul descended into generic anti-Western, anticapitalist tropes as tiresome as any critical theory textbook.) Booth Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” is as good a portrait of 20th-century American capitalism as any economics treatise. If you think you’ve only just discovered technology’s corrosive effect on the human spirit, read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” from 1932.

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'Between an abandoned market and a rusty, decades-old electrical substation in a rundown part of Liverpool sit two buildings with a shiny coat of white paint behind a high-security fence. This ordinary-looking site is considered “critical national infrastructure” because of what’s inside: two 95-ton cylinders with rotors turning 1,500 times per minute. It’s called a synchronous compensator, and it’s northwest England’s best hope of avoiding blackouts.

The UK’s grid operator pays a Norwegian power company to keep the rotors running at a fixed speed. And the service it provides is so valuable to the grid that the company, Statkraft, has nabbed orders to build four more of these around the country.

“If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,” says Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, while giving a tour of the facility. He’s referring to the April afternoon when Spain’s electrical network came to a screeching halt and the whole Iberian Peninsula went dark for nearly a full day — the worst outage in Europe’s modern history.

Solar farm outages had destabilized Spain’s grid, and there weren’t enough gas plants online to provide stability. Synchronous compensators could have kept clean power flowing at the right frequency and voltage, avoiding the blackout. But continental Spain doesn't have any.'

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It was January 2007, and Bevacqua oversaw the consumer-price index at Argentina’s national statistics agency, Indec. Rising inflation threatened the electoral hopes of leftist President Néstor Kirchner’s wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was running to succeed him. Bevacqua was unwilling to fudge the numbers, so Kirchner replaced her with a loyalist who did it.

Echoes of the Argentine saga have reverberated in the U.S. since President Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on Aug. 1 after big downward revisions to jobs data. He accused the bureau of rigging the data to make Republicans look bad but provided no evidence, and independent economists dismissed the allegation.

“This is the sort of thing only the worst populists do in the worst emerging economies,” economist Phil Suttle said of McEntarfer’s dismissal in a note to clients.

Although Argentina is an emerging economy, its statistics agency was regarded as professional and independent, and governed by a solid legal framework. That makes its experience a useful lesson in what awaits the U.S. if new leadership politicizes economic data.

Following Bevacqua’s removal, Argentina’s officially reported inflation rate fell to 8.5% in 2007 from 9.8% in 2006. Fernández de Kirchner easily won the election, and the government initially saved billions of dollars in interest on inflation-linked bonds which could be spent on social programs and subsidies.

In reality, inflation had accelerated to around 25%, private economists estimated. The government faced lawsuits from unions and pensioners whose social-security checks were indexed to inflation. Some of the government’s savings on inflation-linked bonds were offset by higher payments on debt tied to gross domestic product, which came in artificially high.

“It started to become a huge mess,” said Alberto Cavallo, an Argentine economist teaching at Harvard University who created a website that tracked inflation based on publicly available prices to fill the void left by Indec. Users bombarded him with all sorts of questions over email, like how much to adjust settlement payments to an ex after a divorce. “The examples add up, and you end up realizing how important some of these statistics are,” he said.'

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https://archive.is/E3kxj

'This summer the knowledge settled in about where we are with artificial intelligence. Almost everyone is rattled by the speed of its development. The story is no longer “AI in coming decades will take a lot of jobs” or “AI will take jobs sooner than we think.” It is “AI is here and a quiet havoc has begun.”

Jobs growth in July was lower than expected, the May and June jobs numbers were revised downward, and news reports on this mentioned various causes—tariffs, general economic uncertainty and, lower down, AI.

But all sorts of feature reporting puts AI higher up. Last week Noam Scheiber in the New York Times reported economists just out of school are suddenly having trouble finding jobs. As recently at the 2023-24 academic year, said a member of the American Economic Association, the employment rate for economists shortly after earning a doctorate was 100%. Not now. Everyone’s scaling back, government is laying off, big firms have slowed hiring. Why? Uncertainty, tariffs and the possibility that artificial intelligence will replace their workers. Mr. Scheiber quotes labor economist Betsey Stevenson: “The advent of AI is . . . impacting the market for high-skilled labor.”

That’s only economists, not beloved in America, we probably have enough. Here’s another unbeloved group. This week Journal reporter Chip Cutter had a piece titled “AI Is Coming for the Consultants. Inside McKinsey, ‘This Is Existential.’ ” If AI can crunch numbers, analyze data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck in two seconds, what will the consulting firm do to survive? Rewire its business. Smaller, leaner teams; let AI build the PowerPoint. McKinsey’s global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, said that in the future the company will likely have one AI agent for every human employee. It’s already reduced head count.'