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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, November 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Former Democratic fundraiser Evan Barker tells all, one year after voting for Trump. Apple’s openly gay CEO becomes an awkward enabler of China’s anti-gay crackdown. Suzy Weiss says body positivity is dead—but will anyone miss it?
But first: Niall Ferguson vs. Tyler Cowen on whether AI is a bubble.
Yesterday in our pages, economic historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson issued a warning: The AI boom, he wrote, “is a house of cards.”
That’s an alarming conclusion to reach, given that the promise of AI is now the principal driver of the stock market and the U.S. economy. And if the reader wasn’t already worried enough, Niall then draws an ominous comparison between today’s AI gold rush and the frenzy that preceded the great crash of 1929. (He also finds a way to get Dr. Seuss into his argument, but I won’t try to explain that here.)
It’s a sobering argument, but is he right? Another Free Press columnist, economist Tyler Cowen, isn’t so gloomy. He writes that it is “premature to write off current AI valuations as a ‘bubble.’ ” Tyler reaches for a more recent historical analogy—the dot-com bubble—and draws encouragement from Amazon. Its stock crashed along with the likes of Pets.com and Webvan, then soared to heights beyond anyone’s expectations.
“The lesson is clear: If you see an investment that looks steady, sometimes the best thing to do is to jump on it,” Tyler writes. “No one can know when the market bottom is going to come, and either way, it’ll probably spike again fairly soon.”
He goes further: Perhaps all this talk of a bubble is really a security blanket, because the alternative—that the AI hype is real—is even more unsettling. Read two of the sharpest thinkers taking either side of perhaps the biggest economic question in the world right now.
—Rick Brooks
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