Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Raising the Youth Minimum Wage Made Sense Before AI. Now It's Pricing Young Workers Out of Their First Jobs.

lse

• Youth unemployment in Britain has hit its highest level since 2014, with around a million young people not in education, employment, or training — even as the government pays firms to hire them.
• The author argues that AI has fundamentally changed the calculus on minimum wage policy: entry-level jobs that once had no machine substitute now do, meaning higher wages increasingly tip employers toward automation or credentialed workers instead of school leavers.
• The practical fix proposed is simple: pause convergence of the youth and adult minimum wage rates while youth unemployment is rising, and update how the Low Pay Commission measures the risk of automation for each job category.

How China Is Stealing AI Capabilities from American Models — and Why It's Hard to Stop

cset

• Chinese AI labs have been running large-scale 'distillation' campaigns — systematically querying American AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to harvest their outputs and use them to train Chinese models, a practice that's technically common but increasingly seen as a form of intellectual property theft.
• The process involves five steps: choosing target capabilities, feeding 'seed' questions to the American model, steering it toward useful outputs, collecting its responses as training data, and using that data to improve the Chinese model — sometimes by rerouting millions of unsuspecting users' queries through U.S. models without their knowledge.
• U.S. companies have detected some of these campaigns, but the lack of transparency about methods and scale makes it hard to assess how much Chinese AI development has benefited, whether effective defenses are feasible, or whether existing law can address what amounts to a sophisticated terms-of-service violation at industrial scale.

Most Americans Now View ICE Unfavorably, and the Slide Is Happening Even Among Republicans

pew

• A majority of Americans (56%) now view ICE unfavorably, making it the least popular of 12 federal agencies tested in a new Pew survey — up sharply from a year ago.
• The drop in support is bipartisan: Republican favorability fell from 72% to 67%, while Democratic unfavorability rose from 78% to 84%.
• Majorities of Black, Hispanic, and Asian adults view ICE negatively, and even among white adults, unfavorable views now outpace favorable ones.

In the News

Sergey Brin Is Spending $100 Million to Kill a California Billionaire Tax That Could Cost Him $13 Billion

hoover

• California's Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state's roughly 200 billionaires, raising an estimated $30–100 billion — and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, facing a potential $13 billion bill, has become the largest individual donor in California ballot-measure history to defeat it.
• The fight has split California Democrats, with Governor Gavin Newsom opposing the measure while Bernie Sanders, progressive unions, and some congressional Democrats support it — turning the vote into a proxy battle over the party's relationship with billionaire donors.
• Polls show support slipping below 50% heading into Election Day, and opponents are outspending supporters nearly 5-to-1; even if it passes, legal challenges are virtually guaranteed.

Analysis

The Real Reason Your Boss Wants You Back in the Office? Their Ego.

wharton

• A new study from Wharton's Adam Grant finds that narcissism — not concerns about productivity or trust — is the strongest predictor of which CEOs resist remote and hybrid work.
• Narcissistic leaders need employees physically present to exercise dominance and earn status; video calls and Slack simply don't satisfy that need.
• The researchers studied 259 Fortune 500 CEOs using behavioral proxies for ego and ran two additional studies, consistently finding the same pattern: narcissism drives return-to-office pressure.

Also Worth a Look

• The U.S. Is Quietly Banning Whole Categories of Foreign Tech — and Even Allies Are Getting Caught in the Net (csis)
• A $300 Billion Corner of Private Credit Is Showing Signs of a Classic Bank Run (wharton)
• Four Years After Dobbs, More Than Half of Women in Ban States Don't Know Where to Get an Abortion (kff)
• Miami Just Had Its Longest Coastal Flooding Streak on Record — and It's Going to Get Much Worse (yale_climate)
• Early Data Hints That AI May Finally Be Boosting Productivity in the Information Sector (stl_fed)
• Opposition to Data Centers Is One of the Few Things Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon Agree On (the_conversation)
• Zelensky's reveal of North Korean POWs may have been a deliberate move to pressure Pyongyang — and Seoul is furious about it (csis)