First we got the bill. Now we have the numbers.

The Inflation Reduction Act, the surprise deal that Senator Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer struck last week, would significantly reduce greenhouse-gas pollution from the American economy. If passed, the bill would cut annual emissions by as much as 44 percent by the end of this decade, according to a new set of analyses from three independent research firms.

That would make the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the most significant climate bill ever passed by Congress. No law has ever made such a big dent in U.S. emissions, or cut them as rapidly: It would more than double the pace at which the American economy has been decarbonizing, the analyses say.

“I was skeptical of it when we started doing the modeling,” Anand Gopal, the executive director of strategy at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan policy group in San Francisco that prepared one of the studies, told me. “But now I’m convinced that this is a really meaningful action by the United States on climate in this decade.”

Two-Thirds of the Way to Paris The Inflation Reduction Act would cut emissions 41 percent by 2030, compared to their all-time high, according to a new analysis from Princeton researchers. That would get the country two-thirds of the way to meeting its current commitment under the Paris Agreement.

The three new estimates were conducted by Energy Innovation; Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm in New York; and the REPEAT Project, a university-associated team led by Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton engineering professor. The studies represent a new spin on an old approach. Normally, when Congress considers a major piece of legislation, outside economists pore over its details, feeding them into computer models to estimate how each provision might affect GDP, inflation, and the federal budget deficit. Instead, the three groups looked at the bill’s climate effects, sketching what the bill could mean for carbon emissions, clean-energy deployment, and energy costs.

All three analyses reached a broadly similar conclusion, pointing to a roughly 40 percent drop in emissions by the end of the decade.

That sort of decline would place one of President Joe Biden’s biggest climate goals in reach for the first time. When the United States rejoined the Paris Agreement last year, Biden committed to cutting the country’s emissions in half by 2030 compared with their all-time high. That goal is in line with estimates that say carbon pollution from the world’s richest countries must go to zero by 2050 if the world wants to stave off the worst effects of climate change by the end of the century.

The Manchin-Schumer bill wouldn’t get all the way to Biden’s 2030 goal, Jenkins told me. But it would get close enough that states, cities, companies, and the Environmental Protection Agency could get the country over the finish line. And it would also boost America’s clout in international climate negotiations, giving it more credibility to push other countries to rapidly decarbonize. “At the moment, the U.S. has just gone to these [UN climate] forums—or even engaged bilaterally with countries—with very limited credibility,” Gopal said. If the bill passes, “that is going to change.”

Three Studies, One Conclusion Independent analyses of the climate impact of Inflation Reduction Act arrived at the same finding: If passed, the bill will cut U.S. emissions by about 40 percent compared to their all-time high.

At its core, the bill has one idea that would help accomplish these cuts. “​​The biggest thing is, it makes clean energy cheap. That's really the bottom line,” Jenkins said. At nearly every point in the energy economy, it aims to lower the cost of clean energy, providing generous subsidies to spur clean-electricity production while creating programs to tackle bottlenecks on deploying that electricity, such as America’s inability to build an interconnected and blackout-proof grid.

But it is worth dividing the policies in the bill into two categories. In the first category are policies that will drive greenhouse-gas pollution out of the economy this decade. The crown jewel of these policies is a new set of tax credits that will apply to any form of zero-carbon power production, subsidizing the cost of new zero-emissions power plants. These new policies replace an older and kludgier regime where every individual electricity-generating technology had to be subsidized separately, which led to a strange, uneven status quo where, for instance, the federal government would subsidize only the opening of a new solar farm, not the production of solar energy.

The bill takes a similar approach in the transportation sector, the most carbon-intensive part of the American economy. The bill subsidizes the cost of new electric cars, SUVs, pickups, and vans by up to $7,500. Together, the power and transportation sectors make up the largest share of emissions cuts in the bill, Jenkins said.

That’s only half of the policies in the bill, though. The second half of policies focuses on reducing emissions after 2030 by developing today the technology that will make that possible. That means it focuses primarily on the industrial sector, which is poised to become the country’s most-polluting sector by the end of the decade. The bill offers a slew of incentives to underwrite new factories, encourage clean-energy manufacturing, and push that sector toward reaching net-zero emissions. If its policies are successful—and they are, for once, funded well enough that they should be—it will turn the United States into a global leader in the nascent geothermal, hydrogen, and carbon-removal industries.

One thing that every modeler agrees on is that their estimates are going to be wrong. Reality will not look like what their projections suggest. Energy-system models as used in these reports do not account for sudden changes in consumer taste or major geopolitical upheavals, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nor do they consider that some consumers, for practical or cultural or political reasons, might want to stick with, say, gasoline-powered vehicles, even at lurid personal cost.

But they’re still useful tools for orienting how to think about this bill. Take Rhodium’s forecast, for instance, which projects that the IRA will cut carbon pollution by 31 to 44 percent by 2030. That worst-case scenario, only 31 percent, assumes that virtually everything that could go wrong will, at least short of a world war, Ben King, one of the firm’s analysts, told me. It would require the rapid cost declines for solar, wind, and electric vehicles that we’re seeing right now to stop altogether, he said. Natural-gas prices would have to crash from their current near-record highs to their historic lows, then remain in the doldrums for 15 years straight. Oil prices, too, would have to collapse. “All of those things could happen, but it’s pretty darn unlikely,” King said.

The scenarios also assume that were Congress to pass the IRA, no further entity at any level of the American government would pass any climate policy for a decade. The EPA would have to decline to regulate carbon pollution from power plants or cars and trucks, even though the Biden administration is already beginning to write rules for those sectors. States and cities would have to not pass local climate laws, even though the IRA would make it cheaper to do so.

Which isn’t to say that the U.S. will automatically overshoot the best-case scenarios in these reports. A future Republican president and Congress could weaken the IRA provisions. Nobody knows the future. But it suggests that compared with nothing, passing the IRA will improve the country’s odds of tackling climate change no matter what the future holds.

Earlier this year, Rhodium projected that under current policy, America could cut its emissions 24 to 35 percent by 2030, compared with their all-time high. Now it says that under the IRA, the U.S. can expect emissions cuts of 31 to 44 percent. In other words, even in a (very unlikely) worst-case scenario where the IRA passes and then everything goes wrong, U.S. emissions will be just a few percentage points higher than if nothing had passed and absolutely everything went right.

There is no perfect climate bill, but these reports suggest that the IRA is a pretty good one, and much better than Democrats might have once expected. The analyses show that the IRA clearly and easily meets one of the core requirements of any climate bill: It cuts emissions on net compared with the status quo. In all likelihood, it will leave us significantly better off. Ten years from now, even in a worst-case scenario, the United States will have knocked out much of its emissions from the power and transportation sectors. And the country will have a much better idea of how to eliminate the final 50 or 60 percent of emissions remaining in the economy.

Finally, the results point to one overarching conclusion: Only Congress has the power to decarbonize the economy. With one piece of legislation—a bill that Joe Manchin, whose family owns a coal-trading business, has agreed to, for crying out loud—the legislature can double the pace at which the American economy is cutting emissions. One single, imperfect act could do more for the climate than 30 years of federal, state, and local action combined. Because of the demographic doom that the party is facing, this may be Democrats’ last chance to pass a bill for the next decade or so. This is the country’s best and last opportunity to meet the 2030 goal and, with it, a world where net zero by midcentury is actually possible. But to get there, Congress has to pass the bill.

If Democrats avoid the worst outcome in November’s midterm elections, the principal reason will likely be the GOP’s failure to reverse its decline in white-collar suburbs during the Donald Trump era.

That’s a clear message from yesterday’s crowded primary calendar, which showed the GOP mostly continuing to nominate Trump-style culture-war candidates around the country. And yet, the resounding defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas showed how many voters in larger population centers are recoiling from that Trumpist vision.

Democrats still face enormous headwinds in November, including sweeping voter dissatisfaction over inflation, low approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and the near unbroken history since the Civil War of the party that holds the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives during a president’s first two years.

Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.

In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.

The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.

An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.

A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.

This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.

Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”

[Geraldo L. Cadava]: The battle for latino voters in the rust bell.

One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.

That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.

In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.

Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”

Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, told me that the magnitude of the pro-abortion-rights vote in Kansas was “unexpected,” but it does not guarantee Democratic candidates’ suburban domination in November. “This was a rare up or down vote on this issue,” he told me in an email. “November will be different, as voters will have lots of reasons to vote and lots of issues to consider … Polls consistently show the economy trumping this issue in the minds of the voters.”

But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.

The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.

Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.

Given the headwinds, Democrats would take a November outcome in which they narrowly lose the House but hold their Senate majority and preserve control of the governorships in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while perhaps adding some others, such as Arizona. With Biden’s approval rating still scuffling, that outcome is hardly guaranteed. But it remains a possibility largely because, as yesterday’s primaries showed, Republicans have responded to their suburban erosion by betting even more heavily on the policies and rhetoric that triggered their decline in the first place. In November, white-collar suburbs may be the deciding factor between a Republican rout and a split decision that leaves Democrats still standing to fight another day.

On the surface, Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan looks like an American triumph. The House speaker flew into the island’s capital yesterday, undeterred by China’s threats and the announcement of military exercises in the surrounding seas. As she met with Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, and spoke to its legislature, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping had to watch helplessly, able to do no more than order his forces to splash about in nearby waters in a display of rage and futility.

This narrative has elements of truth, but things aren’t that simple. Pelosi’s trip is likely to be the beginning, not the end, of a crisis in U.S.-China relations. Beijing could stretch out its response for weeks, even months, with unforeseeable consequences. Only hours before Pelosi’s arrival, China’s foreign ministry warned that the U.S. would “pay the price” for the affront. The real impact of Pelosi’s visit may not be clear for years.

Pelosi’s Taiwan gamble has reinforced trends in the U.S.-China relationship that are edging both countries toward conflict in East Asia. Ever more ambitious, Beijing believes that China has a right to be the paramount power in the region and that the U.S. is standing in its way. In Washington, D.C., policy makers see America’s future as depending on Asia and are resolved to maintain, or even expand, its system of alliances in the region to entrench U.S. influence and contain China’s.

Taiwan sits directly on the fault line between these two competing powers and their agendas. To the U.S., Taiwan is not merely a longtime friend, but also a crucial economic partner and a link in the network of democracies that upholds American power in the Pacific. To China, Taiwan is an indispensable component of the country’s ascent to superpower stature. Claiming Taiwan has been a top priority for the Chinese Communist Party ever since it chased its Nationalist foes off the mainland to the island at the end of the civil war in 1949. To this day, Beijing considers Taiwan an errant province that remains an integral part of China.

Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan intensified the insecurity among China’s leaders about achieving that goal. They already fear that the government in Taipei is drifting ever farther into the American orbit, making “peaceful reunification,” as they call it, less and less likely. The Pelosi visit exposed the limits of Beijing’s power over the island—especially with the U.S backing up Taiwan—and the risks that that poses to the Communist regime. In Beijing’s perception, Pelosi’s visit offers legitimacy to Taiwan’s democratic government. And if all of Beijing’s bluster and threats couldn’t scare away even an octogenarian from California, what’s to stop a parade of foreign dignitaries from visiting Taiwan in defiance of China? The outcome, China’s leaders fear, could be Taiwan declaring formal independence—a step they could never tolerate.

[Read: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Beijing has, of course, been complaining about American “interference” in Taiwan for decades. And Pelosi’s trip is not without precedent. Members of the U.S. Congress travel to Taiwan regularly, and another speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, visited 25 years ago. But the Taiwan issue is taking on even greater importance in China because of significant changes in Chinese domestic politics. Xi has justified his one-man dictatorship by promising the Chinese public that he will attain what he calls the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation—which is impossible without unification with Taiwan.

Such nationalistic goals are also becoming more central to the Communist regime as a source of legitimacy. For decades, the Communist Party counted on its successful program of economic development to validate its right to rule, but with the economy slowing, that argument no longer packs the same punch. So the message has morphed from “the party will make China rich” to “the party will make China great.” That entails not only achieving unification with Taiwan, but also seeking revenge against those enemies that try to prevent it and “keep China down.”

This represents a major shift in China’s national policy. For much of the past four decades, its leaders tended to put economic growth before other policy goals. That, in turn, rendered their approach to foreign affairs—focused on matters of development—generally predictable. Now the party is turning its attention to getting foreign-policy wins over those it deems adversaries as proof of its competence and as a means of rallying domestic support.

Hence Beijing’s hysterical reaction to Pelosi’s visit. To China’s leaders, her Taiwan jaunt is another humiliation perpetrated by the U.S., and one not so easily forgiven or forgotten. But Xi brought this embarrassment on himself. Beijing’s extreme reaction to the proposed trip elevated it to an eyeball-to-eyeball superpower standoff, and Pelosi didn’t blink. Xi, the supposed champion of the Chinese nation, was made to look weak in the eyes of the world and, worse still, in the eyes of his own people, who followed Pelosi’s trip on social media.

The speaker’s tenacity also amplifies fears in Beijing that Washington is actively working to thwart unification. Officially, the U.S. still upholds a “one-China policy,” but Beijing isn’t buying that. Foreign Minister Wang Yi accused Washington of following a “fake” one-China policy in a conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in October. During the leaders’ discussion last week, Xi warned President Joe Biden on the Taiwan issue, telling him that “those who play with fire will perish by it,” according to the official summary from China’s foreign ministry.

The fact that Pelosi defied such warnings affirms Beijing’s growing conviction that China may never attain national greatness as long as the U.S. is entrenched in East Asia. That could prompt Beijing to intensify its efforts to undermine the U.S.-backed global order and consolidate Xi’s anti-American partnership with Vladimir Putin. Pelosi’s Taiwan trip could then have repercussions far beyond the Taiwan Strait and even East Asia.

[Read: The lessons Taiwan is learning from Ukraine]

But what may be most worrying, from Beijing’s perspective, is the response to Pelosi’s visit from Taiwan itself. Like Pelosi, President Tsai brushed aside Chinese threats over the visit. And rather than cowering before an enraged Communist Party, the people of Taiwan announced their defiance in lights on Taipei’s tallest skyscraper, with the message: “Speaker Pelosi … Welcome to TW.” Simply put, Taiwan rubbed Xi’s nose in it. Beijing will read that as an indication that Pelosi’s visit has emboldened the island to resist China and its dream of unification.

Unfortunately, all of this adds up to greater disorder in East Asia. In response to Pelosi’s arrival, the Chinese military announced four days of intensive military exercises around the island (beginning Thursday, after her departure), which may encroach on its territorial waters. That heightens the danger of unintended consequences that could lead to outright conflict. Short of that, the exercises may have a blockade effect, which could further disrupt already strained supply chains. Beijing has also turned to what has become its usual hostile tactic of turning trade into a tool of state by banning the import of some food items from Taiwan.

No one knows where this will end. As Taiwan stands firm, and Beijing grows more desperate, the level of Chinese coercion could increase—at some point perhaps convincing the Communist leadership that only war can capture Taiwan. As these events unfold, the possibility of the U.S. and its allies getting dragged into a regional conflict is not hard to imagine. Pelosi’s visit, then, was a step in a process transforming a war over Taiwan from a remote possibility to a real risk that should worry the world.

That is why Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan will remain controversial, and a sharp debate will continue in the U.S. over whether its hazards were worth the reward. (The people of Taiwan are not of one mind on the point, either.) Because of the visit’s purely symbolic nature, and with so much on the line, cold logic alone suggests it won’t prove worth it.

But that assessment misses what the excited crowds that met Pelosi in Taipei surely understood. The people of Taiwan were willing to advertise her arrival from the top of their tallest building, come what may from Beijing in sanctions and pressure. Pelosi’s presence was a signal that the Taiwanese are not facing down an angry, authoritarian China on their own. An editorial writer in the Taipei Times welcomed Pelosi as “a comrade-in-arms in the fight against tyranny and the pursuit of liberty.” As the U.S. and China drift toward confrontation, Pelosi’s display of resolve may be necessary—to show the Chinese and the world that the U.S. isn’t afraid, either.

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Everything in America is getting older these days. In practically every field of human endeavor—politics, business, academia, science, sports, pop culture—the average age of achievement and power is rising.

Politics is getting older. Joe Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Remarkably, he is still younger than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. And they aren’t exceptions to the general rule: The Senate is the oldest in history.

Businesses are getting older. The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is very likely at its record high, having gradually increased throughout the 21st century. And it’s not just the boss; the whole workplace is getting older too. Between the 1980s and early 2000s, Americans under 45 accounted for the clear majority of workers. But that's no longer the case, since the large Baby Boomer generation has remained in the labor force longer than previous cohorts.

Science is getting older—not just in this country, but around the world. Discovery used to be a young person’s game. James Watson was 24 when he co-discovered the structure of DNA, and Albert Einstein was 26 when he published his famous papers on the photoelectric effect and special relativity. But in the past few decades, the typical age of scientific achievement has soared. Nobel Prize laureates are getting older in almost every discipline, especially in physics and chemistry. The average age of an investigator at the National Institutes of Health rose from 39 in 1980 to 51 in 2008, and the average age of principal investigators receiving their first major NIH grant increased from about 36 in 1990 to about 45 in 2016. In fact, all of academia is getting older: The average age of college presidents in the U.S. has increased steadily in the past 20 years. From 1995 to 2010, the share of tenured faculty over the age of 60 roughly doubled.

In pop culture, the old isn’t going out of style like it used to. The writer Ted Gioia observed that Americans have for several years shifted their music-listening to older songs. In film, the average age of movie stars has steadily increased since 1999, according to an analysis by The Ringer. So far this year, the seven highest-grossing American films are sequels and reboots. Sports such as tennis and football are dominated by superstars (Nadal, Djokovic, Brady, Rodgers) who are unusually old for the game. Incredibly successful young artists and athletes obviously do exist—but older songs, older stars, and existing franchises are dominating the cultural landscape in a historically unusual way.

So, what’s going on?

1. As rich Americans live longer and healthier lives, American power is aging.

The average American lives longer than they did in 2000, despite life expectancy flatlining in the past decade. Rich Americans have it even better: The wealthiest Americans live at least 10 years longer than the poorest Americans, and that gap is growing.

Since the rising ages of prominent politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners are what’s at issue, a focus on the elite seems appropriate. For most of this century, the richest quartile of men have been adding about 0.2 years to their life expectancy each year. If we extrapolate that annual increase to the entire century, it would suggest that rich men have added roughly four years to their lifespans since 2000. The average age of U.S. senators did, in fact, rise from 59.8 in 2001 to 64.3 in 2021—a roughly four-year increase.

But many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that. A few years ago, Inside Higher education noted that for college presidents, 70 seems to be the new 50

The average age of new CEOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies increased nine years since 2005—from 46 to 55. The average age of leading actors in films increased about 12 years since 2001—from about 38 to about 50 for male stars.

Maybe we should consider not just life spans, but health spans. In sports, for instance, a superior understanding of diet, exercise, and medicine has allowed stars to extend their careers. The tennis stars Novak Djokovic, 35, and Rafael Nadal, 36, are old for their sport, but they’ve somehow won 15 of the last 17 grand slam men’s tournaments. Three of the last five NFL Most Valuable Player Awards went to quarterbacks over the age of 36—Tom Brady in 2017 and Aaron Rodgers in 2020 and 2021. In basketball, LeBron James recently became, at 37, the oldest NBA player to average 30 points per game in a season. The winningest pitcher in Major League Baseball is Justin Verlander, who is 39.

So the longevity factor is twofold. Not only are Americans overall living longer, but richer Americans are living even longer, and rich Americans with access to dietitians, personal exercise, and high-class medical care are extending their primes within the context of longer lives. As a result, we should expect older workers to vigorously contribute to their fields much longer than they used to.

2. As work becomes less physical and more central to modern identity, the old elite are spending more time at work.

Another way to frame the central question here: Why are the Boomer elite working so hard, so late into their lives?

One explanation for the rapid aging of our political leaders, academic faculty, and chief-executive class is that the boomer generation is choosing to stay in the workforce longer than previous generations did. This has created what the writer Paul Millerd calls a “Boomer blockade” at the top of many organizations, keeping Gen-X and Millennial workers from promotions. As older workers remain in advanced positions in politics and business, younger workers who would have ascended the ranks in previous decades are getting stuck in the purgatory of upper-middle management.

If one wanted to frame things more generously, one could say that declining ageism has allowed older Americans to stay in jobs that they really like and don’t want to leave. These folks could retire, but they love their work and draw an enormous amount of pride from their careers.

But 70- and 80-somethings loving their work so much that they never retire is awfully close to something I’ve called workism—the idea that work has, for many elites, become a kind of personal religion in an era of otherwise declining religiosity. Workism isn’t all bad; it’s nice that the economy has evolved from brawn to brainy labor that gives people a sense of daily enrichment and higher purpose. But workism isn’t all good, either: The corner office was not designed to function as a temple, and a work-centric identity can lead to a kind of spiritual emptiness. What’s more, though this subject is complicated and sensitive, a lot of very elderly people in positions of great power are clinging to their jobs long after their cognitive and verbal capacities have peaked. This is not a good recipe for high-functioning institutions.

3. The “burden of knowledge”: Science is getting older, because we’re all getting smarter.

Longer lives and increasing workism could explain why our political and business leaders are quickly getting older. But they don’t explain the biggest mysteries I’ve highlighted in the field of science—such as why the average age of Nobel Prize laureates has increased or why young star researchers are rarer than they once were.

The best explanation for both of these trends is the “burden of knowledge” theory. We are learning more about the world every year, but the more we learn about any subject, the harder it is to master all the facts out there and push the frontier of knowledge outward.

This theory is pretty obvious when you think about it for a few seconds. Let’s imagine, for example, that you want to revolutionize the field of genetics. Three hundred years ago, before any such domain existed, you could have made a splash just by shouting, “I’ve got a strong feeling that genes are a thing!” Two hundred years ago, you could have done it by watching some peas grow in your backyard and using your powers of observation to form a theory of inheritance. But now that we know that genes are a thing and have figured out dominant and recessive genes and have mapped the genome, the most groundbreaking research in the field is really, really complicated. To understand the genetic underpinnings of a complex disease such as schizophrenia, hundreds of people around the planet have to synthesize data on the infinitely complex interplay of genes and environment.

The burden of knowledge affects the average age of scientists in several ways. First, attaining mastery at a young age of an existing domain becomes harder. Since scientists have to learn so much in fields such as physics or chemistry, they take longer to become established, and the average age for achieving breakthrough work (or fancy prizes) goes up and up. Second, the knowledge burden necessitates large teams of researchers to make new breakthroughs, and these teams tend to be led by older principal investigators. Third, scientific-funding institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, may be awarding a disproportionate amount of funding to older researchers precisely because they’re biased against younger researchers who they assume haven’t overcome the knowledge burdens of their field. Or perhaps, as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.

The burden of knowledge theory represents a double-edged sword of progress. It is precisely because we know so much about the world that it is getting harder to learn more about the world. And one side effect of this phenomenon is that science is rapidly aging.

4. “Data dulling” has made institutions risk-averse (and consumers obsessed with familiarity).

Pop culture in 2022 has been a warm bath of nostalgia. The song of the summer is quite possibly Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which was originally released 37 years ago. Its success was launched by the show of the summer, the ’80s pastiche Stranger Things. The year’s biggest blockbuster, Top Gun: Maverick, is a sequel-homage to the 1986 original.

Okay, well, that’s just one summer, you might be inclined to say. But it’s not. So many recent albums have fallen short of expectations that The Wall Street Journal has called it a “new music curse.” Every year in the last decade, at least half of the top-10 films in America have been sequels, adaptations, and reboots. (Even the exceptions are their own sort of franchise: The two biggest opening-weekend box offices for original films since 2018 were for movies directed by Jordan Peele.)

Is this about median longevity, or workism, or the burden of knowledge in physics and genomics? Uh, no. These are cultural stories, and they deserve a cultural explanation. The best I’ve got is this: As the entertainment industry has become more statistically intelligent, entertainment products have gotten more familiar and repetitive.

In music, I’ve previously called this the Shazam effect. As the music industry got better at anticipating audience tastes, it realized that a huge portion of the population likes to hear the same thing over and over again. That’s one reason why hit radio stations have become more repetitive and why the most popular music spends more time on the Billboard charts.

For the past few decades, the same statistical revolution that reshaped sports—a.k.a. moneyball—has come for entertainment. You could call it data dulling: In entertainment, greater algorithmic intelligence tends to ruin investment in originality. When cultural domains become more statistically sophisticated, old and proven intellectual property takes money and attention from new and unproven acts.

What does data dulling look like in art? It looks like music companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying the catalogs of old hitmakers when, in previous generations, that money would have gone toward developing new artists. It looks like movie studios spending significantly more on the production budgets of sequels than on originals. It looks like risk-averse producers investing more in familiar content, which amplifies consumers’ natural preference for familiarity—thus creating a feedback loop that clusters new cultural products around preexisting hits. It looks a lot like what we’ve got.

***

America’s multidisciplinary gerontocracy is complex. It comes from a mix of obviously good things (we’re living longer, healthier lives), dubiously good things (an obsession with the music and tastes of the 1980s), and straightforwardly bad things (a stunning dearth of young political power and an apparent funding bias against young scientists).

Solving this problem is similarly complex. I would be very uncomfortable with laws that ban ambitious 74-year-olds from working. I’m not very interested in forcing Bruce Springsteen fans to stop listening to him. But I’m enthusiastic about new research organizations that specialize in funding young scientists.

Another matter worth investigating is that other countries don’t share the gerontocracy problem across disciplines. In the U.K., for example, the public is getting older, but its leaders aren’t. I think we should be more open to asking hard questions, such as “If the Democratic Party is the preference of America’s young people, why are so few young people represented in its leadership?” and “How do we balance a respect for the elderly with a scientific approach to evaluating the cognitive state of our oldest political and corporate leaders?” In the end, this is about nothing less than how an aging country learns to grow up wisely.

Want to discuss more? Join me for Office Hours August 16 at 1 p.m. ET. This month, I’ll discuss whether we’ve missed our chance to tackle climate change with my colleague Robinson Meyer. I’ll continue to hold office hours on the second Tuesday of each month. Register here and reply to this email with your questions about progress or the abundance agenda. If you can’t attend you can watch a recording any time on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Earlier this summer, when the Supreme Court ended a 50-year federal right to abortion, Democrats had no choice but to place their faith in voters to rebel against the ruling. Until tonight, however, no one could definitively say whether Roe v. Wade outrage would carry over to the polls.

Tonight in Kansas, Americans got their first hint of that response, and it was a resounding victory for abortion rights. Voters there decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to ban abortion across the state. With more than three-quarters of precincts reporting, the “No” vote was leading by more than 20 points. The surprising result keeps abortion legal in a GOP stronghold, one of the few states in the region where conservative majorities have not already outlawed the procedure.

Politically, the outcome is sure to reverberate across the country and buoy the Democrats’ bid to capitalize on the overturning of Roe in the midterm battle for Congress this fall. It will lift the party’s hopes that anger over the Supreme Court’s decision will matter more than concerns about inflation and President Joe Biden’s leadership, allowing Democrats to maintain their narrow majorities on Capitol Hill. “This victory tonight confirms that abortion is popular in all states, not just on the coasts,” Elise Higgins, a lifelong Kansan who is the director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive advocacy group, told me.

Tonight marked the first time that voters had a chance to weigh in directly on abortion since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe in its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Both public and private polls had shown the race to be close, and opponents of the anti-abortion amendment were cautiously optimistic in the closing days that they could pull out an upset victory. None, however, predicted the landslide that occurred.

[Read: Abortion is literally on the ballot in Kansas]

Republican lawmakers in Kansas had put a constitutional amendment on the ballot long before the Supreme Court ruling, scheduling the vote to coincide a partisan August primary that they hoped would help the anti-abortion cause. For more than a year, it looked like that decision would pay off. But the June 24 decision in the Dobbs case galvanized abortion-rights supporters, who blanketed Kansas’s most populous counties with television ads that targeted not only Democrats but independent and Republican voters as well.

The amendment would have banned taxpayer funding of abortion and effectively invalidated a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that the state’s constitution protected abortion rights. Approval of the ballot measure would have given Kansas’s GOP lawmakers free reign to follow their counterparts in other conservative states, including Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas, and ban abortion without exceptions. Republicans have a supermajority in the Kansas legislature, meaning they would likely be able to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.

Drawing on polling data over the past several years, the “Vote No” campaign insisted that despite the state’s Republican leanings, support for abortion rights in Kansas extended nearly as broadly as it does in the nation overall. “The majority of Kansans want abortion to remain safe, legal, and accessible,” Higgins said.

Kansas’s abortion foes didn’t make much effort to dispute that assertion. Rather than campaign outwardly for voters to give them the right to ban abortion, the “Yes” side argued that the ballot initiative—named the “Value Them Both Amendment”—would merely take the decision away from the courts and return it to the public and elected representatives. Canvassers were instructed to make clear to voters that the amendment itself did not outlaw abortion, even though its passage would free the GOP-controlled legislature to do so.

At times, anti-abortion advocates clouded their pitch in the language of their opposition, using words like “choice” and “regulation.” That effort veered into outright misinformation a day before the election, when thousands of voters—including a former Democratic governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius—received a text message warning that women in the state “are losing their choice” on abortion. “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice,” the text said. “Vote YES to protect women’s health.” The sender was unidentified, although the Washington Post reported that the group behind the texts is run by a former arch-conservative Kansas congressman.

Higgins was one of the voters who received the text on Monday. She sent “a strongly-worded reply” to the number, she told me, but got no further response. “I was really furious,” Higgins said. “It was part and parcel of the deceptive tactics that the anti-abortion movement is using in this fight.”

But Higgins also told me she was hopeful, seeing the desperation inherent in the misleading texts as evidence that abortion-rights supporters had already succeeded in overcoming their biggest challenge. They had mobilized voters to turn out in what was expected to be a sleepy summer primary in which many voters would otherwise have had no reason to participate. That initial victory was confirmed the moment the polls began to close tonight, when Kansas’s secretary of state, Scott Schwab, said turnout would likely shatter expectations and rival that of a presidential general election.

The question then became whether a surge in enthusiasm would be enough to carry the abortion-rights side in a state that Donald Trump won by 15 points just two years ago. Within a couple of hours, the answer became clear, and it wasn’t particularly close. Now, Democrats will try to replicate that winning strategy in another long-shot campaign: keeping control of Congress in November.