‘We’re losing it’

Recently in The Signal: Where have all the workers gone? Matthew Notowidigdo on the transformation of the global labor market.

Today: Why are people’s cognitive skills declining? Gloria Mark on how consumer technology is making us more error-prone, more stressed, and less productive.

+ Can elected officials ever really control U.S. national security?

& new music from Deradoorian.

First: what we’re tracking for this week’s despatch …

The U.S. economy is shrinking

U.S. GDP declined by 0.3 percent in the first quarter of this year—the weakest quarterly performance in three years.

• U.S. President Donald Trump blames his predecessor, Joe Biden, for the result: “That’s Biden; that’s not Trump.”
• GDP had grown by 2.4 percent in the last quarter of 2024.
• The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment dropped this month by 32 percent, down to the lowest level since the 1990 recession.

This appears to be a direct result of Trump-administration policy. After the pandemic, U.S. GDP growth was the strongest in any Western country. Europe’s economy was meanwhile falling farther and farther behind the United States’—for more on which, see Martin Wolf in The Signal.

But Trump’s new round of tariffs on April 2 upended the American economy. The U.S. stock market fell so steeply after the tariffs that it recorded the worst 100-day start for any U.S. presidency in 50 years. While the cause of the decline would seem clear, the extent to which Trump might be willing to respond by pulling back on the tariffs is not.

Clampdown in Türkiye

Turkish authorities arrested 18 employees of the Istanbul city government on Wednesday, Charging them with corruption, four days after doing the same to about 50 other municipal officials.

• The detentions started when police arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on March 19, accusing him of multiple felonies—as İmamoğlu was very likely to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the next presidential election and was leading Erdoğan in some polling.
• Demonstrations supporting İmamoğlu continue and about 30 people were arrested during them last week.
• According to a recent poll, 65 percent of Turks say İmamoğlu’s arrest was wrong.

The situation would seem to be the work of an autocratic ruler doing whatever he can to stay in power. Erdoğan is also jailing his political rivals, Turkish and foreign journalists, and cutting off social-media accounts that criticize him.

Meanwhile, Türkiye’s economy has virtually collapsed in the past two years under high inflation and a steep decline in the value of the Turkish lira. The key question now is whether the repression will keep protest under control—and enable Erdoğan to win the next election.

Meanwhile

The landing module of a failed Soviet spacecraft is about to come falling back to Earth around May 10—but no one knows where it’s going to land. The U.S.S.R. built and launched the Kosmos 482 probe in 1972 to make observations of the surface of Venus, but a rocket malfunctioned and the ship never managed to escape the Earth’s orbit—so now the landing module, which weighs almost 500 kilograms, might survive re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere and smash somewhere into the planet: “With satellite trackers continuing to observe the spacecraft’s tumble from orbit, a clearer picture of its uncontrolled re-entry will emerge in the coming days.”

Feature

Addled

Why are people’s cognitive skills declining? Gloria Mark on how consumer technology is making us more error-prone, more stressed, and less productive.

The SignalGustav Jönsson

Books / from the member’s despatch

Can elected officials ever really control U.S. national security?

Coming soon: Glynn Tonsor on why people in the United States are eating record amounts of meat …