John Naisbitt, author of the '80s bestseller Megatrends, died a couple of weeks ago. This got me thinking about the big underlying ideas that animate a lot of my views, so I figured I should stop for a bit and write them down. Those of you who are regular readers will recognize most of them since they pop up frequently, but there are a few that have mostly stayed in the background. Here they are:
- US politics will stay toxic as long as Fox News is around. Rupert Murdoch has discovered that spreading fear and outrage is the most reliable way of making money, so that's what he does. It's all but impossible to sustain a traditional political system when half the population is scared senseless of the other half, and that will remain the case until Fox New is somehow reined in.
- Don't worry so much about China. China is now, and will remain, our biggest rival on the geopolitical stage. They will cause us plenty of trouble. At the same time, they have lots of problems that aren't always obvious. Their GDP per capita is still a small fraction of ours. They are coming up on the middle-income trap at the same time that their population is aging. And most importantly, they are a paranoid autocracy that will never fully embrace market capitalism. This is their Achilles' heel, and it's the reason that the United States will stay ahead of them more or less forever.
- Black students need to graduate from high school reading at a 12th grade level. This will not "solve" racism. However, it will prove impossible to make very much progress on reducing racism until Black kids are performing at the same level as white kids.
- Geoengineering is our future. I am not in favor of geoengineering. Nobody with a room temperature IQ is in favor of geoengineering. Nevertheless, the world has shown no willingness to take the collective action needed to address climate change, and it's unlikely that a fabulous new invention will do the job either. Around 2040 or so this will become obvious and the only alternative will be some sort of geoengineering. So we'll do it. This means that we should be studying every possible form of geoengineering now so that if we end up doing it, at least we have some idea of what we're getting ourselves into.
- The United States is the best placed country in the world right now. For all our faults, the US is by far the country best positioned to be successful over the next few decades. We have the best higher education system in the world. We have strong demographics. We valorize innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition. We are dedicated to market capitalism. Immigrants understand this instinctively, which is why the US remains by far the preferred destination for people around the world who would like to move.
- We are entering a biotech golden age. I know, I know: we've been entering a biotech golden age for the past four decades. But after years of prologue, I think we really are finally on the verge of huge change. Cheap genome sequencing, CRISPR, and mRNA vaccines are harbingers of the near future.
- Islamic terrorism will disappear within a decade. Explanation here.
- Artificial intelligence is coming. Don't be fooled by all the crap that's laughingly billed as "AI" by overenthusiastic marketing departments right now. These things are all toys. Real AI is still about 20 years away, but when it comes it will be the biggest breakpoint ever in human history. It will bring about change so massive and so extensive that it's nearly impossible to predict what the world will look like 40 or 50 years from now. I wish I could be around to see it!
1. Fox News is not the source of cancel culture.
2. From your mouth to God's ears.
3. But no one has the faintest idea of how to do that.
4-7. Interesting thoughts.
8. I won't be here to see it either.
"1. Fox News is not the source of cancel culture."
The Dixie Chicks would beg to differ.
But more seriously.....'cancel culture' peaked in the early 50's with McCarthy. Not a significant cause of the current toxicity.
They're just 'The Chicks' now, and they weren't cancelled. Some of their erstwhile fans boycotted them, but AFAIK they didn't lose any recording contracts, weren't cut from their label, etc. Maybe a station here or there refused to play their songs for a week or two.
Sounds no different than what happened to Seuss.
Completely different. Nothing happened to Seuss. The Seuss estate made a decision. The Chicks didn't take themselves off radio.
"Maybe a station here or there refused to play their songs for a week or two."
They were entirely blacklisted by thousands of stations in the entire country, with the stations going as far as firing or suspending DJ's that refused to enforce the ban, and it was for nearly the remainder of Bush's Presidency, not just a week or two.
Whether they have analyzed it or not, everyone with a kid who has gone through college knows how to accomplish 3, its just that there is no political will for it.
For "3" to work, there needs to be an investment in the minimum standards of education, and not only do people have more than a "faint idea" I would say that its known exactly how to accomplish it. You need to, probably as early as 3rd or 4th grade, assign class size by level of kid. Kids on track, essentially the highest performers, can be in classes of 20 to 30. If a kid is seriously underperforming, they need to be in a class of 10. That's basically it.
But classes of 20, through 12th grade, let alone classes of 10, cost money, and its money that generally the public is unwilling to spend.
We have a system where, after a certain point, the educational system is designed to identify intellectual talent and channel that talent. Its not designed to get everyone up to a certain level.
Well, there is a certain minimal level but its so low that its not particularly useful in modern society.
Twiddling with education standards and teacher standards and class sizes has been going on for at least the past 50 years. No one knows a way to fix education so that the poor and disadvantaged receive a better education. Has not happened yet and it never will.
But the thing is, we do know how to fix the underlying problem and the underlying problem is not fundamentally with our schools. It's with the students. How do we fix the students without fixing the schools? This is both easy and difficult. Give their families money. Children from middle class families do better in school. Make all families with children middle class families by giving them money. That will solve the problem. Or at least it stands a much better chance that more testing or incentives for teachers or charters schools or whatever nonsense has been tried over the past half century and done nothing.
I've been teaching in Los Angeles, mostly Watts & South Central, mostly English, since 2005. I agree with most of what you are saying, but the education world is adamantly, maybe immovably, set against separating students by their level. Leaving that issue aside, I would add:
The foundation of the student's language skills are well established before the student comes to kindergarten. Teachers can do a lot, but it is always going to be hard and we will always fall short. In the schools where I've taught English, the number of students who have mastered English enough to take freshman English w/o remedial (nobody uses that word any more) classes at junior college is almost zero.
We, as a society, need to put more emphasis on developing and mastering language skills across the whole range. The LA schools focus almost exclusively on grinding out responses to "informational text" because that's what is on the standardized tests. In the time I've been teaching, we have been hammering the STEM - mostly the M. We could use, but do not need, a nation of students who can do Algebra II. We do need a nation of students who can listen, speak, read, and write college level language.
The whole system of 30-40 students in a room with one adult for an hour a day/five days a week or two hours a day/twice a week needs to be scrapped. One thing revealed by distance learning over the last year is that class time is a waste of time for some students and desperately needed for others.
It's a mistake to talk about reading as if it is separate from all other language skills. It's listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They all go together in the brain. Neuroscientists have been trying to explain things to education world for years, but they do not want to hear it.
People will lament the sad state of reading skills, but when it comes down to it, they don't really care whether other people's children can read.
Some great comments on the subject but one rational reason against tracking student by ability is the historical incidences of tracking being used as de-facto segregation and the danger that some students get mislabeled early on and get stuck in a low track, then give up on school.
I went to one school without tracking and one with. I was bored out of my gourd many classes. Yet some teachers wanted to hold me back because my penmanship was sloppy and I'm a horrible speller. I left the non-tracked school for a more highly regarded school that did track students.
And in my seventh grade class (circa 1980) only boys were selected for a higher elite math pre-sat test thing, can't remember the specifics but I was highly curious as to why there weren't girls in the program, I had transferred to the school so I was too late to have been in it. It bothered me a lot but I didn't speak up, I didn't want to be a troublemaker.
What on earth does cancel culture have to do with Kevin's point about Fox News being a toxic cesspool for our democracy? Oh, yeah. Squirrel!
AI has been "on the cusp" since before I was a CS grad student in the 60s. Not sure what is different now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Sorry "80s", not "60s"....not that old 🙂
I'm old enough to remember the "AI Winter" of the late '80s and early '90s. I recall everyone trying to learn LISP.
Now I am thinking about Amarylis in the Music Man.
Just thinking about LISP gives me a headache.
(Just (thinking (about (LISP (gives (me (a (headache))))))))
Lost In Stupid Parentheses indeed.
You're a youngin' by the standards of this blog.
Kevin addressed that. He doesn't mean toy AI, he means the real deal. People were talking about it in the '80s as an idea. No serious person believed that real AI was just around the corner in the '80s.
That's just not factual. It makes me think you didn't live through the AI ferment in CS departments in the 80s.
Correct. In the '80s there was the "expert systems fad."
I did qualify my statement: "no serious person"
"Real" AI is not a useful term. The proper term is Artificial General Intelligence. I think we are unlikely to ever achieve this. No one knows what general intelligence is really so how we make an artificial one I can't even imagine.
This isn't a common term but I think the kind of "toy" AI we have now should be referred to as Simulated Intelligence.
IMO, "Artificial Intelligence" will be like turning lead into gold was in the Middle Ages, or like a perpetual motion machine in the early modern era. We'll learn some very useful things on the quest (including why it isn't possible) but will never achieve it.
Also, I wish I had your confidence in "market capitalism" being a huge advantage. China is doing the "big things" to upgrade their infrastructure that used to be an American hallmark, but now we seem happy to stumble along on the commons infra built by the big thinkers of yesteryear.
It goes back to China being a paranoid autocracy. People aren't promoted so much because they are good, but because they have an uncle highly placed in the party. I worked in aerospace company that was a subcontractor to COMAC, Boeing, and Airbus. Boeing and Airbus both have their issues, but with the C919 COMAC is struggling to build an airplane comparable to what Boeing built 50 years ago.
That’s a good point. The Chinese can’t build a plane comparable to what Boeing once built. But then neither can Boeing build such a plane. Different vectors but essentially the same disease.
The 737 MAX did nothing wrong.
I apologize for seeming to pass a moral judgment. Sorry for sounding a bit judgmental bu, normatively speaking, it’s better when planes don’t fall out of the sky.
Milton Freidman caused the 737MAX crashes (as well as the Deepwater Horizon disaster). The old Boeing existed to build superior airplanes. They were famous for their design rule: no single point favorites. Once they were taken over by McDonnel Douglas they followed the Freidman axiom: customers don't count, the public doesn't count, the employees don't count, the only thing that counts is the stock price. Short cuts were taken on the 737 MAX, the MCAS was designed to be dependent on a single failure prone angle of attack sensor. At the last moment the MCAS was extended to cover a large part of the flight envelope without proper analysis or testing in order to meet the schedule. From the standpoint of driving the stock price higher it was a reasonable gamble. From the standpoint of building a good airplane or protecting the public from being killed, it was stupid and inexcusable.
1. Fox News didn’t invent either the paranoid style or bigotry. They weren’t the first or only ones to foment and exploit fear, suspicion and resentment. I think we can reduce these through better civics education, but they will always be a factor in political life, here and elsewhere.
On 2, define "ahead."
On the last: Do you think eventually we should turn over governance to AIs? Obviously not in 20 years but in 50? 80?
At some point would we have an ethical obligation to abandon democracy in favor of a system that would provide better QoL? Would like to read your thoughts on that.
Also a no on market capitalis. A % of ownership of the means of production should be socialized in public hands OR collectivized by employees such as worker councils in Germany.
I think economic planning to the extent that public investment should drive the economy in some degree in some industries (which may change depending on the global situation) is a must.
maybe this is too pollyanna-ish, but i see AI as a counterweight against climate change.
here is my thought process: AI solves a lot of the fusion energy problems, or makes renewables feasible at scale, if we have not gotten there already by that time, leading to a lot of cheap energy options.
affordable reliable cheap energy reduces emissions for production, but also provides opportunities for de-carbonization; massive deployment of this type of mechanism becomes trivial with cheap energy: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/switzerland-giant-new-machine-sucking-carbon-directly-air
again, maybe too optimistic, but i am an american after all.
AI decides the best solution to Xlimate change is to kill all humans. Carbon emissions plummet.
Skynet agrees.
"AI solves a lot of the fusion energy problems, or makes renewables feasible at scale"
Bit of a quibble: renewables are already feasible at scale. This isn't a technology problem so much as it's an implementation problem. There's a lot of money and human capital tied up in fossil power, and it will not go quietly into the night. As a result, you have a lot of actual, existing companies with huge market and political clout fighting transition to clean energy against merely nascent clean energy companies. That's what holds us back, by and large.
But maybe AI could help with that, too. Shades of Asimov's "The Inevitable Conflict."
Also too, the negative externalities have never been priced into the fossil fuel business model.
1) Hasn't the rightwing propaganda machine evolved to the point that Fox News is only the biggest but not only player, and if reigned in somehow it's spot will be filled in by OAN and others?
5) What metric are you using to determine the US has the best higher education system in the world?
6) Strong agree. I just invested in a biotech ETF because I think this is going to be a blockbuster segment both from a financial standpoint and quality of life impact standpoint over the next 10 years and beyond.
The idea that the US or China or any country is going to run out of workers is total nonsense. In the US, the fraction of the population of working age has been and will remain at about 60%:
http://www.skeptometrics.org/RealDemographics.html
There will be more of a decline in China because their ratio has been much higher:
http://www.skeptometrics.org/China_Demographics.png
but in 2050 they will be near that same 60% ratio, which did not hold back economic progress in the US through much of the 20th century.
Kevin claims to read Dean Baker's blog, where the fact that any decline in working population will be offset by productivity increase is frequently explained. It is particularly stupid to claim that robots will take away the jobs, as Kevin does, and also warn that there won't be enough people to fill the jobs. If you think that global warming, destruction of environment, etc. are problems, why would you suppose that population must always increase?
I would take your opinions more seriously if you used language that didn't insult the man whose blog you so frequently comment on: " It is particularly stupid to claim that robots will take away the jobs, as Kevin does, and also warn that there won't be enough people to fill the jobs."
Simply substitute "mistaken" for "stupid" and you solve the problem.
Shorter version: It's a mistake to assert stupidity if you want to have a productive discussion.
+1
It is particularly stupid to keep reading a blog one regards as stupid.
Particularly offensive.
'And most importantly, they are a paranoid autocracy that will never fully embrace market capitalism. This is their Achilles' heel, and it's the reason that the United States will stay ahead of them more or less forever.'
I think that this is a good time to remind ourselves that we are fighting a pitched domestic battle to prevent scorched-earth Capitalism from turning us into a third world country... so let's not be so naive as to portray Capitalism as the reason for our past economic success- it is also the very reason for our Depressions and Recessions and economic inequality.
China appears to have a mixture of capitalism and direct government planning. For reasons not specified Kevin seems to think this is inferior to the more capitalistic system of the US, but the fact is that China has greatly outperformed the US economically since Maoism was abandoned. The standard of living has been improved tremendously. What exactly does Kevin think is ideal - the "gilded age" unrestrained capitalism of the late 19th century? Or does he think that the best system is the one run by big corporations, which is what the US is clearly headed for?
China may not keep up its recent rate of growth but there is no reason whatever to think that the growth potential of the US is greater.
'We valorize innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition. We are dedicated to market capitalism.'
Not by policy or practice are these things true. You are sounding like a Libertarian, Kevin. We favor Corporate Crony Capitalism. We no longer enforce our anti-monopoly or anit-trust laws, our Finance sector is bloated and a drag on our economy, our tax and regulatory system treats global mega-corps the same as local businesses, large corporations continue to suck up incentives and tax breaks designed for start-ups.
Consolidation is the nature of modern Corporate Capitalism. And it is the opposite of what you claim drives our economy. The warnings of the game Monopoly have been lost on us as a nation....
"You are sounding like a Libertarian, Kevin."
Kevin shows strong techno-libertarian tendencies. Like most really stupid ideas, tecno-libertarianism was born in California.
One benefit of increased broadband is that streaming will overtake cable before the decade's out--if cable even lasts that long. That will pretty much sink FoxNews back into the fringe lunatic realm it's always belonged in.
Media Matters explains why here:
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
Until then, we can all play our parts by cutting cable. And save hundreds of dollars a year in the bargain.
For years, please have wanted a-la-carte cable packages. With the fragmentation of streaming, that's pretty much what we're getting and all those separate subscriptions add up fast. In the end, many people wind up spending just as much (if not more) than they did on their old cable packages.
Someone just said in the comments to Drew Magary's FUNBAG that if anyone ever ends up packaging Disney+/Peacock/Paramount+/HBOmax/ESPN+/etc as a single-available service, they have just reinvented cable.
I have HBO, SHO, STARZ, Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon. Its definitely less than I used to pay for a cable bundle and the best part is I'm not forced to give FOX News any of it.
"In the end, many people wind up spending just as much (if not more) than they did on their old cable packages."
Does that calculation include internet? It's not like we have internet just to watch TV; it's a basic utility now. I have four premium streaming channels, and spend about $40 a month for them.
And every month, I catch myself wondering why I don't drop Netflix. (I spend more time on free YouTube watching old movies and British TV.) Because I can drop any of those channels when I've seen enough of their offerings, and get back on again when they have something new I want to watch.
Unbundle the cable bundle = Defund Fox.
Something like this could be the beginning of the end:
https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1385297661461471239?s=20
UPDATE: Good news about a @verizonfios plan that doesn’t require customers to pay carriage fees to Fox News and Tucker Carlson’s white supremacist rhetoric.
FYI - @verizonfios’ Basic Local cable package does NOT include @FoxNews & they allow you to add your five most watched (handpicked) channels, any additional sports and premium channels on top.
So, good for @Verizon offering an option not to pay White Nationalist Tucker Carlson!
I mostly agree with everything but I completely disagree with #3.
Look at the Asian experience. Racism is alive and well, set within the expectations of White America.
What will cause racism to fade away into the background is the acceleration of the number of multiracial families, particularly in conservative circles. For reference, see: https://bityl.co/6Usx
Probably Kevin should have said that anti-black racism would fade to the low level of current anti-Semitism. In my opinion, anti-Asian racism is already at that level, e.g., anti-Asian hate crime is slightly lower than, but of the same order of magnitude as, anti-Semitic hate crime.
Current intermarriage rates might well eliminate anti-Semitic and anti-Asian prejudice (at the cost of eliminating distinct Jewish or Asian communities), but current intermarriage rates are nowhere near high enough to meld the black and non-black populations.
Regarding #6, read: https://bityl.co/6UtD and https://bityl.co/6UtG
It sure looks like mRNA-based vaccines are a paradigm shift. To have two different mRNA-based vaccines hit upwards of 95% efficacy on infections is just stunning. And oh by the way they've already started testing a third shot for SARS-CoV-2.
If Moderna is able to achieve modest success, very soon we'll just be taking an annual combo vaccine that will protect us from all of the viruses and variants that cause seasonal cold/flu.
Our robot future.
Drink!
"Black students need to graduate from high school reading at a 12th grade level. This will not "solve" racism. However, it will prove impossible to make very much progress on reducing racism until Black kids are performing at the same level as white kids."
The poor performance of Black kids relative to white kids is a RESULT of racism as much as it is a measure of the effects of racism. The entire culture of public schools is biased to favor middle-class kids with middle class attitudes, from the teaching methodology to the assessments. Add that to the huge disparities in funding and white flight = more racism and poorer results for Black kids.
Finally, if you want Black kids graduating with 12th grade reading levels, you can start by eliminating child poverty and offering early childhood education.
Kind of seems like #8 should have some bearing on how much we need to research #4 ahead of time
Re #3, I think you are on to something but your framing puts the onus on black kids. It belongs on school administrators. It's actually an important difference because there's little that black kids can do to affect the quality of their teaching from pre-K to 3rd grade, when it matters most.
First and foremost, it belongs to black parents. But, yes, school administrators play a large part as well.
Academic achievement is pretty highly correlated with income. In the mid 20th century we were able to massively increase educational attainment for white children at the same time we improved average incomes for white households. I dont think it is a coincidence that men with union jobs were able to watch their kids graduate from high school or even go to college. Those jobs provided much needed stability.
I dont know how we increase education levels without dramatically increasing wages, which has proven to be extremely difficult over the last few decades.
Family income and zip code are pretty much all you need to make sound predictions of educational outcomes.
I think you are highly overrating capitalism as an inherently good and desirable economic system, particularly with regards to China. Basically, how can you (we) be sure that the "capitalism is good" first principle is even true? The same goes for innovation, entrepreneurship, and competition - all of which are basically just parts of capitalism?
FWIW, I think capitalism restrained by the state is probably fine, but I also haven't lived under any other regime. I also don't think we're actually living in a restrained capitalist market state, but more like monopolism allowed to run amok and ruin all the benefits that capitalism can actually have.
1. Fucksnooze isn't really a news organization, it's satire, The Onion for people who don't get the joke but want to imagine they do.
1) If Fox goes away someone else will just take their place.
2) Agreed
3) Not so much a trend. My suggestion is we need to give poor people with kids more money if we can't get them better paying jobs. That's the solution to our education problem.
4) I would not be so hopeful about this. Think of COVID denialism and vaccine hesitancy and multiply it by a billion. If one country wants to purposefully change the atmosphere and another country does not, wars are started over less. Also, what could possibly go wrong?
5) I pretty much agree, but we shouldn't fall down from patting ourselves on the back.
6) The GMO revolution in agriculture pretty much never happened because of (mostly unwarranted) consumer freakouts. I'm not sure what's going to change in the future.
7) Probably.
8) LOLz. AGI has been 20 years away for about 50 years now. We'll see.
#1. Shutting down Fox would make no difference at all. Like everybody else, you are making the mistake, as monstrous as it is elementary, of looking at the storyteller instead of looking at the audience.
#5. Where do you think the engineers are going to come from?
#8. No AI. Only a brutal succession of Therac-25s. This is partly about the gradual extinction of engineering, but more about the already-complete extinction of accountability. We will see how much more (or less) patience we have with machines killing people than with police killing people.
the usa is not the best place to live. number one reason being lack of decent medical coverage. big reason number two, too many guns.
Of course in the long run, global warming is going to make it a little harder to sustain a room temperature IQ.
2. Don't worry so much about China. ...the United States will stay ahead of them more or less forever.
True. China has grown phenomenally the past 20 years. The demographic outlook from here, however, is a huge headwind.
Estimated change in working-age population, 2021-2050
China: -19%
US: +11%
https://twitter.com/morganhousel/status/1385300510408806406
4. Geoengineering is our future.
Disagree. We could argue whether we will think it is necessary in the future, but it not only too early to say, it is counter-productive to think now it will be inevitable in the future.
Michael Mann (whose new book on climate needs to be read more than Bill Gates's):
A fundamental problem with geoengineering is that it presents what is known as a moral hazard, namely, a scenario in which one party (e.g., the fossil fuel industry) promotes actions that are risky for another party (e.g., the rest of us), but seemingly advantageous to itself. Geoengineering provides a potential crutch for beneficiaries of our continued dependence on fossil fuels. Why threaten our economy with draconian regulations on carbon when we have a cheap alternative? The two main problems with that argument are that (1) climate change poses a far greater threat to our economy than decarbonization, and (2) geoengineering is hardly cheap—it comes with great potential harm.
https://michaelmann.net/content/my-comments-new-national-academy-report-geoengineering
8. Artificial intelligence is coming. ...It will bring about change so massive and so extensive that it's nearly impossible to predict what the world will look like 40 or 50 years from now.
Prediction on what people will be saying 40 or 50 years from now: "Artificial intelligence is coming. ...It will bring about change so massive and so extensive that it's nearly impossible to predict what the world will look like 40 or 50 years from now."
My guess is that the world in the future will be richer, safer, and healthier. The massive changes will be in fashion, pop culture, how we entertain ourselves (i.e., filling our time of more leisure, less drudgery). But the day-to-day lives of most people will look very much the same, as it has for ages. People will live in apartments or houses. Kids will go to school. Their parents will go to work. Their grandparents will have longer retirements to enjoy their cruises and adventures. And everyone will be bored and disgruntled.
Anther point:
I'm not sure how it ends, but I don't believe we're destined for permanent cold civil war. The forces that threaten our democracy and our freedoms will exhaust themselves sometime this decade. We'll look back on the past few years and say "WTF! How did that happen?" The fever may already have broken, even if we're not out of the woods just yet.
I used to kid that we were in better shape as a country when the biggest division between Rs and Ds was the tax rate on capital gains. So the Biden announcement and Wall St. reaction today may be the beginning of a good thing.
But there growth is Chinese people. Ours....isn't.
Not sure I understand.
-19% is not really growth but shrinkage, and total pop of China is expected to fall after this decade.
see his comment below, he's an anti immigrant racist just ignore him
I see. Yes, indeed.
Geoengineering worthy of research provided whatever is studied is coupled or paired with also reducing increasing ocean acidification. Fiddling with radiation budget without offsetting adverse effects of increasing CO2 emissions(even if lower) on ocean acidification makes little sense. from continued CO2 emissions.
More libertarian tinged techno optimist proposition nation garbage. The US is rapidly becoming Brazil north because of mass immigration. I'd be surprised if it is around as a polity by 2050. I pray that it isn't.
You couldn't load a few more buzzwords in that first sentence? Or maybe change it to say something meaningful?
"Islamic terrorism will disappear within a decade. "
Tell that to Afghani women.
Not sure if Fox News is a cause or an effect. After all, nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head to force them to watch, nor is it the only "news" source available. Seems like as long as there is a demand for such "news" programming, there will be somebody willing to provide it (I mean, I think there are at least 2 networks as it is waiting in the wings should Fox News faulter.)