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Forget Donald Trump. A new analysis suggests the U.S. publics sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridges Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before rising steadily from 2008 onward. Using more than 35,000 responses from the American National Election Studies between 1988 and 2024, they estimate that issue polarization has increased 64% since the late 1980s, with almost all of that change occurring after 2008. The research uses a machine-learning approach to move beyond party labels and better understand what actually drives Americans political views. Instead of relying on whether respondents identify as Republican or Democrat, the team grouped people based on patterns in what they believe across a range of issues, from abortion and traditional family values to race, inequality, and health insurance. That distinction matters because in many countries politically opposite parties do not exist, says David Young, a psychology researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and one of the studys authors. You might even want to study countries where there are no parties, like Saudi Arabia, he says. The paper challenges the idea that polarization is solely a Trump-era phenomenon. It points to 2008 as the major turning point, a year that also included the financial crisis, Barack Obamas election, and the widespread adoption of the iPhone-era internet. Our ability to nail down when it starts is slightly divided by the fact that we only have data points every four years, Young says. Still, we know that this increase starts from our 2008 data point, he adds. Thats our best guess at the starting point. The researchers argue that the widening gap is driven less by the right drifting further right and more by the left moving rapidly in a progressive direction. Based on the issues surveyed, the left cluster became 31.5% more socially liberal by 2024 compared with 1988, while the right cluster shifted only 2.8% more conservative. Its not necessarily that left-wingers and right-wingers have become more extreme, Young says. Its more that theyve become more kind of consolidated.
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Its tax season. Americans will pay an average of $10,489 in personal taxesabout 14% of the average households total income. Most will do so because they think it is their civic duty. Many believe they are morally obliged to obey the law and pay their share. But as tax day approaches, many Americans will bemoan their tax bill and complain that it is unfair. So, how are we to know if paying taxes is the right thing to do? Perhaps philosophy has some clues? Reasons to obey the law Many philosophers agree that we should obey the law. In The Crito, for example, Plato describes Socratess choice after the Athenian jury sentenced him to death for impiety. Crito, a wealthy friend of Socrates, arranges for him to escape from the prison a night before his execution. Socrates refuses saying he ought to obey the law. In explaining his decision, Socrates hinted at roughly three reasons why it would be wrong for him to break the law: First, he had chosen to stay in the city for many years despite being at liberty to leave if he did not like the laws. Second, he might hurt other peopleby damaging the state if he disobeyed. Finally, he had benefited from the laws in the past. More recent scholars endorse many of these claims. Eighteenth-century philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that citizens agreed to the law of the state by continuing to live in the place. Locke, for example, held that if a man owns or enjoys some part of the land under a given government, while that enjoyment lasts he gives his tacit consent to the laws of that government and is obliged to obey them. Twentieth-century British philosopher R.M. Hare suggests that citizens should obey the law to promote good social outcomes. Another British philosopher of the same era, H.L.A. Hart argued that citizens should comply out of fairness to others who obey. He held that it is unfair, and therefore wrong to benefit from their actions, without doing the same for them in turn. Is there a moral duty to pay taxes? Yet it is hard to see why these arguments would give the average citizen a moral responsibility to pay their taxes. Most of us never consented to the law. We were simply born here. Leaving would be costly, and even the chance to emigrate is dependent on another countrys willingness to accept us. Given the amount of government waste and its total budget, individual citizens could think that their tax bill is unlikely to make a difference to the services the government can provide. Even if they agree with how the government spends money, they might therefore conclude they have no reason to contribute. After all, one persons $10,000 is not going to determine whether the military can secure national borders. The most commonly defended argument from scholars for why one should pay taxes is a duty of fair play. Fair play is the notion of reciprocity, the idea that you should not take advantage of others. As philosophers like George Klosko argue, people benefit from their fellow citizens paying their taxes. They enjoy the roads that everyone helps pay for, the fire departments they fund. They ought to pay back fellow citizens who benefited them, just like you ought to do something for a friend who gives you a ride to the airport. The case against paying taxes As a philosopher who studies civic ethics, I have argued in a recent paper that this kind of responsibility still does not explain why one should pay taxes. The idea that we have to pay your taxes because other people have benefited by paying theirs rests, from my perspective, on a wrongly narrow view of what it means to satisfy ones duties of reciprocity. All that reciprocity requires is that one should compensate people for the work they have done that benefits us. Just like we can repay a friend who gives us a ride to the airport by doing something else that benefits themsay, making them dinner or helping them moveso, too, can we repay our fellow citizens by doing something other than paying our taxes. Lots of actions benefit your fellow citizens that you might pay for: taking a pay cut to do legally discretionary work to help the environment, volunteering to do policy research, choosing a career in public service over a more financially rewarding line of work, and more. If you do enough such acts, it could be argued, you would have no duty of reciprocity to pay your taxes. You would already have done enough to compensate your fellow citizens. Why pay taxes Given this, the best argument for paying our taxes, as I argue in my paper, is intellectual humility. And here is what it means. Satisfying these duties of reciprocity requires successfully compensating our fellow citizens for all the burdens they took on our behalf. As one can imagine, it is a hard calculation to make. It is difficult to know if we have done enough. If we choose not to pay taxes because we think we have already repaid our fellow citizens in other ways, we run a strong risk of getting it wrong. Paying the tax bill is one way of avoiding that risk nd making sure we treat our fellow citizens fairly. Brookes Brown is an assistant professor of philosophy and the director of the Law, Liberty, and Justice Program at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
If you ask journalists and PR professionals what they fear most from AI, typically theyll say variations of the same narrative: AI will make content so easy to create that their roles will have little to offer. Virtually any AI model today can write passable articles and pitches (and lots more), so it feels like the value of the human touch is questionable at best. It is true that AI is automating big parts of knowledge work, and exactly how that plays out in media and adjacent industries is still being determined. At the same time, AI is transforming information discovery. Billions of people now get information from AI experienceseither chatbots or synthetic summaries like Googles AI overviewsinstead of traditional search results. Clearly, how AI answer engines find and present information (how they filter, prioritize, and interpret the things they find on the web) will play a central role in how media and public relations work going forward. More importantly, it will determine how the two sides work together. And I mean “together” in the most neutral way. Sometimes journalism and PR are complementary and sometimes they are in conflict, but in either case, AI will be the new interface where this plays out. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} What Im talking about of course is GEO (generative engine optimization), or more precisely the incentives it creates. AI answers are often said to be the new front door of the internet, since theyre extremely popular (ChatGPT alone has almost a billion users) and that popularity is growing. Googles AI Mode for search, which subs out the 10 blue links for an AI conversation, is now prominent on both the Google homepage and the Chrome omnibox. Some are predicting it will become the default this year or the next. That would (will?) be devastating for publishers (a subject for another column), and it would also instantly cement the AI summary as the new informational portal for . . . well, everyone. But it also suggests the future that journalists and PR pros fear, an arena where the primary weapons are automation and slop, is incorrect. Or at least incomplete. Narrative is the new SEO It all comes down to how generative engines prioritize information. Both sides want their narratives to become the basis of AI answersPR for clients, media for itselfin the hope of cementing their authority. Good news for the media side: Studies show that AI portals prioritize journalistic content far above commercial content (such as a corporate blog or site). Thats also good news for PR, since a large part of their job is interfacing with the media. If you think of the goals and messaging of a PR campaign as one circle, and the stories that a journalist wants to tell as another circle, where those two circles overlap is the highest chance for both sides to influence AI answers. Thats because of a fundamental difference between AI engines and search engines: AI is looking for patterns instead of keywords. The more it sees similar narratives across sites, domains, and social media, the more confidence it will have in the summary it’s creating. Domain authoritythe strength of any specific URLstill matters, but topical authority matters more. What that means in practice: If an AI engine sees that a site or person has continually covered the same topic, and from many different angles, and is cited often elsewhere, it will boost the authority signal. And that can matter just as much if not more than more generalized coverage from a major (Tier 1, to use PR lingo) publication. That has two key consequences for the publicist-journalist relationship. First, specialized journalists who are narrowly focused on a beat have increased value. That applies to publications, too, which makes trade/B2B pubs newly relevant. Second, while journalist relationships are crucial in media relations, its still just one part of a larger content strategy. There are other ways to build authority in the eyes of AI engines, including corporate blogs, social, and more. Yes, content from journalists takes priority, but all the rest will reinforce the narrative the answer engine sees. Beyond the byline On the flip side, journalists need to play this game, too. While their content is first in line for GEO, if it lacks uniqueness it wont stand out from competitors. If its too general or incomplete, AI engines will likely prioritize other content thats more specific and comprehensive. If it doesnt answer the common questions people ask AI, AI will move on to content that does. All this is to say that in an AI world, its far better for a journalist to have a clear coverage area instead of being a generalist. But thats just step one. In the same way that PR needs to build a narrative with a larger content strategy that involves other platforms and formats, journalists should too. Most journalists write articles for a living, but to better get the attention of AI engines, it’s advisable to spread those stories across formats and platforms. Whether its creating a personal website or newsletter, attending events, or publishing in new formats like short-form video or podcasts, the goal is to elevate the visibility of the stories youre tellingthe stories people are asking about in ChatGPT, Google, and Perplexity. Building your brand around them is a bonus. The irony about all this is that AI, at first, promised to lighten the “content marketing” duties like writing social media copy and SEO headlines, which virtually no journalist wanted to do. But it turns out that to successfully leverage GEO, those duties get amplified: You need to continually think about the ways your stories can be presented and remixed to ensure AI engines take notice. The upside is that its all inherently human. Generative engines look for patterns, but they also prioritize uniqueness within those patterns. And uniqueness is what humans are best at. For journalists, its the scoops and unearthed facts that make compelling stories. For PR, its the person-to-person relationships that remain the most reliable way to find connections to those stories. As AI reshapes how stories are found and told, the edge still belongs to those who know how to tell them best. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/media-copilot.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/fe289316-bc4f-44ef-96bf-148b3d8578c1_1440x1440.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to The Media Copilot\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for The Media Copilot. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Emediacopilot.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91453847,"imageMobileId":91453848,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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