The Wall Street Journal’s 10-Point newsletter this week let subscribers know that Nvidia is in talks to backstop a $250 billion loan for a $500 billion data center in Ohio. A few paragraphs later, it noted that the number of children under eighteen in big American cities has dropped six percent in a decade, and that even cities gaining population are losing children. The Journal did not connect the dots. The editors are too good at their job to miss them. They simply have no interest in the story they tell.
I will tell it for them. The story is this: the movement that claimed to stand for the family and the local community has spent the last generation converting the nation’s productive wealth into abstract machinery that has no children, no home town, and no future that can be measured in anything but quarterly earnings per share. The children have left the city. The money followed the bot.
Let me offer the steelman the Journal would give itself. A booming stock market. Private enterprise making the largest capital deployment in a generation. Innovation at American scale. The AI hiring-panic of 2023 failed to materialize; the newsletter actually presents this as a point of relief. The market is bidding on the future. This is what markets do, and America comes out ahead for it. That is an honest argument from the premises of the shareholder-primary world. Even by the market’s own measure, the argument is already fraying: the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq have fallen two weeks in a row heading into the earnings-and-rate decision that will test the rally further. The machine is not even delivering on its own terms.
The steelman holds until you read the rest of the newsletter. The Nvidia deal, underwritten by SoftBank and funded by Japanese trade-deal power on federally controlled land, will produce a ten-gigawatt compute cluster. It will produce exactly nothing for the school board that cannot keep a teacher in the classroom, nothing for the parish that closed its doors last year, nothing for the families who looked at the cost of a starter home and the price of daycare and decided the city had nothing left for them. As MSI’s base-rate reckoning in June showed, the revenue projections have never justified this scale of deployment. A half-trillion dollars concentrated in one building in one county in Ohio, and not a single dollar of it answers to the people who live in that county.
I have watched this before. The same newsletter runs analyses on the fertility-rate crisis and the exodus of young families from urban cores every few weeks. It treats each as a separate problem — a policy puzzle, a demographic curiosity, a piece of data for the portfolio manager to file alongside the Fed rate decision. The newsletter does this because the connections would indict the whole edifice. You cannot celebrate the rentier as the engine of growth and grieve the vanishing child in the same paragraph without sounding like a man trying to have it both ways, which is exactly what the fusionist coalition has been doing for forty years.
The party that cut the checks for the data center is the same party that defunded the city school, opposition-researched the parish, and told the young family that their problems were solved by a tax credit that didn’t cover the rent. It is the same party that wrapped itself in the language of local control while the soft-capital-backed management consultants consolidated the school districts, consolidated the hospitals, and consolidated the grocery supply chain. The $500 billion disappear into a tax-abated shell in Ohio and the estimated assessed value accrues to nobody who has to send a child to the strapped public school down the road. This is not a market failure. It is a theological failure of the movement that was supposed to conserve the institutions of place and replaced them with a server farm.
What does the counter-model look like? It is not the state. I have no use for a federal program that merely renames the concentrated power from a private chief executive to a public one. The answer is the thing that cannot concentrate half a trillion dollars in one place because it answers to the people who live there. The rural electric co-op in my county wired the sand plain before the investor-owned utility would look at a county without a manufacturing base. The credit union on the corner pays out its surplus to its member-depositors and cannot be acquired by a holding company the way its banking rival was. These are distributed, member-owned, concrete. They have a child to feed.
A conservative who genuinely believed in the family and the local community would look at the Nvidia-SoftBank-OpenAI deal — the pinnacle of the financialized abstraction — and ask why none of that half-trillion is obligated to the county where it sits. He would ask what a society looks like when its most valuable physical asset is a machine that predicts the next word in a chat box, but it cannot afford to let a young couple sit down in a kitchen they own with a child they can support. The movement I left in those pages traded its inheritance for a stack of graphics processing units, and the newsletter that cheered the deal ran the census data in the next column. And as the analysis of the career-risk calculus behind the AI FOMO made plain, no one in the C-suite can afford to be the one who stops buying. The children have already left the city. The rest of us are just waiting for the power bill.