Putin is testing Europe’s red lines with drone incursions, sabotage, and cyberattacks. Who will draw the line before conflict spreads further? Ian Bremmer explains. Subscribe to GZERO’s YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔): / @gzeromedia Subscribe to Ian Bremmer’s YouTube channel / @ianbremmer Sign up for GZERO’s free newsletters on global politics: https://www.gzeromedia.com/subscribe Russia’s war in Ukraine is increasingly spilling beyond its borders. From suspected sabotage and cyberattacks to drones and aircraft testing NATO airspace, Moscow is probing how far it can go without triggering a wider confrontation. Meanwhile, uncertainty over US support is forcing Europe to rethink its own defenses. But with 27 EU countries divided by competing priorities and far-right, nationalist politics gaining ground across the continent, can Europe agree on how to respond? Ian Bremmer explains why Putin’s biggest test for Europe may be whether the continent can act together before a crisis forces its hand.
Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels anonymously 300 years ago in October 1726. Everyone knows the story, tiny people preforming bondage on giants, plus talking horses.
Most people dont know it’s one long howl of rage at how England treated Ireland. He was a savage. Swift was born in Dublin to English parents, and for the first part of his career he wanted London and kept getting Ireland instead. He became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1713 and stayed there until his death in 1745. This city never let him go, and by the end he’d stopped trying to leave. The lad was a genius,but he was difficult to be mates with and he suffered terrible with mental and physical health issues. He’d severe vertigo, tinnitus, and his cognitive decline later in life was due to Meniere’s disease.
Swift was acutely aware of the stigma and terrible care surrounding mental illness, satirising his own legacy in his 1731 poem Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift but more on that in a second. The book itself Gulliver’s Travels has a Cavan connection cause Swift spent time around Swanlinbar and Mullagh visiting his uncle and a mate.The local folklore there has a giant farmer nicknamed Big Doughty supposedly which inspired Gulliver’s scale, and a night spent asleep by a cottage fire ended with local boys tying his hair to the chair similar to how the Liliputians staked him on the beach.
But its the Anglo-Irish and French politics, that had an unmistakable influence. Lilliput and Blefuscu going to war over which end of an egg to crack is Swift mocking the pettiness of English and French squabbling, and by extension the absurd laws heaped on Irish Catholics and dissenters at home.Laputa, the floating island that starves the land beneath it by literally blocking the sun, is Britain’s government hovering over Ireland with total indifference. And Lindalino, a city that rises up against the island and gets censored out of early British editions for the trouble, is Dublin in a very thin disguise.
Although published anonymously Swift wasn’t writing this totally disguised. Under the name “M.B. Drapier” he’d already talked all of Dublin into rejecting a rotten British coinage scheme with the Drapier’s Letters, and a few years later he’d publish “A Modest Proposal”, satirically suggesting the Irish poor sell their children as food, just to show England how it sounded when cruelty was dressed up as policy.
He left his fortune of about £12,000 to found what became St Patrick’s Hospital, Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, which finally opened its doors in 1757 and is still treating people today. That poem I referenced earlier goes “He gave the little wealth he had To build a house for fools and mad And showed by one satiric touch No nation needed it so much.” He was one of the good ones, and we must go for a jar with him in the DTM again soon.
He’s buried in St Patrick’s Cathedral under an epitaph he wrote himself. In Latin translated by W.B. Yeats as: “Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveller; he Served human liberty.”
You may have read about Lewy body dementia in the news recently following the sad passing of Sir Patrick Stewart. If you don’t know what Lewy body dementia is, you’re not alone. Here’s what you need to know.
Dementia is caused by different diseases that affect the brain. Lewy body dementia is caused by Lewy body disease. About 1 in 10 people with dementia has Lewy body dementia. In this disease, tiny clumps of proteins known as Lewy bodies appear in the nerve cells of the brain, causing a range of symptoms, some of which are shared by Alzheimer’s disease and some by Parkinson’s disease.For this reason, dementia with Lewy bodies is often wrongly diagnosed.
Everyone experiences dementia differently. Both Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer’s disease can cause problems with staying focused, difficulties with making decisions, memory loss, and problems with the way the person sees things around them. However, Lewy body dementia also causes symptoms that are not usually seen in Alzheimer’s disease. These include hallucinations, problems staying fully awake, difficulties with movement and very disturbed sleep.
We have more information about Lewy body dementia on our website. And if you’re worried about yourself or someone else, give our Dementia Support Line a call on 0333 150 3456.
Decline in reading scores a problem with potential economic, political fallout, experts note. But, they say, it’s fixable.
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
October 29, 2026 6 min read
Education experts are growing alarmed by the steady decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ reading scores, which continue to lag behind those of their peers in several parts of Asia and Europe.
According to the results of the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global test measuring 15-year-old students’ performances in reading, math, and science in industrialized countries, American students were outperformed by counterparts in nations including Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Estonia, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
The pattern mirrors the global trend.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, U.S. students’ reading test scores continue to drop, a trend that started before the pandemic. Reading test scores have trended downward since 2013 for eighth graders and since 2015 for fourth graders.
“We should be more concerned about this now more than ever,” said Capin. “At this point, there is pretty overwhelming evidence from the PISA results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the United States, and from other national and international sources of reading data, that too many of our students are reading at or below proficiency levels.”
Experts agree that the slide mirrors a decline in reading itself. It is a phenomenon that has myriad causes, including pandemic disruption, chronic student absenteeism, fewer resources to support struggling readers, and the rise of smartphone technology and artificial intelligence.
“There are reasons to worry that this will get worse before it gets better,” said Capin. “Outside of school, smartphones are taking opportunities away from children to read and take part in other more literacy-rich activities. We’re seeing less reading for pleasure among children, but also adults. And AI, when used inappropriately, replaces opportunities to read and write, which are critical to the type of deep, rational thinking that democracy depends on.”
For Paola Uccelli, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, the situation amounts to a national and global crisis that affects both children and adults, in the U.S. and around the world.
“We have a literacy crisis in the United States,” said Uccelli, an expert in reading and language. “But this is truly a global literacy crisis that needs to be understood both as an instructional problem and a broader societal problem.”
The heart of the problem is that too many read too little.
“Reading doesn’t happen only in school,” Uccelli said. “It happens outside of school too. The kids who read for fun almost every day and the kids who miss no days of school score the highest in our national reading assessments. Yet today’s world does not invite most of us to engage in sustained reading.”
The number of children who read for fun outside of school is plummeting. In 2012, 27 percent of U.S. eighth-graders reported reading for fun almost every day. In 2025, the number fell to 14 percent.
To improve reading outcomes, global education expert Robert Jenkins, an Ed School lecturer, said it is necessary to focus on foundational learning in the lower grades.
“To be successful in school and meet learning levels when you are 15 years old, you had to have earlier support along your learning journey,” said Jenkins.
For some experts, the reading crisis may challenge the idea that literacy instruction ends in third grade, when the transition from learning-to-read to reading-to-learn takes place.
They are finding that while reading proficiency by that level is a crucial milestone, literacy instruction should continue into middle school. The 2024 Nation’s Report Card found that only 31 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or advanced readers.
“If you’re struggling in elementary school and don’t like reading, you don’t read, and you don’t get better at it. It’s a downward spiral.”Pamela Mason
“We used to think that literacy was the inoculation model, sort of if you teach kids to read fluently by third grade, they’ll be fine throughout school,” said Uccelli. “Now we know that reading continues to develop and needs support throughout the years because as the texts get more complex, the students will need more support, and teachers also need more support.”
In addition, the shift from students reading printed books and articles to doing much of it in short-form digital media like texts and social media posts is not helping children, said literacy specialist Pamela Mason. It can hamper the building of reading stamina, the ability to read at length, she said.
“If you’re struggling in elementary school and don’t like reading, you don’t read, and you don’t get better at it. It’s a downward spiral,” said Mason. “The other issue is that reading on screen doesn’t build your reading stamina. If you’re used to reading 25 words or short texts, and all of a sudden somebody hands you a 500-, 700-word text you’re supposed to read and comprehend, it becomes challenging.”
The reading crisis among the young is a fixable problem, said Capin, the reading specialist, but it requires a collective effort to implement effective programs and practices such as instituting school-based accountability, and offering universal pre-K, among others.
Experts note that declines in reading skills extend to adults.
A 2023 survey found that 28 percent of U.S. adults had low literacy proficiency, meaning “they can understand short texts, find specific information and identify relevant links,” and only 13 percent had high literacy skills and could “comprehend and evaluate long, dense texts across several pages, grasp complex or hidden meanings, and use prior knowledge to understand texts.”
The consequences of low literacy skills are substantial.
A report from the 2023 OECD survey found that “adults with low literacy skills are about one-third less likely to be active in the labor market, and those who work earn about $5 less per hour on average than adults with medium proficiency.”
It also found that adults with low literacy skills report worse health and lower life satisfaction.
In the age of social media and AI, which teems with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, reading proficiency is more important than ever at nearly every age, Capin said.
“Reading is not just reading the words on the page,” said Capin. “It’s critical that students have the foundational skills of reading the words and understanding what they mean, but also that they have the advanced literacy skills to read multiple sources of information on a topic, evaluate the trustworthiness of those sources, and make an informed judgment based on the evidence.”
The moment requires urgent action, he said.
“We are potentially entering a new phase of our relationship to reading as a society,” said Capin.
After the United Nations adopted a resolution in September 2026 endorsing a map that more fairly represents the size of Earth’s landmasses, author and journalist Moky Makura of Africa No Filter – a main sponsor of the Correct the Map initiative – asked: “What else about Africa is the world underestimating that’s also hidden in plain sight?”
It is a fair question.
The initiative brought attention to the way continents are distorted by projections that display our rotund planet on two-dimensional maps, something that has long made Africa especially appear far smaller than it actually is.But it left another assumption untouched: that European maps of Africa – which became the basis of how we see African countries today – are based solely on the observations of the Europeans who made them.
Most African map traditions are undocumented or ephemeral.But ground and oral mapping was common in the pre-colonial period, and often highly valued. European explorers relied upon these indigenous mapping practices during their travels and sometimes incorporated them into their own maps.
For example, sections of French explorer Henri Duveyrier’s 1861 map of the Sahara owed much to the maps drawn in the sand by his guide, Cheikh‐‘Othmàn. Indeed, more than a third of Duveyrier’s map is based on information provided by local sources.
Part of Henri Duveyrier’s and Edouard de Desbuisson’s 1861 map of the western Sahara showing African-sourced routes in solid black lines and European-surveyed routes in solid red lines. Bibliothèque nationale de France
A common objective of mapping is to solve a spatial problem.Route mapping is all about finding one’s way between points A and B and determining the distances between them. For Europeans, it was important to know where African leaders resided or the most direct route to important trade centers.
When European explorers and soldier-surveyors inquired, African guides, interpreters and merchants described the road ahead and often drew these routes on the ground with a stick. Europeans valued African oral and ground-mapping practices for their contributions to knowledge; they were also useful for empire building.
In his 1892 travel memoir, French Navy Lt. Louis-Gustave Binger reproduced the plan of Niellé, a city in contemporary northern Ivory Coast that was drawn on the ground by his interpreter, Fofana Diawé.
Niellé’s chief prohibited Binger from visiting the town, making Diawé’s drawing particularly valuable. In another instance, Binger reports that an African intermediary placed varied lengths of straw on the ground to indicate the distances between localities in the Kong region.
In his exploration of the area between the Niger River and the Gulf of Guinea in the early 1890s, Navy Lt. Jean-Baptiste Marchand routinely collected route information from local inhabitants about places he could not visit. This “locally sourced route information,” as he described it, appears as dashed lines on his landmark map of the region. The routes of Marchand and other European explorers appear as solid lines.
African guide and interpreter Fofana Diawé’s ground map of Niellé reproduced by French Navy Lt. Louis-Gustave Binger. Binger, 1882
When the total distance of all routes is calculated, African sources account for 65% of routes on Marchand’s map.
Thanks to African intermediaries guiding these military explorers, Binger discovered that the fabled Kong Mountains, which stretched across most 19th-century maps, did not exist.
And Marchand learned that the savanna penetrated more deeply into the rainforest in south-central Ivory Coast.The elimination of the imaginary Kong Mountains and knowledge of a shorter travel distance through the dense tropical forest accelerated French colonization of the region.
But this practice of displaying locally sourced route information on European maps was debated among European geographers and military officers. Some mapmakers refused to display African mapping because it did not follow the standards of scientific cartography.
They argued that the geographical information was based on hearsay rather than measurement. Others, particularly military officers trying to expand colonial boundaries, appreciated locally made maps’ practical value. Embedded in this debate was the self-claimed civilizing mission ideology underpinning colonialism, which assumed the superiority of European knowledge. The dashed lines suggest that locally sourced information was tentative and would eventually be replaced by solid lines based on European measurements.
A digitized version of Jean-Baptiste Marchand’s 1896 map of part of West Africa. Locally sourced route information is shown in blue dashed lines. Afriterra – The Cartographic Free Library.
Filling in the blanks
The appearance of blank spaces on maps is typically seen as demonstrating the scientific standard of accuracy: Cartographers don’t show what we don’t know.
Blank spaces were also viewed as instrumental to imperial expansion. That’s because they suggested vacant areas open to colonization.
The common denominator of both views is that Europeans determine what is shown and not shown on maps of Africa. But a closer look at explorers’ and soldier-surveyors’ reports indicates that blank spaces often emerged from the refusal of African authorities to allow Europeans to travel through their territory.
Wisely, these African rulers understood the ultimate goals of European soldier-surveyors – to map the road to colonial conquest. In the memoir of his exploration of contemporary Mali, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, Binger explained the blank spaces on his four-sheet map as deriving from his lack of “a good guide and a travel permit [from African authorities].”
To try to overcome this lack of access, colonial officials employed Africans to explore and map.Traces of their little-known expeditions appear in late 19th- and early 20th-century compilation maps assembled by European mapmakers. The travel routes of two Senegalese explorers, Roger Panet in 1850 and Bou El Mogdad Seck around a decade later, appear in Hermann Habenicht’s ten-sheet map of Africa published in 1885-1886.
Bou El-Mogdad, Senegalese interpreter and explorer, who mapped a route from northern Senegal to west-central Morocco in 1860-1861. Le Tour du Monde,/Wikimedia Commons
The central Africa mapping of two Africans working as Portuguese trade agents, Pedro Joao Baptista and Amaro José, is depicted on the “Kabébé” sheet of Régnauld de Lannoy de Bissy’s 63-sheet map of Africa.
The display of their itineraries in solid lines alongside those of Europeans indicates their equal treatment by Lannoy. Lannoy also used the dashed-line symbol to show locally sourced geographical information. More than two-thirds of the route information displayed in his 1882 Segou-Sikoro sheet stems from African mapping practices.
Both maps were used at the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884-85 to determine the boundaries of free trade zones in the Congo and Niger river basins.
The conference kick-started the “scramble for Africa” that was to last into the 20th century. Paradoxically, the maps that Africans helped construct were later used to divide their territories into European colonies.
Decades after decolonization, when we open the drawers of national archives, we find these remarkable maps with their solid and dashed lines. And map historians are finally acknowledging that these maps, cataloged as purely European achievements, are in fact hybrid productions that emerged from complex intercultural encounters. The evidence was hidden in plain sight.
Many public authorities currently recommend that citizens maintain emergency stockpiles inside their residences. Across several regions in North America and Europe, official agencies advise families to keep a reserve of water, food, and vital provisions to ensure self-sufficiency if critical infrastructure fails during an unexpected crisis.
Specific duration targets vary significantly by nation. For instance, Canadian and French guidelines suggest preparing for a minimum of seventy-two hours, a standard closely mirrored by readiness advice in the United States which encourages stocking resources for several days. Other European countries advocate for longer preparation periods, with Sweden recommending at least one week of self-reliance and Germany suggesting ten days of food and liquids while noting that even a three-day supply offers meaningful protection.
These precautionary measures address a wide array of potential threats, including military conflicts, severe weather anomalies, and hostile cyber operations capable of disabling societal networks. A single major event like a destructive flood, severe blizzard, or electrical blackout can simultaneously compromise multiple vital sectors. Consequently, roads often become blocked, commercial deliveries cease entirely, and residential areas frequently lose access to electricity or municipal water systems.
Physical storefronts may become unreachable during these disruptions, and digital financial transactions or communications networks can experience widespread outages. Maintaining a residential reserve serves as a critical buffer, sustaining individuals until external assistance arrives or municipal infrastructure is fully repaired.
Standard preparedness kits typically feature potable drinking water, non-perishable food items, necessary prescription medications, flashlights, battery-operated radios, backup power cells, and manual tools for opening cans. Families are urged to customize these kits to accommodate infant care, domestic pets, specific medical diets, and unique personal requirements.
Importantly, these long-standing recommendations apply broadly to various systemic vulnerabilities and do not signal an impending global catastrophe. Most of this guidance reflects well-established civic policies rather than a sudden or newly coordinated international alert. The fundamental advice remains to build these provisions incrementally over time, store them in accessible locations, and routinely inspect them for freshness.
The Rundown: The NYT just reported that U.S. officials found Alice Huang, an exec at Singapore-based data center firm Megaspeed, was allegedly passing intelligence to Beijing while keeping close ties with Jensen Huang, with Trump briefed about a year ago.
The details:It’s unclear what Ms. Huang passed to Beijing or its value, but officials worried she could offer insight into Trump’s view on chip sales to China, and into Nvidia itself. Officials didn’t believe Jensen knew of her alleged role when Trump was briefed; he never got a defensive briefing, often given to U.S. citizens targeted by spies. Megaspeed, already under U.S. probe for steering Nvidia chips to China, bought at least $4.8B in Nvidia gear via a sister firm, and remains an Nvidia cloud partner. Nvidia called Jensen’s meetings with Ms. Huang routine, saying customers get ordinary business info and “zero information relevant to national security.” Megaspeed said outside counsel is investigating and it’s cooperating with the U.S., while China called the claims “groundless smears and slanders.
”Why it matters: The report reads like a spy thriller, but nothing has been publicly proven,including whether Ms. Huang passed anything to China. The immediate fallout may hit the loophole allowing firms like Megaspeed to rent Nvidia-powered computing from Southeast Asia to Chinese AI labs — one Trump reopened but may now close.
Which way will they break? Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images
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The midterm elections on Nov. 3 threaten to break Republicans’ trifecta, with the House and Senate both in play, if polling suggesting a “blue wave” is to be believed. Democrats are hopeful, with such deep-red states as Texas appearing to be within reach. But two years after Gen Z men broke for President Donald Trump, this vote offers yet another look at Gen Z and its apparently budding appetite for socialism.
Some polls make Gen Z’s politics sound downright revolutionary. A June Cato/YouGov survey found 53% of Gen Z hold a favorable view of socialism, against 45% for capitalism. But bank statements tell a different story.
Betterment’s 2026 Retail Investor Survey found 52% of Gen Z investors moved money meant for investing into sports betting over the past year, compared with 4% of baby boomers, while an Intuit survey found 43% of Gen Z adults plan to start a business this year. That’s a lot of capitalist behavior from a generation that tells pollsters it’s done with capitalism, and who have another chance to swing a pivotal 2020s election.
The other complicating factor is that when you ask what Gen Z means by socialism, the answers sound a lot like the good old-fashioned American Dream: a home, a career, and a shot at getting rich. This vote, then, offers a checkup of sorts from the most disillusioned Americans on whether the American Dream is surviving into the 2020s, or what the new version of it—even a socialist one—might look like.
The 21st century Horatio Alger American Dream
In 1868, about 60 years before “the American Dream” took hold as a concept during the Great Depression, Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick became a smash-hit novel that summarized the American rags-to-riches story. Dick, a New York City shoeshine boy, works hard and saves his pennies, but his big break comes when he saves a rich man’s son from drowning and is rewarded with a job in the man’s office.
Carol Graham, a senior Brookings fellow and University of Maryland professor who has spent two decades measuring hope and despair, thinks the way Americans tell this story is part of the problem.
“Even the old famous Horatio Alger story, he had a benefactor,” she told Fortune earlier this month. “And they never talk about that when they tell the story.”
For about 30 years after World War II, the government and big employers played the Ragged Dick rich man part for baby boomers and their parents. The GI Bill, federally backed mortgages, and companies that planned to keep you for 40 years vaulted a whole generation into a new level of broadly shared economic prosperity.
“The middle class was constructed in the ’40s,” said Misael Galdámez, data manager at the Living Wage Institute, who has been working to understand just what happened to the middle class over the last half-century or so. “So if you want a middle class for the 21st century, it’s also something that needs to be constructed through policy, through employer investment.”
That’s roughly what young people mean when they say socialism, according to Graham, who started her career making the case for market reforms in Latin America and isn’t scandalized by the word. Gen Z is describing “progressive attitudes about everything from diversity and inclusion to safety nets to being able to afford housing,” she told me in a follow-up email.
Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, Boston Consulting Group’s global chief economist, put an even finer point on it in a separate statement to Fortune. By a strict definition, he pointed out, not even European economies like Sweden or Norway are socialist, but “capitalist systems” with features including individual ownership, price competition, and decentralized decision making, even as they “choose to divert significant income to soften capitalism’s edges.” That choice doesn’t make them socialist by definition.
When Gallup asked the question in 2019, about half of young adults viewed socialism positively, but 83% felt good about “free enterprise.”
A home
“Gen Z definitely sees owning a home as less attainable,” Galdámez told Fortune.
His group’s living-wage data shows the share of workers earning enough to support a family fell from 47% to roughly 43% between 2021 and 2025. Now it’s building an index of what a middle-class life costs, county by county, and he expects two surprises when it comes out: “how high the level of income needed to actually support what people think of as a middle class life is,” and “how few people actually have it.” People are already adjusting the dream down, he said, and now they’re “less likely to say in order to be middle class, you need to own a home.”
Housing costs are the top political issue for voters 18 to 34, a CNBC poll found, and the country is short about 4 million homes, by Realtor.com’s count.
Carlsson-Szlezak doesn’t buy it. Millennials are catching up with Gen X’s homeownership rate in their early 40s, he wrote, and could get there sooner by moving to the suburbs. Hold home size constant, and affordability “has not fallen nearly as much” as the headline numbers suggest.
“I’m not sure when it became a baseline expectation to own a home at age 24,” he said, noting someone willing to build their career in, say, upstate New York has that option. “I don’t think it was ever feasible in NYC and never will be.”
A career
The second promise was a job that turned into a career. MIT labor economist Paul Osterman, whose book was covered by Fortune in September, found young people want that as much as their parents did.
“The desire to get a real job and have a career? That’s stable,” he said.
The supply is what changed. He counts 35% of the American workforce, more than 55 million people, in what he calls “disposable” jobs, and traces the devolution of middle-class status to the iconic 1981 moment when then-President Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 air-traffic controllers. Former President Joe Biden swore in 2022 he was “sick and tired of trickle-down economics,” and young men largely pulled the lever for Trump anyway two years later. Now Osterman expects AI to cut “hiring for entry level jobs and so young people will be more affected than others.”
A dark theory has increasingly taken hold about the 21st century version of the Alger story: elite overproduction. Peter Turchin, the University of Connecticut professor emeritus who founded the field of cliodynamics, has argued in several books that societies throughout history fall into crisis when they create more credentialed strivers than they have good seats for.This week, he told Fortune the “growing unemployment/underemployment of university graduates and those with advanced degrees” is one of the trends to watch. The New York Fed found 42% of recent graduates underemployed in June, working jobs that don’t need the diploma.
Carlsson-Szlezak sees a generation adapting. The mid-20s were always precarious, he wrote: “That’s true today and was true of every prior generation, too.” Getting ahead now takes “more nimbleness, more career-switching and risk-taking, more hustle,” and “Gen Z appears to be doing that.”
A shot at getting rich
In January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said young Americans were warming to socialism because they aren’t invested in the stock market. Their investments are more in things like whether the Jets cover the spread.
Gen Z made up 48% of online betting activity among Bank of America’s customers in July, my colleague Cat Gioino reported, and the bettors got back less than 75 cents on the dollar. Gen Z was twice as likely as other Americans to call betting an investment. The legal betting boom also pulled in young, college-educated men who had mostly stayed away from gambling, Cat found, which is about as close to Turchin’s surplus strivers as data gets.
Graham said that on a 0-to-10 hope scale, she put the 24-year-old moving retirement money into a sportsbook “closer to 3 or 4 than 8 or 9,” a “whatever” attitude nearer to despair.
“For one, it is not a good choice,” she told Fortune. Frustration over a lack of agency, she added, eventually “goes from being a possible motivational factor to a hope eroding factor.” Carlsson-Szlezak points to the market doing what it does, more than a grand theory of hope or despair: “You simply couldn’t bet and speculate as freely and easily before, whether that’s Crypto or Kalshi.”
The quieter bets look a lot like their grandparents’. Galdámez said “most of the Gen Z folks that I know are much more into saving for retirement.”
A house, a job that pays, a business with your name on it: the wish list is about as bourgeois as it gets.
Turchin himself declined to make a conclusion about Gen Z’s socialist tendencies, pointing to economic fundamentals when reached by Fortune, and saying Trump is failing the bourgeois wishlist test.
“Trump/MAGA have failed to improve the well-being of common Americans, instead involving [the] USA in a losing war with Iran,” he told Fortune. Other counter-elites could seize the opening, he added, maybe the DSA, but that is more likely to come in the next presidential election, in 2028. Past that, “we are in a highly unpredictable environment, with highly variable possible outcomes. I realize that you would prefer a more definitive forecast, but I don’t have such one for you.”
Fortune asked Graham who plays Dick’s benefactor for Gen Z now. Rich kids get one through their parents, she wrote, “and my guess is that there are not too many benefactors just hanging out.”
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