Do readers remember the debt panic of the early Obama years? For a while scare stories about national debt dominated discussion in the media and inside the Beltway.

.I got a lot of grief at the time for bucking that consensus, urging people to relax about government debt. The United States, I argued, had lots of “fiscal space” — ability to run up debt without losing investor confidence — so it should focus instead on the importance of restoring full employment, which required running substantial deficits.

These days, however, many though not all of the people who were screaming about debt back then have gone quiet. Funny how that happens when there’s a Republican in the White House.

Yet there is much more reason to be worried about debt now than there was then. On one side, there’s no longer any good economic reason to be running large deficits. On the other, America has changed in ways that have greatly reduced our fiscal space, our ability to get away with a high level of debt.

And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which just passed the Senate and will probably pass the House, will make things even worse.

Why was I relatively relaxed about debt back in the day? Largely because history tells us that advanced nations can normally run up large debts without experiencing crises of confidence that send interest rates soaring.

Look, for example, at the debt history of the UK, which ran up huge debts relative to GDP during the Napoleonic Wars and the two world wars without losing investor confidence:

Why are advanced countries normally able to pull this off?

First, they’re normally run by serious people, who don’t try to govern on the basis of crackpot economic doctrines and will take responsible action if necessary to stabilize their nations’ debt.

Second, they’re competent: They have strong administrative states that can collect a lot of tax revenue if necessary. The United States collects 25 percent of GDP in taxes, but could collect much more if it chose. Some European nations collect more than 40 percent.

These factors normally lead investors to give advanced countries the benefit of the doubt, even when they run big deficits. That is, investors assume that the people running these countries will take action to rein in debt once the emergency justifying deficits ends, and that they will be able to take effective action because they have effective governance.

And that’s why I was a deficit dove in, say, 2011. America needed to run substantial deficits to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. But I didn’t think this would cause trouble down the road, because we were a serious country run by serious people, easily able to do what was necessary to stabilize the debt once the economic emergency was past.

But that, as I said, was then.

Right now we are running big budget deficits even though we aren’t fighting a war, facing high unemployment, or dealing with a pandemic. We should be taking action to bring those deficits down. Instead, Republicans have rammed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which will add trillions to the deficit even as it causes mass misery. Money aside, the way Congress was bullied into passing that bill and the lies used to sell it show that we are no longer a serious country run by serious people.

Republicans are using transparently dishonest accounting to hide just how much they’re adding to debt — hey, we aren’t really cutting taxes, just extending tax cuts that were scheduled to expire. And they’re also claiming that the OBBBA’s tax cuts (the ones that they say aren’t really happening) will generate a miraculous surge in economic growth. I’ve had my differences with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, but it’s an honest, highly competent think tank, and its (appropriately) incredulous analysis of Trump officials’ economic projections is titled “CEA’s fantastical economic assumptions.”

Add in Trump’s bizarro claims about what his tariffs will achieve. Again, do we look like a serious country run by serious people?

Moreover, mass deportation and incarceration of immigrants, aside from being a civil liberties nightmare, will inflict severe economic damage and significantly worsen our debt position.

Finally, how long will we have an effective government that can collect taxes when necessary? Elon Musk’s DOGE failed to find significant amounts of waste, fraud and abuse, but it did degrade the functioning of the federal government and demoralize hundreds of thousands of civil servants. Republicans have done all they can to eviscerate the IRS and make tax evasion great again. Even if control of the government is eventually returned to people who want to govern the country rather than pillage it, it will take years to recover competence in tax collection and other mundane government functions, which we used to take for granted.

The falling dollar is an indication that foreign investors are losing faith in America. But I don’t think they fully realize, even now, that the risk of a U.S. debt crisis is vastly higher now than it was when Republicans were yelling about Obama’s deficits.

MUSICAL CODA

On August 5, 1945—the day before the world ended—Frank Sinatra was at a yacht club in San Pedro, California. There, he is reported to have rescued a 3-year-old boy from drowning.

On the other side of the country, Albert Einstein—the father of relativity—was staying in Cabin No. 6 at the Knollwood Club on Lower Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks. Einstein couldn’t swim a stroke, and (in a reverse Sinatra) was once saved from drowning by a 10-year-old boy.

What neither of them realized when they woke up on the morning of August 6 was that at 8:15 a.m. Japan Standard Time, the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy,” had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima, obliterating standing structures and killing close to 80,000 people.

“The day the world ended” is how Kurt Vonnegut described it in his novel Cat’s Cradle, published in 1963. Vonnegut had served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and was one of a handful of survivors of a different American attack: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden, which killed as many as 35,000 people and leveled the town once described as “Florence on the Elbe.”

“The sky was black with smoke,” Vonnegut later wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel that fictionalized his experience. “The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.”

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima is believed, by some estimates, to have killed as many as 146,000 people, once injuries, burns, and long-term radiation poisoning were factored in—approximately the population of Gainesville, Florida, today.

Here is a photograph of the children who dropped it:

I say “children” because the mission commander, Colonel Paul Tibbets, was 30. Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot, was 27. Thomas Ferebee, the bombardier, was 26. The navigator, Theodore “Dutch” Van Kirk, was 24. Here is a picture of what happened to the children down below:

President Harry Truman was on the USS Augusta at the time, returning from a conference in Potsdam, Germany, following that country’s surrender. The ship’s captain interrupted Truman’s lunch to give him a message announcing the attack.

That afternoon, Truman attended a program of entertainment and boxing held on the well deck. The ship’s orchestra played. The boxing ended abruptly when the ring posts collapsed, slightly injuring a spectator. Such was the nature of human suffering that day.

Cat’s Cradle was Vonnegut’s fourth novel. He had started it nearly a decade earlier, in 1954, when he was just 31 years old. It is the story of Jonah, a journalist who has set out to write a book about what famous people were doing the day of the Hiroshima bombing. In the book, Jonah tracks down the three living descendants of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called fathers of the atomic bomb. Hoenikker is an eccentric scientist who once left a tip for his wife by his coffee cup and would go on to create a substance called Ice 9, which could freeze all water on Earth at room temperature—thus ending the world.

[From the July 1955 issue: Kurt Vonnegut’s short story ‘Der Arme Dolmetscher’]

Cat’s Cradle made about as much impact on popular culture when it came out as Vonnegut’s previous books had, which is to say not much. His first novel, Player Piano, had been published more than 10 years prior, to little acclaim, and Vonnegut was scrambling to make ends meet for his growing family. After the war he had made a pretty good living writing short stories, until that market softened. Since then he had worked as an English teacher at a school for wayward boys and as a publicist for General Electric; in a fit of optimism, he had even started a doomed Saab dealership on Cape Cod. An apt word to describe Vonnegut’s state of mind in those years would be desperate. Little did he know that Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, would make him one of the most famous writers in the world.

Vonnegut was similarly unaware that World War II would be the last war of what historians call the Industrial Age. In the 19th century, steam-powered machines had revolutionized human enterprise. Then, following the development of electricity, came a wave of innovation never before seen—the telegraph, telephone, automobile, airplane—as physicists such as Einstein and his successors illuminated the very fabric of the universe. Many of those same physicists would later join the Manhattan Project, harnessing the power of the atom and creating the first atomic weapon.

In some ways, Little Boy was the ultimate invention of the Industrial Age, which ended a few years later. What replaced it? The Atomic Age, of course, followed in the 1970s by the Information Age. Were Vonnegut alive today, he might say that whatever they call the age you live in is actually the name of the weapon they’re using to try to kill you.

In 1943, two years before the bombing of Hiroshima, Kurt Vonnegut dropped out of Cornell University and enlisted in the Army. He was 20 years old. Here is a photo of him:

The Army taught him to fire howitzers, then sent him to Europe as a scout. Before he left, Vonnegut surprised his mother, Edith, by going home for Mother’s Day 1944. In return, Edith surprised Vonnegut by killing herself. That Saturday night, she took sleeping pills while he lay unaware in another room. Seven months later, Private First Class Vonnegut was crossing the beach at Le Havre with the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division.

They marched to Belgium, taking up position in the Ardennes Forest near the town of St. Vith. It was one of the coldest winters on record, and death was all around them. On December 16, the Germans attacked. Inexperienced American troops holding the front buckled, creating a bulge in the line, thus giving the ensuing battle its name. When it was over, about 80,000 American soldiers had been killed or wounded. But Vonnegut didn’t make it to the end. He barely made it three days. Cut off and outnumbered, his regiment was forced to surrender; Vonnegut and more than 6,000 other soldiers were captured. As the Germans advanced, his buddy Bernard O’Hare shouted, “Nein scheissen! ” to the advancing German troops. This did not mean “Don’t shoot!,” as he thought. What he yelled instead was “Don’t shit!”

After a long forced march, Vonnegut and thousands of other American POWs were packed into boxcars. The dark cars smelled of cow shit, and the soldiers were crammed so tightly, they were forced to stand. It took two days to load them. Vonnegut later recounted how, 18 hours after their departure, the unmarked German train was attacked by the Royal Air Force. It was Christmas Eve. Strafed by RAF fighters, bombs dropping all around them, dozens of American prisoners were killed by Allied planes. Against all odds, Vonnegut was still alive.

The name Little Boy was chosen by Robert Serber, a Los Alamos physicist who worked on the bomb’s design. It seems only fitting for a weapon dropped by children from a plane named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay. Ten feet long and weighing close to 10,000 pounds, “the gadget”—as the scientists called it—was a plug-ugly sumbitch, made of riveted steel and wires. Nothing like the sleek, gleaming technology of today. See for yourself:

Little Boy was a gun-type bomb, its explosive power triggered by firing a “bullet” of uranium into a target of uranium. When the projectile and target combined, they formed a supercritical mass capable of sustaining a rapid nuclear chain reaction. That’s a fancy scientist way of saying “massive explosion,” and boy howdy, was it.

Fission reactions occur so fast that it’s hard to describe them using our human sense of time. Within one-millionth of a second of the uranium bullet hitting its target, a fireball of several million degrees was formed, spawning a shock wave with a blast equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT that pushed the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, and that traveled outward at two miles per second from the hypocenter. The fiery shock wave flattened everything in its path, igniting birds in midair. About a third of the bomb’s energy was released as thermal radiation: gamma and infrared rays that flashed through clothing, burning textile patterns into victims’ skin and causing severe burns up to a mile away. In the time it takes to say “boom,” roughly 80,000 people were reduced to ash, and 4.4 square miles of city were obliterated.

Wilfred Burchett was the first Western reporter to reach Hiroshima after the bombing. On September 2, sitting on a piece of rubble, he wrote, “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.”

For clarity, a steamroller was an Industrial Age machine used for compacting dirt and gravel in order to create smooth surfaces upon which vehicles could drive.

And so the world ended, if not in fact then in theory.

When he arrived in Dresden, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were put to work in a malted-syrup factory, making food for Germans that the POWs were not themselves allowed to eat. The guards were cruel, the work exhausting. Vonnegut was singled out and badly beaten. One night, as air-raid sirens roared, Vonnegut and the other POWs were herded into the basement of a slaughterhouse, huddling among the sides of beef as the city above them was bombed.

All told, British and American bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of highly explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden that night.

Vonnegut described it this way in a letter to his family: “On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F.” The combined forces “destroyed all of Dresden—possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

Here is a photo of the city before the bombing:

And here is what it looked like when the Allies were done with it:

To destroy the city of Dresden took hundreds of bombs dropped over multiple hours. To destroy the city of Hiroshima, all it took was one. This, a cynical man might say, is what progress looks like.

In his 1967 collection of essays about the Atomic Age, The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian British author and journalist, wrote, “The crisis of our time can be summed up in a single sentence. From the dawn of consciousness until the middle of our century man had to live with the prospect of his death as an individual; since Hiroshima, mankind as a whole has to live with the prospect of its extinction as a biological species.”

Throughout human history, children have adopted a rule of engagement called “not in the face.” Think of it as the first Geneva Convention. Violating the not-in-the-face rule opens the offender up to serious retribution. It is an act of war. Now I get to hit you in the face, or worse. In fact, maybe I should kick you in the balls to teach you a lesson and restore the balance of power. Maybe I need to make the cost of hitting me in the face so high, you never take another swing. If Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked face punch, then Hiroshima was the kick in the balls to end all future wars. Scientists of the Industrial Age made that kick possible.

Vonnegut’s relationship with his own children after the war was mixed at best. There would be seven in total, three biological and four of his sister’s boys, who had come to live with him and his wife, Jane, in 1958, when Vonnegut’s brother-in-law, Jim, died in a train derailment, his commuter train launching itself from the Newark Bay Bridge into Newark Bay. Two days later, Vonnegut’s sister, Alice, died of breast cancer. So it goes. It was Alice who had shaken Vonnegut awake on Mother’s Day 1944 to tell him their mother was dead. Vonnegut considered Alice his muse, and later wrote in Slapstick : “I had never told her so, but she was the person I had always written for. She was the secret of whatever artistic unity I had ever achieved.”

Suddenly the house was overstuffed with children between the ages of 2 and 14. For the next five years, Vonnegut tried (and mostly failed) to write Cat’s Cradle. The stress of supporting that large a family as a writer, while still processing trauma from the war, made him irritable. Never a hands-on dad, he left most of the actual parenting to Jane, and as the chaos of family life filled the house, he would hole up in his study all day, chain-smoking. The slightest noise from the children could propel him from the room, ranting.

Vonnegut himself had been raised in a house of math and science. His father was an architect. As a scientist, his brother would pioneer the field of cloud seeding. But Vonnegut had a complicated relationship with the word progress. His experience in the war had soured him on the idea that science was exclusively a force for good. Too often, he believed, scientists and engineers focused on the question Can we do something? rather than Should we? He saw this when he looked at the Manhattan Project. Though scientists at Los Alamos knew that the bomb they were designing was meant to be dropped on people, they rarely thought about the consequences of dropping it.

After the war, the physicist Victor Weisskopf, who’d worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, admitted that he was “ashamed to say that few of us even thought of quitting. It was the attraction of the task. It was impossible to quit at that time.” The task, he said, was “technically sweet.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer himself used this phrase during testimony at his security-clearance hearing after the war. “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it.”

“Nice, nice, very nice,” as Bokonon wrote in his “53rd Calypso.” “So many different people in the same device.” Bokonon was the fictional founder of a religion that Vonnegut invented for Cat’s Cradle, a novel as much about the hypocrisy of organized religion as it was about war. Bokonon’s first dictum is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

Here’s another shameless lie: The atomic bomb was dropped to save lives. This is an ancillary thing that war does; it inverts language. See, the lives that mattered to scientists at Los Alamos were American. So they chose to focus on the lives they would spare—the GIs who would theoretically die in a conventional invasion—instead of the Japanese citizens who would actually die when the bomb was dropped. This made the morality of their actions easier to justify. In this way, they kept things sweet.

And yet, to quote a survivor, those scientists who invented the atomic bomb—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”

Here are some things that happened. Day turned to night. In a flash, the bomb destroyed 60,000 of the 90,000 structures in a 10-mile radius. Of the 2,370 doctors and nurses in Hiroshima, 2,168 were killed or injured too badly to work.

This is what the atomic bomb did to survivors: “They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back,” a survivor told The New York Times in 1981. “Their skin—not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too—hung down.” In this way they stumbled down the road, going nowhere, “like walking ghosts.”

Only a few of the survivors were children, as most school-age kids near ground zero were killed on impact. This is because at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, they had gathered outside their schools to help create firebreaks to slow the spread of flames in the event of firebomb raids like the ones that had destroyed Tokyo and so many other Japanese cities. Did they hear the distant roar of the B-29, I wonder, flying overhead? An air-raid siren had gone off an hour earlier, but no planes had come, so now, when the Enola Gay approached, many didn’t even look up.

Picture the children of Hiroshima on that sunny morning, thousands of little haircuts, thousands of gap-toothed smiles. Thousands of children trying to be good citizens, wondering what the morning snack would be. This is whom the child pilots flying overhead dropped the bomb on: schoolchildren and their parents. What else are we to think? The city of Hiroshima had no real military or technological value. It was a population center, chosen to send a message to the emperor.

So it goes—or, as the survivors of Hiroshima used to say, “Shikata ga nai,” which loosely translates to “It can’t be helped.” This sentiment was born from the Japanese practice of Zen Buddhism—an even older made-up religion than Bokononism, Vonnegut might say. And yet, what else can one say about a world in which children drop bombs on other children?

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes of an argument he had with his old Army buddy Bernard’s wife, Mary. Vonnegut has gone to their house to drink and trade war stories, and when he tells them he is writing a novel about the war, Mary erupts:

“You were just babies then!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs! … But you’re not going to write it that way, are you … You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them. And they’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”

Later, thinking back on Cat’s Cradle’s amoral physicist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, Vonnegut said, “What I feel about him now is that he was allowed to concentrate on one part of life more than any human being should be. He was overspecialized and became amoral on that account … If a scientist does this, he can inadvertently become a very destructive person.”

This overspecialization is a feature, not a bug, of our Information Age.

What are our phones and tablets, our social-media platforms, if not technically sweet? They are so sleek and sophisticated technologically, with their invisible code and awesome computing power, that they have become, as Arthur C. Clarke once wrote, indistinguishable from magic. And this may, in the end, prove to be the biggest danger.

Because so little thought has been given to the Should we? of the Information Age (what will happen if we give human beings an entertainment device they can fit in their pocket, one that connects them instantly to every truth and every lie ever conceived?), we have, as a society, been caught unprepared. If the atomic bomb, riveted from steel plates and visible wires, was irrefutable proof of the power of science, how is it possible that even more sophisticated modern devices have decreased our faith in science and given rise to the wholesale rejection of expertise?

Talk about a shameless lie! And yet how else to explain the fact that misinformation spread through our magic gadgets seems to be undermining people’s belief in the very science that powers them?

To put it simply, if the bomb was a machine through which we looked into the future, our phones have become a looking glass through which we are pulled back into the past.

Shikata ga nai.

After the war, Vonnegut wrestled with what he saw as hereditary depression, made worse by his mother’s suicide, his sister’s death, and the trauma of war. Unable to justify why he had survived when so many around him had died, and unwilling to ascribe his good fortune to God, Vonnegut settled instead on the absurd. I live, you die. So it goes.

If it had been cloudy in Hiroshima that morning, the bomb would have fallen somewhere else. If POW Vonnegut had been shoved into a different train car, if he had picked a different foxhole, if the Germans hadn’t herded him into the slaughterhouse basement when the sirens sounded—so many ifs that would have ended in death. Instead, somehow, he danced between the raindrops. Because of this, for Vonnegut, survival became a kind of cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line.

On May 11, 1955, the Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister, was featured on the American television program This Is Your Life. He had come to the U.S. to raise money for victims of the atomic bomb known as the Keloid Girls or the Atomic Maidens.

Seated on a sofa beside the host, Ralph Edwards, Tanimoto wears a baggy suit and looks stunned. After an introductory segment, the camera cuts to the silhouette of a man behind a screen. He speaks into a microphone.

“Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima,” he says, “all I could think of was ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”

The camera cuts back to Edwards and Tanimoto. “Now, you’ve never met him,” the host tells the Hiroshima survivor sitting next to him, “never seen him, but he’s here tonight to clasp your hand in friendship. Captain Robert Lewis, United States Air Force, who along with Paul Tibbets piloted the plane from which the first atomic power was dropped over Hiroshima.”

The camera pans across the stage as the screen retracts and Captain Lewis emerges from shadow. Tanimoto steps into frame and shakes his hand. Both men appear as if they want to throw up:

“Captain Lewis,” Edwards says, “come in here close, and would you tell us, sir, of your experience on August 6, 1945?”

There is an uncomfortable beat, in which we wonder if Lewis will be able to continue. The camera cuts to a close-up of Lewis. He is unable to make eye contact with Tanimoto.

“Well, Mr. Edwards, when we left Tinian, in the Mariana Islands, at about eight—at 2:45 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945, our destination was Japan. We had three targets. One was Hiroshima. One was Nagasaki. One was Kurkura.

“About an hour before we hit the coastline of Japan, we were notified that Hiroshima was clear. Therefore, Hiroshima became our target.”

The camera cuts to Tanimoto, listening, horrified. The social contract of human behavior freezes him in place.

“Just before 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time,” Lewis continues, “Tom Ferebee, our very able bombardier, carefully aimed at his target, which was the second Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. At 8:15 promptly, the bomb was dropped.

“We turned fast to get out of the way of the deadly radiation and bomb effects. First was a thick flash that we got, and then the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened, and there in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared.”

“And,” Edwards says, “you entered something in your log at that time?”

Lewis’s voice breaks and he rubs his temples, trying to compose himself.

“As I said before, Mr. Edwards, I wrote down later: ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”

After retiring from the Air Force, Captain Lewis went to work in the candy business, where he patented various improvements to candy-manufacturing machinery. Sweet treats for kids. Picture them. All those happy kids.

Picture them putting quarters in the vending machine. Picture them in store-bought costumes holding out their Halloween sacks. They are no more theoretical than the children of Hiroshima, but unlike them, these children would grow up.

They would come of age practicing duck-and-cover drills, diving under their desks at the shriek of a whistle; come of age hiding in the bomb shelters their parents had built, terrified of the theoretical deaths that the A-bomb had made all but inevitable.

Nice, nice, very nice. So many different people in the same device.

This article appears in the August 2025 print edition with the headline “Vonnegut and the Bomb.”

In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan nominated James B. Edwards to lead the Department of Energy. This was an unusual choice. As a dentist-turned-politician, Edwards’ expertise in drilling had more to do with root canals than oil fields. His appointment, however, was part of a coherent strategy: to dismantle the previous administration’s energy agenda. Under President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. had become a world leader in energy R&D. Solar projects took off around the country. Under Reagan, this progress unraveled. Research spending plummeted. Subsidies expired. Solar startups crumbled. As for the oil and gas industries? Reagan offered them new tax breaks.

The cost of this reversal was immense. According to Gregory Nemet, a professor and historian at the University of Wisconsin, Reagan’s election was the most important factor in the sudden halt of US solar development in the 20th century. Having invented the efficient photovoltaic cell in the 1950s and captured the lead in solar in the 1970s, the U.S. ceded the technological frontier to Japan, Germany, and eventually China, which now installs more solar panels than the rest of the world combined. We had the future in our hands, and we gave it away.

I’ve been thinking lately about Reagan and solar—and Edwards and molars1. Like Reagan, Donald Trump came to power in 2025 in the middle of a historic effort to increase US renewable energy, such as solar, storage (i.e., batteries), and wind. Like Reagan, he is seeking to dismantle progress made under the previous Democratic president. And, far worse than Reagan, he’s doing this at a moment when renewable energy isn’t just a neat side project, but rather the fastest growing source of American electricity, in an age when energy demand is rising alongside the emergence of artificial intelligence.

At a hinge point in history, the U.S. needs an energy policy fit for the 2030s. Instead, we’re getting a rerun of the energy whiplash of the 1980s, at the very moment when we can least afford it.

Higher Electricity Prices to Own the Libs

Trump’s signature legislation—the so-called Big Beautiful Bill—doesn’t just dismantle the tax credits for solar, storage, and wind that Joe Biden signed into law as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. It goes further by adding a new tax that clean energy projects can only avoid if they can prove they aren’t using critical parts made in China. Similar to how the BBB includes onerous Medicaid "work requirements" that force low-income patients to trudge through bureaucratic mud to get health insurance, this provision would punish clean energy firms with excess paperwork; in fact, the policy is kind of like a work requirement for decarbonization. It essentially ties clean energy’s legs together and says, “okay, now let’s see how fast you can run.”

You’ll sometimes hear conservatives accuse progressives of caring so much about climate change that they’d force ordinary Americans to bear the cost of higher prices and worse lives just to save the planet. But right now, it’s Republicans who are willing to stymie energy production, at the risk of rising electricity costs, just to own progressives and punish their favorite energy sources. I’m not sure I fully understand what woke means to the far right, but I’ve sometimes gathered that it means “a movement that’s willing to sacrifice economic common sense for unsound cultural ideology.” If that’s right, this GOP energy policy is as woke as it gets.

To appreciate just how bad this law would be for energy policy, you don’t have to listen to environmentalists approaching DEFCON 1 levels of panic. You could instead listen to Republican tech entrepreneurs, red-state experts, and ordinary energy analysts. Many of them think the bill is “utterly insane.”

That’s how Elon Musk characterized the BBB’s punishing attacks on clean energy, which he called "a massive strategic error" that will "leave America extremely vulnerable in the future." Since Musk is the chief executive of an electric car company, you might wonder if this criticism is a bit self-interested. But he’s not alone. The chief policy officer of the pro-business US Chamber of Commerce wrote that "taxing energy production is never good policy" and these measures "should be removed." Doug Lewin, president of the energy consultancy Stoic Energy and author of the Texas Energy and Power newsletter predicted that the state is “going to build less [renewable energy], and what we build will be more expensive.”

The Trump administration has a reply to these critiques. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has claimed that solar and wind power are “expensive” sources of electricity that make the energy grid “less reliable” and mostly just make politicians “feel good.” This argument would have worked in, say, 1981. In 2025, however, every claim falls flat. Even including installation costs, solar energy plus storage is in many cases the cheapest source of energy production available. Along with wind power, it’s become so easy to build that almost all of the net electricity generation growth in Texas has come from renewable energy in the last decade. (Do you really think the typical Dallas energy baron in 2025 is building wind and solar because he cares so much about polar bears on ice floes?) Far from unreliable, renewable energy is now critical for stabilizing the Texas grid. As the New York Times reported:

During the scorching summer of 2023, the Texas energy grid wobbled as surging demand for electricity threatened to exceed supply. Several times, officials called on residents to conserve energy to avoid a grid failure.

This year it turned out much better — thanks in large part to more renewable energy.

The electrical grid in Texas has breezed through a summer in which, despite milder temperatures, the state again reached record levels of energy demand. It did so largely thanks to the substantial expansion of new solar farms.

When you take away an energy source whose cost is falling and whose reliability is rising, the effect is predictable: It becomes more expensive, and less reliable, for folks to heat and cool their homes and offices, run their appliances, and power big data centers. If the BBB passes, electricity prices are expected to surge in the next decade, especially in red states such as Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. Ironically, that’s because Republican-led states in the sun-drenched south and windy midwest are currently deploying the most solar and wind. Battery manufacturing projects announced since the IRA in Georgia, Tennessee, and Indiana could be endangered, as well. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, warned Congress that, without IRA tax credits, nuclear power expansion in his state is “dead.”2 Once again, many of this legislation’s opponents aren’t card-carrying members of the Sierra Club. They’re just conservatives who want cheaper electricity and didn’t lock their energy takes in a 40-year-old time capsule with acid-wash jeans and VHS tapes.

America’s Resource Curse, China’s Future Shock

Three decades ago, US economists coined the idea of a “resource curse” to describe the historical irony that countries blessed with commodities (e.g., gold, silver, oil, timber) remained trapped in the past, while nations without ample resources embraced new technology and grew faster. For example, resource-poor Netherlands eclipsed the Spanish Empire, despite the latter’s hauls of gold and silver; Switzerland and Japan grew faster than the petrol-state of Russia; and Korea and Taiwan left oil-rich Venezuela in the dust in the second half of the 20th century.

Now consider the U.S. and China. The United States sits on a geological jackpot with easily accessible oil and gas reserves. We are the largest producer of oil in the history of the world and the largest exporter of natural gas. But in our eagerness to maximize this fossil-fuel advantage, we risk smothering the clean-electric economy before it can mature. On the other hand, China lacks sufficient oil or gas to power a billion-person economy, which is why it has spent decades trying to wean itself off foreign dependency by developing alternative energy sources.

China wasn’t blessed with America’s hydrocarbon plenty. But which nation is the cursed one, now? China dominates global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, advanced batteries, electric vehicles, and the mining and processing of materials critical to the global clean-energy economy. While the Trump administration pines for the energy policies of the past, China is racing toward the future.3 (For more on this theme, you should check out Noah Smith’s work on energy and China. You can start here.)

One measure of America’s resource curse is a historical ambivalence toward renewable energy. The U.S. had one clean-energy policy under Carter and another under Reagan. Then, we had one clean-energy policy under Biden and now another under Trump. While China invests along multi-decade time horizons, the U.S. is whiplashing between policy regimes every time a new American president puts his hand on the Bible. As the philanthropist and former energy trader John Arnold wrote this week, “reversing which fuels get subsidized and which get penalized every time control of Washington shifts is about the stupidest way to run an energy system that needs long term planning and stable supply chains.”

The implications for artificial intelligence are uncertain but worrying. Training and using AI demands energy abundance; scaling AI while running a normal economy without brownouts requires energy superabundance. I have heard some Republican defenders of the Trump administration say that, while they might not support the stuff on vaccines or science or immigration, they trust the White House to do the right thing on AI data centers and energy. But if there are brownouts and blackouts due to insufficient energy generation in the next few years, “the narrative on every TV and newspaper and meme is going to be that AI data centers did this,” Paul Williams, executive director of the Center for Public Enterprise, wrote. “If you thought data center development was challenging now, wait until bills go up 30% and every single media actor blames data centers.”

What would a more reasonable policy look like? In conversations with folks in the solar and storage industries over the past few days, the issue that came up more than any other wasn’t even tax policy. It was time policy. As we wrote in Abundance, it takes too long to build important stuff in America. It takes too long to build houses where people most want to live. It takes too long to build transit where people most want to move. And it takes too long to build energy at a time when electricity demand is skyrocketing. Rather than hamstring solar and storage with new onerous rules, the U.S. should be streamlining NEPA and permitting and finding ways to reduce interconnection queues so that solar and battery manufacturers can build on a reasonable schedule and get more electrons pumping onto the grid and into homes and corporate offices and data centers.

Getting all this right doesn’t just require policy expertise. It takes a certain disposition toward the future. To build new things, we have to want new things. The Big Beautiful Bill doesn’t want new things. It wants an energy policy that belongs in the 1980s to go along with a tariff regime that belongs in the 1880s. It’s hard to see exactly how we’ll beat China to the future if we’re chugging this hard in the opposite direction.

First, the bad news: Global fertility is falling fast. The aging populations of rich countries are relying on ever fewer workers to support their economy, dooming those younger generations to a future of higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three. Birth rates in middle-income countries are also plummeting, putting their economic development at risk. Practically the only countries set to continue growing are desperately poor.

By about 2084, according to the gold-standard United Nations “World Population Prospects,” the global population will officially begin its decline. Rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging. And the rest of the world will have become old before it ever got the chance to become rich.

Sorry, did I say “bad news”? That was actually the good news, based on estimates that turn out to be far too rosy. Every two years, the UN’s demographers revise their population projections, and for the past 10 years, they’ve always had to revise in the same direction: down. Next year, they’ll do so again. In reality, the worldwide population decline is set to begin decades ahead of their expectations. Because global fertility trends are much worse than they, and probably you, think.

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, a University of Pennsylvania macroeconomist, studies how poor countries develop. This development usually happens alongside a fertility transition. As people move from rural areas to cities, their economic opportunities expand, and kids become less crucial as a source of agricultural labor. Women gain access to contraception and education. They go from having about six kids, on average, to two. Fernández-Villaverde calls this “the standard modernization story,” and he’s been teaching it for decades.

Much of Fernández-Villaverde’s research focuses on Latin America, an economically middling region where one would expect middling fertility rates. In recent years, however, births in some Central and South American countries have plummeted to rates far lower than most rich countries’, in defiance of the standard modernization story. Each year, Fernández-Villaverde updates his data on Latin American birth rates, which he gathers from the countries’ official birth statistics, in preparation for a class he teaches about the region’s economic history. He first began noticing in 2019 that the UN was too optimistic, but only in the past few years did the discrepancies become downright alarming.

For 2024, the UN had projected 701,000 births in Colombia; it had put the chance of the number of births being lower than 553,000 at only 2.5 percent. In the end, Colombia saw only 445,000 births in 2024. That translates to a fertility rate of 1.06 births per woman, down more than half from 2008. Chile’s is even lower: At current rates, 100 reproductive-age Chileans can expect to have 52 children and only 27 grandchildren. (Demographers generally consider a birth rate of about 2.1 to be “replacement level,” or the point at which a society doesn’t shrink from one generation to the next.)

[Olga Khazan: An unexpected argument from the right]

The discrepancies were not limited to South America. In 2024, Poland’s births were also below the 2.5-percent probability cutoff, as were Estonia’s and Cuba’s and Azerbaijan’s and Sri Lanka’s and Egypt’s. These supposed outlier results aren’t outliers at all—the world is just not having as many babies as the UN had thought it would.

Digging into the UN’s model, Fernández-Villaverde found something even stranger. For nearly every low-fertility country, the UN projects either one of two outcomes: The fertility rate will flatten, or it will rise to a number somewhere between one and two births per woman—still below replacement level, but not quite as catastrophic. The United States is in the first category. Our fertility rate has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, from 2.1 to 1.6. One might therefore expect the decline to continue. But the UN projects that the U.S. birth rate will stay flat, not just this year but also in 2026 and 2030 and 2060 and 2090, never rising above 1.7 or dipping below 1.6.

In the other category are countries such as Thailand, whose fertility rate has been falling for 72 years and has never stopped for longer than a single year. Nonetheless, there the UN projects a demographic miracle: Starting in two years, the country’s birth rate will begin to climb, first slowly and then a little more quickly, finishing out the century with a birth rate of 1.45, up from its projected 2024 low of 1.20.

Every part of that appears to be wrong. In reality, Thailand’s reported birth rate last year was 0.98, and preliminary 2025 data show the decline continuing. In a country the size of Thailand, the difference between the UN’s projection and the real fertility rate throughout the 21st century will amount to millions of people who will never be born.

All in all, as Fernández-Villaverde recently explained at a research symposium in London, humanity won’t start to shrink in 2084. It will start to shrink in 2055, if not sooner.

“There are two types of people,” Alice Evans, a British professor who studies falling fertility around the world, posted on X after reading Fernández-Villaverde’s presentation: those “not bothered about demographics” and “those who’ve read Jesus’s slides.”

The UN has a simple explanation for its optimistic projections: Fertility has rebounded in the past, so it will rebound again.

In Belarus, for example, the fertility rate in 1988 was at replacement level; it fell to an abysmal 1.22 only nine years later. But then it rebounded, all the way up to 1.73 by 2015. Australia’s birth rate fell to 1.7 in 2001, only to bounce back to 2.0 in 2008. France’s rate followed a similar trajectory during the same period, as did Italy’s and Sweden’s. “To the extent you think the ‘World Population Prospects’ are wrong, that is the extent to which you are saying, ‘This time is different,’” Lyman Stone, a Ph.D. student and birth-rate consultant, told me.

The thing is, this time really does look different. Birth rates in Australia and France and Italy and Sweden have now fallen to all-time lows (excluding during World War I, in France’s case). Belarus, a onetime redemption story, recorded a fertility rate of just 1.1 last year, lower than the lowest lows the country experienced in the 1990s. Deaths outnumbered births by nearly two to one. If a rebound is coming, there are no signs of it yet. Fernández-Villaverde estimates that the world is already below replacement fertility: The population is not just projected but guaranteed to shrink if things don’t change. That was not the case in the 1990s.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Why the left should embrace pronatalism]

The UN’s model hasn’t adjusted to the new normal. If a country has ever experienced a fertility increase (as Australia and France and Belarus have), then its birth rate is assumed to be stable. If a country has never experienced an increase, then the model assumes that it will at some point, once fertility gets low enough. In other words, the model assumes as its end state a stable and modest number of births. This is perhaps a reflection of humanistic optimism. “There is, at some point, a minimum social capacity to adapt and eventually at least address some of the concerns or challenges that exist in that country,” Patrick Gerland, the chief author of “World Population Prospects,” told me. “The people living in those countries don’t necessarily want their country to totally disappear.”

To his point, the model comes with a hard-coded minimum: No country can ever be projected to have a fertility rate less than 0.5 children per woman. Like the rest of the model, this, too, might need to be revised. Macau (which the UN analyzes separately from mainland China) had a fertility rate of 1.2 a decade ago. Last year, it fell to 0.58, and it looks set to fall even further: In the first four months of 2025, births were down another 13 percent.

If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18 percent of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4 percent of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.

The fertility rates that doomed the Japanese economy ranged from 1.3 to 1.5. So imagine what’s in store for modern-day Colombia (1.06) and Chile (1.03). How will they grow with so few workers? How will they ever become rich if each worker is expected to provide for so many elderly people? The overly optimistic UN estimates have obscured just how urgent these questions really are. Because if the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.

In just 6 short months under Donald Trump, federal funding for science has been slashed and there are clear attempts to censor research. Our great research universities are under assault, and foreign scholars are being denied visas. Many are foregoing coming to America for fear they may be deported or even arrested. We have a health secretary who isn’t just anti-vaccine — he reportedly doesn’t accept the germ theory of disease, preferring the “miasma theory” that was discredited by Louis Pasteur in the 19^th century. The acting head of FEMA said he wasn’t aware that the US had a hurricane season.

One of the ironies of this great leap backward is that it was made possible in part by a hard turn toward Trump among technology billionaires — men who surely imagine that they are leading us into a glorious future, not into a latter-day Dark Age.

Silicon Valley used to support Democrats. For one thing, people in tech tend to be socially liberal. And at least some recognize that the modern Republican Party is hostile to science and education, the pillars on which the tech industry rests.

So what explains the turn away from Democrats and, given Trump’s obvious authoritarianism, democracy?

A major factor may have been a shift in attitude and policy on the part of Democrats, especially Biden administration officials, who moved away from uncritical tech boosterism and toward increased regulation.

This change in attitude didn’t come out of nowhere. There is growing evidence that social media can do real harm, especially to children. There were, as I’ll explain, good reasons to worry that the benefits of technology were no longer flowing to consumers and business as a whole. And the Biden administration was also reflecting a broader change in perceptions: Many Americans have turned sour on the tech sector and tech leaders. In fact, the industry’s fall from grace has been little short of spectacular.

It’s hard to believe now, but for a time some tech leaders approached folk-hero status. Mark Zuckerberg was the subject of a biopic, The Social Network, that wasn’t entirely positive but certainly fed perceptions that he was a great innovator. Elon Musk was reportedly a partial inspiration for Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, the Marvel character.

More significantly, social media was widely given partial credit for the “Arab Spring” of 2010-2012. And in 2011 Americans were three times as likely to consider technology companies more trustworthy than average as they were to consider them less trustworthy.

But that was then. These days Americans don’t consider technology an especially trustworthy industry. They rank it above health insurance and pharma, but that’s a pretty low bar.

Another survey, by researchers at the Brookings Institution, found widespread loss of faith in institutions, but some lost more ground than others. In particular,

we discovered a marked decrease in the confidence Americans profess for technology and, specifically, tech companies—greater and more widespread than for any other type of institution.

What’s behind this “precipitous loss of faith”?

Back in January Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviewed the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, who declared that he and his friends have turned right because America’s elite universities are “politically radical institutions” that teach their students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Am I allowed to say that this is completely crazy?

If you look at the Brookings report, it shows that the backlash against Big Tech is by no means confined to members of the elite who were radicalized at university. On the contrary,

every sociodemographic category we examined—and we examined variation by age, race, gender, education, and partisanship—saw its mean confidence in the three tech companies collapse

And while there has, as I said, been a decline in confidence in many institutions, that decline has been especially, indeed uniquely severe for tech companies.

The “techlash” may in part reflect concerns about just how much wealth and power tech barons have accumulated. Sunday’s primer was about the extraordinary accumulation of wealth at the very top of the distribution since the 1980s. As I tried to document, this accumulation was initially driven mainly by financial wheeler-dealers, especially hedge funds. But since the early 2010s it has largely reflected the soaring value of technology companies that have achieved quasi-monopoly status through network effects: everyone uses their products — everyone feels they have to use their products — because everyone else uses their products. That is, the Masters of the Universe have been overtaken by the Tech Lords.

The public might not care about the wealth of our new oligarchs if people felt that the tech lords were earning their vast fortunes by providing ever better products. But many people, myself included, feel if anything that what Big Tech offers is getting worse, not better, as companies shift their focus from creating new and useful tools to exploiting their market position. On Sunday I quoted Cory Doctorow on “enshittification,” but for those who missed it, I think his model — because that’s what it is! — is worth quoting again:

First, com­panies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.

And let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg, by appealing to Republicans, successfully blocked bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time, have imposed regulations to protect children from the damage social media can cause.

How should policymakers deal with the tech industry’s flaws? The Biden administration turned to regulation. Lina Khan, at the Federal Trade Commission, sought to treat enshittification as a modern version of traditional antitrust concerns. Gary Gensler, at the Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical about the value of cryptocurrency and worried about its risks — a view regular readers know I share — and sought to rein it in. Various Biden officials — perhaps aware that social media, once viewed as universally good, has turned out to have serious downsides — sought to regulate and limit the spread of AI.

One way to look at all this is to say that the Biden administration was trying to treat technology as an ordinary industry that should be subject to normal oversight and regulation. But tech leaders, who still see themselves as special because they’re leading us to a glorious future, were outraged, sufficiently so in many cases that they backed Trump.

Now, maybe Biden’s people could have handled this better. But my prediction is that tech types who backed Trump will soon be very, very sorry.

MUSICAL CODA

It’s easy to go gaga over the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N on a short backroad blast or rip around a track. It’s mind-blowingly fast and, more impressively, a genuinely unique driving experience. Though I have to admit, I never completely got over the inherent goofiness of fake manual shifting and the video-game interface. I understand why people love this car, but I wasn’t sad when my weeklong test came to a close.

The Basics

A curb weight of 4,861 pounds is a lot—but so is an output of 601 horsepower, which can spike to 641 hp with the 10-second N Grin Boost button. The torque figure of 545 lb-ft also increases to 568 when that button is pushed. Hyundai says the Ioniq 5 N can do a zero-to-60-mph run in 3.25 seconds at maximum attack, but MotorTrend recorded an even more dizzying 2.8-second pull and ran the quarter-mile in 11 seconds flat. In a mass-produced car that can also carry four people and a dog comfortably? That’s crazy talk—but it’s real.

The 5 N’s specs, grip, responsiveness, and real-time customizability have been discussed ad nauseam on podcasts, in reviews, and here on The Drive. It looks great and loads a lot of cargo because, as you’ve also probably read, while it may have the shape of an ’80s rally car, it’s got the footprint of a crossover. Four adults can easily fit, plus luggage. The $70,000 list price is justified, too. A BMW X3 M50 is about the same money, and while that may feel fancier, the Hyundai is far, far quicker. At least, until it runs out of juice, which does happen annoyingly soon. Hyundai’s official max range estimate for this car is 221 miles; expect a bit less if you drive as hard as the car invites you to.

Former The Drive staff writer Chris Rosales (now at Motor1) called out the weak driving range as the 5 N’s “one major flaw,” and yeah, it does make a long day of adventuring less free-wheeling. Where he’s at, at the north end of Angeles Crest Highway in California, you could easily rack up 200 miles bombing canyons. Similar story here in rural New York, where I do my relaxation driving—I can put 100 miles on a car just doing weekend errands.

When you do need a charge, the car’s supposed to be able to go from 10% to 80% in 18 minutes if you can connect to a 350 kW DC fast charger. A 50 kW DC charger should be able to do it in one hour and 10 minutes. Charging the car to max from 10% on a 240-volt outlet at 10.9 kW would take 7 hours and 20 minutes—even that’s not terrible as long as you can just have it plugged in overnight.

Driving the Ioniq 5 N

The cockpit layout is tidy but not aggressively minimalist, and the sporty seats are taut and supportive. It can be driven in near-silence, but the Ioniq 5 N has no chill. It wants to party. It wants to be driven hard. It might even be too stiff to be practical in some regions. Rough roads felt extremely unforgiving to me, and there are a whole lot of those in the Hudson Valley.

I’m not saying the car should be softer. On the contrary, the ride felt very well matched to the vehicle’s vibe and intentions. And while it punishes you in potholes, it does reward you with a good feel for where the car is below you.

Arguably, the 5 N’s best party trick is its customizability. As our former reviews editor Chris Tsui wrote wrote last year after his drive at Laguna Seca: “Eleven driver-selectable, fully variable levels of front-rear torque output mean Ioniq 5 N can go from fully FWD to fully RWD (70 rear, 30 front is the default), while an electronic limited-slip differential and ‘N Drift Optimizer’ function can simulate a clutch-kick to make smoky slides easier.”

I was completely blown away by that idea when I first read about it. Now having now driven it on public roads for an extended period of time, I have some salient thoughts. If you’re a car nerd, you can amuse yourself for hours running the same loop, trying it with different power distribution. You’ll be able to enjoy and appreciate it at socially acceptable speeds, too. The sliding, I have to admit, I simply could not find a place that seemed safe enough to drift. This brings me to another key factor in what this car’s like to drive: You really need to treat it with respect. You can sneeze on the accelerator and warp into the next zip code.

But I’m happy to confirm that, unlike with some modern performance vehicles, you don’t need to drive this thing like you’re in a Mission: Impossible movie to enjoy it.

Lastly, you can also select between a traditional EV experience and a simulated “engine,” where you get a tach that climbs as you push the tall pedal, and then “shift” with the paddles. The way the car bucks as you “shift” and stutters if you hit the “rev limiter” is spectacularly realistic. As a fan of science and technology, I’m deeply impressed with Hyundai’s achievement in creating what is essentially a drivable video game. That said, as a driving enthusiast and open-road appreciator, the 5 N kind of leaves me feeling like the kid in this meme:

I know—one could argue that every modern performance car has a degree of this experience. With today’s traction management tech and almost-everything-by-wire, how connected to the road are you, really, in anything built after about 2015? In principle, the idea of a manual mode that can only affect performance adversely, and forces the computer to behave exclusively for my amusement, feels kind of cringey, just like the sound piped in to give the motor an aural character. I’m glad Hyundai allows you to silence it with the push of a button.

Value and Verdict

As long as you can work with a 200-ish mile range EV, this is an easy one to endorse. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 N is absolutely a compelling option if your car budget is in the $70,000 neighborhood. It’s got a great combo of novelty, style, and serious speed. Personally, I would rather get a softer, cheaper EV for getting around and keep my 22-year-old manual Bimmer for fun. I can push that E46 and probably not even break the speed limit.

The weight of the wheel in your hand, the sigh of the straight six when you make a higher-rev shift, the momentum transfer through corners. It’s cliché to say, but new hardware just doesn’t hit the same, even if it does a perfect job simulating a transmission.

The other side of that is something I touched on above—the speeds you can hit in this car without even thinking about it. I get that it’s cool, and I certainly admire the capability from a technological standpoint. But at the risk of sounding crotchety, do we need mass-market vehicles that snap to 60 mph in under three seconds? The Ioniq 5 N didn’t convert me to categorical EV superiority, but it impressed the hell out of me. There’s no question this is a good car; it’s just not the ultimate performance experience.

Want to talk about what the most enjoyable 0 to 60 time is? Email the author at andrew.collins@thedrive.com

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