Category Archives: Sociology

More data centers means more power plants coming

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Where will the power come from for all the data centers recently built, under construction, and in the works?

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xAI’s rivals are all building similarly large data centers to develop their most powerful generative-AI models; a metropolis’s worth of electricity will surge through facilities that occupy a few city blocks. These companies have primarily made their chatbots “smarter” not by writing niftier code but by making them bigger: ramming more data through more powerful computer chips that use more electricity. OpenAI has announced plans for facilities requiring more than 30 gigawatts of power in total—more than the largest recorded demand for all of New England. Since ChatGPT’s launch, in November 2022, the capital expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have exceeded $600 billion, and much of that spending has gone toward data centers—more, even after adjusting for inflation, than the government spent to build the entire interstate-highway system. “These are the largest single points of consumption of electricity in history,” Jesse Jenkins, a climate modeler at Princeton, told me.

Even conservative analyses forecast that the tech industry will drop the equivalent of roughly 40 Seattles onto America’s grid within a decade; aggressive scenarios predict more than 60 in half that time. According to Siddharth Singh, an energy-investment analyst at the International Energy Agency, by 2030, U.S. data centers will consume more electricity than all of the country’s heavy industries—more than the cement, steel, chemical, car, and other industrial facilities put together. Roughly half of that demand will come from data centers equipped for the particular needs of generative AI—programs, such as ChatGPT, that can produce text and images, solve complex math problems, and perhaps one day inform scientific discoveries…

The optimist’s case is that, by then, advanced nuclear reactors will have obviated many of the new fossil-fuel plants, and AI tools will have invented technologies that can solve the climate crisis. That may well happen. But today, “the market has converged on Add gas now, and then add nuclear later,” Jenkins said. In other words, if natural-gas turbines seem to offer the most expedient path to an AI-enhanced future, then clean air may have to wait…

Northern Virginia offers a glimpse into what the AI rush may bring to the rest of the nation. Loudoun is running out of space, but new data-center hubs are popping up in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas. Amazon and Meta are building AI data centers in Indiana and Louisiana, respectively, that will each require more than two gigawatts of electricity, dozens of times more than standard facilities. OpenAI has proposed that the U.S. establish “AI Economic Zones”: little Loudouns everywhere.

Infrastructure is necessary to keep the modern world going but does not always get much attention until there are big changes (good or bad). We expect, electricity, water, the Internet, roads, and more to just be there and work just fine. Each of these required large-scale efforts to build and require a lot to maintain. AI may appear through the air but it is based by a massive infrastructure that includes land, servers, water, and electricity. Putting this all together is no easy task as it takes years, if not longer, to plan, find funding, get building approval, and complete construction.

Not noted as much in this article is how opposition to data centers has often focused on these infrastructure aspects. Who will pay for the water and electricity needed? What happens if there is air and noise pollution? Residents tend not to want to live near power plants, waste transfer facilities, and sewage treatment plants. How many people want to live near data centers?

Given the resources needed for data centers, how much are utility companies supporting these plans? Development, particularly intensive development, can generate new business. Growth machines, coalitions of local leaders and organizations, benefit from new development.

Funding local services via property taxes or state funds

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What should be the formula by which local governments and the state of Illinois contribute monies for local services? There might be change coming:

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The concern centers on the Local Government Distributive Fund, the long-standing revenue-sharing mechanism that sends a portion of state income tax collections to cities and towns across Illinois.

Illinois mayors are warning that Pritzker’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget plan reduces the share of state income-tax revenue distributed to local governments, a shift that would force many municipalities to make tough choices.

The proposal would lower the municipal share of income tax revenue distributed through the fund from 6.47% to 6.23%, meaning cities and villages would receive about $60 million less than they would under the current formula. Lawmakers have reduced that share significantly over the years, starting with a substantial cut from the 10% level that persisted prior to 2011 when lawmakers significantly increased the income tax.

While the change would send more money to the state, it would squeeze local governments that rely heavily on property taxes to fund services. Pulling additional dollars from the LGDF risks shifting the burden onto Illinois homeowners, who already face some of the highest property tax bills in the country. Property taxes are set locally, but state decisions about revenue sharing inevitably shape how much local governments must rely on them. 

Several matters appear to be at play:

  1. Local residents and leaders tend to like more local oversight of government and funds. But they are not necessarily opposed to getting funds from elsewhere – like the state – to then spend locally.
  2. Who should be making “tough choices”? Let’s say the formula is reconfigured; what local services are at risk for Illinois communities? Or where is that extra money the state is keeping then being spent? Would that money be spent in ways that helps lot of people?
  3. Property taxes are a hot button issue in many places. People like their property values going up but they do not like their property taxes going up along with that. And property taxes pay for the local services that help support their property values (schools, local amenities, etc.). If people don’t want property taxes to keep going up, what would local communities actually cut or scale back?

Percentage-wise, the formula change seems small but this gets at a fundamental issue in the American political and social system: there are multiple layers of government that provide for residents. Americans tend to like local control but townships, counties, states, and the federal government also provide services. The optimal distribution of funding and services is up for negotiation and the debate grows stronger when there is less money to go around.

White collar crime and the “most stupid fraud in history”

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A recent local headline about a court sentencing included this quote: “most stupid fraud in history.” What was the crime?

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A south suburban man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison Tuesday in a massive, $14 million fraud scheme where he collected kickbacks for filing more than 1,500 bogus loan applications at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic…

According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Zenner, Shrieteh submitted more than 1,500 false PPP loan applications on behalf of at least 1,025 clients beginning in 2020, causing some $14 million of funds to be dispersed, most of which was forgiven by the U.S. government…

As the fraud associated with the PPP loans began making national news, Shrieteh acknowledged to an associate that he was being paid big money, saying in one text message, “Mother(expletive) it’s not coffee,” according to prosecutors.

“You gonna put my ass in jail soon,” Shrieteh wrote, according to the prosecution memo. “Most stupid fraud in history.”

I remember first really thinking about white collar crime in an undergraduate criminology course. Among all the things we did that semester, we spent about four weeks considering white collar crime and its consequences. It often draws less punishment than violent crime. It may be more common than violent crime but tends to get less attention. It can affect a lot of people.

In this particular case, a suburban tax preparer collected money as he used his clients to defraud the federal government. The total PPP loan program in the COVID-19 pandemic involved a lot of money. This was certainly just a drop in the bucket, even as the absolute value of fraud would be a large amount of money for most people.

Is this the “most stupid fraud in history” because this tax preparer was caught? Would lots of people try to defraud the government or take money from a large corporation because they might barely know the money as gone?

Such monies could have gone to helping other people. Taxpayer dollars could have been spent more wisely. And this happens in corporations and other organizations as well; employees can embezzle, cheat, pollute, skirt regulations in ways hurt people.

I bet there might be other examples of white collar crime that people think qualifies as the “most stupid fraud in history.”

What I learned working for a Christian college radio station #2: the formal and informal practices of radio

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Organizations may have some obvious or well-known procedures while other practices are more hidden. Some of the formal policies of radio stations might be obvious. You have to air a station ID around the top of the hour. You have to air emergency alert tests every so often. Not following through with these policies comes with consequences.

Here is one example of a less well-known policy. According to the FCC, certain information had to be kept in a file. Radio is a federally regulated industry with licenses coming with requirements. I always wondered who might stop by and look at such files. Do most people even know were radio stations are located?

Some practices are less formal or more open to interpretation across stations. Two examples stand out. One was the way we organized music during a typical hour. We had certain categories for songs, such as heavy rotation, medium rotation, and power gold. How many slots each hour had for these categories plus the number of songs in that category determined how often those songs would play. With some other rules for songs (such as there had to be a certain amount of time between two songs from the same artist playing), this meant the heavy rotation songs would play about 40 times a week. And the heavy rotation category led off every hour. Why do people listen to music on the radio? They want to hear the popular songs. With our system the would not hear them every hour but every few hours. And those songs would tend to play at the beginning of the 15 minute increments that make up radio hours (and that are tied to ratings). As a college radio station, we did not always follow this format – we had other parts of the day that were structured in the same ways.

A second example involved how we referred to ourselves. Radio stations have options, that typically include their FM or AM frequency number or their call letters (typically 4). We were WETN on FM 88.1. We would often call ourselves “WETN – Wheaton College Radio.” Sometimes we would refer to our frequency: “FM88, Wheaton College Radio.” Or “WETN, FM88.” WETN is a good shorthand for “Wheaton,” a name both our college and community shared (traced back to the same Wheaton brothers who were early settlers). And not a lot of stations can boast that they are in the 88s.

Once I knew these practices, they seemed obvious. The station ID was built into our on-air scheduling software. How many ways are there to refer to our call letters and frequency? Perhaps this is true in all settings but with no previous experience in radio, it took time to learn these official and informal policies.

Some programs offering housing assistance to residents with higher incomes

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As housing prices have gone up in recent years in much of the United States, some assistance programs now offer monetary help to people with higher incomes:

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Down Payment Resource, a company that compiles information on more than 2,700 home-buying programs, shared data with The Washington Post that showed more than 115 programs have raised their income threshold requirements since 2023. In most of those cases, the programs now offer aid to would-be home buyers whose income is above their local median, sometimes well above.

Memphis, for instance, now offers down-payment assistance to households with twice the local median income that purchase in designated areas of the city. San Francisco offers loans of up to half a million dollars for first-time home buyers; a single person with income up to $218,200 can apply…

Adam Grubbs, who runs a municipal down-payment-assistance program in Aurora, Illinois, said local leaders there decided to use municipal funds (about $300,000) to give middle-income households support similar to a federally subsidized program for low-income buyers.

“It’s those police officers, your fire department staff, nurses, teachers: those people that, they do have good jobs, but with this housing market it’s still unaffordable for them. Even they need help trying to buy their first house,” Grubbs said.

These changes get at some key questions underlying how Americans view housing and housing policy:

  1. Who needs help regarding housing?
  2. Who deserves help regarding housing?

More broadly, is housing a human right, a privilege, available to those with the right resources, for those who work hard as individuals, or something else?

These changes in programs also remind me of a quote from a former Bank of England official: “Most countries have socialized health care and a free market for mortgages. You in the United States do exactly the opposite.” Providing homebuying assistance helps people achieve homeownership, a goal viewed as desirable in the United States.

Conversations in local communities can often help answer these questions. Local residents and leaders often have a sense of who they would like to see live in their community. Take the quote above involving Aurora as an example; municipal housing funds are designated for civil servants, potential residents that serve and who are seen as contributing to the community.

Neighborhood of 3D printed homes in California

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Homeowners will soon be able to live in 3D printed homes north of Sacramento:

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The $1.1 million 3D-printers have churned out at least five new modern properties so far, with the first one taking only 24 days to complete.

Made by 4DIFY, the 1,000-square-foot house was the initial installment in the 3D-printed neighborhood…

Additionally, the process requires less labor and materials and also produces less waste, helping keep costs down.

The 3D printers mainly use concrete as filament for their builds…

“By automating the construction process with robotic precision and reducing material waste, we’re cutting build times by up to 75% and significantly lowering costs while increasing structural integrity, fire resistance, and seismic performance,” the spokesperson emphasized.

If construction techniques after World War II helped contribute to a suburban boom – mass production, large-scale subdivisions – could 3D printers help change the market? Two things stand out to me about the possibilities of 3D printed homes:

  1. The speed at which homes can be built.
  2. A lower price point compared to other construction techniques.

If both these things are true (and perhaps might even be improved at a larger scale), there could be opportunities. This neighborhood is also being constructed in California, a place where housing is especially needed.

The biggest change for a possible homeowner might be having concrete as a primary material for their home. Many American homes are made of wood frames clad with different materials. Concrete is essential to the modern world and why not have more homes made of the material? (I can also think of downsides; would people push against having concrete homes?)

High housing prices and inheriting a house in California

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What if housing prices were so high in some American markets that a regular way people acquire homes is through inheritance? Take the case of California:

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About 18% of all property transfers in the state last year, representing nearly 60,000 homes, were made through inheritance, according to a recent analysis by real-estate data firm Cotality.

That share is a record for California in data going back to 1995, up from 12% in 2019. It is also roughly double the national share of 8.8% last year…

The state’s high rate of inherited homes reflects California’s unique circumstances: years of skyrocketing home prices, and tax policies that encourage owners to avoid selling their houses before they die.

The people who inherit these houses enjoy tremendous benefits. They can move into homes that they otherwise might not be able to buy at current prices, or they can sell them and keep the proceeds without having to pay capital gains taxes.

But the high rate of homes passed on after death is distorting the state’s housing market, favoring longtime homeowners and their families over all other home buyers.

The postwar idea of suburban homeownership included social mobility, the idea that someone could work hard and purchase their own house and plot of land. Follow the American pathway to success and it would end in homeownership.

But what if this does not always work out? Or if conditions in some places mean that the typical path does not work for a good portion of people? This postwar expectation was not necessarily available to everyone even then; communities and programs were not open to people of all races and nationalities.

The California case is one where observers can see that this social contract of homeownership is or is not working. Can a regular worker or household find a home in California? Wasn’t a lot of California’s growth due to this postwar social contract? In the American social and economic system, is inheritance a preferred or a good way to obtain a home?

It also remains to be seen whether the trend in California becomes the norm in other American settings or whether it is an isolated case with a unique housing market.

Two significant changes in the ways Americans perceive mortgages as illustrated in one paragraph

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A recent piece about mortgages in the United States contained this paragraph:

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The mortgage, the cornerstone of wealth building for generations of Americans, is vanishing. Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association show that Americans are applying for fewer mortgages than they have at any point in the past quarter century, including during the worst of the Great Recession, when the jobless rate was more than twice as high. Since the end of 1999, 96 of the 100 lowest readings of the MBA’s weekly index of new mortgage-loan applications have occurred in the past three years.

These sentences highlight two major changes regarding how Americans view mortgages in the last 80 years (post World War II era):

  1. The expectation that mortgages are available for everyone. This came about in the postwar era due to changes in mortgage terms as well as interest in homeownership. Regarding terms, mortgages became 30 year obligations, lowering the monthly cost for consumers. Regarding homeownership, pent-up housing needs (Great Depression plus World War II) plus an existing American ideology privileging property ownership led to mortgages used for single-family homes. And with the relative economic prosperity of the postwar era, more Americans than ever could access mortgages. This became the norm: follow the societal paths for success and secure a mortgage as a 20-something or 30-something.
  2. The expectation that mortgages serve as wealth building instruments. This has increased in recent decades as property values have risen dramatically in many parts of the United States. Prior to this, homeownership or property ownership was its own end. The owner could do what they wanted with the property. They could participate in local community life as a property owner. They could provide for their household. Now people expect to profit in the long-term off their mortgage: they will pay off interest and some equity and then sell it for more money down the road as they pursue their goals.

The hint in the article above is that pursuing and having mortgages has decreased and might decrease in the future. Does this then change perceptions regarding mortgages? Americans have not always viewed mortgages in the same way in the past and may not do so in the future.

Split housing market illustrated in Miami: ultra-wealthy drive prices up, housing stagnant for everyone else

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Recent real estate activity in Miami highlights a feature of current life in the United States: billionaires are buying up property and driving up prices in that segment of the market while housing has stalled for many other residents.

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The median home price in Miami, at $610,000 in January, was down 7.2 percent from the previous year, with homes sitting on the market for a median of 115 days, according to Redfin. Even the merely luxurious homes, those listed between $10 million and $30 million, are sitting on the market for months. But at the top, a battle is on for the best land that can be had…

Todd Michael Glaser, a Florida developer, likens this era to the Gilded Age, when the country’s wealthiest families, with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Rothschild settled into sprawling “cottages” akin to the estates of the British aristocracy…

When demand is high among buyers with unlimited budgets, prices become almost meaningless, ballooning to whatever sum it takes to persuade a seller to move. “When you’re worth, not even in the billions anymore, but in the hundreds billions, it’s just a rounding error for you,” said Jeff Miller, a Miami luxury real estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty.

Five years ago, sales of homes over $50 million were nonexistent. In 2025, they represented over 7 percent of the market, by dollar volume, according to Jonathan J. Miller, director of markets at StreetMatrix, a hyperlocal market data site. “It’s not that prices appreciated,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s that prices reset because there was a recalculation as an asset class by the wealthy.”

Those with resources can consume while most people have to watch their budgets. The wealthy can throw large amounts of money around while the general public has to look for good deals. The most desirable real estate keeps going up in value while others struggle to sell their properties and afford decent housing.

These are not new features of American life. (See the 1929 sociological study The Gold Coast and the Slum for a look at these dynamics in Chicago roughly one hundred years ago.) Yet, the contrast seems noteworthy given (1) ongoing housing needs in many metropolitan regions in the United States, (2) an economic system that relies on consumption and luxury goods, and (3) ongoing public and policy discussions about wealth.

Take the housing issue in Miami. How does this activity with expensive properties contrast to housing activity elsewhere? What is being constructed and for whom? What happens to older housing on the market? Can people in the region access good housing at different price points that enable them to live well and pursue opportunities?

Possible link between major music releases and driving deaths

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A recent working paper looked at the possible connection between music releases and traffic fatalities:

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A group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School recently issued a working paper reporting an association between the release days of the most-streamed albums and an increase in US traffic fatalities. The authors say the pattern is consistent with smartphone-enabled driver distraction, including the use of in-vehicle phone-mirroring platforms.

“Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study,” the researchers said in their explanation for performing the study. Fatal traffic accidents and release days for popular streaming albums, the team said, were chosen as an “exogenous event” that “may offer an opportunity to quasi-experimentally study the impact of distraction using observational data.”…

The team used data from the US Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which catalogs all fatal crashes on public US roadways, and compared that to data from Spotify charts, looking specifically at the top 10 albums with the most first-day streams between 2017 and 2022 (Taylor Swift and Drake each appear three times in the top 10, for those curious)…

They adjusted for fixed effects like holidays, the day of the week and week of the year, repeated the analyses to select for infotainment systems and other automobile information, and accounted for driver characteristics including age, the number of people in the car, and involvement of alcohol. The team even conducted multiple “placebo album” falsification tests, running experiments on randomly-selected dates, to be sure they weren’t overlooking something else unknown.

This sounds like an example of a “natural experiment” where researchers can see what happens to driving deaths on Fridays with major music releases and Fridays without them.

Three quick thoughts in response:

  1. I remember when major music releases were on Tuesdays, not Fridays. And when the music was not yet digital, a consumer had to go to a location to buy a physical copy. I was never in any release lines but I definitely went to stores on release day to buy CDs. (Have never done this for records or cassettes.)
  2. How many people enjoy new music in a car versus via ear buds, headphones, and speakers in other settings? A moving vehicle can make it difficult to hear music. The road is noisy. A vehicle makes noise. The car has a certain sound system. In newer vehicles, the listener is streaming music. But driving is better with entertainment. And driving with friends and music can be fun. Driving fast with friends and loud music can feel fun.
  3. What might be a public health response to this? Regulations about screens in cars – making them easier to operate, smaller, less distracting, etc.? Music release days back on Tuesdays or another weekday to avoid the possible connections to weekends? Public safety messages? Promoting the use of driverless vehicles?