Babies v climate change; AI v IP; bonds v world

NPR

This is the Indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Darian Woods.

And I'm Adrian Ma.

And connecting with the Indicator crew this week is the very merry Mary Childs.

I'm merry to be here, folks.

And merrily we all row into Indicators of the Week.

Woo!

That's right.

We have looked at interesting numbers in the news this week, and we are here to tell you all about them.

On today's episode, how bad are babies for climate change?

Really?

How to train your AIs on books and then get sued for it.

And I know you're going to be shocked to hear this, guys, but I'm here to talk about corporate bonds.

The bond queen.

Let's go.

Woo, woo, woo.

After the break.

Okay, indicators of the week.

Starting off, Darian.

What you got?

My indicator is a heat-related indicator.

It's been very hot here in the northeast.

Don't know about where you guys are, but it is sweltering.

Tell me about it.

It's got me thinking about climate change and how much I should blame people having babies.

It is probably almost certainly the baby's fault.

Yes.

But what do the numbers say before we accuse, you know, an innocent child?

A bunch of economists and demographers from the University of Texas at Austin and the City University of New York wanted to analyze this.

So they fed some scenarios into a model.

Scenario one, population growth.

The world population grows and grows.

People keep having lots of babies.

Scenario two, population decline.

So this means that by the year 2200, there are billions more people in the growth scenario.

Can you guess which makes the planet hotter?

The one with more people driving more cars, consuming more plastic every year.

Yes, yes.

That is

burps and belches and farts.

Just tooting everywhere.

That is the obvious answer.

But what was surprising is that it's only extremely marginally.

The researchers estimated that by the year 2200, so in 175 years, the world would be only less than 0.1 degrees Celsius hotter under the population growth scenario.

That is my indicator of the week: 0.1 degrees Celsius.

Right.

And countries have been trying to limit global warming to two degrees.

So what you're saying, 0.1 degrees warmer, is not a huge increase in the scheme of things.

Correct.

So I guess I'm just curious how that actually works, because I'm pretty sure that children eat a lot and require a great deal of driving around and like clothing and just they're very energy intensive.

So how could it be that they have only marginal climate effects?

So the insight here is that any shifts in population take many decades to take effect.

So even if there was a completely unrealistic decree that nobody can have any babies, what's the population going to be tomorrow?

It'll still be 8 billion people.

And so it would take decades and decades for the population to really start decreasing meaningfully if people start having much fewer kids.

And so the idea is that as we start using electric vehicles more instead of combustion engines, as we electrify our heating, as we use solar power instead of coal, the average life will be much less carbon intensive in a few decades time.

So what really matters for climate change is how carbon intensive our world is over the next few decades, not in these faraway generations.

I mean, we seem to be on the path to having fewer babies anyway, which is actually the topic of an upcoming episode next week.

Yeah, I look forward to hearing more.

This news is going to land like an anvil in the anarchy community.

Okay.

This is going to upend a lot of their assumptions.

I look forward to that.

Speaking of upending, let's talk about something that is going to upend potentially our whole industry, which is the world of AI.

My indicator has to do with Anthropic, which is the company behind the AI chat software Claude.

And the indicator is 7 million.

That's the number of pirated books the company downloaded into its own internal database a few years ago.

And since then, the company has used some of those pirated books along with books that it purchased to to train its large language models.

And this, of course, did not sit well with some of the authors of those books.

What these authors did was they sued Anthropic for copyright infringement.

And this week, a federal district court in San Francisco ruled in the company's favor.

So the court said using a lot of these books to train large language models is actually okay under a legal doctrine known as fair use.

Fair use is this long-standing exception to the general rule that copyright infringement is a no-no.

Okay, so using books to train AI fair use, according to this judge.

Basically, the judge said that what Anthropic did qualifies for the fair use exception in part because it was transformative, another legal term.

And sure, Anthropic didn't get the author's permission, but by using the books to train an LLM, Anthropic created something really different from the original.

And that helps get it to that exception.

I've been watching cases like this for a while.

We've covered artists suing AI companies before.

This seems like a milestone in this big battle.

That is right.

And actually, shortly after there was a second victory for an AI company,

a U.S.

district judge also in San Francisco ruled against authors in favor of Meta.

Although it's worth noting that the judge in that case said that training models on authors' works could be considered unlawful in some circumstances.

So it'll be interesting to see how these cases play out.

Well, thank you, Adrian.

We will keep watching this space with interest.

Mary, what's your indicator?

This week, as with every week, I am thinking about bonds, specifically this week, corporate bonds, because the New York Fed just updated its measure that it tracks of corporate bond market distress.

And that measure has fallen.

Did you know, to its historical 15th percentile.

That is my indicator of the week, 15th percentile, meaning this index is near the bottom of the range where it has been ever.

So, in basic terms, what does this mean?

Okay, so you know the bond market is where companies borrow big, huge sums of money to fund themselves, to do anything from, you know, build new factories to expand their operations or just to function depending on the health of the company.

And this index that the New York Fed has, it measures things like how much new debt companies are issuing, and are the prices where they're issuing high or low?

Are people trading those bonds, etc.?

Okay, the bond market's super chill right now, which stands in marked contrast to the world outside with tariffs, the labor force and the immigration crackdown and companies being nervous.

Consumer confidence is in the pits.

What the heck is happening, Mary?

So I think it's that companies are stressed out, but they are not distressed.

Like, if you think about Ford and GM and all of those companies that have suspended their forward guidance, they're not going to say any longer how much they expect to sell in the next quarter or whatever, because they just don't know what's going to happen in the market to themselves with the tariffs.

They just can't predict.

So they stopped doing it.

But that doesn't mean that there has been a negative impact just yet.

Okay.

But what if it's just going to come soon?

Yeah, right.

So that's kind of the sentiment right now.

For example, SP Global on June 24th forecasts that the U.S.

economy will grow just 1.7%

this year, which is pretty blah.

And then the next year will also be blah.

And earlier this month, Fitch Ratings said that non-financial companies in North America have a deteriorating outlook thanks to negative trends they expect to see in the economy, like inflation and slowing consumer spending.

And that's yet another thing that people expect to get worse, but it just hasn't really started to filter through yet.

We just talked about this the other day on the show.

We talked to a lot of listeners who spent a ton in the past few months just to get ahead of tariffs and then pulled back.

Yeah, people were doing some spending to buy ahead of tariffs hitting, but they seem to be pulling back.

We're getting data in still, so it remains to be seen what the real impact will be.

We're just in wait and see mode.

Perhaps you've heard that a lot lately.

And I've also heard analogies, perhaps you have too, to, you know, Wily Coyote being suspended in mid-air, having just gone off a cliff holding an anvil.

He's just like hovering there for a second.

We might be in that split second.

We'll find out.

Well, I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

Indeed.

With a chill bond market.

Yes, it's a nice view from here.

Mary Childs, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Quasi League.

It was fact-checked by Ciara Juarez, edited by Julia Ritchie.

Keikin Cannon is our editor, and the indicators are production of NPR.

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