The proposed $420 billion merger between Dominion Energy, mostly of Virginia and NextEra Energy, based primarily in Florida, places a very high value on a sector, utilities, that investors have all but ignored. Yet the two companies are primary energy providers for the AI boom, notably “Data Center Alley” in Loudoun County, Va. If those hard physical assets and science-based intellectual advances are where today’s economic value lies and presumably the job opportunities are best, then why are women increasingly dominating college admissions, mostly to specialize in “soft” arts subjects whose value is disappearing with AI’s new capabilities. Can’t they read the market?

There is no question that women as a whole are investing a lot of their energy in the university system. Overall, according to Education Department statistics, the Class of 2026 at colleges skews 61.3% female. The greatest skew is at the Associate’s and Master’s levels, where 64.6% and 63.4% respectively of the Class are female. This suggests that women are especially vulnerable to the social pressure of college, with a high percentage of marginal students going to college for an Associate’s degree rather than taking vocational training and a high percentage of women with Bachelor’s degrees incurring massively more student debt, probably at a level they will never be able to repay, to obtain a Master’s degree that may well be economically worthless. The degrees with the greatest value in the real world, Bachelor’s for basic college skills or Doctorates for academia and the highest scientific posts, skew much less heavily female.

Alex Karp, founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies, has made the same point (well, I can’t be startlingly original every time!) In a recent interview with CNBC, he said AI would lessen the power of

“highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat. This technology disrupts humanities trained – largely Democratic – voters and makes their economic power less. And increases the power of vocationally trained, working class, often male voters.”

In another interview with the podcast TBPN, he elaborated:

“There are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. Or two, you’re neurodivergent.”

Well first, this column has always been neuro-divergent; that was the inspiration for its inception in 2000 when everything one read was bullish on the hopelessly over-inflated dot-com stock market. Neuro-divergence has been its guiding star over the 25 years plus since then. So, it is very good that the column will have an economic future in the brave new world of AI, despite it being written in a bizarre kind of humanities-major English rather than in mathematical formulae (most weeks!) The column’s neuro-divergence is also very fortunate, as on Karp’s alternative qualification, being utterly ham-fisted I could never make it as a plumber or electrician!

But Karp’s view appears to be a common-sense assessment of where AI will lead, by one who as founder of Palantir has presumably thought about that question longer and more deeply than almost anyone else. Certainly, it is not wishful thinking – Karp is a major mainstream Democrat donor and appears to have voted against President Trump in each of the last three Presidential elections, so presumably regrets that new technology is hurting his political side’s prospects. So, Karp’s wisdom leads one to speculate: why are so many women of this generation immersing themselves in abominable amounts of student debt to get an education at a fancy college in liberal arts that is of almost no monetary value, and will make them almost unemployable in the new AI world?

One can understand previous generations; they were left-leaning (as women have been since the middle 1980s), socialized further left by their schools and believed deeply in careers for women. Therefore, they attempted to get the “best” possible college qualifications in the largest possible quantity for their chosen career despite the appalling financial cost of that choice. But believing in 1996, before the Internet started to hollow out journalism, that a liberal arts degree would provide comfortable employment for the rest of one’s career was rational; believing the same in 2026 is not.

That uncomfortable fact may explain much of the political opposition to data centers, especially in suburban areas where expensively educated arts-major women proliferate. Loudoun County is the quintessential example of such an area, home not to the younger graduates, but to those who have established a successful career in government or more lucratively one of the lobbyist or non-profit groups that infest Washington. Twenty years ago it was solidly Republican, now it is equally solidly Democrat. Since it was the closest area to Washington where there was still spare land and its local government appeared to be friendly, it became home to almost 50 million square feet of data centers, which now pay nearly half Loudoun County’s taxes.

I can reliably forecast that trouble is coming to Loudoun County’s data center paradise. The state government is no longer headed by the reliably corporatist Glenn Youngkin, but by the leftist wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing Abigail Spanberger, and the state Assembly and Senate both have Democrat majorities. Thus, Loudoun County’s ladies, facing extinction of their comfortable liberal-arts-major existence, have the chance to wreak political havoc against the evil powers of AI, that threatens their cozy existence and bids fair to replace them with male plumbers, people they only deal with when they absolutely have to and whose bills always appear to them exorbitant.

They don’t know any such people socially. A recent study by Verdant Laboratories of the political affiliations of the most Democrat and most Republican occupations found that arts administrators, English professors, film editors, History professors, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and museum curators, the sort of people the Loudoun ladies would be happy to have as neighbors, all skewed more than 95% Democrat. Conversely, roofers, mechanical contractors, car salesmen, and home builders, the most Republican groups, and the sort of people they would rarely meet socially, were no more than 80% Republican, thus a much more diverse and tolerant group. Incidentally, if the ladies of Loudoun had the sense to live in a neighborhood with lots of plumbers, like Poughkeepsie, they would find their plumbing bills much more reasonable. Supply and demand, lady, a concept you didn’t come across in your Sociology class!

The Dominion/NextEra merger will provide opportunities for lots of people the Loudoun ladies don’t know socially, whose work is remarkably valuable. The 30,000 employees of Dominion/NextEra combined, the great majority of which will fall into one or other of Karp’s favored groups, appear to be producing $420 billion in value, judging by the merger size. Unlike many tech mergers, this valuation is not unduly inflated by anticipation of the future; the component parts of Dominion and NextEra have been around for a century or more. Yet their value is an amazing $14 million per employee, far more than your average sociology PhD is worth! While I am generally against mergers, this one seems to have the unquestionable advantage of reducing the ability of the Loudoun ladies to mess up the business, either by prohibiting the construction of more data centers or by forcing the companies concerned to install expensive and ineffective windmills.

As for the data centers, they can be installed in deeply rural parts of North Carolina, the parts where FEMA under the Biden administration did not bother answering phone calls. Asheville, NC would I am sure be happy to have some data centers that reliably paid large amounts of local taxes. And yes, it’s further from Washington, so much so that Loudoun ladies probably couldn’t find it on a map. But does it really matter that Federal bureaucrats must wait 0.00252 seconds for their data to travel the 469 miles from Asheville rather than 0.00017 seconds to cover the 32 miles to Leesburg? (Yes, I could have put that in scientific notation 1.7 E-04, but I wanted the Loudoun ladies to understand the point!)

In the unpleasant world in which we live, political games get played in much of the country; for example New York State, a vast area with huge AI potential, has a proposed three-year moratorium on data center construction because of dozy opposition to them by Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State legislature. While I oppose mergers in general, that between Dominion and NextEra allows providers of data centers in the southeastern United States, the region served by those companies, to choose between several states and regions, few of which will be as expensive and hostile as the ladies of Loudoun. This neuro-divergent column thus welcomes it!

-0-

(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

The post The Bear’s Lair: Have women misread the job market? appeared first on True Blue Will Never Stain.