The news about marriage has been so bad for so long, with rates steadily falling, that many Americans have despaired that not much, if anything, can be done to revive its fortunes.

But maybe — just maybe — Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce might nudge things in the right direction. The pop singer’s immense popularity among young women puts her squarely in a position to influence the very demographic most sceptical about marriage. That scepticism runs deep: in 2022, only 73% of 12th graders expected to marry someday, with girls’ expectations dropping most sharply.

Part of this wariness stems from prominent female cultural voices who portray marriage as a losing game — from pop star Chappell Roan to New York Times writer Amy Shearn, who writes that “married heterosexual motherhood in America… is a game no one wins.” But is Swift’s influence enough to shift the tide of marriage culture in America?

It’s worth considering. Swift’s sway over her devoted fanbase is almost unmatched in today’s pop culture landscape. As Forbes notes, her influence stems from a network effect: she acts as a social “barometer”, with followers adopting aspects of her identity in pursuit of approval and belonging — a phenomenon dubbed the “Taylor Swift Effect”. The power of this effect isn’t surprising when you consider that many Swifties describe her concerts as near-religious experiences.

There’s reason to think the Taylor Swift Effect could extend to marriage. Media and cultural signals play a powerful role in shaping decisions about dating, marriage, children, and divorce. One study even found that a popular soap opera in Brazil led to higher divorce rates and lower birth rates. Similarly, high-profile celebrity cases of non-marital childbearing may have contributed to the weakening of the marriage norm in America. While these effects are striking, they shouldn’t be surprising: our social networks — now increasingly digital and parasocial — profoundly shape what we value, influencing everything from whom we marry to whether we stay married.

But will the Taylor Swift Effect usher in a marriage renaissance? Probably not. While Swift and Kelce’s engagement might inspire some Americans to rethink marriage, they are far from an average couple. Both are 35 — well above the typical age for a first marriage — and have achieved extraordinary success. It will take far more than the example of one exceptional celebrity pair to meaningfully boost the nation’s marriage rate.

Still, it’s refreshing to have some good news about marriage in America for a change. Let’s hope Taylor and Travis’s union endures and inspires many young men — and especially women — to pursue lasting marriages of their own. Perhaps a “happy, healthy marriage” era will be the next trend Taylor sets.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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