For that reason, I thought it would be a good idea to explain why Acemoglu’s most famous book is wrong, and from there critique some of his contemporary political opinions. I honestly hesitated for a bit before writing this, because Acemoglu only follows 356 people on X, and I am one of them, which is flattering. We’ve had a few pleasant interactions and he seems like a perfectly nice man, so I didn’t want to be too negative about his work. But ideas matter, and I hope he finds this criticism useful.

In Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson summarize their main thesis in the preface:

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.

The rest of the book tries to explain how the histories of different nations and regions of the world are consistent with this idea. In the colonies founded by white settlers, like the US, Canada, and Australia, elites shared political power, which led to broad prosperity. In Latin America and post-colonial Africa, elites have hoarded power, lined their own pockets, and created poorer and less functional societies as a result.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here.

So in Acemoglu’s telling, political rights lead to economic opportunity, which leads to prosperity. Why some nations end up with political rights and others don’t is based on historical contingency. The ultimate question in the study of economic history is, of course, what started the Industrial Revolution, and here the authors place their emphasis on the struggle between kings and nobles in England.

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Links from the discussion:

The Deep Left take

John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood

John Carreyrou in 2015 breaking the story

My ChatGPT query about federal prison rules

Billy Evans on the All-In podcast

Wired on “Theranos 2.0”

Podcast on The Curse with Rob Henderson

This podcast is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

Below is a cleaned-up version of the transcript.

Coming to the Elizabeth Holmes Story

Richard Hanania: Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I’m here today with Zoe Bernard. We’re going to talk about the Nathan Fielder movie about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything, which is in theaters right now. Zoe, can you introduce yourself to the audience before we begin?

Zoe Bernard: I’m a journalist, mostly covering tech, culture, and the world of business. I’m currently working on a book about prediction markets that should hopefully come out next year. And I have a lot of thoughts on the movie.

Richard: Awesome. You’ve written for Vanity Fair, right?

Zoe: I’ve written for Vanity Fair in the past, and also for The Information, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Business Insider.

Richard: Got it. It looks like you came into this having read a lot about Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: I was a reporter when John Carreyrou initially broke the story, and it was the coolest story on the tech beat at the time. I avidly consumed everything he was writing. I read Bad Blood when it came out, and I watched The Dropout only fairly recently, maybe a couple of months ago. So I came into this with a ton of cultural baggage and an understanding of the reporting background of what had happened at Theranos.

Richard: I’d read some stories about Elizabeth Holmes, probably eight years ago, but I didn’t remember much or follow it closely. I knew the basic outline: She wanted to be like Steve Jobs; it was all fake; she had Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and these other people on her board. I knew the sexy details, but I never got into the evidence of what she did or how strong the case was.

Zoe: You knew about the voice? The fake voice?

Richard: I remember that, too. I watched the movie yesterday in the theater. Then today, in preparation for this conversation, I read a bunch of old New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporting and made it through most of Carreyrou’s book.

Zoe: Oh my God, you read fast.

Richard: I skimmed it. I skipped the parts about where an employee majored in computer science and went to Stanford. I don’t need to know that. I tried to get as much of it as possible. And I talked to ChatGPT, of course, to ask about some of the details. I sent you a comparison I had it make between Elizabeth Holmes’s exaggerations and lies and Elon Musk’s. That was interesting. I love that you can just have it spit out a report for yourself.

Did the Movie Make Elizabeth Holmes Seem Innocent?

Richard: Here’s my impression of the movie, and then you can tell me yours. I watched it and thought, There’s a chance Elizabeth Holmes was innocent. From the film alone, I mean.

Zoe: Wait, really? Whoa. That’s wild.

Richard: Yes, just from the film. And a spoiler warning to the audience: There’s a sense in which there are no spoilers because we know she goes to jail, but there are spoilers in how the story plays out. If you want to experience the movie without knowing any of that, consider yourself warned.

By the end, you’re led to think about this guy Billy Evans—her partner, although I found out they’re not legally married.

Zoe: Are you convinced by that? I wasn’t convinced.

Richard: No, I’m not convinced anymore. I’m talking about what I thought when I had no context beyond the movie. She seems—people use the word autistic too easily these days, but she seems almost like that. There’s the big scene where Nathan shows her Abbott and Costello, and he asks why it’s funny. She says, “I don’t know.” It’s very strange.

I sent you a screenshot from Carreyrou’s book about something similar: Somebody made a parody advertisement or poster, she didn’t get the joke, and she basically locked down the company. That seems consistent with the film’s portrayal.

I knew she had this old boyfriend, Sunny, and now she has Billy. One interpretation you could take away, just from watching the film, is that she’s a woman who’s socially unaware, gets taken in by men who aren’t good for her, and is manipulated by them. Maybe that happened with Billy, and maybe it happened with Sunny when she was running Theranos.

But then I read all day, and the evidence is much stronger that she was on top of everything. She created an entire culture of denying reality. She had this reality-distortion field. You can compare her with Musk or Jobs: These people can be bullshitters, but they actually built great products. Theranos got as far as Walgreens, where its testing services were offered before they were pulled. And the technology just didn’t work as promised. The company had about a decade to get it right.

At some point, you have to deliver. Maybe if she’d managed it by 2012, everything would have been forgiven. But she didn’t. She was lying the whole time. So I think she was guilty. That’s my way of saying the film was good to her: It fooled me into thinking that maybe she was innocent. What was your impression?

Zoe: That’s interesting, because I’ve seen that take online a lot: People whose only entry point into Elizabeth Holmes is this movie walk away thinking maybe she’s innocent. I knew so much about her already that I didn’t experience it that way.

One of the central questions the film asks is: Did she knowingly lie, or did she believe her own lies? My assumption walking in was that, of course, she believed her own lies. I think most founders have to believe what they’re selling. She’s obviously the hero in her own story, and she had to justify what she was doing again and again. But it’s fascinating that you were able to walk out thinking maybe she was innocent.

Richard: Everyone knows there’s a spectrum of how much entrepreneurs get away with, how much they bullshit. Just watching the film, I didn’t know where she fell on that spectrum. I sent you that Deep Left article, which we’ll probably talk about. The author seemed to have the impression that entrepreneurs all bullshit, and from the article I wasn’t sure he’d read much beyond what was in the movie. I thought maybe Elizabeth Holmes was within the normal range.

But she’s not. She wasn’t just exaggerating that a product would be ready in a year. She told bald-faced lies. She claimed the devices were being used in Iraq or Afghanistan, carried around in Humvees by our troops. It’s presented as this patriotic product. There were fake reports with pharmaceutical-company logos, making it look as though those companies had verified Theranos’s techniques. These were things made up out of thin air.

She’s obviously guilty. Whatever the exact legal standard is—knowledge, reckless indifference to the truth, whatever—she has to meet it. But you said you had a contrarian take on the movie.

Was It All Fake?

Zoe: My contrarian take is that everyone seems obsessed with this movie, and I thought it was fine. I didn’t totally love it. That surprised me because I love Nathan Fielder and have watched just about everything he’s done.

Richard: Did you see The Curse?

Zoe: Oh my God, I loved The Curse. I thought it was excellent. Brilliant.

Richard: It was great. I did a podcast on it. It was one of my favorite shows, although—no spoilers—I didn’t like the ending. We won’t get into that here.

Zoe: The ending was weird. But I also loved The Rehearsal. So to be fair, my expectations couldn’t have been higher. I thought I was about to see the best movie I’d ever seen.

One of my biggest issues involves the scene where Elizabeth says to Nathan, almost offhandedly, “I’m not benefiting economically from this project whatsoever.” He makes a little face, and then roughly an hour of the movie is devoted to investigating whether she knew that Billy had asked to be compensated. That small question stands in for the larger question about her time at Theranos: Did she know Sunny was doing all these things on her behalf?

My problem was: Why didn’t Nathan just ask her when she was sitting right there? I actually think he did ask her and didn’t include it. The only time we hear her answer to some degree is when he’s effectively writing lines for Amanda Seyfried to read.

Richard: Those lines were supposed to be based on his notes. He didn’t have transcripts, but they were supposedly based on his notes—unless he’s lying.

Zoe: In theory. I’ve seen people online suggest he just wrote the dialogue, and I’ve come around to thinking he made it up.

Richard: I have no idea. He’s the director; it’s his movie. I’d like to hope people don’t do that. As for why he didn’t confront Elizabeth in the moment, it didn’t strike me as so strange. They were filming only days before she had to report to prison. Suppose Nathan suspects Billy is manipulating her. If he starts a fight about money, Billy might say, “What the hell? Why did you mention that to her?” Then Nathan gets kicked out of the house, loses the scene where she goes to prison, and they stop talking to him. His movie is screwed. Billy had already leveraged the production to secure a cut of the money. Nathan may just have been careful.

Zoe: But Nathan confronted them in so many uncomfortable ways! There’s the Abbott and Costello video, and the moment when Billy says he can’t understand why Elizabeth would be into him, and Nathan asks, “Isn’t your family rich?” He’s willing to bring up very awkward things. It seemed like he’d ask about the money in that same offhand way. Maybe he wouldn’t, though.

Richard: I liked the film. Three hours is a long time to sit in a theater these days, but it kept my attention. I liked the buildup. In the beginning, Billy seems like the victim and Elizabeth the manipulator. Nathan implies she might be with him for his money. Over time, that switches around.

I was invested in whether she knew about the money because it really does tell you something. It’s strange, though. At one point she goes upstairs and leaves the men alone to talk. They say the baby is crying, and then they go upstairs. Was that contrived? She didn’t know the baby would cry, presumably.

What held my attention was that Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. You spend three hours with her, and I still can’t arrive at a definitive conclusion about her character. I can make a case that she’s a complete manipulator, in on everything, telling Nathan that she didn’t know about the money when she actually did. But I can also construct a story in which she’s a sucker for Sunny and Billy. Not an airhead—she must have a high IQ—but socially unaware, susceptible to men who are ambitious and find a use for her. I can believe almost anything between those extremes.

Zoe: Totally. She is fascinating. This is the first time we’ve really seen her so close up—maybe almost too close up. I was amazed by how hypnotic I found her. I’ve always thought she looked a little strange, but by the end of the film I found her extremely beautiful. I don’t know what happened. I’ve met some odd but very successful and powerful people, and her draw reminded me of what those people possess. She’s instantly magnetic.

Richard: She gets better-looking over time. That’s what happens with charismatic people: The way you perceive them changes. At first I thought Amanda Seyfried was too beautiful to play Elizabeth Holmes. I also only just realized she’s the actress from Mean Girls.

Zoe: Yes!

Richard: By the end, though, I thought the two of them had sort of converged.

The Deep Left Interpretation

Zoe: They did. Speaking of Amanda Seyfried, you sent me that Substack piece where she’s almost the villain and Billy Evans is the person we’re supposed to aspire to be more like. Was that the general take?

Richard: That’s Deep Left Analysis. People who read my blog often know who he is. He has an interesting take. And I think he’s right about the filmmakers’ intentions: We’re supposed to dislike Billy. By the end it seemed almost personal, as if Nathan had a financial motive, because he kept pressing Billy to give up the money.

Zoe: But that’s an interesting question. If Elizabeth and Billy get a cut of the film, it changes the whole way you perceive it. When it was revealed halfway through that they might have a financial stake, I thought, Wow, maybe they don’t care what the movie says about them as long as it’s a massive success.

Richard: I agree. That’s why documentarians generally don’t pay their subjects. But once that was established, I thought it was strange for Nathan to keep badgering Billy to give up his share. By that point the movie was nearly over, so why was that so important to him? And then at the end, Billy gives the money back. That made him look like an idiot. He’s already been cast as the villain, and now a line at the end says he gave up the money. He just looks weak and villainous at the same time. It doesn’t help him.

The Deep Left take is basically that these people are doers. Think about Elon Musk, the most extreme version of this. He does amazing things. From what I hear, Tesla now actually has self-driving cars. You can buy a Tesla, and you’re officially supposed to pay attention to the road, but you don’t have to. That’s one of the coolest technologies ever. I’ve taken a Waymo, and I hope to buy a self-driving car someday.

Then you look at Musk’s posts on Twitter, and he can seem like the dumbest person alive. If Twitter were all you knew about him, you’d think he had the IQ of a rodent. I don’t think he’s just pretending to be stupid. I think he’s probably genuinely stupid when it comes to politics. He exaggerates and lies about his own businesses, too.

In the Deep Left interpretation, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans are versions of this entrepreneurial type. They aren’t as competent as Musk, so they fail. Nathan Fielder, meanwhile, is a guy who whines about them. And Seyfried’s role is more about gossip and stirring the pot.

Zoe: The criticism of Amanda was that she’s a little fake. Behind Elizabeth’s back she’s saying how much she dislikes her, and then to her face she’s saying, “You’re so amazing; you have a beautiful family.” That’s fair.

Richard: Exactly. What’s her intention in being involved? It seems like she’s in it for the gossip. Maybe that’s unfair; Nathan approached her, and she got an opportunity to appear in this movie. But why is she there? She played Elizabeth Holmes, yet it’s not as though she has unique insight into her. It was funny and enjoyable watching the reenactments, though.

The problem with the overall Deep Left take is that Holmes and Evans weren’t especially competent. Reading Carreyrou’s book and other reporting, Elizabeth doesn’t seem to have known much about biology. It’s not as though she was a scientific genius with a bold idea that almost worked. She seems to have been completely out of her depth and somehow coasted along for a decade, scamming people. A little bit of scam mixed with competence might get you somewhere. But if you’re just a scammer, there’s nothing to celebrate.

Zoe: And the big issue is that they had tests out in Walgreens. They were using these tests on the American public. You can lie about your SaaS product, but if you’re testing a healthcare product on actual people, that’s a huge liability.

Richard: Right. I read the original Wall Street Journal piece, and I wondered whether someone could make a pro–Elizabeth Holmes case. I doubt it, but I’d like to know how often the tests worked versus didn’t work. With any product, there’s a tradeoff. Maybe something is cheap and convenient, though not very good. You have that in healthcare, too. Not every test is the highest-end test. Maybe a test that’s merely good enough could be useful at a lower price.

Zoe: It’s healthcare, though. If they’d openly said, “This test is so much cheaper, but it’s only 15 or 20 percent accurate,” or whatever the actual figure was, then at least consumers would know.

Richard: They certainly presented it as far more accurate than some rough-and-ready alternative. And you have to put that in the context of the company trying to bully people and silence criticism. It’s not as though one regulator came along and made trouble for an otherwise honest company. Almost everyone working there seems to have developed suspicions about what they were doing at some point.

I came out of the movie loving the possibility of a revisionist pro–Elizabeth Holmes take. I love that sort of thing. But I don’t think there’s actually a good case to make. I’d be surprised if someone managed it.

Zoe: I definitely didn’t leave the theater thinking she was innocent. But it offered a fascinating possible insight into her relationship with Sunny. Maybe he really was controlling. At the end of the day, was she the puppeteer, or was he the mastermind? Does she just find herself in these roles? I think she’s pretty kooky.

A Two-Person Cult

Richard: Once might be chance. Twice is a pattern. She seems to have a type. Did you end up disliking Billy? Did you find him sympathetic at all?

Zoe: No. I didn’t like Billy. Did you?

Richard: Nathan actually stands up for him at the end. Amanda Seyfried is much more negative, and Nathan says it’s a love story. Billy does seem to genuinely love her and care about his kids. He talks about not having sex for 900 days. I love these awkward moments because Nathan doesn’t let them pass as quick jokes; he keeps probing.

Billy seems to care about his family. He has a company now, and I read a Wired piece about it. As far as we know, serious people are involved, and it’s not just Theranos all over again. We shouldn’t assume that it is.

But let me ask you this: Were you surprised when you found out he was a Charlie Kirk fan?

Zoe: Not at all. Were you?

Richard: Not really. I didn’t expect it to come up in the movie, but when it did, it made sense.

Zoe: It made so much sense. The day I saw the movie, I was talking to someone who knows Billy, who said he sees him all the time in Austin and Billy always shows up with his gun. According to this person, nobody really likes him. I didn’t find him likable from the beginning. He seemed like an oddball. But I do think Elizabeth and Billy have some kind of love.

Richard: I don’t even know if it’s weird love. It just looks like love. Everyone’s relationship seems strange if you examine it closely. Given how weird Elizabeth is, the relationship with Billy and the kids might be the least weird aspect of her life.

Zoe: When they talk about it, though, it’s too much. She wants to build “monuments of love.” They say they never argue and get along all the time. He has an AI version of her hanging out in the kitchen. It’s strange.

Richard: That AI thing was weird. That’s something a Charlie Kirk fan would do.

Zoe: Their relationship felt like high-school first love, something not entirely grounded in reality, even though their reality is very real and he’s visiting her in prison.

Richard: Maybe that’s what love is.

Zoe: It’s definitely a form of love. The best analysis I read on Twitter called them a “two-person cult.” That’s what it feels like.

Richard: That’s very good. She draws people in, and the most cult-like relationship might be the one she has with her lover. And they have kids. Will this be some multigenerational cult? I don’t know.

Zoe: I wonder what will happen to those children. Imagine being a child who’s featured so prominently in this documentary, and then having Elizabeth Holmes as your mother.

Richard: It’s not just the kids. Her parents believe in her, too. When did you learn her dad had worked for Enron?

Zoe: I watched The Dropout recently, and it comes up there. What did you make of her parents and their relationship with her?

Richard: We don’t see much of the mother, but we see the father. He seemed like a nice, normal guy, acting the way a normal person might if his daughter were in that situation. He didn’t seem crazy. He even said this was different from Enron because she’s innocent. At least he isn’t a conspiracy theorist about every criminal conviction.

He seemed willing to talk to Nathan, whereas Billy would rush in and try to control the conversation or stop them talking. I find it difficult to say much bad about the father.

Zoe: The parents looked very nervous when Billy and Elizabeth were talking about starting a new company. They looked stressed out, and for good reason.

The Swimming Scenes

Richard: What did you make of the swimming scene?

Zoe: I couldn’t recognize the man. Could you see who it was?

Richard: I was pretty sure it was Nathan. I couldn’t positively identify the woman, but it had to be Elizabeth, right?

Zoe: That’s funny because I recognized Elizabeth, not Nathan. I’ve read that different viewers can’t tell who it is. I think there were two versions of the scene. Wasn’t there one where Nathan swims with Amanda Seyfried, impersonating Elizabeth?

Richard: Maybe. I don’t know.

Zoe: I think it comes up twice. The interpretation I’ve seen is that this is a moment when Nathan and Elizabeth connect. He might be suggesting that he develops some kind of feeling for her—not necessarily romantic—that affects how he edits the movie.

Richard: I thought he might be falling for her. There’s the long, almost electric hug. He’s also trying to drive a wedge between her and Billy, so the movie starts to look a little like a love triangle. I half expected Nathan and Elizabeth to hook up at the end. I wondered if that’s where it was going.

The swimming scene itself is strange because they never explain it. Earlier she offers to go into the water with him, and he says he’s scared of cold water. Then suddenly they’re swimming together, and we never learn how it happened. Something feels missing. They’re telling us something in that scene, but I’m not sure what.

Zoe: Maybe that’s because the point is simply their genuine connection. They’re laughing and having fun. Nathan has a moment when he sees beyond the possibly sociopathic person he’s been investigating and actually connects with her. I initially thought the man was Billy, but now that you say it, it must have been Nathan.

Richard: Who else could it be? I could tell it wasn’t Billy. Nathan looked different because his hair was wet and combed over, but it looked like him. And Billy was in better shape.

Zoe: I believe you. One other thing: I kept reading that there was an insane twist in the middle. What do you think the twist was?

Richard: Maybe the money revelation. It didn’t feel like one enormous twist to me. It felt like a gradual buildup toward making Billy the villain.

Scam Culture

Richard: The gun thing was interesting. It suggests a very paranoid mentality. Billy’s almost a prototype of a certain type: He likes Charlie Kirk, he’s on Twitter all day, he’s got what I’d call right-wing Twitter brain. We should talk about the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account because I’ve had some experiences with it. In a small way, I’m a character in this movie.

There’s also the AI version of Elizabeth. I don’t know why, but there’s something psychologically interesting about Trump supporters and Charlie Kirk fans. They seem especially drawn to this kind of thing. I can’t imagine a liberal making an AI version of his partner and putting it in the kitchen. It all seems to fit together.

Elizabeth herself doesn’t come across as particularly political. She wears a cross; I don’t know how important religion is to her.

Zoe: I was curious about her politics. I’ve followed the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account a little for a while, and whoever was tweeting seemed very right-wing and heavily MAGA. I figured she was trying to get a pardon. I had heard her husband might be running the account, but I wasn’t sure. Now we know.

Richard: And I’ve interacted with that account a few times. I dunked on it for something and got a snarky comeback from “Elizabeth Holmes.” Before the movie, I didn’t even know if the account was really hers. These days anyone can buy a blue check. I remember criticizing it for being a very right-wing, MAGA-seeming account. Now we know it’s Billy using her account to tweet.

Zoe: When the teaser trailer came out, everyone on Twitter lost their minds over it. Then the Elizabeth Holmes account tweeted something genuinely supportive of the film. That shocked me because in the teaser she looks pretty crazy. At the time I wondered why she’d endorse a portrayal like that. Then you learn it’s Billy. As I watched, I thought: He’s endorsing it because he has a financial stake.

Richard: I don’t think it’s only the movie money. They’re trying to build a company. Hype matters. If the movie gets people’s attention, and even some viewers become sympathetic, maybe that helps raise money. They have an interest in the film’s success even without a direct cut. Billy has his company, and according to the Wired article Elizabeth isn’t legally involved in it.

I think he sees Elizabeth’s fame and the fascination surrounding her as something he can parlay into a new business. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her. But it explains the billboards and his association with that inventors group. He’s willing to go along with this bizarre publicity effort because it gets attention.

Zoe: I remember seeing those inventors billboards around L.A. and thinking, I’m not looking into that.

Richard: His attitude seems to be: Milk it, get as much publicity as possible, and hopefully turn that into a successful company. He’s hustling off Elizabeth Holmes being in prison.

Zoe: I had the same thought, and then I started wondering whether she was actually a mark for him. Did he see her notoriety as an opportunity? In America, being a scammer can almost be a good thing in terms of publicity. Think of the woman in New York—Anna something.

Richard: I remember her. Wasn’t she German, or pretending to be German?

Zoe: Yes, she’s German. She’s parlayed being a scam artist, going to Rikers, and serving time into a celebrity career.

Richard: Fame opens doors. When you go to a party or reach out to somebody, it helps if they’ve heard of you. People are interested in someone notable, whether for good reasons or bad. Otherwise you’re just one face among a million.

Martin Shkreli is another example.

Zoe: Exactly. I think I read that he might be going back to jail.

Richard: And these people all seem to gravitate toward MAGA. It’s a culture of being loud, getting attention, and not being ashamed.

Zoe: And of acting as if rules don’t matter.

Richard: They don’t care about corruption. They care whether you’re funny. That’s Trump, right? There’s the Andrew Tate example, although I think he finally went too far, even for some MAGA supporters. A lot of them went silent about him. The Trump administration ultimately cooperated with an extradition-related process, or something along those lines. It took a lot of bad press for them to turn on him, but there is a limit.

Then look at George Santos. He’s still on Twitter; I don’t know what he’s doing now, but he’s around. He got a pardon, and he’s certainly not living in shame. We have this decline of shame.

Should Elizabeth Holmes Be in Prison?

Zoe: For sure. Let me ask you something. After watching the movie and digging into her case, did you feel her prison sentence was unfair or too long?

Richard: I’m pretty tough on crime. If you defraud people out of something like $400 million, eleven years in prison sounds about right to me. I could go either way, but I don’t find it outrageous.

Zoe: I feel similarly. But when she was sentenced, I remember being shocked. So often you read about people committing financial crimes or defrauding investors and nothing really happens to them. When something actually happened to her, it surprised me.

Richard: I think the legal system often goes hard on people who become famous for their crimes. Take the Diddy case. He had serious sex-trafficking charges, but the jury wouldn’t convict him on those. He was convicted on prostitution-related offenses, which ordinarily, especially for a first conviction, might not produce a huge prison term. I forget his exact sentence. My impression was that the judge came down especially hard because he’s Diddy and people believed he got away with something more serious.

I have similar doubts about the punishment in some other famous cases, including Ghislaine Maxwell’s. Fame is usually good for you, but when prosecutors and judges become convinced you’ve done something terrible, it can really work against you.

Zoe: Look at Sam Bankman-Fried. I can’t remember his exact sentence, but it was a long time. He’s not coming out soon.

Richard: It was multiple decades. I do think we should sometimes consider the benefit a person could bring to society. Some people are lifelong criminals with thirty or forty arrests, and you don’t expect them to contribute much if released. SBF had talent. Elizabeth Holmes, maybe—I don’t know whether she had much talent beyond scamming. But I think we should consider the possibility of a person’s future social contribution.

Zoe: If Elizabeth Holmes got out of jail tomorrow, do you think she’d go right back to building Theranos 2.0 and lying to people?

Richard: She’d have trouble securing investors. But if she could convince people a second time, that would itself demonstrate a skill.

Zoe: I think she could do it. If she tried, I think she could raise money.

Richard: You’re probably right. There are a lot of rich people, and you don’t have to convince all of them—just some. Who knows? Maybe the second time she’d actually build something. The tragedy is that, if she had been more competent, or had someone genuinely competent running things alongside her, the story could have been different. Imagine if her partner had been somebody like Steve Jobs, somebody who could actually manage a business.

It seems she never had that. Her reality-distortion field worked on herself. Anyone who told her things she didn’t want to hear became disloyal or a traitor. It’s hard to build a successful company that way.

I think Musk is more capable of keeping two parts of his brain separate. One part is rational and deals with the technology, and the other part bullshits. You can’t confuse the two. Holmes seemed like an extreme case of combining them. That may be why she could fool people for so long, but it was also her downfall.

Is that fixable? Could you imagine a universe where Elizabeth Holmes builds a great company? Maybe, with the right circumstances.

Zoe: Maybe some software. Maybe the next Facebook.

Richard: Maybe. I have no doubt she could raise some money.

Zoe: Fundraising and selling people on a product or a vision are major parts of being a CEO. But one of her fundamental flaws is that she surrounded herself with yes-men.

The Elizabeth Holmes Utility Function

Richard: Absolutely. And that’s her fault. Let me ask you about motivation. Do you believe her when she says she doesn’t care about money? In the opening of Carreyrou’s book, he says he’d heard from people who knew her that she wanted to be a billionaire from the time she was a little kid. Do you think she’s financially motivated? What do you think motivates her?

Zoe: I think she’s motivated by power. From the stories about her childhood, her family placed a high value on making the world a better place. I think she wanted to be regarded as someone doing good. And in her mind, she was. She was bringing people a healthcare product that would save them money, be more accurate, and revolutionize the industry. But she couldn’t execute because she didn’t have the scientific knowledge.

Richard: When I think about her utility function, I don’t think she wants money in the sense of private jets and lavish vacations to islands in the Pacific. She points out that she never cashed out her shares. It doesn’t seem like she wanted to live that kind of lifestyle. Money seems more like a status symbol to her. I don’t know if I’d call it power, exactly, but she wanted the status of being a female billionaire.

She probably sees herself as someone who cares about science and people’s health and wants to revolutionize medicine. She liked comparing the little Theranos device to the iPhone: this beautiful, elegant thing. But someone genuinely obsessed with creating the device would know a lot about biology. They’d be a nerd who dives into a subject and becomes very knowledgeable about it.

That doesn’t seem to be who she was. The driving force was ambition and status rather than fascination with the science. Musk seems to be the kind of nerd who sits around thinking deeply about rockets. Elizabeth Holmes strikes me as far more superficial in what she actually wants and thinks about.

Zoe: Totally. It feels as if she was distracted by status and media attention early on. It was almost as though she thought, I don’t actually care about building the company; my job as CEO is to sell the vision. Meanwhile she wasn’t paying attention to what was happening with the product.

Richard: All sizzle and no steak—is that the expression?

Zoe: I think people do say that. That’s a perfect description of Elizabeth.

Why Are the Close-Ups So Uncomfortable?

Richard: What did you think of the extreme close-ups? I was watching on a big movie screen, and it’s almost uncomfortable how closely you see the faces. You can see every hair on Nathan Fielder’s face. It’s not flattering. At one point you can see Elizabeth Holmes’s teeth and even what looks like staining between them. I notice the same thing when I look too closely at my own teeth. It’s not even food stuck there, more like a discoloration from something I’ve eaten.

Zoe: I didn’t notice that, but I believe you. The shots were way too close for comfort.

Richard: Is this just Nathan trying to make us uncomfortable for three hours?

Zoe: You should reach out to Elizabeth and say, “Hey, I have the same problem.”

Seriously, at first I didn’t like the close-ups. I thought they were too stylized and annoying. As the film went on, I started liking them. Later I thought: Maybe the point is that you’re looking so closely at someone’s face that you think you ought to understand them. But there’s total opacity. You still can’t see what’s going on inside.

You can look at somebody right in front of you, hear them tell you something to your face, and still not understand their intentions or know anything definitive about them.

Richard: You’re saying that effect is magnified when you get so close?

Zoe: Yes. That’s my interpretation of why he might have chosen to film it this way. You have unusually intimate access to Elizabeth Holmes—almost too close for comfort—but she’s this confusing, mercurial character. You can see what she’s eaten between her teeth, and you still can’t understand her.

Richard: I wonder if there’s another part to it. When you blow up a face on a huge screen, you can literally see the face better. We’re always reading facial expressions: smiles, frowns, eye movements. If you magnify all that a hundred times, are you better at figuring out what someone is thinking?

We evolved to notice very subtle things in people’s faces, but we didn’t evolve to see faces quite this large. Maybe magnification misleads us. Or maybe it’s like using a microscope, and you do see more. I’d love to see research on this. Are you better at reading emotions or detecting lies from a giant image of a face than from looking at somebody normally? That’s a fascinating question.

Zoe: My instinct is that you’d be better at telling if somebody is lying from farther away, because you can see their posture and their hands. You lose all that information when the frame is this tight.

Richard: Fine, for the study you could blow up the head while keeping the rest of the body visible, too. I agree you lose something when you crop a shot. But all else equal, what happens when you look at a much bigger face? Maybe there are things you’re better at reading and other things you’re worse at reading.

Zoe: If she made a dramatic gesture every time she said, “I’ve never told a lie,” maybe we’d have the key to that scene.

Richard: Exactly. Anyway, the close-ups are captivating because we’re not accustomed to looking at people that closely. Maybe the director doesn’t entirely know what the effect is. But it’s part of the same experience: You’re supposed to feel uncomfortable. They stare at each other, Nathan presses on awkward lines of conversation, the camera gets extremely intimate, and the music is spooky. It all works together.

Billy in the Shower

Zoe: We haven’t gotten to the most important part of the movie: Billy naked in the shower.

Richard: I was going to bring that up. But first, do you remember how The Curse was obsessed with Nathan’s character’s penis?

Zoe: Yes. The size of it was a big part of the show. It was quite small.

Richard: There’s a scene where his wife apparently tells her parents about it. I think that’s what happened; I could be wrong. When I did a podcast about The Curse with Rob Henderson, Rob said it was a very small penis. I told him I don’t look at many men’s penises, so I don’t know what’s small or big. Did you think Nathan’s was small?

Zoe: Are you asking me for my professional assessment? My first impression of the one hanging there in the shower was that it was a pretty good size.

Richard: No, I’m talking about Nathan in The Curse. We’ll get to Billy.

Zoe: Oh! Nathan’s was small. I remember that. I think I even rewound it to get a better look. It was a while ago, but the small size was definitely part of the show.

Richard: That’s interesting. He makes a show where his character has a small penis, then shows the audience his penis. Billy’s, on the other hand, looked like a good size to me, though again I don’t have much basis for comparison. But why is Billy just standing there in the shower? What does that add to the movie?

Zoe: Exactly! And how did they get that shot? There’s a moment when Billy gets out of the shower and walks past Nathan, and they exchange this strange look. Was there a conversation where Billy agreed to let the crew film him showering?

Richard: You’d think there would have to be limits in the contract. You can’t just film everything someone does in the bathroom and use it, surely. Maybe Billy was an idiot and signed away the right to everything, and they used a few seconds of him naked.

Then there’s Nathan almost leering at him. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it took me back to The Curse. Is he jealous? Is he sizing Billy up? It connects to the idea of a love triangle. Nathan might have developed feelings for Elizabeth and be trying to bring Billy down. And here he’s checking out Billy’s manhood in the shower.

I liked Deep Left’s interpretation: Billy is this brutish man of action, very physically imposing, while Nathan is the smaller, sarcastic, thoughtful, neurotic guy. The shot exaggerates that dichotomy.

Zoe: Throughout the movie I kept asking myself whether there was sexual tension between Nathan and Elizabeth. I thought I was picking up on something, but I couldn’t be sure. Toward the end it’s funny because Elizabeth is absent from the screen, but Nathan sends her a letter and mentions he’s been through a breakup. That seemed like a peculiar personal detail to share with the subject of your documentary, someone you haven’t spoken with in a while.

Then, based on Nathan’s account of their meeting, they spend time talking about his breakup, and Elizabeth comforts him.

Richard: There’s also the reenacted scene where she tells Nathan he would be great at having kids. That seems to strike him as especially flattering. Maybe that’s just what she does: She gets into people’s minds.

Do you think you’d be charmed by her?

Zoe: I’m not entirely certain I wouldn’t be susceptible. What about you?

Richard: I don’t think she’s the type who charms me.

Zoe: I don’t think she could sell me something, but I’d find her fascinating and want to ask a ton of questions.

Richard: I think anybody would. The people who really win me over tend to be more outgoing and unpredictable. Intense eye contact isn’t the way to win my heart. But she’s interesting.

Zoe: Intense eye contact is how she flirts.

The Eggs: Control, Care, or Creative Editing?

Richard: What about the scene where Billy takes over beating the eggs? What did you make of that?

Zoe: I was confused. I saw the movie with my fiancé, and I leaned over and asked why Billy took the eggs away from her. My fiancé said, “She’s not whisking them fast enough.” Apparently there’s a technique to it. He didn’t think it was a big deal.

But the film builds it up as though Billy is so controlling that Elizabeth can’t even mix eggs without his supervision.

Richard: I also thought it was meant as a metaphor for their relationship. But the way she froze when he took the whisk was strange. I thought her hands shook for a moment, and I think the camera focused on them.

At first I wondered whether this would turn into one of two stories. Either she was frightened of Billy, and he was about to show us how controlling he could be; or she was having some sort of nervous breakdown, unable to function, and he was stepping in gently to help her.

Neither interpretation was really confirmed. She never seemed afraid of him, but she also didn’t seem like a woman who was falling apart. Given that she was about to go to prison for eleven years, she seemed surprisingly together. So the scene remains this strange, ambiguous little moment.

Zoe: There were so many moments like that. They’re tiny, seemingly innocuous things that you can analyze in completely different ways. I thought Billy looked weird in that scene, but I also wondered whether the editing made it look worse than it was.

Think of Elizabeth stumbling over the difference between what the Theranos device can do and what it is capable of doing. It’s presented almost like a semantic question, and you can get lost interpreting one word in several ways. You could show that egg-whisking scene to a theater full of people and hear completely different accounts of what it tells you about their relationship. Does it really have the significance we’re assigning to it?

Richard: That’s why I thought the film made her sympathetic. The “can” versus “capable” scene seemed designed to suggest that in her own mind she’s telling the truth. Maybe her problem is that she’s extremely literal. Just like with Abbott and Costello: What if people think she’s lying, but she’s actually interpreting language differently?

But after reading the evidence, I don’t think that can be the whole story. She may just be nuts. I think she probably believes every aspect of her own story, though.

Zoe: I agree. I honestly think that’s right.

Autism and Ambition

Richard: There’s an image of autistic people as being extremely concerned with truth, or obsessed with getting to the bottom of a question. Some develop an intense interest in understanding or making something. Elizabeth strikes me as someone who takes that kind of intense, almost autistic focus and applies it to her own ambitions.

It’s a horrifying combination. It has the outward appearance of somebody striving for truth or doing something great and beautiful. But in reality, what are we looking at? A woman with her Charlie Kirk–fan boyfriend, AI holograms of themselves, efforts to raise money, and attempts to hobnob with famous people. There seems to be nothing beyond that.

Zoe: It’s almost like what you see is what you get with the two of them.

Richard: Right. They’re so superficial that it becomes mysterious. You wonder what’s beneath the surface, and maybe there isn’t anything.

Zoe: That’s true. You can overanalyze it. Do you think Nathan was actually manipulated and beguiled by Elizabeth, or was that an act he was playing?

Richard: I think Nathan Fielder knows what he’s doing. They weren’t together very long. The production followed her for roughly a month before prison, and he only moved in for part of that time. Then he didn’t see her for years before picking the project back up. I don’t think he was sitting awake every night pining for Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: I agree. I think he was playing a character. That’s why the whole love-affair suggestion felt a little ridiculous to me.

Richard: But to his credit, he didn’t say he was in love with her. He left breadcrumbs for viewers to interpret, including the swimming scene. If he’d announced, “I’m so in love with her; I have to see her,” it would have been ridiculous. Maybe he struck the right balance and created just enough tension.

I wish he’d made a move. That would have been a great climax, whether she rejected him or not. Either way, we’d learn something.

Zoe: That would have been better than the swimming scene. It did sometimes feel as though she was flirting with him. Was she?

Richard: I don’t know. She’s charming everybody. I imagine she spoke to George Shultz and Henry Kissinger in the same way. Maybe you call that flirting, maybe not. She’s trying to win people over. Nothing she did was especially sexual. She wasn’t drawing attention to her body or asking Nathan how her shirt looked. There wasn’t that kind of thing.

Zoe: I suppose. It’s her way of looking at him that stood out. You can see how somebody might be beguiled by that.

Richard: That’s her thing. She stares at everybody. We did see her breastfeed once, which was interesting. But I’d have liked to see her interact with more women in the film, to know if she behaved any differently.

Zoe: We barely see her mother, and when her mother shows up, she’s almost completely silent. It makes you wonder whether that was a role model for her.

Richard: I don’t know. That may be reading too much into the mother. We really don’t know much about her.

Theranos Whistleblowers and the Evidence Against Holmes

Richard: Anything else worth discussing about the film?

Zoe: Have you seen Tyler Shultz’s commentary? He was one of the Theranos whistleblowers. I saw some of his tweets and a video interview. He said that when Elizabeth pulled out the device in the movie, it wasn’t even the device Theranos actually used. Apparently he was almost screaming in the theater. If that’s right, she was still lying in the documentary itself.

Richard: What was the difference between the device in the film and what they used?

Zoe: From what I understand, the one she showed was a much more sophisticated device, a tiny thing. The machines they actually used were bigger. I remember from The Dropout that they used Siemens machines, not just their own technology. In some cases they were effectively taking somebody else’s machine and putting Theranos branding on it.

Richard: I read the book today, so this is fresh in my mind. It was a combination. There were a few things the company could do with its own equipment and other things it did with modified or repurposed machines from other companies.

Zoe: Right. But the Theranos machines I remember were bulky. The little one she shows in the film seems like something you could hold in your hand.

Richard: What other reactions have there been from people who knew her or were involved in the story?

Zoe: John Carreyrou wrote an op-ed, I think in The New York Times, analyzing the movie in light of his reporting. He talks about how Elizabeth and Sunny had this legal team threatening him and chasing down sources.

Richard: Yes, that’s in the book.

Zoe: So it’s hard not to think she had something to hide. She was going after the reporter and the whistleblowers.

Richard: Maybe I’m being too naive. When I put Carreyrou’s reporting together with the movie and everything else, I start thinking she must be a psychopath.

Zoe: I think that she can be psychopathic in her behavior and still have a story in her mind that justifies it. A lot of entrepreneurs see themselves almost as martyrs. They believe they’re bringing a new idea into the world, and everyone is challenging them. Elizabeth thought she was disrupting a multibillion-dollar industry. She could have convinced herself that Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics were behind the criticism and had sent this reporter after her.

Richard: This is what’s fun about Elizabeth Holmes: My mind keeps going back and forth. For all I know, Sunny could have been behind the lawyers and the threats. I haven’t seen anything that definitely rules that out. Maybe there is still a sliver of a case for her.

Zoe: In theory, he could have been.

Richard: I’m not saying there’s a good legal defense. I mean a defense against the harshest moral judgment of her. There’s always a thread you can pull on that doesn’t quite fit the prosecution’s portrait. There’s her failure to understand Abbott and Costello. There’s the story in Carreyrou’s book about her missing a joke. Those are two different sources, and together they suggest a person who is intensely literal.

You could imagine she’s like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There: She just exists, other people project meaning onto her, she becomes strangely charming, and powerful men attach themselves to her. I don’t think that’s a crazy interpretation.

But I don’t think that’s where the preponderance of the evidence points. On balance, the evidence supports a harsh judgment of Elizabeth Holmes.

Zoe: There’s another weird moment I remember. Amanda Seyfried is at Billy’s house, Elizabeth calls from prison, and Billy casually says, “Amanda’s here.” Amanda asks Elizabeth whether she knew she’d be there. Elizabeth gives this bizarre answer—something like, “I think I knew I knew.” She won’t straightforwardly acknowledge whether Billy told her. Why not just say, “Yes, he said you were coming over”?

Richard: I remember that, and Amanda comments on it later. But the exact words matter. If Elizabeth said, “I think I knew,” that’s not so strange. I could say that if someone had probably told me about a visit, but I couldn’t remember. “I think I knew I knew,” on the other hand, is a very unnatural phrase.

Zoe: It was something strange along those lines. I’d have to watch again. There’s also the question of why that phone call could be included in the documentary when others couldn’t.

Richard: You’re right. She was already in prison when that call happened.

The All-In Interview and Recording Prison Calls

Zoe: Speaking of prison calls, did you see Billy’s interview at the All-In conference? I saw it in a review, and it’s fun to watch in retrospect.

Richard: I knew he appeared at All-In, but I haven’t seen it. I personally can’t stand the All-In guys. The way they talk, think, and act makes me understand why some people hate billionaires. I become a socialist when I watch them. But tell me about this interview.

Zoe: It was the least obnoxious of the four hosts doing the interview—the less-famous David. Not David Sacks, the other one. [Editor’s note: the speaker appears to mean David Friedberg.]

Billy’s on stage, and Elizabeth calls his phone. He must talk to her constantly, and surely she knows he’s attending this conference. The interviewer asks whether they can put her on speakerphone, which would be a great moment for the audience. But Billy refuses. He says she could end up in solitary confinement, or a higher-security prison, if the call gets recorded or broadcast.

Then Billy talks to her as though she doesn’t know where he is. “Hey, how are you? I’m at this conference.” It feels artificial. Why wouldn’t she know he was going to be onstage?

Richard: Let’s check whether his claim about prison rules is true.

Zoe: I’ve interviewed people in jail before, though not necessarily in federal prison, and I didn’t encounter anything like that. I also heard about someone planning to interview Sam Bankman-Fried for a Substack. It seems possible to interview inmates. And hadn’t an earlier Elizabeth Holmes call already been recorded for the film?

Richard: There’s a distinction between interviewing an inmate, the prison’s own routine recording of phone calls, and recording or broadcasting a call for the media without permission. I looked it up: Billy may be exaggerating how automatic the consequences would be, but there is a real basis for concern. Federal prisons regulate media interviews and outside recording or broadcast of inmate communications, and violations can result in disciplinary action. There’s no general rule that a recorded call automatically means solitary confinement or a transfer to a higher-security prison. But I can understand why they wouldn’t want to take a risk.

Zoe: Fair. Still, it feels over the top that saying hello to a conference audience would lead to something so severe. And if interviews can be arranged, why didn’t Nathan interview Elizabeth regularly while she was in prison?

Richard: That’s what the final part of the movie is about: Nathan trying to get a prison visit. He had to arrange it through calls and communications, and Billy was getting in the way. He barely managed to secure that one meeting. Elizabeth seemed dependent on Billy, or at least unwilling to communicate directly with Nathan without him.

Zoe: He could have kept trying. It also seems strange that she might not be able to watch a movie about herself. Don’t prisoners have access to media?

Richard: It probably depends on the prison and the available access. I don’t know for sure whether she’ll get to see it.

Final Verdict on the Movie and Holmes’ Future

Richard: Anyway, I liked the movie and would recommend it. It kept my attention for the entire running time.

Zoe: I would recommend it too, even though I wasn’t as enthusiastic.

Richard: How much longer does Elizabeth have? She was sentenced in 2022, right? Or was it 2023?

Zoe: She’s got a long time. She was sentenced about three years ago, and the sentence was eleven years, so maybe eight more years in theory.

Richard: I read something about her moving to a lower-security or halfway-house arrangement at some point. Her conditions could change, though I don’t know exactly how that works. We’ll see what becomes of Billy’s company and the Elizabeth Holmes Twitter account in the meantime.

Zoe: I feel like when she finally gets out of prison, she’s going to have a huge publicity blitz.

Richard: It’ll be interesting to watch. All right, Zoe, this was fun. Thanks for doing it.

Zoe: This was so fun. Thanks for having me. Have a good one.

Richard: Absolutely.

I got connected to Avik Roy (see on X) through my participation in these discussions. I had known him as someone who had been involved in policy disputes during the Obamacare debates. This took me back to a time when conservatives pretended to actually care about policy issues that weren’t directly related to race. I decided to interview Roy for a larger piece I might write about Indian-American Republicans, but the discussion was so good I’ve decided to share the whole thing here, cleaned up for grammar and readability through ChatGPT.

I realized during this discussion that I came to conservative politics in a way that was different from a lot of people who have become disgusted with the direction of the movement. I had always assumed conservatives were racist, and when I was racist myself, I saw it as important to fight so that the id of the movement could take over. That is exactly what ended up happening, but the racists are of course much dumber than I ever was, so their version is way more destructive.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here.

Meanwhile, people like Roy once believed that conservatives were in it for the ideas about individual liberty and small government. He eventually found out that racial resentment was the underlying motivation of a lot of right-wingers involved in politics, a fact that has become completely undeniable at this point. Our different paths taken to the same endpoint made for an interesting conversation.

Background and Conservative Beginnings

Richard Hanania: Can you tell me a little about your background? What do you do, and how did you get into this work?

Avik Roy: I’m the chairman and co-founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that focuses on how to use individual liberty and free enterprise to help Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder. How do we show that freedom, rather than socialism or the things people on the left propose, is the engine of social mobility and economic equality?

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This of course was always ridiculous. An unarmed man of any race being killed by police is one of those things that is so rare that the rational thing to do is to never think about it at all. If you were going to list all the dangers in the world from most to least threatening, suffering abuse at the hands of the police should be way down the list, unless you are a criminal. When there is more societal concern about this topic, it should be understood to be a manifestation of a neurotic spirit.

I thought about this after watching this clip about the differences in life experiences between “Boomers” and “Zoomers.” (The very framing itself is a sign of victimhood culture.)

According to this AI slop cartoon – which is exaggerated for comedic effect while still intending to make a sincere point – previous generations of American men were offered jobs, cars, houses, and submissive wives simply for existing. Today, they are gatekept out of corporate offices by fat tattooed lesbians, can only meet women who do porn, and are kicked out of their dingy apartments by BlackRock to make room for muscular Somali refugees in tracksuits. This self-pitying trash has two million views on X, with hundreds of replies and retweets talking about how much it hits home.

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Einstein was uncomfortable with quantum mechanics, a fact that has come down to us in his famous quote that “God does not play dice” with the universe. But, according to his fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics wasn't what bothered Einstein the most. Rather, it was the suggestion that physical properties do not have an objective existence independent of measurement. It’s one thing to believe that an electron might be found in a positive or negative state with some degree of randomness; it’s another to say that it takes a specific state only when we measure it. Even more disturbing was the concept of nonlocality. As Einstein wrote in March 1947,

I cannot seriously believe in [the quantum theory] because it cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky actions at a distance.

Previously, we learned that measurement influences the state of particles, or at least the impact they have on the physical reality we observe. A particle that has one feature, which might be called hardness for pedagogical purposes, cannot be said to have a definite state in terms of another feature, color, at the same time. Rather, an electron that has one definite value of one feature is in superposition with regard to the other.

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When I was a nobody graduate student, I would sometimes get really into an academic literature or try to master a statistical method. Now, the opportunity costs of doing this are much higher. If I bury my head in dozens of papers to learn about a completely new subject, it may be a while before I have anything to say. So the Substack goes a little slower, and this is bad, since I want the newsletter to have more readers and enjoy giving the world ideas that are read by a decently large and highly elite audience.

Let’s say my understanding of political science is 7, my understanding of economics is 4, and my understanding of climatology is 1. I can produce many new political takes by just reading the news and paying attention to current events. I can make a good case that I’m just as worth reading on American politics as anyone else in the world. With a bit more effort, I might have something that is interesting and worth saying on economics. But it might take months or years to have an opinion on climatology or nuclear physics.

Hence, when I approached the issue of climate change, I focused on what the cost-benefit analyses of various scenarios are, not the underlying science that they were based on.

I’ve always wanted to get the basics of quantum mechanics. From the limited insights that I have grasped from reading popular articles and books on the subject, it seems that the field has settled on basic truths that are in deep tension with our fundamental understanding of the universe. I’ve just been too distracted to devote the time necessary to learn what those are, and form opinions on them.

But I don’t like the idea of getting lazy, and so I’ve decided to finally take the leap. This requires a lot of math, and familiarizing myself with new concepts. This means my output in terms of the normal subjects I cover will go down for a little while. Maybe a few weeks, or a month, or longer, though I should have election takes after the votes are counted.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

I’ve looked for books on quantum physics that would provide enough math to get the basics while also exploring the philosophical implications, and have settled on Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Z Albert, a philosophy professor at Columbia University. I’m also reading the third volume of Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics, though I’ll be deferring to Albert for the order in which I focus on concepts.

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When serious budget analysts look at the programs of DSA-aligned and other left-wing politicians, however, the math rarely adds up. You cannot tax billionaires nearly enough to create the kind of welfare state that socialists dream of. Doing so would require soaking not just billionaires but the much larger class of millionaires, successful business owners, and high-earning professionals whose very prosperity makes them difficult political targets.

Take Medicare for All, perhaps the policy position most associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party. The CBO estimates that it would cost $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion a year extra by 2030. The individuals on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans are altogether worth $8 trillion, and including additional billionaires, gets you at most $10 trillion. This means that seizing 100% of billionaire wealth pays for one DSA program for a few years at most. And it’s not as if you can wait for new crops of billionaires to arise after taking such a path, since no one is going to build a fortune just so it can be expropriated. We are seeing such a scenario possibly begin to play out in California, which is about to vote on a ballot initiative that, if it passes, would tax 5% of wealth over $1 billion and cover no more than about six months of current California federal and state health-care spending.

It’s true that American wealth is concentrated at the top. But it is spread far more widely than a handful of billionaires and CEOs of major corporations. Under the billionaires at the pinnacle of the pyramid, there are centimillionaires, decamillionaires, millionaires, and those with wealth in the high six-figures. And the wealthy are a surprisingly large group. Among Americans in their late 50s, a full quarter of households is worth over a million dollars. Among households headed by someone 65 or older, those with a net worth of at least $1 million outnumber those below the poverty line by roughly two to one! To significantly expand the American welfare state would require a class war against both millionaires and billionaires, and also higher taxes on the much broader class of professionals that receive six-figure salaries.

There appears to be little appetite for doing this. Biden promised not to raise income taxes on individuals making less than $400K a year, which covers many in the millionaire class. Bernie Sanders has put forward plans that would increase taxes across a wider range of the public, but this is an exception, and even he has shifted rhetorically. When he ran for president in 2016, the Senator talked of “millionaires and billionaires.” Over time, he began to focus on billionaires alone. The Michael Bloomberg campaign in 2020 cynically noted that the change occurred soon after Sanders himself saw his income increase to beyond $1 million a year for the first time . The broader shift has occurred elsewhere on the left. A Google search shows the term “millionaires” appearing once on the DSA website in the last year, compared to ten mentions of “billionaires.” On Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s official X page, the last mention of “millionaires” was in early 2021. Since that time, she has talked about “billionaires” around two dozen times.

It’s not difficult to understand why. It’s much easier to attack a smaller minority than a larger one. Among the elderly, there are more millionaires than there are blacks or Hispanics. Advocates for gay rights used to say that as more people came out of the closet, Americans would become more tolerant and supportive of the cause. This theory seems like it was probably correct. Yet something similar has happened with millionaires, who have seen the same effect without anyone advocating for them as a minority. Inflation has played a role here too, as a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. But the main cause of the rise in millionaires over the last several decades has been the growth in real wealth.

Another reason for the left’s squeamishness is that it has no interest in emphasizing that a lot of Americans are really rich. For a long time, the left talked about the “decline of the middle class.” It is true that there are fewer people in the middle class than before, but that is because so many people have moved up in income, not because living standards have declined. This fact is discrediting for a narrative that depends on masses of Americans suffering for the benefit of a few oligarchs.

It would also be one thing if millionaires were the types of people who just inherited their wealth and were living off unearned rents. But, as Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick explain in their new book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, “the typical millionaire is more Main Street than Wall Street.” Relying on access to tax data, they estimate that the share of rich owners of private businesses who inherited their firms or bought them from family members is only between 20 and 25 percent.

Often, they have built their wealth by doing unglamorous but nonetheless unquestionably productive work. No fewer than thirteen hundred Main Street Millionaires – or business owners worth at least $5 million – work in the paper and paper product merchant wholesaling business. Zidar and Zwick invite the reader to, the next time he is in a fast food restaurant, imagine how many people got rich off the supply chain for his meal, including everything from the hamburger buns and the cheese slices to the toilet paper in the bathroom, not to mention the goods and services provided via the paving of the parking lot, the HVAC system that cools the establishment in the summer, and the janitorial services that keep it clean.

While the left prefers to focus on billionaires and the poor, every cookie-cutter shopping center in every town in America is a gold mine producing fortunes on a mass scale.

If you take all Main Street Millionaires together, they had more than thirteen times as much wealth as the Forbes 400 in 2022, and for each person on that list, there were over four thousand private business owners with at least $10 million in net worth. Heavily taxing these people and those with even less is the only possible way to acquire the resources to fund programs like universal healthcare.

To describe Main Street Millionaires is almost enough to understand why they are not the focus of left-wing attacks. These are people who work hard, take risks, are deeply integrated into local communities across the entire country, and dedicate their lives to providing goods and services that their fellow Americans want. Many of them do benefit from unfair and anticompetitive practices: car dealership owners and beer distributors in particular owe their fortunes in large part to special privileges enshrined in law. But overall, they are a large and sympathetic group of people who are difficult to scapegoat for society’s problems.

This doesn’t mean that we should all fall on our knees and worship the wealthy. But the fact that there are so many of them, and it is so easy to explain how they are responsible for American prosperity, serves to illustrate the intellectual flaws of the socialist worldview while also discrediting economic populism as a political project, at least in its current forms.

Going back to Marx, few ideas are more central to the analysis of left-wing economics than the division between labor and capital. In the American context, this divide has become increasingly artificial. Successful capitalists often began as laborers, and they put just as much effort and sweat into their jobs as anyone who is classified as working class. An American business owner is often a laborer who was really good at his job and saved money that he later risked in order to create more jobs and opportunities for others. Sixty-two percent of Americans own stocks, meaning that they are invested in the success of our largest corporations.

Does all this imply that we should all simply reject a politics centered around helping the working poor? Not necessarily. But, if it’s going to deliver on its promises, and aspire to something more than revenge against the narrowly defined rich, any such movement needs to be more realistic and less demagogic. The local car dealer is a much less appealing villain than a tech executive. But while the Silicon Valley entrepreneur gives his products away for free, the car dealer artificially raises prices by ensuring that manufacturers cannot sell directly to consumers.

The ideology of the DSA finds its enemy to be large and far away from those it wants to appeal to. The multimillionaire, more normal business owner is close and comparatively small. How different this is from socialists of a previous era. The Soviet Union and Mao’s China famously were able to turn neighbor against neighbor, with Stalin’s war on kulaks targeting, in the words of historian Robert Conquest, “peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors.” In Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Conquest describes a Stalin-era novel that sympathetically portrays a Communist activist who declares he would gladly machine-gun kulak women and children for the sake of the revolution.

This attitude, thank God, is foreign to American culture. The most successful Marxists have historically been intellectuals who took their own ideology seriously and used it as a guide to behavior when they were in power. DSA, for all the talk of the movement being alienated from the mainstream, reflects the American culture it grew out of and the need to compete in a democratic system. Successful businessmen are the neighbors and relatives even of the working class, and often the caretakers of beloved local institutions, or in industries that help make the existence of such establishments possible. You can attack the “rich” in American politics, but must define that group narrowly if you hope to build a successful movement.

The fact that the left’s cultural radicalism, despite it being scaled back from the heights of wokeness, makes its brand poison in much of the country only compounds the problem. Socialists and mainstream Democrats must rely on high-earning professionals and businessmen for donations and votes, further forcing them to put forth relatively unambitious policy programs.

None of this even considers the coming entitlements crisis. There is no hint that anyone on the left is considering cutting Social Security or Medicare, and any tax increases will have to go to those programs first.

Perhaps a politically more realistic path for the left is to advocate for “predistribution” instead of redistribution. That is, rather than try to take money from some people and give it to others, the focus can be on indirectly trying to help the bottom of the income distribution through regulations that don’t require much new government spending like encouraging unionization and raising the minimum wage. But, even here, one has to go to war with the power of the millionaire class, which makes up a large share of legislators and donors to political candidates and causes. Zidar and Zwick note that 40 percent of state legislators came from business backgrounds, and this doesn’t even include lawyers and doctors with their own practices. The numbers are similar in Congress.

Predistribution is not only politically difficult; on substantive grounds such policies often backfire or, at the very least, offer more complicated and less certain paths to reducing inequality. While redistribution can directly make the poor better off, policies like raising the minimum wage or encouraging unionization often have unintended effects such as increasing unemployment.

Perhaps the main lesson of the rise of the millionaire class is that if you want a social democracy, you need to establish it relatively early in a nation’s historical development. Once an economy is sufficiently mature and wealthy to spread the fruits of capitalism widely enough, even the self-described socialists will not put forward realistic proposals for redistribution on a mass scale. If the DSA-aligned left gains enough power, it can certainly make billionaires suffer. But it cannot build the welfare state it imagines without eventually reaching much further down the wealth distribution, which means going after the very people whose success makes capitalism so politically resilient.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

Michael joins me to stream directly from the Cornell campus. We talk about the media freakout he has inspired, and I question him on whether he’s being recognized as he goes about his business. We get into a fiery debate late in the podcast about whether Michael is exaggerating what institutions are claiming constitutes rape. I say that the “affirmative consent” standard is ridiculous enough as applied to sexual assault, but no, he insists that all unwanted touching could might be classified as rape according to Cornell, and this is just wrong. I trust the judgment of listeners on this.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

Note: If you would like to get this podcast through a regular podcast app, go to richardhanania.com on a browser on your device (it doesn’t work in the app), log in to Substack, and click on the tab for either the Hanania Show or the H&H Podcast. Select the episode you want, and then choose one of Apple, Spotify, etc. under “Listen on” to your right. You’ll be able to add the show through an RSS feed, after which you will get new episodes, either free or paid depending on what kind of subscriber you are, through whichever platform you use.

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The idea that Asian immigrants work too hard has recently been fully endorsed by Chris Rufo. Helen Andrews has also made this argument. Yes, I know the boring point to make here is that conservatives supported objective standards of merit until five minutes ago. But let’s put that aside and think about why, even if the striver argument is true, it doesn’t come close to forming a rational case against immigration.

It’s true there is such a thing as being too ambitious for one’s own good. Education in particular is largely a negative-sum credentialing game, and it’s probably better if society as a whole invests less in schooling. If immigration increases but Harvard does not proportionally increase the number of students it admits, it becomes more difficult to get in. In some fields, like medicine, professional organizations restrict entry to drive wages up. These are pathologies in specific areas of the economy, and we should obviously fix them.

But not everything in life is zero-sum! In fact, most things aren’t. That is the secret of capitalist success (this is yet again another thing conservatives used to understand, but I’m trying not to get distracted yet by all the ways that they are twisting themselves in knots in order to oppose skilled immigration). If a business owner or scientific researcher is obsessed with succeeding at their job, that is generally positive for society as a whole. This means more growth and technological innovation. Maybe the striver himself invested too much in work and is unhappy as a result, but he makes the rest of us better off.

Conservatives now love talking about jocks and nerds. I don’t think this is a very good framing, as what we are seeing here is a different type — the chud — rising in status and power on the right. But if we accept this dichotomy, then in a world with more nerds, the jock’s traits become scarcer, which translates into more economic opportunities and cultural capital. Here’s Rufo:

We need both the valedictorian and the football captain; the math nerd and the prom queen; the software engineers and the artists, soldiers, statesmen, pioneers, farmers, and poets, all representing deep American archetypes.

Well, yes. But adding more “math nerds” does not mean deporting a “prom queen.” Talented and successful people with different strengths help one another, and society as a whole. In economic terms, these different types are complements, not substitutes.

America has the best software engineers in the world and also the most successful film industry and the best basketball and football players. Will the NFL get worse if we have more talented scientists? Will American children not be allowed to play outside? What is the actual chain of causation through which more hard-working people and a wealthier society lead to individuals being less able to pursue diverse passions?

I’ve talked about opposition to immigration being based on false zero-sum thinking about the economy. But rightists have invented an entirely new form of zero-sum thinking, in which society depends on maintaining exactly the right balance of “jocks” and “nerds,” with each increase in one category leading to a decline in the other. And just as in economics, this view reflects an inverted understanding of reality. There’s a connection between us having the best software engineers and professional athletes. Economic growth means more football stadiums, dances, and extracurricular activities because all these things require money and free time, which rising GDP provides. Advances in sports medicine made by “nerds” mean high school players can better recover from injuries, and allow LeBron James and Tom Brady to stay at their peaks for longer. Silicon Valley is the creation of charismatic visionaries like Steve Jobs working alongside fresh-off-the-boat immigrants who are afraid to talk to a girl. It is those with the outgoing personalities who reap the greatest rewards, but everyone benefits from the concentration of diverse forms of talent.

If you like Trump, check out how happy he looks hanging out with immigrant CEOs and entrepreneurs. They are the ones responsible for the economic success that allows him to strut along the world stage like a buffoon, making the MAGAs feel proud that they can push other countries around.

So the argument that immigrants work too hard and we therefore need more restrictionism makes sense only if your sole concern is going to an elite university and you don’t care about your living standards or ability to pursue your passions. What an ironic argument for conservatives to make! They say that we shouldn’t let in Asians because they’re strivers who only worry about credentials, yet their argument against immigration only makes sense if you want to encourage Americans to be strivers who only worry about credentials.

There’s a brilliant term that’s been floating around recently: “Goldilocks racism.” For sixty years, conservatives have said blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, don’t work hard enough. They’ve now switched to saying Asians work too hard. But the hypocrisy and double standards go deeper than that. Their entire understanding of how society works has had to be reengineered. Nobody, except maybe leftists who complain about white parents reading to their kids, has ever suggested that the very existence of “nerds” creates negative externalities until this very moment.

And if you do want elite universities to apply more subjective criteria in admissions, focusing on well-rounded students with good “personalities,” you had that with affirmative action! Conservatives used to cite scholars who showed that the idea that Asians have bad personalities was used as a pretext to discriminate against them. When you looked for evidence for such character flaws in the data, including face-to-face interview ratings, it simply wasn’t there. Universities were pretending some groups had better personalities than others because they wanted to get a specific racial balance.

The fact that conservatives are making stuff up to push a racial agenda is no less obvious here. Asian-American college applicants list slightly more extracurricular activities, including those involving top leadership roles, than white applicants. Are more extracurricular activities a sign of a well-rounded personality or a sign that a group is grinding too much? I’m sure the nativists will tell us as soon as they figure out which story provides more support for keeping the country as white as possible.

The arguments against Asian immigration rest on false beliefs that, even if true, would still not justify keeping people out. Sometimes nativists are compared to wokes, but this is an insult to the race-obsessed left. Wokes made a much greater effort to apply their beliefs consistently. Hence, they started out criticizing whites, but the idea that success means a group is guilty of something occasionally led them toward antisemitism and calling Asians “white-adjacent.” It all has a certain logic to it.

The right, in contrast, has adopted a completely different approach to thinking about societal issues. They are simultaneously mad at groups for studying too much and studying too little. Conservatives hate universities and supposedly believe in the private sector, yet make anti-immigration arguments that treat getting into an elite university as the most important thing in life. They like participation in some extracurricular activities but not others. Spelling bees are good, I guess, but studying too hard for them is not. “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and “personal responsibility” sound good because they’re white-coded, while Asians are “strivers” who “grind.” Subjective personality assessments to achieve a racial balance are un-American in university admissions but apparently appropriate for immigration policy.

I always thought that the most extreme wokes were too far gone to reason with. But the drive toward some kind of consistency in their worldview created vulnerabilities, such as when they went after Jews as another group that achieved too much success. Nativism is more adaptive due to its complete lack of grounding in any principles other than identitarianism. That flexibility, however, comes at the cost of appealing less to those who have some need for logical coherence and do not share the exact same prejudices. This makes it important to keep harping on the inconsistencies of this worldview and stressing how divorced from reason these people are.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

Keeperman complains about those who say:

You are a moral reprobate for preferring homogeneity. That makes you a bad person. That is pathological for you to express those preferences. And moreover, it’s pathological and bad for you to pursue your political preferences or political policies to advance your preference for homogeneity.

Conservatives, in his view, used to accept pro-immigration arguments because the restaurants were good and their neighbors were nice people, but now they’ve come to the conclusion that “maybe actually my desire to preserve homogeneity is just fine.” Restrictionists have no need to explain their preferences to the Cato Institute beyond “I just prefer this actually.”

An Unusually Passionate Minority

There’s an unstated assumption here that most Americans agree with nativists. But they don’t. Polls over the decades consistently say that they think immigration is good for the country. In 2023, 68% said so, compared to only 27% who thought it was bad.

I’ve noticed a tendency of nativists to simply assume that most people agree with them, while acting like those who disagree on immigration are all lying or brainwashed. But I don’t think there’s a reason to think that preference falsification can come close to explaining results this lopsided.

Still, immigration remains a hot-button issue because a small minority has intense preferences. Alex Kustov has shown that, while strict restrictionists are usually nowhere near a majority of voters in Western countries, they tend to be deeply passionate about the topic, more likely to name immigration as the top issue facing their country. More cosmopolitan voters do not prioritize it nearly as much. Hence, Republicans make deportations and keeping foreigners out their main rallying cries to energize their base, while Democrats tend to mostly talk about other things. In Europe, right-wing populist parties will focus on this one issue and get a decent share of the vote, but other parties that organize around broader principles can still outvote them.

The vast majority of Americans either like the idea of their country welcoming new people in, or think that such decisions are best made from a technocratic perspective. The view that a preference for homogeneity should be the driving factor in immigration policy is a minority opinion. Which should win in a democracy: the majority, or the faction that is most attached to its position? Do we weigh people’s opinions by intensity? One could argue either way, but regardless, the nativist assumption that most people agree with them is not true.

My read of the left is that they’re not passionate about immigration. It’s a pretty low priority for them, but they will radicalize when they see restrictionists who appear to be motivated by racism. Nobody on the left cares that Denmark has taken a hard line on immigration, because it appears that they are doing it for technocratic or liberal reasons. This is different from Trump, Orban, or Le Pen, for whom restrictionism is seen as part of a general fascist orientation. The point here is that if you want to talk about intensity of preferences, you have to stop and consider how many people really hate racism, which explains why far-right parties in Europe are so often not accepted into ruling coalitions.

Judge People by the Impacts of Their Positions

Regardless, none of this answers the question we started with: are immigration restrictionists bad people?

I would say yes, if they don’t want more Indians. Opposing low-skill immigrants or those who create more cultural difficulties can be rooted in innocent, pro-social motivations. But being opposed to high-skill immigration generally cannot be. Usually, when it comes to moral judgment, the issue is not which preferences we have, but how we act on them.

I dislike women having tattoos. If that’s just a personal preference regarding who to date or socialize with, that’s not something anyone gets passionate about. People will sometimes judge a race preference when it comes to dating, but they’re wrong to do so, and as long as you don’t feel the need to shout it from the rooftops, others will leave you alone to partner up with whoever you want.

In contrast, if my preference led me to demand that people with tattoos be banned from my town, or taxed at much higher rates, others would judge me harshly for this, as they should. A preference is not a carte blanche to treat others however we feel like. It’s what we do or advocate for based on our preferences that matters.

Restricting immigration means excluding people from living in the country of their choice. That’s a pretty extreme step, and inflicts a major harm on them. Even if you think the job of policy is only to look out for one’s own fellow citizens, Keeperman is acknowledging that he doesn’t care if lowering immigration reduces American living standards, since the focus of his rant was Indians. There’s always a hiding-of-the-ball aspect to this, where nativists will talk about “GDP” in order to make the costs of restrictionism as abstract as possible. Hence, they will say, “I want to cut immigration, even if it reduces GDP,” but will never say “I want to cut immigration, even if my children become poorer as a result.” The latter would make the tradeoffs more concrete.

When it comes to skilled immigration, then, the restrictionist “preference for homogeneity” means that, because people have a different phenotype or speak a different language at home, you want to take away their opportunities to improve their lives while also harming the future of your own country, and human progress more generally. This is before even getting into the gleeful cruelty many restrictionists regularly display.

If you’re uncomfortable around Indians, no law will force you to invite them to your house. Yes, anti-discrimination laws still exist, but people nonetheless are able to form communities that are practically all white. Indians ask nothing from you but to be able to work, innovate, and contribute to the economy.

Yellapragada Subbarow came to America and helped develop the drugs that produced the first successful remissions of childhood leukemia. Here’s what happened to the survival rate of that disease and other childhood cancers over time as a result.

More recently, Vinod Balachandran led a team that developed a personalized mRNA vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer. One can list an endless number of immigrants who have clearly saved American lives.

I don’t care if you personally like such individuals or want them as neighbors. But to want fewer of them in the country reflects a diseased mindset. It’s not a matter of just having more medical researchers; those who simply help grow the economy indirectly contribute to scientific research by creating larger markets and more money that can go toward research and development.

Go ahead and set aside any concern with fairness to outsiders. Your fellow Americans mostly want to live in a country where the economy is growing, living standards increase, and diseases are being cured. If your policy position is “my grandchildren can die sooner, as long as I maximize the percentage of whites” — and make no mistake, this is what opposition to H-1B visas means — it’s not the preference itself that is the issue, but your deranged value system.

Why Restrictionists Abandon Reason

To be sure, nativists try to come up with more rational sounding arguments for their views. I’ve written a series of articles deconstructing them one by one. See my pieces against higher-order race realism and the silly idea of “ethnic niches,” and my conversations with Amy Wax. These positions usually involve grasping at straws. You need to argue for uncertain impacts that would have to be truly disastrous in order to outweigh the risks of keeping even a single Jensen Huang or Elon Musk out of the country, much less larger groups of talented individuals. As I wrote in January of last year:

The most important point to stress from my perspective is that the costs of restricting high-skilled immigration are absolutely massive. You may worry about cultural change or other things, but a single Jensen Huang or Elon Musk can carry a lot of dead weight. As of October, Nvidia’s market cap was around $3.5 trillion. By way of comparison, all US spending on federal welfare programs was $1.2 trillion in 2022. Nothing in Huang’s family background indicates that they would have been let into the country under a system that only sought proven geniuses, as some restrictionists say they favor. If one wants to take all the human and physical capital assets of some of the most successful companies in the US and toss them into the ocean, they need to have an incredibly compelling reason.

Nativists seem to understand all of this at some level. They’re always reminding us that they’re not bad people, which is a pretty clear sign of a guilty conscience. There is also a constant need to construct their message in a way that avoids the natural implications of what they’re saying. GDP replaces concrete discussions about wealth, affordability, and a longer life expectancy. So much of their rhetoric centers around avoiding explicitly saying that they prefer whites, with euphemisms such as “Heritage American,” “high-trust society,” and “preference for homogeneity.”

Everyone of course tries to present their ideas in the best possible light. But because the root ideas are so indefensible, you see a lot more incoherence and many more euphemisms among restrictionists than those of other political persuasions. Nearly every argument that they make against low-skilled immigration — welfare use, crime, etc — suggests being more open to high-skilled immigration, yet only when forced into a corner will they bite the bullet and say that they only have preferences, not reasons. Nativists will likewise argue that they don’t care about GDP, and then complain about immigration’s effect on home prices or the labor market.

It’s remarkable how often these people demand an exemption from the normal rules of debate and rational discourse. How often do you see someone commenting about politics and saying “I don’t owe you an explanation”? Keeperman’s job is to explain his views to people! Yes, no one is interested in an explanation of why you prefer pizza to hot dogs, or why you chose your wife. But when you are in the political arena advocating policy positions that affect other people’s lives, you are generally expected to justify your views.

Nativists never shy away from providing reasons when it comes to groups that use welfare and commit crimes at high rates. As soon as the topic turns to Indians, however, they’re reduced to declaring that they have no use for your bugman reliance on facts and logic. And one can understand why. Rufo and Keeperman trying to explain the basis of their views was met by universal scorn across X outside the right-wing bubble, even among people who in other contexts are with them on DEI. The pro-immigration side can talk about improving health, longevity, national greatness, and scientific progress, along with basic moral principles like fairness, equality, and merit. The nativists have to ramble about spelling bees and fullbacks at keggers, and the subjective preferences of the most hateful and least productive members of society. Conservatives’ big idea this week is that “no real American studies for the spelling bee,” which wouldn’t even matter if true, and is contradicted by generations of cartoon and sitcom episodes anyway.

No wonder they’re so hostile to reason! The nativists are clearly embarrassed by their own arguments, as they should be.

These ideas aren’t just bad on their own merits; they’re strikingly inconsistent with what conservatives say they believe in other contexts. In The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait notes that while talk of merit was central to anti-DEI messaging, conservatives now treat it as a dirty word, as they assert that identitarian preferences matter more than objective standards, individual liberty, or the good of society as a whole. The fight against wokeness has achieved successes because it has rational arguments on its side, and can appeal to those outside the right-wing echo chamber. Organizations composed largely of moderate and liberal academics like FIRE and Heterodox Academy were able to make common cause with conservatives. We don’t see anything similar happening with the anti-immigration movement, and that is no accident. This is a reason for optimism, as in the long run ideas that can appeal to smart people are the ones that tend to have an advantage.

I’ve defended those who want to build all-white enclaves, taking the position that they should be left alone to live how they want. Certainly, these people are much more racist than your typical nativist, who doesn’t sacrifice for his preferences to anywhere near the same extent. But they are not hurting anyone, and that is what in the end matters. You might suspect that if members of Return to the Land had more power they would force their views on others, but we’re a long way from ever getting to that point, and people’s liberty generally shouldn’t be restricted based on theoretical concerns about what they might do in the future. The nativists, in contrast, are powerful, and support a concrete policy agenda that would make the world worse off.

It has likewise never bothered me to know that racism often motivates libertarian economic views and opposition to DEI. People can be right for the wrong reasons. Nativism, in contrast, combines bad motivations and disastrous impacts on the world.

The most honest restrictionists are the ones who are openly racist. But while they should be credited for their honesty, it is difficult to find other positive qualities that describe their views. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be friends with such a person, but I do consider restrictionism to be a character flaw, depending on how far one wants to go. If you want me to be more specific, I’ll say that to oppose a massive increase in the number of skilled workers coming into the US can’t be justified by any human value system that is worthy of respect. To go beyond the natural status quo bias that most people have and want fewer H-1B and F-1 visas is of course worse.

You don’t have to even care about foreigners to appreciate the wisdom of being pro-immigration. Simply having an enlightened view of the interests of your fellow citizens should alone take you at the very least toward supporting a world of open borders for educated professionals. If you don’t get there, something has gone terribly wrong in terms of your reasoning ability or moral judgment. Maybe having more Indian doctors can help us figure out what’s wrong with you.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

First, allow me to credit ChatGPT. We spend so much time debating questions like whether AI will end the world that it prevents us from appreciating how miraculous this new technology already is. In 2022, cleaning the data, doing the statistical analysis, and creating the figures for the survey took days of work. This time, it was literally minutes. And within a few hours, I was able to make an interactive webpage where you can search through the results for both 2022 and 2026, see how my readership has changed, and filter the results by year, sex, country, and age.

Hanania Survey Results, Interactive Page

While the number of subscribers has grown fivefold since 2022, the number of respondents went down from 1,284 to 771. I don’t put too much stock in this, as I made less of an effort this time to encourage people to take the survey.

Younger and Richer

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This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

I believe that even the optimists on job loss do not go far enough. Regardless of how AI progresses, there will always be work. This is true even in the extreme case where machines can do literally everything humans can, cheaper and better. This is the world that Bill Gates fears:

So there’s no doubt that to date, A.I. has created more jobs than it’s destroyed. The demand for the skill sets, even just to build the data centers, is very, very high. We have a reasonably low unemployment rate.

The superiority of these systems is subject to a threshold where you have to believe that it’s incredibly reliable. If you’re going to have your telesales or telesupport capability be A.I.-driven, you want to make sure that its accuracy is better than humans…

We will, in the next few years, cross over those thresholds for accounting, legal work, telesales, telesupport — where there’s service 24 hours a day, in every language, with infinite trivia capability and no urgency.

I imagine people starting with a mental checklist of jobs, and then crossing them off as computers can do them more affordably than humans. Attorney, accountant, nurse. Check, check, check. Before, we checked off things like farming. Now, technology comes for the brain work, mops up the last remnants of physical work, and at that point there will be nothing left. Sure, the pessimists acknowledge, in the past there was always something else for humans to do, but now we are reaching beyond the limit of this principle, at which point the members of our species will be completely superfluous.

There are two versions of this argument. One fundamentally misunderstands what a job is and is pure lump of labor fallacy. A more sophisticated version acknowledges we will get productivity gains but nonetheless rests on a broken understanding of political economy in which all the gains will go to the top and the human desire for both government redistribution and charity will be abolished in circumstances where we would least expect that to happen.

Luddites of previous generations were wrong not because of the nature of technological development, but because they lacked a sufficient appreciation of human nature and fundamental truths about the economy.

To say “this time is different” reflects someone not fully internalizing the lessons of history. As I’ve written before,

In the US, the unemployment rate is about 4%. In India, the government estimates an official unemployment rate of 3.1% in 2025. What a remarkable coincidence that India has four times as many people as the US, and somehow around four times as many jobs available. The coincidences don’t stop there. In the first US census in 1790, the country had about 4 million people, including slaves. Today, we have 342 million. Yet each society seems to end up with about the same number of jobs, in proportion to the population…

So “jobs” is not the reason some countries and societies are wealthier than others. Why, then, do people in the US enjoy much higher living standards than people in India, who are better off economically than people at the American founding, who didn’t have antibiotics, cars, indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and an endless number of modern conveniences we now take for granted?

The answer is technology and productivity. In a sense, you can say richer societies have “higher paying jobs.”

To talk about Jevons Paradox, in which new technology leads to more jobs in a specific field, misses the point. Jevons Paradox is sometimes true, and sometimes false. When it comes to the overall economy, it’s a red herring.

A job isn’t usually something that fills a societal “need.” It is a social construct. We don’t actually “need” accountants, psychiatrists, professional basketball players, airline pilots, etc. We can ban all of these jobs and it wouldn’t kill anyone.

We can define a job as “something that gives humans an excuse to transfer ownership rights over green pieces of paper between one another.” To say there will be no jobs is to say there is nothing a human being can do for you, which is in effect saying that all desires will be met, including those related to status – this latter part being impossible since status is zero sum.

With Enough Productivity, We Can Literally Just Play Games All Day

Ruxandra recently wrote an article in which she accepted the jobspocalypse view for the sake of argument while saying she doesn’t necessarily buy it, but I would object that this isn’t one of those things you can accept for the sake of argument because doing so requires such a radically unrealistic view of the human condition that it changes too much about any hypothetical for it to be useful. If I said “imagine if humans didn’t have families” without specifying anything else about how the world changes, it would be a bad thought experiment, because humans without families would be a different species, so you can’t usefully speculate about what the economy or social norms would look like in such a situation.

It’s the same with jobs. To say “imagine a world without work” is to say “imagine a world where humans have all their needs met and don’t care about status.” If nothing else, wealth will always rank human beings, and so people will try to gain as much wealth as possible. They’ll think about what they can do to get it, and whatever actions they take in that process society will call a “job.” For more sophisticated people, education, moral values, and refinement are considered more important than money for achieving status, and so we will have podcasters, columnists, writers of non-fiction books, etc. That class is already post-material in a sense, and we will always continue trying to impress each other. Making busywork for others can itself be a source of status – as the nonprofit and education sectors largely are – and here the possibilities are endless.

If, as imagined under the worst-case scenario, a small number of individuals capture all the gains from superintelligence, they’ll be able to pay enormous sums for whatever human-made products and services they prefer. Even if they spend only a small fraction of their wealth this way, a tiny portion of an economy this large is a great deal of money. The humans they pay will have preferences of their own for things only humans can provide, and so on down the chain.

Remember that machines doing “all the jobs” means the jobs get done, so aggregate consumption is far higher than today. In a world where gains are widely distributed, living standards are high and you have to pay well to get talented people to provide the services you want. Think the Baumol effect on steroids. If they’re highly concentrated, the same result might require an income floor, so that people whose labor has little market value can still live well and don’t have to take whatever the rich offer. That floor doesn’t require a new political outlook as sometimes suggested; keeping welfare spending constant as a share of GDP would be more than enough. Even a modest portion of the winners’ income going to charity would accomplish the same thing.

This is why I find Luke Drago’s essay “The Intelligence Curse” so unconvincing. It assumes that private and government redistribution depend on labor having leverage over capital. But the largest transfers in the American welfare state go to retirees, who have no labor leverage at all. The union membership rate has fallen by half since 1983, while social spending has risen as a share of GDP. Redistribution in democracies rests on votes, norms, and status competition, not on elites needing workers. Political scientists have generally found weak connections between economic self-interest and political attitudes.

Resource-rich states like the Gulf monarchies spend lavishly on their citizens despite not needing their labor. The Drago view requires assuming that those who capture the gains from AI will be driven almost entirely by narrow self-interest, with no role for moral norms or the status that comes from being seen as generous or benevolent. That is as unrealistic as the Marxist belief that people can be socialized to work only for the collective good.

The idea that all mechanisms of redistribution completely disappear in a world with superintelligence is part of the denial of human nature that is required for one to fear the jobspocalypse scenario.

Wealthier societies increasingly replace unpleasant work with amusing pastimes and hobbies. Take chess. All the way back in 1997, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion, in a six-game match. By a decade later, computers were clearly better at it than every human, and the gap has grown since. Yet there are probably more people making a living off the game than ever before.

The same thing has happened with poker, where the machines passed humans around 2019. But between 2016 and 2026, the number of entries for the World Series of Poker Main Event went from 6,737 to 9,208, which we might take as a (very) rough proxy for the change in the number of professional poker players.

In chess and poker, we care about the relative ranking of humans. There are more people that can devote their time to playing chess and poker than in centuries past because we are a more productive society, even though machines are superior to people in these narrow domains. There’s nothing stopping competitive gaming, artwork, and other hobbies from becoming a much larger share of the economy.

Right now, there are around 450 players in the NBA with an average salary of $12 million a year. The reason that our society, unlike modern Congo or Ancient Greece, can afford to pay people so much to play an ultimately meaningless game is that we are wealthy. We also have the WNBA, where players earn an average of around $600,000 a year, despite the superstars of that league not being as good as the top male high school athletes. We chose to have a professional basketball league for women, which we are able to do because we are rich enough that a lot of people make a lot of money doing things that there isn’t even that much of a demand for.

There’s no theoretical reason why in a world with superintelligence the number of professional athletes in society can’t increase by multiple orders of magnitude, as long as there is some minimal level of redistribution. We can have basketball leagues for men under six feet tall living in Chicago, elderly Latinas, etc. Why would anyone watch any of this? I don’t know. Why do people watch high school basketball or the WNBA? Everyone does not simply prioritize seeing the best athletes over all else. Some people watch women’s basketball to make a political statement. High school and college sports depend on fanbases that care due to their personal connections to educational institutions. The wealthier society gets, the more we can indulge these kinds of preferences.

All an individual needs to do in order to have a job is to find some way to amuse or entertain fellow humans, or be part of a competitive enterprise or community that others care about. It’s unlikely that the entire labor force ends up being basketball players. Some will play chess or Dungeons and Dragons. Others will do hobby-like or hobby-adjacent work like podcasting, playing video games, or streaming.

In 1970, the average NBA salary was $40,000. Adjusting for inflation, that would be about $342,000 today, which is less than what WNBA players currently earn. NBA salaries have increased by around 35 times in real terms since 1970 not primarily because players have gotten better in the last several decades, even though they most certainly have. Rather, GDP has grown, which means that every form of work that still exists is much more highly compensated. Sometimes, as in farming, this involves a productivity increase, but this doesn’t really apply in professional sports, which involve zero-sum contests audiences watch for pleasure – though it’s possible that players being better athletes makes watching a game more enjoyable.

It might sound ridiculous to assume that everyone can practice some kind of hobby as a job. But from a historical perspective, many things we consider real jobs today would look like hobbies to a previous generation. Imagine telling an eighteenth-century English miner coughing up a lung that one day a woman will be able to live much better than he does by handing out cups of coffee and spending her hours chatting with customers and co-workers while running a cafe. A lot of small businesses are already a kind of hybrid between a traditional job and a hobby. Those who supply toilet paper to gas station bathrooms probably aren’t doing the thing that they are most passionate about, but those who own and work in yoga studios, gyms, and marijuana shops are doing what interests them. As we get richer, we have the luxury of increasingly blending work and pleasure. I think most women who open yoga studios could theoretically do something that makes more money, but they live in a society that is productive enough that there are a lot of ways for them to meet their basic needs and they can afford to spend their days doing something that they generally enjoy.

This analysis of course applies to people who want something that we would call a job. For many, after the singularity working won’t be necessary and leisure will be too enjoyable, and they may lack ambition or a desire to play the wealth status game. But this would just be a continuation of historical trends. Everything will be a hobby, and in situations where money changes hands, we’ll call a hobby a “job.” Everything else we’ll call leisure. There won’t be people who want to work but can’t, because if nothing else a society that is so productive that it can automate all human labor will have enough resources to subsidize an endless amount of useless activity.

This would just mean staying on the same current trajectory. We spend more time in school and live longer as retirees than previous generations due to economic growth. Keynes’ dream of productivity gains turning into less work has come true. He was only wrong in assuming that the work week would be shortened, when in reality we simply extended the periods of life during which humans don’t engage in the labor force. We’re already in a post-industrial world where a lot of people who can choose not to work still choose to do so anyway because they like to feel useful, they want a standard of living that is higher, or they simply need to occupy their days.

At this point, you might say it is implausible to imagine a society rich enough to pay elderly Latinas a million dollars a year to play basketball. But people apparently find it plausible that AI will automate all jobs. These are the same thing! A world where machines can do everything humans can cheaply will be rich beyond our wildest imaginations. You would be able to find pocket change in your couch and use it to take a luxury vacation to the Bahamas, since it will be nearly costless to make an airplane, pilot it, staff the hotels and restaurants at tourist destinations, supply the food there, etc. You can set up a Latina grandmothers’ basketball league if the market demands it, or do anything else that involves competition, status seeking, and the transfer of money.

That’s the implication of unprecedented increases in productivity to the point that human labor isn’t worth hiring. The discourse is not taking this point seriously enough. If a few people capture all the gains, they’ll occasionally lose their wallets, which they won’t bother to look for because it won’t be worth their time. Then someone will find them, and use the money to finance enough games and amusements to power the economy of an entire state. Maybe here you’re thinking they won’t carry actual cash, but hopefully you get the point.

People are imagining everyone going out of work, and then maybe growth increasing to 5% a year and the gains going to the top, instead of GDP doubling or tripling each year. When growth is high enough, there’s no more need to talk about “winners” and “losers,” since everyone wins. That’s why the poorest Americans today live better than the rich of two centuries ago.

I don’t think that a world of Latina grandmother basketball stars is plausible. But that’s because I don’t think AI will automate all human work any time soon, if ever. If you do worry about technology being able to costlessly replace all human labor, then you need to take the implications of your prediction seriously enough, which include humans living better than billionaires do today. To worry about “jobs” at that point is beyond silly, but if your real concern is that we continue transferring ownership over green pieces of paper between one another, then you can rest assured that we’ll always be able to do that.

Why Animals Don’t Have Jobs

So “everyone plays games” is the extreme end of what is possible, but the more realistic scenario is that humans will still be needed, they’ll have much higher standards of living, and the most unpleasant kinds of work will become less and less common. It’s unlikely people will ever want to spend all their time playing or watching basketball, but everyone has something that interests them, and the wealthier societies become, the easier it is to monetize games and hobbies. We probably won’t see a world where 100% of workers are basketball players, but with superintelligence we should expect an economy where there are a lot fewer garbage men, accountants and lawyers, and more professional athletes, chess players, podcasters, Substack writers, escorts, prostitutes, yoga instructors, streamers, party planners, artists, and others doing more enjoyable work where the human touch is valued. Categories of work will open up that we can’t even imagine existing right now.

Maybe somebody will be a “professional family Thanksgiving planner.” Even if AI could theoretically do that job better, all it takes for professional Thanksgiving planner to be a job is for someone to come up with the idea and convince others their services are necessary before OpenAI or Anthropic gets around to doing it, or before people can realize that they can get Claude to do the same thing. In a world with super high productivity, individuals will have a lot more disposable income and their time will be more valuable, so they wouldn’t have an incentive to seek out every single way in which an AI is cheaper than a human. A lot of work involves bringing to people’s attention things that they didn’t know they needed, which humans will be incentivized to do more than AI agents. Building professional family Thanksgiving planner AI agents will be priority number ten million for Sam Altman, while it would be the main focus of an entrepreneur who just lost his job.

People sometimes make the analogy to the gap between us and apes, but we’re not even better than ants, horses, or lizards at every conceivable task. In fact, I think every animal likely does something better than humans, even from the perspective of things that our species values. As Katja Grace points out, the reason that animals don’t have jobs is because they’re incapable of coming to agreements with us specifying the terms of their employment contracts. Ants, for example, are better than humans at cleaning hard-to-reach places. We could pay them to be janitors, but we have no way to explain to them that such a transaction would make them better off. If I could communicate with a gorilla and trust it to fulfill its contracts, it would be useful to have one around the house that I could pay with bananas to move furniture around and play with my kids, conditional on it using the toilet and not ripping off the faces of any humans.

Sometimes people bring up the decline in the number of horses, which were once used extensively in farm work and transportation. Their population plummeted with the invention of cars and other forms of mechanized labor-saving technology. But the reason behind the decline of horses wasn’t that they “lost their jobs.” It was because humans were in charge and didn’t need as many of them anymore. If we wanted to keep the same number of horses alive and give them a much higher standard of living, we’re certainly capable of it. So yes, AI doom is a risk if we lose control, but the horse analogy tells us nothing about what happens in a world where AI is aligned.

It’s ridiculous to me how far ahead of ourselves we’re getting when we still have low-skilled workers giving massages, delivering food, and providing haircuts all around us, not to mention masses of people living in crushing poverty across the developing world.

Some kinds of manufacturing have been automated, but people have found other things to do because, again, human desires are unlimited. If there’s even a single spot in your house that your vacuum cleaner can’t reach, or one kind of hand movement AI struggles with, there will be jobs. If people have a slight preference for humans over machines, even for reasons of virtue signalling alone, there will be jobs. And if AI can do 100% of what we can do for cheap, then we will have basically unlimited resources to engage in redistribution and indulge even a slight preference for human-made products and services, and we can all just call our hobbies jobs and pass green paper around, treating the accumulation of money as one status game among many.

It might be the case that more people don’t work because leisure is too enjoyable and they don’t want to bother making the minimal effort to try to get green pieces of paper from others. Here we must distinguish between the unemployment rate – the percentage of individuals who want a job but can’t find one – and the labor participation rate, which refers to what portion of the public has or wants a job. The latter excludes students, housewives, NEETs, retirees, etc. Someone being retired or being a housewife generally isn’t considered bad just because they’re not working. More unemployment, not a decreased labor force participation rate, is what people worry about when they talk about job loss.

I can construct scenarios where AI fizzles out, where it leads to a utopia, or where it kills or enslaves us all. But the one thing I will guarantee is that a future with aligned superintelligence but without jobs for the people who want them is impossible. I would be willing to bet that, assuming there is no doom scenario or other kind of civilizational breakdown, two things will be true for the rest of our lives.

1. We will not see sustained unemployment rates higher than historical norms for reasons having to do with automation; and

2. People working will be earning higher and higher incomes.

We may see unemployment significantly increase at some point, but if so it’ll be for normal reasons related to economic crisis and government mismanagement. My prediction will be falsified if unemployment rates stay elevated at higher rates than they have been in previous decades and most economists agree that it is due to AI. There is zero evidence in the current data to indicate such a scenario is coming, or even possible.

Why We Shouldn’t Pace the Rate of Change

Sometimes the issue is presented as being about the pace of change. Here, it’s at least theoretically possible that this could be a problem, unlike the idea that we can permanently lack jobs. If tomorrow Anthropic announces the creation of an aligned superintelligence that makes all white-collar workers unnecessary, this argument says that society might be fine in the long run, but we need to worry about the adjustment costs in the meantime.

I think this radically underestimates how quickly markets adjust to changing conditions. Every white-collar worker has probably at some point thought to himself, “I should quit my 9-5 and open a cat cafe/become a podcaster/run my own dog-walking business.” After superintelligence, society as a whole would become a lot more productive, and those who capture the gains will have a lot of money to spend. They will increasingly devote themselves to entertainments and bespoke services that other humans can provide. People are resourceful, and they would probably be capable of convincing other, more powerful humans that they’re still necessary even when AI can do a job better.

Note also that white-collar workers are heavily invested in the stock market and own property. Their loss of jobs would be cushioned by massive increases in the value of stocks and other assets. Predictions of a massive political backlash to the decline of traditional white-collar work need to take this into account; as upper-middle-class workers are losing their jobs, their home values and stock portfolios will be seeing massive gains. Again, political forecasting is hard, and we shouldn’t adopt policies that harm productivity based on inherently speculative predictions.

The fact that Luddites have always been wrong should give us pause here. Throughout the late 1970s, the unemployment rate hovered around 6-8%. After nearly half a century of innovation, today it is 4%. The fact that we constantly get more and more automation and unemployment, when policy makers are doing a good job, always remains in the 4-10% range should tell us something. So we have:

1. Zero evidence from human history that technological innovation can cause massive spikes in unemployment that well-functioning market societies can’t adjust to.

2. Constant and irrefutable evidence that fears of technology taking jobs are harming living standards.

I see arguments for pacing job loss as a Trojan horse for Luddism. Not as dumb of a theory as permanent 100% unemployment, but still bad and an argument we should dismiss. Thinking any good can come of worrying about the pace of job losses rests on a belief that government can rationally foresee the effects of technology on the labor market and adopt wise policies that don’t end up just harming economic growth. I don’t believe either of these things is true.

Technological progress always has some losers in the short run. So I’m not saying literally every single person will be better off at every single point in time. But one has to understand that Luddism and risk aversion represent the natural state of public opinion. Attempts to pace the rate of change will almost mechanistically lead to laws and regulations that freeze the status quo in place long after the justifications for the original policy have stopped making sense, if those policies are even wisely chosen in the first place. To create new excuses for government to protect jobs against technological innovation is like leaving a recovering alcoholic alone in a room with a bottle of whiskey.

Right now, our welfare state overwhelmingly functions to transfer money to the elderly, the group that needs it least. I have no reason to believe that policies designed to slow the pace of job loss will be any more rational.

The fact that humans will be materially fine in a world of aligned superintelligence does not necessarily mean that they will all be happy or fulfilled. We see famous actors and musicians die of drug overdoses and suicides at disturbingly high rates. This is a different question than the jobs worry. Getting the economic issues right is hard enough, and people should think carefully about social problems that are caused by affluence.

But the answer to diseases of affluence is never less affluence! And just as I don’t trust government to come up with rational policy solutions to pace the rate of change, I don’t trust it to intervene in the economy to construct meaning for people in order to deal with scenarios that haven’t even occurred yet. This isn’t necessarily because government is inefficient and often irrational; even the wisest among us cannot begin to foresee what a post-scarcity world will look like. I can only tell you a world with aligned superintelligence will make humans materially better off. So we should work on alignment and improving productivity, then deal with other issues as they arise.

I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the lump of labor fallacy as the key to understanding bad economic ideas. When it comes to human progress and economic growth, the worst position of the right is hostility to immigration, while the worst positions of the left are support for labor unions and opposition to technology more generally. All of these views rest on the belief that there is a fixed set of jobs available that need to be hoarded.

To say that believing in a limited amount of labor in the world is wrong wouldn’t be going far enough. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what a job even is. And to think that our political economy will ever allow a world with little to no redistribution, even as productivity skyrockets, is to express contempt for everything we know about human nature.

We need to purge every variation of the jobspocalypse scenario from public policy discussions, and use its continuing existence as evidence that even smart analysts sometimes get wrong fundamental things about the way that the world works.

I doubt we’re getting GDP growth of 100% or more any time soon. There’s an absurd disconnect between a reality where nearly half of sub-Saharan Africa lacks reliable electricity and a discourse that worries about how we’ll handle a world where America can easily give each African their own private jet for a fraction of what we currently spend on foreign aid. That’s not the world people think they’re imagining when they talk about AI costlessly replacing all jobs. But that’s only because they are not understanding the real connections between technology, productivity, and wealth.

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One week after she was supposedly raped at a frat house, the woman was upset because she was disinvited from a party at the same location “for her own good.” Days later, she started describing her experience as non-consensual.

We’ve been doing this campus rape controversy thing for decades now, and these conversations never get anywhere because they only reveal that we are in denial about human nature.

Women have been told that consent is what matters in sexual relationships. Of course, “consent” sometimes exists on a spectrum, particularly when it comes to sex, an area of life where humans communicate more subtly than they do elsewhere. Little explicit guidance is given beyond that. Men, we all know, want to have a lot of sex with a wide variety of sexual partners. Movies, TV shows, and feminism tell us that women can legitimately decide to behave the same way, and that this is either morally neutral or empowering.

You’re particularly likely to get this message if you’ve made it to an Ivy League university. If you’re on the spectrum or bad at understanding subtle social cues, you might take this ideology seriously.

One thing I’ve always been struck by is how little congruence there is between what educated Americans say and what they do on matters of race, sex, class, and other sensitive topics. I’m not talking about the normal conservative critique of “oh, you believe in racial equality but live in an all-white neighborhood and send your kids to private school.” That’s an old argument, and it’s true. But I’m talking about personal interactions, sources of self-esteem, and how individuals understand their social roles.

Next time you’re around a highly educated young woman who has views and attitudes typical of her social class, imply that something about her is stereotypically masculine. It could be her gait, her jawline, her voice, whatever. If your understanding of humanity is based on how people answer survey questions, you might expect her to shrug it off. But trust me, unless she’s a fully committed pronoun person, she will not. You can try the same thing with the typical cis-hetero male of the same educational background, and call him effeminate. I admit to having conducted versions of these experiments, and people generally react with anger or distress, since they still desire to be perceived as someone representing traits associated with their biological sex.

Most girls who go to elite universities are not that promiscuous. They understand that everyone is supposed to say that men and women should be judged equally, but also that nobody lives that advice. Educated American women generally do not have group sex with random men. And if there are times when they do behave like sluts, they try to keep such behavior secret rather than proudly owning it like actresses do in the movies.

The sexual double standard rests on certain fundamentals about human nature. Men who were promiscuous had an evolutionary advantage, while a woman who wasn’t selective about her partners was at risk of ending up with bad genes for her offspring or being abandoned in a vulnerable state.

I’m not failing to make the is/ought distinction here. It is true that simply having an evolutionary explanation for some aspect of human nature doesn’t morally justify it. Nonetheless, the fact that men and women are psychologically different must be taken as a fact about the world. The double standards aren’t just a matter of judging other people, but determine how we judge ourselves too. If women did not evolve to have casual sex, then casual sex is probably going to cause psychological distress. Morning after regret is a woman’s body telling her that she did something wrong, and the social stigma that comes from such acts is no less a part of human nature.

How we feel about the behavior of others is not infinitely malleable through rational discourse. Note that we are talking about an Ivy League university in the fall of 2024. Even in such an environment, a woman was slut shamed to such a degree that it led to her dropping out of college and ruined her life. If Ivy League universities cannot eliminate slut shaming after decades of feminist ideological domination, what hope do the rest of us have? Civilized countries should be applauded for no longer arresting those who have sex outside marriage or stoning them to death. But to go beyond this and say that we should not judge promiscuous women harshly is asking too much of human nature. Every other society has found it easier to just encourage women to practice modesty and discretion. We’ve decided to try something else, and the result is endless moral panics and controversies over fuzzy concepts like consent, sexual assault, and power imbalances.

The Cornell student is a victim. Likely not of rape, but of lies about human nature.

Here’s what women need to be told. You have a choice to behave promiscuously. We’re a civilized society and believe in individual liberty. But if you do have sex with men you don’t know well and are not in a committed relationship with, you will likely regret your actions. Other women will gossip about you, and even the men who you’d think would be grateful will often dehumanize you, laugh at you behind your back and see you with contempt. I know you’ve seen a lot of TV shows where the most attractive, confident, and high status women go through life sexually free and open without suffering much in the way of emotional distress and reputational consequences, and there is probably some minority of women for whom that is possible, but the odds are extremely low that you are one of them. This will be true whether you’re a waitress at a restaurant or an elite college student, even though in the latter case you’ll be subject to a lot more propaganda on this topic.

We are in the process of relearning what nearly every other society has understood instinctively. Unfortunately, our unwillingness to take human nature seriously enough is creating a lot of broken women and punishing too many innocent men along the way.

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; (“knowing what time it is,” denigrating the Constitution, calls for authoritarianism from Yarvin and Haywood)

• the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; (individual liberty must give way to forcing virtue on the public and removing all immigrants)

• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; (white grievance politics, conservatives being hunted and killed, exaggeration of DEI, elites are selling your country to foreigners through immigration and free trade)

• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; (foreigners as figuratively and literally polluting American culture, liberalism and consumerism making people weak, selfish, and disgusting, women in institutions ruined everything)

• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; (demands for mass deportation, calls to round up leftists, all in the name of building a “high-trust society”)

• the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny; (Trump cult, in the process of being transferred to Vance)

• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; (Trump, trust the plan, election denial as a litmus test because it’s the leader’s will despite no evidence for it at all)

• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; (every problem can be solved by strength and not being a cuck)

• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle. (the ideology of Heritage Americans, Stephen Miller channeling the Melian Dialogue, law can’t be allowed to interfere with preserving white demographic dominance and defeating the left)

Again, this was all published over a decade before Trump became president. Yet it seems to describe the movement that he leads perfectly. Trump, nearly universally opposed by intellectuals and other elites, even among those on the right, achieved power first. Then came the process of reverse engineering justifications for his instincts and prejudices, which he shared with his electoral base. Naturally, more serious intellectuals who glommed onto the movement were disappointed, as MAGA over time morphed more completely into mindless leader worship and a vehicle for those with fascist sensibilities.

Trump’s movement resembles those of Mussolini and Hitler not because he or those around him are students of history. Rather, there is an underlying human nature that is alienated from organic elites, but occasionally overwhelms democratic politics when a particularly charismatic and ruthless figure comes along at the right time. It wants spectacle and it wants to hate. This happened in Italy and Germany in the aftermath of the First World War and the breakdown of their parliamentary systems, and again in the United States with the rise of the internet and social media.

On the intellectual roots of fascism, or lack thereof, Paxton writes the following:

Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an “ism” like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing.

The other “isms” were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical “isms” rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.

Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.

In a way utterly unlike the classical “isms,” the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is “true” insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.

Paxton points out that Hitler and Mussolini had early intellectual supporters, but they were bound to be disappointed. Fascism made compromises with established forces in its rise to power, and was ideologically flexible in terms of the things intellectuals tend to care about, even as its hatreds and oppositional attitude toward the enemies it focused on remained constant.

There’s a good demonstration of these lessons in the recent spat over Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders releasing a video about a white welfare mooch. I thought my opinion of the right couldn’t get any lower, but even I found this controversy, which seemed to suck in nearly every influential MAGA figure on X, depressing. Read the comments and look at the replies, and there’s nothing to indicate that these people care about the underlying issue at all. Instead, they’re upset that the welfare bum being portrayed was the wrong race and sex. This isn’t just internet nonsense, as Huckabee Sanders felt a need to respond, though her not backing down in the face of the moronic hordes crying out “GIVE US SHANIQUA” is a bright spot, and fills me with hope that politicians can start to brush these people aside.

The rightists don’t even feel the need to pretend like they have a take on welfare. This is different from wokeness on the left, which is also race obsessed but combines its demands for acceptable representation with an actual policy checklist and at least hints at attempts to incorporate what it believes into a rational worldview. To these people, the only thing that matters is that the Arkansas governor insulted the collective honor of the white race, whose superior position relative to other groups must be maintained. In this case, conservatives demand using blacks to push an anti-welfare message, but JD Vance proved that you could praise Elizabeth Warren’s economic views and appeal to the same group of people as long as you keep the enemies constant. The vice president has constructed an ideological structure in which every group of poor people coded as white is sympathetic and every group of minorities is portrayed as a threat to the nation’s finances and culture regardless of their socioeconomic status, managing to find a way to demonize everyone from urban criminals to immigrant engineers. You can’t have enough contempt for this as an intellectual project.

Fascism harks back to a glorified past, yet it is in a certain sense ahistorical, without a real intellectual legacy or rootedness in the political tradition of a nation. The right’s demand that Republicans embrace explicit racialism in all its messaging, its alienation from most mainstream politicians, and its hatred for every previous generation of conservative leaders are signs of that. Fascism also doesn’t build institutions. Trump can temporarily bar the prestige press from the White House, but the MAGA media that he’s handpicked can’t even provide a decent sound system to replace it. Within days, a federal judge – a Trump appointee no less – ordered the administration to let them back in anyway.

The administration has given special access to propaganda outfits like Lindell TV and compliant social media influencers in the hope of raising their profiles, but traditional news organizations still have the prestige and credibility. They’ll be around for a long time after this president is gone, while the Trump-favored outlets and influencers have nothing but their relationships to power.

We see the same thing in the think tank world. After Trump lost in 2020, the America First Policy Institute was established. It served as a center for networking and organizing for the purpose of being in position to staff a second Trump term, often called a “White House in waiting.” Heritage was captured and MAGAified. But even that has been deeply controversial internally, and, in general, the think tank space looks like it did before Trump came down the escalator. Serious people in Washington who have done decades of institution-building are still there, just as the real media remains in place. The spirit of fascism appeals to those seeking immediate gratification, and this, along with its human capital problem, prevents it from laying down lasting foundations.

One encouraging difference between Trumpism and fascist movements of the past is that MAGA has little appeal to the youth, and even less ability to mobilize them. On their way to power, fascist leaders of previous generations sent muscle into the streets, where they intimidated opponents and made their presence felt. Trump supporters don’t commit much violence; they’ll barely get off their couches. Part of the reason is that Trumpism appeals to the old. The president is currently underwater with all age groups, but is doing worst among the young.

Trump supporters generally get their cruelty fix by watching social media clips of immigrants being arrested or college snowflakes being triggered. The one incident of mob violence MAGA has been responsible for is the storming of the Capitol on January 6, which was in effect a top-down call from the president himself in order to serve his own narrow ends rather than any wider goal. The law came down hard on the perpetrators, even though they all eventually received a blanket pardon or had their sentences commuted. The lack of a real Trumpist youth movement is another reason MAGA will have limited staying power.

Trump has accomplished his main goals: he filled his pockets, sucked up all the attention the country could possibly give him, and held onto power as long as possible. Yet while we know that democratic socialists, libertarians, social conservatives, and liberal elites will all be part of the conversation within a decade or two, the same can’t be said about Trumpism. Unlike more rooted political movements, fascism needs a leader, and it needs to make politics exciting. Neither the issues themselves nor an ideological vision is enough to motivate the more ignorant sector of the public that it relies on for its strength.

The forces that created and supported Trump will of course still be there, and ambitious politicians will try to mobilize them. Changes in communications technology have made this much easier to do. But the institutions that resist authoritarianism are far from dead, and have a consistency of purpose that keeps them going even when others have stopped paying attention. That is what separates them from populist movements and remains one of the secrets to their enduring success.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

When I last did the survey, I had 1/5th of the readers I have now. I think it would be fascinating to see how the audience has changed over time, if at all. I plan to throw the results into AI and ask it to tell me what’s new or interesting.

Take the survey here.

After publishing my article on the Eyferth study, I learned that there’s a replication study from Japan. Two of the authors are the familiar names of Kirkegaard and Lasker. The sample sizes involved are even smaller than Eyferth, but they do find no difference between the children of black and white occupation troops. Of course, if you don’t find Eyferth convincing you won’t find this convincing either, since the same selection effects are an issue. But the result indicates that the German results weren’t just a fluke.

It’s good that those who accept hereditarianism publish studies like this. In general, the hereditarians in these debates have always been more careful and honest than the environmentalists. James Flynn was a rare exception as an environmentalist who added to knowledge, in contrast to figures like Gould and Turkheimer who simply obfuscate on the issue.

I was on the Comedy Cellar this month to talk about Kakistocracy with my friend Noam Dworman.

I discussed the book on the Quillette podcast too.

Finally, I went on Rising to talk about my piece on climate change not being that big of a deal.

Links for the month are below.

1. Throughout the whole Cofnas controversy, you might have wondered how he was hired in the first place given how woke Ghent University turned out to be. This provides the background. Individual professors in the department are given a lot of freedom to hire them, and Cofnas has one particularly important fan. One amusing thing I learned from this article is that the trans rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, has spoken positively about designer babies despite cancelling Cofnas. She was also the deputy prime minister of Belgium from 2020 to 2025. This is a data point in support of my view that we can not talk about race and IQ and nonetheless have a healthy intellectual environment without it. Focus on improving humanity, not ranking races.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

2. Yglesias on Trump’s war on skilled immigration. The correct attitude is of course 1) H-1B and OPT are working great; and 2) they could be better by being more selective. But people who don’t agree with 1 are unlikely to institute positive reforms, since it reflects an inability to clearly understand what is going on. One of the biggest problems with the H-1B program is that it relies on the theory of labor competition, with candidates ranked based on what they would be paid relative to those in their field. This is a stupid way of looking at the world. A janitor who earns slightly more than the average janitor is not producing more value than a below average engineer. Ranking things in this way makes sense if you start with the assumption that there is a set number of jobs and we have to worry about Americans competing with foreigners over them. Those who want less skilled immigration agree with this framing, so are unlikely to reform in the desired direction since they just want fewer people coming in. So in a sense the status quo and the attacks on skilled immigration have the same flaw, which is the lump of labor fallacy. The changes to OPT seem like they’re going to be more damaging than those to H-1B. In fact, the changes to H-1B might be on net positive if the $100K fee actually leads to better selection effects, assuming that the slots fill up. But OPT is uncapped, and here they are just shrinking the program.

3. On female beauty:

I think some people have managed to convince themselves that if they keep to genteel company – with the educated, the kind, and the rational – then they haven’t cost themselves anything by eschewing feminine effort. But I think they have actually just silenced the men around them and not actually rewired their desires.

Science and common sense say men like a low hip-to-waist ratio, low body fat, and giant breasts. People like to pretend otherwise because 1) it sounds too unsophisticated, like enjoying fast food; and 2) upper class Westerners spend a lot of time dancing around the feelings of women. But the younger people are when they learn the truth, the better. A lot more women should be getting breast implants.

4. As countries get wealthier, the environment first gets worse and then gets better. This is called the Kuznets Curve. Can something similar happen with how we treat animals? This makes a somewhat optimistic case, but it sounds to me like it’s a political choice. We can treat animals we farm for meat better, but whether we do largely depends on what kinds of laws are passed. Cleaning up the environment was more natural, since people care about the water they drink and the air they breathe. For farm animals, it needs to be pure altruism. Nonetheless, there’s something here, and wealth does open up options. It’s still up to us to make the moral case.

5. A top lawn care influencer named Greg Chism found that he could make a lot of money on YouTube by having his two young daughters get into food fights and dress up and act like babies, which he did for his channel Toy Freaks. He eventually found that to keep the momentum going he’d have to become the third baby. I was shocked to learn that there were months around 2016 to 2017 when Chism was the top content creator on YouTube. Watching the clips from Toy Freaks embedded in the story, they’re quite disturbing, and I wonder how many viewers were pedophiles or pedo-adjacent, and how many were, as the article implies, actual kids. YouTube eventually terminated the channel, with Chism saying he had been informed that “my videos were attracting audience members who do not have childrens’ best interests in their hearts.” The role of the company itself in training Chism to be a better content creator is a fascinating tidbit into how the company grew.

I kept thinking about why I found Toy Freaks clips so disturbing while reading this.

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Here is the original article, and below is an English translation I got from ChatGPT.

Eyferth

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Overall, the study included 181 colored occupation children, excluding 11 from the IQ analysis for being too young, and 83 white occupation children, of which 2 were excluded on the same grounds. The IQs of both groups ended up being practically identical, with about a 0.7-point difference in favor of the whites. This is obviously much smaller than you would expect in a study involving mixed-race children given the IQ gaps between whites and blacks that we have traditionally seen in the US. Eyferth tried to match the white and colored children on socioeconomic characteristics, and sometimes found both types of occupation offspring in the same classroom.

Eyferth reports whites doing better among males and the colored group scoring higher among females.

He calls these results statistically significant in each case, but he was using an approach that would not pass muster today. By our modern (and better) methods, there is no statistically significant effect within either sex. The takeaway here is that, pooled together, there was no notable racial difference in intelligence.

In 2005, J Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen explained why the study isn’t as much of a slam dunk for environmentalism as one might think.

Eyferth (1961; Eyferth, Brandt, & Hawel, 1960) reported IQ data for out-of-wedlock children fathered by soldiers stationed in Germany after World War II and then reared by White German mothers. The mean IQs for 83 White children and for 98 racially mixed children [these sample size numbers are errors; the mixed-race number was 170, reduced from 181, and the n for white children was 81 after exclusions — RH] were both about 97 (97.2 for the Whites, 96.5 for the racially mixed). As Loehlin et al. (1975, pp. 126–128) noted, however, these results are ambiguous for three reasons. First, the children were still very young when tested. One third of the children were between 5 and 10 years of age, and two thirds were between 10 and 13 years. As discussed in Section 5 (see Figure 3), behavior genetic studies show that while family socialization effects on IQ are often strong before puberty, after puberty they dwindle, sometimes to zero. Second, 20% to 25% of the “Black” fathers were not African Americans but French North Africans (i.e., largely Caucasian or “Whites” as we have defined the terms here). Third, there was rigorous selection based on IQ score in the U.S. Army at the time, with a rejection rate for Blacks on the preinduction Army General Classification Test of about 30%, compared with 3% for Whites.

So the least intelligent blacks usually weren’t sent to occupy Germany; we know childhood family environment matters less for IQ as people get older; and some of Eyferth’s children were actually the offspring of North Africans anyway.

One way to frame the problem is that we don’t know the IQs of the fathers or the mothers of the colored and white children. Given how racist Germany must have been at the time, it seems to me that a black man who was able to find sexual partners in the aftermath of Hitler’s regime might have been quite exceptional.

James Flynn argued that this is not the case, and if anything African Americans who fathered children in Germany were below average for their group. He points to a 1947 military study that looked at the relationship between cognitive test scores of black troops in Germany and whether they were involved in serious offenses, including contracting venereal diseases. Men who scored between 70 and 78 on the AGCT, the army’s general cognitive-aptitude test, were most likely to get in trouble, while those below 70 or over 100 were better behaved. If we assume that the population that contracts STDs is the same population that fathers children out of wedlock, then perhaps we may conclude that the black fathers of occupation children were unusually dumb.

At the same time, there is direct evidence that women in Germany involved with black GIs were not all from the fringes of society. A 1949 survey of 600 German mothers with black occupation children described 134 as upper class and 180 as middle class. Sixty-two had been married and living with cuckolded husbands at the time of their relationships (imagine the German rightoid memes they would’ve made about the men coming back from the Eastern Front if they’d had Twitter back then). Some expressed a desire to marry the black fathers of their children, indicating those men weren’t complete losers. Many of the black soldiers did try to get married, but they had to receive permission from the military, which rejected them at higher rates than white soldiers.

It’s possible that Flynn is correct that the blacks who suffered from venereal diseases were lower IQ, often getting infected by visiting prostitutes. But those who fathered children might have been smarter and more commonly in long-term relationships, sometimes with higher-class women, which would have required that they be impressive enough to overcome deeply entrenched prejudices. These populations do not have to be the same.

A 1956 West German government report found 67,753 out-of-wedlock children of occupying forces, of which 37,261 were American-produced. An unpublished tabulation from the same census shows that 3,491 children among the latter group were colored. Among American occupation children with unmarried parents, then, 9% had black fathers. But, as we’ve seen, blacks sometimes had more trouble getting permission to marry German women, so the percentage of American fathers who were black was certainly less than 9%, since here we are not counting those who married the mothers of their children. Regardless, black men having children with German women was quite common.

As for the characteristics of the women themselves, it’s possible that those who had black partners were smarter on average, as people with a greater openness to violating social norms in a liberal direction sometimes are. Or they could’ve been dumber, for the reason that having a black partner in a racist society makes one’s life more difficult, and women who do this might be bad at foreseeing the consequences of their actions. Eyferth tried to control for social class and other characteristics of the mothers, but that doesn’t mean we can dismiss the idea of a selection effect.

The Eyferth study still fascinates those interested in the race and IQ debate because it is the rare cross-racial behavioral genetics paper that cuts pretty directly against the hereditarian hypothesis. In nearly every other case, it’s the environmentalists who need to come up with reasons why the results didn’t come out as they expected. It is too bad that the Eyferth study is the product of a unique historical moment, meaning that it can’t be replicated, and there are too many unknowns to draw strong conclusions about what it tells us. Nonetheless, for those who dislike the implications of hereditarianism, it can’t be totally dismissed and therefore remains standing as a beacon of hope.

A more recent survey from December 2024 presents this figure.

At the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of concern, the probabilities of extinction or extreme disempowerment are 1%, 10%, and 25%. Yet a quarter of researchers estimate the odds to be higher, all the way up to 100%.

What is a non-expert supposed to do with these numbers? Generally, when there is an expert consensus, you can probably trust it. But here, the data is telling us that the field can’t agree on anything.

When experts are giving you a range of literally <1% to 100% on a question, it indicates that people are talking past one another, and they lack agreed upon methods to determine how to draw conclusions about an issue.

With a distribution like this, I don’t think you can just take the mean or median and consider that a reasonable guess. There’s a difference between a 10% probability of doom in which the vast majority of specialists are between 5% and 15% – in which case I’d be inclined to trust the experts – and one where the estimates are all over the place.

Instead of looking at experts in AI, we might ask what the superforecasters think. A report from the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) explains how, between June and October 2022, the organization brought together 80 specialists on long-run existential risk and 89 forecasters with a history of accurate predictions.

What’s interesting here is that domain-level experts were more worried across the board. At the median, experts thought that there was a 20% chance of a catastrophic risk by 2100, which meant at least 10% of humans dying within any 5-year period, compared to 9% for superforecasters. Experts at the median gave a 6% chance of human extinction by 2100, which is defined as fewer than 5,000 people alive. For superforecasters, the number was 1%.

The chart below shows the distribution of answers for superforecasters, AI experts, experts in other domains, and a public survey on the question of AI catastrophic risk.

We see the superforecasters not only having a lower estimate, but clustering much closer together.

This report was from 2022, which was a very long time ago in terms of AI capabilities. But things haven’t changed that much among superforecasters. As of mid-2026, superforecasters thought that there was a 2.4% chance of an AI catastrophe by 2100, as defined above, compared to 5% for experts. Respondents were asked about their estimates depending on whether AI progress was fast or slow by 2030, with the results shown below. Note again how the experts have such wide confidence intervals, compared to the superforecasters.

Note that experts here are not all specialists in AI. They are described as “44 computer scientists, 37 industry professionals, 45 economists, and 68 research staff at policy think tanks.” If you look at the median estimates for catastrophic AI risk by 2100 for each group, you get the following:

Computer scientists — 8%

Policy experts — 7%

AI industry professionals — 3%

Economists — 3%

The estimates of doom among the best forecasters are much higher at Metaculus, though it depends on how the question is framed. Metaculus uses a weighted median based on each participant’s most recent update. Among pro forecasters, as of this writing we find a 36% chance of a catastrophe from any cause in which humanity suffers an at least 10% population decline within a 5-year span by 2100. Conditional on such a catastrophe happening, they give a 67% chance it results from AI. And if we get an AI catastrophe, the pro forecasters say there is a 72% chance that we see an at least 95% population decline.

Multiplying those three probabilities together, you get 0.36 x 0.67 x 0.72 = 0.17 as a probability that AI reduces the number of humans by at least 95%.

At the same time, however, if you ask whether humans will go extinct by 2100, pro forecasters only give a 7.5% probability.

Obviously, it is impossible for the odds of human extinction due to AI to be higher than the odds of human extinction for any reason. There could be a logical reason for the disparity, since all humans going extinct is different from an at least 95% population decline. So perhaps pro forecasters think there is an approximately 10% chance that we lose 95% of humans but that there are a few survivors. I doubt this is the case, and it’s more likely that framing effects explain the results.

It’s worth noting here that the Metaculus community as a whole is much less pessimistic than the pro forecasters. All users of the site give a 3% chance of extinction from any cause, and an implied 4.3% chance of an at least 95% population decline as a result of AI. That puts them close to the FRI forecasters.

When it comes to the most successful users of Metaculus, however, no matter which estimate we use, they think doom is much more likely than those affiliated with FRI. The table below shows the most recent estimates for each group discussed so far.

The difference between 2.4% and 7%-17% is quite large. And the gap is not driven by recent news events, as the pro forecasters at Metaculus have consistently thought that there was a higher risk of extinction or catastrophe going back to 2022, though the gap has grown over time. Note also that the table likely underestimates the current difference between FRI forecasters and AI experts, given that the survey of the latter was in late 2024.

Why is there so much disagreement between these various groups? The best explanation is probably sociological. Metaculus grew out of the rationalist community, where people are obsessed with the idea of doom. Meanwhile, the Forecasting Research Institute is rooted in Phil Tetlock’s academic work on expertise and making predictions, which has been a project of academic psychologists and economists from the beginning.

We’ve already seen that China is less fearful of doom, likely due to that country not having as much of a rationalist subculture, and not being as afraid of the future or as pessimistic about technology. Now, we can see that, in the United States, there are large differences even among people who are considered high-quality forecasters, based on their connections to the rationalist community.

Again, maybe the rationalists are right. But they have a unique view on this topic and have had trouble convincing other smart people to take the threat of misalignment anywhere near as seriously as they do. They’re having more success in the court of public opinion, but this is not surprising, as voters are very dumb and anxious, and always put ridiculously high estimates on nightmare scenarios. AI experts are also pretty close to the rationalists at Metaculus in their estimates, but I think that the overlap between the categories of “AI experts who answer surveys on AI” and “rationalists” is quite large.

So who should you trust? One of the main lessons to come out of Tetlock’s work is that the best generalist forecasters are usually better at telling the future than domain-specific experts, even when it comes to those experts’ areas of study. This is because forecasting itself is its own science that requires a unique way of thinking, and a person having a great deal of knowledge about a field is no guarantee that they have good epistemological habits. If you’re going to ask, for example, whether American democracy is falling apart, an expert might start by making a superficial comparison between the modern US and the Weimar Republic. Someone with a forecasting mindset would be more likely to begin with a question like “how often do advanced democracies slide into dictatorships?” The answer is not very often.

Based on Tetlock’s work, and without a good reason to think otherwise, I would tend to trust the superforecasters more than the AI experts. The fact that, as mentioned before, AI expert estimates are all over the place, seems to indicate that they are even less trustworthy than experts in other domains, at least on this question. I doubt that if you asked economists about the odds of a recession in the next few years, you would get that large of a range. Then again, the Metaculus crowd complicates things, since their selected superforecasters are much more pessimistic than the FRI crowd.

I have no strong feelings here, and will therefore say that a good guess for the probability of doom is probably somewhere between 2% and 17%. On the one hand, you have both the Chinese and Tetlock-affiliated superforecasters not really treating misalignment as an existential problem. On the other, I tend to trust rationalists and think highly of their judgment on most issues, since they tend to be for things like genetic engineering and assisted suicide. So who knows?

Here, someone might say that it doesn’t matter where we land, and that a risk of either 2% or 17% is too high. That would be true if AI didn’t have a chance to be a transformational technology. If the payoff to superintelligence is that we cure most diseases and all live like billionaires, then where exactly your estimate falls within that range could determine which path you think we should take.

I would go with base rates, and this is probably how most non-expert superforecasters are thinking. A base rate analysis says:

1. Humans have never gone extinct.

2. Since perhaps the Black Death in the fourteenth century, our species has never even come close to suffering a disaster on the scale of 10% of humanity dying over five years, or a 10% population decline, which are the two definitions used for catastrophic risk in the forecasts cited above. And the Black Death was hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution started us on the path of sustained economic growth, since which large die-offs as a share of the human population have become even rarer.

3. New market-based technologies are almost always good.

That’s what we know. Most other analysis seems to be speculation based on mood affiliation, no matter how close individuals are to AI technology.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here. If you apply, make sure to use the links provided here so I can receive credit, and name me as a reference in the process.

One way to get around this is through cross-adoption studies. If children from culture A are adopted into culture B, we can just look at what happens in their lives and see which group they end up m…

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Most intellectuals tend to prefer more structural theories. Globalization, capitalism, and the state of technology are pointed to as explanations for political developments. These things obviously matter. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, we can often look back and see how one individual can have an outsized influence. World War II is unthinkable without Hitler, whose unique charisma and appetite for risk brought the Nazis to power, and whose radical instincts in foreign policy were opposed at key moments by his own generals. Stephen Kotkin in his biographies of Stalin has shown how the Soviet dictator’s ideological radicalism was behind the purges under his regime and the ruthless drive toward collectivization.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here.

Trump has probably had about as much influence on the politics and culture of an advanced democracy as a single individual possibly can. It’s often been remarked on how he has shifted Republican views on topics like Vladimir Putin and free trade, and how in general he has made the GOP more downscale and working-class, though outside of trade and immigration actual Republican policies have not changed as much as the rhetoric might suggest.

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