I have a good friend who is upset that I am critical of Kirk because he was in their mind a good person, but we all live our lives a certain way, and I consider his mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, tribalism, and white nationalism to be an important factor in making the modern right what it is. There’s no clearer, or more ironic, demonstration of this than his promotion of Tucker Carlson.

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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.

Michael joins me on the livestream to talk about Steinem and her legacy. I had mixed feelings reading Michael’s article. On the one hand, what happened with the Satanic Panic was truly depressing. At the same time, I had thought we were unusually stupid today, and yet nothing of the last few decades compares to putting people on trial over allegations that a random daycare was ritually abusing children. Michael argues that moral panics like this take off when we get buy-in from both conservative bumpkins and liberal elites, which we saw in the 1980s and again today with the Epstein hysteria.

We touch a bit on Lindsey Clancy, a case I’ve tried not to pay attention to because it’s too depressing. We reflect a bit on the political reaction to the case, which I find more worth discussing. See here for the video that upset rightoids, which we talked about during the stream. We close with a preview of my article on the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, out tomorrow.

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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Pro-side: Immigrants are good for the economy.

Anti-side: But they commit crimes, use welfare, vote for the wrong policies, and change the culture.

Pro: Just punish the criminals, take away immigrants’ right to vote, require assimilation, and don’t let them go on welfare. These are called keyhole solutions.

Anti: That’s unrealistic.

The average GDP per capita in Haiti, adjusted for PPP, is about $3,200 a year, while the typical income of a household headed by a Haitian-American is $72,000 a year. These figures are not directly comparable, but we know that a Haitian coming to America massively improves their living standards. A person working a job is also good for Americans. Some say that immigrants suppress the wages of natives or take away employment opportunities, but I’ve shown that these are very stupid arguments, and you should never take seriously anyone who invokes “wage competition” or “protecting jobs” as a reason to oppose immigration, free trade, or the deployment of new technologies.

Yet while the purely economic case against immigration can be cast aside as degrowther nonsense, other restrictionist arguments have more merit. Immigrants do in fact sometimes fail to assimilate, vote for left-wing parties, commit crimes, and use welfare. The restrictionist side assumes that the people we let in will either always have the exact same rights as everyone else, or they will be kept out.

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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.

Imagine that when we tested cars for safety, we got rid of the seatbelts, airbags, sensors, automatic braking, and stability control. We then find that cars kill a lot of crash test dummies under these scenarios, and the lesson that people take away from this is that cars are inherently unsafe products.

This is pretty analogous to what’s happening with most of the more concerning AI security incidents. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be worried at all, but it does suggest that some of the coverage may be too alarmist.

A second consideration that makes me think we’re being too pessimistic is that groundbreaking technologies, setting aside medical and health discoveries, practically always come with risk, and those risks usually manifest themselves quickly. As soon as cars, airplanes and railroads were invented and deployed, to say nothing of nuclear weapons and guns, people died.

In laboratory conditions, we now have examples of AIs lying, hacking, and cheating. Yet through all this, the number of people actively harmed by misaligned AI agents in the real world is approximately zero, and so is the number of serious attempts, though it is true that humans have deliberately used them for malicious ends. One possible counterexample I’ve found is the MJ Rathbun/OpenClaw incident, where a guy created an autonomous coding agent with a combative personality and very little human supervision that published a personalized attack on a person who rejected its proposed code changes. Given the way the agent was configured, it is hardly a clean example of a normally deployed AI spontaneously becoming misaligned.

Yes, there have been a few suicides, but these are generally freak incidents that are difficult to link directly to chatbots. The harms of AI aren’t even close to what you see with social media. So far as we know, AIs have never autonomously stolen money or financial assets. Maybe they’re not smart or persistent enough to do this yet. But there are a lot of AIs out there being deployed, and you would think that by now some system would try to engage in real-life aggression on its own, beyond hacking incidents that have caused little actual harm.

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This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is going fine for now, but they’re trying to make sure that we stay on the right path. 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.

But “cheap” is not always bad. Should you buy a cheap car or an expensive one? Get a cheap or expensive haircut? Obviously it depends on your financial situation and what your preferences are. Some people really care about driving a nice car, while others don’t. Some can afford to buy a Mercedes and others can’t.

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When I think about why I didn’t read Frederick Douglass’ biography until now, part of the answer is that I basically never read anything in school, even what was assigned. Still, I’ve read a lot of books over the years, and I was never inspired to pick this one up. It’s kind of strange, though, since Douglass was the most prominent black intellectual of the nineteenth century, and I knew that he had been born a slave before escaping, so the story would obviously be of interest.

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That was 68 years ago. Jung was looking around and saying, “Gee, there are so many cameras in the world! Americans really love taking pictures. And not a single good one of a UFO? Really?”

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I haven’t done a mailbag in a while. So, if you’re a paid subscriber, leave your questions below and I will get to them before long.

While in San Francisco recently, I met a physicist named Joe Finberg, who runs Laurelin Technologies, a nuclear fusion startup. Right now, there is rapidly increasing demand for energy (you may have heard of this new thing called “data centers”), and projects can take years to connect to the grid. Laurelin is trying to get around that problem by building a fusion generator that can go on a shipping container and be bought directly for about $5 million, with no grid connection necessary. The company has published a schedule of tests it has to pass to prove the machine works, with results going public no matter the outcome.

They’re currently trying to raise $3 million at a $15 million valuation, and plan to have a prototype in three months. If you’re interested in investing or learning more about the company, reach out to me through Substack direct messages.

1. An article that takes a look back on the progress we’ve made in curing disease, and talks about what comes next. One of the things that anti-aging activists argue is that living longer by curing individual diseases is really like trying to drain the ocean with a bucket, because the risks of all diseases increase so much as you get older. Therefore, we should get a handle on what aging is and how to reverse it. That’s fine as an argument, but working on curing individual diseases seems to add up over time. Between 2013 and 2023, for example, life expectancy in Europe went up 1.7 years. Covid likely suppressed our gains; the ten years before that saw 3.7 years added. Extend life by 2-4 years each decade, and we’re talking about real gains over time, though obviously there’s probably some limit we’re going to run into without breakthroughs in anti-aging. Even without that though, progress is still happening. We have gotten way too pessimistic.

2. Cremieux takes issue with my theory about Therapy Culture making liberals more mentally ill. His argument is that, since the correlational matrix of things associated with mental illness looks similar across liberals and conservatives, if something was making liberals more mentally ill it would change the correlational matrix in ways we could find. I’m not convinced, because this seems like it would prove too much and rule out just about anything “explaining” the gap between conservatives and liberals other than selection. It seems plausible to me that there is some underlying trait of mental illness/unhappiness, and belief in Therapy Culture shifts the average while keeping the correlations relatively constant. It’s true that I wouldn’t expect the correlations to remain exactly the same, though I need to do some research to find if there are subtle differences we can see. I would be very surprised if there weren’t.

This post is sponsored by Mechanize. They are hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Research Engineer ($500K base pay), Recruiter ($200K), Growth Manager ($250K), Interns ($150/hr), and legal counsel ($400K). You can even “build your own role.” 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.

3. ACX book review contest entry on The Epic of Gilgamesh. I had heard of this story, knew that it came from an ancient Mesopotamian civilization, and that it included a great flood that influenced the Old Testament, but that was about it. The historical timelines are so vast here as to be difficult to fathom. The story was first written about a millennium before The Odyssey was composed. Comparing the two stories, it’s striking how much they both rely on a very emotionally dense form of male friendship that seems at least somewhat gay in our eyes. Were all the ancients homos? Are we perhaps all homos in cultures that don’t explicitly prohibit it? There is a lot of comparing the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu to one between a man and woman.

This question led me down a rabbit hole, which involved mostly talking to ChatGPT, with the results here. It informed me that the poem is elsewhere explicit about fornication between men and women, and that we just don’t see it when it comes to Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

I had the thought that maybe the authors of the text saw male-female penetration as worth mentioning as an important act, but that guys doing gay stuff is just bros being bros. When I asked ChatGPT about this, it said nope, Mesopotamian literature did refer to explicit male-male sex in other contexts. “Legal and omen texts mention male–male anal intercourse directly, often focusing on which man penetrated and which was placed in the socially subordinate role. So homosexual acts were not simply an invisible, linguistically unmarked form of ordinary male friendship.” Moreover, since they cared a lot about who exactly was penetrated, having gay sex in a friendship of two male equals would create awkwardness in the Gilgamesh narrative.

This led to my next question, which was whether perhaps my theory applies to sexual acts not including anal penetration. Was bros mutually jacking each other off maybe something so normal it was not worth mentioning? At that point, I was informed there is a translation of a tablet where the ghost of Enkidu refers to “the crotch that you touched” while speaking to Gilgamesh. But that isn’t the only interpretation of that line.

This is why we need data centers.

4. Marijuana is more like cigarettes than alcohol, that is, a high percentage of users are daily or near-daily users. It appears that increasing legalization has had public health consequences well beyond what most people expected, with the percentage of Americans using more than doubling to 15% over the last decade. Is this perhaps a cause of the rise of figures like Rogan and Tucker? If pot makes you paranoid and stupid, then doubling the number of users in the country would be good for conspiracy theorist podcasters.

5. Why is sociology so politicized? Here the comparison is made to economics, where you start with the individual and try to build a theory from there. Sociology does the opposite, starting with “society” as the unit of analysis, which gives the researcher the freedom to basically argue whatever he wants. Over time, dynamics within fields become self-reinforcing, with the people interested in understanding the world and doing the hard work required involving quantitative analysis going into economics, and those who want the prestige of being an academic while doing political activism becoming sociologists. I’m all for broad theorizing, but it needs to be grounded in big facts about the world, and sociology has ignored many of the most useful among them. Political science I’ve always seen as midway between the two fields, having elements and subfields that are more like economics and others that are more like sociology.

6. Adam Mastroianni: Incentives are for losers. I agree that people who simply respond to material incentives tend to have something missing inside of them. I don’t know about this part though:

It took me a long time to understand this. In my early 20s, when I was at the bottom of every ladder that I aspired to ascend, I assumed the people at the top of those ladders must be pretty great. How wise these incentive-maxxers must be, how cool and smart, to have the things that everybody else wants!

But over the years, as I had the opportunity to meet some of these captains of industry, these Grand Pooh-Bahs and Distinguished Scholars, I’ve realized how wrong I was. They only seemed enviable because I was looking at them from a distance, so all I could see was what they had. Up close, when you can see what they are, it becomes clear that only a few of these ladder-toppers are indeed wise and cool. More often, they’re sniveling little twerps. They’re spiritually chinless. They have no convictions, no passions, no purpose other than ladder-climbing. It’s sad to watch them, these people who have everything except the one thing that actually matters.

My experience has been the opposite. The higher up you go, the more passionate and authentic people tend to be. We’re talking averages here. The idea that “elites all suck” is a cope. One might make an exception for academia, which is largely a meaningless status game that is hard to justify by appealing to higher principles, so it gets a more superficial kind of person rising to the top.

But most who are highly successful are not simply “responding to incentives.” That’s what the guy at the office who just wants to go home early on Friday to beat traffic is doing. Those who get far in life often have an inner drive that compels them to work to do great things. Politicians and major intellectuals, for example, are in my experience way more passionate about ideas than the typical educated American.

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White Southerners understood the Negro and in large measure loved him. They realized that the agitation rending the South originated with organized white minorities in conjunction with mixed-bloods well over on the white side of the spectrum. They deplored the deterioration this agitation was producing in existing race relations in the blacker South. Yet they could scarcely bring themselves to hurt their own. The South, after generations of experience, had developed customs and a way of life with the Negro that took his limitations into consideration with a minimum of friction and a maximum of kindness. It was entirely against these customs, these adaptations, openly to analyze and publicize the reasons for them.

Segregationists didn’t completely avoid race science arguments in all contexts. Putnam’s book itself became popular, and was even endorsed by Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Richard Russell of Georgia. Around this time, the governor of Alabama commissioned a study on race differences in intelligence to be used in desegregation cases, and the resulting work was a 1962 book called The Biology of the Race Problem, written by a UNC anatomist named Wesley Critz George.

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The public wants government to tell firms what to charge for products and services, but elites of both major parties almost never do this. Why? Well, politicians are much smarter than the public and listen to experts who tell them that if you implement price controls, you’ll get shortages. Leaders might care about the well-being of the country, or they might be completely self-interested and not want to deal with the backlash from people not being able to find the products that they’re used to buying. Either way, the result is you end up with policy outcomes that are superior to what you would get if politicians just did what the voters wanted.

Interestingly, autocracies seem more willing to shield consumers from high oil prices, though the evidence is mixed: one IMF study of fuel-price pass-through in developing countries finds the political variables pointing that way without reaching significance. As I point out in Kakistocracy, authoritarians have less legitimacy on account of not being elected, so will often make up for it by acting more in accordance with public opinion than democratic leaders do. Dictators also tend to be dumb compared to elected officials, and in many cases may simply not have access to the information that would let them know that price controls are counterproductive.

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The fact that authoritarians try to be popular too is something critics of democracy often miss. A dictator also has political constraints. It’s not as simple as “the people are dumb, so let’s have a smart guy make all the decisions instead.” Abolish democracy, and you’ll still have to deal with political realities and humans as they exist.

I’ve thought about this in the context of the debate on AI data centers. According to the latest polls, 75% of Americans would oppose one being built near where they live, which is higher than for any other form of infrastructure, including coal plants. And it’s not just a matter of NIMBYism. Sixty-three percent of voters support a data center moratorium of at least one year. In a survey taken last year, Americans were five times more likely to say that they were concerned than excited about the use of the technology in daily life, tied with Canada for the worst ratio of twenty-five countries polled.

Jasmine Sun has been reporting on data center opposition in a sympathetic light, but her work is unconvincing if the goal is to make these activists look reasonable. They seem paranoid and unable to think rationally about costs and benefits. Sun quotes the activists on things that might go wrong for a community when a data center is built, but there is nothing to indicate that they are rationally balancing the probabilities of positive and negative outcomes. In one case, there is useless land sitting there that can be turned into a source of revenue for a Wisconsin community, with the developer picking up a $30 million tab for the cleanup of contaminated soil, and Sun notes that activists would rather the whole area remain a toxic slab of concrete.

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I think this worldview is deeply naive about empirical realities. For Americans to propose new costly welfare programs is like a guy who is going bankrupt, and has additional expenses coming down the line that will make his financial situation much worse, thinking about how to begin an expensive new project of remodeling his house. We don’t have the financial flexibility, and this doesn’t depend on who exactly gets into office in the coming years.

Our financial future is largely set based on decisions that were made long before most Americans were born. Social Security and Medicare were established in 1935 and 1965 respectively. In 1970, they made up a combined 19% of the federal budget. Now, the number is about twice that. And if you don’t include the cost of interest on the debt, without major restructuring Social Security and Medicare will likely be over half of all federal spending within two decades.

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I’ve actually been getting jealous of all the Nathan hate. At least someone sent me this, informing me that I was “catching strays,” as the kids say.

We should all applaud Nathan’s bravery. But the fact that he has become the face of the anti-Arday movement has something to teach us about the fundamental, unbreakable nature of the race/IQ taboo, which people seem to have trouble understanding correctly.

In the two and a half years since I wrote “Shut Up about Race and IQ,” it seems that every other taboo enforced by the left has become weaker, including the one on open racism. This is the culture of the Based Ritual. You’ll find major conservative figures arguing that women should be housewives, vaccines don’t work, authoritarians like Franco were great, and we should deport 100 million imaginary people. On the trans issue in particular, there was a major vibe shift that began the moment Elon took over Twitter, which I predicted would happen at the time. But race and IQ remains forbidden territory. Sure, Trump may refer to Somalis as “low IQ” and that can titillate the racists, but the only people who focus on group differences in intelligence and make it regular to their messaging are generally figures who remain fringe.

Free speech was enough to make trans activists into laughingstocks. But you got your free speech to talk about race and IQ, and here we are still seeing the race science crowd making the exact same arguments as they’ve been making since at least the 1960s without getting anywhere.

Why does there remain a sense among people across the political spectrum that this taboo must be maintained, or at least is not worth fighting against? Most standard explanations are unconvincing. For example, in the top comment to my article on race science, someone noted that “most normies would find hereditarianism more palatable if they understood that the bell curves overlap.” A famous writer messaged me after publication and said that she liked the piece while making a similar point.

This is a strange argument. Of course people understand overlapping bell curves. If I tell someone that I met a woman who was taller than me, people don’t respond “Impossible! That would mean overlapping bell curves. I thought all men must be taller than all women. I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

You can think of a thousand other examples. “Some kids are more mature than adults.” Not a difficult statement to accept.

If anything, people understand overlapping bell curves too well. Women are able to beat up men on TV much more often than they can in real life. Audiences love a story of the triumph of a protagonist who supposedly couldn’t accomplish something based on their group characteristics, but then overcame obstacles to succeed. And a lot of people seem to not understand that if groups differ on average, then there are likely to be massive disparities at the extremes of the distribution, which is again a case of expecting bell curves to overlap too much.

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People argue against bosses sleeping with their subordinates on the grounds that such situations involve a “power imbalance.” Occasionally, they go a step further, and imply that some men are so rich and powerful that relationships with almost any woman can be presumed potentially abusive. Part of the hysteria about Jeffrey Epstein comes from the fact that many seem to assume that anyone that wealthy going out with a younger woman is somehow taking advantage of her, even though the more lurid accounts of what he was doing have never been substantiated.

All of this is completely backwards. While it is true that such relationships do have power imbalances, they’re clearly in favor of the woman.

Take the case of Eric Swalwell. One of the accusations that led to him dropping out of the California gubernatorial race was that he received oral sex from a staffer and “twice sexually assaulted her when she was too drunk to consent.”

Think about the state of affairs before Swalwell and his staffer hooked up. When going into any relationship, both parties understand that it might lead to hard feelings at a later point in time. Swalwell has to keep the affair a secret for the sake of his career and reputation. If he gets mad at his employee or she rejects his advances, he may fire her from a job that doesn’t pay all that well. In theory, he could perhaps wield his position to ruin her life in other ways, like trying to stop others from giving her a job. But usually powerful men don’t have the time or psychological incentive to do things like this. That’s simp behavior. Men who don’t have options are the ones most likely to become vengeful stalkers, while those with power can much more easily deal with rejection.

What about the woman’s perspective? Her leverage over Swalwell is much greater because he has a lot more to lose. We all saw what happened to his hopes of political advancement as a result of this affair and other indiscretions. Moreover, luckily for the woman, the media will believe and amplify her story regardless of the state of the relevant evidence or how she behaved at the time. It doesn’t matter if Swalwell has a hundred text messages of the staffer saying “I’m loving every moment of this. I happily give you my consent!!!” She is free to decide at any moment that she was a victim. Was a drunken hookup a memory she looks back on fondly or “sexual assault”? It’s up to her. No choice is final – she gets to change her answer whenever she wants. If they were both drunk, he might have sexually assaulted her. For Swalwell, being intoxicated compounds his crimes rather than excuses his behavior.

In fact, I was probably wrong when I just said that Swalwell can at least fire her if the relationship goes downhill. He has to be extra careful not to anger this woman. Swalwell should be expected to go out of his way to not treat her unfairly, knowing that she can destroy him at any time. This is true whether they have an affair or he simply makes a pass that is rejected. This might lead to a bias against other employees, though it is the woman who had the relationship who our society considers the real victim.

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Yet there is a near universal pattern in the opposite direction, as shown in a new paper by John Nye and his co-authors called “Education and Market Liberal Preferences.” Looking at World Values Survey data over the time period 1990 to 2023, they find that higher education predicts pro-market values in 95% of cases, with 77% of the country-years showing a statistically significant relationship in that direction.

Pro-market values are determined using three World Values Survey questions asking respondents to place themselves on scales concerning a) whether incomes should be made more equal; b) whether private ownership of business and industry should be increased; and c) whether competition is good because it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas. The authors combine the three into an index, coding each so that higher scores represent more pro-market views.

Below is the percent change in a pro-market direction associated with having a college degree for various countries across the last few decades.

Compared to most other places, college graduates in the US are not that much more pro-market. But note that even in America the sign is positive in four out of five years.

This is all pretty remarkable considering the state of the universities. And Nye et al. find that being more educated is associated with more pro-market views even among Russians who grew up in the Soviet Union. There is a deep connection between being more friendly to capitalism and being more educated that seems to go beyond what is taught in any particular education system. It is probably related to intelligence and openness.

By just looking at the US and the UK, we get the wrong impression about human nature, since these are unusual cases. That said, even American college graduates were more pro-market than non-college graduates as late as 2017, though just barely. Yet they still voted for Hillary.

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While some actually deny he was a plagiarist, it seems more common to acknowledge that Arday screwed up while saying that the media and conservatives on X should be condemned for paying too much attention to the story.

This reminds me of something an old professor told me when I was in graduate school. He was a historian who had grown disgusted with the direction in which academia had gone. In his class, we would dig deep into some of the work of prominent political scientists and expose the flaws in their papers and books. This was effective in puncturing the aura that surrounded high-status figures in academia, and we would wonder how they got away with producing such drivel. He told us that many academics saw their work “like a game.” You don’t care all that much if someone you know cheats in a board game. Who cares? Why start a conflict? We’ve all got a nice thing going here, and it’s better if we all just continue getting along.

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A chooses a more capitalist system, and B chooses social democracy. Let’s say that, because of this, a poor person in B is better off.

At the tenth percentile of income, assume a person in A makes 35% of the average, or $35,000 a year. In Country B, because it engages in more redistribution, the person at the tenth percentile makes 45% of the average income, so $45,000. This is unrealistically high for the difference between relatively unequal and relatively equal rich countries, as the gap between the US and Sweden is much smaller than this. But let’s just go with it.

Let’s also assume that because A is more capitalist, it has faster growth. A grows at 2% a year, compared to 1% a year for B. In per capita, PPP-adjusted terms, America has grown about an extra 1% a year compared to Italy over the last three decades, so this is not unrealistic.

Here’s what happens in each country to average income and income at the tenth percentile over the next fifty years, assuming the ratio between the two doesn’t change.

By year 26, the poor person in A ($58.6K) ends up wealthier than their counterpart in B ($58.3K). From there, the gap grows. In 50 years, the poor person in A is at $94K, compared to $74K in B. That’s ignoring what has happened to the average, which is now $269K in A and $164K in B, and of course we’re ignoring everyone doing better than average too.

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It was genuinely shocking to me how bad the arguments against the hereditarian hypothesis were in those years. Geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out that on many genetic markers there was more variation within races than between them. This somehow meant that the concept of race had “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is such a bad argument that it is now called “Lewontin’s fallacy.”

Writers like Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould tried to say that humans had separated too recently for important cognitive or behavioral differences to exist.

This can be refuted by…simply looking at human beings. Honestly, that’s all you need to do. There is obviously enough temporal separation between human races to make them appear very different. So the idea that there couldn’t be cognitive or behavioral differences was always based on the at least implicit assumption that physical features change much faster than mental traits. I’m aware of no principle of evolution that indicates that is the case. And we’ve actually seen species change in their mental traits on time scales that are much shorter than those that separate major human races.

In fact, when we breed animals for certain kinds of behavior, we usually end up changing their physical appearance too. The same is true when going in the opposite direction. Chickens selected for body weight become more aggressive. And dog behavior varies according to traits like weight and skull shape. If among animal species you see two populations that have zero overlap in physical appearance, then the odds that they would have no statistical differences on important behavioral or cognitive traits are quite low. The main reason that races diverge in physical appearance in the first place is that different environments selected for different physical features. It’s simply not credible that regions with such diverse climates wouldn’t also shape cognitive and behavioral traits. You wouldn’t expect this with any other species.

The fact that Gould and Lewontin were able to publish influential articles and books with such terrible arguments reflects how much desperation there was to refute the hereditarian hypothesis. The typical liberal found the ideas put forth by Jensen and others like him so uncomfortable that they couldn’t even stand the thought of genetic racial gaps being an open question. They needed people with fancy credentials to tell them that natural race differences were impossible.

Herrnstein died in 1994, and Jensen passed away in 2012. They left no successors. The Trump administration might claim to be bringing back free speech on university campuses, but the taboo on postulating natural racial differences in IQ is so strong that it’s one thing that is well beyond the power of the law to remedy.

And yet…science has marched on. In 2010, Svante Pääbo and his colleagues found that humans outside of Africa had 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. That same year, scientists first reported on the discovery of an archaic hominin population called Denisovans, who make up about 4-6% of the ancestry of Melanesians. Trace amounts of Denisovan heritage can be found in other modern populations including East Asians and Native Americans.

Ancestry in the 1-6% range might not seem like a lot, but even small genetic influences can have a major effect. For example, Tibetans have a Denisovan-derived genetic variant that helps in high-altitude environments, indicating that it was important in their evolutionary history. For now, scientists can only speculate regarding most traits our hominin cousins may have given to different populations.

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Now imagine that you are writing this in a country that has a colored tax. If you are black, Hispanic, etc., some part of your paycheck is taken away and given to white people. In fact, programs earmarked specifically for whites make up over a third of the federal budget. Moreover, these programs are projected to grow to the point that, in less than a decade, they will be impossible to maintain as is, and our society will have to choose some combination of tax hikes and spending cuts as a result.

I would think that in such a situation, cutting white entitlements should be your main issue. But Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America doesn’t take that route when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. Rather, despite pages and pages explaining how the elderly are too wealthy relative to the young, he believes that entitlements need to be expanded.

The reasons he gives for this highlight the extent to which his book about “gerontocracy” is not ultimately about redistributing resources and power by age, but socialism. When anti-gerontocracy and anti-capitalism conflict, as in what to do about Social Security and Medicare, hostility to individual liberty and markets tends to win, although YIMBYism is an exception to this. One must ensure that when we dispossess old people, it has to be done in the service of building a more collectivist society where government takes a larger role in providing care, meeting people’s needs, and placing limits on the control private individuals have over resources.

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Tucker Carlson is outraged, having made resistance to Flock cameras one of the messages he prints out on the hats he sells for allowing his fans to broadcast their low socioeconomic status. Groups that are worth taking more seriously, like the Institute for Justice and the ACLU, have also expressed concerns. How much should we worry? And where should we come down in this particular iteration of the old debate of liberty versus security?

Flock Cameras Likely Explain the Recent Crime Collapse

On the plus side of this technology, a 2023 study from the company itself estimated that Flock cameras are used in solving 700K crimes each year, or approximately 10% of all reported crime in the US. This study involved surveying law enforcement agencies that were Flock customers, ending up with 123 respondents that provided data researchers considered adequate for analysis. They were asked “How many arrests have you made that can directly be attributed to the use of a Flock Safety camera?” and asked to provide corresponding case records.

From there, the authors make broader estimates of society at large. More recent research from Flock boasts about last year seeing 1,000,000 “cases supported” and helping to locate approximately 10,000 missing persons. The company estimates that its technology was involved in roughly one in five cases cleared in its customer jurisdictions.

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