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.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents….

Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

Read the whole thing here.

And if you don’t believe me, here’s Charlie Kirk yucking it up with Tucker, the guy who couldn’t even wait until his memorial was over to begin spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about his death.

Looking back, I consider 2020 election denial to have been an important watershed in what happened to American conservatism. There have always been false narratives floating around, but the events of 2020-2021 meant that a conspiracy theory – one built around protecting the ego of and demonstrating loyalty to one man – regarding a plain historical fact became a litmus test in Republican politics. Nobody can say Biden was legitimately elected and also work in the administration or become a major conservative media figure, which is different from other conspiracy theories out there because this one requires regular affirmative support, along with a policy agenda that goes with it. This brought people who were most comfortable with an authoritarian cult of personality more into the Trump orbit, and destroyed the influence of the kinds of traditional Republicans who largely served in his first term, with Mike Pence being the most obvious example.

Before researching this article, I had forgotten what a key figure Kirk was in Stop the Steal. Subsequent events would show that he made the right bet for the sake of his own influence. Despite the tragic nature of his death, it’s important to say plainly that the moral and intellectual decline of the American Right is a direct result of choices Charlie Kirk made.

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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?”

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

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.

Read more

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

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.

This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers to the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.

Subscribe now

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.

Both of our major political parties are being overtaken by virulent strains of populism. On the right, MAGA has normalized corruption, misinformation, and open bigotry. On the Democratic side, avowed socialists have been winning primaries, bringing closer to power politicians whose agendas pose a distinct threat to the country’s long-term economic health.

No single factor caused this deterioration. But one contributor has been the tendency of politicians and intellectuals who should know better to place partisan interests above the greater good. We cannot criticize the crazy people on our own side, the thinking goes, without giving the opposition an advantage and helping it gain power.

Escaping this undesirable state of affairs will require leadership, along with concrete steps to build reciprocal trust across the political aisle. Toward that end, I have a simple proposal: Nationally prominent Republicans should reject Ken Paxton and support James Talarico in the Texas Senate race. At the same time, Democrats should reject Abdul El-Sayed and support Mike Rogers. Members of each party should do this in the context of creating a bipartisan movement of politicians, activists, intellectuals, and donors that is both clear-eyed about political realities and optimistic that we can make things better

Luckily, prediction markets and prognosticators consider each race a toss-up, meaning no party would gain a clear advantage from such a movement. If both efforts succeeded, Republicans and Democrats would simply exchange one seat apiece while preventing two unusually bad candidates from entering the Senate.

Paxton is a generationally corrupt politician. In 2023, the Texas House impeached him by a vote of 121–23—a bipartisan majority that included more than 70 percent of House Republicans—over allegations that he abused his office to assist a wealthy donor and retaliated against whistleblowers who reported him. He stayed in office after Donald Trump took an interest in the story and pressured Republicans to vote to acquit him in the Senate

Meanwhile, in nominating El-Sayed, Michigan Democrats have selected a candidate on the party’s far-left edge. He has repeatedly campaigned with Hasan Piker, a socialist streamer who called Mao Zedong “one of the great leaders of this world” and defended Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea as justifiable.

Partisans will find much to dislike about Talarico and Rogers. But neither has revealed himself to be remotely as corrupt as Paxton or shown El-Sayed’s willingness to embrace radical left-wing economic policies and align himself with apologists for authoritarianism.

The parties could continue fighting for control of the Senate everywhere else on the map. Rather than gambling on winning both races and risking the election of both Paxton and El-Sayed, each side would accept one victory and one defeat.

Of course, it would be foolish to expect every Republican or Democrat to sign on to such a plan. But it would take only a few prominent political figures from each side to turn their effort into a major national story.

One problem our politics has faced in recent years has been the difficulty of inspiring moderate and independent voters who are sick of partisanship, corruption, and politicians embracing the most odious figures on the left and right. A Rogers–Talarico bargain could give those voters something to believe in. And because both races are competitive, there is a plausible chance that such a movement could tip each contest toward the more acceptable candidate.

This path would, of course, involve risk. What if Republican-leaning voters in Texas did the right thing and rejected Paxton while Michigan Democrats didn’t, or vice versa? Any political figure who endorses a member of the opposing party while control of the Senate hangs in the balance would be opening themselves up to attacks from within their coalition. Still, some leaders and intellectuals might see an advantage in betting on a future politics that is less acrimonious and destructive than what we have now.

The combination of these two terrible candidates and their being involved in two similarly competitive races creates a rare opportunity. If either contest were a blowout, there would be little possibility of a positive-sum arrangement that placed the interests of the country above those of either party.

Seizing the opportunity now provided will require real leadership. If American politics ever moves in a healthier direction, the nation will be deeply indebted to those who showed courage during an era in which it was conspicuously absent.

To call each race a toss-up might be a bit of an exaggeration, at least in Michigan. On Kalshi, Paxton has a 54% chance as I write this, and El-Sayed is at 62%. So the bargain would very slightly favor Republicans, but it’s close enough that neither side is taking a huge risk here. I don’t see why a few people couldn’t start on this cross-endorsement thing, and then it could snowball. It’s risky at the individual level, but not so much that I would put it in the impossible category. The more people do it, the more cover they have.

In other “Country over Party” news, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs is apparently going to pick James Giles, a Republican former mayor of Mesa, to run alongside her. This is timely, coming on the heels of my article on what has happened to Arizona Republicans. Giles was already a critic of MAGA, so it’s not that radical of a step, but still notable and interesting. Hobbs is running against Andy Biggs, who was one of only 12 members of the House to vote against giving Congressional Gold Medals to US Capitol Police over what happened on January 6. That means he’s at the extreme end of the pro-insurrectionist spectrum, even within the Republican Party. We need more gestures like this.

I’ve never actually watched The West Wing, which ran on NBC from 1999 to 2006, but the show has remained famous for its idealistic portrayal of politics. I just had a funny thought that I should livestream myself watching the show and reacting to it, so look forward to that.

Temperamentally and politically, I’m not really a moderate. I’d like a world much different than the one we have. But I’ve realized that practical politics has to at this moment involve a defense of the establishment, since any attempt to use populism to remake society will take us further away from the kind of country I want to live in. This is because public opinion is really awful, especially if you weigh the views of individuals by intensity, which is what matters most in practice. The median voter is actually better than the more mobilized part of the public, since El-Sayed and Paxton will each underperform for their state. Both Democrat and Republican primary voters are currently behaving irresponsibly because these are the most engaged electorates, and being engaged in politics now increasingly means spending a lot of time on the internet and indulging in false narratives and the kinds of hatreds that often drive mass movements.

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.

Despite this clear and straightforward fact, I’ve rarely seen anyone make an obvious argument that seems to follow from it: men should get preferences in jobs, and probably other things that involve material status like inheritance.

This is because a dollar is worth a lot more to a man than a woman, in the same way that it matters more to a poor person than a rich person. The latter fact is used to justify economic redistribution, and the logic seems equally sound when comparing the sexes.

When it comes to buying goods in a store, a dollar is equally valuable in the pocket of an individual of either sex. But it does more to contribute to a man’s social position and future prospects of starting a family.

There’s even evidence that couples are least stable when the woman earns more than the man. A Swedish study of lottery winners showed that men who won were more likely to get married and have children, while married women who won got divorced at nearly double the baseline rate. This means that if you are choosing between a male and female employee, giving the man the job is more likely to create a family, while giving the woman the job might destroy one.

Usually, arguments that rely on the idea of job competition rest on economic illiteracy. You should never restrict immigration, free trade, or the deployment of new technologies on the grounds of labor competition, although you may have other reasons for taking these positions. Destroying jobs is how progress happens. Labor competition can drive wages down and even put people out of work in the short run, but there is no other way to improve living standards. We’re all better off when we think about how to make society more productive rather than see jobs as scarce goods that we need to distribute fairly.

But here, there are potentially positive sum outcomes to society giving jobs to males over females. Doing so can lead to more sexual attraction in the world, more coupling, and more families. In theory, it is basically the equivalent of waving a magic wand and making all women more physically attractive to the opposite sex, but doing it for men instead, who are judged less based on looks and more on relative wealth and status.

Here, you might be saying that mate preferences will change to account for new technological developments. That always happens to some extent, but one of the key lessons of evolutionary psychology is that people in modern societies continue to operate using behavioral modules that are no longer adaptive.

For example, men like big breasts. The evolutionary reason for this is that boobs indicate sexual maturity, fertility, and necessary energy reserves. Someone may be tempted to argue that, these days, everyone has sufficient calories and baby formula has already been invented, so men should stop prioritizing breast size. But attraction doesn’t work like that. Even if the object of attraction is no longer as good a signal for reproductive success, women are still rational to get breast implants.

Likewise, female preferences can’t just “get with the times” because we’ve achieved greater sexual equality in the economic realm. Women’s attraction to those with more resources and status than themselves is as hardwired as men’s attraction to breasts. When a male earns more money than a woman and has a more desirable job, she is more likely to want to partner with him. It does little good to tell her “Stop caring so much about money! That’s just caveman values talking. Today, you don’t actually need a man to support you.” We don’t choose what we’re attracted to. Instead of adjusting their desires to take into account modern conditions, a lot of people will simply end up not partnering up.

It seems that a lot of right-wing economic populism, of the type represented by groups like American Compass and politicians like JD Vance, is about trying to create a world where men have higher status than women, with the implicit assumption that this will lead to more family formation. Hence, they prefer an economy that creates more manufacturing jobs, where men tend to have an advantage, over one with more service jobs, where women do relatively better. The problem here is that government central planning is difficult enough to do when you are directly shooting for a particular outcome. Trying to remake the economy as you’re hiding your ultimate motivations from others and not explicitly pursuing your real goal – in this case increasing relative male status – is even less likely to succeed. This is why right-wing economic populism simply makes everyone poorer without doing anything for family formation.

In his 2022 Senate campaign, Blake Masters would show how based he was by talking about how it should be possible to support a family on a single salary, while usually not specifying which sex would be the one working. This argument made no sense. Objectively, you can definitely live a 1950s lifestyle on one salary today without much problem. But most women are not going to marry you if that’s all you can provide. I’m often extremely hard on right-wing economic populists despite agreeing with some of their social goals because I think that by refusing to be honest about what they want, they talk themselves into dumb economic views and end up building ideological constructions based on their trying to avoid saying what is actually bothering them.

So does this mean that we should just directly advocate for male preferences in hiring, whether through government or the private sector? Well, to start, we can say that women caring more about a partner’s income is another good reason to get rid of affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws meant to help women. I’m of the belief that such programs shouldn’t exist anyway because the market punishes irrational discrimination, and even if it doesn’t, freedom of association matters. If government policies to help women are also bad for family formation because they raise the status of females relative to males, that is just another reason they shouldn’t exist.

At the very least, we can say job preferences in favor of men are much easier to rationally justify than discrimination going in the other direction. Here, we can add that men who face financial difficulties in life are more likely to abuse drugs, suffer depression, and commit suicide, so even if we didn’t care about marriage and babies, there are other reasons to make policy with the idea that jobs matter more to men in mind.

All that said, I don’t think male job preferences can work in terms of helping family formation. There’s a Catch-22 quality to the debate. Men become more attractive if they are higher status than women. But what does it do to a man’s status when he argues for special preferences from society on the grounds that he needs them in order to attract a partner? We can call this the male status paradox. Men need higher status than women to have reproductive success, but a man arguing that case loses status.

Whenever I see men talking about how they need to be protected in the labor market from competition or they want society to do something for them, I am overwhelmed by disgust. I can just imagine how women feel, given that they have been evolutionarily constructed to be repulsed by losers. This is why “men’s rights” has a stench to it and is a lot less politically powerful than feminism.

It also explains why women, particularly those who are successful or highly educated, react so negatively to the traditionalist and populist right. They understand that the ultimate goal of such movements is to reduce their status, as can be seen in the outraged reaction to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” remark. Right-wing populists, in addition to taking standard conservative views on social issues, tend to glorify things that men are better at than women, like toughness and physical labor. If a trad movement took power in a Western country with the goal of raising relative male status, the situation would end up like Iran, where you would win over some of the lower classes but get massive resistance among the more educated segments of the public, particularly women. Any gain in increasing mutual attraction by using government to artificially boost male status would probably be more than cancelled out by women resenting the way that they are being treated.

And here is perhaps the genius of religion, and why faith traditions that call for male leadership in public life have proved so adaptive. Religion creates patriarchy without men directly having to argue for it. “Look, honey, I’d love for you to have equal rights and responsibilities, but it’s just not in God’s plan. It’s right there in the Bible. So what are you going to do?” Religions give men higher status, thus making them more attractive partners, without the ick-inducing sight of men saying that they need to keep women down in order to have a chance of finding a mate. This doesn’t require that everyone in a community even believe in God. Rather, it’s enough that people believe that others do, which creates communal norms that everyone feels obliged to follow.

Even without religion, an economy favoring male skills in the labor force gives us the same effect. When hard manual labor is the best way to earn a living for most people – which has been true throughout most of history – men will have a lot more money than women, and we don’t even need evolutionary theory to explain why women will be more inclined to be housewives, since material incentives alone will make such a life more attractive. But the way heterosexual attraction works likely compounds the effect. The problem with the American Compass types is that they have convinced themselves that you can just have government decide to rearrange the economy to engineer higher male status without making everyone much poorer, which would not be sustainable as a policy orientation.

To the extent that we can get rid of female status-enhancing aspects of the economy that make society worse off in the aggregate – like anti-discrimination laws – we should definitely do that. And maybe we should in fact sacrifice some economic growth for more family formation, but we need to be honest about what we’re doing. A movement that emphasizes crank economic ideas as a mask for social goals is going to draw in true believing cranks, and end up pushing for policies that are unlikely to help anyone.

In the last three quarters of a century, we’ve seen four general trends that have reduced male status relative to female status: the decline in religion, the decline in the value of physical labor relative to social skills and intellectual labor, birth control making pregnancy optional, and government programs and initiatives to benefit women. It is thus unsurprising that coupling and birth rates are falling everywhere, with the partial exception of communities that remain strongly centered around a religious tradition, despite living standards improving for nearly everyone.

Maybe the outcome isn’t so bad? Why do we need low status men to form families anyway? There are good reasons to worry about population decline, but if the declines are coming disproportionately among the less productive members of society, one can argue that this is at least a silver lining. And indeed, there’s today a positive relationship between income and fertility among men. Perhaps we should focus on pro-natalism directed at the upper class – where the wealthiest men still outearn practically all women – since the sexes have achieved more relative equality at the left end of the socioeconomic spectrum, meaning that many low status men don’t have much hope of starting families no matter what we do.

Pro-natalism has two components: encouraging coupling, and then the decision to have children. High-status men still get married at relatively high rates, so with them it is mostly a matter of convincing them and their wives that having kids is something worth doing. But there may be hard limits to what society can do for those who are unable to attract a mate in the first place.