This year marks the 20th anniversary of Idiocracy — director Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy envisioning a future America staggering under the weight of popular stupidity….It returned as a cultural touchstone in the wake of the 2016 election, which many in liberal America saw as a harbinger of the kind of society depicted in the film: mindlessly consumerist and enslaved to low passions, with a public discourse more befitting of WWE-style wrestling than a Jeffersonian republic (Donald Trump had appeared in WWE events, after all).

Yet today, it’s clear that Idiocracy was, if anything, too optimistic. Twenty years hence, American public discourse is cruder and attention spans are shorter; mind-deadening drugs have become more pervasive, and politics is far more tribal and hateful than anything depicted by Judge. All this has taken place on a much faster time scale than Idiocracy predicted, moreover, and the changes are far more the result of ideologies spun up from resentment and hate than the biological degeneration featured in the film.

Read the whole thing here.

I just did a podcast with North Korea expert Peter Ward for the CSPI podcast. We discussed the clampdown that has occurred after the failed negotiations with Trump and Covid, Kim giving up on reunification, and what Kim is thinking by creating the impression that he has chosen his teenage daughter as his successor. For those who need reminding, I suggest subscribing to the CSPI newsletter and adding the podcast to your feed. All the material is free. Think about it as covering many of the similar topics as this newsletter, but more academic and without the personal touch.

I’ll be doing an event at Northwestern on May 5. More details to follow. If you want to invite me to something else in Chicago around the same time, this is the opportunity to do so.

I’m going to remind you to preorder my book again (Amazon link), as I will regularly until it is released. Find more details here. As I’ve written,

Aside from providing support to me personally, Kakistocracy can be seen as a book that explains what has been perhaps the main global political development of the twenty-first century. It sets out to explain populism in a way that will be satisfying to both the political scientist and the interested news consumer. Until about a decade ago, we were all used to thinking about politics primarily in terms of right versus left. While it would be ridiculous to claim that ideology as traditionally understood doesn’t remain extremely important, one country after another has been shaken up by the increasing salience of the populist–non-populist axis. This often centers around the topic of immigration, but populism has also risen in countries where this isn’t a major issue, and it more broadly reflects a shift in how citizens interact with the institutions that rule over them and claim to provide structure, guidance, and information.

Preorders are extremely important for how much attention a book gets, so please just buy now. For the superfans who read everything and are getting tired of the endless plugs, I ask for your patience. Somewhere out there is sure to be someone reading this who maybe glances at one in five articles and for the first time has just learned that I have a book on populism coming out. Endless self-promotion is the cost of being a writer who is almost completely independent (yes, yes, I didn’t forget about UnHerd and The Boston Globe).

I promised that I wouldn’t be too long in judging the wisdom of the Iran War, based on my belief that we should judge foreign policy decisions by their short-term impacts. I think this is increasingly looking like a blunder. I wrote that a leader-decapitation strategy approach to foreign policy makes sense, but not in a situation where you set off a war that has major costs and you have no clean path to finish. There was no way of knowing at the beginning whether the US and Israel had contacts on the inside or some coherent plan for regime change. It’s increasingly looking like they didn’t.

Below the fold, I review the new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, and share thoughts on EHC liberalism versus EHC libertarianism, MAHA declining as Trump enters his lame duck phase, the problem with the Giving Pledge, and more.

1. Tyler Cowen has a new free book out: The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution (Sumner review here). I realized as I was reading this that what Tyler calls marginal thinking I always just thought of as economic reasoning. Examples of the insights of this method that he gives: congestion pricing forces drivers to pay for their externalities and can change behavior; closing abortion clinics can reduce abortions; if people don’t buy health insurance, it might indicate that they don’t care about health insurance that much. Here’s how Tyler explains the related concept of price theory: “The price theory approach suggests that you should think very carefully about basic economic concepts and try to figure out which of those apply to the problem you are working on.” I would hope so!

It seems to me that lurking in the background here is a fundamental political disagreement. Marginal economists are more pro-market, and economists who take different approaches are less so. These different approaches seem to be complicated mathematical models that many people can’t understand and empirical research using the highest evidentiary standards. One empirical result, or even a literature, rarely tells you what general approach to policy makes sense, and so if you don’t like the implications of marginal thinking – because it forces you to be too pro-market or come to politically incorrect conclusions – drowning your opponents in findings from studies is a good way to give yourself enough wiggle room to adopt whatever politics you want.

I’m generally impressed with the empirical work in top economic journals. Much less so in political science, which was my field of study. Tyler agrees. When discussing why economists write so many papers outside of their area of expertise, he notes “The dirty little secret is that what distinguishes economics as a field, right now, is a mix of higher standards, harder work, better math, and higher IQs.” This is clearly true; being familiar with economic papers has made me feel embarrassment toward the kinds of political science articles I used to take seriously, where you simply find some data, conduct a regression, and declare that you have found evidence for causation.

Despite this, it seems to me that we are now nowhere near the point of diminishing (marginal) returns of making the basic insights of marginal thinking better known and working to apply them to policy. Look how many cities have rent control, and how few have congestion pricing! How ashamed we should be that free parking on crowded city streets still exists! There is a long way to go. Sumner is right that the abundance movement is largely selling old wine in new bottles.

A question I had reading this is what the field of economics would look like if the marginal revolution were still going strong. Many of the fundamental insights can only be discovered once. A defender of where economics has gone might say that as we investigate more complex questions, we need more complex theories and empirical approaches. But I think that there’s probably a good deal of low hanging fruit that could be explored from a marginalist perspective. Yet when I try to understand what those are, I keep coming back to the idea that hypothetical younger marginal economists would simply test more theories that have politically incorrect or pro-market implications.

For example, most advanced countries right now are facing an immediate future that will be dominated by an aging crisis involving expensive pensions and too many old people relative to young workers. What political economy factors explain this? And what kind of incentives do we create when we shift so much consumption toward the end of life? A non-marginalist could investigate these questions as much as a marginalist. But he’s probably less likely to. Perhaps Tyler’s complaint can be reformulated as the field has moved too far to the left from the perspective of reaching important truths and benefiting society. That’s my “Straussian” reading anyway, which I’m sure Tyler would appreciate. The triumph of MAGA, unfortunately, has made such frontal political attacks that involve taking up the banner of the right more difficult since thinking people do not want to be associated with the current clown show.

2. Upon publishing my article on Christian history, Lyman pointed me to his piece from last year covering similar topics. He thinks Christians were not exactly prone to turning the other cheek, and actually got ahead through persecuting their enemies. He also argued that Philip the Arab was a Christian based on circumstantial evidence. I asked Claude about these claims, and it treats them as not crazy but open to scholarly debate.

3. Multiple methods converge on the estimate that there were around 14,000 murders in the US in 2025. That is the lowest absolute number since 1968. The negativity bias in the news is incredible to ponder. You have to go to highly specialized Substacks to find this information, while every uptick in crime is a huge national story. Murder plummets and there’s zero interest in what we’re doing right. Perhaps at some point it goes up again, and we’ll be less prepared to deal with the problem because we put forward practically no effort toward figuring out what happened when things were going well.

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For UnHerd, I published an article on cutting back on my phone use.

I can now distribute copies of my upcoming book. If you are a journalist, podcast host, or someone who might review it or bring attention to it in some way, reach out and I can get you a PDF. If you want to enter into the ACX book review contest, also be in touch. I can’t give a copy to everyone who asks, but I will probably share if I have good reason to think you’ll actually enter the contest, like if you’re a professional writer or at least have participated in contests like this before.

You can read about the book here, and order it here.

Below, I review Lauren Southern’s new memoir This Is Not Real Life, and have links on topics including the North Korean intranet, the last days of Assad, findings on Neanderthals mating with human women, and more.

1. You might have heard that the murder rate has gone down because we've gotten better at saving people. Yet Jeff Asher says there's no evidence of such an effect over the last 15 years. Go back further, and the data becomes iffy and it's hard to say. One countervailing force of better medical technology is that guns on the street have apparently gotten more powerful. See also Scott Alexander’s post on this.

2. Lyman on Gulf Arab fertility. I recently found out that the TFR numbers for these countries that you can look up online include foreign residents. But they’re somewhere in the range of 40% to 90% of the population of each state! So you need to dig a bit to have any kind of citizen fertility estimate. Lyman says that UAE and possibly Kuwait are still at around 3 and therefore doing remarkably well given their levels of development. Why is this? Lyman puts forth a theory that UAE just functions so well that…citizens feel like things are working and have more kids as a result of this optimism? Perhaps. But not really a testable theory. The idea that it’s just Islam works better. Muslims are overperformers everywhere. Granted, the Gulf Arabs are much bigger overperformers than other Muslims, so it’s not just Islam, but it’s no secret that this region of the world practices a stricter form of the religion. Anyway, I hope Lyman is right about governance, because if he is, that means there are transferable lessons that can be applied elsewhere. I’m intrigued by his idea that Israel and UAE are two countries that started focusing on fertility before it fell below replacement, and this helped maintain a positive equilibrium.

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There’s been continuing discussion of the pro-natalism issue throughout various Substacks. Let me say I endorse Lyman Stone’s theory of politics, which is that you’re not necessarily trying to find people who are your ideological soulmates, but rather those who want to work towards the same goals regardless of their philosophical orientation. Not all pro-natalist have to agree about everything, but only need to be united in the conviction that the fertility issue matters and we need to take a scientific approach regarding how to fix it. This is what I was getting at in my own piece on the subject where I said that I did not like many of the people attending the Natal conference, but nonetheless will not shy away from the pro-natalism label in response.

I’ve been posting less than normal lately, as I am completing a move to San Diego, but should get settled in within the next two weeks and be back to normal. If anyone wants to help me out, I’m in Carmel Valley and looking for a dentist and a babysitter who works on weekends. I had a tooth pulled in LA but there wasn’t enough time to put in the artificial one while there, so I need someone new to do it. DM me if you have suggestions for either.

It looks like Substack discontinued the meetings feature. I’m still willing to do meetings though for those who are interested, just DM me through Substack and we’ll set something up. The price is $150 for half an hour, or $120 if you’re a paid subscriber. As inflation has cut into the purchasing power of the dollar and I’ve become more famous and important, I’ve yet to raise the price, so take advantage.

Links are below, in addition to two book reviews, Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, and Silence of the Gods by Francis Young. I’m now discussing the Chang book among paid subscribers in the chat here, so join me there if you’ve had a chance to read it yourself. I will open one up for Silence of the Gods soon. I was actually worried there would not be enough people who read the book to have a good chat, but turnout is good so far.

Finally, I was featured a bit in a NYT story where they caught DHS in a bald-faced lie regarding their white nationalist social media strategy. Highly recommended for insights into what these people are like.

1. Two good pieces on the gerontocracy issue. Here’s Yglesias and Russ Greene on “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.” Having written about this issue already, there was still a lot here that was new to me, particularly what happened with Medicare Advantage. I knew that Social Security gets adjusted upward for inflation, but wasn’t aware that it never gets adjusted downward!

Yglesias agrees with Scott Alexander that we shouldn’t demagogue the gerontocracy issue, but the facts really call for taking a strong stand on what’s happening! It’s interesting to see Greene able to promote these non-populist ideas in The American Mind. Interestingly, it is Vance, the New Right’s favorite political figure, who is the Republican who has done the most other than Trump to turn the right against dealing with the entitlements issue. But with these people it’s all about if you can sell ideas in some identity-based exciting way. So if you want to cut entitlements because free markets, that’s gay and lame, and doesn’t sell. If you talk about BOOMERS as a privileged class, then they’ll start listening. Alexander and Yglesias have liberal sensibilities so don’t want any form of demagoguery. I see Greene as having taken my advice to start building an actual anti-gerontocratic agenda in the language and tone that will appeal to a sizable faction of conservatives. When talking to rightists, though, just don’t mention the implications for the racial distribution of wealth!

2. Review of Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’ve talked about the review or podcast that is so good it makes me want to get the book. This one is new. It’s so good that I stopped reading the review half way because I don’t want any more spoilers. Will circle back.

3. Anton Howes’ series on pre-Industrial Revolution England has a new installment, and they’re all must reads. From these essays, I realize that my impression of the policies of this era were mistaken. I thought governments were a lot more limited in their willingness and ability to control the economy. I would’ve thought this was especially true for England, or at least there was some kind of proto-freedom ideology at work two centuries after the Magna Carta. But no, the governments of the time were true mercantilists who oppressed workers. Excited to see how he ties all his research together to explain what exactly happened beginning in the eighteenth century.

4. NYT on Delcy Rodríguez. Reading between the lines here, the difference between her and Maduro appears to be that she’s much smarter than him. She studied abroad at fancy schools and impresses those she talks to; he was a union organizer who never finished high school. Some of her actions have been pro-market and have stabilized the Venezuelan economy. These are bullish signs.

5. I really enjoyed Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang. I got the recommendation from Noah’s footnote in this article. In a narrow sense, the book is about the lives of Chinese country girls who came to work in the factories of the southeastern city of Dongguan in the mid-aughts, along with the author’s investigation of her familial background. Publishing in 2008, Chang notes:

Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-collecting, barbershops, and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century.

In other words, if Chinese migrant workers were their own country, it would’ve been one of the ten largest in the world!

More broadly, the book has something deep to tell us about human nature. The factory girls care nothing about China’s “five thousand year history.” One didn’t even know that Hu Jintao was the leader of the country. They care about finding boyfriends, music, and gossiping about their friends. They treat their relatives left behind in rural China with contempt. One factory girl tries to teach them how to use a garbage can to be more like civilized city folk. They prefer the anonymity of the city to the stifling conformity of the rural village. When they go back, they look forward to returning to their friends and the jobs that many in the West consider a form of “wage slavery.” Status hierarchies in the villages are turned upside down, as parents and elders try to get money out of young girls working on assembly lines.

It’s fascinating how Chinese patriarchy collapsed immediately upon first contact with modernity, while it has remained strong in places like the Muslim world. As Chinese birth rates plummet it is not too early to think of the long term civilizational implications of this.

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I was in a symposium in The Free Press responding to the viral article by Jacob Savage on DEI harming white men. I say yes, take the issue seriously, but the data shows that white men are still doing pretty well, because markets are too rational and efficient to ever let things get too out of hand across the entire economy. You like fairness, opportunity, and merit? Protect capitalism, and any interference with those principles will be limited in its effects. Things get really bad when standards are subjective or market mechanisms are weak, which is the case in the arts, journalism, and academia.

Below the paywall, you’ll find my review of Ken Burns’ new documentary The American Revolution, along with links and discussions on Charlie Kirk’s sort-of successor on Ross Douthat, the coming Trump presidential library in Miami and what it tells us about 2028, the recent struggles of Las Vegas, why cancel culture might be necessary in Russia, Richard Spencer’s interview with Nick Fuentes, and more.

Finally, for those who missed it, my new book on populism is coming out in July. My 2025 year in review and a discussion of the book can be found here.

1. Elephants and bats live a long time in part because they don’t get cancer. This article explores the possible mechanisms involved. TP53 is a gene that encourages cancer cells to die. Humans have one copy, elephants have 20, and long-lived bats have up to seven.

Can we just add these genes to humans?

Unfortunately, elephants’ multiple TP53 copies are closely integrated into the elephant immune system and DNA regulatory system. Managing to get the same working in, say, mice, would require a ton of work to integrate these copies into the mouse immune system and DNA regulatory system. This is, as far as I know, currently beyond the capabilities of genetic engineering.

Maybe one day.

2. Recently, I was at a Barnes & Noble and saw Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens on the shelf. Having enjoyed the author’s biography of Genghis Khan many years ago, I picked it up and started reading, and ended up buying the book. It starts with a mystery.

ON AN UNKNOWN DAY LATE IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, an unidentified hand clumsily cut away part of the text from the most politically sensitive section of The Secret History of the Mongols. The censored portion recorded words spoken by Genghis Khan in the summer of 1206 at the moment he created the Mongol Empire and gave shape to the government that would dominate the world for the next 150 years. Through oversight or malice, the censor left a single short sentence of the mutilated text that hinted at what had been removed: “Let us reward our female offspring.”

In the preceding section of the text, Genghis Khan bestowed offices, titles, territories, and vassals upon his sons, brothers, and other men according to their ability and contribution to his rise to power. But at the moment where the text reported that he turned to the assembly to announce the achievements and rewards of his daughters, the unknown hand struck his words from the record. The censor, or possibly a scribe copying the newly altered text, wrote the same short final sentence twice. Perhaps the copyist was careless in repeating it, or perhaps the censor deliberately sought to emphasize what was missing or even to taunt future generations with the mystery of what had been slashed away.

Well, that’s certainly intriguing. Genghis Khan was woke on the woman question, but his misogynistic offspring and other Mongols wrote the daughters out of the story. Weatherford tries to piece together what we know about powerful Mongol women, from the time of the rise of Genghis Khan up until the rule of Manduhai (b. 1449). The next two hundred plus pages are filled with colorful stories about the heroic feats and follies of exotic queens and members of the royal family.

There are two stories I want to highlight that changed the way I see history, and made me much more skeptical of how much we can possibly know about much of anything before the last few centuries. First is this on Khutulun (1260-1306), the great-great-grand daughter of Genghis Khan, who we are told fought alongside her father, Qaidu Khan.

Khutulun followed an unorthodox method of confronting the enemy. She rode to the battlefield at her father’s side, but when she perceived the right moment, in the words of Marco Polo, she would “make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout, as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father; and this she did many a time.”

Her romantic life was supposedly even more interesting than her battlefield heroics.

As accustomed as the Mongols were to seeing women on horses and shooting arrows from bows, no one had seen a woman who could wrestle as well as Khutulun could. According to Marco Polo, the independent princess refused to marry unless a man could first defeat her in wrestling. Many men came forward to try, but none succeeded. In order to wrestle her, each opponent had to wager ten horses on a bout, and thus she substantially increased the size of her herds. Her parents became anxious for her to marry, and so, around 1280, when a particularly desirable bachelor prince presented himself, her parents tried to persuade her to let him win. He was “young and handsome, fearless and strong in every way, insomuch that not a man anywhere in his father’s realm could vie with him.” He brought with him a thousand horses to bet on his victory.

A crowd gathered for the match that was held in front of Khutulun’s parents’ court. It seems that with the hope of pleasing the parents whom she loved so much, Khutulun wanted to let the prince win. That resolve melted, however, in the rush of excitement when the match began. “When both had taken post in the middle of the hall they grappled each other by the arms and wrestled this way and that, but for a long time neither could get the better of the other. At last, however, the damsel threw him right valiantly on the palace pavement. And when he found himself thus thrown, and her standing over him, great indeed was his shame and discomfiture.” She not only defeated but humiliated him, and he disappeared, leaving behind the additional thousand horses for her herd.

In tennis, there’s a long history of “battle of the sexes” type matches, and the lesson is that you have to get pretty far down in the male rankings before the best female players have a chance. The sex gap in wrestling must be much more extreme. And here we are told that a woman could constantly pin a long line of hardened warriors!

The second woman who sounds too tough to be real is Manduhai. We are informed that she produced ten children: two with a previous husband, and eight children with Dayan Khan, including three (!) sets of twins.1 Quite impressive before IVF.

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Below, in the links you will find discussions of what Hitler’s DNA tells us about historical causation, the failed (or failing) efforts to build a line city in Saudi Arabia, Sweden as the possible EHC capital of the world, the rise of Chinese pharma, young men becoming addicted to screens, why language preservation is an authoritarian ideology, and much more.

1. On the effort to oust Maduro. It looks like Rubio managed to convince Trump that Maduro was some kind of major drug dealer, because he wanted to pursue regime change anyway. Trump appears to have had instincts going in both directions, but Rubio really cares and is close to the president so he’s getting his way. The stated reasons for the policy — terrorism, drug dealing, weaponizing migrants — appear to be pretextual, though maybe Trump believes some of them. The idea that these justifications are fake is reportedly what the intelligence says, and it makes sense too. It’s like the question of whether Saddam was involved with al-Qaida. Why would he do such a thing and invite American intervention, absent some reason based in national interest or ideology? Regardless, I think pushing for regime change is the right policy here. I’m sick of the idea that’s become almost conventional wisdom that you should never change the government of a country, no matter how awful. I’d be comfortable taking out the leadership of Venezuela and seeing if something better emerges.

2. Works in Progress talks to economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverd about the fertility crisis. He seems to index too little on smartphones and too much on most other things to explain the last two decades, where fertility has collapsed everywhere.

At one point they discuss why poverty is more rural in East Asia while you see it in the cities in the West. The explanation I think is that there’s no reason that poverty should exist in cities unless your underclass is unusually dysfunctional. Cities are the place where you find the most economic opportunities. And some of our ghettos in the US are extremely well placed for success and would be excellent communities to live in if only the locals were better behaved. Look at Oakland and Chicago. The US is an extreme case, but the UK also has urban poverty for the same reason.

East Asia is very weird because by Western standards there’s basically no urban dysfunction. So all urban dwellers can benefit from economic opportunities, without bearing the costs in terms of everything from noise pollution to the threat of violence. This is a terribly underrated fact. Cities produce so much wealth, and when you add our high tolerance for dysfunction, people can survive there by just mooching off society.

Another note: nice to hear an Ivy League professor say we should prefer professionals in particular to have more kids. One of those things that’s very obvious from any rational perspective but people are afraid to say. I like the host bringing the conversation back to the idea that we just need to get rid of distortions through subsidies disproportionately having an impact on the behavior of the poor. Tomayto-tomahto.

3. 20% of post WWII prime ministers of Japan have been Christians, a group that makes up less than 1% of the population. On how they became an elite. One thought that struck me reading this is how inconsistent this story is with theories about Asian culture historically valuing education, and that explaining modern success. Japan in the nineteenth century didn’t have educational establishments and had to rely on Christian missionaries and schools. Asians weren’t that into education after all! Yet in the modern world they are much better than all other major populations in math and science. The cultural explanations for this are completely ad hoc.

4. BBC podcast (Apple link) on Hitler’s DNA. Here’s the accompanying article. I was shocked to find that he was in the top 1% for schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar. If those traits are distributed at random, there’s only a one in a million chance anyone would be that high on all three! Yet I checked and, as I suspected, the polygenic scores are correlated with one another. So Hitler’s result was closer to something like 1 in 25,000. Still, it’s fascinating that you can tell from his genetics he was a highly unusual man. Autism makes perfect sense given his obsession with ideas. I also wonder whether paranoid political views are a sign of mild schizophrenia. Chalk one up for the great man theory of history. Hitler was genetically unique.

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I’ve recently been quoted or cited on this topic in The Atlantic, Politico, UnHerd, Vanity Fair, Vox, and Vox again. Sometimes the pundit game is a meritocracy. You point out something that’s true, and then people will notice when the world confirms what you have been saying.

This week, people are now talking about how I was early on Groyperization too. The human capital framework has provided a lot of explanatory value.

Scott Alexander responded to my piece on the Fatima miracle, and I responded to his response in the comments. I remain very convinced by my “peasants are very suggestible and conformist” theory. It appears he’s conceded the point that we only know about one skeptic who was on record as skeptical beforehand and then reported witnessing something unusual. This is important, as I thought the claim that there were multiple such people was one of the most convincing arguments for there having been a miracle.

I’d like to remind people to sign up for meetings if you’re interested. I used to get a lot of requests, but although the Substack is growing, people seem to have forgotten the feature exists, or they never learned about it after signing up. Some people I’ve met through meetings have actually become friends, or I’ve promoted their work, and I always enjoy talking to fans.

I was at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics this month, where I debated John Carney, a writer for Breitbart, on the populist project. My big takeaway is I’m never going to wear glasses at a public event again.

1. Just read Hayek’s “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” I found a kinship with Hayek, writing in 1949, about how conservatives don’t have idealistic defenders of markets. This was a time when you actually had Austrian economists around. Today we have MAGAs. You’ll also see an argument similar to the one I made in “Why Is Everything Liberal?” which is sort of dated by now, because conservatives have shown in the Trump era the ability to overcome having fewer idealistic people via pure force. But as they do that, they become less reflexively pro-market and use power in order to achieve other goals. Another passage here shows how little things have changed:

The difficulty of finding genuine and disinterested support for a systematic policy for freedom is not new. In a passage of which the reception of a recent book of mine has often reminded me, Lord Acton long ago described how “at all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition....”

This sums up the classical liberal alliance with American conservatism, which we can say has been getting more intense. Compared to a generation or two ago, libertarians are getting both more out of the deal (school choice, zero tolerance for tax increases) and more things that are objectionable (hostility to trade and immigration). The right becoming less libertarian ideologically goes hand in hand with it being less beholden to the left, which benefits libertarianism sometimes, especially at the local level. At the national level, the president’s level of discretion over trade and immigration is just too high for things to work out well.

2. NYT on older women taking testosterone, and the challenges of getting mainstream medicine to accept it as a treatment for aging. Indications here are that the Trump administration is more friendly. This is the upside of the MAHA ethos; it’s a weird thing where they’re sometimes more willing to explore new treatments than the mainstream medical establishment and also more safetyist, especially on vaccines.

How to understand this? Maybe it’s just populism, in the sense of giving in to short term-gratification. Testosterone feels good, so do it. Vaccines scare people, so don’t. This can be good in one case and bad in another.

The medical establishment in contrast is too willing to accept natural decline without any kind of intervention. They have this completely arbitrary line between “curing disease” and “enhancement.” Not that the masses don’t also have that distinction, and populist-leaning voters are probably among the most safetyist parts of the electorate in any sense of the term. But populism can also be understood as giving in to loud, mobilized minorities, and in that case anything that works to make people’s lives better, at least in the short run, will have a constituency.

These thoughts make me 20% more sympathetic to MAHA.

3. Misha Saul on the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. I think that comparing manpower and industrial capacity to say the war was unwinnable for Germany is too simplistic. Nations collapsed under less pressure in the First World War! It couldn’t be taken for granted that Stalin’s regime would hold. A testament to Soviet indoctrination and the methods for establishing control they honed over a generation.

4. Andrew Sullivan interviews Charles Murray about religion. The most telling part here was when Murray said he wouldn’t take a pill that would let him live healthily until 120 because he’d “get bored.” Really? This guy has written books every few years for several decades. He doesn’t think he could find new intellectual vistas to explore? His intellectual curiosity has been satisfied, or he thinks it will be in ten years? Just following the news to see what happens to AI and our politics would be fascinating.

There are an endless number of books I want to read and movies I want to watch and countries I want to visit that I will probably never get to. And then if I watch a movie or read a book and return to it after twenty years, it’s often like experiencing it almost new. Maybe it makes sense for a dumb person to say they’d get bored. But how could an intellectually curious person like Murray pull the boredom card for a mere 120 years?

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1. This Economist report on North Korea is dark. North Korea was always known as a slave state. Yet in the last few years, it has gotten even more repressive. No more NGOs or the UN, few embassies, and the number of defectors to the South has collapsed. There is a clampdown on South Korean media coming into the country, and attempts to roll back liberalization in the private sector.

North Korea like no other place reminds me why politics matters. Something this awful you’d think couldn’t exist in the twenty first century. Yet it continues because its leaders are evil. The rest of us are fighting the same struggle, and it’s only a matter of degrees. Many people in every country dislike markets and interactions with the rest of the world, and if they get their way they will make life worse off for their fellow citizens, even if no other nation is this extreme. I’m overcome with gratitude that other countries have had leaders that haven’t been as bad as the Kim family. History could have worked out differently. The fact that it is happening to Koreans makes it even more tragic. These are people who we know would live completely modern lives if the politics of their country were anywhere near normal.

Setting aside the moral and philosophical aspects of the regime, the turn even more inward seems to have started around the time Trump’s outreach failed. The regime appears to have concluded that building ties was hopeless. We should’ve probably just recognized them as a nuclear power and established connections with them. My moral instinct is to try to destroy the regime, but rationally I know that we never really tried to make things better by seeing if we could reach a modus vivendi, in which case the government would be more secure, its people would suffer less, and there would be some hope of influence. I’m not saying this could have worked, only that Trump was the only president willing to meet with the North Koreans, and his top officials were clearly unenthusiastic about his efforts, when not actively sabotaging them.

2. Ben Shapiro on Ezra Klein. I appreciate Shapiro unequivocally saying that Vance has the same economic worldview as Sanders and Warren. Yes! I feel like I’m insane when I see rightists shriek about socialism and then ignore this. Shapiro is also good on tariffs, will say nice things about legal immigration, and is open about Trump’s flaws.

Klein mentions Shapiro as allergic to the psychology of victimhood. This creates revulsion towards DEI, but also an ability to see the same traits in right-wing populism. It’s been too rare for people on the right to care about their principles more than partisanship. We need more visceral contempt for this stuff, in addition to intellectual critique.

I don’t agree with everything in Shapiro’s worldview – notably, I think the right is much more far gone – but he’s one of the few major influencers who I can look at over the last 5-10 years and say I still recognize the principles that were there before.

Unfortunately, he was kind of grandfathered into his current level of status at a time when the right-wing base was looking for something else. The rise of Tucker, Candace, etc, is the product of a much more diseased culture, and the one that is going to be in the driver’s seat on the right for the foreseeable future.

3. On “African Time”:

In the Ivory Coast, poor punctuality was seen as such a hindrance to the economic development that a campaign was launched against it in 2007. Slogans such as “‘African time’ is killing Africa, let’s fight it” bolstered the campaign. They proposed a “Punctuality Night,” and offered a prize to the person who could demonstrate excellent punctuality. One man’s unusually good punctuality earned him, along with the prize, the nickname “Mr White Man’s Time”

4. The Financial Times on how spending on old people is creating massive burdens for the UK and France. The reckoning is soon coming here too. The most underperforming piece I’ve ever written, from the perspective of insight and importance, was in my opinion Critical Age Theory. I can’t get people to be as excited about the Boomer Question as culture war issues.

5. I always assumed that IQ dropped pretty linearly with age. This article argues that this is an artifact of the Flynn Effect. If you just compare IQs of old people to young people, you have to account for the fact that older generations were lower IQ. But if you compare the same people over time, or find other ways to account for the Flynn Effect, you find that IQ is pretty stable into one’s fifties and sixties before declining!

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I recently interviewed the academic Laurenz Guenther for the CSPI podcast about his recent paper on immigration and the rise of populism. Subscribe to CSPI in order to get new content from there. It provides more academically focused discussions than you get on this newsletter, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I also just talked to Johanna Maska, who was an aide to President Obama. She is such a great person, and if I may say so, we provided a model on how to disagree civilly. You’ll learn something here that is easy to forget. I’m pretty right-wing! It’s just you have to be a dumb conspiracy theorist now or you’re left coded. I also enjoyed joining my friend Noam Dworman at The Comedy Cellar to discuss mostly Israel, but also other things too. I have a friend in comedy now, other than Bryan Caplan, which is pretty cool. Maybe I should follow Bryan and do standup one day.

1. Here’s a discussion of the Guenther paper I wrote before conducting the interview above:

Laurenz Guenther looks at surveys of politicians and residents across European countries and finds a one standard deviation gap in cultural views. This is bigger than the gaps between any demographic groups. On economic issues, politicians are more pro-market in a small majority of cases, but almost as often more left wing.

Countries where politicians are the most pro-market: Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Estonia, Malta

Where politicians are more pro-statist than the masses: Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden, Lithuania, Ireland

Interesting pattern where it is Eastern Europe where elites have the best views relative to the public, while Scandinavia is the opposite. Check out Estonia! Very libertarian politicians. No wonder it has done so well in the post-Soviet era. This provides deeper support for my article "Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal." I used different methods and surveys to come up with the same results.

The idea that "Compared to the public, elites are practically always more liberal on social issues," appears to be settled social science. Guenther’s work can be read as a call for elites to cut down on immigration to stop populism from rising. This article shifted my views a bit towards the “it’s all immigration" thesis instead of the “it's a combination of immigration, conspiracy theorizing, and general social conservatism” idea that I held before. One problem with the paper is that he keeps implying this is simply an issue regarding politicians not being representative of the masses. No, it's every group of people that is highly educated and thinks a great deal about ethics and public policy issues. You'd get if anything an even greater gap if you compared the public to scientists, activists, professors, or any other group of non-business elites.

He notes that the gap is mitigated but remains when you compare politicians to the 7% of residents who got a perfect score on questions of political knowledge. But these are strange questions, a mix between ones that are obscure and ones that are really easy. I think there's a kind of interactive effect where people who think carefully about issues even in isolation are more libertarian than the public, and are pushed even more in that direction when they go into meaning-maximizing fields. At the same time, those with non-libertarian views select out of these careers. This would explain the results we see.

2. Absolutely loved this ACX book review on Joan of Arc. I consider this type of evidence for the existence of God, based on historical accounts from before the modern era, to be quite weak. But she was remarkable regardless and I’m glad to have become familiar with her story.

3. Been reading quite a bit on Alberto Fujimori, the Japanese-descended president of Peru from 1990-2000, who dissolved the parliament in 1992 and then ruled with a heavy hand until he was finally hounded out of office after winning what many saw as an illegitimate third term.

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They also interviewed me on my politics and personal background more generally. That one is paywalled, but I suggest you subscribe and listen to it here. It was more personal than most podcasts I do, with a lot of discussion on my background, the cancellation attempt, and other topics.

I’m planning to take a trip to the Bay Area in the coming weeks, so reach out if you’re there and want to meet.

1. I just read The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience by Emory Thomas. It's a very short book, with the thesis that the Confederacy had to gradually sacrifice its principles in the course of trying to win the war. They began to urbanize and industrialize. Women took on more prominent roles in society. Blacks were given more freedom, and the decision was eventually made to let them fight for the cause, although they weren’t deployed in time. Localism was out, a strong national government was in. The Confederacy became the first government in North America to ever institute conscription, the year before the Union followed suit. On the economy, one scholar cited called the Confederacy “the most successful demonstration of State Socialism to be found up to the time in modern civilization.”

By the end, they were even willing to give up slavery itself! Thomas writes:

It was left to Jefferson Davis to demonstrate just how far the Confederacy was willing to go in the matter of emancipation. Later in March of 1865 Davis played what he believed was his final diplomatic trump card. He realized that only immediate foreign intervention would save the Confederacy by that time. Accordingly Davis dispatched Louisianian Duncan F. Kenner to the Confederacy’s unofficial embassies in Britain and France. Kenner’s mission was no less than to offer in the name of the Confederacy to emancipate all the slaves in exchange for recognition. The offer was as desperate as it was vain. Neither European power was willing to recognize a moribund South. Emancipation would come with a Union victory, and this would cost Britain and France nothing.

The Confederacy was past saving by March of 1865. The Kenner mission did, however, carry to completion the internal revolution in the Confederate South. Having sacrificed other features of the “Southern way of life,” the Confederacy ultimately placed slavery on the altar of independence. The Southern nation became an end in itself. Independence required the sacrifice. Faced with choosing between independence and the Southern way of life, the Confederacy chose independence.

The romantic vision that Confederates believed in and fought and died for was never a realistic option. It couldn't be a rural slave state indefinitely and not end up a poor, miserable backwater. If it achieved independence and tried to maintain its way of life, it would have been weak and subject to outside influence, Union and European.

The European attitude towards slavery and how it confounded attempts at forming alliances show that the institution would've been constantly under attack, from inside and out. Who knows, countries can sometimes exist in an isolated and repressive state indefinitely. See North Korea. But there's no way that the South could have remained as it was and been a powerful nation on the world stage or ended up in a situation where independence would not have been considered a disaster.

There's a lesson here for reactionaries everywhere.

2. Kotkin on Dwarkesh is self-recommending. See my review of his two volumes on Stalin.

No matter how many times it's explained to me, I still don't understand the Stalin phenomenon. And I doubt anyone else can either. The man simply wipes out every other power center in the government. Top levels of the political leadership, army, and secret police see massive turnover. No one is safe and anyone can be next. And he just does it? Without any serious challenge or chance to remove him? Kotkin tries to explain, but it just doesn't make sense. And I can't think of any other historical equivalents, in the modern era at least, when a leader acted without any restraint like this, and so completely wiped out not only enemies, but friends and loyalists. Was Stalin that amazing as a man? Could he inspire that much devotion and loyalty? Or was it a mass psychosis that made the government behave like this, and focus on Stalin as a God-like symbol? Does this say something deep about the Russian character? All we can do here is speculate.

I also was interested in the discussion of why the Tsarist regime was so indulgent of communist agitators, who would escape from prison and even do things like continue to write for newspapers while in custody. They weren't executed and their punishments were mild. Kotkin says something about Tsarist state capacity, though historically, state capacity has often been a reason to engage in more repression, not less. It is regimes with low state capacity that wipe out enemies because that's simple, while it's harder to enact more complicated forms of control. The fact that there was such a small educated class in Russia at the time should've made the challenge even easier. As Kotkin says, norms in the early twentieth century were just different. The point deserves more emphasis.

I found Kotkin much less insightful on China than Russia, his area of expertise. He seems unwilling to give the regime any credit at all for the pivot away from central planning. I'm no fan of the CCP, but I don't see the idea that they were forced into reforms as credible, and Dwarkesh does a good job pushing back.

3. Reflections on thinkers using ChatGPT. The fact that ChatGPT can replace mediocre analysts but not me yet gives me a sense of pride. Will it do so eventually? I don’t know. But it feels like the gap between recycling older thoughts and providing new ones that synthesize work from various fields and sources of information may be vast. Famous last words?

4. Washington Post podcast on the Diddy trial. This thing was a travesty. There are federal laws that ban prostitution across state lines and drug distribution. There are also laws that ban criminal conspiracies. The government put these together and decided that a guy buying prostitutes and doing drugs at parties was therefore someone who needed to go to jail for decades for "human trafficking." He might have been guilty on a strict reading of the law, but this is an absurd law. If I were on the jury, I would've voted not guilty on all counts according to the principle of jury nullification. In the podcast, they talk about how these women appeared to be enthusiastic participants in some of the acts, but they loved him and their careers depended on him. So what? It's illegal to sexually take advantage of people who want something from you? This is a ridiculous state of affairs where women can use their bodies to get ahead, and then when it's over try to have the man they made the implicit deal with bankrupted or thrown in jail. Glad the jury saw through it. There’s a similar issue with the Epstein “victims” who have all kinds of credibility issues but whose words keep getting treated as gospel.

5. I highly recommend Ed Glaeser's excellent Triumph of the City.

Some of my favorite passages and thoughts below.

Tolstoy may have been right that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but among cities, failures seem similar while successes feel unique. Someone wandering through Leipzig’s boarded-up neighborhoods could very well think she was in Detroit. Empty houses give off a similarly depressing feeling whether they’re in England or Ohio. But no one could ever confuse Bangalore with Boston or Tokyo with Chicago. Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.

One reason I love reading books on history and learning about foreign cultures is that they expand your ideas of what is possible in terms of arranging human affairs. This book made me realize that successful cities provide their own kinds of experimentation that show how radically different the world can be.

Glaeser stresses the importance of face-to-face contact, a message that I think has become more important as the internet has swallowed real life in the seventeen years since the book was published.

Pundits and critics have long argued that improvements in information technology will make urban advantages obsolete. Once you can learn from Wikipedia in Anchorage, why pay New York prices? But a few decades of high technology can’t trump millions of years of evolution. Connecting in cyberspace will never be the same as sharing a meal or a smile or a kiss. Our species learns primarily from the aural, visual, and olfactory clues given off by our fellow humans. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it works best when combined with knowledge gained face-to-face, as the concentrations of Internet entrepreneurs in Bangalore and Silicon Valley would attest. Every one of Harvard’s economics students uses technology constantly, but they also get plenty out of face-to-face meetings with their peers and professors. The most important communications still take place in person, and electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual movement.

I’ve realized the wisdom of these points through the limited travel experience I’ve had in recent years. My partnership with Insight Prediction started with a meeting at Manifest, and my last trip to DC put me in touch with Marian Tupy at Human Progress, who I’m now writing monthly articles for. When I travel, I gain a surprising amount in terms of opportunities for business and professional collaborations and cementing friendships in really short periods of time. Experiences simply matter more when you’re with other humans. When I went to Poland a few years ago, I met a fan who said that I taught him about the importance of approaching women and how it can change your life. People have told me similar things through DMs and emails, but I rarely remember it, while having someone explain how I helped them in person becomes a cherished memory. Everything about real life interactions just feels more real, for understandable evolutionary reasons.

All this gives me a deep sense of regret that, for personal reasons, I cannot live in New York or DC, but maybe I’ll get out East eventually.

As Glaeser suggests, there’s a lot you can theoretically do online. I’ve learned that in the course of building my public profile almost totally through cyberspace. Yet it’s clear that face-to-face contact remains indispensable. I guess people still need to pick up on my “aural, visual, and olfactory clues” for things to click. Kids today who from their earliest days are missing out on constant real life interaction may not know what they are losing! Again, this is another reason to continue being angry about Covid restrictions, and also to take the phone addiction issue seriously.

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I also appeared on Liron Shapira’s AI doom podcast (Substack, YouTube). If you want to hear me talk for two hours about various scenarios I find plausible or implausible, you’re in luck. I enjoy these types of exchanges, but realize they might not be for everyone.

In other news, I’ll be writing a monthly column for the Human Progress website from now on, so look out for that. There’s too much pessimism in the discourse, which I find both contrary to the facts and unmanly. The world is in fact tragic but the trends are in the grand scheme of things good, which is something that too few are now willing to acknowledge and incorporate into how they see reality. Happy to be part of a project seeking to make a difference on that front.

1. I thought Bimbo Ubermensch was one of those black women you see in commercials but never in real life, skinny and stylish with the wild curly hair.

Apparently, she is a Coptic Christian. This essay on bringing her boyfriend to meet her parents hits home, with the fair warning that some or all of it might be fictionalized. I assume it's mostly true.

I relate to the feeling of being embarrassed and overwhelmed by awkwardness when seeing your unsophisticated Middle East family members. Unintellectual, boring conversation, a focus on material gain and status seeking in the most transparent ways possible, devoid of any kind of virtue signalling, which some of us have a tendency to dislike until we see what the alternative is. And the kitsch. The kitsch is just unbearable. Do you understand now why immigrants are going MAGA?

"Under their roof, I tended to linguistically regress. Not into baby talk exactly, like I often did with men in more amorous contexts, but into simplified vocabulary, shorter sentences." Yes, I get this too.

I'm not a fan of the discussion of the supposed trauma she suffered. When people say they've been harmed by abuse, I think that's almost always a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and except in the most extreme situations when you hear someone complain about how broken they are due to their childhood, they're just confessing something about themselves as an adult and the narratives they've bought into.

Here, I think that she's pretending that her parents' supposedly abusive behavior was a big deal because the truth is she feels uncomfortable around them due to them being boring and cringe, and doesn't want to admit that.

Regardless, highly recommended for the insights into cringe immigrant parents and the kids that they end up alienating.

2. The Yarvin profile is long, and I think confirms a few points I've made before: 1) the dissident right is really white nationalism; the assumptions are all about the centrality of HBD, the dangers of immigration, etc. 2) The right-wing epistemological environment is bad. Most telling anecdote here is Yarvin believes in the Brigitte Macron was born a man theory. I guess he’s of the position that all modern thinkers are useless other than Candace Owens?

As to Scott Alexander's view that Yarvin sold out by discarding a lot of his ideas about seeking and achieving power, I think that the fact that he won't budge on the biological racialism indicates what's important here. Though I concede that walking back the race stuff would probably not be good for him anyway, since all these guys want is to just say "based" and that's what really counts.

3. Remarkable piece on the terrible state of data collection in Sub-Saharan Africa. GDP is simply a series of guesses. Murder rates are implausibly low. For a certain period of time, just compiling news reports of violent deaths in Nigeria gave you three times the number of murders reported by police.

For homicide rates in most African countries, the WHO doesn't rely on any underlying data, but gives you a model estimate based on various economic and demographic factors!

Population estimates are based on old censuses that had all kinds of problems, including fraud. “Only 5 mainland Sub-Saharan African countries have a birth registration system that registers at least 90% of births: Botswana, Congo Republic, Djibouti, Sierra Leone and South Africa (Mo Ibrahim Foundation, 2024, p. 16). In Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Niger, Tanzania and Zambia, fewer than 30% of births are registered." Death registration is also of poor quality.

This is very bleak, given how much of the growth of humanity is going to come from Africa. There's just a lot we won't know about how much humans are progressing. Or maybe the fact that we won't have the numbers to even know how well we're doing will tell us all we need to know.

Someone needs to dive into the African population numbers. You won't get accurate totals, but the question is whether the official figures are likely to be over or under estimates. Same with fertility rates. From the article, it seems that the bias is towards incentives for overestimating, but I hope to dig more into this at some point.

4. Nate Silver on why Democrats are losing young men. This shifted my views a bit. I’ve been thinking too much of the incel and online rightoid as representative of the young conservative male, but generally they are too mentally healthy, risk accepting, and anti-feeling like a victim for the modern Democratic Party to appeal to them. Glad there isn’t much in the way of anti-immigrant sentiment among them either.

5. Enjoyed this article tracing changes in how Americans have viewed their role in the world through the prism of the Call of Duty franchise.

6. Review of a book claiming that free trade has stronger intellectual roots on the left than the right. One thing about the trade issue that I think is interesting is that opposition to trade is unusually likely to be driven by bad motives.

Imagine two politicians. Both are equal in their support for markets overall. But A is a protectionist who is relatively more pro-market domestically. B is a free trader who wants a more expansive welfare state. How should we judge these two individuals?

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1. This is excellent on the “Lost Cause” narrative emerging surrounding DOGE. No, it’s not that they had good intentions that were thwarted. It’s that most of what they said was lies, their theories and beliefs about government were false, and they made no effort to even seek out the knowledge that would have helped them achieve their goals.

This was clear from the very beginning. Federal spending wasn’t going to be significantly cut based on DOGE’s activities, and they couldn’t hope to even create momentum towards substantive change because they weren’t dealing in reality.

Don’t let them get away with the Swamp narrative. I’ve seen on the right that events that we all observed often get stupider and more ideologically self-serving as time goes on. This happened with the 2020 election. A new Lost Cause narrative surrounding DOGE will only ensure that budgetary issues never get solved. We’re not at a point where we have a conservative movement that can be reasoned with in a debate over priorities or ideological disagreements. It’s a movement that just believes false things and therefore can’t hope to ever make rational decisions.

2. Loved this Works in Progress piece on cruise ships. They just keep getting larger, better, more affordable and more efficient because they’re not subject to the same laws and regulations as things like buildings. I can’t imagine going on a cruise because it’s dense living but you’re around people who I imagine are uninteresting. But I can appreciate the accomplishment. Articles like this are a good reminder of how much is possible in a world where decisions are made through market rather than political mechanisms.

Look at these contrasts.

3. History Extra podcast on the unification of Italy, called the Risorgimento. There’s a remarkable artificiality to the whole thing. Major events were the result of French or Prussian rather than Italian victories. Italy remains the most unnatural large European state to this day.

4. Douthat interviews Vance. Painful to listen to. Most Trump cultists are just hacks who don't pretend to be intellectuals; they're playing to an audience of one. Vance of course plays to the same lunatic but also needs to feel like he is taken seriously intellectually. Good for Douthat for pushing him on a few things, particularly immigrant crime, a completely made up narrative that the right is committed to. My favorite part was when Vance claimed that Trump wanted to send American criminals to El Salvador because he was worried about conditions in our jails and thought they would be better if we deported the worst people. I'm sure that conversation really happened.

5. Aella on her childhood, during which her parents followed a program called Growing Kids God's Way. The basic idea is to teach obedience. You hit children, break their will, and make sure that no matter what happens they obey their parents. You make rebellion literally unthinkable, by not allowing kids to consume media where children are disrespectful towards adults and preventing contact with non-GKGW children.

At first I thought that this seems adaptive because it makes parents' lives easier. Then I saw how much work it took to break a child's will and I thought I wasn't so sure. It seems like a lot of work, relative to just letting your kids do what they want and giving in to their whims. I asked Aella though, and she said parenting is actually easier for people like this.

As for the kids, I think that as a social science experiment, it shows the importance of role models and social connections in determining behavior. Things like teenage rebellion and toddler tantrums are by no means natural, but a societal choice we made. Who made the choice? No one really. I think that most of us are just too nice to want to keep hitting kids even when they're crying and that became the new norm.

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1. You work in areas I am interested in, particularly politics, government, media, or think tanks.

2. You are a rich guy who might be open to giving me money.

3. Young people with a lot of potential, i.e., top of your class at Columbia, a top three law school student, Stanford physics PhD student, etc.

4. You are a woman, since I respect women and am always trying to learn from them. That’s right, I’m practicing DEI now.

If you fall into any of those categories, or if there is some other really good reason you think we should meet, reach out. I prefer DMs through Twitter, but Substack messages are also an acceptable communication medium. Four years ago, I would’ve met with any random person who wanted to talk to me, but now I just don’t have the time. I don’t want to make anyone feel bad, but this is the reality.

For the larger meetups, pay attention to Twitter, Substack Notes, and the Substack chat, where I’ll be announcing where I’m going to be. You should get an email through the chat if you’re subscribed.

Below are the links. This month’s collection includes reviews of the books Neighborhood Defenders and Why Nothing Works, the mini-series Adolescence, and Season 3 of Yellowjackets. I also discuss how while Trump’s awfulness is depressing, it also has helped free me psychologically by allowing my heart and head to align on political issues.

1. Scientists find that bonobos can put together individual sounds to make new "words," an essential feature of language.

The scientists wondered if a pair of calls carried a meaning greater than that of two individual calls on their own. To test that hypothesis, they spent two years studying one pair in particular: a call known as “waa-bark,” followed by another known as “alarm-huu.”

Chimpanzees make the waa-bark call as a way to bring other chimpanzees to them. An ape will make the call during a hunt, for instance, or to summon allies during a fight. They make the alarm-huu call when frightened or surprised — in response to an earthquake, perhaps, or the unexpected sight of a scientist’s raincoat.

Dr. Townsend and his colleagues wondered if “alarm-huu” when it was followed by “waa-bark” meant something else. They noticed two occasions in which a chimpanzee paired the calls when it encountered a snake while other chimpanzees were within earshot. Perhaps, the scientists thought, the two calls together meant something like, “Get over here and help me deal with this snake!”

Experiments followed. In one, the researchers pulled a fake snake across a trail as chimpanzees passed by. The apes, as predicted, often responded with “alarm-huu” followed by “waa-bark.”

2. Is the idea of Chinese meritocracy a myth?

Out of 9,380 prefects who served under the Qing dynasty, only 57% came through the civil service exam system…Roughly 13% bought their way into office by making ‘contributions’ to the state…Another 4% inherited eligibility from their fathers…about 2%—got in through ad hoc channels like battlefield promotions or personal recommendations. Then there were the 23% who were Manchus. As the ruling ethnic group of the dynasty, Manchus were allowed to bypass the standard exam system entirely. They often entered the bureaucracy through parallel institutions or separate military-based evaluations.

That said, a third to half of your elites being chosen through standardized tests is pretty remarkable by historical standards! China was a pretty awful place to live regardless, so I don’t know how much good it did them when merit was about memorizing a bunch of old texts.

3. Must read Yglesias on how we can know whether the abundance agenda is winning. He notes that many Democratic leaders seem to agree with abundance ideas, but this doesn't show up in what they actually do, citing Buttigieg's stint as Transportation Secretary as an example. This gets back to my discussion with Derek Thompson, where we note it's about more than just persuasion. There are structures in place and activist organizations standing in the way of better policy, along with public opinion manifested through local control over zoning.

I appreciate that he lists current fights that will tell us what to expect going forward. The continuance of Democratic failures even in the face of abundance types winning in the battle of ideas is among the best cases I've seen to continue voting Republican at the local level. This case needed to come from a liberal, of course, given the lack of intellectual firepower on the right now.

4. Erik Hoel on the possibility that we have found life on planet K2-18b, 120 light years away. He mentions how little discussion this is getting compared to the UFO-mania that swept the world a few years ago. I've brought up a similar idea in the context of talking about ancient genomics versus those who believe in lost ancient civilizations. Real science and what we might call populist science, the stuff that gets you on the Joe Rogan podcast, are often interested in the same questions. And real science does amazing things, like find biomarkers for life or reconstruct ancient migratory patterns. But the public finds all this boring. They want little green men in suits coming down from a spaceship, not some confusing explanation about how if light bends this way it means one thing, unless later data shows it means something else. The way you establish real science is boring too. Papers, conferences, journals, trying to get a little more grant money to conduct one more experiment. A challenge for people who care about the future of science and maintaining its funding, if not instilling appreciation for it, is knocking populist science down a peg and trying to get people excited about the real thing.

On the substance of the finding, the question here is what it means for the Fermi Paradox. I've always thought "we're too far away" is a plausible explanation for why we don't see aliens. The emergence of humans seems to have been contingent. It took a lot of time, no other species on this planet has similar intelligence, and even when we developed intelligence it took a long time for our living standards and ability to communicate with future generations to rise above the level of animals. This makes me think that life is probably plentiful in the universe, but intelligent life is much rarer, or at least life that is collectively intelligent in the way we are. At an individual level, it does not seem impossible that whales are smarter than humans, the key difference being they don't have writing, or hands, because they live in the water. See Henrich's The Secret to Our Success on this. It would therefore make sense that the first signs of alien life we would find would be biomarkers, and not signals intentionally sent out.

5. Dennis McCarthy on sugar gliders and the three different categories of mammals, relying on info from his excellent Here Be Dragons. See my discussion with Dennis here.

6. *Review of Neighborhood Defenders, by Einstein et al.*

This is a deep dive into land use hearings in the Boston area, not including Boston itself. The reason for choosing these communities is that Massachusetts keeps detailed records of what goes on at local meetings on housing and the kinds of people who participate. Also, some nonprofit has collected the actual regulations in various locales, aiding the project.

They basically find that neighbors who show up don't like housing, and they're usually old, white, and homeowners. The following two figures show some of the main results. This flips the rightist idea that minorities support and advocate policies that hurt society as a whole on its head. We've failed in few other things as much as we've failed in housing, and it is the old white gerontocracy that is once again the problem.

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You may be asking yourself what happened to the one on Elite Human Capital? Well, nobody wanted to publish that one, and a friend in the industry convinced me that going the self-publish route was actually a bad signal if I wanted to write popular books in the future. Moreover, I became convinced by critics who said that the term was too confusing.

As he’s become a dominant political force, I’ve realized that I have an Elon Musk problem. He exhibits in extreme form all of the worst traits of Low Human Capital, but one has to admit he is smart and economically productive. So explaining to people that I have a definition of Elite Human Capital that excludes Elon Musk – or more precisely, that he is the antithesis of – became too difficult. This isn’t to say that the underlying idea here is wrong. We need a framework to understand the fact that he, and others on the right, lie all the time and have a deep hostility toward truth seeking and open dialogue, and this forms a cultural that contrasts with what the ones we find among the mainstream media and other elite institutions.

For the book I’m writing now, I’ve gotten a major publisher. The ideas I will present are going to be related to those that were going to be in the EHC book, but the topic is distinct and the ideas will be presented in ways that make more intuitive sense to people. As for the term Elite Human Capital, I’m going to stop fighting against what the marketplace of ideas is telling me and start to use it in a more intuitive sense, to refer to smart people. Musk is therefore EHC, though most EHC is, thank God, not like him and in fact disgusted by the role he plays in our political and social life.

I’m unsure how to think about when to talk more about the book. I have an outline, but it feels too soon to go into what it will be about. I’m aiming to publish some time in the first half of 2026, and you will obviously hear more about it as the release date approaches.

What all this mean for this Substack is that I’ll have much less time to write articles from now until the rest of the year. There’s a direct tradeoff, as time and mental energy put towards new essays delay when I can finish the book. So I definitely will not be keeping up the pace of 2-4 articles a week that has been the norm. I’ll probably be cutting back to one article a week, or perhaps even one every two weeks. Even though there will be fewer essays, I may paywall a higher percentage of them in order to still be giving paid subscribers enough unique content. It depends on how I feel about any particular piece. I’ll probably continue to do livestreams and podcasts at about the same rate, since those don’t take a lot of time. I also hope to publish works from lesser known writers that I think deserve more exposure.

And of course, I’ll continue doing the links, as I am here.

Some recent podcast appearances: interview with Anna Gát, and a stream where Substack CEO Chris Bests hosted me and Katherine Dee. I’ve previously shared my recent Vox interview, but for those who didn’t listen here’s a transcript, attached to an article about my role in popularizing the idea of a relationship between civil rights law and wokeness.

1. John Hodgson was a British journalist who traveled with anti-Bolshevik forces, and a decade later published a book about it called With Denikin’s Armies: Being a Description of the Cossack Counter-Revolution in South Russia, 1918-1920. Here’s an article that takes excerpts from the book on how the White Army saw Jews and a few other topics. No surprise: they were not fans. A lot of detail here on how virulent and irrational a lot of the antisemitism was. Part of that was the result of Russian society not having built a native class of intellectuals and leaders under the stifling influence of the aristocracy. Hodgson’s prediction that maybe the Bolsheviks wouldn’t be so bad as rulers didn’t hold up though, to say the least.

2. Relatedly, a reader passes on this 2022 article on "Judeo-Bolshevism." Honestly, I had read a lot about the connections between Jews and Bolshevism from my racism days, Kevin Mac Donald and such, and although I no longer blamed contemporary Jews or thought it had contemporary relevance, I took it for granted that the underlying facts were true.

This is a comprehensive piece that shows although Jews were overrepresented among the communist elite in many ways, the same is true for other minorities. And Jews weren't the worst offenders; Latvians and Lithuanians are much more blameworthy! Moreover, Jews did not vote for socialist parties when they had the chance, and as a relatively well off group disproportionately suffered due to policies aimed at dispossessing the upper classes.

Good read for anyone who is interested in this period of history, or wants to detox from far right ideas.

3. In his conversation with Tyler, NYT science reporter Carl Zimmer is completely stumped by a question asking about his most non-mainstream scientific views.

ZIMMER: [sighs] The thing is, when I am writing about science itself, in terms of the scientific findings that are coming out every day, and I tell people about them, they’ll say, “What? That is crazy.” I’ll just be like, “I’m just telling you about what scientists are discovering about our world.” If I describe what whale scientists are discovering about how whales communicate, I’m not going wildly beyond what they’re finding and their theories, but to most people, that’s crazy that whales can hear each other across oceans and can change their songs.

COWEN: But that’s mainstream now, right?

ZIMMER: Yes.

COWEN: You’re just endorsing the mainstream, and I would agree with that. I think whales might be smarter than humans. That’s a non-mainstream view I have. What are your non-mainstream views?

ZIMMER: It’s interesting that I’m drawing a blank on that, simply because I am just so dazzled by so much that I learn about in terms of the scientific world. The scientific mainstream can be quite mind-blowing to everybody else. If I just say offhand, “Oh yes, there are billions of microbes in that cloud you see in the sky,” people say, “You’re crazy.” I’ll be like, “I’m not crazy.” So, I am a scientifically mainstream sort of person, I guess, and to everybody else, I seem a little crazy.

This way of thinking is completely foreign to me. He researches a vast range of issues. I can't get into a topic without having some skepticism about what I'm reading. For Zimmer, nothing comes to mind? This is an incredible degree of conformity of thought, and probably insightful into the kind of person who has a successful career at the NYT.

Maybe there's a benefit to this. You don't want every science reporter at the NYT coming up with his own theories about virology or plate tectonics and working them into articles. Think of the Roganspehre as the other end of this spectrum, where every doofus finds it easy to conclude that the experts are obviously wrong about everything after watching a YouTube video. You'll probably go less wrong just blindly trusting the experts. But realize that this is what people in established institutions are inclined to do, and adjust your judgments of what they're saying accordingly.

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Below are the links for February. I have short reviews of two books: How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O'Brien and The Rhetorical Presidency by Jeffrey Tulis. I also finally finished the miniseries Rome, and discuss my thoughts below the paywall. The links this month include stories and commentary on immigration restrictionism in Denmark, Tyler’s interview with Gregory Clark, the birthright citizenship debate, Israelis caught spying for Iran, and more.

1. Interview with Matt Weiner, the CEO and founder of Megafire Action. He had a very interesting job, advising all California congressional Democrats on policy issues, including the topic of wildfires.

Some things I learned:

• The 2020 fires alone wiped out 20 years of gains on California carbon emissions.

• The Clean Air Act penalizes a state for controlled burns, which count towards emissions they're allowed to have, but not for letting wildfires happen.

• The permitting issue is absolutely huge. Of four major wildfires since 1999, each of the areas was in the midst of a National Forest Service assessment on whether authorities could do controlled burns when it happened. The "expedited" reviews take 180 days, the norm being much longer.

Interesting throughout. Also a lot of information on how broken the California insurance market is.

2. Here’s a review from Maxwell Tabarrok of that 2017 paper by Bruce Gilley on the case for colonialism that got the author cancelled, concluding that it wasn’t that good even if you’re sympathetic to the arguments. It presents some better ways to approach the question. Tabarrok concludes colonialism was probably net bad, but my reading of the evidence he presents suggests the opposite.

3. Here’s JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. His intellectual vision is becoming clear. It involves:

1) A belief that Western societies are fundamentally broken due to censorship, mass migration, and a general sense that elites aren’t “listening to the people.”

2) A concurrent lack of interest in foreign affairs. The choice to focus on domestic issues here sends that signal.

3) Pompous rhetoric on nationhood and peoplehood, which has no policy content except opposition to immigration.

4) The idea that America is better than Europe because it regulates the economy less. But he switches from capitalist assumptions about the world to socialist ones when trade and migration come up. This point is from the AI speech just before, rather than this one.

5) A globalist perspective on these things, where there’s a similar battle going on between the same forces of light and darkness across the West. Not much interest in the rest of the world, which gives this a kind of white nationalist flavor. Why does an American care about immigration to Europe anyway? It’s a globalist perspective, though one based on race and symbols of the white world like Christianity more than higher principles.

This is the populist synthesis he’s going with. It’s better than I expected from JD in that I worried he was going to go socialist on everything, but the statism is limited to interactions with foreigners.

Anti-migration hostility is fundamentally irrational in America, though it makes more sense in some European states. This is the destiny of conservatism across the West. It merges the interests and ideology of business with the main concerns of the masses, which are the right to be racist and not have dark people around. I wish the vision would unambiguously take the side of Russia’s neighbors against it, though it looks like the American version may be friendlier to Putin while Europeans other than Orban and a few others will remain wary. But what the Trump approach to Ukraine will be is still up in the air.

4. On ants that can live five times longer when they are queens.

5. How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O'Brien is a masterful achievement. As the title promises, the author provides a broad framework to understand what caused the Allied victory in WWII. The battlefields we hear so much about – Kursk, Stalingrad, Iwa Jima, etc. – weren't what mattered. It was Allied land and sea power that shut down Axis production and won the war.

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I’ve been enjoying doing livestreams on Substack lately. There is one scheduled with Noah Smith next Wednesday at 3PM ET, so make sure to join us for that.

There’s been some media coverage of my writing on DEI and Trump’s executive order. See Semafor and The Wall Street Journal.

On to the links. Remember, you can get these posts in real time by paying $3/a month on X.

1. Propecia, the most effective hair loss drug, was discovered when scientists started studying reports that girls were turning into boys in the Dominican Republic.

As it turns out, these kids were actually boys who were born with female-looking genitalia. But then they went through puberty. They were known as “Guevedoces,” which means “penis at 12.” The Guevedoces did not see their prostates grow or lose their hair as adults. Using this knowledge to replicate the natural enzyme deficiency responsible for this, Merck made a prostate shrinking drug, which also worked to prevent hair loss.

2. Dispatch from Korea early in the month begins with the story of a 72 year-old man who says he's willing to die for Yoon Suk Yeol.

The protestors on his side are older churchgoers who adhere to conspiracy theories and have been radicalized by the internet, including YouTubers. The parallels to MAGA are obvious. They even hold signs that say "Stop the Steal"! Yoon's followers are called “taegeukgi budae,” which means "national-flag brigade."

This is a fascinating case of convergent evolution. Young and educated go left, the right is able to build a fanbase of isolated old people with too much time on their hands. You might want to add angry and alienated young men to the right-wing geezer-led coalition. Dementia and pensions are the fuels of right-wing politics, and intellectuals and activists seek ways to direct it. This obviously is not a model of all democratic countries at the moment, but the fact that the US and South Korea ended up with similar dynamics is intriguing and may indicate that they're just ahead of the curve.

3. Zuckerberg briefed Stephen Miller on Meta doing away with their DEI policy before it happened. He also promised him that he would do nothing to obstruct Trump's agenda.

There's been a long-standing debate in political thought about corporate power versus political power. Seeing how quickly Silicon Valley has shifted under Trump and as soon as conservatives started going after wokeness confirms what many of us pro-market types have always said, which is that political power is the real thing.

“Economic power” is nonsense. Private companies at their most powerful are institutions you are free to deal with or not. No company has a monopoly on the essentials of life. They can't force you to for a second do anything you don't want to do, whether as a consumer or employee. Meanwhile, a midlevel bureaucrat can make your life a nightmare on a whim.

Retire the idea of "economic power," except in the sense that financial elites can use money to purchase government favors, or shape public opinion to determine political outcomes, as Elon has done by buying X. In either case, it is government power that is the essence, and money is just a means to influence it. Economic power resulting just from being big or having a lot of money is not real.

On a similar note, Zuck also just agreed to pay Trump $25 million for banning him from Meta.

4. One of the most insightful pieces I’ve read on populism in a long time. Milei and Bukele are solving real problems. MAGA’s “problems” are to a large extent imaginary and if they got their way on immigration, Americans’ living standards would decrease. So Texas ships migrants to Martha’s Vineyard but won’t require E-Verify for private business. Populism as a kind of ignorant grunting while we get pro-market policies is a good outcome. Everyone should subscribe to the Chasing Sheep Substack by the way. One of the best small newsletters out there.

5. I decided to pick up an Alexander biography after listening to the latest Hardcore History. I chose the Philip Freeman one because that was the first that popped up in my Audible app, so I got both the audio and the book.

No other historical figure makes me feel this ambivalent. There is no one close in terms of military accomplishments. Alexander conquered Persia in its entirety. You know how you watch a show like Breaking Bad, and the protagonist is a genius, and you keep thinking that there’s no way he's going to get out of this latest mess, yet he always finds a way? And then you start to think come on, the laws of probability have to catch up with the guy eventually.

That’s the story of Alexander. On more than one occasion, he’ll encounter some hill people on some plain in the sky who think they’re completely safe from the Macedonians, and then Alexander will just lead his men up steep cliffs and strike them down. Or he’ll travel in winter through one of the most dangerous mountain paths in the world, which even the locals fear, and outflank his enemies. The people of Tyre in modern Lebanon thought they were safe because they were on an island and Alexander had no real navy, but then he put one together and built a causeway to reach them while under constant attack. The causeway to this day connects the city to mainland Lebanon.

Here’s the map of his journey from the book.

Alexander achieves one miraculous victory over another as he goes through Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Bactria, Sogdia, and finally India. He faces every kind of geographical challenge, from snowstorms to treks through the desert and monsoons. All along the way he interacted with ancient cultures and learned about the customs of the great civilizations of the known world. Yet the guy was clearly a murderous psychopath. There was no ideological project. He was Alexander, he wanted to conquer the world, and that was all there was to it. Villages that surrendered were sometimes treated well, but their inhabitants were also sometimes slaughtered. It doesn’t do to say he was a product of his time, because some of Alexander's actions were shocking even among his contemporaries. For example, the sacking of Thebes was considered a stain on his reputation. See also this passage regarding the aftermath of his victory at Granicus.

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Well, you’re in luck. I recently had a discussion with Brianna Wu and three of her friends. You can watch below.

Someone asked, and yes, as you might have guessed, I no longer hate pronouns more than genocide. My dislike of rightoids has grown so intense that anyone they hate automatically becomes more tolerable, and they don’t hate anyone as much as they hate trans. I’ll continue to be honest, and as I tell Brianna and friends, I’m so pro-woman that anything in the shape of one is basically fine with me. But I’m still grossed out by female-to-male transitioners. A biological female with a beard fills me with rage. You can add boobs to a human, but it’s a crime to remove them. So my instinctual ranking of dislikes are now 1) Female-to-male 2) Rightoids 3) Genocide 4) Male-to-female. If we’re going in terms of political danger, however, you have to put rightoids and genocide ahead of all trans. This is my truth, and I will not apologize for it.

In other news, there’s now an X bot trained on my work that you might follow and have some fun with. It’ll occasionally engage when people tag it and reply to those it follows. It’s mostly got my ideas correct but is way more dour and serious, and lacks the humor, sarcasm, and creativity that make me who I am. I still maintain my humanity. Still, this is a fun project, and I plan to continue feeding it inputs and trying to improve it over time. As the tech gets better so will the Hanania bot, and I’m intrigued by the vision of one day having an AI that has completely nailed my values and beliefs but is able to digest all the information on the internet. Maybe at that point I can just outsource all my opinions to it and give the bot control of this newsletter.

There’s also now a Reddit for fans. I’ve never been a big Reddit guy but have been lurking there for a bit. Seems like a good place for fans to get together and talk about ideas.

As a reminder, I have an end-of-year special on paid subscriptions if you use the link below. Sign up for a year now, and you’ll be able to renew indefinitely at 20% off. That’s on top of the savings you get by paying yearly rather than month-by-month. The offer is only good until January 1.

Hanania End-of-Year Special: 20% off for Life

Below are the links for the month. As a reminder, to get them in real time on X, you have to subscribe to my account there.

1. NYT on the elimination of hereditary peerage, told through the eyes of Godfrey John Bewicke-Copley, the 7th Baron Cromwell.

Lord Cromwell himself says he doesn't believe in the hereditary principle, and if the Lords themselves don't believe in it there's not much hope for the system.

However, the article makes a compelling case for being conservative here, as it turns out that British governments are now stacking the House of Lords with "lifetime peers" who are just donors, former politicians, and other connected people. The House of Lords is now a sprawling body full of elites who were appointed by governments but can never leave. This seems as bad, if not worse.

Burke nods.

2. Article on Confucianism and its effects on fertility patterns. It doesn’t seem to me that the Chinese have ever had either a real eugenics movement or a principled anti-eugenics stand like in Europe and America. Trying to synchronize science and thought on human affairs is more of a Western thing.

3. As insane as you think NEPA regulations are, things are even worse. Government agencies produce thousands of pages of reports before they can do anything, when the content of the reports doesn't matter. They just have to produce the paperwork, and groups that are not interested in learning about the underlying issue or improving government decision making, but simply want to stop projects, sue to get more paperwork. How long can this continue?

4. Stephen Kotkin talks to Tyler about his studies, time with Foucault, Siberia, East Asia, and Stalin. No biography I’ve read has captured a man and his times better than his two volumes on Stalin. See my review here. The books raise deep questions of historical causation and the nature of power. Disappointed to hear that it’ll still be a few years until the third one is published.

5. Just watched the 1942 Italian adaptation of We the Living. The book was my favorite of Rand's novels, and the movie absolutely blew me away.

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Anyway, I asked Megan how her views fit with those of Ayn Rand, and she responded. And here is me talking to the incredible (you’ll see why) Zoe Booth on the Quillette podcast.

Below, I provide links and commentary on topics including the rise of Christianity, whether racism is a good explanation for the 2024 election outcome, and the origins of the war in Ukraine, along with a review of Joker 2.

1. In-depth report on the violence in Ecuador. Upshot, after describing a country in the midst of shocking savagery: “Whether Noboa can effectively imitate Bukele’s efforts remains unclear. Doing so would require disregarding Ecuador’s constitution.”

This is insane. Civil liberties are great. But this needs to be considered a war time situation. Note how much the gangs are able to function and recruit in prisons, or officers talking about how they have trouble prosecuting people. Note also how gangs recruit minors to commit crimes because they can’t be prosecuted as adults. These are luxuries that Ecuador cannot afford.

2. Can you get better polling results by asking people who their neighbors are voting for? People argue it was a good measure this time, but the same thing was asked in 2022 and it worked terribly. Interestingly, it was tilted relative to the polls in the same direction as 2024, predicting Republicans doing better. My theory is Republicans are just less neurotic and project confidence, and people read “who are your neighbors voting for?” as “who will win around you?” and they go with the more confident side.

3. Brian Chau with a high IQ case for Trump’s destructive style. The low IQ case that bears a superficial resemblance to it is “the elites hate you, are replacing you, etc.” That’s Tuckerism. Better case, alluded to here, is that systems are dysfunctional and you need to go to war to get basic competence and accountability.

4. Dan Klein with thoughts on whether you can be a populist and a classical liberal, with a focus on Milei. I agree with the implication that those atThe UnPopulist Substack are letting their aesthetic distaste for populism get in the way of them appreciating Milei’s successes, which they should.

I also agree that populism in rare instances can be good. In Argentina, where the establishment is socialist and there’s a long history of statism, great, be a populist libertarian. On the American right, though, populism has been associated with a shift in a more statist direction on entitlements (biggest part of government spending), immigration, and trade. It’s also brought in conspiratorial thinking on issues like vaccines and made the right anti-democratic as a general matter, at least whenever Trump loses.

Milei is an exception, but populism is almost always anti-liberal. Mostly this is because elites are more liberal than the masses, so if you’re going to whip people up against them it has to be from a statist position. Tyler has a similar idea.

5. ***REVIEW: Joker: Folie à Deux***

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Maybe it’s because in the run up to elections, people are actually scared, and for much of the public there’s something unsettling about having a holiday that revolves around the idea of scaring each other for fun a few days before we’re going to pick a president. And perhaps that’s why I feel so bad for Halloween itself, since I think people take politics way too seriously and should relax. I’m not a braindead populist type who thinks elections don’t have real consequences, but no single one is going to determine the future of the country. The battle of ideas is worth engaging in, but elections are just a single front in that battle, and one where there are more shades of grey than there are elsewhere.

So today, make sure to strike a blow against neuroticism and tribalism, and enjoy Election Year Halloween to the fullest extent possible.

On to the links and commentary, which includes reviews of Trump on Rogan and Kamala on Daddy, and topics like whether MAGAs will be able to overturn the election, the relationship between progress studies and libertarianism, the emergence of a moderate wing of the Taliban, and unions moving towards Trump.

1. The story of the Jane Collective, which performed underground abortions for women in the years before Roe. Had no idea about this history. I always thought that if you ban abortion women, mostly just give up, or at least that was true in previous decades, but no, they created a real underground market/charity system.

2. Jill Stein profile in the NYT makes clear that she actually wants to be a spoiler for Kamala, with a campaign seemingly targeted towards that purpose. That’s one way to get into the history books. Her Jewish socialist self-righteousness reminds me of Bernie Sanders, and makes me wonder if she could’ve ended up a party man like him if she was from Vermont or things went a bit differently.

3. Douthat on the logical inconsistencies of mainstream pro-life and pro-choice positions. He’s right but I think trying to find consistency in what political movements say is a fool’s errand. Logical consistency is worth appealing to if your goal is to convince others at an intellectual level, but when you focus on the level of mass persuasion and winning votes every movement will say things that contradict one another. On the substance of this question, I prefer my “life is a continuum” argument and I think this is a view a lot of people hold implicitly.

4. According to New York Magazine, flying cars are here. They're just sort of illegal and the hope is you skate enough around the regulations so that the FAA doesn't shut you down. Specific regulations lead to arbitrary design choices that help you get around the rules. But, "[t]he rules explicitly warn that if the agency comes to feel that its liberality is being taken advantage of, it may have to crack down." There appears to be no public interest the government might need to protect here. The FAA isn't worried about people causing dangers to third parties. It's simply a matter of individual safety and paternalism. Good luck to those working on this.

5. I listened to Kamala on Call Her Daddy. This is the first time I ever heard the show. Really nothing of note in what Kamala said, she's a normal politician and sticks to her talking points. I was more interested in what the Daddy phenomenon represents.

For most podcasts, I skip over the commercials, but in this one I was more interested in them than the content. The commercials were for athleisure wear that looks good, lip balm, over-the-counter birth control, and a dating website that promises safety. This podcast has a massive audience, and it’s composed of normal women, comfortable with their femininity, wanting to look good and date men. They may spout every politically correct talking point about race and sex, but if so it's only skin deep. They're neither on the same side of conservatives nor their mortal enemies. A huge swing demographic that represents Taylor Swift normalcy, and will largely determine the future of our politics.

6. I also listened to Trump on Rogan. First, he was a lot more there than I expected. Yes he makes stuff up, says whatever he thinks sounds cool in the moment, and keeps forcing the conversation back to how great he is and how everyone loves him. But he did three hours and was engaged, never lost the whole time. This wasn’t Biden. Voters can tell the difference.

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1. Can you believe the Sydney Sweeney boob discourse is still going on?

Here’s a new piece from Newsweek. This article angered me, as it lumped Hawk Tuah in as part of the same phenomenon, which I hate.

This one from Vox is better. The author groups in a lot of things on the right and argues they’re part of the same outlook. But the rightists who want to ban abortion tend not to be the ones who like the idea of hot women showing off their bodies. They’re allies of convenience for the most part, though I’m sure the author is right that there are some men who want both. In my original Sweeney piece, I agreed with the author that The Man Show was bad. Women can be attractive and people can enjoy it but they shouldn’t be publicly degraded is fine as a synthesis.

2. I enjoyed this history of neoliberalism from Sam Hammond. I don’t really agree with the conclusion that it failed in an objective sense or that the shifts he discusses caused the legitimacy crisis. I’m something of a technological determinist here, I think AM radio, getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of Fox and finally the internet and social media caused our current unrest, not the lack of labor unions or other intermediate organizations between citizens and their elites.

Here is a followup piece on “Deflationary Liberalism,” or the idea that freedom is less a matter of the triumph of an ideology and more a process of discovering how to turn negative and zero sum games into positive sum games between groups. A fascinating way of looking at liberalism that I’m going to give a lot more thought to.

3. Cremieux on the Protestant origins of modernity, via the Turks, who fought Catholics and therefore forced them to stop suppressing Protestants for a while. A twist on the standard story of Protestantism being important here is that Crem doesn't believe Protestants were necessarily more tolerant or had a more liberal culture or anything, only that they were worse at suppressing science because they were fragmented. I've long been convinced that Protestantism was key to modernity, as I think the evidence here is strong. But I don't believe that Protestant and Catholic cultures are pretty much interchangeable except for the latter being worse at stomping out dissent. It was taken for granted in the precolonial period and throughout the first two centuries of the United States that Protestantism was more conducive to individual liberty and I doubt that this was a just-so story to explain American success. The question is why did they care about liberty so much in the first place, and use it as their standard of judgment?

4. Very interesting on government data collection, with a focus on immigration numbers. The Census says there was a net migration total of 1.1 million in 2023, soon to be adjusted to 1.4 million, compared to 3.7 million for the CBO. That’s quite the difference! And the number we use ends up determining things like the unemployment rate. I’m still unsure whether to be appreciative of the competent professionals in government who work on this data or declare it all witchcraft.

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That said, I’m really glad I picked this one up and I hope to interview the author soon. Dennis also has a book on the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, which I’ve also been reading, and publishes a Substack I recommend everyone subscribe to. You can find excerpts from the book and commentary on them for paid X subscribers here.

Last week, Jeff Maurer wrote a response to my piece on who we should want to win the 2024 election. He graciously invited me on his podcast, and you can listen to our conversation here. See too Bentham’s Bulldog on the Trump piece, and my discussion with him. Finally, my podcast with Deep Left Analysis just came out.

Here are the links for the month. You’ll find stories and commentary on the latest YMIBY news, why Rome did not industrialize, quantum processes in biology, the implications of so much social psychology research being fake, what kinds of things on the economy a president Trump or Harris could actually do, and much more.

1. Slate writer on his existential despair seeing his childhood hero Ice Cube transform into a MAGA. Microcosm of the blacks for Trump phenomenon, which is ridiculously shallow. Cube was apparently hawking more affirmative action and black set asides in 2020 before taking this turn. These rappers turning MAGA are just not very intellectual Gen X types sort of befuddled by everything that has changed since the 1990s and who appreciate the Rogan/Tucker/Trump aesthetic of just don’t trust anyone and seem like a 90s version of a regular dude.

2. Ukraine’s Kursk offensive seems to have possibly derailed negotiations meant to stop attacks on power facilities by both sides. There appears to be a pattern here where Ukraine, or factions within the government, seek to disrupt peace talks. This appears to have been what happened when Denys Kireyev was killed in March 2022.

3. Absolutely beautiful piece on the evolution of birds and their cognitive abilities, with useful videos interspersed throughout. I’ve always been fascinated by birds, and used to get pictures of them with one of those advanced cameras, but had to quit when children showed up.

4. Story on far-right groups and their conflicts with antifa. (Apple News, via The New Yorker) The story centers around Patriot Front, which people on twitter believe is all a bunch of feds. But they’re very much real, just from a different class than right-wing influencers and the intelligentsia. One of their top members for example was an assistant electrician making $50K a year. A lot of these guys are in the military. This antifa versus far right stuff is a kind of battle of the proles in a world you probably have no familiarity with if you’re reading me.

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