I have the sense that compared to you they seem to be more focused on their specific issues (universities/wokeness & energy respectively) so they are still trying get something out of the MAGA movement & are much friendlier to it. At the same time this focus on the details of specific issues makes them seem more grounded & sane than someone like Musk. Do you think these people are right to act this way based on their more activist profile or do you think it is the duty of any person with brains & dignity to be more explicitly critical?

I know and like both of them, and think that they do a lot of good work. And I wouldn’t stand up and say that everyone has to criticize their tribe all the time in order to maintain their dignity, even in the Trump era. Different people have different roles, and they need to consider what they’re best at and what will give them the most influence.

In my case, I am incapable of staying quiet on things that bother me or I think are wrong. I place an extremely high value on intellectual freedom. It’s not really a matter of strategy. I could say I just have so much integrity, but a critic could also accuse me of lacking emotional control, which is true. To not talk about issues where I’m compelled to speak gnaws at me, and I’ll pick battles based on personal annoyance sometimes even if there isn’t a larger principle at stake.

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Tracing Woodgrains

Michael Tracey

Garrett Jones

Bobby Miller

James Lynch

There will be more to announce later. It will be a great crowd of influential and interesting people in DC. Click here to buy tickets.

I haven’t done a Mailbag in a while, so leave your questions below. Anyone can ask a question, but only paid subscribers will get the answers.

If you see a question you find particularly interesting, click on like, and that will help determine which ones I end up answering. I won’t respond to things that I’ve already talked about elsewhere. Many of you absolutely love to ask about IQ differences and immigration, which I’ve discussed at length time and time again. It’s ok, not everyone has read everything I’ve written, but if you are curious about something I might have addressed already, that’s what the search function is for.

In this mailbag, I answer questions on topics including whether belief in inherent racial differences would harm support for poverty reduction programs; whether I’m unusual in finding success as a “decoupler”; tattoos on women; if I’d prefer a Yglesias dictatorship over American democracy; whether people in politics are mentally ill; and what a single 45-year-old should do with the rest of his life.

Alec Lemas asks

The Democratic Party's nominees for President and Vice President are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Kamala Harris failed the California Bar Examination on her first try. Do you consider either of these people to be "elite human capital?" If not, how do you square it with your "elite human capital" thesis?

I’m glad I got this question because it shows how the idea of EHC is often misunderstood. It’s nobody’s fault, as I think that Anatoly Karlin and I, the two people who rely most on the concept, haven’t really spelled it out. I can’t speak for Anatoly, but for me the idea isn’t just about IQ.

In most modern countries, a certain class of people tends to have a disproportionate cultural and political influence. Yes, they are smarter than average, but plenty of smart people, and even successful ones, are not Elite Human Capital. In addition to high IQ, EHC has two other distinguishing features: an interest in ideas, and a moral code that it lives by that goes beyond tribalism or a primitive form of machismo.

So take two people with the same IQ, say 120. One ends up owning a number of car dealerships in Ohio and makes a lot of money, but he never reads a serious book in his life or thinks about much other than the well being of himself and his family. If he votes, he’s likely conservative, just from instinct, not because he understands anything about the benefits of free markets. The other moves to NYC and becomes a freelance journalist, barely scraping by as she publishes articles on the topics she’s interested in. She spends a lot of her time reading nonfiction and everyone she knows has some kind of interesting job as a writer, artist, academic, or political operative.

Despite the two of them being equally smart, only the second individual is Elite Human Capital. This is not about who is more valuable to society. A small business owner probably contributes more on average than a journalist or academic, with many of the latter categories making society worse off through spreading bad ideas. But the car dealership owner matters a lot less for cultural and political outcomes. Every society has to a certain extent looked down on merchants and technicians relative to other groups that are seen as doing more intellectual or spiritual work. This is not necessarily a good thing, since I believe American culture, and the West more generally, giving the entrepreneur higher status is one of the secrets of our success, as argued by Deirdre McCloskey. But most educated people still have a sense that individuals in academia, politics, journalism, the non-profit space, etc. are doing something more meaningful than those in say oil extraction or supply-chain logistics.

Regarding Kamala Harris, I don’t think she’s very smart. She went to a not very good law school despite being half black, and flunked the bar exam. This should create the presumption that her IQ isn’t that high, and from watching her in public life there is little to indicate that presumption is wrong. She’s very attractive and quite charismatic, and I think that if she had a high level of intelligence too she would be a once in a generation political talent like Obama or Clinton (Bill, of course). Kamala is good at making crowds like her, but when she’s put on the spot or faces hostile questioning, she often gets in trouble due to an inability to think well on her feet. Nonetheless, the fact that she’s a career politician and comfortable in elite liberal circles makes her EHC.

As when talking about conservatives and liberals, when I discuss EHC versus low human capital, I’m less interested in individual differences than in the kinds of communities and norms various groups of people create. An important point to remember is that EHC cares more about status and ideas than money, so this is why they have such an outsized influence. And in many ways, they have better communal norms.

For example, in the midst of his presidential campaign, Trump has recently been selling NFTs. Kamala Harris could not get away with this. It’s not just because there are fewer liberals stupid enough to fall for such a scam, though that is probably true. Rather, liberals have stronger norms against running such scams. She would lose status and respect among people she needs to win over. Trump’s staffers and social circles aren’t demoralized by him screwing over the members of his cult, and conservative media doesn’t do any in depth investigations on the topic in the way that the liberal press will occasionally report on Democratic corruption.

A conservative might try to argue for a false equivalency by pointing to something like the Clinton Foundation and note that its donations collapsed after Hillary lost the presidential race. But the point is that when liberals are corrupt, they at least have to go through the motions of pretending to do some good in the world. And sometimes this means actually doing good in the world – the Clinton Foundation did in fact save a lot of lives. Academia is similar. It’s a scam in a sense, but one where the people involved believe that it is connected to higher ideals, and as a byproduct they do often contribute knowledge to the world.

Recently, I wrote about how Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was caught red handed being corrupt, and MAGA rallied around him. Democrats, in contrast, are more likely to dump politicians when their crimes become too obvious, as did the GOP before the descent into Trumpism. The fact that EHC types are more reflective people makes them care more about truth and avoiding hypocrisy and the most blatant forms of corruption.

Low human capital cultures are the world of transparent scams: anti-vaxx, Stop the Steal, the corrupt televangelist, gold and silver bars sold at exorbitant prices, fake news content mills. Yes, conservatives disproportionately create and fall for such scams. But they proliferate because even among smart people on the right who should know better, there is no culture of shaming or stigmatizing members of the tribe for even the most egregious types of behavior.

This doesn’t mean that Low Human Capital communities are completely devoid of a moral sense. But it’s a tribal morality, which appeals to people who are stupider and less idealistic. Donald Trump in his prime was probably smarter than Kamala Harris. But through most of his public life he never showed interest in anything other than making money, getting his name in the papers, and having sex with models. When Trump did talk about politics, the message was always that foreigners are bad and hurting Americans. This was true for decades before he became a presidential candidate, when he was railing against Japan “taking our jobs” in the 1980s. EHC tends to have higher ideals, while LHC sees the world in zero-sum terms, and can only be inspired if it has an enemy to bash. Its favorite targets include minorities, free thinkers, sexual non-conformists, and of course, foreigners most of all. From this perspective, it is not surprising that conservatives are happier than liberals, because their “thinking” about politics, which they approach like a football game, is a kind of self-indulgence, based around the bonding experience of rooting for their own team and the idea that the groups they identify with are superior to others.

Because EHC are the ones who matter most for politics and culture, any movement that wants to succeed needs to win them over. They seek high status, low pay professions and their commitment to ideals means they will sometimes take the steps necessary to push for major changes in society.

Although EHC types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.

Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.

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I used to arrange comments by likes in these posts, but I won’t this time because it biases the results. Feel free to like the questions you want to see answered, but they won’t get an artificial boost in terms of visibility. For previous mailbags, see here.

Also, allow me to plug the meetings, which you can schedule here. My readers are almost always interesting, and I enjoy talking to you guys. And once in a while, I like to think that I help people make difficult life decisions.

I was just on Ethan Strauss’ podcast, which you can listen to here.

I’ve basically followed the practice of answering the questions that got the most likes. I also picked a few that were buried that I thought were particularly interesting. There’s a tendency for the earliest comments to get the most likes, which makes them more visible, which in turn gets more likes, in a self-reinforcing cycle. Therefore, I was on the lookout for good questions that came relatively late and didn’t have much of a chance to be voted up.

I address questions on why I didn’t practice law, my updated take on my first book, what anti-market thinkers get right, whether the US should adopt a Gulf Arab-type immigration system, and more.

ECLECTIC JOURNEYS writes

For your “Bullying Grandma” theory, why was it a “Bullying Grandma” instead of "Bullying Grandpa"?

Now that’s a fun question. When I think about a MAGA rally, the old ladies are the ones who seem to be the most enthusiastic and aggressive. And when I think about the most obnoxious MAGA members of Congress, Boebert and MTG pop into my mind. They’re both pretty young, although Boebert is a literal grandma. I see MAGA’s reliance on emotion, pettiness, and personal rivalries as inherently feminine. This might not be the way people usually think of Trump supporters, since they regard themselves as belonging to a masculine movement, and I enjoy highlighting that disconnect. So Bullying Grandmas feels right to me, though there are of course Bullying Grandpas out there too.

Nate:

Why did you decide not to practice law after obtaining your J.D. from a top school? I feel like in a different life, you would have made a good lawyer. If you could return to your twenties, would you still go to law school?

I talked about why I didn’t become a lawyer in my autism piece. See footnote 1 and the accompanying text. As for whether I should’ve gone to law school, when I look back on my life it’s very hard to do counterfactuals. A lot had to go right for me to get to this point, and I’m happy where I am, so I’m tempted to say I wouldn’t change anything. One thing going to an elite law school did was it was the first time in my life I was around people who were comparable in intelligence. I had a prole background, then went to a not very competitive undergrad, so this was a completely new experience that I didn’t get until late in life.

I don’t think that I would be the person I am or have the same insights without it. Rob Henderson talks a lot about the culture shock he experienced going to Yale, and I went through something sort of similar, though not at the undergrad level like he did. Being around elite law students, along with the judges and intellectual celebrities that we were surrounded by, might not have been that important to someone with a more upper class background. I actually enjoyed law school intellectually, it was in the end more valuable than my political science PhD, since what we talked about at least mattered. Political science was supposed to make up for its distance from the real world by offering more in the way of truth and intellectual purity, but the vast majority of what we learned ended up striking me as trivial or wrong.

At a more superficial level, people knowing that I graduated from the University of Chicago Law School tells them that I’m pretty smart. In our culture we don’t walk around with our IQs tattooed on our faces, but degrees serve a kind of similar purpose, which is why people compete so desperately to get into top schools even if the direct financial benefits are not always that high. Again, background matters here, as if I had gone to Yale or Harvard as an undergrad, I wouldn’t have needed a Chicago degree to show I was smart, so getting my JD from there was more valuable to me than it would have been for others. Not that I think it’s irrational to make assumptions about people’s IQs depending on where they went to school. Just like racial profiling, it’s a statistical judgment based on truth. Those who read me should be judging my intelligence and insight by the substance of what I say, but all the time, and especially when you’re just starting out, people are rationally looking for indications as to whether you’re worth listening to or not.

So no, I can’t say I regret going to law school, although it was probably unlikely I would ever practice law.

Usually Wash

Are you going to do another mega-poll on what your audience thinks where they rate things from 1 to 5? Curious to see how it's changed since last time you did such a poll. How has it grown and with what demographics? Who has joined? Who has left? Maybe the pro-Putin pro-Taliban crowd.

Probably not for a while. In the original survey, my audience tilted heavily towards classical liberalism. Since that time, I’ve ditched the conservative label completely and have moved more in that direction, so it’s hard to see how it would be much different. It’s a bit of work, and I haven’t seen much to indicate that the composition of my audience has changed, so I don’t know if that’s the best use of my time.

Squirrel House writes:

What are the odds University of Austin Texas and the Peterson Academy succeed at achieving their respective mission statements, i.e., to challenge and replace our traditional educational institutions?

I am not optimistic. Not because I don’t think it can be done, but rather that I think it won’t be done in these specific cases.

UATX was the only institution that denounced me after the HuffPost cancellation attempt, so thankfully I feel free to be as brutally honest here as I want, as I otherwise might have been tempted to hold back.

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I’m wondering whether I should actually keep writing down the responses or you’d prefer a podcast where I just read the questions and answer them.

To find out what people think, I’m conducting the poll below. I won’t necessarily abide by the results, but if public opinion is strong in one direction or the other it’s likely to influence what I do.

Bentham Bulldog (see his Substack):

What do you think of Beauchamp's piece here, advocating constructive solutions to what Israel should do? You've worried that smart liberals have been failing to provide solutions to Israel's problem other than the status quo — but Beauchamp has a solution that he argues for at length.

I was pretty unimpressed by that article. I know something about quantitative research in IR, having spent a lot of time working on this stuff in graduate school, and I can tell you with confidence that it is for the most part a classic case of scientism. Beauchamp talks about the professor who studied “460 terrorist groups to figure out what caused their collapse.” No one really studies that many terrorist groups in any depth. If you spent only one month studying each of 460 terrorist groups the process would take you almost 40 years before you could even begin writing or synthesizing what you found. More realistically what they do is they build a statistical model based on what graduate students read on a Wikipedia page, and then build a story around it. Who knows how accurate or complete the data is – it’s often surprising how limited our information is about many contemporary conflicts. Then they’ll carry out some kinds of statistical analyses that do not take adequate steps to deal with selection effects, because doing so is impossible. So if you find, for example, that governments that respected human rights were more likely to eliminate terrorism, it could be because that strategy worked, or because those terrorist groups were less formidable. A million other explanations are also possible.

Even with all that said, Beauchamp acknowledges that repression can work, it’s just that democracies tend not to be willing to do what it takes. But as I’ve written, that’s because they’ve been fighting wars that really don’t matter. Israel is now fighting a pretty brutal war, and the only reason it’s not even more brutal is international pressure, not because they are a democracy. All of that depends on a Democrat being in office though. If all this happened under Trump, they’d basically be able to starve and bomb Gaza until they got whatever they wanted. I think Netanyahu’s plan is probably just to wait out the Biden administration. At least that’s what I’d do.

Matt writes:

How do international examples fit into your idea that woke is civil rights law. Countries like Canada and Australia seem as or more woke than America. Do you think US laws influence Canadian and Australian laws, and then their legal systems impact culture and corporations? Or is that American culture is so globally dominant and alluring that woke is exported and implemented in these other countries despite a weaker legal underpinning?

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Anyone can ask a question in the comments, but I’ll prioritize answering those of paid subscribers, and only paid subscribers will be able to see the mailbag post.

If you see a question you find particularly interesting in the comments, make sure to like it, so I can know which ones people would most like answered.

You can ask about personal advice, political opinions, or whatever else you want. On a different topic, I’m also still doing personal meetings, which have gone so well that I’m considering becoming more of a life advice guy.