“I’m not aware of a single other prominent intellectual who took the position that Trump should be in jail but he was still better than Kamala.” True. This was perplexing, but I respect that you were true to your views and clear-eyed about Trump.
Congrats on a great 2024, including the growth in reach and subscribers! I upgraded from a monthly plan to an annual plan to demonstrate my own small financial commitment to your writing. I’d encourage other subscribers to do likewise, as I imagine all writers appreciate the more stable funding of longer-term subscriptions.
I’m particularly looking forward to the future installments of your Elite Human Capital book to better understand and appreciate what distinguishes the cultural and political institutions built by our modern educated classes relative to more instinctual modes of human organization throughout history. I also like this approach of releasing draft chapters one by one because I’m increasingly hesitant to commit to reading entire books when I already have so many engaging newsletters. I hope to see other writers adopt this installment format so that we subscribers can engage with larger topics at a deeper level through our existing subscriptions. Eg, Yglesias did a five-part series on “The Strange Death of Education Reform.” [1]
In terms of topic suggestions, I recently recommended tech analyst Ben Thompson’s work on the evolution of the media business—notably news and opinions—with the internet, in the context of Chapter 2 in EHC concerning the death of mass media. [2] In general, I find Thompson to be particularly insightful on how the internet disrupted the information ecosystem and shattered our shared-consensus reality. He also has a lot to say about the subscription business model because Thompson pioneered the paid newsletter model with the launch of his Stratechery newsletter in 2013 (Substack founders listed his publication as their inspiration).
Thanks for insightful and engaging articles and looking forward to more in 2025!
"I am completely incapable of kissing up to people who could help me or maintaining potentially valuable relationships, if doing so requires compromising my intellectual integrity." If being disagreeable was a superpower, get this man a cape and some spandex.
You say that “a completely unregulated marketplace of ideas turns into a sewer.” But note that X (Twitter) is only a small part of *the* marketplace of ideas, which includes every place where communication occurs. *The* marketplace of ideas is, on the whole, almost unregulated by any authority; and, while it does contain a fair amount of sewage, the whole thing is not a sewer.
Substack is also relatively "free" in terms of content moderation, as far as I can tell. I imagine that the algorithms recommending content and such behind the scenes also play a large role. I would also contend that pre-Musk Twitter was simply a sewer of a different sort, an even worse one IMO. While I don't spend much time on Twitter these days, before Musk bought it I spent zero time on it at all.
I admit to some hesitations on this one, but not because I hate Indians. There's actually some fairly clear evidence that something like a 1/3 of these Visas get hoovered up by shitty outsourcing consulting firms and not by Google or Apple. I'm not proposing we stop companies from outsourcing (I am pro friend-shoring anyway) but should they really get basically subsidies in the form of government sanctioned imported cheap labor to help send jobs out of the USA? I think most of my concerns would be eliminated by getting rid of the rule that people on these Visas have to work for a specific company or be sponsored. So long as people on such Visas aren't going on the welfare dole, let them go work where they please or start a business. Then Google can still get its amazing software engineers or whatever and crappy outsourcing companies aren't getting to double dip. I doubt actually talented imported Indians will hang around making 60K at the crappy consulting company if the threat of imminent deportation was removed.
India has about 4 million developers working in "offshore software". The top 10% of these are significantly productive and would be a huge asset to any company
They may not be the superstars, but they can help the stars implement their mission.
The H1B pulls from that pool of 4 million. The question is not merely how to get the superstars,.but also how to attract the top 400,000.
Okay, how would that not tend towards a general reduction in dev wages for "average" engineers then?
I admit some of my source of trepidation is because I'm a middle rung "tech" person. I don't work in tech. I actually work in IT. I'm not "elite human capitol" and I know that. I never will be. But I have worked very hard to get myself into the top 20% income bracket and I intend to keep working hard until I get into the top 10%. I do this by spending lots of my free time up-skilling. I constantly look for ways to be more productive and for jobs that give me more challenge and growth. I'll stop when I'm happy or when I'm topped out. I don't know when that will happen.
It is 100% certain that there are hundreds of thousands of Indians who will do my job for way cheaper than me and be as good at it as me. I know because I've met some of them. I also searched that H1B database that's been making the rounds for very unsexy old school IT roles like "system administrator" or "network admin" and a huge number of them were posted for like 65K. This is dog shit for an experienced sysadmin or network admin, let alone a cloud engineer or a solutions architect or similar.
I have 0 qualms about competing for the Indian for the 90k-110K job. May the best geek win. What I'm not willing to do is take a multiple tens of thousands dollar pay cut because companies want smart peons. This is what I have taken to calling this type of labor. You need a smart person to perform some challenging, necessary, but not revenue generating task, but you want them to have the expectations and temperament of the janitor. To be very clear about it, fuck that.
This is why I say remove the need for sponsorship from these Visas. That smart Indian also won't stay there being treated like a janitor either. If companies don't want these Visas absent the guarantee that the worker is tied to them, I think it exposes that it is isn't actually about getting top talent. It's about smart peonage.
(For full disclosure I was a sysadmin for about 10 years and recently transitioned into cyber security).
"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians"
Such a process of churn is unambiguously worth it for things like cutting edge mathematics. There is more ambiguity when all it does is make services slightly cheaper. In aggregate over 100 years, yeah, sure worth it. But I won't be alive in 100 years and I do not derive satisfaction in vicarious life through imaginary future people. The economy is not zero sum, but my life certainly is. Pretty much anything actually does make me specifically better or worse off.
I’m still mystified by your original contention that the right is better for capitalism. Capitalism happens even in totalitarian countries - it’s called the black market. Rule of law and respect for institutions is much rarer and harder to maintain.
Capitalism happening under the black market is sort of like the exception that proves the rule of its necessity. The left forces capitalism into the black market, where it is much less efficient than it would be if legal.
By the way, North Korea practically wiped out the North Korean black market during and after the covid 19 pandemic. The country has become even more insulated, it is believed that the black market has lost most of its past prominence. Totalitarianism, socialism and the left are mortal threats to prosperity.
Trade is a fundamental human instinct - even children do it at lunch time. Institutions are not.
I used totalitarianism as an example because it's so stark. But in the modern world a more common scenario is something like environmental regulations (rule of law + institutions) to ensure that corporations don't dump toxic waste into the rivers.
Environmental laws are left coded, but incorporation laws that limit investor liability are right coded. In both cases there have to be mediating institutions, and there is risk of corruption from all sides.
In the current political context that means things like using tariffs to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
Lots of people like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made those same points, but the president doesn’t set policy in California. And Trump has run as pro NIMBY in the past, warning that Democrats will allow more apartments in the suburbs.
Trump says a lot of stuff. Republicans still allow more building by default, because progressive politics results in more regulation. They favor big talky collectives more than the right does https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/forager-v-farmer-elaboratedhtml
Just how long will this last when the proles are flocking more and more to the right, though?
In the future, it looks like the Democrats will be more and more the US's EHC party, and EHC are more pro-free speech and pro-capitalism than the proles are, to my knowledge.
I think you over learn from singular events. I’ve always thought it’s true that the tech right is better than the general movement on average. This is what you’d expect from the demographic facts from Myth of the Rational Voter. It’s just that there’s a spectrum, and you should never just expect perfect political beliefs from people who have better beliefs on average.
Just a note on the percentage of US Nobel Prize winners who are immigrants. There is usually a gap of 20 to 30 years between when the Nobel-worthy work was done and when the prize is awarded. American universities often try to poach overseas scientists who are predicted to win a Nobel eventually, offering enormous salaries, as a means of boosting their prestige. This will greatly boost the “fraction of winners who are immigrants” statistic.
One signifiant change you seem to have gone through recently is your attitude towards trans people. You used to focus on their appearance and the disgust reaction they inspired in you, and pretty clearly hated them as a class, but now you seem to just treat them like normal people, perhaps even somewhat in admiration of their willingness to violate social expectations in search of their true self, and you direct your ire only towards the particularly unreasonable trans people who represent the worst of wokeness.
I wonder how much of this was caused by your befriending of anti-woke trans people like Brianna Wu?
Richard's previous argument that people should only have a gender-conforming appearance didn't make sense to me. After all, by that logic, why not also only engage in gender-conforming behavior, such as heterosexual sex?
Seems to me like if having gay sex should be acceptable, and it should, then so should cross-dressing.
Just subscribed. Particularly interested in reading more about the Tech Right's capacity to exist as a separate phenomenon from the populist right.
e.g. The AI folks pushing for UBI as a form of placating the newly unemployed means that much of the tech right is trending toward limited socialism. This seems like an interesting conflict of new and old right.
"America has continued growing at a healthy pace and there’s no indication that democracy is in crisis outside of the imaginations of misanthropes disconnected from reality" There's a period of time before a person with terminal cancer actually dies, but that doesn't mean he's healthy.
Government spent two TRILLION dollars more in 2024 than it brought in. GDP has been in recession for several quarters even with all this massive government spending, and all the books have been cooked to make things appear much rosier than they are.
What does the country have now that it didn't have four years ago for that eight trillion borrowed dollars, besides 10 million more migrants and eight trillion more debt? That INSANE level of theft, corruption, and fraud would make even the Roman emperors blush.
I appreciate Mr. Hanania's writing despite deeply disagreeing in many ways, but would also like to suggest that "feelings of disgust" (towards e.g. stupidity/egalitarianism), and being "deeply in love" with a certain vision of oneself in the world, may not always be infallible guides to truth and falsity. Happy New Year!
Maybe you should do a collaboration with Anatoly Karlin about what Russia would have looked like had the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) took it over in late 1917 instead of the Bolsheviks? Such speculation would be interesting because it would allow us to see what a Russia that would have been a true peer competitor of the US, rather than merely a hollow shell of one like in real life, could have been able to achieve.
I don't think that such a Russia could have eclipsed the US, but it could have perhaps come close to equalling it. Imagine 400 million Eastern Slavs (300 million Russians and 100 million Ukrainians + Belarusians) and 100 million Central Asians in a 500 million-strong Greater Russian state!
I’m unsure. I think it might automatically convert if you use the link. That’s what I’d do and see what happens. Try support with Substack if it doesn’t work.
Were you "incapable" of that behavior when you were writing under a pseudonym? I don't know what you were expressing under your real name back then and whether it differed.
Yes I was going around in literal college classes talking about race and IQ. I had no friends and shocked everyone I came across. I was defective, like most people obsessed with the topic. Now I can at least not obsess about things regardless of the circumstances.
i really like your Hoste article on artificial madeup black middle class and i was Shook . I didn,t expect the invisble hand of affirmatiev action to be so consequential
“I’m not aware of a single other prominent intellectual who took the position that Trump should be in jail but he was still better than Kamala.” True. This was perplexing, but I respect that you were true to your views and clear-eyed about Trump.
Congrats on a great 2024, including the growth in reach and subscribers! I upgraded from a monthly plan to an annual plan to demonstrate my own small financial commitment to your writing. I’d encourage other subscribers to do likewise, as I imagine all writers appreciate the more stable funding of longer-term subscriptions.
I’m particularly looking forward to the future installments of your Elite Human Capital book to better understand and appreciate what distinguishes the cultural and political institutions built by our modern educated classes relative to more instinctual modes of human organization throughout history. I also like this approach of releasing draft chapters one by one because I’m increasingly hesitant to commit to reading entire books when I already have so many engaging newsletters. I hope to see other writers adopt this installment format so that we subscribers can engage with larger topics at a deeper level through our existing subscriptions. Eg, Yglesias did a five-part series on “The Strange Death of Education Reform.” [1]
In terms of topic suggestions, I recently recommended tech analyst Ben Thompson’s work on the evolution of the media business—notably news and opinions—with the internet, in the context of Chapter 2 in EHC concerning the death of mass media. [2] In general, I find Thompson to be particularly insightful on how the internet disrupted the information ecosystem and shattered our shared-consensus reality. He also has a lot to say about the subscription business model because Thompson pioneered the paid newsletter model with the launch of his Stratechery newsletter in 2013 (Substack founders listed his publication as their inspiration).
Thanks for insightful and engaging articles and looking forward to more in 2025!
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-teacher-evaluation-reforms-flopped
[2] https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-origins-of-elite-human-capital/comment/83305597
Thanks, I’ll check out Thompson’s work.
"I am completely incapable of kissing up to people who could help me or maintaining potentially valuable relationships, if doing so requires compromising my intellectual integrity." If being disagreeable was a superpower, get this man a cape and some spandex.
I actually don't believe that, but I think he picks his fights carefully, which is more valuable in many ways.
You say that “a completely unregulated marketplace of ideas turns into a sewer.” But note that X (Twitter) is only a small part of *the* marketplace of ideas, which includes every place where communication occurs. *The* marketplace of ideas is, on the whole, almost unregulated by any authority; and, while it does contain a fair amount of sewage, the whole thing is not a sewer.
Substack is also relatively "free" in terms of content moderation, as far as I can tell. I imagine that the algorithms recommending content and such behind the scenes also play a large role. I would also contend that pre-Musk Twitter was simply a sewer of a different sort, an even worse one IMO. While I don't spend much time on Twitter these days, before Musk bought it I spent zero time on it at all.
I admit to some hesitations on this one, but not because I hate Indians. There's actually some fairly clear evidence that something like a 1/3 of these Visas get hoovered up by shitty outsourcing consulting firms and not by Google or Apple. I'm not proposing we stop companies from outsourcing (I am pro friend-shoring anyway) but should they really get basically subsidies in the form of government sanctioned imported cheap labor to help send jobs out of the USA? I think most of my concerns would be eliminated by getting rid of the rule that people on these Visas have to work for a specific company or be sponsored. So long as people on such Visas aren't going on the welfare dole, let them go work where they please or start a business. Then Google can still get its amazing software engineers or whatever and crappy outsourcing companies aren't getting to double dip. I doubt actually talented imported Indians will hang around making 60K at the crappy consulting company if the threat of imminent deportation was removed.
India has about 4 million developers working in "offshore software". The top 10% of these are significantly productive and would be a huge asset to any company
They may not be the superstars, but they can help the stars implement their mission.
The H1B pulls from that pool of 4 million. The question is not merely how to get the superstars,.but also how to attract the top 400,000.
Okay, how would that not tend towards a general reduction in dev wages for "average" engineers then?
I admit some of my source of trepidation is because I'm a middle rung "tech" person. I don't work in tech. I actually work in IT. I'm not "elite human capitol" and I know that. I never will be. But I have worked very hard to get myself into the top 20% income bracket and I intend to keep working hard until I get into the top 10%. I do this by spending lots of my free time up-skilling. I constantly look for ways to be more productive and for jobs that give me more challenge and growth. I'll stop when I'm happy or when I'm topped out. I don't know when that will happen.
It is 100% certain that there are hundreds of thousands of Indians who will do my job for way cheaper than me and be as good at it as me. I know because I've met some of them. I also searched that H1B database that's been making the rounds for very unsexy old school IT roles like "system administrator" or "network admin" and a huge number of them were posted for like 65K. This is dog shit for an experienced sysadmin or network admin, let alone a cloud engineer or a solutions architect or similar.
I have 0 qualms about competing for the Indian for the 90k-110K job. May the best geek win. What I'm not willing to do is take a multiple tens of thousands dollar pay cut because companies want smart peons. This is what I have taken to calling this type of labor. You need a smart person to perform some challenging, necessary, but not revenue generating task, but you want them to have the expectations and temperament of the janitor. To be very clear about it, fuck that.
This is why I say remove the need for sponsorship from these Visas. That smart Indian also won't stay there being treated like a janitor either. If companies don't want these Visas absent the guarantee that the worker is tied to them, I think it exposes that it is isn't actually about getting top talent. It's about smart peonage.
(For full disclosure I was a sysadmin for about 10 years and recently transitioned into cyber security).
*Edit*
Relevant: https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/collapse-soviet-union-and-productivity-american-mathematicians
"The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians"
Such a process of churn is unambiguously worth it for things like cutting edge mathematics. There is more ambiguity when all it does is make services slightly cheaper. In aggregate over 100 years, yeah, sure worth it. But I won't be alive in 100 years and I do not derive satisfaction in vicarious life through imaginary future people. The economy is not zero sum, but my life certainly is. Pretty much anything actually does make me specifically better or worse off.
I’m still mystified by your original contention that the right is better for capitalism. Capitalism happens even in totalitarian countries - it’s called the black market. Rule of law and respect for institutions is much rarer and harder to maintain.
Capitalism happening under the black market is sort of like the exception that proves the rule of its necessity. The left forces capitalism into the black market, where it is much less efficient than it would be if legal.
By the way, North Korea practically wiped out the North Korean black market during and after the covid 19 pandemic. The country has become even more insulated, it is believed that the black market has lost most of its past prominence. Totalitarianism, socialism and the left are mortal threats to prosperity.
Hun, I had been hearing even after 2020 that the black market was the only effective economy in NK and the official economy consists of make-work.
I should've been more explicit.
Trade is a fundamental human instinct - even children do it at lunch time. Institutions are not.
I used totalitarianism as an example because it's so stark. But in the modern world a more common scenario is something like environmental regulations (rule of law + institutions) to ensure that corporations don't dump toxic waste into the rivers.
Environmental laws are left coded, but incorporation laws that limit investor liability are right coded. In both cases there have to be mediating institutions, and there is risk of corruption from all sides.
In the current political context that means things like using tariffs to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
You shouldn't be mystified by Richard's stance if you read this: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/forty-years-of-economic-freedom-winning
Californian environmental regulations aren't resulting in a more livable state. They result in an inability to build renewable energy (or housing).
Lots of people like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made those same points, but the president doesn’t set policy in California. And Trump has run as pro NIMBY in the past, warning that Democrats will allow more apartments in the suburbs.
Trump says a lot of stuff. Republicans still allow more building by default, because progressive politics results in more regulation. They favor big talky collectives more than the right does https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/forager-v-farmer-elaboratedhtml
Just how long will this last when the proles are flocking more and more to the right, though?
In the future, it looks like the Democrats will be more and more the US's EHC party, and EHC are more pro-free speech and pro-capitalism than the proles are, to my knowledge.
I think you over learn from singular events. I’ve always thought it’s true that the tech right is better than the general movement on average. This is what you’d expect from the demographic facts from Myth of the Rational Voter. It’s just that there’s a spectrum, and you should never just expect perfect political beliefs from people who have better beliefs on average.
Just a note on the percentage of US Nobel Prize winners who are immigrants. There is usually a gap of 20 to 30 years between when the Nobel-worthy work was done and when the prize is awarded. American universities often try to poach overseas scientists who are predicted to win a Nobel eventually, offering enormous salaries, as a means of boosting their prestige. This will greatly boost the “fraction of winners who are immigrants” statistic.
One signifiant change you seem to have gone through recently is your attitude towards trans people. You used to focus on their appearance and the disgust reaction they inspired in you, and pretty clearly hated them as a class, but now you seem to just treat them like normal people, perhaps even somewhat in admiration of their willingness to violate social expectations in search of their true self, and you direct your ire only towards the particularly unreasonable trans people who represent the worst of wokeness.
I wonder how much of this was caused by your befriending of anti-woke trans people like Brianna Wu?
Richard's previous argument that people should only have a gender-conforming appearance didn't make sense to me. After all, by that logic, why not also only engage in gender-conforming behavior, such as heterosexual sex?
Seems to me like if having gay sex should be acceptable, and it should, then so should cross-dressing.
Just subscribed. Particularly interested in reading more about the Tech Right's capacity to exist as a separate phenomenon from the populist right.
e.g. The AI folks pushing for UBI as a form of placating the newly unemployed means that much of the tech right is trending toward limited socialism. This seems like an interesting conflict of new and old right.
"America has continued growing at a healthy pace and there’s no indication that democracy is in crisis outside of the imaginations of misanthropes disconnected from reality" There's a period of time before a person with terminal cancer actually dies, but that doesn't mean he's healthy.
Government spent two TRILLION dollars more in 2024 than it brought in. GDP has been in recession for several quarters even with all this massive government spending, and all the books have been cooked to make things appear much rosier than they are.
What does the country have now that it didn't have four years ago for that eight trillion borrowed dollars, besides 10 million more migrants and eight trillion more debt? That INSANE level of theft, corruption, and fraud would make even the Roman emperors blush.
I appreciate Mr. Hanania's writing despite deeply disagreeing in many ways, but would also like to suggest that "feelings of disgust" (towards e.g. stupidity/egalitarianism), and being "deeply in love" with a certain vision of oneself in the world, may not always be infallible guides to truth and falsity. Happy New Year!
Wishing you more kids even if income doesn’t go up in 2025!
Maybe you should do a collaboration with Anatoly Karlin about what Russia would have looked like had the SRs (Socialist Revolutionaries) took it over in late 1917 instead of the Bolsheviks? Such speculation would be interesting because it would allow us to see what a Russia that would have been a true peer competitor of the US, rather than merely a hollow shell of one like in real life, could have been able to achieve.
I don't think that such a Russia could have eclipsed the US, but it could have perhaps come close to equalling it. Imagine 400 million Eastern Slavs (300 million Russians and 100 million Ukrainians + Belarusians) and 100 million Central Asians in a 500 million-strong Greater Russian state!
I’m currently have a monthly subscription. Do you cancel my monthly then resubscribe? Or will that automatically happen?
I’m unsure. I think it might automatically convert if you use the link. That’s what I’d do and see what happens. Try support with Substack if it doesn’t work.
Were you "incapable" of that behavior when you were writing under a pseudonym? I don't know what you were expressing under your real name back then and whether it differed.
Yes I was going around in literal college classes talking about race and IQ. I had no friends and shocked everyone I came across. I was defective, like most people obsessed with the topic. Now I can at least not obsess about things regardless of the circumstances.
i really like your Hoste article on artificial madeup black middle class and i was Shook . I didn,t expect the invisble hand of affirmatiev action to be so consequential
You were talking about this in day to day life? What kind of responses did you get?