Announcing: Book on Elite Human Capital

The idea the world needs right now

Each of my first two books was the product of my becoming obsessed with a topic and finally realizing that I needed to get everything to be said about it out of my system. In graduate school, I had been studying American foreign policy, and came to the conclusion that the ways that scholars were thinking about the issues involved were wrong. This resulted in Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. I’ve also had a long-term interest in culture war issues, and since I was in law school I had been convinced that the role of law in changing how society addresses topics surrounding race and sex is underexplored. With the rise of wokeness throughout the 2010s and its increasing salience as a political concern, I thought that this was a message the world needed to hear. Now it seems my work has been bearing fruit in the courts and is probably going to be informing the Trump administration, which is very rewarding.

After my first book, I started to write a lot less about foreign policy, and after the second, my interest in culture war issues largely dissipated. I feel like too many intellectuals just write the same things over and over again, and I’ve never wanted to be one of them. Plus, I myself get bored with topics after a while, usually much sooner than my audience seems to.

You probably have noticed that over the last few years I’ve been focused on the idea that the right is Low Human Capital. This has been accompanied by an increasing appreciation for the media and liberal institutions that is so shocking to those who have been following my work that many seem to believe it is all an elaborate troll. Given where my mind keeps wandering and what I seem to notice about the world that few others do, I feel compelled to write a book on the concept of Elite Human Capital.

As of now, I’m thinking that it will be composed of: three chapters based on previous articles but reworked to incorporate new ideas and recent events; three completely new chapters; an FAQ that I will do in collaboration with ChatGPT; and a new introduction at the beginning. I was worried that working on a book would take time away from this Substack. I decided to solve this problem by serializing the new chapters here for paid subscribers only. Today, I’m giving you the introduction. Consider it a draft, and feel free to respond with questions or suggestions, along with pointing out grammatical or other types of mistakes. In the coming months, I will share the three new chapters and the FAQ before the book is finally released.

On a related note, I’ve been doing a few interesting podcasts recently, so check me out on Upstream with Erik Torenberg, where I first announced the EHC book and discussed the need for it; Rising with Robby Soave; and the Comedy Cellar.

The tentative title is Elite Human Capital: Class, Status, and the Secret to Liberal Institutions. For the cover, I’m thinking of something that glorifies male-to-female transsexuals and sends the message that the more attractive among them deserve to rule us. But that’s also subject to change. I’m aiming to finish the book by spring at the latest and release it soon afterwards.

Trump naming RFK to lead HHS has further reinforced my view that this is the book I need to write. The appointment was something that I did not expect. For the first time since I started betting on politics, I am now in the red for this year. This is all due to three big losses that wiped out gains elsewhere: thinking Biden would be the Democratic candidate, and believing that Gabbard and RFK would not get cabinet nominations. I realize that the common thread between these wrong predictions was that I didn’t take my own ideas about human capital seriously enough.

As I wrote at the time, Democrats being able to push a sitting president out of the race was an Elite Human Capital project. LHC falls in line behind leaders, and individuals don’t take personal risks for the greater good. EHC, in contrast, is able to cooperate towards pro-social goals. Even though it didn’t work out in the end, getting rid of a clearly senile Biden was better for both the party and the country. I also predicted that there would be enough pressure within the Republican coalition for Trump not to nominate people who are as crazy, unqualified, and ideologically non-aligned with the GOP as Gabbard and Kennedy. I talk a lot about Trumpism as a kind of cult where nothing matters within the party except worship of the leader, but he’s acting more unrestrained than even I thought he would.

Matt Gaetz withdrawing his candidacy for Attorney General and John Thune winning the race to become majority leader over Rick Scott are signs that the Senate is going to still act somewhat independently. But Trump at least feels strong enough to try and steamroll that body with mostly the cultists and Gribbles on his side, and he may to a large extent succeed. My estimation of the probability that the Trump administration turns really bad has gone up by quite a bit, as has the probability I place on the Republican Party shedding any redeeming qualities it has, namely a reflexively pro-market orientation, after the leader of the cult is gone.

Human capital has become more and more relevant with increasing education polarization. It’s likely that the sorting is not yet complete, given we are getting four more years of Trump, his complete embrace of cranks, and what has happened with X. Now more than before the world needs to understand what makes Elite Human Capital special.

It’s sort of funny that my last book has had an impact on what conservatives are doing, and my next one is to a large extent about their moral, intellectual, and spiritual flaws. But everything is a product of what came before, as the wise Mamala taught us (I miss her). And I will also do my best to make the steelman case for Low Human Capital, though the ultimate goal should in the end of course be some kind of synthesis between these two modes of existence.

---

In the weeks after winning the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump announced that he was nominating Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is famous for being perhaps the most prominent anti-vaccine advocate in the country. He has spread discredited claims about vaccines causing autism, and wrote the foreword to a book that listed the names of young people who had died with the implication that they had been killed by the covid vaccine. This is no way to do science, but the anti-vax organization that published this book couldn’t even get its facts right. The Associated Press found dozens of cases of people featured who died of causes like suicide and overdose. The 12-year-old boy placed on the cover hadn’t even been vaccinated against covid.^[1] Other beliefs RFK Jr. has promoted or given credence to include the ideas that 5G is intended to control behavior through tracking, the Covid pandemic might have been purposely engineered, the coronavirus might have been designed to target some races over others, HIV does not cause AIDS, WiFi causes cancer, and mass shootings are caused by psychiatric medication. He is also plagued by personal scandal, having driven a previous wife to suicide after she found a notebook he kept recording the dozens of women he cheated on her with.

It's often been said that Donald Trump gets away with an endless number of transgressions that would alone sink any other politician. Yet one could say that Trump is a fluke, and that there are no other politicians like him. A decade ago, being a well-known anti-vaxxer would have made one practically ineligible for high-level public service. Now, as of this writing, Kennedy looks likely to become the top health official in the country. Not only that, but he is going to be appointed by a Republican president, despite holding left-wing views on positions like the environment and abortion rights.