Below are the links for June 2026. Underneath the paywall, I cover topics like whether you can actually defend the American college admissions system, the conservative case against “Great Books,” the parallels between the Glorious Revolution and YIMBY, JD Vance’s new religious autobiography, remarkable claims about the Russian war effort in Ukraine, and Scott Alexander putting the final nail in the coffin of all the miracle talk in the rationalist blogosphere. A very high portion of the links comes from Works in Progress, which I think has become in essence the most must-read thing on the internet.
This is the last links post before my book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, comes out this Tuesday. I know you all deeply admire me and want me to succeed. But if there's ever a time to show support, it's in preordering the book. Forget Substack, X, or op-eds. Successful books are the ultimate measure of intellectual status. Elite Human Capital can only win with your help.
The book is basically a summary of all my most important thoughts on how to think about the populist/non-populist divide, which is becoming salient all over the world and maps on closely to the right and left in the American context. It’s a deep dive into empirical data, and also considers the nuances of when populism might actually go right. I touch on topics that are core to the focus of this Substack, like politically relevant differences based on IQ and partisan alignment, the value of various sources of information, how we go about acquiring knowledge, and the ultimate source of political differences. So if you’re here, you should definitely read it.
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One more announcement: I’ve got an approximately 10,000 word piece coming out on what made The Sopranos great. I’m telling you ahead of time because if you haven’t watched the show, you should definitely start so you can be done by the time you read it. There will be no mercy on the spoilers.
1. Scott Alexander explains the Frankfurt School. I knew these people from what I’ve read rightists say about them. Never having an inclination to believe that Marxism might be true, I never bothered to read the original sources myself. But I got an appreciation here of the underlying logic of them trying to grapple with certain facts about the world, namely how successful capitalism was and how much communism failed. It seems that orthodox Marxists don’t do that. As Scott pointed out, they never questioned why anyone would think that “dialectical mysticism” was true. Reading their thoughts on Mother’s Day cards and jazz, these people seemed like they were malcontents who hated the world, in love with their ability to write long and convoluted explanations of why everything sucks. This reminded me more of modern right-wing reactionaries than anyone on the left today.
2. Scott Sumner with thoughts on trade with China. That nation has its own “rust belt”, with the northeast of the country getting hit extremely hard by reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, beyond anything seen in the US. And just as with the US, reform was unquestionably the right thing to do. It’s strange when we stop caring about people and start worrying about specific places. Maybe you need to for political reasons, but I think even that is exaggerated, as economic self-interest has always been a poor predictor of voting. Usually the political economy constraints come from the fact that regions themselves have political significance in both democracies and dictatorships, regardless of how few people live in them. But as always, that means we should work to overcome bad policy positions. It doesn’t give an entity like Ohio or Liaoning some moral claim over the rest of a nation.
3. Sumner with thoughts on economics and life. Every older person probably has stories like this:
Some stuff that I recall seemed normal at the time, but weird in retrospect. At age 13, I would see my (divorced) dad every few weeks. We’d sit at the bar, and I’d drink soda (then called “pop”) while he consumed six or eight scotch and waters, and we’d talk about all sorts of stuff. Then he’d drive me home! (Blood alcohol level? Don’t ask.) He’d occasionally give me 40 cents to buy him a pack of Kents from the cigarette vending machine. Or at the same age, hanging around the rail yards at night with my friends, dodging the police while collecting flares to use in making fireworks.
Sumner also points out that it’s hard to judge how pro-market one economy is compared to another. There are about 1.1 million federal government regulations, before getting to the state and local level. If we found out North Korea had fewer than that, it wouldn’t mean North Korea was freer than the United States. But we can observe certain patterns occurring in the world that are consistent with economic theory.
The sluggish West German economy took off after ending price controls in 1948.
The sluggish South Korean economy took off after removing some barriers to trade in 1964-65.
The sluggish Chinese economy took off after improving property rights in rural areas after 1979.
The sluggish Polish economy took off after extensive privatization in 1990.
The sluggish Indian economy took off after significant deregulation in 1991.
It’s hard to think of counterexamples: countries undertaking major capitalist reforms and being worse off. Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is one obvious case. But it’s much simpler to believe that Russia just didn’t do capitalism the right way in this one particular case instead of needing to come up with many more excuses to explain away the consistent record of socialist failure, with countries more fully embracing statism being correlated with worse results.
4. Noah Carl: High US murder rate is due to both racial demographics and guns: “White Americans have a homicide rate almost three times higher than white Britons, while black Americans have a homicide rate four times higher than black Britons.” I remember, back when I identified emotionally with the right, trying to explain to them that yes, race matters, but guns do too, and liberals aren’t wrong on that. I couldn’t get them to accept it! I was very surprised by this, though I’m not surprised by any irrationality I see on the right now, especially among those who consider themselves “red pilled” on issues leftists are supposedly lying to you about. I’m not even that against guns. After all, they make suicide much more plausible, and I have a very strong belief in not standing in the way of people wanting to kill themselves. But facts are facts. More guns means more deaths.
5. Works in Progress article on the part of Vancouver being developed by the Squamish, a Native American tribe. I love the irony of this story. Nearly always, when we hear about advocacy on behalf of minorities, including indigenous groups, it’s about advocacy for big government policies that allegedly help the group in question but are bad for society. Here, the indigenous activists are on the side of capitalism and progress, while it is white society that has been preventing development and making everyone poorer!
This suggests that the connection between Western culture and progress might be tenuous and historically contingent. Could Vancouver or any other major North American city be built with the culture and institutions we have today? I doubt the Squamish have something about their culture that made them much more likely than other Native American groups to do something like this. Rather, they found themselves sitting on a goldmine, and the incentives lined up for them to give the city more housing, which it needs more than just about anything else.
