There have been a lot of reviews and podcast appearances related to my new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. I list them below, with links.
Reviews:
Ross Douthat (now moving on to 60 Minutes)
Scott Greer (podcast review)
Podcasts and Streams:
Reasonably Optimistic with Megan McArdle (YouTube video here)
Coleman Hughes (Free Press link, YouTube)
Terms of Engagement, from the Harvard Ash Center
In case you missed it, there was an Atlantic profile.
There’s also this from The Times, which applies the lesson from Kakistocracy to understand the trajectory of Nigel Farage, and Bloomberg Opinion (ungated here), which uses it to analyze the rise of the populist left.
The Free Press asked me to participate in a symposium on the rise of the latter topic. Here’s how mine begins.
The rise of democratic socialism on the left has become a cause of great concern among those who, witnessing the relative economic dynamism of America over Europe and red states over blue ones, believe free markets are the best way to organize society. Yet, as much as this is a story of the left, one can’t understand the phenomenon without looking at what’s happening on the other side of the political spectrum: namely, the complete collapse of any intellectual justification for capitalism on the right.
In a recent interview with Michael Knowles, Vice President J.D. Vance laughed about how Trump wanted to “seize the equity of AI companies.” He celebrated the fact that there is little opposition to this and praised the president for reorienting the right away from the ideas of thinkers like Milton Friedman. This isn’t a new theme for Vance, who has regularly gone out of his way to praise market-skeptical politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Read the whole thing here.
It seems that more people are finally starting to realize that JD Vance has a deep hostility to capitalism. It took long enough; he hasn’t exactly been subtle about this. It’s going to be hard to stop him becoming the nominee, but him becoming president would be the most straightforward way for the United States to end up ruled by two slopulist parties.
1. A fascinating read on the January 1942 Wannsee conference, where high-ranking officials in the Nazi regime met to organize the Final Solution. The article is more broadly on the decision to commit the Holocaust, which you can’t understand without knowing a lot about how the Nazi system worked in general. People make Hitler/Trump comparisons a lot, but a more sophisticated analogy is in governing styles. Each formed a cult of personality where they sit on top, ignore details, and have everyone below them try to enact their own priorities by either being close to the leader or making a credible case that they are acting in accordance with his wishes or the spirit of what he believes. Hitler was a committed murderous antisemite, and this was therefore a major priority of the state and party. He didn’t appear to wake up one day and say he was going to kill all Jews, but his own ideas and the behavior of those throughout his government made that seem like more and more of a natural option as the war went on. This working toward the leader concept is a very recognizable feature of right-wing populism. It’s also interesting to think about how Germany’s status as a democracy and federal state before the Nazi takeover impacted the way it governed, traces of which one can see throughout the regime.
2. I had no idea how absolutely awful the case for “nuclear safety” is. Low doses of radiation might be slightly harmful, slightly beneficial, or have no effect at all. We built a massive safetyist regime based on lies. And note how we treat nuclear risk compared to other kinds..
Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby...
Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses.
A warning for those who think we can reasonably regulate AI. Are we good at doing cost-benefit analysis for the purposes of regulation when it comes to new technology? It doesn’t seem like it to me.
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3. This Works in Progress article on land reclamation is one of the most informative things I’ve read in a while. Like most people, I thought land was relatively fixed. I had no idea how much of it in major cities has historically been created by draining wetlands. Singapore has expanded by a quarter since 1975, and ”eight percent of the land in America’s major coastal cities was underwater in the 1890s and has since been reclaimed.” The article explains why we stopped, despite the higher costs of land making land reclamation more economically rational than ever before. The villain here is environmental regulations.
I knew NEPA and other laws passed in the 1970s were bad, but had no idea about this particular effect, which seems to be worse than all the others. I can’t say this article changed my mind on something. Rather, it provided new facts that strengthened a conviction I already had: so much of our relative stagnation is self-inflicted and due to bad policy rather than being the result of constraints placed by nature or economic necessities. It also made me even less concerned about global warming than I was before. Who cares about rising sea levels? Draining water is apparently very easy. This is yet another argument as to why, instead of focusing on stopping climate change, we should work on adapting to it.
4. Decker on caste in India. This is quite horrifying. The article gave me a new perspective on the connections between kinship based cultures and strong labor protections, as leveling norms make some kinds of policy choices more natural for a society than others. My other major thought here is how awful everything about the caste system and the culture it is based in looks, in contrast to how great Indians are as immigrants. Can selective migration explain everything? It’s the largest country in the world, after all.
