There were a few interviews this month. I was on Razib’s podcast, which is always good. Here is Pisco’s livestream, and here is Prediction News, where I forecasted the future of American politics and talked about prediction markets more generally.
There’s been continuing discussion of the pro-natalism issue throughout various Substacks. Let me say I endorse Lyman Stone’s theory of politics, which is that you’re not necessarily trying to find people who are your ideological soulmates, but rather those who want to work towards the same goals regardless of their philosophical orientation. Not all pro-natalist have to agree about everything, but only need to be united in the conviction that the fertility issue matters and we need to take a scientific approach regarding how to fix it. This is what I was getting at in my own piece on the subject where I said that I did not like many of the people attending the Natal conference, but nonetheless will not shy away from the pro-natalism label in response.
I’ve been posting less than normal lately, as I am completing a move to San Diego, but should get settled in within the next two weeks and be back to normal. If anyone wants to help me out, I’m in Carmel Valley and looking for a dentist and a babysitter who works on weekends. I had a tooth pulled in LA but there wasn’t enough time to put in the artificial one while there, so I need someone new to do it. DM me if you have suggestions for either.
It looks like Substack discontinued the meetings feature. I’m still willing to do meetings though for those who are interested, just DM me through Substack and we’ll set something up. The price is $150 for half an hour, or $120 if you’re a paid subscriber. As inflation has cut into the purchasing power of the dollar and I’ve become more famous and important, I’ve yet to raise the price, so take advantage.
Links are below, in addition to two book reviews, Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, and Silence of the Gods by Francis Young. I’m now discussing the Chang book among paid subscribers in the chat here, so join me there if you’ve had a chance to read it yourself. I will open one up for Silence of the Gods soon. I was actually worried there would not be enough people who read the book to have a good chat, but turnout is good so far.
Finally, I was featured a bit in a NYT story where they caught DHS in a bald-faced lie regarding their white nationalist social media strategy. Highly recommended for insights into what these people are like.
1. Two good pieces on the gerontocracy issue. Here’s Yglesias and Russ Greene on “Total Boomer Luxury Communism.” Having written about this issue already, there was still a lot here that was new to me, particularly what happened with Medicare Advantage. I knew that Social Security gets adjusted upward for inflation, but wasn’t aware that it never gets adjusted downward!
Yglesias agrees with Scott Alexander that we shouldn’t demagogue the gerontocracy issue, but the facts really call for taking a strong stand on what’s happening! It’s interesting to see Greene able to promote these non-populist ideas in The American Mind. Interestingly, it is Vance, the New Right’s favorite political figure, who is the Republican who has done the most other than Trump to turn the right against dealing with the entitlements issue. But with these people it’s all about if you can sell ideas in some identity-based exciting way. So if you want to cut entitlements because free markets, that’s gay and lame, and doesn’t sell. If you talk about BOOMERS as a privileged class, then they’ll start listening. Alexander and Yglesias have liberal sensibilities so don’t want any form of demagoguery. I see Greene as having taken my advice to start building an actual anti-gerontocratic agenda in the language and tone that will appeal to a sizable faction of conservatives. When talking to rightists, though, just don’t mention the implications for the racial distribution of wealth!
2. Review of Dostoevsky’s Demons. I’ve talked about the review or podcast that is so good it makes me want to get the book. This one is new. It’s so good that I stopped reading the review half way because I don’t want any more spoilers. Will circle back.
3. Anton Howes’ series on pre-Industrial Revolution England has a new installment, and they’re all must reads. From these essays, I realize that my impression of the policies of this era were mistaken. I thought governments were a lot more limited in their willingness and ability to control the economy. I would’ve thought this was especially true for England, or at least there was some kind of proto-freedom ideology at work two centuries after the Magna Carta. But no, the governments of the time were true mercantilists who oppressed workers. Excited to see how he ties all his research together to explain what exactly happened beginning in the eighteenth century.
4. NYT on Delcy Rodríguez. Reading between the lines here, the difference between her and Maduro appears to be that she’s much smarter than him. She studied abroad at fancy schools and impresses those she talks to; he was a union organizer who never finished high school. Some of her actions have been pro-market and have stabilized the Venezuelan economy. These are bullish signs.
5. I really enjoyed Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang. I got the recommendation from Noah’s footnote in this article. In a narrow sense, the book is about the lives of Chinese country girls who came to work in the factories of the southeastern city of Dongguan in the mid-aughts, along with the author’s investigation of her familial background. Publishing in 2008, Chang notes:
Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-collecting, barbershops, and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century.
In other words, if Chinese migrant workers were their own country, it would’ve been one of the ten largest in the world!
More broadly, the book has something deep to tell us about human nature. The factory girls care nothing about China’s “five thousand year history.” One didn’t even know that Hu Jintao was the leader of the country. They care about finding boyfriends, music, and gossiping about their friends. They treat their relatives left behind in rural China with contempt. One factory girl tries to teach them how to use a garbage can to be more like civilized city folk. They prefer the anonymity of the city to the stifling conformity of the rural village. When they go back, they look forward to returning to their friends and the jobs that many in the West consider a form of “wage slavery.” Status hierarchies in the villages are turned upside down, as parents and elders try to get money out of young girls working on assembly lines.
It’s fascinating how Chinese patriarchy collapsed immediately upon first contact with modernity, while it has remained strong in places like the Muslim world. As Chinese birth rates plummet it is not too early to think of the long term civilizational implications of this.
