I’ll be at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago on October 15 to debate the question of “Is the populist project worthwhile?” You can get your tickets here. The event will be moderated by Tom Ginsburg, my old law professor, so that will be fun. Chicago was the first time in my life I had ever been around smart people – it took until my mid-twenties! – and it was more politically open minded than most places in academia, which meant I really enjoyed my time there. Be in touch if you would like to inquire about media or other events.
1. This Economist report on North Korea is dark. North Korea was always known as a slave state. Yet in the last few years, it has gotten even more repressive. No more NGOs or the UN, few embassies, and the number of defectors to the South has collapsed. There is a clampdown on South Korean media coming into the country, and attempts to roll back liberalization in the private sector.
North Korea like no other place reminds me why politics matters. Something this awful you’d think couldn’t exist in the twenty first century. Yet it continues because its leaders are evil. The rest of us are fighting the same struggle, and it’s only a matter of degrees. Many people in every country dislike markets and interactions with the rest of the world, and if they get their way they will make life worse off for their fellow citizens, even if no other nation is this extreme. I’m overcome with gratitude that other countries have had leaders that haven’t been as bad as the Kim family. History could have worked out differently. The fact that it is happening to Koreans makes it even more tragic. These are people who we know would live completely modern lives if the politics of their country were anywhere near normal.
Setting aside the moral and philosophical aspects of the regime, the turn even more inward seems to have started around the time Trump’s outreach failed. The regime appears to have concluded that building ties was hopeless. We should’ve probably just recognized them as a nuclear power and established connections with them. My moral instinct is to try to destroy the regime, but rationally I know that we never really tried to make things better by seeing if we could reach a modus vivendi, in which case the government would be more secure, its people would suffer less, and there would be some hope of influence. I’m not saying this could have worked, only that Trump was the only president willing to meet with the North Koreans, and his top officials were clearly unenthusiastic about his efforts, when not actively sabotaging them.
2. Ben Shapiro on Ezra Klein. I appreciate Shapiro unequivocally saying that Vance has the same economic worldview as Sanders and Warren. Yes! I feel like I’m insane when I see rightists shriek about socialism and then ignore this. Shapiro is also good on tariffs, will say nice things about legal immigration, and is open about Trump’s flaws.
Klein mentions Shapiro as allergic to the psychology of victimhood. This creates revulsion towards DEI, but also an ability to see the same traits in right-wing populism. It’s been too rare for people on the right to care about their principles more than partisanship. We need more visceral contempt for this stuff, in addition to intellectual critique.
I don’t agree with everything in Shapiro’s worldview – notably, I think the right is much more far gone – but he’s one of the few major influencers who I can look at over the last 5-10 years and say I still recognize the principles that were there before.
Unfortunately, he was kind of grandfathered into his current level of status at a time when the right-wing base was looking for something else. The rise of Tucker, Candace, etc, is the product of a much more diseased culture, and the one that is going to be in the driver’s seat on the right for the foreseeable future.
3. On “African Time”:
In the Ivory Coast, poor punctuality was seen as such a hindrance to the economic development that a campaign was launched against it in 2007. Slogans such as “‘African time’ is killing Africa, let’s fight it” bolstered the campaign. They proposed a “Punctuality Night,” and offered a prize to the person who could demonstrate excellent punctuality. One man’s unusually good punctuality earned him, along with the prize, the nickname “Mr White Man’s Time”
4. The Financial Times on how spending on old people is creating massive burdens for the UK and France. The reckoning is soon coming here too. The most underperforming piece I’ve ever written, from the perspective of insight and importance, was in my opinion Critical Age Theory. I can’t get people to be as excited about the Boomer Question as culture war issues.
5. I always assumed that IQ dropped pretty linearly with age. This article argues that this is an artifact of the Flynn Effect. If you just compare IQs of old people to young people, you have to account for the fact that older generations were lower IQ. But if you compare the same people over time, or find other ways to account for the Flynn Effect, you find that IQ is pretty stable into one’s fifties and sixties before declining!
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