Dwarkesh Podcast - Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Richard Hanania is the President of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy: How Generals, Weapons Manufacturers, and Foreign Governments Shape American Foreign Policy.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Episode website here. Follow Richard on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Read Richard's Substack: https://richardhanania.substack.com/Timestamps:(0:00:00) - Intro(0:04:35) - Did war prevent sclerosis?(0:06:05) - China vs America's grand strategy(0:10:00) - Does the president have more power over foreign policy?(0:11:30) - How to deter bad actors?(0:15:39) - Do some countries have a coherent foreign policy?(0:16:55) - Why does self-interest matter in foreign but not domestic policy? (0:21:05) - Should we limit money in politics?(0:23:47) - Should we credit expertise for nuclear detante and global prosperity?(0:28:45) - Have international alliances made us safer?(0:31:57) - Why does academic bueracracy work in some fields?(0:36:26) - Did academia suck even before diversity?(0:39:34) - How do we get expertise in social sciences?(0:42:19) - Why are things more liberal?(0:43:55) - Why is big tech so liberal?(0:47:53) - Authoritarian populism vs libertarianism(0:51:40) - Can authoritarian governments increase fertility?(0:54:54) - Will increasing fertility be dysgenic?(0:56:43) - Will not having kids become cool?(0:59:22) -Advice for libertarians? Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe

So there's this idea on like the populist right that like we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over and I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? Like when did that happen? When did they defund public education? Like, no, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism. And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends. Today I'm speaking with Richard Henania, who is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of the new book, Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grant's

strategy. So Richard, first, can you just summarize a book briefly before we get into questions? Sure. So the argument of my book is, it has two real audiences. So first, people who study international relations, political scientists, there's something in there for them. And there's also, I think, something in there for people who are just interested in American foreign policy more generally. So the way that academics tend to study foreign policy, and this is a simplification, but if you're going to have to generalize about the way sort of it's understood in political science, field of international relations. The idea is that states basically are rational

actors and rational actors is something what they do is necessarily good for the world or whether their values are consistent with other people's values but basically that states seek certain goals and their behavior can be understood in that context. So basically the study of grant strategy is sort of a is a is a sort of corollary of this and the idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military means tend to be put towards the same goals. They're all basically moving in the same direction. And I think this view of understanding foreign policy is sort of naive.

My main argument is that we don't think like this in terms of domestic policy. We don't think that there's a grant strategy of the U.S. government with regards to immigration, with regards to health care, with regards to tax system. It's sort of a, there's a fallacy of seeing it decide in international, kind of a design in international relations or kind of a kind of sort of goal-focused behavior and we tend not to make that mistake in other areas so that's you know the first two chapters are basically the theoretical you know people the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong that you know people are just in academic works they're interested in sort

of thinking about ideas and political philosophy i think they're you know people will enjoy those chapters and then most of the rest of the book is basically looking at in American foreign policy and asking does a theory of grad strategy or a theory based on public choice which I present as an alternative model does that explain things like when the US US troop presence of two crew presence is abroad when we start and end various wars the American sanctions regime so major parts of American foreign policy and I argue that the public choice model of foreign policy just works better so maybe the unitary actor model is not right right now But wouldn't be true in the future.

So, you know, like the countries that have a fucked up foreign policy where the whole thing is in shambles and contradicts itself, you know, they'll lose out to the countries that actually have a cohesive national strategy. And in the long run, the countries that actually do have a cohesive aggrand strategy will win, right? Yeah, so this is actually one of the arguments

for how you get rationality that I take issue with. I think this is most closely associated with international relations theorist Kenneth Walts. you know, there's a few things you can say about this, right? So, you know, it might just go against the nature of the state, right? Maybe the state is such a big and complicated thing, that maybe you get closer to rationality,

you get closer to grand strategies through a sort of a selection process, but it's still an open question how close you get. You know, and the other thing is, I would say that there's a lot else going on in the world beyond how states react to one another. So, you know, there's, you know, the origins of economic development are a complicated thing, and a state can have a country like the United States can have a lot going for it as far as human capital, as far as institutions, and do very well economically.

And then, you know, just, and it can afford to have a sort of irrational foreign policy. There's actually one possibility is that states that tend to have good institutions for economic growth, with things like decentralization, individual freedom, and open society, that might be bad for forming a grant strategy for international relations because you can have interest groups influence foreign policy and people are worried about their own lives rather than, you know, what's going on abroad, and the state is limited, it can't really enforce its will. So this is a possibility that, you know, nobody's brought up before, but perhaps, you know, there is some kind of tension there where states with bad foreign policies will tend to have good

good economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength. Interesting. So it's one way to read your book that maybe the decline of war has been bad, right? Because when you had war, you know, I've got the casualties and everything, that's bad. But at least you had to keep countries on their toes and their political institutions couldn't become all messed up. So it's like it's one way to read your book that the political institutions in our world have become so sclerotic because there isn't enough war. I mean, so you know there's not a war is, you know, on balance bad, but are there good things we can say for war sort of as far

as historical development goes? I think that, you know, depending on your politics, if you look at World War I and World War II, a lot happened for the expansion of the American federal government, and I think that's mostly been bad, but if somebody thinks that's good, if you're a big supporter of the welfare state and sort of the centralization of power in Washington, you know, you have to credit World War I and World War II. I think that's clear from the welfare state and sort of the centralization of a, of power in Washington, you know, you know, you have to credit World War I and World War II. the historical record. So unquestionably, war leads to changes. You know, the potential for war probably, you know, was part of the Cold War and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. If there was no potential for any kind of conflict there, you know, who knows, maybe the Soviet Union could

have existed forever. So unquestionably, war is an accelerant and a sort of catalyst for change. And if you think we need a lot of change, maybe you might distress seeing that the decline of war over time, but change can also go in a negative direction too. Now, to what extent are these problems unique to democracy, so, you know, concentrated interest, being able to pull government to, you know, do counterproductive things. Because, I mean, if you look at the quote-unquote China's grants right of view, right, it's a very centralized system. There's one guy at the top.

But, you know, they're doing some very stupid things. Like they're fighting over some irrelevant islands with Japan. You know, they're getting into skirmishes with India over. some mountain regions and you know we'll see about the Belt and Road but you know right now it seems like there's some place you wouldn't have more than me but there seems like there's some places where there's cost overruns and where you know they're building stuff in places that are relevant so to what extent are centralized governments able to have a better grant strategy so yeah

we should be careful not to say you know having a grant strategy is better or smarter in some ways just the question that I address in the book is whether it's coherent whether China so we can understand understands China in comparison to the US on these two axes, whether it's, you know, smarter-wise versus whether it's coherent. Whether it's smarter-wise, which I think your question was getting at, I mean, China's, you know, blunders in, you know, having, you know, squambles with Japan over a few islands. I mean, if you compare that to the U.S. investment in Afghanistan or Iraq, I mean, there's really, you know, we're not really wants to talk about, you know, foreign policy

blunders. I mean, the Chinese, even spending on the military is pretty low. I mean, the nothing that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, I mean, Syria, so we have blunder after blunder. And whether it's to Chinese, but whether the Chinese system has more coherence in foreign policy and whether that could be attributed to it not being a democracy, I think that, I think that's right. I mean, I think that, I think that, you know, that the fact that the Chinese basically, is China's grand strategy has been not to have much of a foreign policy, I mean, relative

to the US, you know, not to take much, you know, not to take much, you know, not to care much about what goes on in most of the world. And then, you know, there does seem to be a concerted effort to sort of push out or push outward and push its weight around within its region, which is natural, which is what states do as they, as they tend to grow. And so, you know, when I look at Chinese foreign policy, do I see more coherence than American? Yes, I mean, you don't see, you know, you see China basically inflict the punishment of a nation

and there's usually a goal, right? And then you can usually, you know, so for example, Lutuania, I think just, I don't if they recognized Taiwan or they did something with Taiwan. China didn't like it. So China did something against Lithuania. I don't know if Lithuania has responded or whatever. But basically, I mean, you can understand how this makes sense, right? In the US section, somebody basically says, we're going to recognize this government.

It destroys the economy. It's more total than anything China does. And then it never talks to them again. And that's basically the end of it. So yeah, I mean, there's certainly more coherence and I think more sense to what China's doing than what the US is doing. But to what extent is that just because, you know, China is powerful and awkward, it doesn't have enough money to waste on debacles like Afghanistan and

Iraq. So like maybe in like 30 years when, or not even 30 years, but like once their economy is bigger than ours, right? Will they be making the same kinds of mistakes? I mean, if you look at when was the British Empire most overextended, you know, the peak of colonization was when they weren't fully a democracy, right? Yeah, so countries even without a lot of resources can often put a lot of efforts overseas. So Maoist China, I think, was one of the, you know, at least for its per capita, level was the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world by far was giving guys money for like subsidies in Eastern Europe for countries that were richer than itself so Mao's China was extremely poor and had an extremely interventionist

foreign policy that had invested a lot in Russia today over-invested foreign policy you know relative to its economic size so you know it's you know the US certainly can't afford to do more than China in my PPP terms I mean China has has caught up or passed the United States United States. So China, I mean, has the potential to do a lot more. I just think it chooses not to. Right. Now, you're saying the book that the public doesn't really care about that much about foreign policy, at least in comparison to domestic policy. Does that mean that if the president actually did have a coherent vision of a grant strategy, he could enact it because

the public is just not going to be paying attention and if he just like really want something, he could do it? I think it depends on the, you know, the costs of what the grant strategy. If the grant strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties, that's going to be really hard. If this, you know, if it's more along the lines that we're going to crush one nation, you know, and you know, how we define grant strategy, there's grant strategy at the macro level, and then there's sort of an idea. We can think about it as like, you know, approach to one country. And sometimes we do see that like I think the last administration had a de facto basically, not a de facto, more than a de facto, sort of an intended policy of regime change towards Iran.

And that wasn't, they weren't open about that. But the idea was basically you just, you know, you just sanction them as much as possible and you just hope, you know, they're as less powerful as possible and potentially collapse. And there was a more official strategy of regime change. And they recognized a different government in Venezuela. And, you know, that didn't require any American casualties. It required a lot of suffering in the countries that were targeted. But it just seemed that the American efforts were put towards certain goals.

So yes, you're right, within certain limits, presidents do have freedom to do a lot. And people don't care about Iran, and they don't care about that as well. So there was a lot of, yeah, there was a lot of freedom there. Okay, now you say sanctions don't work, intervention doesn't work, but if we look at a country like North Korea,

we feel like, you know, if there was something, we really ought to be able to, we really ought to do it, like we really don't want them to have nukes or the capacity to launch nukes to the United States. So if these traditional interventions don't work, is there something you could do about a country like North Korea? Or like, you know, Venezuela is like serving its own people, Obviously, the sanctions are making it worse, but like if you wanted to get rid of Maduro,

is there something we could do that is just like feasible and it's not counterproductive? So I mean, each of these cases is sort of unique. So I mean, North Korea, I mean, interventions work. I mean, if you know, if you just overthrow our government, you can get rid of them. You know, but obviously that would be very costly in the case of North Korea for nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons, they have a lot of, you know, a pretty big army. yeah, can we do something about North Korea and, you know, nukes? I think, you know, one school of thought is basically that North Korea wants nukes

because it's afraid of the U.S., right? It's basically defensive. It's fixed in the U.S. If it's not going to invade it at this point, it's because of nukes, if you know, would like to see the regime fall anyway. And that's probably true. And, you know, and the question is, do you, you know, And the question is, do you accommodate sort of that fear if what you're worried about is nuclear weapons and learn to live with the government?

Now, there's another school of thought of North Korea that says basically they want the U.S. out and they want to conquer the South. You know, I don't have insight into the thinking of the North Korean regime. So it's really hard to say, which is the, you know, which is the correct position? And then on Venezuela, like, is there something we can do to, you know, counteract the, you know, the terrible economic policy? that the Maduro regime and the form of the Shavas regime have implemented, you know, it's very, very hard. I mean, I think the move towards more open markets globally has been the result of basically people seeing that markets work much better than central planning.

I mean, the Soviets in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe realized that what they were doing was not working, and they basically moved to a capital assistant. it wasn't because Gorbachev wasn't forced into it. There was nothing, there was no like rebellion from below or civil war or anything. They just basically decided that the regime had lost legitimacy, even if not from the people, at least from those at the top, and especially for the Soviet satellites. And so that doesn't mean that that movement's going to be, you know,

the movement is going to be consistent in the direction of markets all the time everywhere. So you have to understand sometimes some places are going to go in the opposite. direction. I think, well, you know, one thing the U.S. does have to do some very harmful things to Latin America that I think they probably shouldn't do. I mean, the drug war, I mean, these countries, so much of their politics revolves around stopping the flow of drugs and because that's what the U.S. demands and like, you know, who cares about drugs? Is that worth having a civil war over? No, of course not. And, you know, Mexico and these other countries in Latin America would probably be much better off if we didn't, if we didn't do that. I think that there's also

a sense of a lot of U.S. meddling as far as like democratization and human rights, which people think these are generally good things and all else being equal, they might be good things. But we are not in a position to know, like if you're a country that has a serious violence problem, right? And that's like in the first, you know, that's the prerequisite to everything else, to peaceful living to growth, to everything is getting violent and subject control. And Latin America just have really bad problems with it. And then somebody comes from abroad and says, you know, you have to fight crime or you have to fight cartels in a way consistent with our human rights norms, you know, that's something that sounds good, but might not actually, you know,

might not actually be conducive to getting the best possible policy at the local level. So I think there's a lot of meddling and sort of hubris about what we know and what's best for these countries. And I think that moving away from that would probably help them solve their problems in their own way. Now, you say in the book that one of the agents that are influencing American foreign policy are foreign governments like Israel and Saudi Arabia, But if they are able to actually influence American policy in a way that is good for them as a nation, doesn't that make these countries rational actors then that have a cohesive grant strategy? Yeah, I mean, so something I don't go into the book is, and well, I mean, you have just talked about it now,

sort of what countries, when countries have, you know, can act like more like unitary actors and when they don't. And in the case of, I think that one of the determinants of whether a country acts with, you know, a strategy in a certain domain, is how important the issue is to them, right? So Iran is much more important to Israel and Saudi Arabia than it is to America, right, by many, many times. And so you can imagine Israel and Saudi Arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to Iran, and the U.S. has a sort of open political system

and is liable to be influenced by those countries. And often it's not even, you know, you could even question whether it's always those countries or it's a faction within those countries. But yeah, I do take the point that often there's something closer to a strategy in what other countries are doing just because they're closer to the problem and it actually just matters a lot more to them. And in the book, you say that when it comes to foreign policy, special interests matter more than ideas. And then ideas are after the fact, justifications for what these special interests want. But when you talk about domestic policy, you seem to making the opposite point that actually is the ideology that matters more.

and then economic self-interest actually determines very little about people's political preferences. So why is there a difference between foreign policy and domestic policy? So my view on domestic policy, I mean, so there's, you know, the level of the voter, there's, I think, very little in terms of objective interest because the voter doesn't have a stake in their vote doesn't determine the outcome of the election. So one of the consistent findings of political science is basically that people's economic circumstances do a very, very poor job of predicting their, you know, their political orientation. So whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or whatever, your

economic situation is not very predictive, you know, not even close compared to demographic factors and, you know, cultural attitudes and things like that. Now when it comes to policy, you know, there's a, you know, there's a few different kinds of policy. So the most things, there is, you know, the public opinion is just not paying attention to this public opinion have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code or, you know, it's, you know, the exact details of environmental regulations or you know whatever i mean the same thing in foreign policy with you know something like nato expansion the uh you know so the i think this is this basically you know both international domestic policy international relations and domestic politics

the uh the interest groups you know have a have a huge role to play now the um when it comes to certain issues that are particularly salient so in the domestic context this is something like social security like people aren't going to notice like if you cut their social security benefits or the Medicare or something like that you know there's not a lot of taxes you know something there's not a lot of issues that are exactly like this but here public opinion matters and here you have to you have to try carefully if you're a politician and it's the same thing in foreign policy when there's a cost that when you're going to do something that's potentially

very costly to the country and it becomes a major political issue then then it then public opinion matters a lot more so you need a you know public to be on your side to go into Iraq. There was an overwhelming support for the Iraq war at the time. Now, one of the unique things I think about foreign policy that makes gives leaders sort of more freedom of movement compared to domestic politics. And if you're going to say, what's the difference

in sort of my understanding of politics between domestic issues and international issues, this is probably one of the most important. It's the fact that basically public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign relations, right? I don't think there's a way to sell getting rid of Social Security that's going to work with the American public.

You could easily sell some countries a threat to the United States because most Americans don't have experience with foreign countries. They don't have independent knowledge. These places like Ukraine or Russia or Estonia or anything is basically exists as an abstraction and why we think of one country as a friend and one country is an ally and one country is an enemy. I mean, that's basically, that's media coverage. That signals coming from elites.

And so it's, you know, you look at like going back to the Iraq War, I mean, nobody was thinking about attacking Iraq, you know, right after 9-11. But basically the Bush administration had, you know, high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack. There was a full-on, basically, PR campaign to not explicitly tie to them to 9-11, but basically tied to Al-Qaeda, you know, would make people be afraid of WMDs. I mean, even though the Bush administration never said this, I mean, there was a, I think it was a majority or a platoon. of the public actually believes Saddam was personally involved in 9-11, you know, which there was never any evidence for. But it was easy to sort of lead people in that direction just because you know who knows anything about Saddam Hussein or Iraq, right? People have to sort of trust their leaders on these things. And maybe that's getting harder as like polarization is more extreme and people don't trust their leaders anymore. But there's still just more room to maneuver on foreign policy than there is a lot of domestic issues.

You see in the book near the end that one of the ways to fix this should be that that we better regulate a foreign lobbyist in the government and, you know, funding of, you know, let's say defense contractors onto think tanks and research institutions. Do you think the same should be true of domestic policy, so we should limit the, I mean, this is kind of the leftist agenda of limiting how much money there is in politics, or is this unique to foreign policy? So, I mean, I sort of throw those ideas out there as sort of institutional fixes that people can think about.

I am, you know, I am not, you know, I don't think it come back, come down and say, you know, this, this is something to fix it. I just think that people should be thinking in terms of institutional changes rather than, you know, arguing, you know, just sort of operating in the realm of ideas. I think that, yeah, and so they, but, you know, I think I probably would support, you know, some limits on lobbying for people who worked in the government for, like in the Pentagon, should we do that for all of politics? You know, because there's not really, I don't think I have a principled answer here. I think that I think that the foreign policy,

basically the establishment has had negative influence on American politics and sort of on domestic politics. I think the influence of money on politics has been sort of mixed. The idea of campaign finance reform, for example, is you get money out of politics. But if you get money out of politics, who gets the press coverage well you know it's basically the governments in the party so it's

some other small group of people determining sort of the uh the lay of the land and what you know what the lay of the land and what the sort of what the parameters of the debate are um i think that you know one thing we should do is i mean i i am i'm less um less hesitant or less conflicted about endorsing sort of a cultural change so for example uh in the areas like for example when you you you know when you're interviewing a formal general on you know a in a newspaper or on TV you don't just say this is a former general you say this guy is also on the board of this corporation or that corporation I mean that that I think changes the entire focus of the you know of the conversation and that was

yeah Washington Post wrote a story about this how basically this is the norm and I I was interviewed for them for that story I you know I think there's no good reason not to do that I think part of my one of my book it's not just sort of institutional or legal fixes, it's also such as, you know, telling people think about this in a different way and having sort of this cultural change, which I think takes away a lot of the credibility of the people influencing foreign policy. Gotcha. Okay, so let's talk about experts now.

So in your article in Tel-Lac and Taliban, you point out many ways in which we have established fields, and if you look at the track record of societal trends associated with those fields, you know, things like suicides, when you talk about psychology or crime when you talk about criminology, or obviously, you know, Iraq and Afghanistan, we talk about international relations, you know, things have been getting worse. But if that's a standard you're going to apply is how do the societal trends associated with the field do, then you must think that, you know, global poverty research and development economics must be amazing, right, because we've seen like a billion people lifted out of poverty

or more since 1990. So if you're applying the same standard, then wouldn't it imply that some fields have been doing extraordinarily well? Well, actually, I do think that. I think that the reduction in poverty has come from China first and then India. And if you ask economists, are Chinese and India policies better or worse than they were in the 1960s and 1970s? You could say they're definitely moving in the direction of sort of the consensus of economics. So I actually do think economics is a little bit more of a serious science than other fields. And so, yeah, I would agree with that, actually.

I think economics looks good in the context of the decline of poverty over time. So then would you credit the fact that there hasn't been a nuclear war? Is that something you put in the pro column for international relations? Yeah, that one, you know, I think is different because we, you know, poverty is something we can look at and we can say it's always existed and now it's, you know, it's getting better. And so for nuclear weapons, it's not like we had an era of like a lot of nuclear wars and now we don't, right? We had nuclear weapons. They were invented, and that's consistent with a story where just these weapons were too horrible for anybody to use. But I think if you're going to have like a, you know, a steelman argument of, say, the case for American Empire, it would be something along the lines of, you know, I don't believe that, you know, American hegemony has kept it is what basically has given us, you know, relative peace since 1945.

But I think it would be a side of kind of like a Burkean argument that you know the international system is very complex and it's working out well and just don't change anything you know too radical because potentially you know there's just so much we don't know all the consequences that that would be Well how would you respond to that by the way? I would say that you know I would say that yeah you have to take different parts of American foreign policy and I would be more sort of open to get rid of you know doing the way with certain of them than others so for example regime change wars that's and sanctions. I think those are the low-hanging fruit. I don't think that you can make the case that, I think you can make the case that these are, you know, these have terrible effects on the world, and I don't think you give it in the case that they contribute to global order or anything like that. You know, overthrowing governments is a huge source of international disorder. And then, you know, as far as, you know, whether the, you know, the sort of U.S. hegemony has been keeping peace of that, then you would move on to, say,

the commitments to NATO and, you know, the presence in Japan and, so. South Korea and you would say okay you know we've relative we've kept the you know kept the peace in a relative way there I mean it's it's you know I think you have to sort of look I think that there's a good reason to think that it's not necessarily the influence of the US that's behind the decline of violence because you look at areas even in countries which like they don't have you know you look at diets where they don't have any relationship with the US on either side just war is just down basically across the

board everywhere and you could say well that's all the American system but I think it's hard to figure out exactly how you know the US having a presence in East Asia or or Eastern Europe you know that makes Africans stop fighting each other right and so the fact that everyone basically is not doing war any war it just gives you sort of this I think backs up John Mueller what John Mueller thinks or what Stephen Pinker thinks that's basically you know we're in the realm of ideas and people just think war is stupid and from that perspective you know the is sort of an outlier in how much it uses war and then the US is potentially a

source of instability I think I would lean towards that view but I yeah I've all acknowledged that sort of the Berkian view of you know things have been working out relatively well let's not mess with it I mean the other thing that hasn't been working well actually the number of being killed in like civil wars and civil conflicts has not gone down the way international war has and if you look at who's behind a lot of the civil wars that have the huge death rates I mean that's the United States so not everything is actually working out well I think keeping order with income

countries, we mentioned Latin America. A lot of these things are classified as high crime rates. They could potentially be classified as civil wars. And if you think American foreign policy is having a negative effect in Latin America, I mean, that's another contributor to the violence abroad. So yeah, I think that's the response to it. But again, I acknowledge there potentially could be something

to that argument. So I think one of the other things, Stephen Pinker thinks, is behind the decline of violence is also like international alliances like NATO. Now, to have as a point against that, which is that it, you know, while in the short term, it makes us more safe in the long term, you know, you're like if Russia invades, you know, some North Macedonia or something, then we had to go to war and then it starts World War III. So do you buy Pinker's argument that actually these American alliances have created a safer world?

So I haven't, I read Pinker, you know, when it came out, Better Angels of Our Nature about a decade ago. I don't remember him having that argument about NATO. I don't recall, but, you know, I'll think your word for it. I could be wrong. I thought it was in my enlightenment now, but yeah. Okay, so yeah, I also read in Lightning now, I don't remember. You know, could be there or not. It's a possible argument, even if it's not Pickers.

Yeah, even if it's not Pickers' arguments. Let's see, I'll just take the argument. Yeah, so NATO, I mean, the argument for NATO making the world safer, okay, first of all, I mean, during, you know, the, you know, I think the justifications for NATO, right, but originally were, there was potentially a Soviet land invasion, of Europe, right? And the Soviet Union is gone, right?

And so the question is like, you know, is there a potential for, all we're talking about is Russia, I don't know, like what else we'd be talking about, right, like the North Africa's gonna in Europe or something. It's like, you know, the only potentially thing I think we're talking about here is Russia. And you know, I, it seems not to, I mean, it seems, there doesn't seem to be sort of a,

you know, there's a capability and there's a question of will, right? Russia is just not economically positioned to try to take on Germany or France or Western Europe. It cares a lot about Ukraine and it cares a lot about Georgia. And I think it's pretty clear that Russia, you know, the instability is due to Russian fears over the expansion of NATO. So in Georgia, basically, the government launched a war to try to take back some regions that were sort of breakaway regions with alliances towards Russia. And the idea was basically they thought the United States had their back

and they were trying to settle this issue to get into, to get it to NATO. There was a great Adam 2's substack on this about the history of Russia and NATO. So it's clear that there's this sort of, that there's been sort of a destabilizing influence. Russia's fear that these places would become part of NATO, I think, has driven a lot of this sort of behavior abroad. I think ultimately, though, I think of what it's really about actually at its root in like where the antagonism comes from, I think. that the US sees Russia as a potential for regime change. I think it considers the current government

illegitimate. And I think Russia doesn't, it probably doesn't think that like the US is going to go into Ukraine and add them to NATO and Georgia and then like launch an invasion of Russia, you know, that seems very unlikely. I think that the idea is basically there's an ideological war against the idea of the legitimacy of the Russian state as a non-democracy that has a different form of government, different ideological ideas about, you know, just different things than the US does and I think they're responding to that. So I think this idea of sort of this idea of regime change is sort of beneath the surface and driving a lot of attentions.

Interesting. All right, going back to the topic of expertise, you criticize the focus on peer review and specialized knowledge. It seems that some fields, that seems like a valid criticism, right? It seems like there isn't that much specialized knowledge to begin with, but it feels like let's say particle physics or computational complexity. That seems like academic bureaucracy and incentives at work and I expect people at the top of that field to be the best in the world as that But it seems like the same kind of academic institution as you know like a field like international relations, right?

So why are the two different? So I think I do say in my experts piece I think I say this That it's basically you know I'm focusing on the social sciences because that's what I know best But you said economics works well right And economics works relatively well I think yeah I mean we could We could talk about why, that's an interesting question too. But, you know, I think, so like Nassim Nicholas Talab would say that actually the peer review process doesn't work that well. He has some data on, like, where the big innovations in science comes from, and he tends to think it comes more from the private sector. So I don't know if that's right or wrong to be something.

You know, if you look at something like, it's complicated, something like the MR-RNA vaccine, you know, they couldn't get the publications. it was based on into the top peer-reviewed journals, and then it took, you know, Pfizer and, you know, it seems like there was, it seems complicated because it was, didn't belong on some university research in some ways in government funding. I think it would have one of the big differences between the social sciences and the heart science,

I mean, there's a few differences. The first one is there is some connection to reality, right? You can design the MRNA vaccine, you could take it out of, you know, you can go, even if you're rejected by the peer review paper, You can take it to a pharmaceutical company. They have an incentive to find out whether you're right. It can go on there in the real world.

It can work. And then that changes sort of the ideas in economics. In social science, a few things, it's more complex. So at some ways, it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't. We don't do, like, randomized experiments on big things. We do, like, polling questions, but not on, like, you know, the state have this economic reform, and the state have this other economic reform. We don't do it anything like that.

And I think part of the reason we don't do that, and this is the second big reason why social science is so hard, is because there's not as much social desirability bias. People don't have, you know, deep-seated beliefs about the best way to get a vaccine. I guess some people do. They say that RNA vaccine is scary, but in generally, in general, about these physical things, right?

People don't have strong beliefs about the way they want the world to work, right? And when it comes to the social sciences, people have very, very strong ideas about the way the world should work. And when you combine that with a lack of accountability, with account of, with the lack of any real world test in the form of, you know, markets or some kind of, you know, real experimentation, people can just, you know, believe whatever they want or believe whatever, you know, some kind of like vested interests like the State Department and, you know, the Pentagon bureaucracy, basically, whoever's in power wants to believe.

And so this is why social science is heart and this is why social desirability biases I think the enemy in the search for truth now one thing about economics is I think it's more of a male-dominated field it's a more you know if they have a mathematical sort of requirements that are more stringent I think that leads out a lot of people I think it's it's more of a sort of a you know there's a sort of you know there's complaints from other disciplines that economics is a little bit mean and aggressive when I was in a I got my PhD in political science I was you know surprised to find that but sometimes you know somebody's theory would just fall

apart and then everyone like other people would not just say okay this is wrong go study something else they would be like oh it's okay just you know adjust it this way and then like nobody you know there was always I always felt like people were treating others with sort of kick gloves right I think there was a culture in other fields and this is political science and probably much worse in other fields of not sort of this sort of willingness to you know, to really hurt feelings and to, you know, and just willingness to be wrong.

I think economics has done that better than other fields. And I think there's a movement to make, I've talked about other people in economics who agree with this, there's been a movement to make economics like other fields, and that would potentially be it, that would potentially be disastrous. Right, right. But now, it doesn't seem clear to me that even before

calls for diversity dumped down academia, that things were that much better. You know, they're like fads like communism, or, or, you know, disarmament that were popular in academia and you know like the Vietnam War it was waged by people who had you know like Cassinger McNamara people who had degrees from procedures universities and you know they were right and male but they were still you know that they still were disconnected from the outside

world yeah so have like newer developments in academia actually made it worse well no I mean white white males can have you know the same pathologies as any other group the yeah I think the international you know the dumbing down of academia, you know, I think is a problem. You know, work Kissinger and these, you know, these guys, you know, if you look at the Vietnam War, you know, it's very, it's actually very interesting because everyone sort of knew from like, you know, John, from the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration that basically, you know, they were, you know, that it wasn't winnable, that they were saying to the public wasn't true. And I think that, you know, that if you

look at like the historical record of what politicians were saying personally, they were amazingly explicit in their willingness to admit to themselves and those around them that they were doing stuff for political reasons. Right. So I think they were responding to, I think they were responding to basically a political pressure and basically, you know, public opinion and sometimes using public opinion for their own ends. You know, I don't think if you took professors at international relations and like whatever that equivalent of that would have been and whether they support the Vietnam, I don't think so.

I think the big names, like the ones who are the ones who are, like the ones who are who are not connected to the government, right? So Kiss and Drive me in his heart, because he's like, you know, he's a guy who was in academia, but also like in and out of government, right? And you know, like, it's, it's, you wouldn't expect that person to have like, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't,

you know, because if you had different views basically, he wouldn't be in government. And that's the issue. His views had, he had to be selected to at least be tolerable to whoever, you know, the president happened to be at the moment. And so yeah, I mean, the least, I think the dumbing down of academia, I think to move away from sort of explicit, sort of more hard standards, like just basically being able to meet some standard of mathematical ability, you know, the rise of, you know, cancel culture against free speech,

all these things are harmful. It doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of pathologies before. Yeah, we can see that definitely. Yeah, you know, it was whether expertise has gotten better overall. I mean, I think that, you know, so if you look at a political scientist from the 19, you know, look at just some other fields from the 1960s or 1970s, and you look at political science today, If you go to Twitter, there's a, so there's like a subject to political science, so it's like a good gauge of like what the most prominent political scientists are saying, and it's all stupid like graphs, like democracy has gone down 16.2% since Republicans took power in this state. It's really, really stupid. I mean, you get the mean, the median political scientists from the 1960s, I mean, there's nothing that ridiculous. So I do think, you know, it probably has gotten worse. But, okay, so we would, the problems you're pointing out with academia seem like they're

inherent to any institution that is disconnected from the market and also to like something that can be imperfectly measured. But we would like to have expert knowledge and fields like international relations or criminology or psychology, right? So is there any way to start up institutions that can study these sort of ambiguous topics in a way that actually adds insight to the way we legislate? You know, do we need expertise, do we even need expertise of international relations or criminology or psychology? You know, I tend to believe that the cost, you know, I tend to believe that the costs are more, I tend to believe the costs are, you know, that they outweigh the benefits actually here.

I think a lot, I think if you rely on common sense for crime, for controlling crime, and some basic statistics, right? I think you're better than the field of criminology. I would definitely test, you know, I would definitely, you know, take the, I think there's an idea in, like, the public that, you know, if you, you know, if you want to stop crime and, you know, come down very hard on crime, and I think that's, you know, maybe more controversial among criminologists, but I think the problems, I, actually, I wouldn't say that, I haven't done any survey of criminology, but this is part of the problem in that you have this field called criminology, and even if it, like, arrives at something that's, like, you know, that's

true or logical, you know, or they have, like, some unambiguous finding, the people, There will always be criminologists who politicians who want to do something else will rely on and they will go and they will, you know, find those people. So having this category called criminologist and unless we're going to like survey the field and just do, you know, who knows if that will work, but unless you're going to like survey the field and then just do whatever they get this in the field, you're going to end up the media politicians. They're going to be selecting the people that they want during the COVID stuff. You know, they always say experts say this, expert say that. But you look at the, you know, something like the Great Barrington Declaration. And I just hurrying around the media, I thought these people were crooks and nobody's.

And then when I look at their credentials, they're like Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School. And somehow when the media cites expertise, it's never these people, right? It's always the most hysterical person possible, pushing for some kind of restriction. So I think the idea, you know, expertise, you know, potentially can be valuable. But the idea of expertise can be harmful. And that basically, you know, gives certain people power who want to do things, you know, more sort of legitimacy to do things that are irrational. Now I think that like, you know, at a broader level,

you know, I trust, you know, things like prediction markets, like economic markets, things that are, that don't rely on credentials, but rely on track records of getting things right. And I would, you know, agree with Rahman Hansen and others who would, you know, cheer for these things to have potentially have more of an effect on policy making or the way we think about issues.

Okay, now let's talk about politics. So you say that one of the reasons that liberals has been winning is because liberals just care more about politics. But how does that explain why things have shifted more liberal over the last three decades? Is it just that conservatives have started carrying less about politics, and liberals have started caring more about politics? What's changed?

Actually, to a certain extent, yes. So in 2016, there was a huge mobilization effect on the left. So I do have a, on our substack called 2016, the turning point. I just used 2016 for convenience. Basically, if you look at like 2010 versus 2016 to 2020, and 2020, and you look at, like, 2016 to 2020. in like your probability, for example, of having attended a protest or signed a petition if you were conservative versus liberal, it was maybe you were two or three times more likely as a liberal in 2010 by 2016 to 2020.

I mean, it was multiple so that was something like, you know, 10 times more likely to have done these things. So I think that national politics and sort of the mood has a lot to do with it. I think Trump mobilized a lot of people on the left. He did not, he mobilized a lot of voters on the right, like low-proven city voters who like wouldn't otherwise vote came out on board for Trump and it was pretty good for Republicans and they were concentrated in certain states. And that tended to be good for Republicans politically or at least, you know, makes the bag. While I think Trump did a terrible job of sort of motivating people who are, you know, activists or sort of people who would be bureaucrats or lawyers or, you know, the people who actually

make policy on a day-to-day basis, you know, he really turned those people off and made them, if anything, made them more liberal. And so, yeah, I would say that, you know, the changing it would be. but over time is part of the story. So I'm wondering how this theory explains why certain institutions are especially more liberal. Take for example, big tech, right? Or compared to like a company like Walmart, right?

Now I don't expect that if I went to Walmart headquarters, I'd see a whole bunch of like BLM posters. But if I go to like Facebook and Facebook office, I bet I'll see a few things like that. Or like, diversity is or strength or something like that. So, you know, but both of these companies have face pressure from liberal employees. both of these companies have to face a little rights lawsuits.

And it's not like in the fame companies, you have a bunch of people who have given up high salaries in order to have a position of cultural influence because they're making a lot of money there, right? So it's not like journalism or something. So what explains by big tech especially is super woke? Yeah, so big tech is such an interesting case because until 2015 and 2016,

there was calls, there was a lot of calls for censorship and from the media. And Twitter basically didn't censor anybody until 2015, and Facebook too. So basically, the big tech was a lot less woke than the media wanted them to be. I think that there was basically a lot of political pressure that came down on them from the top.

I think Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, Jack Dorsey are relatively not woke people compared to a lot of elites in America. When tech, you know, and I think other people have made this point. point. Basically, when, you know, the initial generation of, you know, leaders in tech, they were the people who were sort of the pioneers, they were not conformists, right? They tended to be less, you know, they tended to do their own thing just sort of, and they would have

their own political and social views, right? And then when tech sort of became established, it started to, you know, it started to draw people who are more conformists. And that's why, you know, these people have put forth the argument that basically crypto now is more right-wing than tech, because crypto is sort of the next, you know, kind of kind of. edge not thing that nonconformists are doing. So I think tech, I mean it started out, I think, with a more of a libertarian ethos, and it sort of became the establishment, became the, you know, sort of the thing for high conformist people to do. And, you know, I think that that's probably, it explains its willification over time. And then like something like, you know, Walmart, I mean,

you know, and I think, you know, it just sort of be ether right now is if you're all, if you're an idealistic person, it's easier to be idealistic on the left than the right. I don't think their right has done a good job of providing sort of an idealistic vision that appeals to a lot of people. When I think if you go work for Walmart, you know, your views are more maybe, you know, you get enough meaning from, you know, just getting logistics right and getting people the goods and services they need. So I think that attracts a completely different kind of person. Sorry, I don't think I understood the difference between Walmart and Big Tech and that gets like, but in Big Tech, you're also doing stuff like, you know, shipping a product that like you can get meaning out of that as well, right? Yeah. And then in both those cases, they're like getting older in Big Tech, they're becoming older institutions. that attract inform us.

So why is big tech more woke? Yeah, so Amazon, you're working on like logistics, right? I mean, Facebook and Google and Twitter are sort of more in the, you know, because they're not actually producing anything. You could say that they're having to tell themselves a story about why they're doing something good for the world and some people, you know, believe in that story.

You know, they convince themselves of it or they believe in it or they don't. So like this kind of like, you know, like the Google thing, like don't be evil, right? I mean, this is sort of idea that they were doing something social and revolutionary, I think was part of the ethos from the start. While Walmart, you know, they want to get you lower prices and, you know, make your life better. But I don't think it ever had that idea that you were going to fundamentally revolutionize society

by having more Walmarts, right? Yeah, it's kind of analogous to America policy in a way that, like, you know, like Google is something like America and that we have, they have an explicit create, and then they had to do stuff to further that create that actually might make things more. That's interesting. So you write that one thing that your theory can somewhat help vindicate is authoritarian populism. Not that you necessarily support it, but just the idea that you can have a right-wing government that pushes back on the liberal elite who just care more than conservatives,

even if they're not more numerous. I wonder if compared to this, you think this theory also vindicates libertarianism more because in that case, you just, first of all, you don't have the funds for this rent-seeking elite to be able to survive. So, you know, there's less journalism, academia. And also there's, like, less these elites can do to, like, actually coerce people without the help of government. Yeah. So you're getting at sort of my, you know, the sort of the motivation behind a lot of my writing on American politics, which I, you know, I'm disturbed by wokeness.

And I think that the fight against wokeness has been confused and not very effective, which is, you know, it's almost like, you know, that has to be self-evident because wokeness has gone so far and, you know, won so much. And so I'm thinking about, you know, the different ways you can go about sort of working against it. So, you know, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not coming down on, you know, I think that, you know, like to just have one sort of thing, it's either libertarianism or it's populist, you know, more authoritarian. I think that, you know, the words like those are very sort of selectively used. But whether it's like a more interventionist or non-interventionist, you know, I don't think that, like, the ideal response would be a pure version of either of these, right?

So what you could say for the libertarian perspective is that, and Robbie Swolvin, reason, that's the lesson he took from my article, was basically like, you know, they're going to, you know, whatever you try to pass, you see the government has to be like this or it has to be like that, it's going to get around it. And one thing they can't get around is you cut off their funding. You stop giving money to the universities. There's, you know, they're not going to go out. They just don't have the funding anymore to do the stuff that they want to do. You pass a law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservative. that it's a fair hearing, well, I mean, who do you think is going to be interpreting that law and deciding what a fair hearing is and what political discrimination is and all that? So, yeah, there's something to that, I mean, shrinking, like saying, you know, the government at sort of these institutions that are under the influence of, you know, bureaucrats and activists, just shrinking their role in society rather than remaking them, remaking those institutions. I mean, there's something to be set up for that.

But then, like, you know, it depends on, like, what you want, right? If you are really bothered by, you know, if you're really bothered by the direction of the culture, you know, and, you know, and the fact that, you know, activists, you know, are, you know, propagandizing or people who basically are, you know, just the market, I mean, whoever's or whoever, you know, the media institutions and, you know, popular music and culture, if you're upset that they're, you know, they're selling sexual promiscuity to children, for example, you know, you might have a, you know, come, you know, you might have a more forceful response to that. I mean, you can't, there's, there's probably, you know, there's probably not an answer

within the confines of libertarianism or it's very hard. I mean, you could set up your own private community and go off and do something. All right. They're, you know, potentially there's something there. But, you know, you could potentially say, you know, I don't like what's considered art now. I don't like what's considered pop culture. And you might just say, well, that's the, that's the only potential thing you can do. So I'm not sure I follow, like if you're a parent, right, like just don't buy her kid porn. I guess you had to buy them a smartphone at some point. You have to buy them a smartphone.

I mean, they have friends if all their, if you can't, you know, you can only afford to send them to a public school and everyone else is watching porn in the bathroom. I mean, I don't know, like, you know, the people are influenced by that, right? Right. It's not, you know, I don't think it's as easy as turn off the TV. I think we all exist within this culture and, you know, there's a, you know, what other people do, it does affect you. Right, right.

But I guess I'm skeptical of, to the extent of what, right. when government can actually influence the culture. And that brings me to the next topic I want to talk to you about, which is fertility, right? So you're more optimistic about what countries like China and Hungary can do about fertility. But it seems to me that if, like, giving people checks doesn't get them to fuck. Like, I don't know. I don't know if, like, you know, banning makeups on guy is going to actually make a difference.

Well, I mean, so you look at, you step back and you look at sort of what correlates with high fertility levels, right? And it seems more clearly to be associated with culture than economic situation. as humans have become more able to afford kids, they've tended to have less of them, right? So this is a pretty strong argument against it being an economic issue, or largely an economic issue, as a driver of differential fertility rates.

And then, you know, you look at things like, so religiosity are, you know, very important. And the question is, can government influence culture, right? I see no reason to think it can't. I think one thing is civil rights law, I think one of my main arguments on civil rights laws is it actually did influence in culture. And even that wasn't,

that heavy-handed compared to say what the Chinese government could do potentially. So, yeah, you think the idea that fertility is a cultural issue and that government can't have an influence on culture, then basically follows the government if it wanted to change a fertility rate or potentially a lot of other things, you know, it can do so through control the culture. Right, right. But I guess one reason to be optimistic is, depending on a perspective, to be optimistic about China's fertility is, you know, like, listen, look at what they did with COVID, where they were able to, like, just bowl people down in their houses until, like, there were zero cases in the area.

Yeah. And if they, you know, the Western countries couldn't do that so they couldn't get COVID into control. So what if they did something similar on fertility? But there doesn't seem to be some obvious analogous human rights violation that you do to, like, increase fertility that the West is not willing to try, right? It's just like, what are you going to do that's analogous to? Sure.

Sure there is. You can, you know, ban all anti-nationalist propaganda. You can make that education system just be nothing about, you know, about how you should have children to, you know, for the fatherland. You could, you know, tax single people and, you know, unmarried people and 100% and, you know, give all their money to 200. So, you know, there's tons of stuff you could do. You know, whether that's good, you know, whether it goes to like zero COVID is where, you know, the fact that China did it is pretty impressive. Whether it was worth it, you know, I think, you know, they probably gotten overboard at this point, right? So you can debate whether it's worth it.

But I think, you know, yeah, having a competent and authoritarian government sort of open to. of different possibilities. By the way, so you think by what year is China's fertility going to be 1.9, 2031, right? Yes, I give it 2031. I mean, I'm the only, you know, I talk to other smart people and I'm sort of out on the limb here. And, you know, the other smart people, they either think it's impossible or they think the will is not going to be there on the China, and the part of the Chinese government. But yeah, I take a different view and I explained it in my substack.

By the way, I'd make you a small bet on that if you're willing. So, like, I give you like even three to one odds in your favorite. odds in your favorite one point nine yeah okay well one point nine yeah okay well one nine is my median so if yeah I'd have to take that all right yeah yeah we'll figure out the conditions later on but oh and then are you afraid that what these countries will do to actually increase fertility if that'll have a dysgenic effect right so it's just that if it's cash transfers or it's just sort of economic incentive you know maybe it's the people on the margins who like

desperately needed the cash we're gonna have more babies and these are exactly the got people who um or um yeah you know what i'm saying yeah it's that's an that's an interesting question i think that you know so if you let's say the government uh you went down the cultural path and just try to propagandize people at um you know the highest level to have as many kids as possible right are smart people are stupid people more prone to propaganda um i think the argument could be made that smart people are i mean you look at wokeness i mean smart people tend to accept it a lot more than that's stupid people. So maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the smartest people will, you know, will take the hint, you know, most clearly and change their behavior while the stupid people want.

Or maybe the stupid people, you know, stupid or, you know, are just sort of more, it might be different kinds of propaganda appeal to different kinds of people. So something like that's nationalistic might appeal disproportionately to stupid people or, you know, and something like wokeness and like more, you know, it's more idealistic and sort of supports from reality, might appeal to smart people. But I don't think, you know, so that's one, potential issue but I historically if you look at like the way nationalism came about it was the elites generally who who were nationalistic first and then it sort of trickled down to the masses so I don't think there's necessarily a

sort of a rule of human nature that anything sort of nationalist or right-wing propaganda necessarily only disproportionate appeals to the to the less intelligent but it's a fascinating question like what the you know compositional effects are I would it hazard to predict that you know I could just I think it'd get the birth rate out whether it'll be smart people or not smart people I don't know right it was probably still net good in either case but I don't know about China but like for example if the government tried to actually change the culture in America to make it more pro-natalist I could like very well imagine that it would have a counterproductive effect

because then it would become countercultural or or contrary to like oppose a right wing government and like not have kids right so it depends on it depends on like what you know what kind so like yeah the Republican Party took power and said oh you know our biggest thing getting the fertility rate up and it was like somebody like Trump would just trigger it all educated people yeah that that could probably that would probably backfire you know so in some place like China I mean I've seen some data that indicates that like the elites and more educated are more nationalistic so they could actually just you know they could be united and in favor of you know they could be very potentially receptive to such a message it's so complicated because like it's like

China I think Chinese elites see themselves as part of a country that's competing with the US while U.S. elites don't see themselves really as people competing with China. They see themselves as people, you know, competing with other Americans or competing with, you know, nature and trying to change the world or, you know, social peace. So there's completely different dynamics there. And this might be one reason why sort of, you know, the West has become left wing as it's become more dominant and that, like, elites don't have anybody to compete with or, you know, try to feel, try to defeat or feel superior to, you know, the Western gap between, you know, in recent and the decades of the World War II, you know, between the Westerners and the rest of the

world was so large that, you know, they weren't really seen as, you know, competition. And that, you know, might change with, you know, the rise of China, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's, like, really registered as something that's fundamentally shape people's outlook. So, yeah, it's, you know, the compositional, yeah, the compositional, yeah, the compositional you know, effects that sort of who's responsive to propaganda. These are fascinating questions. I think it's hard to predict that in advance. You just, you know, you just have to sort of,

you just, you know, you watch what people do, and then, you know, one thing, actually, you brought up the economic point. So like there's, you know, there's, if you make like say a crap cash transfer for each child, right? Like $10,000 for example. That matters a lot more to a poor person than a rich person.

Now, if you do something like you cut how much they're paying in taxes, right, And some, I think, I think, I think they did this in Quebec and I think, and then Hungarian sort of system works like this too, where if you're getting tax breaks, the rich people pay more taxes. It could potentially be worth more to rich people, to have more kids. So it's, yeah, so the structure of how it's set up would also matter quite a bit. And, okay, final question. What should libertarians do in order to win? So like in the next 20, 30 years, given your theory,

politics, what should the libertarian strategy be? They should hope for ridiculous polarization. They should hope for Americans to hate each other because libertarian ideas are unpopular. The only way you get them is you basically make them, you take over the Republican Party, and then they just win 50% of the time no matter what they do. And they're going to have to control certain states don't matter what, and they have a lot of more freedom to do unpopular things. I think that's, I think polarization is actually good for libertarianism, and I think we might, you know, we might actually they might have a good few decades actually. Right, that also, by the way, explains very well

what wokeness has been winning in the last few decades, right? It's increased polarization, they can get unpopular things fast. Yeah, well, it's a cause and it's a consequence of polarization, right? So these things work together. I think what libertarians should do, and I think I'm doing a part of this, is they should really make clear to be. So there's this idea on the populist right, that like we tried libertarianism,

and now wokeness has taken over it. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? Like, when did that happen? When did they defund public education? like you know and you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism and now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends so in my argument in my article what institutions is just civil rights law I try to make people clear like the conservatives haven't been libertarian enough they

haven't even talked about this or understood the downstream effects of broad interpretation of civil rights law on business and the wider culture so you know I think people should have you know they should try because people really are motivated by anti-wokeness. Some people are motivated by the idea of small government and what can do, but you can reach people who are motivated by anti-wokeness, and that's a lot, a lot of people on the right. And if you explain to them how libertarianism can help them and what they want to do anyway, I think that's a good strategy. Okay. All right, well, those are all the questions I had, Richard. Thanks so much for reading on the podcast. This is fun. Yeah,

great. Yeah, great.