Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

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. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09L9Y2W7S Watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/QyWs-XomCk0. Listen on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/22-richard-hanania-foreign-policy-fertility-and-wokeness/id1516093381?i=1000552080284, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3KLwjmeHEOg9x2ZfhbMUnW?si=y3C3JX3jT7WLLrzRIuAzdw, or any other podcast platform. Episode website here https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/ richard-hanania. Follow Richard on Twitter https://twitter.com/RichardHanania. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp 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? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So there's this idea on the populist right that we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? 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.

• 0:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Today, I'm speaking with Richard Hanania, 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 the book briefly before we get into questions?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Sure. So, the argument of my book is, it has two real audiences. 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 it's understood in political science, the field of international relations, the idea is that states basically are rational actors. And rational actors doesn't mean 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.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  So, basically, the study of Grant's strategy 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 naïve. 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's strategy of the US government with regards to immigration, with regards to healthcare, with regards to tax system. It's sort of a, there's a fallacy of seeing it designed in international, kind of designed

• 1:59Speaker 00

  in international relations, or kind of, you know, a kind of sort of goal-focused behavior. And we tend not to make that mistake in other areas. That's, you know, the first two chapters are basically the theoretical, you know, the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong. That, you know, people are interested in academic works, they're interested in sort of thinking about ideas and political philosophy. I think, you know, people will enjoy those chapters. And then most of the rest of the book is basically looking at American foreign policy and asking, does a theory of grand strategy or a theory based on public choice, which I present as an alternative model, does that explain things like when the US troop presences

• 2:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 grand strategy will win, right?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  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 Walz. You know, there's, so there's a few things you can say about this, right? Like, so the, you know, it might just go against the nature of the state, right? Maybe the state is such a big 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

• 4:02Speaker 00

  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 positive.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Is that states that tend to have good institutions for economic growth with, you know, things like decentralization, you know, individual freedom and open society, that might be bad for forming a ground 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 and 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 economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength.

• 4:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Interesting. So is one way to read your book that maybe the decline of war has been bad, right? Because when you had war, you know, I'm sure you had 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 is it like, is one way to read your book that the political institutions in our world have become so sclerotic because there isn't enough war?

• 5:20Speaker 00

  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 historical record. So unquestionably, war leads to changes. You know, the potential for war probably was

• 6:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Problems unique to democracy. So you know concentrated interest being able to pull a government to um you know do counterproductive things. Because if I mean if you look at the quote unquote China's grand strategy, 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 um and you know we'll see about the Belt and Road but you know right now it seems like there there's some place you wouldn't have known about this 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 grand strategy?

• 7:07Speaker 00

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

• 7:47Speaker 00

  even spending on the military is pretty low. I mean there's nothing that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. I mean so we have blunder after blunder. And whether it's a Chinese, but whether the Chinese system has more coherence in foreign policy um and whether that could be attributed to it not being a democracy. Um I think that I think that's I think that's right. I mean I think that the I think that the 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 not to take much uh you know not to care much about what goes on in most of the world. Um and then you know there does seem to be a concerted effort to sort of uh push outward, push outward and uh push its weight around within its region, which is natural, which is what states do as they

• 8:31Speaker 00

  as they tend to grow. Um 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 a punishment on a nation and there is usually a goal, right? And then you can usually, you know, so for example, Lithuania, I think just, I don't know 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? The US sanctions, somebody basically says, you know, we're not 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 you know, 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.

• 9:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  But to what extent is that just because, you know, China isn't powerful enough or doesn't have enough money to waste on devocals like Afghanistan and Iraq? So like, maybe in like thirty years, when, or not even thirty 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?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  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, it was giving us money for like subsidies in Eastern Europe for countries that were richer than itself. So Maoist China was extremely poor and had an extremely interventionist foreign policy that it had invested a lot in. Russia today, over invests in foreign policy, you know, relative to its economic size. So, you know, the US certainly can't afford to do more than China, and by PPP terms, I mean, China has caught up or passed the United States, so China, I mean, has the potential to do a lot more, I just think it chooses not to.

• 10:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. Now, you say in 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 like, the public is just not going to be paying attention? And if he just like, really wants something, he could do it?

• 10:39Speaker 00

  I think it depends on, you know, the costs of what the grant strategy are. The grant strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties, that's going to be really hard. If the, you know, if it's more along the lines of, we're going to crush one nation... You know, and you know, how we define grand strategy, there's grand strategy at the macro level. And there's sort of a, 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

• 11:14Speaker 00

  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, there is as less powerful as possible and potentially collapse. And there was a more official strategy of regime change and they even 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, 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, they don't care about Venezuela, so there was a lot of, yeah, there was a lot of freedom there.

• 11:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 starving its own people. Obviously, the sanctions are making it worse, but like, if you wanted to, you know, get rid of Maduro, is there something we could do that is like feasible and it's not counterproductive?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  So, I mean, each of these cases is sort of unique, so, I mean, in North Korea, I mean, interventions work, I mean, if you know, if you just overthrow a government, you can get rid of them. The, you know, but obviously, that would be very costly, the case of North Korea for nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons, they have a, you know, they have a lot of, you know, a pretty big army. Yeah, can we do something about North Korean, you know, nukes? I think, you know, one, one school of thought is basically that, that North Korea wants nukes because it's afraid of the US, right? It's, it's basically defensive, it thinks that the US, if not, if it's not going to invade it at this point, it's because of nukes, it would like to see the regime fall anyway. And that's probably, that's probably true.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  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 you learn to live with the government? Now, there's another school of thought on North Korea that says, basically, they want the US 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 correct position. And then Venezuela, like, is there something we can do to, you know, counteract the, you know, the terrible economic policies that the Maduro regime, you know, and before the Chávez regime have implemented?

• 13:50Speaker 00

  You know, it's very, very hard. I mean, the, I think the, 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 Soviet Union, the elites in the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe realized that what they were doing was not working, and then, basically, they moved to a capitalist system. It wasn't because the 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, you know, from those at the top, especially for the Soviet satellites.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  And so that doesn't mean that that movement's gonna be, you know, the movement is gonna be consistent in the direction of, you know, markets all the time and everywhere. So you have to understand sometimes some places are gonna go in the opposite direction. I think, well, you know, one thing the US, you know, the US does have, 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 US 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 do that.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  I think that there's also a sense of a lot of US 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, you 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 violence under control. And Latin American countries 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, at the local level. So I think, I think there's a lot of meddling, sort of hubris about what we know

• 15:56Speaker 00

  and what's best for these countries. And I think that moving away from that will probably help them solve their problems in their own way.

• 16:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 grand strategy?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so, so it's something I don't go into the book is, and well, me and 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, 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 could imagine Israel and Saudi Arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to Iran. And the US 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 know, it's, you could even, you know,

• 17:03Speaker 00

  question whether it's always those countries or it's a faction within those countries. But yeah, I do take the point that, you know, 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.

• 17:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 be making the opposite point that actually it's the 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?

• 17:43Speaker 00

  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 the, you know, 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, 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, I think there's a, you know, there's a few different kinds of policies. So the, most things, there is, you know, the public opinion is just not paying attention to.

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Does public opinion have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code? Or, or, 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, you know, so I think this is basically, you know, both international and domestic, international relations and domestic politics. The, the interest groups, you know, have a, have a huge role to play. Now, the, 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 their Medicare or something like that. You know, there's not a lot of taxes, you know, same thing.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  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 tread carefully if you're a politician. And it's the same thing in foreign policy. When there's a cost, 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, you know, public opinion to be on your side to go into Iraq. There was 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.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  It's the it's the it's the fact that basically public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign relations. I don't think there's a way to sell, you know, getting rid of social security that's going to work with the American public. There is you could easily sell some countries as a threat to the United States because most Americans don't have experience with foreign countries. They don't have independent knowledge. You know, 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 as an ally and one country as 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 Iraq war.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I mean, nobody was thinking about attacking Iraq, you know, right after nine eleven. 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 Saddam to nine eleven, 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 plurality of the public actually believes Saddam was personally involved in nine eleven, 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

• 21:21Speaker 00

  trust their leaders anymore. But there's still just more room to maneuver on foreign policy than there is a lot of domestic issues.

• 21:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  You see in the book in the end that one of the ways to fix this should be that we better regulate a foreign lobbyist in the government and, you know, funding of

• 21:39Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 how, you mean, this is kind of a leftist agenda of limiting how much money there is in politics? Or is this unique to foreign policy?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  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 I come back, come down and say, you know, this, this is something to fix it. I, 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, I think that, yeah, and so they, but I, but you know, I, I think I probably would support, you know, some limits on lobbying for people who worked in the government for, like in the Pentagon. Does that make, does that, should we do that for, for all of politics?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  You know, because I, you know, there's not really, I don't think I have a principled answer here. I think that, I think that the foreign, you know, the foreign policy, basically, the establishment has had a negative influence on American politics and sort of on domestic, on domestic politics. I think the influence of money on politics has been sort of mixed. You know, 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, the lay of the land and what, you know, what the, the lay of the land and what the, sort of what the parameters of the debate are. I think that, you know, one thing we should do is, I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm less, less hesitant

• 23:20Speaker 00

  or less conflicted about endorsing sort of a cultural change. So, for example, in the areas like, for example, when you, you know, when you're interviewing a, a former general, you know, 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, the Washington Post wrote a story about this. How basically this is the norm and I was interviewed for that story. I think there's no good reason not to do that. I think part of what my book does is not just sort of institutional or legal things. It's also just, you know, telling people, think about this in a different way and having

• 24:04Speaker 00

  sort of this cultural change, which I think takes away a lot of the credibility of the people influencing foreign policy.

• 24:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  Gotcha. All right, so let's talk about experts now. So in your article, "Talbuk 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're talking about psychology or crime and 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 the 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.

• 24:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  So if you're applying the same standard, then wouldn't it imply that some fields have been doing extraordinarily well?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, actually, I do think that. I think that, you know, the reduction in poverty has come from China first and then India. And if you ask economists, you know, are Chinese and Indian policies better or worse than they were in the 1960s and 1970s? You could say that they're definitely moving in the direction of sort of the consensus of economics. So I actually do think economics is a little bit, you know, 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.

• 25:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  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?

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that one, you know, I think is, I think is different because we, you know, we, 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, 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 gonna have like a, you know, a steel man 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, that is what basically has given us, you know, relative peace since 1945. But I think it would be a side, a 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

• 26:24Speaker 00

  anything, you know, too radical because potentially, you know, we, there's just so much we don't know about what the consequences of that would be.

• 26:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Well, how would you respond to that, by the way?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  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 getting rid of, you know, doing away with certain of them than others. So first up, for example, regime change wars, that's sanctioned. I think those are the low hanging fruit. I don't think that, I don't think 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 can make 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, US, you know, the sort of US hegemony has been keeping peace of, then you would move on to say the commitments to NATO and, you know, the, the presence in Japan and South Korea.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  And you would say, okay, you know, we've relative, we've kept the, you know, we've kept the peace in a relative way there. I mean, it's, it's, you know, I, I, 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 where it's like, they don't have, you know, you look at dyads where they don't have.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  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 Eastern Europe, you know, that makes Africa stop fighting each other, right? And so the fact that everyone basically is not doing war any more just gives you sort of this, I think backs up John Mueller, what John Mueller thinks or what Steven 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 US 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 acknowledge that sort of the Burkean view

• 28:25Speaker 00

  of, you know, things have been working out relatively well, let's not mess with it. I mean, another thing that hasn't been working out 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 within countries, you mentioned Latin America, a lot of these things are classified as high crime rates, they could potentially, they could theoretically 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, that, you know, I think that's the response to it, but, you know, again, I acknowledge there potentially could be something to that argument.

• 29:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  So I think one of the other things Steven Pinker thinks is behind the decline in violence is also like international alliances like NATO. Now, to have is 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?

• 29:31Speaker 00

  So I haven't, I read Pinker, you know, when it came out, Better Angels Over Nature, about a decade ago. I don't remember him having that argument about NATO. I don't recall, but you know, I'll take your word for it.

• 29:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  I could be wrong. I thought it was in Lightman now, but yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Okay, so I also, yeah, I also read in Lightman now. I don't remember. You know, could be, could be there or not.

• 29:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's a possible argument, even if it's not Pinker's.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, even if it's not Pinker's argument, 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, originally were there was potentially a Soviet land invasion of Europe, right? And, you know, 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 would we be talking about, right? Like, that North Africa's gonna invade Europe or something. It says, 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

• 30:37Speaker 00

  sort of a, you know, there's a capability and there's a question of will, right? Russia is just not, you know, 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, you know, I think it's, 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, launched a war to try to take back some regions that were, 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 into NATO. There was a great Adam Tooze Substack on this, about

• 31:21Speaker 00

  the history of Russia and NATO. So it's, 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, what I think it was really about, actually, at its root, and 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, the idea is basically there's an ideological war against the idea of the legitimacy

• 32:03Speaker 00

  of a Russian state as a non-democracy that has a different form of government, um, different ideological ideas about, you know, just different things than the US does. Um, and I think they're responding, they're reacting to that. So I think, I think this idea of sort of a, uh, this idea of regime change is sort of beneath the surface and drawing a lot of attention.

• 32:21Dwarkesh Patel?

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

• 32:54Speaker 00

  So I think, um, I, I do say in my expert's piece, I think I say this, uh, that it, it's basically, you know, I'm focusing on the social sciences, uh, because that's what I know best.

• 33:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  But, but you said economics works well, right?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, and economics works relatively well. I think, um, yeah, I mean, we could, we could talk about why, but that's an interesting question too. Um, but, um, you know, I think, uh, so like, um, Nassim Nicholas Talab would say that actually, um, 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, uh, the private sector. So I don't know if that, if that's right or wrong, but something, um, you know, if you look at something like, it's, it's complicated, something like the mRNA vaccine, um, you know, they couldn't get the, the publications it was based on into peer, into the top peer reviewed journals, um, and then it took, you know, Pfizer and Moderna, you know, it, it seems like there was, um, uh, there's a, it seems complicated because it was, did rely on some university research in some ways and government funding.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  I think we go to one of the big differences between the social sciences and the hard side. I mean, there's a few differences. The first one is there is, there is some connection to reality, right? You can, 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 reviewed paper, you could take it to a pharmaceutical company. They have an incentive to find out whether you're right. It can go out there in the real world. It can work. And then that changes sort of the ideas in economics. In, in social sciences, a few things, it's more complex. So sometimes, in some ways, it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't. We don't, we don't do like randomized experiments on, on big things. We do like, like polling questions, but not on like, you know, you know, the state have this economic reform and the state have this other economic reform.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  We, we don't do it, anything like that. And I think part of the reason we don't do that, and this is another, this is the second big reason why social sciences is, you know, so, 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 the mRNA vaccine is scary, but in generally about, 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, the way the world should work. And when you combine that with a lack of accountability, with a kind of, with, with a lack of any real world test

• 35:15Speaker 00

  in the form of, you know, markets or, 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, like the State Department and, you know, the Pentagon bureaucracy, basically whoever's in power wants to believe. And so this is why social, uh, social science is hard. And this is why, um, social desirability bias is, 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, um, you know, they have a, a mathematical sort of requirements that are more stringent. I think that weeds out a lot of people. I think it's, it's more of a sort of a, I think that, you know, there's a sort of a, you know, there's complaints from other disciplines that economics is a little bit.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Mean and aggressive. When I was in, I got my PhD in political science, I was, you know, surprised to find that 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 kid 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 to, you know, 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 been talking to other people in economics who agree with this, there's been a movement to make economics

• 36:45Speaker 00

  like other fields, and that would potentially be disastrous.

• 36:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, right. But now, it doesn't seem clear to me that even before calls for diversity dumbed down academia, that things were that much better. You know, there were like fads like communism or disarmament that were popular in academia. And, you know, like, if you look at the Vietnam War, it was waged by people who had, you know, like Kissinger, McNamara, people who had degrees from prestigious universities. And, you know, they were white and male, but they were still, you know, they still were disconnected from the outside world. So have like newer developments in academia actually made it worse?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Well, no, I mean, 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, from the Johnson administration, the Nixon administration, that basically, you know, they were, you know, that it wasn't winnable, that what 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

• 38:05Speaker 00

  that they were doing stuff for political reasons. Right? So I think they were responding to, I think they were Responding to basically political pressure and basically, you know, public opinion and sometimes using public opinion for their own ends. Um, I, you know, I don't think if you took professors in international relations and like whatever that the equivalent of that would have been and whether they supported Vietnam, um, I, I don't think so. I think the big, the big names, like the ones who are not connected to the government, right? So Kissinger, I mean, it's hard because he's like, you know, he's a guy who's in academia, but also like in and out of government, right? And, you know, like it's, it's, it's, you wouldn't expect that person to have like, you know, you, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, you know, because if he had different views, basically, he wouldn't be in government.

• 38:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  That's the issue. He, his views had, he had to be selected, um, to, to, to at least be tolerable, um, to whoever, you know, the president happened to be at, at the moment. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, the, the, these, I, I, um, I think the dumbing down of academia, I think the 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, the rise of, you know, cancel culture against free speech, all these things are harmful. Doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of pathologies before. Yeah, we can, 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 nineteen, you know, look at just some other fields from the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies, and you look at political science today, if you go to Twitter, um, and, you know, there's

• 39:34Speaker 00

  just, there's like a, uh, like a, a subject, 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 sixteen point two percent since Republicans took power in this state. It's really, really stupid. I mean, you get the, you know, the mean, the median political scientists from nineteen sixty, nineteen seventies, there's nothing that ridiculous. So I do think, you know, it probably has gotten worse.

• 39:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, but, okay, so we would, uh, 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 in fields like international relations or criminology or psychology, right? Um, so is there any way to set up institutions that can study these sort of, um, ambiguous topics in a way that actually adds insight, uh, to the way we legislate?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Um, you know, do we, do we need expert expertise? Do we even need expertise in international relations or criminology or psychology? You know, I, I tend to believe that the, the cost, you know, I, you know, I tend to believe that the costs are more, um, I tend to believe the costs are, you know, 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 than the field of criminology. I would definitely test, you know, I would definitely, you know, take the, you know, I think there's an idea in like the public that, you know, if you, you know, if you want to stop crime and for, 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.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  I haven't done any survey of criminology. 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 ambiguous 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 criminologists 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 that gets us 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, experts say that. But you look at the, you know, the, something like the Great Barrington Declaration and

• 41:51Speaker 00

  I just heard you around media, I thought these people were crooks and nobodies. And then I want to look at their credentials were 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, gives certain people in 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, 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.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  And I would, you know, agree with Robin Hanson and others who, who would, you know, cheer for these things to have, potentially have more of an effect on policymaking or the way we think about issues.

• 42:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  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, why things have shifted more liberal over the last few decades? Is it just that conservatives have started, started caring less about politics, that liberals have started caring more about politics? What's changed?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  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 use 2016 for, for convenience. Basically, if you look at like 2010 versus like 2016 to 2020, and 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, there was, there was multiples of that. It 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

• 43:44Speaker 00

  on, like, on the right, like low-profile city voters who, like, wouldn't otherwise vote, came out and voted for Trump. And it was, 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, mixed 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, you know, effectively made them more liberal. And so, yeah, I would say that, you know, the change in engagement over time is part of the story.

• 44:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  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, like, I, I don't expect that if I, you know, went to Walmart headquarters, I'd see a whole bunch of, like, BLM posters. But if I go to, like, Facebook, Facebook Office, I bet I'll see a few things like that, or like "Diversity is their strength", or something like that. So, you know, but both of these companies have faced pressure from, you know, liberal employees. Both of these companies have to face civil rights lawsuits. And it, it, and it, it's not like in the fang 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 why big tech especially is super woke?

• 45:05Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, you know, when tech, you know, and I think, you know, I think other people have made this point. Basically, when, you know,

• 45:49Speaker 00

  the initial generation of, you know, leaders in tech, they were the people who were the sort of the pioneers. They were non-conformists, right? They tended to be less, you know, they tended to do their own thing to serve, 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 conformist. And that's why, you know, these people have put forward the argument that basically crypto now is more right-wing than tech because crypto is sort of the next, you know, cutting-edge thing that non-conformists 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

• 46:28Speaker 00

  people to do. And, you know, I think that that's probably, it explains its woke-ification over time. And then like something like, you know, Walmart, I mean, you know, I think, you know, the just sort of the ether right now is if you're, if you're an idealistic person, it's easier to be idealistic on the left than the right. I don't think the 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 the logistics right and getting people the goods and services they need. So I think that attracts a completely different kind of person.

• 47:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Sorry, I don't think I understood the difference between Walmart and Big Tech. And I guess 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?

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  And then in both those cases, they're like getting older, in Big Tech, they're getting, becoming older institutions that attract conformists. So why is Big Tech more woke?

• 47:21Speaker 00

  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. I think, you know, you could say that they're, they have 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. 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?

• 48:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  All right. Yeah, it's kind of analogous to American foreign policy in a way that like, you know, like, Google is something like, America, that we have, they have an explicit creed, and then they had to do stuff to further that creed that actually might make things worse. 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 know, 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.

• 48:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  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.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  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, I'd like to just have one sort of thing, it's either libertarianism, or it's populist, you know, or 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

• 49:36Speaker 00

  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 Swallow agrees in, that's the lesson he took from my article, was basically like, you know, they're gonna, you know, whatever you try to pass, you say the government has to be like this, or it has to be like that, it's gonna get around it.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  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 have, they're not gonna go out. They just don't have the funding anymore to do the stuff that they wanna do. UPAS a law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservatives a fair hearing. Well, I mean, who's, who do you think's gonna be interpreting that law? And deciding what a fair hearing is and what political discrimination is and, and all that. So, yeah, there, there's something to that. I mean, shrinking, like, saying, you know, the government and 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 said for that. But then, like, you know, it depends on, like, what you want, right?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  If you are really bothered by, you know, if you're really bothered by the direction of the culture, you know, and the fact that, you know, activists, you know, are, are, you know, propagandizing or, 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, you know, have a, you know, come, you know, you might have a more forceful response to that. I mean, you get, there's, there's probably, you know, there's probably not a 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.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  All right, and, 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.

• 51:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Uh, so I, I'm not sure I follow, like, if you're a parent, right? Like, just don't buy your kid porn. I guess you had to buy him a smartphone at some point, but...

• 51:44Speaker 00

  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?

• 51:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  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 does affect you.

• 52:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, right, but I guess I'm skeptical to the extent of what right-wing 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 gonna actually make a difference.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  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 is the 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, civil rights law, I think one of my arguments on civil rights laws, it actually did influence the culture. And even that wasn't that heavy-handed compared to say what the Chinese government could do potentially.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  So, yeah, you take the idea that fertility is a cultural issue and that government can have an influence on culture, then it basically follows that government, if it wanted to, if it wanted to change the fertility rate or potentially a lot of other things, you know, it can do so through the control of the culture.

• 53:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, right, but I guess one, one reason to be optimistic is, or depending on your 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 bolt people down in their houses until like there were zero cases in the area. And if they, you know, the Western countries couldn't do that, so they couldn't get COVID under 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, that the West is not willing to try, right? It's just like, what are you gonna do that's analogous to?

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Sure, sure there is. You can, you know, ban all anti-natalist propaganda. You can make the education system just be nothing but, you know, about how you should have children to, you know, for the fatherland. You could, you know, tax single people and... People at one hundred percent and you know give all their money to

• 54:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  So there you know, there's tons of stuff you could do.

• 54:19Dwarkesh Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  You know, whether that's good, you know, whether they could see like something like zero covid is where you know, the fact that China did it is pretty impressive.

• 54:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  Whether it was worth it, you know, I think, you know, they've probably gotten overborne 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 opens up different possibilities.

• 54:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  By the way, so you think by what year is China's fertility going to be one point nine, twenty thirty one, right?

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Yes, I give it twenty thirty one. I mean, I'm the, you know, I'm the only, you know, I talked to other smart people and I'm sort of out on the limb here. And, you know, the other one, you know, other smart people, they either think it's impossible or they think the will is not going to be there on the China, in the part of the Chinese government. But yeah, I take a different view when I explain it in my Substack.

• 54:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  By the way, I'd make you a small bet on that if you're for willing. So like I give you like even three to one odds.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  That it won't be one point nine?

• 55:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 55:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  It would be less than one point nine, yeah.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Okay, well, one point one nine is my median, so if, yeah, I'd have to take that.

• 55:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  All right, yeah, yeah. We'll figure out the conditions later on, but.

• 55:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  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 if 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 were going to have more babies? And these are exactly the kind of people who, or, yeah, you know what I'm saying?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, that's, that's an interesting question. I think that, you know, so if you, let's say the government used, went down the cultural path and just tried to propagandize people at, you know, the highest level to have as many kids as possible, right? Are smart people or stupid people more prone to propaganda? 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 stupid people. So maybe, 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, the stupid are, you know, are just sort of more, it might be different kinds of propaganda appeal to different kinds of people. So something like this nationalistic might appeal disproportionately to stupid people.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Or, you know, and something like wokeness and like more, you know, it's more idealistic and sort of enforced from reality might appeal to smart people, but I don't think, you know, you so that's one potential, you know, 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 disproportionately appeals to the, to the less intelligent. But it's a fascinating question like what the, you know, compositional effects are, I wouldn't, I wouldn't hazard to predict that, you know, I could just, I think it'd get the bird rate up whether it'll be smart people or not smart people, I don't know.

• 57:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right, it's 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 would have a counterproductive effect because then it would become countercultural or, or contrarian to like oppose a right-wing government and like not have good, right?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it depends on, it depends on like what, you know, what kind, so if like, yeah, if the Republican Party took power and said, oh, you know, our biggest thing is getting the fertility rate up, and it was like somebody like Trump who just triggered all educated people, yeah, that could probably, that would probably backfire. You know, so in someplace 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 US elites don't see themselves really as people competing with China, they see themselves as people,

• 58:07Speaker 00

  you know, competing with other Americans or competing with, you know, nature and trying to change the world or get, 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, feel superior to, you know, the Western gap between, you know, in recent, in the, particularly since 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 the, 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 shaded people's outlook. So, yeah, it's

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the compositional, yeah, the compositional, you know, affects it sort of who's responsive to propaganda. These are, these are fascinating questions. I, you know, I think it's hard to predict in advance. You just, you know, you just have to sort of, you just, you know, you watch what people do. But then, you know, one thing, the, actually, you brought up the economic point. So like, there's a, 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 so I think, I think, I think they did this in Quebec, and I think, and the 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

• 59:36Speaker 00

  more to, 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.

• 59:45Dwarkesh Patel?

  And, okay, final question. What should libertarians do in order to win? So like, in the next 20, 30 years, given your theory of politics, what should the libertarian try to do?

• 59:56Speaker 00

  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, you 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 gonna have to control certain states no matter what, and they have a lot of more freedom to do unpopular things. I think, I think that, 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.

• 1:00:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  Right. That also, by the way, explains very well why wokeness has been winning in the last few decades, right? Because increased polarization, they can get unpopular things passed.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it's a cause and it's a consequence of polarization, right? So these things, 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 like, 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 educa- 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. So In my argument, in my article "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law", I try to make people clear, like conservatives haven't been libertarian enough. They haven't even talked about this stuff or understood the downstream effects

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  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-woke-ness. Some people are motivated by the idea of small government and what it can do. But you can reach people who are motivated by anti-woke-ness, 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.

• 1:01:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Okay, all right, well, those are all the questions I had. Richard, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  A pleasure, yeah. You're great.