Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Like when did that happen? When did they defund public education? Like, no, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism.

Speaker 1 And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends.

Speaker 2 Today I'm speaking with Richard Hinania, who is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of the new book, book Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy.

Speaker 2 So Richard, first can you just summarize the book briefly before we get into questions?

Speaker 1 Sure. So the argument in my book is it's you know it has two real audiences.
So first people who study international relations, political scientists, there's something in there for them.

Speaker 1 And there's also I think something in there for people who are just interested in American foreign policy more generally.

Speaker 1 So the way that academics tend to study foreign policy, and this is a simplification, but if you're going to have to generalize the way sort of 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, basically, the study of grant strategy is sort of a

Speaker 1 sort of corollary of this. And the idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military means tend to be put towards this, put towards the same goals.
They're all basically moving in the same direction.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 We don't think that there's a grand strategy of the U.S. government with regards to immigration, with regards to health care, with regards to the tax system.
It's sort of a

Speaker 1 there's a fallacy of seeing it designed in international, kind of a design in in international relations or kind of

Speaker 1 a kind of goal-focused behavior. And we tend not to make that mistake in other areas.

Speaker 1 So that's, you know, the first two chapters are basically theoretical, you know, the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong.

Speaker 1 That, you know, people are interested in academic works, they're interested in sort of thinking about ideas and political philosophy. I think that people will enjoy those chapters.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 U.S.

Speaker 1 troop presence is abroad,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 So maybe the unitary actor model is not right right now, but wouldn't it be true in the future?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And in the long run, the countries that actually do have

Speaker 2 a cohesive Iranian strategy will win, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is actually one of the arguments for how you get rationality that

Speaker 1 I take issue with. I think this is most closely associated with international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 so there's a few things you can say about this, right? Like, so the state, you know, it might just go against the nature of the state, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, and the, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, just, and it can afford to have a sort of irrational foreign policy. There's actually the

Speaker 1 one possibility is that states that tend to have good

Speaker 1 institutions for economic growth,

Speaker 1 things like decentralization, you know, individual freedom, an open society, that might be bad for forming a grand strategy for international relations because you can have interest groups influence foreign policy and people are worried about their own lives rather than what's going on abroad and the state is limited and can't really enforce its will.

Speaker 1 So this is a possibility that nobody's brought up before, but perhaps

Speaker 1 there is some kind of tension there where states with bad foreign policies will tend to have good

Speaker 1 good economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength.

Speaker 2 Interesting. So is it 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 Gosh, you had the casualties and everything, that's bad.

Speaker 2 But at least you had to keep countries on their toes and their political institutions couldn't become all messed up.

Speaker 2 So is it one way to read your book that the political institutions in our world have become so sclerotic because there isn't enough war?

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 so you know, there's not a

Speaker 1 war is, you know, on balance bad, but are there other good things we can say for war sort of as far as historical development goes?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 power in Washington,

Speaker 1 you know, you have to credit World War I and World War II. I think that's clear from the historical record.

Speaker 1 So, unquestionably, war leads to changes.

Speaker 1 You know, the potential for war probably

Speaker 1 was part of the Cold War and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. If there was no potential for any kind of conflict there, who knows? Maybe the Soviet Union could have could have existed forever.

Speaker 1 So unquestionably

Speaker 1 war is an accelerant and a sort of catalyst for change. And if you think we need a lot of change, maybe you might

Speaker 1 you might distress seeing the decline of war over time, but change can also go in a negative direction too.

Speaker 2 Now to what extent are these problems unique to democracy? So, you know, concentrated interest being able to pull a government to do counterproductive things?

Speaker 2 Because if you look at the quote-unquote China's Grants Rativi, right? It's a very centralized system. There's one guy at the top, but they're doing some very stupid things.

Speaker 2 Like they're fighting over some irrelevant islands with Japan. They're getting into skirmishes with India over some mountain regions.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we'll see about the Belt and Road.

Speaker 2 But right now, it seems like there's some place, you would know more about this than me, but there seems like there's some places where there's cost overruns and where they're building stuff in places that are relevant.

Speaker 2 So, to what extent are centralized governments able to have a better grant strategy?

Speaker 1 So, yeah, we should be careful not to say

Speaker 1 having a grant strategy is better or smarter in some way. It's just the question that I addressed in the book is whether it's coherent.

Speaker 1 Whether China, so we can understand China in comparison to the US on these two axes, whether it's smarter-wise versus whether it's coherent.

Speaker 1 Whether it's smarter-wise, which I think your question was getting at, I mean, China's

Speaker 1 blunders and

Speaker 1 having

Speaker 1 squabbles 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

Speaker 1 foreign policy blunders. I mean, the Chinese

Speaker 1 spending on the military is pretty low. I mean, there's nothing that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, I mean, Syria.
I mean, so we have blunder after blunder.

Speaker 1 And whether it's just Chinese, but whether the Chinese system has more coherence in foreign foreign policy and whether that can be attributed to it not being a democracy,

Speaker 1 I think that's right. I mean,

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 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 U.S.,

Speaker 1 not to care much about what goes on in most of the world.

Speaker 1 And then there does seem to be a concerted effort to sort of

Speaker 1 push upward and push its weight around within its region, which is natural, which which is what states do as they tend to grow.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, when I look at Chinese foreign policy, do I see more coherence than American? Yes.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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? When the U.S.

Speaker 1 sanctionships sanctions somebody, it basically says,

Speaker 1 we're not going to recognize this government. It destroys the economy.
It's more total than anything China does.

Speaker 1 And then it never talks to them again. And that's basically the end of it.
So, yeah, I mean,

Speaker 1 there's certainly more coherence and I think more sense to what China's doing than what the US is doing.

Speaker 2 But to what extent is that just because China isn't powerful enough or doesn't have enough money to waste on debacles like Afghanistan and Iraq?

Speaker 2 So maybe in 30 years, or not even 30 years, but once their economy is bigger than ours,

Speaker 2 will they be making the same kinds of mistakes? I mean, mean, if you look at when was the British Empire most overextended, you know,

Speaker 2 the peak of colonization was when they weren't fully a democracy, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so countries even without a lot of resources can often put a lot of efforts overseas. So Maoist China, I think, was

Speaker 1 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 guys

Speaker 1 money for like

Speaker 1 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 invested a lot in.

Speaker 1 Russia today overinvests in foreign policy relative to its economic size.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the U.S. certainly can't afford to do more than China.
In my PPP terms, I mean, China has caught up or past the United States. So China, I mean, has the potential to do a lot more.

Speaker 1 I just think it chooses not to.

Speaker 2 Right. Now, you say in the book that the public doesn't really care that much about foreign policy, at least in comparison to domestic policy.

Speaker 2 does that mean that if the president actually did have a coherent vision of a grand strategy, he could enact it because the public is just not going to be paying attention.

Speaker 2 And if he just really wants something, he could do it?

Speaker 1 I think it depends on the costs of what the grand strategy are. If the grand strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties, that's going to be really hard.

Speaker 1 If it's more along the lines of we're going to crush one nation,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 how we define grand strategy, there's grand strategy at the macro level, and then there's sort of at the, we can think about it as like, you know, approach to one country.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 policy of regime change towards Iran. And that wasn't, they weren't open about that.
But the idea was basically

Speaker 1 you just sanction them as much as possible and you just hope

Speaker 1 they're 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that didn't require any American casualties. It required a lot of suffering in the countries that

Speaker 1 were targeted. But it does seem 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.

Speaker 1 And people don't care about Iran and they don't care about Venezuela. So there was a lot of

Speaker 1 freedom there.

Speaker 2 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 if there was something, we really ought to be able to

Speaker 2 do it. Like we really don't want them to have nukes or the capacity to launch nukes to the United States.

Speaker 2 So if these traditional interventions don't work, is there something you could do about a country like North Korea?

Speaker 2 Or if Venezuela is starving its own people, obviously the sanctions are making it worse.

Speaker 2 But if we wanted to get rid of Maduro, is there something we could do that is feasible and it's not counterproductive?

Speaker 1 So I mean each of these cases is

Speaker 1 sort of unique. So I mean in North North Korea, I mean, interventions work.
I mean, if you just overthrow a government, you can get rid of them.

Speaker 1 But obviously, that would be very costly. In the case of North Korea, for nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons,

Speaker 1 they have a lot of

Speaker 1 pretty big RV.

Speaker 1 Yeah, can we do something about North Korean nukes? I think

Speaker 1 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 thinks that the U.S.,

Speaker 1 if it's not going to invade it at this point, it's because of nukes. It would like to see the regime fall

Speaker 1 anyway.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's probably true.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the question is, do you...

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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. I don't have insight into

Speaker 1 the thinking of the North Korean regime, so it's really hard to say

Speaker 1 which is the correct position.

Speaker 1 And then on Venezuela, like, is there something we can do

Speaker 1 to counteract the

Speaker 1 terrible economic policies that the Maduro regime

Speaker 1 and the form of the Shama's regime have implemented?

Speaker 1 You know, it's very, very hard. I mean,

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 the move towards

Speaker 1 more open markets globally

Speaker 1 has been the result of basically people seeing that markets work much better than central planning.

Speaker 1 I mean the Soviet Union, the elites in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe realized that what they were doing was not working and they basically moved to a capitalist system.

Speaker 1 It wasn't because the Gorbachev wasn't forced into it.

Speaker 1 There was no rebellion from below or civil war or anything. They just basically decided that

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the movement is going to be consistent in the direction of

Speaker 1 markets all the time everywhere. So you have to understand sometimes some places are going to go in the opposite direction.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 one thing the U.S., 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,

Speaker 1 so much of their politics revolves around stopping the flow of drugs, because that's what the U.S. demands.
And like, you know, who cares about drugs? Is that worth having a civil war over?

Speaker 1 No, of course not. And, you know, Mexico and these other countries in Latin America would probably be much better off if

Speaker 1 we didn't do that.

Speaker 1 I think that there's also a sense of a lot of U.S.

Speaker 1 meddling as far as democratization and human rights, which people think these are generally good things, and all else being equal, they might be good things.

Speaker 1 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, you know, 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So I think there's a lot of meddling and sort of hubris about what we know and what's best for these countries.

Speaker 1 And I think that moving away from that would probably help them solve their problems in their own way.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, so

Speaker 1 it's 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 or like unitary actors and when they they don't.

Speaker 1 And in the case of,

Speaker 1 I think that one of the determinants of whether a country acts with a strategy in a certain domain is how important the issue is to them, right?

Speaker 1 So Iran is much more important to Israel and Saudi Arabia than it is to America, right, by many, many times.

Speaker 1 And so you can imagine Israel and Saudi Arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to Iran, and the U.S. U.S.

Speaker 1 has a sort of open political system and is liable to be influenced by those countries.

Speaker 1 And often it's not even, you know, you know, it's 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But when you talk about domestic policy, you seem to be making the opposite point that actually it's the ideology that matters more, and then economic self-interest actually determines very little about people's political preferences.

Speaker 2 So why is it there the difference between foreign policy and domestic policy?

Speaker 1 So my view on domestic policy, I mean, so there's, you know, at the level of the voter,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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 political orientation.

Speaker 1 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 cultural attitudes and things like that.

Speaker 1 Now, when it comes to policy, you know, I think there's a, you know, there's a few different kinds of policy. So the

Speaker 1 most things there is, you know, the public opinion is just not paying attention to. Does public opinion have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code or

Speaker 1 the exact details of environmental regulations or whatever. I mean, the same thing in foreign policy with something like NATO expansion.

Speaker 1 So I think this is basically both

Speaker 1 international relations and domestic politics,

Speaker 1 the interest groups

Speaker 1 have a huge role to play. Now,

Speaker 1 when it comes to certain issues that are particularly salient, so in the domestic context, this is something like Social Security.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 There's not a lot of issues that are exactly like this.

Speaker 1 But here, public opinion matters, and here you have to tread carefully if you're a politician. And it's the same thing in foreign policy.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 public opinion matters a lot more. So, you needed public opinion to be on your side to go into Iraq.
There was overwhelming support for the Iraq war at the time.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 This is probably one of the most important.

Speaker 1 It's the fact that basically

Speaker 1 public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign in foreign relations, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You could easily sell some country as a threat to the United States because most Americans don't have experience with foreign countries. They don't have independent knowledge.

Speaker 1 You know, these places like Ukraine or Russia or Estonia or anything is basically exists as an abstraction.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Um, and so it's, you know, if 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.

Speaker 1 There was a full-on, basically, PR campaign to not explicitly tie Saddam to 9-11, but basically tie it to Al-Qaeda, you know, would make people be afraid of

Speaker 1 WMDs.

Speaker 1 I mean, even though the Bush administration never said this, I mean, there was a, I think it was a majority or a plurality of the public actually believe Saddam was personally involved in 9-11, you know, which there was never any evidence for.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And maybe that's getting harder as polarization is more extreme and people don't trust their leaders anymore.

Speaker 1 But there's still just more room to maneuver on foreign policy than there is on a lot of domestic issues.

Speaker 2 You see in the book near the end that that one of the ways to fix this should be that we better regulate a foreign lobbyist in the government and

Speaker 2 funding of,

Speaker 2 let's say, defense contractors onto think tanks and research institutions.

Speaker 2 Do you think the same should be true of domestic policy?

Speaker 2 So we should limit the, I mean, this is kind of a leftist agenda of limiting how much money there is in politics, or is this unique to foreign policy?

Speaker 1 So, I mean, I sort of throw those ideas out there as sort of institutional fixes that people can think about. I am,

Speaker 1 you know, I am not,

Speaker 1 you know, I don't think I come back, come down and say, you know, this is something to fix it. I just think that people should be thinking in terms of institutional changes rather than

Speaker 1 arguing, you know, just sort of operating in the realm of ideas.

Speaker 1 I think that, yeah, and so the, but you know, I think I probably would support, you know, some limits on

Speaker 1 lobbying for people who worked in the government for,

Speaker 1 like in the Pentagon. Does that make does it should we do that for

Speaker 1 all of politics? You know, because I, you know,

Speaker 1 there's not really, I don't think I have a principled answer here.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 domestic politics, I think the influence of money on politics has been sort of mixed.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, it's basically the governments and the party. So it's some other small group of people determining sort of the

Speaker 1 lay of the land and what, you know, what the

Speaker 1 lay of the land and what the sort of what the parameters of the debate are.

Speaker 1 I think that, you know,

Speaker 1 one thing we should do is, I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm less

Speaker 1 less hesitant or less conflicted about endorsing sort of a cultural change. So for example, in areas like, for example, when you inter, you know, when you're interviewing

Speaker 1 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 the Washington Post wrote a story about this how basically this is the norm and I

Speaker 1 was interviewed for that for that story.

Speaker 1 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 fixes.

Speaker 1 it's also sort of 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.

Speaker 1 Gotcha.

Speaker 2 Okay, so let's talk about experts now. So in your article in Teflak and Taliban, you point out many ways in which we have

Speaker 2 established fields. And if you look at the track record of societal trends associated with those fields,

Speaker 2 you know, things like suicides when you talk about psychology or crime when you talk about criminology. Or obviously, you know,

Speaker 2 Iraq and Afghanistan when you talk about international relations, you know, things have been getting worse.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 if you're applying the same standard, then

Speaker 2 wouldn't it imply that some fields have been doing extraordinarily well?

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, actually, I do think that.

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 the reduction in poverty has come from China first and then India.

Speaker 1 And if you ask economists, 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.

Speaker 1 So I actually do think economics is a little bit

Speaker 1 more of a serious science than other fields.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, I would agree with that. Actually, I think economics looks good in the context of the decline of poverty over time.

Speaker 2 So, then would you credit the fact that there hasn't been a nuclear war?

Speaker 2 Is that something you put in the pro column for international relations?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that one, you know,

Speaker 1 I think is different because

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But I think if you're going to have like a steelman argument of, say, the case for American Empire, it would be something along the lines of,

Speaker 1 I don't believe that, you know, American hegemony has kept, it's what basically has given us,

Speaker 1 you know, relative peace since 1945.

Speaker 1 But I think it would be 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 too radical because potentially

Speaker 1 there's just so much we don't know about what the consequences of that would be.

Speaker 2 How would you respond to that, by the way?

Speaker 1 I would say that, you know, I would say that you have to take different parts of American foreign policy, and I would be more sort of open to get ridden of, you know, doing away with certain of them than others.

Speaker 1 So, for example, regime change wars, that's and sanctions. I think those are the low-hanging fruit.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, overthrowing governments is a huge source of international disorder. And then as far as

Speaker 1 whether the

Speaker 1 U.S.,

Speaker 1 the U.S. hegemony has been keeping peace of that, then you would move on to, say, the commitments to NATO and

Speaker 1 the presence in Japan and South Korea. And you would say, okay,

Speaker 1 we've kept the peace in a relative way there.

Speaker 1 I think you have to sort of look, I think that there's good reason to think that it's not necessarily the influence of the U.S.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 any relationship with the U.S. on either side, just war is just down basically across the board everywhere.

Speaker 1 And you could say, well, that's all the American system, but I think it's hard to figure out exactly how the U.S. having a presence in East Asia or

Speaker 1 Eastern Europe, you know, that makes Africans stop fighting each other, right?

Speaker 1 And so the fact that everyone basically is not doing war anymore 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.

Speaker 1 And from that perspective, you know, the U.S. is sort of an outlier in how much it uses war, and then the U.S.
is potentially a source of instability. I think I would lean towards that view.

Speaker 1 But I'll acknowledge that sort of the Burkean view of, you know, things have been working out relatively well. Let's not mess with it.

Speaker 1 I mean, another thing that that hasn't been working out well, actually, the number of

Speaker 1 being killed in like civil wars and civil conflicts has not gone down the way international war has.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I think keeping order within countries, you mentioned Latin America, a lot of these things are classified as high crime rates.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So, yeah,

Speaker 1 I think that's the response to it. But

Speaker 1 again, I acknowledge there potentially could be something to that argument.

Speaker 2 So I think one of the other things Stephen Pinker thinks is behind the decline in violence is also like international alliances like NATO.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 to him is a point against that, which is that

Speaker 2 while in the short term it makes us more safe, in the long term,

Speaker 2 if Russia invades some North Macedonia or something, then we ought to go to war and then it starts World War III.

Speaker 2 So do you buy Pinker's argument that actually these American alliances have created a safer world?

Speaker 1 So I haven't. I read Pinker

Speaker 1 when it came out Better Angels of Our Nature about a decade ago. I don't remember him having that argument about NATO.

Speaker 1 I don't recall, but

Speaker 1 I'll take your word for it.

Speaker 1 I could be wrong.

Speaker 2 I thought it was Enlightenment now, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I also, yeah, I also read Enlightenment now. I don't remember.
You know, it could be, it could be there or not.

Speaker 2 It's a possible argument, even if it's not Pinker's. Yeah, even if it's not Pinker's argument,

Speaker 1 I'll just take the argument.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 so NATO, I mean, the argument for NATO making the world safer, okay, first of all, I mean, during, you know, the justification, you know, I think the justifications for NATO, right, originally were there was potentially a Soviet land invasion of Europe, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know, like, what else we'd be talking about, right? Like, that North Africa is going to invade Europe or something.

Speaker 1 The only potential thing I think we're talking talking about here is Russia.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 economically positioned to try to take on Germany or France or

Speaker 1 Western Europe. It cares a lot about Ukraine and it cares a lot about Georgia.
And

Speaker 1 I think it's pretty clear that

Speaker 1 the instability is due to Russian fears over

Speaker 1 the expansion of NATO. So in Georgia, basically, the government

Speaker 1 launched a war to try to take back some regions that

Speaker 1 were sort of breakaway regions with alliances towards Russia. And the idea was basically they thought that the United States had their back, and they were trying to settle this issue

Speaker 1 to get into NATO. There was a great Adam II's substack on this about the history of Russia and NATO.
So it's clear that

Speaker 1 there's been sort of a destabilizing influence. Russia's fear that these places would

Speaker 1 become part of NATO, I think, has driven a lot of this sort of behavior abroad.

Speaker 1 I think ultimately though, I think what it's really about actually at its root of like what where the antagonism comes from, I think that the U.S. sees Russia as a potential for regime change.

Speaker 1 I think it considers the current government illegitimate. And I think Russia doesn't, it probably doesn't think that like the U.S.
is going to go into Ukraine and add them to NATO.

Speaker 1 and Georgia and then like launch an invasion of Russia. You know, that seems very unlikely.

Speaker 1 I think that the idea is basically there's an ideological war against the idea of the legitimacy of a Russian state as a non-democracy that has a different form of government, different ideological ideas about, you know, just different things than the U.S.

Speaker 1 does.

Speaker 1 And I think

Speaker 1 they're reacting to that. So I think this idea of sort of this idea of regime change is sort of beneath the surface and deriving a lot of attentions.

Speaker 2 Interesting. All right, going back to the topic of expertise,

Speaker 2 you criticize the focus on peer review and specialized knowledge.

Speaker 2 It seems that some fields that that seems like a valid criticism, right? It seems like there isn't that much

Speaker 2 specialized knowledge there to begin with.

Speaker 2 But in fields, like let's say particle physics or computational complexity, that seems like academic bureaucracy and incentives have worked, and I expect the people at the top of that field to be the best in the world as that.

Speaker 2 But it seems like the same kind of academic institution as a field like international relations, right? So why are the two different?

Speaker 1 So I think I do say in my expert's piece, I think I say this,

Speaker 1 that it's basically, you know, I'm focusing on the social sciences because that's what I know best.

Speaker 2 But you said economics works well, right?

Speaker 1 Economics works relatively well. I think, yeah, I mean, we could talk about why.
I mean, that's an interesting question, too.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 you know, I think, so like Nassim Nicholas Talib would say that actually the peer review process doesn't work that well.

Speaker 1 He has some data on where the big innovations in science come from, and he tends to think it comes more from the private sector.

Speaker 1 So I don't know if that's right right or wrong the 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 and then it took you know Pfizer and Moderna you know it seems like there was um you know there's a you know it seems complicated because it wasn't didn't rely on some university research in some ways and government funding I think

Speaker 1 one of the big differences between the social sciences and the hard science, I mean, there's a few differences. The first one is

Speaker 1 there is some connection to reality, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 In

Speaker 1 social science, a few things, it's more complex, so in some ways it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't.

Speaker 1 We don't do like randomized experiments on big things. We do like polling questions, but not on like, you you know,

Speaker 1 the state have this economic reform and this state have this other economic reform. We don't do it

Speaker 1 anything like that. And I think part of the reason we don't do that, and

Speaker 1 this is the second big reason why social science is

Speaker 1 so hard, is because there's not as much social desirability bias. People don't have deep-seated beliefs about the best way to get a vaccine.
I guess some people do. They say the mRNA vaccine is scary.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 in general, about these physical things, right? People don't have strong beliefs about the way they want the world to work, right?

Speaker 1 And when it comes to the social sciences, people have very, very strong ideas about

Speaker 1 the way the world should work. And when you combine that with a lack of accountability,

Speaker 1 with a lack of any real-world test in the form of markets or some kind of real experimentation,

Speaker 1 people can just believe whatever they want or believe whatever

Speaker 1 some kind of vested interest, like the State Department and the Pentagon bureaucracy, basically whoever's in power wants to believe

Speaker 1 and so this is why social social science is hard and this is why 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

Speaker 1 you know if they have 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 mean and aggressive.

Speaker 1 When I was in a,

Speaker 1 I got my PhD in political science, I was surprised to find that sometimes somebody's theory would just fall apart and then everyone would, like other people would not just say, okay, this is wrong, go study something else.

Speaker 1 They would be like, oh, it's okay, just 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?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 you know, just willingness to be wronged.

Speaker 1 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 economics, 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.

Speaker 2 Right, right. But now,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 disarmament that were popular in academia.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So, have like newer developments in academia actually made it worse?

Speaker 1 Well, no, I mean, white males can have the same pathologies as any other group.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think the international, you know,

Speaker 1 the dumbing down of academia

Speaker 1 is a problem. You know, Wirt Kissinger and these guys,

Speaker 2 you know, if you look at the Vietnam War, you know,

Speaker 1 it's actually very interesting because everyone sort of knew from like, you know,

Speaker 1 from the Johnson administration, the Nixon administration, that basically, you know, they were, you know, that it wasn't winnable, that whatever they were saying to the public wasn't true. true.

Speaker 1 And I think that, you know, if you look at like a historical record of what politicians were saying personally, they were amazingly

Speaker 1 explicit in their willingness to admit to themselves and those around them that they were doing stuff for political reasons.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think they were responding to basically political pressure and basically public opinion and sometimes using public opinion for their own ends.

Speaker 1 I don't think if you took professors in international relations and whatever that equivalent of that would have been and whether they support Vietnam,

Speaker 1 I don't think so. I think the big names, like the ones who were not connected to the government, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 And, you know, like, it's, it's, it's, you wouldn't expect that person to have, like, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't, you know, because if he had a different views, basically, he wouldn't be in government.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's the issue. His views had to be selected

Speaker 1 to at least be tolerable to whoever, you know, the president happened to be at the moment.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, I I mean, these I'm 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,

Speaker 1 the rise of cancel culture against free speech, all these things are harmful. Doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of pathologies before.
And yeah, we can see that definitely.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, but 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, and you know, there's a, so there's like a

Speaker 1 subject of political scientists, 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.

Speaker 1 It's really, really stupid. I mean, you get the, you know, the mean, the median political scientists from the 1960s, 1970s.
There's nothing that ridiculous. So I do think it probably has gotten worse.

Speaker 2 But okay, so we would,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But we would like to have expert knowledge in fields like international relations or criminology or psychology, right?

Speaker 2 So, is there any way to start up institutions that can study these sort of

Speaker 2 ambiguous topics in a way that actually adds insight to the way we legislate?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 do we need expertise? Do we even need expertise in 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,

Speaker 1 I tend to believe the costs are, you know, that they outweigh the benefits actually here.

Speaker 1 I think if you rely on common sense

Speaker 1 for controlling crime and some basic statistics, right,

Speaker 1 I think you're better than the field of criminology. I would definitely test, you know, I would definitely

Speaker 1 take the idea. I think there's an idea among the public that

Speaker 1 if you want to stop crime,

Speaker 1 come down very hard on crime. And I think that's maybe more controversial among criminologists.
But I think the problem is, actually, I wouldn't say that. I haven't done any survey of criminology.

Speaker 1 This is part of the problem in that you have this field called criminology. And even if it arrives at something that's true or logical,

Speaker 1 or they have some unambiguous finding,

Speaker 1 there will always be criminologists who politicians who want to do something else will rely on.

Speaker 1 And they will go and they will find those people so having this category called criminologist and unless we're gonna like survey the field and just do you know who knows if that will work but unless you're gonna like survey the field and then just do whatever they consist of the field you're gonna end up the media politicians they're gonna 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 I just heard about the media I thought these people were kooks and nobodies.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 It's always the most hysterical person possible pushing for some kind of restriction.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 gives certain people power who want to do things more sort of legitimacy to do things that are irrational. Now, I think that

Speaker 1 at a broader level,

Speaker 1 I trust things like prediction markets, like economic markets, things that

Speaker 1 don't rely on credentials but rely on track records of getting things right.

Speaker 1 And I would agree with Robin Hansen and others who would cheer for these things to potentially have more of an effect on policymaking or the way we think about issues.

Speaker 2 Now let's talk about politics. So you say that one of the reasons that liberalism has been winning is because liberals just care more about politics.

Speaker 2 But how does that explain why things have shifted more liberal over the last few decades?

Speaker 2 Is it just that conservatives have started caring less about politics, and liberals have started caring more about politics? What's changed?

Speaker 1 Actually, to a certain extent, yes. So in 2016, there was a huge mobilization effect on the left.
So I do have a substack called 2016, the turning point. I just use 2016 for convenience.

Speaker 1 Basically, if you look at 2010 versus 2016 to 2020, and 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.

Speaker 1 By 2016 2016 to 2020, I mean, it was multiples of that. It was something like, you know, ten times more likely to have done these things.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 He did not, he mobilized a lot of voters on the right, like low-propensity voters who wouldn't otherwise vote, came out and voted for Trump.

Speaker 1 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, mixed bag.

Speaker 1 While I think Trump did a terrible job of sort of motivating people who are activists or sort of people who would be bureaucrats or lawyers or the people who actually make policy on a day-to-day basis, he really turned those people off and made them, if anything, made them more liberal.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, I would say that

Speaker 1 changing engagement over time is part of the story.

Speaker 2 So, I'm wondering how this theory explains why certain institutions are especially more liberal. Take, for example, big tech, right? Or compare it to a company like Walmart, right? Now,

Speaker 2 I don't expect that if I went to Walmart headquarters, I'd see a whole bunch of like BLM posters.

Speaker 2 But if I go to like Facebook and 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

Speaker 2 have faced pressure from liberal employees. Both of these companies have to face civil rights lawsuits.
And

Speaker 2 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 of money there, right?

Speaker 2 So it's not like journalism or something. So what explains why big tech especially is super woke?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so big tech is such an interesting case because until 2015 and

Speaker 1 2016,

Speaker 1 there was a lot of calls for censorship

Speaker 2 from the media.

Speaker 1 And Twitter basically didn't censor anybody until 2015 and Facebook too.

Speaker 1 So basically the, you know, the big tech was a lot less woke than the media wanted them to be.

Speaker 1 I think that there was basically a lot of political pressure that came down on them from the top.

Speaker 1 I think Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, Jack Dorsey are relatively not woke people compared to a lot of elites in America.

Speaker 1 You know, when tech,

Speaker 1 you know, and I think, you know, I think other people have made this point.

Speaker 1 Basically, when you know the initial generation of leaders in tech, they were the people who were the sort of the pioneers. They were non-conformists, right?

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 people have put forth the argument

Speaker 1 that basically crypto now is more right-wing than tech because crypto is sort of the next cutting-edge thing that non-conformists are doing.

Speaker 1 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 sort of the thing for high-conformist people to do.

Speaker 1 and you know I think that that's probably its explains its wilification over time

Speaker 1 and then like something like you know Walmart I mean you know I think you know that 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 your views are more maybe you know you 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.

Speaker 2 Sorry, I don't think I understood the difference between Walmart and big tech in that case.

Speaker 2 But in big tech, you're also doing stuff like shipping a product that you can get meaning out of that as well, right?

Speaker 2 And then in both those cases, they're getting older. In big tech, they're getting, becoming older institutions that attract information.
So why is big tech more woke?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so Amazon, you're working on logistics, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, Facebook and Google and Twitter are sort of more in the, you know, because they're not actually producing anything, you know, you could say that they have to tell themselves a story about why they're doing something good for the world.

Speaker 1 And some people, you know, believe in that story.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I mean, this sort of idea that they were doing something social and revolutionary, I think, was part of the ethos from the start.

Speaker 1 While Walmart, you know, they want to get you lower prices and, you know, make your life better.

Speaker 1 But I don't think it ever had that idea that you were going to fundamentally revolutionize society by having more Walmarts, right? Alright, right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of analogous to American foreign policy in a way that

Speaker 2 Google is something like

Speaker 2 America that 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 I wonder if, compared to this, you think this theory also vindicates libertarianism more?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And also, there's less these elites can do to actually coerce people without the help of government.

Speaker 1 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, I, you know, I'm dispirited by wokeness.

Speaker 1 And I think that the fight against wokeness has been confused and not very effective, which is almost like that has to be self-evident because wokeness has gone so far and won so much.

Speaker 1 And so I'm thinking about the different ways you can go about sort of working against it. So

Speaker 1 I'm not saying I'm not coming down on,

Speaker 1 I think that

Speaker 1 to just have one sort of thing, it's either libertarianism or it's populist, you know, or authoritarian.

Speaker 1 I think that you know the words like those are very uh uh 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 um of either of these right um so i for what you could say for the libertarian perspective is that and robbie swovic reason um that's that's the lesson he took from my article um 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 um

Speaker 1 and what the one thing they can't get around is you cut off their funding. You stop giving money to the universities.

Speaker 1 They're not going to go out and they just don't have the funding anymore to do the stuff that they want to do.

Speaker 1 You pass a law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservatives a fair hearing.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I mean, shrinking, like saying, you know, the government and sort of these

Speaker 1 institutions that are under the influence of bureaucrats and activists, just shrinking their role in society rather than remaking them

Speaker 1 remaking those institutions I mean there's something to be said

Speaker 1 for that

Speaker 1 but then like you know it depends on like what you want right if you are really bothered by

Speaker 1 you know if you're really bothered by the direction of the culture and you know and the fact that you know activists you know are

Speaker 1 you know propagandizing or or people who basically are you know just just the market I mean the whoever's or whoever you know the media institutions and popular music and culture.

Speaker 1 If you're upset that they're selling sexual promiscuity to children, for example,

Speaker 1 you might have a more forceful response to that.

Speaker 1 There's probably not an answer within the confines of libertarianism. It's very hard.
I mean, you could set up your own private community and go off and do something.

Speaker 1 Potentially there's something there. But you could potentially say,

Speaker 1 I don't like what's considered art now. I don't like what's considered pop culture.
And you might just say, well,

Speaker 1 that's the only potential thing you can do.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure I follow, like, if you're a parent, right? Like, just don't buy or kid porn. I guess you had to buy them a smartphone at some point.

Speaker 1 You have to buy them a smartphone. I mean, they have friends

Speaker 1 if

Speaker 1 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? So

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 what other people do does affect you.

Speaker 2 Right, right. But I guess I'm skeptical to the extent of what right-wing government can actually influence the culture.

Speaker 2 And that brings me to the next topic I want to talk to you about, which is fertility. So you're more optimistic about what countries like China and Hungary can do about fertility.

Speaker 2 But it seems to me that if giving people checks doesn't get them to fuck,

Speaker 2 I don't know if

Speaker 2 banning makeups on guy is going to actually make a difference.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, so you look at

Speaker 1 you step 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.

Speaker 1 As humans have become more able to afford kids, they've tended to have less of them, right?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 I see no reason to think it can't. I think one thing, civil rights law, I think one of my main arguments on civil rights law is it actually could influence the culture.

Speaker 1 And even that wasn't that heavy-handed compared to, say, what the Chinese government could do potentially.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, if 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,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Right. But

Speaker 2 I guess one

Speaker 2 reason to be optimistic is,

Speaker 2 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 just bolt people down in their houses until there were zero cases in the area.

Speaker 2 And if they, you know, with the Western countries couldn't do that, so they couldn't get that COVID under control. So what if they did something similar on fertility?

Speaker 2 But there doesn't seem to be some obvious analogous human rights violation that you do to like increase fertility that

Speaker 2 the West is not willing to try, right? It's just like, what are you going to do that's analogous to.

Speaker 1 Sure, sure, there is. You can ban all anti-NATOS propaganda.
You can make the education system just be nothing but about how you should have children for the fatherland.

Speaker 1 You could tax single people and hundreds of people at 100%

Speaker 1 and give all their money to 200%. So there's tons of stuff you could do.

Speaker 1 Whether that's good, whether it goes something like zero COVID is worth, the fact that China did it is pretty impressive.

Speaker 1 Whether it was worth it, I think they've probably gotten overboard at this point. right? So you can debate whether it's worth it.

Speaker 1 But I think, you know, yeah, having a competent and authoritarian government sort of opens up different possibilities.

Speaker 2 By the way, so you think by what year is China's fertility going to be 1.9, 2031?

Speaker 1 Yes, I'll give it 2031. I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm the only,

Speaker 1 you know, I talked to other smart people and I'm sort of out on the limb here.

Speaker 1 And 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 in the part of the Chinese government.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I take a different view when I explain it in my substance.

Speaker 2 By the way, I'd make you a small bet on that if you're willing. So like I'd give you like even three to one odds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, okay. Or less than 1.9, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, well 1.19 is my median, so if, yeah, I'd have to take that.

Speaker 2 All right. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 We'll figure out the conditions later on. But

Speaker 2 oh, and then are you afraid that what these countries will do is to actually increase fertility, if that'll have a dysgenic effect, right?

Speaker 2 So if it's just that if it's cash transfers or if it's just sort of economic incentive, you know, maybe it's the people on the margins who

Speaker 2 desperately needed the cash, we're going to have more babies, and these are exactly the kind of people who...

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's an interesting question. I think that, you know,

Speaker 1 so if you, let's say the government

Speaker 1 went down the cultural path and just tried to propagandize people at

Speaker 1 the highest level to have as many kids as possible, right? Are smart people, are stupid people, more prone to propaganda?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 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 stupid people. So maybe it's the opposite.

Speaker 1 Maybe the smartest people will

Speaker 1 take the hint most clearly and change their behavior, while the stupid people won't. Or maybe the stupid people, you know, the stupider

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, and something like wokeness and like more, you know, it's more idealistic and sort of divorced from reality might appeal to smart people.

Speaker 1 But I don't think, you know, so that's one potential, you know, one potential issue.

Speaker 1 But historically, if you look at like the way nationalism came about, it was the elites generally who were nationalistic first, and then it sort of trickled down to the masses.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 disproportionately appeals to the

Speaker 1 less intelligent. But it's a fascinating question, like what the compositional effects are.
I would hazard to predict that.

Speaker 1 I think they'd get the birth rate on whether it'll be smart people or not smart people. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Right, it's probably still net good in either case.

Speaker 2 But I don't know about China, but for example, if the government tried to actually change the culture in America to make it more pro-natalist, I could very well imagine that it would have a counterpredictive effect because then it would become counter-cultural or

Speaker 2 contrarian

Speaker 2 to oppose the right-wing government. and like not have good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it depends on like what, you know, what kind of...

Speaker 1 So if like, yeah, if the Republican Party took power 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 that could probably that would probably backfire.

Speaker 1 Um, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So they could actually just, you know, they could be united in favor of, you know, they could be very potentially receptive to such a message.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 They see themselves as people competing with other Americans or competing with nature and trying to change the world or get

Speaker 1 social peace. So there's completely different dynamics there.

Speaker 1 And this might be one reason why sort of the West has become left-wing as it's become more dominant and that elites don't have anybody to compete with or

Speaker 1 try to defeat or feel superior to

Speaker 1 the Western gap between

Speaker 1 recent

Speaker 1 decades after World War II, between the Westerners and the rest of the world was so large that they weren't really seen as competition.

Speaker 1 And that might change with the rise of China, but I don't think it's really registered as something that's fundamentally shaped people's outlook.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it's

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 the compositional

Speaker 1 effects and sort of who's responsive to propaganda.

Speaker 1 These are fascinating questions.

Speaker 1 I think it's hard to predict in advance.

Speaker 1 You just have to sort of

Speaker 1 watch what people do.

Speaker 1 One thing,

Speaker 1 actually, you brought up the economic point. So

Speaker 1 if you make, say, a cash transfer for each child, like $10,000, for example, that matters a lot more to a poor person than a rich person.

Speaker 1 Now, if you do something like you cut how much they're paying in taxes, right,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I think they did this in Quebec, and I think

Speaker 1 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 more to rich people to have more kids.

Speaker 1 So it's, yeah, so the structure of how it's set up would also matter quite a bit.

Speaker 2 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 be?

Speaker 1 They should hope for ridiculous polarization. They should hope for Americans to hate each other

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they're going to have to control certain states no matter what. And they have a lot more freedom to do unpopular things.

Speaker 1 I think polarization is actually good for libertarianism. And I think

Speaker 1 we might actually, they might have a good few decades, actually. Right.

Speaker 2 That also, by the way, explains very well why Wilkins has been winning the last few decades, right? Because they increase polarization, they can get unpopular things fast.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, it's a cause and it's a consequence of polarization, right? So

Speaker 1 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 people.

Speaker 1 So there's this idea on 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?

Speaker 1 Like when did that happen? When did they defund public education? Like, no, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism.

Speaker 1 And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends. So in my argument, in my article about Institutions It's Just Civil Rights Law, I try to

Speaker 1 make people clear, look, the conservatives have a good libertarian enough.

Speaker 1 They haven't even talked about this stuff or understood the downstream effects of broad interpretation of civil rights law on business and the wider culture.

Speaker 1 So 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 it can do.

Speaker 1 But you can reach people who are motivated by anti-voteness, and that's a lot, a lot of people on the right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Okay. All right, well,

Speaker 2 those are all the questions I had. Richard, thanks so much for bringing on the podcast.

Speaker 1 Yeah, been great.