Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty

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Charles Murray needs a little introduction, so let's begin with Human Accomplishment,

The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences.

I first want to ask you, what motivated you to write this book?

Thank you. Charles Murray needs no introduction.
So let's begin with Human Accomplishment, The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences. I first want to ask you, what motivated you to write this book? Well, a lot of times while I was writing it, I wondered that myself.
It was an incredibly difficult book to write. The short answer is back in the 1980s, mid-1980s, I read a book by Daniel Borsten called The Discoverers, I think it was.
And Borsten, you know, when I picked it up, I thought it was going to lay out this panorama of human accomplishment over the centuries. And it was really just a set of many biographies of a lot of major sciences and so forth.
And there wasn't anything wrong with that, but it's not what I wanted to read. I wanted to see the whole thing as a panorama.
And as has been the case with other books I've written, I had a book I wanted to read and the way to do that was to write it. And so I set off on writing this and it was a five-year task altogether, very intense five years.
Clearly you can see that from the book itself. I've always had this question when I read books like this that seem to integrate every single domain of human knowledge.
How does a human being write a book like this? Like, how do you consolidate so much information and integrate in these new explanations? Well, I don't do it the way a lot of people do. A lot of people pretty much map out the book ahead of time.
And they know which chapters are going to follow which chapters and so they go ahead and do a lot of their research and then they start to write. human accomplishment was different for me because in one sense i couldn't start writing until i had done a lot of this historiometric research.
People who have not read the book should know that I establish inventories of events and inventories of people in the arts

and sciences. And I use a technique that's quite well established, it's been around for a long time,

whereby you go to the index of a book and you count up the number of pages that

a given person is referenced and the logic behind it is this that if you are writing a history of

music you are going to end up spending a lot more time on Beethoven than you do on Prokofiev

and the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music Beethoven's music takes more time

Thank you. than you do on Prokofiev.
And the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music, Beethoven's music, takes more time. And he looms larger in the story of music.
The same thing goes with science, that Einstein gets a lot of space. Same thing goes with the arts.
All right. So in order to accumulate inventories, and I have something like 16 or 18 of them.
I have one for Western literature. I have one for Indian literature, too, and for Indian philosophy and for Chinese art.
I just had a whole bunch of separate inventories. Well, I spent two years basically doing nothing but going through these indexes of books and writing down the data.
There was a set of books called The Dictionary of Scientific Biography. It's a wonderful resource in that it is supposed to be the definitive catalog of the important figures in science.
took 17 10 hour days at the Hood College Library, which is about 20 miles away from me, to do that one source.

So in one sense, I had to do an awful lot of research beforehand.

But then when I started out, I did what I always do, which is I get interested in some particular aspect and I dig into that. And I write and then I go on to another topic and there's no particular rhyme or reason to it.
It's very idiosyncratic. And for a while, I have a lot of stuff in my my head so my wife would say as I was finishing human accomplishment that for a few shining moments there you knew everything but then of course you start to forget it all immediately as I went back to the book today to remind myself I found myself in the position of reading a passage and say that's really interesting because i completely forgotten that it was anyway the answer is i go about this stuff very very personally and the analogy that comes to mind is the guy who was a fine sculpture and he asked how do you do it how do you make a sculpture of a horse? And he says, you have this block of wood, and you cut away everything that isn't a horse.
And when I'm doing a book, I have this idea in my head of what it ought to look like, a very vague idea. And I cut away everything that doesn't look like what I hoped it would be.
Did you write it one chapter at a time or did you bounce around between them? Pretty much one chapter at a time. Because one thing would lead to another.
For example, I've realized that if I'm going to talk about this measure, this way of measuring stuff using the historiometric method that I need to describe to my readers what these distributions of things look like. And then I started to find out about the Latke curve, whereby with great accomplishment, it is not a bell curve at all.
It is a very, very left skewed curve. Here's the example I ended up using in golf.
In golf, you will have a lot of people who win one tournament. And the number of people who win two tournaments in professional golf just plunges.
The number of people who win three, you're getting down towards the bottom. And when you get out to the greats, they are all by themselves at the end.
That's true in almost every field of human excellence. Well, all of that was new to me.
I didn't know that when I started writing the book. And it just was an obvious topic I had to take up.
So I took it up, wrote it up, went on to the next chapter. Yeah, what I found most fascinating about that chapter on the locker curve is the inputs in those, you know, winds were actually bell curves, whatever contributed to it.
And the consequence was the Locker Curve. I actually wanted to ask you about a related phenomenon of just excellent performance by one individual, which is excellent performance by one individual in one year.
There's a phenomenon of the Annus Mirabilis. It seems like Einstein had one in 1905, where he did special relativity and Brownian motion

and the photoelectric effect in one year.

Newton had one, optics, gravity, motion, calculus.

Plague year.

Huh?

It was a year he was isolated because of the plague.

Exactly.

Yeah, it makes me seem pretty lazy.

But what is behind not just the Locker Curve, but its consolidation in short intervals like this? Part of it is if you are at a very productive part of your life, it spills over. And that productive part of your life is probably going to be, well, if you're a hard scientist, if you're a mathematician, then maybe in your 20s.
All right. There are an awful lot of great mathematicians and everything that they did that was important.
They did by the age of 26, because if you're operating at the far end of mathematics, you need every single neuron, you know, clicking at full, full force and you start to lose them. And if you're in something like the soft sciences or policy like i am the nice thing is that you actually first place you don't need that many brain cells to be a decent social scientist compared to being a mathematician and and also the judgment and experience works into it so whereas judgment and experience is no help whatsoever to mathematician, it's of great help if you're dealing with issues of history and public policy and so forth.

So you can be in the 40s and 50s, but in my own case, which I'm not comparing to Newton's miraculous year, but in my 40s, I was clearly doing my best stuff in terms of sort of a combination of abuse and experience. And that fits in with what they have found with age distributions.
So age is one thing. It's very unlikely you're going to have a miraculous year in your 70s.
also if you think about Newton and about Einstein

and their miraculous years

the different things they were doing did feed into each other in a lot of ways so you can see that if you had somebody at the peak of his powers and he was dealing with one important thing which also required him to do another important thing or look at another important thing you can see that they're just being burst there also it's mysterious and that's part of the answer these things just come out of nowhere in some cases and who knows how let me ask you about um whether how mysterious the different patterns and habits of these um a great accomplishment the people who made these great accomplishments are or if there's some uh some consistency between their lives and their habits have you noticed that these are people just it doesn't seem to have a rhyme or reason to the way they love their lives or they're all over the lot in terms of personality you have lots of stories about the mad genius and you have lots of people who are under the impression that when you've got a really super high iq for example you become pretty odd and don't have many interpersonal skills and so forth that's actually an illusion you notice the brilliant people who are also also oddballs you don't notice the people who are brilliant but uh but aren't oddballs and so in music you have the contrast between beethoven and bach uh beethoven who was phenomenal he's tied with mozart in music inventory not surprisingly but he also acted as if he were God's gift to the world. In his case, he was right.
He was God's gift. But not very many people are.
And he sort of set the standard of the artist genius who has no time for ordinary people and don't get in his way because he has to express himself okay in his case it was justified unfortunately everybody who came after him thought oh well this is the way you're supposed to act contrast that with Bach Bach number three right after Mozart and Beethoven and I have lots of people who say that's ridiculous he should be number one he created not just spectacularly wonderful music he created an incredible oeuvre of it i mean he was writing a cantata every week for the church in which he played and he also sired something like 22 children he was this german family man with one woman, with his wife.

And he was this classic German burger, you know, who, you know, very staid, looked like a prosperous German middle class person.

He was a genius.

So you've got all of these ranges of personalities. Hard work is the common theme.
You know, there is no such thing as the person who was really great in their field, who sort of did it with their left hand while they were, or waited for the muse. The thing that ties everybody together, I'm not the first person to observe this.
Other historians who've looked a genius have noted the same thing. Incredibly hard work over very long periods of time, their whole lives, six, seven days a week.
And that includes, by the way, Mozart.

Mozart is one of the people that a lot of,

he has the reputation of having tossed off these things while he was writing one piece of music

while he was playing another.

I mean, the stories about Mozart

and his incredible facility of music are legendary. But he also worked fanatically hard.
So are there any other common themes in these people? I guess that... No, I'm thinking about literature and the the great writers and you have everything from the very stayed you know trollop writing his 2500 words every morning and then stopping and starting a new book the same day he finished a previous one and then you have tolstoy who was as weird as they they get in his old age they're all like they're all over the lot you lot.
You can't say much as a generalization. What do you think contributes to the common narrative that these are people who are just, it's also true of, as well as Mozart, of Feynman in physics, that this was just an incredibly playful person.
He just, whenever curiosity struck him, he would just go there. But in fact, when you look

at his life, there's incredible amounts of hard work and tediousness. What do you think contributes to the narrative that it's not hard work, but just kind of innate skill paired with just tepid curiosity? I'm trying to think of, well first place you'd have to give me an example of who did it that way so that I could react to it.
Because anybody that comes to mind did work really, really, really hard. And I have to say that this is one of the things that I think is way underrated right now, where there is a tendency for people to want to have a balanced life.
And I'm always struck when I am talking to people your age. You're what? You're 20? 20.
You are 20. Two zero.
Okay. I'm thinking about when people are looking for jobs at the american enterprise institute or other places and and the people who are interviewing them come back and report to me and then you know they say he's this person's really worried about uh you know the vacation days and that is are they're going to be asked to work late and so forth.
And part of what I go into in the curmudgeon's guide, which we may be talking about later, is you're 20 years old. What do you want a balanced life for? In your 20s is the time you should be going flat out in pursuit of what you love to do and finding out what you love to do.
But you shouldn't be looking to have balance. And if you want to be at the top of your field, E.O.
Wilson, the biologist, has a striking paragraph in this regard. He says, if you want to be a top scientist, not just a good one, but a top scientist, if you've got 40 hours a week that you will spend on your teaching and ordinary university duties, and then you will have another 15 hours that you will spend on this, he said, and then you'll have another 15 hours you spend on that.
And at the end of the paragraph, he's outlined basically an 80 hour a week. And he said, this is just sort of basic.
You aren't going to get there from here unless you're willing to do that. And in my experience, that's the answer.
The people who drive us to the top work their asses off. And hardly anybody knows.
I was going to ask you this when we talk about convergence guide, but I'll bring it up now. This seems to contradict your other advice of spending your 20s either in the military or in some far off country and place.
Should you focus in your 20s on your pursuit and vocation or should you spend it doing these other things? Well, you've caught me in a way in a contradiction there. I did say pursuing the thing you love and learning what you love.

So in your 20s, what you don't want to do is to go directly to law school, above all else, from undergraduate. Actually, you don't want to go to graduate school at all, because you are 20 years old, 22 years old if you're graduating, perhaps.
You've proved one thing in life, you're good in the classroom. That's your comfort zone.
Not only have you proved already you can deal with that environment, it's quite possible that you have never dealt with any other environment in your life. You've gone to good elementary and secondary schools, you've gone to a good college all your life, you've been one of the smart people.
You haven't the least idea what's out there in terms of the different options in life. And you've got to be proactive in jerking yourself away from your comfort zone.
And the two best ways to do that are to go into the military if you're a new graduate, or for that matter, to get on an airplane with a one-way ticket, get off the other end and make a living in that strange country for a couple of years. Don't be a backpacker hanging out with the expats.
Get a job teaching English or tending bar or whatever, and get to know another really alien country. You can't go to London and Paris and do this.
You can go to Bangladesh. You can go to Thailand the way I did.
You can go to Nigeria. But you've got to see what's out there before you can decide how you want to spend your life.
Once you start, once you find something you want to do, that's the point at which you go into high gear and pursue that. Thank you for asking for that clarification.
Let me ask you about your time in Thailand and we'll get back to human accomplishment eventually. but in Thailand other than contributing to your political sensibility as you explained

in pursuit how did it contribute

in a way that you could

not have gotten it in an American town or that it was especially efficient to get it in Thailand, in a different country? Well, let me illustrate it with the early days in Thailand. I was assigned when I first got there to a town called Lampang,

which is in the northern part of the country.

And I didn't know it at the time.

I was being assigned to one of the most wonderful assignments I could get.

It's just gorgeous up there.

I was the only male Farang foreigner in the entire province,

except for an elderly French priest.

And I had culture shock.

Thank you. male Farang, foreigner in the entire province, except for an elderly French priest.
And I had culture shock, just like the classic case. I was miserable.
I would be walking down the street of Lampang, and I would just be exhausted because I spoke the language sort of, they gave pretty good training in Peace Corps training, but the social cues, the social cues are such that if you walk down a street in the United States, you know what's going on around you. You walk down a street in rural Thailand in your first days there, you have the least idea what's going on.
And it's very tiring.

And I prided myself on loving every kind of cuisine,

didn't like Thai food.

And it just, let's put on, I was miserable.

But I still remember the day,

maybe three months in,

and I was in the back of a pickup truck and we were heading heading out to a village we were doing building wells and privies was the project and the sun was rising and the mist was coming up over the paddies and uh the I said you know this isn't so bad and and I had i had become comfortable in an environment where i had been utterly convinced i could never be comfortable and an environment in which i eagerly sought to escape i couldn't without losing my pride go home but i really wanted So what's, what good is that? Subsequently, anytime I've been thrown into a really strange environment, I've been able to look back on my own life experience and say, that's okay. You can deal with this.
And that's what I mean by having three years later, I stayed in Thailand six years altogether, but by three years later, I'd be going down a street in Bangkok. And I was just absolutely cocky at that point.
I understood everything that was going on around me. I was completely at home.
And that kind of accomplishment translates. It generalizes.
That's why I want more people to do it. Also, that's where I learned what I love to do.
It turns out I love to play with data, to try to make sense of patterns in numbers. And I didn't know that when I went to Thailand.
I did know it by the time I came back. let's talk about the patterns then of human accomplishment and the causes of it um

you mentioned in the book that there are very few golden ages of human accomplishment in times of peace. Why do you think that is? Partly it's an artifact because the world has usually been at war.
It's even much more common to have periods of war than periods of peace.

Well, I'm in danger here of speculating in a way that I didn't in the book, as far as I can remember.

It's possible that you have a relationship between a country that is fighting a certain kind of war, wars of expansion, wars of which where, which is part of a culture, which is very vital and alive and aggressive and confident, which is the way that, you know, Toynbee characterizes a society on the rise. A civilization that is in the full flush of growing is also likely to be a not very good neighbor to the countries around it.
That goes under the category of speculation that you should not take to the bank. But there's probably some relationship.

And let's talk about wealth here. You write in the book, whether wealth was a direct cause of Florence's artistic accomplishments, or whether the wealth and the artistic accomplishments were both effects of some other cause is difficult to entangle.
What would this other cause be? here's where you're asking me a question i could have answered a lot better 15 years ago when i was working on the book than i can now um human capital can't here's here's some things that can't be very easily it can't be human capital because the human capital in florence uh 50 years before the renaissance was basically the same as the human capital in florence during the renaissance models make a huge difference so that you get socrates and but socrates begets plato and Plato begets Aristotle and he's got great models you have you have in music Bach and some of the other great composers the Baroque and they established this very rich musical structure theory of harmony that others could could feast on for the next hundred years and that's true both in the sciences and in the arts you have a great novelist in the country that novelist inspires other novels that's an important feature you've read the book more recently than i have what else do i say is important oh there's the thing about purpose and autonomy, which we haven't gone into. And here's where it's interesting to compare East Asia and Europe.
And I say East Asia instead of South Asia, because I don't know as much about South Asia as I know about East Asia. But I think probably a lot of what applies to East Asia applies to South Asia.

You had in China this incredibly stable society throughout all the invasions and the Manchurians and this and that and the other thing.

It was an incredibly long-lived civilization. and it functioned at a very high level for a very long time.
Even though at the top of the politics, things were unsettled, they were extremely stable within the country. One of the costs of that is that people were more willing to subordinate their own interests to others in the family, especially.
The family ties were very tight and that was in huge contrast to the West, to the modern West where individualism became very strong and it was okay to walk away from your family and to devote yourself to your passion. When you have that kind of autonomy, you are more, you have better chance of pursuing excellence in the field.
You aren't tied down in any way. And the other thing that the West had, that East Asia did not have in the same form, was a sense of purpose in life.
And here I think Christianity's role in the West is just crucial. In a time of secularization, I don't think that the generations today studying history have any idea what a huge cultural force Christianity was in the West and in Europe.
And one of the ways in which it fostered so much accomplishment was not the Protestant Reformation, which played a role. I mean, the Protestant Reformation emphasized the individualism even more.
I'm going to go back to Thomas Aquinas and thomas aquinas said very powerfully in his theology trying a lot from it from aristotle as well as christianity that it is pleasing to god to have his creations understood so that to explore the universe and the workings of the universe is, is, is a way of expressing your love of God. And God himself is, is enthusiastic about this.
Contrast that with, with Islam in its, certainly its earlier forms, whereby it is blasphemous to, to explore. Mysteries of the universe.
And at this point, whenever I start to talk about Islam, then people say, yes, but you had the center of scientific development was in Baghdad and in the Middle East for centuries and in Spain when Spain was under Islam. And I do discuss that somewhat in Human Accomplishment, the short story being that basically the theological leaders sort of looked the other way.
But it was never enthusiastically embraced by the theology, and they just allowed a lot of more freedom at

some points in history than they did at others but it's a very different it's a very different

environment for fostering individual accomplishment uh islamic and taoist and buddhist

outlooks on life versus christian and i'm not saying this in as a believer in a

Thank you. outlooks on life versus Christian.
And I'm not saying this as a believer in a religious tradition. I'm talking about its consequences culturally for certain kinds of accomplishment.
So, I mean, the Islamic golden age was only golden in comparison to the dark ages that Europe was going through. But then this adds a wrinkle to both of the arguments, the one you were defending and the one that, that claims that Islam had a similar golden age, which is that why did Europe have a dark age, a following the rise of Christianity that caused the fall of the Roman empire or contributed to it.
What took so long between that and the Enlightenment? And, you know, the counter narrative

is, of course, that the Enlightenment resuscitated Europe from Christianity to promote future

excellence. What's wrong with this narrative? I think you have to distinguish between two

periods of Christianity. Christianity started out as a very communal, almost communistic

Thank you. between two periods of christianity christianity started out as a very communal almost communistic um religion people living together in common sharing things in common uh and also it had put huge emphasis on the world to come and for centuries and this is why you had it was so popular to have hermits and monasteries and so forth this life is the preparation for the next and it's unimportant in a way and that's where Aquinas was so important because he flipped that and said no no, using this life to accomplish these great things is pleasing to God.
That was a huge change. And it probably was a major factor in changing the cultural setting for the Renaissance.
Why did it last so long? Well, the blindness didn't come around along until what? Now I used to know this, it's around the end of the first millennium, all right? So until then you had a collapse of all sorts of civilized apparatus. The Roman roads, the aqueducts, the functioning cities, a lot of that went away.
So you had a life that was very fragmented, not many universities except a few in Italy, and they were very rudimentary and they didn't come along until the Middle Ages. So there wasn't really any foundation on which to build.
The universities started to provide a little place to stand for some kinds of things to get started. You had specific inventions that had a huge effect why do you get this outpouring of art great art in the 14th century oil paints made a difference oil paints made things possible that weren't possible before but mainly perspective you know three-dimensional recreation of three-dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional canvas was a huge new thing on which people could build and the other thing was a gradual development of the scientific method which took a long time but every step in that just opened up a new increment to start building that foundation.
And that as a foundation got built, it became easier to build upon that. And you had the outpouring of the Renaissance.
The Enlightenment did not rescue Europe from Christianity. I remind you, the Enlightenment didn't come along until the 18th century.
An awful lot had happened before the 18th century. Things were really, you know, at a very high velocity at the time that the Enlightenment occurred.
I admire Steve Pinker. I think that his infatuation with the Enlightenment is a little overstated.
it occurred to me while you were talking that there's there's an interesting pattern here that

you his infatuation with the Enlightenment is a little overstated. It occurred to me while you were talking that there's an interesting pattern here that you talk about more in the Bible, which is the institutional sclerosis is only evaded when there's something that just causes the downfall of everything that came before.
And it seems like that's what happened in Europe, where you had nothing to start off with. And that just caused immense rates of accomplishment after.

For people who are not familiar with institutional sclerosis, this is the contribution of Mansur Olson, an economist who wrote a couple of seminal books back in the 1960s and 70s, which said, look, what happens with any society is that over time you have sclerotic institutions because it's like barnacles in a boat that slow it down

in the case of institutions it is that special interests get things worked out to their advantage

where uh so they want to keep it that way and then another special interest gets another twist in the law or whatever and over time you get hundreds of these inefficiencies, these barriers that get put up it's very very hard to get rid of them. I'll you the classic example uh is the sugar subsidy in the united states that we still have a subsidy for sugar farmers in the united states which leads americans into a situation where they're paying twice the world price for sugar this benefits a very small number of sugar farmers why can't you get of it? Because you can't get the entire nation excited about paying twice the world price for sugar, but the sugar farmers are really, really excited about keeping their sugar subsidy.
And so every time Congress tries to repeal it, you have this very effective, powerful lobbying thing go into operation in Washington, and they manage to convince enough people to keep it that it never, never goes away. Okay, take the sugar subsidy, multiply that 500 times, 1000 times, and you have institutions that really can't get much done.
And does that remind you of any institutions in the United States today, such as the CDC and so forth? And Ansar Olson said, well, there is one way, and that's to lose a total world war. And so he contrasts the economic recovery of Japan and Germany with the economic recoveries of England and France after World War II.

And he says, what's the difference?

Germany and Japan had no choice but to start over from scratch.

And the French and the British were not required to do the same thing.

And Germany and Japan just cruised right on past them within a few years.

This kind of sclerosis also sounds like not just contemporary U.S., but also your account

Thank you. just cruised right on past them within a few years.
This kind of sclerosis also sounds like not just contemporary U.S., but also your account of Antonine Rome, where you talk about civilization that had accomplished a great deal already, but was now stagnant, sclerotic, secular. Am I reading too much into this, or are you in part describing the U.S.
as it is yeah uh ross douthat the new york times columnist wrote a book called i guess the title is the decadent society and he's basically making the point that that's where we are now and he he makes the point as well that you can have a society that is decadent, that is still a very pleasant place to live. And Rome in the Antonine period was still, at least if you had money, it was still a very pleasant place to live.
And you can even have certain kinds of accomplishment go on, but they tend to be more derivative. And, well, the case that the example that Ross Huthett gives is actually going to the moon, which the United States did a long time ago, as opposed to having movies that spend vast sums of money in creating an utterly wonderful simulation of going to the moon.

It's a real, you know, the genius of the people who create these special effects is real.

The artistry of what they do is real.

It's a very different accomplishment from actually taking the Saturn V out on the launch pad and lighting that mother up and sending it to the moon yeah you're in an especially good position to talk about this because you wrote with your wife the book on Apollo to what to what extent has the decline in the rate of accomplishment contributed to our society being decadent or is it the other way around that because our society became decadent the rate of accomplishment contributed to our society being decadent? Or is it the other way around that because our society became decadent, the rate of accomplishment declined? I think that it's the decline in the rate of accomplishment is in the sciences, partly a function of maybe inevitable decline in certain fields. So that anatomy used to be a scientific subfield that had a lot going on with it, a lot to learn.
There's nothing to learn about human anatomy anymore. Contrast that with genetics where we are in a golden age and there's all sorts of things being discovered all the time and so you have different fields at different stages development in the sciences there's a number of fields that are extremely well developed and there's only so many fundamental discoveries that you can make you know once you once you've discovered uh Newton's, yeah, you can then get quantum mechanics, but it's getting harder and harder to have basic new discoveries of things that have already been done.
So to some extent, you've gotten the science is an inevitable decline. In the arts, it's a different thing.
There is no reason why we still couldn't be composing great music in C major. It's not as if Beethoven and Brahms and Haydn and so forth wrote all the great music there was to be written there.
But it's not going to happen. and it's not going to happen because the cultural milieu simply is not going to produce that kind of accomplishment.
And similarly, you are not going to have certain kinds of great literature written anymore because, again, of the cultural milieu. The kind of culture that produces the English novel of the 19th century requires a fundamentally different sensibility from the cultural milieu in which writers today live.
So there, I think you've got a case that a society that has become decadent in some ways changes the milieu, which impedes artistic accomplishment. I'm not sure I can say the same thing about scientific accomplishment, but I could certainly say it about social science accomplishment.
whereby what we are witnessing now in the social sciences is a collapse of the principles that my generation of social scientists grew up believing were absolutely inviolate, such as, I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Such as that if there is science you don't agree with, the answer to that is to have better science that refutes the bad science.
And the idea of safe spaces, of getting triggered, of being canceled because you say things which are factually true, but are hateful or whatever. That is a sign in the social science of not just evidence, but pervasive corruption.
That's a case of a culture having enormous effects, not in the hard sciences, but in the soft sciences. Although there are people working in the Google who will tell you that it's having effects on the hard sciences as well.
Yeah. And it's not only just culture of responding to arguments, but of actually engaging and try to understand what you disagree with in the first place.
You're going through an episode right now with Harvard inviting you there. You, you shared an op-ed from the Harvard Crimson, Crimson, that explained why you shouldn't be invited.
And it implied that you think that innocent people should be shot down or that you don't think people are created equally in a moral sense. And the idea that anything you have ever written even implies anything like that is so absurd.
It just does not engage with who you are as a person. Well, this has been happening to so many people for so long.
I mean, it was going on when the bell curve came out. And that was 26 years ago that the bell curve came out.
wasn't at the same level of vitriol. It wasn't at the same level of sort of completely quelling anybody standing up for academic freedom.
The time the bell curve came out, you still had people who said, this is a legitimate scientific inquiry. Now, I don't even think I'm the most egregious example of being misrepresented.
What's even scarier is examples of people who have made factually accurate statements about something involving race or gender. Nobody is saying that the fact was wrong.
They are saying that it shouldn't be said, that it's wrong to say it. Whereas in my case, they're saying that Dick Ernstine and I said things in a bell curve we never said, or subsequent to Dick's death, that I've said things that I just simply never said.
And the idea of white supremacy or that it's okay for certain people to die is just nutty. Yeah.
I'm sorry to joke about it, but it's so absurd that you have to laugh at it. I want to ask you though, why do certain miliees contribute, are innately better at contributing to human accomplishment?

You write in the book, devotion to a human cause, whether it's social justice, the environment, the search for truth, or abstract humanism, is by its nature less compelling than devotion to God. Now you have people, as you mentioned, like Pinker, who have written books about how this narrative of human progress can promote a future of growth in science and reason and everything good.
Do you suspect that this narrative will not be strong enough to withstand the counter, the sort of counter-enlightenment forces? Yeah, I've undergone an evolution, by the way, since over the last 20 years.

And I was kind of at the beginning of it when I finished Human Accomplishment in 2004, 2005, where I was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the, particularly Christian religiosity, extremely important to the,

particularly Christian religiosity,

extremely important to Western civilization

of what had gone on.

I was also beginning to think

that secular humanism didn't have the staying power

that it needs.

And this is my question for the Steve Pinkers of the world. What is your ground for your moral beliefs? that's a question that is very

hard to answer

if you do not think that they are in no way given by God. And by God, I don't mean a little old man sitting on the mountaintop in the clouds.
I'm talking about a much more realistic concept of whatever the God might be.

But the notion that rape is wrong, murder is wrong, they will always be wrong, they are irredeemably wrong, they can never be justified as human, you know, the Ten Commandments, basically.

What is the basis for that belief? If it is the nature of the universe, that's one thing. If you're saying we have reached this through human ratiocination, that's a much weaker

a much

a much weaker force to prop it up when times get tough. And I think that in all sorts of ways right now, I hope you don't ask me for a lot of specific examples because I'm not sure I can give them.
But you see people backing off of what used to be very firm moral principles because it's increasingly unpopular or inconvenient or unfashionable to believe them. and the examples of backing off the principles of moral and social science of the search for truth,

of the importance of backing off the principles of moral and social science of the search for truth,

the importance of the truth as trumping everything else, the importance of civil discourse and all

that, all sorts of things which you have professors who 25 years ago would have said,

this is the foundation, my moral foundation for the way I conduct my life and my profession,

Thank you. 25 years ago would have said, this is the foundation, my moral foundation for the way I conduct my life and my profession, who now have backed away from that big time when it comes to their professional obligations.
And I'm saying to myself, doesn't this also spill over into your, the firmness is the persistence of your moral principles in other ways.

So I think a secular society is not just that it's likely to be much less productive than the West was previously.

I think that it has a false sense of security that it can never fall back into the bad old days, the totalitarianism and barbarity of all kinds. We can fall back into the bad old days very easily.
so um i could ask philosophical questions about how, you know, which philosophy better grounds its morals, but let me ask you instead of practical question, which is we do see declining rates of religious adherence in America and across the world. And it doesn't seem, I mean, it could be the case, but it doesn't seem like a huge resurgence of Christianity is coming anytime soon.
if secular humanism isn't strong enough to stay in the face of these other totalitarian trends, is there any sort of other philosophy that doesn't require Christianity that is? Excuse me. I'm going to have to cough for a second second first place don't write off christianity quite yet and don't don't write off uh the other great

religions uh quite yet either i use the analogy i think the first time i ever used it was in human

accomplishment that the 20th century was kind of the adolescence of mankind

Thank you. the first time I ever used it was in human accomplishment that the 20th century was kind of the adolescence of mankind.
That the enlightenment had delivered some body blows to some very old ways of looking at the world. You had the enlightenment and the, the primacy of reason.
Then darwin who uh dealt a body blow to the understanding about the biblical description of how the the universe and the world were created you had uh uh relativism in all sorts of forms psychologically you had the discovery of the subconscious the the unconscious. You had relativity and physics, which spills over into the way you look about it, that objective truth and all sorts of other things.
And I call it the adolescence because I think intellectuals in the 20th century were sort of like adolescents who have decided that their parents have made mistakes, that they hadn't realized their parents aren't perfect, and they decide their parents are wrong about everything. And the rejection of religion, I think, was of that order.
So it was not the case that in the 20th century, intellectuals carefully considered religion and rejected it. Religion became something that nobody smart believed in that anymore.
And that progressed throughout the century. So that by the time I went to Harvard in 1960, 1961, it was just taken for granted.
It was in the air. If you're smart smart you don't believe that stuff anymore and the fact is that these are ultimate issues that human beings really want to grapple with starting with the ultimate question why is there something rather than nothing uh and then going on into other questions about what are the foundations of human morality? Are we making all of this up? Is this all a matter of evolved tendencies that add survival value over the course of hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of the species? Or is there something else at work? My sense is that there is a resurgence of interest in those questions.
I have some friends who teach courses at places like Harvard that raise them. They are talking about religion specifically.
They are jammed. Or if there is a public lecture on one of these issues, people are standing at the back of the hall.

There is sort of, I think, a real, I don't know about the University of Texas. I suppose you have the University of Texas.
You probably have some kids who are straight from the Bible Belt and other kids who are your overeducated intellectuals who think it's all nonsense. Probably something in between.
but certainly in the elite schools I think that there is a real sense of

here are all these important subjects we haven't been allowed to think about seriously. So I'm kind of optimistic about the resurgence of a more thoughtful way of thinking about religion, whether that takes the form of Christianity as we've known in the past, I don't know, but I think it's vitality is out there.
But if I can express some skepticism about that optimism, you yourself have in the past called yourself an agnostic despite being convinced of the historical

role of Christianity and promoting human accomplishment and you I don't see how even if I did agree with the arguments that Christianity was and continues to be uniquely powerful for promoting a free society I don't see how I could bring myself to agreeing with the actual theological basis of Christianity.

How do you reconcile the fact that you yourself are agnostic with the idea that in the future, other people who aren't even convinced of the value of Christianity will turn to Christianity? I suppose the simple answer is I'm becoming a closeted believer. But apart from that, I'd say don't give up on a thoughtful consideration of these issues.
You don't have to do it in the Christian framework. You can do it in a variety of frameworks.
It would be one of the things I did not realize until I just a little background here is that my wife is.

Is a Quaker, a Quaker by convincement. She came to this as an adult as well.
She was like me. She was an agnostic in college and so forth.
and through her I've been exposed to a lot of really brilliant writing about a lot of really difficult issues that doesn't require you to read chapters about the resurrection or things like that. But they're talking about broader theological issues, and sometimes not even in a Christian framework at all.
And the thing about this literature is that it's really smart. It's really subtle and thoughtful and smart.
And so you ought to expose yourself to that. And then I can't give you a reading list right now, but I think it would be perfect to pick up readings in a variety of traditions that are sort of of the best that has been said and thought into those traditions just so that you can be sure that when you reject religion you are doing it on the basis basis not of saying i don't believe bible stories anymore or whatever the equivalent is in buddhism and islam and the rest of.
It is, you were saying, no, I have given consideration to the reasons why some very thoughtful, smart people do believe this. And with respect, I simply disagree with them now.
You've got to give yourself the basis for coming to that conclusion. Yeah.
I predict that if you expose yourself to a fair amount of that material you will have planted a different sensibility that will do you good in years to come and i should say you have um you have given a reading list in the curmudgeons guide of such literature. Yeah, and I'm not sure if you were familiar with Jordan Peterson when he was doing his tour, explaining his version of what he thinks God is and how that relates to Christian theology.
I'm not, no. Okay.
Well, do you suspect that if Christianity ordered to resurge, it would be through somebody who isn't bringing back the old version of theology that required, you know, beliefs and actual metaphysical existence of God, but something like Jordan Peterson, where it's not clear what he believes, but it is motivating enough. There doesn't seem to be a purpose and some transcendental good that is being promoted.
Well, again, since I don't know directly what he's said, I can't comment on it. I can describe my own sense.
Well, just a couple of observations one is that i have a much greater sense of mystery than i used to have about the universe and i don't think that's made up i think that contemplating all sorts of things that we see around us and you know that that to say that everything that can be known can be known by the human minds that becomes a little more implausible because let's stipulate that there is a god it is absolutely impossible for us to avoid anthropomorphizing that God. We have to think in terms of the frame of reference that we have, and a God that lives outside of time, outside of history, that permeates everything is not possible for us to understand.
We are, if there is a God, we are like my dog trying to figure out what I'm doing when I'm running a regression equation. Okay.
The dog can look at me and he can try to try to relate that to something he can understand. He has the slightest idea.
And similarly, similarly when people say well how can there be a god because if there were a god they would never allow all the suffering i mean that's sort of the level of of just a lack of appreciation for the intellectual challenge of trying to get your head around some of these questions though i will also make other observation, and this comes through my wife and the people I have been exposed to over the years through her. I think that there is, in religion, something equivalent to being tone deaf.
Some people cannot hear a melody.

Doesn't mean the melody doesn't exist.

It means that they are impaired in trying to hear that.

Some people are colorblind.

Doesn't mean color doesn't exist.

It means that they can't see it. I think there are differences in human beings in their ability to sense other ways of knowing besides the hyper-rational

ways in which I try to know things.

And I have become convinced it is not that they're making stuff up.

It is that they aren't making it up. And the fact i can't see it is because i'm the

equivalent of tone deaf or colorblind uh and it's not my fault but it is incumbent on me to do the best i can to understand what the melody is like and understand what the color red is like I suspect this might be the hubris and naivety of my youth, but I have read C.S. Lewis and a few other people.
And obviously, I haven't engaged with the literature in any serious way. But it seems to me when statements like God is beyond time and place are made, they're not even wrong.
I'm not even sure what is being said. But like you said, it might be just me not understanding the way in which it's being said on the other hand if you start with these stipulated truth that there is a god then in what sense would that god be time bound or space bound yeah but what does it mean to not be time-bound? Remember what I said? It's hard to get your head around this stuff.
That's exactly what I mean. Yeah.
Exactly. I will go back and try to...
C.S. Lewis is better than nothing.
I mean, I'm glad you've read C.S. Lewis.
Did you find him interesting? I did. And it was actually in the context of a debate i was having with a friend in high school and she convinced me to read i was making the same arguments about the problem uh the problem of evil and she convinced me to read one of those books um and i i mean he has a way he has a prose that's really captivating but i just didn't find the arguments that persuasive okay Okay, well, you've exposed yourself.
Yeah, I'll expose myself some more on your recommendation. But let me ask you now about the link between liberty and human accomplishment.
China not only, of course, had the differences in worldview and milieu that contributed to lower purpose and autonomy, but it was, to go to some more physical differences,

it was easier to govern geographically than Europe.

Maybe that contributed to the fact that it was also easier

to thwart innovation and new ideas.

And now we're coming in a time when,

as you described by the people,

there's just a tremendous burden on the average individual

from the government.

To what extent do you suspect that this has dampened

the rate of human accomplishment?

You know, in working on human accomplishment,

I had to come to grips with the fact that so much,

basically, liberty as conceived by the founders,

by Locke and the 18th century tradition is very young it's very new and all of this vast array of human accomplishment that I'm writing about came before that so I had to sort of accept to myself that you don't have to live in a libertarian world in order for great things to happen because they've happened in the past. But I'd reconcile that to some degree by saying, but the people who accomplished those great things had a lot of de facto liberty.
So that they might've been living under an absolute monarchy. They might have been living in France, which was much more authoritarian than Britain was.

But you could still, if you were one of the French intellectuals, be given a lot of personal freedom to go ahead and pursue what you wanted to pursue. And that was true elsewhere in Europe as well.
having said that there's got to be a link

between the freedom to do what you feel this passion to do and being able to do it. I mean, it's just simply got to be, you've got to have more potential for great human accomplishment when in some ways you have created de facto freedom

for people to pursue it. And if you're going to have de facto freedom for a few, this is the point at which I've become a good constitutional Madisonian and say the great thing about the United States was the United States said was everybody should have that freedom, not just the people that the state will leave alone.

So let's talk. The United States said was everybody should have that freedom, not just the people that the state will leave alone.

So let's talk about your plan then about setting up these various defense funds to create this de facto autonomy. Okay, this is a book that hardly anybody who's listening to us will have read.

It's called By the People.

And it spends the first four chapters

detailing all the ways in which this society is becoming more abundant in terms of the constitution

which is now bears no resemblance to the constitution as it existed up until about 1937

uh to the sclerosis in the uh government. I'll just give people a quick sense of how much things have changed.
In 1960, hardly any corporations even had an office in Washington, D.C. Maybe the airlines did because they were regulated in the trains but most american

corporations washington just wasn't important now not only does every corporation have a major presence in washington both directly and employing lawyers and lobbyists and all the rest of that they

run their businesses

in large part

by trying to get a competitive advantage the way a regulation is written or a piece of legislation that's passed whereby the state is providing them with an edge over their competition, just in complete opposition to what the free market economy is supposed to be like.

Then you've got the regulatory burdens,

which are the main focus by the people,

whereby I'm not worried about J.P. Morgan

and all the regulations that have been foisted on it

by the post-2008 recession, J.P. Morgan can afford to have, you know, 500 lawyers jumping through all the hoops the government wants it to jump through.
And in fact, by the way, since I'm mentioning J.P. Morgan, it is the CEO of Chase who said that it gives us a bigger moat, referring to the legislative, regulatory legislation.
It gives them a better protection against competition. I'm worried about the guy who wants to open up a corner store and can't open up a corner store because of all the regulatory hoops he has to go through.
I'm worried about

the person who a bureaucrat can come to them and say, oh, you're in violation of such and such. And if you try to fight this, I'll put you out of business because you can't resist the amount of pressure we can bring on you.
And so I suggested, why not have legal defense funds for systematic civil disobedience.

And the proposition is federal government cannot possibly enforce these tens of thousands of regulations that it has piled up. Can't possibly do it.
They can only get away with all that if people voluntarily comply, even with idiotic regulations. And so why don't we not comply with idiotic regulations? Let's go ahead and run our business the way it should be run.
And then if the government comes after us, we have defense funds, perhaps funded by the profession, perhaps funded by philanthropists, which say to the government, we're going to fight this. And we understand that we are technically in violation of this stupid regulation, and that sooner or later, you will probably win.
You're going to have to invest a lot of resources in this. You're going to have to invest the time of your staff and your lawyers and the rest of that.
Do that you really want to do that and i think that you have the potential in this for getting the entire federal government to behave the way that the highway patrol does which is you know i don't know about the part of the country you live in texas is okay texas you can still do lots of things in Texas, but in the part of the country I live in, which is Maryland, the speed limit is 65 and you go 75 and you're fine because on the major highways, 75 is kind of the flow of traffic and those highways were designed for those speeds and they don't stop you. we're violating the law.
There's no way the cops can start picking up everybody. And so why not have a regulatory, de facto regulatory regime in which we have discouraged the government from enforcing the stupid regulations and encouraged it to focus on the important ones.
And I have more specific suggestions for how to do that. But that's the premise for developing the defense funds.
It's a fascinating idea. And I want to ask you first about the circumstances which make, it is a radical proposal proposal and the circumstances which make civil disobedience seem necessary.
And part of it goes back to if we lose or if we continue losing the sort of liberty sensibility that America has had, that a unique way of life will be surrendered. Can you describe what it was about the American founding that made it unique in charting a nation that prioritized maximizing the liberty of its citizens? Why has this not happened in other places and in other times? The British made progress toward it, so that at the time of the founding, you already had a lot of de facto freedom there, there and you had a certain amount of constitutional freedom even though they had an unwritten constitution but coming out of the common law but you also had in that encumbered with an aristocracy you had that encumbered with all sorts of class lines and so forth.
And the genius of the Americans was that it said that all people should be free to pursue happiness. And that all people are capable of pursuing happiness.
That was a break with history. No other government had ever been established on the premise that the individual human being should be allowed to live his life as he sees fit as long as he accords the same freedom to everyone else nothing else remotely like that had happened.
And subsequently in subsequent revolutions, including the French Revolution, it didn't happen again. The United States was the only one which had not only a statement of the freedom of people to pursue their own happiness, they set up the government with explicit tortuous ways of constraining that government from ever uh sliding down the slippery slope into an ordinary authoritarian government now the fact that it lasted two two comments about that uh because i know the reaction out there but they

were slave holders you had you had a large chunk of the american population that was enslaved it was the fatal flaw in the founding it's sort of guaranteed that it would collapse eventually because the evil was so great

you could not have this, this expression of how a human being should be allowed to live in contradiction to this reality of slavery. That was just never going to last forever, but it was kind of amazing.
It lasted as long as it did. So that you had from 1789 when the constitution was passed to 1937, the federal government was still incredibly highly constrained from interfering with the lives of its citizens.
And that's not a bad track record for such an ambitious experiment.

What is the cause of your pessimism that this basic idea will not originate again of founding a nation based on this kind of charter? well

I'm

hesitating

because Well, I'm hesitating because I have been so surprised by the last four years.

the answer I would have given you in 2012 when I was writing Coming Apart

was that we have reached a modus vivandi

whereby when I was writing Coming Apart, was that we have reached a modus vivandi, whereby the elites have established a society that really works just fine for them, but they are passing off enough benefits to the rest that you sort of buy them off. And you aren't going to have any principled demands for get the government off our back because the working class, which in the past was so central to this, the strength of the American experiment, has essentially been going down the tubes in terms of its own commitment to this way of life.
And so I saw in 2012 the antagonism toward the elites that existed even then. I way underestimated the depth of the anger, the breadth of the anger that produced Trump.
And in one sense, that seems to indicate a potential for the resuscitation of an older way of looking at how American society should function. But the last four years have also been a case where what was formerly known as the right has proved itself to be every bit as authoritarian in its own way as the left is, and just as willing to engage in all sorts of practices which would ordinarily be considered just antithetical to a conservative perspective in the world, let alone a libertarian perspective in the world.
So we are now in a situation where there's way more energy in the middle class and the working class for radical change than I ever would have suspected

existed. I'm not happy about the kind of radical change that they're in favor of too.
Basically, at this moment in history, as I reached my 77th year, no, I'm in my 78th year, a movement that I thought had enormous vitality and potential just 10 years ago. Namely, a practical libertarian form of politics.
Practical libertarian means small l libertarian. It's Madisonian.
I'm really thinking about Madison's conception of the rule of government. Whereas I thought that really had a chance of regathering some strength.
I'm an oddball now. All sorts of people on the right now think people like me are cucks.
We're, you know, we're useless. They're, they're going to go beyond that.
So basically, if you can give me any reason not to be pessimistic, I will grasp that. Strategically, I think there's a certain degree of optimism, but not tactically, not within the next couple of decades.
Do you think that the coalition that Trump assembled could be recaptured to a more libertarian sensibility? Because right now you have what could be seen as the voice of that coalition on TV, Tucker Carlson, sometimes using the word libertarian as an epithet. You have the Tea Party's wing in the Congress,

the Freedom Caucus,

being the strongest supporters of Trump

and high deficits and whatever else.

Can this movement be reconsolidated

with a more libertarian sensibility?

Gee, if Tucker Carlson just could channel his former self,

he would have a potential for being a very effective

Thank you. Orilson just could channel his former self, he would have a potential for being a very effective political figure.

And by getting in touch with his former self, I'll tell you my reaction as I listen to Tucker, which I don't do very often.

But I used to know, you know, I used to know Tucker.

Not close friends, but knew him and admired his work. And sometimes when I have listened to him in recent years, I still agree with him.
And he is saying things with passion, which needed to be said. And in a way, Tucker has had the same kind of experience I've had, where I've decided I was way too cavalier about low-scale immigration.
The economists say, hey, low-scale immigration is a net win-win, and they're not taking away jobs from Americans and all the rest of it. And I just bought into that too clibly and didn't think hard enough about how it feels not to be an economist going through the numbers and saying, hey, it's a win-win, and instead being a carpenter who used to get $19 an hour, and I've been undercut by low-skill immigrants who are working for $12 an hour with no benefits and no social security and all that.
And I'd say, how would I feel if I were in that situation? I would be angry as could be if i were in that situation and so i think tucker has hold of some some uh growth that he has done where he has augmented his former positions which i was very close to about liberty with some other that need to be taken into account. What's happened is, though, you're right, he uses libertarian as an epithet, and he has gone too far in defending the indefensible with a lot of the things Trump has done.
But I would like to think that when Trump is gone, which I assume will happen after this election, could be wrong, that you might have people like him who have a synthesis of some aspects of the populism that deserve to be part of the synthesis, but a core that goes back to individual freedom and limited government. And the one thing that you can be too dismissive of when you're being a pessimist like me is that you discount the effect that an individual can have.
So if you had a Ronald Reagan type of personality or an FDR kind of personality that were holding these views this time, that person could be a successful politician. Problem is you can't manufacture that kind of person.
So I don't know if one's going to come along. But you have manufactured for them, I think, a worldview that would be incredibly helpful in shaping their policy agenda and their communication.
I think you could be analogous to what Hayek was to Ronald Reagan, to whoever comes in the future. But do you have in that position advice for people who want to preserve a remnant of the libertarian sensibility and mold this worldview

in a way that could be applicable and persuasive

to current and future circumstances.

Do I have, let me go back to the beginning of your question.

Do I have any ideas about what?

Advice for keeping this remnant.

I guess at this point I'd hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. Now you're 20 years old, so you're going to be hunkering down for a while anyway, just as a matter of biographical necessity in the sense of, I certainly hope you don't hit your peak at the age of 23 or 24.
That would be a disaster.

But suppose I were 30 years old, 35 years old, and interested in being engaged in this sort of thing again. I think I just accept that probably not much that I want to do is going to be possible to do for a while.
And that you could possibly do something like, you could join a think tank, you could run for office at local levels, campaigning on your principles and probably get elected. but you're not going to be in a position to run against the milieu in a big way.
The milieu is really strong and it's really hostile to the kinds of things that I think you probably think right now. And just sit back and wait for things to be less hostile, I guess, is what I would do.
I don't have time to sit back and wait for things to get less hostile. I have all this time in the world.
I want to ask you about the methods of this civil disobedience. What has come of the Madison Fund since you wrote this book?

Nothing.

What happened is there were some people

who were interested in starting one.

But remember the book came out,

I think in 2014 or 15.

And it hadn't been out very long

until we were in the 2016 election cycle.

And all of this kind of stuff

Thank you. And it hadn't been out very long until we were in the 2016 election cycle.
And all of this kind of stuff, just nobody was paying any attention at all to it anymore. you expect your skepticism that these issues could be resolved in the political process

but somebody who's trying to make the case for Trump might say he has done

some amount of deregulation we're about to have six to three conservative majority on the court. To what extent has the political system been able to solve these issues? Well, I wish I knew what the story was with regard to deregulation.
I've heard people say that there have really been some quite significant things that have been done. I've also heard that actually there's more smoke than fire there.
But are we better off with regard to the regulatory regime than we were four years ago? The answer is probably yes. Six to three majority on the supreme court does that make it conceivable that that the court would uh modify what's called chevron deference and um sorry to introduce the legal jargon but chevron deference comes from a case involving the chevron company and the Supreme Court held that.
And by the way, Anthony Scalia was in favor of this. The Supreme Court has said that the court should defer to what the regulatory agency has said in its regulation in cases where there is any doubt whatsoever.
In other words, the court is not going to try to second-guess the regulators.

Well, I sympathize with the notion that the court should not try to become expert

in these very arcane issues that a lot of regulations involve,

but there should be some modification of that,

whereby if the administration of this regulation is clearly, obviously idiotic,

Thank you. But there should be some modification of that, whereby if the administration of this regulation is clearly, obviously idiotic, translating that into some more acceptable legal language, the court ought to be able to overthrow regulations without having to get into the minutiae of all the technical things that led to Chevron deference.
Well, if that were overturned, what you would basically be doing is putting a rein on the regulatory state, which it has not experienced for the last 23 years, at least. So is that possible, the 63 court? I guess it's not impossible.
That's better than nothing. I, if that doesn't happen and we have to stay with this bizarre system of regulations we have.
And by the way, the first part of that was such a, it was a great description, but it was incredibly frustrating to read that you have this, everything, if you want to appeal the regulation that the regulators are imposing on you you have to go to the regulators themselves um but if you were trying to battle them in this sort of legal war of attrition with the madison fund people will say how do you expect to beat the federal government what kind of resources could you possibly assemble that would be enough to combat their resources? Oh, it's much easier than people think, because you just take a look at the budget of, let's say, the Regulatory Agency for Workplaces. I'm blocking on the name of it right now.
They're responsible for regulating every workplace in the country and enforcing regulations on.

And you're talking about thousands of regulations and they don't have that many inspectors.

So you will have companies that won't get inspected, particularly small companies won't get inspected for years at a time. And they, at the level of the, they have taken on so much regulatory responsibility that there's no way that they can staff up to respond to that.
And when you appeal, or let's say that you have knowingly violated a regulation, they've come and they want to fine you for it. And you say, okay, we're going to fight that.
You are not fighting the entire federal government. You're fighting the local office of that government agency, which has maybe, what, 10, 20 people in it, max.
And you have bureaucrats who are not that eager to get deluged with a lot of work that they can avoid. And you are saying to a specific bureaucrat who wants to bring you to book for this violation, okay, how do you feel about spending 100 hours, 150 hours this next month dealing with all the stuff I'm going to load on to you? Because one of the things about the regulatory state, which is you can, you don't have to prove things.
You just have, you can set things in motion, which will cause an enormous amount of work just to deal with the, the process that you've set in motion. And that's what the lawyers would be doing for the Madison fund.
The lawyers of the Madison fund would be saying, you know what, we're just going to take this intricate legal system that you have developed and we are going to exploit it, not with an eye to getting justice, but with an eye to making life difficult for you. And guess what? We can do that.
So you're dealing with individual human beings who are given a choice do I want to pursue this or maybe I'd pick an easier target

and a lot of them are just going to pick an easier target

by the way

here's what Donald Trump has shown us

Donald Trump

got a reputation for litigating anything

and so

when he said to the subcontractors that he stiffs, you know about this practice of Donald Trump's, but when he had subcontractors, you know, who were supposed to do the plumbing or whatever in one of the buildings, and when they're done, he says, oh, well, you didn't do the work correctly. I'm just going to pay you three quarters of what the contract says.
And when they say, we're going to fight this, Trump would say, you fight this and we will keep you in court forever. And he made good on it.
And so he actually could make that into a business model whereby he could systematically underpay his subcontract because he'd established the threat of that makes it not worth their well. Now, why people still did subcontracting work with him i don't know that's another question but uh the fact is you can just a credible threat of litigation in defense of against the regulatory state could have an enormous impact i actually didn't know about that that's astonishing um but my i was telling one of my friends about this idea, and he said, if this strategy could work, you would be expecting big corporations to be working together to enervate the government in regards to the regulations that affect them.
And the fact that you don't see them doing this should be evidence for the fact that it's not workable. What do you say to that? Well, the big corporations don't have much incentive to do it.
The big corporations like the regulatory state because they can afford it and they have the competitive advantage they talked about earlier. So I'll tell you, the kind of place it would work is in the professions, like dentists.

By the way, I raised this with my own dentist, and he said, yes.

Dentists are subject to all kinds of picayune things.

My dentist had once been fined because he had inadequately instructed his staff in the use of the fire extinguishers in the office.

And he paid a fine.

So you have the dentist's legal fund,

and he contributes 100 bucks a year to it.

And in return for that,

there are a set of specified regulations

that you can just go ahead and ignore,

and we'll defend you

if the government comes after you on those.

Each little dentist's office

would have a lot of incentive to be part of that.

Thank you. that you can just go ahead and ignore and we'll defend you if the government comes after you on those.
Each little dentist office would have a lot of incentive to be part of that. The same could go for physicians, other small companies.
There could be lots of different organizational groups that would have an interest in combining because together they could pose a response to the government that no individual dentist could. Yeah.
And the added benefit there would be that there would be a number figure on the cost of regulation of a dentist. If a dentist is willing to contribute $100 a year, then you can say that this is actually the cost of the regulation you're imposing on dentist offices, if they're willing to pay that.
Yeah. But so here's some other issues that somebody might bring up with this scheme.
You say in the book that regulations that have a halo effect should be avoided because even though they might be insensible, you're not going to get a majority of the people to back that cost. Aren't most regulations probably ones that have a halo effect behind them? By halo effect, I mean the purpose of the regulation is to protect the environment or an endangered species.
It's very hard to get, if you are resisting regulations that people say will create dirty air, if you resist those regulations, It's going to be a public relations disaster. You'll be amazed how many don't have that halo effect.
I give some examples in the book about getting fined for not having a sign saying poison on a storage place of beach sand. And the reason is this is a brick making factory that in some conditions under some grinding operations, beach sand can produce a respiratory problem.
So you're supposed to label the room in which the beach sand is being kept with poison, you know, that kind kind of you have no idea if you have not been directly involved in this how picky you so many of these regulations are and they don't have a halo effect they cannot stand the light of day i'm glad i went to computer science i don't know how to deal with the uh you're in one of you're in one of the areas which has the least regulation of anybody. Yeah, and not if Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson have something to say about it.
Yeah. But so then this brings out the question, if this method works, why hasn't the Madison Fund taken off? Why have these defense funds taken off? First place, the answer I gave you before.

Donald Trump came along a few months after the book came out.

Now, even if Donald Trump hadn't come along, the fact is not that many people read books like that.

You would have to have a couple of people who read the book that have big bucks and would start a trial fund all on their own. Actually, if you had one guy, I mean, suppose that a Jeff Bezos decided this was something to try.
You have a variety of people in this country who are so wealthy, they can undertake significant innovations like this all on their own. They don't have to get a bunch of other donors.
But it would have to be that kind of effect, I think. It has to be somebody else who is as crazy about the idea as I am, but who has lots more money than I have.
I haven't bought that person yet. Let's talk about the future of liberty.
In the last part of the book, you talk about your optimism that in 200 years, when we've grown much wealthier, we'll find this sort of interference on the government unnecessary and even absurd. But we grew much wealthier than we were 100 years ago.
And yet we're still impinging on the lives of other Americans. What makes you optimistic that as you grow wealthier, we'll see lesser need of these regulations? Part of the driving thing is increasing wealth.
One of the things that makes you wonder about the importance of public policy is if you plot per capita GDP in constant dollars over the last century.

It basically goes up like this.

And you can see the depression of 1929,

but it's a little tiny blip in terms of this longer term curve.

You take a look at 2008, it's a little blip.

And then we go back up. So unless you have policy of, you know, Stalinist stupidity of Soviet stupidity, presumably we're going to continue to get richer and that might be lower growth rates than we've had before.
But even if you growth, have a growth rate of one or 2% from the base we have now, you're still getting richer reasonably rapidly. At some point when per capita GDP is $100,000 per person, the idea that we need this vast, elaborate, bureaucratic apparatus to, let's say, deal with poverty, it's really silly.
I mean, for a long time, a lot of us have been saying, look, if you just took the money and gave out the money, you'd get rid of poverty and it's a lot easier. But we've never been at a point of national wealth where it is so obviously idiotic that we are using this complex machinery.
So I think that time will come that that wealth, wealth will be enough that we can afford free riders. You know, that we can have some people that will take a guaranteed basic income, which I've written a book in favor of, and they will use it to live their lives off the backs of their fellow citizens.
But by that time, the backs of their fellow citizens won't feel the burden anymore. And we already have a lot of people behaving that way anyway.
And so who cares? Free up the rest of us from all of this stuff we have to put up with public policy. In terms of other kinds of technological changes, however, actually policing, which is such a big deal now with the Black Lives Matter thing, in many ways, policing is being transformed by technology.
and so is our vulnerability to crime so that you're much more

invulnerable to property crime

than you used to be

and the police

with the body cameras and so forth

do we expose terrible behavior in the part of the police? Sometimes, yeah, we do. That's a good thing in terms of a deterrent effect in the future.
And it's also much a way that you need far fewer governmental oversights if you have more transparency without the government oversight. And an awful lot of the transparency on policing is coming not from anything the government is doing to oversee the police.
It's the public overseeing the police with video cameras. So you take all of these things, even ones which are in the sectors like crime, which are the subject of so much angst and so forth, probably technology over time is going to make the central government powerful presence less important rather than more.
I hope so. By the way, you were absolutely right in the last chapter when you said that even liberals will have to recognize that local, that public unions in their local governments are causing problems.
And of course, this has happened in police unions. And, you know, the claim, which is true, is that they protect people from accountability.
They don't reward good behavior and prevent punishment of bad behavior. And this raises the question, what about the other public sector unions? Should they be given the same treatment? So hopefully that lesson will permeate.
Do you think that's going to happen? Well, two things. At the local level, a lot of these unions behave differently than they do at the national level.
Or I should say in small cities and towns, they behave differently. So let's take the public schools, for example, and the teachers union.
The teachers unions are incredibly destructive in big cities in terms of the ways in which they protect themselves at the expense of the students. In Valley Elementary School, six miles from here where my kids went to elementary school, I think the teachers are members of a union, but they don't behave that way.
They behave as teachers have traditionally behaved, and they are nurturing and very concerned about the children. And so a lot of the de facto evils of public unions are concentrated in big cities.
But that's true of so many of the things. I think it's also in one of the final chapters of By the People that I make the argument, which I'm more and more convinced of, that this divide between daily life in the big cities, and Austin is a big city in this regard.

But Chicago and Dallas and Houston and Los Angeles are even more like this. It's just so different.
All of your, all of your relationships are way different. If you are dealing with a plumber in New York city.
and you're dealing with a plumber in a town of 15,000 people. The ways in which the problems of daily life are utterly different in big cities and small cities and towns I think is behind an awful lot of the political polarization that's taken place.
The people in the big cities look at problems of public unions.

They look at the problems of the police. They look at these and they have one set of characteristics.

When you look at the police and the unions and the rest of the small cities,

have completely different characteristics.

By the way, you mentioned the universal basic income. What did you think of Andrew Yang's candidacy in 2020? Well, I got to tell you, I don't pay much attention to day-to-day politics.
So people would tell me that Andrew Yang had a proposal for a basic income and I really should learn about it. And I was busy with other things, so I don't know much about what he said.
Sorry. I'm probably, for example, I did not listen to a word of the debate last week between Biden and Trump.
The degree to which I isolate myself from politics is hard to exaggerate. Trust me, you're better off for it.
I know that I have better mental health than a lot of my friends who did watch. Yeah, that's almost a guarantee.
So usually I end interviews by asking for what advice you would give to a 20 year old. Now you've written a book on this topic.
So I'll just ask you about that book instead. The last chapter of that book is about the movie Groundhog Day.
What do, in your view, may such a profound moral fable? For people who've never seen Groundhog Day, it's kind of hard to explain, but let's assume we're talking to people that have watched Groundhog Day. If you watch, and let's say you watched it once, I imagine that your impression, if you watched it once, was mine.
It was funny. There was great chemistry between Andy McDowell and Bill Murray.
It was a rom-com with a happy ending. I really enjoyed it.
If you go back and watch it a second time, you start to see the ways in which his character changes over the movie that are more subtle than you realize the beginning. And the things that were just mostly funny at the beginning begin to take on a different cast, such as when Bill Murray is tries to commit suicide by every known means and can't and fails because he wakes up the next morning.
Well, it was funny,

but then all at once you start to realize

the degree to which this guy who initially reacted by,

say, well, I'm immortal,

and I'm going to have the same,

I will eat whatever I want to eat.

I will have whatever kind of sex I want to do.

There's no consequences to anything I do.

And that is deeply unsatisfying to him to the point that he tries to commit suicide. And can't.
And then you start to see the ways in which he is changing. And it's very gradual.
It's very subtle. And you will see more the third time than you saw the second, more the fourth, you saw the third.
You are watching this guy transform from a jerk into a good human being good in the aristotelian sense of being good and it's done without preaching but the evolution he goes through is one of deeper and deeper moral insight that's my argument and you will never have a less painful lesson in how you evolve moral insight than by watching that movie again and again. I'm looking forward to watching it the second time.
And then a couple more times after that. I only watched the first time.
It didn't occur to me at that point you made that the suicide is a consequence of that lifestyle he was living in the beginning. Let me ask you another question.

You say in the book that getting noticed

is easier than you think

because good help is hard to find.

And what do you think explains the fact

that there are young people with talent

who are trying to get noticed,

who are trying to get opportunities.

At the same time, there are curmudgeons

who are looking to hire people

who are qualified and talented.

And yet both of them are frustrated. Why are the young people who are looking for, how are they frustrated? Are they not able to get jobs where they think they can do that? I'm not sure, but I think that's the common perception, that it's harder to get noticed and get your first break and your opportunity.
Well, I guess that you're just going to have to take it on trust that because I felt exactly the same way when I was 20 years old and I was thinking, I was thinking, gee, how will I get ahead? Am I going to go work for a company and sort of hope that somebody will notice me? And I really can't overemphasize the degree to which, if you look at it from that point of view, it just looks like the luck of the draw.

And if you look at it from my end of it now, which is you're hiring people, or I used to hire people. You want something really simple.
I used to, when I used to interview people to hire back in the late 1970s, that's a long time ago, but I was looking for a hint that they were anal compulsive. what I wanted was some sort of, in the course of the questions, some sort of a sense that they weren't just making it up.
They weren't saying it to make me happy, but they just cannot rest if there is an imperfection in something they're supposed to do. They just, they can't stand not doing a good good job on things some hint that they won't even roll their eyes if you said oh we're all going to work till 10 o'clock tonight because we got to get this thing out that they'll that they will jump in on that it is so hard to find someone who says, I'm going to work my ass off if you hire me.

No holds barred. If you can convey that, the number of people who will hire you like this instantly is very high.
But not only that, look, I've had lots of research assistants. Well, they are research assistants.
I haven't. I gave up on using those a long time ago um but i have had some administrative assistants and they're doing mostly very simple things and a couple of them stand out enormously and the simple reason they stand out is that if they are asked to do something it it happens.
That's really simple. And unless you've hired people and had co-workers, there are people working for you, you don't realize how rare it is to find somebody who will do it.
You know the Nike slogan, just do it. I know exactly where that comes from.
Don't tell me about the storms at sea. Don't tell me about the traffic.
Don't tell me about your dog being sick. Just get it done.
And that is really a rare quality. So you're going to do fine if you have that attitude.
Yeah. If I don't, I'll try to cultivate it.

And I'll try to make sure I do.

This, by the way, reminds me of the final paragraph of human accomplishment.

And if you happen to have the book around you, I would love to hear you read that final passage.

It's incredibly beautiful.

Well, thank you, because I enjoyed writing that final passage there are some last paragraph yeah yeah the last one one of the things about uh going back to reread books is that i have friends of mine who write books and say they hate it um that they say oh i could have written this better i say, I go back and I reread my books and I say, this is really great. Okay, here is the last paragraph of human accomplishment.
A story is told about the medieval stonemasons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral, hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view, invisible from any vantage point in the ground.
They sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others, even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down, their work would remain forever unseen by any human eye. It was said that they carved for the eye of God.