Some years ago I had convinced myself that communism was a sort of dirty word and that is, to some extent where my bias still lies.
My faith in the American system has been shaken over time. I’ve gotten confused. Who even are the American people? Might “diversity” be another word for busting the sort of solidarity which made unions possible? Might some of the things I’ve been taught been used to take advantage of me? Why is it that my generation must be saddled with college debt? What was the misadventure in Afghanistan and Iraq really about? How fake really was this pandemic after all? And why were so many of my friends taken in by it?
Among all subjects this is particularly the case with economics. There have been a number of criticisms of economics over the years that I’ve entertained but that all seem more or less to be influenced operations designed to achieve a particular end. Indeed I’ve more or less concluded that Conservatism Inc. itself is a foreign intelligence operation in that it erodes state capacity for seemingly everything but our great and glorious military, which of course never quite lives up to its reputation. (Say, in light of Ukraine, how sure are we that our own military would hold up as well as the Russian military anyway? It sure was easy to get billions for Ukraine but nowhere near as easy to get any funding to defend our borders.)
In the spirit of full disclosure I wasted my time studying economics and government in college. The more I’ve studied both the less I’ve come to believe that I know anything about anything. Like a lot of young people I went to college because that’s what you do and because with a few jobs and some minor help from my parents that’s what you did in the 2007-2008 recession. I wanted to join the military but my health more or less dissuaded me from going down that particular path. Thank goodness because I would have been a lousy soldier.
Over the pandemic I gave up drinking and more or less socializing and so I read a lot. Some of you have detected some of this and often ask me for book recommendations which I sometimes indulge. But a book list is a dangerous thing and it is as liable to get the person who writes it down into trouble and not as likely that the recipient will read it.
But with time on my hands I went back and read all of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. I watch a lot of BBC documentaries and continue to swap controversial documentaries. I’m particularly a fan of DW and PBS’s FrontLine. I put in a toe into the fever swamps of Chinese and Russian state propaganda mostly out of curiosity. I read French and Spanish fluently and poke around there as needed. I spend a lot of time reading and studying people’s family trees and going through old archives of newspapers. The past really is a foreign country and I love to visit it.
Of course this is all what I do after my other jobs and obligations and I usually get to it in the small hours of the night.
Should I be lucky enough to have another pandemic I think I’ll tackle some other subject that I think I sort of know but don’t. Maybe statistics? I might even retain a tutor. Who knows?
When I grew up I more or less had the view that anything behind the Iron Curtain was wrong, wrong, wrong and bad, bad, bad. But I wonder:
Was I being played?
A different way to think about inflation is that perhaps we are returning to a world where productivity and real income are getting closer again.
There are a lot of stories that could be told about this delta between real compensation and real output.
My sense is that the change in 1972 has a lot to do with both permissive immigration policies in the United States and the beginnings of offshoring to China. Both actions had a downward effect on American wages whilst technological change contributed to increasing productivity.
I think that period is coming to an end.
Rather than trust to “muh free market” we are going dirigiste with national priorities. We will have to have our own five year, ten year, and even fifty year plans. Can we even think in those terms now that we have Twitter? Perhaps the nature of our society is to be the inverse of the Chinese.
No, I haven’t gotten full Mencius Moldbug. I don’t want a dictator in the White House or in the board room. The cult of the founder is a dangerous thing — particularly when there is a narcissistic founder. There’s no India or Israel to run to.
Balaji, who worked as a partner at the Chinese-compromised A16Z and as CTO at Coinbase, sure seems awfully Chinese now, especially when you consider the role he played in the ill fated Ubiome.
After every pandemic real wages have risen and real interest rates have declined. At first blush this led to labor unrest but ultimately to technological progress. In our own day it’s leading to an inflation in asset classes, especially houses, but government policy could be used to rein in these negligent landlords and to curb their excesses. You won’t find all of that from Governor Youngkin who vetoed a bipartisan anti-slumlord bill. I’m sure that the recently announced real estate fund set up by his former boss the Carlyle group isn't to blame. Virginia isn’t for lovers and houses aren’t for living in apparently but for gouging people.
The Spanish flu of 1919 gave us the Roaring Twenties — one of the most technologically advanced period in American history. (I once discussed this period with billionaire Peter Thiel and he agreed wholeheartedly.)
President Calvin Coolidge made it still better for workers and responded with an immigration moratorium. I wrote about Coolidge in my 2013 book, Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons From America’s Most Underrated President. There was a neocon biography published around that same time by Amity Shlaes which sold a lot better but revealed a lot less about Coolidge’s political thought, especially his relationship with the WASP power brokers and thinkers of his day.
By restricting immigration and celebrating American working men and women he helped tame some of the excesses of his day.
We could do that again, too. But with a technical twist.
At some point some governor somewhere is going to use facial recognition to keep his or people safe. But then won’t we have to have a notion of who is and who isn’t our people?
And now to the mail pile… I love getting emails that influence my thinking.
Charles
Some thoughts on your article about home schooling and high IQ women.
The now defunct Communist East Germany is the only society to successfully encourage high IQ women to have children in their twenties.
The East Germans, who measured everything, noticed that their academically trained women were marrying late and not having children.
The regime in East Berlin reacted with a program to encourage academically trained women to have three children. They offered a 7000 Mark loan to couples who married before the age of 26. Each child born to the marriage reduced the amount of the loan, with the third child bringing total forgiveness. Young families also got preference for housing in the state controlled housing market. As a result, the majority of college educated East German women had their children in their twenties. The program ended with unification.
In his German best seller “Germany is abolishing itself” (Deutschland Schafft sich ab) Thilo Sarrazin noted that 40% of college educated German women are not having any children, leading Germany to become dumber and dumber. He suggests giving premiums of 50 to 100 thousand Euros to young married couples to provide the financial means to have children early.
Kerstin Herrnkind, who has written a book complaining about the position of childless women in Germany, admitted in an interview with German radio that she should have had children during her undergraduate years. She noted that she had the right partner in her early twenties. But they did not feel it was the “right time”. By the time was right the partner was gone. After that she could not find a suitable partner for marriage and children. Now she is beyond her child bearing years. She concludes that she would have had the energy for children in her twenties while the college schedule would have given her the flexibility to have them. The East Germans got it.
A Pew Research Center study has shown that American women with advanced degrees are more likely to have children than their German counterparts. In 1994 35% of women with advanced degrees were childless in their forties; that declined to 20% by 2015. But another Pew Study indicates that most delay children until after they turn thirty. In addition, these studies are looking at women who graduated before the student loan debt explosion of the past 20 years. If student loan debt is making early marriage virtually impossible for this generation, then I worry that the childless figure is going to shoot up again.
I encountered the problem of student loan debt again and again in my mentoring. These mentees came from every kind of school but all had 30 to 100K in student loan debt. One of them called it her “negative dowry”. All felt that they had to pay it off before they could really move on. As they advanced in their careers, they saw their debt burdens get smaller. But they also saw the pool of eligible men get smaller too.
And that is the problem. How do you get the high IQ kids to meet and commit as undergrads, or even early career, get married and have children? How do you convince 20 year old women that the energy they put into partying all weekend, could better be channeled into children?
The Christian women I have mentored all understand the problem. They would all like to get married and have children. But they too feel forced to start a career, pay down the debt and cross their fingers they will meet someone.
A young German couple we met in the early 1980’s drew my attention to the East German program. Both had traveled to the German Democratic Republic on various occasions and knew about it. The wife, Andrea, drew her own conclusions. “Since a woman will be disadvantaged in her career regardless of when she has children, better to have them now”. She had two children in the first three years of marriage. She completed her undergraduate degree with two children.
How do you get both young men and women to think like Andrea?
The growth in home schooling is a good start. But then?
The Kerstin Hernnkind discussion is quite literally the plot of Idiocracy, a film that was so true it was basically barred from movie theaters lest it promote eugenics.
The first and obvious priority for any serious government is to make it so that the student loan industry carries the costs. This means seizing the assets of corrupt people like Cary Katz.
I’ve changed my views somewhat on this but I think a lot of for profit schools could well be shut down. I support Larry Hogan’s attempt to eliminate a four year bachelor degree.
There’s no substitute for successful people taking on apprentices though how you do that in a world of lawyers and labor law I couldn’t say.
I do, however, think the real problem is that the Ph.D. itself is a scam perpetuated on high IQ women.
A lot of women think they are entering the professoriate but they’re really entering a convent.
Super powerful ending with the women entering a convent analogy. Another prime example of how my thinking has completely changed on population just in the past few years; what else was I totally wrong about?