so there's this idea on like the populist right that like we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over and i'm like okay when did republicans repeal the civil rights act like when did that happen when did they defund public education like no and you
actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism and now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends today i'm speaking with richard henania who is the president of the center for the study of partisanship and ideology and the author of the new book public
choice theory and the illusion of grand strategy so richard first can you just summarize book briefly before we get into the questions uh sure so the argument of my book is it's you know it has two real audiences so first people who study international relations political scientists there's something
in there for them and there's also i think something in there for people who are just interested in american foreign policy more generally um so the way that academics tend to study foreign policy and this is this is a you know a simplification but if you're going to
have to you know generalize about um the way sort of it's understood in political science the field of international relations uh the idea is that states basically are rational actors and rational actors doesn't mean what they do is necessarily good for the world or or you know whether their values are
consistent with other people's values but basically that states seek certain goals and their behavior can be understood in that context um so basically the study of grant strategy is sort of a is a sort of uh corollary of this and the idea is that diplomatic economic and
military means tend to be uh put towards this put towards the same goals they're all basically moving in the same direction um and i think this view of understanding foreign policy is sort of naive my main argument is that we don't think like this in terms of domestic policy we don't think
that there's a great strategy of the us government with regards to immigration with regards to health care with regards to uh tax system it's sort of a um there's a fallacy of seeing it designed in an international uh kind of a design in international relations um or kind of
a you know kind of uh sort of goal-focused behavior and we tend not to make that mistake in uh in other areas so that's you know the first two chapters are basically the uh the theoretical you know the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong um
that you know people are interested in academic works they're interested in sort of thinking about ideas and political philosophy i think that you know people will enjoy those chapters and then most of the rest of the book is basically looking at american foreign
policy and asking does a theory of grand strategy or a theory based on public choice which i present as an alternative model does that explain things like when the us u.s military presence of two true presences abroad um when we start and end various wars uh the american
sanctions regime so many major parts of american foreign policy and i argue that the public choice model of foreign pulse just works better so maybe the unitary actor model is not right right now but wouldn't be true in the future so you know like the the countries that have a [ __ ] up foreign
policy where the whole thing is in shambles that contradicts uh itself you know they'll lose out to the countries that actually have a cohesive national strategy and in the long run the countries that actually do have um uh a grand strategy will win right yeah so
this is um we actually one of the arguments for how you get rationality um that i uh that i take issue with i think this is most closely associated with a international relations theorist kenneth waltz um you know there's so there's a few things you can say about this right like so the st you know
that it might just go against the nature of of the state right maybe the state is such a big and complicated thing that maybe you get closer to rationality you get closer to grand strategy through a sort of a selection process but it's still an open question how close you uh you get um you know and the
you know the other thing is i i would say that there's a lot else going on in the world beyond how states react to one another so you know there's uh you know the the origins of economic development are a complicated thing and a state can have a country like the united states
can have a lot going for it um as far as human capital as far as institutions and do very well economically and then um you know just and it can afford to have a sort of irrational foreign policy there's actually the one one um one possibility is that states that um tend
to have good uh institutions for economic growth with you know things like decentralization um you know individual freedom and open society that might be bad for forming a ground strategy for international relations because you can have interest groups influence foreign policy and
people are worried about their own lives rather than you know what's going on abroad and the state is uh limited and can't really enforce its will so this is a possibility that you know nobody's brought up before but perhaps you know there there is some kind of tension
there where states with bad foreign policies will tend to tend to have good um good economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength interesting so it isn't one way to read your book that maybe the decline of war has been bad right because when you had more you know about gosh you had the
casualties and everything that's bad but at least who had to keep countries on their toes and their political institutions couldn't become all messed up so is it like is one way to read your book that um the political institutions in our world have become so uh sclerotic because there isn't enough
war um i mean so you know there's not a war is you know on balance bad but are there other good things we can say for war sort of as far as historical development goes um i think that you know depending on your politics if you look at world war one and world war ii a
lot happened um for the expansion of the american federal government and i don't i think that's mostly been bad but if somebody thinks that's good um if you're a big supporter of the welfare state and sort of the centralization of uh uh of power in washington um you know you have
to credit world war one world war ii i think that's clear from the uh historical record um so unquestionably war leads to uh changes um you know the potential for war probably uh uh you know was was part of the cold war and eventually the soviet union collapsed if there was no potential for
any kind of conflict there you know who knows that maybe the soviet union could have uh could have existed forever so unquestionably um war is a accelerant and a sort of catalyst for change and if you think we need a lot of change maybe you might uh you might distress seeing that you know
the decline of war over time but change can also go in a negative direction too now to what extent are these problems unique to democracies of you know concentrated interest being able to pull uh government to um you know do counter-productive things because i mean
if you look at the quote-unquote chinese grants right if you're it's a very centralized system there's one guy at the top but you know they're doing some very stupid things like they're fighting over some irrelevant islands with japan you know they're getting into skirmishes
with india over some mountain regions um and you know we'll see about the belgian road but you know right now it seems like there's some place you wouldn't know more about this than me but there seems like there's some places where there's cost overruns and where you know they're building stuff in places that
are relevant um so to what extent are centralized governments able to have a better grant strategy uh so yeah we should be careful not to say you know um having a grant strategy is better or smarter in some ways just the question that i address in the book is whether it's coherent uh whether uh
china so we can understand china in comparison to the us on these two axes whether it's you know smart or wise versus whether it's coherent um whether it's smarter wise which i think your question was was getting at i mean china's uh you know blunders and um you
know you know having um you know uh squabbles with japan over a few islands i mean if you compare that to the u.s investment in afghanistan or iraq i mean there's really we're not really wants to talk about you know uh foreign policy funders i mean the chinese um even
spending on the military's play pretty low i mean there's nothing that compares to iraq afghanistan libya syria i mean so we have blunder after blunder um and whether it's to chinese but whether the chinese system has more coherence in foreign policy um and whether that could be attributed to it not being a
democracy um i think that i think that's i think that's right i mean i think that i think that you know that the fact that the chinese basically is china's grand strategy has been not to have much of a foreign policy i mean relative to the us you know not not to take much uh you
know not to care much about what goes on in most of the world um and then you know there does seem to be a concerted effort to sort of push out or push outward and push its weight around within its region which is natural which is what states do as they as they tend to grow um and so
you know when i look at chinese foreign policy do i see more coherence than american yes i mean you don't see you know you see china basically afflict the punishment of the nation and there is usually a goal right and then you can usually you know so for example uh lithuania i think just um i don't know
if they recognize taiwan or they did something with taiwan china didn't like it so china did something uh against lithuania i don't know if lithuania has like responded or whatever but basically i mean you can understand how this makes sense right um when the us sanctions
somebody it basically says we're good you know we're not gonna recognize this government it destroys the economy it's more total than anything china does um and then it never talks to them again and you know that that's basically the end of it so yeah i mean that there's uh
there's certainly more coherence and i think more sense to what china is doing than what the us is doing but to what example is that just because you know china isn't powerful enough or doesn't have enough money to waste on debacles like afghanistan and iraq so like maybe in like 30 years when or not even 30
years but like once our economy is bigger than ours right um will they be making the same kinds of mistakes i mean if you look at when was the british empire most overextended um you know the the peak of colonization was when they weren't fully a democracy right
yeah so i mean so countries even without a lot of resources can often put a lot of um efforts overseas so maoist china i think was uh one of the uh you know at least for its per capita level was the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world by far it was giving guys uh money for like
uh subsidies in eastern europe for countries that were richer than itself so maoist china was extremely poor and had an extremely interventionist foreign policy that it invested a lot in russia today over invested foreign policy you know relative to its economic size um so you
know it's you know so the u.s certainly can't afford to do more than china in by ppp terms i mean china has um has caught up or passed the united states so china i mean has the potential to do a lot more i just think it chooses not to right now you see in the book that the public
doesn't really care about that much about foreign policy at least in comparison to domestic policy does that mean that if the president actually did have a coherent vision of a grand strategy he could enact it because like the public is just not going to be paying attention and if he just like
really wants something he could do it i think it depends on the you know the costs of what the grand strategy are the ground strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties um that's going to be really hard um if this you know if if it's more
along the lines of we're going to crush one nation um you know and you know how would you define grand strategy those grand strategy at the macro level and then there's sort of at the uh we can think about it as like you know approach to one country and sometimes we
do see that like i think the uh the last administration had a de facto basically not a de facto more than a de facto sort of an intended um uh policy of regime change um towards iran um and that wasn't that they weren't open about that but the idea was basically you just you know you just
sanction them as much as possible and you just hope you know there's less powerful as possible and potentially collapse and there was a more official uh strategy of regime change and they even recognized a different government uh in venezuela um so and you know that didn't require any
american casualties it required a lot of uh suffering and the countries that were uh then were targeted um but it does seem that the american efforts were put towards um certain goals so yes you're right within certain limits um presidents do have freedom to do a lot and people don't care about iran and
they don't care about that as well so there was a lot of uh yeah there was a lot of freedom there okay now you say sanctions don't work intervention doesn't work but if we look at a country like north korea we feel like you know if there was something we really ought to be able to
we really ought to do it like we really don't want them to have nukes or the capacity to launch nukes to the united states um so if these traditional interventions don't work is there something you could do about a country like north korea or like you know venezuela is like starving your own
people obviously the sanctions are making it worse but like if you wanted to you know get rid of maduro is there something we could do that it's like feasible and it's not counterproductive uh so i mean each of these cases is uh uh is sort of uh unique so i mean north korea i mean interventions work i
mean if you know if you just overthrow government you can get rid of them um the you know but that obviously that would be very costly in the case of north korea and for nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons they have uh you know they have a lot of you know a
pretty big army um yeah can we do something about um north korean you know nukes um i think you know one one school of thought is basically that um that north korea um wants nukes because it's afraid of the us right it's it's basically defensive it fixed in the u.s if not if it's not
going to invade it at this point it's because of the nukes if that together would like to see the regime fall anyway um and that's probably that's probably true um and you know and the question is do you um you know and the question is do you uh accommodate sort of that fear if what
you're worried about is nuclear weapons and learn to live with the government now there's another school of thought on north korea that says basically they want the us out and they want to they want to conquer the south you know i don't have insight into the
thinking of the north korean regime so it's really hard to say which is the you know which is the correct position um and then on venezuela like is there something we can do um to you know counteract the uh uh you know the terrible economic policies um that the maduro regime you know and and
before have implemented um you know it's it's very very hard i mean the um i think the uh the move towards um more open markets globally um has been has been the result of basically people seeing that markets work much better than central planning i mean the soviet union the uh the elites in the
soviet union in eastern europe realized that what they were doing was not working and they basically they moved to a capitalist system it wasn't because the gorbachev you know wasn't forced into it where there was nothing uh there was no like rebellion from below or
civil war or anything they just basically decided that the the um the regime had lost legitimacy even if not from the people at least from you know from those at the top um and for the especially for the soviet satellites um and so that doesn't mean that um that movement's going to be you know the
movement is going to be um consistent in the direction of you know markets all the time everywhere so you have to understand sometimes some places are going to go in the opposite direction um i think well you know one thing the u.s you know the us does have do some very
harmful things to latin america that i think they probably shouldn't do i mean the drug war i mean these countries uh uh so much of their politics revolves around stopping the flow of drugs and because that's what the us demands of like you know who cares about drugs is
that worth having a civil war over no of course not and you know mexico and these other uh uh countries in latin america would probably be much better off if we didn't uh if we didn't do that um i think that there's also a sense of a lot of u.s meddling as far as like
democratization and human rights which people think these are generally good things and all else being equal they might be good things but we are not in a position to know you know like like if you're a country that has a serious violence problem right and that's like you know the first uh you know that's
the prerequisite to everything else the peaceful living to growth to everything is getting violent and sudden control and latin america because you have really bad problems with it um and then somebody comes from barad and says you know you have to fight crime or you have
to find cartels in a way consistent with our human rights norms um you know that's something that sounds good um but might not actually you know might not actually be conducive to getting the best possible policy at the local level so i think i think there's a lot of
meddling and sort of a hubris about what we know and what's best for these countries um and i think that moving away from that would probably help them solve their problems in their own way now you see in the book that one of the agents that are influencing american foreign policy are foreign governments
like israel and saudi arabia but if they are able to actually influence american policy in a way that is good for them as a nation um doesn't that make these countries rational actors then that have a cohesive grand strategy yeah i mean so so it's something i don't go into the
book is and well i mean you have just talked about it now sort of what countries when countries have you know can act like more like unitary actors and when they don't um and in the case of i think i think that one of the determinants of whether a country acts
with you know a strategy in a certain domain is how important the issue is to them right so iran is much more important to israel and saudi arabia than it is to america right by many many times and so you can imagine israel and saudi arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to
iran and the u.s has a sort of open political system and is liable to be influenced by those countries um and often it's not even you know you know it's um you could even you know question whether it's always those countries or it's a faction within those countries
but yeah i do take the point that um you know often there's something closer to a strategy in what other countries are doing just because they're closer to the problem and it actually just matters a lot more to them and in the book you should say that when it comes to foreign policy special
interests matter more than ideas and then ideas are after the fact justifications for what these special interests want but when you talk about domestic policy you seem to making the opposite point that actually it's the ideology uh that matters more and then economic self-interest actually
determines very little about people's political preferences so why why is there a difference between foreign policy domestic policy uh so that i mean so my view on domestic policy i mean so there's you know the level of the voter um there's there's i think very little
in terms of objective interest because the voter doesn't have a a stake in the you know a stake their vote doesn't determine the outcome of the election so one of the consistent findings of political science is basically that um people's economic circumstances do a very very poor job of predicting their
uh their political orientation so whether you're republican or a democrat or whatever your your economic situation is not very predictive you know not even close compared to demographic factors and you know cultural attitudes and and things like that um now when it comes to
policy you know there's i think there's a you know there's a few different kinds of policies so the um most things there is you know the public opinion is just not paying attention to this public opinion have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code or um or uh you
know the exact details of environmental regulations or you know whatever i mean the same thing in foreign policy with you know something like nato expansion um the uh you know so i think this is this basically you know both international domestic policy
international relations and domestic politics um the uh the uh interest groups you know have a have a huge role to play now the um when it comes to certain issues that are particularly salient so in the domestic context this is something like social security like people are going to notice
like if you cut their social security benefits or their medicare or something like that you know there's not a lot of taxes you know same thing there's not a lot of issues that are exactly like this um but here public opinion matters and here you have to you have to trade
carefully if you're a politician and it's the same thing in foreign policy when there's a cost that when you're going to do something that's potentially very costly to the country and it becomes a major political issue then um then uh it then public opinion matters a lot more so you need you know public
opinion to be on your side to go into iraq right there was overwhelming support for the iraq war at the time now one of the unique things i think about foreign policy that makes gives leaders sort of more freedom of movement compared to domestic politics and if you're going to say what's the
difference in sort of my understanding of politics between domestic issues and international issues it's probably this is probably one of the most important um it's the it's the it's the fact that basically public uh public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign
foreign relations right i don't think there's a way to sell um you know getting rid of social security that's going to work with the american public um there is you could easily sell some country as a threat to the united states because most americans don't have experience with
foreign countries they don't have independent knowledge you know these places like ukraine or russia or estonia or anything is basically exists as an abstraction and why we think of one country as a friend and one country is an ally and one country is an enemy i
mean that's basically that's media coverage that signals coming from elites and so it's you know if you look at like going back to the iraq iraq war i mean nobody was thinking about attacking iraq you know right after 9 11. but basically the bush administration had you know
high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack um there was a full-on basically pr campaign to not explicitly times to them to um 911 but basically tied to al-qaeda you know would make people be afraid of wmds i mean even though the bush administration never said this i mean
there was a i think it was a majority or plurality of the public actually believes saddam was personally involved in 911 you know which there was never any evidence for but it was easy to sort of lead people in that direction um just because you know who knows anything about saddam hussein or iraq right
people have to sort of uh trust their leaders on these things and maybe that's getting harder as like polarization is more extreme and people don't trust their leaders anymore but there's still just more room to maneuver on foreign policy than there is on a lot of domestic issues
you see in the book near the end that one of the ways to fix this should be that we um better regulate a foreign lobbyist in the government and you know um funding of you know let's say defense contractors onto think tanks and uh research institutions uh do you think the same
should be true of domestic policy so we should limit the i mean this is kind of a leftist agenda of limiting how much money there is in politics or is this unique to foreign policy so i mean i i sort of throw those ideas out there as sort of institutional fixes that people can think about i am
you know i am not um you know i don't think i come back come down and say you know this this is something to fix it i i just think that people should be thinking in terms of institutional changes rather than um are you know arguing you know just sort of operating in the realm of ideas um
i think that yeah and so they yeah but you know i think i probably would support you know some limits on um lobbying um for people who worked in the government for uh uh like in the pentagon um does that make this should we do that for um for all of uh politics you know because
i you know there's not really i don't think i have a principled answer here i think that i think that the forum you know the foreign policy basically the establishment has had a negative influence on american politics and sort of on domestic domestic politics i think the influence of money and politics has
been sort of mixed you know the idea of campaign finance reform for example is you get money out of politics but if you get money out of politics who gets the press coverage well you know it's basically the government's in the party so it's some other small group of people
determining sort of the uh um the lay of the land and what you know what the uh um the lay of the land and what the uh sort of what the parameters of the debate are um i think that you know um one thing we should do is i mean i i i'm less less hesitant or less conflicted about
endorsing sort of a cultural change so for example uh in the areas like for example when you intro you know when you're interviewing a um a formal general on you know a in a newspaper or on tv you don't just say this is a former general you say this guy is also on the board of
this corporation or that corporation i mean that that i think changes the entire focus um of the uh you know of the conversation and that was um yeah washington post wrote a story about this how basically this is the norm and i i i was interviewed for them for that story
i you know i think there's no good reason not to do that um i think part of my what my book does it's not just sort of institutional or legal fixes it's also so just you know telling people think about this in a different way and having sort of this cultural change which i think takes away a lot of the
credibility of the people influencing foreign policy gotcha um all right so let's talk about experts now so in your article in uh topic and taliban you point out many ways in which we have established established fields and if you look at the track record of societal trends
associated with those fields um you know things like suicides when you talk about psychology or crime when you talk about criminology or obviously you know uh iraq and afghanistan we talked about international relations you know things have been getting worse but if you're
there if that's the state energy you're going to apply is how do the societal trends associated with the field uh do then you must think that um uh you know global poverty research and uh development economics must be amazing right because we've seen like a billion
people lifted out of poverty or more since 1990 so um if you're playing the same standard then wouldn't wouldn't it imply that some fields have been doing extremely well well yeah actually i do think that i think i think that um you know the reduction in poverty um has come from uh
china first and then and then india and if you ask economists you know are chinese and uh indian policies better or worse than they were in the 1960s and 1970s you could say they're definitely moving in the direction of sort of the consensus of economics so i actually do
think economics is a little bit you know more of a serious uh science than other fields um and so yeah i i would agree with that actually i think economics looks good um uh in the context of the uh the decline of poverty over time so then would you credit the fact that there hasn't been a nuclear war is that
is that something you put in the pro column for international relations um yeah that one uh you know i think is i think is different because we you know we poverty is something we can look at we could say it's always existed and now it's you know it's getting better and so
for nuclear weapons it's not like we had an era of like a lot of nuclear wars and and now we don't right we had nuclear weapons they were invented and that's consistent with a story where just these weapons were too horrible um for anybody to use but i think if you're gonna have
like a you know a steel man argument of say the case for american empire it would be something along the lines of you know i don't believe that you know american hegemony has kept it as what basically has given us uh uh you know relative peace since 1945 but i think it would be a kind of like a berkey an
argument that you know the international system is very complex and it's working out well and just don't change anything you know too radical because potentially you know we do there's just so much we don't know about what the consequences of that would be well how would you
respond to that by the way um i would say that you know i would say that yeah you have to take different parts of american foreign policy and i would be more sort of open to get rid of you know doing away with certain of them than others so first up for example regime
change wars that's sanctions i think those are the low hanging fruit i don't think that i don't think you can make the case that i think you can make the case that these are you know these have terrible effects on the world and i don't think you can make the case that they contribute to global order um or
anything like that you know overthrowing governments is a huge source of uh international disorder and then you know as far as you know um whether the you know us um you know the sort of u.s uh hegemony has been keeping piece of that then you would move on to say the commitments to
nato and uh you know the the presence in japan and south korea and you would say okay you know we've relative we've kept the p you know we've kept the peace in a relative way there i mean it's it's um you know i i i think you have to sort of look i think that there's a good reason
to think that it's not necessarily the influence of the us that's behind the decline of violence because you look at areas even in countries where it's like they don't have you know you look at diets where they don't have any relationship with the us on either side just war is just down basically
across the board everywhere and you could say well that's all the american system but i think it's hard to figure out exactly um how you know the us having a presence in east asia or or uh eastern europe um you know that makes africans stop fighting each other right
and so the fact that everyone basically is not doing war anymore it just gives you sort of this uh i think backs up john mueller uh what john mueller thinks are what stephen pinker thinks um that's basically you know we're in the realm of ideas and people just think war is stupid and from that perspective you
know the u.s is sort of an outlier in how much it uses war and then the u.s is potentially a source of of instability i think i would lean towards that view but yeah i'll acknowledge that sort of the berkeley and view of you know things have been working out relatively well um
let's not mess with it i mean another thing that hasn't been working well actually the number of uh uh uh being killed in like civil wars and civil conflicts has not gone down the way international war has and if you look at who's behind a lot of the civil wars
that have the huge death rates i mean that's the united states so not everything is actually working out well i think uh keeping order within countries you mentioned latin america a lot of these things are classified as high crime rates they could pretend they could um they could um theoretically be
classified as civil wars and if you think american foreign policy is having a negative effect in latin america i mean that's another contributor to the violence abroad um so yeah that you know that i think that's the response to it but i you know again i acknowledge there's there potentially could be
something to that argument so i think one of the other things to see when picker thinks was behind the decline of violence is also like international alliances like nato um now that was a point against that which is that it you know while in the short term it makes us
more safe in the long term you know you're like if russia invades uh you know some north macedonia or something then we had to go to war and then it starts world war iii um so do you buy pinker's argument that actually these uh american alliances have created a safer
world uh so i haven't um i read pinker you know when it came out uh better angels of our nature about a decade ago i don't remember him having that argument about nato i i i don't recall but you know i'll take your word for it uh i could be wrong i thought it was an enlightenment now but yeah okay so yeah
also yeah i also read in lightning now i i don't remember you know could be it could be better or not um it's a possible argument if it's not okay yeah even if it's not pickers arguments let's see i'll just take the argument um yeah so nato i mean the argument for nato making the world
safer okay first of all i mean during you know the uh justification i think the justifications for nato right originally were there was potentially a soviet uh land invasion of of europe right um and you know the soviet union is gone right and so the question is like you
know is there uh a potential for all we're talking about is russia i don't know like what else would we be talking about right like that north africa is gonna europe or something it says you know the only potential thing i think we're talking about here is russia um
and you know i i it seems not to i mean it seems there doesn't seem to be sort of a you know there's a capability and there's a question of well right russia is just not um you know economically positioned to try to take on germany or france or um western western europe it cares a lot
about ukraine and it cares a lot about georgia and you know i think it's i think it's pretty clear that russia you know the instability is due to russian fears over um the expansion of nato so in georgia basically the uh the government launched a um uh launched award to try to take back um uh some
regions that were uh that were sort of breakaway regions with alliances towards russia and the idea was basically they thought the united states had their back and they were trying to settle this issue to get into uh together to nato there was a great uh uh adam two's uh
stack on this um about the history of uh russia and nato so it's it's clear that there's this sort that there's been sort of a destabilizing influence russia's fear that these places would um uh become part of nato i think has driven a lot of this uh sort of behavior abroad i think ultimately though i think
what it's really about actually at its root of like where the antagonism comes from i think that the us sees russia as a potential for reject change i think it considers the current government illegitimate and i think russia doesn't it probably doesn't think that like the
us is going to go into ukraine and add them to nato and georgia and then like launch an invasion of russia you know that seems very unlikely i think that the the idea is basically there's an ideological war against the idea of the legitimacy of the russian state as a
non-democracy that has a different form of government um different ideological ideas about you know just different things than the u.s does um and i think they're respon they're reacting to that so i think i think this idea of sort of uh uh this idea of regime change is sort
of beneath the surface and deriving a lot of intentions interesting all right going back to the topic of expertise um you criticize the focus on peer review uh and uh specialized knowledge yeah it seems that some fields that that seems like a valid criticism right uh it seems like there
isn't that much um specialized knowledge to begin with but it feels like let's say particle physics or computational complexity uh that seems like academic bureaucracy and incentives have worked and i expect people at the top of that field to be like the best in the world out of that
right so but it seems like the same kind of academic institution uh as you know like a field like international relations right so why why are they the two different so i think um i i do say in my expert's piece i think i say this uh that it's basically you know i'm focusing on
the social sciences um because that's what i know best but as you said economics works well right economics works relatively well i think um yeah i mean we could talk about why i mean that's an interesting question too um but um you know i think uh so like nicholas talib would say that actually
um the peer review process doesn't work that well he has some data on like where the big innovations in science comes from and he tends to think it comes more from the uh the private sector so i don't know if that that's right or wrong b something um you know if you look at
something like it's complicated something like the mr rna vaccine um you know they couldn't get the the publications it was based on interpret to the top peer-reviewed journals um and then it took you know pfizer and modernity you know it seems like there was um uh there's a europe it seems
complicated because it was did rely on some university research in some ways in government funding um i think one of the big differences between the social sciences and the heart side i mean there's a few differences the first one is there is um there is some connection
to reality right you can you can design the mrna vaccine you could take it out of you know you can go even if you're rejected by the peer review paper you can take it to a pharmaceutical company they have an incentive to find out whether you're right it can go out the way they're in the real world it can
work and then that changes sort of the ideas in uh economics in in um social sciences a few things is it's more complex so sometimes in some ways it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't we don't we don't do like randomized experiments on big things we do like um like polling questions but
not on like you know uh you know the state have this kind of economic reform in the state have this other economic reform we don't do it at anything like that and i think part of the reason we don't do that and this is another this is the second big reason why um social
sciences is you know so hard is because there's not as much social desirability because people don't have you know deep-seated beliefs about the best way to get events i guess some people do they say that rna vaccine is scary but generally about in general about these
physical things right people don't have strong beliefs about the way they want the world to work right and when it comes to the social sciences people have very very strong uh ideas about the way the world the way the world should work and when you combine that um with a lack
of accountability with account of you with with the lack of any real world test in the form of you know markets or or some kind of uh you know real experimentation um people can just you know believe whatever they want or believe whatever you know some kind of like vested interest like the like the
state department and you know the pentagon bureaucracy basically whoever's in power wants to believe and so this is why social social science is hard and this is why social desirability bias is i think the enemy in the search for truth now one thing about economics
is i think it's more of a male-dominated field it's a more um you know they have a mathematical um sort of requirements that are more stringent i think that weeds out a lot of people i think it's it's more of a sort of a i think that you know there's a sort of uh you know
there's complaints from other disciplines that economics is a little bit mean and aggressive when i was in uh uh i got my phd in political science i was you know surprised to find that sometimes you know somebody's theory would just fall apart and then everyone like other people would not just say
okay this is wrong go study something else they would be like oh it's okay just you know adjust it this way and then like nobody you know there was always i always felt like people were treating others with sort of kid gloves right i think there was a culture in other fields and this is political
science and probably much worse in other fields of not sort of this sort of uh willingness to you know to really um hurt feelings and to you know and uh uh you know just willingness to be wrong i think economics has done that better than other fields and i think there's a
movement to make um i've been talking other accounts as people in economics who agree with this there's been a movement to make economics like other fields and that would potentially be it that would potentially be disastrous right right but now um it doesn't seem clear to me that even before uh calls
for diversity dumbed down academia that things were that much better um you know there were like fads like communism or um or disarmament that were popular in academia and you know like if you look at the vietnam war it was waged by people who had you know like kissinger
mcnamara people who had degrees from procedures universities and you know they were wide and male but they were still you know that they still were disconnected from the outside world yeah so have have like newer developments in academia actually made it worse uh well
no i mean white white males can have you know the same pathologies as any other group um the uh yeah i think the international you know the the dumbing down of academia um you know i think is a problem again we're kissinger and these you know these guys um you know if
you look at the vietnam war you know it's very it's it's actually very interesting because everyone sort of knew from like you know john from the johnson administration the nixon administration that basically you know they were um you know that it wasn't winnable that what they were
saying to the public um wasn't true and i think that you know that if you look at like the historical record of what politicians were saying personally they were amazingly um uh explicit in their willingness to admit to themselves and those around them that they were doing stuff for
political reasons right so i think they were responding to uh i think they were responding to basically uh a political pressure and basically uh you know public opinion and sometimes using public opinion for their own ends um i you know i don't think if you took um professors in international
relations and like whatever that the equivalent of that would have been and whether they supported the vietnam um i i don't think so i think the big the big names like the ones who were not connected to the government right so kiss the driving is hard because he's
like you know he's a guy who's in academia but also like in and out of government right and you know like it's it's it's you wouldn't expect that person to have like you know you wouldn't you wouldn't you know because if he had different views basically he wouldn't be in government i mean that's
the issue his views had he had to be selected um to to at least be tolerable um to whoever you know the president happened to be at the moment um and so yeah i mean the the these thing i i i um uh i think the dumbing down of academia i think they move away from sort of um explicit uh
sort of a more uh hard standards like just basically being able to meet some standard of mathematical ability you know the the rise of you know cancel culture against free speech all these things are harmful doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of pathologies
before and yeah we can we can see that definitely yeah you know whether expertise has gotten better overall i mean i think that you know so if you look at a political scientist from the 19 you know look into some other fields from the 1960s or 1970s and you look at political science today if
you go to twitter um and you know there's a so there's like a uh like a subject of political science so it's like a good gauge of like what the most prominent political scientists are saying and it's all stupid like graphs like democracy has gone down 16.2 percent since republicans took power in
this state it's really really stupid i mean you get the you know the mean the median political sciences from 1969 there's nothing that ridiculous so i do think you know it probably has gotten worse um but okay so we would uh the problems reporting with academia
seem uh like they're inherent to any institution that is disconnected from the market and also to like something that can be improperly measured but we would like to have expert knowledge in fields like international relations or criminology or psychology right um so is there any way to stand up institutions
that can study these sort of um ambiguous topics in a way that actually adds insight to the way we legislate um you know do we do we need expert expertise do we even need expertise in international relations or criminology or psychology you know i tend to believe that the the
cause you know you know i tend to believe that the costs are more um i tend to believe the costs are you know they outweigh the benefits actually here i think a lot i think if you rely on common sense for crime uh for controlling crime and some basic statistics right um i think you're
better than than the field of criminology i would definitely test you know i would definitely uh uh you know take the idea of i think there's an idea in like the public that you know if you uh you know if you uh want to stop crime and for you know come down very hard on
crime and i think that's you know maybe more controversial among criminologists but i think the problems i actually i wouldn't say that i haven't done any survey of criminology this is part of the problem in that you have this field called criminology and even if it like
arrives it's something that's like you know uh that's true or logical you know or they have like some unambiguous finding the people there will always be criminologists who politicians who want to do something else will rely on and they will go and they will you know find those people so having this category
called criminologists and unless we're going to like survey the field and just do you know who knows if that will work but unless you're going to like survey the field and then just do whatever the contest in the field you're going to end up the media politicians they're going
to be selecting the people that they want during the cobit stuff you know they always say experts say this experts say that but you look at the you know the something like the great barrington declaration and i i just heard about the media i thought these people were kooks and
nobodies and then i when i look at the credentials or like harvard medical school stanford medical school and somehow when the media cites expertise it's never these people right it's always the most hysterical person possible um pushing for some kind of restriction um so i think the id you
know expertise you know potentially can be valuable um but the idea of expertise can be harmful and that basically you know gives gives certain people um power who want to do things you know more sort of legitimacy to do things that are irrational now i think that like you
know at a broader level you know i trust i trust you know things like prediction markets like economic markets things that are um that don't rely on credentials but rely on track records of getting things right and i would you know agree with robin hansen and others
who who would you know cheer for these things to uh have potentially have more of an effect on policy making or the way we think about issues now let's talk about politics so you say that one of the reasons that liberals has been winning is because liberals just care more about politics but how does that
explain why um why things have shifted more liberal over the last few decades is just that conservatives have started caring less about politics if liberals have started caring more about politics what's changed uh actually uh to a certain extent uh yes so in 2016 there
was a huge uh mobilization effect on the left so i i do have uh our sub stack called 2016 the turning point i just used 2016 for for convenience but basically if you look at like 2010 versus um like 2016 to 2020 and like your probability for example of having um attended a protest or signed a
petition if you were conservative versus liberal uh it was maybe you were two or three times more likely as a liberal in 2010 by 2016 to 2020 i mean there was it was multiples of that it was something like you know 10 times more likely to have done these things um so i think
that national politics and sort of the mood has a lot to do with it i think trump mobilized a lot of people on the left he did not he mobilized a lot of voters on like on the right like low performance city voters who like wouldn't otherwise vote came out on board for trump and it was it was pretty
good for republicans and they were concentrated in certain states and that tended to be good for republicans politically or at least you know mixed bag while i think trump did a terrible job of sort of motivating people who are you know activists or sort of people who would be bureaucrats or lawyers or you
know the people who actually make policy on a day-to-day basis you know he really turned those people off um and made them you know if anything made them more liberal um and so yeah i would say that you know the uh change of engagement over time is part of the story so i'm
wondering how this theory explains why certain institutions are especially more liberal uh take for example uh big tech right um or compared to like a company like walmart right now i like i i don't expect that if i you know went to walmart headquarters i'd see a whole
bunch of like blm posters but if i go to like facebook and facebook office i bet i'll see a few things like that or like diversities or strengths or something like that so um you know but both of these companies uh have faced pressure from you know liberal employees both of these
companies have to face civil rights lawsuits and um and it's not like in the fang companies you have a bunch of people who have given up um high salaries in order to have a position of cultural influence because they're making a lot of money there right so it's not like journalism or something so
what explains why big tech especially is super woke yeah so big tech is such an interesting case because um until 2015 and 2016 and 2016 there was calls there was a lot of calls for censorship um and from the media and twitter basically didn't censor anybody until 2015 and
facebook too um so basically the you know the big tech was a lot less woke than the media wanted them to be um i think that there was basically a lot of political pressure that came down on them from from the top i think mark zuckerberg is uh you know jack dorsey
are relatively not woke people compared to a lot of elites in america um what you know when tech you know and i think you know i think other other people have made this point um basically when you know the the initial generation of you know leaders in tech um they were the people who were
the sort of the pioneers they were non-conformists right um they tended to be less you know they tended to do their own thing to serve and they would have their own political and social views right um and then when text order became established it started to uh you know it
started to draw people who are more conformist and that's why you know these people have put forth the argument um uh that uh basically crypto now is more right-wing than tech because crypto is sort of the next you know cutting edge not thing that non-conformists are doing
so i think tech i mean it started out i think with a more of a libertarian ethos and it sort of became the establishment became the know sort of thing for high conformist people to do um and you know i think that that's probably it's explains its willful vocation um over
time um and then like something like you know walmart i mean you know i i think you know that just sort of the ether right now is if you're if you're an idealistic person it's easier to be idealistic on the left than the right i don't think the right has done a good job of uh providing sort of an
idealistic vision that appeals to a lot of people when i think if you go work for walmart you know your your views are more maybe you know you you get enough meaning from you know just getting the logistics right and getting people the goods and services they need so i think
that attracts a completely different kind of person sorry i i don't think i understood the difference between walmart and big tech and negates like but in big time you're also doing stuff like you know shipping a product that like you can get meaning out of that as well right yeah and then in both those
cases they're like getting older in big tech they're getting becoming older institutions that attracted foreign so why is big tech more uh more woke yeah so amazon you're working on like logistics right i mean facebook and google and uh and twitter are sort of
more in the you know because they're not actually producing anything i think you know you could say that they have to tell themselves a story about why they're doing something good for the world and some people you know believe in that story um you know they uh they convince themselves of it or they
believe in it uh or they don't so like this kind of like um you know like the google thing like don't be evil right i mean this is sort of idea that they were doing something social and revolutionary i think was part of the ethos from the start while walmart you know they want
to get you lower prices and you know make your life better but i i don't think it ever had that idea that you were going to fundamentally revolutionize society by having more walmarts right all right yeah it's kind of analogous to american foreign policy in a way that like uh you know like
google is something like uh uh america and that we have they have a explicit career and then they had to do stuff in to further that grade that actually uh might make things worse that's interesting so you write that one thing that your theory can somewhat uh help vindicate is authoritarian populism
not that you necessarily support it but just the idea that um you know you can have a right-wing government that pushes back on the liberal lead which is care more than conservatives even if they're not more numerous i wonder if um compared to this you think uh
this theory also vindicates libertarianism more because in that case you just first of all you don't have the funds for this rent-seeking elite to be able to survive so you know there's less journalism academia and also there's like less these elites can do to like actually
coerce people without the help of government yeah so you're getting at sort of my uh you know the sort of the motivation behind a lot of my writing on american politics which i you know i'm disturbed by wokeness um and i think that the the fight against smokiness has been confused and not very effective
which is you know it's almost like you know that has to be self-evident because vocalist has gone so far and you know won so much um and so i'm thinking about you know the different ways you can go about sort of working against it so i you know i'm not saying you know i'm not
coming down on you know i i i think that you know i'd like to just have one sort of thing it's either libertarianism or it's populist you know or authoritarian i think that you know the words like those are very uh sort of selectively used but whether it's like a more interventionist or
non-interventionist you know i don't think that like the ideal response would be a pure version of either of these right um so i for what you could say for the libertarian perspective is that and the robbie's sullivan reason uh that's that's the lesson he took from my article um was
basically like you know they're gonna you know whatever you try to pass you say the government has to be like yes or it has to be like that it's gonna get around it um and one thing they can't get around is you cut off their funding you stop giving money to the universities there's
there's you know they have they're not going to go out and they just don't have the funding anymore to do the stuff that they want to do you pass a law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservatives a fair hearing well i mean who do you think is going to be
interpreting that law and deciding what a fair hearing is what political discrimination is and all that so yeah there's something to that i mean shrinking like saying you know the government that sort of these um institutions that are under the influence of you know bureaucrats and
activists just shrinking their role in society rather than remaking them um remaking those institutions i mean there's something to be said for that um but then like you know it depends on like what you want right if you are really bothered by um you know if you're really bothered by
the direction of the culture um and you know and the fact that you know um activists you know are are you know propagandizing or people who basically are you know um just the market i mean that have whoever's or whoever you know the media institutions and you know popular music
and culture um if you're upset that they're you know they're selling sexual promiscuity to children for example um you know you might you know have a you know come you know you might have a more forceful response to that i mean you get there's there's probably um you know
there's probably not a answer within the confines of libertarianism or it's very hard i mean you could set up your own private community and go off and do something all right you know potentially there's something there but you know you could potentially say you know i don't like what's
considered art now i don't like what's considered pop culture and you might just say well that's that that's the only potential thing you can do uh so i i'm not sure i follow like if you're a parent right like just don't buy your kid porn i guess you had to buy them a
smartphone at some point but you have to buy them a smartphone i mean they have friends if all their if you if you can't you know you can only afford to send them to a public school and everyone else is watching porn in the bathroom i mean i don't know like you know the people are influenced by that right
right it's not you know i don't think it's as easy as turn off the tv i think we all exist within this culture and you know there's a uh you know what other people do does affect you right right but uh i guess i'm skeptical of to the extent of what uh right-wing government can
actually influence the culture and that brings me to the next topic i want to talk to you about which is uh fertility right so you're more optimistic about what countries like china and hungary can do about fertility um but it seems to me that if like giving people checks doesn't get them to [ __ ]
like i don't know i don't know if like you know banning makeups on guy is going to actually make a difference well i mean so you look at you you step back and you look at sort of what correlates with high fertility levels right and it seems more clearly
to be associated with culture than economic situation as humans have become more able to afford kids they've tended to have less of them right so this is a pretty strong argument against it being an economic issue or largely an economic issue as the driver of differential fertility rates
um and then you know you look at things like so religiosity are you know very important and the question is can government influence culture right um i i see no reason to think it can't i think one thing civil rights law i think one of my main arguments on civil rights laws that
actually get influencing culture and even that wasn't that heavy-handed compared to say what the chinese government could do potentially um so yeah if you take the idea that fertility is a cultural issue and that government can't have an influence on culture then basically follows the government if it
wanted to if it wanted to change the fertility rate or potentially a lot of other things you know it could do so through the control of the culture right uh but um i guess one one reason to be optimistic is or depending on your perspective to be optimistic about um china's fertility is
you know like listen look at what they did with covet where they were able to like just bolt people down in their houses until like there were zero cases in the area yeah and if they you know the western countries couldn't do that so they could get that code under
control so what if they did something similar on fertility but there doesn't seem to be some obvious uh analogous human rights violation that you do to like increase fertility that um that the west is not willing to try right it's just like what are you gonna do that's analogous to sure sure there
is you can you know ban all anti-natalist propaganda you can make that education system just be nothing but you know about how you should have children to you know for the fatherland you could you know tax single people and uh hundred people like 100 percent and
you know give all their money to 200. so you know there's tons of stuff you can do you know whether that's good you know whether that goes like something like zero covert is where you know the fact that china did it is pretty impressive whether it was worth it you know i think
you know they've probably probably gotten overboard at this point right so you can debate whether it's worth it but i think you know yeah having a competent and authoritarian government sort of opens up different possibilities by the way so you think um by what year
is china's fertility going to be one point nine twenty thirty years yes i give it 2031. i mean i'm the you know i'm the only um you know i talk to other smart people and i'm sort of out on the limb here and you know the other one you know other smart people they either
think it's impossible or they think that will is not going to be there i'm not in the part of the chinese government but yeah i take a different view and i explained it in my substance by the way i'd make you a small bet on that if you're away for a while so uh like i'd give you like even three to one knots
yeah okay less than 1.99 okay well 1.99 is my median so if uh yeah i'd have to take that all right yeah yeah uh we'll figure out the conditions later on but um oh and then are you afraid that what these countries will do to actually increase fertility if that'll have a dysgenic effect right so if it's just
that um if it's cash transfers or is there a sort of economic incentive you know maybe it's the people on the margins who um like desperately need the cash we're going to have more babies and these are exactly the kind of people who um or um yeah you know what i'm saying yeah
it's that's a that's an interesting uh question i think that you know so if you let's say the government uh used went down the cultural path and just tried to propagandize people at uh you know the highest level to have as many kids as possible right our smart
people are stupid people more prone to propaganda um i think the argument could be made that smart people are i mean you look at wokeness i mean smart people tend to accept it a lot more than stupid people so maybe maybe it's the opposite maybe the smartest people will you know will take
the hint you know most clearly and change their behavior while the stupid people want or maybe the stupid people you know the stupider you know are just sort of more it might be different kinds of propaganda appeal to different kinds of people so something like this nationalistic might
appeal disproportionately to stupid people or you know and something like wokeness and like more you know it's more idealistic and sort of important from reality might appeal to smart people but i don't think you know so that's one potential you know one
potential issue but i i historically um if you look at like the way nationalism came about it was the elites generally who who were nationalistic first and then it sort of trickled down to the masses so i don't think there's necessarily a sort of a rule of human nature that anything sort of nationalist
or right-wing propaganda necessarily only uh disproportionately appeals to the um to the less intelligent but it's a fascinating question like what the you know compositional effects are i wouldn't i would hazard to predict that you know i could just i think they'd get
the birth rate up whether it'll be smart people or not smart people i don't know right it's probably still not good in either case um but i i don't know about china but like for example if the government tried to actually change the culture in america to make it more
pro-natalist i could like where will a match that would have a counterproductive effect because then it would become counter cultural or um or contrarian um to like opposing a right-wing government and like not so it depends on it depends on like what you know what kind of stuff like yeah if
the republican party took power and said oh you know we're our biggest thing is getting the fertility rate up and it was like something like trump would just trigger all educated people yeah that that could probably that would probably backfire um you know it it so in some
place like china i mean i've seen some data that indicates that like the uh elites are more educated are more nationalistic so they could actually just you know they could be united in favor of uh you know they could be very potentially receptive to such a message um it's so complicated because like it's
like china i think chinese elites see themselves as part of a country that's competing with the us while u.s elites don't see themselves really as people competing with china they see themselves as people you know competing with other americans and or competing with you know
nature and trying to change the world or get so you know uh social peace so there's completely different dynamics there and this might be one reason why sort of you know the west has become left-wing as it's become more dominant and that like elites don't have anybody
to compete with or you know try to feel uh trying to defeat or feel uh feel superior to um you know the western uh gap between you know recent and uh the particulars of the role of world war ii you know between the westerners and the rest of the world was so large that you
know they weren't really seen as you know competition um and that you know might change with you know the rise of china but i don't think it's i don't think it's like really registered um as something that's fundamentally shaped people's outlook um so yeah it's um yeah you know the composition yeah the
compositional um you know effects and sort of who's responsive to propaganda these are these are fascinating questions i i think it's hard to predict in advance you just you know you just have to sort of uh you just you know you watch what people do and then you know one thing the um
actually you brought up the uh economic point so like there's a you know there's if you make like say a crap cash transfer for each child right like ten thousand dollars for example that matters a lot more than a poor person than a rich person now if you do something like you cut
how much they're paying in taxes right and some i think i think uh i think they did this in quebec and i think hungarian sort of system works like this too where if you're getting tax breaks the rich people pay more taxes it could potentially be worth more to uh to rich
people um to have more kids so it's um yeah so the structure of how it's set up would also matter quite a bit and um okay final question what should libertarians do uh in order to win so like in the next 20 30 years uh given your theory of politics uh what should the libertarian charity be they should
hope for ridiculous polarization they should hope for americans to hate each other uh because libertarian ideas are unpopular the only way you get them is you basically you make them you take over the republican party and then they just win 50 of the time no matter what they do
and they're going gonna have to control certain states no matter what and they have a lot of more freedom to do unpopular things um i think i think that i think that's i think polarization is actually good for libertarianism and i think we might you know we might actually uh they might have a good few
decades actually right that also by the way explains very well why wokeness has been winning in the last few decades right because increased polarization they can get on popular things fast yeah well it's a cause and it's a consequence of polarization right so these things
these things work together i think what libertarians should do and i think i'm doing a part of this is they should really make clear to me so there's this idea on like the populist right that like we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over and i'm like okay when did republicans repeal the
civil rights act like when did that happen when did they defund public education like no and you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism and now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat right for all these negative trends so in my argument uh in my article book
institutions is just civil rights law i try to make people make people clear like the conservatives haven't been libertarian enough they haven't even talked about this stuff or understood um the downstream effects of uh broad interpretation of civil rights law um on business and the wider culture so you
know i think people should have you know they should try because people really are motivated by anti-wokeness and some people are motivated by the idea of small government and what it can do but you can reach people who are motivated by anti-weakness and that's a
lot a lot of people on the right and if you explain to them how libertarianism can help them and what they want to do anyway i think that's a good strategy okay all right well uh all right those are all the questions i have richard thanks so much for being on the podcast [Music] you