The Free Press

Tyler Cowen: A Conservative Case for Liberal Immigration

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” So spoke Don Tancredi to his uncle in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s famous novel The Leopard. Few truths are more important for understanding the current American predicament when it comes to immigration policy…

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18 days ago · 115 likes · 32 comments · Tyler Cowen

Is Tyler writing this for an immigration-restrictionist conservative voter as imagined by the GMU faculty lounge?

Not a single person who is strongly opposed to mass immigration would have their convictions even remotely dinged by many of the arguments he makes.

Unstated in the piece is that Tyler wants to triple the existing rate of immigration into America. He does so while also appearing to insult native-borns, as he did recently, where he said native-born Americans are not as impressive compared to the immigrants he wants imported. Not very persuasive if the reader should know about these!

But the primary reason why his piece is unpersuasive to the intended audience is that Tyler does not intuit the single biggest complaint (often left unstated in polite company) is that it didn’t address this:

Demographic Change

(Which will be the focus of this response, though I have many other objections, which I won’t get to).

To the extent that Tyler directionally tries to address demographic change, namely the retvrn to 1950s America meme, I don’t think he quite gets the psychological impetus.

Anti-mass-immigration advocates are not just pining for the white picket fence symbolizing 1950s American prosperity. A significant number of them are also pining for the demographic America of that era, when the country was overwhelmingly White. It’s not just the 1950s White Picket Fence; it’s the fact that 1950s White America was overwhelmingly White.

This is why there is an entire genre of tweets and posts from them (I don’t want to say alt-right, or New Right or MAGA right as the cohort is more nebulous than that) that go like this (paraphrasing): “The past is a foreign country” which means images and videos from an earlier period of 90% White America are radicalizing, “Remember what they took from us,” etc., etc.

You can dislike that preference, argue that it is racist and morally wrong, argue that demographic continuity should not matter, or argue that the benefits of immigration outweigh it. But you do actually have to address it if you are trying to persuade these people.

They are certainly not going to be convinced by arguments for liberalizing immigration even further said Demographic Change was brought about through deception at worst and a huge miscalculation at best.

Why would they favor expanding immigration, when one of the central features of the post-1965 immigration system, from their perspective, has been a very rapid and large demographic change that its proponents at the time explicitly promised would not happen.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which has a good claim to being the most consequential 20th-century American law, as it quite literally changed the country, was sold to the public under false pretenses, intentionally or unintentionally.

Ted Kennedy famously assured people that the bill would not “upset the ethnic mix” (his exact words) of America and that immigration levels would remain broadly similar. Those assurances turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Immigration restrictionists understandably tend to interpret those assurances as a brazen lie. (He’s a Kennedy, so go figure.)

Regardless, the law abolished the old national-origins quota system and, especially through family reunification, helped produce an immigration system whose long-run effects even some of its proponents drastically underestimated. Post-1965 immigration and the descendants of those immigrants have played a major role in moving the United States from an overwhelmingly White/European country toward a much more ethnically diverse one.

Whether Kennedy and the bill’s proponents were lying or were simply catastrophically wrong in their predictions is almost beside the point here.

Think from the POV of a right-winger who is an immigration restrictionist. Why exactly would that history make you more inclined to trust elite assurances about what another round of immigration liberalization will do?

And there is an obvious democratic legitimacy question here that Tyler never grapples with: Had Americans in 1965 been shown an accurate picture of the demographic effects of the immigration system they were creating over the following 50 or 100 years, would the bill have passed by anything like the margins it did?

(To Tyler’s credit, he called out what is happening in Europe: A median voter theory of right-wing populism.)

What percentage of White voters in particular would have even remotely supported the bill if they had been told plainly and honestly that the resulting immigration wave would materially accelerate the decline of the White share of the population and help put the country on a path toward becoming majority-minority?

Who then would have supported the 1965 immigration system and its consequences when they’re acutely felt by later generations; monumental demographic changes, large numbers of Hispanic LTEL children in schools, neighborhoods where Spanish is the sole language, White flight from increasingly immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, parts of America where you can barely hear English spoken at all, “Press 1 for English,” etc., etc., etc.?

(I am trying to remember the last time I saw an entirely English-speaking White McDonald’s crew, especially one with teenagers in an urban McDonald’s. I don’t recall.)

We know the answer. It would be astonishing if such a bill with the consequences explained, both positive and negative, would’ve even cleared even 20% in Congress when put to a vote in 1965.

And there is some remarkable contemporary polling that makes this question more than hypothetical.

In June 1965, only 7% of Americans wanted immigration increased. Thirty-nine percent wanted it kept at existing levels, and 33% actually wanted it reduced. Yet after the Act passed, 70% said they approved of the new law. That makes perfect sense if people understood the law roughly as its proponents presented it, not as what the legislation would actually do: implement an immigration system that would become vastly larger and demographically different from the one voters thought they were getting.

Pew calculates that without post-1965 immigration, the U.S. in 2015 would have been 75% non-Hispanic White rather than 62%, 8% Hispanic rather than 18%, and less than 1% Asian rather than 6%.

Interestingly, GPT says per capita GDP wouldn’t change much all in this scenario.

Demographic composition is a monumentally important question, perhaps the single most monumentally important question a citizenry can ask itself: “Who are we, and who are we choosing to be?”

If you care about democratic stability and preventing populism, something as consequential as the long-run composition of the country shouldn’t even be done through ordinary Congressional legislation, let alone through elite and Chamber of Commerce/WSJ editorial board-preference-driven, which is almost always the case with immigration liberalizations.

This is why I think this essay, which came out just before the 2024 election, was one of the most important essays written since the rise of populism: Immigration as a Constitutional Issue | Compact.

Gregory Conti, a political theorist and intellectual historian, in Compact Magazine, argues that immigration policy is analogous to the decision to merge territories or join a supranational governing body like the EU—a national question concerning the makeup of the people themselves. That should not simply be delegated to elected representatives, precisely because the question is constitutive of the electorate itself.

I agree with Conti. If only we had an intelligent conservative movement that talked like that. Instead, we get Trump and fatal shootings of citizens by ICE agents, and no Trump push to actually reduce or reform legal immigration despite clear majorities in the GOP electorate wanting this. We get unprecedented Trumpian corruption, though.

Then there is the usual chicanery when it comes to illegal immigrant amnesties. The 1986 Reagan immigration law granted legal status to millions of illegal immigrants while also establishing employer sanctions and other enforcement measures.

Legalization happened immediately and permanently. The promised enforcement provisions existed on paper and were implemented to varying degrees, but they plainly failed at their intended purpose of preventing another enormous unauthorized population from developing afterward.

That experience became foundational to restrictionist distrust of “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Then the 1990 Immigration Act substantially increased legal immigration, including employment-based immigration, despite there being no obvious mass public demand for a major increase in immigration levels. Again, these changes were overwhelmingly elite-driven.

Then came the repeatedly proposed ‘grand bargains,’ in which immigration restrictionists were told, in one form or another, this: Accept amnesty/legalization now, and you will get meaningful enforcement in return. But then the amnesty advocates get the amnesty, but the restrictionists don’t get the promised enforcement.

The 2013 Gang of Eight bill is a good example of this. It passed the Senate but died in the House after intense opposition from the Republican base.

It proposed a very large legalization program for all 11 million (or if we found out later there are actually 12-20 million) illegal immigrants coupled with promises of stronger future enforcement. By that point, immigration skeptics had decades of experience telling them which half of that bargain they should expect to be permanent. Some senators who voted for past amnesties in the late 1980s said they won’t for this because of that.

The Gang of Eight fight was also an important part of the political background to Trump’s rise two years later. I often come across people who endlessly go on about “The Rise of Trump” but have very little if anything to say about the political scars left by the Gang of Eight fight within the GOP. Gang of Eight amnesty politics mattered so much to grassroots GOP voters, but the elites didn’t grasp the intensity of it. That’s one reason the GOP establishment wasn’t trusted by much of the base anymore after that fight. It’s a major reason why Rubio was badly damaged in the 2016 GOP primary.

Why would they support further legalization and immigration expansion when the mere election of Joe Biden, even when Trump was a lame duck, triggered a border crisis?

We essentially had de facto open borders under Joe Biden. Kamala Harris promised free surgeries to criminal illegal immigrants in prison who wanted to transition into the opposite sex free of charge with taxpayer money among other things.

Almost 2 in 3 of all immigrants to the US under Biden were illegal immigrants. Why would the GOP voter be in an immigration liberalizing mood?

Lately I’m often surprised by how little understanding Tyler and Alex sometimes seem to have of what people they’re arguing against (in this case the immigration-skeptical right) are actually against, what they are saying, and what they want.

(You see this in their posts on AI art and a few other topics, where their understanding of the opposition is sorely lacking. But they’re topics for a different day. I intend to write about Tyler not understanding the backlash to AI art in the next 2-3 weeks)

This passage is a particularly good example of this:

Robust fertility is another American tradition, and one that has been ailing recently, with the total fertility rate now below 1.6 births per woman. Immigrants can help us out.

Just take a moment to think how this sounds to the person Tyler is supposedly trying to persuade.

“Hey, [unimpressive] native who harbors anti-immigration views: immigrants will drive demographic change even faster due to their higher fecundity!”

That is supposed to make them soften their position? To immigration-skeptical right-wingers for whom demographic change is a major concern, immigrants’ higher fertility relative to White Americans is not a feature but a bug. It means that the demographic transformation they oppose happens faster.

Tyler would do well to actually read some writers who have actually written about immigration politics from the Right instead of making unpersuasive arguments because he does not even understand the opposition and this constituency. Read someone who understands this like Michael Brendan Dougherty. Also, David Frum’s immigration screeds in The Atlantic pre-2024 are also excellent.

Further in the piece, Cowen is essentially saying, You conservatives value prosperity, entrepreneurship, optimism, family formation, and population growth? Immigration gives you those things.

But the people he is trying to persuade are also saying this:

“Yes, we value them (or we pretend we do while supporting Trump). But those are not the only things we value. We also care about demographic continuity, cultural continuity, assimilation, and having some democratic say over how rapidly the composition of the country changes.”

Libertarians and New Rightists/Conservatives fundamentally differ on what the economy is for and what even an economy is.

Libertarians tend to start with individuals, welfare, growth, and voluntary exchange, and then ask which policies maximize those things.

New Right conservatives start from the premise that the nation is itself a real political community with legitimate interests in continuity, cohesion, and self-preservation.

To them the economy exists to serve that society, not the other way around. So if preserving greater demographic or cultural continuity means accepting somewhat slower economic growth by restricting immigration, almost all of them will gladly take that tradeoff.

Demographic Replacement worries are almost always spoken in code words if at all, and are always an amorphous complaint in polite company.

Normal everyday people don’t have a good language for even expressing their unease with demographic changes occurring around them, but it is nevertheless a real one, especially for the voters exposed to negative consequences of immigration in their lives, like, say, the LTEL children in their children’s schools, it is the central one.

This inexpressible anger is the central driving force behind a solid portion of populism.

So much has been lost: neighborhood trust, informal support networks, stable employment, affordable schooling, and the psychic security that used to come with them.

Makes you wonder how much progress (or deprogress) is hidden outside GDP statistics and how well (or poorly) we are at capturing them.

Sure 2025-11-11 09:00:07:
For a start, non-market based service provision. In the 1960s, most wealthy Americans weren’t decamping long distances for education, entry level jobs, or stable career and disrupting their social networks in the process. Those that did were typically able to replace such ties with folks from their neighborhood who shared some additional social ties (e.g. belonged to the same union, worshipped at the same church, or played in the same rec league). But now? Most of my residents have absolutely no one to step in if they need emergency childcare - no nice old lady they know from church, no cousin who is still in college who could take a morning shift, and no teenaged kid in the apartment complex they know and trust to pay 20 bucks to manage things until the bus comes if the usual care arrangements falter. My patients cannot find people to change a bandage, sponge wash their backs, or often just drive them to appointments. We spend utter fortunes doing stuff for patients today that are just 5-minute demonstrations for a spouse or even a responsible child not that long ago.

Likewise, back in the 60s, we weren’t eating the costs to travel for family. Families burn maybe a week a year on pure travel - families routinely have grandparents in two different states while living in a third with cousins in a fourth; and modern norms dictate regular travel (my international couples get a lot of flak if they don’t fly internationally every other year).

For another, a lot of quality-of-life stuff has gotten pricier. Ever more of the housing market has converted to small apartment living as ever more of the population prefers larger digs (even among folks prefer to live in apartments they prefer 3 bedroom to 2, and they do so even with the same square footage in floorplan rankings). Likewise, a lot of the places with high incomes have much worse traffic these days than anywhere had in the 60s, overall, commutes have gone from an average of 43 minutes a day to 54 but the places where folks haven’t seen an increase (or even a decrease) are wildly more likely to be places with lower household incomes.

And then, of course, there are schools. In the 60s, most schools were blindingly safe, instructed students to reasonable levels of numeracy and literacy, and afforded most (bright) students a reasonable chance of upward mobility. Now, entire urban school districts are wastelands. The tuition for competitive private schools has exploded and if you want something additional (e.g. a woke or explicitly not-woke schooling experience) you pay even more.

And of course, it is increasingly harder to wall yourself off from urban pathologies. Levittown and the like spread crime out so the same per capita figures were lower per bloc and you didn’t have to endure the stress responses from seeing crime, being exposed to drugs, and the rest. We judge threats by spatial rates as a species and dense urban living (if only while on the job) is far harder on our psyches than something spread out.

Then, of course, there is the life course aspect. Doing the historically natural thing and marrying and starting a family before 25 is very hard. Getting to $150K means two incomes for most and it is absolutely brutal trying to pair careers. And once you pair up, you suddenly lose the option to relocate to the hot new job market (Austin, SF, Maimi, Williston - whatever). So people tend to marry after establishing careers and that means they lose a lot of non-market hedonic benefit. Unstable relationships mean less sex, more per capita housework, and less hedonic benefit from activities (virtually all consumers report that vacations are more enjoyable with companions) on average. At just the going rate for prostitution, the non-market hedonic benefit of stable relationships and sexual access is huge.

We took all the good paying careers, erected hoops to jump through, and each of these exerts a high cost on a sizeable fraction of the folks jumping through.

You are going to miss a lot of this in the GDP numbers because it is very hard to quantify the value of being able to alloparent kids until you don’t. It is very hard to put a dollar value on time with grandma until it requires your entire vacation and a bunch of peak demand airline fares.

And then beyond all the actual differences in total (market and non-market) consumption, we come to security. People are loss aversive. And how does the modern economy run? Well, you are required to gamble on what sorts of pricey skills to acquire (because firms refuse to do the basics themselves) and then hope that technology doesn’t destroy your livelihood. Will immigrant truckers depress wages? Will Tesla allow for AI convoys with minimal human presences? Will your skills operating CnC equipment be useless if everything is shipped to China? Remember Alex is comparing folks back when IBM, Ford, GE, and so many other firms employed huge masses of folks with basically employment for life. And if you went independent, the ecosystem was largely stable - shipping costs were high, international trade was suspect and we had all manner of trade barriers, and things obsolesced over periods longer than your typical career. I know plenty of exceedingly well-paid physicians who take six figure pay cuts for wage security. I highly doubt that any sort of calculation looking at the risk for modern wages would place $0 in premia relative to 1960.

Particularly relevant in the light of the Baroness Casey report on the Grooming Scandal Rape of English Girls By Muslim Men the British Elites Imported With the Full Knowledge of Other Muslims in their Household scandal

Had to make it a Substack post. Go follow her on X @DrJenIzaakson

You will learn more from this about culture and assimilation on immigration than reading everything Bryan Caplan has ever written on culture/assimilation as it relates to immigration.

People like this love to pretend there’s no enormous differences between cultures and yet won’t have any close white British friends because they don’t have enough in common. They speak out of both sides of their mouths and trade off our liberal tolerance. Liberal tolerance ofc doesn’t exist in their culture.

I’ll give an example. I have a British-Somali friend of almost 20 years (18 yrs now). Her parents still don’t speak English despite moving here 30+ years ago.

She dropped out of university because she didn’t want to be around ‘kafirs’ (she would go back and forth on the question all the time. Would send a msg saying we couldn’t be friends because im gay, then would turn up at the next Stop the War society meeting [I was its President] and chat to me like nothing happened. Other people got messages saying “hi we can’t be friends anymore because you’re not Muslim, sorry, Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:51 says X and Y”. Her Somali friend told her this is how Shaytan works (Satan has non-believers befriend you).

I even went to her dpt when she dropped out via email to ask them to pause the process for a few weeks because she so often changed her mind (she didn’t this time) and it was ‘complicated’. During this time, I visited her parents council flat in Peckham, her siblings were screaming the entire time and throwing things (she said noise was ever present at home, but liked it that way). Her brother was a drug dealer by age 15 but she was the success story having managed to get into university. There was no light in the bathroom and no toilet seat. Her mother started shouting at her for bringing a man home until she explained my name is “Jennifer” and I just look boyish. “My mum you’re going to have boiling water poured down your throat forever in hell for being gay”. I just used to laugh, because I was the biggest naive white libtard going.

After dropping out she had an arranged marriage to another Somali and his parents organised a 1-bedroom apartment in Shepherds Bush, which meant once they had children (which they did right away) they were overcrowded and became the councils problem. The overstretched council let them rot in a 1-bed flat with 2 kids for 3 years. Eventually she stopped going outside or taking her young kids outside. I would visit to try encourage her to let me take them swimming or to the park. It was always no. She said she didn’t want to leave home due to racism and at the time I bought it (my guess now is she was depressed). I once took a suitcase of toys round (secondhand, from a friend whose son had grown out of them) and she gave back all the ones with faces (worries about idolatry, as if a child will begin to worship Thomas the Tank Engine).

Eventually they were put in a B&B for 2 years and then into a Housing Association home with a garden, good enough. What happened next? My friend took her kids out of education to go travelling the Gulf states. The local authorities dgaf so her daughters received no education from ages 7-10. Now as teens they’re enrolled in an online Islamic school.

My friend always said she wanted to move back to Somalia. Said she liked the ‘chaos’, the noise pollution, how there’s no driving rules, that people can have weapons, and the noise all night. I asked why. “Because it’s like the home I grew up in”. This is someone who grew up here, attended our education system, got into uni and had a ‘diverse’ friend group. It didn’t matter. Her parents ofc came here as refugees, but spend 6 months of the year back in Somalia. She goes all the time to visit cousins and says she’d like one day to move back to her home village (no electricity, no running water).

The reality is she doesn’t feel comfortable in this country because her culture is at odds with it. There isn’t really any overcoming that. We’re also allowed to feel uncomfortable with cultures that are oppositional to ours. The experiment has been run. There isn’t a way to hang on to non-Western values and be integrated in the West.

It took being put under male guardianship in an Islamic country for me to (still only years later) work these things out. One of the biggest ways those seeking to live off the West whilst hating it attempt to pretend oppositional cultures can live in utopian harmony, is to confine culture to food, music, and clothes. Things everyone likes and feel don’t matter too much.

But the reality is ‘culture’ is first and foremost a synonym for sexual politics. It primarily refers to family unit, understandings of and rules around romantic love and desire, sexual practices, arranged marriages or not, cousin marriage or not, etc. Those inform FGM, the Algerian practice of families on the wedding night waiting in the next room to see the blood on the bedsheets (proving she’s a virgin) after the wife has been fucked, no doors at home allowed to be closed so everyone can hear sex (no privacy at home, expectation of privacy in public i.e the niqab). Mufti Menk even says to have sex noisily in the family home because it’s ‘halal’ so why not.

But to broaden it, Western values are to do with fair play (nepotism happens but it’s decried), a non-psychotic relationship to time (punctuality), romantic love (not arranged marriage), privacy at home with no expectation of it in public, secularism (no religious laws being the actual law), individualism not collectivism, nuclear family unit over the extended family network, emphasising truth over taboo (most people in the West who have a gay aunt don’t pretend she isn’t gay to save face), the idea of honour being individual rather than to do with family (your actions reflect your morality, not your father / brothers i.e male orientated clannishness), corruption is hidden and done by those in power (still frowned upon when exposed) rather than existing at every level of society (scamming, bribes), polygamy isn’t considered acceptable (people have affairs, but frowned upon), the concept of childhood (no such concept exists in Islam bar believing children are now adults the minute they hit puberty, but children aren’t told by their parents they love them, little affection shown by parents), thinking magic doesn’t exist (in Islamic cultures it’s a feature to think miscarriages happen or marriages are harmed due to curses), religion can be mocked as opposed to it meaning you’re Shaytan, images aren’t forbidden because we don’t think people are so stupid they will start worshipping the angel on a Christmas tree, and so on.

There are exceptions to this and the Muslims most non-Muslim British people meet are at university, where there are liberal members of the international elite (foreign students) who as 1%ers all buck most cultural norms and Muslims who grew up here who tend to only make close Muslim friends, so no one finds out the huge cultural differences, unless you’re a libtard like I was. That path ultimately led me to being put under male guardianship in an Islamic hellhole where women can’t step foot out after dark. So… yeah

Illegal immigrants overwhelmingly live in neighborhoods and housing arrangements with other illegal immigrants or mixed-status households. Given this fact, how many would call 911 when they are the victim of a violent crime? I would imagine a lot of crime in these neighborhoods goes unreported. Even within households, does domestic violence get reported?

Secondly, as Wayne Burkett, an excellent follow on Twitter, writes, the United States has an outrageous amount of violent crime, which the average American spends quite a lot of time and money avoiding. There’s no reason to index anything to the existing rate. This is important for making value judgements on immigration-driven crime rates, especially since 1965. The native-born American crime rate is already high, and we should never put up with it.

Additionally, it is crucial to note that the average American crime rate does not accurately reflect the crime rate of the average American. This is from AnechoicMedia.

AnechoicMedia further goes on to write:

It is true that immigrants compare more favorably to same-race natives. But the same cannot be said for their kids. At the end of the day, what hispanic immigration does, is increase the percent of the country that is hispanic. And if hispanics born in America have higher crime rates than whites, on some time scale hispanic immigration brings more crime.
The only way for this not to be the case would be for the immigration to be highly selective, such that immigrant-hispanics and their descendants remain superior to native-hispanics. But this obviously isn't the case if illegal immigration to the US isn't enforced. So the fact of low immigrant crime rates fails to make the case for further liberalization of immigration.

More from Wayne Burkett:

The average American crime rate, isn't the crime rate of the average American” succinctly explains the disconnect on the debate about whether immigrants commit more crime than natives. You don’t even have to focus on the racial aspect of this, if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s enough just to notice that crime rates differ quite a lot on an important dimension and that our society is largely segregated by the same dimension. That means that you’ve got two distinct, largely non-overlapping rates for which it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the average.

Also, why do we even need to tolerate even one minor crime from one illegal immigrant since definitonally they do not need to be in the country.

1. The Median American's Decline

The median American is further behind where their parents were. They marry later. They buy houses later. They have fewer kids (with a growing gap between realized and ideal fertility). And they have fewer supports.

They report fewer friends, they are less religious, they belong to fewer civic organizations, and they have fewer social ties in the neighborhood. They struggle more with addiction, other mental health disorders, and chronic health troubles.

Even if they do everything right, they get to watch as their peers from school, their siblings and cousins, their friends down the block—somebody—descends into addiction, despair, and suicide. Annually, about 1.5 per 1,000 Americans kill themselves.

Figure that you have 50 years as an adult who understands the significance and 200 folks that mean something to you in some fashion, and we are talking about 1/3 of Americans directly seeing a suicide in their face. Add in some reasonable estimates for effective closest contact pool (e.g., parents, spouse/partner, children, best friend) and for concentration of suicides among the down and out—and you are talking about the bottom half likely each having suicide make a direct impact on their lives.

Oh, and you have wildly less sex than your predecessors. No job stability—(“Oh, we moved production to China,” “We quintupled the productivity of the janitors by buying a bunch of robots and let 60% of them go,” “We decided that your entire industry is too polluting so we made it impossible for your company to return a profit”).

There are endless rounds of internet police enforcing rules about expression you might never have heard about that appear as though they could ruin your life at any time.

That is where these vibes come from. These are not the folks enjoying ever more novel experiences. They don't get to join the polycule for an endless sexual buffet whenever they are in the mood.

They live precariously while the folks with security kick down on them and then tell them it's their fault for being too heavy to carry out of a burning building.

2. U.S. Foreign Policy: Allies and Clients

We were critically dependent on oil, and letting Khomeini run amok in Iran resulted in national humiliation and the prospect of a militarily successful Iran dictating oil prices for generations.

For a lot of Americans, they like a two-prong test. They will like you and support you if your values are a close enough match to theirs. So maybe the Canadians, with their astronomical dairy tariffs, aren't acting in the interests of a Wisconsin dairy farmer—but Canadians seem enough like him that he is willing to play ball.

On the other hand, the Saudis make little pretense that they are like us. But they offer a simple quid pro quo: we give them a security guarantee (at least partially by them buying a lot of American military hardware), and they, allegedly, give us some deference on containing Iran, managing oil prices, and generally behaving well.

You can be our friend. You can be our client. But anyone else is supposed to be treated warily at arm's length.

As to why we didn't do that with China? Some of it was hangovers from our tactical alliance with China against the USSR. Some of it was boundless faith in markets to eventually shift values and make China our friend.

But I think a lot of it was simply that China allowed executives and their hangers-on (i.e., politicians) to become fantastically wealthy. The advantage of offshoring production, opening the Chinese market, and the rest was huge. And while everyone knew there was rampant IP theft and protectionism, for a while, you could do quite well by the stock numbers by playing along.

So we had legacy beliefs about the geopolitics of China (they used to be our client, sorta), idealistic belief about the impacts of markets on values and democracy, and a political setup that allowed the socialization of costs (e.g., unemployment, Medicaid, welfare, suicide) and privatization of benefits.

That takes a while to overcome in an electoral system dominated by lawyers and the elderly.

3. Unequal Benefits

The benefits of immigration are uneven.

If you have a stable job, good income, and class, then getting a nice new ethnic restaurant that is "authentic" is deeply meaningful. Exposing your kids to "diversity" in music or fashion is seen as a way of improving their understanding of the world. And being "compassionate" gets you awards and recognition.

Look at what happens to people who actually try to oppose it. Trump's staff was hounded out of restaurants. People picket outside the homes of justices. We even appear to have a trans-vegan death cult that actively targets immigration enforcement officers.

If you sound too déclassé about immigrants—if you say that it ain't all sunshine and roses or that the benefits are flowing disproportionately to the wealthy—you don't get invited to the right dinner parties. Your kids may be blackballed from the right sort of colleges. People might engage in bureaucratic harassment of your company, or you might be libeled in the news with only the barest of technicalities preventing your defamation case from winning.

Addendum: Look at physicians. We have licenses to print money. We provide essential services, and if we all take the same week off, people die—a lot of them. We have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of our lives, but the DEI industry cuts a swathe of terror through the profession.

We know our professional society dues get skimmed for racist rackets. We know that prestige positions are awarded on the basis of race. We know that "gender medicine" is a morass of stuff that makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine when you look at any objective endpoint (e.g., suicide rate).

Yet people are afraid of social shunning. Absent anonymity, people in (at worst) the top 5% of the population simply will not voice contrary opinions.

And you expect the politicians—who climbed a greased pole by hook or by crook—to buck that pressure? Tell me another one.

4. War and Its Moral Calculus

Wars are most moral when they are never fought, and the best option is for free peoples to be heavily armed.

So Trump backs arming Ukraine and Taiwan, maybe even extending some security assurances. But once wars start, we can no longer attain an ideal state of peace through strength. At that point, the goals become ending the war in a way that does not engender a renewal of conflict in short order.

Unconditional surrender undoubtedly increased the duration of WWII in Europe and Japan, but it also created such a catastrophic loss that we saw no rise of stab-in-the-back myths nor revanchist demands for generations.

In Ukraine, then, the goal becomes some way of ending the conflict—preferably in a manner that leads to neither nuclear war nor a revanchist affair in 10 years.

Damned if I know what Trump is proposing, but I could see something Trump-supporting being a setup where Putin takes his Crimean land bridge and Ukraine develops at least tactical nuclear weapons with tacit American support. This would undoubtedly shred a lot of norms, but those norms did jack all to prevent the invasion in the first place or to enable Ukraine to win rather than grind out a slow stalemate at best.

Gaza? Come on.

Israel has demonstrated that it has no intention of relaxing its security control as long as Hamas or similar organizations are a threat. And having the other guys use their strategic advantage to go murder children is not going to inspire confidence that there is a viable way to remove Israeli security control that is not just asking for another massacre later.

Hamas, on the other hand, basically just watched its territory get pulverized 20 times worse than any other conflict Israel has ever fought. And all they had to do was offer up the hostages.

Are these Trump's motives? Damned if I know.

Are these even the best moral lens to look at these conflicts through? I am doubtful. But whatever your moral analysis, it is at least possible to argue that ending and preventing wars is paramount—even as the operational details in each case result in very different specific strategies to end or prevent wars.

2. Amazon Robots Struggling to Keep Up With Human Workers

3. Trump's new AG Pam Bodi - New Records Shed Light on Donald Trump’s $25,000 Gift to Florida Official - The New York Times

4. California unemployment insurance insanity -- California businesses unknowingly became responsible for repaying a nearly $20 billion federal loan taken by the state to address unemployment fund shortfalls during the COVID-19 pandemic. When California ceased payments on this loan, federal law shifted the repayment burden to the state's businesses, highlighting an unforeseen consequence of the state's financial decisions.

5. ~~datahazard~~ on X: "... 0.5% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis alone...a shocking figure.

The shamelessness of Indians in Canada continues apace --

4. The story of how Dwarkesh’s podcast came to be.

Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast Progress Update

Can we just take a step back and acknowledge how crazy it is that this is my job…

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2 years ago · 90 likes · 17 comments · Dwarkesh Patel

“Goodbye Stranger” - Supertramp

“Don’t Stand So Close to Me” - The Police

“Give A Little Bit” - Supertramp

“Wandering Star” - Portishead

“Calling to The Night” - Natasha Farrow

“Maneater” - Daryl Hall & John Oates

“Albatross” - Fleetwood Mac

“Jane” - Jefferson Starship

Even ChatGPT thinks the universe must feel old to humans. I disagree.

… based on scientific evidence and our current understanding of the age of the universe, it is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old, which is certainly a very long time by human standards. The vastness of time and space in the universe is awe-inspiring and humbling, and it reminds us of the scale and complexity of the natural world around us.

Yes, the universe is old. The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. But I do not find it unimaginably old. Even three generations of human life is long but we conceptualize past time into mutually and socially recognized chunks. By that metric, I argue the universe is quite new. (And no I will not be using arguments like ‘since we live in a universe where the CMB is detectable, the universe is new’.)

The universe only feels old up until the moment you recognize that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old means the Earth has existed for nearly a third (~32%) of the universe’s existence. I haven’t met someone who hasn’t been caught surprised by this fact. Even those who know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old have a mistaken mental picture of the Earth as being a recent entrant to the cosmos although it’s not.

The universe feels old up until the moment you recognize that the Earth has been hosting multicellular life for an estimated 66-77% of Earth’s existence. This means the only known (to humans) multicellular life in the universe has existed for a 15% of the universe’s existence.

The time, when Jesus Christ lived (~2000 years ago / 0 AD) is the universal ruler by which we normal people measure and judge all of recorded history. It’s a mutually and socially recognized chunk of time. The Pyramids feel noticeably older than everything else because they’re thousands of years older than 0 AD. Everything around the time of Christ feels noticeably cozy and not so distant, but events much older than Christ like the Pyramids feel that much more distant in the past.

Similarly, I think a lot of us feel a certain coziness about the Earth. “Sure it’s 4.5 billion years old but that’s not that old!” we subconsciously think to ourselves. Especially if one has a mental picture of the timeline of life on Earth. (A boring half a billion years of asteroids pummeling making it inhospitable for life. Then the emergence of unicellular life for another boring billion. Then around last 500 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion happens. Then primordial animals, dinos, and 66 million years later humans).

I think we have a bias towards classifying events older than the Earth as very old just like how we have a bias towards classifying events older than 0AD/Christ as very old. But the universe which is supposed to be mind-bogglingly old is just as thrice as old as our comfy recent Earth.

I think it’s remarkable we find ourselves in a universe on a planet that has existed for nearly a third of the universe’s existence and has hosted multicellular life for nearly 15% of the universe’s existence. We could have found ourselves when the universe that’s 100B or 1,000B or 10,000B years old. Yet our universe is a mere 13.7B years old.

We shouldn’t devolve into couch fainting at the age of the universe even when its age is easily imaginable in cozy chunks and small multiples like the age of the Earth, the age of unicellular and multicellular life, etc.

P.S.: A small thought experiment:

Imagine if an intelligent species very much like us (for all intents are purposes humans) found themselves in the first third of the universe i.e. their universe was only 4.5B years old. Would our current real age of the universe (13.7B years) be unimaginably distant for them?

I’d argue it wouldn’t be. Our existence would only be older by 9B more years i.e. twice the age of their universe (2 x 4.5B). So the 4.5B species imagining the universe as it is now wouldn't feel radically old to them.

Also, this is the key point to comprehend: The above thought experiment is only viable because they're starting with X billions of years that are quite small and easy to comprehend (13.7B /3 = 4.5B). (Our universe really isn’t that old!)

But if we performed this thought experiment in a universe where humans evolved in a 100 billion-year-old universe then the thought experiment fails as the first third of the universe would be a 33 billion-year-old universe. A species that existed in the first third of the universe’s existence would have to wait for 66 billion more years to find human evolution.

Both the earlier species and humans would exist in a universe that will feel unmistakably and inarguably old for the intelligent species/human brain. A 100 billion-year-old universe would have had enough time to fit 22 Earth-to-human evolution lifecycles back-to-back. We live in a universe that only fits 3. So this isn’t some artifact of human biases. It’s because we exist in a universe that’s only thrice as old as our host planet.

1. Almost all of them wrongly guessed MLB/Baseball is the most popular American sport. Most thought basketball/NBA was #2 and football/NFL (called incorrectly Rugby in India) was #3. (Actual rank: NFL > NBA > MLB)

2. When I asked them to guess the demographics of the US, they were in this range: Whites 70-80%, Blacks 25-50%, 5% rest. All of them overestimated the number of Indians in the US. All of them there were shocked to hear that there are more Hispanics than Blacks. (Actual distribution: 61% non-Hispanic Whites, 12% Blacks, 17% Hispanics incl. White Hispanics, 5% Asians)

3. Most of them thought the population of America was 500-700M. One friend thought it was 100M.

4. I told them that the actual population of America is only 330M. I asked them to guess the number of illegal immigrants. All of them underestimated the number. The highest number I heard was 5M. (It is 12-15M or higher)

5. All of them underestimated the divorce rate at 30-40%. That black single-parent rate was >75% was a shocker to them. All of them wrongly guessed higher SES Americans have a higher divorce rate than lower SES Americans. Possibly because celebrities have a high divorce rate.

6. That state capitals are not the biggest cities of their respective states was surprising to them. I asked them to guess the capital of NY and CA; they guessed NYC and LA.

7. None of them guessed correctly that there is a quota system for African Americans (and Hispanics) in colleges in America. All of them said no.

8. All of them guessed the most popular meat wrongly as beef. Some guessed pork (just called pig meat in India, very rare in India). It’s chicken.

9. All of them underestimated how much I make when I told them the median income in America is ~$60K.

Not as underrated as the others on the list. It’s #60 on DDR’s Greatest Rock Guitar solos list and on Rick Beato’s Top 20 Rock Guitar Solos video at #3. But it still isn’t as revered as it should be.

Only someone as virtuosic as Larry Carlton could pull off such an extremely melodic guitar solo on a harmonically complex chord progression. Definitely the most chordally complex guitar solo ever put on record on a reasonably popular song. The perfect balance between musicality and accessibility.

The outro solo is also overlooked. The licks after 4:00 remind me of the time I spent in Miami for some reason.

6. Mark Knopfler on “Tunnel of Love” (1980) by Dire Straits

Not on any “best of” lists I am aware of.

5. Steve Vai on “Tender Surrender” (1995)

I understand why guitarists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani aren’t well known outside guitarist enthusiast circles given how lengthy and unnecessarily distortion-laden their playing usually is. But this deserves to be well known even outside guitarist circles. I would not change, remove or add a single note. There are no wasted spaces or phrases. It’s listed at #67 on DDR’s list while his most famous track “For The Love Of God” is rated at #19 even though I prefer this “Tender Surrender” over the other. But then again the list is ranked for “influence, and lasting appeal” so I guess it’s alright.

4. Eric Bell on “The Rocker” by Thin Lizzy (1973)

Eric Bell might be one of the most underrated guitarists period (A list I will be doing in the future). A search on YouTube doesn't even show much from Eric Bell. The criminally underrated and founding member Eric Bell didn't last with long Thin Lizzy only to be replaced by a slightly overrated Gary Moore. No signature twin guitars of Thin Lizzy here, just Eric Bell all the way. Plenty of false summits along this lengthy guitar solo; it keeps going even when you think it will end.

3. Eric Clapton on “Steppin’ Out” by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (1966)

I think almost everything Clapton did post-Layla is overrated and had the effect of making his pre-Cream outings with John Mayall and Blind Faith underrated.

Steven Van Zandt on Rolling Stone magazine:

The day may come, if you're a young rocker, when you'll hear one of Clapton's mellow, contemporary ballads on the radio and think, "What's the big deal?" Put on "Steppin' Out." And bow down.

People talk about Cream, Layla, and his solo career. They don’t talk about this period and if they do they talk about the album as a whole but not this particular track. They should. Every note in this guitar solo is a masterpiece. The most inventive blues phrasing I’ve ever heard. You can clearly hear after 1:33 he has no idea where to go but has a burst of creativity and he improvizes and it’s as good as the earlier parts which I think were planned.

It’s a shame he became an unimaginative guitarist after the mid-1970s and was a shell of his former self. Would Hendrix have become as decadent as Clapton if he had not died? My bet is he wouldn’t have. But still worth pondering.

2. Steve Hackett on “Firth of Fifth” by Genesis (1973)

This masterpiece has never been listed on any ‘best of’ lists as far as I can tell. Revered by prog-rock types but not well-known among non-prog rock and classic rock fans.

I don’t even listen to the studio version of this (I’ll be doing another most underrated live guitar solos list). The tone is a little off and the playing is a little rushed in the studio version. But still worth listening to where this originated. My go-to is the 2013 Royal Albert Hall live version.

Bonus: Check this isolated guitar track version. The guitar solo starts at 3:09.

1. Steve Hackett on “Every Day” (1979)

Yes, another Steve Hackett song. The most underrated guitar solo in my opinion also happens to be one of the most underrated songs of all time. A top 20 of all-time favorite in my book. Very obscure. Fans familiar with prog-rock know of and admire “Firth of Fifth” but not this. Similar to “Firth of Fifth”, I’ve never seen this mentioned in any guitar forum or list.

Everything about this song is a masterpiece. The riffage, the vocal melody, and the guitar solo. Even something small as that lick at 1:32 is amazing.

I love both the album version and the Alternative mix version.

I’ll edit this piece in case I remember something else and I think it should supersede a song on this list.

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