“Size-adjusted” is very important when looking at election data. The most conservative voting parts of the United States are the most rural and depopulated. That is interesting trivia, but for most people impractical as a decision-making tool. My intended use case was for those seeking to identify healthy areas for raising families1, balancing economic opportunities2 and Republican presidential voting share.

The latter is especially interesting to me for 2024, when voting for post-felonious Trump was a much more radical act. Whatever his foibles, Trump, between 2020 and 2024, further blew open the Overton window. A specific use of the 2024 data, where Trump overperformed compared to 2020, is to suss out “soft Republican” areas containing the kind of people who support lower taxes while rejecting harder social conservatism.

Some may question the use of counties to identify outlier Republican boroughs. They are indeed convenient data, already compiled nationally. But I would further argue that counties, though admittedly arbitrary political subdivisions of the states, provide two additional meaningful benefits as units of analysis.

First, they provide some meaningful geographic buffer, more substantial than a neighborhood or part of a larger city. Second, they usually indicate a separate justice system, and as we’ve seen, Republican control of, say, district attorney’s offices is increasingly important for the durability of nice things, both offensive (removing druggies, punishing criminals, and generally encouraging aggressive policing) and defensive (less risk of political prosecution for self-defense against Left-favored clients).

My local county line, for example, provides an instant demarcation for the end of addicts and vagrants scaring and harassing vulnerable elderly, women, and children in public. While the metro center, a majority-Democrat city nearby, operates with learned helplessness in dealing with the vagrancy problem and associated permanent encampments, somehow those same drifters have learned that it’s a smart idea to stay away from the empowered, aggressive policing of a 90% Trump suburb just miles away.

Balancing Voting Share and County Size

One challenge is defining what kind of size adjustment is appropriate. Republican voting share is constrained to a practical range of, say, 10 to 90% (~9X), whereas county size ranges from a few hundred people to millions (~10,000X). And counties skew very Republican and very rural: the median county voted 70% Republican and had a vote total of about 12,000, representing a population of 33,000. The median county, then, is more than 2:1 Republican and moderately rural3.

There are two ways to handle these differences for what I care about. One is to simply rank the counties by Republican vote share and vote totals, and report which have the highest average percentile for both4. The other is to use “z-scores,” which let the statistics speak for themselves and will naturally put more weight on size, since it’s the wider distribution5.

The forced ranking method gives us “the most Republican counties with significant economic opportunities,” often smaller suburbs of midsize cities and disproportionately populated by multi-generational locals. The z-score method gives us “the most Republican counties near a Whole Foods market,” or solidly Republican places where the most specialized, high-earning workers will face little to no cost-of-living-adjusted opportunity cost6.

Size-Ranked Republican Outlier Counties

Here are those medium-sized outliers from 2024, compared to 2020:

Results were remarkably stable between elections. St. Clair, Alabama, exited despite no significant change in Republican share (~81.4%) because Van Zandt, Texas, increased its Trump share from 85.6% to 87.1%.

Here’s a helpful chart for all eleven counties in either list, and their associated metros:

Observations:

• Hank Williams, Jr., declared, “I was one of the chosen few to be born in Alabam7,” and Alabama tops this list in both years with a 50% share of outlier counties in 2024, receding from a 60% share in 2020. These counties, in fact, make up a pretty large contiguous area in the state’s central north to northeast, and might be America’s most conservative micro-region, which I deem the “based belt”:

Conservatives shouldn’t dismiss this region as backward. Alabama is a relative economic powerhouse for its size (among states, #8 largest share of manufacturing GDP, #2 automobile exporter), didn’t sell out its conservative birthright and identity at the state level like Georgia, and the Huntsville area in particular is a huge center for engineering, thanks to, umm, certain high-Republican-propensity “German immigrants” historically precocious in their development of intercontinental ballistic missiles8. A little German competence seasoning on general Southern conservatism makes for a nice place to live. It’s a win-win cultural exchange that may be key to some of Texas’ success: Southerners learn to follow through and finish projects to their full innate capabilities instead of indulging Scots-Irish restiveness; Germans learn how to not feel guilty, be less uptight, and have some fun.

• My pride is just a little wounded in seeing my hometown parish, Livingston, backslide from the top of the list as the most conservative size-ranked county-equivalent political subdivision in the country to third by regressing and shedding 0.5% in a generally favorable Republican election year. If Livingston Parish, Louisiana, ever goes woke, I’m telling you, it’s pretty much over. IYKYK.

• Parker County, Texas, remains the only county sufficiently Republican and sufficiently large to make both lists.

Large County Republican Outliers

When both metrics are normalized, size will naturally dominate9 the comparison, and the following rankings result:

A couple of notes. In the previous post, I inadvertently excluded some counties due to bad data hygiene, so this 2020 list is the correct one. This corrected list is much more geographically diverse, with the Southern states, including Texas, still having a 60% share overall. Utah and Texas lead with two counties each.

For the 2024 cycle’s top ten counties, here are the associated metro areas:

Another useful comparison is to compare these outlier counties by educational attainment. Where can one live in a dense suburb with unlimited professional opportunities, surrounded by Republicans?

In the 2024 cycle, Montgomery County, Texas, expands its absolute ownership of the natural statistical frontier, boasting an index score over 2/3 higher than its nearest statistical neighbor, much smaller Baldwin County, Alabama, and more than double that of #3, fellow Texas county Parker. As its population and voting totals grew, it increased its Trump share from 71.2% to 72.2%. This is extremely counter-trend, as generally, higher vote totals and populations are significantly negatively associated with Republican vote share: urbanization usually means more Democratic votes. Montgomery's move is all the more striking given its 39% bachelor's-or-better attainment rate.

A scatter plot of the absolute Republican margin illustrates:

There were 136,670 more Republican than non-Republican votes in Montgomery County, the highest margin in the nation. Out of curiosity, I had Codex download Montgomery’s precinct-level results for an internal Z-score analysis:

Where precisely is the most based size-adjusted neighborhood in the most based size-adjusted US county, giving 85% of its 4,236 total votes to the Felonious Trump? It’s precinct 30 (Zillow), just east of the Aggie Expressway, running along Farm to Market Road 1488 [sic, local libs not ok].

Access the Data

Find the interactive table here. A reader kindly exported the data to a beautiful map visualization here.

Note that this table includes a new metric, the RESI, or Republican Electoral Strength Index. It gives the same flavor as the large-county Z-index but works for counties below the mean. It’s particularly useful for finding the most conservative counties in a less conservative state.

Coda: You Can Have It All

One common complaint of smart conservatives is that conservative places lack good aesthetics and decent coffee. That appears to no longer be true. Several of our larger Republican outlier counties feature walkable, New Urbanist developments, which one can enjoy with fewer paraphilia flags and blue-haired devouring mothers with Munchausen by proxy:

• Historic Malbis — Daphne, Baldwin County, Alabama.

• Village of Tannin — Orange Beach, Baldwin County, Alabama.

• Village at Blount Springs — Blount Springs, Blount County, Alabama.

• The Market Common — Myrtle Beach, Horry County, South Carolina.

• Millworx — Post Falls, Kootenai County, Idaho.

• Village at Riverstone — Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai County, Idaho.

• City Harbor — Guntersville, Marshall County, Alabama.

• East Shore — The Woodlands, Montgomery County, Texas.

• Hughes Landing — The Woodlands, Montgomery County, Texas.

• Market Street — The Woodlands, Montgomery County, Texas.

• Pine Market at Woodforest — Woodforest, Montgomery County, Texas.

• Walsh — Fort Worth, Parker and Tarrant counties, Texas.

• Willow Park North — Willow Park, Parker County, Texas.

• TerraBella Village — Covington, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.

• University Place — Orem, Utah County, Utah.

• Utah City — Vineyard, Utah County, Utah.

• Desert Color — St. George, Washington County, Utah.

George Mitchell, the founder of The Woodlands, the largest city in Montgomery County, was a proto-New-Urbanist, dedicating much of the development to conservation easements and a 220+ mile walking trail network. Trees over 6” in diameter require special town approval to remove. Mitchell, the prime mover enabling energy abundance through fracking, was also an overpopulation nut. Ironically, his major professional accomplishments (cheap oil and family-friendly living space) and personal life (ten children) were against the grain of his private concerns.

1

I encourage new readers to review my reasons for preferring Republican areas in the previous post. This may also matter for mental health. While conservatives are generally much more resilient than liberals, there is a depressing effect of living in a liberal outlier:

6

And sometimes significantly better cost-adjusted income. Our winning county for both 2020 and 2024 is Montgomery County, Texas, where my conservative friend in Scottsdale says, “houses are basically free,” in that very nice newer construction homes are less than the price of a lot in Scottsdale. And The Woodlands has higher income! Brutal:

Her first book, GIRLS®, is an exhaustive catalog of the commercialization of every vice and insecurity. As a late Gen Xer who stays relatively current on Internet culture, in reading her book I realized that, while my online life is predominantly experienced, 00s style, in multi-tabbed browsers on a 5K screen, I had little knowledge of the true depths of hell present on the apps. Any parent of a teenager should buy her book.

Problems, Solutions, and Incentives

India focuses more on problems, not solutions. But as I was reading, I remembered Richard Hanania’s now-validated hypothesis in The Origins of Woke. Sometimes that which looks like an inevitable societal trend has its efficient cause in bad laws. Hanania claimed that all of the various aspects of DEI — from affirmative action programs to woke HR trainings to the celebration of the most marginal ethnic and sexual minority holidays in company email newsletters —had their origin in anti-majority interpretations of textually neutral 1960s Civil Rights Laws. For example:

• Affirmative action was a requirement for federal contractors instituted by LBJ, and since most large corporations are also federal contractors, most employers practiced it.

• Selective hiring and promotion were a function of disparate impact laws and the courts’ notorious “4/5” rule: any seemingly objective employment practice, regardless of actual discriminatory intent, was presumed to be discriminatory if protected classes were at least 20% underrepresented.

• Meanwhile, binding precedent had made discrimination claims by historically majority groups (men, whites, Christians, heterosexuals) subject to a higher bar akin to showing not only discriminatory intent but actual malice.

• Late 80s and 90s rulings on “hostile work environments” allowed subjective damages claims independent of actual discriminatory acts in hiring or promotion, with a quasi-affirmative defense available for employers who could show they conducted regular trainings and promulgated policies aimed at promoting tolerance and diversity. Engineers had to waste their time in all-day seminars listening to an aging hippie talk about implicit bias because of a CYA practice instituted by legal.

• And of course, like many legal regimes, and especially given the risk of reputational damage, the cautious bureaucrats in charge of these things often over-complied with what the law, as interpreted, required.

Since the publication of Hanania’s book, his hypothesis was partially tested by the actions of the second Trump administration and several Supreme Court rulings. And as he predicted, DEI practices have retreated in proportion to the change in the legal environment. That they have not retreated entirely is because several court precedents, including those for disparate impact, remain available for private lawsuits despite administrative policy. These partial results lend even more weight to his idea that law matters. Or as Charlie Munger put it, “show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.”

That Hanania was proven right is instructive whether one agrees with the administration’s actions or not, in showing that entire cultural paradigms can be downstream of law and legal interpretation. I contend that the efficient cause of today’s poisonous online environment is a single law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). This isn’t quite the whole story, as other laws and legal doctrines contribute, but a single section of a single law passed in the consumer Internet’s infancy, 1996, explains much of the problem.

The Communications Decency Act

The CDA, ironically, was one of several early attempts to regulate the distribution of obscene materials online, criminalizing their dissemination in any public forum accessible to children. In this regard, it sought to create a parallel regime to public indecency laws, which impose constitutionally permissible criminal restrictions on speech.

To use a pre-Internet example, it is legal to own a pornographic magazine. It is illegal, and remains illegal, to display the pornographic material from such a magazine to strangers passing on the sidewalk. If a perpetrator does that to a child, in public or private, it is considered a criminal child sex offense. Similarly, private nudity is routine, but public nudity and exposure are criminal.

The key legal question was whether publicly accessible websites should be treated as a broad public square or private forums where adults could engage in their full private speech rights. And of course, the Internet companies wanted it both ways. They wanted a public square such that their material was accessible to search engines, leading to user growth and network effects, while simultaneously claiming to be private forums for the full gamut of adult expression, including abnormally salient content of a prurient and titillating nature that would turbocharge that same public growth.

Our representative government disagreed. Both the CDA and its successor, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), were passed on a bipartisan basis by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton. Both became law, unfortunately, when our legal doctrines were under the maximal influence of the radical 1960s free speech movement, which saw obscenity as legitimate artistic expression and restrictions on its distribution repressive, and both laws were eventually struck down by the courts.

But for several years, while they were in force, a different legal regime and ecosystem developed online. Pornographic websites, threatened with criminal liability, put even their free content behind age-gated paywalls, with central service providers performing age verification through credit cards. That comparably primitive 90s and early 00s Internet commerce technology enabled effective age gating when early dopamine merchants were threatened with prosecution makes similar arguments from today’s Internet companies about how such is technologically impossible or burdensome rather ridiculous.

Section 230

While the anti-pornography provisions of both laws were eventually rolled back by the courts, what would become their most legally significant section, 230, survived and was expanded in scope by binding precedent. This section held that the operator of a website or computer service was not considered the “publisher” of content uploaded or submitted by others, and created a statutory safe harbor for those same platforms to optionally moderate their content without becoming a publisher. This provision was enacted rather innocently, as prevailing law had held that any attempt at moderation made the service become a publisher and incur all of the liabilities associated with it, so companies that operated public forums online were incentivized to not moderate at all.

This concept of being or not being a publisher carries enormous legal weight. The First Amendment provided for free speech, but only touched government actions against speech, not long-established common law torts by private parties. Our law has long held, for example, that newspapers are jointly liable for libel published in their pages, along with the actual author of a libel. Since a newspaper profited from and repeated a libel, it made sense that they would be liable, just as an employer is jointly liable with its agents, such as employees, for wrongs committed in the scope of their work duties.

The earliest examples of this online were forums and chat rooms, where the service, say AOL or Prodigy, simply provided a neutral space for discussion, in these cases funded by subscription fees from users themselves. Since these services merely mechanically repeated the messages of end users and exercised no editorial discretion, it seemed fair to some to provide an immunity safe harbor via Section 230. Later iterations of the neutral operator would include free web-based forums and chat rooms that ran banner ads, only eventually evolving into the sophisticated algorithm-driven apps like Instagram and TikTok.

With algorithms, a service promotes certain content to users, distributes that content to them without their asking for it, and runs ads driven not by traditional geography and demographics but rather by the user’s behavior relative to the promoted content and every other trackable action they take on and off the platform. That sounds an awful lot like editorial judgment and traditional publishing.

Doesn’t that make the platforms responsible for content they choose to promote, instead of passively retrieving in response to user requests? The courts, amazingly, have answered no, that the editorial judgment element of the algorithm is insufficient to incur any liability because of the statutory exemption provided by Section 230. One doubts Congress, in 1996, intended to give Instagram immunity to build an amoral robot optimized for maximizing engagement by promoting self-harm content to depressed 14-year-olds, but this is what the courts have held.

And it’s worse than many realize. The courts have held that Section 230 is an absolute shield from liability for any platform for any content hosted, with a narrow exception provided by the DMCA for copyright owners, as long as the content is uploaded by a user, not even requiring an affirmative duty to remove criminal content upon notice.

This immunity is what enabled the unbelievably abusive behavior of the world’s largest pornography website, exposed in 2020 by the NYT. The courts’ interpretation of this law manifested itself as something demonic in its depths, as while the law otherwise requires sites to notify the government if they discover child sexual abuse materials on their site, Section 230 protects them from all civil liability for continuing to host it, and for allowing it to be reposted by users, even when begged by victims to remove it, even when platforms know about it, and profit from running ads next to it. These court rulings fortified the worst of the Internet, not only CSAM but revenge porn and actual videos of rape, providing bulletproof immunity as long as the content was uploaded by a user instead of the platform.

Superintelligent Algorithms

Porn, while still a problem, has been eclipsed by broader social media overuse. We have arrived at the strange point where women, historically the less susceptible sex, now match men in compulsive Internet use. The cause of this was the emergence of algorithmic feeds, arguably the first type of superintelligence, if we define it as machines that surpass human performance in a non-computational domain (in this case, content curation). Porn and gambling are understood to be inherently habit-forming stimuli, but algorithmic feeds have made content that is benign in isolation addictive at scale.

TikTok was the first major platform to do this, by sequencing short-form videos that were pushed to users instead of relying on explicit follows. I recall my introduction to TikTok, in hearing of a 4th grader being harassed with racial epithets in private messages from purported classmates who turned out to be her own family members.

This minor was attracted to the product due to its algorithmic feed of, at the time, mostly benign dance videos. TikTok, like all platforms, has no affirmative requirement to verify age in most jurisdictions. And even though a minor could not consent, and her parents shouldn’t be allowed to consent to an addictive, destructive product, Section 230 protects TikTok from liability. It also protects it from responsibility for the acts and speech of adults who harassed her through anonymous accounts impersonating classmates. And since Section 230 requires no standard of behavior by any platform and grants absolute immunity, TikTok was simply the first to recognize, respond rationally, and develop technology to make its product maximally addictive.

The ecology of this is inherently a race to the bottom. All platforms are acutely aware of the threat of rising network effects in competitors. Instagram, which had once been a chill app to share photos with friends, quickly adopted a similar algorithm and refocused the app on compulsive short-form video. And Facebook recently devolved its app to the same lowest common denominator, with the news feed deprecated to a separate tab and algorithmically served reels made the default media displayed on open.

With Section 230’s broad immunity, each and every platform, to survive, must adopt the most aggressive and addictive algorithm possible, lest it lose users to those who do not show comparable restraint. Human minds have a negativity bias, which means the worst content tends to be the most salient and addicting. Thus, Section 230 stands as the core fact of the market that makes all incentives effectively evil.

Libertarian Errors

Much of the tech industry is spiritually libertarian, in believing that human beings are rational creatures who should be free to do as they wish as long as no one else is physically harmed. Many subscribe to radical doctrines of free speech and regard long-standing common law exceptions to it, like libel, copyright, trademark, or invasion of privacy, as unacceptable compromises.

Most of us reject these priors, but we have tried the libertarian experiment online, and it has failed, as India documents in her book. Perhaps the best empirical demonstration of this is a recent study showing the release of the iPhone alone inhibiting the most essential biological function of the human organism and dropping fertility rates by up to 52%, well before the most addictive apps were released. Of course, smartphones don’t directly cause sterility, but rather social isolation from their compulsive use. This means fewer social outings, fewer real-life chance meetings with potential partners, fewer people becoming couples, fewer people getting married, and fewer children. Given the other well-known harms of isolation and loneliness, the externalities of Section 230 and related legal interpretations protecting algorithms as free speech are profound.

Now libertarians may dislike the following analysis, but I think it holds morally even within their framework. In providing statutory and legal immunity for Internet companies that hold them less accountable to private enforcement relative to offline publishers, the public is, in effect, giving them a subsidy. Implicitly, at least, the libertarian view, in rejecting government regulation, must support private regulation provided by the plaintiff’s bar and common law.

And surely all classical liberals can agree that there is no obligation to provide public subsidies to the tech companies, and the rotten fruit of this subsidy is an urgent impetus to withdraw it. Without libel and obscenity laws, for example, the economics of newspapers and magazines would have followed the same path of salacious, addictive, and degenerate content as the Internet, showing these limits on speech served a constructive purpose. Yet even at their potential lawless worst, the technological limitations of cellulose-based publishing would have inhibited the scope of damage compared to the scale of Internet-based broadcasting. When technology enables distribution to every child’s private bedroom, more, not less, public and private regulation should be the rational response.

Some conservatives will object that such regulation invites the very kind of censorship that peaked in the post-Covid era. Still, smart conservatives have rejected the fallacy of refusing to govern because of what the other side might do with the same power. I’d further argue that if unregulated technologies are socially lobotomizing most of our people, collapsing birth rates, and engineering systemic mental illness, then continuing to extend absolute free speech rights to artificial legal persons like machines and the giant corporations that operate them is a much more serious problem. There can be no marketplace of ideas if there are no sane, sustainably reproducing humans around to debate in it.

Good laws can be crafted to provide broad exemptions for all political speech. Just as regulations on CSAM, or Section 230 exceptions covering sex trafficking, have not materially reduced free speech rights, further regulations on other classes of speech, specifically obscenity and machine-generated output, should pose no fundamental liberty issue. I don’t think the drafters of the First Amendment had in view Meta’s right to publish the output of a computer algorithm with no civil or criminal exposure, and to subject it to the same or even heightened standards relative to traditional publications is not repressive.

Legal Frameworks to Collapse the Economics of “User-Generated” Slop and Scams

From lesser to greater in scope, I propose the following changes to present law and precedent:

• Section 230 must be amended, at minimum, to exclude content featuring sexual acts and nudity. Numerous federal and state laws already covering sexual assault provide adequate statutory delineations of what constitutes a sexual act. Excluding such content from Section 230 enables victims to receive restitution while freeing prosecutors to pursue obscenity cases. Much of obscenity law remains dormant because the dominant distribution channel is protected by Section 230.

• Congress must expand Section 2257 requirements to cover user-submitted content, providing criminal exposure to those who distribute user-uploaded pornography without proper documentation. Further, Congress should create a private enforcement action with statutory damages and attorney’s fees to enlist the plaintiff’s bar in eliminating violators.

• In the interest of throwing more sand in the gears of pornographers, individuals under 21 should be considered minors for their purposes, a regulation that passed constitutional muster in Texas when applied to strippers. Anyone who can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes should not be allowed to consent to producing sexual content, and such legislation should be applied retroactively if possible. Given the Internet is forever, such consent, even when of age, must be continual and non-waivable by contract, and inure to a performer’s heirs or next-of-kin upon death. Once withdrawn, and constructive notice provided, content propagation should be a criminal act and civil tort subject to significant statutory damages. If prohibition proves too difficult, bury the industry in paperwork and legal landmines.

• Foreign websites exceeding some statutory bar of monthly visitors must be required to post a bond to ensure adequate capitalization to handle these new potential torts. If a foreign website fails to post one and is sued, ISPs, upon constructive notice of a legal action, must cease distribution of that website’s content or become liable themselves for continued harms.

• Algorithmic promotion of UGC otherwise covered by Section 230 should constitute a separate act of publication by the platform, subject to all common law tort claims attaching to traditional media. A safe harbor could be provided for platforms that solely deliver non-sexual content organized chronologically and drawn from accounts the user already follows.

• Advertisements should not be considered UGC, but rather be subject to publisher responsibilities of review for facial fraud and false claims. Up to 10% of Meta’s revenue is from obvious scams that would create potential liability under traditional publisher norms.

• Platforms often adopt conflicting legal positions to avoid liability. When content creates a potential tort, they are careful to say they are not the publisher, i.e., not engaged in an act of their own speech. When the algorithms are attacked under product liability and consumer protection laws, they claim algorithm outputs are their speech protected by the First Amendment. Ideally, instead of having it both ways, they would face dual accountability. Algorithms contain a speech component, which should be subject to speech-based torts, and are products subject to ordinary product liability.

• With the success of some state attorneys general in prosecuting Meta under product liability laws, I would implore our legal establishment to reject arguments that the potential cumulative damages, over $1 trillion, should be reduced as unprecedented and fundamentally unjust. The damages are fitting and unprecedented because the harms these platforms have caused our society are unprecedented and easily exceed the damages sought. Mark Zuckerberg and others entirely deserve to have their wealth liquidated to compensate their victims.

• We need to restore a right of privacy in everyday life and eliminate the parasitism of the social networks in distributing the images of people without their consent. My most radical proposal is to take a page from the publicity rights laws of celebrity-friendly states like California and Tennessee and merge that with European concepts of “moral rights” in one’s likeness. Copyright law for mechanical reproductions, like photography, is somewhat inadequate in vesting rights, by default, in the photographer rather than the subject. Since we’re all part of the show now, every American should have a non-waivable moral right to remove images of themselves from distribution on these services on definite timelines, with statutory penalties for platform non-compliance. It ought to be possible to attend a child’s birthday party and get your children’s images removed from platforms when the Boomer grandma overshares on Facebook.

I am not an attorney, so the proposals above are likely riddled with technical problems. The core idea, however, is that quantity and scale are their own kind of quality. Bad laws are often made before their full implications are understood. When Section 230 was passed in 1996, just playing an mp3 on a desktop computer would burn most of its CPU and memory. Internet video at any reasonable resolution and framerate was a distant dream, to say nothing of supercomputers in our pockets. Reasonable laws become unreasonable under different circumstances.

The platforms will argue that without immunity, they could not offer their services to the public, as it would be uneconomic for them to vet every post uploaded by a user before distributing it, or to review all ads for obvious scams before syndicating them. Meta, for example, only makes ~$12 in free cash flow per user per year. On a per-user basis, it’s a sorry business, and provides little absolute value to broader society.

Walmart, by contrast, makes $55 per year per weekly shopper, as the lowest gross margin operator in the lowest margin offline business. Meta’s economics only work with negligence as part of the business model, as hiring properly trained employees to vet content would damage their business perhaps irretrievably. To which I respond, that’s probably a good thing. The traditional causes of action restraining publishers from reckless behavior have a real moral basis. Some businesses are of such a moral character that they should not exist.

In operating this Substack, I do my best to be truthful and to carefully vet claims made. I closely monitor the comments and, on occasion, delete those in bad taste or with defamatory content. This is because people I care about read this space, and part of being a responsible human being is a regard for the truth, especially in public speech featuring potentially infinite distribution.

It is willfully negligent and sociopathic to monetize user-generated content, to profit from allowing the general public to post whatever they want no matter how exploitative or depraved, without close moderation, and to empower a machine algorithm to farm those same users, including developing children and adolescents, for engagement no matter the harm to their mind or soul. But because we have a law that immunizes such behavior, we should not be surprised to have an Internet economy dominated by the most talented sociopaths.

To merely deliver these tech companies into receivership and prevent further harm is, on the moral plane of what they actually deserve, given the human cost of their conduct, an act of tender mercy. That the outcomes we observe were inevitable given the incentives does not morally excuse those that best captured them. “For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”

A Call to Political Entrepreneurship

Reform of the tech exploiters is one of the few deeply bipartisan issues. No one, liberal or conservative, wants to see the people in their lives have their brains fried for profit, including the users themselves: half of Gen Z wishes the Internet had never been invented. That’s impossible, of course, but a better Internet is possible, one regulated by our ancient laws and customs rather than immunized from liability.

MAGA Republicans and Left liberals alike distrust the big tech platforms, who have overplayed their hand and have no friends. Their latest gambit with AI is making them even less popular. Ambitious political entrepreneurs should take note.

The end goal must be to make the scale and scope of the social networks fundamentally uneconomic, and I hope the effort makes some enterprising plaintiff's lawyer a neo-tobacco billionaire. We have chosen this fresh hell, and we can unchoose it.

The Missing Billionaires is a book I keep returning to as a foundational work of personal finance. Strangely, it does a poor job of explaining its thesis (a friend of mine thinks it fails to account for confiscatory taxation of fortunes) while presenting a rational, market-agnostic method of investing. Technical readers in particular will appreciate its deep dive into the mathematics of probability and favorable gambles, the largest of which is the public equity market.

They Really Will Drop Money from Helicopters

For better or worse, I’ve spent much of my life being overly pessimistic about the general economy and investments. Only after the 2020 Covid crash did we become fully invested when it became apparent that a) Covid was not the end of civilization, not even as bad as the Spanish flu, which preceded the Roaring 20s, b) certain mass delusions about green energy (perhaps long-term directionally correct, but way too early) gave old economy natural resource stocks insane low-end valuations that were too incredible to pass up, and c) the 2008 crisis was confirmed not to be a one time exception in demonstrating that a massive deflation like The Great Depression can never happen again because fiat money gives central banks the means to prevent it. The pandemic showed their repeated resolve to drop infinite money from helicopters, just as Ben Bernanke promised.

The latter implies that cash and dollar-denominated bond investments are always a long-term sucker play, only useful to those whose liabilities consist of nominal dollars, such as life insurance companies or pensions. Normal investors have lifestyle liabilities in real dollars, and holding fake ones without a specific warrant is to bleed out wealth slowly. If the real risk is holding fiat-denominated assets, some smart commentators question whether there is such a thing as a durable risk premium in equities.

Is the Efficient Market Hypothesis Correct? Sort Of.

All of this would seem to validate the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and its philosophy of buy-and-hold through dollar-cost-averaging into minimal-fee mutual funds. One danger, however, of this is that it has no limiting principle. If the price of stocks is always fair, why would we expect them not to get bid up to the point where they have no advantage over alternatives?

The key insight of The Missing Billionaires was to accept EMH at a broad level but use different market conceptions of it, critically comparing the earnings yield of the S&P 500 to that of the single dollar-denominated exception to inflation risk, TIPS securities. My original review details that methodology. It was brilliant in unifying theories of positive-expectation gambling, governed by the Kelly equation, with allocations in a model portfolio of stocks and inflation-protected bonds. This approach outperforms, on a risk-adjusted basis, buy-and-hold by avoiding extreme market valuations and providing a reliable trigger for going all-in when the market is at historic values. It is not necessary to follow the model exactly to get an objective read on market risk.

Based on first principles thinking, it demonstrates why Shannon’s Demon works in the markets, and why approaches like Buffett’s 90-10 portfolio (his recommendation for average investors, 90% broad stock indexes, 10% t-bills, constantly rebalanced, which juices returns by keeping a cash buffer to capture value as the market falls) and The Permanent Portfolio (25% stocks, 25% cash / money market, 25% gold, and 25% long-term bonds) can often produce superior returns. By systematically selling appreciating assets and buying depreciating assets, investors end up owning better values over time and taking profits off the table in times of extreme valuation.

The key mechanism of the SPX/TIPS portfolio is comparing the S&P’s CAPE yield to the real yield of TIPS, and adjusting for the volatility of the former. CAPE stands for cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, which smooths current earnings by incorporating a ten-year window, normalizing those for inflation, and dividing today’s price by the result. Since earnings are cyclical, often unsustainably high or low at market tops and bottoms, respectively, this calculation is empirically proven to predict 10-year forward market returns better than the current earnings yield or long-term average returns. To predict where the S&P will be in ten years, simply divide 1 by the CAPE. Currently it’s 41.71, implying an annual return of 2.4% over the next ten years. By comparison, the current risk-free TIPS yield (i.e., the return exceeding inflation) is 2.2%. The S&P currently provides very little compensation for risk.

The model works on a very simple principle: capital seeks the highest risk-adjusted returns it can receive. When risk-free real rates are low or negative, it disciplines bears to buy stocks even if they seem overvalued historically. When real rates are high relative to equity valuations, it forces bulls to limit exposure.

Post-TMB Refinements

The authors, who manage money at Elm Wealth, later refined their measures to be more bullish, as while CAPE is superior to alternatives, it still tends to under-predict stock returns somewhat. By incorporating an iterative calculation that compounds retained earnings at the CAPE yield, they derive a new ratio called P-CAEY, and show that it better predicts both forward returns and earnings than CAPE. That modified earnings yield, the expected annual return over 10 years, now sits at ~2.86% for the S&P, using March earnings and June prices (since earnings are calculated quarterly, the numerator remains fixed for three-month windows).

Another modification mentioned but not precisely quantified in the book was further enhancing returns with the use of momentum. While the S&P has average volatility of 20% — the math is complicated but this means that the average deviation will be ~16%, so if expected return is say 5%, then investors would see an average range of returns anywhere from -11% to 21% in any given year — history shows that when it is rising, as indicated by being above its one-year moving average, volatility is lower at ~15%, and when falling (below the one year average) volatility is higher at ~27%. Bull markets are safer than bear markets.

By switching out the volatility measure for the current market state, higher stock allocations can be justified at higher valuations that exceed the risk-free rate, riding out a top, and faster exits when momentum deteriorates. This can result in frequent trades in and out at market transitions, but this is less important because trading costs for highly liquid instruments like S&P funds are low generally, and in practice they sample momentum states weekly and limit any week’s change to only 25% of the portfolio. They also critique concerns about taxes as being likewise often mathematically minimal in consequence (and non-existent for most investors who utilize tax-deferred retirement accounts).

Application to June 2026 Valuations

Thus, I have been convinced, against my natural pessimism, to trust strangers with my money across a wider range of conditions: that my default ought to be owning equities and other assets that produce income. Sitting around in t-bills whining that we can’t achieve the charmed Boomer-tier returns of Warren Buffett by buying companies for less than cash in the bank would have been ruinous over the last 30 years. Something has definitely changed in the market, and there does seem to be a general glut of capital. We should not expect bear markets to be as long and deep as they were historically. Robust 5-10% real returns are treasures when found.

That said, it does not do to throw in the towel and become a perma-bull. Within living memory, the S&P underperformed t-bills from the 2000 peak to around 2013. This risk is more pronounced for those with high wealth relative to income (e.g., retirees or family offices with legacy wealth), who will not benefit as much from future dollar-cost averaging. And it’s most perilous when valuations reach extremes.

The challenge then is to discipline a bias toward bullishness, subject to a limiting principle and an EMH-compatible, emotion-agnostic framework. I find that in the modified Merton models from the book, in my assenting to the authors’ latter-day bullish modifications for retained earnings and momentum, and rest on the empirical evidence, rather than staying skeptical about management’s ability to reinvest capital or the inherent irrationality of trend-following. I must submit myself to the gods of the straight lines and sacrifice my congenital bearishness on their altars.

Where does that take us in June 2026? With Codex’s help, I built a Google Sheet implementing this most maximally bullish rational model that I can in good conscience endorse. Featuring live Google Finance and FRED data, both SPX and TIPS yields are refreshed daily at close, with only the P-CAEY value needing manual revision quarterly (the price component of the proportion updates daily, with the derived numerator for earnings, which moves slowly anyway as a ten-year average, holding steady for the quarter).

The current recommended S&P allocation as I write this in mid-June 2026? Only 13.9%! Most of this is due to the momentum signal. If the S&P were to go below its one-year moving average, the target would shrink to 4.3%.

One interesting twist is that Elm does not use their own models! Why? I speculate that clients are resistant to following them, as it would be extremely psychologically difficult to go to a 14% exposure in today’s market. It’s very hard to sit out when everyone else is making easy money. They instead feature a “target allocation” of stocks and use the Merton models to modify it, along with adding in some other sectors such as emerging markets and real estate. For most clients who will only tolerate 50% of their “dynamic scaling,” this means a minimum exposure of 42.5%, which is admittedly worlds better than 100% for perma-bulls or 0% for perma-bears. Most people want to have some chips in the casino, regardless of valuations. But strictly following the model, that’s ~14% right now.

And as much as I fight my skeptical priors, I can’t help but notice a recent study by Visa showing that much of the recent economy is driven by wealth effects:

There is a wide body of research on the wealth effect, with most studies concluding that consumers spend between 4 percent and 15 percent of newfound wealth. According to our estimates, the wealth effect between 2002 and 2017 was 9 percent. Said another way, for every $1 increase in household wealth, consumer spending increased by 9 cents. Over the last few years, however, something changed dramatically. Using data through the third quarter of 2022, we find that the wealth effect has increased to 34 cents, almost quadruple the pre-pandemic average. For wealth held in stocks, bonds, and pension entitlements, the spending responsiveness was 24 cents. For wealth held in owner-occupied housing, it was 20 cents.

For comparison, the Federal Reserve found that the long-term average for this measure from 1964 to 2011 was 3.5%, so we are looking at an almost 10x increase in people spending paper gains in the economy. That is, for every dollar of marginal wealth in stocks or housing, people would spend about 3.5 cents annually, which seems reasonable. Visa says that number is now 34 cents, or fully a third of unrealized gains. Paper net worths as a percentage of income are at historic highs.

This strikes me as unsustainable, and accounts for why there appear to be so many “rich” people around. When we vacationed earlier this year in Hawaii at a ridiculously expensive resort, but apparently not expensive enough, I was shocked by how many fat people with garish tattoos were waddling around eating $26 personal pizzas. Where do these people, who clearly have a high time preference, get the money to afford this? The answer, I think, is that they cannot, but spend anyway because that is their expectation as 401k balances balloon.

It’s Never Felt Dumber to Be Smart

People with longer-term outlooks, who are trying to spend wisely and save, have never felt poorer. In my little corner of Texas, median incomes are about $45,000 per worker, but you wouldn’t know it with most people’s lifestyles. By the numbers, nothing makes sense in today’s economic environment.

However, aggregate debt and debt service levels are reasonable. The economy is indeed “K-shaped” at the moment, with a larger-than-ever prosperous class and a shrinking middle class. The top 10% of earners account for about half of spending. The wealth effect may be accelerating an eventual rise to unsustainable borrowing, but it hasn’t happened yet.

2000 Redux?

The closest analogy seems like 2000, not 2008. The standard weighting of indexes is by market capitalization, which means that of the 500 S&P companies, investors end up with less diversification than they might expect, because they own more of the top stocks. The higher certain stocks go, the more standard indexes force passive investors to hold them. Currently, the top 10 SPX stocks account for ~38% of the index, and the top 50, ~63%. This is a historically unprecedented concentration:

Alternative funds feature equal weighting, sidestepping this issue, though with the liability of theoretically owning more of lower-quality companies than investors might prefer.

Currently, the low earnings yield of the SPX is almost entirely an artifact of tech companies, because extreme valuations are notably not present on an equal weight basis, nor in mid or small caps. Using a linear proportion to estimate the forward P-CAEY (messy but good enough):

Using the standard model and assuming comparable volatility, the rational allocation to the equal-weight S&P is 25%, and up to 45% under the momentum-informed model:

This is somewhat overpriced, but hardly severe crash territory, for the equal-weight S&P. Meanwhile, the standard S&P has a worse concentration overall than during the 2000 Internet bubble, though with a somewhat more favorable earnings yield relative to the risk-free weight. ChatGPT summarizes the numbers:

And in that era, the equal-weight SPX did much better, declining only 20-25% by the best estimates compared to 78%, 49%, and 38% for the cap-weighted Nasdaq, SPX, and Dow 30, respectively. Note that things don’t have to be as extreme as 2000 to get a crash; for example, 2007:

And comparing both to today (numbers compiled 6/23/2026) with the simple, less invested Merton model for relative comparison:

So right now we’re somewhere between the 2007 and 2000 peaks in terms of valuations. Some caution, or at least reallocation away from the high-fliers through an equal-weight index, is cheap insurance. I hate to be forced into a semi-bearish posture, especially given my previous errors, but what cannot go on forever will eventually stop.

And considering the strategic importance to all of humanity of keeping oil flowing, it was a mistake to allow the accidents of geography to determine their sovereignty over the same. There was a strong argument not so long ago that God intended the sons of Britain, that world-changing combination of Anglican prudence, Presbyterian muscle, and Methodist zeal, to govern the Earth as the most capable of doing so2.

So I’m not automatically opposed to the assertion of American authority in the area, as such would be an improvement on the region’s domestic situations, if Americans would rule instead of engaging in fantasies of nation-building3. I’ve held off on commenting, as these things take time to play out, and I was hopeful that it would somehow work out well. That now seems less likely, as even a strategic victory appears to be a disaster politically.

1. The origins of the operation seem to be linked to a unilateral action planned by Israel that the United States joined. The strategic reason for this, presumably, is that if Israel were making a move for which the US would be considered a co-belligerent, it would be better to more severely reduce Iran’s response capability with a joint US force.

2. This, however, doesn’t quite make sense. Iran historically has blustered a lot about treating an Israeli attack as an American one and promising total destruction upon their enemies, but their response last year to a limited bombing campaign was mostly symbolic. Iran’s government is more a Boomer kleptocracy than a theocracy in practice. They care more about retaining power than ideological consistency.

3. So why did Trump order a major engagement? One story is that he believed Netanyahu’s claim that regime change by air would be easy, and perhaps he was overconfident coming off the success of the Maduro raid, despite the warnings of senior US military leaders that the Israelis always exaggerate. But this seems to sell Trump short, as I think he’s too smart to believe Netanyahu at face value.

4. The subsequent episodes with Netanyahu and the Israelis escalating to derail cease-fire efforts are a particular tell as well. Trump wants to end it quickly, but somehow cannot.

5. I generally hate indulging in conspiracy theories, but it cannot be dismissed that the Israelis might have some kind of compromising information as leverage. I highly doubt this involves Trump himself or any direct relationship with Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein’s MO was helping rich dorks who can’t pull women on their own connect with vulnerable teenagers and trafficked women from Eastern Europe.

6. In fact, one of my contrarian theories about Trump is that he’s not as promiscuous as he likes people to think he is. Trump is a germaphobe and a natural monogamist, at least serially, and he compensated with all of the “John Barron” leaks to the Times about his supposed sexual escapades. He has talked of his fear of AIDS in the 1970s (which never posed a significant risk to heterosexuals using anatomy as designed). He even has a strong personal preference for specific brands of hand sanitizer. In relationships, given his opportunity space, he’s a fairly normal secular male who cheated on his first wife, probably got cheated on by his second, and has remained married to his third. In each of those cases, he married women who were 22 (when he was 28), 30 (at 47), and 34 (at 58), respectively. This is not a pattern that indicates a paraphilia for teenagers. There’s simply no evidence he was interested in anything Epstein could offer. Thus, I think any intel the Israelis might have involves Trump family members, and while there are public clues as to what this might be, I won’t speculate here. This might be more effective leverage, as while Trump is pretty shameless about his own behavior and will defend almost anything about himself, he would be more sensitive to those around him.

7. Israel’s behavior is more perplexing. Trump’s foreign policy, without war, had delivered the best security in their history, including de facto recognition by the Gulf States. They had a free hand to handle Gaza, though they seemed to have managed it poorly in the post-television and post-smartphone era. They have claimed that Iran is “months away” from a nuclear weapon for twenty years. Yet it also seems this is a quixotic concern because a) the long-run odds of suppressing an 80-year-old military technology from a large nation-state with East Asian, European, or Central Asian scientific capability are almost nil, and b) mutually assured destruction is demonstrably the world’s best security regime, halting the horrific early-to-mid-20th-century industrial war meat grinder in its tracks. This is even true for lower-tier cultures with higher baseline irrationality, like India and Pakistan. There is no reason to think the same disincentives wouldn’t hold for Iran. Israel’s insistence on not leaving well enough alone and destabilizing the situation, unfortunately, feeds antisemitic tropes about Jewish paranoia and seems bearish for the region and Israel itself.

8. One hopeful alternative hypothesis is that Netanyahu’s particular circumstances might better explain Israel’s erratic behavior. He’s facing serious criminal accusations of corruption in Israeli courts, and the Iran war is serving the same purpose of delaying court proceedings that the Gaza crisis did. As a native of the Mediterranean-influenced culture of Louisiana, I can say this means the graft must be pretty bad, especially when you strip out Christianity’s higher ethics in the case of Israel. No Prime Minister of Israel nor governor of Louisiana is going to be indicted by their states for common pig-at-the-trough self-dealing, but rather for outlier hogs-get-slaughtered-scale behavior that even those cultures find beyond the pale. It means Netanyahu exceeded the petty personal enrichment that is expected as a matter of course in such jurisdictions and attempted to grab the chips of other power centers with their own means of state retaliation.

9. It is indeterminate at this moment if the war will end up somehow serving American interests. It’s hard to see how it does, as all we need from Iran is to produce and sell oil, which they are perfectly happy to do; however, the UAE’s recent departure from OPEC is good for us. But Trump, thankfully, is a pragmatist without ideological or theological commitments. He may be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat like he has so many times before and turn this into a win on the merits. If he can, it will be his greatest political triumph, as inflation is always extremely unpopular with voters, even if temporary, because prices are sticky and wages rarely keep up.

10. But this may not matter. The concerning problem is an unrecoverable fracture of the MAGA coalition post-Trump. This country can roughly be divided into 35% conservative, 30% liberal, and 35% independent.

11. The Trump electorate can be described as an amalgamation of anti-war independents and anti-immigration conservatives. The independents don’t care as much about immigration, but they hate war and religious nuts who foment wars unnecessarily. The extended Dubya wars were traumatic for the nation, particularly for those who served in the military. And while Dubya wasn’t a dispensationalist, his motivation for the war was adjacent to evangelicalism’s “main character” narratives surrounding personal testimonies. As a former drunk, Dubya could have seen himself as less qualified to lead because of the addict’s fundamental selfishness, and consigning himself to a quiet life working with his hands (which seems to be how he copes now, painting portraits of men he caused to be wounded). But evangelical culture made him think he was more qualified to lead because of a special connection to God, which is just the same narcissism in religious garb. The same idiocy resulted in a conviction that all Middle Easterners needed was “freedom” and the gospel of liberal democracy to turn around their innate pathologies. The country as a whole, especially independents, correctly identified this hypocrisy / stupidity and hated it.

12. Nothing radicalizes a person like comrades who died, got maimed, or were hollowed out psychologically for a pointless war. Many of those people correctly identify Zionist neoconservatives as key agents fomenting that war. Trump’s breakout moment in 2015 was his bullying of Jeb over Dubya’s folly. I fear war-motivated voters will never trust Trump or Republicans again4.

13. I have been working for some time now on a piece on the “postwar consensus,” seeking to synthesize several threads from the Dissident Right. I had hopes that a new coalition would be possible, given the Left’s seeing Western Civilization broadly, Heritage America, and Israel as essentially the same thing: oppressive white colonizers.

14. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this is politically viable after the Iran debacle. The war is so unpopular, and more realist members among Israeli nationalists, like Bill Ackman, seem unable to restrain their bloodthirsty Boomers like Miriam Adelson, and by extension, Benjamin Netanyahu. This is really bad for Jewish / Israeli interests long-term, as their cause is now almost universally hated among the young, and feelings search for rationalizations that are difficult to reverse once popular. Why would forward-looking conservatives expend effort and political capital debunking, say, Holocaust denial, when doing so would alienate potential voters? Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.

15. What I mean here is that any association with the ultra-Zionist wing is politically dead on arrival, which makes it hard to appropriately nuance, for public consumption, alliances with more reasonable, realist Zionists. There’s not really an upside to an alliance for the rising Right. A majority of Americans, independents, liberals, and young conservatives now have sharply negative views of Israel, all for very different reasons. The public will assume any such combination, including even realist Zionists, will undermine the stated agenda, and the ultra-Zionists will use their power to push for wars not in the American interest. Given that’s what they just did with Trump — manipulating the administration into a needless conflict, selfishly burning political capital and thus disrespecting other members of the coalition by hindering the domestic agenda for a generation with their foolishness — the public’s skepticism is not without cause. This is not to predict a general anti-Jewish bias at the individual level, but rather that anyone, regardless of ethnic heritage, becomes a liability if they are a public lackey for Israel. Stephen Miller is in, but Ted Cruz is out.

16. Incumbents like Cruz will continue for a time, given the ignorance of voters makes incumbents difficult to unseat and strong support among the fading demographic of older dispensationalist Christians in the American South. But in any open seat, Cruz-style glazing for Israel will become a liability. I predict a major split in the 2028 Republican primary. A soft Israel skeptic will arise, possibly Vance, leading to the bitterest primary since 2015, and perhaps exceeding it. A watershed moment will occur when Zionist money cannot overcome the will of the voters.

17. Netanyahu and his generation of leadership have made grave political mistakes. As Israel gained strength, they continued to lean on the Holocaust as carte blanche for Israeli actions. American Jewish organizations such as the ADL alienated conservatives by smearing them as racists and anti-Semites for years, relying on the irrationally motivated dispensationalist wing of the Republican Party to maintain right-wing support. Young conservatives largely reject this theological mythology and, in private conversations, pin many of our societal problems, like ubiquitous pornography, on Jewish influence5. Further, the Holocaust-as-raison-d'être gambit is a classic “if you win, you lose” fragile strategy, for the lesson of the Holocaust is that the weak are privileged, and strength is always suspect. To the broader world, as Israel gained strength, it looked more like the Nazis and less like victims. The Palestinians outmaneuvered them in the media by successfully copying the tactics of the best 20th-century leftist agitators.

18. Rational Zionists must make a clean break and pin this on Netanyahu. In fact, the only way for Trump to put the band back together would be make Netanyahu a scapegoat for the entire war. Trump would be well-served to ensure he dies in prison, and that Israeli interests commit themselves to reasonableness going forward and accept being a “normal” country: okay with diplomatic half-loaves like everyone else. Short of this, what’s happening here, whether deliberate or not, looks like the Boomer’s last ride, from goofball useful idiot old dispensationalists like Mike Huckabee to Netanyahu himself, who may see Trump’s presidency as his last best chance to reset the diplomatic table militarily before US support becomes more limited in the future. They severely underappreciate the worldwide reputational damage being done to the Zionist cause and their ability to contain it in the social media era.

19. Anti-Jewish stereotypes are, ironically, becoming out-of-date even as they strengthen. The New York Times this past weekend published a piece on Israeli use of trained rape dogs. Whether the allegations are true or not, and more remarkably if they’re not, it’s clear that “Zionist control of the media” is not currently the situation6. Netanyahu is now reduced to a common schmuck forced to sue a newspaper for defamation after the fact.

20. Economically, the most interesting aspect of the situation in Iran is the durability of cheap oil. Extreme anti-war types continue to predict economic catastrophe real soon now with the Strait closed, but people with money on the line don’t agree. As I write this, oil delivered in January 2027 is selling for $76.

    

    If the market is right, it means Iran and the Middle East don’t matter as much. American petroleum engineers can ramp up production with advanced fracking technology that changes a lot of the geopolitical assumptions. A professor at Texas A&M, the world’s leading petroleum engineering program, puts it this way:

    The potential $90/bbl price is geographical fiction. Operators are pulling crude from the earth at $15/bbl using advanced computation, while the global market panics and pays $90 simply because a surface tanker cannot safely cross a conflict zone. Producers are not slowing down; they are drilling relentlessly for the cash flow required to service debt and sustain operations, completely ignoring the surface-level geopolitical chaos and silently adding to the massive, hidden global glut.

    Most petroleum molecules are in the shale, at least 4:1, and that’s just known reserves. We find more when we look. We’re headed for an unbelievably massive abundance long-term with cheap oil. F-250s aren’t going anywhere. And the oil glut, of course, makes the case for this war being in the country’s interest much less plausible. If we can produce all the oil we need in places like Midland, why do we need to be involved in Bronze Age feuds between dueling Christ-denying religions?

Like Marx, George blamed the social pathologies and inequality of his era on a singular actor. Marx’s devil was capital; for George, it was the unfair advantages accruing to landowners. George proposed a less radical solution than Marx: laissez-faire except for a single tax on the value of land, not improvements, sufficient to offset the value of income derived from the land itself.

The Georgist Economic Model

George, unlike previous economists, separated production into three rather than two factors: raw land (including all materials and natural resources attached to it), capital, and labor. For George, moral rights in property can only accrue based on man’s thrift (capital, as a form of accumulated labor) and work (labor). Since land is provided by God and nature, he believed any income derived purely from land was immoral and parasitic upon the rest of mankind, in that the landowner received value from others without an equal exchange of his own smarts, virtue, or production.

George arrived at his conclusions somewhat empirically, though I’ll have to more precisely quantify what he seemed to be saying. He noticed that the conditions of the unskilled laboring class, say the 25th percentile, were highest where economic development was lowest. In newly opened territories, men could find good land cheap and, with their own hands, scratch out a better living than what was offered as an unskilled laborer in the cities or more developed parts of the country. Effective “wages” or quality of life were higher on the frontier for the poorest people, and inequality the lowest.

To George, this was a paradox, because higher population density results in higher economic output per person, because each person can more efficiently specialize. This is even true at the micro level in agriculture, in that 5 men working 25 acres will have higher output than each working 10 acres alone.

And scaling beyond this, all things being equal, quality of life ought to be better in a city for everyone, given higher production. But this wasn’t the case. The squalor of laborers in the cities contrasted with the obscene wealth of the upper classes was something universally concerning to 19th-century social reformers. Conservatives argued it was due to nature, some combination of Malthusian and Social Darwinist reasoning, whereas liberals argued it was due to capitalism and called for direct wealth redistribution.

George made the more elegant argument that it was caused by land rents. Now this sounds like a weird concept to non-economists, but it was and is a widely accepted economic fact, first defined by Ricardo.

Imagine an independent farmer growing a cash crop. Out on the frontier, settlement has coalesced around a river, where irrigation is easy, and the soil is rich. This land, however, is already owned by someone else. Other land, not as good, is available for free if one claims a homestead. Now, say the rich land can produce a crop worth $5,000 per year per acre after expenses, and the free land, with the same labor, can produce a crop worth $2,000. The guy who owns the good land can offer the newly immigrated farmer a deal: if you work my land, I’ll take 50% of the crop, and you can keep $2,500. The landowner does zero work, collects $2,500 equivalent as rent, and the farmer is still better off than owning his own land, which would only produce $2,000 per acre. In this scenario, like all realistic scenarios, the tenant farmer is offered a small incentive relative to acquiring his own land, but we can see that the maximum “rent” of good land can be defined as the difference between the profit generated on the good land and the profit generated on the next best land available to work, in this case, $3,000 per acre.

This is the simplest example, but land rent is even more pronounced in densely populated areas. Imagine a modern scenario in a city for an operator of a coffee shop. The shop occupies 1/10 of an acre. In a prime location, it would generate $200,000 a year in profit, and in a less prime location would generate $100,000 per year in profit. Assuming the building is identical in both locations, what is the marginal value of the land rent for the prime location? $100,000 per tenth of an acre, or $1 million per acre. But the value created by the prime location, according to George, is nothing attributable to the landowner other than his luck in owning it, but rather to the network effects of the city, the labor and production of millions of people, in which the landowner effectively owns an interest, which George thought morally worse than slavery (more on that later).

The Idiot Index, or Gross Material Profit

Perhaps the easiest way to explain George’s model is to borrow Elon Musk’s “idiot index,” which compares the material cost of inputs to the sales price of the transformed output. Musk brings stuff in-house when any component seems to have a high idiot index. This can be expressed as a workable accounting I call gross material profit, modified for George:

Gross Material Profit = Sales - Material Costs

Thus, gross material profit is all of the money possibly available to pay the humans involved. Such that:

Gross Material Profit = Profits (“Supervisory Labor”) + Return on Capital (Equity / Interest) + Labor + Land Rent

George’s thesis is simple: mathematically, the higher land rents, the less money available to compensate business operators (George calls owner profits “supervisory labor,” and as a business owner who sometimes loses sleep worrying about various problems I agree with George’s taxonomy), investors and/or lenders (which George lumps together as “interest,” all the same thing just varying degrees of risk), and laborers. George would predict that as an economy develops, landowners will do best, businesses and investors second, especially to the extent their businesses aren’t constrained to local markets where rent extraction hits hardest, and labor third.

George is surprisingly charitable among progressive reformers towards business owners, and particularly merchants and traders. He rightly acknowledged that a distributor who, for example, ships oranges from Florida to Ohio is essentially an economic alchemist who produces amazing value. Most people’s consumption of oranges is very limited, so moving oranges from where there is an excess of production to where they are demanded is of the essence of producing common wealth for society.

One of George’s ideas that rings true for me as an operator is that he says that wages are not paid by capital out of an arbitrary fixed pool, but rather by labor itself. In other words, no business owner hires anyone without an expectation of sales from customers to absorb that employee’s wage plus some profit, either now or in the future, appropriately discounted.

Land Speculation

His theory doesn’t stop there, however, blaming most of the problem not on rents per se, but rather on land speculation. Land rents are bad enough, but when lands are bid up beyond their income value to the value someone expects them to be in a few years, this introduces distortion into the economy. Land demanded for food, or housing, or some productive use is held in reserve by speculators. According to George, the primary benefit of his land tax would be to make holding land out of production inordinately expensive, as the only way to offset his tax is to put land into use.

One of George’s key insights is that supply and demand are the same thing. In his time of relatively high moral development, he thought it absurd that men who wanted to work in order to provide goods for their families often could not find employment. The man with a supply of labor and a demand of wants, he thought, ought to be able to find work, especially in a specialized economy! His work, though specialized, should satisfy the wants of other men’s families, and likewise the work of those other men his own.

George suggests, but does not prove, that it must be land speculation that causes the occasional disruptions and depressions that prevent supply and demand from naturally finding each other. He says:

That land speculation is the true cause of industrial depression is, in the United States, clearly evident. In each period of industrial activity land values have steadily risen, culminating in speculation which carried them up in great jumps. This has been invariably followed by a partial cessation of production, and its correlative, a cessation of effective demand (dull trade), generally accompanied by a commercial crash; and then has succeeded a period of comparative stagnation, during which the equilibrium has been again slowly established, and the same round been run again. This relation is observable throughout the civilized world. Periods of industrial activity always culminate in a speculative advance of land values, followed by symptoms of checked production, generally shown at first by cessation of demand from the newer countries, where the advance in land values has been greatest.

And invites us to compare the starving urban masses to a man on an island:

In his own willing hands is the supply. Put him on a solitary island, and though cut off from all the enormous advantages which the co-operation, combination, and machinery of a civilized community give to the productive powers of man, yet his two hands can fill the mouths and keep warm the backs that depend upon them. Yet where productive power is at its highest development they cannot. Why? Is it not because in the one case he has access to the material and forces of nature, and in the other this access is denied?

Caveats to George

While I find George generally persuasive, his strident, idealist tone is off-putting (more on that in the Coda). But a couple of quick caveats that occurred to me:

The increasing production of population density, even in agriculture, is George’s strongest argument against Malthusianism, which he takes significant time to refute, as it was the core objection Social Darwinists used to counter progressivism. We now know from more robust economic histories, such as Clark’s A Farewell to Alms, that Malthus was right about most of history, but started being wrong just about when he came up with his theory around 1830. Wages and birth rates did, in fact, go up after medieval plagues because population limits were running up against the carrying capacity of the land.

And by George’s day, the Industrial Revolution had broken Malthus, and I’ll note that George was making his observations in the 1870s, at the peak of the post-Industrial but pre-petroleum age. Petroleum enables cheaper transport of goods and people, decreasing the value of location and land rents relative to other factors in the economy. It would not surprise me if it were true that George’s observations were true at the time, but became less true as petroleum supercharged the Industrial Revolution. And George himself, in his less wide-eyed moments, acknowledges that improvements in technology can raise absolute wages even as it captures a greater proportion for landowners.

Where George’s arguments seem weakest is in his claim that agricultural wages, net of land rents, must determine factory wages. It seems to me that manufacturing is more agnostic to land quality and location than agriculture or, say, retail stores. As more of the economy drifts into manufacturing, I don’t see how that necessarily translates to more rent for landowners. A factory can take the worst land and pay higher wages, driving up the competitive wages for agriculture, and thus lowering landowner rents.

But George here has a ready counterargument, and an empirical one. Take, say, a knowledge worker whose need for land is trivial. That same worker consumes the products of land: food, petroleum, and most critically, housing. The inability of Gen Z to find affordable housing, as the reasonably commutable suburbs of major cities have been built out over the last 50 years, would tend to make George’s arguments more relevant than ever. In other words, the fruits of petroleum in increasing the local addressable supply of land, and expanding the middle class, was a one-time windfall that has mostly been reaped, and George’s iron laws of land rent are back in operation1.

Testing George Empirically

It occurred to me that George made certain predictions that can be tested in today’s economy. With the help of Dr. Claude, I tested two predictions of George:

1. The wage premium in the cities with the highest populations should be entirely captured by the higher cost of living.

2. That land ought to be a better risk-adjusted investment over long periods (say a century, 1920-2020) than any other asset class, including stocks. This intuitively feels wrong, but George claims that land rents will eat the lunch of business owners over time.

Looking at #1 first, nominal wages to cost of living, comparing the top ten metros to the cheapest metros, BEA statistics show that there is no wage premium for more expensive cities:

The data show that workers in the highest value metros receive virtually no wage premium in terms of cost of living, and the lowest wage earners are slightly worse off. This is even more surprising given that the highest value metros have more human capital: more education, and higher value industries. NYC has a GDP per capita of $100k, whereas Memphis is at about $65k. Median workers get virtually zero of that premium.

Claude estimates that median NYC workers lose just over 32% of their take-home pay in land rents2!

Now moving to #2, is land a better risk-adjusted investment? I asked Claude to compare a portfolio invested in land, real estate, S&P, treasuries, and gold from 1920 to 2020. To remove hindsight bias, the real estate portfolio was selected prospectively, based on the top ten cities as of 1920, so it includes some winners, like NYC, and some relative losers like Detroit. The simulation assumes a general downward trend in rents from ~6% in the early part of the dataset to ~3% today. Investors have bid up George’s core thesis!

Urban land had a higher return and less downside volatility3 than the S&P 500, gold, and bonds. And because of the difficulties in finding clean data, this analysis likely understates the true return, as the land portion comes from residential land estimates from the Case-Shiller housing index, not the most valuable urban commercial land. This means these returns are artificially capped as formerly residential land is distilled off into the highest-earning commercial properties.

A further tell on the superiority of land is that real estate is the only class of asset where banks will loan 80% of the value, with a fixed rate of interest. They will not do that with stocks!

The only sixth-generation wealth I’ve ever encountered was in real estate. The family’s patriarch purchased crop land outside the city, which became part of its eventual urban loop. The family has a simple rule: never sell and never borrow4. Likewise, Johann Kurtz highlighted a study out of Britain showing that, among nobles, the landed aristocracy, as opposed to those given to merchants starting in the mid-1800s, are today wealthier than the “new money” that was supposed to replace them. Your odds of being an elite in 2026 are much higher if your ancestor came over “with the battle-ax” in 1066 than the proprietor of a massively successful business in 1850.

The Georgist Portfolio

George was a utopian schemer whose land tax is practically unworkable for reasons not worth discussing because they’re also politically impossible. The man was economically correct, however, and the implied strategy is obvious. If landowners eat for free — a “first-rate fortune” endorsed by Dumas’ Count — then the task of any investor seeking permanent wealth is to transform as much of his labor and inferior assets into land rent income as possible.

Now, before you Texans get too excited, the implication here is not to go buy hundreds of acres of rural land so you can pretend to be a cowboy; they call it “land poor” for a reason. Your ranch is a consumption item, not an asset. The real engine of George’s thesis is not agriculture, but rapidly developing urban land that achieves rent density far in excess of its raw natural value. Improvements are a drag on returns because they depreciate, so the best investment would be prime land in urban cores with highly depreciated improvements that provide an acceptable rent based on the land value rather than the structure value. In other words, be a “worst of the best” slum lord: dingy warehouses, dilapidated parking lots, and almost fully depreciated triple-net fast food or retail franchises with fewer than ten years remaining on the lease, but in the best locations for redevelopment.

This also makes us feel pretty good about our top investment, pipelines, which are more of a real estate play based on the value of land than the improvements. The corridor of easements, etc, is many times more valuable than the transport infrastructure. They complicate the tax return with K1s, but that other great advantage of pass-through real estate income, depreciation, makes much of the income tax-free.

That said, because of the advantage of control, there are numerous advantages of owning parcels outright instead of slices. With minority stakes in real estate investment trusts or publicly traded partnerships, there are often situations where management acts irrationally to protect their own jobs, whereas an independent owner can close value gaps by taking action with the asset.

And then, of course, there’s the 1031 exchange, an unbelievable gift to real estate owners. Imagine if stock market investors were able to defer capital gains indefinitely as long as they bought a new stock within six months of selling an old one. Well, real estate investors get exactly that with a 1031 exchange! They can sell and buy new property without zero tax liability as long as they reinvest within six months, effectively never paying taxes on gains unless they leave the asset class. And given the returns, why would they? Mason Gaffney, one of the few recent mainstream Georgist economists, thought the entire project of neoclassical economics was a conspiracy of sorts by landowners to strangle George’s movement, and the 1031 exchange makes this believable! And as I wrote in my review of The Sovereign Individual, land even seems to survive conquest:

Even conquest from a competing state rarely results in a permanent loss for a great asset owner. Nazi Germany, for example, mostly did not seize multi-generational landed wealth in France nor Poland. Go down one tick in rapacious severity to the previous European tyrant, and we find that Napoleon conducted virtually no private wealth seizures and simply redirected tax revenues to his coffers. Unless your occupiers are ideological communists, even hostile enemies understand that they are better off collecting taxes from a competent owner than risk mismanagement of the assets underlying their tax revenue stream, or disrupt supply chains that could starve millions.

Self-owned parcels could also be superior in that one of their weaknesses, illiquidity, may be a strength. The aforementioned Johann Kurtz, in his recent Leaving a Legacy, recommends real estate for durable family fortunes because it is a) hard to sell and b) relatively easy to manage. All heirs have to do is not sell and cash rent checks. If the heirs are self-controlled enough to follow the advice of The Missing Billionaires and calibrate consumption to income rather than the market value of assets — which is easier to do when an asset is illiquid and only easily valued by monthly income — then a fortune is much easier to keep by avoiding overspending from temporary wealth effects endemic to frothier times in the stock market. Some critics call this “volatility laundering,” but since stock market earnings are much less volatile than stock market prices, it seems salutary if one’s liquid value isn’t reassessed daily, which, given Mr. Market’s irrationality, would exacerbate the twin demons of fear and greed.

But control is key because owners have the power to reduce volatility. Owners decide how much of the cash flow goes to reinvestment vs dividends, with no conflict of interest with management. They can sell something if values are high, but the management of a public company can resist sales and poison pill to preserve their jobs. Control enables taking advantage of irrationality on the upside and downside. And because real estate is typically evaluated based on earnings yield, buying at a low price feels more like a win (“we bought a Class A property for an 8% cap rate”) than with stocks.

So how should one acquire a Georgist portfolio? After all, one of George’s theses is that land is often bid up past its inherent economic value in advance of expected future appreciation, and Buffett famously said an asset owner makes his money when he buys: don’t pay too much. It is harder to overcome bad timing and buying when speculative values are at their max. You’d rather be an unsophisticated real estate investor with good timing than a sophisticated one buying at a peak.

Interestingly, Georgists have identified an approximately 18-year cycle in real estate based on George’s theory of land speculation driving economic crashes. Our last cycle peak was 2008, which would mean our next peak is (checks math)… 2026. Once a peak occurs, the ideal time to buy is 4-8 years later, which would be 2030-2034. If George is right, it’s fortuitous to discover him now, with time to accumulate dry powder when the next cycle begins.

Later in life, George began to see that other types of monopolies were akin to land rent5. Yet, all businesses need “moats” to survive, some form of monopolization, and it is the duty of all business owners to turn earned advantage into more durable and sustainable unearned advantage, as the same pitiless forces that oppress the laborer oppress the owner of a commodity business.

But George, however impractical, is a moral witness that all successful enterprises incorporate some aspects of unfair, lucky, or providential monopolies. To whom much is given, much is required, and while one can reject George’s radicalism, those blessed in the capitalist system should keep in mind their obligations to others and be particularly generous to those who co-labored with them to build durable margins without unlimited upside, as well as do their part to maintain the communities and political systems that enable their prosperity.

Coda: The Two Georges & Yankee Idealism

George’s rhetoric was my first book-length encounter with the type of Yankee idealist cited by another George, the Southern apologist George Fitzhugh, who said:

The Abolitionists, the only assailants of Southern Slavery, have, we believe, to a man, asserted the entire failure of their own social system, proposed its subversion, and suggested an approximating millennium, or some system of Free Love, Communism, or Socialism, as a substitute.

…

The failure of laissez-faire, of political economy, is admitted now by its last and lingering votary. Free society stands condemned by the unanimous testimony of all its enlightened members.

…

The people in free society feel the evils of universal liberty and free competition, and desire to get rid of those evils. They propose a remedy, which is in fact slavery; but they are wholly unconscious of what they are doing, because never having lived in the midst of slavery, they know not what slavery is.

Fitzhugh attempted to link abolitionism to other radical Northern doctrines, and the documentary record made that rather easy. “Free love” included the “complex marriage” of the Onedia colony, the polygamy of the Mormons, and the “radical individualism” of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Unlike most provincial Southerners, Fitzhugh had an intellectual curiosity about Northern radicals, considered many his friends, and took their claims about the interconnectedness of various liberation movements seriously. Andrews made explicit his belief in the abolition of both slavery and marriage:

I take the position which, saving the judgment of my critics, is exceedingly new in the world, that I have no better right to determine what it is moral or proper for you to do than I have to determine what it is religious for you to believe; and that, consequently, for me to aid in sending you or another man to prison for fornication, or bigamy, or polygamy, or a woman for wearing male attire, and the like, is just as gross an outrage in kind, upon human rights, as it would be to aid in burning you at Smithfield for Protestantism or Papacy, or at Geneva for discarding the doctrine of the trinity.

…

I suppose the case that in the use of our new-fledged freedom I act on my convictions, not his, and change my relations every week or month, or take an unusual number of conjugal partners…

…

The restraints of marriage are becoming daily less. Its oppressions are felt more and more. There are to-day in our midst ten times as many fugitives from matrimony as there are fugitives from slavery; and it may well be doubted if the aggregate, or the average, of their sufferings has been less. There is hardly a country village that has not from one to a dozen such persons.

Subsequent history and the “penumbras and emanations” of Supreme Court jurisprudence seem to align more with Fitzhugh’s jeremiads and Andrews’ prophecies than conservatives’ standing athwart progressivism, demanding that it stop.

On the wage versus chattel slavery issue, Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All uses as its central rhetorical device an example borrowed from Andrews. Imagine a merchant’s carriage breaking down in a rural village where there is one wheelwright able to conduct a repair. The merchant has perishable cargo worth, in today’s money, $15,000, that must be delivered to a nearby port, or it will be worthless. The wheelwright offers to repair the wheel, which will take an hour, for just under $15,000, since that’s “market price” in the circumstances.

Most readers’ consciences are shocked by the wheelwright’s behavior, but to Fitzhugh, this is hypocrisy because a) the situation is not morally different but simply unusual, whereas everyday acts of commercial advantage-taking are accepted due to convention, and b) it represents a rare instance of labor exploiting capital rather than the reverse. To Fitzhugh — and many abolitionists agreed, which he extensively documents, with approximately half his book consisting of quotations or paraphrases of his opponents’ admissions against interest — free labor was nothing more than a race to the bottom to give the lowest possible wage for the maximum extracted output. Fitzhugh’s core argument to the North was to remove the plank in your own eye before seeking to correct the speck in the eye of your countrymen6.

Orestes Brownson, a prominent Bostonian and abolitionist, likewise critiqued the North’s wage system:

Wages is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders.

…

If the slave has never been a free man, we think, as a general rule, his sufferings are less than those of the free laborer at wages.

The laborer at wages has all the disadvantages of freedom and none of its blessings, while the slave, if denied the blessings, is freed from the disadvantages.

We regard the slave system as decidedly preferable to the system at wages.

Henry George agreed:

When the slaveholders of the South looked upon the condition of the free laboring poor in the most advanced civilized countries, it is no wonder that they easily persuaded themselves of the divine institution of slavery. That the field hands of the South were as a class better fed, better lodged, better clothed; that they had less anxiety and more of the amusements and enjoyments of life than the agricultural laborers of England there can be no doubt... In the Southern States, during the days of slavery, the master who would have compelled his negroes to work and live as large classes of free white men and women are compelled in free countries to work and live, would have been deemed infamous... But in London, New York, and Boston, among people who have given, and would give again, money and blood to free the slave, where no one could abuse a beast in public without arrest and punishment, barefooted and ragged children may be seen running around the streets even in the winter time, and in squalid garrets and noisome cellars women work away their lives for wages that fail to keep them in proper warmth and nourishment. Is it any wonder that to the slaveholders of the South the demand for the abolition of slavery seemed like the cant of hypocrisy?

…

Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain. So long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership of the land from which other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material progress goes on, must grow and deepen!

George and others’ diagnosis of the poverty of free labor in this era was later verified with modern empirical techniques when Nobel-winning economist Robert Fogel documented that enslaved people had superior diets (about 3,400 calories / 165 grams of protein vs. 2,800 calories / 100 grams of protein for free laborers), longer life expectancy (36 vs. 33), fewer working hours (2,800 annually vs. 3,200+), and better housing (69 square feet per person versus 30-40 in NYC tenements). None of this is to say that slavery was good, but rather that if the wage free labor could attain was materially worse than what they would receive in-kind as chattel slaves, then there must be some hidden injustice in the Northern system, especially given industrial advances in production per capita7.

This, I think, is ultimately both why slavery had to end and some form of socialistic safety net extended into the free market: public workers’ compensation, unemployment, disability, and retirement insurance8. At some point, the moral logic of Huey Long’s “BBQ speech” dominates, in that when the common necessities of life become so trivial to produce due to technological advances, it seems unjust for basic material needs to go unmet. But this is a hard problem, and one set of benefits, morally justified, creates a constituency for bigger public benefits that create real moral hazard, given our current condition of mass public dependency and 11% of prime-age men not in the workforce.

George never quite explains how he wants to spend the revenues of his land tax. It would have covered the entire government of the time and then some, and he’s unclear whether he would have redistributed the excess directly to citizens with some sort of UBI, or else have the government spend it on other public goods. Today, however, a total tax on land rent would barely cover 25% of government spending. George’s bigger prediction, never tested, was that such a tax would free up additional productive capacity to make many of today’s social welfare programs unnecessary.

And, this, I think, is the best argument contemporary Georgists can make. If George is right, it would be much cheaper and morally desirable to tax land (and presumably other types of monopolies) and open up labor and capital to expand output to more efficiently and evenly distribute the bounty of modern production, rather than engaging in ruinous schemes to redistribute the stunted yield of monopolies on the back end9. Like Fitzhugh, his ideas were a brilliant synthesis reconciling the productivity of capitalism with the moral claims of socialism, and unlike Fitzhugh, he does not feature slavery as a central organizing principle. And his land tax is endorsed by many mainstream economists as the least harmful in avoiding taxing productive activity, agreeing with George practically in his moral claim that God’s endowment of nature is rightly property of the entire commonwealth.

But George’s rhetoric goes well beyond that, and this is what ultimately kills his credibility. A wide-eyed idealist, he claims his land tax would, among other things:

…abolish poverty; tame the ruthless passions of greed; dry up the springs of vice and misery; light in dark places the lamp of knowledge; give new vigor to invention and a fresh impulse to discovery; substitute political strength for political weakness; and make tyranny and anarchy impossible.

That thieves, drunks, and prostitutes would disappear:

The potential earnings of the labor thus going to waste, the cost of the reckless, improvident and idle habits thus generated; the pecuniary loss... suggested by the appalling statistics of mortality, and especially infant mortality, among the poorer classes; the waste indicated by the gin palaces or low groggeries which increase as poverty deepens; the damage done by the vermin of society that are bred of poverty and destitution—the thieves, prostitutes, beggars, and tramps...

That he would eliminate pride and greed:

It seems to me that in a condition of society in which no one need fear poverty, no one would desire great wealth—at least, no one would take the trouble to strive and to strain for it as men do now. For, certainly, the spectacle of men who have only a few years to live, slaving away their time for the sake of dying rich, is in itself so unnatural and absurd, that in a state of society where the abolition of the fear of want had dissipated the envious admiration with which the masses of men now regard the possession of great riches, whoever would toil to acquire more than he cared to use would be looked upon as we would now look on a man who would thatch his head with half a dozen hats, or walk around in the hot sun with an overcoat on. When every one is sure of being able to get enough, no one will care to make a pack-horse of himself.

And George makes the error of many progressives in rejecting God if the world is, by design, unequal:

It is difficult to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation which are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind result from his enactments; while the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity, irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life, not the individual life, which is the object of human existence. Thus has vanished with many of us, and is still vanishing with more of us, that belief which in the battles and ills of life affords the strongest support and deepest consolation.

George was accidentally right about Malthus, but takes this argument further, advancing an extreme blank-slate view about the uniform abilities of man, and the limitations of any differences to merely superficial. He argues in another passage that men are more equal in their ability than other animals, more like different colors of horses than breeds of dogs (and interestingly, he ignores the more obvious analogy of breeds of horses, which are significantly different from each other, say a Clydesdale versus a thoroughbred). But at the margin of productivity in complex, fragile, advanced economies, small differences can add up to big outcomes. This seems an unnecessary idealism for his theory, given that rejecting Malthus was sufficient. But for him, Malthus and Darwin are sufficient reasons to reject belief in God.

This makes no sense to me. The Scriptures teach an eternal, infinite inequality that seems much harder to accept than unequal temporal conditions, but this error is not uncommon among modern Christians, who somehow sit more easily with the doctrine of eternal hell, which I struggle with mightily, but can’t abide mere differences in innate productive capacities and resulting material inequality here, where our “days are as grass.” Divine election and hereditary traits are both non-meritorious favor or disfavor, but the former is forever.

And finally, I promise I’m not making this up, George believes his land tax would inaugurate the return of Christ:

With want destroyed; with greed changed to noble passions; with the fraternity that is born of equality taking the place of the jealousy and fear that now array men against each other; with mental power loosed by conditions that give to the humblest comfort and leisure; and who shall measure the heights to which our civilization may soar? Words fail the thought! It is the Golden Age of which poets have sung and high-raised seers have told in metaphor! It is the glorious vision which has always haunted man with gleams of fitful splendor. It is what he saw whose eyes at Patmos were closed in a trance. It is the culmination of Christianity—the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl! It is the reign of the Prince of Peace!

And what of landowners relying upon their title and security? Well, under George, they get nothing for the diminution of their property:

Historically, as ethically, private property in land is robbery. It nowhere springs from contract; it can nowhere be traced to perceptions of justice or expediency; it has everywhere had its birth in war and conquest, and in the selfish use which the cunning have made of superstition and law.

…

This robbery is not like the robbery of a horse or a sum of money, that ceases with the act. It is a fresh and continuous robbery, that goes on every day and every hour. It is not from the produce of the past that rent is drawn; it is from the produce of the present. It is a toll levied upon labor constantly and continuously. Every blow of the hammer, every stroke of the pick, every thrust of the shuttle, every throb of the steam engine, pay it tribute… It takes little children from play and from school, and compels them to work before their bones are hard or their muscles are firm; it robs the shivering of warmth; the hungry, of food; the sick, of medicine; the anxious, of peace… it fills brothels with girls who might have known the pure joy of motherhood; it sends greed and all evil passions prowling through society as a hard winter drives the wolves to the abodes of men; it darkens faith in the human soul, and across the reflection of a just and merciful Creator draws the veil of a hard, and blind, and cruel fate!

…

Now if we apply to this case of The People vs. The Land Owners the same maxims of justice that have been formulated by land owners into law… we shall not only not think of giving the land holders any compensation for the land, but shall take all the improvements and whatever else they may have as well.

Security in property ownership is the foundation of the rule of law, yet we see, in one volume, a fanatical Yankee making the case for seizing it, without compensation, and those who refuse him are the moral equivalent of man-stealers and antichrists holding back heaven on Earth. Talk about Jurassic Locke! George may be directionally correct, and his remedy among the least crazy, but controlling the intellectual descendants of these people remains a challenge for any free society.

They were and are bats**t crazy religious heretics. Darren Beattie has argued that conservatives must have a positive vision for ruling, that “don’t tread on me” will always lose persuasively to “silence is violence,” and I tend to agree. But man, that seems hard when a Yankee liberal can work himself into a lather about the Second Coming of Jesus Christ over a preference in tax policy. What conservative is unhinged enough to compete with that?

Conservatism means not doing that kind of thing, of accepting limits in a fallen world, but I think attracting support in a mass democracy will require it. We see this drift already, with the masses attracted to insane but directionally correct narratives that thinking conservatives accommodate out of political expediency. Some bemoan this drift, but to me it’s no different than the way the Left has motivated their lumpenprole voters for decades, and part of conservatives’ finally figuring out a formula for durable electoral success, because a gentleman’s republic it ain’t. We could return to the elegant arrangements of our founding, but that seems less achievable than George’s land tax.

Nothing is less helpful than “Boomer bootstrap” pep talks by people who could pay for college with part-time summer work, get a good job with benefits based on a firm handshake instead of competing with third-world ethnic networks, and buy a house for two years’ wages; most simply cannot understand Gen Z’s real challenges. And while in this piece I will try to be helpful, I acknowledge that my Generation X had it only slightly harder than the Boomers economically. I went to a state school, easily found a well-compensated position with a Fortune 50 company, and could afford to buy a new home within a year of starting that job. Gen Z is red-pilled and angry that the “deal” of the American Dream, the return that should attach to their effort and education, has been largely financially captured by others.

But the downside of the red pill is the black pill. If believing pretty lies is myopia, exaggerating the truth is equally destructive. Human psychology tends to focus on the negative — if it bleeds, it leads — and this creates a market for “despair merchants” who take the unfortunate situation of Gen Z and extrapolate beyond rational bounds. Despair, while painful, is also attractive because it offers its adherents an excuse for inaction in the face of adversity; since people are always motivated to conserve energy, a sense of hopelessness can be comforting, especially when the counterparts of the despair merchants, the dopamine merchants of online distraction, are eager to monetize and encourage wastes of life and its precious, limited time.

In a recent talk with Jeff Giesea, Aaron Renn spoke of the opportunity for Gen X to serve as “generational brokers” to mediate between out-of-touch Boomers and despairing Zoomers. As a younger Gen Xer, I step into the breach at the risk of sounding old and out of touch and offer the following.

Category Errors and Epistemic Arrogance

The fallacy of the woke era was “because exceptions exist, stereotypes are statistically false.” An opposite fallacy of the post-woke era is “because stereotypes are statistically true, exceptions are so rare as to be practically non-existent.” But stereotypes are statistical statements, which, to be complete, must include some measurement of variability, which means exceptions! Unfortunately, people are prone to thinking of continuities as categories. Despair merchants drive engagement by taking legitimate shifts in the distribution of underlying phenomena, like economics or problems with the opposite sex, and exaggerating those into absolute statements.

Online culture has even developed its own faux-fallacy, NAXALT, “not all X are like that,” to mock those who advocate personal agency to find exceptions to trends. Now it is a fallacy to use exceptions to protest a distribution, but in many cases, insular online communities of despair insist that whatever exceptions exist are irrelevant to their complaints and that trying to optimize one’s personal situation is a betrayal of the cause.

Arguments from exceptions are fallacies if debating political mega-trends, but this is notably not true for any individual. A person needs one job, one house, and one spouse. Logically, an undesirable shift in distribution should a) cause one to support policy or cultural changes to correct the distribution shifts, while also b) causing one to individually expend more effort to find exceptions. These two are not in tension. It is the insistence that effort is useless, or that lower or zero effort is justified, that is logically unrelated to bad societal trends.

A further problem with statistical trends is that they can lead to an epistemic arrogance beyond the actual weight of the evidence. Take the parenting children as an example. Much of a child’s future is set at birth from their genes1, but this plurality of influence is moot once a child is born, since genes are set at conception.

Thus, all further effort on behalf of that child, while considering any limitations, will focus on entirely non-genetic causes of life outcomes, i.e., optimizing the child’s environment. And indeed, we see this is exactly how parents raise their children! The genetics of a child, while important, are of little marginal utility when it comes to raising that same child. The only relevant insights are a) letting parents calm down and maybe have more children, since many outcomes are pre-baked and outlier efforts that limit family size to optimize the environment are likely wasted, and b) being careful about peer influences, which seem to be at least as significant as parenting in affecting outcomes2.

Contrast this with public policy. That genes control most life outcomes has enormous implications, notably for excessive education spending, which is likely wasted compared to other interventions. It would tend to advise against assuming structural or cultural causes of inequality rooted in discrimination and oppression, and laws based on such assumptions are likely to cause economic harm. Since culture and intelligence behave like phenotypes, immigration policy should be extremely cautious about assuming universal assimilability, insisting only on immigrants with a desirable origin society as “proof of work.” The same statistical fact about distributions has massive public policy implications at the macro scale, but many fewer at the micro scale for optimizing the life outcomes for any individual.

Thus, unfavorable economic and cultural trends are functionally “background noise” for any individual. It’s unfortunate, but just a cost of doing business, and the “business” here is life itself, the only thing any of us truly possesses.

Overcoming Epistemic Arrogance Through Sales

Statistical tendencies that are valid over large numbers are often practically moot in individual situations, particularly where small zero-cost probabilities of success are worth pursuing. These are exactly the types of situations where Gen Z is struggling: jobs, housing, and relationships. No matter how low the odds, and how much worse it is from previous generations’ opportunities, it doesn’t cost anything real to apply for a job, search for a deal, or ask someone on a date.

The perceived costs are fear of rejection, and the tendency to over-rely on intuition; “this will never work” is fatal if it’s only approximately true, if the odds are actually small but non-zero, and repetitions are low cost. This is particularly true for people like me, as I tend to overly abstract reality and stay stuck in my head. That’s why it was so helpful that one of my first jobs was in commission sales at RadioShack.

Zoomers may only know of RadioShack from episodes of Young Sheldon; think of a Best Buy, but about 1/10 the size, tucked into a mall or small shopping center, but offering all of the same products from televisions to cell phones, minus the appliances, and adding in a hobby section in the back for electronics nerds. Reasonably competent with tech, I was delighted when offered a position at minimum wage plus 6% commission.

Now, I am not a great salesman, and RadioShack didn’t change that, but the experience hardened me against my overreliance on intuition. There were certainly trends as to who may or may not be a good customer, but those patterns were irrelevant for any individual customer. The store was rarely crowded anyway, so each customer was a possible positive interaction to earn a commission.

We were at the beginning, in 1996, of the consumer era of the cell phone, which had been confined to business use or the very wealthy. The company required me to ask every customer if they had a cell phone, and to go through a precise script to qualify them, direct them to a postpaid or prepaid plan accordingly, and attempt to close the sale. Those sales earned me 6% commission plus a $10 spiff from BellSouth Mobility, which felt incredibly lucrative as a recent high school graduate.

Being a mediocre electronics salesman taught me that patterns are of limited utility in the small numbers of sequential in-person interactions. Some rich guy might come in and talk to me for an hour about a $2,000 stereo with a 100-CD changer, tell me he was coming back the next day with his truck to buy everything, and never show again. An annoyed customer in a hurry, 5 minutes before closing, would come in for a portable phone battery and end up buying a computer. A frazzled mom with her kids tagging along, who just wanted a Caller ID box, would end up waiting 15 minutes on a credit check and walk out with a cell phone.

Exceptions to trends were a substantial part of my take-home pay, and this would not have gotten through my thick head without the experience of seeing it happen every day. And all I had to do was talk to people, help them competently with their initial request, and ask them politely about buying something other than what they had intended to buy.

These experiences helped me learn to just do things to take advantage of low-risk, low-odds situations, which is most of life. If something costs little to try, the odds don’t matter that much. Take something with a 1% chance of happening but negligible cost in time and money. How many shots does one need to take before it’s likely to work out?

Well, the equation for that is n = log 0.5 / log 0.99 = ~69. That’s 69 tries before, chances are, something is successful. Hard, yes, but not impossible. And it exponentially improves with better odds. For 5% odds, it only takes ~14 tries before it more than likely works out. So bad background situations, like my likelihood of convincing any particular customer to buy a cell phone, or deteriorating economic and cultural environments, are offset by low-cost repetition.

Employment

This brings us to how young people can handle today’s job market. As an employer, I can shed some light on this. Like sales, all good things pursued are non-linear processes, iteratively achieved through probing, getting more information, and trying again, especially when dealing with people. Every person’s job search is idiosyncratic, but here are some relevant thoughts on the current economic/employment moment:

• The AI narrative is real and fake at the same time. The technology, while promising and impressive for limited-scope operational tasks right now3, does not replace humans, and only reached a very basic level of trustworthiness less than a year ago with the release of the o3 model. At best, according to my smartest tech-forward developers working with it, we’re talking a 10-15% bump in productivity when working with a scalable, customer-facing, revenue-generating production codebase (as opposed to vibe-coding prototypes or one-off internal tools), which is a steal on a pay-as-you-go basis, but hardly, at this point, revolutionary. But that’s an inconvenient truth for many large orgs that went all-in. Here’s how this works. Decision-makers for enterprise software are old guys, and those selling it are young, fratty guys who make bank by helping their customers seem cool and on top of trends. The guys selling the tokens, usually in bulk, guaranteed money deals to large customers, have an incentive to create a media story that AI can replace massive numbers of employees. If you’re an older decision-maker with a budget, your biggest insecurity is being considered a dinosaur who’s hopelessly behind the times, yet you’re too far removed from actual work to know what’s really going on. The fratty salesmen prey upon these insecurities to sell tokens. If you spend enough on tokens, your butt is on the line if they’re not used. You need to show ROI4. That means forcing AI into the org, regardless of where it makes sense, and changing performance evaluations to consider it as a “leading indicator” of future productivity. Most critically for ROI, that means slowing hiring and claiming an AI framing, even if it means adding to technical debt, spending reputational capital, and/or burning out incumbent employees. Further, the current hiring slowdown predates the latest, most useful models by at least 18 months, so AI in actual use cannot possibly be the proximate cause. At best, it’s an extrapolation of what AI may be able to do in the future.

• Large orgs exhibit herding behavior in hiring. When big employers are locked into the AI narrative, a temporary cartel of sorts can slow hiring across the economy. Almost any organization not controlled directly by majority owners (i.e., nearly every large org) has many unnecessary workers and can function for quite a while without hiring. The salary system of fixed annual pay means they pay no marginal cost for overworking their staff, and if they all slow hiring at once, staff can’t leave for better working conditions.

• Given AI is really good at the sort of useless CYA “strategic planning” where midwits attempt to predict the future to show that they’re operating by expert consensus and thus can’t be blamed when things go wrong, perhaps many bureaucratic email-type “jobs” can be replaced5. As I’ve covered elsewhere, AI provides a pretext for highly paid executives to remain highly paid with smaller staffs, and thus work less, and spend more time in Colorado working remotely, for which they developed a taste during Covid. This is overall maybe a good thing, as we have a weird system where our “aristocracy” works itself to death while the poor are so idle and subsidized they get diabetes, once the affliction of kings! It will be a blessing long-term if our upper classes can take a prosperity dividend, like the welfare class, and spend more time with their families instead of pretending to work by writing memos and attending meetings all day, or at least have AI produce the memos for CYA purposes and then summarize them to save time on the consumption end.

• The BLM-driven, DEI hiring spree of the 2021-2022 was economically destructive. Large orgs ended up hiring a lot of dead weight, and AI provides an innocent fig leaf to lay these people off. Unfortunately, you can’t just fire the bad ones if there’s disparate impact, so a legally defensible last-in-first-out scheme, or else targeted departments, means competent employees will also be part of the carnage, even if these layoffs are a net economic gain. This fig leaf also requires a delay in new hires on a more meritocratic basis, if only to maintain appearances.

• AI has one more 2-3 year cycle in front of it. The large capital expenditures for AI only work out economically if “artificial general intelligence” is achieved, which I’ll define as actually replacing most white-collar human jobs not protected by a licensing cartel6. The scaling laws of AI require exponentially more compute and training scale to achieve economically significant increases in functionality. The current models are on the scale of tens of billions of dollars, and the next step is hundreds of billions, collectively adding up to trillions, which are being deployed into data center and hardware spend right now. The next models must produce something approaching AGI to justify these expenditures, as the next step, spending tens of trillions, is likely economically impossible. If those models do not, there will be a massive crash in the values of most companies investing in it7, and companies in a “wait and see” mode will begin hiring again. Most importantly, old guys who bought tokens from frat boys will be able to admit they were wrong and not get blamed, because it will be acceptable to be wrong when “no one could have predicted” how things would turn out, whereas to admit you are wrong now is risky if AGI is achieved, and in bureaucratic environments there’s no upside to be right early.

• Young people can wait this out because the fundamental demographic math isn't changing. Legions of Boomers are retiring with nominal dollars, which they expect to provide them with goods and services as they no longer contribute economically to society. Those dollars will bid up the value of a shrinking pool of workers, particularly high-quality workers, given long-term cultural trends eroding the Protestant work ethic. The graph of the dependency ratio will continue its high-velocity upward trajectory through 2030. Sometime between now and then, there will likely be a wage reset upward for workers and a great hiring boom. If Boomers, perhaps after an AI-deflated market correction and crushed by inflation in living expenses, start selling their giant empty houses and collapse the housing market, young families might have a chance again for the American Dream.

  

But what to do in the meantime? Two recommendations:

1. Young people must network. As a business owner, my goal is never to hire from the general public, as it’s too risky, because people be crazy. The EEOC rules make this too dangerous, so most desirable jobs outside huge organizations, and many inside them, are never posted to a job board. Anyone who makes a hiring decision is vulnerable if that decision goes sour, so people seek certainty by hiring among networks of others they trust. Probably the best source of leads is friends of older people who know and trust you. Most hiring decisions are made by older people, so a friend of your parent, pastor, or mentor is more likely to work out than networking with your friends in entry-level positions, and these folks love helping out younger people who show drive and initiative in other contexts. Nearly every young person probably knows 20+ older people who could help. And don’t email, work those phones!

2. Consider using the hiring depression to do a rotation in a sales position. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at it or if the opportunity is sketchy financially; just avoid shady employers who want you to sell your grandmother whole life insurance. You want real sales experience selling to actual strangers. Even failing at a sales job is an opportunity for enormous growth in a universal skill that never depreciates. Sell solar panels door-to-door, or books for Southwestern. The latter is possibly the hardest-core opportunity available, where the first task is to approach strangers and convince them to allow you to rent a room in their home in your sales territory. Which takes us to our next topic, housing.

Housing

Gen Z is uniquely disadvantaged in that those lucky enough to find jobs can’t afford the kind of housing Americans have always preferred for family formation: detached homes with a yard. High-density New Urbanism isn’t a solution here either, as the only places where raising kids in urban density is doable — the kinds of places where it’s safe to send your kid to the park unaccompanied — are also extremely expensive thanks to fair housing laws8, as the only legal way to exclude troublemakers without disparate impact is economically. Two-bedroom townhomes in Serenbe, Georgia, for example, are well north of $500,000.

The housing market of the last few years has been the worst in recent history for new homebuyers. Both prices and mortgage rates have remained out of sync, an anomaly in housing history, where rising rates usually crash housing values, such that monthly payments stay reasonable via one mechanism or the other. The friction in the housing market seems driven by two factors:

1. Incumbent early Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer homeowners often have, due to higher incomes or wealth effects from investments, the capacity and confidence to either service two mortgages, own two homes, or pay cash for one and finance the other. Higher post-inflation incomes with lower nominal fixed costs means fewer homeowners are forced sellers even when they no longer desire to occupy the property.

2. The rapid rise in mortgage rates means many of these homeowners are sitting on 3%-vintage mortgages, which are, functionally, assets that represent a lose-lose upon selling the home.

3. These same owners have been taught their entire lives to “buy the dip,” and so holding out for higher prices seems wise for them. Given the certainty of future money printing by the government, this isn’t crazy.

4. All of this is incredibly unfair to younger buyers, and again, it’s policy choices by the government, such as printing money and shutting down the economy for a virus that was mostly harmless to the younger people who paid the price for these choices.

The result is that housing prices sit well above the net present value of their future cash flows. Another name for the latter is rent, and indeed, in almost every market, rents lag far behind housing values.

Gen Z might be advised to remember the words attributed to Rockefeller, “own nothing, control everything.” Homeownership with borrowed money is a costly business, and when rents are low relative to values, renting is not a bad strategy:

• Rent is indeed throwing money away, like any other consumption expense; there’s no residual value in the expenditure. But the same applies to renting money. Interest is over 80% of the first year payments on a 30-year mortgage. In some markets, interest alone exceeds the cost of renting an equivalent home.

• Homeownership also means being owned by your home. Almost everything in a house depreciates and eventually needs replacement or repair. The cost of repairs has likewise exploded, which is yet another liability that ought to moderate home values, but has not in this very strange market. If owning a boat means “bust out another thousand,” homeownership means being ready for another “T” because it’s not unusual for a needed home repair to be ten or twenty thousand.

• Strictly speaking, an asset is something that produces net income. Thus, a home is an asset to the extent its annualized total cost of ownership offsets rent. When owning is more expensive than renting, owning a home is a liability.

• We’re at a weird spot in the market where homes are “valued” past even a reasonable premium on rent. As mentioned previously, many incumbent owners have homes with non-transferable 3% mortgages, where it feels weird to sell at a market-clearing price. Remember, older people dislike write-downs on their net worth spreadsheets. Many will gladly rent their properties for near the marginal cost of the 3% mortgage, taxes, and insurance.

• What you really want is the use and control of a single-family home with a yard, and accepting this, younger people can be more flexible about whether, financially, that’s better structured as debt or rent.

• Tenants have more power over landlords than many assume in fragmented single-family housing. In a normal market, this is called being a “customer,” which is usually the preferred position! A good, clean tenant is hard to find, and changing tenants is risky. Landlords have a fixed cost, and so they are often reluctant to raise rent and risk going vacant or replacing a good tenant for a bad tenant, since the latter can cost way more than any rent increases. Tenants often indirectly benefit from the landlord’s need to just cover their on-the-books historical cost.

So, how best to make this calculation? You need to directly compare annual rent to the annual total cost of ownership, and this will differ by market. An extremely financially literate younger friend of mine, married with two children, decided to rent instead of buy a very nice home in an upscale suburb of a top 10 market after running the numbers. He came up with the elegant solution of using percentages. This is convenient because the mortgage rate is expressed as such, and it makes the math easier. The formula is roughly:

Ownership Annual Cost = Loan Value * Mortgage Rate + Annual Insurance + Annual Maintenance + Annual Taxes + Annual Opportunity Cost of Down Payment

That last term is the lost return in conventional investments in having money tied up in a house, because, long-term, houses only keep up with inflation. It’s reasonable to assume that the mortgage rate and the opportunity cost of the down payment are about the same right now, something like 6.5% for the entire sales price. Doing this, the whole equation can be rendered as a percentage for any metro by dividing everything by the sales price. The equation simplifies to:

Ownership Cost Annual % of Sales Price = Mortgage Rate + Insurance Rate as a % of Sales Price + Maintenance as a % of Sales Price + Annual Tax Rate (slightly more detailed online calculator here)

Say mortgage rates are 6.5%, insurance rate is 1%, and taxes are 1%. People in the rental business usually assume about 1.5% in annual maintenance costs, which again can vary widely from year to year, but serves as a long-term average. That gives 10% total of the sales price, which is exactly what my friend calculated as a total for his market, though differing in the underlying numbers.

He figured out he could rent a $2.5MM house for $6,000 per month, i.e., $250,000 annual cost to own vs. $72,000 annual cost to rent. And this is not a rare find! He did it with his previous, smaller home, too, where his rent was $24,000 annually on a home valued at $1.2MM (the actual sales price after he moved out). Buying this home would have cost $120,000 per year, and rent was only $24,000! He had a cordial relationship with the landlord and, for years, was paying only $18,000 annually.

As long as these discrepancies between rents and home values continue in certain markets, owning will remain economically irrational. The market will eventually sort it out, but buying now means locking in these bad economics, whereas renting gives optionality if values converge.

The best deals require some legwork, because the Fair Housing Act makes public rental listings as risky for a homeowner as the EEOC makes public job listings for a business owner9. Even realtors, who used to quietly facilitate shadow rental inventory to connect civilized tenants to picky landlords, are extremely reticent to share any information, even about the quality of local schools, for fear of losing their license. The best results, again to use those sales skills, will be looking up individual owners with desirable homes for sale (ideally that have been on the market a while and sit unoccupied) on property tax records, and directly connecting via social media, where they can see what kind of tenant is asking before considering a lease.

And socially, what matters is that you enjoy possession of a single-family home. It’s no one’s business if you rent or own, and if pressed, saying “oh, I lease it from a friend to help him cover his mortgage” is both true and nearly as high-status as owning. Which brings us to the next topic: the epidemic of loneliness.

Loneliness

Perhaps the hardest-hitting form of despair for the young is the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the sexes. Rod Dreher speaks of the dangers of “forbidden knowledge,” of the perils of knowing too much about the bare material substrate of human relations. He specifically relates this to population-level genetics research, which might severely undermine the assumptions of equality necessary for a multicultural society to function, and while I disagree with him on that specifically — multiculturalism is an optional policy choice not required for human flourishing — too much material cynicism about the opposite sex is arguably in this category. Men and women have to get along for any society to perpetuate itself.

The cat is already out of the bag, however, for Gen Z, and there’s no going back. The deepest cut of despair for many is their accepting that the most intimate relationship of one’s life is backstopped by a type of economics, just like employment and housing, and that the looting of the country for the medium-term gain of old people’s stock portfolios also explains a good bit about why they can’t find a suitable spouse. I will argue that while this is mostly true, it is not entirely true, and false enough at the individual decision level to preserve some dignity, that our relationships need not be wholly mercenary.

But to make this argument and extend another analogy, one can’t engage in Boomer denial (“just be yourself”), or Gen X anger / cynicism (“I wish I was special”), or Millennial bargaining that retreats to “authenticity,” but must walk alongside Gen Z’s full acceptance of reality. They believe that, for men, height, status, and income matter most, and for women, appearance, and they’re fully prepared to either compete on this basis if they can, or give up and drop out if they can’t, because to many of them, the idea of romance uninformed by “market value” is dead.

And again, to draw on the previous framework, material explanations do appear to be the primary driver of big-picture statistical outcomes, directionally validating the instincts of the most disenchanted Gen Z influencers in the space:

• One speed dating study with a large 10,000+ dataset found that once controlling for observable physical traits (e.g., physical attractiveness, height, age, BMI, race), most harder-to-observe traits add little. The authors report that variables like education/religion, etc., typically explain <1% additional variance in men’s desirability after the physical variables are in the model. It explicitly notes that desirable women, especially those with lower BMI, end up matched with higher-income men largely because those men choose them, not because women are strongly selecting on income in the event.

• Another speed dating study found that “Women put greater weight on the intelligence and the race of partner, while men respond more to physical attractiveness. Moreover, men do not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own. Also, we find that women exhibit a preference for men who grew up in affluent neighborhoods.”

• We may scoff at young guys who go through elective surgery and months of pain to add a few inches to their height, but a study of married couples showed “gender-asymmetric trade-offs arise within couples between physical and socio-economic traits, but also between anthropometric traits, with significant penalties for fatter women and shorter men. Wives’ obesity (body size or weight) measures are negatively correlated with their husbands’ income, education and height, controlling for his weight (or body size) and her height, along with spouses’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Conversely, heavier husbands are not penalized by matching with poorer or shorter wives, but only with less educated women. Men’s and women’s height are both valued in the market, with shorter men matched to heavier and less educated wives, and shorter women to poorer and less educated husbands (the latter effect only shows up in 2005).”

These empirical realities about averages and distributions are taken by engagement-bait farmers and extremized into absolute categories. The message is that if you’re a short guy, or make less than $250,000 a year, or are a plain woman, you’ll never find love. They try to convince women that the guys are all porn-brained and only care about impossibly perfect, or else entirely artificial, standards of beauty — and then the idiots’ gallery piles on for rage bait in describing Margot Robbie or Sydney Sweeney as “mid” — and likewise tell the men that women all think they’re entitled to “6’5”, blue eyes, finance, trust fund.”

It doesn’t help that there is a massive tragedy of the commons, with the obesity epidemic lowering the baseline of mutual attraction, while overexposure and desensitization to beautiful outliers of both sexes are constant in high-definition fidelity. And this isn’t even porn, just Instagram, which, in presenting body forms, differs by just a few square inches of opacity. We’re a long way from the 90s guys who were exposed to a few minutes a week of Baywatch on fuzzy, standard-definition, tiny tube TVs, or the 90s girls whose expectations of extreme luxury were limited to Cribs or Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

This is, again, all statistically true on the macro level, where variability tends to cancel out. But nothing in life is as micro as, ideally, finding the one person to share one’s life. And there is significant hope at the micro level.

Take the reductive but common “1-10 scale.” While average ratings are highly objective and replicable, individual ratings are quite variable10. For someone who is an ordinary “5’,” about 25% of people will see them as a 4 or below, and 25% of people will see them as a 6 or above; the typical perception will be a whole point up or down from the average. Among 10 people, the expected spread for this same 5 will be a low of 3 and a high of 7.

This means one has to be very careful about cynically dismissing romance as a cruel and indifferent market. It is not a brutal commodity market where goods are precisely defined, competition is purely on price, and no one makes a profit on average, but rather a differentiated market where significant win-win possibilities exist. And this is good news!

The whole reason why markets beat socialism is due to subjective value and the possibility of win-win trades where everyone feels like they got a deal. Contra the despair merchants, a good match is not two 5s settling for each other and relegating themselves to a merely tolerable coexistence because of their average luck in the genetic lottery, but rather two 5s who both think they’ve caught a 7, which, for most non-delusional people, is an amazing alternative to dying alone.

How possible is this? Well, running the same math in parallel, for an individual who is a 5, to meet someone who is also a 5, where both parties perceive the other as a 7 or better, would happen with a 50% probability after something like 83 random interactions. Not dates, just interactions, as people can size each other up pretty quickly. And for two 5s who consider the other a 6 or better, it’s only 11 interactions before the probability exceeds 50%.

And the real odds are likely much better than this, as interactions with the opposite sex are anything but random, and these ratings, like the apps, are based on two-dimensional photos. The problem with the apps is not so much that they’re superficial, but that they’re not even superficial, but rather facile, based on inadequate information to even make such a judgment. There’s a reason people who look unusually good in photos are called “photogenic,” because they have facial or body shapes that translate well when compressed to flat images.

People are not designed for photos, which were absent from ancestral history, but rather the four dimensions (space and time) and five senses in which real life is experienced. Images cannot capture the vast subtleties of shape, voice, smells / pheromones, facial expressions, movement, bearing, all superficial traits observed in the first 30 seconds of real-life interaction that would add even more variability to first impressions of attraction, before even considering deeper areas of compatibility like personality, intelligence, and common interests.

Like employment and housing, romance is ultimately a numbers game, best realized as a function of real-life social “surface area.” Find a way to get more interactions with people, and some of them will be interested in you for friendship and romance. And admittedly, this is harder for a younger generation more used to screens than human faces. This is where sales experience comes in; even if you’re bad at sales, any minimal practice of it will quickly eliminate, via exposure therapy, any fear of just talking to people or rejection, and the repetition of asking people to part with their hard-earned money should make it, at minimum, not awkward to network for other things you want11.

As someone who last dated at the tail-end of the previous century when online dating was still considered weird, I hesitate to give specific advice. But a few final observations:

• Despite the claims of the despair merchants, 75% of Gen Z desire marriage, and nearly 70% want children.

• Most people entering long-term relationships don’t meet on apps: only 27% of newly engaged couples, but that’s still a large plurality, such that they can’t be entirely written off. No app seems particularly market-dominant either, again, an argument for overall social surface area.

• Employed, educated men are in short supply compared to women. But conservative women are scarce compared to conservative men in numbers that more than offset the education/employment gap. Young conservative women should not be afraid to appropriately signal their conservatism, even if there’s social pressure not to be a “pick me.”

The Volatility Generation

Note, in all of this, I am not saying that things are fine, actually, and repeating the Boomer trope that young people today are just lazy and not taking advantage of opportunities. It would be nice for Gen Z if, like the Boomers, college were affordable with a summer job, or a starter home was twice the annual starting salary of a college graduate, if Boomer leaders hadn’t hobbled opportunities for young Americans with globalization and outsourcing for short-term stock option payoffs12, if the ideologies of what the kids dub “gay race communism” were merely embryonic and had yet to percolate to their logical ends in the culture, making it harder for people to get along and removing social cues for a happy and virtuous life in their respective callings.

Gen Z has one critical advantage, one abundance that compares to no previous generation, which is the accessibility of information. Particularly with the best AI tools, agentic people can self-learn just about anything, informed by evidence-based practices. At the same time, non-agentic people, the great mass of humanity, are having their already limited brains cooked for profit by the social media platforms. Thus, Gen Z will be the most volatile generation in history. Many, unfortunately, will end up fat, unemployed, sedentary, smoking pot, filling their lives with digital heroin before dying of colon cancer by 50, unless society gathers the collective will to pull back from libertarianism to enable all vices and socialism to undermine all virtues.

But the members of Gen Z who make it through what Ross Douthat calls the “age of extinction” will be extremely impressive and able to do more with their exceptional self-control and ambition than any generation previous. A key part of maximizing this possibility is to distance oneself from online memes of despair, to enjoy most of online culture “for entertainment only,” and remember that whatever holds for social trends, it has been and will always be true that “the riches are in the niches.” Or, as Peter Thiel puts it, “competition is for losers.” Life is best lived in the exceptions.

This can vary across the animal kingdom in wildly strange ways. It is thought, for example, that a peacock’s tail demonstrates the male’s superior genetics and low mutational load. The biological burden of developing such an ornament is a fitness signal, and peahens prefer the largest, most colorful, symmetrical tails indicative of good genetics and resistance to disease. Male peacocks don’t seem to be particularly picky about females, but humans are different. Human males, Jordan Peterson explains, are the most maternal among animals, as both parents make significant investments in raising a child. Hence, both sexes are picky about those investments, though women are pickier than men due to their relatively higher investment.

It is natural, for example, for women to prefer tall, athletic, and/or muscular men, because women need the protection of a man to ensure their personal safety and that of their children. Likewise, men are attracted to the physical features of women that indicate fertility and low mutational load. These instincts are pre-rational but have a rational basis. Desire for these secondary sexual characteristics, since they are leading indicators of successfully raising offspring to maturity, is healthy and normal.

Sexuality Is Classically Conditioned

But another curious fact about mammals is that their sexuality is also highly plastic under operant conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs. Rats, for example, are normally repulsed by the smell of cadaverine, the chemical emitted by rotting flesh, because it indicates a risk of infection. But under manipulated laboratory conditions, male rats can be conditioned to exhibit carnal attraction to this odor or to prefer same-sex partners. These sorts of rat paraphilias are never observed in the wild because rats live under constrained natural conditions.

Humans, on the other hand, largely live in a self-built and unnatural environment, and mastery of nature allows manipulation of natural biological rewards. Our larger brains also make us better at learning from these manipulations and better at rationalizing them. We can manipulate our psychology with both substances and behavior, cheating nature’s payoffs. One of those ways is by manipulating, even inadvertently, our sexuality.

In the psychology course, a paraphilia was defined as any sexual behavior or preference not related to natural sexual characteristics that interferes with reproductive sexual functioning. Many people seem to think of these as fixations on certain body parts of the opposite sex, but those aren’t necessarily a problem, in that the sexes are different, from obvious to subtle degrees, in every aspect of their bodies (literally every cell), and attractions to these are not strictly considered paraphilias in a clinical sense, unless they interfere with consummation of reproductive sex. Real paraphilias are weirder, often further afield from the body features of the opposite sex, which, after all, is a biologically appropriate target for attraction.

My professor cited one case study that is so ridiculous that I don’t think it is prurient to share as an example. This patient was a man who could not get in the mood unless his wife went to the garage, started the car, and revved the engine several times. I guess this is one dude who will never buy a Tesla! Somewhere in this guy’s past, that stimulus got wired into his sexuality and became a necessary precondition to sexual activity. Clinically, these were difficult to address. Phobias can be treated by exposure therapy: show the stimulus without any attending harm, and the brain unlearns the phobia. Paraphilias are much more difficult to treat because the reward process is internal.

These processes can be generalized under a model of addiction, which can be broadly defined as a shortcut to alter brain chemistry designed for a natural reward. Drug addicts ingest or inject brain-altering chemicals directly. Food addicts stimulate unnatural levels of pleasure by consuming junk food alien to the ancestral environment, engineered to stimulate brain chemistry (in nature, for example, sweet and salty tastes are never present with fat, but combinations, particularly sweet and fat, create unnatural pleasure). Paraphilias are a species of addiction in that they feature shortcuts to the natural rewards of sex absent reproduction.

In moderation, not all of these broad categories are problems, and enhancement of natural rewards under a threshold of compulsive addiction can be enriching. Married couples enjoy and don’t enjoy certain things behind closed doors, and if it doesn’t interfere with reproductive sex or involve coercion or unnatural acts, clinically and morally, there’s broad liberty. Most bourbon aficionados are not alcoholics, nor are most wine drinkers. Humans have created extensive rituals and cultures surrounding the consumption of food, including highly processed food, that are not necessarily harmful. The French and Italians have rich and decadent food cultures that did not, historically, cause them to be obese or unhealthy.

Sexuality & Drugs As Faux Profundity

Human culture building around shared pleasure extends beyond the benign. Alcoholics almost always seek drinking buddies. Drug users seek other druggies. Some more complex drugs create altered states of consciousness, like marijuana and psychedelics, and provide the user with a sense of pseudo-profundity that causes them to organize countercultures with sophisticated rationales.

Those who grew up in the 90s remember the rise of weed culture. A high school friend circa 1994 had a Cypress Hill CD, and the liner notes were full of fun facts and conspiracy theories about hemp. The rap artists felt obliged to use the space of their album to educate the public in tiny font about the many uses of hemp: how it was a cheap and abundant source of food, was better than cotton for clothing, and had innumerable uses that would benefit the world. They helpfully explained how many of the Founding Fathers were hemp farmers — it was that American — until the federal government irrationally banned hemp production in the 20th century. Hemp couldn’t even be smoked, contrary to puritan prejudices, because, unlike marijuana, it contained very little THC. If only society would legalize hemp again, almost all of the world’s problems would be solved! Of course, the reason hemp was banned was that it is almost indistinguishable from marijuana, and made drug enforcement on the grower side impossible. The potheads had devised this elaborate scheme surrounding hemp (and it eventually worked) to make their addiction de facto legal.

Pot generates this kind of community because of its mild-altering chemistry of pseudo-profundity, in which the common sense filters of the mind are suppressed. Hence, the typical comic portrayal of potheads saying things like, “Yo, dude, I just realized that dog spelled backward is like, god. That’s wild!”

Sex, unlike food or simple drugs like nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine, is a profound pleasure akin to the mind-altering effects of marijuana or LSD. Sex is more profound than these drugs, since most drug users still seek out sex. It makes sense that since reproduction is the critical and central biological function of an organism, it would be attached to the ultimate natural pleasure.

Communities built around the brain chemistry of profundity are resistant to evidence. Marijuana use is reliably stupefying and a major cause of schizophrenia, just as some paraphilias reliably damage major body functions, expose participants to disease, and cost decades of life expectancy. Nevertheless, these communities will resist, to the last, any effort to pathologize their experiences, because they see them as central to their identities. In one, due to an accident of brain chemistry where consuming a plant metabolite stimulates the right receptors that perceive spiritual experiences, and in the other, la petit mort that, in a functional sexuality, is the physical antecedent, a profound release from our tensions and cares, to the co-creation of eternal souls.

I remember in high school health class watching the mid-80s Nova episode on sex and childbirth that ends with a full view of a human birth. Many of our female classmates found it funny that the guys, perfectly fine with watching the most violent R-rated action movies, almost universally turned our heads from the television to avoid seeing a baby entering the world. But this video was quite good in describing the nature of sexuality, in cataloging the psychological aspects of intimacy involving a sort of regression to childhood. Couples engage in non-sexual touching akin to that of the attachment behaviors of children, baby-talk to each other, and invent silly private nicknames. Part of the vulnerability of sex is this regression, of revealing to another person a part of one’s core being that remains but must be hidden in the adult world, and by implication, because of that vulnerability, properly ordered sex must be strictly private between couples, and for people with healthy sexuality, any discussion of one’s sex life is embarrassing.

Like pot culture, it seems that paraphiliacs are struck by a pseudo-profundity in their non-reproductive sexual practices such that, when they reach a certain critical mass of the population, they demand recognition, celebration, and approval not unlike potheads. Their addiction becomes central to their identity. The identity, however, is essentially fluid based on societal impulses and accidents of development.

There was a time when I entertained a somewhat more tolerant view of these things. What made me suspicious was observing over and over again the rather large population of men who embraced a sterile sexual orientation later in life but managed to father children with a woman. Through a friend, I learned of a situation a few years ago involving an accomplished professional and community leader in a midsize city in Georgia, who had five children with his pretty wife, only to suddenly abandon his family for an alternative lifestyle. Without getting too detailed, it is in the very nature of sexual reproduction that the male cannot impregnate the female without being aroused and sexually attracted to her. Since human females have hidden and uncertain ovulation, the number of congresses necessary to produce five children, depending on underlying fertility, easily numbers in the hundreds.

When I heard about this, my immediate intuition was that this was a developed paraphilia, no different than the guy who liked hearing the car redline. A path-dependent layer of plastic sexuality was somehow built on top of natural proclivities, and when combined with societal approval/celebration, the cheap thrill of public transgression, no-fault divorce, and given the lower effort of hooking up with random dudes compared to husbanding a wife with all of the trials of raising children, the incentives won out. Just as there are more potheads when pot is legal, socially approved, and easy to obtain, there are more paraphiliacs when there is friendly cultural conditioning.

The Curious Case of Ed Smart

A more famous example is the curious case of Ed Smart, the father of Elizabeth Smart, the teenager whose kidnapping and subsequent rescue in 2002 riveted the nation at the tail end of the mass media’s cable news scandal-of-the-month era. The Smarts were Mormons with a traditional, large family of six children. Ed Smart waited until 2019, at 64 years old, to declare himself gay, divorce his wife, and leave the Mormon church.

There’s a lot to unpack with this. The first is the abject narcissism of such an act. If this were true, if you’re 64 years old, what’s wrong with just riding it out and not embarrassing and destroying your family? There are a lot of sexual opportunities that an incontinent 64-year-old without extraordinary wealth or fame is deprived of anyway, so what’s one more? But Smart would not be the first example of the correlation between narcissism and his later behavior.

Second, the guy had six kids with a woman. And like the Georgia guy mentioned previously, not just any woman, a pretty woman! We are supposed to believe Ed was indifferent to women his whole life, yet when he married, presumably under cultural duress, he didn’t pick a random woman but rather one of considerable attractiveness, and didn’t even have the decency to marry a homely woman so his eventual wife could find a husband who would presumably appreciate her beauty.

And when the house is full of toddlers, and mom is exhausted, Ed could have been easily relieved of most of his oppressive marital duties, but to keep pressing to six kids means Dad is bothering Mom a lot when she’d rather be sleeping. I remember listening to a comedy tape of Jeff Foxworthy when I was 15 years old, where he had this bit about getting older and the dilemma a tired married couple faced in deciding between sleep and sex, and how sleep sometimes won the battle. I simply couldn’t imagine that ever being true at 15, but the stress of adult life and caring for children is real. Motivations can be mixed!

So, how motivated was Ed Smart?

Ed’s youngest child was born in 1999, when he and his wife were about 41. And at age 41, a healthy couple has natural pregnancy odds of ~4% per menstrual cycle, assuming sex every 2-3 days, and ideally every 1-2 days during the fertility window. It would take about 18 months of constant, frequent sex to get pregnant with that last baby! The numbers seem to imply he was a guy in his 40s very much into having sex with his tired wife. And among married couples, 6+ children is easily among the top 1%.

I think it’s fair to say that if Ed Smart wasn’t heterosexual, almost no one is heterosexual. Occam’s razor suggests a hypothesis that he was a straight guy who developed a paraphilia along the way. A taste of fame from his daughter’s kidnapping whetted his appetite for the thrill and gave him a platform and incentive, given cultural changes from 2002 to 2019, for publicly humiliating his family.

Is Sexual Orientation Real or Just a Paraphilia?

Ed Smart is far from the only example of gay men fathering children with women. It’s happening today and throughout history. Yet the bill of goods that was sold for gay liberation was that sexual orientation was absolute. Implied in that, I think, from the perspective of heterosexuals, is that they must find relations with the opposite sex as disgusting as we would find relations with the same sex. If not allowed to practice their alternative sexuality, they would be forever closed off from intimacy.

This, however, is biologically implausible. Any immutable, absolute inability to be intimate with the opposite sex would be ruthlessly culled in a single generation by the most basic natural selection that even the most adamant Darwin-denying Young Earth Creationist would endorse as self-evident. And indeed, twin studies have backed up this biological tautology:

One definition of an organism is that it is an embodied information system that a) consumes net energy generating heat as part of an open system of entropy to create a discernible local pocket of lower entropy, and b) reproduces additional units of itself when surplus energy is available. On its face, the idea of immutable sterile sexuality is extremely unlikely.

Physicist-anthropologist polymath Greg Cochran argues the most plausible biological explanation is an infectious disease, though no doubt subject to modification by social conditions. There are indeed many examples in the animal kingdom of pathogens that maladaptively alter the behavior of their hosts to complete the pathogen’s lifecycle. The unhygienic quality of some unnatural acts certainly makes this plausible. And every year, scientists discover more pathogens that cause cancers, even dementia, etc, previously thought to be spontaneous or idiopathic. That brain damage, brain tumors, or dementia in the elderly can often mark the emergence of previously unexpressed paraphilias would tend to support this hypothesis.

One alternative argument for the immutability of sexual orientation is the observation of sexually non-conforming prepubescent behaviors that correlate with later sexual preferences. This, however, can only be a risk factor, as 90s-era “gaydar” seemed to completely break down with the emergence of Millennial men. I have seen men's purses, heard lisps, observed whole gamuts of zesty, effeminate mannerisms among men who are, in fact, completely heterosexual with families. They tend, I notice, to pair up with more bossy-type women, so perhaps there’s a biological niche. There is, it seems, a population of straight men who act more feminine naturally.

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller would likely describe it as an artifact of sexual selection, in that men with more feminine minds would do better with some women by competing on orthogonal planes to traditional masculinity. One example Miller advances in The Mating Mind is that music was likely invented by men to impress women. Most artistic men are smaller, many short, a phenotype with severe disadvantages given women’s standard preferences, though useful in harsh ecologies where calories and protein are at a premium. Perhaps artistry to gain status and effeminate tendencies to make women feel safer, more cared for, and more comfortable were adaptations to even the playing field with conventionally masculine men.

The musical genius Prince fits this phenotype, thoroughly effeminate in behavior and aesthetics, but continually paired up with extremely beautiful women throughout his career. One can easily add to this list numerous similar examples: Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and all of the Beatles. These guys would have no luck playing football, but nevertheless found a way to impress the ladies, though there is still something undeniably masculine in the creation of powerful art1.

One can’t help but wonder if this is a natural biological niche with an increased proclivity hijacked by cultural standards that tell all feminine-tilting men that they must be gay or transgender. It seems like a significant number of men of alternative masculinity, who would otherwise be perfectly functionally heterosexual, have been contaminated by a societal meme. Something like 40% of self-reported gay men admit to phone surveyors of having a past female sexual partner, even in a societal context that tells them their sexuality is fixed.

The initial pleas of tolerance for a small minority are belied by the social contagion of 20% of Gen. Z identifying with some form of sterile sexuality, which makes no evolutionary sense. And this social contagion is reinforced by three factors unique to paraphilic sexuality.

First, only normative, fertile sexuality in a committed relationship is complete in and of itself, bringing pleasure aligned with nature’s imperatives. To counter this, many paraphiliacs engage in public displays of “pride” and demand compensating approval from others. The idea of heterosexual “pride” is laughable, akin to the literate demanding public recognition of their basic cognitive function.

Second, for many paraphilias, the appeal of stolen bread is enhanced by a sense of public transgression and exhibition that are alien to normal sexuality. Wishing to be seen as a freak in public is likely driven by an attending masochism. As I wrote in a footnote in last year’s post on patriarchy:

One of [Rushdoony’s] more profound ideas is that sexual paraphilias are usually manifestations of masochism, which he identifies as a way of bargaining with God by confessing to (or making a humiliating public exhibition of) a lesser sin to create a license for the greater sin. Even among males, masochists outnumber sadists, including the bizarre phenomenon of men like Jerry Falwell, Jr., who like to “watch,” which is the polar opposite of what evolutionary theory based on pitiless natural selection would predict. Rushdoony, more generally, in The Politics of Guilt and Pity, identified both de-growth environmentalism and DEI/woke as societal manifestations of masochism, as the common grace prosperity of modern life creates an unbearable sense of guilt in the unregenerate man, for which he substitutes an alternative system of penance which carefully allows for his sins of choice. The confluence of sexual deviance and Leftist politics is no spiritual accident.

Tolerance, then, leads to further demands for recognition and celebration, enhanced by the thrill of public transgression.

Predatory Paraphilias

Third, there’s more going on than simple cultural meme propagation, given considerable evidence that same-sex attracted men have a comorbid preference for adolescents much less prevalent in normal sexuality. The Jeffrey Epstein case is shocking to the conscience because of his predilection for minors. And among heterosexuals, Epstein was a freak, and there’s a technical term for his disordered attraction to adolescents as an adult man, not pedophilia, but hebephilia and/or ephebophilia, a preference for early and late adolescents respectively.

Strangely, apologists for Epstein’s behavior like Richard Hanania have emerged, who argue that, actually, Epstein wasn’t a pervert because his victims were post-pubescent, and that this isn’t the big deal people think it is, because as long as both parties are post-pubescent, it’s really just arbitrary laws of consent that cast this as fundamentally immoral. The implication is that men would, in an amoral state of nature untainted by Christian prudishness, be like Epstein and prefer the youngest fertile mates.

While dating app data does show a marked difference between men's and women’s attractiveness by age — women usually find a man their own age or slightly older most attractive, whereas men’s preferences for younger women are stable throughout adulthood — normal adult men seem to find women most attractive in the age range of 22-27, not as teenagers. In high school, my male peers and I thought Kathy Ireland and Cindy Crawford, both 10+ years our senior, were the most beautiful women in the world.

This preference also aligns with nature, because completed fertility is a unimodal curve, not linear and downhill from puberty. The cumulative odds of successfully carrying a child to term peak at around 25-27. Post-puberty teenagers, while fertile, are not fully developed and have miscarriage risks that make their all-in birthing outcomes comparable to those of women in their late 30s. So the argument that our moral standards are at war with nature is not borne by the evidence.

Our ancestral practices align with nature; in England before the modern era, women married, on average, at age 24, and in the more prosperous United States in the 1800s, it was slightly lower, 23. Epstein and his friends were pervs, actually, and appeals to nature or history are foreclosed. There are Near Eastern cultures where women were treated like cattle historically and featured norms of marrying teenage girls to much older men, including first cousins, but the particular perversions of that backwards part of the world should not govern the policy of more advanced Anglo-Saxon societies, and score another win for true religion bringing man’s deformed morality closer to natural law.

Of course, the strongest arguments are moral. Anyone who’s raised teenagers knows their mental maturity lags far behind their physical development, and as such, they cannot give meaningful consent to relationships with adults. And this isn’t germane to overreaching feminist critiques of power dynamics between adults, as women can naturally find wealthier or more powerful men attractive for legitimate reasons, nor related moralizing from single older women about the propriety of age-gap relationships between consenting adults. Late adolescence is a time of rapid, non-linear development, such that an early-20s woman’s consent is in a different universe qualitatively than the 14-17-year-olds targeted by Epstein. The issue is that teenagers cannot give actual, cognitively legitimate consent, and Epstein’s behavior was functionally rape2.

It is well-documented in the literature that late adolescents are often targeted by lower-status, narcissistic males because it allows these males to exploit women more attractive than they would otherwise, before these women are fully aware of their capacities to attract higher status males versus rat-faced creeps who groom vulnerable teenagers. And for such paraphilias, to desire such a transgression, to ruin innocence, is undoubtedly part of the thrill and reflects a depraved mind.

Like Epstein, the gay community also idealizes adolescents, with typical age gaps far exceeding those of heterosexuals, as a belying feature of these relationships is to seek an analog of sexual polarity, which finds its feminine in youth. I won’t document this in detail here because it’s so gross, but this is not a controversial statement about gay culture. The plastic nature of sexuality and the sterility of such relationships suggest, at least in part, a predatory means of reproduction3.

A Unified Theory of Paraphilias

The rapid emergence and prevalence of other sexual communities, from the transgendered to those identifying as theme-park-style animal mascots, who also insist, like the gay community, that their behaviors represent a stable and unchanging identity, suggests a common cause. The weirder the sexual zoo gets, the less plausible immutability seems. A simpler framework might be:

Pre-existing proclivity —> early trauma/abuse and/or idiopathic childhood conditioning stimuli —> social acceptance of paraphilias reinforces latent operant conditioning —> paraphilic experiences mistaken for profound meaning due to fundamental sexual biochemistry —> biochemical induction of profound meaning mistaken for locus of identity —> demands for toleration, recognition, and approval

This makes sense because it happens to heterosexuals too! How many people divorce a spouse thinking they’ve finally found a “soulmate” core to their newly discovered “true self” when the real story is just about sex, and specifically a deceptive biochemical soup of infatuation induced by a novel partner that marital counselor Gary Chapman labels “the tingles,” and then demand their family and friends respect the farce? And part of that is increased social acceptance of divorce.

On these less controversial topics, including divorce, obesity, eating disorders, or even emerging “Tourette’s” among teen girls, social contagion effects are well-documented and accepted by mainstream psychological science. It would be strange for social contagion not to be a major factor in the rise of identification with alternative sexualities, especially given the time frames for these developments are extremely recent relative to the slow pace of more fundamental causes.

If the population of those engaging in sterile sexual activity is malleable, it makes sense biologically why all societies previous to The Current Moment imposed high social costs on their public expression. Ancestral folk wisdom had discovered that plastic human sexuality must be constrained lest the population cease to reproduce itself.

The social contagion risk also makes hedonic sense. Babies are a lot of work, essentially 20 years of voluntary slavery in a modern, specialized economy requiring advanced education. Just as junk food will be more appealing to many than whole food, sterile sex, which provides some of the pleasure of reproductive sex without the costs of raising children, will always prove attractive. A society that wishes to survive must address these, pun intended, perverse incentives.

Costs and Solutions

Our problem, however, is more pressing ecologically than morally. With birth rates among productive people already in the tank, accelerating this further with a now ~20% level of sterile sexuality among potential future parents is a major societal crisis. Regardless of right or wrong, tolerance of alternative sexualities hastens civilizational ruin.

If operant conditioning is at work, and the effects are self-evidently not uniform, then there must be a spectrum of responsiveness to the conditioning, and thus there exist some individuals who would exhibit healthy behavior but for the conditioning. Society then has an interest in controlling the types and levels of allowable conditioning.

Some might call it oppression, but the purpose is not to harm the few who would be afflicted anyway, but to benefit the many at the margin of susceptibility to have functioning reproductive sexualities. Observing this level of sexual disorder in any endangered species would rightly concern conservationists, who would assume some sort of environmental toxin or pathogen, and demand intervention to eliminate its identifiable cause. Just as it’s better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man be convicted, likewise it is better to deny ten people of sterile sexuality full liberty of public behavior than for one salvageable family unit be lost.

Some clawback of the Sexual Revolution is necessary, but even strident conservatives are timid compared to the past. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the now-elderly author Stephen King was up past his bedtime and claimed on X that Kirk supported “stoning” gays. This was, in fact, inaccurate, and King was forced to retract the claim as Kirk’s supporters vigorously denied the charge as the basest libel.

King, however, as a consistent liberal, was vaguely indirectly correct in his claim, given Charlie Kirk’s and mainstream conservatives’ worship of “the founding.” At the time of the American Revolution, all colonies practiced English common law, which held “buggery” as a capital offense4 no less than Leviticus. The great liberal, humanitarian outlier of the founders, Thomas Jefferson, advocated softening this and related sexual crimes to lesser punishments like gelding.

Interestingly, I only know about this because of a segment Rush Limbaugh did on the topic in the mid-90s advocating against gay liberation. Compared to secular Boomer AM-radio conservatism of the 90s5, even the most based among us are functionally liberals. Such a position now seems politically suicidal, and in a recent podcast with a notoriously “based” pastor, both he and his guest Nick Fuentes of all people were careful to qualify any perceived extremism on the issue. It’s a strange world where the n-word and misogyny are edgy trolling, but Anglo-Saxon common law penology of 200 years ago is still well outside the frame of the Overton window, or, for that matter, the laws of the state of Texas as recently as 2003.

It is interesting to consider the second-order effects of the extreme sanction of the colonial period. There is only one documented case in Virginia of prosecution for buggery, but nor were there any public expressions of the paraphilia. It seems like the political equilibrium was very little actual persecution with an effective cordon sanitaire of any possible social contagion. And since the Southern colonies in particular had very weak central governments with few prosecutorial resources, and prosecutions in every case require witnesses, limiting any possible enforcement to egregious acts, it seems that strong laws, rarely enforced, are quite effective to contain public sexual disorder and instruct the public in morality without turning into an inquisition of everyone’s private bedrooms. This is not to say disordered sexuality was absent from early American society (hardly), but rather hypocrisy’s tribute to virtue served to limit it to more incorrigible situations.

Leaders of society used to understand they had a duty to maintain some level of sexual propriety lest the lower classes, already lacking in self-control, devolve into total sexual anarchy. Hence, why Darcy, for example, in Pride and Prejudice, could not marry Elizabeth if her foolish sister’s fornication and thus her reputation was not cured by a shotgun marriage. His role as a moral example for the local community was incompatible with any taint of public sexual scandal, even indirect.

If most of the salutary effect is moral instruction and lack of public expression, perhaps the position of Russia is a happy minimum. Russia’s laws prohibit public exhibitions of paraphilic sexualities to limit their influence on developing children while declining to prosecute entirely private behavior. This might even be preferable for smarter, more cultured gays, who seem to understand that their condition is not a sustainable, universal good and must always remain the exception, and have little desire for low-IQ public spectacle. Peter Thiel, for example, destroyed Gawker for outing him. Apple’s buttoned-up Tim Cook, a native of Alabama and the archetype of a choir director of a First Baptist Church in the urban midcentury Deep South, likewise kept his situation private for a very long time. But this, again, seems well outside the Overton window.

Pornography Is a Political Paper Tiger

What does seem addressable politically is that additional catechizer of postmodern paraphilias in the pervasiveness of pornography. As an inferior substitute for sex involving only 1.5 senses (audio and two-dimensional imagery), and lacking the most fundamental element of a partner co-experiencing the bind of mutual desire, pornography must make up in novelty what it lacks in basic stimuli. Infinite variety is one dimension, but for more habitual users, the development of the most bizarre, unnatural paraphilias often provides the compensatory shock value to elevate a fundamentally impoverished sensory experience. Some have credibly hypothesized that many marginal cases of paraphilias derive from tube site algorithms of novelty escalation. The marginal effect of this explosion of artificial sexual stimuli may be unknowable, as scientists who attempt to study it can’t find large enough control groups of unexposed populations!

Crucially, my read is that its continued prevalence is a paper tiger of public policy. In the Paxton case affirming Texas’s law requiring age verification, the dissent by Justice Kagan focused on technical issues of law and featured no full-throated defense of 1960s-style sexual liberation narratives. Justice Thomas quietly opened the door to renewed obscenity standards, signaling the court is receptive to arguments that adults, in fact, do not have an absolute First Amendment right to access smut. It seems a quiet consensus has been reached that quantity and ease of use have become a different sort of quality in which the state might have a legitimate interest. And critically, despite the best efforts of the major platforms, pornography users seem especially unwilling to organize themselves politically to oppose restriction.

The difficulty, of course, is defining pornography. This, however, isn’t as thorny as it might seem, if reasonable lines are drawn. The corpus of Western art frequently features nudity, but never sex acts. And while distinguishing artful nudity from otherwise might be statutorily impossible, the law conveniently features durable federal statutory definitions of sex acts. This provides an objective line for obscenity, which remains, despite lack of enforcement, an exception in federal jurisprudence to First Amendment rights, and a majority of the Supreme Court seems ready to affirm a reasonable definition and roll back some of the unfortunate decisions of the 1970s, when viewing such content required physically showing up to a seedy theater. It would also seem reasonable, like another recent Texas law successfully defended by Ken Paxton concerning strip clubs, to limit depictions of nudity to subjects 21 years old or older.

Such limitations would put pornography in the same category as other vices regulated and taxed, like alcohol and tobacco, where the prudent statutory regime is neither prohibition nor absolute liberty. At worst, limiting lawful pornography to simple nudity narrows its scope to sins of appetite, not those against nature, and reinforces the proper target of sex. It is, after all, lawful in marriage to see nudity, but never to watch other people engage in sex acts, which, when you think about it, is actually kind of gay.

Coda: Christian Arguments & Implications for Paraphilias

Some fellow Christians may notice that my reasoning here is mostly natural, not scriptural. I tend to think that when something is supremely obvious from nature — that sex is for reproduction and societies have an interest in collectively organizing to address threats to its proper functioning — that appeals to Scripture are weak. If someone asks me if drinking bleach is a good idea, I don’t need the Bible to say it’s dumb. Whether complementarianism or biological sexuality, abandoning the testimony of nature and all mankind before the postmodern era to retreat to the positive law of Scripture is surrendering the stronger argument.

Much of the Protestant church, however, cannot appeal to nature because they have compromised with the Sexual Revolution in disconnecting sex from reproduction, lest its own singles and DINKs feel judged for their own, historically speaking, technology-enabled, childless “alternative lifestyles.” The most encouraging thing the church could say to all young people is something like, “Unless you have the gift of celibacy or struggle with infertility, God has designed you sexually to get married and have babies, to love yourself as much as He loves you by having a stake in the future of humanity.”

Church history is, unfortunately, littered with confusion on the issue, often featuring suspected closet cases declaring all illicit, or even licit, sexual desire as equally problematic or degrading to human rationality, practically conflating the escalating severity of natural sins of appetite, positive but natural breaches of covenant, and those against nature6. I wrote in my post on technology addictions last year:

Such a condition would tempt a person to want to relativize all non-marital sexual desire as equally bad and construct an alternative status system based on self-denial.

Sometimes I wonder how many hardcore pietists are like this, damaged goods wanting company in misery, and theology, as a non-falsifiable field of study compared to say chemistry or physics, tends to attract BS artists who deal in vibes over logical arguments. Like teenagers cutting themselves with a razor blade for the endogenous opioids, pietists like to feel bad so they can feel good by setting up impossible moral traps, and by implication, make themselves look better than others.

The church may not have the best answers anyway, but rather classical behavioral psychology. Sexuality’s susceptibility to operant conditioning implies that overspiritualizing it may be counterproductive. If the gay can’t be prayed away, maybe it can be extinguished like Pavlov.

Cognitive therapy approaches like the Addictive Voice Recognition Technique could help paraphiliacs objectify dysfunctional urges as external to core identity. Perhaps lines of research combining episodic exposure with naltrexone, akin to the Sinclair Method, with subsequent reconditioning to biologically functional stimuli, absent naltrexone, to build stronger neural networks of latent normal sexual appetite. That some gay men, like the married guys mentioned earlier, are not, by their revealed preferences, completely indifferent to women’s beauty bolsters the hypothesis.

The idea of building actual things people value, like a Ford or Toyota, seems almost quaint, and it’s hard to say if those who do so are heroic or pitiable. Serving actual customers and making a profit is freaking hard, and there’s certainly the temptation, in a general decline, to, if I can’t beat them, join them, and get what’s mine.

Hard vs. Soft Scams

Recent news has focused on hard scams, actual fraud, not the broader areas of vice and cheating. A few examples will serve to illustrate.

A few years ago, we had some significant investments in the “tobacco” space. We were encouraged by the coming transition to reduced-harm or zero-harm nicotine products and had a thesis that nicotine, as the ultimate nootropic and thus marijuana’s virtuous opposite chemical in its effects, would make a comeback as the stimulant of choice for high achievers, eventually seen as safe and harmless as caffeine (which is consistent with the data in Sweden, where reduced-harm products have zero net effect on mortality relative to non-users). It’s no exaggeration to say that caffeine and nicotine may have catalyzed Western man’s latent Promethean drive from the Reformation to the Scientific Revolution to the moon landing in just a few centuries.

We assumed, given the uneasy but durable alliance between states dependent on tax revenue and regulatory capture of the industry, that reduced-harm products would be owned by industry incumbents and responsibly regulated to wall off these products from minors. The FDA did this, notably, when they forced pouch and vape manufacturers to file applications demonstrating the safety of their formulations, while, in the case of vapes, requiring manufacturers like Juul and NJOY to add bitterants to their products to make them taste like cigarettes, not candy, and thus less appealing to kids and targeted to adult smokers seeking a healthier alternative. The regulated American manufacturers complied, and thus, kids would be protected, and our investments would enjoy a nice little oligopoly with pricing power.

We ended up exiting those investments for a smaller profit than expected a couple of years ago, when the thesis proved false, in that the heretofore effective regulatory regime of nicotine products failed against the swarm of Chinese-manufactured vapes and Indian-owned convenience stores and smoke shops. These immigrants do not quietly comply with laws, but rather demand a level of enforcement resources our country lacks. Here’s a typical display from a recent road trip:

Above this display, but unpictured, were several offerings of THC-related compounds that are similar in psychoactive effects but chemically modified to evade state law, laws our Republican legislature was too cowardly to fix, given the power of the pot lobby. Why do we never hear of convenience store and vape shop owners being perp-walked for selling these illegal products? Why do taxpayers subsidize the proliferation of these trashy little stores with SBA loans for non-citizens1? And how are responsibly manufactured, safe, properly regulated American products supposed to compete when the Chinese flood our country with illegal ones?

Big Time Soft Fraud

But this is small-time as the hollowing of norms and voluntary compliance reaches its full apogee in international trade. The most valuable intellectual property in the world is arguably Eli Lilly’s patent on tirzepatide, the most effective weight loss drug. Yet, despite the FDA’s closing of loopholes, a simple Google search will reveal dozens of sources for compounded, pirated tirzepatide sourced from Chinese labs.

Given that the stuff is sold as a powder and doses are measured in milligrams, it would seem almost impossible to cut this off from international trade, at least on the black market. Nevertheless, scammers operate openly and domestically to undercut Lilly’s intellectual property investment, and nothing happens. In cities like Houston, it’s trivial to receive a prescription from an immigrant doctor and fill it from an immigrant-run compound pharmacy, since Americans playing by the rules largely no longer operate the compounding pharmacy industry, which used to be a niche service for patients needing strange or alternative dosing of common medicines not otherwise commercially available.

How is this possible? Drug manufacturers in China can “register” with the FDA, pass one inspection, and sell any drug into compound pharmacies. And in this case, one part of the government doesn’t talk to the other. Such firms can rip off US intellectual property, and this does nothing to affect their FDA approval. Many of these inspections, due to FDA backlogs, are only subject to “remote inspections,” i.e., the FDA looks at paperwork submitted electronically, trusting Chinese firms to self-report their compliance! And, as long as they register with the FDA and apply for inspection, they can begin selling into the US market before they’re ever inspected. And if they get inspected and fail, they can close up shop, register again under a new entity, and be good for another few years. Trump was right, they really must be “laughing at us” for being such easy, dumb marks.

Regulations surrounding such pharmacies, like those of the IRS, depend on Anglo-Saxon norms of voluntary self-regulation, not police inspection. They simply no longer work when those norms are not shared by many of our residents and trade partners.

Many Americans are likewise unaware that most of their generic medications are made in India or China. These manufacturers, who are outside of US criminal jurisdiction attaching to impure drugs, are allowed by our government to have FDA approval. My first job, some readers may recall, was at an FDA-regulated facility. It was drilled into all of us to never slack on quality or record-keeping because of the dreaded “surprise inspection.” The FDA can show up at any time and start digging, and while rare, veterans at the company shared war stories of previous inspections. The company maintained its own internal “red team” of surprise inspectors, many former FDA, who often showed up at manufacturing plants unannounced to simulate government inspections. QA and manufacturing people could and would be fired if internal inspectors found serious problems likely to surface in an official one. We also knew about the criminal penalties for major negligence discovered in such an inspection. Almost no one actually went to jail for this, of course, but the thought of being arrested and having a “criminal record” scared our domestic employees terribly. It was understood to be a high privilege to make products people trusted to put into their bodies.

That system is imperfect enough in the US as Christian norms recede2, but imagine we had a competitor in China or India. Technically, they are FDA-approved and subject to surprise inspections. But the manpower to do so, and the criminal penalties, are absent. And in any of these countries, the odds that the FDA can actually execute a surprise inspection are extremely low, simply because their movements can be easily tracked or shared with the manufacturer by locals. And absent criminal penalties enforced by US courts, records can be falsified, and lies told without consequence. How could a US manufacturer possibly compete with such regulatory asymmetry? The expense in making a medicine is all in quality control and compliance, not raw materials. And the price we pay is impure drugs and the hollowing out of our ability to make the world’s most useful medicines domestically (the most valuable medicines, i.e., the low-hanging fruit, tend to be older proven generics).

At a similar scale but with a more dispersed impact has been Amazon’s effect on small American manufacturers, famously chronicled by Austin-based entrepreneur Molson Hart’s futile attempts to have the online platform play fair and respect his intellectual property. On a recent episode of Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary pronounced the futility of preventing knock-offs on Amazon, even with a patent, and recommended that brands knock themselves off with white labels selling just above cost to at least gain some small return on sales that would otherwise go to Amazon scammers3.

Again, the incentives of our laws make it almost impossible to compete on a legitimate basis. Section 230, an early Internet law designed to indemnify online forum operators from liability for their users’ speech, has been interpreted to protect Amazon from the acts of its resellers. By contrast, Target, with a conventional vendor reselling relationship, is often jointly and severally liable with the source of goods for any tort. Honest retailers can be sued, but if you turn your website into a bazaar for foreign scammers to lie, cheat, and steal on your behalf, it’s “user-generated content” and statutorily excluded from any liability, even if, like Amazon, the platform makes most of the profit in the transaction and controls the entire customer relationship from billing to fulfillment to communications to returns.

At the other end of the value chain, the fundamental currency of American meritocracy itself, the SAT, finds itself dealing with Chinese websites that publish the contents of every test online within hours of administration. The dumb WASPs who run the SAT were gullible enough to allow Chinese students to use their own devices, in China (well, Hong Kong and Macau, same culture), to take the tests. And thanks to Obama abandoning US sovereignty over ICANN domain name registrations, there’s nothing SAT can do about it.

And that’s East Asia, maybe the most functional non-Western culture. Things get much darker elsewhere. Nigerians and other third-world financial scammers torment our vulnerable elderly, often with the help of domestic mules. Why are they allowed on Facebook, and why is Facebook immune from liability for allowing this on their platform4? Has anyone asked the question of why Nigerians are generally allowed to use the US banking system and receive international wire transfers? Why is this culture allowed any access to our monetary system at all?

The Lethargy of Voluntary Compliance

Bottom line: the slow-moving, minimally invasive Anglo-Saxon schemes of regulation and litigation assume fair play, that people mean well, deserve due process, and are entirely unsuited for the vast majority of the world’s population, who do not share these cultural values. Such systems require a “guilt culture” like ours, where individuals, as part of their self-image, desire to behave according to abstract notions of right and wrong and align their behavior, however imperfectly and often tempted, to those notions, and feel bad when they fall short. In much of the world, the only effective regulation to make scammers behave is swift, violent, and unilateral punishment, no trials, no judges, no juries.

Our system is only well-suited to a free people with at least a residue of cultural Christianity, where outliers are uncommon enough that enforcement’s necessity is rare. It will fail against the human default of “shame cultures” where public reputation is all that matters, and besides which, cultures where cheating foreigners, especially, from their perspective, gullible, foolish ones like us who believe in people following the law voluntarily as a matter of personal morality, is seen as smart, not wrong.

These are not insignificant concerns. The sort of middle-class jobs Americans desire demand that business owners have defensible margins to insulate their innovations and intellectual property, however trivial, from a race to the bottom with sweatshop and scammer cultures, foreign and domestic. Only defensible margins allow business owners to provide good salaries and benefits to American employees, and to allow foreign businesses practically exempt from the jurisdiction of US courts to sell into our markets directly is to commit long-term economic suicide. No serious person suggests that businesses be immune from all liability, but this is exactly what libertarians and free-trade zealots propose functionally in their globalist schemes.

It seems a mystery why any company would move operations to China, given the pervasive theft of intellectual property, as such is often the only reliable defense of profits. My best guesses are:

1. Most businesses are neither owner controlled or managed. Managers of large public corporations have severe principal-agent problems and are usually incentivized for profit growth over at most a 5-year time horizon. Access to overseas manufacturing and markets (including IP sharing, which China often demands to sell to her internal markets) will indeed lift profits for a time. I can’t imagine replacing my domestic employees to save 50% on payroll to educate future foreign competitors. But if I were a hireling manager with a 4-year stock options package and likely to bounce to my next job within the decade, why not? And once one hireling defects for short-term gains, the others, whatever their motivations, are tempted to follow if they cannot compete with higher COGS for a time that will ruin their stock options.

2. As the incentives of #1 came to dominate, many options for domestic manufacturing disappeared. Molson Hart has documented this, how it’s more or less impossible to manufacture injection-molded toys or stuffed animals domestically, regardless of an entrepreneur’s theoretical preference. You will manufacture in China, and you will be ripped off and scammed by them if they sniff a percent of margin above bare costs.

Hope for a New Coalition

Shame cultures only respect enforcement, not appeals to abstract moral standards. Fortunately, our legal system offers a system of private enforcement in the plaintiff's bar, which many have described as our “private attorneys general.” As I’ve been involved in legal matters over the years, and had a thoroughly good time helping coach my teenagers and their friends in mock trial competitions, I’ve developed an affection for lawyers as fun, entrepreneurial rascals. Hating attorneys is as nonsensical as hating guns. Attorneys don’t sue people, laws and incentives do.

I believe a major project for populist conservatives must be a selective increase in our system’s litigation surface area to better regulate abuse in private markets. Notably, common immunities, most notably Section 230, given to platforms or resellers must be stripped when the tortfeasor is outside the jurisdiction of US courts.

Perhaps a safe harbor could be offered if foreign sellers or speakers post a hefty domestically-attackable bond ($10MM would get the job done) and provide a US agent to receive service. And many of our laws need to allow more private enforcement. If “Elf Bar” or whatever Chinese trash vape brand were required to post such a bond as a condition for their distributors and retailers to not be sued, and competing domestic businesses affected by their behavior could sue all actors involved in the supply chain absent such a bond being provided, including landlords5 who were given adequate notice of a problem, I suspect many if not all of these products would disappear from the shelves.

Litigation and the threat of litigation work well together to produce effective private regulation. For example, commercial insurance often requires building owners to submit to inspections and fix safety issues without any cost to the taxpayer. Likewise, any insurance company issuing a $10MM bond to a foreign actor would regulate those actors’ behavior and exclude many of them to reduce its own exposure. The insurance policy itself provides for the reliable collection of damages and makes more plaintiff’s attorneys willing to take cases for small businesses on contingency, and the latter arrangements further incentivize attorneys to be efficient and operate at scale to deliver justice more comprehensively throughout the economy.

These are just the beginning of some ideas, and I’m sure they’re flawed in various ways that only a skilled attorney crafting legislation could fix. My vision is a grand alliance between the plaintiff’s bar and populists to provide proper private regulation of globalism’s externalities and correct the asymmetry posed for domestic players in the US market, who, after all, can be sued and sanctioned, and regulated by every jot and tittle of the US Code and Federal Register, whereas their foreign competitors cannot and are not.

There’s already some hopeful evidence that this is happening. In the most recent legislative session in Texas, an effort by the tort reform crowd to exclude disfigurement6 as a category of compensation for plaintiffs was defeated by a cohort of populist Republicans in the House, some of whom are beginning to realize that big business is not a reliable friend of the conservative cause. Outlets friendly to populists ran cover for their opposition by (rightly) framing the legislation as undermining the litigation rights of disfigured children victimized by transgender medicine clinics.

Democratic politics requires money and votes. Conservative populists have more votes than money, and a durable political coalition must ensure its clients get paid, and efforts are self-funding. It’s fortunate that trial lawyers, by nature, have money and are functionally non-ideological. Conservative populists likewise reject pretextual laissez-faire economic arguments that are, they have noticed, selectively applied by special interests, and further understand that the rot in our society is deep, almost in the bones, and largely beyond the government alone to correct. Trial lawyers, as private actors, can more efficiently and effectively help achieve conservative policy goals if given the right incentives.

Expose the enemies of civilization to torts proportionate to the harm they cause, attach liability to every externality with private profits and public costs, and let a thousand lawsuits bloom.

To reiterate my purpose here, I write because a) I enjoy it, b) writing helps me more precisely discover what I actually think, and c) I believe there is a dearth of writing from people operating in the real world, versus professional pundits who are more subject to audience capture or the distortions of the terminally online. I am finding I prefer longer-format, less frequent pieces that allow me to fully develop a line of thought over shorter pieces. The latter would build the audience more, but I like an audience that can follow complex arguments, and that also keeps me out of trouble.

In 2025, I began the year with one of my occasional health posts on how protein maxxing seems to be a cheat code for staying lean. With RFKJ’s new dietary guidelines dropping last week, yet another point for The Tom File, giving you tomorrow’s news today.

Later in January, I further developed my late 2024 thesis on the economic oppression of young Americans, with a post showcasing the objective evidence for the repression of Heartland talent. I still believe deeply in the BS Jobs thesis as well, and while I believe capitalism is more efficient than the alternatives, one of the issues I address in the post is the H1B problem, and how Vivek was a fake entrepreneur (many such cases!). The fallacy of market absolutists like Richard Hanania is to assume that because markets are more efficient than the alternative, they are robustly efficient, especially when perverse incentives from principal-agent problems and uneven policy are present (such as the effective indentured servitude of H1Bs, or in many cases, outright bribes to corporate personnel from nepotistic ethnic networks).

In February, I deviated from my usual avoidance of current events to post my thoughts on DOGE reflecting the repressed rage of technical workers in having to deal with wordcel bosses, and the “Chief of Staff” solution discovered by many technical companies to avoid putting frat boys in charge of important things (other than sales) best managed by engineers.

Later in February, I gave my take on the various flavors of modern patriarchy. I’m an extreme pragmatist on this. With few societal supports and a culture unsuited to functional human psychology, the most important task for both sexes is to marry someone unusually sane, not rely on St. Paul’s words in Ephesians to reinforce a marriage1.

March featured a major effort post, and my first effort at using AI to augment my research, in quantifying the costs and benefits of vaccines. On net: to vaccinate or not vaccinate is a minor medical decision, but disproportionately subject to a regret minimization problem on the anti-vax side. If your kid gets a chronic disease from vaccines, you’d never know for sure why. If your kid dies from measles, you know why. And because people are irrational and our elites have eviscerated the country of any sense of natural community to which one would have self-sacrificial moral obligations, public health authorities are tempted to hide the ball on any cumulative risks. I attempt to construct an alternative regret minimization schedule that optimizes for both concerns. It’s a conclusion that both sides of the debate will find unsatisfying.

In April, I again waded into current events with commentary on Trump’s tariffs. With inflation staying low and manageable, I’d say these comments aged fairly well. With corporate profits at all-time highs and labor’s share of GDP at near all-time lows, it seems like we have more headroom for additional tariffs without major macroeconomic consequences.

May was a goose egg for posting, but early June saw yet another high-effort post as I posted my “half-baked” thoughts on parenting. In summary: genetics matter more than most people think, behavior training matters, don’t be surprised by the natural rebelliousness of teenagers, early childhood is a precious and fleeting time to set family norms, why I don’t normatively recommend homeschooling through high school if families can afford alternatives, and why you should take your kids to a conservative, serious church free of evangelical cringe.

In mid-June, I commented on a minor kerfuffle in my denomination to demonstrate the Boomer succession problem and float the “emeritus” solution to give elderly men purpose and reap their wisdom without full retirement, while allowing younger men to advance.

June continued as my most frequent month with a review of the late-90s futurist book The Sovereign Individual, whose remarkable hits and many misses demonstrate the strengths and fallacies of the libertarian worldview.

July’s sole post was another major effort piece, the second featuring my half-baked parenting advice, wholly dedicated to the problems of technology and addiction, including the dangers of pornography, but more remarkably, the strange rise of female Internet addiction, which now likely eclipses that of males and with more acute mental health consequences.

August again featured one post, this time an update on the state of AI, and the major step change in mid-2025 in reasoning models that spider outside Internet resources that moved LLMs from fascinating toys to useful research assistants. The deceleration of model quality improvements in GPT5 also represented a cost-saving measure by OpenAI in its changing of default settings, which further emphasizes the caveats in my post. To get something like mid-2025’s "o3” model, users will have to pay for a plan and choose “heavy” reasoning, and again patiently wait 2-5 minutes. Most will not do this.

September opened with an interrogation of the brilliant sad-sack Rod Dreher.

Later in September, I integrated a review of Hobbes’ Leviathan as an interpretation of our late Republic’s decline in light of the Charlie Kirk murder. My reading of Hobbes (a dense effort read, which I am still finishing before allowing myself to move on into the rest of the precarious tower on my nightstand) was inspired by the brilliant author Matthew Carden, whose “Jurassic Locke” Substack most profoundly influenced my thinking in 2025. Carden, I believe, has nailed why classical liberalism is no match for human psychology, even in its ideal, organic, and generative setting. He shows that, since secular moral panics emerged in an environment where political power was solely held by Anglo-Saxon men (to be fair, mostly Yankees2), any political problems blamed on the fairer sex or particular cultural aliens are downstream of more fundamental causes.

October saw the editing and republishing of one of my private business writings dealing with “The Cult of Growth.” The declining marginal utility of wealth strikes me as a rather big deal, maybe one of the most important concepts in economics. The authors of my favorite finance book, The Missing Billionaires (reviewed here), demonstrate how Bernoulli3 used it to solve the St. Petersburg Paradox. A lot of themes surrounding this seem to be converging in my head lately as I think about the future. A key paradox seems to be that durable wealth management is supremely boring, yet people need work and interesting projects for virtue’s sake. Rich people invest in startups, I’ve found, more for something to talk about than their actual odds-weighted returns.

In November, I reviewed Isenberg’s White Trash, a serendipitous find this summer in a used bookstore. She indirectly confirmed my increasing tilt to empiricism over ideology. The New Deal efforts to build infrastructure seem good, whereas LBJ’s Great Society was largely a failure. Ideology (on either side) doesn’t yield the right answer to distinguish the two. Government spending is neither good nor bad, but that fallen human psychology makes it so.

I closed out the year with a reflection on the Parker raid of Texas hero Lawrence Sullivan Ross, a reiteration of themes from my review of Lone Star in observing Texas culture as a semi-kindred outsider from Louisiana, emphasis on the semi. I still need to write my major effort piece on the differences between the two state cultures, which I suspect will be quite entertaining to many.

I expect my 2026 posting schedule to be similarly constrained as I finish up a few projects in the early part of the year. Thanks for reading and subscribing!

During the 2020 unpleasantness, the statue was vandalized, resulting in a standoff between older alumni, largely veterans from the era when it was predominantly a male military college, and the minority of woke students, faculty, and outside agitators. The administration cordoned a perimeter around it and promised to “study” its impact on campus, no doubt a prelude to its removal. Ultimately, the alumni and donor base was sufficiently vocal and physically confronted protesters and protected it during the worst of the tumult, such that the statue survived, and continues in its place to this day. It is remarkable in being, as far as I can research, the sole prominent former Confederate statue on a major college campus, and more than that, the centerpiece of campus, with no apologies or “context” on offer.

So how did these Texans do it? As I hypothesized in my review of Lone Star, Texas, in its revolution, was a throwback to the blood and soil nationalisms of Europe. Predominantly Scots-Irish settlers girded their strength, Old Testament style, to drive out the inhabitants of the land for the benefit of their posterity. Most importantly, they won their gamble, and winning in history, I have come to believe, is everything. Winning means you are psychologically immunized against cancellation:

The pantheon of Texas heroes is still awaiting cancellation, yet Leftists in the state are mostly silent. Qualitatively, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Sam Houston and Robert E. Lee; both were Southern men of their time who practiced slavery. Why has the latter been canceled of late while the former remains untouched?

One big part of the answer is that Houston won. Winning in history is everything, it turns out. As Patton told his troops, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.” Why is this?

The average person has very little ability to parse moral or ideological arguments. Every loser in history has a rationale for why they lost and why it was “wrong” for them to lose. Hundreds of different losers all make the same argument, and it’s much simpler for a simple person to apply a filter of outcomes. The winners are, on average, more virtuous than the losers, and the average person has zero power to right historical wrongs and must operate their daily lives in the moral systems constructed by the winners anyway. It’s just psychologically easier not to carry around the burden of historical special pleading.

So Texas is more resistant to cancellation because Texas won her independence, and only gave that up under her own terms. This is probably why of all the former Confederate states, Texas has been the most successful, because Texans had a winning identity that transcended the Lost Cause mythology which crippled much of the broader South with a backward-looking nostalgia.

…

On some level, Texans know their ancestors were warriors and killers who took the land from others and they’re ok with that and at least a little bit proud of it.

Lawrence Sullivan Ross survived cancellation despite his associations with the losing Confederacy2 because he was sufficiently associated with the Texas pantheon. Winning means heroes remain heroes, whatever the details of how they won. Winning means not feeling guilty, such that even the irregular militia that mercilessly cleansed the land of enemies has museums built in their honor, boys yearn to be found worthy of their ranks, TV shows glorify them, and schoolchildren are told of their prowess and bravery, not their culpability.

Vince Lombardi was right, winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing in the amoral struggle among civilizations. Further, Texans have embraced their identity as winners, and identifying as a winner steels the soul against the complaints of sore losers. As Fehrenbach put it, the Texans were “brutalized” by the frontier, stripping them of the moralistic blank-slate effeminacy of a Christian civilization already in the throes of evangelistic sentimentalism. “Go west, young man” indeed.

The Texas anthem, “Texas, Our Texas,” much more often sung than that of other states at public events immediately after the national anthem, is unintentionally Nietzschean in its jettisoning of moral veneers demanding “All hail the mighty State,” proclaiming Texas to be “boldest and grandest, withstanding every test,” an “Empire wide and glorious” Texans hope will remain “brave and strong” to “grow in power and worth throughout the ages long.” Bravery, strength, wealth, and power will maintain the state, not moral navel-gazing about the losers vanquished to take the land.

The Alamo3 Cenotaph monument likewise portrays its heroes in the flames of a quasi-pagan transfiguration, declaring its heroes “perished in the flames of immortality that their high sacrifice might lead to the founding of this Texas.”

Such a frame of winning helps one see that the moral claims of losers are insincere pretexts, and that, if the situation were reversed, they would do the same and probably worse to you. Thus, if morality is at worst a wash, even if one were willing, like some Christians, to entertain a moral veto over one’s civilizational survival, then one should still prefer to win than lose.

But how were sincere Christian gentlemen like Sul Ross able to mercilessly kill their enemies? The concept seems so alien to contemporary Christianity that they might as well have practiced a different religion. And perhaps the most famous, almost memory-holed, episode of Ross’s life, demonstrating this, is his role in the recapture of Cynthia Ann Parker, 165 years ago this month.

The Parker Raid

Most American settlers of the West followed the United States Army after the Civil War, the wisest only building settlements within range of its protection. The “Texians,” however, took pacification of the land onto themselves during the much earlier days of the 1820s Austin colony, and faced constant war with the Comanche and other tribes.

One particular episode in the early days of the republic was the Fort Parker raid, where the Comanche overwhelmed a Texan settlement. As was common, some women and children were denied the mercy of death. One survivor, eventually ransomed by her family, was Rachel Plummer, 17, a young mother, who wrote a memoir of her experience as a captive. Wikipedia summarizes her experience with the Comanche:

On May 19, 1836, at sunrise, everything appeared normal as the men went to the work in the fields. Plummer, three months pregnant with her second child, was in the fort caring for her firstborn, James Pratt, two years old, the first child born to the family in Texas. It would be the last normal morning of Rachel Plummer’s life, and the last time she would ever see her child. Her husband and father were working in the fields.

In her memoir, Plummer wrote that “one minute the fields (in front of the fort) were clear, and the next moment, more Indians than I dreamed possible were in front of the fort.” As the Parkers debated what to do, one of the Indians approached the fort with a white flag. No one believed the flag was genuine, but Benjamin Parker believed it gave the family a chance for most of them to escape. He got his father’s support to try a bold gamble, and went out to try to buy time for the family to escape - which most of them did. Only five women and children were captured.

As the other women and children were leaving, Plummer chose to stay in the fort out of fear that she and her son would not be able to keep up. After Benjamin Parker returned from his first talks with the Indians and warned them that they would likely all die, Plummer wanted to flee, but Silas told her to watch the front gate while he ran for his musket and powder pouch. “They will kill Benjamin,” she reported her Uncle Silas saying, “and then me, but I will do for at least one of them, by God.” At that moment, she said she heard whooping outside the fort, and then Indians were inside. She then ran, holding her little boy’s hand, while behind her she said she saw Indians stabbing Benjamin with their lances.

Plummer was then seized by mounted warriors who threw her up behind them, and watched helplessly while another seized her son. She witnessed her grandfather’s torture and murder and her grandmother’s rape. Her cousins Cynthia Ann Parker and John Richard Parker as well as her aunt Elizabeth Kellogg were also captured. All five of the men present in the fort that morning were killed. After the war party stopped that night, they performed a ritual scalp dance, whipped their captives, and then stripped Kellogg and Plummer naked and tortured and raped them.

…

In her account of her life among the Comanche, Rachel wrote that six weeks after giving birth to a healthy son, the warriors decided she was slowed too much by childcare, and threw her son down on the ground. When he stopped moving, they left her to bury him. When she revived him, they returned and tied the infant to a rope, and dragged him through cactuses until the frail, tiny body was literally torn to pieces.

All of the captives were eventually ransomed except one young girl, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. Her father was killed, and her mother captured, but her uncle, James Parker, who survived the raid because he was out working in the fields, spent much of his life and fortune after 1836 seeking his lost niece Cynthia. It would not happen during his lifetime, but the fate of Cynthia became a matter of honor for the Texans.

On December 19, 1860, one day before the secession of South Carolina, Lawrence Sullivan Ross was a young captain for the Texas Rangers commissioned by Governor Sam Houston to protect the still beleaguered Texians in now Parker County, named for the same family. Ross determined that the best defense was offense and sought to attack the band known as the “Nokoni Comanche, who were considered the hardiest fighters among the Comanche, who were in turn considered the fiercest of the Plains Indians.”

Ross and his men launched a surprise raid, killing nearly all, including women and children caught in the crossfire. Among the survivors were a strangely blue-eyed woman and her daughter, who turned out to be Cynthia Ann Parker, now “married” to a Comanche chief and fully assimilated into the tribe4. Ross brought Parker back to her family, but due to her extended time in captivity and likely Stockholm Syndrome, she was never quite at home in returning to her people. The state legislature awarded her a pension in recognition of her extended hardship.

The Searchers

The Parker episode was the most notable historical event inspiring John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), often cited as the greatest American Western film of all time and among the top ten movies ever made. Steven Spielberg reportedly watches it annually for inspiration. A transitional film between the conventional “white hat, black hat” Saturday matinee Westerns and the morally ambiguous “anti-Westerns” of later stars like Clint Eastwood, The Searchers features John Wayne in one of only two career roles in which he stars as a former Confederate.

Like that other great Western, The Outlaw Josey Wales (and famously, the real-life Jesse James), Wayne as Ethan Edwards depicts the brokenness of Southern men crushed not by lack of valor but the insanity of their obsolete feudalism in challenging a fully modern industrial machine superior in arms and numbers. Many who could not cope with the new dispensation escaped to the receding Western frontier to find the comfort of a pre-modern world they understood. Ford, like Fehrenbach’s Lone Star, seeks not to moralize but to depict conditions as they were, a zero-sum conflict between two ultimately incompatible ways of life which the Texans won by blood if not always by contemporary notions of morality.

The Searchers, set on the post-Civil War Texas frontier homestead, opens with a Comanche raid and kidnapping of two of Edwards’ nieces, whom he vows to find as a matter of honor. One niece is discovered raped and murdered, while the other, Debbie, survives, though, like Parker, is forcibly married into the Comanche tribe. The primary tension of the film is Edwards’ determination to kill his niece if she will not return with him to her family. That honor required him to kill her if he saw her paired up with a Comanche “buck” because “living with the Comanche ain’t living.” In the end, he softens this stance when she at least seemingly willingly returns to her family.

But Ford’s depiction of Edwards seems to have the taint of modernity: that to kill the Indians and take the land must reflect some wound, some fundamental moral tension, as depicted in Wayne’s character, that would cause him to consider murdering his niece. The ending of the movie, the famous doorway scene copied in Saving Private Ryan, where Edwards, after returning his niece, refuses to enter back into domestic life, seems to imply that, for civilization to survive, there must be an outer rind of uncivilized men who do the dirty work that good people can safely ignore in their insulated piety. We may not like Ethan Edwards, but those like Ethan Edwards are needed to deal with the uncivilized who threaten us. It’s as if, as early as 1956, we could no longer conceive of heroes and invented the anti-hero.

Moral Clarity

This character, however, has little to do with the actual men involved in the Parker raid. Lawrence Sullivan Ross was more a man of action than words, and so we have zero historical record of any moral dilemmas he may have felt about his involvement, other than reporting his version of the facts of the encounter. Ross was a lifelong Methodist who assented to the Christian religion but never wrote much about his personal faith. For Stoic men of the time, “let’s talk about me” would have been seen as effeminate, and given the therapy-speak cringe of modern evangelical testimony culture, that seems like a reasonable stance.

Nor did his involvement in the Indian Wars or the Civil War seem to affect his ability to lead a normal domestic life or serve in the public realm of his polity. Unlike Ethan Edwards, no inner demons seem to have tormented him. The Texas pioneers were, in fact, in a terrible hurry, full of almost manic energy, building a civilization from nearly nothing in the space of Ross’s lifetime.

Ross’s family constructed the first home in Waco in 18495, and his older sister Kate was the first Anglo-American child born in the city. By 1856, Ross had entered Baylor University, then in Independence, Texas. By 1860, he was a Texas Ranger in the aforementioned raid, followed by Civil War service and promotion to Brigadier General. All of this was followed by two terms as governor of Texas, the presidency of the state’s first public university, and eventually a seat on the state railroad commission, all the while fathering nine children with the wife of his youth.

So, what to make of the Parker raid? In the end, it was simply a standard operating procedure of a manly civilization, no anti-heroic moral dilemmas necessary. As I speculated in my piece on Andrew Tate, violence and patriarchy are features of all stable societies. You can have a violent patriarchy of civilized men or a violent patriarchy of uncivilized men, and Tate represents what happens when civilized men abandon violence. In that piece, I wrote that it was

expected that a family of honor would use extralegal violence to protect their moral reputation.

In the 1800s, the post-Great-Awakening theologians made very strong arguments that this blood-honor culture was un-Christian and that no personal offense against a family justified violence outside the legal system. I’m not sure they were correct. Sex is such a powerful force that its regulation may be so fundamental that it pre-exists the organized law, which itself is only truly possible in a monogamous society that depends on extralegal violence for its maintenance.

Men of the time felt very strongly that any sexual offense was of such a nature that to endure the humiliation of due process for the offender was to emasculate oneself, even if that meant risking imprisonment or death. Such offenses demanded immediate and violent retribution, as the rogue males who committed them were considered animals without rights.

Such practices kept monogamy from becoming overly domesticated, and dare I say, boring and unattractive. Women want to know that their man is capable of violence, that there are situations where he might kill outside the formal bounds of the law. When monogamous men are perfectly domesticated, thugs, rakes, and rogues become relatively more attractive.

That honor demanded warrior cultures of disorganized polygamy targeting your women, like the Comanche, must be mercilessly crushed, was never questioned by men like Sul Ross. This is a demonstration of Hobbes’ state of nature, where, outside of sovereignty, there is war. And this is deep in our civilizational instincts, in that our oldest literature, The Iliad, concerns a war of honor when a woman is kidnapped by a rival tribe. America’s first war on “the shores of Tripoli” was caused by our unwillingness to tolerate Muslim white slavers and pirates harassing our Navy.

This may be encoded at a cellular level. We can track maternal and paternal ancestry, respectively, through mitochondrial DNA, which comes entirely from mothers, and Y chromosomes, which come entirely from fathers. Ancient DNA analysis reveals a stark pattern of an almost continuous transmission of maternal DNA, whereas paternal DNA is subject to sudden runs, fits, and stops, of entire paternal lines suddenly dying out and new paternal lines entirely replacing the old. Human history is demonstrably replete with examples of men being wiped out and their women being taken by others.

And just as hunting regulations targeting male deer have changed the behavioral patterns of the largest-racked, longest-lived specimens in rewarding those most cautious of human contact, the ancient pattern of conquest would breed into human men a primordial, pre-rational fear of seeing women of their tribe carried off by men of another tribe, for such a sight would indicate, for nearly our entire history, weakness to prevent it, and weakness, as the unforgivable sin of nature, a leading indicator of impending death and genocide. This is why the cause of Cynthia Ann Parker was critical for the honor of the Texans, and why, whatever the cries of effeminate preachers and moralists, Sul Ross and his men mercilessly hunted the Comanche.

The Scots-Irish, like Ross, who conquered the continent, weren’t terribly introspective. I suppose if one could question them as to how they morally justified their conquest of the Comanche, they might respond with something like, “Those who place themselves outside the law of civilization are likewise deprived of its protection, and all appeals outside the law are appeals to force of arms.” Or as the half-Scottish Donald Trump put it, in a message responding to the murder of the young Ukrainian woman on Charlotte's public transportation, “We must be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”

Our older theologians understood this, with Robert Dabney describing the state of nature outside Christian civilization: “This world is a hard and selfish scene where the weaker goes to the wall.” An obvious implication of this is that Christians are not bound to Christian norms in dealing with those who deny them, and certainly the use of organized violent power through politics, as war by other means, cannot be denied to Christians on a Christian basis.

Yet, today, Christians doing the most basic preliminary theoretical ressourcement work on the classical Christian ethics of political self-interest in response to a failed post-liberal order are subject to tendentious questioning for impure motives by even our most conservative popular theologians. May a man not reject theology a priori that demands the suicide of his civilization? That such debates are necessary, that we must justify with careful exegesis the morality of survival strikes me as an indication of fundamental decadence.

Must one confess a catechism about the moral particulars of the four-fifths of a century past Second World War to be allowed to strive for one’s continued existence? Isn’t it ok by the liberal order’s own standards to make alliances of convenience with distasteful, even murderous, people, like, hear me out, Joseph Stalin, to accomplish important goals? Might semper reformanda apply doubly to our uninspired Constitution, whatever its virtues, if certain assumptions necessary to its functioning were, understandably, left unstated in the thoroughly Christian society that ratified it?

Right Must Make Might

Two things must be true in a fallen world. Because God exists, might does not make right. But, just as critically, since we are called to live in a fallen world, right, properly understood, must make might. If what we call right normatively results in pathological societal weakness, it cannot be right. No religious tenet, and certainly no political tenet, can be true that requires us to disinherit our children.

Our ancestors, whatever their faults, delivered on this account, and since we enjoy the fruits of their conquest, unless we are willing to return to the poverty from which they delivered us, we should be humble, and given our late circumstances, perhaps lean more into emulation than critique so that our children can also have the luxurious option, but hopefully resist the indulgence, of complaining in their prosperity of the moral deficiencies of the circumstances leading to their patrimony.

And like the Texans, we must embrace our heritage as a willingness to act in our own self-interest. What if, at worst, the blood libels of the woke are fundamentally correct in part? What if we accepted our conditionally carnivorous nature? We don’t need David Barton to slap a Whiggish Christian veneer on our history; we can just accept that while we aren’t necessarily better or worse than other humans when it comes to morals, we are just more effective at pursuing our interests with resolute efficiency, and we had better maintain that resolution in a fallen world, and ignore manipulative guilt trips, to steward our heritage.

And what if we were, like Sul Ross, just ok with that and went about our busy lives anyway, fighting our enemies, worshipping our God, making babies, governing states, and educating the youth without a second thought to these indictments? After all, as the Left tells us, this is just who we are.

“Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?”

3

The Alamo museums remain a surprisingly un-woke throwback to unironic, unqualified hero worship. Texans get very touchy with any attempt to add “context” or sympathy for the enemy, and rumored attempts to do so wrecked the early political career of Bush scion George P. Bush when he attempted to wrest control of the site away from the Daughters of the Texas Revolution. On a visit a few years ago, I found this project seeking to portray the “phenotypic traits” of the defenders through their descendants particularly interesting:

As a sarcastic, cynical Louisianan, I once joked to a Texan that I didn’t understand the big deal about the Alamo, and how it struck me that suicide was maybe not the best military strategy. I was promptly informed that my joke was not funny, a reaction that might have been expected from an atheist joke 200 years ago. That Texans have a sacred respect for their ancestors is indicative of a pre-modern strength of character.

On this particular trip, my first was to the less aesthetic used bookstore, run by an older Boomer couple. I was amused as they grumpily battled over the Alexa speaker playing music. The wife clearly wanted classical string quartets, “Alexa, play Vivaldi,” whereas the husband wanted music from their glory days, “Alexa, play John Lennon.” When “Imagine” came on, the older gentleman was instantly transported to the days of his youth, an experience I can appreciate given my aged 90s grunge Pandora channel that hypes me up during workouts.

Still, though, you have to be pretty committed to your worldview to be on death’s door and listening with any comfort to “imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky.1” It was in this store that I sampled Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and determined that, after reading his equivocation on self-mutilation, he was a disordered thinker, a typical other-worldly-no-earthly-good German pietist2, which gave more weight to the circumstantial evidence of his disordered personal life, which I summarized here in the piece I was working on at the time.

A few days later, I found a larger, more hip bookstore, the type with more knick-knacks for sale in the front and a coffee shop attached. I couldn’t help but notice, as I explored, nearly alone, the overstuffed racks of books in the back, that the books seemed more like decorations than something the clientele was actually interested in. Younger leftists, like younger people generally, are less likely to read, though they do like the idea of sipping their oatmilk latte in proximity to old books.

It was in these stacks that I found the left-wing activism and anthropology sections. After skimming one book that served as a manual for the prison abolition movement — I was curious what alternative they proposed for dealing with criminals, and was disappointed to see this unaddressed — I found a book with the provocative title White Trash by Nancy Isenberg, the emeritus T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University.

Isenberg attempts in this book to add evidence of structural inequality concerning class to the already well-plowed fields of American Marxist scholarship on race. To do this, she does an incredible job, especially for a person sharing Left presuppositions, of focusing exclusively on the history of poor white people in the United States, and elite attitudes towards them. Regardless of one’s agreement with her interpretation, she compiles an impressive collection of anecdotes on class among whites in American history. Since America perceives itself as a classless society, this is especially interesting.

Notable highlights:

• Throughout the book, she seems unconcerned with economic bedrock realities. England, for example, saw North America as a useful dumping ground for “waste people,” i.e., the perpetually morally challenged and malnourished poor of the mother country. From the time of discovery until approximately 1800, mankind was still bound by Malthusian limits to food production, and Malthusian societies are zero-sum in that some people will end up at the bottom in pitiable circumstances. Virgin land in North America was a solution for this.

• She also dismisses Benjamin Franklin’s rather non-controversial claim, given Malthusian limits, that America was a land of opportunity because low population density meant wages were high and land was cheap, the opposite of England. Again, basic economics, supply and demand. The average person is better off when there are plentiful natural resources and a shortage of labor, and America was a glorious local exception to the norms of the Old World during the time of its early development.

• She likewise dismisses Franklin’s rags-to-riches story and his admonitions for frugality and industry as a solution to poverty, simply because certain wealthy people helped him in his ascent in Philadelphia society. Marxists dismiss these narratives as exceptions incapable of scaling to help the broader society, rather than accepting that capitalism is a win-win. Franklin, who made his fortune in newspaper publishing, provided his readers with relief from boredom for a small exchange of resources and improved the life circumstances of both parties in the process. Likewise, her dismissal of his having help from wealthy patrons effectively dehumanizes the wealthy as universally ruthless exploiters, rather than human beings capable of compassion and in many cases eager to provide an up-and-coming talent with assistance.

• Isenberg makes some interesting observations when it comes to the early American interest in the influence of heredity. The English were the most likely to produce a Darwin because the country aristocracy was obsessed with animal breeding, particularly race horses (the etymology of the word race, as in human races, is related to horse racing), with Thomas Jefferson a proto-Darwin in his quip that, “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other animals. Why not in that of man?”

• She recounts the class-based insults on both sides of the Civil War. It’s easy to forget that the dominant factions at this time, in order of popular support, were Anti-Slavery, the “Slave Power,” and abolitionists. Only a portion of the latter had modern notions of human equality. “Anti-Slavery Men” were most concerned with keeping slavery out of the West and preserving the frontier for free white labor. Stephen Douglas attempted to square the circle with “popular sovereignty,” which broke down in the Kansas troubles, with violence and cheating on both sides. Some Southerners, notably the filibusterers, dreamed of a “Golden Circle” of slave societies around the arable tropics of the Gulf of Mexico. Lincoln’s election was a self-own by the Southern Democrats, who were unwilling to accept that their institution, while destined to go extinct economically within a generation with the mechanization of farming and the late-antebellum development of petroleum in Pennsylvania3, was even at its height only economically viable in the areas where it already existed, not the plains of Kansas or further into the Mountain West.

• Southerners denigrated Northerners as “mudsills,” low-class whites who lacked the sophistication and martial spirit enabled by the Greco-Roman model of Southern elite society. Northerners returned the favor, denigrating Southern elites as idle, sexually predatory degenerates removed from the necessity of labor and lacking drive and industry to develop a modern economy. Southern poor whites were portrayed as hopeless swamp dwellers or subsistence farmers, relegated to the worst land due to the dominant land-owning families having a monopoly on cheap slave labor. Possibly the most underappreciated book of the period was Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South, arguably more influential and widely read at the time than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Helper, a Southerner, made the case that slavery harmed and retarded the development of the poor whites of the South, which is why, he explained in some many words, many had outcomes of “white trash.”

• While most of the Confederacy’s officers had aristocratic origins, many of the Union’s were self-made men like Grant and Sherman, who had a class-based contempt for southern pretensions to superiority, and as Isenberg documents, this was particularly aimed at elite southern women late in the war as southern manpower was depleted. One manifestation of this was General Benjamin Butler’s “Order No. 28” during the occupation of New Orleans, which said any woman showing disrespect to a Union soldier would be treated as a prostitute, i.e., unprotected by the law from rape. A general under Sherman, Judson Kilpatrick, organized what he called a “Nero’s Ball,” gathering the southern belles of Barnwell, South Carolina, and forcing them to socialize and dance with Union troops while their town was burned to the ground.

• After the war, Isenberg documents that part of the opposition to President Andrew Johnson, a Southern Unionist of humble origins, was due to his plan to elevate the neglected southern whites to leadership of the South after the defeat of the Southern aristocracy. Johnson’s plan, she says, would have turned the South into a “white trash republic.” His Freedmen’s Bureau would help freed blacks and poor whites, but Republicans expressed as much contempt for the poor whites of the South as any Southerner did for blacks.

• The stereotypes of poor whites of the South were not entirely unjustified. I heard the term “white trash” growing up as a warning to avoid certain associations and friendships.

• My direct ancestors were prosperous enough to own land, but not labor, and my male line was fortunate enough to be born at convenient times to avoid conscription in that tragic meat grinder; 1848 was a conspicuous year for my great-great-grandfather Andrew Jackson Owens to be born, and to paraphrase Trump, I appreciate the luck or skill of ancestors who managed not to die in wars before having children. I often wonder what benefit they achieved from migrating south rather than due west, say to more temperate Ohio or Indiana. How could white people who could barely tan and adapted to the climate of far north Scotland end up in the mosquito swamps of Louisiana before air conditioning and public sanitation? The strange answer, I think, is The Little Ice Age. The temperate northern climes to which they were well-adapted became too cold, particularly in winter, and the heat of the South wasn’t quite as bad. This period of cooling lasted until about 1850, notably, which I can’t help but think made people more miserable, angry, and itching for a fight.

• The effects of warming in the South in the mid-1800s would have severely increased disease burden, particularly parasites. The hookworm epidemic of the South caused loss of IQ, height, and strength among those with often already deficient nutrition.

• As a result, in a period of declining public prejudices, poor whites remained the one group for whom it was universally acceptable to mock and denigrate as hicks, inbred, idiotic, and sexually degenerate. The progress of poor whites, many of whose descendants now make up the middle class, is a story worth telling, and it’s a fairly recent story. The poverty and lack of development in this country until very recently are pretty striking. Neither of my parents, for example, had indoor plumbing until their teenage years. This still manifests in class divides today. In the broader South, several pairs of universities are the nominal “flagships” with bitter rivals created after the Civil War as land-grant institutions: Alabama vs. Auburn, Virginia vs. Virginia Tech, UNC vs. NC State, South Carolina vs. Clemson, Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State, and Texas vs. Texas A&M. These rivalries are salient because loyalties to one or the other tend to indicate how many generations off the farm one’s family is likely to be4. For many Aggies, the “Farmers Fight” cheer against the hated t-sips is moving because of living memories of ancestors who were just that.

• Isenberg, throughout the book, portrays her subjects sympathetically despite the well-known Manichean simplifications of American history. One particularly unexpected vignette of Isenberg’s is her portrait of Hazel Bryan, the 15-year-old young woman made famous by a photojournalist capturing her angry shouts at black students during the integration of Little Rock public schools in 1957. Isenberg highlights the untold story of this period in that Little Rock had two white high schools, one on the rich side of town and one on the other side of the tracks. Given upper-class hypocrisy on issues of race, one can easily guess which high school was chosen for integration. Bryan’s background was troubled. Her mother had married at age 14 to a man twice her age, neither of her parents had graduated high school, and her father was a circus performer who regularly beat her. Their move to the poor white section of Little Rock when she was ten years old was the first time the family had enjoyed indoor plumbing. About 225 journalists had descended upon Little Rock to cover the event, and many of these journalists, rather than functioning as neutral observers, egged on the students to create a story, with Bryan featured, according to Isenberg, as “the face of white trash. Ignorant. Unrepentant. Congenitally cruel. Only capable of replicating the pathetic life into which she was born.” Her immature behavior as a 15-year-old broadcast to a world eager for a white trash narrative, Bryan would drop out of high school a year later and live in a trailer.

  

• The latter part of the book expands on the reinvention of country people in popular culture, including the ascent of country music. Omitted mostly from her discussion is the unique ethnicity of the Scots-Irish, who, like Chechens, defy normal categorization, and are described at length in Fischer’s classic account of America’s birth, Albion’s Seed. The classic division among species is that of r and k selection, which demonstrates how ecology affects the microevolution of geographically isolated subspecies. Classical r-selection features a mild but unstable ecology that favors early puberty, low parental investment, and heavy sexual competition. Classical K-selection features a harsh but stable ecology that favors later puberty, high parental investment, and more stable pair bonds. The Scots-Irish, however, in enduring a millennium of war on the English border, were subject to a microevolutionary environment that was both harsh and unstable. Like Chechens, the Scots-Irish are cold-weather people with personality characteristics typical of more unstable environments. In contrast to, for example, the calm and measured Dutch, the Scots-Irish spirit is more stop-start, featuring bursts of manic energy, extreme risk-taking, and periods of relative languor, but accompanied by extremely high capability when energetic. The high technical skill and frantic tempo of bluegrass music, for example, reflect the fundamental fever of the Celtic mind. The early, arguably insane USAF test pilots profiled by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff were of disproportionately Scots-Irish origin, and the US Space Program was a combination of German scientists smart enough to design interstellar rockets with 1960s-grade tech, and Scots-Irish test pilots glory-crazed enough to ride in them.

• Isenberg strikes me as an honest old-school Marxist. Under her model, elites stir up racial resentment among poor people, who develop a “false consciousness” along racial lines instead of uniting politically for the redistribution of unjust accumulations of wealth. I don’t buy this hypothesis, but her documentation of the irrationality of some Southern conservatives who opposed, for example, rural electrification under the TVA for their own predominantly poor white constituents during the New Deal demonstrates plenty of irrationality on both sides. The New Dealers were correct in believing that the neglected parts of the country had enormous potential. Empirically, it seems that government-funded projects that “redistribute” tax revenue to enable productive activity through the provision of infrastructure that are natural monopolies, require eminent domain, and/or require investments exceeding the risk/return tolerance of private investors are good ideas. It seems equally empirically demonstrated that redistribution of tax revenue for consumption — food stamps, Social Security unadjusted for lifespan gains and subject to disability claims for non-objectively diagnosable conditions like chronic pain, welfare payments, minimum guaranteed income, etc — is a terrible idea due to moral hazard. No one quits working or gets pregnant out of wedlock because the government built a bridge or highway, but behavior changes quickly when bad decisions are directly subsidized.

• Isenberg also mostly neglects the development of religion on the American frontier, some of which was quite legalistic and fervent, and would produce behavior quite the opposite of the stereotypes of white trash. It strikes me as an interesting area of research to test this hypothesis (one MIT study seems to validate, as does this one). I would bet that the more seriously religious among the poor were like coiled springs ready, upon opportunity, to escape poverty due to better cultivation of virtue. Was this due to an independent effect of religion or just genetic propensity towards conscientiousness? Probably a mix of both! It’s understandable why Marxists would avoid this area of research.

Coda: The Dangers of Naive Intuition

Isenberg spends much of the book relating the plight of white trash to the eugenics movement, and does a remarkable job documenting how the thrust of eugenics activism was directed not towards other races, but rather inferior whites. The famous case of Buck vs. Bell , where Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,”5 concerned a young white woman, Carrie Buck, who was under the care of the State of Virginia in the state mental hospital. After getting pregnant in its care, the state had sought to sterilize her after declaring her “feeble-minded.6”

Isenberg, as a Leftist, seems to dismiss any hereditary influence on outcomes, which admittedly throws cold water on Marxist hopes for earthly utopia. But she nevertheless does an admirable job documenting an overindexing on genetics and heredity among elites as explanations for disparate outcomes in the early American period. Ironically, such views were least explanatory in previous eras of extreme poverty, i.e., most of human history. People tend towards all-or-nothing thinking, rather than seeing outcomes as cumulative of many causes. Even then, we tend to think of additive influences rather than geometric ones.

Take, for example, an index of outcomes based on the following equation:

Outcomes (phenotype) = Genetics + Environment

My intuition, however, is that human capability is multiplicative rather than additive. Such that:

Outcomes = Genetics x Environment

In other words, both environment and genes serve as hard limits for human flourishing, both equally limiting. The most extreme example of this would be death for some accidental, non-genetic cause, like a famine. If the environment goes to zero, the outcome is zero, i.e., death, regardless of genetic quality. Likewise, certain rare chromosomal abnormalities are death sentences, such that genes go to zero, and nothing in current medical technology and our amazing, abundant environment can fix the situation.

Ironically, this seems to cause us to come to the opposite conclusion of the truth in both poor and abundant ecologies. In the distant past, infant mortality and the difficulty of survival meant that genes were under continuous harsh selection pressure. The primary limiting factor was, in fact, the environment. Improving the environment in such a situation yielded huge increases in IQ, height7, and general human outcomes. And the “easy money” was improving the physical environment through nutrition, particularly protein availability, supplementation of key vitamins like iron, iodine, B vitamins, and Vitamin D, and reducing the burden of infectious disease through antibiotics and better public sanitation. Further interventions, like the massively expensive Head Start program, proved fruitless8. The only effective “eugenics” program in history was the mass affluence enabled by petroleum, and we’ve tapped it out. The trend of increasing height and IQ ended in developed countries with the Millennials.

The impoverished environments of early America looked like a genetic problem despite being an environmental problem, which is why so many elites focused on heredity as the primary culprit of poverty. Grinding multi-generational poverty leading to successive predetermined outcomes of inadequate prenatal and childhood nutrition, along with parasite and infectious disease burden, looked a lot like genetic determinism, but it was fundamentally wrong.

Similarly, today, with these basic needs almost universally provided, any remaining inequality is likely to be a residue of primarily genetic influence, or else cultural patterns so deeply ingrained they are impossible to address. Yet we assume, despite having harvested all of the low-hanging fruit of improved environments, that outcomes are determined by environment. Perhaps this is an availability bias, in that our technological sophistication and wealth are not yet advanced enough to edit genes for complex traits reliably (genes for behavior and intelligence, like height, number in the thousands and are widely distributed in the genome), but can fund boondoggles like Head Start that seem like they must work, and because they provide market-insulated employment for do-gooder types, have a plethora of enthusiastic public advocates.

This is also, I think, because our enormous wealth enables almost every family to create its own environment according to genetic predispositions; under mass affluence, environments are self-directed phenotypes. Every great work of Western Civilization is available for free on the Internet, but so is TikTok, and with freedom and leisure, people seek the stimuli to which they are most naturally attracted. You have homeschoolers reading Aristotle, and the type of people who watch reality shows all day (and that is among the more benign of online subcultures), and both forms of leisure, as opposed to ceaseless backbreaking labor or else starvation, are enabled by petroleum-enriched dirt-cheap calories compared to historical standards.

In the past, what looked like genes was determined by variable environments and runs of bad luck that took entire family lines into the morass of “white trash.” Today, what looks like variable environments is most likely determined by genes. But rather than be thankful for our incredible chronological privilege relative to our ancestors, we focus on frankly negligible, by historical standards, relative inequalities. Because one thing that will never change in natural history, to the chagrin of both Left and Right utopians, is fallen human nature.

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” This is a common refrain in American business circles, but it’s entirely illogical. The purpose of a business is to generate a profit that can be equitably distributed to its stakeholders: owners, employees, key suppliers, and the surrounding community. Increasing top-line sales may or may not achieve this objective. Even seeking to grow profit may not achieve this objective if it undermines the sustainability of the existing profit of a firm. Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of cancer.

Further, it seems to me obvious that financial security, which has unlimited upside, is best used to free up time, which is strictly limited. Yet, many business owners live and breathe their business and work all the more furiously as their business grows. They need an economics lesson on declining marginal utility.

Declining Marginal Utility of Wealth

A key concept in economics is that of declining marginal utility. Most goods are more valuable at first than they are later. A good example is rain. The first 10” of rain a year are critical for the ecosystem, and every additional 10” provides less and less marginal benefit to the organisms in that ecosystem. At some point, an area can get too much rain, and, unless one is an amphibian, the marginal benefit turns negative. The first bite of ice cream brings more pleasure than the last. Going from being homeless to a 2,000 square foot home improves someone’s life more than going from 2,000 square feet to 4,000 square feet. The absolute difference - 2,000 square feet of living space - is the same in both cases, but the benefits are almost infinitely incomparable from the first to the second situation.

Wealth, if evaluated hedonically in terms of tangible improvement in one’s life, follows a similar pattern. Going from zero dollars in the bank to a $1,000 emergency fund stabilizes finances much more than going from $1,000 to $2,000.

Describing the value or utility of a good at a certain quantity versus its quantity is called a utility function in economics. The most common function utilized to describe the marginal utility of wealth is logarithmic:

Where U is an arbitrary measure of utility and W is the monetary value of a person’s wealth. Here’s a chart of utility at various net worths:

The units here are arbitrary and only have relative meaning. But let’s say you’re a middle-class person with a net worth of $100,000 between vehicles, retirement funds, and home equity. How much more value or enjoyment from life does Bill Gates get from his wealth of ~$100 billion? According to this utility function, the answer is (11-5)/5, or just 120% more. This kind of makes sense intuitively. A middle-class person can afford vacations on airplanes, but Bill flies privately. Bill’s car isn’t faster than yours in getting him between locations. Bill’s house doesn’t keep him dry and comfortable much more than yours does. And for certain, if you’re in your 20s or 30s, your youth is more valuable than Gates’ wealth, because I guarantee you he would trade everything he has to be 30 again. The declining marginal utility of wealth is real because money doesn’t really do that much to impact happiness, especially in a prosperous society where even the vast majority of the poor have housing, enough food to eat, and endless cheap or free entertainment.

I think the logarithmic utility function may somewhat overstate the utility of wealth at the high end and understate it at the low end. Think about the person with a literal $10 net worth. This is someone insecure in every way: can’t afford housing, food, or clothing. The middle-class person at utility level 5 (4 units higher) is infinitely better off, not just 5x better off. The billionaire, four units higher than the middle-class person, is not gaining the same increase in utility as the person who goes from almost nothing to middle-class comfort.

To me, the only difference once we leave the middle class is a sense of freedom. As we approach the higher end of the scale, someone with a $10 million net worth is someone who never has to work again (or more virtuously, can choose his field of labor for love without regard to remuneration), whereas someone with a million-dollar net worth just has a nice retirement nest egg. The rich guy with $100 million doesn’t live that differently from the guy with $20 million (maybe he owns his jet instead of renting), but both live very differently than the prosperous retiree with a $1 million 401(k).

At the high end, I endorse a modified utility function proposed by some economists called the “bliss point.” At a certain level of wealth, and I place this somewhere around $10 million in 2021 dollars, there is no legitimate additional personal utility to having more. The only remaining utility is the degree to which it allows one to serve others, which, while valuable and ultimately most fulfilling, deserves a much more measured approach to risk. Thus, it is rational as one approaches or exceeds this level to trade additional wealth opportunities for a more limited resource (such as family time), and to more highly value preserving wealth than growing it. This implies some sort of sigmoid function, and by trial and error, I believe the following best approximates my personal utility function:

Where BP is the bliss point, which I locate at approximately $10 million1. Here’s that same chart from above, normalized to the same range:

This “feels” more right to me. Small amounts of money that equate to insecurity for the basics of life have very little utility, and then we see growth as people attain first some degree of material security (from about $10,000 - $1 million in net worth) and then personal freedom from the necessity to labor between $1 and $10 million.

Note, I say the necessity of labor. A healthy person will always want to engage in some sort of productive work. A corollary of this is that if a company can make work not suck, but rather be enjoyable and meaningful to employees, and employment secure, this can accrue to their personal utility equal to millions in net worth. A lot of people yearn for financial freedom simply to escape bad work situations, like being pressured to work 50+ hours a week or catering to a narcissist and/or incompetent manager. Thus, crafting sustainable work situations for good people is a gigantic, multi-million dollar arbitrage opportunity.

My formula may somewhat understate the value of additional wealth if one wants to make an impact on the external world, but this is actually quite difficult. Most donors make much less impact than they would like, because the set of problems donated money can help solve is small, non-obvious, and subject to the machinations of charlatans2, so I think it limits the actual utility relative to wealth for one’s family. Charity is mostly a duty, but only sometimes an opportunity, so it is limited in legitimate scope and is better done as income is earned than in large chunks.

It may seem excessive to reduce this to a mathematical function, and indeed it is nothing more than an approximation, and people can disagree on the details. However, a function that is approximately broadly reflective of declining marginal utility can allow us to make better business decisions. Say we are at the bliss point as a business, “worth” $10 million. What is the relative value of gaining or losing an additional $1 million net present value in profit? With this function, we can calculate that it is about 83% as good to gain a million as it is to prevent losing a million. Thus, we should work about 25% harder to preserve our existing profits than to seek new profits. Since money is fungible, this mostly relates to risk management, like avoiding excessive debt. It serves to quantify why bigger is not always better.

Why do some rich people act as if this is not true? Why is it that, for some, the more they get the more they want and the harder they push themselves to get a little more? Why were the wealthy in the past considered the “idle rich” but today can’t get off the rat race treadmill? An astute commentator said we are the first society with rich people who kill themselves working while supporting the idle poor. I think this is driven by a few distorting factors in the modern world.

1. One factor, at least for the moderately prosperous, is the advent of a mass consumer society with luxury goods. Luxury manufacturers utilize psychological techniques in advertising to make those who have already satisfied their basic material needs desire goods that signal status rather than provide additional utility. Think of the dentist who works hard for a decent living, but is not truly wealthy since he still must labor, and is brainwashed by advertising to waste $5,000 on a luxury watch, or spend $20,000 more for the same vehicle with a luxury nameplate3.

2. Generally, as people become wealthier, they start hanging around higher-status people. One minute you feel like you’ve made it, the next minute you’re wondering why you’re a loser chartering a light jet when all these other guys on the tarmac at Vail own Gulfstreams. This, in my opinion, is the meaning of the “love of Mammon.” It’s when wealth is seen as useful for its ranking relative to others instead of for its inherent utility. I think living in a mid-size city helps mitigate this4. There just aren’t enough super-wealthy people around to start getting antsy about what one doesn’t have.

3. Many of today’s ultra-wealthy either do not control their companies, have fiduciary duties to minority interests, or else have shareholders in the public markets. External shareholders will all have different utility functions and tend to want growth out of a smaller business5.

4. The final and most significant factor has been the rise of the bubble economy. It has been so long-lasting and so distorting in its effects that it deserves an extended treatment.

The Bubble Economy

Benjamin Graham, in his classic The Intelligent Investor, declared the value of any investment to be the net present value of all cash flows the investment would ever pay to its owner. His most famous student, Warren Buffett, made the bulk of his initial fortune applying Graham’s techniques to the depressed stock market of the 1970s and 1980s, often finding companies trading for less than their cash in the bank. That such opportunities existed at all seems unbelievable when looking at stock market prices today.

Graham famously described the market as one’s business partner. Mr. Market, as he called him, is manic depressive. Some days, he comes in depressed about the future. On those days, if the price is right according to Graham’s analysis techniques, you buy what he’s selling. At other times, he’s overly optimistic and willing to pay more than fair value net of tax consequences, so you sell to him.

Graham’s theories were challenged by two developments in the 1970s and 80s. The first was the advent of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). Experimental data had shown that most money managers, net of fees, underperformed the broad indexes of the market. To explain this, EMH declared that the trading price for any given stock reflected the fair price for it, incorporating all known relevant information. Since market participants competed with each other to establish a price, the current price was the best price.

Such a position held that people like Buffett were lucky fools and that securities analysis was mistaken, and that Mr. Market, despite his eccentric behavior, was smarter than nearly everyone. If Graham’s methodology showed a stock was under- or overvalued, it simply meant that the market knew something Graham didn’t, and on average, the market would be proven right.

The second development that challenged Graham’s viewpoint was the rise of fast-growing tech companies. Microsoft, for example, was able to grow profits, on average, something like 50% per year in its first decade as a public company. Any static analysis of its business would result in underpricing its securities because securities analysis is based on factual analysis, which is by definition backward-looking. The techniques that had proven so useful in analyzing companies in the competitive world of atoms could not adequately comprehend the extreme and defensible margins of a software company dealing in bits. Microsoft in the 1990s probably had the best customer-facing business that ever existed, or possibly ever will exist.

Microsoft, in retrospect, was objectively undervalued. Anyone who used Graham’s techniques would underperform a manager who discovered Microsoft and “overpaid” for it compared to some industrial stock in 1987. The lesson learned from this was that no one wanted to miss the “next Microsoft.” The difficulty, of course, is knowing in advance who would come to dominate an industry. Microsoft had many competitors in the 1980s. Dominant, well-funded companies made superior products, like the Apple, Amiga, and Commodore 64 PC platforms. Direct retailers like RadioShack had their own competing platforms. It was far from obvious, from the perspective of 1986, who would win and who would become a zero or near zero.

Nevertheless, the lesson was learned that tech companies’ valuations couldn’t be assessed by static analysis techniques. The problem is that this thinking was extended beyond its logical, historical base.

It’s hard to believe now, but at Microsoft’s IPO in 1986, the company was already insanely profitable. At its IPO price of $21, this high-growth, profitable company was immediately trading at 19 times earnings, i.e., actual profits. This demonstrates a principle of business that has served me well: things that end well start well. Nearly all of the actually profitable enterprises in tech - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook - were profitable at their IPO, or shortly thereafter, when they monetized their ad inventory.

It’s important to note how different Microsoft and these similar, wildly profitable tech companies were. Microsoft paid little in dividends, which was the “cash flow” part of the Graham analysis regime, instead reinvesting profits to build massive new enterprises and buy back stock. This makes total sense in a company with additional growth opportunities. The DOS and Office profits, for example, fueled the development of Windows 95, by far Microsoft’s most successful and significant product of the era. Stock buybacks are more tax-efficient than dividends, and so represent a sort of pseudo-cash-flow.

Let’s say you’re Microsoft in the 90s and you have a bunch of extra cash. If you dividend that out to investors, the funds will be double taxed, both at the corporate level and then again at the individual investor level. Let’s say Microsoft stock is trading at 15 times earnings. Taking the reciprocal of that, we get an earnings yield of 1/15 = 6.67%. That 6.67% represents the theoretical sustainable maximum you could pay out as a cash dividend to shareholders. Let’s say Windows 95 is about to launch, and you think your earnings could double over the next two years, bringing the earnings yield relative to the current stock price to over 12%, and you think there’s more growth left after that.

The math is a little confusing, but using the cash to buy back stock is financially equivalent to paying a dividend, except there’s no double taxation. That is, when you buy back your stock, it gets canceled such that the stock that remains owns a proportionally greater share of the earnings. Now, these increased earnings per share increase exactly as if the dividend were paid as cash. If we keep going with the reasoning, it is possible to never pay an actual dividend but just buy back stock to simulate a dividend, and avoiding taxes makes it about 40-50% more financially efficient.

All of this is incentivized by the dumb tax laws. Your stock price then becomes a function of a dividend you could theoretically pay, but never do. When investors need cash flow, they just sell a few shares, as the company’s buying program supports the stock price from falling too far. This creates a double tax incentive. Not only are taxes on dividends avoided entirely, which in the past were taxed as regular income at 40% marginal rates, but the stock that’s sold by the investor to create cash flow, if held for longer than a year, is taxed at the 20% or so long-term capital gains rate6. These benefits are extremely significant to terminal net worth, which is why Warren Buffett, despite seeking cash-flowing businesses based on value rather than hype, hasn’t paid one in Berkshire since 1967, relying on buybacks to return capital, and only then when shares were undervalued.

So investors got used to the idea that a security wasn’t the sum of future cash flows, but rather the sum of potential future cash flows. In the case of a legitimately profitable enterprise like Microsoft, this worked. Google and eventually Facebook would take this even further.

Google famously IPO’d before it had earnings. Unlike Microsoft, it was not profitable when it issued stock. It had a huge audience, however, and so delayed monetization to build the core product. When it finally did monetize, it began selling ads against its search results and became an insanely profitable business.

So investors were taught another lesson. Instead of buying a business like Microsoft that made a real profit and could pay a dividend but chose not to for tax efficiency purposes, investors were rewarded for buying a business that could make a real profit, but had not yet, profits that could theoretically pay a future dividend but likely wouldn’t because buying back stock or reinvesting in the growing business was a better use of funds. The connection between cash flows and value became even more abstract.

Facebook fared similarly, just with less valuable ad inventory and an overall less valuable business. Facebook took this further, though, and issued reduced-rights shares to the public markets, ensuring founder Mark Zuckerberg’s permanent control over the company. This was key, because with Microsoft and Google, the potential of future dividends was enforced by the theoretical right of shareholders to elect a new board that could force a dividend to be paid. With Facebook, however, the founder could never be coerced to do so, and since already wealthy, has little incentive to do so. Indeed, Facebook’s earnings have been continually reinvested in science projects of interest to the founder. The potential dividend is not subject to the discretion of the economic owners if they ever begin to doubt the founder’s leadership.

Both Google and Facebook began to show cracks in the tech facade. Unlike Microsoft, neither has developed any substantial profitable businesses besides selling ads. Their core ad-selling business remains insanely profitable, but neither has figured out how to make profits in any other space, that is, outside of providing a “free” product to users and selling those users to advertisers.

Amazon took this logic further. Amazon deliberately does not make more than a nominal profit, since profits are taxed, but takes advantage of a provision in the tax law that allows payroll to be expensed immediately, regardless of whether the payroll functions like a capital expense.

A business dealing in the world of atoms, like Fedex, must capitalize large expenditures by law. For example, if they spend $30 million on an airplane, they do not get to just deduct this expenditure against that year’s profits. They must depreciate it over time, usually something like 10 to 20 years (it varies according to IRS guidelines), reflecting approximately the useful lifetime of the asset. The reasoning is that turning cash into an airplane that will last 10+ years isn’t really a loss of profit that should lower the tax bill in the current year, and it makes sure companies pay taxes as they are profitable and can’t just indefinitely delay a tax bill until they’re finished growing. In other words, the government wants its cut of profits when they happen, and capital expenses have to come from after-tax money, just like they would if the business were a startup.

Amazon, however, is mostly a software business. The salaries they pay engineers build products that will produce value many years into the future. They, however, by law get to deduct all of those salaries7 that build long-term assets made of bits, while companies dealing in the world of atoms do not. In addition, Amazon functions as a conglomerate. The profitable parts of its business, like book sales and Amazon AWS, are in the same unit of accounting as new, unprofitable parts. Amazon’s accounting is carefully engineered to make nearly zero profit, with profits on cash-flowing portions of the business offset by losses on the future growth areas.

Jeff Bezos, who famously built a 10,000-year clock in the desert, takes an extremely long view. And as long as investors will buy it8 - that is, agree to value Amazon on profits it might eventually make even decades from now - Amazon can operate the world’s most tax-efficient business. So while Microsoft was valued on real future profits and theoretical dividends, and Google was valued on theoretical but short-term future profits, Amazon is explicitly valued on profits it could make but chooses not to, so it can build additional lines of business over a multi-decade or even multi-century horizon.

Don’t get me wrong, all of these examples so far are great businesses and challenge the Graham securities analysis paradigm. But, as often happens in the financial world, with real success comes the endless supply of investment opportunities that mimic.

In the natural world, this is called Batesian mimicry after the biologist who pointed out that species can engage in a subtle form of parasitism by evolving traits that mimic useful traits without making the investment of actually developing them. The venomous coral snake, for example, warns predators with bright colors to leave it alone, a credible threat based on its taking on a real biological burden in maintaining a cache of venom. Other species of snake have co-evolved with the coral snake to copy its colorful markings, thereby tricking predators into thinking they are venomous and dangerous, without actually making the costly investment to develop and maintain venom glands.

Because of these examples of wildly profitable businesses that didn’t pay dividends or even generate immediate profits, investors have become obsessed with finding the next Google or Facebook, partially because we are cognitively biased towards lottery-type outcomes. The problem with this is that the old, staid notion of the quarterly dividend and valuing stock based on that dividend was inherently honest. Either the cash showed up in the brokerage account or it didn’t. Without that accountability, businesses that never have any hope of paying a real dividend comparable to their market capitalizations have multiplied. Without the discipline of dividends paid in cash, alternative, non-GAAP accounting measures proliferated to justify crazy valuations.

Perhaps the best example of this is Uber. Uber has never made a profit, and it has gained a user base by offering a valuable service below its actual cost. Because the service is in the world of atoms, it is fundamentally constrained in the efficiencies it can enjoy with scale. As Google got bigger, the marginal cost of an additional Google search provided to a user became exponentially lower. As Uber gets bigger, the cost of transportation only goes down slightly because it’s a real operation that must be performed in the real world. If Uber offered rides at the actual all-in cost, it would be more expensive than the taxi services it competes with. The plethora of startups (“Uber for X”, e.g. DoorDash, etc) premised on applying Moore’s law to the real world where it doesn’t apply are voluminous, and none of them are profitable.

Uber, then, is “valued” purely on sales or user growth. This is true of many tech companies, including Google and Facebook, but particularly true of the unprofitable ones. The whole premise behind Uber is that if they get big enough, somehow, magically, they’ll be profitable. So when they don’t grow, they die. When your customer is the stock market, not your actual customers, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying” is actually true.

So all of these Bubble companies must show extreme growth, the famous “hockey stick” for investors to believe they might actually be worth something one day. A substantial part of the stock market is now composed of unprofitable, possibly never profitable, companies. Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world as I write this, has never returned a dollar to investors. He has never cumulatively served his customers profitably.

Every dollar anyone makes in an unprofitable business must come from a new investor. In this way, they are Ponzi schemes. Uber, for example, has never paid a dividend. If you own Uber stock, you have never received cash simply for being a shareholder. Now, you may make money in Uber, but you can only do so by selling shares. As I write this, Uber is trading for $44 on volume of 10 million shares so far today. That means about $44 million of Uber has traded on this particular date. Every single one of those transactions has a buyer on one side providing cash and a seller on the other side providing Uber stock. Let’s say you were an early-stage Uber employee with 100,000 shares of stock that cost you pennies. If you sold at $44, you would net $4.4 million. Every single bit of the money you just made came from a new Uber investor. Uber itself did not give you that money, but rather someone else who wants to own the stock. It is, so far, entirely a zero-sum game.

Now contrast that with a boring royalty trust, Dorchester Minerals. It’s trading at about $19 but has paid out 8% of that in dividends over the past year. That money comes from royalties it earns on mineral property, which ultimately comes from customers who buy the oil. If the flows continue, I only have to hold this stock for about 12 years before I’ve made back my entire investment, and still own any future cash flows. None of that return came from other investors, but rather a profitable business. These are two fundamentally different types of transactions. One is speculation on the potential of future profits, the other is a return on capital invested in a profitable business, the profit earned proportional to the good its economic activity provides in the marketplace.

Humans always are subject to recency bias, the idea that what’s working now will always work. The result has been a change in the business ecosystem away from profits and toward top-line growth at all costs. This ideology has trickled down to companies in real, profitable businesses. One of my other investments, Pardee Resources, a 150-year-old family-owned timber and coal conglomerate, has spent a ton of shareholder money on solar energy boondoggles. Businesses that quietly make an honest profit are fearful they will be left behind in the heralded new economy, which, like Elon Musk’s promises of autonomous vehicles, always seems around the bend but never quite arrives.

All Bubbles End

I think my generation, Generation X, has a different perspective on all of this than younger generations. We lived through the first dot-com bubble in 2000, and then the financial crisis of 2008, the result of which was a savings account outperforming the S&P 500 from 2002-2017. By many objective metrics of valuation, current stock market prices exceed the valuations of 2000, and history has repeated itself with unprofitable tech companies dwarfing the market cap of their profitable “old economy” counterparts.

For better or worse, this is not a game I have chosen to play. I am more content and feel more secure in running and investing in businesses that make an actual profit over growing top-line sales above all to feed a future monopoly narrative. Such a course strikes me as more rational, because it is more sustainable to make an honest, modest profit than to compete in winner-take-all contests with lottery-like components. A rational response to the declining marginal utility of wealth is to avoid lottery outcomes at all costs and preserve wealth.

Growth, then, is neither necessarily good nor bad. For a teenager, growth according to the body’s design for maturity is good. For an adult, growth in muscle volume from strength training is good, but growth of fat or tumors is bad. Growth in skills and self-knowledge is good, but growth in greed or bitterness is not.

Warren Buffett emphasizes more than anything else his concept of the “margin of safety.” The number one rule of investing or business is not to lose money. Investments one makes should be so safe that even if one is severely wrong about a key component of the investment thesis, there is sufficient safety in the investment to compensate and avoid a total loss. This seems like the sane approach. What cannot go on forever will eventually end, as will the current economic froth. I prefer timeless approaches to wealth and growth that are antifragile in both bubbles and hard times.

Coda: Maybe Not

While my investment approach has not changed, I am less convinced in 2025 that the “Bubble” will end anytime soon. In my 2024 economics post, I said:

Benjamin Graham famously declared that the value of an investment is the net present value of its future cash flows. I think he’s still right, but a major shift in my thinking is realizing that not all things called investments are investments.

I live about an hour east of Lake Charles, which is full of casinos designed to help Texans make the short drive from Houston dispose of their money. Given that the expected cash flow of gambling is negative, why do casinos exist? For entertainment, most charitably, but in reality, addiction, because they couldn’t exist without problem gambling.

In surveying, a few years ago, the popularity of everything from meme stocks to cryptocurrency and NFTs, it occurred to me that these “investments” were simply more efficient forms of gambling, which demonstrably has some hedonic value to the consumer. More broadly, I think some stocks trade like collectibles.

What is the value of a baseball card? It produces no cash flow and has no intrinsic value. It is simply an artifact of someone’s affection for an athlete, made more special by its scarcity. Likewise, I think many “investors” like to own stocks based on their affection for the products a company produces, regardless of price or valuation.

Given that both the gambling and collectibles markets are permanent features of human economic activity, the ease of investing via apps like Robinhood should cause one to expect that some stocks will and can become permanently elevated in their popularity. Some people might make money predicting these trends, but it’s a different art, and a more irrational art, detecting subjective vibe shifts, i.e., zero-sum speculation, than value-based investing.

Some investments pay dividends in cash, others in neurotransmitters.

Further, as I speculated in my post on the post-scarcity glut of capital, waiting around for a crash to buy good assets cheaply may no longer be viable; instead, “it seems wise to be content with those relatively safe single-digit real returns that are available. The miracle of compound interest ensures that even small returns add up to something large over time.”

Someone, however, has to do the retail work, and no one was better at this than Charlie Kirk. Add to that his sincere, public Christian faith, his political entrepreneurship from a nobody on a college campus to a major political player (building TPUSA into an $80mm+ annual revenue institution by age 30!), his general friendliness and happy personality, and critically, his willingness to publicly consider and embrace more conservative positions as he weighed the evidence, and he probably was on-track to be if not a future President, then the most influential political commentator of Generation Z.

I’ve felt a bit numb since Kirk’s assassination, as I’ve known for a long time what the Left is. I can’t be as outraged because I’m not surprised.

His assassination is a major historical event, as he was the most prominent American since the 1960s to be murdered for his opinions and political activism. And just as martyrs from that era took their movements much farther than they would have proceeded otherwise, the same and more could happen with Charlie Kirk. While the various 1960s liberation movements exercised power of an indirect nature, ultimately dependent on the compassion of the majority, Kirk represented a larger constituency of young conservative men who can, if they so desire, dictate the future of our civilization without needing others’ cooperation.

The former, by necessity, adopted the tactics of Gandhi, of non-violence and provoking contradictions in the self-image of those with power, and were limited to what the majority was willing to allow because they felt true guilt and shame1. Kirk’s constituents, by contrast, can seize power directly as an act of will, for the entire edifice of modern liberal civilization consists in a perverse noblesse oblige, without any notions of nobility but rather demonization, of the naturally strong granting de jure rights in law and custom to the weak. There is no de facto natural governing limit if this obligation is cast aside.

It is hard to overstate the psychological impact of Kirk’s assassination on his natural constituents. He played by what were supposedly the rules, debating his opponents with perfect civility, winsomeness, and Christian charity. He used his voice, like he was supposed to in our system, and was shot in the throat. That he was murdered for precisely this, and more critically, his murder was celebrated or else excused by much of the Left, empirically validates the more cynical voices of the Right who said that John Locke’s experiment in self-government was doomed outside its initial conditions of a Christian, Anglo-Saxon nation.

I have personally been torn between my head and heart, in that the evidence points towards cynicism, but I badly desire there to be some other way. Many of the hardest right-wing cynics, some of whom had criticized Kirk severely for his naivety, nevertheless, in his death, praise him because he represented something beautiful, that he was the best of us, what we wish we could be if we weren’t “mugged by reality,” and what we could still be if generations previous had not foolishly expanded the Lockean experiment past its natural limits.

That Kirk was so likable, so guileless, and ended up dead, with his children orphaned and his wife widowed, is a deep wound even to cynics. They say every cynic is a disappointed idealist, and his assassination takes away even that grain of disappointed idealism, the secret hope that maybe I’m wrong and there’s still some way out that isn’t entirely unpleasant. For many, and granted nerves are still raw, the time for cynicism is over, and the time for a pitiless struggle for power has arrived.

There is a deep irony and tragedy in his murder. The Left has always struck me as a movement of disobedient children desperately seeking boundaries, complete with dress-up parties, with a death wish, or else a father hunger, to bring about the very conditions they claim to most fear. In murdering Charlie, to echo Menken, they may get it “good and hard.”

Hobbes and Locke

Why, ultimately, was Kirk murdered? In a phrase, “Jurassic Locke.” Let me explain.

Back in May, a friend sent me an amazing framework by a writer named Matthew Carden. If you want to understand modern morality and politics, please watch the short presentation he gave for Aaron Renn. I believe he is a software programmer and has constructed an amazing explanation of modern morality as an imperfect system of “hacks.” The full write-up is here, and he does a better job than I will, but I’ll attempt to summarize.

Carden posits that the medieval world of universal divine authority was undermined by the equations of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. As the world was disenchanted, mankind became, in many ways, functionally atheist. It’s not necessarily logical, but if math can explain the basic mechanics of the world, the unproven claims of religion, and particularly religious sectarianism, were severely reduced in their salience. People might be willing to believe in religion, but they were no longer willing to kill and die for unfalsifiable ideas like the authority of the Bishop of Rome. Religion was put in a box of private conviction.

But without divine authority, how was man to live? One model was that of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, of nature’s war of all against all, and the necessity of an absolute monarch to settle disputes, including suppressing speech likely to bring disorder, and bring peace. Another was that of John Locke, the intellectual founding father of the United States, of maximizing “utility” — maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain under a regime of personal liberty — while limiting government to essentially something like the libertarian idea of the non-aggression principle.

Disputes would be settled within some form of representative government; the US Constitution, for example, is a Lockean document. The losers of disputes would accept their loss civilly and try again next time, knowing their fundamental rights were protected.

Though Locke accounted for fallen human nature in his concept of the separation of powers, he perhaps underestimated man’s ability to settle disputes by the process of law. Carden identifies a particular human type he calls “pulpiteers:” dominant, narcissistic personalities who desire to tell other people what to do rather than “work quietly with their hands.” In times past, these folks would be drawn to religion, fomenting division and hatred (on both sides) over issues like the mode of baptism or the authority of the Pope, but with religion placed in a harmless box, they had to find other avenues for their drive.

The pulpiteers found their escape in moral panics, emerging barely 50 years into the American experiment in the abolition movement. When the Lockean system tolerated real secular harms, as in the case of slavery, quasi-religious zealots were able to break its containment of political disputes to civil discourse and elections. William Lloyd Garrison declared that the Constitution, in allowing slavery, was a “covenant with death and agreement with Hell” and won the argument in the actions of John Brown2. But critically, once these ideas broke containment, they also appeared in clusters. No pulpiteer worth his salt would want to solve a problem and go home, giving up the ecstasy of public acclaim and self-righteousness, so new causes had to be found. Prohibitionism, for example, had nothing logically to do with slavery, but was a fellow-traveler in the movement and its successors.

Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way,” just as human passions found a way to escape civil discourse. The sudden appearance of secular panics to replace religious panics leads Carden to call the new moral system “Jurassic Locke.” To understand the system more fully with a modern example, check out his article on the Gaza conflict, which he describes as an ideological contest between the two megafauna akin to King Kong and Godzilla, Slavery vs. Hitler3.

Carden’s system explains much of public behavior. People who disagree with the basic tenets of the “science box,” like Flat Earthers or perpetual motion machine enthusiasts, are deemed both crazy and harmless4. People who disagree inside the religion box are deemed in error but respectable. But those who disagree with Jurassic Lockean hot buttons, like defending slavery or questioning the Holocaust, are deemed not merely in error but crazy, evil, and dangerous.

Hence, Carden explains, most modern Christians would think well of neighbors who were Hindus, a religion that worships idols, and extend friendship to them, but severely ostracize neighbors who used racial epithets. This despite idolatry being the preeminent sin of the Old Testament, breaking the entire first table of the law, while to the ancient mind racial epithets, to the extent we stretch our understanding of ancient morality to even allow such a category (Jesus called a Samaritan woman a dog to her face to test her faith), can only be Biblically argued to be a species of heart murder akin to lust or covetousness.

Can you imagine trying to justify this distinction to the prophet Jeremiah? But because epithets are closely associated with the secular harm of slavery, Christians behave exactly as secular people would in identical circumstances. Any outrage over the honor of our God is locked in a small private box, while outrage against indirect secular harms is vented fully to show solidarity with all decent people.

So, how was Kirk murdered? By a transgender activist, the ideology of which, cultivated by the Left, has successfully transformed itself into a moral panic. Not content with merely being tolerated in the latter phases of the Sexual Revolution5, the transgender movement demands that everyone else participate in a gross public role play of their exhibitionist sexual kink, and to refuse to do so causes transgender people psychological distress, and sometimes leads them to commit suicide; therefore, it’s literally murder to not go along with the fantasy.

People like Charlie Kirk, who object at scale with large public platforms, are further guilty of “genocide” against transgender people, no different from Hitler, who, everyone agrees, according to previous moral panics, would be justifiable to murder6. One moral panic feeds another, ad infinitum. That this has happened not once but several times in succession indicates that Locke’s system is irretrievably broken. It was nice while it lasted, but there are no brakes on this train.

Hobbes’ Revenge

Hobbes is mostly forgotten in the West. He was hated by all, by classical liberals for obvious reasons, but also by conservatives asserting the divine right of kings. The latter were uninterested in a secular, social-contract style rational argument for monarchy when they had what they believed was the firmer rock of Scripture.

Carden, however, mentioned that Hobbes has re-emerged in the modern world in China. No longer really Communist (top marginal tax rates of 45% are well below the 70% of Jimmy Carter), the Chinese state is managed by a committee of absolute rulers, mostly engineers, who have shed the Communist ideological baggage for a fully secular, Hobbesian state pursuing the interests of their people. They have done so not as reactionary Luddites but as an advanced technological civilization.

In writing my recent piece on teens and technology, it occurred to me that sufficiently advanced technological capitalism may entirely disable any hope of normal people enjoying both personal freedom and a decent life. There’s money in catering to addiction, and addiction has higher margins than improving people’s core quality of life, and our Lockean system seems helpless to stop it. The very essence of our system is due process and slow-moving courts whose OODA loop is entirely insufficient to address fast-evolving harms.

Take, for example, the $30 billion a year our government spends on dialysis (1% of the entire federal budget!), almost entirely from preventable cases of diabetes. It seems impossible to imagine a) that our government would, should, or could simply let these people reap what they have sown without stealing from other taxpayers to pay for their health care, or b) that our society could ever be totalitarian enough to prevent the sale and distribution of the addictive processed foods that cause the condition. Similarly, we cannot imagine regulating social media platforms that destroy young people with mind viruses like that of the transgender movement that led to Kirk’s murder.

China, meanwhile, just bans porn. China limits video games to 30 minutes per day. China’s TikTok algorithm is boring and non-addictive, only allowing wholesome content, while serving up brainrot to Americans. Tech companies there, and foreign tech companies operating there, don’t violate the bans because there’s no Lockean “due process” where talented lawyers can throw sand in the gears of helpful social regulations.

Even China’s demographic problems, as Richard Hanania recently opined, may be addressable by their system. Whenever China is ready to make babies again (right now, while TFR is below replacement, they still have a surplus rural population to integrate into their long-term goal of an advanced economy), they’ll simply flip a switch and implement a hard preference for married couples with children for college admissions, or else access to white collar jobs after graduation, tying social status to reproduction. Compared to the test prep Chinese kids are put through, making a baby for the country will be the easy part of joining the middle class.

A highly agentic friend asked me why this matters, and I replied that “I want normal people to have a nice life.” And for that, they need authoritative guidance instead of technology-enabled exploitation. Waddling around Walmart with pre-diabetes, feral kids in tow from last decade’s various hooligans of the week, covered in unsightly tattoos, morals polluted with the latest vapid, narcissistic trash on Spotify and Netflix, convinced by TikTok they’re “non-binary,” middling minds dulled 15 IQ points by ubiquitous cannabis with THC content exceeding the weed of the dirtiest hippie by 8x, buying Chinese junk with the taxpayer’s money, too distracted by their phones to even ponder eternal things for a moment, is no way to live.

On the flip side, I’d like people with healthy values not to have to spend half their income on a mortgage just to insulate their kids, and then only partially, from the trash culture. I want the best for all of our historical countrymen, and I don’t want our system to collapse under the weight of its dysfunction. Evolution will eventually take care of the problem, but it would be nice to avoid the 80% die-off coincident with the introduction of novel, addictive stimuli like alcohol that we see in the ancient genetic record.

What About Locke 1.0?

Carden’s comments about Hobbes and his demonstration of Lockean failures motivated me to read Hobbes’ Leviathan. I’m 225 pages in, and have nearly finished his commentary on government. He’s a brilliant philosopher, and rightly points out the limits of freedom, but I’m not convinced we must go so far as to form a Chinese Hobbesian hive.

Perhaps, if we like Locke’s liberty-maximizing system generally as a sort of natural optimum for Anglo-Saxon civilizations, we ought to consult the man on the constraints. If the janky, buggy, underspecified version of his system worked well enough for so long, we can only imagine how good it could be if we implemented it as intended. Among other boundary conditions, Locke supported:

1. No religious toleration for atheism, in that oaths and promises “can have no hold upon an atheist.” It’s amazing how this “one weird trick” would fix so many problems. No atheism, no communism, among other things. Note this is not to ban atheism as a matter of conscience, but rather to ban its public confession and advocacy where it can corrupt weak minds7.

2. Limited religious toleration for Catholics, but only if they rejected temporal papal authority, which would undermine the state. Few American Catholics today, nor the pontiff himself, take this seriously, but it would advise against Islamic immigration, for example. The general principle is that those who would undermine, by their native political culture or hard commitments like religion or ideology, the system itself, should not be included in the body politic. And the stakes are too high for mere verbal assent, but citizenship rather should require historical demonstration that the cultural phenotype emigrated from is capable of liberty and self-government for long periods of time. This protects extant Lockean societies by requiring “proof of work” in building a durable Lockean republic in the home country before immigration is a possibility.

3. This will come as a shock to modern ears, but John Locke didn’t necessarily think everyone should vote. Locke’s system was designed to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” i.e., property. The latter is fundamental in Locke’s system, enabling the former, and is the state’s top priority to protect. He had the very politically incorrect, decidedly un-woke notion that propertyless voters might abuse the privilege to provide themselves with benefits from the public treasury. So it should be no surprise that in the one constitution Locke himself wrote, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, he limited the franchise to those who owned at least 50 acres of land, and membership in the legislature required owning at least 500 acres. In today’s money, with an average US land value of around $4,350 per acre, that would imply requiring voters to own real estate worth at least $217,500 (a starter home) and their elected representatives $2,175,000. Since his was an agricultural society, these qualifiers served to make sure only net taxpayers voted. The Lockean slogan “no taxation without representation” can only work when paired with its inverse, “no representation without taxation.” This may seem unfair, and would have disenfranchised me as a poor college student, but consider the outcomes. Imagine how different the government of our most dysfunctional cities would be with this tweak. Net tax consumers could not elect political opportunists who’ve never had a real job to represent them, and justice for violent crimes might be more severe if jury service were limited to the same.

4. Locke states that “adultery, incest, and sodomy” violate the “intention of nature” and can be punished by the civil magistrate.

Now, if John Locke, considered an extreme liberal in his time, appeared today advocating for these things, he would be labeled a horrible, theocratic Christian nationalist by many of the very people who claim to speak in his name. Much like the never-Trumpers in the “Lincoln Project” who rail against Trump’s supposed abuse of the Constitution, so much of today’s political commentary is fake and performative.

But if the system is broken, it must be fixed. Maybe Locke is unworkable, but a minimal, moderate theoretical position is to restore the initial conditions specified by Locke for his system to work: no public atheism, a body politic consisting of those historically demonstrated to be assimilable to a Lockean system, no voting by net tax consumers, and marginalization of obscenity and vice, sexual and otherwise. These are all things our system did in the relatively recent past, so it is not “unconstitutional” for those foolish enough to think that adjective retains any objective meaning, though it may well be “unconstitutional” relative to today’s arbitrary, historically anomalous court interpretations.

Now, these conditions may be unachievable directly, but perhaps a synthetic functional equivalent hack would work, not unlike modernity itself. By a functionally equivalent hack, I mean if the explicit conditions are politically unattainable, then implicit, attainable pretexts that ensure functional hegemony that is indistinguishable in outcomes from the explicit conditions. And many things formerly unattainable may be attainable in the wake of Kirk’s murder.

Politics is the art of the possible, and what’s possible may look like an unprincipled hodgepodge of policies with the same practical outcome as the more principled, politically impossible position, which political opponents or feckless libertarians will attack with that weakest of arguments, the “double standard,” whose pleas should simply be ignored. This is the price we pay for democracy when median voters have 30-second attention spans, get their history from Hollywood movies, and haven’t read a book since high school; the Right ought to master this skill just like the Left.

Advice to Moderate Republicans

Auron MacIntyre cut to the essence of our political moment with this tweet:

My message to moderate Republicans is to get out of the way. The American system has tolerated authoritarians before, from Jackson to Lincoln to FDR, and all of you at least endorse the last two. Determined reformers can crush the Left as effectively as it crushed the Right if conservatives are willing to use power.

Granted, the federal courts, which stand idly by when conservatives are persecuted, will quickly intervene to prevent the rational tit-for-tat response game theory dictates is necessary. Trump or his successor will likely have to ignore some federal court orders8. Locke himself likely would have opposed Marbury v. Madison in creating so much mischief and undermining, eventually through the incorporation doctrine, what republican limits remained on American democracy9. This is not even to speak of the federal courts’ front-running public degeneracy on abortion, obscenity, marriage, etc. Their ethos is nil, and the people will welcome their being brought to heel.

Restoring the initial conditions of a functioning Lockean republic will likely require operating outside of the strict limits of that system for a time. When the head of a screw is stripped out from misuse or deficient quality, the elegant solution of a screwdriver is foreclosed, and a drill becomes necessary. The point isn’t to replace the screwdriver permanently with a drill, but restore the conditions under which a screwdriver does the job.

Since the Constitution, as written, has been a dead letter since the 19th century, it’s really nothing new, except that conservatives will hopefully get to put some time back on the clock on behalf of the historical American people. As Rahm Emanuel said, never waste a crisis. Charlie Kirk agreed:

Up until three months ago, generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, were interesting toys, reliable only in certain limited contexts. They were theoretically capable for a lot of business communications related to marketing, meeting summaries, and the like.

However, I think that says a lot more about the inefficiencies of how most businesspeople operate than about the technology as of January 1, 2025. Since I have always run business meetings towards coming to a resolution and action items following any discussion, and those conclusions were too critical to trust to an AI, such tools seemed superfluous1. Good summaries are useful for those, admittedly most, who talk for entertainment purposes without specifying objectives clearly.

I am, however, quite interested in tools that can make my search for better mental models more efficient. Early this year, I had high hopes for the o1 reasoning model, one of the first large language models (LLMs) that would attempt to check its own work before spitting out an answer. I quickly became disenchanted, however, in seeing it hallucinate sources and quotes. With some prodding, it could often correct its errors, but practical usefulness remained limited.

On April 15, 2025, OpenAI released its o3 model, only available on paid plans. This model, like o1, features a recursive reasoning component that allows it to correct (most) hallucinations, but more importantly, can search the web to gather information directly. Unfortunately, the training process of LLMs introduces significant information compression into its structure, so outside of the most general, well-documented knowledge, these compression artifacts often produce information that, even if directionally correct, is incorrect in its details; they might arrive at the appropriate conclusion, but cite non-existent sources. The ability to search live information on the Internet and use that as its authoritative sourcing, rather than its training data, is a huge game-changer. More importantly, it allows users to directly verify its conclusions.

Upon experiencing o3’s capabilities over time, I noticed a behavioral change in my searching activity, going to o3 first for many, and now most, queries instead of Google. Strangely, I think this is partially because Google has gotten worse in its use of AI-based summaries. About 18 months ago, aside from topics touching aspects of political correctness, Google was the best it had ever been, surfacing useful results by broadly interpreting queries. The workflow of an AI interpreting a naive non-expert user’s queries and surfacing the most relevant results is an awful lot like today’s o3!

Google, however, had a big problem. GPT4, released in March 2023, was quickly polluting the web with almost undetectable spam, lowering the usefulness of the results it did surface, while many users shifted to the shiny object of ChatGPT for queries, despite its inaccuracy.

Scared by ChatGPT, Google quickly implemented its own AI summaries, which are often quite wrong, and waste time in that a savvy user must click through and verify the facts at the source, instead of being served the source with a snippet (to quickly assess relevance) like on old Google. Right now, AI can be good or fast, but not both, the implications of which I’ll discuss momentarily.

Whether I like it or not, old Google probably isn’t coming back, and o3 is now better for nearly every even semi-complex search.

Using o3

The o3 model is best conceived as a better search engine, as much of a breakthrough that Google was over previous incumbents in 1998. It’s right at least 95% of the time and can save significant effort collecting disparate facts across a traditional search engine’s results. Most importantly, at its current functionality, it’s a tool I will gladly pay for, much more than $20 per month if forced to, and I would be sad to revert to old-style Googling.

Unfortunately, this is subject to several caveats that, at the current state of the technology, augment the effectiveness of savvy users while harming average users:

• o3 is kind of slow, in that to provide good summaries and research it must a) retrieve multiple sources from the web, which takes 20-30 seconds, and b) analyze those sources, questioning its reasoning in a loop. A good answer from it can take 2-3 minutes, longer if in “deep research” mode. This is much faster than doing it myself. However, the existence of faster models like 4o, and Google’s AI summaries means average users, not understanding the technology, will get bogged down by impatience and be subject to more frequent errors. The savvy get functionally smarter, the average user functionally dumber.

• Google is not irrational to serve up fast, dumb AI, as most users are super impatient. Never underestimate the irrationality of consumers! One of the reasons Amazon is a dumpster fire for bad actors is that Amazon knows users care most about speed in loading the Amazon website, so Amazon runs its massive catalog on a NoSQL database optimized for this. But on the back end, this means the most basic queries to identify scammy activity take days to run in batches, leaving Amazon constantly playing defense instead of proactively preventing scam activity.

• o3 is only as smart as the sources it can access, and it will fake it if it can’t find good sources. The more obscure the topic, the more likely a hallucination. For example, when researching bureaucratic procedures related to purchasing for government entities, I’ve seen it completely fabricate details of vendor applications. When challenged, it will say it made it up for illustrative purposes, when expected behavior would have been for it to just admit it couldn’t find the information.

• Like all flat-priced subscription “chat” products, which are operated at a loss for power users, computing resources are carefully metered. This is either to control costs or meet user expectations of speed. It’s much better to ask one simple question at a time.

• But even that’s difficult, because after an extended chat it tends to get dumber, a phenomenon called “context rot.” It’s important to remember that it has only a very basic reasoning capability, and once that’s exceeded, it defaults back to dumb LLM next-word guessing. The best practice for research is to frequently start new chats before it gets dumb, especially if the direction of the query changes significantly.

• And as impressive as it is, the user must remember how dumb it can be. As a general intelligence, LLM technology, despite almost infinitely more raw computing power, is still very bad at chess, for example, inferior to specialist algorithms developed in the 90s. In one of my research projects, in calculating a population proportion, it incorrectly reported that 55 divided by 2.4 was approximately 6, not approximately 23. Its response: “Thanks for catching that—I should have done the division instead of eyeballing.” I’m a math guy and almost missed this, because it’s so convincing rendered in that gorgeous LaTeX font.

So far, it seems most useful for bringing a savvy user up to speed on general topics, doing basic research for which copious information already exists, and sometimes generating useful hypotheses in more obscure areas. The best mental model for o3 is that it is your genius, idiot savant buddy with a schizophrenic comorbidity who is mostly right but occasionally gets things entirely wrong. Nothing it says should be relied upon until verified.

I’m most impressed with its ability to synthesize empirical data across vast corpuses of research literature. It can’t generate “secrets” or genuine innovation per se, yet, but there’s enough irrationality in the world such that many empirically verified facts are in effect open secrets.

This has to be coaxed out of it by the right lines of questioning (and its obsequiousness means proper queries matter a lot), and the user has to be rational enough to trust evidence over gut hunches, but it seems like smart users can synthesize true expertise across a large number of domains, building mental models that are better than the competition, without years of education in each specific field. It seems the ultimate fulfillment of Scott Adams's “systems vs. goals” framework, for those few inclined to it.

The Downsides of AI

Strangely, its positive capabilities are better than its negative ones. Two LLMs, for example, recently won gold medals at the International Math Olympiad. Its peaks are somewhat unbelievable. And it should be noted that this recent accomplishment was done with private models not available for public use and verification; it’s entirely possible, maybe likely, that Google and OpenAI somehow cheated on this. These are advanced high school math problems for which expert mathematicians, of whom they have many, could help the AI. It is a well-known tactic in Silicon Valley to semi-fraudulently simulate software functionality under the advice “do things that don’t scale” to impress the market and worry about figuring out the technical side later.

In addition, reliable work is more than just positive accomplishments, and arguably primarily about avoiding screwups. The jagged edge seems to be high achievement but low reliability. Hence, AI can (maybe, if we believe them) win international math competitions competing with 145+ IQ humans when the stakes of failure are low, but cannot yet compete with 80 IQ humans in driving cars2. It also cannot yet replace a 110 IQ manager at a convenience store.

Unfortunately, the apparent competence and confidence of AIs is a huge trap for midwits. I know rich frat bros, smart enough but not geniuses, who think they no longer need attorneys because they believe LLMs are competent to review multi-million dollar contracts. But even when you hire an attorney now, if they’re dumb enough to use AI credulously, including, ironically, ones representing a major AI company, you might get sanctioned for submitting court briefs with hallucinated cases. The online marketing crowd is also an eager early adopter, filling the Internet with more inbred AI slop that may work for a time, but will quickly tire and frustrate consumers.

AI also seems to be a huge risk in education. Accurately assessing learning is inherently difficult at scale. A one-on-one tutor can do it, but classroom teachers serving many students have always had to resort to shortcuts involving homework. This works well enough if students don’t cheat, but cheating on these imperfect, non-realtime assessments has always been possible, as they are indicators of learning if recalled without aid but not inherently difficult if one has the source available. Even “cheating” has educational value if it involves a student physically opening a book and interacting with its contents to find answers; the book’s physical aspects, such as locations on a page, can help tie learning memories together. AI, however, lowers this effort to nearly zero and allows students to cheat without hardly any memory formation.

I think an accurate description of the future is that AI will augment the capabilities of those who learned to read, think, and write critically before the advent of AI; for those educated with available AI, it will become a crutch stunting intellectual formation. Today’s students face an impossible choice: work harder, learn more, avoid AI, and make worse grades, or use AI to make better grades. Most education is fake anyway, so what does it matter?

It seems schools, if they care about being effective, are going to need to invest more in faculty and instruction, falling back to assessing students with oral exams, proctored exams, or in-class written assignments blue-book-style, or else reconcile themselves to certifying students pretending to learn while they pretend to teach. Given the abject laziness I’ve observed in college faculty, their fear of student feedback if they dare hold students accountable for learning, and the pressure to have their not-so-bright students demonstrate “mastery” on exams and assignments for accreditation, most would rather not know how much students fake learning with AI and will simply look the other way.

This was, unfortunately, already the case at most non-selective universities, but it will be a tragedy for whatever margin of talented students who might only be motivated to learn when challenged; the “spark” that every teacher dreams of lighting in a capable but incurious student will increasingly be smothered by easy AI cheating. The 5-10% of students who are naturally intellectually curious and self-motivated to learn will be fine, AI or not, as they enjoy reading, learning, and writing for their own sake. But before AI, most students were already using SparkNotes, Chegg, or other aids to avoid reading or thinking, and badly plagiarizing others’ writing, and LLMs simply enable this more easily and without reliable detection.

Perhaps AI simply makes it more obvious that our forebears3 were correct in thinking that, beyond basic literacy and arithmetic, the traditional studies of high school and college were wasted on most of the population. Given that few of today’s college graduates possess 19th-century levels of competency then associated with an 8th-grade education, this seems true. Bryan Caplan makes the argument that most modern education is net-negative in adding value to society, serving only as a costly signaling function arms race that makes life increasingly miserable for upper middle class kids, even before AI prevented most students from learning anything.

AI and Jobs

One good rule of thumb is to never believe anything a CEO says about unpopular decisions like layoffs. The job market is certainly soft right now, but that trend began in 2023 before the major breakthroughs in AI of the last 18 months.

My gut as an operator is that AI, while becoming more interesting, isn’t quite yet able to replace humans, only augment them, at best saving 50% of value-adding labor in very specific applications requiring expert validation and calibration4. CEOs would have incentives to claim AI is replacing jobs, however, because it makes them seem fluent in a broader enthusiasm and, more importantly, provides a pretext for cutting jobs without being blamed. These trends come in waves as corporations move in packs to avoid being the singular focus of ire.

The better explanation for job market softness is overhiring during the previous, post-Covid easy-money regime. The market rewarded top-line and headcount growth when interest rates were low. When money is tight and inflation causes costs to rise, businesses must unwind these excess hires to restore expectations of earnings growth. Since much of the 2021-22 hiring spree was focused on non-meritorious, DEI-type hiring practices, this makes broad, rather than targeted layoffs, along with new hiring freezes, most efficacious at avoiding liability. You can’t just keep the good ones if there’s disparate impact5, and liability is much harder to avoid in firing and promotions than hiring.

One other longstanding thesis of mine is that most companies have significant margins of “BS Jobs” they have been slowly jettisoning since at least the 90s. One troubling development for mediocre workers is that, since Covid, I believe we have seen a slow decoupling of managerial compensation from headcount relating to status. The rise of boutique firms, particularly in private equity and venture capital, has created a class of well-compensated, white collar elites who operate semi-remotely, with few employees.

If more mainstream companies adopt this model — that elite workers can be compensated highly despite a small number of direct reports, or else some of them will bolt for employers that will — then middle managers will be less motivated to overhire in the future to justify their salaries, and more motivated to cut costs and claim even fake or marginal use of “AI” to show they are as productive as a team of 20 were formerly. “I manage a team of 20 AI agents” will be the new claim. And this will be easy, as every software tool any professional uses has some AI gimmick now, however useless, marginal, or simply a rebranded old-school algorithm.

If they can get their bosses to justify six-figure salaries without a redundant “team” attached, so much the better for everyone. People, after all, are a hassle, and the lack of them makes it easier for high-capability workers to disappear from the office and work from a beach6. Who knows what the future holds for AI actually replacing people, but if AI hype becomes the smart-sounding pretext for cutting jobs while expanding margins and holding onto fat management-tier salaries for those who survive the cuts, it’s watch out below for broader middle-class employment.

The lesson for new grads? The most reliable jobs are going to be those where you’re protected by a licensing cartel that will enforce your interests in the state legislatures. Even if AI replaces many jobs, lawyers will want someone to sue, which means we’re still going to need licensed accountants, physicians, dentists, speech therapists, and the like to sign off on whatever the AI is doing. I expect more licensing cartels for white collar workers and more unionization for blue-collar workers in the future as an unspoken way to insulate the middle and skilled working class from replacement by AI, with AI’s errors used as a pretext to protect the public. Keeping people in respectable work, even if they’re just watching the robots, is better than income redistribution schemes.

The Future of AI

I wanted to get this column into the world as a time capsule of my thoughts before the expected August 2025 release of GPT5. For entertainment purposes only, here are some predictions:

• Productivity gains from AI will be disappointing in at least the short term (18 months). The delayed release of GPT5 must mean hard marginal declines per unit of development in AI technologies at the moment. Acceleration is slowing; the third and probably the second derivative of innovation is negative, at least for LLMs. Now this is always true of any technology that matures, but the pace of change can give clues to the ultimate terminus.

• Apple’s continued reticence on incorporating AI into its products is due to appropriate caution, not incompetence. This is the best-run, most profitable tech company in the world, which makes the world’s best in-house processor hardware, and to think they are clueless about LLMs is fantasy. That it’s useful to me as a research tool doesn’t mean it’s ready for production in many applications when people expect simple, reliable functionality. Apple is appropriately cautious about protecting its brand reputation as reliable computing for people too busy to tinker with not-quite-baked tech. It does use AI where it works reliably, for example, for summarizing messages and predicting typing, which now saves me a bit of time each day. What AI can’t do reliably yet is manage a calendar or email conversationally like a personal secretary. That Apple promised and then missed delivering on the more advanced Siri features is further indication of slowing innovation; they reasonably linearly extrapolated the rate of progress in reducing errors to tolerable levels from the time of their announcement, but progress must have stalled. When AI can do these tasks reliably, Apple will incorporate it. With their gigantic cash pile and complaints from investors who perceive them falling behind in the AI race, they must further see that no acquisition target is any closer to solving these problems than they are, or else they would have already closed on one.

• All of the AI giants are going to need to find a way to incentivize humans to continue writing expert-level content, so that the LLMs don’t eventually choke on their own vomit. Much of o3’s internal reasoning, I’ve noticed, is evaluating and discarding sources likely contaminated by spam. OpenAI will likely, if they haven’t already, develop their own web spider and web index, along with highly secretive AI detection algorithms to avoid citing its own or other LLMs’ output in the wild. Human-written content will be promoted in cited sources, rewarding experts with at least some credit and attention for their efforts. This is especially true with new or updated knowledge, as LLMs still train in batches with a cut-off knowledge date, and to keep the models (and their web-reference output) fresh and accurate, they will have to find ways to filter out AI slop and reward human creators.

• Those productivity gains that do occur might be ephemeral in economic measures to the extent that they simply enhance CYA paper-pushing and zero-sum marketing activities. The most common economic pattern is that supply creates demand, so AI could just exponentially increase the number of TPS reports without adding value by cutting jobs or serving customers. If a company doubles its social media output with AI assistance, it doesn’t make the economy as a whole wealthier. Cal Newport of Deep Work notoriety cites this Brookings study showing that the entrance of the first computers into offices did very little to enhance productivity, net of costs (less than 1/10 of a percentage point annually during a period of 2-3% annual growth):

  

  I can vouch for this, in that my first professional job at a Johnson & Johnson factory involved a transition from paper records to SAP software, a project which both predated and continued after my term of employment. They spent millions and millions on consulting contracts, missing the deadline by several years (the consultant hung around the factory with an assistant and never seemed to get much done), and after two years before I quit they still had vaporware, whereas the sweet Appalachian lady who checked and validated paper files manually for me, Pearl — with 20 years of experience, sharp as a tack, and knew the entire factory floor to ceiling — could locate records within minutes upon request. I assume they finished at some point after I left? The result was not a more productive factory (Pearl made, in 2002, maybe $20 an hour plus benefits, much cheaper than software), but a system where execs in New Jersey could theoretically pull reports they’d never be interested in reading using software they didn’t use often enough to learn well, when Pearl could grab anything they needed and fax it in 15 minutes, and might have anecdotal details in her memory that would be useful to any investigation. But hey, for some ambitious middle manager with an MBA, stacking cash selling overpriced sutures under one of the world’s most valuable trademarks is boring compared to being a “thought leader” wasting shareholders’ money on software boondoggles that continued long after they’d been promoted for their “vision.”

• Where AI is important, the most productive sectors of the economy are already using specialized AI that does a better job than LLMs. Chess, where LLMs continue to struggle, was “solved” in 1998 when Deep Blue beat the best human chess player alive, and no human has been competitive with computers since. Every energy company is using AI to get better at finding oil. Every biotech company is using specialist AI to search for candidate compounds. Really smart people are already incentivized to use the best technology where there’s money to be made, and it’s getting better. These are real innovations that are to some extent already baked in, and will tend to be ignored compared to the consumer-facing technologies accessible to non-specialists. And it seems LLMs will be perpetually behind these specialist AIs. It’s hard to imagine, for example, feeding the latest LLM a map of the Permian basin and having it do a better job identifying candidate drilling sites than the specialized machine learning already used by petroleum engineers at Chevron.

All that said, the state of current technology is exciting and useful. I’m sure it will continue to improve, augmenting curious minds with a wealth of information.

The contemporary technological environment is historically unprecedented and entraps our dopamine circuits. And since teenagers, by design, have higher dopamine levels, and thus higher reward-seeking behaviors, they are particularly prone to developing addictions of all kinds, substance and otherwise. Just as it’s wise to wait until age 21 to consume alcohol, when the brain’s reward circuits are more attenuated, similar oversight must be brought to the behavioral addictions of technology.

Silicon Valley, unfortunately, is an industry built on addiction on the consumer side. The first Internet addictions to emerge surrounded gaming and pornography, largely among males, who are more obsessive and prone to addiction generally. But perhaps the greatest surprise of the last ten years is the power of social media algorithms to take content that is not naturally addictive, simple user-generated images and video of a non-pornographic nature, and make them more addictive, in terms of hours spent globally, than more naturally addictive content.

And for the most part, social media addiction is a female phenomenon, the sex less prone historically to compulsive behavior. This seems like a rather big deal. If you had told us in the mid-90s that girls would spend more time looking at pictures and chatting with people on the Internet than boys — something at the time was only done by nerds who ordered modems from the back of computer magazines — we wouldn’t have believed you.

On Male Weakness

It may be most helpful to discuss pornography first as the simpler phenomenon to explain. It simply is part of human design that males are highly motivated to see females. You can judge men for this fundamental aspect of their design, or accept it.

And while it may be tempting to dismiss men as pigs, I suspect that upon some reflection, women would not like to live in a world where men were as indifferent to them physically as they are (relatively) to men. It’s a key reason why women, in effect, run the world and control 80% of the spending — i.e., every working man and woman is, in the end, competing to get a share of the 80 cents on the dollar controlled by female consumers. Men might be stronger physically, but this is more than balanced by their weakness for women1.

How weak? Quite. Contrary to stereotypes, men are typically more eager to commit in existing matched relationships. Rob Henderson reports that:

Several studies have found that men fall in love faster than women. Nearly twice as many men (27%) compared to women (15%) report that they have fallen in love with their current partner within 4 dates.

Men, on average, are ready for an exclusive “couple” relationship after 2.5 months, compared with 6 months for women. Men are also quicker to reach the point of expecting the relationship to lead to marriage.

Another study found that 88% of people believe that women fall in love in a relationship first.

But when asked about their most recent relationship, men reported falling in love faster.

Who says “I love you” first?

19% of women in relationships reported that they said “I love you” first.

64% of men in relationships reported that they said “I love you” first.

One reason for the gap in stereotypes versus reality might be due to the fact that high-status men are less likely to say I love you first and are less interested in romantic entanglements.

Related to this, St. Paul makes a revealing comment in his first epistle to Timothy when he states under inspiration that, unlike Eve, “Adam was not deceived” in our parents’ first transgression. Adam ate of the fruit fully aware of the consequences. Milton, in Paradise Lost, speculates, and I concur, that the immediate cause of Adam’s sin was fear of losing Eve, who would have been, in her perfection, the most beautiful woman ever created. Milton’s Adam declares his devotion to Eve, after she has eaten but he has not yet, in contemplating his knowing rebellion:

O fairest of Creation, last and best
Of all Gods works, Creature in whom excell'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be formd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
…

Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn'd,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.

…

However I with thee have fixt my Lot,
Certain to undergoe like doom, if Death
Consort with thee, Death is to mee as Life;
So forcible within my heart I feel
The Bond of Nature draw me to my owne,
My own in thee, for what thou art is mine;
Our State cannot be severd, we are one,
One Flesh; to loose thee were to loose my self.

Such is the cause of all the misery in the world, but you can’t say it isn’t romantic! There are likely some ladies reading this who are thinking, “I wonder if my man loves me that much.”

If Eve’s beauty and charm, and Adam’s design to desire her, overcame his perfection to choose death with her over life with God, what hope of resistance have his fallen sons to resist an exponentially more tempting world? Only that which is enforced by human society’s hard-won ascent from the mire of original sin.

And when the fallen male sex drive is properly socialized in the most advanced, Christian, monogamous cultures, it can again approach the virtuous and beautiful, perhaps best illustrated by what may be the most romantic dialogue ever published, in Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Darcy declares to Elizabeth that “you have bewitched me body and soul” and because of that, he has moved heaven and earth, including defying his relatives, for them to be together. That word “bewitched” implies he has lost control of himself in his desire for her, but luckily for them, that desire finds a route to be consummated through marriage.

Much of the drama of the book is how this desire must be channeled and processed to happen properly, and for both parties to come to a right understanding. But at bottom, Darcy’s desire is irrational, though corralled by his impressive self-control and sense of propriety.

However, this beautiful depiction of passion under control for useful social ends inevitably begins as irrational and undirected. While normal boys can be attracted to girls from the earliest ages, the sexual urgency of this begins at puberty, around age 13. Sex hormones and some mysterious developmental process wind back the clock of his impulsiveness to around 8 years old, while his body begins producing up to 100 million gametes a day and testosterone production expands 30-fold.

There’s an old quote, probably apocryphal, from Socrates, or maybe Sophocles, that a young man’s libido is akin to being chained to a lunatic2. Involuntary sexual thoughts come a mile a minute, to the point of being an annoying distraction. And this can’t be solved by the girls wearing longer shorts, because the system is self-tuning to the stimuli available!

Every part of an attractive woman is inherently interesting at these ages, because every part of a woman is prettier, better-formed, more symmetrical, and elegant than the corresponding part of a man3. Any woman given a raw feed into 13-year-old Fitzwilliam Darcy’s imagination would be grossed out, even if all he’s seeing are necks and ankles. One does wonder what to make of the classical statuary at Pemberley!

What has its proper end in mature, directed male sexuality, e.g., the 20+ year married couple where the husband still can’t keep his hands off his wife and regularly grosses out the teenagers, begins as an immature instinct that is natural, God-ordained, and, because involuntary, mostly outside the moral realm.

Perils of Purity Culture

This is part of the reason why purity culture is wrong. Expecting sexuality to stay dormant for 10, maybe 20 years, until a young man is economically able to support a family, and then, just-in-time, happens to pair bond with the one woman he will marry, is not realistic. And it’s just a difference of degree for women.

I didn’t grow up with sisters, so I enjoyed getting to know a few girls in high school in the 90s who became platonic friends. I noticed several interesting but contradictory ideas they seemed to hold (and pointing out these contradictions could be quite entertaining to my teenage self if I could get them just a little angry). On the one hand, they were judgmental of male sexuality being visually promiscuous, even as many of them wore the skin-tight bodysuits and near-zero inseam denim shorts in fashion at the time. In a strange, delusional tragedy of the commons, while they reserved the right to provoke visually, they insisted their boyfriends, or their future husbands, should have eyes only for them4.

At the same time, there were a few men, notably Brad Pitt and George Clooney of E.R. fame, whom they would openly, dare I say, lust over, stating their desire to “have his baby” given the opportunity. This was confusing to my 16-year-old self. First, why were they so interested in old guys, in their 30s? Clooney famously even had prematurely gray hair! Second, these same young women were clear on several occasions of their intention not to have anyone’s baby until well after being established in their ambitious careers. Even as they expressed mostly indifference towards their male classmates, their convictions were as flexible as the boys depending on the circumstances, which surprised me, as I was very early in my continuing education program concerning the fairer sex.

But these tendencies among the girls are part of the core fantasy of every romance novel — the high-status movie star, billionaire, or even better, secret billionaire vampire who can have almost any woman he wants, yet his sexuality is, by fate, only precisely tuned to respond to the heroine. It’s a fantasy every bit as unrealistic as male ones of infinite sexual variety and availability.

By contrast, my male friends and I probably thought at least a third of the girls at our high school were attractive, and probably 10% were “hot” by our standards. The guys were simply more realistic and fair. In reality, these girls were as lustful as boys, just way pickier.

Purity culture, arguably, was an attempt to Christianize an unrealistic, romance novel model of pair bonding by placing Pharisaical boundaries around sexuality. Instead of dealing in obvious truths, like “it’s good to avoid venereal disease, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and sexual relations with people who will become old flames permanently recorded by biochemical attachments in your psyche and undermine your future marriage,” it turned into a performative, impossible standard.

And when teenagers perceive an impossible standard, they’re likely to just ignore or fake it. It’s possible to avoid venereal disease, sexual relations before marriage, and be faithful within marriage. It is not possible for anyone, least of all teenage boys, to be “pure,” only feeling desire for an eventual lifelong partner, like a duckling imprinting on the first caregiver it sees after hatching.

For this to be remotely possible, we’d need sexual maturity to occur ten years after full adult rationality is achieved, not ten years antecedent to it. Why are we designed this way?

Sexually Overclocked by Design

My best guess is a runaway feedforward loop related to our giant brains’ capacity to reason. Our huge brains mean that humans, compared to animals, a) can rationally plan to manipulate our behavior and environment to maximize hedonic rewards and minimize associated costs, and b) have infants that require years more care than any other creature, their giant heads making them immobile, clumsy, and fragile.

Having children is signing up for a decade plus of voluntary slavery, and so historically mankind often found ways to extract the juice of sexual pleasure without the pulp of reproduction (Caesar Augustus, for example, was disgusted by the Roman elite’s decadence of sex without reproduction). To force humans to reproduce anyway without making us dumber, the drive of at least one of the sexes had to be overclocked beyond the capacity of our substantial reason to contain it (and peak in intensity before brains fully develop), but not enough to completely collapse civilization, hence men. You could say God, of necessity to sustain the race, loves babies more than sexual purity.

Our designer also made other curious choices. 99.9% of mammals, including dogs and cats, go into heat and only mate when the female is ovulating, which is made obvious by physical signs. Humans, however, feature concealed ovulation, a rare trait we share with only a few other species (5 out of 6,704 extant mammals, or 0.07%), which ensured humans would have a maximal amount of sex and thus, sexual thoughts, relative to that strictly needed for reproduction.

This revelation from the Book of Nature contradicts early Christian overreaction to Roman laxity in casting sex as a necessary venial evil contrary to and corrupting of our essential rational spirit. Our design implies our essence to be both maximally rational and maximally sexual compared to animals. Dr. James Dobson, his empirical training as a psychologist making him more reasonable than most, did his best to offer a more measured perspective, while purity culture doubled down on its rebellion against nature.

‘90s Problems

Unfortunately, these were “‘90s problems,” and this whole debate became moot with the advent of Internet pornography. The ‘90s parents who found a pilfered Playboy or two featuring R-rated content more tame than the latest streaming trash on Netflix were dealing with a minor problem unlikely to have permanent consequences, and even if a few mothers were shocked to find their sweet little boys were like the rest of the dirty men out there, not a few fathers were secretly pleased to by an admission against interest that their sons were, indeed, like the rest instead of light in the loafers.

Internet pornography, by contrast, is a paradigm shift in quantity, variety, convenience, and habituation that is a major problem, in that it theoretically represents an extinction-level threat, but not in the way many expect. The naive interpretation is that such a stimulus would increase interest in sex and turn its users into aggressive criminals. In reality, like so many modern dopamine traps, it has been accompanied by a dimming and deadening of users’ sexual responsiveness to real-life stimuli, similar to the hearing loss experienced by firemen and pilots overexposed to decibels exceeding OSHA limits. The causation, however, is complex and non-obvious, to be discussed momentarily.

Nevertheless, our pornified society has an epidemic not of rape, but rather of functional sexlessness among young people. The great bugaboo of the ‘90s purity movement, teenage pregnancy, has declined precipitously alongside other former teenage passions, like getting a driver’s license. The idea that teenagers might overcome their Internet-induced social anxiety and sexual overstimulation and get together IRL, with their imperfect, unfiltered, unaltered bodies, put away their phones, and make a baby seems almost preposterous!

Avoiding Shame

In talking to young men about this, it seems important to sidestep guilt and shame. I recommend an appeal to self-interest: “There’s nothing wrong with liking the way girls look and being attracted to them, in fact, that’s how you’re supposed to feel. The problem with porn is that it’s addictive, and I don’t want you to be a loser who can’t talk to girls and have your brain so burned out that you can’t have a real-life sexual relationship with a woman as an adult.” The rhetorical emphasis is that porn is for cheaters and losers, not that their natural desires are bad.

It’s cheating because pornography, as a supernormal stimulus, provides young men with a form of sexual access to highly physically attractive women. Not only are the women themselves a form of supernormal stimulus (i.e., often more attractive than the young man could naturally attract), but the ease of access removes motivation from the young man who indulges in the vice. A man’s drive to seek an attractive woman, all other things being equal, is good and righteous, and should manifest itself in efforts to make himself as maximally attractive as possible.

And if he’s successful, he gets one woman. Porn provides an unlimited supply of attractive women, with zero effort, something that, morality aside, isn’t even achievable in real life, given real-life polygamists, whether the cast of Sister Wives or the extensively pierced, neck-beard, blue-haired, Reddit crowd into polyamory, aren’t exactly outlier examples of human beauty. And this still understates the issue, as habituation to porn in some users drives further novelty-seeking down rabbit holes entirely unrelated to normal reproductive sex, checking every box and then some from a mid-century abnormal psychology textbook.

So the main case isn’t shame and guilt for natural desire, but enlightened self-interest and self-respect. The appropriate substitution for fake goods is real ones, in a young man being attracted to pretty girls in real life, being confident enough to talk to them, and accomplished enough to attract them, without feeling guilty about it!

The Guilt Merchants

And if you’re raising your kids in the church, there can be a lot of counterproductive guilt messages. Christians are generally suckers for pietist guilt merchants, who are often odd ducks, if not predatory charlatans, like the strangely single, childless Bill Gothard, who was, incredibly, a parenting authority in the more gullible parts of the homeschool movement, as I covered in my essay on the Duggars.

As mentioned previously, early Christianity overshot the Bible in its sexual ethics, even seeing marital sex as at best a necessary evil, a legacy that continues to foment errors in the church. Church father Origen reportedly castrated himself in a literal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount.

Even latter-day pietists like Dietrich Bonhoeffer want to have it both ways, who in Costly Grace excoriates any definite reasoning being applied to Christ’s rhetorical overstatement, common in the Biblical genre of wisdom literature to which this passage belongs, when it comes to lust, saying illogically we are called to take His words literally and non-literally at the same time. Bonhoeffer wants every normal red-blooded man to not castrate himself, but also feel bad about not castrating himself.

Applying this hermeneutic, referencing an earlier part of the Sermon, we should feel as guilty as a murderer when we call someone a fool, yet pietists always seem to zero in on sex above all (or money, if reaching for your wallet) when it comes to preaching smuggled self-righteousness5. Strangely, they never seem to apply this to their own schtick, in that calling other believers fake Christians (or usually, implying it given their typical unmanly rhetoric) for their lack of hyper-moralizing rigor is a libel worse than calling someone a fool. So how did this zeal to resist even thoughts about women manifest in Bonhoeffer’s life?

Bonhoeffer, it turns out, lived with a dude: “They spent much of the next eight years living and traveling together, kept joint bank and household accounts, sent joint Christmas cards and gifts, and, in their frequent times in Berlin, shared a bedroom in the Bonhoeffer family home.” Tell me, normal men, have you ever considered opening a joint personal bank account with a close male friend? Doesn’t that seem like totally normal behavior?

To be clear, there is no evidence Bonhoeffer was anything but celibate6 — though it does seem like there’s a double standard, in that no one would buy claims of celibacy from an unmarried man and woman who shared a bedroom, bank account, and gave Christmas gifts as a couple — but many seem to think he struggled with same-sex attraction. Such a condition would tempt a person to want to relativize all non-marital sexual desire as equally bad and construct an alternative status system based on self-denial.

Sometimes I wonder how many hardcore pietists are like this, damaged goods wanting company in misery, and theology, as a non-falsifiable field of study compared to say chemistry or physics, tends to attract BS artists who deal in vibes over logical arguments. Like teenagers cutting themselves with a razor blade for the endogenous opioids, pietists like to feel bad so they can feel good by setting up impossible moral traps, and by implication, make themselves look better than others.

Related to this is the strange case of Joshua Harris, the OG Pharisee of 90s purity culture, who tried to make a whole generation of Christian young men feel guilty about kissing their girlfriends in his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye. In 2019, he announced he was no longer a Christian, divorced his pretty wife with whom he had three children, and promptly marched in a Pride parade. I never bought what Harris was selling in the 90s7, but I knew a lot of young people who did, struggling over his grievous legalistic burdens. Maybe a guy who was likely more interested in the wedding flower selections than the honeymoon shouldn’t advise on what’s pure and what’s not?

Young women should probably know that, in a relationship, a young man who seems to have supernatural self-control, who seems so spiritual that he doesn’t struggle with controlling what should be a very strong attraction to his girl, the Bayesian priors8 should send up some alarm bells about a possible closet case or a porn addict for whom real-life female company is no longer sufficiently exciting and motivational.

You don’t want to marry a porn addict, a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or a Joshua Harris!

Inversion of Harm Between the Sexes

Porn, however, seems now to be the smaller part of the problem. As I mentioned in the introduction, we are in a strange time when women are spending as much time on the Internet as men, and much of men’s time is spent gaming, which is more solitary than social. That’s an entirely separate problem parents must manage.

But spending too much social time online is now seen as stereotypically effeminate, as Gen Z women have informed me that one of the things they find attractive in a man is a relative lack of investment in social media. A “green flag” is a neglected Instagram profile updated three years ago in high school. The simps who post, like, and comment on everything are seen as either insecure, desperate, or “zesty,” their clever term for effeminate men9.

Just as boys with raging hormones and 8-year-old levels of self-control cannot be reasonably expected to self-manage the temptations of porn10, nor can girls with their own related to social media. Jordan Peterson gives a lecture explaining the personality changes concomitant with female puberty, which drives an increase, from childhood baseline, in traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and anxiety.

Peterson focuses on puberty preparing girls for their most important biological role as mothers, and in this, the most vulnerable period of early infancy, citing the mother-infant dyad as the critical design bottleneck for which female psychology is optimized. Getting along with the group and avoiding direct conflict is extremely important given the vulnerability of infants. Just as porn and video games hijack male drives for sex and accomplishment, social media exploits female drives for maintaining good relations with their group and ensuring social stability.

However, the relative threat between the two is often misunderstood. While pornography is always morally wrong, and social media is only wrong in excess, the data suggests that social media does more harm and is a major root cause of dysfunction, whereas porn is most often a symptom of dysfunction.

Causes of Current Teen Dysfunction

I took the opportunity when writing this column to use OpenAI’s o3 model to dig into the literature on these topics. A common claim is that pornography is causing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction during partnered sex in young men, something that should never happen physiologically. And indeed, rates of this have at least doubled since the pre-Internet world.

In assigning causation, however, except for porn addiction (daily or near daily use), which only afflicts 8-11% of men, the effect of porn use on ED almost disappears once accounting for confounders:

The true estimated root causes are several, with the largest being depression/anxiety (31%), cannabis use (21%), SSRI side effects (13%), obesity (11%), sleep deprivation (10%), testosterone decline (10%), and compulsive porn use (4%). The direction of causation seems to be that depressed and anxious men are more likely to use porn, and the former is the common cause of both ED in normal sex and porn consumption.

So the major cause explaining almost half the effect is depression, anxiety, and side effects of treatments for the same. If we add in sleep deprivation, we get to nearly 60% of the effect. And what does the literature say about the root causes of increased depression and anxiety in teens?

This has been extensively studied, and it’s no longer even significantly controversial to state that it’s social media and compulsive technology use in general, which also drive additional harms with sleep deprivation:

Looking at this chart, something like 65% of the mental health challenges faced by young people today are downstream of technology, specifically smartphone use. And it’s not just correlation:

This is not to discount the porn problem, and indeed early exposure, like early alcohol drinking, is more likely to lead to compulsive use later.

But like the purity movement, religious people can get tripped up by over-emphasizing clear moral categories over things that are only wrong in excess. Obesity, for example, is extremely prevalent in our society, to the point where the US government spends $200 billion per year on kidney dialysis alone, mostly for preventable cases of diabetes in old, fat people.

This is a major source of harm and the leading cause of preventable deaths and medical spending, but gluttony is rarely a sermon topic or subject to accountability groups or monitoring software to prevent its spread as a social contagion. The typical evangelical church will serve donuts on a Sunday morning while strangely only using the Yankee legalist Welch’s grape juice for communion, despite overweight/obesity (74% of Americans) being a much more common vice than alcoholism (10%)!

Perils of Social Media

And in the online context, many parents, even if proactive in protecting their sons from porn, will underestimate the harms of their daughters spending 2+ hours a day on social media. The data demonstrate that social media is worse than porn in terms of harms:

• Social media is more addictive than porn because it features intermittent reinforcement, like a slot machine. Sometimes hours of “boring,” compulsive scrolling pass before the user discovers some new video, influencer, or meme. It’s counterintuitive, but psychological science has firmly established that intermittent reinforcement is the most addictive form of reward. Porn, by contrast, features constant reinforcement and, in men, a refractory period inhibiting further interest for a time.

• Porn is fake, fantastical, and everyone knows it, but social media is fake while seeming real. The constant curated feed from friends and influencers breeds discontentment with one’s own social life, appearance, and status. Few porn users realistically expect it to mirror real life, but many social media users become dissatisfied with their real lives after viewing the luxury experiences of influencers whose lifestyles seem ubiquitous and achievable despite requiring stratospheric incomes, not to mention the curation element that conveniently edits out life’s more mundane or unpleasant realities.

• By way of example, imagine a 40-something mommy vlogger. She looks 30 and is well-maintained in an impossibly youthful figure which she attributes to her whole foods, anti-inflammatory diet, when in reality she also spends $500 per month with her top-end Dallas dermatologist, $400 per month on bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, $1,000 per month on personal trainers, and $700 per month on an undisclosed weekly Zepbound maintenance injection. I’m not judging this, but rather the deceptions, as these interventions will undoubtedly accrue to her good, increase happiness, and expand her useful, productive life, as there’s no better temporal investment than health, beauty, and wellness. But she just posted to her 50,000 followers about taking her family, including her perfectly behaved, photogenic children, to Bali, which she attributes to great “deals” she found online and shares with her audience. In reality, the vacation still cost $40,000, and her pay-to-play lifestyle is supported not by granola health practices and smart frugality but by her fee-skimming, finance-bro husband, who makes $500,000 per year before incentives. This is just as unrealistic an image for a frazzled, average middle-class mom as anything in porn, but the former seems real and breeds more salient discontentment with her workaday life, while the latter is, except for the exceptionally delusional, rightly seen as total fantasy once the cloud of lust passes.

• While porn is usually self-medication for depression and not causal for depression except for compulsive users, social media shows a dose-response relationship for inducing depression, particularly in women and girls, on a per-minute basis, even at levels of use below levels indicating clinical addiction.

• Social media users spend more time on social media than porn users do with porn, exacerbating secondary effects on sleep quality, which further increases depression, anxiety, and ill health. Because of this absolute difference in time spent, social media also more significantly displaces adaptive behaviors like face-to-face time with friends and exercise.

• Because porn is still considered shameful, users must hide and limit their use. Social media use is deemed acceptable, and thus, compulsive behaviors are engaged in more frequently, more strongly reinforcing problematic patterns. 90% of teens check social media hourly.

As parents, we have a clear directive to both morally guide our children and protect them from harm. Luckily, this is not a dilemma, as the solution for both problems is the same: lock down the infernal phones.

Controlling Access to Technology

Just as sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, it can also be indistinguishable from compulsion, exiting the moral realm and becoming more like a natural evil or infectious disease. In short, technology hijacks biology and overrides natural limits or formerly achievable efforts at self-control. Since self-control is already attenuated in teenagers, they are most vulnerable.

This technological exploitation of natural drives is beyond the reasonable capacity of teenagers to control. The minute a parent provides any Internet access or hands a child a phone, it is the parent’s moral responsibility alone to control the use of that device.

Thanks to decades of bad laws and court precedents, there’s an entire column I could write about how the technological dystopia we now live in is a matter of collective choices we tolerate as a society. The shadowy fellow who owns Pornhub and the creep Mark Zuckerberg — who called his first users “dumb f***s” — are statutorily protected by literal Acts of Congress and cowardly and/or lowlife federal judges in seeking to render your children’s most precious drives into slightly higher CPM rates for their advertisers.

Unfortunately, I think the only long-term realistic solutions to these problems are legal restrictions. Digital fentanyl must be suppressed, and if not possible to ban, at least made as inconvenient to access as offline equivalents. The needs of the “least among us,” including adults with low baseline self-control, must guide policy.

It’s fair to say that one must assume a) that Silicon Valley is incentivized to maximize user engagement without regard to harm and b), as parents, for now, “you’re on your own, kid,” to try to protect your children. All of the systems involved are complicated, buggy, and imperfect.

The first and most robust defense is to delay. Keep them off screens and the Internet as long as possible. Get them a dumb phone if they need a phone. Try to integrate into a peer community where parents are practicing some self-control in delaying access to devices. Maybe start a “landline pod” like these clever parents.

The second defense is inconvenience. Welcome 90s anachronisms into your home! Maybe the first device they can access is a desktop computer in a public location. Few know this, but with a Mac, kids can have an iCloud email and iMessage account without a dedicated device or monthly fees, with a separate user account. They can “text” friends from the desktop, but the inconvenience factor reduces the addictive potential. The 24” iMac is an incredible value for this application. Even more conveniently inconvenient, a Mac, unlike a phone or tablet, allows multiple children to share the same device and forces them to take turns, further reducing the salience of notifications otherwise seen on a personal device. Likewise, an iPad’s ungainly size and lack of portability are features, not bugs, if it delays a phone.

The third defense is reducing access and features. With either a phone or iPad, take the time to set up Screen Time (or equivalent in Android) and go through every screen setting up every possible restriction. Turn off the web browser to break most of the broader Internet. Turn off lock screen notifications for almost everything to reduce compulsive checking behavior. And if they must have a phone, delay social media. And when social media is granted, take the time — again, it’s a hassle on purpose as these companies want to make it maximally painful to the parent — to restrict use, for example, with Instagram teen account controls. The data seems to indicate that most harms are avoided if total screen time is limited to about two hours per day and social media to less than one hour.

One creative strategy for adults and children is to restrict social media use to a desktop computer only. A larger screen and a web browser seem to reduce the addictiveness of the feed, allowing quick skimming of content more efficiently, and accessing only via a computer eliminates notifications from the apps.

The fourth defense is content filtering. Three levels are best, the first of which is on-device under parental controls. The second is setting up content-blocking DNS on the home wifi. The third is an installed VPN, like Canopy or Bark, for mobile networks. Again, this takes work and effort. I’m fairly tech-savvy, and I found the process of setting this all up needlessly complicated. Given the importance of this, if you’re not tech-savvy, hire a nerd to help you; it’s that important!

Fifth, all of the previous safeguards must be regularly checked on the teen’s device. Both Screen Time and, especially, Instagram parental controls are buggy, the latter likely on purpose, with the hope that a parent will just give up and allow unlimited access.

The harms are so obvious now that many public schools are entirely removing phones from campus. Ironically, this is creating a type of child, too common among homeschoolers, that is well-supervised in real life, but almost entirely unsupervised online. For homeschool parents not on the ball who give kids early access to the Internet all day, I predict some public school students may end up having better outcomes from being protected from their phones during at least the normal school day, as the greater harms are online. Whether it’s homeschooling or modesty culture, parents have to be careful about fighting the last war and overly focusing on ‘90s problems. You’d rather a son be distracted by some girl’s yoga pants in real life than catechized by fetishists on Reddit.

The most effective parents are those who can keep tech to a minimum in their teenagers’ lives. I’d suggest delaying iPads to 12, phones to 14, Instagram to 16, mobile web browsers to 17, and TikTok and Snapchat to over the parent’s dead body. Some parents can do even better than this, and the more delay, the less convenience, the better. Especially hardcore parents might consider a Gabb phone, which, out of the box, looks like a normal phone but doesn’t display images from any source, has no apps, no web browser, and only supports maps, texting, and calls.

One hope, and there’s some evidence of this emerging, is that restricting device use will be seen as high-class behavior. There are already social norms that code giving your toddler a tablet as trashy, akin to putting Coca-Cola in their sippy cup, and granola offline childhoods as what smart, educated parents do. If these norms can be extended to delaying tech use in the teen years, so much the better.

Bind the Phone, Free the Teen

Your teens desperately want boundaries in this area, at least when they talk privately to opinion surveyors. Nearly half of young people wish the Internet had never been invented it produces so much misery in their lives. 64% of young men and 72% of young women want Internet pornography restricted by law. A recent pop song expressed a yearning for the pre-Internet world:

Sometimes I think about the 90s
I know that everyone romanticized it
But you could sign me up
For a world without the internet
Hate how easy they can find me
Just by looking up my mom's address
I think about the 90s
When I was not a problem yet

No parents of any generation have dealt with a revolution in communications technology as radical as ours. The best practices may be “half-baked,” but given the early sociological data, I don’t think anyone will regret being more restrictive. They have their entire adult lives to meld with the electronic collective; preserve the precious offline years as long as you can.

One must have great charity for old books making predictions about the future, and judge them less on specifics but rather general frameworks. The future is hard to predict, so even getting one major thing right is extremely impressive.

This book, however, didn’t so much predict the future but help create it. Most famously, its authors posited that the mathematics of prime numbers underlying private-public key encryption, featuring calculations that are hard to guess but easy to verify, could be adapted to create digital money. These few off-hand paragraphs eventually inspired the creation of Bitcoin, itself now an asset class worth over $2 trillion.

For those who love interesting, unorthodox ideas, it’s a treat, often running for paragraphs of sheer brilliance, but then disappointing when it veers into libertarian ideology contrary to empirical evidence.

Property Is Violence

The authors resonate with me in departing from libertarian orthodoxy about the inherent goodness of man and embracing the reality that all social order relies on violence or credible threats of violence. Such a discarding of utopian delusions is, in my view, necessary to any realistic appraisal of the political economy of fallen man. My own views on this are not quite so hyper-Calvinist, for while man is totally depraved, he is not utterly so. The more realistic view is that in any human population, however generally cooperative most people might be, there will be a sufficient number of violent individuals such that some sovereign will have to exert force to restrain them from evil.

This percentage matters a good bit empirically, in terms of the resources necessary to control the violent and the social taxation on peaceful citizens in the precautions they must take to avoid being a victim. In Denmark, for example, it is easier to have nice things when only 0.067% of the population requires incarceration, compared to the 1% of my native Louisiana, the highest of any democratic polity on Earth1. Still, the vast majority of Louisianans are peaceful, good people, but even this small percentage imposes significant costs. The power law distribution of criminal offenses is well-established, as just a few bad apples commit the vast majority of crimes.

The necessity of defensive violence being established, it becomes apparent from experience that, like electric utilities, defensive violence is a natural monopoly. Better to pay protection money to one “criminal,” the state or sovereign, than risk random predation by many criminals. All states begin as a sort of warlord that conquers the other criminals through superior organization. Unlike the libertarians, I believe this can evolve into a fundamentally symbiotic and ennobling relationship as security in status and, most notably, the Christian religion, soften the hearts of sovereigns towards their subjects. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe has documented, traditional monarchies, in owning their sovereignty, were and are less exploitive than democratic states, whose politicians merely rent and are thus incentivized to short-term plunder over long-term capital appreciation.

The Sovereign Individual argues that the key to understanding history is the marginal returns of violence relative to scale. When the efficient scale of violence is small, as in the medieval era, states would tend to be small and less exploitative. When the efficient scale of violence rises, as in the modern era, the most efficient states are the largest states, which face less competition internally and more competition externally, and thus tax and confiscate more than their medieval forebears. Further, as these states grow, they become captured by their own bureaucrats. Thus, from the medieval era to the modern era, governments went from being privately owned to employee-owned. “Employees” in this case include both the bureaucrats and the dependent clients the government services in exchange for votes. Employees having more perverse incentives than owners, it is natural that modern states have become more exploitative. This is all well and good, and an analysis I agree with completely.

The authors, however, dared hope, in that starstruck dot-com optimism of the late 90s, that digital technologies would change everything, reverse the modern course of history, and lower the efficient scale of violence such that sovereignties would splinter. These smaller states would face more competition, and function as customer-driven, on behalf of property owners with maximum benefits for minimum cost, rather than run as either private or, worse, public monopolies. In this, they commit the typical libertarian errors of betting too much in the goodness and rationality of man, with a dose of techno-utopianism thrown in for good measure.

Human Nature Means Nothing Ever Happens

I remember a mentor of mine who, circa 2005, started sounding a little crazy about government surveillance. He claimed the government was spying on everyone all the time, and was adamant that everyone he knew learn how to use PGP encryption for emails and put their phones in Faraday cages. He sounded crazy, but subsequent Snowden revelations showed he was correct. The thing was, though, no one really cared. I didn’t care enough — PGP was hard to use (about as user-friendly as Bitcoin, i.e., a geek hobby with poor UI), and I figured the government was too busy to read my rather boring communications — and if I didn’t care, I certainly knew the average person wouldn’t care.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg, likewise, storm into the breach with claims of how the Internet and its democratizing, open-source technologies would revolutionize the power of individuals against the state. Some of their predictions were plain wrong, for example, their claims that cyberwarfare would come to dominate large-scale traditional warfare, that secure specialty of modern states. I suppose this was an understandable enthusiasm in the milieu of the Y2K-driven predicted digital apocalypse.

Since cyberwarfare was, at the time, mostly the domain of small groups, they reasoned that the lumbering nation-states, with their great armies, could easily be brought to their knees by hackers anonymously ensconced on some Caribbean island. And thus, they would be tamed to respect others’ sovereignty for fear of mutually-assured cyber destruction of their infrastructure. Great thesis, except it didn’t happen. Cyberwarfare is now most efficiently conducted at scale by those same large nation-states, and its impact is limited. Mostly, security technologies have evolved with the threats and except for a few million a year paid in ransom for those who forget to patch software or use two-factor authentication, cyberwarfare appears to be mostly at a stalemate. It can certainly be done, but only on a targeted basis by state actors at a moderate scale.

I suppose the authors today would point to the predominance of drone warfare in the Russia-Ukraine war in making many existing military technologies obsolete. But I think this has more to do with technological evolution, akin to carriers and battleships, than a change in scale. The endgame of drone warfare will likely be very expensive AI swarms of drones and counter-drone defenses, and AI is perhaps the most scale-dependent tech to date. The incumbent defense sector might be obsolete, but it will be replaced with better, but not necessarily cheaper or less scale-sensitive, disruptors like Anduril. If America fails to adapt and keeps subsidizing fattened, lazy behemoths like Lockheed with cost-plus contracts due to political lobbying, it will be a strategic mistake exploited by other large nation-states, not a fundamental change in the scale of warfare.

The Sovereign Individual was even more prescient in predicting, at the early date of 1997, that digital technologies would lead to geographic flexibility in conducting knowledge work, particularly for wealthy individuals not subject to the demands of an employer. It took 25 years and a pandemic to get older customers and clients to download and use the Skype / GoToMeeting clone Zoom, despite video chat being viable tech for 15 years prior, but the remote work era is clearly here, whatever its downsides for productivity, innovation, and work relationships.

They further predicted that, freed from geographic proximity to economic opportunities, sovereign individuals would use the emerging 90s tax-avoidance domiciles to optimize their wealth. The math, as the authors demonstrate, is undeniable. Paying a 50% marginal rate vs. a 10% marginal rate over one’s lifetime has a net orders-of-magnitude impact on final net worth. Wouldn’t every rational wealthy person take advantage of such an opportunity?

It turns out, very few do, and it doesn’t even require, as the authors recommend, renouncing citizenship, moving to a dodgy charter city in some third world tropical polity, negotiating a private tax treaty with Switzerland, or giving up the protection of the United States Marine Corps. As I write this, any American can move to Puerto Rico, live there six months and a day out of the year, and pay zero federal income taxes. It’s a backwater, a bit like the typical midsize city, but otherwise a nice place with nice beaches, yet very few wealthy individuals are willing to move there for the tax break.

The authors fail to account for the declining marginal utility of wealth and the extreme human preference for nice amenities, nice climates, and the feeling of being near the physical center of elite activity, things that cannot be bought. But for family and other social obligations, which I find binding as a matter of duty, I would much prefer to live somewhere cooler than Texas. My ideal location balancing culture, climate, geography, and tax policy is probably East Tennessee. But most people with options find these of little consequence, and are more likely to move based on climate, perception of elite status, and amenities than tax policy or family proximity. Even highly-taxed wage earners like physicians are loath to move from somewhere nice to double their take-home income.

The asset-wealthy in particular already have options for paying very few taxes regardless of geography — such as the buy, borrow, die strategy — but voters who might be inclined to support higher taxes are too ignorant to know the difference. They see Democrats proposing higher marginal rates and think they are sticking it to Bill Gates when it’s really harming the newly minted oncologist struggling to pay off medical school debt. The legal details are too arcane for sound bites, so the political equilibrium is a headline policy that sounds progressive but allows politicians from both parties to have fewer powerful people angry at them and less likely to support political challengers.

The real sovereign individuals are those who hire good legal counsel2. The most profitable decision of Peter Thiel’s life might have been “wasting” three years in law school, because his legal education likely gave him the foresight and technical skills to properly set up the world’s largest self-directed, alternative-asset Roth IRA when he was still poor on paper at PayPal; as a result, he lives rent-free in California. Similarly, startup founders don’t usually pay much in taxes, ever, due to the QSBS loophole3. Business owners also have the enviable position of self-reporting their income based on the opinions of lawyers and CPAs who work for them, rather than ratted to the IRS, on a gross basis, free of legal but creative deductions, on W-2 forms.

The exploitation of modern states is not so much of the very wealthy, the imagined sovereign individuals oppressed by confiscatory taxation, but rather the moderately successful, asset-poor, but high-income W-2 upper middle class. Given this, it’s only natural that any revolutionary class, as Sam Francis predicted, would have to come from the abused middle, and that is exactly what we sort of see in Trump, though his crassness has induced a sort of false consciousness in the very upper middle class wage earners who ought to care most about extending those tax cuts4.

Digital “Assets”

The authors also predict the rise of digital assets that would allow sovereign individuals to escape the necessity of submitting to government taxation. And yes, Bitcoin was a huge prediction in 1997, a full decade before its genesis and 20 years before its mass popularity. But Bitcoin’s public ledger makes material tax evasion by ultra-wealthy owners of it harder, not easier. If you’re rich and want to avoid taxes, you’d rather do it legally with hundreds of pages of arcane documents and a team of 130-IQ tax lawyers squaring off against middling, overworked IRS bureaucrats than betting the FBI can’t link you to your public transaction keys.

Regardless, my opinions on Bitcoin remain unchanged. I subscribe to Robert Kyosaki’s accounting taxonomy: an asset is something that produces income. Since Bitcoin produces no income, it is not an asset. At best, it might be digital, fiat gold, but as discussed in my Bitcoin post, the intrinsic value of fiat currency is historically stolen from the world of the gold standard, in debt instruments and tax liabilities linked to assets denominated, when originated, in gold-backed dollars. It is a “one-time” theft of value that is arguably not available to other fiat currencies like Bitcoin, however limited in supply.

Gold has and had intrinsic value for industrial and decorative uses, though admittedly, much of its value is as a store of value built on top of its intrinsic value. A string of pseudorandom digits must always have zero intrinsic value, however much speculation is built on top of trading it. The great question for Bitcoin is whether a form of money can originate with zero intrinsic value and still work as a store of value if others agree. This is still an unanswered question.

But regardless, as I also mentioned in the Bitcoin commentary, the wealthy do not store value and swim in giant vaults of gold, digital or otherwise, but rather deploy value to own intrinsically productive assets: apartments, mines, forests, factories, and the like. All of these must be protected by men with guns and thus demand a sovereign to whom the owner must pay taxes.

Those most important assets that are “digital,” or at least immaterial, like copyright, trademark, and patents, rely even more upon men with guns to protect their statutory monopolies. After all, if I own an oil well, my competitors must go through the trouble of finding their own oil to compete with me. Trademark rights, by contrast, demand that, in the end, someone point a gun at another human being to prevent them from printing a two-cent label on their competing good. Copyright demands someone with a gun ultimately prevent costless digital piracy, and patents demand someone with a gun prevent a competitor from using publicly available information to enhance their productivity. Ironically, the true “digital assets” are those most sneered at by libertarians as unjust because they are most intrusive to natural liberty and most dependent on the state to enforce their artificial statutory rights!

And it’s critical for wealth building that assets have income. As The Missing Billionaires posited, income from investments is the safest signal of what one’s assets can support in terms of consumption. When asset values are speculative, producing no income, it is nigh impossible to know how rich you really are and how much is an ephemeral wealth effect. The longest-standing wealthy families tend to own natural resources and adjust spending to after-tax income, those taxes being a cost of doing business.

Even conquest from a competing state rarely results in a permanent loss for a great asset owner. Nazi Germany, for example, mostly did not seize multi-generational landed wealth in France nor Poland. Go down one tick in rapacious severity to the previous European tyrant, and we find that Napoleon conducted virtually no private wealth seizures and simply redirected tax revenues to his coffers. Unless your occupiers are ideological communists, even hostile enemies understand that they are better off collecting taxes from a competent owner than risk mismanagement of the assets underlying their tax revenue stream, or disrupt supply chains that could starve millions5.

Today’s wealthy have more sophisticated ways of owning income-producing assets, many publicly traded. This makes seizure of those same assets even more politically dangerous. And contrary to the predictions of the authors, there is no “digital asset” out there that produces income and is both free of government control / taxation and not subject to third-party credit risk. If you loan out your Bitcoin, you have to give up custody, and if you don’t get paid back, you end up in the government’s courts again, asking the state to use its guns to enforce your contract rights. The anarcho-capitalist utopia remains a distant dream.

And being free of the government as both a tax rent extractor and protector of property rights has its downsides, even for those skilled or prescient enough to have profited from digital asset speculation. In the crypto vacuum of stateless assets, nature’s war of all against all is reasserting itself. No criminal can kidnap me and force me to give up my real estate or stock market holdings with a contract any government court will enforce. But those foolish enough to publicize their Bitcoin holdings are increasingly vulnerable. I’d rather pay my taxes than have my wealth at risk proportionate to my ability to tolerate having my fingernails pulled out by pliers, Leviathan or not.

Quirks and Quibbles

The authors exhibit some of those typical schizophrenic libertarian tendencies when it comes to collective obligations beyond immediate family. As libertarians, they must believe in inequality, yet seem to yearn for its causes to be moral virtues rather than natural inheritances. They rhetorically, at one point, in disclaiming collectivism of any kind, state that human remains from a plane crash are indistinguishable as to nationality, I suppose to emphasize that we are all fundamentally individuals with differences only skin deep. They assume this, but must not know that physical anthropologists and forensic scientists can reliably determine a person’s broad geographic ancestry from skeletal remains alone.

Similarly, they argue the fundamental irrationality of any kind of nationalism by claiming that state propaganda hijacks our natural love of family to extend it to the arbitrary category of the nation, and work the math naively to show that any random countryman shares only maybe a few thousandths of a given individual’s blood, making national loyalties irrational social constructs. In reality, human pedigrees collapse, else everyone would have more than a billion ancestors, more than the then-existing total human population, even as recently as AD 1000. Some ancestors do double duty in everyone’s family tree, which makes us more related to certain people than others, especially when those ancestors shared a constrained geography before the modern era, i.e., a nation6. This would make winnable defensive wars rational in many circumstances, as well as some offensive wars, especially when there’s a defensive pretext, to wrest prime virgin territory from weak, diplomatically and geographically isolated paper tiger opponents, like in the Mexican-American War7. Though I share the authors’ general aversion to war as a racket, they tried to prove too much with these inaccurate biological claims.

And in a great demonstration of the frustrating, sometimes contradictory, but occasional sheer audacity of the book, in a closing chapter, they seek to reconcile libertarian ideology with environmentalism by way of eugenics! After previously endorsing the most ideological blank-statism imaginable, they more or less claim that Western aid to Africa “short-circuited negative feedback consequences” to “counterproductive cultures” to produce more children than they otherwise would, wreaking environmental havoc with overpopulation. Their prescription, presumably, is that people who are unable to produce enough food to feed their children should starve, to teach them to change their behavior, or else change their genetics through culling the more imprudent, a bold synthesis of Malthus and Von Mises. I’m against foreign aid, too, but I’m not sure I would be brash enough to spell out the implications so bluntly, and I’m at least partly optimistic people would figure out a solution other than mass starvation.

Coda: Libertarian Nostalgia & the New Right

Many on the New Right, like the old neoconservatives, are libertarians “mugged by reality.” I never had a libertarian phase, but I’m sympathetic to it. And I did love Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012, and who couldn’t, as he was Cassandra in the form of a kindly grandpa. Ron Paul was the most winsome, decent, rational, democratic statesman imaginable, and his rejection by voters caused many of his supporters to move on to political ideas more informed by human nature, and further radicalized by his mistreatment by the GOP establishment.

I think a good deal of support for Trump from thinking conservatives is revenge for the rejection of Ron Paul. We might not get Austrian economics as government policy, but we can at least see Jeb Bush humiliated on national television. This includes Thiel, who now rejects any hope of democracy leading to a healthy society, and likely sees the Trump era as transitional to something more autocratic, in that since the people will not choose liberty, it must be imposed upon them from above.

That there would be some nostalgia for more idealistic times, at the dawn of the commercial Internet, is not surprising, even though most have long moved on. The open Internet itself is dead, with only two of the major decentralized protocols, HTTP and email, in common consumer use. Most content and web traffic is consolidated into the walled gardens of Facebook and Google, not independent websites. Few of the new generation have ever configured a router or built a computer.

All of this should have been predictable given human nature, but for a brief period in the 90s, anything seemed possible, even practical libertarianism. Surely, if it were easy and cheap, people would embrace freedom! The Sovereign Individual is a time capsule of that hopeful spirit.

This was an unwise decision for several reasons. First, technological illiteracy. He was daft enough to hold up a small, handwritten “enemies list” of critics on a live, HD podcast, and then make several claims about the men on the list. Smart anons immediately screenshotted and enhanced the few milliseconds of frames to elucidate the names on the list, exposing his claims about them as self-evidently defamatory. Friends of his are claiming the blame lies with those who captured the frames, rather than him for holding it up, assuming it would be illegible. It’s sad when people fundamentally misunderstand how the Internet works, which again underscores the need for leadership that didn’t spend most of their careers in obsolete media ecologies.

Second, possibly, and most charitably for a long-serving church officer, cognitive decline. We all have unspeakable, uncharitable thoughts about people all the time; our filters keep developing until about 45 and decline beginning at 65, giving us a preciously small window of maximum wisdom and sharpness1. In a previous era, errors like this would be removed in post before the DVDs went to production, or dropped from a text draft by a smart editor. Men in the public eye could work later into their twilight years without risking their legacy on an offhand comment. This paradigm is no more.

Third, outdated mental models. This relates to technological illiteracy, but also to an inability to forecast cultural trends and then doubling down on failed strategies. This same individual brought controversy last year by inviting, and then being forced to disinvite, the notorious David French to address the general assembly. For conservatives trying to productively channel the (justified) radicalism of young Christian men tired of being dumped on in the culture, inviting the neocon Never-Trumper squish French — who believes the magic words of the Constitution, not effective smashmouth politics, to be a universal salve in the face of American Gomorrah — only feeds the flames of their suspicions that church institutions are obsolete in addressing, if not complicit in, today’s actual problems.

Institutions with much to lose with their reputations must be led by men who are old enough not to say something dumb on purpose, and young enough not to say something dumb by accident, and particularly avoiding the grumpiness and annoyance that comes from old age in men when they are past their cognitive prime but don’t want to admit it, and when they are prone, due to lack of mental energy, to respond irritably to criticism, legitimate or not. My advice to the PCA for their next stated clerk: hire the smartest, most media-savvy 50-something you can find, and set a mandatory retirement age of 65.

That, however, seems unlikely given the track record of Boomer succession. Instead of elevating rising voices, they will tend to hold onto prominent positions way past their expiration date and end up saying silly things to fend off challenges to their position.

The Succession Problem

Admittedly, this is tough. This man, Bryan Chapell, at his prime, was a slick verbal operator. Name recognition and talent go a long way for many media-centric ventures, and every leader today representing an institution is arguably a media personality. Dave Ramsey, wiser than many older leaders, has been diligently trying for years to expand his media company beyond his singular talents and natural charisma, with mixed results at best. The personal connection people feel with media personalities is difficult to scale under a common brand umbrella.

Second, Boomers have been blessed with amazing advances in medical science. Whereas a member of the WWII generation might have been dead by 60 with a heart attack — and that generation’s early mortality was why many Boomer leaders have had such long careers, promoted to high levels of leadership in their 30s — advances in remediation of cardiovascular disease and diabetes have given them an astounding health span compared to their parents2. The widespread availability of PDE5 inhibitors and TRT clinics, just as their generation began late middle age, has caused many older men’s essential bodily virility to far outpace their mental capacities and judgment, giving false signals of seemingly eternal youth. Just like there’s no liberal like a Southern liberal, there’s no fool like an old fool.

Those older men who are fitness enthusiasts, like George Gilder, who still runs miles per day in his 80s, can remain productive far beyond the typical midcentury elderly, who, as the first to live in a post-scarcity world, lacked knowledge of the compensating necessity of exercise and nutritional restraint, and lacked great alternatives to cigarettes for delivery of the world’s greatest nootropic. And since retirement is particularly bad for men, who generally base their self-worth on their productive capacities rather than family relationships, who are we to demand that talented people stop using their talents because of age?

And there is much to learn from this phenomenal generation. Aaron Renn recently posted on the virtues of Boomer self-confidence, using John Piper’s “seashells sermon” as an example, contrasted with Gen X’s “too cool for school” detached cynicism. The content of Piper’s message, which was a manipulative guilt trip about the inadequacy of ordinary Christian vocations, is besides the point, but rather that he felt confident enough to give specific advice — even casting himself as everyone’s “spiritual father” like some kind of Pope — rather than vague analysis. Regardless of the merits of the message, people find this attractive. The reason it’s entertaining to listen to Dave Ramsey is to hear him rant at people for their poor financial decisions and tell them exactly what to do. The other “Ramsey” hosts are boring because it’s all Millennial uptalk and therapy-speak. Maybe part of the reason for the succession crisis is because members of subsequent generations are simply less likely to show leadership qualities, so hung up on displaying personal “authenticity” or “vulnerability” that they are unable to be effective3.

As I’ve said before, many people want to be told what to do, and if reasonable voices don’t fill that void, unreasonable ones will. The paradox of this is that the people most hesitant to give advice, because they are thoughtful, are the most qualified to give it. Now, maybe part of Gen X’s cynicism was caused by observing Boomer leaders’ unjustified confidence. But that cynicism is itself taking a position! And if we think we’re right, for example, in distrusting the pietistic guilt trips to which guys like Piper are prone, then we ought to have the courage to take our own side, publicly and confidently, in a real argument!

Cognitive Decline

These are undoubtedly circumstances unique to the Boomer generation that deserve sympathy. Yet the iron law of death and taxes remains, and while the latter is addressable with good CPAs and attorneys, the former remains only delayed, not solved4.

And there are problems well before death. Fluid intelligence (raw IQ) declines rapidly, about 1 point per year, beginning at age 70, with the average person being a full standard deviation, 15 points, lower by age 70 than they were at age 25. Crystallized intelligence, or knowledge, peaks later, at age 40 (and this would tend to peak somewhat later the more complex and/or critical the role), but is likewise almost a standard deviation below its peak by age 75. This is all, of course, mitigated or accelerated by personal fitness.

IQ is a tricky concept. Formally, it is always age-adjusted since it is by definition a relative number with 100 as an arbitrary mean and a standard deviation of 15. Referencing raw scores, a 12-year-old, for example, with an IQ of 100 is equivalent to an adult score of 85. Raw scores on tests peak at age 28, which is coincidentally when individuals in fields most dependent on raw IQ, like physics and math, reach maximum productivity. Since most fields are not like this, raw competence, or crystallized intelligence, seems to peak in most things at 40. Executional competence, which might be defined as the functional mix of raw IQ, crystallized intelligence, and wisdom, seems to peak in the early 50s for economic endeavors, which is incidentally, according to the data, when entrepreneurs are most competent in starting successful new enterprises, and is the modal age for CEOs5.

Since, for most of one’s adult life, one becomes more, not less, competent, with increasing age, it can be difficult to accept that this process eventually runs in reverse, and declines more quickly than it ascended. But for every man, there comes a point where grandpa needs to step away from the keyboard, or at least be heavily edited, and younger, more capable leaders make major decisions. It seems like every leader needs an exit plan to emeritus-advisory status by age 70, which means picking and grooming a successor by age 60 so that there is a full decade of institutional knowledge transfer before handing over the keys. Leaders in the media spotlight probably need to make this move five years earlier6.

The Active Emeritus Solution

And I think this requires rethinking how many organizations work, particularly the “up and out” culture that only allows promotions or retirement, never demotions. There’s a great Lebanese proverb shared by Taleb that says, “If the beard is brown, pay attention to the reasoning but ignore the conclusion. If the beard is gray, pay attention to both the reasoning and the conclusion. If the beard is white, ignore the reasoning but pay attention to the conclusion.”

Take Bryan Chappell. As a whitebeard, directionally, he was correct that there does exist a class of people who make it their vocation to bitterly criticize those in leadership, but it was an error in reasoning, and likely just old-age grumpiness, to link that to a specific list of people he personally finds annoying and then to further link that to a sweeping statement about their faith and morals; he probably got confused thinking of one or two good examples and mixed it up with this list. Maybe this observation could have been synthesized by a graybeard or a team of editors into a coherent commentary that would have been beneficial rather than corrosive. But critically, he shouldn’t be in charge of deciding whether his raw statements are suitable for public consumption!

The ideal leadership team would seem to be a sort of council where a 50-something graybeard has final executive authority, but is informed by both younger advisors for execution and older advisors for wisdom. And the best older advisor would be the former graybeard-in-charge!

This solves two critical problems. First, it prevents organizations from growing sclerotic due to elderly men with impaired reasoning skills and increasingly outdated mental models of the world. Second, it provides those same men with something valuable to do without retiring, for retirement is grim for men7. Such an option may reduce some of the grumpiness of aging, an existential fear, because men ultimately are only valued and respected for what they do and produce8. The older former leader should be allowed to take a pay cut, enjoy reduced hours and responsibilities, but be looped in on decisions where his intuitive wisdom can often prove invaluable. He can even still do media if he has name recognition and notoriety, as long as it’s not real-time and offhand comments can be edited out.

Unfortunately, most Boomer leaders, who tend to prefer command-and-control structures with clear reporting lines, would never have put up with an emeritus advisor who used to do their job. But perhaps Gen X, as we ascend to leadership one funeral or ill-advised outburst at a time, and being more comfortable with flatter organizations, can be gracious and keep our elders around in advisory roles for their and our benefit. Likewise, seeing this example, Millennials and Gen Z will hopefully be kind to us as well in our twilight years.

Now, about that pay cut, which probably just rubbed some senior leaders the wrong way. Everybody wants engaged younger leaders, but few are willing to do what it takes financially to make that happen. Boomers need to recognize their incredible luck at being born at the right time. My generation, Gen X, didn’t have it quite as good, but as I documented in my analysis of the economics of the middle class, we were closer economically to Boomers than the dystopia of the Zoomers.

Young people, because they feel like they are getting a raw deal, are historically alienated from our society’s institutions. Many are turning to various Absoloms online, like the odious Andrew Tate, for validation. No doubt, being frozen out of opportunities and good paychecks, and observing the lack of advancement opportunities to the very top for their immediate elders in their late 40s and 50s, Gen X, adds to their cynicism and desire to burn it all down.

All institutions must make better efforts at providing opportunities to our best young people, and not just for appearance’s sake. This was the case with DEI tokenism, now clearly both immoral and illegal, which often featured an older Boomer leader surrounding himself with younger people based on arbitrary demographic characteristics rather than competence.

I can’t help but think this was a feature, rather than a bug, for many aging leaders, who would feel less threatened by non-meritorious hires. Thus, in many bureaucracies, including arguably the PCA, key mentorship opportunities for 30 and 40-somethings in the last decade often excluded the bulk of its constituency, who couldn’t help but notice that the opprobrium for “stale, male, and pale” just so happened to exclude the head Boomers-in-charge.

Pulling up the ladder is not only wrong, but a bad strategy. To paraphrase LBJ’s famous quip, edited here for a family audience, you want the young, energetic men inside the tent directing their efforts outward to your common enemies. If they start to think you’re the enemy, good luck preserving your institution.

I’ve been loath to give parenting advice in these columns. Newlyweds shouldn’t give marital advice, and people whose children aren’t yet fully independent adults should be cautious about parenting advice. The problem with this is by the time parenting advice has credibility in terms of its outcomes — of course while acknowledging the role of factors outside of the parents’ control in outcomes — it is likely much of the advice is at least partly outdated in our fast-changing world.

Parenting in a world with smartphones is possibly more different than any world of parenting in the past. Those who grew up before 2000 might have more in common with a Roman adolescent’s experience than those growing up in the Panoptipercepticon of the AI-powered cloud and distributed mobile social media.

So with caution in mind, I will tempt the fates by occasionally writing what I will admit is “half-baked parenting advice.” Take it or leave it, there’s no warranty, strictly sold as-is, and may only be worth what you paid for it. These are simply some of the mental models I’ve found useful in making best guesses for parenting.

In this piece, I’ll again tempt fate in giving more of my half-baked thoughts on parenting.

Understanding the Primacy of Nature Is a Parenting Superpower

The economist Bryan Caplan published a book a few years ago encouraging people to have more kids. He cited the well-developed literature that genetics is most determinative for children’s outcomes, so parents should stop worrying so much about effort per child and have more children. And children are, strictly speaking, pretty cheap. In our post-scarcity world, you can feed them all essential nutrients with pork, sweet potatoes, rice, and beans for pennies a day, and that’s almost all that’s strictly required.

I endorse Caplan’s position, properly clarified. It’s not that nurture or parenting isn’t important per se. For people smart enough to read Bryan Caplan, certain environmental variables are operating in a very restricted range. The children of his readers will largely be loved, adequately fed, and live in a milieu of middle-class people who meet their responsibilities. Caplan’s point is that the marginal benefits of more intense parenting, once this base is assumed, are minimal (and perhaps negative, given the neurotic nature of many helicopter parents), so you’re better off having more kids than trying to optimize the childhoods of fewer of them. It does not follow that Elon’s approach, however, of creating fatherless children and betting purely on genetics, is likely to turn out as he expects, as such behavior is far outside of the range of environments implicitly assumed in the literature.

Practically, the best way to see children is not as blank slates but as undeveloped photographic film. The film can be developed poorly, but it cannot be developed beyond what is already there. And given a reasonable range of parental practices, notably love, two-parent households, etc, genetics come to predominate. As any parent can tell you, a child’s temperament and personality from the earliest ages are largely inborn, unalterable, and predictive of their eventual development. The most important “parenting” decision is who you choose to have children with, as each child is a remix of both parents’ dominant and recessive traits.

Recognizing that nature makes children different eases pressure on both the parent and the child, and helps avoid serious parenting mistakes that deprive children of love and can even lead to cruelty. Several of my children have been involved in running sports, perhaps the most genetically determinative of all sports, assuming some reasonable level of practice and conditioning. Yet I have observed many “sports dads,” under the illusion that “character” and “grit” are all that matter, yelling at their kids for failing to perform at a competition. Similarly, I have been told by overconfident tutors that “anyone” can learn advanced calculus if their specific techniques are followed. Kids who don’t measure up are blamed for character deficits by such parents, undermining the attachment that is critical to the relationship.

Thus, given the primacy of nature for both parents and kids, much of my advice will be negative, in terms of things to avoid and protect kids from assuming some sort of reasonable base of parental love, capability, and support, but this emphasis is simply practical. But the positive side cannot be overstated: children are a wonderful source of joy and fun. They make every life experience fresh and new, and the struggles of this life worth the effort.

On Behavior

Jordan Peterson explains the purpose of behavior training when he instructs parents to “do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” His point is not one of selfishness on the parents’ part, but rather an allowance for the parents’ bias! We tend to naturally like our children, so if they behave in ways that make us dislike them, other people will definitely dislike them, and preparing them for social life with other humans is a top priority.

Child behavior is more about consistency and quick delivery of some consequence, and mostly unrelated to mode1 or severity. Mostly, kids are impulsive, and much of this in the early years is simple operant conditioning. Overly talking about things is probably bad with children of any age, and delivering a reasonable, minor consequence consistently seems most important. Dr. Phelan’s 1-2-3 Magic is one approach that embraces this philosophy. Simple, but not easy.

One thing I’ve deliberately avoided is overly spiritualizing discipline. Many of the things kids do, again, are just impulsive, not big spiritual shortcomings. But one problem with the modern church is a tendency to overspiritualize everything, and that runs the gamut from the Duggar-aligned Pearls to more respectable voices like Paul Tripp. I’ve always felt intuitively that it borders on spiritual abuse to make every discussion about disobedience relate to the kid’s “heart” or whatever. Some children require more correction, and temperaments associated with this are evident almost from birth, well before a child is making conscious moral choices. Linking the child’s spiritual state to their unchosen temperament is thus a form of spiritual abuse.

And this, I think, is the biggest risk for naturally conservative, religious parents, particularly those in fundamentalist-adjacent communities. One big piece of wisdom my parents taught me was to be skeptical of anyone who “wears their religion on their sleeve.” Religion, unfortunately, can attract the mentally unstable, with the broader evangelical world full of incompetent Bible interpreters who extrapolate wisdom literature into rules-based systems they think provide guaranteed outcomes, not realizing the whole rickety edifice is speculation stacked on speculation. Many unintentional abuse situations come from parents attempting to use rigid frameworks despite observational evidence that it’s ineffective in this situation for this child.

Business experience has given me a natural allergy to overconfidence. I know how difficult it is to A/B test a website layout based on thousands of randomized trials with certainty. Hence, people who claim certainty with fewer samples on more complex phenomena like human behavior are usually wrong. While others’ frameworks can be useful, particularly those more evidence-based, children are so diverse in their temperaments that there’s no substitute for relying upon intuition based on personal observation.

Most behavior situations are not a spiritual crisis but are best handled with a quick, mild consequence and moving on with your day. It’s the endless talking about it that undermines the relationship, as most kids are willing to take the L on a consequence if the parent can avoid the temptation to lecture, and it’s consistent consequences, ideally ones that model real-life consequences as closely as possible, that change behavior. Again, simple but not easy. The parental fantasy of lectures, it seems, is that somehow the child will reach a state of enlightenment through argumentation: “Yes, Dad, I now see the error of my ways through your clear and cogent elucidation of moral principles, and I will correct my behavior going forward.” I like debates, so I find myself sucked into this more often than I should!

For older kids, a good resource is Kevin Leman’s New Kid by Friday. Leman is a Christian, but smartly avoids spiritual manipulation as a discipline strategy. Rather, he has the parent operate from a position of strength as the provider of things kids want, but don’t have to have. It’s a very Zen approach of asking calmly for compliance and delivering a natural consequence with minimal emotional engagement. Parents have more leverage than they realize, which is best exercised quietly, from a position of strength, rather than endless arguing and debate with someone who is not the parent’s peer and shouldn’t be treated as such. Kids are natural empiricists and understand quickly that talk is cheap.

On Teenagers

Chimpanzees make lovely pets until they hit puberty, at which point they can rip a human’s face off. So it’s not entirely unrelated to state that just as one should be cautious about taking marriage advice from newlyweds, one should be very cautious about taking parenting advice from those whose children have not yet entered and exited puberty with good outcomes. A huge parenting mistake is expecting linear progress in maturity based on age2.

I wrote the following summary on teenager psychology in my post on the Duggars:

Human development is so designed that puberty starts before the mind is completely mature in its adult capacities for self-control, and hormones undermine rather than enhance the accumulated self-control of late childhood. In educational contexts, I will often show this chart of objectively measured impulse control by age:

Teenagers lose impulse control due to sex hormones and do not fully recover their ten-year-old levels of self-control until 18-19 years old. If your mental model of teenager development is linear, you are going to be sorely disappointed by reality.

Further, I wrote the following in a post relating to the attainment of the middle class:

As I’ve raised teenagers, it’s become more obvious to me the importance of peers. I tell younger parents that their biggest leverage post-puberty is careful control (i.e. range restriction) of their child’s peers. Sex hormones change everything and orient young people towards the future, rather than the past, and they are ultra-sensitive to what attains status among their peers than what their parents think.

Ok, with some background considerations laid down, I’ll attempt to construct a “Half-Baked Unified Theory of Parenting.”

The Window and Cultural Leakage

Humans are fundamentally social animals, and we cannot thrive without community. In a child’s development, this community slowly expands from family to the broader world, and accelerates during puberty, when a normal part of development is a quasi-rejection of the family to find one’s own identity.

This means that the window of early childhood is especially precious for setting family norms. And this experience will be notably different based on birth order. Oldest children will have the longest window of being insulated from outside cultural and peer influences, perhaps until age 12. Younger children will have a shorter window, as peer influences from older teenage siblings will produce more cultural leakage downstream. Thus, the critical “window” for one’s family is the 13 years after the first child's birth.

As I’ll revive as a common theme, you can always loosen up later, but it’s hard to start loose and ratchet down. The job as a parent is to “give ground grudgingly” to modernity, being neither inflexible nor neutral in the face of cultural decline. Like Fabius, pick favorable battles, know when to retreat, and make the cultural enemy’s efforts a net unprofitable enterprise. And in a sense, it’s a battle parents are meant to lose, in that the goal is to produce independent adults who make good decisions, not permanent parental control. We appropriately insulate, delay, mitigate, and arrange circumstances to minimize the influence of modern “mind viruses,” but children, sooner than we expect, will be making their own moral choices.

Thankfully, I’m a “strong opinions, loosely held” type of person, so a Fabian strategy comes somewhat naturally. But for more inflexible personalities, it’s really important not to fall into the Duggar trap of trying to control too much and appearing publicly weird. As I related in my disgust and discretion post linked above:

Reconciling these two principles — the necessity in certain areas to go against the cultural grain and living in community with others — requires the application of discretion. Discretion means keeping one’s mouth shut publicly when appropriate to do so. It means being ok with holding a very different position privately than the rest of society while practicing verbal self-control in public settings when one holds such an opinion. If done competently, this reassures children that having contrary positions on popular foolishness doesn’t mean being a social pariah, and also models how to do the same with their own children, creating a sustainable multigenerational pattern of healthy private behaviors and opinions while still maintaining social ties in an unhealthy society.

After early childhood, peer selection becomes more important. While you cannot control peers directly, you can impose an indirect restriction of range by careful selection of geography, education, and extracurricular activities. This is why people pay so much money to be in the “right” schools and the “right” area. And with so much of the surrounding culture descending into degeneracy, the remaining islands of sanity and function become all the more valuable and expensive.

On Education

As children grow older, they will both need and desire peers their age, and for most people, the educational community they choose will be the predominant source of those peers. Much of this will depend on family resources and local options.

I was once a committed homeschooler, and I still share many of the presuppositions of that world. But like I said, I try to hold my strong opinions loosely. If I look around and notice something askew in my mental model, I reconsider.

I attended a large, competitive suburban high school. I had many smart classmates who attended several reasonably competitive universities, and I experienced real academic competition that motivated me to work harder than I would have without it. It was in this very high school that I met several very talented, ambitious individuals who eventually became critically important partners in my business endeavors.

In the homeschool community, however, I couldn’t help but notice lagging achievement in high school; it seemed like homeschoolers would often start ahead in early childhood but end up behind the “honors” contingent of suburban public high schools by graduation. It struck me as a problem if, whatever the other benefits, my children’s education would be less academically rigorous than mine.

My vision for my children was not of the extreme rat race type — the elite pre-school to miserable childhood of resume padding to “impressive” name brand college halfway across the country to miserable 100 hour weeks at McKinsey to barely afford a studio apartment in a major fertility-shredding urban center pipeline — but it did seem reasonable to provide an opportunity for competitive academics and matriculation, maybe even a scholarship, to a reasonably selective flagship state university or second-tier regional private school, if even only for the indirect benefits.

I do think the university racket is mostly a scam that could be eliminated by employers administering standardized tests to 18-year-olds for entry to on-the-job apprenticeships, but unless everyone coordinates an exit, it’s hard to go against the grain. There’s also the problem that there are barriers to many lucrative, cartel-protected occupations (MD, CPA, RN, etc) that require degrees to sit for the licensing tests, so however practically worthless (or at least inefficient and wasteful) university educations might generally be, it’s necessary to avail oneself of the benefits of these licensing cartels; and in a world of AI and remote outsourcing, a licensed cartel protecting one’s middle class sinecure will become increasingly important. And again, it’s all about those peer relationships, and that continues into early adulthood, and if most of the smart 18-22-year-olds are on college campuses, it’s hard to opt out.

So while we homeschooled early, this “noticing” planted a seed such that a few years later, when we had an opportunity to join a hybrid model school with paid teachers, real grades, real transcripts, etc, but with only two on-campus days a week, we made the switch. I think part of the benefit of this again relates to child development, and it’s a more historic idea than many homeschoolers realize.

The Puritans famously had a tradition of “sending out,” where, around age 13, teenagers would be sent from their homes of origin to another family to serve in some capacity3. Adolescents at this age are often more cooperative and eager to please any adult who isn’t their parent, again because sex hormones activate the necessary psychological process of separating from the home of origin to prepare to establish their own homes, and the concomitant desire to prove and test themselves in the broader world. The Puritans’ elegant solution was to simply “trade” their teenagers with each other to avoid the inevitable conflict.

In an academic setting, teachers and coaches who are not the child’s parents provide this third-party accountability. It is tough as a parent to provide objective accountability while maintaining a loving parent relationship. If one’s child makes a bad grade because they didn’t study, it’s hard to comfort them if the parent gave the grade, and it’s hard for them to learn from the experience if the objective assessment of their needing to work harder also comes from what they reasonably expect to be a source of unconditional love, and when there’s no motivation from competition with other students.

When forced to choose when playing this dual role when homeschooling, most parents reasonably choose love, which results in a better relationship but undermines any accountability for objective results. Functionally, however, this results in coddling. Just as girls often have their fathers wrapped around their fingers, boys are often coddled by their mothers, which is why it’s so important to have third party accountability for some kind of objective result in some part of their lives, to motivate them to suck it up and do hard things so they can eventually provide for a family.

You can almost judge the quality of a peer environment based on the behavior of the boys4, since they are the natural leaders, for better or worse. If the norm for them, especially the popular and athletic ones, is achievement and ambition, it’s a good environment for the girls too5. However, if the boys are underachievers who compensate by denigrating academic effort as effeminate, and are rewarded for whining about school being too hard, then girls will also dial down their efforts so as not to become the objects of scorn, or else hold the boys in contempt. Given the well-documented struggles of young men today, this problem is all too common, and unfortunately, likely only avoided in fairly selective, elite groups.

In addition, much of the homeschooling movement has been influenced by the West Coast hippie “unschooling” contingent, which says requiring students to study things they’re not passionate about is oppressive, so you end up with teenagers with statistically improbable career ambitions related to hobbies. This approach eschews the boring and complicated disciplines that are most consistently rewarded in the economy.

No doubt, there are exceptional parents and self-motivated, agreeable teenagers who make it work. Still, it’s an uphill battle to continue homeschooling into high school, where parents handle assignments, teaching, and grades in increasingly technical subjects, and leaving the cocoon of home is an important developmental milestone. Historically, many teenagers were in apprenticeships or other forms of outside work by these ages, as 14-year-olds were often treated as little adults.

Unfortunately, the most cost-effective solution, public school, remains an unattractive option. It’s not necessarily the ideological problems, which could be overcome, in a generally conservative jurisdiction, by a well-formed faith and worldview at these ages, but again, the peer environment. The biggest problem with public schools6 is that they must admit literally anyone.

Especially with the challenges posed by technology, to be discussed in a follow-up post, it is imperative to choose some sort of school where the community of parents is more on the ball than the general population’s neglect and incompetence. You could almost pose the question as, “What percentage of your teenager’s peers do you desire to have unmonitored access to hardcore pornography on their phones?” Choosing a public school, by default, means an awfully high percentage.

This leaves high-quality, values-aligned7 private schools as the best option for the high school years, but these are not affordable for all families, with tuition from $10,000 to $70,000 per year. Part-time, university-schedule private schools work for more, but again, even half the standard tuition amount is a budget buster for many. There are affordable options for online high schools conducted at home, but “peers” and “teachers” have to be put in scare quotes when those relationships are mediated through a Zoom call and geographic dispersion. The lack of good, affordable options is one of the best arguments for universal school choice, and in the meantime, for benefactors to fund scholarships for otherwise qualified families who cannot afford retail tuition.

On Religion

I made the general case for Christianity and church attendance in my second installment on belief here. I’ll paraphrase again my advice that people who 30% believe in God should 100% go to church. And again, citing the critical development window, between the ages of 2 and 18, a mere 16 years, children will internalize, based on their family’s practices, whether going to church is the sort of thing that’s done or not done. Social science now tells us of the mental health benefits of church attendance, and evolutionary psychology of its adaptive purpose. Since most people for most of history have found value in religion, even agnostic parents should attempt to believe and at least offer their children a chance at faith in a church community.

For Christians in my audience, I’ll offer a contrarian perspective on the intersection of church selection and parenting. There’s an opportunity to connect the critical developmental window with the lost virtues of the past.

My 1980s early childhood is hardly ancient history, when we attended a tiny Southern Baptist church in a rural Louisiana town of 400 people. It was humble, but it had traditional architecture with a steeple and a church bell. Worship exclusively featured songs from the Baptist Hymnal, much as people had worshipped 100 years prior. Our deacons, few to none of whom had a college degree and were electricians, sheriff’s deputies, or construction workers during the week, dutifully wore suits and ties every Sunday, and when offering a prayer, spoke to God in respectful inflections of King James English. The sermons were delivered by our white-haired pastor, whom I thought, as a child, like Moses, got that way through direct communion with God. His sermons were given in the Adrian Rogers type rhetorical high tone of educated Southern gentlemen, undoubtedly picked up indirectly in his seminary studies despite his likely humble roots. There was a sense of dignity and reverence, a residue of the high church Anglicanism that was our common distant heritage before our people spread to the American frontier. Relative to popular culture, Sunday morning was a timeless contrast, not a cheap imitation.

But what I experienced as ennobling, some saw as inauthentic. Today, at many evangelical churches, laity dress in shorts and t-shirts, and clergy can’t be bothered to tuck in their golf polos, else they appear stuffy to the “seekers.” Worship is less a communal act than a concert where volumes are so loud that no one can hear if they’re singing in tune, and forget about sight-reading parts and harmony if you’re unlucky enough to be an alto or baritone for whom the melody is out of range. Emotion in worship is not spontaneous, welling up tears as one hears the tension between the comforting words and triumphal war-march tune of "How Firm a Foundation,” but rather carefully scripted and performative. Much of evangelicalism has degraded to the point where the ultra-liberal National Cathedral features more scripture in a service than many churches will preach in 6 months.

When our children were young, it was still possible to easily find evangelical churches with a traditional format, and we eventually found a home in one of the breakaway Southern conservative Presbyterian denominations, the largest of which is the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Though it happened to also feature traditional worship8, I was initially attracted to this church because of its intellectual culture in engaging with hard questions about my faith in my 20s. In other circumstances, we may have made a different choice, but I was happy, for at least one more generation, to continue the chain with my ancestors in more reverent worship.

As I became acquainted with Presbyterian theology, I observed more benefits. Strangely, these have little to do with Calvinism, of which I am still not entirely convinced, but rather views of baptism and communion. An under-appreciated divide between the churches rests at this fault line. Are children part of the covenant before they are capable of faith? Does communion entail some special presence of Christ of whatever type, or is it purely memorial? Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians all answer yes to both questions. Most evangelicals answer no.

These questions orient the foundations of practice either towards a) the corporate body and its worship of God for His glory alone, or b) individual faith experiences, with worship primarily a tool to enhance the latter. The infiltration of California megachurch-style worship and practice into historic, organic faith communities was more successful in those churches already more individually oriented, where traditional practices were running on the fumes of custom rather than enjoying a solid theological footing.

My preferences aside, these are good, faithful churches; they undoubtedly meet “felt needs,” have mass appeal, and teach a saving gospel. In such a context, the culture is almost certainly too far gone to return universally to a more reverent format, which is self-evidently what most people do not want.

Many of these congregations had a tough choice to make in the 00s: a) uphold tradition and continue to bleed families, budgets, and talent to first movers in the market, relegating their church to niche status9, or b) change to give the people what they want. No one is necessarily to blame, it’s just what is. But for individual families, there’s an opportunity, especially when children are young in the critical developmental window, to normalize something more traditional and measured that emphasizes the centrality of God, not man, and teaches important skills like how to sit still and pay attention.

If you have smart kids, an additional benefit is that, among Protestants, conservative churches informed by the Magisterial Reformation tend to have greater intellectual depth. Their theology is almost half a millennium old and continuous with the great thinkers of Catholicism like Augustine and Aquinas, not invented by some self-promoter 150 years ago during America’s 19th-century religious crank-fest. Their members are discouraged from self-interpreting the Bible like a horoscope, but rather rely on consensus documents (confessions, catechisms) informed by centuries of scholarship. Smarter kids are going to naturally have more doubts, and it can be helpful to be a part of a church tradition that can engage intelligently with the best opposing arguments instead of relying primarily on subjective emotional experiences as the basis of faith10.

It’s also essential that children see church commitments reflected at home, most importantly in parents’ (mostly) non-hypocritical behavior, but also in explicit commitments of family time. While I have a friend who has successfully led his large family, toddlers included, through the Bible more than once (and the KJV at that), covering a chapter per day, a more achievable goal I’ve found sufficient is a weekly family Bible study on Sunday nights. Something achievable consistently is better than an ideal avoided. Similarly, one of the more powerful demonstrations of “church is something we do” is to make a point of going to church weekly, even on vacation, even when it’s inconvenient, if at all possible. In parenting, as in most other things, talk is cheap! Action reflects our true core commitments.

Part Two: Practical Applications

In the next post, I’ll take these broad concepts and suggest some practical applications, particularly surrounding the great challenge for today’s parents, managing the strange new world of technology.