All political and social philosophies rest, implicitly or explicitly, on some claims or claims about the nature of humans.

Consider the thought of Kong Qiu (c.551 BC – c. 479 BC), known as Kǒngfūzǐ (孔夫子) (Great Master or Wise Teacher Kong), hence Confucius. He held that human nature is naturally good and that it is therefore a reasonable aspiration to create a society of harmony, a society without conflict, if everyone just behaves with the propriety appropriate to their place in society—in particular, according to their placement in the web of social connections. His constant concern for the rites (li 禮) is for people to show the correct forms of, and orientation towards, those socially embedded interactions.

This leads very naturally to a very authoritarian, hierarchical view of politics as enforcing social harmony, particularly as people vary in their willingness and capacity to cultivate such virtuous propriety. The notion that politics is legitimately an arena for bargaining between competing interests—the Western idea of “normal politics”—becomes not a natural way to do politics, but a failure to achieve proper harmony.

Master Kong developed his ideas—that were further developed by disciples and commentators—in a civilisation with no tradition of warrior assemblies, self-governing cities, or deliberative assemblies of any kind. A ruler’s court is a place where officials report, and may even debate, but the ruler decides. You can see this narrow view of politics in comments by Master Kong in the Analects such as:

8.14 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.”

14.26 The Master said, “If you don’t have a particular [government] position, then don’t meddle with any of its business.” Master Zeng [Zengzi] commented, “The gentleman does not allow his thoughts to go beyond what his position calls for.”

In such a political culture, judicious quotes based on mastery of a shared literature become a way of communicating to superiors while giving minimum offence. Conversely, political rhetoric has little or no value, because there are not the deliberative assemblies to be swayed by argument. Master Kong deprecated glib persuasiveness, on the grounds that it tended to hide one’s real character (or lack thereof).

Where command-and-control hierarchy is the dominant method of political action, hoping for propriety to pervade the hierarchy has obvious resonance. Putting such propriety as a mechanism for social harmony is a way to, ironically enough, be persuasive—which requires a positive view of human nature. But it also hugely elevates the moral claims of governorship. Hence comments such as:

2.1 The Master said, “To rule by virtue is like the way the North Star rules, standing in its place with all the other stars revolving around it and paying court to it.”

12.17 Ji Kangzi asked about the way of governing [zheng]. Confucius replied, “To govern [zheng] is to correct [zheng]. When you set an example by correcting your mistakes, who will dare not to correct his mistakes?”

This concern for harmonious propriety is not a world away from ibn Khaldun’s concern for asabiyya. Nor is it so far from recognising the importance of a coherent civic culture in order to maintain robust institutions, which rest on norms and rules. This is a factor that much of mainstream Economics fails to seriously grapple with, leading to incompetent analysis of immigration.

The problem is that this cultural and institutional framework turns the thought of Master Kong, his disciples and commentators, into what is, in effect, one-trick moral propriety politics, however sophisticated other aspects of this tradition may be. The choices of governance are narrowed down to punishment and example:

2.3 The Master said, “If you guide the people with ordinances and statutes and keep them in line with [threats of] punishment, they will try to stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. If you guide them with exemplary virtue [de] and keep them in line with the practice of the rites [li], they will have a sense of shame and will know to reform themselves.”

They are reduced to trying to make autocratic command-and-control politics work as a successful long-term project: as the repeated dynastic collapses in Chinese history show, they did not succeed. Indeed, the recurring pattern of Chinese political reformers and reform programs ending badly reflects that such fail to break out of that autocratic command-and-control pattern, so end up being swallowed by its incentive structures—including the long-term pathologies of bureaucracy and the inherent fears of autocrats.

The most thorough attempt to implement ideas based on rú (儒) classicism (“Confucianism”) in Chinese history was the disastrous reign of Wang Meng (r.9-23), who provides an object lesson in overweening Theory leading to disastrous policies. Ironically, Master Kong himself was against such grand theorising:

9.4 The Master stayed away from four things: he did not put forth theories or conjectures; he did not think that he must be right; he was not obdurate; he was not self-centered.

The episode is a particularly disastrous example of Etienne Gilson’s principle that the conclusions of the master are the premises of the disciple, thereby all too readily reducing struggles with complexity to a simplifying dogmatism: a trap that scholarly commentary on The Analects often tried to avoid.

The thought of Master Kong also wanders very close to someone is morally better, not only because learned, but because smart and learned. For instance:

5.9 The Master said to Zigong, “Who is the better man, you or Hui [Yan Hui]?” Zigong replied, “How dare I compare myself with Hui? Having learned one thing, he gives play to ten, while I go only as far as two.” The Master said, “You are not as good as he is. Neither of us is as good as he is.”

This arrogance of the appropriately credentialed periodically led to mass outbreaks of infuriated peasants removing educated heads from elite bodies. The most recent manifestations of this were the Cultural Revolution in China and the megacidal Cambodian horrors under Pol Pot but you can see versions of this reaching back into Chinese history—for example, the massacres by Huang Chao’s rebellion (874-884) towards the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the earlier peasant revolts that brought down Wang Meng.

We can also see the same self-righteous exploitive arrogance of those credentialed with “morally proper knowledge” afflicting contemporary Western societies along with bureaucratic pathologies that have also been a feature of Chinese history—remembering that we Westerners copied the Chinese pattern of bureaucratic selection through examination without considering the long-term patterns of Chinese history. Fortunately, national populism generates a less violent outlet for popular frustrations than Chinese peasant revolts.

Within the analytical framework of rú (儒) classicism / Confucianism, the transactions of commerce become inherently suspicious, as commerce seeks gain rather than virtue. It creates winners and losers via outcomes unconnected to (Confucian) virtue. The amoral—in the sense of not driven by virtue—dynamism of commerce is corrosive of stable harmony:

4.16 The Master said, “The gentleman [junzi] understands what is morally right. The petty man [xiaoren] understands what is profitable.”

The rival school of Legalism—fǎjiā (法家) or the School of fa (incl. law, method)—is not any better in supporting what Western thought saw as normal politics. Legalism takes human nature to be bad, so needing strict control. But the underlying notion is that all human action—certainly, all political action—be directed to upholding the power and authority of the state.

Once again, the notion of politics as an arena for bargaining between competing interests is rendered illegitimate, for such undermines the unity of social action required to fully empower the state. Legalism is also suspicious of the dynamism of commerce and its transactional connections outside the state.

China has rich commercial traditions, but in some ways that is despite the Chinese state, not because of it. Commerce in China has been protected in part—and to varying degrees—by the sheer scale of China and the limited reach of command-and-control bureaucracies. The revenue needs of the Song (960-1279) fostered commercial vitality, the security obsessions of Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) rule tended to undermine the same, while CCP rule has oscillated between the two approaches to an extreme degree.

Even Daoism is not much of a barrier to this uniform social harmony thinking, as its notion of putting oneself in accordance with the Dao, the Way, can easily be read as orienting oneself to a single, shared Dao. Daoism did, however, show some tendency to restrain official intrusion into people’s lives.

As an aside, we can see the limited influence of Confucian thought on Japan, as Japanese politics—with its rival power centres—accepted from very early on that bargaining between political actors was a fundamental metier of politics. Conversely, the elevation of consensus within Japanese society and politics is, arguably, quite Confucian in its celebration of social harmony, though that consensus is supposed to arise out of a bargaining process.

Both Confucianism and Legalism rest on notions of human nature as uniform; that human nature is some X which applies to all humans. Master Kong holds that individuals vary in moral character and understanding, but he also sees that as a soluble problem for establishing social harmony, given discerning leadership and inculcation of pervasive propriety. Any blank slate notion of human nature is also a uniform conception of the human: it is a notion of human nature as a tabula rasa.

The obvious implication of this human uniformity is that properly directed social action—by operating on our uniform human nature—can achieve whatever social transformation is required. So, for example, an all-encompassing social equality is possible, precisely because we share, in some deep sense, a common, uniform, human nature.

This is, of course, the underlying claim of communism, including Marxist Communism. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, may look like it accepts the diversity of the human, but it does not really, for it assumes that uniform emotional reactions can be achieved. Specifically, that our profoundly and inherently social “species-being” can be realised if social action goes on the correct path.

CCP Confucians

We can thus see that a contemporary puzzle—why the Marxist-Leninist CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, has taken up pushing a form of Confucian thought, both domestically and externally—becomes much less of a puzzle. Marxism and Confucianism share an underlying notion that overt political bargaining is illegitimate; that pervasive social harmony is the proper goal of political and social action; that the proper hierarchy in charge of morally correcting the populace will achieve this; and that politics should be directed to the welfare of the people. Though the last has so often been legitimating rhetoric rather than actual practice.

The proper hierarchy in this case being accepting the right, authority and need for the CCP to direct—indeed correct—Chinese society at all levels. After all, the claim that Communists who have mastered correct Theory should have a guiding role in the transformation of society is explicitly stated in The Communist Manifesto:

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The notion that the democratic centralism of Leninism is some profound distortion of Marxism is simply not true. It is the operationalisation of Marxism based on claims already in The Communist Manifesto.

Authoritarian politics seeks to control what you do, at least within the realm of politics. Totalitarian politics seeks to control who you are, within all social realms.

Hence totalitarians seek to seize control of the means of production of humanity. Communists seek to seize control of the economic means of production of people; Nazis of the racial means of production of people; Fascists of the means of production of the nation, via the state. The varying conceptions of the means of production of humanity depends on what is taken to be the key to what and how we are.

Legalism—fǎjiā (法家) or the School of fa (incl. law, method)—is clearly resonant with Fascism, though without the overt nationalism, as it in evolved in the Warring States period (c. 475 – 221 BC) whose states were all Chinese.

Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and Mao all zeroed in on seizing the means of cultural production of humanity. Though Mao utterly despised Confucianism, this cultural turn has since given the CCP another point of resonance with Confucianism.

This is especially so, given how much the CCP leadership in general—and Xi Jinping in particular—is driven by the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The aim is both to maintain sustaining belief (asabiyya in ibn Khaldun’s analytical framework) within the CCP and, via an adjusted Confucianism, moral resonance with wider Chinese society—including the Chinese diaspora.

From whence conflict?

If human nature is uniform—and the achievement of full social and political harmony is the proper goal—then the question arises: why is there conflict in society? The Confucian answer is a failure to follow propriety. The Legalist answer is because the bad impulses of humans are not being properly controlled and repressed by state action.

The Communist answer is, in the case of Marxism, class conflict. The deeper answer—in all forms of Communism—is private property: an idea that predates Marx. For private property alienates us from our shared, inherently social, nature. It creates divergent interests that create classes that create social conflict. The solution is obvious—get rid of private property.

If human nature is uniform—or can be reasonably moulded to be so—then full social equality is achievable. Put everyone in the same social conditions, they will act in the same way, have the same emotional reactions and we will get profound social equality—at least in the sense of a society without classes and class differentiation.

The “root causes” delusion

The common pattern in these philosophies of uniform human nature is that, if humans have a common, uniform nature, then negative differences cannot come out of our uniform human nature, they must come from social causes. From this you get the search for the “root causes” of social conflicts and social pathologies.

These “root causes” have to be social, they cannot come from inherent disparities and varieties among humans, because a uniform human nature cannot generate such. If human nature is sufficiently uniform, there is no people unlike me problem.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

People Unlike Me

If you take a properly designed and normed personality test (either Five Factor or HEXACO), one trait both will assess is your conscientiousness…

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2 years ago · 408 likes · 157 comments · Helen Dale

Except, of course, there very much is a pervasive people unlike me problem. The thing to understand about these claims of a uniform human nature is that they are profoundly false.

Human nature is not a uniform thing, human nature is a distribution of traits that differ between individuals. Moreover, different human groups will have different distributions of traits. This is an inevitable outcome of us being evolved beings; of all our social capacities resting on our genetic capacities; of different human lineages evolving in different environments for long enough; and us being immersed in varying cultures.

If one finds it difficult, or impossible, to think statistically, then this inherent variety in the distribution of traits, and its implications, become hard to get your head around. Identitarian thinking is, at its base, reassuringly simple thinking, no matter how much verbal prolixity is built on top of its underlying simplicity.

This base idea, this fundamental claim, that human nature is uniform is why left-progressivism is regularly so profoundly hostile to evolutionary science being applied to humans. Because one thing evolution absolutely says is that traits will differ between individuals AND their distribution will differ between human groups.

Any attempt to apply uniform human nature thinking to any area of public policy will therefore quite fundamentally mis-diagnose the human dynamics involved. But if differentiated social outcomes can only have social causes, then all failures to achieve the desired outcomes must themselves have social causes. Hence the doubling-down on failure and the endless search for the wrong-thinkers who are causing the grand social transformation not to work. The demand for a pervasive social harmony—rather than just a workable social order—requires repressing, expelling or just killing those who fail to conform.

In order-versus-chaos moral metaphysics—which you get in farming and pastoralist societies as survival depends on the regular pattern of the seasons sustaining crops and herds—the celebration of order, as in the Egyptian concept of maat, the Mongol concept of tore or the Chinese concept of dao, can lead to a harshness against what are seen as chaotic or disordering persons.

Ramp that up with a strong notion of harmony, and you can get execution of entire families or clans as disordering elements. The most extreme version of that is the nine familial exterminations.

Conversely, peace, order and good government invokes a much less intense notion of social order that goes with a notion of ordinary politics based on bargaining between different interest groups and viewpoints. It is precisely because the status games that have become dominant among Western elites are derived, via Critical Theory, on meditations on Marxism—so invoke a strong notion of social harmony achievable through social action acting on uniform human nature—that we see the attacks on freedom of speech attempting to enforce control of social legitimacy by enforcing what is “acceptable” discourse, “acceptable” social and political concerns, and so “acceptable” voting.

As Western elites have lost authority—through their own incompetence; their multi-level attacks on the interests, concerns and heritage of their working classes; and the opening of the information flood gates—they have attempted to double-down on control. They coordinate via moralised status games whose animating ideas both lead to bad policy and justify that doubling down on control.

Crime realities

We can see this clash between false understanding of inherently varied human traits and “root causes” thinking based on all differences having social causes—due to human nature being uniform—in a recent manifestation of such thinking: the defund-the-police push, which itself rests on abolish-the-police thinking.

The evidence is very clear: violent crime is a power-law phenomenon.

A Swedish population study found that one per cent of people—overwhelmingly, as in 94 per cent, male—generate 63 per cent of violent crimes. Four per cent of people (almost 90 per cent male) generate all the violent crime. Thus, seven per cent of males, and less than one per cent of females, generated all the violent crime. This is a classic manifestation of how human variation can lead to dramatic differences in behaviour due to differences in underlying traits.

Thus, the way to control violent crime is to effectively police a community so as to remove from society—or otherwise effectively deter—that small, highly violence-prone, minority. Such policing includes playing attention to the social architecture and dynamics of localities, given that localities wildly vary in their level of crime precisely because crime is such a power-law phenomenon due to human variation.

Specifically, effective crime policy requires policing effectively the small minority of (overwhelmingly male) humans very prone to reactive aggression, as such aggression dominates violent crime. Given genetic differences in the distribution of traits between human groups, the size of that highly reactively aggressive minority varies between human populations—a factor that can be amplified or reduced by culture. Human populations therefore generate different propensities to violent crime and so different levels of need for effective policing. Thus, the US is, ironically, a severely under-policed society.

The failure to grapple with the—ultimately genetic, though mediated by culture—reality of human variations pops up in lots of places, because so much human political, and even economic, theorising is pre-Darwinian in its roots. That is, its base ideas were developed before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) and/or have not been updated in the light of what evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology tell us.

For example, Libertarianism postulates a sufficiently uniform level of executive function to make its vision of social order work that, in fact, does not exist. Much of mainstream Economics postulates that everyone is a uniform economic agent. In particular, mainstream Economics regularly analyses immigration on the basis of a patently false claim: that immigrants can be treated as undifferentiated—in all the relevant senses—economic agents.

There is the further difficulty that we human cognitively model significance, not facts. Moreover, we spend around two decades immersed in particular social milieus before we become significant economic transactors. The consequence of that is people vary, sometimes dramatically, in their cognitive framings (aka culture). People in the same circumstances will behave differently precisely because they are using different cognitive framings.

Philosophy versus law

Going back to Chinese thought, China shares with India and Classical Greece two features—having highly developed traditions of philosophy while being bad at law and legal reasoning.

Legal reasoning is a very particular, and not very natural, form of reasoning. It requires rigorous application of reasoning through analogy. One has to work out what and how some type of human action or human-connected thing is—or is not—like other types of human actions or human-connected things and what principles apply: including the relevant trade-offs.

Philosophy regularly displays three vices antipathetic to good legal reasoning: too much abstraction; nitpicking beyond the useful; missing one or more key factors.

Abstraction is compression. Not having law’s grounding in concern for specific sets of circumstances, it is very easy for philosophy to abstract in a way that does not work—for example, postulate a uniform human nature.

Philosophy can get wrapped up in nitpicking way beyond the useful. Law needs enough differentiation and categorisation to apply to the facts and circumstances of the case in question, and no more. Lacking that grounding, philosophy can get lost in nitpicking that turns into useless, even toxic, purity spirals. When you get intellectual “problems” that are purely problems within, or for, some Theoretical framing, you are in the world of useless nitpicking. This is how Analytic Philosophy finished up among the most genderwoo captured of all disciplines, while lawyers just fought among themselves.

The final problem is that philosophy, in its abstracting and nitpicking, can just miss key factors. A key part of law is working out what is relevant in a given situation, all while addressing actual human interactions. In its far less grounded abstracting, philosophy can absolutely miss out one or more key factors. Such as, for example, failing to deal accurately with human variation that we now know is an inevitable consequence of us being evolved beings with varying genes and cultures.

Every philosophy that postulates a uniform human nature displays these failures.

By contrast, the two great legal traditions—Roman (aka Civil) law and common law—come out of a deeply practical civilisation (Rome) and culture (England) that developed their rich legal traditions well before they developed any local philosophical tradition.

Toxic telos

Another consequence of claims about a uniform human nature is this readily becomes the claim that human history has a telos, a proper direction. This is not the same as saying society has a proper form. Confucianism can claim that society should be able to constituted to be fully harmonious; Legalism can claim that society should uphold the authority of the state; without either claiming that history has an inherent direction.

Both Confucianism and Legalism are entirely compatible with a cyclical view of human history. Order-versus-chaos views of human society—which both Confucianism and Legalism arose within—rather naturally take a cyclical view of human history.

Good-versus-evil moral metaphysics, on the other hand, lend themselves to a notion that history has a telos, a direction—specifically, the final triumph of good. This seems to have specifically been injected into the religious history of humanity by Zarathustra (Zoroaster).

A notion that history has a telos, a direction, does not require a notion of a uniform human nature but if you marry the claim of a uniform human nature to a good-versus-evil moral metaphysics, then it becomes very natural to make the claim that history has a telos, a direction. That telos, that direction, being the final manifestation of our uniform human nature—uncorrupted by social pathologies—into a fully harmonious society without class conflict or other such divisions. This becomes the final good to which all proper human action is directed. This is a form of social salvation that generates salvational politics: politics that reproduces the patterns of salvational religions—including heresy hunts, excommunications, and denunciations of blasphemy.

The incorporation of all proper human action includes all proper human political action. Once you conceive of history as having a telos, a direction, that also incorporates political action, various consequences follow.

One consequence is that you have a way of grading human political choices that de-legitimates all “wrong” choices—including “wrong” electoral choices. You have adopted a principle that trumps democratic choice—we can see this operating in the EU with its “ever closer union” principle that is clearly used to grade electoral choices.

Second, the notion that politics is legitimately the process of bargaining between different interests either gets completely over-ridden or very strongly curtailed—being limited only to “right-thinking” folk who act in accord with that telos. You end up with a notion of “our democracy” where right-thinking folk get to grade which political choices are legitimate or not.

Nowhere is this tendency clearer than the de-legitimising of all forms of national populism.

As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi so well analyses, whatever else “woke” is, it has generated, and mainly manifests as, a set of moralised elite status games. This set of elite status games comes out of various derivations of Critical Theory. All those derivations from Critical Theory are based on meditations on Marxism. This means that they claim that history has a proper telos, a proper direction; that human nature is uniform; and that all social pathologies have social causes. They are also conspicuously hostile (in whole or in part) to the application of evolutionary thinking to human affairs. They are especially hostile to the notion that distributions of traits varies among human groups.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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6 months ago · 68 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

This set of moralised elite status games very much grades (other people’s) political and electoral choices as legitimate or not and their contributions to public discourse as legitimate or not. It also very clearly sees political bargaining as only being legitimate among right-thinking people. Those committed to such (highly moralised) status games are deeply hostile to freedom of speech and thought, and to electoral choices as having authority able to be asserted against such right-thinking people.

These elite status games also clearly lead to bad public policy. They lead to bad public policy not only because they are committed to blocking all sorts of inconvenient feedback but also because they are based on claims about human nature—and thus about human social dynamics—that are demonstrably false.

Either these destructively pre-Darwinian ideas are purged out of public policy, and our institutions, or their combination of falsity plus their war against truth (for that is what it is), freedom and feedback—including democratic feedback—will lead to cascading policy and institutional failures and various levels of civil strife.

The claim that we have a uniform human nature is false, and nothing good can be built from it.

References

Mikael S. Adolphson, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan, University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Yale University Press, [1995] 2001.

Confucius, The Analects, (trans. with introduction by D.C. Lau), Penguin, 1979.

Confucius, The Analects (Lunyu), (trans. with introduction and commentary by Annping Chin), Penguin, 2014.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

Laura E. Engelhardt, Daniel A. Briley, Frank D. Mann, K. Paige Harden Tucker-Drob, ‘Genes Unite Executive Functions in Childhood,’ Psychological Science, 2015 August, 26(8), 1151–1163. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4530525/

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Ignatius Press, [1937] 1964.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29581024/

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public And The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, 2014.

Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Jens Ludwig, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

Emily M. Norman, Devon L. L. Polaschek and Nicola J. Starkey, ‘Executive function in individuals who are compliant and non-compliant with the conditions of a community-based sentence,’ Psychiatry Psychology and Law, 2022 Feb 10;30(2):161-176. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10026818/

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

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Timothy Snyder, ‘Commemorative causality,’ Eurozine, 6 June 2013. https://www.eurozine.com/commemorative-causality/

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The Empire then broke into four parts, three of which lasted less than a century before either collapsing or breaking up into smaller entities: the Ilkhanate 1256-1335 (79 years); the Chagatai Khanate 1266-1347 (81 years); the Yuan Dynasty 1271-1368 (97 years), though the Northern Yuan rump state continued until 1635. The most successful of the original four was the Golden Horde 1266-1459 (193 years). The Chagatai Khanate and Golden Horde also had surviving rump states, notably the Great Horde (1459-1502). The last remnant of the Chagatai khanate, and of the rule of Genghis Khan’s descendants, was the tributary Kumul Khanate (1696-1930).

Among imperial dynasties of China, there are the brief unification dynasties:

• Qin (221-206 BC, 15 years)

• Jin (280-304, 24 years: though the dynasty lasted from 266 to 420, it only unified China briefly)

• Sui (389-618, 29 years)

There are the long unification dynasties:

• Han (206BC-220, 426 years)

• Tang (618-907, 289 years)

• Ming (1368-1644, 276 years)

• Qing (1644-1912, 268 years)

Technically, the Song (960-1279) are not a unification dynasty, not even the Northern Song (960-1127). Indeed, it is an important feature of the Song dynasty that it was always part of a state system it never militarily dominated.

The Mongol Yuan dynasty is very much the “in-between” dynasty, unifying China longer than the three brief unification dynasties, but considerably less than the long unification dynasties. What is more striking is that it kicks off a period of effectively continuous unification of China, from 1279 until 1912, punctuated by strife during the transition from one dynasty to another.

So, what did not work against the Mongols during their remarkable waves of conquest?

1. Responding to a Mongol invasion by going straight to set-piece battles.

The Mongols would invade: well-supplied, highly mobile, well-informed, using tactics the defenders were not experienced with or prepared for and which the Mongols homed by fighting against an (expanding) range of enemies. Going for such set-piece battles regularly ended disastrously for the defenders. Hence the Mongols creating the largest contiguous empire in history.

It was only well into the Mongol era—when folk had much more experience with how the Mongols operated—that going out and meeting them in set-pieces battles began to work. Examples of that included the victory of the Mamluks of Egypt over the Mongol Ilkhanid forces at the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 and the victory of the Sultanate of Delhi over the Chagatai Khanate at the battle of Ravi in 1306. Both of these victories ended Mongol attacks into the regions being defended.

That early Mongol success was part of a larger pattern. Having a range of enemies has regularly proved to be a winning military advantage for states by forcing the development of flexible and resilient military capacity. This was the advantage that the Macedonians had over the Greeks; the Romans against almost everyone; the Spanish Conquistadors against the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas. It was also why China was usually unified by northern frontier dynasties and pharaonic Egypt by southern frontier dynasties.

Conversely, if you fought regularly against one group, you learned their tricks and they learned yours. The Western Roman Empire eventually failed when the Germanic invaders—typically led by people who had fought in the Roman Army or as Roman allies—developed equivalent operational capacity to the Romans. This operational equivalence was demonstrated most dramatically by the crushing Roman defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, even though the Western Empire took almost another century to collapse.

The Battle of Adrianople was less important in its immediate effects than in what it presaged. Tactically, it was a repeat of Cannae (216BC), except with a wagon laager rather than a clever infantry formation.

Much more importantly, the invading Germanics had developed an equivalent operational capacity to the Roman imperial state without the expensive bureaucratic “tail” of the late Roman state. This gave them a systematic advantage that eventually wore the Roman imperial state down.

This process took about a century—partly because it was the field army of the Eastern, not the Western, Empire that was destroyed at Adrianople. But also because the Western Empire still had considerable resources—especially compared to any specific Germanic group—and significant (though declining) institutional resilience, so it took time for the combination of the Germanics having equivalent operational capacity, but the Romans having a more expensive administrative tail, to work through into final Roman collapse.

Once people could generate forces of equivalent operational capacity to the Mongols, and learnt Mongol operational patterns, they could defeat them. This was especially so if they could use advantages of the local terrain. The Mongols also were not successful in sea-going naval operations against Japan (1274, 1281) or Java (1295), so we will leave them aside.

(2) Responding to a Mongol invasion by hiding in cities.

Simply holing up in fortified cities did work at first, but as the Mongols became more adept at siege warfare—partly by acquiring Chinese engineers—it rapidly stopped working. The problem with hiding in cities is that it abandoned the countryside and mobility to the Mongols. They could set up camp, remain supplied, and wear down the defences of a city.

The Southern Song (1127-1279) responded to the Mongol threat by using river fleets and lines of fortified cities and strong points. This took around 45 years for the Mongols to wear down, but as nothing the Song did actively undermined the Mongol capacity to generate military forces, the Mongols did eventually wear the Song defences down, and thereby conquered Southern China, the first set of pastoralists to do so.

As an accessible path into Mongol history, I recommend the Fall of Civilisations podcast’s two-part discussion of the Mongols. (The podcast is excellent in general.)

Wear the Mongols down before counter-attacking

So, what did work against the Mongols? Wearing them down by denying them foraging and supplies and counter-attacking when they had been sufficiently weakened, worked. Both the Vietnamese and the Hungarians managed to do this, though the Hungarians were more unambiguously successful, as, despite winning various battles, Dai Viet accepted a tributary relationship to the Yuan dynasty. The Hungarians had the advantage of not being geographically right next door to a Mongol dynasty ruling a very populous empire.

The original Mongol invasion of Hungary of 1240-41 had been devastating. The Hungarian military system of light cavalry and wooden fortresses failed utterly. Up to a quarter of the population died, from violence, disease and starvation. The only places that successfully held out were a few stone fortresses.

After the Mongols withdrew, King Bela IV of Hungary (r.1235-1270) decided this must never happen again and spend the rest of his reign restructuring Hungary’s military. He built in Hungary the military system of knightly Europe. Wooden fortresses were replaced by stone castles, light cavalry by armoured knights, cities got stone walls, crossbows were adopted in much larger numbers, the Knights of St John (aka Hospitallers) were brought in to provide frontier defences plus expertise in building castles and training and equipping troops.

When the Mongols returned in 1285, during the reign of Bela’s grandson Ladislaus IV (r. 1272-1290) these changes proved very successful. The Mongols had, once again, invaded during Winter, when rivers were frozen, their horses could eat the shoots under the snow and winter food stores could be looted. Once again, there was a northern and a southern force, each of about 20,000 Mongol warriors.

This time, the peasants and their food stores retreated into the castles—not a single stone castle fell to northern Mongol assault and only one to the southern. The problem is that castles were built to be fortresses—C13th European castles were very well designed, building on centuries of experience—and trying to support a besieging force in such a concentrated location in the middle of Winter was hard. The Mongols burned Pest (already abandoned by its inhabitants) but failed to take any of the stone-fortified cities.

If the Mongols set out small foraging parties, the knights ambushed them. If they sent out large foraging parties, they could not gather enough food to sustain themselves. The Mongols slowly starved. Eventually, when the Mongols were weak enough, the Hungarians would force a set-piece battle and smash them (or threaten such a battle and force them to retreat, the sources disagree). This happened first to the northern army and then to the southern.

It appears that of about 40,000 Mongol warriors, around 5,000 made it back. There was never another substantive Mongol invasion of Hungary, though frontier raids continued. The Hungarians had about 30,000 soldiers: so the Hungarians smashed the Mongols while being outnumbered. The contrast with the failure of the Chinese only a few years earlier is striking.

The Hungarians did nothing particularly remarkable. They just set up, and then applied, the bog-standard Western and Central European castles-and-knights, fortified cities-with-militias, system. In 1345, the Hungarians invaded lands under Mongol (“Tatar”) control, smashed a Mongol army and conquered Moldova. What the Hungarians were not running was a highly bureaucratised state which attempted to internally monopolise armed force.

The warrior-franchise (aka fief) systems of Europe were to prove effective in the long run against the pastoralists, though the farthest eastern version (Muscovy) would not clinch this superiority until the development of gunpowder weapons. Once the European farming-polities had gunpowder weapons wielded by sufficiently drilled troops, then the pastoralists were systematically defeated and conquered. By contrast, the Song were the first major state to have gunpowder weapons, but failed to turn this into a winning military advantage.

Ottoman success

The pastoralist-origin dynasty of the Ottomans did, eventually, overwhelm the Hungarian kingdom, but that was from adding effective infantry and artillery to their forces and being able to mobilise much greater resources. The Ottomans mobilised the Islamic jihad into a system. The ghazis, holy warriors—typically operating as akinji light cavalry—would raid across the Ottoman frontier, depopulating and economically degrading the enemy (i.e., Christian) borderlands. Eventually, the main Ottoman army would invade and conquer. The ghazis would then move to the new frontier: rinse and repeat. This pattern took the Ottomans from the Anatolian hinterland, across the Balkans, to the heart of Central Europe.

Pope Adrian VI (r.1522-3) received a report from Spalato (Split) a few years prior to the Hungarian disaster at Mohacs (1526):

We are troubled by daily attacks of the infidel Turks; they harass us incessantly, killing some and leading others into slavery; our goods are pillaged, our cattle are led off, our villages and settlements are burned; the fields from which we drew our livelihood are in part laid waste to and in part deserted, for those once worked them have been carried off; and instead of fruit they bear brambles. We defend our safety with our walls alone, and we are content that our Dalmatian cities are not yet besieged … But only the cities are spared, and all else lies open to pillage and rapine. (Quoted in The Krajina Chronicle.)

Islam sanctified the Arabian pastoralist synthesis. This sanctified synthesis included:

• Law is based on revelation and controlled by the ulama (religious scholars), apart from qanun: rules for the internal operation of states issued by rulers (i.e., where Sharia is silent). The Ottomans—by having each incoming Sultan re-issue the qanun of the previous Sultan—built up a stable body of administrative law.

• Polygyny of up to four wives per husband, apart from “those thy right hand has seized” (ma malakat aymanuhum or milk al-yamin).

  • Such polygyny meant that low-status males had little or no prospects of marriage within the Muslim community, hence the sanctification of the classic polygynous pastoralist solution of “those people over there have women, steal theirs”, via ...

• Sanctification of raiding of non-Muslims who had not submitted to Muslim rule, including enslaving captives and woman-stealing. Thus, an Islamic martyr is someone who dies while fighting for the umma, the Muslim community.

This meant that that Islam could continually generate ghazis. Even today, the polygyny of the oil-rich Gulf states has helped to generate jihadi recruits in the rest of the Muslim Middle East by siphoning off Muslim women and leaving local young men with no marriage prospects. Polygyny is associated with a range of negative outcomes, including increased violence and less investment in the education of children and—in the absence of armed women, such as among the steppe pastoralists—lower status for women. The Muslim grooming gangs of northern England, ISIS’s theology of rape, and the increased rates of rape and sexual assault in Europe are contemporary manifestations of long-standing patterns.

Wielding self-government (or not)

The Habsburgs were able to stymie the Ottoman conquest system by setting up the Military Frontier (Militärgrenze) of fortified villages of free, self-governing, armed-militia peasants able to raid the Ottomans back. This successfully stopped Ottoman advances. After the Ottoman disaster of the Battle of Vienna (1683), the Habsburgs were able to push the Ottomans back.

The Battle of Vienna included what was likely the largest cavalry charge in history (18,000 cavalry led by 3,000 Winged Hussars). The Polish king John III Sobieski (r.1674-1696) replicated Alexander the Great’s classic approach—remembering that Alexander won his set-piece battles leading his Companion heavy cavalry with no bloody stirrups—of using infantry to pin the enemy and then charging through the gap that opened up. History may not repeat, but it rhymes: a lot.

All this was in dramatic contrast to the slow retreat of the medieval Roman state and the failures of ethnically Han Chinese dynasties. Both used militia systems at various times—for example the Chinese fubing militia and its derivatives and the Roman thematic cavalry—but without the sustained success of the Habsburg Military Frontier.

The militarised self-government of the Habsburg Military Frontier villages was antipathetic to the highly bureaucratised nature of both Roman and Chinese government. Indeed, one of the reasons that the Ottoman raid-degrade-conquer pattern was so successful against the medieval Romans (“Byzantines”) was that the medieval Roman state had a long history of accepting the depopulation of frontier districts so as to provide advance notice of incursions without risking too many resources.

The pattern one sees across European Christendom—which the Habsburg Military Frontier was a particularly effective example—of militarised border marches with elevated self-government (such as the County Palatine’s under the English Crown) was simply either not adopted by Rome or China or, if it was, it was then systematically undermined by the central bureaucracy. (The pastoralist Qing dynasty did use tributary allies.)

The bureaucratic states of Rome and China insisted on a state monopoly of organised violence that the warrior-franchise states, and their early modern successors, did not. This distrust of self-governing decision-making meant that both the Roman—from the reign of Diocletian (284-305) onwards—and Chinese bureaucratic states (with the partial exception of the Song) also undermined the commercial vitality of their own societies, and so the revenue (and technological) possibilities of commerce.

Bureaucracy can be excellent at regularising administration. The problem with bureaucracy is that it is also prone to recurring pathologies, as it selects for: complexity and increasing internal resource use; manipulative personalities; evasion of accountability; suppression and/or delegitimisation of alternative sources of information and decisions; elevating process over outcomes. We can see all these pathologies in contemporary Western societies—they were particularly rampant during the response to Covid.

The pattern whereby the Dominate bureaucracy leached away urban self-government inside the Roman Empire is much the same pattern whereby university central administrations have leached university Faculties and Departments of internal support services and decision-making authority. It is this pattern of being both useful and pathological that makes bureaucracy such a conundrum. The more one sees bureaucratic pathologies in operation, the clearer it is that accountability pressures are not strong enough, as such bureaucratic pathologies operate most strongly the weaker effective (rather than notional) accountability pressures are.

From the collapse of the Tang dynasty in 907 to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912—a period of a thousand years—only two ethnically Han dynasties ruled northern China: the northern Song (980-1127)—who were not able to unify all of northern China—and the Ming (1389-1644). Meanwhile, across that same period, two pastoralist dynasties ruled (all of) southern China: the Yuan (1271-1389) and the Qing (1644-1912).

The inner Asian peoples regularly proved more adaptable than the bureaucratically-ruled Han. Bureaucratic domination of China clearly had a lot of problems. Bureaucratic government of Rome also failed: catastrophically in the case of the Western Empire. The Eastern Empire had a mixture of lesser catastrophes—the Arab conquests in the C7th, the Seljuk conquests in the C11th, the Fourth Crusade in the C13th—and grinding slow decline.

The Western Roman Empire—an imperial scale bureaucratised autocracy—was the only European state to suffer a collapse on the scale of a Chinese dynastic collapse (also imperial scale bureaucratised autocracies). Bureaucracy has a strong tendency to consume the resilience of its societies. Warrior-franchise, samurai and daimyo Japan also proved better at dealing with the Western challenge than did bureaucratised Qing China.

It is very much a matter of what the feedback mechanisms are, what the accountability mechanisms and incentives are and whether there are any systematic character tests (such as the duel of honour). The bureaucratic responses to the Mongols and other pastoralists failed sooner or later. The far more responsive warrior-franchise systems worked out what worked and did it. Add in gunpowder warfare (which China invented but failed to master) and final success was achieved.

References

Douglas W. Allen and Clyde Reed, ‘The Duel of Honor: Screening for Unobservable Social Capital,’ American Law and Economics Review, Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 81-115, 2006. https://www.sfu.ca/~allen/Dueling.pdf

John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204, UCL Press, 1999.

John Haldon, Byzantium at War AD 600-1453, Osprey, 2002.

Yasheng Huang, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, Yale University Press, 2023.

Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (History of Imperial China Book 4), Belknap Press, 2011.

Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, Cambridge University Press, [1988] 2014.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997.

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127. https://conference.nber.org/confer/2011/CE11/Sng.pdf

Srdja Trifkovic and Michael M. Stenton, The Krajina Chronicle: A History of Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies, 2010.

Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development: 13, Princeton University Press, 2023.

That there is some problem in defining the boundary of species is a bit of clue that defining sets of lineages as species is more complex than it looks. Even so, species look pretty stable things to us.

The fossil record tells us, however, that species come and go. That, and genetics, tells us that lineages “travel through” species. Your genetic lineage has passed through many, many species.

In particular, the fossil record tells us that, after each major extinction event, there is a surge in new species. For example, the most recent major extinction event—the asteroid impact that killed off the terrestrial and marine dinosaurs (birds survived)—led to a massive increase in mammal species.

So, speciation is not a constant process. Not only that, during that period of a surge in new species, lineages spread out among to occupy, and in a sense create, a vast array of new-to-that-organism ecological niches. For example, prior to the arrival of humans, a range of ecological niches in New Zealand were occupied by bird species.

There is clearly a process of opportunity search going on. This can be reasonably seen as the exploration of frontiers.

These resource frontiers can be occupied along terrestrial (new physical spaces) and strategy/technique (new methods) frontiers or by supplanting a less capable occupants (population replacement/resource transfer). Despite birds—with their extra many millions of years of evolution—doing a range of things better than mammals (e.g. vision due to more colour receptors), various New Zealand bird species were not able to compete with introduced mammals that had adapted to similar niches in more competitive continental environments.

Each species occupies an ecological niche. Lineages within that species compete to occupy the available ecological niches. This is normal natural selection. Post-extinction surges in new species are a surge in occupied niches, in evolutionary strategies, for that group of species. Strategy shifts that would not have been competitive before the harrowing of species suddenly become so.

Living organisms constantly search for opportunities to eat and breed. This is a matter of competition and opportunity. After a mass extinction event, there is considerably less competition and many more opportunities. It is not that the processes of search have sped up, it is that those processes have way more opportunities to find successful, new-to-the-lineage, strategies. Lineages spread out among these opportunities, becoming new species on the way. Mutations do, however, speed up in occurrence as populations increase.

What is odd about Homo sapiens is that, being a technological and cultural species, we create varied social niches within our species—first a few, then scores, then hundreds, then thousands then … of such social niches. Moreover, we can move between niches.

Elite overproduction, for example, represents heightened competition for elite niches. This can lead to civil war, revolution within a polity, or even the collapse of a polity. One of the many things Marx gets wrong is that states—by their imposition of order and extraction by taxation that greatly increases available surplus: aka resources beyond subsistence—dramatically increase the number, range and form of social niches. This effect includes generating what we might call the society’s class structure.

Jungle environments have way more species occupying similar niches than do desert environments because there are more resources to support more niches. More lineages can sustain themselves through very similar strategies.

Similarly, state societies have way more, and more varied, social niches than stateless societies because, once again, they generate far more resources than do stateless societies. This is due to state taxation both extracting and thereby creating surplus plus the creation of more extensive social order enabling a greater range of transactions and connections.

You can get a lot more spontaneous (social) order when a state is able to impose sufficient order through its suppression of violence so as to regularise its revenue extraction. The combination of increased population plus assets to fight over (farms and herds) led to a massive harrowing of male lineages until the new social strategy of chiefdoms and states developed.

The process of new lineages occupying ecological niches that is so dramatic after a mass extinction event, is clearly not just a process of selection acting on random mutations. The question is whether random mutations—and particularly useful-for-survival random mutations—happen fast enough? Or is the feedback between search and genetic change stronger than that? What all those vacant niches after an extinction event means is that the bar of viable mutations, and of good-enough strategies, gets lowered.

Lactase persistence

What raised my doubts about whether the conventional story is sufficient, is the evolution of lactase persistence in Homo sapiens. Any human population that persists in pastoralism long enough develops lactase persistence—the continuation into adulthood of the capacity to digest lactose. This despite humans having relatively long generations—20-25 years or more. A recent study of late Roman and post-Roman Central Europe found an average length of generations of 28 years.

Moreover, those pastoralist populations do not develop the same mutation for lactase persistence. This suggested that it is not just some process of random mutations, that there is a mechanism of search for opportunities, of strategy-gene feedback, that is more directional than selection on random mutation. It turns out, however, that lactase persistence is a particularly easy mutation to evolve as it merely requires breaking an instruction to change the digestive response to lactose, and there are various ways to break that instruction.

Perhaps the most striking feature of living organisms—things that use information and resources to maintain themselves, what I call their directedness—is that they are anti-entropic. Right down to the cellular level, they act to reduce entropy; to incorporate what maintains or increases order within themselves and to expel what reduces it.

Life incorporates multi-level equivalents of Maxwell’s Demon. Given both the explosion of new species after a mass extinction event, and the varied evolution of lactase persistence in human pastoral populations, this anti-entropic feature, this directedness, perhaps extends down to gene-strategy feedbacks.

How? Have no idea. But this is a question that rests on how common mutation is—really quite common, as it happens, and it gets more common as our population increases. The question rests even more on how common useful mutations in particular evolutionary contexts are. The answer to that is: it depends.

One suspects, for example that mutations breaking the instruction to stop digesting lactose have turned up quite a lot. But as it was usually advantageous to wean children so one could have the next one—given how high infant mortality was—such mutations did not go anywhere until you had populations that were consuming a lot of dairy, when it suddenly became an advantageous, rather than disadvantageous, mutation.

Spiteful mutants?

But mutations can spread without being advantageous to the larger population, just particular lineages. Cancer, for example, represents cells defecting from cooperation. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs is the principle of both families and cancer cells.

If you are sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci) or physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg) then that is going to degrade your experience of society. Physically attractive people are more likely to be conservative while conservative politicians are more likely to be physically attractive. Likely due to different distributions of cognitive traits, conservatives report better mental health than progressives. There is something to Josh Slocum’s notion of “wokery” as including the revenge of the uglies.

The problem becomes if you engage in grandiose theorising on the basis of personal alienation and then inflict such ideas on the rest of us. This leads to the spiteful mutant hypothesis. A rather grim hypothesis. I leave you with a picture of the members of the Frankfurt School.

References

Ali Akbari, Annabel Perry, Alison R. Barton, et al. ‘Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,’ Nature (2026). https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2026_Akbari_Nature_selection_0.pdf

Jens Blöcher, Leonardo Vallini, Maren Velte et al, ‘Demography and life histories across the Roman frontier in Germany 400–700 CE,’ Nature (2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10437-3

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 year explosion : how civilization accelerated human evolution, Basic Books, [2009] 2010.

Pascale Gerbault, Anke Liebert, Yuval Itan, Adam Powell, Mathias Currat, Joachim Burger, Dallas M. Swallow and Mark G. Thomas, ‘Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction,’ Philosophical Transactions Royal Society B, 2011 Mar 27;366(1566):863-77. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048992/

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions,’ American Political Science Review, June 2017, 111, 3. 622-636. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2016/twerp_1129_moav.pdf

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356707920_The_Origin_of_the_State_Land_Productivity_or_Appropriability

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

In Australia, in the Saturday 9 May 2026 by-election for the seat of Farrer—a House of Representatives seat that had previously been held by a Leader of the National Party (Tim Fischer) and of the Liberal Party (Sussan Ley)—the national populist One Nation candidate romped home with 40% of the vote on a stunning 33 %pt swing. By contrast, the Liberal and National Party candidates in Farrer totalled 22% of the vote between them. The winning candidate—the first One Nation candidate elected to the House of Representatives—is a figure of genuine gravitas.

This dramatic win was a manifestation of the One Nation surge in the polls that has been occurring since the 3 May 2025 Australia Federal Election and surged further after the 14 December 2025 Bondi massacre—so that One Nation is now outpolling the LNP Coalition federally. This polling surge has now become a voting surge, with the Farrer by-election win and the 21 March 2026 South Australian State election, where One Nation also gained more votes than the Liberal Party.

I have previously posted on why a Party (One Nation), that has been around for decades, is suddenly surging in the polls, and now in votes.

It has become an open question whether the Liberal Party continues to have a serious base of support. If social conservatives hive off to One Nation, and affluent Merchant Right folks vote for Teal independents, it is hard to see where their base of support is.

The Liberal Party membership has been atrophying for years. Much of its recent politics appears to have been driven by young political staffers of limited life experience who seem to think getting coverage on the public broadcaster—the ABC—is the height of political achievement. A similar pattern appears to have afflicted the Tories in Britain, prior to their crushing defeat in the 4 July 2024 UK General Election.

Meanwhile, in Blighty …

On Thursday 7 May 2026, so a few days prior to the Farrer by-election, elections were held for the Welsh and Scottish Parliaments and various English local councils.

The Welsh and English elections were catastrophic for the Labour Party. In the Welsh Parliament, Labour lost 35 seats, leaving it with 9. In English local councils elections, Labour lost 1,496 seats, winning only 1,068 seats. Given that Sir Keir Starmer is by far the most unpopular British Prime Minister since polling began, the Labour Party is clearly in lots of trouble.

The Scottish results were merely poor for Labour, losing 4 seats and winning 17 in the Scottish Parliament.

The election results were almost as bad for the Tories in Wales and England, and worse in Scotland. They lost 19 seats in the Scottish Parliament, winning 12. They lost 22 seats in the Welsh Parliament, winning 7. They lost 563 seats in English local councils, winning 801.

The two Parties that have governed the United Kingdom since just after World War One have been crushed. The Tories have been reduced to the fifth place in the Scottish Parliament, the fourth place in the Welsh Parliament and in wins in the English local council elections. Labour has retained second place in the Scottish Parliament, been pushed to second place in wins in the English local council elections, while being reduced from first to third in the Welsh Parliament.

Labour and the Tories lost 57 seats between them in the 96-seat Welsh Parliament. They “only” lost 23 seats in the 129-seat Scottish Parliament, where the SNP also lost 6 seats. Of the 4,967 English local council seats being voted on, Labour and the Tories lost 2,061.

Labour lost more seats in Wales and in the English local council elections than the Tories, but had a larger “ballast” of seats to begin with. This greater ballast of seats is even more true in the House of Commons, where it has an enormous majority that, on these figures, would be decimated at a general election.

The biggest winner was Reform followed by the Greens and then, rather distantly, by the Liberal Democrats. Plaid Cymru was a big winner in Wales. The rejection of mainstream politics was clearly stronger on the political “right”, and by working class voters, than elsewhere. The Tories are not picking up the intense dissatisfaction with Labour because people (rightly) blame them for not stopping the “breaking of Britain”.

Reform is essentially stripping the Tories of their past gains among working class voters. One Nation is doing the same to the Liberal and National Parties in Australia.

If one looks that the voting percentages, the results in the UK are even clearer. In the English local government elections, Reform received 26%, the Greens 18%, Labour and the Tories both 17% and the Lib Dems 16% of the vote.

This was a rejection of the UniParty. The two Parties that have governed the UK since just after World War One got 38% of the vote between them, the two insurgent Parties (Reform and the Greens) were the two biggest winners and received 44% of the vote in total.

Trying to tell a Left-Right story is more complicated. The “economic left” (Labour + Greens) got 35% of the vote. The social liberal “left” (Labour + Greens + Lib Dems) got 51% of the vote. The “economic right” (Reform + Tories + Lib Dems) got 59% of the vote.

None of these things are particularly surprising, given what trends are operating. One is the balkanisation of Britain due to multiculturalist “big lumps” immigration. This effect has been predicted for decades and is now playing out politically as well as socially.

As many observers also predicted, Muslims voted for Labour as a half-way house until their numbers reached critical mass. They are now shifting to the Greens and to Muslim independents. The shift to the Greens continues the pattern seen in the 26 February 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election where Muslim voters also shifted to the Greens (who won 41% of the vote); Reform crushed the Tories (with 29% of the vote to the Tories’ 2%); and Labour ran third (with 25% of the vote).

The second is the shift of working class votes away from the Labour Party as it becomes more and more the Party of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up, whose income has little connection to their performance or the social value of what they do. Typically, they are paid for process not outcomes.

The public broadcasters of the Anglosphere—the BBC, CBC, ABC, etc.—are the propaganda arm of the unaccountable classes. This is even more true of their cultural output as of their news coverage, based as both are on purveying narratives of righteousness.

If your personal income has little connection to the creation of value—as measured by reality-tested results, such as by the consent of consumers of what you do—your concerns are going to shift towards other things. Specifically, it is going to shift towards the politics of status. Moreover, this will be status that is driven by interactions within your organisational and social milieu, so with other persons whose individual incomes are also not connected to the creation of value-by-consent.

This is bad enough, but in a modern welfare state it becomes even worse, as much of the welfare state apparatus—including much of the non-profit sector—is paid, in effect, by the level of social pathology. The higher the level of social pathology, the greater their claim on authority and resources.

They are not merely paid for process not outcome, they are paid for processes that continue, or even increase, the worse outcomes actually are. For example, public health gets more money as our metabolic health gets worse. Spending on Aboriginal disadvantage gets more money as their problems get worse. Spending on the homeless gets more money as homelessness gets worse, and so on. In the classic words of the late Charlie Munger: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

All this applies even more to academics. Outside STEM and municipal (i.e. domestic) Law, academics do not have to make anything actually work, all they need is the approval of fellow academics. In the absence of either systematic reality tests or strong accountability mechanisms, the politics of status—of shared status games—therefore becomes paramount. The more grandiose the moral and cognitive grandstanding, the better.

Since we live in the most successful societies in human history, such moral grandstanding has to be directed against social success. That so much of the so-called social sciences are not sciences—they fail the basic test of being consilient with what we know from evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology—is both an indicator of the lack of reality tests and what a weak reed approval by other academics can be. On the other hand, various utilisations of Marxian mysticism—what economist Arnold Kling calls falling into the tarpit of Marxism—have perennial appeal precisely because they provide such a sense of shared meaning, of shared grand purpose.

If you make social success a vice—a negative moral signal—you turn failure into a virtue, a positive signal. The more dysfunctional a group, the better they operate as moral mascots for such status games, because the more you have to ignore/rationalise away, so the stronger the “sacralising” of them operates as a signal of commitment to the shared moral status games.

The result is clear: the growth of the pathological politics of status based on quite toxic ideas. Politics that is not merely not concerned with creating and maintaining a functional social order; this is politics that is actively hostile to it.

If one wonders why Green Parties have sidelined the environment for Trans and Gaza—for there are no groups one has to not-notice and rationalise away more than Hamas and Trans fetishists—this is why. That is where the pathological politics of status purity spirals lead you: to the issues furthest from the practical politics of providing peace, order and good government and most about performative moral display. The Greens can play to the purity spirals of such performative status politics even better than Labour, so peel off those most focused on such purity spirals.

Those most insulated from making things work are those in the education system, particularly academe. The Greens in the UK clearly did best where higher education votes were highest.

When one examines the policies and politics that seem so mad, a consistent feature is that they increase social pathologies—and the employment opportunities therefrom—for paid-by-process folk. This is not just a matter of public sector employment, though it is most pervasive there. HR departments; various non-profit organisations—most notoriously, the homelessness-industrial complex in West Coast US; ignoring or rationalising away various negative patterns among immigrants—see Somali-based fraud and corruption in Minnesota and elsewhere or the grooming gang scandals; policies of not prosecuting “minor” crimes by “marginalised” groups; and so on.

Truth on the Streets

This is Why I Call It the Homeless Industrial Complex

The homeless industrial complex is a multi-billion-dollar system that thrives on homelessness. Governments, nonprofits, and contractors all get paid as the problem grows. Programs are measured by how many people they serve, not by how many actually exit homelessness. The result is a system that manages people instead of solving anything. Good intentions…

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5 months ago · 164 likes · 54 comments · Kevin Dahlgren

What makes Trans even better, is that it enables state authority to reach into, and trump, parental authority. Hence schools hiding from parents the social transitioning of their children and threats to remove children from parents who oppose transitioning their children.

This is status politics based on publicly affirming the “correct” beliefs. This is status politics that actively denigrates the views of those you are asserting moral and cognitive authority over, precisely so as to elevate that sense of status and those claims of authority and on resources. It is also the politics of censorship, of the de-legitimising of dissent, as, if believing X makes you a moral person, then believing not-X must make you an immoral one. This perspective underpins the development of the censorship-industrial complex.

For instance, under such politics of de-legitimisation, it is not legitimate to express dissatisfaction with immigration. Immigration can, apparently, never be done badly, except by not having enough of it.

The creation of the DEI moral caste system—female is better than male; coloured is better than “white”; queer is better than straight; disabled is better than able-bodied; immigrant is better than native; trans is better than cis—is facilitated by many people clearly being unable (or unwilling) to think statistically, to consider trade-offs, or to think through changes/costs across time. So the binary thinking that identity politics thrives on appeals particularly strongly to the articulate but innumerate.

Because these status games operate through networks, and are inherently intolerant of dissenting views—since if believing X makes you a moral person, believing not-X must make you an immoral one—there has been a steady march through the institutions. The monopoly processes of networks—the bigger the network, the more the value in joining it—operates to facilitate increasing domination by such status games across those organisations and institutions, or sections thereof, that are dominated by those paid-for-process not for outcomes. These networks operate internationally, hence the international development of the censorship-industrial complex.

The moral hysteria over One Nation is a case in point of the delegitimisation of dissent. If one examines their actual policies, it is essentially Menzian Liberalism without the white Australia policy.

The notion that this is some sort of moral outrage, or a threat to democracy, is ludicrous hyperbole showing an ultimately totalitarian hostility to dissent. Such is, however, the natural outcome of the politics of believing X makes you a moral person, so believing not-X makes you an immoral one.

When such folk say “our democracy” they mean “democracy, but only if we get to determine what’s legitimate”. The thought-terminating cliche of far right just means “wants to take politics in a direction we do not like”.

The failure of status quo conservatism

The postwar centre-right Parties have been dominated by various forms of status-quo conservatism. These are the folk, who when in power, did little or nothing to combat or reverse any of this. At times, they actively facilitated this. That is the UniParty dynamic.

Such conventional centre-right politicians do not understand the cultural dynamics, they do not understand the institutional dynamics, they just let such march on. Typically, they did not even notice, even (perhaps especially) when they were actively facilitating such.

So, the question becomes: what have they conserved? The answer is, increasingly, nothing.

Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—eliminating an external existential threat—meant that Western elites no longer had any strong reason to conciliate their working classes. The result was trade, immigration, cultural and other policies and politics actively hostile to working class interests and concerns. The debauching of various beloved entertainment franchises by a Hollywood increasing dominated by such status games—and the DEI moral caste system—is part of a much larger pattern. The spread of a shared interests across borders—so elites in various Western countries have more in common with each other than their own working classes—coordinated by shared elite status games leads to the development of an international, networked, censorship-industrial complex.

The gross failure of status-quo conservatism—plus the systematic assault on the interests, concerns and standing of local working classes—are now intersecting with the collapse of UniParty, of status quo, conservatism in the rise of national populism. The working classes are politically re-asserting themselves.

Meanwhile, the UK Greens are successfully harnessing the toxic politics of the unaccountable classes that is at the heart of the problem. UK Labour is, like most of the continental European Social Democratic Parties, losing ground to those more able and willing to either express working class concerns (national populists) or engage in the performative politics of moral display (progressive populists).

The politics of the UniParty have been a gross failure: socially, politically, culturally, organisationally, institutionally, fiscally. This has been particularly intensely so in “Broken Britain”.

Despite attempts to de-legitimise dissent, electoral systems are acting as they are supposed to: provide feedback about the concerns and dissatisfactions of voters. Whether this can be translated into genuine policy solutions in the face of enormous institutional resistance, we shall see.

References

Forrest Bohler, ‘Medicine Without Merit,’ Compact Magazine, May 07, 2026. https://www.compactmag.com/article/medicine-without-merit/

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980844

James Hankins, ‘Why I’m Leaving Harvard,’ Compact Magazine, December 29, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-im-leaving-harvard/

Hrishikesh Joshi, ‘Democracy and the Academy,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs (2026): 1–14. https://philarchive.org/rec/JOSDAT-2

David C. Lahtia, Bret S. Weinstein, ‘The better angels of our nature: group stability and the evolution of moral tension,’ Evolution and Human Behavior, 26, 2005, 47–63. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Lahti/publication/228350694_The_better_angels_of_our_nature_Group_stability_and_the_evolution_of_moral_tension/links/5a218253aca2727dd87a9e97/The-better-angels-of-our-nature-Group-stability-and-the-evolution-of-moral-tension.pdf

Jacob Savage, ‘The Lost Generation,’ Compact, December 15, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, ‘Moral Grandstanding,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2016, 44, no. 3, 197-217. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papa.12075

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck refers to a period around 5000 BC where the diversity in the male y-chromosome dropped precipitously across Africa, Europe and Asia, to a level equivalent to reproduction occurring with a ratio between men and women of 1:17. Discovered in 2015, the research suggests that the reason for the bottleneck may not be a reduction in the number of males, but a drastic decrease in the percentage of males with reproductive success in Neolithic agropastoralist cultures, compared to the previous hunter gatherers.

A comment on Arnold Kling’s response post suggested I did not understand the phenomenon, citing a post by Greg Cochrane on his blog.

In My Tribe

Lorenzo Warby on Feminization

Preliminary: What is wrong with feminization…

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a month ago · 41 likes · 48 comments · Arnold Kling

In understanding the bottleneck, one needs to understand that bottleneck itself was a limited-in-time phenomenon that, nevertheless, extended across generations. It was a sorting process that most male lineages did not survive even if, in any particular generation, a large proportion of men were reproducing. To understand the phenomenon, both its beginning and it (mostly) ending has to be understood.

That the bottleneck was limited in time is why an explanation resting on patrilineality and polygyny is not sufficient. Both of these things played a role in the bottleneck, but both of the these things also continued past when the bottleneck (mostly) stopped.

It is also important to separate out some male lineages having wildly disproportionate reproductive success from the large-scale elimination of male lineages. This distinction is clearest with the Han “super-grandfathers”. China had a combination of features that fostered a continuing pattern of some male lineages being wildly disproportionately successful in reproducing. It had a polygynous elite, which absolutely favours some male lineages doing disproportionately well, reproductively speaking, especially in combination with a patrilineal kin system.

China also had a non-reproducing underclass. China did not import many women relative to its population. So the transfer of women up the social scale to the polygynous elite meant that a rolling pool of men at the bottom of society were deprived of potential breeding partners. This systematic frustration of underclass breeding possibilities had a great deal to do with the banditry and peasant revolts that were such a feature of Chinese history.

Such a pattern absolutely produces wildly disproportionately reproductively-successful male lineages. It is a sorting process. It has effects on Chinese culture and distribution of genetic traits within the Han population. But it is not a male lineage bottleneck. Most male lineages continued.

A time-specific process

Why the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck started is not hard to work out and I alluded to it in the post. The development of farming and pastoralism both greatly increased the human population and generated assets (farms and herds) worth fighting over.

Kinship systems thus evolved and intensified to increase warrior cooperation, both to defend such assets and to seize them. Successful seizure means killing or enslaving the losing men and taking (and breeding with) their women. Do this over enough generations, and there will be systematic elimination of male lineages at scale. You can see this process particularly clearly in the population replacements uncovered by the “ancient DNA” technology.

So, what brings this bottleneck to an end? Creating a situation where winning teams have a reason to keep defeated/conquered males alive and breeding. There are names for this reason: tribute and taxes. Having conquered males retained—and indeed protected—so they then breed more generations of tribute- and tax- payers becomes the superior social strategy. Thus tribute, and especially taxes, is the social technology of exploitation ameliorating the social technology of aggression.

In evolutionary terms, we would expect one of two things to occur as a result of the harrowing of male lineages. One, that the capacity of male teams would tend to equalise across the sorting process. Two, that some alternative social strategy would evolve. Chiefdoms and states represent that alternative social strategy.

“I am mighty, I protect you from border raiders” is a regular artistic trope of rulers. The chariot-riding pharaohs of New Kingdom Egypt were particularly fond of it.

The protection-by-the-state social strategy was only available to kick-off if there were seasonal crops that provided storable food as a tax base. On the other hand, the more one relied on seasonal crops—so food and seed storage—the more incentive there was to develop/acquiesce in such a protection strategy.

The point of my original post was not about how long the harrowing of male lineages took, it was that there was (1) differential selection between male and female expression of genes (clearly true, and true quite intensely); and (2) this differential selection was particularly focused on the capacity for team work. Conquest is the ultimate expression of successful team work. But so is much of success within polities.

Note, the massive reduction in the harrowing of male lineages does not stop some male lineages being wildly reproductively successful. It does not even stop male lineages terminating. What the development of chiefdoms, and particularly states, does mean is that the male lineage bottleneck mostly goes away. The harrowing of male lineages enormously reduces.

In stateless societies, male teams—typically organised as clans—can engage in particularly brutal forms of “self-help”. Much of the function of states is precisely to suppress such “self-help” so as to protect taxpayers so they can breed more taxpayers. Chiefdoms, and especially states, organise to block the harrowing of male lineages at scale within their own territories even while they continue to enable some male lineages to be wildly disproportionately reproductively successful within—or perhaps beyond—those territories.

Foragers, farmers and pastoralists

There are some further wrinkles in this. Most eliminations of human populations in history have been elimination of forager populations, either by fellow foragers or by incoming farmers.

Foraging populations have low population densities. It is relatively easy to push their numbers below the level where they can sustain their technology; foraging populations cannot readily incorporate captives in any numbers; and there is limited transferrable skills into farming. Such elimination of forager populations has very limited differentiation between male and female lineages.

Interactions between pastoralists and farmers have a rather different dynamic. Pastoralists have higher protein diets, operate in patrilineal systems specifically evolved to create resilient and effective warrior teams, and are far more mobile, than farmers. There is a long history of pastoralists raiding, and periodically conquering, farmers. Pastoralists eliminating farming populations is much rarer, as the farmers usually dramatically outnumbered them—which makes the pattern of periodic conquest of farmers by pastoralists even more striking.

Meat-eating folk on horses (or in ships) raiding, and militarily dominating, mostly plant-eaters has a long history. The pattern is particularly intense when those mostly plant-eating farmers spend their time in water-logged fields full of pathogens and parasites. Notice how often the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges and Yellow River valleys were conquered by pastoralist elites.

There was a lot of women-stealing, and just plain slaving, involved in pastoralist raiding. Eastern Europe continued to be ravaged by pastoralist slave raids into the third quarter of the C18th. The Cossacks formed in response, as essentially Christian warrior-pastoralist and river-pirates, raiding back against raiding and enslaving Muslim pastoralists. The Muscovite state created a series of border fortifications to defend against pastoralist slave raids.

The Habsburg Militärgrenze (Military Frontier) was a similar response to protecting taxpayers from border raids. Farmer polities building border walls to block pastoralist raiders has a millennia-long history, including by far the most famous such border wall—which itself is part of a much longer pattern.

Farmer-pastoralist tensions continue to the present. A long history of a pastoralist elite (Tutsis) dominating farmers (Hutus) was a large part of the back history of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide of mostly Tutsis. The 2003-2005 Darfur Genocide was largely Arab pastoralists massacring Nilo-Saharan farmers. Syria has been experiencing clashes between Druze farmers and Bedouin pastoralists.

The farmers typically saw the pastoralists as thieving, murdering, raping, enslaving bastards. The pastoralists typically saw the farmers as weaklings who could not defend their own. In accordance with stereotype accuracy, they were both correct. It is not surprising that, if you give farming populations gunpowder weapons, and the organising capacity to use them, they become quite enthusiastic about killing pastoralists.

Nor is it remotely surprising that so many of the “super breeder” male lineages are from pastoralist societies. Pastoralists add recurrent violence to polygyny and patrilineality. In doing so, they provide a pattern for understanding the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck in a world without—because before—states.

The social technology of states is like the food technology of farming. It starts in identifiable origin locations and spreads out from there. Farming populations spread as invaders. Similarly, far more of the world had states imposed on them than were origin points for states. This is part of why the Marxian view of states as subordinate-to-the-class-structure “creations” of their societies is so mistaken.

The reason why there was never another Roman Empire is that the Romans spread the social technology of statehood—albeit often through emulation—too far across Europe and Europe’s geography (unlike China’s) strongly militated against successful political union.

The Mediterranean itself encouraged political unification, but not if there were too many powerful states to its North getting in the way of such unification. As both the Eastern Roman and the Ottoman Empires discovered. The EU is not a conquest polity, so the geography is much less of an issue, even without considering how modern technology reduces geographical constraints.

Historical demographer Peter Turchin has argued that interactions between farmers and pastoralists encouraged the development of large empires through a mutual spiralling-up of raiding-and-resistance interactions. I would add that pastoralists are also traders. There is clearly an interactive correlation across history between the level of trade and the extent of empires: an interactive correlation that collapsed after 1945.

One of Africa’s many geographical and ecological disadvantages is that the tsetse fly stopped the African savannah acting like the Eurasian steppes. The savannah was unable to support pastoralist societies that could act as conduits for trade, technology and ideas while providing a prod for state formation. Yes, one could reasonable argue that, in terms of institutional learning and development, Northwestern Europe and Japan were both advantaged by being out of range of the Steppe pastoralists. Nevertheless, both civilisational regions still regularly benefited from the trade-and-transmission role of the steppes.

Modern oddities

One of the many, many oddities of the modern world is we have these very highly-taxing states who are presiding over fertility rates that are below population replacement. They are substantially failing to breed sufficient new taxpayers to sustain themselves. It is one of the reasons cited to engage in mass immigration. The point is, as the UN put it, to replace the children the locals are not having with foreigners.

The trouble is, this is so often being done incompetently, bringing in low-skill, low capital, workers who make the welfare states less sustainable. Moreover, immigrants often then proceed to replicate the fertility collapse of the locals.

Some of this is straightforward social-pathology parasitism: aka the welfare state. If you pay folk and organisations according to how many social pathologies there are, they will have an obvious interest in promoting social pathologies and further demands on the welfare state—such as from low-skill, low-capital, immigrants. They will certainly have no interest in solving or reducing such pathologies that thereby reduces their claims on resources. Have enough such networks and they will generate weird-and-wonderful politics to match.

Some of this is having elites made up of non-hereditary office holders, so with short time-horizons. There are many problems with hereditary elites, but they do have the advantage of longer time-horizons. That, plus clear succession rules, inter-generational transfers of skills and advantages in building connections, are why hereditary elites are so common in history. On the matter of incentives and time-horizons, patronage by aristocratic elites shelling out their own funds, and who cared about their reputation, generated great art, music, buildings, literature and the Scientific Revolution. Bureaucrats handing out other people’s money as grants have generated fashionable sludge, feminist Glaciology and the replication crisis.

Some of this is urbanisation, as cities tend to be demographic sinks: especially apartment block cities. Cities, especially apartment blocks, tend to strongly select against the large family “tail” that is needed to sustain positive fertility rates.

Some of this is the loss of male bargaining power, particularly lower down the social scale. The bargain of male protection and provision, in return for women providing children, that has been the basis of human mating for almost our entire history as a species, has broken down across much of modern industrialised societies.

There is also the problems of the social media panopticon and device-distraction that gets in the way of modern dating, or even just socialising. Our technological development is creating evolutionary novelties on an unprecedented scale that are way outstripping our evolutionary adaptations.

So, lots going on. Nevertheless, the Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck is not a particularly mysterious process and generated different selection effects on the male and female expression of genes, whose echoes are still with us, as discussed in the original post.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

You may not be Interested in Genes, but Genes are Interested in You

This is Chinese actor Deng Kai. In the huge hit drama Zhu Yu or, in English, Pursuit of Jade—which is terrific, you absolutely should watch it—he brilliantly plays a creepy, charismatic, obsessive stalker. Naturally, he is now being mobbed by female fans. This is the intense genetic “filter” of the…

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a month ago · 259 likes · 61 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

References

Patricia Balaresque, Nicolas Poulet, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Patrice Gerard, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Evelyne Heyer & Mark A. Jobling, ‘Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: Young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations,’ European Journal of Human Genetics, January 2015. https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2014285

European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en

David Friedman, ‘A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations,’ Journal of Political Economy, Vol.85, No.1, Feb. 1977, 59-77. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24107762_A_Theory_of_the_Size_and_Shape_of_Nations

David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, Faber & Faber, 2018.

Léa Guyon, Jérémy Guez, Bruno Toupance, Raphaëlle Chaix, ‘Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 15, 3243 (2024). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47618-5

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Zvika Neeman, ‘Geography, Transparency, and Institutions,’ American Political Science Review, June 2017, 111, 3. 622-636. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2016/twerp_1129_moav.pdf

Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?,’Journal of Political Economy, April 2022, 130, 1091-1144. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356707920_The_Origin_of_the_State_Land_Productivity_or_Appropriability

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Peter Turchin, ‘A theory for formation of large empires,’ Journal of Global History, (2009), 4(2), 191-217. https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Turchin_JGH_2009.pdf

Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, Picador, 2014.

Shi Yan, Chuan-Chao Wang, Hong-Xiang Zheng, Wei Wang, Zhen-Dong Qin, Lan-Hai Wei, Yi Wang, Xue-Dong Pan, Wen-Qing Fu, Yun-Gang He, Li-Jun Xiong, Wen-Fei Jin, Shi-Lin Li, Yu An, Hui Li, Li Jin, ‘Y chromosomes of 40% Chinese descend from three Neolithic super-grandfathers,’ PLoS One, 2014 Aug 29;9(8):e105691. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4149484/

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9:2077. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

To create a Communist society requires mass appropriation (i.e., theft) of property, abolition of class differences and direction of all social effort to the transformation of humanity based on claims about Homo sapiens that are not true while using ludicrously inadequate analysis of social dynamics. This is a massive concentration of power over others based on falsehoods.

Of course Communism has demonstrated itself to be murderous, tyrannical and hostile to human flourishing. Indeed, the greater the commitment to the goals and claims of Communism, the more murderous, tyrannical and a disaster for human flourishing a regime has been.

This is all particularly so in the Marxist version—the only version of Communism of significance in modern history. For Marxism explicitly holds that there are parasite classes, whose elimination makes everyone else better off. All the Marxist mass murders used categorising people as exploitive parasites, or being lackeys thereof, as justification for mass killings.

In the 1917-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern and Central Europe that Lenin, Stalin and Hitler created; the Soviets mass-murdered deemed-parasite classes, the Nazis mass-murdered deemed-parasite races. Trying to parse moral differences between them in the face of such horrors is ridiculous.

They were also using different evolutionary strategies. The Nazis mobilised a culturally-connected—that they racially defined—set of lineages against other lineages, organised around territorial aggression, a very old pattern in our evolutionary history. Our evolutionary history includes plenty of genocides, though the Nazi scaled-up-through-industrialisation intensity was horribly new.

This is why the Nazis come across as atavistic and—in their murderous grading of entire races as unfit to live—as a profound affront to the moral universalism that Christianity embedded in Western Civilisation. But being a greater affront to particular moral sensibilities is not a moral category.

Communists use an aggressive, block-any-escape, version of a levelling down evolutionary strategy. A strategy of social aggression, eliminating those with more status and resources than themselves and transferring both status and resources through and to themselves (allegedly on behalf of others). During their respective Civil Wars, both the Bolsheviks in Russia and the CCP in China mobilised the least successful, the most angry and resentful, locals to kill the larger landowners and take their property, in a series of local massacres.

It is the moral arrogance that left-progressives so regularly display that they seek the social power to cement and enforce, hence the prevalence of dissent-suppressing mechanisms such “no debate” demands, blanket moralised condemnations, and so on. In the contemporary West, they use networking tactics rather than a centrally-directed Leninist Party, but it is the same social dominance exercise, generating many of the same patterns.

Thus, we have the equivalents of commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc) whose “training” often involves little more than struggle sessions; Zhdanovism in the arts and literature (writer Jenny Lindsay writes about her experience, an example of much wider patterns); Lysenkoism in science and science publishing (see, for example); and censorship (originally paraded as “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information).

Notionally, the levelling-down strategy’s downward transfers are done for the general good, but there is a huge difference between those being equalised and those doing the equalising. Every Marxist revolution or takeover creates a highly exploitive bureaucratised activist elite as an inevitable consequence of the entire political project. For the total transformation of society requires total control of the society by the declared transformers.

The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, not of the proletariat. But that is true, and inevitably true, of every Marxist revolution and takeover then and since. The NGO advocacy economy; the HR scolds; the moral-project bureaucracies; are the networked contemporary versions of this: a “softer, gentler” form of moralised predatory parasitism.

The levelling-down strategy turns some groups into righteous targets and others into righteous mascots. So, precisely because of its ostentatious commitment to equality, Left-progressivism creates moral caste systems.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) in contemporary Western societies is very much a moral caste system, that puts heterosexual “white” males at the bottom of the moral heap. Such moral caste systems are very apparent in the precursors to DEI: the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; Mao’s Black and Red identities; the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system. (A short outline of the full horror of the last is here.)

The failure to confront the way their own political tradition metastasises by editing out the tyrannising mass murderers, and their regimes and their social control mechanisms, from their conception of the Left does, indeed, matter.

James Lindsay’s formulation that:

Communism represents progressive means to regressive ends;

Fascism [and Nazism] represent reactionary means to progressive ends

therefore has something to it. Marx conceived Communism as the return, on a global scale, to humanity’s “species being” as originally manifested in “primitive communism”: so, regressive ends. Left-progressivist politics, from the Jacobins onwards, has stressed the embrace of modernism, of new is better, of championing the socially disenfranchised: so, progressive means.

Conversely, Fascism and Nazism both wished to progress their favoured groups to a higher state of social being and achievement: so, progressive ends. They were clever adapters of the techniques and technology of mass politics. Nevertheless, their fetishising of military modes of social action, their glorification of the past and of military heroism, their explicit rejection of liberal and left notions of progress, their fondness for Roman imagery and forms, their corporatist harmonising of social orders (within the nation or the volk) are reasonably cast as reactionary or regressive means.

Moralised mislabelling

We are normative beings because we needed persistent and robust structures of cooperation to raise our biologically expensive children reinforced by the human predatory pattern. Hunting providing highly variable nutritional returns from day-to-day—so encouraging the pooling of risk via habitual sharing of food—further encouraged the evolution of norms as a basis for robust social cooperation.

Our emotions are a much more basic decision-making mechanism than our reason and well precede it in evolutionary development. Tribalism is also normative and can have great emotional power. Politics operates by mobilising shared emotions and sense of belonging. Normative is not the same as moral.

Such emotional and (yes, normative) tribalism makes it very easy to read political categories as also being moral categories. Easy to do, but wrong, no matter how much people seek to moralise the tribal affiliations of politics and find it congenial to do so. Political categories such as Left, Right or Socialist are not moral categories.

References

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Frank Dikotter, Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity, Bloomsbury, 2026.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Swift, 2021.

Paul L. Hooper, Hillard S. Kaplan and Adrian V. Jaeggi, ‘Gains to cooperation drive the evolution of egalitarianism,’ Nature: Human Behavior, 5, 847–856 (2021). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian-Jaeggi/publication/349707572_Gains_to_cooperation_drive_the_evolution_of_egalitarianism/links/603e684392851c077f127935/Gains-to-cooperation-drive-the-evolution-of-egalitarianism.pdf

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, The Bodley Head, 2010.

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32008953/

Jessica C. Thompson, Susana Carvalho, Curtis W. Marean, and Zeresenay Alemseged, ‘Origins of the Human Predatory Pattern: The Transition to Large-Animal Exploitation by Early Hominins,’ Current Anthropology, Volume 60, Number 1, February 2019. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:da2850f1-f415-4130-9d35-8ed23fdd6b89/files/r2b88qc185

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

It is a regime of eschatological terrorism. Israel and the US are its proclaimed enemies-to-be-destroyed, but so is every Sunni monarchy: Israel and the US are simply more salient targets. The Islamic Regime’s role in both Lebanon and Yemen has been highly destructive. Where does it end with a regime that has been ever more violently destructive and disruptive across decades?

This second test also applies to commentary on the Russo-Ukraine War. Does a commentator examine or consider the patterns of Russian history? If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Western politics and policy.

Putin is acting like a Muscovite autocrat from anytime in the last half a millennium. This is something Russia’s neighbours understand. If a commentator refuses to do so, or is so ignorant they do not realise that there is a clear historical pattern, then their commentary can be dismissed.

As I have previously noted, both the Russo-Ukraine War and the current Iran War are part of much deeper historical patterns of the wars of continental anarchy and with the mercantile maritime order.

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

Yes, great battlefield commanders have an excellent sense of the opponent’s responses and have already incorporated that into their own operational plans. Yes, better trained and equipped forces, with superior operational capacity, can overwhelm opponents, sometimes with startling speed.

But, with any military campaign—and particularly such a complex, multi-level campaign as the Iran War—successful military action is going to operate as a decision-tree, even in such lopsided cases. This is even more so in a period of flux in military technology.

Now, one can hope that one’s side has a well-thought out if-then decision-tree, but there is still going to be a fair bit of “if, then”. The real test is how one copes with the unexpected.

A persistent advantage Western armies—including the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF—have displayed in conventional warfare is being much more able to cope with a fluid battlefield than their Arab opponents. Indeed, the IDF, and Western armies in the Gulf Wars, found generating fluidity on the battlefield very much to their advantage.

This has also proved true for the Ukrainian Army fighting Russia. Hence the successful advances to Kherson and from Kharkiv in late 2022. Unfortunately for Ukraine, the Russian Army has learnt how to block such fluidity from arising. Well, mostly. Recent, albeit limited, Ukrainian successes suggest turning off Starlink has degraded Russian ability to follow its preferred operational patterns.

Whether the Iranians have the same military limitations as Arab conventional forces have displayed is less clear. The disruptions of the revolutionary military purges, problems of coordination between the regular army and the IRGC, and the Iraqi use of chemical warfare, complicates assessing the (highly variable) Iranian performance during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 and they have not been involved in a major conventional land war since.

The US and Israeli forces have very rapidly established naval and air supremacy in the war against the Islamic Regime, but they are superior forces at every level—number, training, equipment, technology, operational capacity, command and control. This has included completely negating the operational strategy that Iran had developed for use against the US Navy in the aftermath of Operation Praying Mantis (1988). The US and Israel have still not been able to fully suppress IRGC missile, and especially drone, attacks, even in such circumstances.

So, two easy, and a more subtle, test to winnow out the truly remarkable amount of bad commentary on the Iran War.

References

Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

This was a disastrously bad decision. The argument for going back at the 1914 rate was to preserve the UK pound’s value as a medium of account: meaning that, prices and debts were expressed in pounds and were paid in pounds.

Going back on the gold standard turned gold into the medium of account for what was still the world’s premier reserve currency, mediated by (and denominated in) pound notes. UK bonds would thus have the same value as they did in 1914, when the UK left the gold standard so it could finance its war expenditure.

The bonds would have the same value provided the UK Government could continue to service the interest owed. There are some complications here regarding bond yields, but the intent and reasoning was clear. Government bonds were a promise, and the UK Government was keeping its promise.

The lower the risk on bonds, the lower the interest rate, the cheaper (in pounds) bonds were to service and the easier to sell new bonds as “risk-free assets”. As UK bonds were denominated in UK pounds, the value of the pound made a difference to the value of the bonds. Hence, the decision to go back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate was focused on the UK pound as the medium of account for UK bonds.

So, if the logic is clear, why was going back on gold on the 1914 rate such a bad decision? Because a lot more pounds had been printed since 1914 than the UK had gold to support at the 1914 exchange rate. (This increased printing of pounds was the point of going off the gold standard in the first place.)

In terms of output, of goods and services, a pound in 1925 bought considerably less than it did in 1914. This meant that, at the 1914 exchange-rate with gold, the pound was significantly overvalued. Gold bought more outside the UK. The consequence was obvious: gold tended to flow out of the UK, putting the pound under more stress.

The solution to the pound being overvalued—it did not buy enough goods and services, enough output, to support its exchange-rate with gold—was to have the pound increase in value in goods and services, in output-value. [For prices in pounds to express the value of gold as the medium of account.]

Money increasing in output-value has a name: we call it deflation, or falling prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys more and more goods and services. (Just as money decreasing in output-value is inflation, or rising prices, as each pound or dollar or whatever buys less and less goods and services.)

So, putting the pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate imposed serious deflation on the UK economy. Prices fell, so incomes fell, while debts increased in output-value. This all put downward pressure on wages. The 1926 General Strike was a direct consequence of putting the UK pound back on the gold standard at the 1914 rate.

All this made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been, increasing the burden of the public debt. It also tended to bleed confidence out of British society, prolonging the effects of the trauma of the 1914-1918 Great War. (You may not be interested in Economics, but Economics is interested in you.)

The roles of money

The classic analysis of money is that it is a unit of account (what prices and obligations are set in), a medium of exchange and a store of value. The store-of-value role is the least important role of money. We can tell that, because people still use money during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst asset, the worst store-of-value, in the economy.

People’s expectations about the future value of money do, however, matter a lot. Precisely because a hyper-inflating currency is such an awful store-of-value, people unload it as quickly as possible. This creates a hyperinflation spiral, where the speed at which money travels between transactors heads towards infinity and the output-value of the currency heads towards zero.

Conversely, if people have strong expectations that money will increase in output-value, they will tend to hold onto it, so transact less, so incomes fall, so production falls, so prices fall, so money increases in output-value, increasing the incentive to hold onto it. Debts increase in output-value while incomes fall, so bankruptcies multiply. All this creates a debt-deflation spiral where transactions fall dramatically, so output heads downwards as the output-value of money heads upwards.

The fact that there is a certain level of consumption people are going to do regardless puts something of a limit on the deflation spiral. Also, money constantly increasing in value creates an increasing incentive to inject money into the system. In the case of the gold standard, to either find new sources of gold (what cured the 1890s Depression) or to take the currency off the gold standard (what cured the 1930s Depression).1

The less store-of-value risk there is in money, the more money becomes a potential safe haven for wealth if there is some increase in risk.2 Hence, if a central bank credibly protects the output-value of money—for instance, by generating expectations of low and stable rates of inflation—but does not credibly generate expectations of stable levels of total spending (so incomes) in the economy, then a sudden increase in risk can lead to a flight to cash (and other “safe”) assets, so a crash in transactions.

Why did the US and other developed economies experience the Great Recession after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), but Australia experienced neither? Because Australian prudential regulation protected from it from the GFC and the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy generated strong expectations of stable levels of total spending in the Australian economy, which almost none of the other Western central banks did for their economies. In those economies, there was a flight to cash (particularly US dollars) and other “safe” assets and so a crash in transactions aka the Great Recession.

Transaction good

But money is a store of value because it can be used in future transactions. This is why expectations about its future value matters so much.

Holding money is using it as an asset. Using money in transactions is using it as a medium of exchange. The term medium of exchange is a usage I particularly dislike, because it helps mystify money.

I much prefer to call money a transaction good, because that focuses on what money primarily does: it reduces transaction costs (particularly search and information costs). It does so massively. That is why people continue to use money even during hyperinflation episodes when money is, by orders of magnitude, the worst store-of-value asset in the economy.

Calling money a transaction good also helps think about money in terms of supply and demand. Any analysis in terms of supply and demand has to define the scope of the commodity—i.e. supply of what, demand for what. If money is being held as an asset, it is not being used as a transaction good. Therefore, money held as an asset is not included in the supply of money being used as a transaction good.

Expectations about the future value of money hugely affect people’s willingness to use money in transactions, so its supply as a transaction good. But no analysis of money that conflates its use as an asset with its use as a transaction good is going to be a good analysis of money.

Thus, any quantity theory of money that aggregates together money being used in transactions—so, as a transaction good—with money being held as an asset is going to be wrong. Calling money a transaction good makes the importance of avoiding such conflation of the uses of money clearer.

Even with supply and demand for money as asset or as transaction good there are some scope complexities. The number of US dollars that circulate outside the US is remarkable. Demand for US dollar notes is by no means limited to their use within the American economy. The excellent Conflicted podcast recently provided a very informative discussion of the dynamics of money laundering and why US cash remains king.

I also dislike the usage the real economy or in real terms, preferring output or goods-and-services as the role of money—and, indeed, credit—in facilitating transactions is very real. Both money and credit can be means of payment, but the latter is even more driven by information and risk than money.

Money is a physical—so physically possess-able and storable—thing. Credit is a promise, paid for (i.e., made worthwhile to do) by interest. (If someone is paying interest on it, it is credit, not cash.) Cryptoassets, such as Bitcoin, are … odd.3

Banks generate credit, based on their assessments of risk. Such credit can, and usually does, generate claims on cash; but it does not multiply money—it does not increase cash in the economy, unless the bank can issue its own banknotes. It does multiply means of payment denominated in monetary units. Hence, it is perfectly possible to analyse monetary policy without worrying specifically about credit, as these are another set of transactions affected by expectations of the future value of the money they are denominated in and the expectations about future income that they have to be paid back in.

Monetising

The term transaction good also helps thinking about the process of monetising an economy. The more an economy is monetised, the lower transaction costs are going to be, so the more transactions and so the larger the economy can be expected to be. Governments have a particular incentive to encourage the monetising of an economy, not only because a larger economy generates more taxes and other revenue, but because monetisation reduces the transaction costs for government itself in acquiring revenue and expending funds.

The alternative to monetised transactions are in-kind transactions. I much prefer to talk about in-kind rather than “barter” because you can have in-kind taxes, in-kind debts as well as in-kind exchange. A medieval manor was not a “barter” system, it was a series of in-kind arrangements.

The processes of monetisation took centuries. As late as the 1940s, the Chinese economy was far from fully monetised, as villages tended to avoid using money in their internal arrangements—to the extent that villagers would travel to the local market town to engage in monetary transactions with a fellow villager.

Chinese society was based around kin-groups, and other connections, far more than were the very individualist Western societies. Law also penetrated Western societies—including rural communities—far more than it did Chinese villages. All this made in-kind arrangements more viable within Chinese villages and monetisation more viable in Western rural communities.

Historical aside: the long history of Chinese villages keeping the state at arms-length helps explain how Chinese villages could spontaneously de-collectivise agriculture after the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution had disrupted Party (CCP) control in the villages. The “clever” thing that the CCP did was to work out how to cope with the de-collectivisation that was already happening.

Robust expectations of a stable path for total transactions

In summary, Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, focused on money as the medium of account for assets (specifically, UK public bonds) rather than the central role of money—as a transaction good. Eight decades later, the Great Moderation was interrupted by the Great Recession because the US Federal Reserve, and other central banks, focused on expectations about the future value of their currency (i.e., inflationary expectations) and not on generating expectations of a stable path for total transactions when financial risks dramatically increased.4

The medium of exchange usage gets in the way of thinking clearly about money.

Money is first and foremost a transaction good. Its use reduces transaction costs, so makes the economy larger than it otherwise would be. [Its greatest benefit is enabling transactions that otherwise would not happen.]

Monetary policy does best, when it generates strong expectations of a stable positive path for total transactions in an economy. What is the most useful measure of total transactions in an economy? NGDP: GDP at current money (nominal) value.

Sure, there is an asset economy as well as an output—a goods and services—economy. But new assets require goods and services in their creation. (Cryptoassets, for instance, require computers, computer code and electrical power.) Assets are mainly of value either from producing goods and services or providing more reliable access to the same. This includes prestige/status assets.

Moreover, as money can be used as a transaction good, or held as an asset—and is the medium of account for output, assets and obligations—money operates as the “hinge” between current and future transactions and between output and assets.

So, monetary policy does best when it generates robust expectations of a stable positive path for NGDP.

References

Katy Barnett, ‘The Australian Approach To Cryptoassets: Another Block In The Chain,’ forthcoming Journal of Banking and Finance Law and Practice JBFLP (2026). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6477598

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Independent Institute, 2015.

Scott Sumner, The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Money, University of Chicago Press, 2021.

James Tobin, ‘Commercial Banks as Creators of ‘Money’,’ Banking and Monetary Studies, (ed. Dean Carson) 1963, 408-419, cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cm/m21/m21-01.pdf.

Fei Xiaotong, From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society, trans, with an introduction and epilogue by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng, University of California Press, 1992.

Chenggang Xu, ‘The Fundamental Institutions of China’s Reforms and Development,’ Journal of Economic Literature, 2011, 49:4, 1076–1151. https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/153452/2/Content.pdf

It was also my birthday, so friends took me out for drinks. Four glasses of an excellent Otago Champagne and a snifter of an excellent whiskey (Port Charlotte) followed by a meal at an African (Ethiopian specifically) restaurant and a couple of stubbies of an Ethiopian beer I am very fond of. This is WAY more alcohol than I normally drink. I also indulged in a couple of blocks of chocolate (Mint and Rum&Raisin) which is way more sugar than I normally consume. But, well, birthday.

That night, I had restless legs for the first time in years. I used to suffer, but since shifting to an essentially ketovore eating pattern, it had gone away. Restless legs is another example of an essentially metabolic condition that can be treated by changing one’s eating patterns.

Folk are probably aware of bulletproof coffee. It is an adaption for American tastes of Tibetan butter tea. Proper Tibetan butter tea is quite an exercise to make. But it is possible to make a tasty butter tea relatively simply that suppresses hunger pangs with a minimal insulin spike.

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Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration—higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures)—are then magnified. [The effect of swamping people’s locality-based social capital, so reducing their ability to manage risks, is also magnified.]

In the case of Australia, the 14 December 2025 Bondi massacre by an Islamawi immigrant father and his locally-born son brought these concerns into sharp relief, but the pushback against mass immigration had been building well before that, hence the Albanese Government sharply cutting back its immigrant quotas. (As Australia enforces its borders, the official immigration quotas actually matter.)

One would think that the obvious tension between Net Zero and mass immigration would be an open part of the public policy debate, within and without government. This is where the serial incompetence of mainstream economists in analysing immigration—incompetence that I have discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and especially here and also here—is very much germane. For part of their incompetence is utterly failing to produce useful models of the capacities of economies and societies to absorb immigrants. The absence of such models both represents the failure to take the costs of immigration seriously and limits the capacity to examine trade-offs with other policies, such as Net Zero.

Another factor is how much of elite politics is dominated by performative status games. One is a Good and Very Serious Person by affirming the correct narratives. The more folk are insulated from having their beliefs reality-tested, the more dominant in their networks such performative status games will be.

To ensure feedback to correct against wandering off into dysfunctional nonsense is, of course, the point of having open discourse and free elections. But those who adhere to grading people by their beliefs—so take dissent to the beliefs that make them “morally superior” people to be morally illegitimate—are highly motivated to frustrate open discourse and effective democratic feedback: hence cancel culture, the push against “disinformation” and the adoption of the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.

This networked incentive to frustrate open discourse and democratic feedback extends to mainstream media organisations, who have come to live off selling the narratives that affirm one is a Good and Very Serious Person.

Such pressures have led conventional centre-right politicians to either adhere to, or pander to, those elite status games. This particularly applies to politicians obsessed by getting mainstream media coverage. They then have even more reasons to pander to the Narratives That Good People Affirm pushed by mainstream journalists who are playing, and playing to, those same elite status games.

Mainstream journalists, government bureaucrats, advocacy non-profits, academe—these social milieus are all pervaded by such narratives. This is what institutional capture means. It takes a fair bit of intellectual curiousity, and moral courage, to stand against all that social pressure. Too many politicians on the conventional centre-right have neither, so fail as instruments for voters to push back.

Hence the rise of national populism. Precisely because both Net Zero and mass immigration are so much Non Player Character (NPC) “I don’t think things through, I just tick the Good Person status boxes” political/policy positions the obvious, serious, tension between the two gets overlooked. The willingness to punish those who dissent—as is required to have particular beliefs, the affirming of particular narratives, show that you are a Good Person—leads to purity spirals around an ever-narrowing set of acceptable beliefs. Such insulation from reality-tests within elite circles—and so within conventional politics—leads to the surge in non-conventional politics.

Within elite circles—among those addicted to the elite status games of affirming Correct Narratives—national populist electoral surges are viewed as a bizarre and wicked pathology. Yes, inconvenient realities are pathological for those elite status games. But that is because those elite status games are very much pathological in the first place. This is especially so given that the more one has to rationalise away or ignore, the stronger the signalled commitment to the shared status games is.

The tension between Net Zero and mass immigration is obvious if you just think things through. A deep problem across Western societies is that so many Very Serious People are playing status games that rely on not thinking things through: indeed, that actively block doing so.

References

Plamen Akaliyski, Vivian L. Vignoles, Christian Welzel, & Michael Minkov, ‘Individualism–collectivism: Reconstructing Hofstede’s dimension of cultural differences,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2025). Advance online publication. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398587882_Individualism-Collectivism_Reconstructing_Hofstede’s_Dimension_of_Cultural_Differences

Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano, ‘Culture and Institutions,’ Journal of Economic Literature, 2015, 53(4), 898–944. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.53.4.898

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, HarperCollins, 2021.

Jan van den Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, ‘Borderless Welfare State - The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances,’ 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371951423_Borderless_Welfare_State_-_The_Consequences_of_Immigration_for_Public_Finances

Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013. https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-and-American-Worker

George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, W.W.Norton, 2016.

Ben Cobley, The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity, Societas essays in political & cultural criticism, Imprint Academic, 2018.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Pelican, 2018.

European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Ryan James Girdusky and Harlan Hill, They’re Not Listening: How the Elites Created the National Populist Revolution, Bombardier Books, 2020.

Zach Goldberg, ‘How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,’ Tablet, August 05, 2020. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of World History, (2002) Vol. 13, No. 2, 323-389. https://culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/goldstone-efflorescences.pdf

David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.

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Israel got (and gets) a lot of attention because it is a Western-style democracy, with the openness and sense of familiarity that involves. It is the only such Western-style democracy stuck in a region of continental anarchy, which has led to all sorts of jarring with the sensibilities of the mercantile maritime order most Western democracies are deeply embedded in. Sensibilities that are epitomised by the fable of international “law”.

The best single lecture to understand the evolution and nature of the current world order.

Many Arab regimes were only too happy to encourage a focus on Israel and its sins (real and imagined). Such regimes for decades ran a sort of geopolitical shell game with their people—we won’t provide freedom, political participation or much in the way of economic development, but we will confront the Zionist Entity. The Islamic Republic of Iran epitomises this in extravagant style.

The Palestinians have entirely lived off confronting the Zionist Entity. That of all the C20th population movements, they were the only ones not taken in (with the partial exception of Jordan) as citizens by their ethno-religious confreres—being kept as stateless sticks to beat the Zionist Entity with—was not something it served the Palestinian leadership to draw attention to. That they had their very own UN body—UNRWA—which maintains their status as the world’s only hereditary refugees, and pays them hundreds of millions of dollars a year to never make peace with Israel, just reinforces the point. They literally live off confronting the Zionist Entity.

If they make peace with Israel, they stop being hereditary refugees, and the money stops. Hence they insist on the right of return—the basis of them being hereditary refugees—which Israel will never agree to. The late Charlie Munger’s point of show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome strikes again.

If one looks at the numbers of fatalities, the Arab-Israeli/Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not even close to the deadliest conflict in the postwar Middle East.

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-8—with its death toll in the vicinity of 500,000 dead—remains by far the deadliest inter-state conflict in the Middle East since 1945.

The Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990—with a death toll of 120,000-150,000—was largely triggered by the political and social dynamics generated by Palestinians being hereditary refugees.

The Algerian Civil War of 1992-2002—with its death toll in the vicinity of 150,000—killed more people than all the conflicts with Israel up to the Gaza War.

The Yemeni Civil War of 2014 to present—with its death toll of at least 150,000 from violence, though famine and other indirect deaths may push the death toll to around 380,000—is the latest, and worst, bout of Yemeni internal violence. (Yes, that the same number keeps recurring does suggest that casualty estimates are very much estimates.)

The anti-Taliban War in Afghanistan of 2001-2021—with a death toll of around 180-212,000—was a remarkably restrained insurgency conflict, given civilian deaths are estimated around 46,000.

The Iraq War of 2003-2011 has highly disputed casualty counts, but ranges of 105-150,000 deaths would put it in a similar level as other Middle Eastern conflicts.

The Iraq War of 2013-2017 against The Islamic State may have killed around 218,000 including 67,000 civilians. Taking the Costs of War Project estimates up to 2018 of up 295,000 deaths would make the two wars combined one of the deadlier conflicts in the region since 1945.

The Syrian Civil War of 2011-2024—with its death toll of around 670,000—managed to be the deadliest conflict in the region since 1945.

The casualties from the various interstate wars with Israel have been relatively light, as the wars have mostly been brief and not fought in urban areas. The estimated total casualties from the Israel-Palestinian conflicts before the Gaza War that began on October 7 2023 (so, 1920-2023), was around 10,000 Jews/Israelis and around 30,000 Palestinians. The casualties from the interstate wars with Israel since 1947 push the numbers up to around 80,000 deaths.

Nevertheless, in terms of death toll, Israel’s conflicts prior to the Gazan War have been a lesser conflict by the standards of the region, despite extending across decades and consuming huge amounts of media attention. The Islamic Regime of Iran may have managed to kill about the same number of its own people in a few days in putting down the recent nationwide protests as had the specifically Israel-Palestinian conflicts prior to October 7 2023.

Gazan Trap

The Gaza War has around doubled the numbers of violent deaths from the conflicts with Israel. Months of urban warfare where the civilian population could not escape will do that. For comparison, the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul had much lower civilians deaths, because civilians could escape.

The civilian population was blocked from leaving Gaza by Egypt. Like other Arab countries (other than Jordan), Egypt refuses to accept Palestinian refugees. Indeed, like other Arab countries (other than Jordan and Lebanon), Egypt refuses to accept Arab refugees, period.

If the civilian population cannot escape, then urban warfare will kill civilians. The entire point of the Hamas strategy of taking all those hostages and hiding them and its military forces—but not Palestinian civilians—in the tunnel network it spent huge sums creating was to use Palestinian civilians as human shields. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed, the better for Hamas’s strategy—both to delegitimise the Zionist Entity and to sabotage Israel’s diplomatic normalisation within the region.

Hezbollah uses the same strategy of civilians as human shields in Southern Lebanon. The Islamic Regime in Iran also uses a version of this human shield strategy.

Anarchistic Regime

The Islamic Regime shoots thousands of missiles and drones at Israel and kills barely any Israelis, not only because of the Israeli air defences—including, famously, the Iron Dome—but also because Israel provides its civilians with very extensive bomb shelters. The Islamic Regime does not provide such shelters for its civilians because Iranian civilians killed by Israeli (or US) strikes are a propaganda win for the Islamic Regime. The Islamic Regime has repeatedly shown it will sacrifice any aspect of the interests of the Iranian people for its ideology, and for the corrupt benefit of the institutions (primarily the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC) that exist to prosecute its ideology.

It is actually telling that it is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

On the subject of that ideology, the Islamic Regime has created/supported a series of proxies that have violently destabilised the region in the interests of prosecuting its ideology. Since 1979, the Islamic Regime has been the prime factor making the Middle East a realm of continental anarchy, where degrading and vassalising neighbours is the path to geopolitical “success”.

Consider that series of conflicts listed above: again and again, the Islamic Regime and its proxies are deeply involved in the violence. You add up all the Muslims killed in the Islamic Regime’s wars—either by its own forces, or its funded and armed proxies and allies—and it is quite clear that the Islamic Regime plus proxies plus allies have been the champions at killing Muslims since 1979.

The Islamic Regime is not a “normal” regime. It is not such either ideologically or structurally. We have decades of the performance of that regime, and its proxies and allies, to see that. If the Middle East is to shift from being a region of continental anarchy to being much more thoroughly part of the mercantile maritime order of “win-win” interactions, then the Islamic Regime in Iran—it is less and less of Iran—has to be overthrown or thoroughly neutered.

Maritime order

The waterways of the world—about 80 per cent of world trade flows by water—are dominated by oceans and seas. They in turn have been dominated by an Atlanticist maritime order that began with the Iberian conquests in the Americas, Portuguese domination of the Indian Ocean and the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

That Atlanticist order, which is thoroughly global, is now half a millennium old. Its most recent manifestation is the US Maritime Hegemony, that is sustained by the greatest alliance network in history.

There are regimes which resist that US-led maritime order. Those regimes have nothing in common apart from the way they oppress their own people for their own—typically deeply kleptocratic—benefit. They have that in common, as that maritime order is the basis of the unprecedented mass prosperity of our age.

If those regimes were genuinely focused on the well-being of their own people, they would be broadly supporting that maritime order, even if they might seek to renegotiate parts of it. Iran is the most grotesque example of sacrificing the well-being of their own people to the interests and obsessions of the ruling regime. It is also the most actively and violently disruptive of the continental anarchy regimes. Unfortunately for it, it is also the militarily weakest of these regimes.

The regime with the most ambivalent attitude to the maritime order is CCP China. Post-1978 China has become by far the biggest beneficiary of the maritime order. Yet the CCP’s ambitions to re-unite with Taiwan represent the most dangerous point of potential conflict for that order, while the CCP very much seeks to control its citizens interactions with that order. As a Xi Jinping-led CCP seeks to emphasise CCP control over economic and other considerations, its relationship with the mercantile-maritime order is likely to become more ambivalent rather than less.

The Atlanticist maritime order began to be built around 1500. It is still with us. It has become an overwhelmingly positive thing for the prosperity—past, present and future—of the peoples of the world.

[From 1500 to the Napoleonic Wars, there were major wars between maritime Powers. From the Napoleonic Wars to the present, major wars involving maritime Powers have typically been against continental anarchy Powers. The Iran War of 2026 is very much a case of this.]

Most of the Middle Eastern states want to integrate into that maritime order more, not less. Hence proposals such as IMEC—the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.

The Iran war—which is the first war that Israel has fought with the US, as well as the first war Israel has fought alongside Arab countries—is not a “distraction” war. It is not about Epstein, or Israel, or Bibi’s legal problems. It is the Atlanticist maritime order asserting itself against a disruptive regime almost everyone else in its region is completely over and which is now attacking all its Arab neighbours, hoping to raise the cost of the war beyond what the US will endure.

Ignore all those who analyse it through their (ultimately childish) political obsessions. Look at it through the prism of history.

All those who wished for a multi-polar world order that was less US-dominated? Congratulations, you have the results of a more contested world order—more violence, not less.

The transcript has been lightly edited to remove pause noises and words.

Winston Marshall

5:50 I’d love to take your impression on this. I’ll start by saying mine is international law is a mirage, in my opinion, and it’s only ever been might that keeps people acting moderately well behaved. It’s only been American hegemony that has kept the peace. And I don’t quite see the point in international law. If anything, international law seems to be an excuse for people like my prime minister, Keir Starmer, to do nothing and to be a coward, as he’s keeps landing on international law. What do you think about international law?

Haviv Rettig Gur

5:38 I share your skepticism and I share it deeply and viscerally.

I remember as a young man in the army, I was a soldier on the northern border for a short time and standing on that Israeli border looking into Lebanon and seeing villages of South Lebanon, Shia villages, ordinary places, populated by wonderful, decent, ordinary people. and knowing that a 100,000 missiles and rockets are buried under those villages, and knowing that Iran put them there, and knowing that Hezbollah manned them, and knowing that the purpose was to make sure that any Israeli attempt to clean out those missile arsenals—meant to set our cities on fire—would have to result either in many civilians fleeing or many civilians dying, and standing there and then seeing alongside places that we knew were Hezbollah outposts or maybe even, we knew, Hezbollah tunnels, were built alongside UNIFIL bases, alongside UN forces that were meant to challenge Hezbollah, prevent Hezbollah—disarm Hezbollah after 2006—but in fact just served as themselves human shields who refused to ever challenge Hezbollah and allowed the arming of this militia buried under this massive civilian population—everything that we’ve seen in Gaza Hezbollah planned in Lebanon—and asking myself, what the hell is the UN? What is it?

UN forces in the Israeli experience, they divided us from the Egyptians. And in the run-up to ‘73 and in the run-up to ‘67, the Egyptians just said leave and the UN forces all left and then they proceeded to have a war with us. The UN forces on the Golan Heights separating the Israelis and the Syrians: well, in the Syrian civil war, I think around 2013 roughly or 14, when Jabhat Al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, was coming down the Golan plateau, all those UN forces fled behind the Israeli military line. In other words, instead of separating Israel and Syria, they ended up being people that the Israeli army now has the headache of having to protect.

There is no such thing as international community and international law when the rubber hits the road.

International law did not stop the massacres in Bosnia. International law did not stop the genocide in Rwanda. International law never stops anything.

When Bill Clinton makes the decision personally, literally, to bomb Belgrade, the Bosnia war ends within two weeks—after four years of nobody doing anything because “international law”. International law is not a thing.

It won’t protect you if you’re a small people in this world and if you rely on it to protect you, it will fail you, guaranteed. There’s zero chance it will actually save you, protect you, or do anything useful for you.

So what actually is it? Why do people constantly talk about it? Well, then you go and look at who’s constantly talking about it.

The progressives teach us a very important lesson. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it claims it is, not what it pretends to be, but what it actually does in the world.

International law does one actual thing in the world. It allows very safe, very powerful people to feel very morally righteous about their safety and power. That’s it. It doesn’t actually do anything more than that.

Europe constantly talks about international law because it has zero challenges. If it actually had a security challenge, if Putin invaded Poland, defeated the Poles—which is I think unlikely because Poland has quite a significant military—but if it did that, and now Germany had to face directly the Russian army, you know what the Germans wouldn’t care about? They wouldn’t care about having a lawyers’ committee figure out every air strike before they dropped the bombs because they would be desperate and they would actually have to survive this thing and win this thing. And so international law only survives because Germany doesn’t think that’s ever going to happen and so it can just talk about the the great and enormous and self-congratulatory morality.

I want international law. I wish we had international law. I desperately wish we had international law.

You know what international law would mean? It would mean that Iran was constrained by the world from being able to ever try to exterminate my people from putting 200,000 rockets onto the villages of South Lebanon. That would have terrible costs for Iran. Costs Iran cannot afford.

Because that’s what law is. Law is enforceable. If you can’t enforce it, it’s not law. It’s a conversation. It’s a suggestion. It’s a best practice at best.

You know what law is? Law flows from the population that it imposes itself on. Right? I have a social contract with law. Community law enforcement infrastructure protects me. Every day they go out there and they catch the bank robbers and they catch the people speeding who threaten my teenage son so that he can drive on a safer road. And therefore, because they protect me, they can also demand of me things.

Well, international law can’t protect me. So, what right does it have to demand of me? What right does it have to tie my hands behind my back in a fight Hezbollah if it can’t do a damn thing to protect me from Hezbollah? And I happen to be powerful, self-made powerful. So, you know, I’m relatively safe from an international law that can’t protect me. But, you know what? You want to take this case to the other side of the aisle and not have an Israeli declare he doesn’t care about international law? Palestinians. What the hell has international law ever done for them? Has it protected them against Israel?

Has it protected them from Lebanon, which for decades had laws on the books that were basically the Tsarist oppression laws against the Jews in Eastern Europe for a century under the Russian Empire? They couldn’t own land. They couldn’t work in professions. Lebanon treated the Palestinian refugees for four generations in Lebanon the way the Tsarist regime treated the Jews that sent millions of Jews fleeing.

Where was international law to protect Palestinians? Either from us or from anybody. Where was that? What happened to that?

You come to the Arab world and you ask about international law. Nowhere do people scream and shout and yell about international law more than in the Arab world and in Iran. The Iranian foreign minister talked about international law this very week. Well, that’s an interesting point. Israel has been taken to the International Criminal Court to face charges of genocide and various other charges. And then you actually look around the Middle East and you notice, there are no Arab countries that are even members of the ICC, that signed the Rome Statute, except, I think, Tunisia.

The Arab world demands that Europe take in millions of refugees from Syria. The Arab world took in almost no refugees from Syria with a couple exceptions of Jordan and Lebanon. I think that’s it.

Well, why didn’t the Arab world take in any refugees from Syria? Why does Germany and and Britain and France have to take in more than all the Arab world combined, each one of them on any given month, more than the Arab world ever has? And then you realize that all these Western countries in the name of morality and international law are all signatory to the Refugee Convention. You know who’s not signatory to the Refugee Convention? Just about every Arab country.

International law is the law in which the people who would behave that way anyway—the good, the decent, the democratic—constrain their ability to face down those who just don’t care and don’t plan to ever follow these laws. It’s a bad idea, if only the good people can’t defend themselves, and that’s what international law has become.

It’s not even built. It inherently can’t be enforced and actually be the one thing that I need a law to be. The one thing that gives it the right to make demands on me, which is that it protects me. It doesn’t protect me. What right does it have to make any demands?

Exactly.

Queers for Palestine, and feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, are particularly blatant examples of this. Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic regime in Iran literally kill homosexuals and violently repress women’s rights: they are religiously committed to women having less rights than men and being subordinate to them.

The inconsistency between who Hamas and the Islamic regime are, what they do, and the alleged ideals of Queers for Palestine and the feminists supporting Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran is obvious. Pointing out such inconsistency has, however, no purchase on Queers for Palestine, feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, or similar groups.

On the contrary, pointing out the inconsistency brands one as not merely an outsider, but an enemy. It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause; to the shared political goals; to the shared politicised moralised status games. Doing all the required not-noticing, the required rationalisations, is a signal of commitment.

If they can make people ignore—or, even better, embrace—such inconsistency, that manifests their social and political dominance. The propensity of academics to be “risk averse”, and be conformist in various ways, has enabled motivated zealots to create the Critical Theory magisterium that has come to dominate more and more of Anglo-American academe.

As women are more risk averse and conformist than men, this has gathered steam as academe has feminised. This effect is all the stronger when they generate an accompanying elite status strategy based on “good people believe X”, turning beliefs into moralised cognitive assets. Assets to be defended—and defended together—as shared assets in a shared status game.

By attacking such inconsistency, one is simultaneously signalling one’s outsider status and attacking the signal they are using the show commitment to the cause; to the moral in-group.

As part of such signalling commitment, believers produce commentary shorn of all inconvenient context. We saw plenty of that in commentary blaming NATO and the US for the Russian attack on Ukraine. We are seeing plenty of the same on Iran.

Even more important than this—at least among the core believers—is that, at the foundational belief level, it is not inconsistent at all. The question is not what Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Regime actually stands for: the question is, who they are enemies of.

For this is the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction. One of the foundational beliefs of left-progressive politics is that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This was stated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Moreover, this is eschatological politics: politics oriented to a final, socially-transformative goal that trumps all other considerations. Both the moralised status games and the politics are directed against people and social structures within their own societies. The issue is not what folk outside such societies do, it is what the implications are within their own societies.

Anyone who is an enemy of such social structures, such people—literally anyone—is a political Friend. This is how the politics of the Friend/Enemy distinction works.

The dynamics of such politics were stated quite clearly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the end of The Communist Manifesto:

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring, to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

…

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

It is no accident that Marx and Engels set out the key elements way back in 1848. All forms of Critical Theory are developments of Marxian thought and utilise the same underlying dynamics and oppressor-oppressed template. They are just updates to avoid the burdens of Marx’s failed predictions; to quarantine away the record of tyranny, mass murder and economic stagnation that operational Marxism so relentlessly generates; and to move away from relying on a Western working class that utterly failed to fulfil their designated role as the foot soldiers of revolution.

Yes, this is monstrous politics that regularly generates and attracts monsters both grand (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Kim dynasty, Mengistu, Pol Pot) and small (such as all those who carried out their mass murders and pervasive cruelties).

Universities increasingly dominated by the Critical Theory magisterium are training graduates—particularly in elite institutions—to be conformist liars who despise people who think differently, replicating patterns within Communist countries because they are the same foundational ideas with the same consequences.

Part of such politics is that its adherents are the only ones who Truly See. This is the metaphysics where (untutored) consciousness is a realm of illusion.

The “true” reality is that the True Enemy is worse than anyone else, and absolutely Worse than anyone who opposes them. A good example of such commentary—carefully stripping events of all inconvenient context, to the extent of outright lies and misrepresentations—is here. It is a display of correct Friend/Enemy consciousness.

Those who think that the inconsistencies should have purchase, should matter, are embracing the primacy of empirical reality, not the primacy of correct consciousness. Giving lived experience priority—a development from Standpoint epistemology—is precisely about denying a shared reality. Instead, it is about whose consciousness has primacy.

Yes, it is worth reminding those outside such politics just what monstrous contortions such politics requires. But none of this will be persuasive to those who embrace such politics.

In pointing out the monstrous inconsistencies, you are broadcasting your outsider and Enemy status. Moreover, given the underlying consistency of any enemy of The Enemy is a Friend, the Friend/Enemy principle that anything that attacks the existing social order within their own societies is to be supported, is far more powerful among the believers.

References

Tim Kaiser, Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, ‘Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset,’ Journal of Personality, 2020, 88, 415–429. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12500

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Oskari Lahtinen, ‘Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes,’ Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, (2024) 65: 693-705. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjop.13018

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Amazon, [1848] 2023.

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, Translation, Introduction, and Notes by George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, [1932] 2007.

So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.

In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies—apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)

One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.

(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law—with genuine remedies—and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.

Rules-based international order

When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.

There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.

Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.

Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.

Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.

Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.

A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.

An order-disrupting regime

By far the most disruptive force in the Middle East since 1979 has been the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its sponsorship of jihadis and terror organisations; its own terrorist activities; its arming of non-state actors; its active killing via it and its proxies on behalf of oppressive regimes; has generated violent conflicts, massacres of civilians and disrupted entire societies.

The Islamic Regime did not start the Lebanese Civil War, which predates it. Its armed proxy—the state-within-a-state Hezbollah—has been profoundly disruptive of Lebanon and undermined Lebanon’s ability to recover from its civil war. Similar dynamics can be seen in Yemen, via the Iranian proxy state-within-a-state the Houthis. The Houthis have engaged in direct attacks on maritime trade, and so the maritime order, in the Red Sea.

The Islamic regime’s proxy Hamas has done everything it can to disrupt Arab states making peace with Israel; carried out the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since 1945; and turned the people of Gaza into human shields, taking Israeli hostages en masse precisely so Gazan civilians were placed between its fighters, the hostages they took, and the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). The Iranian regime provided the military muscle that kept the Assad regime in place in Syria—it is no accident that the Israelis gutting of Hezbollah, and forcing its withdrawal from Syria, was immediately followed by the overthrow of the Assad regime.

The ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been murderously disruptive of order within the Middle East for decades. Particularly now, given Israel’s gutting of Hezbollah and Hamas, and its demonstration during the 12 Day War of the lack of military capacity of the Iranian regime, governments across the Middle East are just over the Islamic regime’s endless, murderous, disruptions. They want to move more completely into the mercantile maritime order—hence, for example, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC).

The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), the state-within-a-state that controls around 40 per cent of the Iranian economy, is committed to the continuation of this murderous disruption. As it became clear that no negotiations with the regime—negotiations clearly subject to the IRGC’s veto—would result in an outcome that the US, and the other states in the region, could live with, the frustration with the regime of the Islamic Republic has become terminal: see Aimen Dean’s comments on Triggernometry and elsewhere.

If there is to be a stable order in the Middle East, the regime of the Islamic Republic has to be either overthrown, or its capacities so gutted that all its energies are re-directed to staying in power. A sufficiently degraded regime would be in a position to accept a deal other states could live with.

Yes, it is entirely possible that a collapse of the regime would lead to a civil war in Iran. Yes, that would be disruptive. But none of the civil wars, or quasi civil wars, in the Middle East since 1979 have been as disruptive to the order of the Middle East as has the regime of the Islamic Republic, whose Constitution commits it to spreading its ideology.

This war is the hegemon of the mercantile maritime order (the US) seeking to move the Middle East from the continental anarchy the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran imposes on the area to becoming far more a region within the mercantile maritime order.

The Israeli-US attack on Iran is about seeking to create a stable order in the Middle East. It is an order-enforcing effort. This is very clear if you look at things in their Middle Eastern context, with a clear-eyed understanding of the history of the past decades.

Commentary destructive of context

Many people, however, do no such thing. Their commentary is entirely driven by what they think of Trump, of Israel, of the West. Such commentary actively undermines understanding.

We saw the same pattern with the Russian attack on Ukraine and the attempt to blame the expansion of NATO for that attack. NATO is a profoundly stabilising force. Joining NATO is about committing to the mercantile maritime order and protecting oneself against continental anarchy.

It is precisely because of their experience of Russian autocracy across centuries that Russia’s neighbours have sought to join NATO. If you do not look at, or understand, the centuries-long patterns of Russian autocracy, you do not understand what is going on and your commentary will actively undermine such understanding.

No war is illegal. It may be an unconstitutional act. It may be an immoral act. It may be a strategic failure. But it is not illegal because (public) international law is not law.

A much more useful question is: does the war disrupt an existing order or does it seek to enforce (even extend) it?

The likelihood of success of any war is an open question. But the US-Israeli attack on Iran is about enforcing an international order against a regime that has proved itself, for decades, to be murderously disruptive of any such order.

ADDENDUM: The UK Attorney-General declaring the war illegal has been part of what has led to the astonishingly incoherent British response. Part of the backstory is that—since the Blairite debauching of the UK Constitution—such legal determinations from within the Civil Service have been used to hobble Ministers and hamstring the British military.

The Zoom link paid subscribers require is below the fold.

Helen has also been commissioned to write a piece on Epstein, Mandelson, Starmer, and Blair—and UK politics. Of necessity, that means drawing out the implications of this earlier piece on the Epstein Files. We want input from our readers, but we’re both also still baffled by and curious about Australian absences from Epstein—even hugely wealthy and influential ones, like Rupert Murdoch.

The few Australians that do appear do so in what are odd contexts (see Kevin Rudd, for example). There’s even a serious case to be made that British-Australian microbiologist Melanie Thomson has managed to emerge from a place in the Epstein Files with her reputation enhanced.

Read more

This magisterium has come to increasingly dominate academe for a range of reasons. It generates intolerant zealots, so benefits from the dynamics of an intolerant minority.

It offers a powerful shared status game—affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.

This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game. This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in—or at least going along with—the shaming and the shunning.

The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.

The emotions this status game attaches to those moralised cognitive assets—care, compassion, concern for the marginalised, if you affirm those beliefs, the opposite if you deny them—also plays into fears about threatening emotions (and safety through norm conformity) which are much stronger among women than men. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.

It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for—what is emotionally resonant in—increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.

But the Critical Theory magisterium has expanded across academe—and beyond—due to the nature of its three foundational claims:

• A blank slate view of human nature.

• A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.

• An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.

The blank slate view of human nature—not merely that we are born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social—means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled—to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction—the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created.

The grander the conceived purpose, the more energising and motivating it is. But also the more it rhetorically trumps anyone who is willing to “settle” for less than complete human liberation. This then feeds back into energising and motivating, as it provides an endless sense of being moral trumps.

A recurring version of such blank slate claims is that our “true” nature has been obscured or repressed by oppressive forces. This might be the alienation via private property (Marx) or by patriarchy, or white supremacy, or heteronormativity or whatever.

The most dramatic statement of the “repressed true nature” claim is also the earliest, in the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762):

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. (l’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.)

The view that oppressive forces are blocking our true nature goes naturally with the claim that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This dominated-by-conflict claim was classically stated by Marx and Engels as the first sentence of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do.

Both of these claims naturally lead to, and gain strength from the claim, that the morally trumping thing to do with information is to prosecute the struggle for human liberation. Marx famously said:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis Eleven, 1845.

Max Horkheimer, in his seminal essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) tells us that:

Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society.

Critical Theory is activist Theory, aimed at human liberation from the unwanted constraints of existing society and epitomises the activist relationship with information. All scholarship is trumped by this aim and so the most authoritative scholarship is that which is most committed to this aim.

Since such motivated and coordinated commitments are aimed at human liberation, all institutions must either be bent to that purpose, or destroyed, so that said human liberation can be achieved. This combination of motivation, coordination and all-trumping purpose that de-legitimises all dissent is thus structured towards taking over institutions.

What has come to make it particularly effective is that it has evolved to generate a supporting status game that people can adhere to without having any idea of where the underlying ideas come from or what their purpose is. People who have never heard of, or read, Marcuse can nevertheless prosecute his repressive tolerance strategy because they are committed to a status game of believing X makes you a Good Person, so believing not-X makes you a Bad One.

This status strategy thereby turns affirmed beliefs and modes of speech into moralised cognitive assets that folk in elite networks—or aspiring to join or create elite networks—can (and do) add to their other assets. There then develops an entire media/education/IT/advocacy non-profit/corporate/government bureaucracy infrastructure that prosecutes this strategy. They do this both on their own behalf as individuals—albeit in networks—and as a service they are selling: these are the narratives that affirming make you a good person, let us help you curate your information flows to build, maintain and protect your moralised cognitive assets.

It is creating a situation where academics and journalists are becoming less and less representative of the wider society.

One of the more contemptible patterns of our time is elite folk—who live by their networks, their connections, their social capital—sneering at working-class folk who arc up at having having their locality-based social capital swamped by newcomers flooding into their communities.

The surface doctrines of left-progressivism—adherence to which provide the basis for coordination in various times and places—can, and do, evolve over time. What is selected for is what works better to coordinate and motivate in various cultural and institutional circumstances. Hence the current selection is for what works best in feminised institutions and occupations.

The underlying foundational claims, however do not go away. As we have seen, they date back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

The evolutionary mechanism that this most builds on is human status-seeking. More particularly, status-through-moral-propriety.

Humans have always been willing to shame-and-shun fellow humans who violate accepted norms. This is very clear from the work of Christopher Boehm and others on the dynamics of foraging societies. The women’s movement became semi-notorious for it. Left-progressivism has evolved on the basis of basic, foundational claims that allow the very effective mobilisation of the shame-and-shun mechanisms.

Levelling downwards

It has also mobilised the levelling strategy that humans—particularly but not only women—mobilise to improve their social position. The levelling strategy is directed against those with more status and resources, to transfer both downwards.

Humans do not typically direct the levelling strategy downwards—so against themselves—thereby transferring resources and status from themselves to those who have less of both. That makes one’s situation worse, which is not a winning evolutionary strategy. Humans using the levelling strategy regularly seek to level downwards towards them, rarely upwards away from them.

What makes Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism so historically odd is precisely that they exult such downward transfers (so levelling up). They do, however, sharply distinguish material transfers from spiritual status. One gets improved spiritual status from the downward material transfer: provided, of course, that what you are giving up is yours; that you are actually making a material sacrifice.

Left-progressivists makes a rhetorical fuss about such downward transfers: but not from themselves. It is very conspicuous that their moral invective is directed upwards, as one would expect in evolutionary terms and particularly as a status game. The most obvious emotion in Communist propaganda—and left-progressivism writing generally—is anger: anger at those materially and socially above them.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell is quite correct: Marx is way more animated by animus toward the bourgeois than any putative love of the proletariat. Indeed, in The Communist Manifesto, it is made quite clear that that proletariat need their cognitive superiors—the Communists—to lead them to liberation.

Moreover, the demanded transfers are not personal sacrifices. On the contrary, they are to be compelled on others, to be taken from those who have materially more.

It is those who commit themselves to the grand project who oversee this grand process—with all the authority, status and resources that accrue to doing so. Left-progressivism has never created a dictatorship of the proletariat: every one of its Party-States has been a dictatorship of (activist) bureaucracy.

A further great advantage that the Critical Theory magisterium has is that it generates moral projects—from speech codes to DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion)—that justify expanded bureaucratic authority and resources. This continuity in foundational doctrines and evolutionary strategy is why the first DEI program was the Soviet Union’s Korenizatsiya program; the next was Mao’s Black and Red identities; and the third was the Kim Family Regime’s Songbun system.

Left-progressivism generates commissars whenever it can.Nowadays, they are called DEI officers, bias response teams, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers …

In Marx’s theory, all the social classes above the Communists—as the vanguard of the proletariat—are to be abolished. Given the required transfer of social power to the Correctly Motivated, this is absolutely a classic levelling downwards strategy, with any levelling upwards being in support of the dominant levelling downwards strategy and not coming from the Communists. As all Revolutionary Marxist societies demonstrate—and, for that matter, every welfare state demonstrates—there is a huge gulf between those who are to be equalised and those doing the equalising.

These three foundational claims—the blank slate; dominance of social conflict; activist approach to information—generate various doctrinal ways of making the following claims:

• All unwanted constraint is oppression.

• What is in my head is better than decades, centuries, millennia of human experience and achievement.

The first claim is obviously highly motivating: who does not have unwanted constraints they wish to get rid of? It is also endlessly motivating, as there are always unwanted constraints, so there is always oppression, so-defined. It allows any blue-haired graduate of an elite university to claim to be oppressed.

The notion that any part of her life experience is somehow in the same continuum as, say, a zek in a Soviet gulag; or a slave being worked to death in a Caribbean or Brazilian plantation; or a Neolithic farmer woman forced to live and breed with the rapist who killed all her male relatives; is utterly, utterly offensive. But playing to people’s narcissism—indeed, enabling them to moralise their narcissism—is a social selection advantage. (This is so, provided that no reality-tests or character tests get in the way.)

The second claim—what is in my head trumps decades, centuries, millennia of human experience and achievement—is also a rampantly narcissistic claim. (It does not become less narcissistic if one hides it behind grand Theory.) But this cognitive narcissism flows quite directly from making human liberation the all-encompassing social goal that trumps all other human achievement.

Such human liberation has never been achieved. It is entirely an imagined and imaginary goal. It is also terribly useful—including rhetorically—as it turns the imagined future into the trumping benchmark of judgement, the trumping moral and epistemic authority. Anyone defending anything with a past—so with flaws—is rhetorically trumped by the imagined vision of the perfected future.

All human history becomes condemned for failing to achieve that imagined liberation. The past becomes a litany of human oppression, while the present is structures of the same. None of such pervasive moral failure provides any basis for learning, beyond what does not work; what has morally failed. Yet past and present constitutes all the information we have, as there is no information from the future. This is a pathological relationship with information.

So, the three foundational claims are highly motivating; they readily enable a great deal of coordination; they naturally combine both towards taking over institutions. Thus is the enduring power of left-progressivism for over two centuries explained.

These three foundational claims also have something else in common. They are not true. They are all false. Nor are they a little bit false: they are comprehensively false.

Systematic falsity

Humans are not blank slates. We are evolved beings with genetic variations between individuals and variations in the distribution of genetically-transmitted traits in different human populations. The longer a human population has been separate from other populations, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be.

The more intense the genetic-selection bottlenecks, the more differences in the distribution of such traits there will be. The male expression of human genes is systematically much better at forming and maintaining effective teams than the female expression of human genes. This is in part because of different evolutionary roles across human history but those differences became much more intense due to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck that arose once farming and animal herding had developed enough to create increasingly intense social conflict over farm and grass lands.

Only about 1-in-17 male lineages made it through the bottleneck. Female lineages were unaffected. Effective male teams killed less effective male teams, took their women as the spoils of victory and bred with them.

Generations of women bred with their rapists who had killed all their male relatives. It is horrible to contemplate. (That romantic novel trope of the male brute tamed by a love of a good woman, well …)

The continuing consequence has been that boys and men are much better at teams than girls and women. Hence teenage boy sporting teams regularly crush adult female national teams. Hence—given that institutions and organisation are formalised teams—there are issues with the feminisation of institutions, organisations, occupations.

The left-progressive program of human liberation requires a concentration of social power that no set of Homo sapiens can be trusted with. The very things that makes left-progressivism work so well to motivate and coordinate themselves operate off a combination of evolutionary mechanisms, plus human variation, operating in various social contexts. Homo sapiens will continue to be Homo sapiens.

The grand social and human transformation will not—indeed cannot—happen. This is so even if we engage in some grand genetic manipulation. For enormous levels of knowledge would be required; genes probably do not work as required; selection processes would still happen; it would require abolishing genetic variation; and it would almost certainly require suppression of traits that are necessary to be a socially competent, resilient, reproducing species. (See the problem with The Pax in the film Serenity.)

It is also not true that human social dynamics are dominated by conflict. Indeed, the opposite is true: every human society is dominated by cooperative mechanisms. The more complex and larger the society, the more that is true.

We are the biosphere champions at non-kin cooperation because we are so able to develop cooperative mechanisms. Western states came to dominate the planet because Medieval Christendom—riffing of how Rome did it—put non-kin cooperation on social steroids.

If you see human societies as dominated by conflict, not only are you basing your program on false claims; you will systematically undervalue, and under-consider, such cooperative mechanisms. You will therefore degrade or break such mechanisms.

We can see this process in progressive-governed cities in the US, where the mad program of redistributing status breaks giving prestige to pro-social actions and stigmatising anti-social actions.

An even more dramatic example of under-valuing—indeed failing to notice or understand—key mechanisms of social cooperation is the disastrous consequences of Marx’s (false) labour theory of value.

By (falsely) characterising all value as generated by labour, Marx systematically under-valued the discovery, coordination and risk-management roles that commerce is structured to do. The attempt to replace commerce with central command—to bureaucratically replace commerce—proved to be a serial disaster that no Marxist regime has been able to fix, except by allowing commerce to once again do its thing.

Marx’s economics were developed to serve his social vision. Hence it has proved relatively easy to unplug that economics, and class analysis, from the foundational claims and put other social groupings into the underlying vision—race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, indigenousness, disability … This is the basis of the Critical Theory magisterium.

The Critical Theory magisterium both systematically ignores and/or undervalues the cooperative social mechanisms whose good operation is required for a well-functioning society while also systematically undermining them as “oppressive” structures whose elimination will allow social transformation to take place. As every single attempt to do so shows, no it will not.

What is “de-colonisation” but seeking to replicate in high-functioning societies that passed the stress-tests of history with flying colours the patterns of lower-functioning societies that failed them? But, of course, one of the deep taboos from the normative dominance of blank-slate claims via elite status games is to not notice inconvenient successes or inconvenient failures.

So much of this is built on the disastrous activist relationship to information. Activism corrupts and degrades every realm of human action whenever it imposes on that realm pre-set requirements from outside. We can very much observe this in the degrading of area after area of popular entertainment by the imposing of the “Diversity Message” on behalf of the (almost entirely mythical) “Modern Audience”.

The only source of information we have is past and present. The future provides us with no guide at all. Certainly not our imaginings of the future, which so easily become directed to very self-serving ends, as the entire history of left-progressivism demonstrates.

So much knowledge is dispersed and embedded. It is not centrally articulated and often can’t be. There is a huge amount of such embedded learning in the institutions and practices we inherit from the past. Yes, they have to be allowed to evolve to adapt to changing conditions, but we humans are very bad at creating Theories to so adapt.

Especially when those Theories are not subject to adequate—or any serious—reality-tests. A huge problem with academe is so much of it treats approval by other academics as an authentication procedure when such approval is very much not a reality-test. Structures of raging falsity can be—as they way too often are—“authenticated” by academic approval, if they play correctly to academic status games.

Useful falsities

Alas, even the falsity of the foundational claims is a motivating and coordinating advantage. For their very falsity becomes a mechanism for displaying commitment to shared purpose, to the shared status-game. The not-noticings and rationalisations one has to do to signal one’s adherence to the correct doctrines and affirmations of the moment display one’s commitment to the same.

The Trans madness is an excellent example of this. Claiming that a person with a penis is a woman—and that the hormonal and surgical mutilation and sterilisation of a gender non-conforming child is care and compassion—requires monumental levels of not-noticing and rationalisations to support a bunch of evil lies that destroy lives. Something that hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated their ability and willingness to do. But their earlier confreres did the same with Castro, Mao, Stalin …

The current cohort display by their not-noticings and rationalisations their commitment to the socially dominant left-progressive status claims generated by the Critical Theory magisterium of the universities especially strongly with Trans. Such status claims have been spread via gay and lesbian non-profits—who shifted to Trans to keep the donation flows going—and by mainstream media whose business model has become selling the narratives the affirming of which made one A Good Person.

This status game is one that so many mainstream journalists became committed to. Indeed, it is part of a matrix of status games that more and more journalists in the mainstream media have become committed to.

But the Trans madness—however horrible for specific individuals and families—is a relatively minor example of the disasters for human flourishing that are the consequences of operating from the three foundational false claims of left-progressivism.

The first—even obvious—point to make is that left-progressivism never achieves what it says on the tin. Ever. The past and present which has failed to achieved the morally-trumping human liberation that justifies all this includes every left-progressive regime ever.

But that failure is not just a failure to achieve human liberation. It is worse than that. Left-progressive governance is regularly a disaster for human flourishing. Mass murder, terror-famines, tyranny, poverty, economic stagnation, intensely exploitive Party-elites: these are the wages of left-progressive governance when it achieves the social dominance it seeks.

Even when it just achieves local control, we see failure. Left-progressive urban government in the US is a litany of failure, from street non-cleaning through entrenched homelessness to crime surges. The current “woke” version of left-progressivism—which seeks to redistribute status—breaks a basic social mechanism, as it separates prestige and propriety from pro-social behaviour and strips stigmatisation from anti-social behaviour. Elevated crime, economic stagnation, fiscal stress, problems with providing basic services: this is what we can observe in such cities.

So, the question arises, how can something based on such false claims, and which has a litany of failures of governance, get so far, and does so in democratic societies? This is due to two factors:

• The expansion of the unaccountable classes.

• The accelerating effect of the coordinating unreality of social media.

The unaccountable classes are all those who are paid to turn up, so their incomes do not directly rely on their performance generating ongoing consent for their income. They include a large proportion of paid employees. They include most people in any bureaucracy, corporate, non-profit or government. They include academics, teachers, public broadcasting journalists.

If one is not subject to the reality-test of performance, then status games that do not require reality-tests become very, very attractive. Such status games the Critical Theory magisterium generates in abundance.

Consider the package it generates: that its adherents own morality; that those who disagree are morally illegitimate and epistemically incompetent; that the past is irretrievably sinful, the present oppressive; that the imagined future—from which we have no information—provides a reliable, indeed superior, benchmark of judgement; that nothing is ever their fault. It is a package made for those who lack systematic reality-tests or character-tests, or where shaming-and-shunning status games can override the same. The larger the unaccountable classes become, the more such politics can be selected for.

The networking unreality of social media has, demonstrably, generated an accelerating effect. That on social media we interact with narrow avatars of humans that lack the full-feedback effects of a living person means that the self-deceiving mechanisms of relational aggression—where you hide your aggression from yourself, and others, behind moral or social concern—can get full flight. Linguistic taboos become king, while online mobbing is so much quicker and easier than the real thing.

These are social displays of performative “goodness” and of casting out “devils”. But a performance of goodness structured to impose costs—including cruel costs—on others is just the ticket for the socially-impoverished feedback-narrowness of social media.

Social media provides a remarkably low personal cost, but potentially very large effect on others, vehicles for moralised social cruelty.

As both Rousseau and Marx were pretty vile human beings, we should be deeply sceptical of any notion of human good emanating from such people, because it will be a conception compatible with being a vile human being. Which is exactly what we find: a whole series of monsters, both great and small, have been attracted to, and empowered by, such politics precisely because it not only hides, it actively mobilises, psychopathy behind grand purposes.

The politics of appropriation of the property of others, and the elimination of entire classes of people, is a politics of violent aggression. It attracts violent aggressors.

It is not only the tyrannical murderous of Revolutionary Marxist regimes that is remarkable, it is their sheer systematic cruelty. A very physical cruelty in the case of the Soviet regime, a more emotional and psychological cruelty on the part of the CCP regime. (Though both regimes exhibited plenty of both.) This difference in patterns of cruelty manifests differences between Russian and Chinese culture. The contemporary politics of left-progressivism is full of emotional cruelty.

The feminist embrace of the blank slate—seeing any argument based on biology as an oppressive constraint on women—has had a disastrous effect for many women, as it lies about biological constraints. A women’s eggs age as she ages, so women’s reproductive capacity peaks in their late teens and early twenties and declines thereafter. So does the quality of men in their dating pool, while observing bad divorce outcomes discourage men from marriage. For lots of reasons, for so many women, “build your career first” has turned out to mean not having the family they wanted.

Mass urbanisation, particularly into apartments, has largely eliminated the large-family tail that positive fertility rates rest on. No-children-outside-marriage cultural patterns—as in East Asia and Southern Europe—then imprisons the fertility rate inside the marriage rate. Nevertheless, blank slatism treating biology as if it was some manipulatable social construct has misled women dreadfully.

A disastrous science of meaning

When we consider the toxic falsities that the Critical Theory magisterium generates and mobilises, Cardinal Newman’s claim, in his The Idea of a University (1852), that a university without an explicit Theology will generate one eventually—just a bad one—is very much not contradicted by the evolution of modern universities. By Theology Cardinal Newman meant the study of God, but we can broaden his definition from his statement that:

All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from Him.

A Theology is a coherent conception of ultimate aims, of ultimate purpose. To put it another way, a Theology is a science of meaning. This is absolutely what Marxism, and its various derivatives, provide. This is particularly true of Critical Theory and its derivatives.

They provide a social ontology—a theory of what exists. They provide a social epistemology—a theory of what we do (or do not) know. They provide an eschatology—a theory of the proper purpose and direction of history. They provide a theory of proper social action—realisation of a society free of oppression and alienation.

They have a realm of divine authority—the imagined future, achievement of which becomes the benchmark of judgement. There being no information from the future, it is a realm from which there is no feedback, so generates no inconvenient feedback. Since the aim of social transformation is moral trumps, no citing of information from the oppressive past or present counts against its authority.

They have a structure of sacralisation—the sacred marginalised groups, whose claims are not to be traded-off against. It generates a structure of demonisation—oppressor groups and whoever speaks on their behalf. It generates a series of linguistic and other taboos. It has a moralised caste system, rating groups on their oppressor/oppressed marginaliser/marginalised scale. Hence entire disciplines and areas of employment stopped employing straight white males.

When French economist Thomas Piketty referred to the Brahmin Left he was so spot on.

Our religiosity is, very likely, an adaptation to being cooperative self-conscious beings. Critical Theory—like the Marxism it evolved from—mobilises our religiosity. It allows people to turn their politics into their religion, their identity.

This is, of course, a very bad thing to do. The modern conflicts of political religions have been as very bit as polarising and destructive as the previous Wars of Religion.

Using politics as religion-substitute—creating salvationist politics—has also enabled a painful unlearning of the lessons of those Wars. Hence the attempts to ban blasphemy, the heresy-hunting, the reputational witch-burnings.

The Critical Theory magisterium is absolutely pushing a Theology, a science of meaning, just a very toxic one. James Lindsay provides a useful definition:

Postmodernism is really a Marxist analysis of who gets to say what things mean.

How much that may or may not be true of the original French Theorists, it is absolutely true of what their New World adapters did with postmodernism.

In the case of Paulo Friere, he went straight into a Marxist Theory of Knowledge—hence his The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is full of citations of Marxists. What pedagogy there is in the book is entirely subordinated to the Marxist analysis and activist aims. Feminism and Critical Pedagogy have been two key vectors through which postmodern analyses of who gets to say what things mean was melded with the Marxian template and adapted to contemporary conditions.

Critical Pedagogy enables any form of Critical Theory to be adapted for use in schools. This has been particularly true of Queer Theory, whose penetration of schooling has been truly remarkable.

Trans became the epitome of all this. The idea that the unwanted biological constraints of the body can be overcome; that your “true” identity was what you willed yourself to be; that such “true” identity was hidden under oppressive social constraints (“sex assigned at birth”); all in the name of the “ultimate” marginalised group; requiring heroic amounts of rationalising and not-noticing; generating a whole new set of linguistic taboos marking one as a member of the cognitive and moral elite: Trans is a perfect storm of left-progressivism foundational falsities in an online age.

Trans generates claims of divine authority from the imagined future on behalf of the ultimate sacred—because against their claims no trade-offs are permitted—minority. It also epitomises left-progressivist politics in another way: it is a pack of evil lies who cost is registered in devastated families and the hormonally and surgically mutilated and sterilised bodies of children. A cost that goes with the mass murders, the tyrannies, the terror-families, …

Mass immigration as cultural disaster

These foundational falsehoods and elite status games have interacted badly with mass immigration. What has become increasingly obvious is that, without a strong and coherent civic culture, your institutions start decaying—as the norms and rules of your institutions will not be enforced—if and when they come under pressure. Such pressure can absolutely come from large influxes of people with very different cultures, so very different maps of meaning, very different patterns of cognitive significance and so patterns of behaviour.

The combination of the elite status games generated by the Critical Theory magisterium—whose original ideas are aimed at breaking down Western civilisation and institutions—with influxes of large social “lumps” of people with cultures, with maps of meaning, with patterns of cognitive significance, that are very much in tension with—or incompatible with—the norms and rules of Western institutions, and civic culture, is demonstrably corrosive of having any coherent civic culture, and so of basic institutions. This pattern has a great deal to do with the decline in trust of basic institutions.

For the elite status games generated by the Critical Theory magisterium make blank slate claims normatively dominant. It becomes verboten, taboo, to consider differences between human groups that contradict (the utterly false) blank slate dogmas. It becomes verboten, taboo, to consider any possibility that immigrants might make things worse.

But there are differences between human groups that matter. Immigrants can make things worse. In certain respects, various immigrant groups are demonstrably making things worse within their receiving societies. The ironically named “diversity bollards” are merely a physically conspicuous form of this. Turning formerly high-trust societies into lower-trust societies is not a social improvement.

When you get as sensible a person as Noah Smith citing well-run cities in notoriously culturally homogeneous societies as a reason to import further cultural diversity into Western societies, you know immigration has become a realm of thought-terminating cliches. Yes, Noah Smith is doing so to promote East Asians as being good immigrants, but he is still citing achievements of culturally homogeneous societies to promote cultural diversity. Besides he never asks who might be bad immigrants? (Somalis, obviously; with the bigger their immigrant “lump” the worse—Sweden is now paying them to go away.)

Thanks to the Critical Theory magisterium, the blank slate is too normatively dominant, so immigrants become the only Homo sapiens in history who cannot make things worse. They become another sacred group (“no person is illegal”) against whose claims no trade-offs are permitted.

Disastrous in any context

But the foundational ideas of left-progressivism do not need culturally-corrosive immigrants to be a disaster for human flourishing. They can manage that in any and all circumstances where they take over institutions.

Left-progressivism represents the worst possible combination of ideas: ideas that are false, yet highly motivating; that readily coordinate people; and thereby easily take over institutions. So, not only are they are a disaster for human flourishing, they are structured to gain power and so be—again and again—lived and experienced disasters for human flourishing.

What stops them? A serious commitment to a vigorous pro-social civic culture. A vigorous commitment to truth. The minimisation of the size of the unaccountable classes. The maximisation of pervasive reality-tests. The operation of genuine and systematic character tests. Institutional barriers to looting the treasury: perhaps going as far as those paid by the state cannot vote.

It means reforming and gutting the universities, that have become such grotesque institutional failures. Ban taxpayer funding of activist scholarship. Replace bureaucratic research grants which are way too easily captured by Critical Theory magisterium status games with block grants for STEM. Move the training of journalists, nurses and teachers out of universities.

(In response to that stunningly stupid meme Weimar problems require Weimar solutions, yes, it is demonstrably true that just shooting enough left-progressives also stops them. That was proved in Spain in the late 1930s, in Indonesia in the mid 1960s, in Chile in the 1970s, in Argentina in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in Iran in the early 1980s, in… Apart from the obvious murder-is-wrong, unless your civic culture and institutional structures erect effective, continuing systematic barriers against its revival, left-progressivism just get re-selected for, as Spain is currently experiencing.)

Such program of systematic barriers is not an impossible program to assemble and implement. But it is a program that needs to be actively and seriously assembled and implemented. This means refusing to give any ground to these destructive falsities and their toxic moral grandiosities.

The conventional centre-right has—again and again—failed to do even that much. At various times, they have done the opposite. Hence, in country after country, they have been pushed aside by national populists. (In large part, because they listened to economists on immigration and entirely failed to realise how much immigration is a cultural issue.) Whether the national populists can do better, we shall see.

ADDENDUM. This is how people behave in Communist regimes. It is what the Critical Theory magisterium that dominates our universities produces.

Under the Critical Theory magisterium, academe has become the most corrupt industry in the Western world.

References

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Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A Spiral of Silence

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one point: Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Not a week has passed without the publication of an open letter…

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4 months ago · 109 likes · 35 comments · Maarten Boudry

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Badly done monetary policy includes chronic inflation and stagflation—where both inflation and unemployment are high. Disastrous monetary policy includes hyperinflation—the Zimbabwean hyperinflation being a spectacular example—or some debt-deflation disaster, as in the 1930s Great Depression.

Monetary policy can be done well. Keeping expectations about the value in goods-and-services of money stable, and—directly or indirectly—expectations about the (positive) growth of spending in the economy stable, is good monetary policy. That produces the Great Moderation. Australia, from “the recession we had to have” until the pandemic shock was an example of such monetary policy.

If an economist said “monetary policy is good” or “I favour monetary policy”, they would be rightly regarded as saying something pretty silly, as how monetary policy is done matters so greatly. Yet as sensible an economic commentator as Noah Smith thinks it fine to say “immigration is good” and as perceptive an economist as Scott Sumner thinks he has said something sensible when he says “I favor immigration”.

The fact they think these are sensible statements to make tells us exactly how economists get immigration wrong. These statements treat immigrants as if they are a homogeneous, economically positive, group in all the ways that analytically count—including the implicit claim that the economic effects are all that matter and are reliably positive. That immigration is so wonderful that the net marginal benefits reliably exceed net marginal costs over all the ranges across which immigration happens and across all immigrant groups. That immigrants are the only Homo sapiens in human history who can’t make things worse.

You may claim to be agnostic at the optimal level of immigration, but even that implies it is just a level problem, not a content problem.

Given that the negative effects of mass immigration include fracturing countries along existing fault-lines leading to civil war—[Mexico in the 1830s], in the US in the 1860s; in Jordan and Lebanon in the 1970s—and mass rape of underage girls (Britain’s problem with “grooming gangs”), this is a deeply silly way to think of immigrants. (Actually, it is an offensively historically illiterate way to think about immigration.)

Immigrants are people. People vary in all sorts of ways that matter for the flourishing of human societies. They also vary quite dramatically in ways that affect how sustainable a liberal society is. People can make things worse.

Neither the costs nor the benefits of immigration are evenly distributed across recipient societies. If one talks of immigration as if it is reliably positive, that not only massively discounts discussion of its costs, it particularly discounts the claims of anyone who suffers disproportionately from the costs of immigration. As that is very much the resident working class—a group whose views and experiences economists rarely have to grapple with, and who they have social-status reasons to discount—this effect is not accidental.

Now, if you think the only things that vary between societies are institutions and policies—that we humans are otherwise interchangeable widgets, so people moving from countries with worse institutions to better ones is unproblematically a net gain—then treating immigrants as if they are interchangeable widgets may make a certain superficial sense. It takes astonishing historical ignorance to think in this way, but if you are the right sort of Theory-fool, it makes a certain superficial sense.

A Theory-fool is my term for what Adam Smith calls a man of system:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Yet treating immigrants as interchangeable widgets—to be analysed as if countries are analytically arenas for transactions where efficiency is what counts above all—does not make all that much sense, even in its own terms. If immigrants change the balance of labour and capital in a society, that matters. The level of capital—including skills, i.e. human capital—that immigrants bring with them matters even more if you are running a welfare state that transfers income from high-income folk to low-income folk.

People can make things worse

If you are running a welfare state, then importing low-skill immigrants will put increased pressure on the fisc. Importing large numbers of low-skill immigrants then makes one’s welfare state less financially sustainable over time, as copious evidence from Europe is now demonstrating. (Europe is famously 12 per cent of world population, 25 per cent of world GDP and 60 per cent of world welfare spending: of course the impact of immigration on welfare states matters.) This is aggravated if immigrants come from populations that have been marrying their cousins for centuries, driving up their rates of birth defects, increasing their sickliness and so driving up health costs.

But the comments by Noah Smith and Scott Sumner demonstrate something else that is quite conspicuous—how mainstream American commentary on immigration ignores European experience and the European debates over immigration. This is not a pattern one sees elsewhere. In Japan, for instance, the Western European experience of immigration is very much seen as something to avoid. Ignoring the European experience of immigration seems to be a very American arrogance.

Even more basically, the claim that the only things that vary between societies are institutions and policies—that we humans are otherwise interchangeable widgets—is flatly wrong. Any commentary that treats immigrants as homogeneous in all the ways that count is either intellectually negligent foolishness or disingenuous charlatanism.

First of all, relying on institutions to generate convergent behaviour in Western societies requires that their rules and norms are enforced. One of the deep dysfunctions in the contemporary West—particularly in Anglo-America—is that elites are not sufficiently enforcing those institutional rules and norms. This is from a mixture of cowardice, political patronage games, and morally performative deference to favoured (“marginalised”) groups shading into outright subversion of those norms and rules (e.g. “decolonisation”), due to how elite status games have evolved, as I discuss in this review of Musa al-Gharbi’s mostly excellent book.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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5 months ago · 64 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

Indeed, mass immigration can—and increasingly is—setting up downward spirals. The need for immigrant votes encourages politicians not to enforce the norms and rules of institutions in ways that the loudest voices in the immigrant communities speak against. The failure to so enforce the norms and rules then degrades the operation of those institutions. The more immigrants from such sources one gets, the stronger the effect becomes. Minnesota is currently providing an object lesson in this pattern, but you can see it across much of Western Europe. This pattern of moving away from the same rules for all is why UK PM Sir Keir Starmer is known as Two-Tier Keir.

The most appalling example of this—and the most egregious example of “Broken Britain”—has been the serial failure to enforce basic laws, due to “anti-racism”, interacting with Islam’s legitimation of rape, thereby creating a Muslim “grooming gang” problem across multiple decades. Conversely, Australia crushed its local problem by the simple expedient of enforcing its laws. See Louise Perry’s excellent discussion below.

This corrosion of local norms and institutions is absolutely a pattern that is strongest among and from Muslim immigrants. So, Muslim immigrants come to the West to get away from the social dysfunctions of their own countries. Then, due to a mixture of familiarity, religious commitment, Western political convenience and cultural cowardice, the same patterns that made their original countries dysfunctional are increasingly replicated in their new countries. Any public noticing of this pattern, let alone attempt to do anything about it, gets denounced by the normal patterns of moral abuse—racist!, xenophobic!, Islamophobic!

Formal and informal censorship mechanisms are then brought in to punish and deter citizens from publicly noticing any of this. So, the citizens find their institutions being debauched, their authority to speak attacked and their public discourse degraded.

But immigration, it can’t be done badly, it’s just inherently good. I am sorry, why the f#@k do we listen to economists when they talk such f#@k-witted nonsense as immigration is just naturally good? As if immigrants are these saintly folk who can never screw things up? Unlike every other set of Homo sapiens under the sun.

Civil wars, mass rapes, degradation of institutions: we can observe these consequences of mass immigration. Why pay any attention to these Theory-fools that cannot do the elementary thing of analysing immigration like they analyse monetary policy?

It’s the culture, stupid

The bit that is missing from “all folk need to do is move from bad institutions to good ones” is, of course, culture. Analysing culture has had an awful record in the social sciences. There are an enormous number of definitions of culture. People regularly use culture as analytical silly-putty—they define and analyse culture to fit whatever hole in their analysis is required to be filled.

I used to be enormously sceptical about culture as an analytical concern for precisely these reasons. Then I read Kenneth Pollack’s PhD dissertation on Arab military effectiveness, and my analytical world changed. The work of Glenn Loury, James C. Scott, Joseph Henrich, Garret Jones; Jordan Peterson noting that we humans cognitively model significance not facts; all added to taking culture seriously.

Trying to find things that only humans do compared to any other species is surprisingly hard. Finding things we do at orders of magnitude greater levels than any other species is easy.

One thing that we humans do way better than any other species is non-kin cooperation. Medieval Christendom took that advantage, put it on steroids, and came—as Western civilisation—to dominate the planet from doing so.

Due to our incredibly biologically expensive children—it takes almost 20 years to train a forager child to garner as many nutrients as they consume—all humans societies transfer risks away from child-rearing and resources to child-rearing. We organise doing these things via culture.

Yes, cultures generate institutions, but our organisation of our societies to so cooperate starts with culture. That need to organise pervasive patterns of cooperation is why we have both culture and institutions.

Both culture and institutions operate to deal with collective action problems. We are the cultural species par excellence because we are the non-kin cooperation species par excellence.

Institutions are the systematic operation of norms and rules. We can think of families as informal institutions but the reality is we grow up immersed in culture far more than any formal institutions. There are reasons that parents in all cultures are nervous about peer groups.

Moreover, as I have noted repeatedly, we cannot neatly separate culture and incentives precisely because we humans cognitively model significance not facts. Culture is what gives us shared maps of meaning, shared patterns of significance. It is hugely easier to organise and maintain institutions when participants share patterns of significance, and so share norms and expectations.

It has become more and more obvious that how organisations and institutions work—or not—depends greatly on the culture of those interacting within, and without, the institution. Families and kin-networks operate as intermediaries between the same. The Roman Republic, the Greek city-states, the Papacy, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches; medieval Christian rulers; the knightly and noble class; everyone who ran a medieval manor; all participated in the systematic suppression of kin-groups in the Classical Mediterranean, Medieval European and Early Modern European worlds for good reason—to destroy an alternative source of authority and social action.

Rulers come and go. The kin-group is forever. This became not so in the Graeco-Roman Classical World, then European Christendom, as kin-groups were suppressed. This suppression created far more individualistic cultures than the human norm. (Kin-groups held out in the non-manorial, agro-pastoral Celtic fringe and the Balkan uplands, until they didn’t.)

Culture is built on the after-birth mechanisms for transferring information; but cultures also shape that information, they shape what is transferred and how. They are shared maps of meaning; shared patterns of significance; plus the bundles of life strategies that go with the same.

Yes, people can (and do) move between cultures. Yes, cultures evolve. But, just as we are not accidentally or incidentally social beings, we are not accidentally or incidentally cultural ones. On the contrary, the two march together. As a Darwinian psychologist with Jungian predilections says:

Now, being is not the same thing as objective reality. Being is what you experience as a conscious creature. That’s being.

Culture profoundly affects how you view and experience the world. Not in some robotic way, but in a pervasive way—especially when it is reinforced within your social networks.

Liberal universalism is itself predicated on an individualism that is the product of a particular cultural and civilisational matrix and is not remotely a universal perspective among humans. Western liberals are so often unable to see how specific to Western cultures the individualistic maps of significance through which they experience and view the world are.

As the scholarship has made increasingly clear, people from different cultures will react differently to the same circumstances. That is because, cognitively, they are not the same circumstances.

This means that people from different cultures—so with different maps of meaning, different patterns of significance—will react differently to institutions. This is why, what superficially look like the same institutions perform so differently in different cultural landscapes.

Hence we end up with patterns such as the correlation between how collectivist cultures are and how corrupt states are being 0.91. (Somali culture is, of course, highly collectivist and clan-based.)

This is why it is so important for high-functioning societies to insist that the norms and rules of their institutions are enforced. But that takes a strong level of cultural confidence. It does not happen in a period of cultural collapse.

What does cultural collapse looks like? When Western elites fail to enforce the norms and rules of our institutions and cultural heritage is no longer transmitted, but rather is actively debauched, subverted and “decolonised”. A cultural collapse that makes mass immigration way more costly as both cause and effect. Indeed, as we have noted, mass immigration spirals up the corrosive effects, as mass immigration puts those norms and rules under more and more pressure, and immigrants are more and more used as excuses not to enforce the norms and rules of the institutions, that make Western countries attractive places to come in the first place.

This pattern of cultural collapse; when the norms and rules of institutions are no longer enforced; when cultural heritage is not only no longer transmitted but is actively debauched; is what we can observe across the Western world. This is a pattern of cultural collapse largely arising out of our toxically incompetent (to put it “positively”), or deliberately destructive (to put it more negatively), universities.

As said universities are increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium that explicitly aims at the systematic subversion and replacement of Western culture, institutions and civilisation, the original intent of the core ideas is to be so destructive. What has given them far more reach is the transmutation of ideas from Critical Theory and its derivatives (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Settler-Colonial Theory, etc.) into elite status signals, into elite cognitive assets—what you have to affirm to be a good person; to be of the moral elite.

More and more, the West, particularly Anglo-America, suffers from skin-suit institutions. Institutions that no longer do, or no longer do well, what it says on the tin they are supposed to do, but nevertheless garner resources, and insist on respect, as if they were still doing what they are supposed to be doing. This includes mainstream media that sells narratives of “this is what good people, informed people, believe” resulting in selectively curated information flows, so information siloes and “bubbles”.

Doing mass immigration badly includes fracturing countries along their fault-lines that extend to civil war; serious political fracturing along provincial/metropolitan and generational divides; mass rape, increasing crime in various localities; degrading institutions … Mass immigration can be done really badly. Any analytically serious approach to immigration would grapple with how badly mass immigration can be done.

The trouble is, so many economists are not analytically serious about immigration. They are performing “skin suit” economics. They engage in the superficial forms of economic analysis—and demand respect for doing so—while refusing to get into the meat of the subject. Because, of course, the meat of the subject leads to inconvenient places.

Such places are inconvenient in a social sense. One is clearly Not A Serious Person, Not A Serious Economist, unless you repeat mantras such as immigration is good and you favour immigration.

Limits of mainstream Economics

It is, however, also inconvenient in an analytical sense. To analyse immigration seriously you have to go to places that demonstrate, very clearly, the limits of Samuelsonian “social physics” Economics.

That one can walk into any shop, market or bazaar anywhere across the planet and the same conventions of property operate, is a realm of astonishing commonality in human behaviour. That the loss-gain-risk pressures of commerce are so powerful leads to more commonalities in human behaviour. This enables economists to identify, and make robust predictions of general tendency, in these realms of human action.

Similar pressures operate in, say, military affairs: but only up to a point. It is easily possible to have cultural patterns that get in the way of being militarily effective. When the British, for example, identified martial and non-martial “races” (i.e., ethnicities) they were observing something real.

Military analyst S.C. “Sally” Paine explains why so much of what seems baffling about Japanese military and strategic behaviour in the Pacific War makes far more sense if you look at Japan’s military culture.

Kenneth Pollack identified features of Arab culture that get in the way of effectiveness in modern conventional warfare because of huge difficulties dealing with the fluidity of modern warfare. A striking example of this was the Toyota War, where the combined forces of mighty Chad—using machine guns on top of Toyota pick-up trucks—crushingly defeated Libyan forces lavishly equipped with every Soviet military item they could purchase.

On the other hand, set-piece defence and attack that they were well-drilled in, Arab forces can absolutely do. See the highly effective Egyptian attack on the IDF’s Suez Canal defences in 1973 or the series of set-piece Iraqi offences against Iranian positions in the late stage of the Iran-Iraq War, or the Iraqi Army’s step-by-step reconquest of Mosul from ISIS.

Being good at set-piece operations and bad at fluid operations in conventional warfare flows quite directly from features of Arab culture. It is how well-trained, well-equipped British and American tank forces—whose armies had not fought any tank battles since the 1950s—could crush Iraqi tank forces in 1991 that had defeated Iran on the battlefield a few years previously. Arab militaries have the same formal institutional structures as do armies around the world, but they operate differently due to cultural reasons.

So, culture matters. The more differences in maps of meaning, in patterns of significance matter, the more culture matters.

Hence the success of mainstream Economics in dealing with the gain-loss-risk patterns of commerce, and similar resource use, is so hugely misleading. Since immigration affects every aspect of the functioning of societies—so every aspect of where and how culture matters—immigration seems to be amenable to conventional “social physics” “economic particles” economic analysis, but is so not.

In fact, it is profoundly an area requiring cultural analysis and cultural politics. As conventional centre-right politicians across the Western world have—again and again—proved to be incompetent at cultural politics, it is mass immigration that is leading them to be pushed aside by national populists. It is why country-club Republicans got Trumped; Gaullists got Le Penned; Forza Italia got Melonied; Tories are getting Faraged; and now the Australian Liberals are getting Hansoned.

It is working-class voters who tend to lead the revolt, as it is their locality-based social capital that gets diluted and swamped by newcomers. It is their rents that get driven up. It is their localities, and access to infrastructure and government resources, that get swamped. It is their localities that have crime rates surge.

But modern economists do not have to grapple with such issues, nor talk to the people who do. On the contrary, they can get their social jollies looking down on such benighted folk from their lofty moral and cognitive heights on top of their Empires of Theory. After all, these people vote for Trump/Le Pen/Meloni/Farage/Hanson, they must be awful. Besides, GDP goes up.

A splendid example of economists being socially-positioning Theory-fools is this paper, whose authors include a future Nobel memorial Laureate in Economics. When you read the paper it is obvious that those quoted therein are complaining about the dilution and loss of their locality-based social capital—social capital as a term appears nowhere in the paper.

The authors of the paper entirely fail to notice this, as the paper does not have the analytical humility to see how things look to its largely working-class subjects, it is about positioning the authors as Very Serious People, who are Very Serious Economists, who can look down on the cognitively and morally benighted working class folk from their Heights of Theory. The authors clearly engage in the necessary level of self-deception to do so. Such self-deception we Homo sapiens are very good at. Contemporary Western academics have brought such moralising self-deception to a peak of perfection.

Mainstream economists have not strangely lost credibility among national populists and other alienated folk, they have pissed their credibility away with their incompetently narrow—and ridiculously Panglossian—takes on immigration. This is the sharp end of a wider over-rating within mainstream Economics of efficiency and under-rating of resilience—the ability to navigate changes in circumstances—even in its Theory-acceptable form of “risk management”.

Hence economists talking as if societies are just free-floating arenas for transacting individuals and firms where maximising efficiency is all we need worry about, not any social cohesion nonsense. If US corporate employers import Africans so they do not have to hire African-Americans, or Indians so they do not have to train Americans, that is just fine. Why do we worry about this citizen silliness anyway?

A large reason why conventional centre-right politicians have proved to be so hopeless at cultural politics—and so have been supplanted by national populists—is precisely because they bought the delusions of economists that immigration was just an economic issue and the economists could tell them what’s what.

No it isn’t and no they can’t.

Mainstream economists then whine about this shift, taking absolutely no responsibility for their role in it. The problem was not that conventional centre-right politicians did not listen to economists, it is that they did.

This analysing-culture-incompetence of too much of mainstream Economics, coupled with immigration becoming something with such strong social desirability bias—after all, we cannot possibly agree that the Western working class might have a point, or several points—is why economists do not analyse immigration as if it was monetary policy: as something that can be done well, badly or disastrously.

It is also why economists should be ignored on matters immigration unless and until they do. Until they stop with the skin-suit economics, and start looking at the entire picture, not just what their Theory tells them to look at. But serial analytical incompetence—provided one plays the correct academic status games—works across so much of contemporary Western academe, why should economists be any different?

ADDENDUM: The Lotus Eater boys discuss the horrors of mass rape across decades as a cost of mass immigration and the callous malfeasance of so much of the managerialist British state. (A Professor of fiqh—Islamic jurisprudence—at Al Azhar university sets out the sanctification of rape under Islam.) The effects of mass immigration are not some theoretical exercise, they are what happens given the people imported and given how the state actually performs.

References

Robert P. Abelson, ‘Beliefs Are Like Possessions,’ Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 16, 3 October 1986, 223-250. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5914.1986.tb00078.x

M. Ajaz, N. Ali, G. Randhawa, ‘UK Pakistani views on the adverse health risks associated with consanguineous marriages,’ Journal of Community Genetics, 2015;6(4):331-342. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4567984/

Plamen Akaliyski, Vivian L. Vignoles, Christian Welzel, & Michael Minkov, ‘Individualism–collectivism: Reconstructing Hofstede’s dimension of cultural differences,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, (2025). Advance online publication. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398587882_Individualism-Collectivism_Reconstructing_Hofstede’s_Dimension_of_Cultural_Differences

Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano, ‘Culture and Institutions,’ Journal of Economic Literature, 2015, 53(4), 898–944. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.53.4.898

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights, HarperCollins, 2021.

Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1144241

Roy F. Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Jan van den Beek, Hans Roodenburg, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, ‘Borderless Welfare State - The Consequences of Immigration for Public Finances,’ 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/371951423_Borderless_Welfare_State_-_The_Consequences_of_Immigration_for_Public_Finances

Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569

Abdulbari Bener, Ramzi R. Mohammad, ‘Global distribution of consanguinity and their impact on complex diseases: Genetic disorders from an endogamous population,’ The Egyptian Journal of Medical Human Genetics. 18 (2017) 315–320. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110863017300174

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure and Change Social Norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.

George Borjas, ‘Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature,’ Center for Immigration Studies, April 2013. https://cis.org/Report/Immigration-and-American-Worker

George J. Borjas, We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, W.W.Norton, 2016.

Maarten Boudry, ‘A Spiral of Silence: How Academia Enforces Orthodoxy,’ Maarten Boudry’s Substack, Jan. 31, 2026.

Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A Spiral of Silence

Anyone who has followed academia over the past two years might be forgiven for concluding that scholars have reached near-unanimous agreement on one point: Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Not a week has passed without the publication of an open letter…

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4 months ago · 98 likes · 22 comments · Maarten Boudry

David Card, Christian Dustmann and Ian Preston, ‘Immigration, Wages, and Compositional Amenities,’ Norface Migration Discussion Paper No. 2012-13, February 2012. https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/immigration-wages-compositional-amenities.pdf

European Commission, Projecting The Net Fiscal Impact Of Immigration In The EU, EU Science Hub, 2020. https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/library-document/projecting-net-fiscal-impact-immigration-eu_en

Jean Ensminger (ed.), Joseph Henrich (ed.), Experimenting with Social Norms: Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective, Russell Sage Foundation, 2014.

Mohd Fareed and Mohammad Afzal, ‘Genetics of consanguinity and inbreeding in health and disease,’ Annals Of Human Biology, 2017 Vol. 44, No. 2, 99–107. https://www.academia.edu/33934871/Genetics_of_consanguinity_and_inbreeding_in_health_and_disease

Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, W.W.Norton, [1989] 1994.

Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press, 2024.

Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties,’ American Journal of Sociology, Vol.78, No.6, (May 1973), 1360-1380. https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/granovetter73weakties.pdf

Mark S. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,’ Sociological Theory, Vol.1, 1983, 201-233. https://www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/Social/f15/wrap/readings/Granovetter-revisited.pdf

James Hankins, ‘Why I’m Leaving Harvard,’ Compact Magazine, December 29, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-im-leaving-harvard/

M.F. Hansen, M.L. Schultz-Nielsen,& T. Tranæs, ‘The fiscal impact of immigration to welfare states of the Scandinavian type,’ Journal of Population Economics 30, 925–952 (2017), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1

Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Penguin, 2020.

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Garett Jones, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Stanford University Press, 2023.

Hillard Kaplan, Jane Lancaster & Arthur Robson, ‘Embodied Capital and the Evolutionary Economics of the Human Life Span’, in Carey, James R. and Shripad Tuljapurkar (eds.), Life Span: Evolutionary, Ecological, and Demographic Perspectives, Supplement to Population and Development Review, vol. 29, 2003, Population Council, 152-182. https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/46603844/Embodied_Capital_and_the_Evolutionary_Ec20160618-27827-pd0oin-libre.pdf

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.

Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021). https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2021/alternative-theoretical-framework-economics

Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lives: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard University Press, [1995] 1997.

Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: The W.E.B Du Bois Lectures, Harvard University Press, 2002.

Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English Review Press, 2016.

Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe?: The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path, (trans.) Gerard Chapple, University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2010.

Tommaso Nannicini, Andrea Stella, Guido Tabellini, and Ugo Troiano, ‘Social Capital and Political Accountability,’ American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2013, 5 (2): 222–50. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.5.2.222

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Jonathan F. Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan P. Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich, ‘The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation.’ Science 366, no. 6466 (2019): eaau5141. https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SchulzHenrichetalTheChurchIntensiveKinshipGlobaPsychologicalVariation2019.pdf

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia, Yale University Press, 2009.

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, [1980] 1996.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom, Picador, 2014.

I wish to contribute to the general debate, which is why I do not put my posts behind paywalls.

I am absolutely against restricting comments to paid subscribers, because I want to encourage feedback and I dislike anything that encourages cognitive “bubbles” or “siloes”.

So, I have come up with a new series of occasional posts that will be behind a paywall—posts on my experiments with low carb (and gluten-free) cooking.

I am not a Coeliac, but my intestines really do not like gluten. Small amounts give me diarrhoea and large amounts cause considerable intestinal pain.

This is something that became clear after going low-carb over the Covid lockdowns, as I stopped eating grains. After the lockdowns were over, I suddenly started getting intense digestive discomfort, which I rapidly ascertained stopped if I avoided gluten.

I had not realised that it is possible to develop sensitivity to gluten later in life. It is. Our (comparatively recent) evolutionary adaptations to a farming diet can wear off as we age. (Adoption of a farming diet was a metabolic disaster, as is the ultra-processed/industrialised food diet.)

In the course of going keto, I lost 43kgs (95lbs). I also got my hip-to-waist ratio to where I wanted it.

Temporarily.

The ratio has creeped back up since, so I am back to waging the battle of the bulge, but still way ahead of where I was.

I am very much a proponent of the n=1 approach—find out what works for you. We vary genetically; epigenetically; in life experience; in habits and preferences. What works for one person will not work for another.

And a routine that you cannot stick to definitely will not work for you.

So, I am measuring my waist regularly (once a week), as regular measurement is pretty much necessary for success in the battle of the bulge. I am not so bothered by weight, as I do not care if I put on more muscle than I lose in fat. Hence using hip-to-waist ratio as my indicator. I have lost 3cm (1.5”) off my waist since 30 December 2025: it has gone up and down a bit, but the trend is down.

As part of this renewed effort, I wanted to replace the alcoholic drink I had been recently having in the bath. So, I tried a concoction of my own.

It had an unexpected effect. I stopped getting up in the night to pee, which had been a nightly thing, whether or not I had any alcohol.

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Mercantilism is one of those terms which is used very loosely for a variety of things, including a certain set of policies AND how they were theorised. What I am referring to in this post is a preference for a trade surplus, for exports to be higher than imports.

For any polity that (1) did not have sufficient local sources of silver or gold (i.e. bullion) and (2) whose economy was not fully monetised, in an age when (3) bullion dominated money, it was deeply rational to prefer to have a trade surplus. It was deeply rational to prefer inflows, rather than outflows, of bullion.

Money is a good. It is a transaction good. It provides a service. That service is to hugely reduce transaction costs. (Transaction costs are search and information costs; bargaining and decision costs; policing and enforcement costs.) Across history, bullion (particularly silver) dominated money, especially for international trade.

Brief diversion about money

Money can be held for later time periods, acting as an asset. Hence money can be analysed in terms of supply and demand, like any good, but you have to separate its use in exchange from its being held as an asset.

That money can be held over to later periods is why Say’s Law—that production generates demand—does not work as Jean-Baptiste Say originally thought it did. Money earned in the current time period could be held over to later periods. If people do that enough, there can be a general “glut” of good and services: that is, the crash in the level of transactions that we call a recession—or if it goes on long enough, a depression.

That debts are typically denominated in money; that money can be either a transaction good or an asset; makes money the “hinge” between output and asset markets and between current and future time periods. That is why expectations about future levels of spending, and the future value of money, are so central to macro-economic performance in our fully monetised economies.

All of this is fascinating stuff for understanding how economies work, though it is less germane to economies still in the process of becoming monetised. (We will return to these dynamics in the discussion of bullion—gold, silver, bimetal—standards.)

Back to the utility of shiny metals

Money reduces transaction costs. The more your economy is monetised, the larger it will tend to be. The less your economy is monetised, the smaller it will be tend to be. A large reason that various credit instruments developed was precisely to lower transaction costs without physically relying on bullion.

So, if your economy was not fully monetised, inflows of bullion expanded your economy. Conversely, outflows of bullion shrank your economy. An expanding economy provided a larger tax base, a shrinking economy a smaller one.

Apart from a bigger economy—most visible through more trade—meaning more tax revenue, rulers particularly favoured monetisation, as it so reduced the transaction costs, and administrative burdens, of their taxation and expenditure.

Clearly, if your economy was not fully monetised, you wanted bullion to flow in, not out. The easiest way to get that to happen, was to have a trade surplus, for the value of exports to exceed imports. So, if your economy was not fully monetised, and you did not have sufficient internal sources of bullion, it was rational to have a policy that fostered inflows of bullion.

How long did it take economies to fully monetise? Centuries and centuries. China imported silver for centuries. At no stage did it suffer significant inflation from silver “saturation”. (It did suffer bouts of inflation, and even hyperinflation, from its pioneering use of paper money.)

By the time of the first Opium War (1839-1842), the Qing Emperor ruled over perhaps a third of the population of the planet and something approaching a third of global GDP. American silver—i.e. silver from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires—had been flowing to China since the mid C16th. Perhaps one third of all the silver mined in the Americas went to China and Asia. At no point did China reach silver “saturation”, at no point was its economy fully monetised.

On the contrary, when there was a sudden sharp drop in silver inflows in the early C17th, this caused a major contractionary effect—in part as falls in transaction costs stalled or reversed—while population growth meant silver rose in value: such deflation had a serious contractionary effect, especially as peasants paid taxes in silver. This helped destabilise the decaying Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

In the C18th, bullion outflows destabilised both the northern Trinh and southern Nguyen regimes in Vietnam (Lieberman Vol.1, Pp421-2). Much of the success of Muscovy came because exports persistently exceeded imports, especially from its Volga and then Siberian conquests, creating a persistent bullion inflow (Lieberman Vol.2, Pp 218ff) that helped finance its imperial ambitions.

That China never reached full monetisation, full silver “saturation”, makes the Qing Dynasty’s resistance to European imports make much more sense. They wanted silver inflows to continue, especially after the Qing central government had expended its silver reserves putting down various rebellions, notably the White Lotus Rebellion (1794-1804).

Not thinking through the implications of economies not being fully monetised—and the role of money as a good that reduces transaction costs—has led to glib denigrations of the Qing Dynasty’s policy. Yes, there was a lack of curiousity about the outside world and an intellectual insularity. Yes, the Court cast its decisions—as Imperial Dynasties usually did—in terms flattering to itself and China. But as was also usually the case, the self-flattering spin was over the top of a practical policy.

It was in the Qing Dynasty’s (and China’s) interest that silver continue to flow into China. This is especially as the experience of paper money under the Song (960-1279), (especially) the Yuan (1271-1368) and the Ming (1368-1644) Dynasties had been rather unfortunate. It was a case of tried that, didn’t like it.

Meanwhile, in Europe …

All this contrasts with Europe, where the flood of first Central European and then American silver generated the “great inflation”, the Price Revolution. If about one-third of American silver went to China and Asia, that meant about two-thirds of it went to Europe.

The European economy was significantly smaller than China’s, was already more monetised, and had more extensively developed credit instruments, which it would develop further. So, silver was flowing into Europe faster than both increases in output and how fast economies were monetising, driving up prices over time. The flood of silver, and expansion of credit instruments, continually lowered transaction costs, generating an expansionary economic effect.

As Europe was recovering demographically from the C14th Black Death (and later) plague outbreaks, the population was increasing, driving up in-kind demand in the non-monetised sections of the economy. This population increase—generally in excess of increases in output—saw the increased returns to labour due to plague-imposed labour scarcity disappear across much of Europe, especially further away from the Atlantic littoral. The increase in trade in the Atlantic economy ameliorated the fall in returns to labour in Northwestern Europe.

The inflationary effect of the inflows of Central European and then American silver was muted, as part of the silver inflows went into expanding the monetisation of European economies. Nevertheless, we can see why, given the size of its population and scale of its economic activity, a China with larger population and output, and smaller inflows of silver, never reached silver “saturation”.

We can also measure (somewhat) the rate of monetisation. We can do that by comparing how much increases in the price level were driven by monetary factors, and how much by population growth.

If your economy is fully monetised, then inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If your economy is not monetised at all, then any rise in the price level cannot be a monetary phenomenon. (What price level means in an economy without money is an interesting question, but we will leave that aside.)

A rising price level means that aggregate demand is increasing faster than aggregate supply. What raises aggregate demand? The use of money in exchange increasing faster than output. The population (so in-kind demand) increasing faster than output. Both these things can raise the price level.

So, the more monetised your economy is, the more inflation will be a monetary phenomenon. The less monetised—the more dominated by in-kind exchange—your economy is, the more inflation will be a result of population increase.

It will also directly signal immiseration, due to the population/land ratio increasing without matching increases in output. Specifically, the supply of labour—very closely tied to population—is increasing faster than output, due to land (and capital) constraints. Malthusian dynamics operate if technology is sufficiently static.

Claiming population increase drives price level rises only makes sense if a significant part of the economy is not monetised. So, the more price level rises are driven by population increase, the less monetised your economy is. Conversely, the more price level rises are driven by increase in the use of money in exchange in excess of increases in output, the more monetised your economy is.

Fortunately, there is a paper that measures precisely that. From it we can see that the European economy did not become fully monetised until sometime after 1700. Even then, the monetisation was not done purely by bullion. The development of banknotes enabled monetisation to spread well beyond payments in bullion, even if their value was still anchored in bullion.

Bullion (gold and silver) standards

Money as a transaction good became a mixture of bullion and banknotes. Means of payment denominated in money extended to some credit instruments. Nowadays, means of payment denominated in money, but using credit instruments, has been massively expanded by EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale).

(A debit card means the bank is borrowing from you, hence it pays you interest. A credit card means you are borrowing from the bank, hence you pay interest. They are both credit instruments, just in different directions. They are also both means of payments denominated in money.)

In 1914, most major Atlantic economies, apart from the US, went off the gold standard. From the UK completing going back onto the gold standard in 1823 to the mass exit in 1914, money as a medium of account—the thing that both denominates prices and promises and is used to pay them—was bullion.

The output-value of bullion was the output-value of money. This was gold in the gold standard countries (notably Britain and its settler dominions), silver in the silver standard countries (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and both in the bimetal standard countries (France and the Latin Monetary Union).

If bullion went up in value relative to output, the output-value of money went up and the money-prices of goods and services fell (deflation). If bullion went down in value relative to output, the output-value of money went down and the money-prices of goods and services rose (inflation).

Periods of gold rushes—of increased output of gold—were inflationary periods in the gold-standard economies. More gold meant cheaper gold, if the gold supply was rising faster than output—which, during the gold rushes, it was.

Periods when the demand for the monetary use of gold increased faster than output were periods when the output-value of gold rose, so prices fell. These were deflationary periods in gold-standard economies. The first such period in the late modern era (i.e., after the French Revolution) was in the 1820s, as the UK completed officially going back on the gold standard.1

There was another notable such period after 1873, when Germany, Austria-Hungary, France and the US all went on the gold standard, greatly raising the monetary demand for gold. The deflation became much more intense in the early 1890s. This severe depression ended with the surge in gold supply from the Witwatersrand, the Klondike, and the Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie, gold rushes.

The last major deflationary episode was what became known as the Great Depression of the 1930s. As the gold-exchange rate of the franc—set in June 1928, when France completed going back onto the gold standard—meant that gold bought more in France than elsewhere, gold flowed into France.

The franc was under-valued (cheap in gold terms), hence gold flowing into France. Conversely, when the UK went back on the gold standard (May 1925), the pound was over-valued (expensive in gold terms). So, gold flowed out of Britain. This pattern somewhat poisoned Anglo-French relations.

The Bank of France simply used the gold inflow to top up its gold reserves. That meant the Bank of France—which was one of the small number of central banks that dominated gold holdings—was continually taking gold out of the monetary system. This continually increased the output-value of the gold still within the monetary system, driving prices down. This meant that money would buy more in the future, so people held onto it. This meant spending fell, so incomes fell, so debts became more and more onerous, setting off a wave of bankruptcies and financial collapse.

This Debt-Deflation economic death-spiral in all the gold-standard countries came from the policy of the Bank of France driving up the output-value of gold by continually reducing its effective supply within the monetary system. (Plus the failure of the US Federal Reserve to counter this.) Countries exited the economic death-spiral the Bank of France had created by exiting the gold standard.

For all folk complain about inflation—especially since the US finally abandoned the link of the US dollar with gold in 1971—the effects of the incompetent technocratic management of the gold-standard in the late 1920s and early 1930s were far worse. In a situation where four central banks (the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England, Bank of France, the Reichsbank) overwhelmingly dominated gold holdings, the gold-standard became technocratic money.

I have little patience for gold-bugs who write as if the millennia of monetary history reached some sort of apogee in … the forty years from 1873 to 1914. Not only was, historically, silver a far more important monetary metal, Milton Friedman suggested—and he was probably right—that the previous period of 1823-1873 where some countries were on the gold standard (mainly Britain and its settler dominions), some were on the silver standard (Germany, Austria-Hungary) and others were on a bimetal standard (France and the Latin Monetary Union) was probably more stable.

The slow process of monetisation

But all this story since 1823 is a story of fully monetised economies, where money is one side of almost all transactions. For most of history, economies were not fully monetised, they included a significant level of in-kind transactions. This was particularly true of economies with significant rural hinterlands.

If your economy was not fully monetised, and you had insufficient local supplies of gold and silver—of bullion—then you wanted bullion to flow in, not out. So, you wanted exports to exceed imports.

Some of the theorising about this was rather silly. But, then, some of contemporary Theorising in mainstream Economics is rather silly too.

Nevertheless—given that money so reduces transaction costs—wanting bullion to flow in, not out, when (1) you did not have adequate local supplies of bullion; (2) bullion was by far the dominant form of money; and (3) your economy was not fully monetised; was sensible public policy.

References

Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, and Peter Howitt, ‘The Schumpeterian Growth Paradigm,’ Annual Review of Economics, Vol. 7:557-575 (August 2015). https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115412

David Hackett Fisher, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the “Rise of the West” and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of World History, 2002, Vol. 13, No. 2, 323-389. http://culturahistorica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/goldstone-efflorescences.pdf

Morgan Kelly, ‘The Dynamics of Smithian Growth,’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112, no. 3 (August, 1997), 939-964. https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucn/oapubs/10197-521.html

Tjalling C. Koopmans, ‘Measurement Without Theory,’ The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Aug., 1947), pp. 161-172. https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/ec439/koop1.pdf

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume I, Integration on the Mainland, Cambridge University Press, [2003] 2010.

Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia and the Islands, Cambridge University Press, [2009] 2013.

Debin Ma, ‘Rock, scissors, paper: the problem of incentives and information in traditional Chinese state and the origin of Great Divergence,’ Economic History Working Papers 37569, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History, 2011. https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/WorkingPapers/Economic-History/2011/WP152.pdf

Debin Ma & Jared Rubin, ‘The Paradox of Power: Principal-agent problems and administrative capacity in Imperial China (and other absolutist regimes),’ Journal of Comparative Economics, (2019), 47(2), 277-294. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/212/

Jacques Melitz, & Anthony Edo, ‘The Primary Cause of European Inflation in 1500-1700: Precious Metals or Population? The English Evidence,’ CEPR Discussion Papers 14023, 2019. https://www.cepii.fr/PDF_PUB/wp/2019/wp2019-10.pdf

John H. Munro, ‘Review of Fischer, David Hackett, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History,’ EH.Net, H-Net Reviews, February, 1999. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2828

Tuan-Hwee Sng, ‘Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850,’ Explorations in Economic History, Volume 54, 2014, 107-127. https://conference.nber.org/confer/2011/CE11/Sng.pdf

Scott Sumner, The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Independent Institute, 2015.

For a horrifying number of people in our modern, highly bureaucratised, highly regulated, highly taxed, highly subsidised societies, the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens to them if they are wrong.

Note, this is different from the question of: did you follow the correct process? It is relatively easy for failure to follow the correct processes to have consequences. The what-if-you-are-wrong question also applies to: what if you follow the correct process and are wrong?

The question of being wrong has lots of layers. Something can simply block good things from happening, but those good things’ lack of happening is typically invisible.

Economic stagnation is a normal condition of human societies, in large part because what is blocked from happening is invisible. Such has become more visible in the world since the 1820s, as mass prosperity has been demonstrated to be an achievable thing. Compare, for example, the post-2008 economic performance of the UK and much of the EU with, say, the US. But such is more visible only by comparison with other societies—we cannot directly observe good things that are blocked from happening.

Even in the US, comparing the path of median incomes in different postwar periods shows that there has been a fair bit of blocking of good things from happening.

Moreover, comparison does not always resonate. People can not bother to compare or think that the comparisons do not apply. This time will be different has a great deal of wish-fulfilment appeal.

Across so much of modern societies, the what-are-the-consequences-of-being-wrong? question has the horrifying answer of no consequences to the person being wrong. (Real consequences, but very delayed, is not much better.)

I have already discussed this no consequences for being wrong with regard to the universities. But the same point applies across much of the non-profit world, the apparatus of the welfare state, etc. It applies intensely to UN bodies.

The end of the (anti-Soviet) Cold War in 1991 was a pivotal year in so many ways. Until then toxic ideas within Anglo-American academe—and Western academe generally—had inflicted their worst disasters on countries outside Anglo-America. After 1991, those toxic ideas increasingly infected Anglo-America itself. Yes, being packaged as elite status strategies was a key distribution vector, but it is also clear that the lack of an external existential threat, and the multiplication of people who suffered no consequences from being wrong, reached a certain critical mass, undermining the ability and willingness to fight off conveniently wrong toxic ideas.

Not On Your Team, But Always Fair

Great analysis, dreadful framing

Housekeeping: Lorenzo and I will be hosting a paid subscribers only Chatham House rules chat on Tuesday 30th December (morning in the UK, evening in Australia). Among other things, we’ll be discussing this piece and—given both of us are Australian, at least in part—the Bondi Beach Massacre…

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6 months ago · 62 likes · 23 comments · Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby

The other aspect of the what consequences for being wrong? question is: what are the accountability mechanisms applying in practice? The answer is too often some version of: none, attenuated, weak or haphazard. Even if we ask what feedback mechanisms are operating?, it is often unclear that such feedback is grounded in consequences in a positive-for-human-flourishing way.

If you want a picture of bizarre, demented, feedback patterns hidden from any accountability, listen to Dominic Cummings explain how the Human Rights Act and government lawyers generate pervasive dysfunction within British government.

The delegated state

Let us consider what is known as the administrative state. That is, the issue of regulations by autonomous or semi-autonomous government agencies. It represents legislatures delegating legislative power to subordinate bodies.

Well, bodies that are formally subordinate. What accountability mechanisms do such bodies have? Typically, tenuous and somewhat intermittent ones. Some elected official or officials appoint the heads and boards of such agencies, who are presumed to control the organisation. If the agency’s performance attracts public attention—and if mainstream media does not subordinate its coverage to whatever accepting this makes you a good person narratives they are pushing—then there is some active accountability.

Generally, however, not attracting public attention is all you need to continue doing what you are doing. Which, of course, gives disproportionate leverage to those motivated and able to potentially kick up a fuss about what you are doing. Legislative oversight via Congressional hearings or Australian Senate Estimates committees or similar can provide some accountability, but much of that depends on the quality and motivation of the legislators (and their staff) and is intermittent rather than systematic (though the threat of it has some systematic effect).

Now, consider those regulators. How good is their knowledge base likely to be? No matter how conscientious they are, very limited is the answer. How well are they able to calculate the implications of the regulations they issue? Again, to a very limited degree. How quickly will the effects of those regulations show up? Often, very unclear. They can claim endless notional bad things stopped, but the good things stopped will remain invisible.

So, why does China dominate drone production? In part, because the US FCC banned drones operating beyond line of sight. China just builds drones.

Once you think through the knowledge problems of regulators, and add to that the public invisibility—so inadequate accountability—of a lot of such regulatory activity, the chances that the net effect of such regulation is socially positive is … low. After all, a lot of the reason for legislators to delegate regulating is precisely to make such regulation less visible and, as much as possible, not their problem. This overlaps with providing benefits to some constituency in a way that is insulated from the vagaries of future Legislative majorities: which is also insulation from the vagaries of future democratic feedback.

One should always be sceptical of shifting government activity from the more visible and accountable to the less visible and accountable. One should also be sceptical of shifting such decision-making from those who have to weigh up trade-offs across the society to those who have much more narrow considerations.

A case of this being done right is how Australian monetary policy operates via an agreement between the Treasurer (an elected official) and the Governor of the Reserve Bank. But central banks are unusually prominent agencies, inherently subject to a lot of public scrutiny.

Much of the problem with “technocracy” is that it presumes way more knowledge than is actually held by the technocrats; greatly narrows the consideration of trade-offs; and skirts (or worse) the accountability issues. So often, making things “less political” means either pretending one is not making such trade-offs; being very narrow in your consideration of trade-offs; or making trade-offs that do not bear much public scrutiny.

One of the strong patterns in the economic data is the positive connection between economic freedom and mass prosperity and economic growth. That is, the lower the transaction friction in a society—i.e. the easier it is for people to transact with each other—the more prosperous a society is. The lower the transaction friction, the less value-creating things are blocked from happening.

It is eminently possible to have laws that reduce transaction friction, that are transaction-friendly. Indeed, social pacification by the state is a huge boon to transacting. Nevertheless—particularly with detailed and specific regulation issued by subordinate agencies—regulation generally being net transaction-friendly is not the way to bet.

Ask yourself the question: what are the consequences to the regulators of being wrong? Ask the question: how much of the relevant knowledge do they actually have? Ask the question: how well can they calculate the full consequences of any regulation?

Ask yourself those questions, and you become way more sceptical of the regulatory efforts of the administrative state. Ask yourself those questions, and the strong association between economic freedom and economic growth and prosperity makes much more sense.

Being conveniently wrong

Now apply those questions more widely. Think about how many resources are consumed and diverted by people who suffer little or no consequences from being wrong. Think how, if they suffer little or no consequences from being wrong, they might then be conveniently (for them) wrong? Think how many resources can then be diverted to the service of those able to be conveniently wrong (e.g. the homeless-industrial complex).

Much of the malaise of modern societies makes a whole lot more sense if you ask (and answer) those questions. After all, if public health regulators are wrong about, for instance, nutrition guidelines, what are the consequences to the regulators, to the issuers of the guidelines of being wrong? (The US nutrition guidelines have been vastly improved, but the scale of the needed change is revealing in itself. We might also ask whether it is a good idea to have nutrition guidelines at all, given human variation.)1

If nutrition guidelines are wrong in ways that degrades the metabolic health of the population—so drives up public health budgets—how conveniently wrong are those nutrition guidelines likely to be? Especially as we Homo sapiens are very good at being self-deceptive in our own interests, in telling stories to ourselves about our noble motives. We are even better at it if we operate in networks with the same interests and perspectives. We are better still if there are social sanctions for dissenting, or raising awkward questions against, said convenient perspectives.

How many of the mis-steps over Covid were about what was conveniently wrong for the resources, reach, and authority of public health officials? The combined water, power, inflation crises in Iran provides an example of how appallingly dysfunctional a system built on being conveniently wrong can be.

A flourishing society is a balance between law and order; commerce and production; culture and connection. Systems positive for human flourishing systematically turn information into incentives, and incentives into information, in pro-social ways.

State apparats that are both overweening and dysfunctional—where both tendencies increase the other—have become interwoven with a careening techno-commerce without the shared sense of meaning or webs of connection to restrain either. Not least because the universities, publishing, the artistic and literary fields, and mainstream media have been actively sabotaging having such.

This creates societies both flooded with information and starved of it: full of media silos, information bubbles, and structural ignorances—see the above comments by Dominic Cummings. It creates anarcho-tyranny: states and local jurisdictions that are increasingly burdensome on the law-abiding but lax about crime and readily manipulated by organised minorities.

We live in societies that have been multiplying the range and ambit of people who benefit from being conveniently wrong because we increasingly live in societies of complex density with broken feedbacks that shield people from the consequences of being wrong. How many toxic ideas have come out of the academy—and then colonised government, non-profit and corporate bureaucracies—for precisely these reasons?

There are so many examples—all the Trans nonsense to start with, but also DEI and everything else derived from Critical Theory. The mountain of blank slate nonsense taught by the academy leaves people ill-equipped to apply evolutionary reasoning to, for example, imposing selection effects on a virus by targeting a particular protein or the likelihood of emergent phenomena in Artificial Intelligence.

This is not going to end well.

ADDENDUM: A post making similar points from a systems analysis perspective.

DataRepublican’s Substack

Minnesota as a Systems Failure

In my upcoming book (preorders open next week), I argue that late-stage empires do not fail because they are weak or poorly intentioned. They fail because they become autopoietic…

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5 months ago · 442 likes · 14 comments · DataRepublican

References

Sean P. Alvarez, Vincent Geloso, Macy Scheck, ‘Economic Freedom Matters A Lot More for Economic Development Than You Think!,’ George Mason University Department of Economics, Working Paper No. 23-14. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4368623

Joana Araujo, Jianwen Cai and June Stevens, ‘Prevalence of Optimal Metabolic Health in American Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2009–2016,’ Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, Volume 17, Number 1, 2019, 46–52. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30484738/

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Murray J. Horn, The Political Economy of Public Administration: Institutional Choice in the Public Sector, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, 1999.

Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, [1980] 1996.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.