The hopeful possibility is that the internet has become a new vehicle for cultural novelty through a kind of sympatric speciation, however, the internet seems to be mostly a standardizing technology, and AI certainly is as well, so it seems the world is likely going to become less weird with time, and I can’t think of a non-painful way to thwart this trend.

A month ago I was on the precipice of graduating from my bachelor’s, and, with a humid April thunderstorm nearly above me, went for a walk for one of the last times in my city. I was thinking about allopatric speciation, and I realized something awful about modern and future art.

So, you might be wondering what allopatric speciation is. I love this concept. The famous example is Darwin’s finches travelling from South America to the Galapagos Islands, blossoming into dozens of new species. A more romantic example is the story of heroic African monkeys holding on for life to driftwood heading west in the Atlantic Ocean, soon to land on the shores of the Amazon and bloom into dozens of amazing new species, like spider monkeys!

Allopatric speciation is, like many things in evolutionary theory, merely a name for a concept that is deeply intuitive to us all already. When you split a population in two, either by an ocean or a mountain range or something else, you restrict gene flow, and so they start to drift genetically as they adjust to their differing environmental stimuli. When they have evolved to the point where even if reunited, they wouldn’t be able to interbreed, then they are officially two new species. This is the main reason we have so much genetic diversity on Earth.

On the walk, I realized you could apply this to cultural evolution, too. (I thank Robin Hanson for his work on cultural drift for getting me in the right headspace to make this realization) A delightful first example came to my mind, from a literal island!

Jamaican slaves descended from a musical culture that, post-migration, they had little or no informational linkage with. What followed was 4 centuries of musical evolution (along with many other cultural elements, like cuisine and norms) that “naturally selected” (culturally selected?) towards a different target than their parent culture. Why? The environmental stimuli were not the same in both West Africa and Jamaica! So, for 400 years they both kept evolving in different directions, and by 2026, they have both created very different music. Thus, the wonderful musical innovation you see above.

But as the thunderstorm approached, I realized something else. Imagine if the meteor that killed the dinosaurs flattened the whole earth, and dried all the oceans up too, and for sake of example, all tectonic activity ceased (so new mountains would never be formed), so in other words, the Earth just became one flat field of grass. This would kill allopatric speciation! In other words, the standardization of environmental stimuli would be terrible for genetic diversity, and 99% of all the wonderful mammalian species that sprang up after the dinosaurs would never exist. I hate to use this word, but wouldn’t that be boring!

You can see where I’m going now. As I look around me, there isn’t much topographical variety left. The oceans have dried up, the mountains have been flattened into hills, and even the hills that do exist today are being continually sanded down in new and inventive ways by the smartest people in the world.

We as a species have tirelessly worked for the whole of human history to increase our interconnectedness, and thus reduce allopatric speciation. (with a few exceptions, such as the Tokugawa shogunate during the Edo period, and Donald Trump today) But humans love trade. Other hominins have nothing on our love of travelling long distances just to barter. Even the shogunate couldn’t resist human connectivity, as they kept allowing Dutch and Chinese trade through Nagasaki, and implicitly enjoyed the past connectivity that brought Japan Buddhism, noodles, and cannons. Similarly, Trump loves Eastern European women.

Even though we’ve been trading with each other for tens of thousands of years, the last 300 have seen an incredible increase in information flow across space, and this has led to an extreme standardization of our environmental stimuli. All over the world, we drive similar cars on similar roads to similar office buildings while listening to similar music on our similar phones and so on. Yes Europeans shop at slightly different grocery stores, but even that, like everything else, is drifting towards universal optimality, otherwise known as Costco.

It’s not just our physical surroundings, but also our informational inputs have become more homogenized across space, a relatively new phenomenon thanks to the printing press, internet, and now AI, to be reductive. I won’t go through the examples again because you get the point. The gap between you and a Korean person, or you and someone just 50 miles away from your home village, 500 years ago, or even 10,000 years ago, is much smaller now.

This is annoying. Allopatric speciation is awesome. Genetic allopatric speciation plus clever plant breeding created chili peppers, and thanks to cultural allopatric speciation, the Méxica, isolated from the old world, created a beautiful, unique and inventive cuisine built around chilis. But if Pangea still existed, all humans would have just universally adopted whatever crop scaled the best. We’d likely just see the massive, optimized farming of Eurasian wheat and cattle, instead of the laborious process of cultivating teosinte or tomatoes or many types of beans into their modern versions, without which we would never have Mole poblano…

Of course, more examples, such as Jamaican musical innovations mentioned above, or even just trivially the language of Iceland itself, would not exist, or be much much less unique, if information flows were smoothed over.

With almost everything about our species becoming more standardized, we would expect cultural creativity and inventiveness to decrease, and fundamentally for the world to become less weird. Too bad.

The economist's argument

But competition has increased tremendously, and also scale. This should increase quality, and if creativity is part of quality, then creativity will be incentivized and should increase. Also, increased immigration should be leading to more creative outputs as well. More immigration should inject weird combinations of culture which should result in weirder products, (Tex-Mex or Jewish American media)

And then there’s another part of me that is just wacking myself in the head reading the first part of this essay. Obviously, connectivity is good! Isolation isn’t! For example, recently I learned that the statues of the Buddha you see everywhere only exist because of pockets of Greeks hoplites in India in the wake of Alexander the Great’s invasion. Western India, after the breakup of Alexander’s empire was still Hellenistic; even their first major Buddhist king, Menander I, was of Greek descent. Greeks being Greeks, when Buddhism made contact with their culture, they decided to make statues of The Buddha in human form, as opposed to the only symbolic works of art Buddhists had made of him before.

These statues caught on, and spread all the way across Asia to Japan, and even now to a little outdoor coffee shop in California where I’m writing this!

Examples like this show how connectivity is awesome for artistic innovation. Reggae would have never existed without rhythm and blues on the radio and electric guitars and keyboards being imported, for another example.

Okay, perhaps I can resolve the disagreement this way. Artistic variety goes down whenever information flows increase, that seems obvious to me. Even if you give isolated hunter-gatherers the technology to create oil paint, they might make some really inventive paintings, but overall cultural variety has decreased, since tool use has become more homogenous. The hunter-gatherers have created new art, but are culturally closer to us now. The more we reduce the frictions of information, the closer they will get to us, since a big point of human connectivity, what makes us us, is our ability (and desire) to copy optimal cultural traits.

However, while variety may be decreasing, might quality be rising? What I mean is quality in human outputs such as medicine, engineering, agriculture, and science in general. For art it’s a bit harder because quality means a lot of different things to people, but going by the definition of taste I outlined in my last couple of blog posts, higher connectivity increases scale, so that means more iteration, and so more people with different perspectives can relisten over generations to, for example, classical musicians, and thus can confirm or modify the status of a composer or work, and determine quality. Also, having more groups of humans increases the frequency of debate over axioms/assumptions, quickening the rinsing out of ‘‘bad’’ assumptions. I would recommend reading the blog post below to get a better idea of how I conceptualize artistic quality.

In short, increasing the amount of people in a market will make it more efficient.

For a simpler argument, it would be quite strange if connectivity improved our ability to create everything else besides art, so it seems likely art gets better with connectivity as well. You would assume, for example, that cooking would improve with better tools, similarly with architecture and painting too. Better tools simply allow the artist to better execute the vision in their mind, so connectivity hardly seems to make things worse.

But here’s a problem: In my posts on art, and generally the last few months, I’ve been thinking about markets from the point of view of the buyers. But what if I thought about it from the seller’s point of view?

Stay with me here. What happens to financial markets when they become perfectly efficient: Active trading (exploring for weird stocks) stops being profitable. Everyone just buys the Index Fund (an average aggregate of the whole market).

What happens when a market for art production becomes perfectly efficient? In other words, when do producers know exactly what consumers want? The more perfect information an artist has, the less they explore, and the more they just execute the optimal formula. Marvel Phase 3 is a flawlessly optimized Cinematic Index Fund. (Of course this requires an implicit assumption that consumer demand affects artists’ outputs, however, that assumption is trivially true.) (as another aside, many artists, some of which I know personally or some I’ve just heard written about, seem to purposefully avoid high artistic connectivity for a fear of the accidental imitation/homogenizing of their own music, which is evidence for this point.)

If you’d like (and I do like), we can include originality or weirdness or inventiveness in art quality, which is why someone could write just as well as Shakespeare today but not be as great, because there is a first-mover effect on quality. If we include this, then contra what I was writing earlier, it seems quality decreases with connectivity!

But what about Jazz and Birria tacos! C’mon, there’s got to be more to this. Connectivity seems so good for art, at a certain margin at least.

That’s it! The answer to this tension, presented by Tyler Cowen: marginal thinking.

So we have two variables, quality and weirdness/variety, which both change in opposite ways when information flow/standardization of environmental stimuli increase. The solution? Solve for the equilibrium!

And that is: New Orleans, circa 1890.

I will nickname this equilibrium of variety and quality, an artistic margin. Before I explain what an artistic margin is, let’s discuss Black American macro-genre musical inventiveness in the last 150 years.

Intermission

We have seen a fall in Black American musical genre invention in the last 50 years.

And why is this, you might skeptically ask? (To really seal the horse in the coffin at this point) because of a standardization of environmental stimuli, of course! What makes this such a good example is that, like all Americans, Black Americans in the last 50 years became more globally homogenous thanks to the internet, greater ease of travel, trade, and so forth, but also because of the special element of structural racism. In other words, Black Americans have uniquely and more intensely standardized in the last 100 years because they were coming down from a much higher point of allopatric speciation than the rest of America in the 20th century.

Due to racism, Black Americans had their own institutions like churches, clubs, radio labels, and so forth. They were quite distant from the mainstream of America. However, they were an interesting case of allopatric speciation, because unlike the finches of the Galapagos or the humans who crossed the Bering Strait, Black Americans still had a relatively high information flow with the rest of the world, especially the rest of the cultures within the United States and to a lesser extent places like Mexico and the Caribbean. They could still get access to innovations happening in other “islands”. If you’re interested, I recommend reading this blog post for a fun example of that information flow producing great art:

Creative Frontiers

The 1925 New Tech That Let a Legend Invent a New Sound

He needed one more tune for the recording session at Okeh Records. Dinner was almost ready, his mother was at the stove, and he sat down at her table to “scratch out” something fast. But this song had to be different. There was a new technology in recording that many were criticizing, but what if he could take advantage of it and create a whole new soun…

Read more

6 months ago · 14 likes · John A.C. Hardin, Ph.D.

Of course, one could look at the Chicago electric blues scene making use of new electric guitars, or the genre of ragtime being invented thanks in part to European pianos and sheet music. But the best example is of course the greatest American art invention of all time, jazz. And jazz is really such an exemplary melting pot of connectivity. We’ve got past Black American genres like blues, ragtime, gospel, and overall West African music theory, (you can thank it for the focus on rhythm) then European instruments, harmonies, brass bands and military/parade music, and European music theory, (more of a focus on melody, which jazz also has in spades) then Caribbean and Afro-Cuban rhythms, and finally the dance halls and musical entertainment industry in New Orleans helped shape the performance style. I don’t care what anyone says about hunter-gatherer cave paintings in France, ancient Egyptian food, or native Pacific Northwest architecture. Jazz beats all, and it’s thanks to the greater connectivity of New Orleans compared to those other places, but specifically, New Orleans being an artistic margin, and them not.

You can now guess what I mean by that. An artistic margin is an edge of a larger system that is separated enough to develop its own cultural inventions, but connected enough to recombine outside influences. Total isolation leads to stagnation; total integration leads to homogenization; but the pressured edge creates hyper-innovation. The Black American art margin in the 20th century was extraordinarily inventive because of segregation, the informational constraints facing all North Americans at the time, the path dependence of West African norms around music, the opportunity cost being lower for ambitious creatives to go into music than other ventures (because of segregation). And for completeness sake of the model, there were also scale effects. There was a huge internal market for Black Americans, much bigger than say Black people in the UK in the 20th century. To make another analogy to biology, the margin cannot be too small because genetic diversity will be too low (inbreeding). The larger the margin, the more opportunity for genetic diversity. Thus, Jamaica is also a margin, but smaller, and so has less musical variety than Black Americans in the United States.

Because Black Americans inhabited such a unique and large art margin in the 20th century, we saw perhaps the most musical creativity of all time. Genre after genre was invented, sometimes multiple within a single decade.

To invent rock, soul, revolutionize the genre of jazz with bebop, and then invent hip hop, funk, and disco, all within 3 decades, is a ridiculously spectacular creative run, one that I doubt will ever be anywhere near matched by any group in any field of artistic human achievement. The chart above does almost nothing to really put it into perspective. One could listen for a lifetime to just one of these genres. Jesus Christ! One could listen for a lifetime to just James Brown….

But this gives you a taste of how important an art margin can be for hitting that perfect equilibrium of information flow without becoming overly homogenous.

Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning of this detour, Black American macro-genre innovation has decreased substantially. No, this does not mean innovation isn’t occurring, but to say that it is occurring at the same clip as the mid 20th century, especially macro-genre invention, is, I think, foolish. Black American music is still high quality, I’m just arguing it’s inventiveness has gone down. My preferred explanation is that, like all over the world, allopatric speciation has been relatively extinguished. Since the flow of culture (genes) is less inhibited, there are not “new” populations to add culture flow (gene flow) to to create novel combinations. There are no new populations. It’s really just one population now. The Mississippi Delta used to be an island. NYC was an island, LA, NO, etc. All that is gone now, and so macro-genre invention has been depressed.

The Mormon Argument

Mormons are a margin with a large population, yet seem in the 20th to be quite uninventive? My answer to this would be that cultural evolution fundamentally relies on mutation coming from purposeful deviation and mistakes. In jazz or early hip-hop, rule-breaking was the opposite of punished; it was often rewarded. But Mormons strongly selected against cultural deviation in the 20th century to build a unified, high-trust, safe community. Why this is would take a post of it’s own, but of course, this objection reveals that I am not saying the margin theory predicts all artistic variance, just that it predicts a lot! But you need more variables, like cultural cautiousness, perhaps. I will also say, the Mormons were less of a margin, since they didn’t face nearly as much segregation.

So, to wrap up, I believe that variety and connectiveness are negatively related, but quality and connectiveness are positively related, up to a point (the art margin) and then past that point, quality actually begins to decrease. You can see this play out with Black American genre invention, but for a less dramatic example, you can also see this with cinema. As the market became more efficient (thanks to repeated iteration and a clear target of profitability to optimize towards) and information environments became standardized, cinema companies moved towards marvalization, and film creators became less inventive. In other words, cinema companies started taking less risks, and made fewer mistakes than they used to, and film became less weird because everyone was consuming the same stuff, relative to the past. It has made movie marketing more formulaic, and in the process, made consumers happier, but reduced quality (since we agree that inventiveness/creativity should be part of quality). You can also see this in the NBA. Over time, the market for NBA strategy became more efficient, and thus, more formulaic. Most prefer a high-scoring league, some don’t. Personally, I don’t know if the shift towards the standardization of offensive strategies has made it worse or better, we may not be at equilibrium yet. But the farther we travel up the curve the higher the chance things will start to get too predictable in the NBA for me.

Academia has also followed this trend. I remember in a recent podcast with Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan, Robin remarking how unfortunate it is that academia has devalued creativity and risk-taking relative to the early 20th century. I think my theory explains why. Global citations, strict publishing rubrics, and the universalizing of English as the language of science means, for example, you can now quickly combine an idea from Tokyo with a data set from Berkeley, or in other words, science has become more high-quality thanks to connectivity, but the standardization of the domain has led to a decrease in eccentric weirdos creating whole new ideas in somewhat isolation. This doesn’t perfectly explain the change in norms around how much we value creativity in academia, (not nearly enough!) but it does explain why it isn’t as creative as it used to be. The universities of the world have all optimized towards becoming one global monoculture.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this threshold point for quality of art. They might be with me for most of the article, but they might negate the premise and say no cinema is as creative as ever, Black American macro-genre creation is as creative as ever, or they might say fine, they’re less inventive, but degree of connection is just a small factor among many, or something else I can’t think of.

This is a conceptual argument which I use illustrative examples for, and if you have specific problems with those examples, then comment and we can debate it, although I would think they would be intuitive. I’m not saying it explains all the variance of art quality, but simply that connectivity creates a pressure toward standardization, and this pressure helps explain why many domains (not just art, but also art) have become more optimized and formulaic over time.

This is probably a bit confusing, so to illustrate what I’m talking about here, I made this graph while I was writing this post in the cafe.

Yeah it’s pretty trash, so I thought about just having Claude make me one, but I decided why not make it myself with my dad’s painting supplies. AI is a standardizing technology anyways, so why not try to make the world a little weirder.

So the axes are quantity for the y, and I forgot to write a C for connectivity for the x axis. The W stands for weirdness or variety, and the red curve is the quality of everything, except for when art splits off it in pink, after which red becomes every human endeavour besides art (the double e stands for: Quality of everything else), and the pink is just the quality of art for the world. As I wrote above, you can see that after a threshold point of connectiveness, quality for everything else, like science and engineering, keeps increasing, but art diverges and begins to decrease in quality. You don’t want novelty and surprise for surgical equipment, for the most part, thus the deviation. New Orleans in the late 19th century, early 20th, would be around that maximum point on the pink curve.

On the right, you can see that once the weirdness line hits zero (everyone is exactly alike and operating optimally), then art hits a lower bound (point on the dotted line) since technique is still high. That flat line is simply the quality of art minus any originality or inventiveness, in a completely connected world. So all we have are perfect Hendrix, Monet, and Chekhov imitators.

On the top left, you could imagine we have a world of hunter-gatherers in complete isolation who are inventive but stagnant across time, and lack the tools to create higher quality outputs like jazz or impressionism. This will be the most weird and inventive for the world, however, since each is completely unique from each other. No world could be more diverse than this one.

Honestly this is quite a simple graph, and it’s pretty easy to poke holes in it. (don’t be so violent though, the canvas was expensive) For example, the art margin is a kind of complicated idea that doesn’t fit well into this simple graph. The art margin seems to have about 5 main variables, being the thickness of the margin, (how high the information barriers are) how open and risk-tolerant the receiving culture is to new cultures, how productive the margin’s neighbors are in terms of copyable cultural inventions, how large the internal market is, and, like the infant industry argument for government sponsored firms, the margin needs a period of relative seclusion where the art form can grow into it’s potential before becoming paratized and monotized by the larger culture.

I know all this seems like a black pill for art in the future, because it’s obvious that connectivity will only increase. However, I present:

The creativity of MAGA argument

In biology, there is a second, much rarer way for new species to be created, which is called sympatric speciation. This occurs when a new species evolves from a single ancestral species while inhabiting the exact same geographic region, and I think it is becoming our main new vehicle for generating novelty.

By classifying all legacy media (CNN, the NYT, academia, Hollywood…) as either evil or bought out, and rampantly conspiring about satanic pedophile rings and pizzagate, the MAGA culture movement was able to successfully alienate itself from the standardized information environment, all while occupying the same geographical spaces as us. This was all orchestrated of course using the internet, specifically on “islands” like QAnon and 4chan.

And now you have it! We’ve got finches on the Galapagos again. These people have voluntarily cut themselves off from the mainstream information environment, and they’ve got radically different norms. (selection pressures) Cultural drift begins. And you can’t argue MAGA hasn’t been inventive.

Here’s a glossary of various slang and invented terms that people in the QAnon movement use. Apparently in Q-lore, North Korea was controlled by the CIA but has now been liberated by Trump and the Q team. Below we have an example of a post from a more famous anon called Victory of the Light, a predecessor and influence on the famous Q, detailing what will occur after “The Event”.

A now famous user named Q took this culture and rode with it, writing what is basically a new 21st century art form, kind of like a serialized novel through short posts, memes, and youtube videos, and also, the novel itself is built in real time with the community. A lot of people seem to believe it’s actually not a novel, and is true, and some who just read it for pleasure. Its core plot is described well by this article.

With the aid of a small group of military intelligence officers called the Q team (one or more of whom is supposedly responsible for writing the drops), President Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophiles who are conspiring to obstruct and overthrow him. The military will arrest them en masse in an event called “the Storm.” The cabal’s membership has grown in the telling (at first, it was “many in our government;” within a month, any “celebs” who had “supported HRC” might very well be in on it; a few months later, there were too many to fit into Guantanamo Bay; later still, three other “detention centers [were] being prepped”), but it would be fair to say that virtually anyone who’s angered or defied President Trump is considered part of the cabal, along with the usual suspects like financier and philanthropist George Soros.

There are also many actual serialized novels that have been written over time within the movement, some of which describe a world where Donald Trump actually won the election, but through a series of events I don’t really get, “allowed” Biden to be a puppet, even while staying in charge of the military, commanding the intelligence apparatus, and apparently all the while waiting to reveal the truth.

So I know this seems bad, but on the other hand, we have the rationalist community!

Lots of not only inventive but really spectacular works of human genius have flowered from this island, including the somewhat founding canon of The Sequences, then, a list of it’s own much superior (to MAGA) slang and phrases, some of which I love and use daily, Eliezer’s famously weird Harry Potter rationalist fanfiction, this other work of interesting fiction that has seemingly turned into a roleplay universe, and also this piece of visual and storytelling art about AI existential risk, which I find cute. I also really enjoy their cultural norms, especially how highly they prize AI, AI safety, prediction markets, and probability theory.

We can keep going, but the point is that the internet is both a standardizing and sympatric technology, and so there is a bit of hope for humanity’s creativity. It’s good on net that groups which would have speciated can now do so because of the internet. MAGA has, of course, been an overall toxic force in the world, but I only use that example because 1) it proves dramatically that the internet is a sympatric technology, and 2) the movement is both interesting and occasionally funny anthropologically.

Unfortunately, the internet seems to be mostly an anti-allopatric technology, and it seems AI is most likely a homogenizing technology as well, and it’s an easy bet that people will become wealthier with time, and travel will become more accessible with each decade. Roon on this point:

renaissance rationalization is a process that commodified itself rapidly: despite the europeans discovering most technology during the early modern period it spread everywhere within a few centuries, and the rate of spread has been increasing dramatically

knowledge of the scientific frontier dissipates around the world faster as science has enabled better communication technologies. it’s getting even faster with INTELLIGENCE technologies which actually explain themselves and help you build them

as we approach more powerful intelligence, the ability to train powerful models is self commodifying rather than building a huge and runaway advantage for a handful of recursive self improvers. this is one reason why you should expect almost all of the benefits of superintelligence to be captured by the public

Generally, I’m confident that we will keep on our 100,000 year trend of greater interconnection, which for science is all well and good, but for or art? Colour me skeptical. Actually, just prove me wrong in the comments! I’m uncomfortably pessimistic that the world will become less weird. Wake me back up to my natural state of optimism, please.

1. Ben Sasse, former US senator and a smiling dignant boulder against the violent seas, is interviewed by Ross Douthat on Day 72 of his terminal cancer diagnosis. Beautiful, so funny, too.

2. ‘I Didn’t Know I Could Feel This Way’ by Freddie DeBoer. Just as beautiful. On life not death, though some of that. It swells the heart.

3. The 17-year mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin’s, identity gets solved by John Carreyrou in the NYT, who goes to El Salvador to confront him with the evidence.

4. There are these ‘transient luminous events’ that occur above thunder storms and they beggar belief. They’re also just one section of this masterwork video covering the world’s strangest lightning.

   

5. Joe Heath introducing the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, who passed last month and is the philosopher most held up alongside Rawls as the great political thinker of the past fifty years. “Like many Germans of his generation, his work was haunted by the specter of totalitarianism. In Habermas’ specific interpretation this took two forms, which we can think of as Orwell’s nightmare and Kafka’s nightmare.”

6. And speaking of John Rawls, a fable/short story…

7. Conan O’Brien goes on The Rest is History and breezes through the full story of The Beatles with Tom Holland, both of them sitting inside Abbey Road, in 90 minutes.

8. Only a small number of people (~15% of quality grads) should take up the EA project of ‘earning to give’.

9. Erramatti Mangamma gave birth at age 74(!) to twins(!!) - from a very good and warm Works in Progress article on the underrated efficacy of freezing your eggs.

10. ‘Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English’ [CWT] - my favourite in a while.

11. And Henry Oliver on how he memorizes poetry, a practice I can happily recommend.

12. The story of the airman being rescued from Iran. Bound to be a movie at some point, and these writers doubtlessly have the best beat at the Times.

13. In awe of this peak propaganda coming from Tehran. So well done.

    

14. The Right To Giant Congress (6,641 representatives, to be exact). And our piece from the archives on the perils of electoral reform.1

15. We wrote about prediction markets and defended their epistemic value, but declined to uncover in those pieces the most thrilling market I’ve ever seen: Bitcoin Up or Down in the Next 5 Minutes?

16. Approximately one year ago we blogged about the possibility we are living through the Hinge of History. As Dylan Matthews writes, ‘The AI people have been right a lot’ and the plateau view considered in the article today seems pretty untenable.

17. A 7-minute study in rhetoric, which is much neglected these days.

18. The wisdom of Robert Frost, here on video.

19. Include the ‘State School Upper Middle Class’ in your models.

20. Kagan and Alito on why we shouldn’t bring video into the Supreme Court. This house agrees. People act differently on camera. You can listen to all of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments with an annotated transcript on screen here (this channel is a big public good).

21. 514-415 by Bells Larsen. A folk song, I guess? And the acoustic version, which is how I prefer it performed. This song has a fascinating backstory to discover.

22. Let flood green into the heart’s fresh gaps;

    Refill ambition and the body it saps.

    

    ---

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Nobody is encouraged to send me emails like this. I do not appreciate the E.E. Cummings schtick, nor the effortful string of emojis. Especially coming from Google, now the second biggest company on earth. Gemini did not cook on ad copy.

That said, it’s pretty obvious that it could cook up a decent CV. I’ve seen it do so for a number of friends and there aren’t really drawbacks to having it make things look good and help drill down on what’s relevant to include. The hours-long process of tailoring things to every role is now much quicker and a good deal of guff has been removed, painlessly.

Those who are doing this well will have a temporary advantage as everyone adjusts to the new equilibrium. They’ll get more interviews at the margin. Life will be a little easier. And then the jig will be up, everyone will be doing it.

So interviews will become the new hiring mechanism. They’ll be easier to conduct en masse because employers can have Claude Mythos run the Zoom calls, take notes, and make decision based on a conversation with their interview bot. But then the savvy will train up AI versions of themselves to attend the interviews and give the best possible answers. Eventually everyone will be doing that too. Another jig’s up.

This is a cycle of signal death. Everyone wants to communicate to prospective employers how good they are and so there’s an ever-increasing supply of resumes as their price heads to zero, which increasingly looks like the equilibrium outcome. Everyone will be able to make a thousand tailored CVs and send them to every interesting opening and there won’t be much of a way to tell them apart. Signal becomes noise.

How do you get back the signal?

One option is to do a digital version of blue book testing, which is many people’s preferred solution to the AI-in-education ‘crisis’. You’d figure out a way to do it like the Remote LSAT or something, where Mythos is carefully proctoring every applicant, unblinkingly, as they peck nervously away at their keyboard. Instead of ever sending in an application, you’d just enlist to take the hiring test on xx/xx/xxxx and any job search would just be a series of similar tests.

Perhaps that will work. Perhaps people will find ways to send their AI selves into those testing spaces too. If they don’t, what they’re left with is a new kind of system stress, not like the old stress, which will reward a different set of people. Out with LinkedIn-maxxing and in with cool, clutch heads.

That’s (generally) a good trait to have, but it’s also establishing it independently from tool use. If Mythos (or whatever AI you think attains these capabilities) can conduct interviews and proctor tests, surely it’s going to be used on the job. So what’s the use of measuring applicant efficacy without tool assistance? Surely some very capable people will be badly-suited to tools and thus less desirable than less capable people who are naturals. Employers aren’t hiring for cosmic merit.

Before I speculate on another option for getting back to signal, I want to float an idea. What seems clear to me is that any output internal to the hiring process is either going to be highly noisy because of AI (CVs, online interviews, open-book tests) or emitting the wrong signal because avoiding AI (in-person interviews, closed-book tests). The solution will require going to outputs external to the hiring process.

One classic option on the table that does this is looking at the applicants past portfolio of work. If I was a film director putting together an original soundtrack, I’d know exactly what I was getting quality-wise if I hired Jonny Greenwood or Trent Reznor. Regardless of what tools they used, they made what they made and can probably do something like it again.

What would it mean for someone in payroll to have a portfolio though? Maybe more professions become portfolio-based. That could work. It’s also true that most aren’t today, so most people don’t have portfolios.

Or do they?

These are my recent chats in ChatGPT and Claude. They are what they are. At this point there’s a trail of these on both services going back three(?) years. Taken in screenshots like this, they are not very informative at all. But as a time-series body of data on my interests, attitudes, habits, and ability to work with these tools, it’s probably the most informative such thing in existence.

That body of data is my portfolio. Everyone who uses the AIs has a portfolio of thought.

Now, I’m not saying we just turn over everyone’s chats with their Claude therapist to every company they might be interested in working for. Privacy is totally dying, but this needn’t speed it along. Instead, OpenAI or Anthropic could let you export a certified cognitive profile in the same way they made those fun Spotify wrapped-style moodboards based on your chats for the year. This would strip out the HIPAA stuff you don’t owe your employer.

Because there will be so much information to parse through, the full cognitive portfolio would be examined by an employer’s Mythos, with the executive summary passed on to the dude making hiring decisions. They can then ask some follow-up questions to Mythos and get basically a full picture of everything they’d want to know.

Hiring is saved.

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Derek Parfit has come under fire for spending too much time in the weeds addressing objections.1 I can’t end up like that. For this reason, I’ll just address a couple.

There’s good old Goodhart—we make a measure (your chat history) a target and people turn it into a bad measure by optimizing for it. In the more straightforward case, where you just begin asking more intelligent questions about more interesting subject matter, I think we should admit that this is good for people; akin to how it’s good that people end up taking a survey English course to get their degree that’s become 90% target and 10% measure. But this isn’t quite the college case, since there people try to optimize for a degree and end up taking a great deal of trivia alongside their Shakespeare. People trying to optimize their chat history will have to do so by… sharpening their thinking. How well they do at this is itself useful signal. Goodhart’s Law is on our side.

There is also a less straightforward and wholesome version of this objection.

So we’ve spent this article imagining AI good enough to perfect CVs, stage immaculate realistic interview performances, and perform economically important tasks with human supervision. If that’s what we’re running with, why not expect the AI to be able to spin up sock puppet Claude accounts filled with fake histories aimed solely at convincing that Mythos hiring bot to praise their human to the head hiring honcho?

More and more AIs will collect IDs in the future I suspect, so that’s one response. Maybe only ID’d accounts get to commission a certified portfolio. There’s also the sheer computational effort of running servers for years on end to produce a convincingly time-stamped fake that looks errant and human throughout. The CVs and interview performances are one-shot tasks, basically. The capabilities required to complete the many, many shot task of essentially faking a life should be much more robust. Once hired, there’s also the matter of continuing to carry off the fraud. It’s a very uphill battle.

Bringing things back to earth for the next one: what about all the people for whom their ChatGPT history is actually not a very good signal at all? I mean, I have one friend who until two weeks ago didn’t even have a Claude subscription. I have other friends who still primarily talk to other humans. Yet more who have probably never queried the AI about anything but their college papers.

To this I say two things.

First, that is still a signal. You don’t use the latest technology. Maybe there’s other evidence about you that can be used to assess whether you’d be good at adapting to the tools if asked to on the job; maybe not. You could imagine a really hipster employer smiling upon a submitted cognitive portfolio that indicates very little engagement with AI.

And second, we’re clearly still in the transitional stage of AI uptake. Sure, lots of us aren’t using it every single day. We’re still at the point where it’s mundane day-to-day utility isn’t obvious to everyone. But Mythos is coming. Then its successor. Then its. So on and so on. Everyone will be using it, more and more, and you’re looking at a gradual phasing into the new hiring order as the share of AI-natives advances across time.2

Okay, that should cover the worthy objections. Time to start optimizing for the future of hiring: ask more questions, frame them better and more precisely, throw out more weird hypotheticals, and keep an open mind.3

It’s so interesting that there is remarkable convergence in film reviews and ethics or even ice cream flavours, yet sometimes two people will walk out of a theatre and have completely opposite takes on a movie. Why does this never happen in math? What does the dreaded phrase “Well, it’s just an opinion” even mean? I really desired to systematize this whole realm of debate without appealing to some hubristic “objective” truth, like many moral or aesthetic philosophers do. If you haven’t yet read it, here is my post where I sketch my theory of what’s happening here, appealing to a coherence view of truth and a 3 variable model of operationalizability, verification infrastructure, and incentives. At first I thought it was so cool to explain it all through just incentives, but I needed to add measurability for it to be a good model. Anyway, if successful, I can explain all of these phenomena simply through conflicting assumptions within the tradition!

However, I’ve hit a snag with my theory. Thus, part 2.

Back 7 months ago, Tyler Cowen recorded a podcast about Bach with Evan Goldfine. Tyler said something I thought was really really interesting, but it was quickly glossed over with another question. I frequently have this problem with podcasts. Interesting lines of questioning are just incessantly washed away by the tide of witty questions. Anyway, this is what he said:

Evan Goldfine: Okay, so, so 15, 20 minutes, you get the deal. 40 minutes maybe? So, so how does that play into your music listening, especially with serious music?

Do you, do you get a flavor and leave, do repeats make you nuts? What’s your consumption function on those pieces?

Tyler Cowen: Well, there’s a big difference. So I think you more or less know in advance what is good. So one belief I hold is that every composer considered to be great is indeed great, that the critical market for classical music is remarkably efficient.

And the people who would be called the best, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, they are the best. And you really just can’t argue it that much. So someone like Schoenberg who took me a while to appreciate, I knew he was the most important and best composer of atonal music, so I just kept on listening. I knew I’d get there, I did.

And there’s no uncertainty. Or as a movie, you can read reviews, but it’s like you know more than the reviewers often. And if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. Don’t necess. You don’t usually have some historical reason for wanting to know what the movie’s about. You would with some films like Citizen [00:14:00] Kane, but say, that’s great anyway.

The critical market for classical music is remarkably efficient! What a delightfully weird and fresh statement. (Yes I know, it is an Outrageous Fortune cliche at this point to profess our love for Tyler Cowen.)

But as lovely as he is, Tyler has now created a problem for my model! (Unfortunately: Cowen’s 1st law)

If you forget from my first post, I explain convergence in traditions like so:

1. Operationalizability: Can many parts of the tradition have testable criteria for truth? Mathematics and physics score high here, film criticism scores low.

2. Verification infrastructure: (Interestingly wine tasting scores higher than ice cream tasting, simply because there are more adjudication bodies.)

3. And finally stakes: Do incentives push traditions to build and maintain the first two parts?

Classical music criticism scores low on 1, 2, and 3. Below, you can see it slots nicely into point 4.

1. High measurability + high stakes: strong convergence (aviation safety, formal engineering).

2. High measurability + low stakes: marginally lower convergence without pressure (puzzles, chess).

3. Low measurability + high stakes: polarization and use of authority (law, ethics, policy).

4. Low measurability + low stakes: pluralism and taste (film, food & fashion).

Yet it’s true, classical music has remarkable convergence, and feels more objective than food or fashion or film. However, another puzzle: modern film criticism might seem pretty subjective, but classical film criticism feels much different, and doesn’t seem like it deserves to be in 4 either. It feels like it should be in the company of classical music and ethics rather than fashion, for example. I still agree with Cowen that it is marginally less efficient than classical though. So we have three problems. (1) I can’t explain why pre-modern classical and film shouldn’t be in 4, (2) why their modern equivalents seem so much more subjective, and (3) why even between the pre-modern markets, classical music seems marginally more efficient than classic film.

So what explains all of this?

I think there’s two things going on here. One can be explained by my model, the second cannot.

For the first part, let’s compare 3 people as an example. A modern film critic, a pre-modern classical music critic, and an investor. First, what does it even mean for a market to be efficient? The unhelpful answer is when the price of an asset = the expected long run return. Okay let’s toss that out. Not sufficiently general. New definition: A market is efficient if the price an investor assigns to an asset always = it’s long run value. So investors are always correct about the true value of an asset.

Now let’s look at their incentive structures.

The investor’s survival is on the line. This is this guy’s life. Perhaps if he isn’t solely on the finance bro self improvement grindset he even has a wife and kids that depend on him. He’s also probably obsessed with money and reputation, which are of course more causally associated with his job than the other two.

The film critic is quite different. If he, like the investor, makes money in his practice, then he is steeped (too conventional, hmmm. How about marinated? Pickled? impregnated with? my bad) in the attention market of release cycles. On the margin, he’s optimizing way more for clickbait and virality. As a result, the signal to noise ratio is lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut. (I learned this phrase from an old man recently.)

The classical critic, on the other hand, is not employed in his business of interest. He probably just does this out of pure enjoyment on his sunday afternoons. You would think that financial incentives would increase the quality of a market, not decrease it, but referring to my model above, high stakes (such as financial incentives) only have a positive relationship with objectivity when there is high measurability. Also, I guess I am partly arguing that a hobbyist that has reputational stakes within a small community of peers might actually be better optimizing for finding value than someone with mass-market financial stakes, which is an interesting conclusion.

So, that makes classic film and music criticism actually fall into (4), because both those writers are probably hobbyists. But again, we don’t want it in 4! It’s in bad company.

So, we’ve explained through incentives why there is a difference between modern and classical art criticism for the two markets. Argument (2) from above. But we haven’t yet figured out (1) and (3). And you’ll quickly see that even for (2), incentives don’t explain the whole thing.

To answer (1) and (3) and even partly (2), I realized I needed to add a mundane but essential variable. New model:

1. Measurability. (I fused operationalizability and verification infrastructure for simplicity).

2. Stakes. Are there serious incentives for traditions to build and maintain the first two parts?

3. And finally: Iterability of judgment. Can the same object be revisited and compared across generational audiences?

So, some traditions converge even without proof because repeated judgment can partly substitute for measurability! The conflicting assumptions get washed out almost as much as if they had high measurability. Hallelujah. I feel like the vocal melody at 0:34 of In the Meantime by Spacehog.

A combination of 3 (the hobbyist vs clickbait incentive argument from above) and 4 now explain why film and classical music criticism shows remarkable convergence, and even explains why, as Cowen said, classical feels marginally more objective than even classic film. (because of classical music scoring higher in 4, though it’s marginal because I think there are diminishing returns to 4)

My theory thus predicts that the markets for modern classical music and film would produce low convergence, comparatively, because they would score low on everything besides stakes, which often just increases polarization. This seems obviously true! They do have much lower convergence. If you think there are any other gaps in my theory, you are welcome to comment. I want it to be as strong as possible.

Human Acts by Han Kang

Recent literary fiction is new to me, but if this is the level of inventiveness we’re at, then the novel is in a healthy place as an artform (reaffirmed by the next book as well). It’s like a tasting menu of form, all in service of evoking strong feelings in the reader. The opening four chapters especially, which range from heartbreaking first-person to strikingly accusatory second-person, are some of the stickiest I’ve read. Parts of the overall feeling I’d compare to The Road—know that there are a number of sickening passages too, as in that book. In both cases, you’re being guided by a preternatural stylist. I’m looking forward to reading more by Kang.

Movie pairings: The Florida Project by Sean Baker and Lessons of Darkness by Werner Herzog

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Halfway through reading this I pitched it to Tristan as elite three-dimensional minds having to tackle a four-dimensional problem… and then that metaphor quickly became a key part of the story. On Substack this is a book that’s been adulated to death, but for good reason. It’s essential reading as we potentially enter the hinge of history and face the prospect of bringing alien intelligence to our world. How many people will take Elon Musk’s position and side with the AIs over humanity? Will world governments play nicely together? What will be the next paradigm breakthrough in basic research? The book is all head and minimal heart, but the head is good.

Movie pairing: Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I love Stevens. He is perhaps my favourite protagonist in any novel and a big part of that is because he’s the most charming narrator and his voice is feeding us every page of this story. If this were narrated third-personally like Don Quixote, it would be a farce: ‘Look at this collaborationist butler, look how he’s thrown everything important away to shine silver real good!’ But the novel is the artform of true empathy, a portal into other minds, and this is a better portal than most. Throughout you cannot help but marvel at the achievement that is his professional life, even while you puzzle over what it amounted to, and mourn for his voids.

Regarding the film adaptation—Anthony Hopkins as Stevens and Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton is great casting, but it’s a shame how little of the effect of the book you get out of it.

Movie pairings: The Green Ray by Éric Rohmer and Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

If you enjoy Shakespeare as a feast of language, then this is naturally self-recommending. Just from the first couple chapters, when our narrator is first encountering the demon Heathcliff:

‘Wretched inmate!’ I ejaculated mentally, ‘you deserve perpetual isolation from your species for your churlish inhospitality.’

…then, hatless and trembling with wrath, I ordered the miscreants to let me out—on their peril to keep me one minute longer—with several incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulency, smacked of King Lear.

There’s a raw animality to the two personalities in the centre of the story, especially Cathy, that is at turns frightening, exciting, and exhausting to read about. I was initially powering through it quite quickly, but I’m coming to see it might be better experienced over a handful of weeks.

Movie pairing: The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers

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Selections from Petrarch

As grandiose and out-of-proportion as he can sometimes be, Petrarch is a master of phrasing feelings in these deliciously dramatic ways. I’ve found him to be a weird form of comfort poetry for a couple years now. I’ll just offer some excerpts:

17
A bitter rain of tears pours down my face
blowing with a wind of anguished sighs
whenever my eyes turn to look at you
for whom, alone, I am divided from mankind.

It is true that your sweet and soothing smile
does calm the ardour of all my desires
and rescues me from burning martyrdom
as long as I keep my gaze fixed in you;

but then my spirits suddenly turn cold
when I see, as you leave, those fated stars
turning their gentle motion from my sight.

Let loose, at last, by those two amorous keys,
the soul deserts the heart to follow you,
and deep in thought from you it is uprooted.

159
How did a heart collect so many virtues
the sum of which is my death?

134
One keeps me jailed who neither locks nor opens,
nor keeps me for her own nor frees the noose;
Love does not kill, nor does he loose my chains;
he wants me lifeless but won't loosen me.

35
Alone and deep in thought I measure out
the most deserted fields, with slow, dark steps,
with eyes intent to flee whatever sign 
of human footprint left within the sand.

I find no other shield for my protection
against the knowing glances of mankind,
for in my bearing all bereft of joy
one sees from outside how I burn within.

128
      You, in whose hands Fortune has placed the reins
of these beautiful regions
for which it seems no pity moves your heart, 
what are the swords of strangers doing here?
In order that the verdant plain
be painted red with that barbaric blood?
      Flattered by futile error,
little you see, thinking you see so much, 
for you seek love and trust in venal hearts—
he with more followers
is more surrounded by his enemies.
O deluge that was gathered
from what strange wilderness
to inundate all our sweet countryside!
If by our very hands
this has been done, then who will rescue us?
      Nature provided well for our condition
when she raised up the screen 
of Alps between us and the German rage;
but blind desire fighting its own good
then managed to contrive
a way to make this healthy body sick.

Movie pairings: Call Me By Your Name by Luca Guadagnino and Casablanca by Michael Curtiz

Last month, when the Maduro plucking saga was going down, I remember being struck by how Tyler Cowen ended off a provocative piece of commentary:

Effective Altruists, are you paying attention?

He meant to suggest that, given the gigantic gains in Venezuelan asset values, intervention was seemingly working out to become a humanitarian miracle (from the standpoint of future expected wellbeing for Venezuelans).

It was the general structure of this point that stuck with me. The most effective interventions for improving lives might be drastic political actions, not mass well-targeted giving by individuals. So it could be the case that instead of hopping on GiveWell and donating to the Against Malaria Foundation,1 it would be more moral to donate to a political candidate who can tip the scales on an important policy.

Taking this seriously means we need to search for political moves that would massively improve human welfare. They should be unambiguous on this front, otherwise the normal EAs will justifiably point to the uncertainty involved and opt for the less risky plays they’re used to.

Fortunately, the motherlode of effective policies is sitting right there:

If we had worldwide free trade, it’s estimated global GDP might go up 5% (probably less).

If we had open borders, it’s estimated it would go up 50-150% — that ranges between adding $62 trillion and $185 trillion worth of new welfare to the world. Every year.2 Welfare that would accrue largely to the global poor, AKA the existing target recipients for Effective Altruism.

II - Unkind Givers

Let’s suppose away the political constraints right now. After all the math would be pretty clear in favour of policy-centric giving at this scale no matter how strong they are…

If what matters are life evaluations.

That is, if the point of giving is to make it so the most possible people look back at their lives and forward toward their future goals and feel quite good about both, all things considered. These evaluations straightforwardly improve as people get richer.3

But what if the point is to make the most people happy? Feeling good, swell, upbeat. Does enrichening achieve that?

Enter ‘Miserable Migrants?’, a 2015 paper by Steven Stillman and co that derives good causal estimates for the effects of moving to a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic country from a middle-income communal country.4

The migrants, coming from Tonga to New Zealand, experienced a tripling in wages, improved mental health, were more satisfied with their income and… reported themselves less happy than before they came. Substantially so.

On a five point scale, four years after migrating, the migrants were, on average, almost a full point less happy. It wasn’t an immediate effect. Instead, slowly but surely, life in New Zealand wore them down.

Or rather, they became New Zealanders. When you go digging, it turns out that the biggest determinant of average positive disposition is a country’s culture, not its wealth. Countries high in baseline happy feelings tend to:

• Be high in sociality, warmth, and interpersonal expressiveness

• Foster dense informal social networks with extended families

• Treat positive emotions as a social obligation or virtue

Money helps, but only to re-order individuals since the baseline is essentially zero-sum. That means that once the Tonga migrants got settled as lower-middle class (think 40th percentile) in New Zealand, they wind up less happy than when they were upper-middle class (73rd percentile) in Tonga, since New Zealand has a worse baseline than Tonga and their position relative to the baseline worsened.

III - Hedonism Waxes Poor

Since we’re in the Davos social engineering headspace, we might as well ask why we don’t just get open borders and make our culture more like Tonga’s. That way everyone gets in a good mood, the Tongans get rich, and nobody loses.

Well, it turns out all of those listed factors help put your country into the middle income trap. They’re anathema for growth; growth = satisfying more preferences; life evaluation turns on preference satisfaction; ergo, they’re anathema for life evaluations. The crux of this are the ways in which robust kinship networks keep people static. They tend to keep more women in the home, keep smart high-achievers in low efficiency communities, and promote distrust of outsiders, making it difficult to reap the benefits of complex cooperation.

That distrust of outsiders also makes it more difficult for migrants to integrate into society. It promotes a particularist morality that prizes treating one’s relatives better. Not just in the household is this expected, but in all spheres. So if New Zealand as a whole were to tip this way, we would expect it to become a lot harder for migrants to arrive and build a life there, softening the gains from opening the border.

When the listed factors don’t income trap you, they make you racist.

East Asia has a few examples of nations that are high-kinship high-growth, but all of them are famously distrustful of outsiders. Think Japan, South Korea, and China. Even if you manage economic success as a migrant, these places make it very difficult to socially integrate and build networks, withholding one of the key hedonic ingredients from outsiders.

So it seems, at least in this case, that you can’t serve both masters. Money only straightforwardly buys one sort of happiness, culture buys the other. It’s people’s preferences with respect to the course of their lives, in which case the GOAT policy is right there, or it’s their day-to-day happy feelings, in which case EAs should seize control of the culture or speedrun the experience machine. Open borders or hedonism and not both. Choose wisely.

The sun was rising again in Macedonia. It was six o’clock at the villa. The crew was hurrying around, putting our sandwiches into coolers and throwing them in the trunks. Trowels, brushes, measuring tapes, shovels, pickaxes, the GPR, and a hundred other little things we would need for the day. The air was cool on my skin this early in the day. “Yo, we’re leaving now,” said Decho from across the villa. “Sounds good. I’ll ride with you.” We talked as we walked over to Nick’s car. He drove out with the others following.

Nick grew up in southern California, a son of Macedonian immigrants. He started working in construction, and quickly transitioned to archaeology. 30 years later, he had traveled the world, created his own company, and now ran a field school for his local university. He was serious, decisive, the most industrious man I knew. He was the inverse of a hippie, concerned with the immediate and the productive. He had no ear for music. He had no interest in abstractions. But he was good at physical labour, and even better at management. He also snorted when he laughed, which was often, and I always found that endearing.

Decho was his only son, given a local name to the delight of the Macedonians who worked with us. I became good friends with Decho last summer. He was very different from his father. Sharp, funny, he was my best friend in this country.

Decho and his dad drove on through Bitola. People were tired so no one talked. And Nick was driving so there was no music either. So I looked out the window at a salad of architectural styles.

By now we were out of the city. We had rounded the mountain chain to the north, and now we drove straight south across the flat land of the valley. “Look, you can see the site,” said Decho. I pressed my face to the window trying to get a look. Then I saw it. Almost hidden amongst the mountains was an oddly flat ledge hanging onto the mountain’s face. God doesn’t draw in straight lines, I thought. I had spent all of last summer on that little defiance of nature. I tapped my foot quickly and stared out at the site as we drove towards it.

We drove past the schoolhouse, past the wooden bridge with the narrow little planks, and into the small town of Crnobuki. I stepped out onto sun-baked dirt and a cloud of dust floated around my legs. I tossed my jacket back into the car. It was too hot for that.

I walked away from the car, sat myself down in the shade, and waited for the Macedonian crew. They were always late last summer. That hadn’t changed. It had been so long since I saw them.

I had a nice pair of brown cargo pants that I had thrifted just for this back in California. I had a little glass bottle of coke in my thigh pocket. I liked how the red label popped against the colour of my pants. I drank the coke many days ago, now it was just my little water bottle. I pulled it out and took a drink. It was only 7:30 AM. It felt good to be back, life was still as simple and quiet as the year before.

The grass was drier this year. It had been a bright green this time last June. Now it looked like the hills of the Bay Area in September. But those hills weren’t brown, and neither were these. It was more like yellow and gold, pleasantly mixed. If you could see warmth, it would be that colour. I stared at the familiar landscape. A thousand yellow blades swayed as the wind gently led it about. And then the wind changed and they all leaned to the east. I watched this for a little while, little Balkan dancers on the side of the hill, waving in the sunlight to the rhythm of the wind.

I heard something in the distance. It was quiet for a long time, and then all at once I jumped up and heard the cars tumbling across the little wooden bridge. Three cars burst into the little village.

Dust clouds tossed and whirled around, and the cars came to a stop. There was that familiar salmon pink Lada Niva. It had been bought brand new in 1997, back when the Yugoslavian government had been open-handed with grant money for archaeology departments. More than 20 years later, it was still the department's only field vehicle.

A dozen workers and archaeologists stepped out into the dry heat. I got up and eagerly hurried over towards the Niva. “Slobodon!” I said. I gave him a big hug, but he gave me one bigger. Slobodan was at least 6’4 and looked like a bear. “Buddy! How have you been?” He had some of the best English of any of the Macedonian workers. “I’m glad to be back.” I smiled. Decho was by my side and Slobodon gave him a hug. He shook Nick’s hand. I saw Nikolai just then, and walked straight over and gave him a big hug too. The Americans and Macedonians were all chattering and embracing. I met a couple of new workers that weren’t there last summer. I saw Ingun too, the boss of this whole operation. He was a tired old man, who got his water from beer and wore a ripped up sky-blue baseball cap over his head. I hugged him, smelling cigarettes. He smoked at least a pack a day. He had soft, hazel eyes, a kind, content face, with black hair and a scruffy gray beard. His skin was wrinkled and tanned from decades under the Mediterranean sun. “I am glad you came back” There was that nice smile again. It came easy in this country.

“Alright, time to go up. Who’s bringing what?” Nick shouted. Everyone began rushing around, picking up this and that. Last summer, I always brought up the sandwiches and the water. For close to 20 people, it was heavy, but I liked the routine of it. I always knew what I was bringing up every morning. So I grabbed the cooler and started up the hill. The group passed a church tower made of stone. It was small, and old. A dog slept on the floor. It looked very cool inside.

Around the dog, broken pottery littered the floor. My hands rested on my backpack straps. I turned around and realized Ingun had fallen behind everyone. I waited for him and let the rest walk ahead, catching a breath for myself. My back had already dampened my shirt.

The two of us passed over a ridge, and, as we ascended the hill, I noticed a herd of sheep. There was a shepherd. He wore Nike flip-flops and an Adidas jacket. Like Ingun he was old and wrinkled, and talked quietly to another man next to him.

The sheep were very dark, dirty, and skinny. They had recently been shaved. Three or four sheepdogs solemnly watched the slopes. Almost all of them were limping. Each time a hoof touched the ground they quickly jerked it up. Ingun said something in Macedonian but he could tell by my face I had no clue what he said. So he lifted his shoe up and pointed it at with a pained expression on his face. I nodded. Hoof disease I guessed. The shepherds couldn’t have afforded antibiotics for the whole herd.

As we made the trek up the spine of the hill, I looked around at all the new and familiar faces. It was such a colourful crew, full of green and bright orange shirts, brown sun hats and dark green pants. I stuck myself by Ingun, Slobodon and Nick, who I knew were about to decide how to split the crew. Last year, we all worked on the top. The site was a two thousand-year-old defensive fort built by locals to defend against Macedonian invasion. Then the Macedonians invaded, then the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Huns, then the Slavs, it went on, as history does in the Balkans. The last day of the dig last summer they had found a Mongolian arrowhead, lodged in one of the basement walls. These stone basements stretched on for miles across the hilltop. Only a fraction of the basements had been dug up. With their funding situation, they would uncover only a fraction more.

Ingun had a premonition this upjumped city had a theatre of its own. Last summer, we had found a small silver coin, with a seat number on the back. A silver ticket. And they had noticed a suspiciously bowl-shaped depression on the side of the hill, with a long flat area in front of it.

“So who’s working on the theatre?” Nick asked, cigarette in his mouth. He only smoked in foreign countries.

“I’ll go if Decho goes,” I said immediately. Decho smiled.

“Decided. Who else?”said Nick.

“Danny and I will come too,” said Slobodon. Danny was a new worker, I didn’t know him.

Nikolai raised his hand. “I’d like to come too”

Ingun said something in Macedonian to Slobodon.

Slobodon turned to Nick and said “Ingun will stay by the theatre with us,” he paused to find the right word, “to help direct”.

“The supposed theatre,” Decho whispered under his breath.

Nick put a thumbs up. “Sounds great, but would Ingun mind if I took Nikolai with me? Most of my crew need someone to teach them how you do things around here,”

Slobodon told Ingun and he waved his hand. “Fine, fine”. I could feel the cooler bringing my body down on my right side, so I switched to my left. We still had a long way to go to the top.

Our new crew peeled off from the rest while they hiked up to last summer’s site. I rushed over for the last few seconds to drop the cooler off. But the grass had been flattened and made slippery by footsteps. I almost fell but caught myself.

I set the cooler down and winced as I felt the weight come off of my hand. I wiped some sweat off my forehead and opened it up. I took out a 2 litre of water and poured it into my coke bottle. I took a long sip, it was deliciously cold. The crew set up our tools and a tent for shade.

I caught my breath before I began work for the day. In early morning, before it got hot, the air was quite pleasant, and the view was lovely. The grassy hill was free of trees, so Nikolai could see all the way to the tall mountains of central Macedonia. So high they still had snow in June. And between those snow-capped mountains and my hill, was a valley peppered with windmills, churches, and villages, nestled against mountain slopes, and hundreds of farms of yellow, purple, and golden orange wheat, rye, maize, oats, vineyards and olive tree orchards.

I gazed across to the end of the valley, where my eyes met the twin towers of the coal power plant. Both a market and a political failure, the Greeks had built it right on the border so that the prevailing winds would carry the filthy haze into Macedonia instead of Greece. My eyes then finally drifted up and over the mountain peaks, noticing a subtle darkness in the sky. Behind them, far behind the mountains, the sky was the colour of a wine stain. The wind blew North-South, I felt it tugging a bit on my shirt. I finally picked up a shovel, and got to work. I knew they would be getting off work early today.

An hour had passed. It was much hotter. Ingun was sitting in his foldable chair, watching us work. “No hold it like that, hold it like this, better for back” he would say to me. He would get up and take the shovel from me and show me. Danny had uncovered a large stone 20 minutes earlier, and Ingun had known right away that it belonged to something larger. 20 minutes later, I was looking down at a row of stones, maybe a wall, maybe seats for a theatre. Sometimes I felt like Ingun had already dug up everything there was to see on the Earth, and his job was just remembering where everything was.

I kept hacking away at the soil. Sweat dripped off my forehead and darkened the dry dirt below me. I stepped out of the hole we had dug and slammed my pickaxe into the ground. I liked the way the pickaxe sunk into the soil and stuck.

I pulled the coke bottle out of my pocket and drank the whole thing. Not enough. I walked over to the cooler. We had set the tent up over the dig, so I had to walk on the steeper part of the slope around it. The grass was flush and smooth, and I almost slipped again.

“Bets on this being a theatre or not?” I asked Decho. He was staring at the ground, moving the metal detector around some of the dirt I had just broken up.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, I offer you two bets, 100 bucks if my coin lands on heads, or 100 bucks if this is a theatre? Which one are you taking?” He thought for a moment.

“Okay, the theatre”.

“So you think it’s higher than 50%!”

“No, I just think it would be more exciting to win 100 from that than the coin”.

“Oh so the stakes aren’t high enough. Okay, same bet, but you gotta give me 100 if you lose”. He stared at the dirt again.

“Still picking the theatre,” he said with a smirk. He continued as he scanned the dirt for metal. “It doesn’t really matter if we find a theatre or not, but it makes for happier living to be optimistic.”

I grabbed a shovel and scraped up the dirt he had metal detected. I looked at my hands and saw blisters starting to form on my palms. I frowned and kept going anyway. I’d get gloves tomorrow, I thought.

Lunchtime. Decho and I took our sandwiches out of the cooler. But we decided we wanted to see how everything up top was going. So we began the hike up.

The wind had been growing more intense since I had first noticed the bruise colored sky beyond the mountains. Now, the whole crew had caught on. We could clearly see the unfolding of the thunderstorm, trampling over the mountains like Hannibal’s elephants. Tendrils of black and grey crept over the mountains to the east, swarming the valley like masses of dark spiders scurrying down the foothills, covering and subduing villages, farms, and rivers.

We made it to the top of the hill, and chose to ignore the storm for now. The hill was still sunny, and I wanted the tomatoes in the cooler. Slobodon had picked them fresh just yesterday from his cousin’s garden, and dropped a crate of them off in our kitchen. So I took one out and sat in the sun with Decho. I started eating it like an apple. The red juice burst from its skin onto my lips and chin. I reached over and shook Decho’s shoulder. “Decho Decho, you’ve gotta try these tomatoes I’ve never had them like this!” It was as juicy as a peach, and tangy and sweet too. Normally I found tomatoes dull and wouldn’t eat one by itself. But those were from grocery stores. I stared at it in the sun. It was beautiful. It was pastel red and firm on the outside, but the gooey interior was a deep crimson and melted in my mouth. I saw Justin eating one too. “Justin these tomatoes are crazy!” “I know, they’re the best I’ve ever had.” We were both smiling. I remembered at that point that there was feta and bread in the cooler. I darted over to pair it with the tomato. The sun and the sweat and the work were all forgotten.

We all walked back down the hill. I had a good feeling. Plus, the mystery of what lay under the dirt was still alive at this point. The winds were rising, the storm was inching closer, and the air was more humid, but we still had about an hour left, it seemed.

We got back to the tent and I grabbed the pickaxe that I had sunk into the ground. I grabbed it by the handle, and jumped into the pit we had made. I started a new line, and Decho brought the wheelbarrow over. I saw out of the corner of my eye Ingun, making his way over to us across the tent. Ingun screamed.

I dropped the pick and climbed out of the hole. Everyone had already stopped and Slobodan was beside him. He had slipped on the brown grass and was clutching his hip. He was groaning in pain, looking up at the sky. Danny tried to bring him his chair, and he tried to get up but yelled out and fell back to the ground. His face was tight and his eyes had a wild, vulnerable look.

Slobodan and Danny grabbed his arms and legs, trying to carry him over, but he screamed again and they lowered him back on the hill. He said something pained in Macedonian and Danny brought him a water bottle. He drank a couple sips and then let his head fall back on the grass. I could see sweat forming on his forehead. His eyes didn’t look so wild anymore. Someone called for some shade over his face. I didn’t know who. But I moved unconsciously towards Ingun, and took my bandana and spread it out wide a few inches over his face. That was my job for the next 30 minutes as we waited for the ambulance.

Eventually Nick came down, as well as Nikolai. “Oh shit” he said as he carefully walked over the grass on the hill. “I think he broke his hip” Slobodon said to Nick. He sighed. A gust of wind almost blew the tarp off the hill side, and a bunch of the workers rushed to grab hold of it.

Ingun had begun chain smoking to numb the pain. At one point he got a business call, and laying on the grass with a broken hip, started speaking perfectly normally. He then got 2 or three more, and smoked about half a pack in the next half hour. We all chuckled at this. The ambulance apparently takes a long time in Macedonia.

At first, there was no lightning, even when the storm had almost come over our heads. For a second there was a bright flash, followed by the noise of thunder that washed over and rolled away from us. The lightning strike had not been much farther than the base of the hill. Everyone looked around at each other nervously. Nick told Nikolai to bring the other crew down from the top of the hill immediately. We would have have left earlier, if not for Ingun.

Not a minute or two later did I finally hear the sound of an ambulance in the distance. I looked out and saw the tidy little farms spread across the valley, sewn together like a quilt of yellows and greens laid over the valley floor. Along one of the thin dirt roads I could see a furious little ambulance racing towards us like a bat out of hell, kicking up a dust cloud on its trail. The wind was wailing and large heavy drops had begun to fall. I had a new reason to cover Ingun’s face with the bandana.

I watched as the sheep dogs frantically ran down the slope towards the village, leaving the limping sheep far behind. Both crews were running around, passing shovels and pushing wheelbarrows. Everyone had a job, and they worked quickly. Another bolt of lightning struck the ground somewhere near. I didn’t see it, I was watching Ingun.

Not able to abandon Ingun in the rain, the whole crew had to wait impatiently as the ambulance came to the base of the hill. It was quite dangerous to be on the hill in a lightning storm. Nick muttered to Slobodon, “We should’ve hauled ass 20 minutes ago.”

Slobodon and others went down the hill to meet the ambulance. They rushed back with a stretcher.

“The ambulance people want us to bring him down,” said Slobodan. Water was streaming down his face. He came over and started lifting Ingun’s shoulders. My body unconsciously moved to grab his legs. Together, they hoisted him up as Ingun yelled out in pain, and as gently as possible, laid him on the cloth stretcher. Again, without thinking, I placed my hands around one of the loops, and Danny, Slobodon, Christian, Yove, and Nikolai grabbed their own handholds. Nick was too old, and the others just watched. I had just been moving off instinct, a thought hadn’t crossed my mind in minutes.

We lifted him up, Ingun cried out a little, and we began our descent.

The crew ran down the spine of the ridge towards the cars. I heard an owl hooting in the church tower below. The wind blew my hat off and my eyes went wide, but I couldn’t race after it. It was gone.

After a couple minutes of holding Ingun, the thin strap had already dug into my hands. I kept on switching hands, holding it in different ways, but the gravity of walking down hill was getting too much. I had chosen the middle strap, and two people had stopped holding him halfway down because the trail was too narrow. Worse still, the blisters had broken apart, and the strap kept sliding down my sweaty hand into them.

I just kept going, but after a while, I looked down and realized my hand was shaking like an old man’s. This had never happened to me before. I guessed that my body was just screaming at me to let go. The pain was growing with every second. It started shaking so badly I wasn’t sure if I could choose to hold on or if my body would just make the decision for me.

If Ingun had been anyone else, I might have asked to hold for a moment, or given up. But I just couldn’t. I was in the middle, and if I dropped him he would tumble down the hill like a sack of potatoes. I kept thinking “I have to do this for Ingun, I don’t care how much my hand hurts. I’ll walk 100 miles like this if I have to”. I talked like this to myself the whole way, I would remember this moment forever I told myself. I wanted to be proud of it.

With the sound of thunder roaring all around us we finally got to the end of the trail, and lowered him onto the ambulance bed. The ambulance raced off and we all ran to the cars. My hands were swollen and red, and I was licking the blisters as I ran. The village was a symphony of howling dogs banging against thin metal fences. I jumped into the car with Decho and Nick. The engine roared as we drove off with lightning on our backs. Rain showers washed off the side of the window in heaps, but I could still make out the bright flashes of lightning, and the owl resting in the window of the tower, waiting for the rain to subside and the worms to come out.

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Okay, you might say, that’s my intuition about rain—what about hurricanes or flash floods or a volcanic eruption? Isn’t there something icky about betting on events that will kill people if they happen? For precision, let’s call these causally impotent lethal markets.

The obvious problem with this ick response is that your disgust is minimally important compared to the epistemic benefits conferred by the prediction market. Having an accurate probability of a terrible thing happening helps everyone potentially affected by the terrible thing to plan accordingly. It helps to weigh Terrible 1 against Terrible 2, it helps to figure out the expected scale, and even what the aftermath might look like.

Maybe you’re of the view that meteorologists are better than prediction markets at assigning accurate probabilities to these sorts of things. That seems unlikely. Nevertheless, you have to grant that we do not have the equivalent of meteorologists in all of the spaces where it would be (life-savingly) useful to provide people with probabilities of things happening.

For an example that should hit close to home for anybody and everybody: pandemics! If you’re anything like me, then it’s likely you’re underestimating the probability of bird flu (H5N1) breaking out into the next global pandemic. That’s useful to know. Now, conditional on a human-to-human bird flu outbreak, there are still lots of questions about its scale and lethality that need to be answered before you can map out contingencies. Fortunately, there are no in-principle reasons not to setup (higher uncertainty) markets for that too.

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An important fact about these markets is that the way they go is not obviously tied up in the behaviour of one or a small handful of individual actors. That’s where the causal impotence is coming from. If someone places a $500k bet on a hurricane developing over the Gulf of Mexico (America?), then there’s no reason to suspect they are working to bring about a hurricane, since a hurricane is not the sort of thing you can work to bring about.2

I focus on causal influence because I think it’s what gives people the ick about insider trading. There might be a fairness complaint about people betting based on inside information—see this Google ‘Year in Search’ story and this one about the Maduro raid—but neither of these people were causal influences on the result of the market (unless Trump or Rubio really needed $400k). A Google employee cannot alter what the world searched for, but they can see the data before it goes public; likewise with a U.S. officer. That means they benefitted by providing true price signals to everyone else in the market. What’s exploitative about that?

Consider, on the other hand, Jontay Porter.

In high school, Jontay helped lead his high school to a perfect season alongside his older brother,3 taking the Washington state championship and winning him scholarship offers to a number of top basketball schools. Then, he grew two inches, catapulting him into ★★★★★ territory. His father became a coach at Mizzou and Jontay committed to go play under him with his brother, keeping the storybook arc going.

At Mizzou he didn’t disappoint. After a slow start, he played well-enough to be ranked among the likes of now-MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as one of the eight best freshmen in the SEC. He had to—his brother Michael, a top two prospect in the nation, went down with a season-ending injury in the first half of the season opener. Despite the bad brute luck, Mizzou went on to make the NCAA tournament, giving them a shot at a national championship.

Facing down Florida State, Jontay shot a meagre 14% in a brutal blowout loss. Afterward, he tentatively declared for the NBA draft alongside his brother, expecting to be a late first round pick. But something gnawed at him—a job unfinished. On the day of the deadline, he withdrew his name, returning for another season to Missouri.

And then disaster struck. In a preseason scrimmage with the team, he tore both the ACL and MCL in his right knee, ending his year and tanking his stock in the draft. Then he tore his ACL again. It was too much risk for NBA teams to stomach. Despite declaring for the next draft, Jontay went unchosen, signing with the Grizzlies without much in the way of hope.

Perhaps the stunning fall from grace is what led him to place “an $80,000 same-game parlay bet” that he would underperform on multiple stats that, if it hit, “would win $1.1 million.” He then checked into the game for three minutes before suddenly falling ill and exiting for the rest of the night.

Jontay’s bookie did not pay out the winnings, so the bet’s lasting legacy is as a textbook example of causal potence in a prediction market. In a market about what Jontay does, Jontay is the master manipulator.

So maybe prediction markets are exploitative when master manipulators waltz into an otherwise healthy market and decide to profit off everyone’s epistemic labour by betting on the most profitable thing they can do, and then they go and do that thing.

More examples: Starmer betting on his own resignation, Musk betting on how many tweets he puts out, Trump betting on pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, and so on and so on—these all represent opportunities for master manipulators to go to work exploiting people in prediction markets.

But what element of the betting can we point to as the part where exploitation enters in? We’ve dismissed the epistemic fact of having inside information. It’s not exploitative to reap a reward for your information, or else everyone with edge in a market would be exploiting everyone else. Is it just the causal fact of being a master manipulator?

We might benefit by zeroing in on the people being exploited. Let’s take the most morally-charged prediction spaces: causally potent lethal markets. Suppose Trump, in relatively direct control of U.S. military capabilities, bets NO on ‘No strike by Feb 28’ in the US next strikes Iran market. He then directs his generals to hit Tehran, killing a mix of IRGC forces, regime non-combatants, and civilians. As a result, he makes a huge profit.

The most obviously exploited people in this case are the deceased Iranians, because in this story they have had their lives ended involuntarily—primarily as a means for personal profit. That’s messed up. Everyone has powerful legitimate reasons not to want other people to treat them this way. If exploitation exists (it’s famously hard to define), then this seems a textbook case.

So at last we have a principle:

(Market-Driven Evil) If a Master Manipulator trades in a market in order to align their incentives with directly harming people, then there is exploitation in that market.

But Jontay did not violate this principle. Direct financial harm resulting from a prediction market is a bit of a slippery concept, but it is safe to say that nobody’s livelihood was tied up in which way his bets went. They aligned his incentives to shoot a basketball badly, not to go and kill people.

Going back to Trump and Iran, in what sense are the other bettors in the market being exploited? After all, it would be wrong to bomb anybody for the sole purpose of profiting, so pointing that out doesn’t tell us anything interesting about prediction markets. The fact it operates through perverse incentives is good to know, but it’s equivalent to the obvious wrong of purposefully cultivating a disposition to harm people.4

(Market-Driven Exploitation) If a Master Manipulator trades in a market in order to align their incentives with increasing the number of losers in that market, then there is exploitation in that market.

Now, everyone trading in a market wants to win. In a technical sense, Polymarket is zero-sum, in that every dollar won in a market is a dollar lost by someone else. So win-seeking is loss-maximizing for others, regardless of who you are. What the principle says is that if you are specifically a Master Manipulator, win-seeking is exploitative (and thereby wrong).

But why? It seems hard to explain without appealing to it being unfair for other bettors—but the unfairness of prediction markets isn’t our question.5

Return to Trump and Iran one more time, but imagine now that Trump was already going to strike Iran and is simply raking in profit over it without altering his own incentives. This requires a little bit of imagination, because it could be that he made the decision and had some time to reverse course, so that now by betting he is altering the incentives around changing his mind. For that reason, you should think of the case as one where the operation has quietly begun and Trump cannot really stop it. In this case, there’s no incentive alignment—it’s just like the case of the Google trader, where an outcome was going to happen and an insider bet helps to better align the public’s probability towards 1. Really, just looking at the facts of the case, Trump is just acting as another bettor, not a Master Manipulator.

Still, there’s an intuitive ick here. I suspect that comes from the sense that Trump is behaving like a parasite on the market. Everyone else in it had to do epistemic labour—they thought things over, weighed the contingencies, and assumed risk—and here comes Trump needing to do none of that because he’s the boss and already gave the order. One party is playing a risk game and one is enjoying a free lunch.

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If the ick is well-placed, it looks like the exploitation of other bettors comes from free-riding off of them for that free lunch. Unfortunately for the view, it clashes with the more rational read, which is that everyone in the market has benefitted by the provision of true price signals to everybody in the market. Trump isn’t free-riding, he’s bringing useful information to the table. It’s on the other bettors to discern that, like they would need to with any bettor showing up with an edge.

We’re still left with the suggestion that what morally matters might be Master Manipulators changing what they were going to do because of the existence of the prediction market. These markets offer huge financial incentives to enter and profit off of one’s position, turning potential manipulators into actuals. But framing this as exploitative of anybody else is a difficult sell.

If anything, it suggests prediction markets might be corrupting, creating incentives that lead to harming not other bettors, but the public interest. This is a more legitimate concern, even if there are good replies available, many of them rooted in institutional design. Look at what happened to Jontay—he got banned from the NBA forever. He used his edge for corrupt free-riding and the system was designed to make sure his edge was taken away as a result.

Taking the corruption objection seriously also requires recognizing that there are solutions; no need to throw away enormous epistemic benefits in order to avoid a few players making ugly plays.

Just make it hard to play ugly!

In the spirit of Jordan Rubin’s great substack, here’s a summary of the post for those who prefer a higher signal-to-noise ratio:

TL;DR

Some traditions feel more “objective” or “subjective” because of how their institutions structure their assumptions. Specifically, it is the amount of implicit assumptions in conflict which, on the margin, determines the feeling of objectivity or subjectivity.

I start with a simple view. Truth = what follows from accepted axioms. I then show why persistent disagreement often comes from conflicting base assumptions. I initially claim that high stakes explain why some traditions converge, but revise that after a strong antithesis using Rubin’s @antithesize coding skill. Stakes are now necessary but not sufficient.

The stronger model has three parts:

Operationalizability: Can claims be clearly defined and tested?

Verification infrastructure: Are there shared methods for settling disputes?

And of course, stakes: Are there incentives to build and maintain (1) and (2)?

Fields with high measurability like math, engineering, aviation, and medicine tend to converge more. Low-measurability but high-stakes fields like politics and ethics tend to polarize, splinter into camps, or lean on an authority which monopolizes force.

Main takeaway: if you want more objectivity in any tradition, build better measurement and verification systems. Also, the world can plausibly be explained without appealing to moral realism. Also, convergence in traditions, like a higher volume of 3-point attempts or the marvelization of cinema, can be explained well by this theory.

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In 2026, it’s actually contrarian to not be a moral realist. (Moral realism means you think there are stance-independent moral truths) The moral realists who think they’re edgy are already behind the curve. Accomplished substacker and friend Xavier Lauriault recently wrote: “When engaging in field experimental philosophy, asking if there are moral truths that exist independently of our opinions, the answer is nearly always. “No.”” True, Xavier finds that most people are moral anti-realists. In this way, it makes the moral realists more contrarian. My enlightenment heroes rest peacefully in their graves. However, 62.07% of professional philosophers disagree with these university students! So in the ivory tower, moral realism is the conventional view! The horror.

In debating these hubristic moral realists, reminiscent of the anti-Copernican Catholics, I have generated my own meta-epistemological theory. My theory, if successful, will explain why certain traditions like film watching seem much more “subjective” than math or chess, what makes statements in morality, math, or aesthetics “true”, and how any tradition, if it so chooses, can become more objective.

As an outside observer of meta-ethics and epistemology, I acknowledge my argument’s weirdness. (Or as Nick said, “quite interesting, but probably wrong.”) But here it is nonetheless. I pray to my enlightenment gods to give me the strength to defeat these presumptuous realists. I will go over counter arguments after the sketch.

First let’s establish what truth means. In my experience this word becomes a problem quickly. Without a definition people get confused. But then again, whenever I ask for a definition, or try to come up with one, the conversation seems to trail on forever.

So I have come up with a very simple definition: X is true when X follows from one or multiple axioms. Truth is simply internal consistency. For example, 2 = 2. This statement is true because you assume the equality rule/axiom, which is that X = X. Likewise, if my coauthor Nick was going 90 mph in a 70, then the statement: “Nick was speeding” would be of course true by virtue of the legal rule + the stated fact. If the observation that he was going 90 mph is proven true, then that premise + the legal rule makes the statement true. Likewise for the definition of a triangle or the rules of the NBA.

Why did I choose this definition?

I’m glad you asked.

One might counter that you can evaluate assumptions as being true or false. If I assume I’m purple, someone could say that’s a false assumption! But why, because it doesn’t fit reality? So you’re leaning on perception. To trust perception, you lean on assumptions about perception. To trust those assumptions, you lean on… you see where I’m going. It seems there are stopping points where some claims are taken as basic.

So, since your epistemology is just assumptions (and claims which follow from assumptions) all the way down, what explains why some traditions feel more objective than others? There is an enormous diversity of ice cream flavours which could be argued over forever with seemingly no “true” answer. Yet, in math, there is remarkable convergence on truth. In soccer, there seems to be some. In music, some. In visual art, less. And so forth.

What explains these varying levels of subjectiveness is the degree to which the tradition has conflicting assumptions. Examples: Let’s start with math again. Once the tradition defines 2, 4, =, and the axioms of addition, the statement “2+2=4” is true. There is no room for disagreement because there are no conflicting axioms such as “the = sign means a + b = b.” Everyone agrees which assumptions are pertinent to that question.

Another example: Spoilers for Marty Supreme, but after watching the film and walking out of the theatre, my friend Rowdy and I had radically different takes on the ending. The ending, to remind you, was Marty seeing his baby and crying tears of joy, deciding to finally favour being a father over his career.

I thought this was bad because it felt like whiplash! The entire time, this guy hasn’t given a shit about his girlfriend nor the baby, he’s been a narcissist who, worse still, is obsessed with something (being an international table tennis star) which directly conflicts with his ability to be a dad. Suddenly, after beating one guy in a match that didn’t matter in the long run, and seeing his baby, he has given up the sport he’s been obsessed with his entire life? Given up his narcissistic personality? Given up his disregard for his girlfriend? It felt way too convenient.

Rowdy had the opposite take. It’s Marty realizing that no matter what he does in his career, he’ll never find genuine satisfaction or peace and looking for that in something potentially much more fulfilling. He felt that seeing a newborn could induce a massive psychological change, and felt that beating Endo was enough of a justification for him to be at least temporarily satisfied. Rowdy eventually brought me somewhat around, but I find the initial disagreement to be really interesting.

Rowdy might disagree with this but roughly here are the (very implicit) axioms I think are in conflict:

I assume a continuity of psychology is a necessary constraint for good character arcs. Big reversals should be seeded through earlier moments. (This is why I love A Song of Ice and Fire) So, if the movie spends most of its time showing obsession + disregard, the ending should resolve that obsession through consequences, not by a sudden moral pivot.

On the other hand, Rowdy’s axioms: Psychological realism is more important than strict narrative continuity. Also, Rowdy assumes that people do change abruptly, (in retrospect this might be because he has friends who moved to Austin and converted to Christianity overnight), especially with intense triggers, and fulfilling this assumption is part of what can make a movie good.

These assumptions are in conflict! Thus the disagreement that feels like it has no right answer. There are many such contradictory assumptions in the tradition which is cinema criticism, much more than math and sports. (Why do you shoot a 3 when you’re open? “Because I want to score.” Why? “Because it helps us win.” Why do you want to win? “Because winning is good.” Why? “Because it just is!” (No one in sports has a contradictory assumption on this basic point, and the statistical research in this tradition has generated a lot of convergence, thus, sports are becoming more truthful.)

In the tradition of politics, I often see debates go on and on about how interventionist the state should be. Side A might argue the state should actively redistribute and regulate to secure equality and welfare. Let’s go through their likely assumptions. I’ve doing this more rigorously now because without structure I get long-winded.

Layer 1

1. [normative] Equality and material security ought to be the ultimate political goals.

2. [empirical] State interventions can materially improve welfare.

3. [structural] Institutions can be constrained to avoid abuse/capture.

Layer 2

1. (for L1-1) [normative] Market outcomes are not morally decisive.

2. (for L1-2) [empirical] Market failures are large and correctable.

3. (for L1-3) [structural] Oversight mechanisms can work.

4. (for L1-4) [definitional] “Justice” includes distributive outcomes.

Side B might argue that the state should be limited and freedom and property rights should dominate.

Axioms:

Layer 1

1. [normative] Individual liberty/property are primary.

2. [empirical] State power tends to expand and be abused.

3. [structural] Markets and civil society allocate resources better.

4. [definitional] Justice is procedural, not distributive.

Layer 2

1. (for L1-2) [empirical] Policy errors are frequent and hard to reverse.

2. (for L1-3) [structural] Competition disciplines misuse of power.

3. (for L1-4) [definitional] Fair process yields legitimate outcomes.

I’m tempted to keep going but I think you get the point. When everyone in a tradition agrees on which assumptions are in force for any specific question, you get true statements. The less contradictory assumptions that are present in a tradition, the more “objective” it feels, and the less people debate or resign themselves from debate entirely (“it’s only my opinion!”).

Now you’ll probably be wondering, why do some traditions have almost zero axioms in conflict, while others have dozens? Why are some incredibly implicit and almost invisible in debate (visual art) while others are widely accessible (music theory)?

My preferred explanation is incentives. Some traditions have higher stakes for finding the truth. If U.S. mathematicians have contradictory assumptions, then the Apollo mission is crashing and burning, people are dying, and the country may lose the space race. If film bros have contradictory assumptions, Rowdy and I have something fun to talk about. Lower stakes incentivize less rigorous assumption organization in the tradition.

Even still, you can see things like the NBA and the movie industry converging on the truth. The truth in 2026 is unfortunately, a high volume of threes and the Marvelizationof cinema. Both of these states of affairs resulted from some assumptions conflicting and then being resolved. (Expected value of threes is higher than many twos, vs threes are lower quality and elite specialists should be treated differently than average players), and (shared universes and event spectacle increase lifetime revenue + general risk aversion vs artistic value not being reducible to revenue or popularity and the assumption that audiences can and should be shaped toward inventive art.) Unfortunately for me, to maximize team winning and company profits, the assumptions I personally enjoyed more were combed out of the traditions for the most part, and they continue to become more objective over time.

Counterargument

Bentham’s Bulldog, perhaps: “So, here are two cruxes of your argument: If low‑stakes fields routinely develop strong, stable measurement regimes, your argument collapses, and if high‑stakes fields show no greater investment in verification infrastructure, your argument collapses. Well, for the former, how about chess, and for the latter, how about macroeconomic policy or presidential campaigns?”

Me: “Well then, it seems stakes are necessary but not sufficient. On average, my argument is probably correct, but it’s not hard to find clear examples where, even when the cost of being wrong is high, there’s much lower truth convergence than other, lower-stakes traditions. Well Bentham, I’m not wedded to this theory, I’ll change it on a dime! An amendment is in order.”

New theory:

Policy debates and moral controversies feel more subjective (don’t converge) than structural engineering, not because people care less, but because the object of inquiry is less operationalizable, and the infrastructure for verification is weaker. A more complete theory has three parts:

1. Operationalizability: Can many parts of the tradition have testable criteria for truth? Mathematics and physics score high here, film criticism scores low.

2. Verification infrastructure: Are there shared practices that settle disputes (proof systems, controlled experiments, standardized tests,

adjudication bodies)? Interestingly wine tasting scores higher than ice cream tasting, simply because there are more adjudication bodies.

3. And finally stakes: Do incentives push traditions to build and maintain the first two parts?

I love this theory now! Thanks Bentham. (I could have just started with this, but I find developing a narrative enjoyable. Perhaps it would be better for everyone’s time if I devoted myself to being a novelist rather than a theorist.) This helps explain the counterargument above: recreational mathematics (low stakes) converges reliably, while parts of public policy (high stakes) remain permanently contested. The first is operationalizable with strong verification; the second is not! The 4 possible examples:

1. High measurability + high stakes: strong convergence (aviation safety, formal engineering).

2. High measurability + low stakes: marginally lower convergence without pressure (puzzles, chess).

3. Low measurability + high stakes: polarization and use of authority (policy, ethics).

4. Low measurability + low stakes: pluralism and taste (film, food & fashion).

I find traditions that find themselves in 3. the most interesting. They seem to play out a few different ways. Often you’ll just see people divide themselves into separate groups because they can’t agree on base assumptions. This seems to happen quite a bit in religion and politics. Sometimes it just seems an authority comes in to substitute for the empirical disagreement. Lineage or charisma seems to be defining features here. This authority (state or church usually) will use orthodoxy policing to suppress rival interpretations within the tradition. And then there’s the fun one where neither side decides to use force, but the stakes are still red hot, so they’re stuck in perpetual disagreement over assumptions! I’m thinking of various schools of thought in ethics here, for example, consequentialists and deontologists. Parties in democratic regimes with stable succession systems also fit.

Of course, all traditions were at one point just as bad off as ice cream tasting is today. Medicine has made great strides towards objectivity. Many centuries ago you would have had debates about medicine as you would ice cream! Or perhaps the debates were stopped by some vague authority-based judgment that said you had to bleed yourself when you got sick. Of course, the stakes (death) are high in this tradition, and germ theory and randomized trials and the scientific method and a salad of other beautiful, replicable measurement techniques have brought this tradition up from the filthy slums of politics and marginally less filthy slums of ethics, out and into the bucolic green pastures of empiricism. Similar things can be said of seafaring and aviation and a whole host of other traditions.

The takeaway here is to become more of an empiricist, not less. Any tradition you admire for knowing the truth was once terribly incorrect. The only solution is to embrace enlightenment style evidence-based inquiry. Also, if my theory is correct, we don’t need to appeal to any of the armchair arguments moral realists are fond of to explain the seeming objectivity and subjectivity of different fields of conversation.

P.S. I’m still searching for an objective theory of title making. Help!

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Alexandre lives in a constitutional democracy called Deliberatia. He’s politically engaged, going down various YouTube rabbit holes, taking some classes in philosophy, and chatting with friends at the bar downtown to learn a fair amount about the world. After thinking pretty hard about it, Alexandre adopts a worldview—libertarianism—joining a larger group of people who roughly think like him and share his values.

When Alexandre shows up to a party he’s invited to and inevitably decides to talk politics in the corner, he does not talk in the language of libertarianism (he tried that a few times and got nowhere). He has to translate to the language of shared values with the person he’s talking to.

On this occasion, the other person happens to have a Christian worldview. Trying to pitch the Christian on libertarian ideas about taxes, Alexandre talks about how important and meaningful it is to freely engage in charity and how the state renders it more difficult to demonstrate the virtue of generosity. He goes on about how concentrating political power in the hands of a few invites the temptation to grow that power and exploit it.

His tailored translations aren’t always persuasive, but they’re essential for reaching the person he’s talking to. Eventually, when the song changes and the Christian wiggles away, Alexandre is left unsure about his success, but confident he was comprehensible.

As he gets older, he decides to enter public life. He graduates from libertarian to Libertarian, running to represent his party and community in the Parliament of Deliberatia. Suddenly he isn’t talking to one or two other people, but tens of thousands, all of whom have (consciously or subconsciously) their own worldviews. Wanting to reach potential voters, he has to translate his ideas to the language of values shared by all of these worldviews—the language of public reason.

This is not a trivial translation exercise. Like anyone raised in Deliberatia, Alexandre has intuitions about what everyone takes for granted in its politics. You can’t touch the public healthcare system, the state pension, or the ballooning marble maintenance fund, for instance. But within these sacred cows are deeper values to uncover: equality, safety, care, reciprocity, tradition. So it goes with the state’s founding documents, which espouse liberty, industry, fraternity, and sobriety. He has to figure out not only what these underlying values of Deliberatia’s political culture are, but also how to conceptualize their hierarchy.

Because these values, which can be listed with widespread agreement, can be interpreted in different ways and ranked in different orders while still being upheld, the language of public reason is open to multiple reasonable political conceptions, of which Alexandre’s is but one. What makes them reasonable is their affirmation of the values of Deliberatia’s political culture.

The debate in Alexandre’s riding pits his conception, of liberty and industry’s priority, against that of the socialist, who argues for fraternity and equality. When they come to substantive policy disagreement, neither side appeals to the commitments of their personal worldviews—Alexandre doesn’t decry taxation as theft, the socialist avoids mentioning the frigidity of rugged individualism—unless they can find a way to ground it in their conceptions of Deliberatian values.

When the election comes and one of them loses, they can hold their head up high knowing they lost to a bloc of reasonable cooperators: fellow citizens with different weightings and interpretations of the same political values.

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To recap the view: agents match to worldviews, which each endorse a political conception (an ordering and interpretation of political values); when a conception orders the values of the public political culture, it is reasonable and can talk, in the language of public reason, with other such conceptions; when a conception orders some other set of values, it is unreasonable, in the sense that the reasons it could offer in public reason would not be accepted by those in the political culture.

But there’s an obvious meta-implication here. This all means politics is downstream of culture, which tracks what we all recognize: successful efforts to change our culture can completely change what we accept as (and what actually is, in this view) reasonable. Altering the political values is the highest-order level of political maneuvering—it transforms public politics from the outside.2

Part of what makes certain politicians epochal, like Donald Trump, is that they operate at this higher level and deliberately affect change in the culture.3 The United States is going through an instability in its political values because he and his movement’s value commitments have been so persuasive and influential.

Lots of people who view themselves as doing politics right, by arguing within public reason, are frustrated by the centrality of the Culture War. Knowingly or not though, the culture warriors are plausibly engaged in the most important political battle of them all. If you feel like you can’t talk to them normally, that’s because they don’t want those kinds of conversations to be normal. They want people to be having a new range of conversations.4

Fast fashion, unhealthy food, AI-generated music, art, and writing, short-form content, the popularity of singles and playlists over albums, algorithmic music recommendations, cheap, convenient, mass-produced food and products over charming artisanal ones, reductions in quality for products like clothes or toasters, products that enable and nurture solitary introverted behaviour over pro-social behaviour, (video games, pornography, DoorDash, X) pornography in general, (especially including the recent episode on X) the loss of small businesses in favour of larger ones, increasing urban densification (building vertically or horizontally, both get hate), the increasing marvelization of movies and the push towards sequels and attention to profits, the rage and clickbait media landscape, the prioritzation of physical apperance in dating apps and social media, the advent of a post literate society, the proliferation of companies with online gambling as their main revenue source, nicotine flavoured with bubblegum and other related addictive substances, airline companies economizing on space and meals, cheap disposable items meant to be replaced rather than repaired, and finally, the inclusion of ads in everything.

Simple thesis: These people blame markets and companies, and not the actual cause, which is consumers earnestly demanding these products. The reason they attribute blame to markets instead of the median consumer? Social desirability bias.

Let’s take the complaints about quality of contemporary clothes, for example. Alex Tabarrok has a wonderful post on this.

Although the average cost of clothes has decreased substantially, people often retort that the quality of clothes has also decreased. But this is all demand driven! Many consumers prefer fast fashion and cheaper clothing. The market is satisfying this preference. For those that prefer higher quality clothing, the market is also satisfying them. Alex writes:

Consider clothing where function, not just fashion, is paramount: performance sportswear and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

There has been a massive and obvious improvement in functional clothing. The latest GoreTex jackets, for example, are more than five times as water resistant (28 000 mm hydrostatic head) compared to the best waxed cotton technology of the past (~5 000 mm) and they are breathable (!) and lighter. Or consider PolarTec winter jackets, originally developed for the military these jackets have the incredible property of releasing heat when you are active but holding it in when you are inactive. (In the past, mountain climbers and workers in extreme environments had to strip on or off layers to prevent over-heating or freezing while exerting effort or resting.) Amazing new super shoes can actually help runners to run faster! Now that is high quality. Personal protective equipment has also increased in quality dramatically. Industrial workers and intense sports enthusiasts can now wear impact resistant gloves which use non-Newtonian polymers that stiffen on impact to reduce hand injuries.

Many products in the past were of lower quality, and more expensive (adjusted for inflation). The ones that were of higher quality and price, like jeans, were often so because they physically couldn’t make them lower quality, even though many consumers desired that. A similar story can also be told for those complaining about lower-quality appliances.

Once you accept this truism, you will start to see it all over. People attributing blame to AI companies providing access to AI-made music is of course nonsense. They are simply fulfilling the demand of consumers. An AI-generated artist just recently hit 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify. (for context, Jimi Hendrix has 6 million, and James Brown has 4 million) This doesn’t make me feel bad. Why should I be sad that people’s revealed preference is for smut over Tolstoy or singles over albums or sequels over originals? I’ve long ago accepted these facts. The reason this stirs up such negative feelings over markets is because most people have a very hard time admitting the socially undesirable truth: most people are philistines. This anti-Quaker truth is much harder to say outloud than to talk badly about Amazon or OpenAI or markets, which are easy scapegoats in a culture where Rawls reigns supreme. I bet you’re already thinking to yourself that I’m an elitist. This is part of the problem. Why is it bad to admit that the average person has terrible taste? This just seems obviously true, and people do mental gymnastics to avoid saying it out loud, and worse, end up vilifying entrepreneurs as a consequence, some of society’s finest members.

Obviously, you understand that when you get happy about the market satisfying your preferences, this is a good thing. But because you hopefully have the ability to sympathize, it is also obvious that the market satisfying other people’s preferences is a good thing!

*Provided it does not have severe negative externalities. Of course, you may have an objection to some products because of this, for example, fast fashion creates a lot of waste. But for almost all of my examples, there are no serious negative externalities. And even then, shouldn’t you be cautious about this line of thinking? You can make up an externality argument about anything you want to dislike after the fact. For example, if George R.R. Martin announced he was finally planning on publishing the Winds of Winter this year, that would have certain negative externalities on tree populations.

Yes there has been a decline in reading, yes there has been a reduction in small businesses in favour of stores like Walmart and Amazon, but this should make you happy, not sad. The market is working well. What’s the alternative? Force people to read more against their will? Force people to buy more expensive, inconvenient products simply because you have a preference for local goods? You’re a tyrant! And why not another insult: is there anything more childish than insisting that other people like what you like? You know what, I’ll even double down. It actually makes me happy that people listen to AI-generated music, because, although people in my personal life routinely deny it, I am capable of empathy. Those AI music and Baby Shark listeners are gaining so much utility, and they would probably call the music I like boring. To them I say we have reached an impasse. I then go and hang out with the people who have similar interests to me.

The beauty of America/the internet/the market is that you can go anywhere. You don’t need to live in Ohio and eat fast food all day. You can move to Northern California and just eat at farmers’ markets. You don’t need to consume pornography if you want to be on the internet. You can just hang out in r/bible or watch short-form fishing videos. Similar things can be said for AI art or algorithmic music recommendations or high and low quality clothing. Markets provide variety, and you will inevitably dislike some of it. Instead of becoming a socialist, just be tolerant. So, what’s the problem with my way of living? Why not join me?

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Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans in with those of others.

Friedrich Hayek ~ The Use of Knowledge in Society

Trains are not only an authoritarian and inefficient medium of transportation, but also an antiquated technology from the 19th century, unbecoming of an ambitious country like the United States. The U.S. needs to look towards new technologies, not marginally better archaic ones.

Before I discuss my vision for the future below, let me ridicule trains for a second discuss the costs and benefits of train centered transportation infrastucture, so you understand why they are not a part of my vision.

Let’s do a fun thought experiment together. Say you wanted to build a new train line. What would that look like?

Step 1) Being a proper and diligent apparatchik, and before undertaking this massive central planning project, you of course have to first ask your city, or group of cities in the case of an inter-city line, to run demand studies. Transit agencies run surveys, traffic counts, and then run some modelling to try to predict where people live, work, and travel. As Hayek rolls around in his grave already, you also to run Title VI (Civil Rights Act) service equity analyses. Are you shifting service or costs onto protected groups? Is there disparate impact? If yes, flag on the play, replay first down!

*Most of the time, Title VI equity analyses just delay or at the most, reroute the line, but sometimes, like in 2010, the government will pull 70 million in funds over Title VI deficiencies, effectively killing things like the Oakland airport line.

**Again, notice what’s happening here from a Hayekian point of view: before a single rider exists, the state has to manufacture knowledge that markets generate automatically!

Step 2) Environmental review. If there’s federal money involved, expect NEPA. State reviews, such as CEQA in California, can add further cost and time. Expect to wait about 2 and a half years for this.

Step 3) You then have to hire and pay for all of the necessary human capital to actually design the train line. Expect this to take 3-5 years on average.

Step 4) We still haven’t even gotten to funding yet. Even if (!) a route makes sense on paper, it only gets built if governments approve funding, which you can guess is not optimized for consumer demands, but instead for political priorities. Politicians may promise to connect certain lines to communities they want support from. Once they lose office, funding for their lines goes with them. Even if they stay in office, political priorities can often shift, and so too the funding, or the federal government doesn’t like something about it, as is the case for that failed Oakland Aiport line.

Even if the funding is consistent, there’s no reason to think steps 1-4 would result in a train line people even want! New York City’s 9 train is a good example of this. The MTA built the 9 train in 1989 to alleviate congestion, but it was already discontinued by 2005. The reason? The system was confusing, induced longer waits, and had little actual benefit.

And if you were wondering: “Average time to complete the steps in the CIG process and receive a construction grant from FTA is 3- 4 years.”

And if you were wondering, yes, it is quite expensive. In New York, for example, it costs billions of dollar per mile to build new subways, and in California, it has cost around 15 billion to even try to build high-speed rail.

Step 5) Then you have to actually build it. This can take anywhere from 5 years to 10 years to, if you’re California, multiple decades.

Step 6) For the sake of completeness, I will add that before you finally run the damn thing, you have to safety test it, which takes about 6 months.

Yes, many of these things can be run at the same time, so in total, expect to wait 10-15 years for a metro line, and 8-15 for an inter-city line.

Okie dokie.

Now let’s do the same thing with cars. You want to get somewhere without a train line, but instead of building a train line, you decide to buy a car.

Step 1) Purchase a car.

Step 2) Drive exactly from the dealership to your destination

Done. Wow that was easy! You don’t need to bring out contrived models to try to estimate demand for destinations, cars are much more sensitive to consumer preferences than that. You don’t need to go through heaps of regulatory add-ons to buy your car. You don’t need to fight with self-interested politicians from the local to federal level, and sometimes cross state (in the case of highspeed rail) for funding to buy the car. Instead of waiting 8-15 years for the new train line, you can wait 18-35 hours for the average car to be built. Even then, you wouldn’t wait that long at all, it’s already pre-built for you. Carmakers build to stock, not to order, because customers value immediate delivery, and carmakers are simply much better at building cars than politicians are at building trains. (most obvious statement I’ve written on the blog so far!)

This is all true for a few reasons. 1) The car market is competitive. Multiple companies, native and international, compete to best satisfy your preferences. This competition brings costs down, and quality and variety up. Innovation is incentivized, and through creative destruction, inefficient car manufacturers are pushed out of the market, and car firms that are better at making people happy are rewarded. The train market on the other hand, is defined not by competition but by monopoly. With no direct competitive threat, politicians pile on goals (equitable hiring, local hiring, union only work, Buy America, climate demands, and so forth), each time and cost-adding. As such, the train market is characterized by slowness, inefficiency, incredible high costs, and, due to a less sensitive demand mechanism, much more dumb decision making. Maoist indeed!

I already mentioned the 9 train example, but another more famous one is the entire history of California high-speed rail projects.

It never made sense. California’s demography is not like Europe or Japan.

That Europe is more densely populated than the U.S., especially western states like California, is a well known fact. I’d like to also include this map because it’s fun.

Successful rail connects multiple dense cities along a corridor. Europe has this, China has this, Japan has this, California does not. What’s in between The Bay and L.A.? Santa Barbara? Bakersfield? The Diablo mountains??? No no no. A quick look at a topographical map explains why this makes such little sense.

California, which is symbolic for the vast majority of the U.S., is not densely populated enough for high speed rail. And yet the perverse incentives of the state government have cost Californians 14 billion and counting. Yes, this is demonstrative of low state capacity, but it’s also demonstrative of what actual consumer demand is for this transit system, which the government has sorely mispriced. Of course, this is also demonstrative of how bad governments are at actually pricing consumer demands. They are much better at fulfilling their ideological objectives. For another example of low state capacity and assymetrical consumer and government interests, check The Washington Post on Biden’s attempt at state constructed broadband networks:

“Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.”

Alex Tabarokk writes that a big part of the problem is the government, as we have seen with trains above, putting on a salad of ideological wish list items.

• “Preference for hiring union workers, who are scarce in some rural areas.

• Requiring providers to prioritize “certain segments of the workforce, such as individuals with past criminal records,” when building broadband networks.

• Requiring eligible entities to “account not only for current [climate-related] risks but also for how the frequency, severity, and nature of these extreme events may plausibly evolve as our climate continues to change over the coming decades.”

I recommend reading Brian Potter’s two-part series on the sad history of American atttempts at high speed rail, but to summarize, an incredibly large amount of US high-speed rail routes have been proposed. These projects have consistently failed because only two lines in the entire world actually pay for themselves, the Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka lines. High speed rail lines by and large just cannot cover their infastructure and operating costs without government assistance. Given this, high speed rail almost always gets shot down after it spends enough time in the political boxing ring. In the past, there have been too many checks on the power of authoritarian types to build dumb infrastructure projects, thankfully. Hopefully the U.S. does not lose this admiration for efficiency and freedom, as it seems Europe did long ago.

*partial steelman relevent to the last paragraph: Where you have a genuinely dense corridor with stable, repeated demand (Tokyo–Osaka-type situations), the information problem is simpler and the fixed costs can be justified. So I don’t claim trains can never work. My claim is a bit narrower, that in the vast majority of the U.S. and Canada, passenger rail requires planners to solve an information system they are structurally bad at solving compared to the next best car focused option. Even then, as you will see at the end, I think my vision for the future is better than the current Japanese system.

So, to recap, trains, both in cities and across cities, represent a form of transport supply that is incredibly constricted, inefficient, and insensitive to consumer demands. Compared to of course car-based transportation systems.

We can continue to compare the two systems even after the train line is built. Benefits don’t stop just at the pre-construction level. Let’s say the train line was built. Cars are still more sensitive to the preferences of the consumer. First, one of the main problems with trains are how insensitive to consumer preferences they are after they are built. Errors, unlike in flexible private markets, don’t get corrected quickly, if at all. In markets Hayek demonstrates how feedback is granular and constant. In car world, this is obvious. People change routes, live in different places, buy different cars, car firms respond quickly because in markets, the decision maker is tied to the consequences, and so forth. In rail, costs are socialized (so the incentive structure is much weaker), and the rail line is one giant irreversible decision. On the other hand, cars are millions of reversible decisions that update daily.

Which technology is more sensitive to consumer preferences in the long run, do you suppose?

Second, cars are a door-to-door technology; trains are not. This makes them more efficient temporally, and also free of schedule dependence. One of the main criticisms of California’s high-speed rail system, besides the lack of dense intermediate cities, is that, once you get into L.A., or The Bay, you are faced with urban sprawl that is incredibly inefficient to get around through public transport. Even if you get to city center, it would still be much better to have a car on either end. All this to say, I’m not surprised when I read that the data shows commute times for drivers to be on average about 26 minutes one-way, while bus riders averaged about 47 minutes, subway/elevated was 49 minutes, and commuter rail/long-distance was 71 minutes. Those figures include walking and waiting, which is why the differences are so large.

I know what the urbanist types who spend too much time on r/urbanplanning and YouTube videos like this are thinking. “Sure, urban sprawl makes inter-city trains hard to sell. So why don’t we just change the urban sprawl to my preferred dense little ‘15-minute city’ where nobody owns a car, every street is a bike lane, apartments bloom like zoning-approved wildflowers above corner bakeries and matcha cafes, and the only traffic is strollers and San Francisco street cars!” These urbanist types frequently drift policy debates back into their preferred environment of Cities Skylines and Sims, where they can rip all of Manhattan or San Jose up and start from scratch. Obviously, that’s not happening. Urban sprawl should be taken at face value, so the point above about commute times cannot be avoided short of designing a whole new city. (I do have high hopes for California Forever.) What I’m mocking is what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge. Urbanists, being epistemically arrogant, treat the city like a simple algebra problem. It’s true that you can centrally plan a system whose intelligence is distributed across millions of lives, but it will not be as optimized for cost or time as the competing, decentralized system is.

We don’t even need to be theoretical here. We can just look at consumer preferences in history. Try the fruit and vegetable shipping industry on for size. A history of an industry that originated on railroad. Why did railroads lose that business to trucks? Do I even need to answer?

The truck, like cars, are door to door. It’s loaded at the origin and unloaded at the destination, while loads that travel by rail are trucked to the rail, unloaded and reloaded onto the train, shipped onto the train to the destination railhead, unloaded and reloaded into other trucks, and then travel to the final destination. Trucks have more reliable schedules as well, succumbing to delay much less often than trains.

This is why, in the early 1900s, all fruits and vegetables were shipped by iced railway lines, but post-interstate, produce logistics shifted hard to the more time sensitive and flexible truck, and by now, “Trucks ship 83 percent of agricultural products and 92 percent of dairy, fruit, vegetables, and nuts.”

The costs of trains and the benefits of cars/trucks for fruit and people are the same. No wonder the market chose trucks.

We don’t even need metaphors. Screw fruit. Look at the historical foot traffic for cars!

An era of history many people have forgotten (including myself before doing research for this post) was the electric interurban trend of the early 1900s.

Built with the idea of attracting short-distance passenger traffic and light freight, the interurbans were largely constructed in the early 1900s. The rise of the automobile and motor transport caused the industry to decline after World War I, and the depression virtually annihilated the industry by the middle 1930s.

link

Car adoption crowded out passenger rail long before the U.S. was incentivizing it with the interstate system. In 1928, rail passenger volume was 33 percent lower than it had been in 1920, and automobile registrations topped 21 million. By 1960, rail passenger counts were at 20 percent of 1944 levels, and railroads reported an annual passenger service deficit of $300 million.

Even despite government support of passenger rail through the Post Office, post WW2 ridership still fell. When mail finally going the way of humans and fruit, shifted off trains in 1967, the passenger rail industry cratered, and had to be bought out by the government to create Amtrak.

I encourage the reader, if still skeptical, to just look into the history of passenger rail and cars. It is quite obvious that, even before the interstate system, consumers simply chose cars over trains. And this is what you should want. In a free market, we let the best technology win. That is exactly what happened in the first half of the 20th century.

Earlier this term, I was hanging out with some master’s students in the economics department, waiting for econometrics professor to show up to his office hours. (I am 4th year.) VIA Rail is incredibly expensive in Canada compared to busing or driving, and people were complaining about it. I casually mentioned the main thesis of this post, and one of the master’s students started going on about how actually, we would have lived in what was basically a European-style train utopia if not for Big Oil, which through some vague Tik-Tok or Reddit sourced argument led to the downfall of trains because they were more environmentally efficient. I was quite surprised by a master’s student in economics espousing this kind of conspiratorial thinking. Like really, that’s your preferred, most likely explanation??. I gave him the argument about the history of market simply preferring cars, and he lukewarmly agreed. Jeez though, if eocnomics is this bad, I can only imagine the state of the average sociology masters student, let alone the average person. (although maybe, for many majors, spending years in academia actually reduces the amount of things you have correct beliefs about below the median American).

Now anyway, let’s move on to another perhaps better counter-argument. You might say that the argument of revealed preferences through the market, and the greater success of cars than trains, is just a reflection of government priority. Sure, cars might be more efficient without government support of trains, but if we spent more of our resources on public transport, it would not be more efficient.

Well, state capacity is at an all-time low. If you haven’t already intutited this from the writing above, think about the 3.4 million cases in the Immigration court’s backlog. Think about the mere 322 miles of high-voltage transmission lines built in 2024 (out of the roughly 5,000 miles per year the U.S. needs to ensure grid reliability and cost effectiveness) or the 50% increase in passengers flying since 2000, paired with the complete absence of major airport construction since 2000, and the anemic rate of runway construction.

We need to shrink an inefectual government, not expand it. The government should choose to do a few things quite nicely, and leave the rest to the market. We need to be choosy about what the government can do well, what it will likely fail at, and also what is just plain dumb. With state capacity being this dour, we need to make less dumb decisions. Building marginally better trains in the 21st century, after the 20th already decided that they were an inferior product, is a dumb decision.

My Vision

Supersonic planes and autonomous vehicles should dominate future transportation networks. Urbanist types hate automonous vehicles even though they solve a lot of their problems because it’s hard to get out of old habits. Matthew Yglesias succinctly sums up the situation in this note:

“I get that it’s inconvenient for those of us with strong urbanist priors that self-driving technology solves a lot of our favorite problems without adopting our favorite solutions. But that’s life.”

Using supersonic planes and autonomous vehicles, the average person should be able to get from any point in the country to any other point in the country in about 3 hours, door to door, cost-effectively.

We should have supersonic airplanes made by Blake Scholl’s Boom Supersonic and other competitors. An autonomous vehicle should be available to pick you up within 30 seconds and whisk you to a nearby airport. They should be able to travel at 100 or more mph since they’re better than human drivers. Security at the airport should be instant, (Dulles Airport level, an example of high state capacity which I experienced earlier this year, wowing me and showing airport security can be incredibly quick even post 9/11) Because the automonous vehicle is so fast, if your trip doesn’t require a plane, it should be able to get you there very quickly. Of course, if it does require a plane, because it’s supersonic, it will be able to get you from SF to NY in about 3 hours or less. If you want to travel to London from NYC, you should be able to get there in about 3 and a half hours.

In cities, automomous cars and autonomous buses with dynamic route planning based on riders’ actual needs will beat subways’ 1-dimensional tracks every time, and because the’re autonomous, run on solar, and organized by AI bureaucrats, they will not only be more efficiently run but be essentially free.

As I said in the beginning, trains are unbecoming of the ambitious and innovative country that I aspire to see. Abundance and Up-Wing types, and of course the curious people looking in from the door, should be looking at and beyond the technological frontier, not romanticizing financially irresponsible and antiquated 20th-century technology.

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There is philosophy and discovery, religion and servitude, love and betrayal, victory and defeat, art.

Against all always is the impulse to sloth; to the pale cast of thought, not in action but dawdling.

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

Such may be true — greats are called in every generation to supreme callings which make eternal their memory. To proceed in learning is, in part, to understand one by one that every sphere has its greats, but that in each sphere they are few and few forthcoming.

I must not suggest that discovery is ever at the point of having been exhausted, for it will never be so. The end of discovery, even interesting discovery, is for immortals alone. It is the borders of discovery, which may be found out, that temper one’s hopes.

—is this the sort of feeling which must lead the never-serving to servitude? The inevitable mapping of the borders of novelty gives way to an angst which left to fester leads to wayward, worthless thought at many an hour of the day. One is tempted to escape not by way of noble striving but by slavish submission to the assumption of responsibility by another, be that God or else.

To find the one sea glooming; to feel one is not the mariner they dreamt; to know the one sea, though large, is the one sea and there will never be another. That might make cowards of most.

See though that these are cowards only and not nihilists, for their world is not lacking for meaning, and they are but fearful scouts who have sailed the water whole and can go no further but must make something of themselves in the strange hills they have seen.

And what strange hills! How unsuitable they seem once you cease to glean them from afar and come to know their contours.

Time keeps careful watch over the hills, ensuring few shall ever summit two, let alone three of them. And so the sickly neurotic is beside themselves, going over and back from base to base, stuffed with thought without thinking: ‘which to climb?’

—yes, tonight I shall watch a film, drink some wine, tend to love, and read, putting off such thoughts which need plague us as winter’s nearness creeps.

Outrageous Fortune has been sadly on the backburner for both Tristan and I during a busy semester, but we hope to return to regular essays sooner rather than later. If you haven’t, do subscribe if you’d like to have those delivered to your inbox.

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Around the world, people want to trample on our right to immigrate, most explicitly now in our very own government. We forget ourselves.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

~ The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus | Engraved on the Statue of Liberty

Watching One Battle After Another worried me. The film, both dispiriting and enlightening, arrives at a time when most Americans, like many humans before them, are sleepwalking into subjugation.

Like all great art, One Battle After Another has a deeper meaning, and that meaning has awakened me to the central problem of our time: There is no end in sight for the continual destruction of our freedom, thanks to the authoritarian indulgence of the present conservative movement.

There is currently an ongoing attack on the core American philosophical disposition: freedom. Free from social desirability bias, credence in freedom’s intrinsic value has weathered the storms of the long and winding journey of American philosophical beliefs.

But perhaps you’d say I’m exaggerating, that we don’t live in the world of One Battle After Another yet. That I’ve just been emotionally touched by a film that portrays a much more authoritarian alternate history than the one we live in. But the Venezuelan case is relevant here.

If the government can wantonly deport people without due process, I have to ask the question: how far are we from One Battle After Another?

To remind you, the Venezuelan migrants were arrested based on them having tattoos, and then flown to a dungeon in El Salvador, otherwise known as the maximum security CECOT prison, for a completely unspecified amount of time, without any due process! The invocation was the Alien Enemies Act, which then had to rely on the claim that the Tren de Aragua gang was acting for Venezuela, even though U.S. intelligence didn’t back that connection at all.

27 of the 50 had pending asylum cases. In fact, Bukele was uncomfortable with these guys even coming to his prison, as he didn’t think the evidence was anywhere near high enough for conviction. Think about that for a moment. As Richard Hanania wrote, “The guy who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” who is famous for mass prison camps, thinks that the U.S. is going too far in locking people up without evidence.”

Let’s keep going. It’s not just about Venezuelan immigrants.

There are 3.4 million cases in the Immigration Court’s backlog.

This year, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded the 2021 protected areas for ICE capture, which included schools, hospitals, and shelters. It is a “Anywhere, anytime” interior enforcement policy now.

Previously, immigrants could schedule appointments and provide information through the CBP One™ mobile application, this feature has been removed, and all appointments cancelled in an effort to constrict migration flows.

From federal reimbursements to performance awards, ICE has been hiring more and more local cops to act as force multipliers:

“From border counties to big-city police departments, more than 1,000 local and state law enforcement agency partners in 40 states now work directly with DHS and ICE to protect their communities. These historic partnerships are a force multiplier for DHS as the Administration continues to use every tool in its toolbox to find, arrest, and deport criminal illegal aliens.”

Federal troops have been deployed to Portland on the pretext of defending ICE facilities from domestic terrorists, directed to use full force if necessary.

D.C. has been militarized, and Memphis, and Chicago are likely next on the chopping block.

Large immigration crackdown operations have been deployed, from the crackdown in California this past summer to the “Chicago Blitz”, which have resulted in a record 59,000 in ICE detention, (71% of which have no criminal record!).

It’s not just immigration, either.

Our current FBI director, a lickspittle who got famous for making children’s books about the president, is doing loyalty purges in the FBI. I don’t blame him, as he’s merely learning from the man who hired him.

Trump routinely prosecutes his opponents, has threatened to remove licences for TV networks that give him bad publicity, has disbanded the FBI D.C. public-corruption squad, has scorned the courts, and has instituted taxes on us without our consent.

And perhaps most depressing, and most similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s world, is this piece of news:

“Trump administration officials on Monday responded to the activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination by threatening to bring the weight of the federal government down on what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on the killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.” NYT link here.

So I ask again, how far are we?

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I wouldn’t be writing this review if One Battle After Another were another simplistic leftist movie, casting conservatives as evil and leftists as heroes. Yes, it presents some conservatives as militaristic, racist psychopaths. It takes a sympathetic look at what it would feel like to have to scurry under floorboards like mice, or to have your store broken into by an authoritarian government with no warrant.

But Marxist terrorists are either cast as impotent or villainous. Sensitive woke types are made fun of multiple times throughout the film.

Too many people specialize in politics, and, running around amidst the chaos, cannot simply look down. One has to look down upon things to understand what is really at stake. Paul Thomas Anderson has done this. He correctly understands that freedom, most explicitly freedom of mobility, is under attack by an authoritarian regime, and everyone, left or right, has to come together to push back. We need to sober up about the efficacy of political violence, we have to be able to laugh about microaggressions, and we need to remember what could be lost if we forget what truly makes America, America.

Freedom is easy to forget. Great art like One Battle After Another has reminded me what it feels like to have to hide in basements for the crime of seeking a life free from poverty, it has reminded me of the terror of a world without due process, one where the military can break into your home with no search warrant. It has reminded me of the sickness of a person who desires to harm innocents just because of their tribalistic out-group bias, or the unfairness of an illegal immigrant who gets deported to a life of poverty for a speeding ticket, while a citizen who commits dozens of crimes can continue to endanger our streets.

I don’t want to dunk too much on the MAGA movement, as I’ve already written an essay partly on how they are slave morality incarnate, and also one partly on debunking the “immigrant crime” debate. There is no point in engaging in a dodgeball contest of left vs right. That’s been done. This is exactly the point of the film. Move on from the culture war, and focus on our core American values. Once you center freedom in your mind once again, you will, with fresh eyes, see the humanity at the border, the authoritarian excess in D.C., and the similarities of your fellow countrymen.

One Battle After Another forces you to think of the Venezuelan deportations in the context of authoritarianism, and with great emotional power, reminds you that if the government can wantonly deport people without due process, that is a problem for all Americans, not just those who have a Latin American phenotype. The film has firmly placed freedom back in my heart and at the fore of my philosophical convictions. For that, I thank Paul Thomas Anderson.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

~ First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln. March 4, 1861.

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Wearing wired headphones? Performative. Reading a book in public spaces? Performative. Drinking matcha while doing it? Performative. Drinking matcha and reading a book while attending a Clairo concert?? Performative male final boss.

The term carries a clear accusation: Men who try to do attractive things in public are almost always faking it, for the sole purpose of seducing women.

The problem is that my generation is kinda sucking on a few metrics right now. We’re lonelier, we date each other less, and we’re more politically polarized than any recent generation.

I happen to enjoy sex. I think, judging by both stated and revealed preferences most other people do as well. You might point to the decline in sexual experiences as evidence against the revealed preference. I disagree. My generation is certainly not less horny. They have shifted their consumption bundle more towards porn and less towards sexual activity because the cost of the latter (speaking to women…) now outweighs the benefits more than it used to. This doesn’t mean men like sex less. The price of sex has risen relative to substitutes. Perhaps the risk premium of hitting on women is higher (see graph above). Or maybe it’s something else. Or a combination. Anyway, the decline in sexual experiences is a negative, not a positive trend, and you want me to get to the point.

So, the topic at hand. The trend has spiralled. The men who, amidst the dysfunctional dating market and polarized generation, are actually putting themselves out there and trying to attract women, are being clowned on! No less for taking an interest in their interests!

Let me make a claim: Performative males are actually an overwhelming net good for society.

Consider this example: Say a guy is reading The Sun Also Rises. He enjoys the book for the book’s sake. He could read it inside, but he says to himself, “girls like when guys read books, and chances are, I’ll be more attracted to the girls that share my interests. Maybe one of them will even be into Hemingway(!)” he tells himself in vain.

Say something even “worse” than that. Say he forgets his Hemingway and only has Kreysley Cole books. (my girlfriend tells me she is a prolific smut writer) Safe to say he isn’t really enjoying reading a book where sex scenes move the plot forward. However, he really really wants to strike up a conversation with women, and knows that reading it outside will of course increase the probability of such an event, as opposed to reading it in his bedroom.

Is this a bad thing?

In the counterfactual, he stays inside because he has no interest in attracting women. That means, on net, less conversations between like-minded people. Less men and women talking about shared interests, less dates, less holding hands, less kisses, less marriages, and so forth. If a guy is reading a book by Twain and a girl likes Twain, he is doing her a service by signalling he likes people who like Twain! That instantly smooths over part of the invisible wall between the sexes, one which seems to be building higher and higher with each generation.

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Nor do I think this is fake or morally corrupt. First of all, most of life is performance. Why focus on this method of attraction when you could focus on the way people style their hair, their face, their body? Most people I know post their Spotify wrapped on their story every year. Most people I know act nicer and more interested, even unconsciously, when they’re talking to someone they have a romantic interest in. So is it manipulative to “perform” for someone else? I guess so, but so is wearing perfume. Why don’t we ridicule that as much as performative males?

People think that you can just be subtle about it and act cool in the corner, waiting for someone to notice you. Even that is a form of performance, but regardless, it’s unambitious and aesthetically inferior. Signal instead what you are interested in to draw people to you. Twiddling your thumbs waiting is not how our generation is going to get out of this “loneliness epidemic”. (Popular, somewhat dramatic term, yes. But directionally correct? Also yes.)

I was going to talk about how performative males embody the Nietzschean spirit of will to power, but I decided that was a bit much. In short, I applaud them for at least trying to bend social reality to their presence, instead of letting the world pass them by.

Anyway, counterargument: You could say that a part of it seems to be pandering to female approval. Not so Nietzschean!

In the world of romance, it’s always a bit blurry. Is it okay if 5% of the reason you play guitar publicly is because you wanna date someone? 40%? 60%?

Somewhere around the 30% to 40% mark seems right to me. And I would guess that it’s rare to find males over 3 quarters.

Think about it. It would take a peculiar person to walk all the way to a bookstore, spend 25 bucks on a book about feminist literature, and then walk all the way to a park in the hope of a 1 in 500(?) chance a woman happens to notice and takes you seriously. I would bet that the vast majority of the time, the performative male, if not doing it as a joke, is actually doing something they enjoy.

You know what let’s double down. I even think it’s a good thing if it’s 100% motivated by wanting to attract women. First of all, taking an interest in the activities of another group is a compliment, not an insult. I would be flattered if someone decided to start reading Bryan Caplan's blogography(?) because they wanted to hang out with me.

Second, if a guy starts reading feminist literature to get female attention, well, sure it’s not the best form of performative male, but we’ve got to start somewhere, people. The genders have diverged too much, and we now require radical solutions.

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Yes, this is pandering. But much of initial courtships is pandering, too. Think of this as jumpstarting the car.

So instead of condemning performative males, we should all try to be more like them. We should try to be curious about the other gender’s interests. (which have become so polarized as of late). Even if only surface level, it is better than the status quo of complete gender interest isolation. It’s also an obvious good to show your interests on your sleeve. It creates more serendipity in your life, and more human connection.

In the gender polarization and fertility crisis that the world faces today, I’m afraid performative males are the heroes we need, but not the ones we deserve.

So, this post.

When Brian Wilson says “I'm pickin' up good vibrations”, or when Tyler Cowen says “The changes in vibes — why did they happen?” or when Noah Smith says “the vibecession is still a mystery that needs explaining,” or when Bentham’s Bulldog says “A non-philosopher will often be moved by a general vibe behind an argument,” what do they actually mean?

What is the actual definition of a vibe/atmosphere/energy/frequency/aura and so forth.

Before we begin I want to distinguish between society-level vibes and individual vibes. For this post, I’ll call them micro and macro vibes.

O.K. Let’s start with the origin. Of course, it’s short for vibration. When did people start saying that?

Apparently, Brian Wilson actually heard about the word vibration from his mother. In the 1950s, the word was used as it is today, but only among very select hippie groups in California.

“[She] used to tell me about vibrations,” Wilson told a biographer, years later. “She told me about dogs that would bark at people … that a dog would pick up vibrations from these people that you can’t see, but you can feel.

Wilson’s song “Good Vibrations” then went on to popularize the term. By the end of the 1960s, it was being said by hippies all over the U.S.

My dad, who was born in 1951, tells me that in the 1960s, people would only use the word to describe things that you literally could not articulate.

For example, “Bob Dylan says he wants to go see the show with us, but something about his vibe is telling me he doesn’t.”

This gets us to my definition.

The word is supposed to have a mystical quality to it. It should be exclusively used to describe things that you can only gesture at.

Side point: What makes it really mystical is when both people independently recognize the same vibe, yet neither can explain it. (this can go wrong sometimes, more later.)

So if you go to a party and you’re getting a bad vibe, that means you can’t put your finger on why, you just have a gut feeling about it.

This is the cool definition, in my opinion. It should be used seldomly, for specific, kind of magical feelings. If you use the word like this, it actually has a place in your vocabulary.

You probably know where I’m going with this.

Nowadays, when people walk into a party, they might say it has a bad vibe, but that’s simply because the music isn’t what they’re into and they don’t know anybody. No mystery there bro.

Nowadays, the word vibe has become so popular that it has lost its meaning, what made it cool in the first place. Because of that, it’s extremely overused by my generation and the section of millennials that’s failing to stay cool. At it’s best, it’s shorthand for an aesthetic or a perfectly expanable mood. At it’s worst, it’s just a signal to other people that you want to fit in.

You see the latter a lot in advertising. Companies that want to attract younger people will often use it wrong. “Coffee shop with cozy vibes,” “good vibes only”. This is just lazy and ruins the word. If you could otherwise articulate what you mean when you say the word, then you are overusing it and being redundant and lazy. Instead of saying the cafe has a nice vibe, compliment the lighting, the drinks, the varnish on the furniture, and so forth.

Thus, micro vibe inflation.

Before I get to the macro side, I want to rant for just a little more about another term.

Low-key and high-key. Example: I was at a big house party with one of my friends last summer. We were all sitting around a fire talking, and there were some girls at the other end of the fire pit. Then one of my friends farted. It was pretty audible, at least on that side of the firepit. As we were all about to laugh, my friend frantically whispered “keep it lowkey, keep it lowkey!” although he was already starting to laugh at the absurdity. We all started laughing.

That’s a good use of the word lowkey. (side point, is lowkey a compound word? If not, I will continue to treat it as such. It’s too casual a term to be decorated by a hyphen.) He specifically does not want us to reveal something outloud. The opposite, highkey (which my generation uses a lot too) is self-explanatory.

Anyways, the point is that these words have a specific meaning, and they have become ruined by popularity as well. Gen Z routinely misuses them. To the point where every 4th sentence starts with the words “lowkey”. I love lowkey, but it’s not lowkey that you didn’t like the movie if you’re literally saying it outloud, it’s not lowkey that you’re dipping if you've already got one foot out the door, you can’t say you’re “lowkey gonna pull a pants beer!” if you’re already unbuckling your belt in front of everybody!

Anyway. On to the rest of the essay.

On the macro side, we see the opposite situation. The word is highly underrated.

Vibe has only just begun to make its appearance in the economics profession. Because of that, the word still carries weight. And contrary to your intution, it actually has a lot of explanatory power in the field.

In economics, (particularly in the econ-blog world) the definition is something like this: we have various measurable variables which help us understand society, however, often we are ignorant of various causal forces which at this point are impossible to quantify. This is usually referred to as culture, which you can think of as the error term. Or, if you want to be cooler, you can call them, as Keynes did, ‘animal spirits’.

Yes, animal spirits is basically a synonym. You’re correct that instead of using vibe, you could say the shift in vibes pre-2024 election was simply a shift in animal spirits. Personally I like vibe more on an aesthetic level, and it’s replacement of animal spirits in the econ blogosphere partially confirms my argument. For example, if there’s a disconnect between public perceptions of the economy and the actual state of the economy, you could label that as a vibecession, or animal-spirit-cession. C’mon people, we know which one looks better.

And yes, it has become more popular over time. For example, searching Marginal Revolution (the biggest (and best!) econ blog in the world) for the word vibe, I count 1 post in 2011, 1 in 2017, 1 in 2019, 1 in 2020, 2 posts in 2021, 1 in 2022, 7 in 2023, 11 in 2024, and 8 so far in 2025.

The explanatory power of the word is obvious: unquantifiable vibes drive economic decision-making and, consequently, economic fluctuations.

For example, the vibe shift, which Tyler popularized in his most popular post last year, was (is) a shift in the general sense of what’s cool, acceptable, or desirable. (in the conservative direction) Tyler gives some possible reasons in his post, but it’s quite hard to quantify them. So the use of the term accurately describes the situation and actually conveys a lot of information to the reader.

Conclusion: I wrote this post so that perhaps I can have an effect on the use of vibe and to a lesser (lowkey?) extent lowkey. It will be highly marginal, but as long as it’s in my direction, I’ll be happy. That’s the micro stuff. (although much more important, simply because of the amount of people using the term this way)

Secondarily I hope that more non-blogging macro-economists start using the term vibe. Of course, just like in micro settings, it should be used sparingly. But I think it deserves a least a small spot in their vocabulary.

A certain alien race, from a planet very far away, loved to cook. Perhaps they evolved from a species which communicated through taste sensors, and their obsession with cooking, and cooking well, is simply an evolutionary byproduct (like our love of music).

Or maybe it’s something else. I’ve always wondered why herbivores didn’t evolve extremely hard to eat meat, like many plant species have. Perhaps in their world, herbivores are laced with poisons or plant-like antifeedants, like tannins and lignin. Only skilled cooks survived and propagated their genes, thus the emphasis on culinary skill.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with evolution. Perhaps it’s just a cultural quirk.

The reason doesn’t really matter. On the morning of January 27th, a race of hyper-obsessed culinary aliens descended upon the Earth, and began the search for someone to talk to.

A man woke up.

Romantic, dark lighting surrounded him. There was a beautiful silence, and he felt quite calm. A voice from a speaker said, “Good evening. I hope you like your living situations. Your society seems to be quite obsessed with ‘liberal values’ such as freedom of property, speech, and person. We don’t care as much, so we decided to abduct you. However, I think you will find this quite fu-”

“How come I can’t see you?”

“We would prefer not to show ourselves. We fear you might find us too unsettling. Perhaps in a few years, when your race has matured. For now, enjoy this meal we have prepared for you.”

A dish was served.

“The ingredients are from the last planet we visited. They had good dishes, but fought with each other too much, and their plants never evolved fruit as a dispersal agent. Anyway. Could we ask you a few questions about your home planet?”

“Of course.”

“Where can we find the best dishes?”

“Probably the United States of America.”

Furious whispering ensued. I did not know I was talking to a group.

“That doesn’t seem to be likely at all. Our prior probability is 2% that that’s true.”

“You have Bayesianism on your home planet?”

“We find it incredibly unlikely because of migration patterns. The worst of European cuisine is located in the British Isles, where most of America’s immigrants were from by 1850. Therefore, the probability that America has the best food is exceedingly low.”

“Well, my prior is like 90%. Recent migration patterns have high culinary upside. Mexican, Latin American, South and East Asian immigrants have all increased the average dish’s quality.”

“If that’s true, it will increase barely at all. Perhaps 6% now. Because how can, say, America’s food be better than Mexico or China, when you already admit that Mexicans coming into the U.S. is upping the U.S average? Doesn’t that imply that the average Mexican is a better cook?”

“Perhaps the average Mexican or Frenchman is a better cook. That doesn’t mean that Mexican cuisine is the best.

Yes, the U.S. started from a low base, but at this point, due to immigration, it has more culinary variety than any other country. Costa Rican food might be quite good, but would you enjoy a culinary trip to San Jose or New York? Being an alien, I think the first day might be equal. But after a week, the variety of the U.S. is beating 90% of most countries every time. And it’s not just an ‘okay’ variety. You can find amazing Afghani and Mexican and Chinese and so forth all within a 30 minute drive in the Bay Area. The same can be said, swapping some of the cuisines out for others, in dozens of other U.S. cities. Even smaller towns are still going to have much more variety than the average foreign small town. In Ohio, you can dine on Indian, Haitian, Italian, even some Mexican food trucks. Will it be as good as in NYC? No, but it will still amaze the average small-town Frenchman or Mexican, who only usually has one cuisine to choose from.”

“Interesting. You’re correct that I would travel to the Bay Area over San Jose for variety’s sake, but again, we’re talking about the best cuisine here. You make a good point about cities and even smaller towns, so I’ll go up to 12%. But I’m still not convinced. Ask any non-American, and they will not agree with you. Even most Americans will think your claim is preposterous. The probability that this and your claim can be true at the same time is quite low.”

“Social Desirability Bias! Can you look up a recent Bryan Caplan post?”

“Caplan? We prefer reading Cowen’s food blogs.”

“Here, I have it on my phone. Caplan quotes Kristian Niemietz in saying:

But tobacco is a big exception. Less then half of the recorded cigarette purchases shows up in the Living Cost and Food Survey. In the US equivalent, the ratio is not even 40%.

The mismatch between what smokers say in surveys and what they do in practice is a classic example of the difference between “stated preferences” and “revealed preferences“. Social engineers love stated preferences. Opponents of big supermarkets, too, always have a survey at hand, indicating that the vast majority of residents in their areas would never set foot in a discounter. But once it is there, it flourishes.

There is nothing schizophrenic about this behaviour. When asked whether you would shop in a big supermarket in your area, of course you respond something like “No! Small, local shops are much more charming and personal” – because that is the socially acceptable thing to say. When you smoke, saying that you want to quit makes you at least a repentant sinner.

“Caplan then says: “Now ask yourself: Is voting more like a national product account – or a consumer expenditure survey?”

I say: Are opinions on American cuisine more like a national product account, or a consumer expenditure survey?”

“I don’t understand.”

“World population in review says America is the 2nd most hated country in the world. Much of this is because of past and present perceived imperialism, and this unfairly spills over into culinary opinions.

That’s survey, stated preference stuff. Now let’s look at “national product accounts”.

McDonald’s has 28,000 stores abroad. KFC has 29,000. Subway has 37,000. Starbucks has 38,000.

These are in countries with “high-level” cuisine. Japan has 5,000 McDonald’s. Do you know what the leading coffee shop chain is in France? Starbucks! I thought Japanese and French cuisine were miles above American?”

“Yes, but those restaurants have been tweaked to regional taste. It’s an unfair comparison.”

“Sure. I remember when I was in Barcelona, I was able to buy a beer with my Big Mac. That was cool. The beef was maybe of a slightly higher quality. But at bottom, I was still eating fries, a Big Mac, chicken nuggets, and ketchup. You can find burger joints in California which use grass-fed beef and organic avocado on their burgers; you can find burger joints in the east that use beef tallow for their fries now. What I’m trying to say is that American cuisine is not always lower quality, and European versions of American cuisine aren’t always high quality. There is serious heterogeneity inside of America, which means Europeans are just eating a certain style of American cuisine that already exists back home.

And let’s look at China. There are about 4,000 American KFCs, but over 10,000 Chinese ones! Yes, they have a much bigger population. But the market is booming. 40% of all Chinese KFCs have been built in just the last four years. Yes, they serve rice and egg drop soup. I admit that it is rare in “American” style restaurants back home. But their specialty, what makes them enduringly popular in China, is their fried chicken. That sense of Americana is most of the reason why they are so popular.

Just look at this graph. Don’t these results make your prior less likely? If the U.S. truly had much worse food than basically the rest of the entire world, then why is this graph such a blowout? I’d also like to add that the only non-American restaurant on here, the Filipino Jollibee, serves heavily American-influenced food.

Jollibee offers American-influenced fast food items and casual Filipino fare. Among the establishment's best sellers are the Yumburger, the house hamburger first introduced during their early days of operation; the Chickenjoy, a fried chicken meal, introduced in the 1980s, with regular and spicy versions; and Jolly Spaghetti, a sweet Filipino spaghetti that includes a beef sauce with pieces of hot dog and ham. In 1995, Jollibee introduced the Burger Steak to its menu. At its international locations, Jollibee also offers localized products, such as chili chicken in Vietnam and nasi lemak in Brunei. Jollibee serves Coca-Cola products in Luzon and Visayas and Pepsi products in Mindanao and its overseas markets.

You could argue that the Philippines was colonized by the U.S. Okay, but they were colonized by Spain, too. How come it was American cuisine that helped to launch their most successful restaurant abroad, and not Spanish? Or why didn’t Vietnam, a former French colony, have a great French restaurant on the list? Considering you think French and Spanish are vastly better than American, these results seem to be quite surprisingly dominant for America.

Here is another, much longer list of the largest resturant chains in the world.

Of the 114 largest, 45 are non-American. That’s 39%. Decent, until you remember that the U.S. only makes up 4.22% of the world’s population, and supposedly has worse food than the rest of the world, and yet has 61% of the top 114 restaurant chains! Even these numbers are still misleading, as most of that 39% are Chinese. But they are only high because they have a 1.4 billion-person internal market. The U.S., while having a large market compared to European countries, is still dwarfed by that, and as such, has had to have much of its success internationally.

Which is much harder than what Chinese companies are doing, because they can just appeal to their native cuisine. The U.S. cuisine, on the other hand, is so damn popular worldwide that they can export it to practically every country (including China). Similarly, number 24 on the list is Tim Hortons, but that has perennially struggled to make it out of Canada and even compete with its incredibly culturally similar next-door neighbour. It’s only on the list because of the weird Canadian quirk of drinking bad coffee for patriotism’s sake, which doesn’t say anything about it’s international culinary quality!

Let’s forget about restaurants for the moment and look at store shelves.

More than 1.9 billion servings of Coke are enjoyed in more than 200 countries each day. Think about that for a second. 1.9 billion divided by 24 is 79,166,667 cokes an hour. Divided by 60 is 1,319,444. Per second it is 21,990. In the time you’ve read this paragraph about 100,000 cokes have been consumed already. Substack says this post will take you 11 minutes and 18 seconds to read. That means 14,909,722 Cokes will have been drunk in the time you took to read this.

If that is not cuisine dominance, I don’t know what is!

Did you know that the best-selling candy bar in the world is Snickers? The best-selling cookie in the world is Oreos, not macarons or British biscuits. Millions of people across the globe happily consume American cereals for breakfast, as well as American condiments and potato/corn chips.

So the average human being is eating American fairly regularly, eating at least one or two American snacks quite often, and buying American ingredients to cook or eat at home with.

This is all quite amazing. Not only can this not be said for any other country on Earth, but it is even more remarkable when you think about the head start countries like India, Japan, and Italy had on the U.S. In 1800, what country would you predict would have the most influential cuisine, as voted by consumer wallets? The U.S. was an economic backwater with cuisine even worse than Britain, which was worse than all its neighbours. I would probably predict China, as would most Europeans at the time, or perhaps Spain or Italy.

“O.K. I accept the earlier claim that American restaurant success is a point for your argument, since much of the food they are selling is available in the U.S. too, and at the bottom, they are tweaking or adding on to classic American flavours. I also agree that there seems to be an allure to “Americana”, especially in East Asia and Europe. The Japanese obsession with KFC at Christmas is quite odd to us.

So fine, my prior goes up to 22%. But not more than 50. The reason we still find it unlikely is because much of America’s international culinary success is not because America “has the best dishes” but because American companies and Americans are, perhaps, the best at optimizing their food for cost and convenience. But that is very different from my initial question about culinary quality. Your argument is conflating preference under constraints with culinary merit.”

“What are your thoughts on regional U.S. cuisines like Tex-Mex, Cajun/Creole, Barbecue, Soul food, and California cuisine? (Yes, California is a real category, and it is quite good.)”

“Those are all tasty, and add to your argument about diversity being America’s greatest strength (probability up to 26% now). But then there are others that bring the average down. I’m talking about mac and cheese, and not the good, quality mac and cheese found in some parts of America, but the bad, never would be eaten in Italy or China type of Mac and Cheese, which is still fairly common, especially in non-coastal areas. The Lunchables snacks, the oversweet overcooked spaghetti, Mini-Wheats, the 64 0z fountain soda, or the average meal at Applebee’s, IHOP, ChuckeCheese, Whitecastle, Little Caesars, and so forth. Highly processed, bland and underseasoned food makes up far too high a proportion of the average American’s caloric intake for them to beat the top countries.

The argument could be made that NYC has the best pizza in the world, but the average American doesn’t consume at that marvellous right tail, they consume in the middle of the distribution, which is Little Caesars or Dominos. Not everyone lives in NYC. And yes, not everyone lives in Rome either, but you aren’t going to catch small-town Italians eating Dominos.

Or look at specific kinds of food. Europe’s got way better cheese, way better bread, and way better butter. Americans eat tremendous amounts of those ingredients. How can they have better sandwiches, for example, when their bread, cheese, and meat are all of worse average quality? Doesn’t this extend to almost all of their meals?”

“Medians are hard for the U.S. But only if you think about it so narrowly. You already admitted that Americans are best when it comes to cost and convenience. We aren’t pulling punches with flavour either, but I admit it’s not our strong suit. However, once you include these other variables, our dishes become the best. And our international success is clear evidence of that.”

“No, convenience and price should not be included. Flavour and texture are all that affect the enjoyment of the meal.”

“Disagree. American cuisine is the most popular food worldwide because Americans are the best at food. Yes, that’s broad, perhaps you’d call it usefully vague for my argument, but it’s true. Doesn’t the atmosphere of the restaurant, the company you eat with, the price of the meal, and convenience of the location and serving, all affect your experience of the food?

At the extreme, if you had to drive 4 hours to a run-down rat-infested restaurant in a sewer with nightmare blunt rotation dinner guests just to get handed a 4-figure bill at the very end, wouldn’t that worsen the experience of the meal, even if it tasted good?

Think about it. McDonald’s is a perfect example of why America succeeds. People’s stated preferences might lead you to think they would never eat at McDonald’s. And yet it’s incredibly popular. Why? Because McDonald’s, although it still tastes good, is even more popular because it is incredibly convenient. And convenience matters a great deal in all of life, including food. Think of a drive-through, where you never even need to get out of your car to get a meal, or recently, the digital self-order screens where you can look through brightly colored renditions of all of their products, neatly organized into sections with ingredient lists and prices. Even more recently, McDonald’s in Brazil has decided to bring the drive-through to you.

Similar things can be said of California-based companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash, which have extended America’s culinary influence to an entirely new generation of delighted customers. Part of this is a story of culinary innovation, which America should get points for, too. (The ubiquitous food truck is also an American invention)

But anyway, we normally don’t think of convenience as so important because of social desirability bias. Caplan again:

Convenience has a massive effect on your behavior. You rarely shop in your favorite store, eat in your favorite restaurant, or visit your favorite place. Why not? Because doing so is typically inconvenient. They’re too far away, or not open at the right hours, so you settle for second-best or third-best or tenth-best. You usually don’t switch your cell phone company, your streaming service, or your credit card just because a better option comes along. Why not? Because switching is not convenient. Students even pass up financial aid because they don’t feel like filling out the paperwork. Why not? You guessed it: Because paperwork is inconvenient.

In politics, however, almost no one talks about convenience. When governments mandate extra privacy or safety or consumer protection, crowds cheer and pundits sing. From now on, you’ll be clicking a few extra boxes a day. From now on, you’ll have to stand ten feet away from the next person at the pharmacy. From now on, you’ll have to sign your name and initials twenty times on a mortgage contract. Privately, almost everyone thinks each of these is a pain in the neck. Yet almost no one goes on TV and self-righteously objects, “These high-minded ideals are going to be awfully inconvenient.”

The answer is social desirability bias. Convenience often sounds like a shameful or trivial reason to be against something in politics.

McDonald’s sells us the convenience humans want, judgment-free. Customers are judged, the company is judged, but it keeps on going, because in public, we say what sounds good, and in private, we do what works well.

I haven’t even gotten to the price, which is part of the convenience of course.”

“But I only care about the taste, let us just isolate that for a moment.”

“But you literally cannot detangle them. These other variables affect the enjoyment of the dish. Don’t you have the phrase “free food tastes better” on your planet?”

2 months later.

Wary of their appearance still, the aliens had built a humanoid robot to fetch their meals for them. They had travelled the entirety of the world, sampling different dishes and cultures. They had yet to reveal themselves formally, although various militaries had recently released footage of their spaceship.

So they decided to go underwater and hide in the shadowy depths of the Pacific.

They had hung out around the Japanese coast, but quickly got bored by the cultural homogeneity. And although Japan had reasonably convenient food services, they had to wait long periods of time for David to make enough money in his new part-time janitor job to afford the higher-end cuisine.

They then moved to China, but quickly became bored with their cuisine too, although it held them for longer. David took far too long to get the food. Sometimes, they wanted a different region’s cuisine, but would have to travel a day or two to get an authentic plate.

Taking a trip across the Indian Ocean, they became delighted with the crispy, thin dosas of South India. They ate widely and stayed for a whole month, up and down the Indian coast. But again, sometimes they would travel days to sample other kinds of cuisine, and even then, they rarely found Chinese or Japanese food, which they missed very much.

They often thought about their conversation with the American. Sometimes in China, they had even ordered David to get some Kentucky Fried Chicken on special occasions. “And don’t forget the Coke, David!”

One day, they finally decided it was time.

Floating underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, they nestled their ship at the bottom of the Bay. David found himself a job as a computer programmer, so they could afford more food.

They had missed South Indian food, so they sent David to San Jose. He came back and they were delighted.

The next day, they missed Chinese, so they sent him to SF. He came back with two bags, one from a Sichuan restaurant, one from a Cantonese restaurant. Along the way, he had snacked on some northern Chinese BBQ, though he ate that all himself. Yum.

The next day, they had Afghani in Fremont, then Filipino in Daly City, then Burmese in Oakland, then Chinese again in SF………….

Conclusion

Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything.

I mentioned many variables that come together to form the sensation of a “good meal.” I didn’t mention nutrition. Of course, this is hitting American cuisine where it hurts. Not that all American food is bad for you. But on average, it’s hard to say it’s anywhere near the competition. And many would say that nutrition is a vital part of the enjoyment of a meal.

But the argument still stands strong, I think. The U.S. has the most variety (from immigrants past and present), the most international influence, and wins most of the non-flavour components of good food.

Sure, Americans might not eat enough fruits and vegetables. KFC’s in Japan might not be your healthiest option. Starbucks in France might have too much sugar.

But at the end of the day, just look at the foot traffic. If Frenchmen really cared about health as much as they said they did, then Starbucks wouldn’t be the most popular coffee chain in France. The same can be said of other countries and other restaurants or grocery store products. This is because it is socially desirable to say you care so much about healthy food that you would never order a hamburger or a pumpkin spice latte. But of course, the market doesn’t judge. American cuisine wins in the heart of hearts of the world.

And why should it be surprising? There is no country in the world that is better at satisfying the demands of the consumer.

Other countries give you what people say you need. America gives you what you want.

Lotteries are ubiquitous in the western world.1 You see their tickets for sale every time you go to the corner store or grab some groceries, though, judging by Substack’s demographics, you probably don’t play.

Tonda Dickerson was a single mom getting by as a Waffle House waitress who was tipped a lottery ticket in 1999.2 In normal circumstances, you’d rather have the cash—but, by some stroke of luck six nights later, that ticket won the $10 million dollar jackpot.

She got sued by her fellow waitresses. She got sued by the guy who tipped the ticket. She got held at gunpoint by her abusive ex-husband (and wound up shooting him). All for a slice of that pie. Then she got sued by the IRS.

Her experience isn’t all that out of the ordinary. I encourage you to glance at this thread of advice for lottery winners, you’ve got implorations to

• Change all your phone numbers and get a PO box

• Disappear for at least a month abroad

• Avoid local and family attorneys like the plague

• Prepare for zombie cousins emerging from the bush

Or else you will go BANKRUPT and DIE. At least that seems to be the message.3

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What’s the point?

Okay, if lotteries are scary and hurt their winners, why is the state sponsoring them? The government is involved because there are a lot of people willing to donate a lot of money to them when the donation box is labelled ‘Power Ball’ or ‘Mega Millions’. Private lotteries are not really a thing, because states want to monopolize these revenues.

Looking at the United States, all of its lotteries put together raised $113 billion in 2024. That’s $337 per capita or $862 per player.

Zeroing in on the state leaders in 2023, you had Rhode Island at $939 per capita, Massachusetts at $877, and West Virginia at $812. Taking the national playing rate of 39% and applying it to these states, that’s $2,400, $2,250, and $2,000 per player, respectively.

For a number of states, lottery revenues represent a serious chunk of their discretionary budgets, on the order of 3%. In West Virginia, a true lottocracy, o3 estimates 12% of that budget is funded this way.

So there’s a big governmental stake in these continuing to operate. That explains the why, but now I want to go over the various shoulds and shouldn’ts to figure out whether this is clever fundraising or something darker.

Is this right?

We’ve established the way in which lotteries act as an important revenue source for various governments, but we’ve also read about how badly things can work out for some of the winners. Some readers’ gut reaction to such stories will be normative. They will think thoughts like ‘people shouldn’t buy lottery tickets’, while others will think that ‘people should do what they please if it’s only hurting themselves’.

Others might be a little uncomfortable with state budgets being made up of gambling revenues. They could think ‘the state has no business selling or advertising social ills for its own gain’, or that ‘the state is preying unjustly upon the poorer classes, who buy up a larger share of the tickets’.

The first group of people is doing really applied ethics, while the second group is posing important questions in political philosophy. Let’s focus on the latter.

They’re asking: when is the state justified in running lotteries?

One move we could make is to collapse this into the question of when states can justifiably levy taxes. But there is an important difference between a lottery and a tax—they’re completely voluntary. No charges are forthcoming if you fail to dutifully buy your tickets that month.

That’s going to matter as we survey the mainstay views on tax justice.

Libertarians should oppose state lotteries

Libertarians, like Robert Nozick, tend to conceive of a moral right to own property and what is made from that property. If such a view is true, then taxation by the state is a form of theft.4 Yet that is because it is compulsory—a voluntary lottery does not have this problem.

For the libertarians, the problem lies firstly in the state’s enforcement of a monopoly on the lottery, not allowing private alternatives to freely operate. It uses the threat of force to prevent a category of peaceful, voluntary transactions from taking place. This is a clearcut violation of economic liberty.

Others in this camp may object to the idea of the state operating a commercial gambling enterprise, given its mandate to serve as a keeper of peace and contracts. However, I suspect this is vulnerable to the critique that voluntary lotteries may be the least objectionable means of financing the basic operations of the state, given they involve minimal coercion.

Egalitarians should oppose state lotteries

Egalitarians, like John Rawls, view property rights as products of a political system which must, on the whole, accord with the principles of justice. This view rejects the idea that pre-tax incomes have any special normative status. For egalitarians, the fact that a lottery is voluntary has minimal bearing on whether it is just; instead, they are interested in the ability of lotteries to achieve a just distribution of resources.

Right off the bat, it is implausible to suggest that lotteries achieve more just distributions of resources. This is because lotteries are empirically regressive; that is, they disproportionately sell tickets to poorer people.

Egalitarians take issue with this because they tend to endorse something like Rawls’ Difference Principle, which holds that the economic distribution should be arranged to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. They would argue:

1. Regressive taxes raise revenue from the least advantaged

2. Progressive taxes could raise the same revenue from the more advantaged

3. Progressive taxes would not reduce the overall benefit to the least advantaged

Therefore, by running a lottery, the state fails to arrange the tax system to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.

This argument is probably sound, with the caveat that high enough levels of progressive taxation could erode the incentives for the most advantaged to produce positive externalities for the bottom end of the economic distribution—think technological innovations and productive but risky investments. Would these effects kick in at taxation levels necessary to cover modern lottery revenues? I am skeptical, but economics has the tools to investigate.5

Here’s another objection to lotteries from the egalitarian standpoint, which appeals to an explanation of why they turn out to be regressive:

1. Lottery sales depend on cognitive biases; they would not occur at the same rate if people were fully rational

2. The least advantaged have a relatively harder time overcoming cognitive biases

3. The state is aware of both of these facts

4. Were the state to stop its sales and embrace a total ban, no serious black market would emerge for lottery sales

Thus, the state is knowingly undermining the ability of the worst-off to rationally pursue their overarching life plans by acting as the sole purveyor of lottery tickets.

Many governments finance advertising campaigns that demonstrate the third premise—these ads aren’t running in the Economist or New Yorker. The fourth is the toughest to prove, but seems plausible. In my experience, lottery purchases are often marginal, being additions tacked on to other purchases at the corner store or grocery store. Would people really substitute that spending into the casino if the lotto ended?

Utilitarians should oppose state lotteries

Utilitarians, like Bentham’s Bulldog, share the egalitarian’s interest in the outcome of taxation. They also want to know whether lotteries achieve a just distribution. However, their standard of just distribution is that which maximizes welfare.

They would first appeal to the marginal utility of money at different levels of income. Lotteries, by virtue of being regressive, raise revenue from those for whom money has a high marginal utility. Progressive taxes could raise the same revenue from those for whom money has a lower marginal utility, without reducing overall utility, so they should be preferred.

Similar to the egalitarian case, there is valuable research to be done on when taxes become progressive enough to reduce overall utility. This is slightly different from the ‘tipping point’ the egalitarian needs to figure out, since the utilitarian is concerned with the sum of everyone’s welfare rather than the welfare of the least advantaged group.

We could object that there is a lot of utility in actually playing the lottery. People are paying for the thrill of what might happen, not to maximize their wealth. That is, analyses like these make the mistake of treating gambles as investments.

Maybe so, but the objector must explain why the welfare-maximizing move by the state is to instate a monopoly which allows it to take higher profit margins on the lottery tickets than the market would otherwise bear.

Well then…

It turns out that all three of these stances lead to the conclusion that the state is acting unjustly when it operates a lottery; a rare bit of cross-theory agreement.

The state is establishing a monopoly over a gambling product to regressively raise revenue. Libertarians must take issue with the monopoly; egalitarians must take issue with the product and the regressive incidence; while utilitarians should recognize the first and third concerns as empirical failures to maximize welfare.

In light of these issues, the state should move to (1) ban all lotteries, including its own or (2) deregulate lotteries, surrendering its monopoly. Egalitarians are able to make a case for (1), and utilitarians could in theory go along with that case, but I believe in the end they would join the libertarians in endorsing (2). Even the egalitarians, owing to their commitments to basic liberties, could opt for a version of (2) that ends direct government involvement and creates a rules-based order for private lottos to compete in.

Any Rawlsians care to share their views on gambling?

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That’s why almost everyone you talk to cites him when they try to convince you that the American Dream has died. Lately, I’ve become quite sick of the argument. Now, both leftists and rightoids are making it, for different reasons.

In case you don’t know, this paper by Chetty found that economic mobility has gone down for every group over time.

If you want to know more, read Nick’s article.

Seems pretty bad, doesn’t it?

Perhaps for a pessimist. Back in March, when he posted this, I immediately began thinking about how Chetty’s research could be wrong. I found this: page 7 of Chetty’s famous The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940:

“We exclude immigrants in order to have a consistent sample in which we observe both parents’ and children’s incomes.”

So that terrible-looking graph doesn’t include immigrants. Why does that matter? Because people sailing across the ocean, leaving behind their impoverished countries for a brighter American future, is an integral part of the American dream! For research purposes, I understand why Chetty left them out, (it’s hard to track down the parents’ information) but for practical argumentation, saying that the American Dream has been fading away (the most common interpretation of his research) is misleading. He’s leaving out the economic mobility of a sizable portion of the US! (14% of our population is foreign-born)

So I had this little point, but I didn’t feel it was enough for a blog post. Until I thought of the lazy hypothesis.

You see, many people being left out of the American Dream is only the 2nd most important point. The more important one starts by looking at how well immigrants are doing today.

The average Haitian income is $1,760 USD a year. Whereas Haitian immigrants in the U.S. have a median income of 65,000. Mexicans have an average annual income of $20,340 USD. Their immigrant counterparts are sitting at a median of 64,500 USD. South Korean households make an average of 46,000 a year, whereas the median South Korean household in the U.S. makes 93,600 a year. Indians have an average income of $4186 USD per year, while Indian immigrants have a median annual income of $166,000!

In a rough way, this shows incredible mobility. Being a place where you can come from an impoverished country like Haiti and make 65,000 a year is an incredible accomplishment for the United States, even if the mobility is cross-national, not intra-national. And remember that the immigrant numbers I have cited are all medians, not averages, so it really is descriptive of how immigrants are doing.

And it has been rising over time. In 1980, immigrants’ median household income was 42,473. Going by decade, it went to 52,893, (1990), then 57,561, (2000), then 52,829, (2010 great recession hurt) and in 2018 it bounced back to 59,000. (converted all to 2018 dollars) Looking at the present(ish), immigrants’ median household income in 2023 was approximately $78,700, slightly higher than that of U.S.-born households, $77,600!

This is incredible. People who are born speaking a different language, following different norms, with barely any money, are beating natives! Even being in the ballpark would be an accomplishment when you think about all the disadvantages they have compared to their native counterparts.

None of this is included in Chetty’s research on the American Dream.

I understand it’s hard to track down tax data on Nigerian moms and dads in the 70s, but it’s not impossible.

Introducing a bit of rigour to the argument are Michael Clemens and some others. In their article: The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the US Border, they find that nearly identical Haitian or Nigerian workers earn 5 to 15 times their home-country wage in the United States. These aren’t direct father-son links, but they’re the best economists can do, and I don’t find it a stretch to say that the enormous gaps here do imply enormous generational mobility for first-gen migrants.

This is getting more into Chetty’s research, but I would like to highlight the mobility between not just the parents of immigrants, but also the parent-child relationship between 1st and 2nd generation immigrants.

A team led by Abramitzky & Boustan linked father-son pairs for three cohorts (1880 to 1910/40, 1910 to 1940, and ~1980 to 2010). They found no downward trend for immigrants at all. Children of immigrants starting in the 25th percentile end up 4–8 percentiles higher than comparable children of U.S.-born parents in every cohort studied. So the immigrant mobility premium, handed down by the grandfathers and fathers to 2nd generation immigrants, is remarkably stable across 140 years.

This whole discussion is not actually the point of this essay. But I wrote it for 3 different reasons.

First point: Contra Chetty and almost everyone else you talk to on the street, I think the American Dream is underrated. Once you include immigrants, upward mobility becomes more common in the data. Chetty’s 50% figure (see graph above) doesn’t include immigrants or their parents. You might argue back that if immigrants had roughly the same mobility the last 100 years (plausible) that the graph would be the same. However, the graph is taking a slice out of the American population, and immigrants have been steadily becoming a larger share of the population every year since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was passed. Today they are 14%.

So their omission is important. And to finish this point, there is perhaps an even bigger reason why discussing the mobility of immigrants is important: because when people who have it much worse than you can still find a way to succeed when you do not, mobility looks a lot more achievable. (That could be phrased much more harshly, perhaps should be)

Second, more minor point: I am, after all, a reptilian skinned globalism fan big supporter of immigrants, as they are the most underrated group in American history by a mile, (yes, better than the 1992 Dream Team, Suffragettes, Apollo 11 crew, The Doors, first responders, etc) and I wouldn’t lose the chance to brag on their behalf.

And thirdly, I needed to discuss all of those stats so that I could neatly segue into my real argument:

But first, a question.

As I alluded to in the first point, it seems that immigrants are beating natives. But are they really? I want to hammer this home because it’s the biggest premise in the upcoming argument.

Chetty concludes that natives have had downward-trending mobility. These trends haven’t seemed to affect immigrants. They are winning with less:

“Immigrants often start their U.S. lives at substantially lower earnings, but experience faster earnings growth than natives with comparable years of education and experience.

Another source confirms more aesthetically that immigrant wages converge, despite early assimilation problems (that natives don’t have).

The reason they often start much lower is because of transferability problems between country-of-origin skills and country-of-destination demands. Or in other words, assimilation is hard, and even harder for a Mexican than a Canadian. This theory is highly intuitive because you can see the transferability problem in the data:

“Immigrants from Asia and Central and South America initially earn about half or less than half of what U.S. natives earn, whereas the entry earnings of Western European immigrants resemble those of the U.S. born. Moreover, these differences persist within age and education categories.”

Another way to think about this: Just a few paragraphs ago I talked about how median immigrant household incomes have been rising steadily over time. But the demographic makeup of immigrants since the 1970s has been, more and more, slanted towards countries with lower GDP per capitas, (less Germans, more Hondurans) so more transferability problems, not less. And yet, they have been rising, and now have a higher median than natives!

Now that I’ve demonstrated that immigrants are indeed beating natives on mobility grounds, here is the argument:

Downward trending mobility for Americans is not primarily caused by greedy billionaires or neoliberalism, or too much bowling alone or cities not being bikable enough or the price of matcha being too high and on and on. It is caused, primarily, by laziness and unambition. It is a fault of character, which immigrants remind us of every day. They show that incredible economic mobility is possible, both in inter-country and intra-country situations. Acknowledging that it is mostly a character issue, not a structural issue, is essential for understanding that the American dream is still alive for those who want to dream it.

If that was too academically crass, then fine: Americans are being held back by their complacency and risk aversion. Many Americans want to simply get through their day, reside in the same area they grew up in, and live a fairly calm and muddling existence. At the margin, I think we should have less of that. Immigrants have less of that. That’s why they are more mobile, and why they succeed more.

Immigrants start more businesses.

“Per capita, immigrants are about 80 percent more likely to found a firm, compared to U.S.-born citizens. Those firms also have about 1 percent more employees than those founded by U.S. natives, on average.”

Immigrants are more mobile.

Indeed, during the period 1980–2000, when inflow of new immigrants was large, the foreign-born population responded much more strongly than did the native population to differential employment growth across labor markets. As a consequence, highly successful cities became cities with higher immigrant density by the year 2000. In the period 2000–2017, which includes a deep recession and strong recovery and during which new migration from abroad declined and the long-term immigrants became a more sizeable group, the foreign born population still responded more than proportionally to local growth in labor demand.

Natives, less so.

“Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of all distances.”

Selection affects people! Those who migrate are going to have higher risk tolerance. That’s fairly obvious. And it pays out. Moving to places where your skills are in demand is one of the surest ways to increase your income.

I thus feel very little sympathy for the socioeconomic problems most Appalachian people’s face, especially when JD Vance is the one narrating them. That area has some of the longest-lasting families in the country. That’s not something to brag about.

If they had more of an immigrant’s ambition, JD’s hillbilly’s would have moved long ago, and been better for it.

That’s rich coming from me? Okay, give your reasons to the average Bangladeshi garment worker who moves across the planet to triple his wage, or the abandoned Mexican mother who illegally swims the Rio Grande with her baby on her back, or the Syrian father who sees his entire village destroyed in civil war and uproots his entire 7-person family, or the Cuban girl who goes to school to be a microbiologist but gets paid the same as a janitor, so she takes a boat across the sea to make a new life in Miami and on and on and on.

All of those people can’t even speak English, but somehow make it to Austin, yet you can’t make the 10-hour drive from Mobile?

Our society has embraced complacency at the cost of competitiveness and success. Excuses turn into reasons, turn into crystallized habits, turn into generations of muddling through, perhaps even poverty eventually.

Of course, policy can fix this. Zoning in high-growth metropolitan areas needs to be reformed. The cost of housing is the biggest barrier against intra-national mobility. Perhaps we could even look at relocation vouchers.

It is incredible to me that American mobility has collapsed, seeing as technological innovations like the interstate highway system, smartphones, and Indeed have made economic mobility much easier than it was in say, the 1930s when it was so much higher. They shave search and switching costs by orders of magnitude. And yet, immigrants are, on average, exploiting these new advantages at a much higher degree.

What reason could there be besides laziness? Immigrants are still behaving the way Americans once mythologized themselves: mobile, entrepreneurial, adventurous, relentlessly upgrading.

So thank God for immigrants. They remind us every day of how much better, how much more American, we can be.

Cowen’s First Law: There is something wrong with everything (by which I mean there are few decisive or knockdown articles or arguments, and furthermore until you have found the major flaws in an argument, you do not understand it).

I find this law most useful when looking at one’s own arguments.

The weakest part of this essay is my confirmation bias. Probably because of a mix of genetics and environmental effects, I am wary of giving credit to reasons not to do something, when I can see myself doing it or have done it in the past. Maybe this is a libertarian folly of thinking that because I can do it, someone else can. A leftist would reply that everyone is different, and comparing to others is unproductive.

For example, my take on addiction: I don’t have much sympathy for addicts. It seems like the popular take is to put most of the blame on producers, then users, and lastly addicts.

I don’t buy this. Opponents say that drugs like fentanyl and social media can literally rewire your brain, but so can learning how to dribble a basketball or play guitar. Brain modification is not reserved for drug use. I look at most of these opponents’ reasons and find them to be excuses. In my view, most addicts have terrible impulse control, and it is, for the most part, irresponsible decisions that have led them to their current state.

Of course, this mindset influences my writing on the mobility issue. I want to be transparent about that. I am naturally going to blame the person, not the structure. Accountability and agency are core heuristics for me. Perhaps it causes me to overlook structural problems, which make up a larger share of the causation.

The great Jimi Hendrix speaking in an interview:

“We’re trying to get across communication with the old and young. And plus we try to get across laziness on anybody’s part. And that takes a few more songs and a few more gigs to get that across really strong enough. I see people just get stoned and sit around and all they do is protest and not really wanna do anything about it. I said listen you can be a dishwasher until you finally get yourself together and they say “yeah but, you know, ughhhhh.” They don’t really wanna know about that. I know where the trouble is. It’s laziness. The people have to realize this or else they’re gonna to be fightin’ for the rest of their lives.”

The great Kobe Bryant:

“I have no tolerance for lazy teammates… If I’ve got to fight to get you in the gym, that’s a problem… You want players who are gym rats, players that want to work.
If you’re lazy, man, I don’t wanna talk to you. I don’t wanna deal with you. You’re gonna make me feel dumber, you’re gonna lower my level. There are plenty of other teams where you’ll fit right in.”

Jimi was born in Seattle. Kobe was born in Philadelphia. They are exemplary Americans, whose lifestyles should not be so easily forgotten. How many Americans would be better off if they had 1% of their risk tolerance, their proactivity, their aversion to laziness? They are the model. And so are immigrants.

PS.

I am being quite harsh on Americans here. That is because I think the best way to get better is to compare yourself. Get better then your last rep and all. But if you look outside of America, you will realize Americans are still incredibly mobile, especially compared to Europeans.

Above, I quoted the Federal Reserve as saying that:

“Internal migration has fallen noticeably since the 1980s, reversing increases from earlier in the century. The decline in migration has been widespread across demographic and socioeconomic groups, as well as for moves of all distances.”

I left out this part:

“Despite its downward trend, migration within the U.S. remains higher than that within most other developed countries.”