--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So there's this idea on the populist right that we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? When did that happen? When did they defund public education? No, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism. And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends. Today I'm speaking with Richard Hanania, who is the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology and the author of the new book, *Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy*. So Richard, first, can you just summarize the book briefly before we get into questions?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Sure. The argument of my book has two real audiences. First, people who study international relations, political scientists—there's something in there for them. And there's also something in there for people who are just interested in American foreign policy more generally.
--:-- The way academics tend to study foreign policy—and this is a simplification, but if you have to generalize about how it's understood in political science and the field of international relations—the idea is that states are basically rational actors. Rational actor doesn't mean what they do is necessarily good for the world, or whether their values are consistent with other people's values, but basically that states seek certain goals and their behavior can be understood in that context.
--:-- The study of grand strategy is sort of a corollary of this. The idea is that diplomatic, economic, and military means tend to be put towards the same goals. They're all moving in the same direction. I think this view of understanding foreign policy is naive. My main argument is that we don't think like this in terms of domestic policy. We don't think there's a grand strategy of the US government with regards to immigration, healthcare, or the tax system. There's a fallacy of seeing it as designed in international relations, as goal-focused behavior, and we tend not to make that mistake in other areas.
--:-- The first two chapters are basically the theoretical case for why a lot of the ways we look at international relations is wrong. For people who are interested in thinking about ideas and political philosophy, I think they will enjoy those chapters. Most of the rest of the book looks at American foreign policy and asks: does a theory of grand strategy, or a theory based on public choice which I present as an alternative model, explain things like when the US has troop presences abroad, when we start and end various wars, the American sanctions regime—major parts of American foreign policy? I argue that the public choice model of foreign policy just works better.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So maybe the unitary actor model is not right right now, but wouldn't it be true in the future? Countries that have a messed up foreign policy where the whole thing is in shambles and contradicts itself will lose out to countries that actually have a cohesive national strategy. In the long run, the countries that actually do have a cohesive grand strategy will win, right?
--:-- Richard Hanania: This is actually one of the arguments for how you get rationality that I take issue with. I think this is most closely associated with international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz. There are a few things you can say about this. It might just go against the nature of the state. Maybe the state is such a big and complicated thing that you get closer to rationality, closer to grand strategies, through a selection process, but it's still an open question how close you get.
--:-- The other thing is that there's a lot else going on in the world beyond how states react to one another. The origins of economic development are complicated. A country like the United States can have a lot going for it in terms of human capital and institutions, do very well economically, and can afford to have an irrational foreign policy. One possibility is that states with good institutions for economic growth—things like decentralization, individual freedom, an open society—might be bad for forming a grand strategy for international relations. You can have interest groups influence foreign policy, people are worried about their own lives rather than what's going on abroad, and the state is limited and can't really enforce its will. This is a possibility that nobody has brought up before: perhaps there is a tension where states with bad foreign policies will tend to have good economic growth and therefore a lot of geopolitical strength.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. So is one way to read your book that maybe the decline of war has been bad? When you had war, you had casualties and everything, that's bad. But at least it kept countries on their toes and their political institutions couldn't become all messed up. Is one way to read your book that the political institutions in our world have become so sclerotic because there isn't enough war? War is on balance bad, but are there good things we can say for war in terms of historical development?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Depending on your politics, if you look at World War I and World War II, a lot happened for the expansion of the American federal government. I think that's mostly been bad, but if somebody thinks that's good—if you're a big supporter of the welfare state and the centralization of power in Washington—you have to credit World War I and World War II. That's clear from the historical record. Unquestionably, war leads to changes.
--:-- The potential for war was probably part of the Cold War, and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. If there was no potential for any kind of conflict there, who knows, maybe the Soviet Union could have existed forever. Unquestionably, war is an accelerant and a catalyst for change. If you think we need a lot of change, you might be distressed seeing the decline of war over time. But change can also go in a negative direction.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To what extent are these problems unique to democracies, with concentrated interests being able to pull a government to do counterproductive things? If you look at China's grand strategy, it's a very centralized system, there's one guy at the top, but they're doing some very stupid things. They're fighting over some irrelevant islands with Japan, getting into skirmishes with India over some mountain regions. And we'll see about the Belt and Road, but right now it seems like there are cost overruns and they're building stuff in places that aren't relevant. So to what extent are centralized governments able to have a better grand strategy?
--:-- Richard Hanania: We should be careful not to say that having a grand strategy is better or smarter in some ways. The question I address in the book is whether it's coherent. We can understand China in comparison to the US on two axes: whether it's smart or wise versus whether it's coherent. Your question was getting at whether it's smart or wise. China's blunders—squabbles with Japan over a few islands—if you compare that to the US investment in Afghanistan or Iraq, we're not really in a position to talk about foreign policy blunders. The Chinese spending on the military is pretty low. There's nothing that compares to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. We have blunder after blunder.
--:-- Whether the Chinese system has more coherence in foreign policy and whether that could be attributed to it not being a democracy, I think that's right. China's grand strategy has been not to have much of a foreign policy relative to the US—not to care much about what goes on in most of the world. There does seem to be a concerted effort to push outward, push its weight around within its region, which is natural, which is what states do as they grow.
--:-- When I look at Chinese foreign policy, do I see more coherence than American? Yes. You see China inflict a punishment on a nation, and there's usually a goal. For example, Lithuania—I don't know if they recognized Taiwan or did something with Taiwan. China didn't like it, so China did something against Lithuania. You can understand how that makes sense. In the US, somebody basically says we're not going to recognize this government, destroys the economy, it's more total than anything China does, and then it never talks to them again. That's the end of it. So yes, there's certainly more coherence and more sense to what China's doing than what the US is doing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But to what extent is that just because China isn't powerful enough or doesn't have enough money to waste on debacles like Afghanistan and Iraq? So maybe in 30 years, once their economy is bigger than ours, will they be making the same kinds of mistakes?
--:-- Richard Hanania: If you look at when the British Empire was most overextended, the peak of colonization was when they weren't fully a democracy. Countries without a lot of resources can often put a lot of efforts overseas. Maoist China, at least for its per capita level, was the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world. By far. It was giving money to countries in Eastern Europe that were richer than itself. Maoist China was extremely poor and had an extremely interventionist foreign policy. Russia today over-invests in foreign policy relative to its economic size.
--:-- The US certainly can't afford to do more than China. By PPP terms, China has caught up or passed the United States. China has the potential to do a lot more. I just think it chooses not to.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You say in the book that the public doesn't really care that much about foreign policy, at least compared to domestic policy. Does that mean that if the president actually did have a coherent vision of a grand strategy, he could enact it because the public just isn't going to be paying attention?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I think it depends on the costs of the grand strategy. If the grand strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties, that's going to be really hard. If it's more along the lines of we're going to crush one nation—and there's grand strategy at the macro level, and then there's approach to one country—sometimes we do see that.
--:-- I think the last administration had a de facto, more than a de facto, intended policy of regime change towards Iran. They weren't open about that, but the idea was you sanction them as much as possible and hope they're as less powerful as possible and potentially collapse. There was a more official strategy of regime change, and they recognized a different government in Venezuela. That didn't require any American casualties. It required a lot of suffering in the countries that were targeted. But it did seem that the American efforts were put towards certain goals. So yes, within certain limits, presidents do have freedom to do a lot. People don't care about Iran, and they don't care about Venezuela. So there was a lot of freedom there.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You say sanctions don't work, intervention doesn't work. But if we look at a country like North Korea, we feel like there's something we really ought to be able to do. We really don't want them to have nukes or the capacity to launch nukes at the United States. If these traditional interventions don't work, is there something you could do about a country like North Korea? Or Venezuela is starving its own people, sanctions are making it worse, but if you wanted to get rid of Maduro, is there something we could do that is feasible and not counterproductive?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Each of these cases is unique. With North Korea, interventions can work. If you overthrow a government, you can get rid of them. But that would be very costly in the case of North Korea because of nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons—they have a pretty big army.
--:-- One school of thought is that North Korea wants nukes because it's afraid of the US. It's defensive. It thinks the US, if it's not going to invade at this point, it's because of nukes. Tokyo would like to see the regime fall anyway. That's probably true. The question is whether you accommodate that fear if what you're worried about is nuclear weapons, and you learn to live with the government. Another school of thought says they want the US out and they want to conquer the South. I don't have insight into the thinking of the North Korean regime, so it's hard to say which is the correct position.
--:-- With Venezuela, is there something we can do to counteract the terrible economic policies that the Maduro regime and before him the Chavez regime have implemented? It's very, very hard. The move towards more open markets globally has been the result of people seeing that markets work much better than central planning. The elites in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe realized what they were doing was not working and moved to a capitalist system. It wasn't because Gorbachev was forced into it. There was no rebellion from below or civil war. They just decided the regime had lost legitimacy, at least from those at the top, especially for the Soviet satellites. That doesn't mean movement towards markets is consistent everywhere all the time. Sometimes some places are going to go in the opposite direction.
--:-- I think the US does some very harmful things to Latin America that it probably shouldn't do. The drug war—so much of their politics revolves around stopping the flow of drugs because that's what the US demands. Is that worth having a civil war over? No, of course not. Mexico and these other countries in Latin America would probably be much better off if we didn't do that.
--:-- There's also a lot of US meddling in democratization and human rights. People think these are generally good things, and all else being equal, they might be good things. But we are not in a position to know. If a country has a serious violence problem—the prerequisite to everything else, to peaceful living, to growth, to everything, is getting violence under control—Latin American countries have really bad problems with it. Then somebody comes from abroad and says you have to fight crime or fight cartels in a way consistent with our human rights norms. That sounds good, but might not be conducive to getting the best possible policy at the local level. There's a lot of meddling and hubris about what we know and what's best for these countries. Moving away from that would probably help them solve their problems in their own way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You say in the book that one of the agents influencing American foreign policy are foreign governments like Israel and Saudi Arabia. But if they are able to influence American policy in a way that is good for them as a nation, doesn't that make these countries rational actors that have a cohesive grand strategy?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Something I don't go into in the book is what countries can act like unitary actors and when they don't. One of the determinants of whether a country acts with a strategy in a certain domain is how important the issue is to them. Iran is much more important to Israel and Saudi Arabia than it is to America, by many times. So you could imagine Israel and Saudi Arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to Iran, and the US has an open political system and is liable to be influenced by those countries. Often it's not even those countries, it's a faction within those countries. But I do take the point that often there's something closer to a strategy in what other countries are doing just because they're closer to the problem and it matters a lot more to them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: In the book you say that when it comes to foreign policy, special interests matter more than ideas, and ideas are after-the-fact justifications for what these special interests want. But when you talk about domestic policy, you seem to be making the opposite point: that ideology matters more, and economic self-interest determines very little about people's political preferences. Why is there a difference between foreign policy and domestic policy?
--:-- Richard Hanania: At the level of the voter, I think there's very little in terms of objective interest because the voter's vote doesn't determine the outcome of the election. One of the consistent findings of political science is that people's economic circumstances do a very poor job of predicting their political orientation. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, your economic situation is not very predictive compared to demographic factors and cultural attitudes.
--:-- When it comes to policy, there are a few different kinds. For most things, the public is not paying attention. Public opinion doesn't have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code or the exact details of environmental regulations. The same thing in foreign policy with something like NATO expansion. Both in international relations and domestic politics, interest groups have a huge role to play.
--:-- When it comes to certain issues that are particularly salient—in the domestic context, something like Social Security—people will notice if you cut their Social Security benefits or their Medicare. There are not a lot of issues exactly like this. But here, public opinion matters, and you have to tread carefully if you're a politician. It's the same thing in foreign policy. When you're going to do something potentially very costly to the country and it becomes a major political issue, then public opinion matters a lot more. You needed public opinion to be on your side to go into Iraq. There was overwhelming support for the Iraq War at the time.
--:-- One of the unique things about foreign policy that gives leaders more freedom of movement compared to domestic politics—and this is probably one of the most important differences—is that public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign relations. I don't think there's a way to sell getting rid of Social Security that's going to work with the American public. But you could easily sell some country as a threat to the United States because most Americans don't have experience with foreign countries. They don't have independent knowledge. Places like Ukraine, Russia, or Estonia exist as abstractions. Why we think of one country as a friend and one as an enemy is basically media coverage and signals coming from elites.
--:-- Going back to the Iraq War, nobody was thinking about attacking Iraq right after 9/11. But the Bush administration had high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack. There was a full-on PR campaign to not explicitly tie Saddam to 9/11, but basically tie him to al-Qaeda, make people be afraid of WMDs. Even though the Bush administration never said this, a majority or plurality of the public actually believed Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, which there was never any evidence for. It was easy to lead people in that direction because who knows anything about Saddam Hussein or Iraq? People have to trust their leaders on these things. Maybe that's getting harder as polarization is more extreme and people don't trust their leaders anymore, but there's still more room to maneuver on foreign policy than on a lot of domestic issues.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You say in the book near the end that one way to fix this should be to better regulate foreign lobbyists in the government and funding of defense contractors into think tanks and research institutions. Do you think the same should be true of domestic policy? Should we limit how much money there is in politics, or is this unique to foreign policy?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I throw those ideas out there as institutional fixes that people can think about. I don't come down and say this is something to fix. I just think people should be thinking in terms of institutional changes rather than just operating in the realm of ideas. I probably would support some limits on lobbying for people who worked in the government, like in the Pentagon. Should we do that for all of politics? I don't think I have a principled answer here.
--:-- The foreign policy establishment has had a negative influence on American politics and on domestic politics. The influence of money in politics has been mixed. The idea of campaign finance reform is to get money out of politics, but if you get money out of politics, who gets the press coverage? It's the governments and the parties. So it's some other small group of people determining the parameters of the debate.
--:-- One thing I'm less hesitant about endorsing is a cultural change. For example, when you're interviewing a former general in a newspaper or on TV, you don't just say this is a former general. You say this guy is also on the board of this corporation or that corporation. That changes the entire focus of the conversation. The Washington Post wrote a story about how this is the norm, and I was interviewed for that story. I think there's no good reason not to do that. Part of what my book does is not just institutional or legal things. It's also telling people to think about this in a different way and having a cultural change, which takes away a lot of the credibility of the people influencing foreign policy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Gotcha. Let's talk about experts now. In your article "Telflock and Taliban," you point out many ways in which we have established fields. If you look at the track record of societal trends associated with those fields—suicides when you talk about psychology, crime when you talk about criminology, or obviously Iraq and Afghanistan when you talk about international relations—things have been getting worse. But if that's the standard you're going to apply—how do the societal trends associated with the field do—then you must think that global poverty research and development economics must be amazing. We've seen a billion people lifted out of poverty or more since 1990. If you're applying the same standard, wouldn't it imply that some fields have been doing extraordinarily well?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yes, actually, I do think that. The reduction in poverty has come from China first and then India. If you ask economists whether Chinese and Indian policies are better or worse than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, they're definitely moving in the direction of the consensus of economics. I actually do think economics is a little bit more of a serious science than other fields. So yes, I would agree with that. I think economics looks good in the context of the decline of poverty over time.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So then would you credit the fact that there hasn't been a nuclear war? Is that something you put in the pro column for international relations?
--:-- Richard Hanania: That one is different because poverty is something we can look at and say it's always existed and now it's getting better. With nuclear weapons, it's not like we had an era of a lot of nuclear wars and now we don't. We had nuclear weapons, they were invented, and that's consistent with a story where these weapons were too horrible for anybody to use.
--:-- If you're going to have a steel man argument for the case of American empire, it would be something along the lines of: I don't believe American hegemony is what has given us relative peace since 1945. But it would be a kind of Burkean argument that the international system is very complex and it's working out well, so just don't change anything too radical because there's so much we don't know about what the consequences would be.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How would you respond to that, by the way?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I would say that you have to take different parts of American foreign policy, and I would be more open to getting rid of certain ones than others. So for example, regime change wars and sanctions—I think those are the low-hanging fruit. I don't think you can make the case that these have terrible effects on the world, and I don't think you can make the case that they contribute to global order or anything like that. Overthrowing governments is a huge source of international disorder.
--:-- And then as far as whether U.S. hegemony has been keeping peace, you move on to say the commitments to NATO and the presence in Japan and South Korea. You say, okay, we've kept the peace in a relative way there. But I think there's a good reason to think that it's not necessarily the influence of the U.S. that's behind the decline of violence. You look at areas, even in countries that have no relationship with the US on either side, war is just down basically across the board everywhere. You could say that's all the American system, but it's hard to figure out exactly how the US having a presence in East Asia or Eastern Europe makes Africans stop fighting each other.
--:-- The fact that everyone basically is not doing war anymore backs up what John Mueller or Steven Pinker thinks—that we're in the realm of ideas and people just think war is stupid. From that perspective, the U.S. is sort of an outlier in how much it uses war, and the U.S. is potentially a source of instability. I would lean towards that view. But I acknowledge the Burkean view that things have been working out relatively well, so let's not mess with it.
--:-- Another thing that hasn't been working out well: the number of people being killed in civil wars and civil conflicts has not gone down the way international war has. And if you look at who's behind a lot of the civil wars that have huge death rates, that's the United States. So not everything is actually working out well. Keeping order within countries—you mentioned Latin America—a lot of these things are classified as high crime rates, but they could theoretically be classified as civil wars. And if you think American foreign policy is having a negative effect in Latin America, that's another contributor to the violence abroad. So yeah, that's the response to it. But again, I acknowledge there potentially could be something to that argument.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So I think one of the other things Steven Pinker thinks is behind the decline of violence is also international alliances like NATO. Now, to have a point against that, which is that while in the short term it makes us more safe, in the long term, if Russia invades some North Macedonia or something, then we have to go to war, and then it starts World War III. So do you buy Pinker's argument that actually these American alliances have created a safer world?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I read Pinker when *Better Angels of Our Nature* came out about a decade ago. I don't remember him having that argument about NATO. I could be wrong. I thought it was in *Enlightenment Now*.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, so I also read *Enlightenment Now*. I don't remember. It could be there or not. It's a possible argument, even if it's not Pinker's. Let's just take the argument.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yeah, so NATO. The argument for NATO making the world safer—first of all, the justifications for NATO originally were that there was potentially a Soviet land invasion of Europe. The Soviet Union is gone. The question is, what else are we talking about? North Africa invading Europe? The only potential thing we're talking about here is Russia. And it seems there doesn't seem to be a capability—Russia is just not economically positioned to try to take on Germany or France or Western Europe. It cares a lot about Ukraine and it cares a lot about Georgia. And I think it's pretty clear that the instability is due to Russian fears over the expansion of NATO.
--:-- In Georgia, the government launched a war to try to take back some breakaway regions with alliances towards Russia. The idea was they thought the United States had their back and they were trying to settle this issue to get into NATO. There was a great Adam Tooze substack on this about the history of Russia and NATO. So it's clear that there's been a destabilizing influence. Russia's fear that these places would become part of NATO has driven a lot of this behavior abroad.
--:-- I think ultimately, though, what it's really about at its root, and where the antagonism comes from, is that the U.S. sees Russia as a potential for regime change. I think it considers the current government illegitimate. I don't think Russia thinks the U.S. is going to go into Ukraine, add them to NATO, and then launch an invasion of Russia. That seems very unlikely. I think the idea is there's an ideological war against the legitimacy of the Russian state as a non-democracy that has a different form of government and different ideological ideas. And I think they're reacting to that. So this idea of regime change is sort of beneath the surface and driving a lot of the tension.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. Going back to the topic of expertise, you criticize the focus on peer review and specialized knowledge. It seems that in some fields, that's a valid criticism—there isn't that much specialized knowledge there to begin with. But in fields like particle physics or computational complexity, it seems like academic bureaucracy and incentives have worked, and I expect the people at the top of that field to be the best in the world at that. But it seems like the same kind of academic institution as a field like international relations. So why are they different?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I think I do say in my experts piece that I'm focusing on the social sciences because that's what I know best. But you said economics works well, right? Economics works relatively well. We could talk about why, but that's an interesting question too. Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say that the peer review process doesn't work that well. He has data on where the big innovations in science come from, and he tends to think it comes more from the private sector.
--:-- If you look at something like the mRNA vaccine, they couldn't get the publications it was based on into the top peer-reviewed journals. And then it took Pfizer and Moderna. It seems complicated because it didn't rely on some university research in some ways, and there was government funding.
--:-- I think one of the big differences between the social sciences and the hard sciences is there is some connection to reality. You can design the mRNA vaccine, you can take it to a pharmaceutical company, they have an incentive to find out whether you're right, it can work in the real world, and that changes the ideas. In social sciences, it's more complex. Sometimes it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't. We don't do randomized experiments on big things. We do polling questions, but not on whether the state should have this economic reform or that economic reform.
--:-- The second big reason why social science is so hard is because there's not as much social desirability bias. People don't have deep-seated beliefs about the best way to get a vaccine. I guess some people do—they say mRNA vaccine is scary—but in general, about physical things, people don't have strong beliefs about the way they want the world to work. When it comes to social science, people have very, very strong ideas about the way the world should work. When you combine that with a lack of accountability, with the lack of any real-world test in the form of markets or real experimentation, people can just believe whatever they want, or believe whatever some vested interest like the State Department or the Pentagon bureaucracy wants to believe. This is why social science is hard, and this is why social desirability bias is the enemy in the search for truth.
--:-- One thing about economics is I think it's more of a male-dominated field. They have mathematical requirements that are more stringent. I think that weeds out a lot of people. There are complaints from other disciplines that economics is a little bit mean and aggressive. When I got my PhD in political science, I was surprised to find that sometimes somebody's theory would just fall apart, and other people would not just say, "This is wrong, go study something else." They would be like, "Oh, it's okay, just adjust it this way." I always felt like people were treating others with kid gloves. I think there was a culture in other fields—political science and probably much worse in other fields—of not having a willingness to really hurt feelings, a willingness to be wrong. I think economics has done that better than other fields. There's been a movement to make economics like other fields, and that would potentially be disastrous.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But it doesn't seem clear to me that even before calls for diversity dumbed down academia, things were that much better. You had bad ideas like communism or disarmament that were popular in academia. The Vietnam War was waged by people like Kissinger and McNamara, who had degrees from prestigious universities. They were white and male, but they were still disconnected from the outside world. So have newer developments in academia actually made it worse?
--:-- Richard Hanania: White males can have the same pathologies as any other group. The dumbing down of academia is a problem. If you look at the Vietnam War, it's very interesting because everyone sort of knew from the Johnson administration and the Nixon administration that it wasn't winnable, that what they were saying to the public wasn't true. If you look at the historical record of what politicians were saying personally, they were amazingly explicit in their willingness to admit to themselves and those around them that they were doing stuff for political reasons. They were responding to political pressure and public opinion, sometimes using public opinion for their own ends.
--:-- I don't think if you took professors of international relations, the big names who were not connected to the government, they supported Vietnam. Kissinger is hard because he was a guy who was in academia but also in and out of government. You wouldn't expect that person to have different views because if he did, he wouldn't be in government. His views had to be selected to at least be tolerable to whoever the president happened to be.
--:-- So yes, the dumbing down of academia, the move away from explicit hard standards like mathematical ability, the rise of cancel culture against free speech—all these things are harmful. That doesn't mean there weren't a lot of pathologies before. We can see that definitely.
--:-- If you look at a political scientist from the 1960s or 1970s and you look at political science today, if you go to Twitter, it's a good gauge of what the most prominent political scientists are saying. And it's all stupid graphs like "democracy has gone down 16.2% since Republicans took power in this state." It's really, really stupid. The median political scientist from the 1960s and 90s—there's nothing that ridiculous. So I do think it probably has gotten worse.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The problems you're pointing out with academia seem like they're inherent to any institution that is disconnected from the market and from something that can be empirically measured. But we would like to have expert knowledge in fields like international relations or criminology or psychology. So is there any way to design institutions that can study these ambiguous topics in a way that actually adds insight to the way we legislate? Do we even need expertise in international relations or criminology or psychology?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I tend to believe that the costs outweigh the benefits actually. I think if you rely on common sense for controlling crime and some basic statistics, you're better than the field of criminology. I think there's an idea in the public that if you want to stop crime, you come down very hard on crime. That might be more controversial among criminologists, but I haven't done any survey of criminologists. This is part of the problem: you have this field called criminology, and even if it arrives at something that's true or logical, or they have some ambiguous finding, there will always be criminologists who politicians who want to do something else will rely on. They will find those people.
--:-- Unless we're going to survey the field and just do whatever that gets us, the media and politicians are going to be selecting the people that they want. During the COVID stuff, they always say "experts say this, experts say that." You look at something like the Great Barrington Declaration, and the media was hurrying around saying these people were kooks and nobodies. Then I went and looked at their credentials—they were from Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School. Somehow when the media cites expertise, it's never these people. It's always the most hysterical person possible pushing for some kind of restriction.
--:-- So the idea of expertise can be valuable, but it can also be harmful. It gives certain people power who want to do irrational things more legitimacy. At a broader level, I trust things like prediction markets and economic markets—things that don't rely on credentials but rely on track records of getting things right. I would agree with Robin Hanson and others who cheer for these things to potentially have more of an effect on policymaking.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's talk about politics. You say that one of the reasons liberals have been winning is because liberals just care more about politics. But how does that explain why things have shifted more liberal over the last few decades? Is it just that conservatives have started caring less about politics and liberals have started caring more? What's changed?
--:-- Richard Hanania: To a certain extent, yes. In 2016 there was a huge mobilization effect on the left. I have a substack post called "2016: The Turning Point." Basically, if you look at 2010 versus 2016 to 2020, your probability of having attended a protest or signed a petition if you were a conservative versus a liberal—in 2010, you were maybe two or three times more likely as a liberal. By 2016 to 2020, there were multiples of that. It was something like 10 times more likely to have done these things.
--:-- I think national politics and the mood has a lot to do with it. Trump mobilized a lot of people on the left. He mobilized a lot of voters on the right too—low propensity voters who wouldn't otherwise vote came out for Trump. That was pretty good for Republicans, and they were concentrated in certain states. But Trump did a terrible job of motivating people who are activists, or people who would be bureaucrats or lawyers—the people who actually make policy on a day-to-day basis. He really turned those people off and made them more liberal. So yes, the change in engagement over time is part of the story.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm wondering how this theory explains why certain institutions are especially more liberal. Take big tech compared to a company like Walmart. I don't expect that if I went to Walmart headquarters, I'd see a whole bunch of BLM posters. But if I go to Facebook's office, I bet I'll see things like "diversity is our strength." Both of these companies have faced pressure from liberal employees. Both have to face civil rights lawsuits. And it's not like in big tech, you have a bunch of people who have given up high salaries in order to have a position of cultural influence—they're making a lot of money there. So what explains why big tech is especially super woke?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Big tech is such an interesting case. Until 2015 and 2016, there were calls for censorship from the media, and Twitter basically didn't censor anybody until 2015, and Facebook too. Big tech was a lot less woke than the media wanted them to be. I think there was a lot of political pressure that came down on them from the top. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are relatively not woke people compared to a lot of elites in America.
--:-- The initial generation of leaders in tech were pioneers. They were nonconformists. They tended to do their own thing and have their own political and social views. Then when tech became established, it started to draw people who are more conformist. That's why people have put forth the argument that crypto now is more right wing than tech—crypto is the next cutting edge thing that nonconformists are doing. Tech started out with a more libertarian ethos and became the sort of thing for high conformist people to do. That probably explains its wokification over time.
--:-- Something like Walmart—the ether right now is that if you're an idealistic person, it's easier to be idealistic on the left than the right. The right hasn't done a good job of providing an idealistic vision that appeals to a lot of people. If you go work for Walmart, your views might be more—you get enough meaning from just getting the logistics right and getting people the goods and services they need. That attracts a completely different kind of person.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I don't think I understood the difference between Walmart and Big Tech in that case. In Big Tech, you're also doing stuff like shipping a product that you can get meaning out of as well. And in both cases, they're becoming older institutions that attract conformists. So why is Big Tech more woke?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Amazon, you're working on logistics. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are more in the—because they're not actually producing anything. They have to tell themselves a story about why they're doing something good for the world. Some people believe in that story. They convince themselves of it or they believe in it. Google's "don't be evil"—this idea that they were doing something social and revolutionary was part of the ethos from the start. While Walmart, they want to get you lower prices and make your life better. But I don't think it ever had that idea that you are going to fundamentally revolutionize society by having more Walmarts.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's kind of analogous to American foreign policy in a way. Google or something has an explicit creed, and then they had to do stuff to further that creed that actually might make things worse. That's interesting.
--:-- So you write that one thing your theory can somewhat help vindicate is authoritarian populism. Not that you necessarily support it, but just the idea that you can have a right-wing government that pushes back on the liberal elite who just care more than conservatives, even if they're not more numerous. I wonder if this theory also vindicates libertarianism more, because in that case, you don't have the funds for this rent-seeking elite to be able to survive. There's less journalism and academia, and also there's less these elites can do to coerce people without the help of government.
--:-- Richard Hanania: You're getting at the motivation behind a lot of my writing on American politics. I'm disturbed by wokeness. The fight against wokeness has been confused and not very effective. That has to be self-evident because wokeness has gone so far and won so much. I'm thinking about the different ways you can go about working against it. I'm not coming down on one thing—it's either libertarianism or populist or authoritarian. I think the ideal response would not be a pure version of either.
--:-- From the libertarian perspective, Robbie Soave took this lesson from my article: whatever you try to pass, the government will get around it. One thing they can't get around is you cut off their funding. You stop giving money to the universities, they don't have the funding anymore to do the stuff they want to do. You pass a law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservatives a fair hearing—who do you think is going to be interpreting that law and deciding what a fair hearing is? So there's something to shrinking the government and these institutions that are under the influence of bureaucrats and activists, rather than remaking them.
--:-- But then it depends on what you want. If you're really bothered by the direction of the culture—that activists are propagandizing, that media institutions and popular music and culture are selling sexual promiscuity to children, for example—you might have a more forceful response. There's probably not an answer within the confines of libertarianism. You could set up your own private community and go off and do something. But you could say, "I don't like what's considered art now. I don't like what's considered pop culture." And you might say that's the only potential thing you can do.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm not sure I follow. If you're a parent, just don't buy your kid porn. But you have to buy them a smartphone at some point. They have friends. If you can only afford to send them to a public school and everyone else is watching porn in the bathroom, people are influenced by that. It's not as easy as turn off the TV. We all exist within this culture. What other people do does affect you.
--:-- But I'm skeptical to the extent of what right-wing government can actually influence the culture. That brings me to the next topic I want to talk to you about, which is fertility. You're more optimistic about what countries like China and Hungary can do about fertility. But it seems to me that if giving people checks doesn't get them to fuck, I don't know if banning makeup on guys is going to actually make a difference.
--:-- Richard Hanania: You step back and look at what correlates with high fertility levels. It seems more clearly to be associated with culture than economic situation. As humans have become more able to afford kids, they've tended to have less of them. This is a pretty strong argument against it being largely an economic issue as a driver of differential fertility rates. And then you look at things like religiosity—very important. The question is, can government influence culture?
--:-- Richard Hanania: I see no reason to think it can't. I think one thing civil rights law—I think one of my main arguments on civil rights law is it actually did influence the culture. And even that wasn't that heavy-handed compared to, say, what the Chinese government could do potentially.
--:-- So yeah, you take the idea that fertility is a cultural issue and that government can't have an influence on culture, then basically follows that the government, if it wanted to change the fertility rate or potentially a lot of other things, can do so through the control of the culture.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right, right. But I guess one reason to be optimistic—depending on your perspective—to be optimistic about China's fertility is, look at what they did with COVID, where they were able to just pull people down in their houses until there were zero cases in the area. Western countries couldn't do that, so they got COVID under control. So what if they get something similar on fertility? But there doesn't seem to be some obvious analogous human rights violation that you do to increase fertility that the West is not willing to try. What are you gonna do that's analogous to that?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Sure, sure there is. You can ban all anti-natalist propaganda. You can make the education system be nothing but about how you should have children for the fatherland. You could tax single people and unmarried people at 100% and give all their money to couples with kids. So there's tons of stuff you could do. Whether that's good, whether it goes to something like zero COVID—the fact that China did it is pretty impressive. Whether it was worth it, I think they've probably gotten overboard at this point. So you can debate whether it's worth it. But I think having a competent and authoritarian government opens up different possibilities.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: By the way, so you think by what year is China's fertility gonna be 1.9? 2031, right?
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yes, I give it 2031. I'm the only one—I talk to other smart people and I'm sort of out on the limb here. Other smart people either think it's impossible or they think the will is not going to be there on the part of the Chinese government. But I take a different view, as I explain in my Substack.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: By the way, I'd make you a small bet on that if you're all right. I'd give you even three-to-one odds.
--:-- Richard Hanania: That would be 1.9?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, or it would be less than 1.9.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Okay, well, 1.9 is my median. So I'd have to take that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: All right, yeah. We'll figure out the conditions later on.
--:-- But then, are you afraid that what these countries will do to actually increase fertility will have a dysgenic effect? If it's cash transfers or just economic incentive, maybe it's the people on the margins who desperately needed the cash who are going to have more babies. And these are exactly the kind of people who—you know what I'm saying.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yeah, that's an interesting question. If the government went down the cultural path and just tried to propagandize people at the highest level to have as many kids as possible, are smart people or stupid people more prone to propaganda? I think the argument could be made that smart people are. Look at wokeness—smart people tend to accept it a lot more than stupid people. So maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the smartest people will take the hint most clearly and change their behavior.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, the stupid people might—different kinds of propaganda appeal to different kinds of people. Something like nationalism might appeal disproportionately to stupid people, and something like wokeness, which is more idealistic and detached from reality, might appeal to smart people. But historically, if you look at the way nationalism came about, it was the elites generally who were nationalistic first, and then it trickled down to the masses. So I don't think there's necessarily a rule of human nature that nationalist or right-wing propaganda only disproportionately appeals to the less intelligent. It's a fascinating question what the compositional effects are.
--:-- Richard Hanania: I think it'd get the birth rate up. Whether it'll be smart people or not smart people, I don't know. It's probably still not good in either case. I don't know about China, but for example, if the government tried to actually change the culture in America to make it more pro-natalist, I could very well imagine that it would have a counterproductive effect, because then it would become counter-cultural or contrarian to oppose a right-wing government and not have kids.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, so it depends on what kind of—if the Republican Party took power and said, "Our biggest thing is getting the fertility rate up," and it was somebody like Trump who just triggered all educated people, that would probably backfire. In some place like China, I've seen some data that indicates that the elites and more educated are more nationalistic. So they could actually be united in favor of—they could be very potentially receptive to such a message. It's so complicated because Chinese elites see themselves as part of a country that's competing with the U.S., while U.S. elites don't see themselves really as people competing with China. They see themselves as people competing with other Americans or competing with nature and trying to change the world or get social peace. There's completely different dynamics there.
--:-- Richard Hanania: This might be one reason why the West has become left wing—it's become more dominant, and elites don't have anybody to compete with or try to defeat or feel superior to. The gap between Westerners and the rest of the world in recent decades was so large that they weren't really seen as competition. That might change with the rise of China, but I don't think it's really registered as something that's fundamentally shaped people's outlook. So the compositional effects and who's responsive to propaganda—these are fascinating questions. It's hard to predict in advance. You just have to watch what people do.
--:-- One thing, you brought up the economic point. If you make a cash transfer for each child, like $10,000, that matters a lot more to a poor person than a rich person. But if you do something like cut how much they're paying in taxes—I think they did this in Quebec, and I think the Hungarian system works like this too—where if you're getting tax breaks, the rich people pay more taxes, it could potentially be worth more to rich people to have more kids. So the structure of how it's set up would also matter.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, final question. What should libertarians do in order to win in the next 20, 30 years, given your theory of politics? What should the libertarian strategy be?
--:-- Richard Hanania: They should hope for ridiculous polarization. They should hope for Americans to hate each other, because libertarian ideas are unpopular. The only way you get them is you basically take over the Republican Party, and then they just win 50% of the time no matter what they do. They're going to have to control certain states no matter what, and they have a lot more freedom to do unpopular things. I think polarization is actually good for libertarianism, and I think they might have a good few decades actually.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right, that also by the way explains very well what wokeness has been doing in the last few decades. If you can increase polarization, they can get unpopular things passed.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yeah, it's a cause and a consequence of polarization. These things work together. I think what libertarians should do—and I think I'm doing a part of this—is they should really make clear to people. There's this idea on the populist right that we tried libertarianism, and now wokeness has taken over. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? When did that happen? When did they defund public education? No, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism, and now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends.
--:-- In my article "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law," I try to make clear to people that the conservatives haven't been libertarian enough. They haven't even talked about this stuff or understood the downstream effects of broad interpretation of civil rights law on business and the wider culture. I think people should try—because people really are motivated by anti-wokeness. Some people are motivated by the idea of small government and what it can do, but you can reach people who are motivated by anti-wokeness, and that's a lot of people on the right. If you explain to them how libertarianism can help them and what they want to do anyway, I think that's a good strategy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, all right. Well, those are all the questions I had. Richard, thanks so much for being on the podcast. It's a pleasure.
--:-- Richard Hanania: Yeah, they're great.
