This podcast is brought to you by the Albany public library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. God daddy these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning
Hey, everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And today I have a very esteemed guest, Dr. Glenn Loury. I'm not gonna keep saying doctor, but you say that out of the bat. He is a professor at Brown University in economics. And he also has a substack and a show called The Glenn show, which has been around for a while. I think it started on blogging heads with John McWhorter. I think a lot of you know about it. And he has just a bunch of stuff going on all the time. But I wanted to kind of Glenn go back a bit into the past. So I have heard about this paper that you wrote in 1976. Because I think there was a profile of you, and first things like around the year 2000. And I remember this paper that you wrote, and it is still your most cited publication from what Google Scholar says. The dynamic. Yeah, “the dynamic theory of racial income differences” So I read it. I'm not gonna lie, I did not read the whole mathematical appendices. But I did read the whole paper before the mathematical appendices. But I'm gonna read the last paragraph because I think this will be interesting to listeners in the year year of our Lord 2023. “Any successful policy must take explicit recognition of the systemic nature of the impediments to minority groups, we cannot rely on the eradication of racial income differences coming about as the result of 10 million black Horatio Algers quote, ‘making it’ in an unchanged American society. Compensatory efforts are suggested within both the educational sphere and the world of work, it must be recognized that continued racial economic disparities no matter how well, they're accounted for, by, quote, objective factors reflect the social and economic consequences of historical reality. It follows therefore, that public responsibility does not end with the acknowledgement that racism is unjust or discrimination illegal, no one committed to justice can be satisfied until we no longer live with the legacy of past discrimination.” So I'm going to just tell you, when I read that, kind of thought it was kind of woke Honestly, I've never read the whole paper. I think I have read the abstract before. But I think that's actually a very contemporary point of view. I mean, it's very relevant to 2023. What would you say? What would you say to that?
Ah, I would say that it was the year 1976. When I wrote that dissertation. What was that 47 years ago, 46 years ago. So while the questions are certainly still alive, the question that I was taking up there, as you read it, it sounded it could have been written yesterday. It did sound like did sound like that. Because some of the rhetoric, you know, has has developed, it's not the same position that I would take today, although I don't I wouldn't disavow the the analytical grounding that caused me to, to write those words. Those are very good words, by the way, I had practically forgotten about I need to resurrect, I need to resurrect that the closing thing and dusted off and so forth. But I don't think I'm answering you, you asked me, wouldn't I think they were relevant today. I'd say 40 years plus, is a fair period of a state of exception from what should be the, you know, baseline set of relationships that we have with one another. I'm talking about making the racial egalitarian project a public project. I'd say it was a public project for sure in 1976. But do we want to make it a public project and 2036 or 2056? And if not, then we you know, we need to start thinking about a it little bit differently. But I don't know we can talk.
Well, so let me so I didn't read the paper. And there's some, you know, mathematical modeling in there, like economic modeling, and I want to get a little bit into that, but actually did check the empirical literature, or just empirical income stuff we know about the wealth gap. That's huge, like order of magnitude type stuff, but I wanted to look Income, because that's an easy statistic to look at. And so basically, I'm just going to describe this for listeners and the viewers. It's a chart in the economist that I found, what you see is between 1960 and 1980, there was a pretty significant closing of the income gap of black male to white male median, earnings. So the gap was around 33%. And then by 1980, it had dropped to about like 25%, a little lower than that according to these data, and you see the same pattern at the 90th percentile, although that's a much bigger shift. But in any case, after 1980 down to and these data go into the mid teens about like, you know, seven years ago, it's a much slower, almost static situation where it's gone from, say, 25%, to, you know, 20 to 23%, bouncing back and forth. And, yeah,
this is - what you're saying is well known, but you don't want to just compare medians. You want to control for the skills that people are bringing into the market, if what you're trying to do is measure discrimination. And you know, but But yes, she saw Thomas Sowell has made much of this point. He says, they - the gap is closing faster before then after the advent of the of the big, great society and civil rights things. And it's based on underlying fundamentals, not on government policy, but you know, yeah,
well, so. So in the in the model, in the model that you have in that paper, you know, you make some simplifying assumptions. So, for example, you basically ignore, you don't basically you do you just as a simplifying assumption, no, interracial marriage, right. That's what I that's what I read.
I mean, it's not a model of everything, like, you should give me a chance to explain what I'm actually trying to do.
Okay
So. So it's it's a, it's an a theory of the dynamic evolution of income disparities between groups. So society consists of individuals who can be identifiably partitioned into groups and reproduce over time. And their incomes determines the consequences of investments that they make and their skills as well as the luck that they have in the luck of the draw with their endowments, genetic or otherwise. And, and there are races and the question is, why would the disparity in incomes between the races persist, if the intervention of discrimination was no longer active in the market, now, if it's active in the market, of course, you're gonna get persisting inequality. But my point was that even if it wasn't overtly preferential differential treatment of black skill, you could still get, and I wanted to try to explain that. And the explanation turned on what was going on on the supply side on the side of skill acquisition, which is costly, but which might be less costly to somebody who's embedded in a community, which is overall prosperous, making it easier for an individual within that community to acquire skills. And if you had historical inheritance that made the two communities black and white, different with respect to the prosperity that they started with, with and that persists over time. That's why you've got mathematics. That's why you got difference equations. It's a it's a dynamic model of how the incomes, incomes will evolve. And what I wanted to say was that, that's it’s the happy ending idea that if you didn't have discrimination, eventually, eventually, eventually, eventually, the disparities would go away that there was no way for that. Because social segregation, the networks of racial affiliation amongst people would carry the overhang of the historical disadvantage into the generations and the generations to come. So everything has to do with t going to infinity and whether or not the variables that represent those skill acquisition in the income and the different groups are converging to the same number. But the end of the day, the answer is it may not that's why you were able to read that closing paragraph for me where I was, it's, you know, waxing philosophic, in saying that, you couldn't just leave this problem alone, laissez faire wasn't going to solve the problem. No intervention was was not going to solve the problem. But we're 50 years on man. And I have a completely different, you know, attitude about whether or not making racial equality for black people, the business of the public, for America is warranted and certainly about reparations, which I think is a terrible, terrible idea.
Yeah, no, I mean, so you guys can get this. I mean, I'll post a link. It's you can get this freely actually. I enjoyed reading it partly because, you know, we're talking verbally right now. It's it is a form model. So you change the initial so one of you know Glenn's results is the initial conditions matter a lot. So there are certain conditions, certain narrow conditions where they will converge, and then other conditions, they'll never converge. Right?
Right.
Like in terms of the income. So, so, you know, the details matter in these sorts of models, in terms of just like the social context, the the bundle of skills that individuals have, I think, okay, Glenn, like I mean, just straight up. I agree with you on a lot of things about this. But I do want to say, just reading the paper, I think that the ideas that you're presenting there that were formed in the mid 1970s, like I'm thinking of, for example, the cartoon of equity versus equality, you know, and that can just apply to what you're saying right in here. So you in I mean, this is, you know, okay, people aren't going to look at the figures and the equations, but you're basically anticipating in the 70s, a lot of what we still are talking about today. And is that because we haven't, the public discourse? Hasn't I mean, they're actually like, I'll tell you like, that's, I feel like that's my perception, a lot of the public discourse at the elite liberal level in particular has not moved beyond the 70s.
No, here’s here's what I think I think I was right in the 70s. But that that moment has passed and that that prescription is not appropriate for the, for the 2020s. But yeah, the … the care the characterization of what I was calling systemic racism, and that 47 year old paper fits perfectly as a better account, even then the account that you get from those systemic racism mongers, today, they could take those words and say them literally verbatim, and substantially enhance the quality of their argument. But it's not where, you know, we're where we are, right now, it's a completely different country, it's a completely different situation. And one of the things that's different is that we're living with the failure to take advantage of the opportunities that were created in the last quarter of the 20th century. I mean, the disparities are not just some imposition by forces of darkness, they're the manifestations of the consequences of human action. And then human action is substantial, especially when we talk of things like crime, or the family that's substantially within the agency of the people in question. So if the theory that I was coming up in the 1970s, within a decade of the civil rights movement, with this very hopeful idea about the government making everything, okay, were to be adapted today would be precisely the wrong theory.
So can you. I mean, you've kind of alluded to some of it, talk about the changing just the changing parameters between say, look, I mean, I was born, I was I was born around when you were writing that paper. So I don't remember the 70s. I'm also an immigrant, I have a totally different experience. Like to talk about the change conditions, like what you saw growing up in the Southside of Chicago, and then what you were thinking, as you were in graduate school, during that period, and then like today, in terms of the opportunities, can you just make it explicit for people? Because, to be honest, a lot of the people listening and viewing they're not they don't have a visceral personal experience of any of this stuff, that you're talking about - how it changed?
Oh, well, I mean, the size of the black middle class, I don't know the statistics exactly off the top of my head. But you know, you could look at occupational profiles, and you were citing median relative median earnings, but the absolute level of earnings says, risen, and educational attainment and so forth, the black middle class is a real thing. They're black billionaires, and so on. And one could parse that I'm not are not especially inclined to, to spend a whole lot of time on it, though.
You're not but I mean, I feel like I feel like you know, a lot of people say or, you know, the assumption is that nothing has changed, partly because they don't specify what they mean, by- in my opinion, they don't specify what they mean by systemic racism, like I don't really, I do ask people who believe in it, what they mean, and I don't really get much specificity aside from another word.
But how can we - come on that doesn't make any sense. Nothing has changed in terms of the structures of opportunity in American society, adverse to African Americans. I mean, frankly the The opposite could be said, we live in a regime of favoring the opportunity of African Americans. Affirmative action is a real thing if we were talking about university admissions, for example, but the whole culture is inclined toward this sort of ideal or idol, I almost want to say, of equity. And what that even to hear you cite that cartoon. I mean, it just shows how insidious how deeply insinuating itself is this sensibility. So the idea that nothing has changed, it's absurd. A person who says, is not really trying to make an argument. They're trying to emotionally manipulate their interlocutor. Alright, yeah. So that that was, that was a speech, but I can't take it seriously.
But I mean, so it's not a logical I mean, basically, you're saying it's not like a logical analytical argument. It's a feeling but don't you think? I mean, maybe it's not your job, it's not any specific person's job to engage with it. But these are the conditions of the world we live in, in terms of what we have to deal with a lot of us in the professional managerial class, what we have to deal with day to day, you know, especially younger people who aren't at the same position you are in your career,
have to deal with what?
Ah, well, I mean,
DEI we're talking about that?
yeah, or just, you know, just even, like, I'll give you a really concrete example. You know, I don't, I'm pretty skeptical of affirmative action. That's my personal view. And I will say it and that does get me in trouble. But I had a friend, and she was saying how she didn't believe in, she was very skeptical of affirmative action in graduate school admissions. And this was in 2012. We were having lunch, but she whispered it. And I'm like, Why are you whispering it, we're like, actually sitting outside, and there's nobody around. And she's not even very political, but she knew that, like her reflex was to whisper it. And so you know, unless you're an extremely disagreeable person. This is just these are assumptions you have to deal with. And so I mean, I understand your point, like, I, personally also find it a little ludicrous. But, you know, the world kind of is absurd.
Yeah, the world is absurd, but houses of cards don't stand a strong don't withstand a strong wind. And this this racial preference, philosophy, as the response to underperformance by blacks is a house of cards. That's what it is. And yeah, they do have the whip end, at a certain cultural moment in certain industries and certain venues. But there's they're on a foundation of sand. The actual performance of people at the end of the day is what's going to drive an organization, not the claims of some kind of mystical, racial injury. Virtue signaling will only carry you so far. Eventually, the bottom line has to kick in. You're talking to an economist here. So So I think I think, for example, when you have things like Georgetown Law, has a negotiation class taught by one name Sandra Sellers, who is a lecturer without tenure on a hot mic, she's overheard saying, mostly kids at the bottom of the class do not not doing well on my test are of color. I really regret that. She's said that she didn't mean for that to be public, but it gets public it gets heard and gets disseminated. Now she's a racist. For reporting the factual observations, she's a racist, for having said it in a private conversation. That's the House of Cards, that whole blame game. The real thing is, everybody knows who's on the bottom of the class. Everybody knows if they want to do affirmative action at the Georgetown Law Center and admits students who are black with less credentials, who then perform less well. The predictable consequence of that is going to be what Sandra Sellers observed. And if then the Zeitgeist attributes, all of that to some kind of atmospheric racism when it's spoken of. They're playing a game they're playing a losing hand. It can't be sustained. Everybody knows.
Yeah. I have a question for you. Just as I was doing research for this conversation with you just like googling things, like looking up numbers. I was looking at the highest median wealth ethnic group in the United States. And that's Japanese, Japanese Americans. In wealth wealth, family wealth, not income. So that’s Japanese Americans. Okay. Number two is Asian Indians and that’s not that's not surprising, but, and then Chinese. But in any case, I actually know a little bit about the Japanese American migration. A lot of them were landless peasants from Kyushu Shikoku, southern Japan. And they were, they were kind of encouraged to migrate. That's why they eventually went to Brazil after United States shut its door. Because there's overpopulation, Malthusian access in Japan, right. And so there's this idea and it's in your, in your, in your discussion papers, also, like, you know, Greg Clark's work, he works on intergenerational persistence of inequality. So these Japanese are landless peasants. They're obviously at the bottom of the heap in Japan. And then they come to the United States on the order of about a century to 75 years ago, well, whatever around a century ago, let's do it. I mean, it's 2023 now, and I forget that it's not 2000. But um, what would what, you know, like, let's use your analytical toolkit, like what's going on here? I mean, how is this this ethnic group, which is not, you know, are they do they benefit from white supremacy? And I just want to point out that they were landless laborers, because these are not Taiwanese American PhDs that arrived after 1965. This tends to be, you know, — say like, later generations,
you'd want to study it. I don't I don't know. It has its own particular history, I would assume it's the kind of thing that again, Tom Sawyer writes about a lot about migration and culture. And and you can reproduce these stories all across the world in terms of ethnic groups, with very significant differences in success. And so but I happen not to know anything, Japanese migration to the United States. And I assume there's a story to be told there. I don't know what it is.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, there's a lot of stories to be told. And I feel like, you know, they're not people are quite incurious about a lot of these things in the United States right now. And it's like political, cultural reasons why.
But the ethnic differences give another reason not to buy the systemic racism account. I mean, the ethnic differences, such as those between Asian Indians, Chinese, Japanese migrants to the United States, and maybe let's say, Latin American migrants to the United States. You know, there, there's a lot of variation there just as 100 130 years ago, there was a lot of variation between those southern European and the Eastern European and Northwestern European migrants that are coming to the United States. All of these cultures have their own peculiar own idiosyncratic character that will lend itself more or less well, to whatever the niches that the people find themselves in an appointed time. We haven't talked about the Jews. I mean, the Jews are, you know, it's extraordinary thing. The Igbo in context of Nigeria and West Africa are an extraordinary thing. I mean, yes
Glenn, Glenn - Don't I don't think you're not supposed to say “the” but just I don't want to get in trouble.
I'm not supposed to say “the Jews”? I'm sorry. I didn’t think…
“Jewish people” I'm kind of joking. But that was like the Chappelle Show thing. Like if you if you preface it with “the”…
well remember, they were one of a half dozen different examples that I was citing. So if I spoke of the Igbo, if I spoke of the Jew in the same, the same reference.
That's fair, that's fair. Yeah. Anyway, so. But yeah, like there's all these different groups. The African immigrant actually, cases are interesting. It used to be 20 years ago, I used to hear a lot more. And I think, you know, Lani Guinier was involved with this with some other people about at Ivy League universities, the proportion of what I think we would call ADOS now, Americans, descendant of slaves, but there's another. Yeah, there's words like that. And like they were, you know, that group of the, quote, ‘black’ proportion were, you know, like, half to 25%. Depends on how you counted it. And, you know, there were like, biracial people were like, 25%. And then, like, there was an enormous number of West Indians and Africans, but I don't feel like I hear that discussion too much anymore. It's not just my imagination.
No, it's not your imagination that you don't hear it, but it's still true. It might even be more true. I don't, again, I don't have any kind of official authoritative thing but just impressionistically and what I hear that the second generation African immigrant, young people, and as you say, Caribbean, and and biracial, would constitute certainly a plurality, certainly more than 50% and maybe more than 75%. I mean, and it's going to vary from institution to institution, but it's noticeable.
Yeah, yeah. It's noticeable, but I feel like people don't. Okay, I'm gonna give.
So because let's follow that through, why would we care? And I'm not saying we shouldn't about the intra racial ethnic composition of the incidence of the admissions policy, is that that we think the policy is only justified if it yields benefits for people who descend from slaves because it's somehow linked to the historical mistreatment of black people in the country? Or do we think that we are creating a diverse student body of all manner of children, including young people, including young people of color, are who themselves come in varied experiences and lineages, but there's no need for a proportionality of anything? In any of that? Which one are we doing? Are we trying to make recompense for slavery with our admissions policy to an elite university? Something tells me that's ridiculous.
I mean, I think that's the theory. Right? that would that would be the rationale given?
Yeah, well, again, I think it's a house of cards.
I mean, what so I mean, obviously, you think it's a very different country? Like what are the, um, you can like name a bunch of like factors like, what are your top factors like the ethnic diversity, the fact that it's been 50 years?
Oh, okay. Look at the leadership of the country. I'm talking about people who are in corporate suites, people who are in law firms, people who are in politics. It's very, very much more racially integrated than it was 50 years ago. Take off these things. But I mean, that, you know, look at the culture, look at what's on television, look at the mainstream media consensus around the major political and cultural issues of the day. It's a slam dunk on behalf of racially progressive woke agenda. I mean, the President of the United States gives speeches in which he says things like, the voting law in Georgia is Jim Crow. 2.0. Now you're going to tell me, that's something that could be could have been said in 1970. It's a unique reflection of our time. Did you see the funeral of Tyre Nichols yesterday in Memphis, where Al Sharpton gave a speech, Barack Obama was president, of the United States for eight years? please! nothing has changed. The country has absorbed 10s of millions of immigrants from non european ports of call in the period since that paper that you started this conversation off was written. And the moment when we speak, the 21st century is moving on China didn't exist as a factor in world politics in 1976, it is going to determine the courts of the 21st century, technology is revolutionizing everything, I have a library in my pocket, people who do not develop their cognitive capacities will not be able to participate. If we hold on to this shtick, racism, white supremacy has done me wrong, black people will be in a permanent second class status of our own making. That's why I don't write the same paper in 2023 years, I would have written in 1976
It's, uh, you know, it's a different time. So, you know, since moving to a less controversial topic, where maybe not I want to talk about academia, you know, we had a conversation a couple years ago, and we touched on this a little bit and I feel things have progressed, maybe not in a good way. So in academia, basically DEI or DIE however order you want, you know, Equity, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, it's a massive thing. You see, systemical changes in — but also places the University of Oregon, you basically have to like read statements or sign statements affirming it. And then, you know, there's in other universities, it might not be as explicit or formal, but you know, it pervades. it pervades like all of these institutions now. So in Florida, as we're recording, Ron DeSantis, has basically appointed Chris Ruffo on the board of New College, which is a liberal arts college, very progressive college, but State University as part of the state system, and they rejected them. Yeah. And so there's this whole there's this.
I didn't hear that -
the I think that the president they replaced the president of New College with someone so they're really going at the administration from the top down, and Ruffo is declaring The War on DEI is on. And you know, I mean, he's known to get results. So this is this is like game on, I guess. And Ron DeSantis is giving him carte blanche, I think to do what he wants to do. I've heard a lot of positive negative things about it. Just to set the set the context, can you tell me or tell, tell the viewers and listeners who are not in academia, what it's like in terms of like these particular issues? And how far left, I give a concrete example, I have a friend who is a Liz Warren supporter, and he gets made fun of as a Republican, by some of his lab mates, you know, so that the distribution is like log transformed on the left scale, let's put it that way. But can you like talk about it a little since you're still you know, you're in academia, and you're a brown?
Yeah, I'm getting ready to retire in a couple of years, though. So I want out I want out. And, you know, it's kind of boring at a level. But with respect, I will respond to your question. I mean, boring in the sense is tedious. I mean, it's like it's all been said, of course, there's a deep sort of ideological bias to the left and the Academy and what not, I mean, DeSantis, isn't it Obviously, he's running for president? And I don't know the particulars about the New College thing. But I gather, it's a part of the state university system that has always had a certain amount of autonomy, and that they're not want to, they want to use it as a kind of experimental laboratory to show different directions in higher education. I mean, there are such experiments ongoing, I have an advisory relationship with the University of Austin, in Texas, which is a new kind of startup, academic institution that I have high hopes for. And, you know, I think, let 1000 Flowers bloom to a certain degree, if DeSantis were to say, look, we're conservative, Republican, traditional values, people, and we want to try to mount something in higher education. And we got Christopher Ruffo doing it. I mean, I don't I don't know that that's the end of the world. But, you know, the, the, the, the thing that you refer to diversity, equity, inclusion, loyalty oath statements, you can't get a job in the science department at the UC system. If you're not prepared to sign off on some, you know, political testament, if they had asked you to swear loyalty to the United States of America, or to the Catholic Church, we would have seen in an instant, what the problem was such a condition of employment, I you know.
Yeah, and, you know, there's not much daylight between us on this, but I'm gonna do you know, quote, devil's advocate, I'm gonna say, what my friends who are woke in academia, what they would say, and it's like, I mean, do you oppose diversity, equity and inclusion? I'm kind of a dick, I'll just say I don't care, but whatever. That's my honest view. But they basically think that if you oppose diversity, equity and inclusion, you're racist. So it's not really a loyalty test. It's just, you know, being against racism. That's what they say. That's what they think. And so who wants to be not against racism?
I agree with that. That's why it's an equilibrium, the condition of affirming this thing is something that the only people who are already certifiable are going to, you know, fall, plant this their flag on that they're going to make their stand on that. If you were unwilling to do it, that would be a pretty good signal of the fact that you had the wrong values with respect to the questions of fairness and diversity. I agree with that. But I think it's a terrible policy.
I mean, so I know that you know, you are retiring. But do you get a sense that it's affecting people who will or won't stay in academia? I'll tell you, there's there is clearly some adverse selection. I know many people I mean, so I, so I come out of biology and genetics, there are people who clearly would have been research one, assistant professors by now who now work in biotech, and part of it is the lack of, I mean, the word you know, in academia that uses collegiality. They really didn't want to continuously they were white males, for example, many of them and they didn't want to denounce white males, and that kind of, you know, there's a certain kind of ritual denunciation, you have to do. They didn't want to do that. So there's adverse selection, but the problem, from what I see it, maybe it is a problem, or it's not the people who are left behind are now more solidified and they're increasing in numbers. So, you know, Ruffo and Ron DeSantis are trying to do things but I mean, this might be a situation where it's just gonna sweep to fixation as we would say in genetics.
Yeah. I don't have any particular response to that
I'm not getting much optimism for you from you, Glenn.
It's an issue of institutional capture.
Yes,
I think I'm not a political scientist, but that's kind of how I would be inclined to think about it. So a certain way of seeing things has pretty much in theirs closure somehow, they can exclude naysayers and external people don't have enough leverage. And, you know, it could be suicidal. I mean, it could be self destructive of the very integrity of the institutions themselves. There are a lot of pissed off people out there, you know, I mean, I'm I'm participate in a couple of sort of email chat group things where people send their sentiments around and there's a lot of bitterness amongst people. Let me - let me now make it personal. Heather McDonald, who is Christopher Russo's colleague at the Manhattan Institute, where I am a senior fellow has a book coming out called “When race, trump's merit”. So how are we going to do science and we got to science by merit? Are we going to do science by racial inclusion? Right. I mean, quintessentially, science is an area of human endeavor that is meritocratic. It's based on getting the right answer to the puzzle. It involves mental activity. So if you're not the best person at the problem solving activity, you're not the best scientist. And it doesn't matter what your identity is. Full stop.
Yeah,
so here is a threat to Western civilization. That's not an exaggeration. It's a threat to the rational ordering of our affairs. People are in a delusion. This is madness. This is a mass hysteria. You're gonna have Newton - wait a minute are you going to do string theory based upon diversity? That's ridiculous. The premise is absurd. Why are we even talking about it? Because the world has gone mad. I'm absolutely serious. If we don't stay in touch with reality, we don't have any chance don't compromise with these people. D I have no place in science. It should be about merit. Full stop.
Okay, I don't I don't disagree with that. So I'm not gonna like really do the devil's advocate because I don't really disagree with that at all. I will tell I will tell quick story. So I hear from people now. So I am. As you can see, Glenn, I am a brown skinned person, just like you we're not, we're pretty much same complexion. So I'm not white. Just just just for everyone out there. I'm not white, although, you know, some people will say that I am function I am politically white. Some people have said that, let's just put it that way. And that's being polite. But in any case, setting that aside. So I have a cousin and you know, she's Muslim. I'm not I'm not religious at all. But, you know, she's, she's in Bangladesh. And now she works. And she works in in software and engineering, whatever. But she has a master's degree in astrophysics. And I asked her, I'm like, Oh, why do you get a master's degree in astrophysics? She's like, well, I just love cosmology. Because, you know, it doesn't matter who you are. You know, she says, it's about the truth. It's cosmology. And so I always just when people explain, like, well, you know, you know, physics is white male, I'm just like, you know, you don't know what you're talking about, like, like, I know, people who are from rural villages in Bangladesh. And when they read a book on cosmology, they're like, this is the truth. Like, this is reality. And, you know, my cousin is religious. So she's like, you know, this is like, the hand of God. Like, this is like the ground of like, the ultimate and so that's how she perceives it. So when I hear people, you know, often frankly quite privileged people saying, well, you know, it marginalizes blah, blah, blah, and I'm really, you know, like, look, my family's from Bangladesh, we're mostly in STEM, there's a reason we're mostly in STEM. And that's because it doesn't matter what your connections are, how polished you aren it’ll matter some like not gonna lie, but compared to other other endeavors, like law, politics, etc. You don't have to be as polished. You know, this is why there's so many, you know, frankly, Asperger's people in software and in the tech fields, right? Because truth is truth. A proof is a proof and the universe is a universe and these are just fundamental realities we took for granted a couple of years ago, a decade ago, and that's not where we are. Now. I do want to say in terms of like, You know what's going on in the academy in some of our institutions, there's something called the iron law of institutions. And it's basically people control the institutions care, first and foremost, foremost about their power within the institution, rather than the power of the institution itself. So I think what we're seeing is, you know, within institutional games, of who's winning, and it's decreasing the prestige of the institution, which you can see, science with a capital S is now a cultural war polarized issue. I am myself on the right, I have to argue with people about vaccinations, and stuff like that. I mean, I believe in vaccinations, whatever that means, believe, like, we have centuries of proof on this, but, but it's really hard sometimes to argue with the people because they tell me, they want us gone. And I'm like, well, that's kind of true. They, I mean, I know what they say about people, like, you know, like people who are outgroup shall we say, they don't like you. And now they don't really hold back, like they used to in the past, you know, so there's no trust there. And if you're a regular person on the street, you kind of have to have trust in the institutions. And that's disappearing. And I don't know where we go from there. That's not very optimistic scenario. But maybe we can't go much further to the bottom. You know, the interest rates are higher, cheap money is gone. Maybe it's gonna impose some discipline on us. What do you think about that? Like, that's my optimistic take.
I'm relatively bullish on economic prospects over the next little bit. This has been a brutal year in the market that cetera. But I'm not that kind of an economist. I don't I don't follow that stuff too, closely. I mean, I think inflation has been a problem. And it seems to be abating, it's going to be a issue for the Fed for a while. I mean, a lot of money was pumped out in the COVID emergencies and, you know, relief packages and so forth, a lot of money is sitting in local and state government coffers not being spent, because so much money was dumped out of the federal FISC. But I'm bullish over the longer term. I mean, I think, you know, the, our prosperity rests on a pretty solid foundation, I'd be worried about trends like aI automation, you know, and the dislocation in employment and things like that. It looks like automated vehicles are coming and things like that. But that's, that's a conversation you should have with somebody else.
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think there's, there's my own life. You know, I'm in tech, there is a disjunction in a way like, we live in the Age of Miracles, like you implied earlier, we have supercomputers in our pockets that we're always checking out. You know, we can like, look up any piece of information in theory, you know, if we have the ability, Google Scholar, whatever access, but there's also, I don't know, I feel a sense of ennui in this country, and this is one of the reason where there's nine, there's a negativity and a pessimism. So people on the right, you know, we lost our country, it's degenerate, it's collapsing. And people on the left are, you know, saying, Oh, well, you know, we're just like, one step away from Jim Crow, or, you know, like Donald Trump will be the eternal dictator, or whatever. I don't like I'm old enough to remember the 90s. We had a lot of issues with, you know, the Clinton impeachment and stuff. But I think that there was a legit positivity, even though our internet was much slower, and all these other things, there was there was the 21st century was going to be bright, and maybe it is bright, and we're deluding ourselves. But I think that there's a disjunction sometimes between our culture war negativity. And just like the material realities, I mean, we have an obesity epidemic in this country, that's bad. But that also means we have an excess of food, which is good.
Yeah, I hear you. Well, this is the subject for some of these big think historians and these people, Steven Pinker has tried, you know, try to make these kinds of sweeping arguments about the trend lines and human wellbeing over the long term. And it does, I and my colleague, Oded Galor has just published a book called “The journey of humanity” which is really quite interesting. It's a very, very interesting piece of work, where he talks about the economic revolution that's happened in the last 200 years in terms of standards of living, and sort of delves into the deeper foundation. So that is something that people have been talking about, I mean, “guns, germs and steel” Was that, you know who I'm talking about Diamond, Jared Diamond. People talking about this kind of thing.
When they say,
What do you zap think about the environmental crisis? Are you are you a alarmist with respect to the climate change threat?
I wouldn't say I'm an alarmist. I think you have to be a realist. I think people have people do have to think about trade offs in economics. And I think we're gonna have to adapt. Because whatever, whatever developing countries or developed countries do, we're not gonna, you know, the standard of living in India is not going to be what it is right now indefinitely. So that's one thing. But you know, we do use a lot less water in the United States did we we doing 40-50 years ago, you know, low flow toilets - Here we are. So I think that there are ways that we can adapt, and we're going to have to adapt, there's going to be shocks.
Excuse me, when you say the standard of living in India won't be what it is not. You mean, it will? It will improve?
Yeah, I mean, they're going to be consuming more plastics. Okay. So
I know that their general level of income is going to increase and with that will come consumption habits that will have environmentally deleterious consequences
Yeah, if we keep the parameters the same. And maybe we're going to do we're going to create bioengineered degradable plastics. So my friend Ramez Naam, who, you know, has, like, worked in the solar space for like a decade now. If you blink, or like if you had blinked in the teens, you would have missed out on a massive transformation. So here, so I'm in Texas, I'm in Austin, actually. And there's a lot of renewable in our grid in Texas, partly because it's easy to build things like wind, and Texas is okay with permitting and whatnot. So it's not all downhill. I mean, you know, I read a lot of environmental stuff in the 1990s. I actually did read the original ‘population bomb’, and I did read sequels. You know, those are written by ecologist and you know, coming from a biological background, I've talked to ecologist, ecologist do not think like economist even though they use some of the same models, the inputs are always the same. And animals do not gain productivity ever. They do not innovate, they stay the same, or they go extinct. And so it is an assumption of like some sort of Malthusian equilibrium, that kind of thought suffuses environmentalism, and I think that's a problem. On the other hand, there are real issues. There are real issues in the world with temperature, with variability in precipitation. And we just have to go with it. Just as in there could be real issues with Chat GPT. And these AI systems in terms of labor market, we either progress or I guess we just give up on the, I don't know, modern world, we could live in a low carbon utilization world as a medieval society for hundreds of 1000s of years, like we did for 10s of 1000s of years. We did we did for a million years as foragers. Right, we can do that. I don't think we want to do that. And so we got to figure it out.
Well, I'm inclined to think that you can't hold you can't hold people back, how are you going to keep them on the farm? Once they've seen the big city? Kind of? That's the metaphor. How are you going to keep them from having a mobile phone once they've had a mobile phone or from wanting air conditioning, or wanting to have transportation possibilities and things of this kind? I don't know how you ask a couple of billion people to wait. When you know, the rich people on the planet are enjoying a certain way of life. Everybody is aspiring to that. I don't know how you just like I don't know how you roll back. I don't know how if it were even ideally, the right thing to do. You never persuade people to let go of their way of life. So I think we could be on a very bad, we could be on a very bad trajectory inexorably. And I find it ironic, because if we're actually going to crash and burn, what's the point in starving ourselves now? You know, I mean, if the long term and unavoidable outcome is dark, and well, maybe it may be tragic, then what's the point of a whole lot of fruitless sacrifice and make policy I'm just philosophizing
Yeah, no, let me let me just bring up something that that a lot of people don't know. So 150,000 years ago during the Eemian interglacial, which lasted for about 15,000 years, or so this is before anatomically modern humans spread much outside of Africa, as when they're Neanderthals and Denisovans, etc, etc. Most people do not know that the Eemian interglacial was warmer than the current interglacial right now. So it's about like two degrees Celsius warmer. I'm reading a lot about Scandinavia right now for substack peas. And Northern Scandinavia was filled with like beech forests during the Eemian. Right now, it's mostly tundra. So when people say, Oh, well, we can't get hotter, like, how will we survive? And like, that's not the issue. Biologically, that's not the issue. The Earth has been warmer in the past. The issue is the current contingencies of our civilization and the just in time economy and the level of consumption that we expect in the just in time economy. But you know, we wouldn't have a billion people if we didn't have the haber bosch process that was invented in the early 20th century. Right. So there's all of these things and you as an economist, you read economic history. You know, the last couple of Centuries have seen massive productivity gains. So the limits of the possibility, we can't, I mean, start, for example, like, you know, the listeners and viewers of this podcast will know, you know, CRISPR CRISPR was known CRISPR genetic engineering the 1980s. But people didn't understand what the applicability would be until about 10 years ago. And then within a year, and I was in graduate school at the time, within a year 90% of laboratories switched from other types of genetic engineering, which were much more labor intensive and difficult to use. There's some like narrow reasons why you would use other other types of tools. So they're still around, they have a niche, but there are niches that everyone switched over to CRISPR. So this is a radical shift right now. In this in the 2020s, we will probably develop develop CRISPR cures for cystic fibrosis, probably sickle cell. I mean, one, one girl has already been cured of sickle cell, and also probably ALS. Um, there's already working dog models on all of these right? And we don't like talking about we just take it for granted. Yeah
What is unique about the CRISPR, genetic engineering, editing technology that has caused it to be so dominant?
Yeah. So I don't like I'm not a molecular biologist with a mechanism. I don't know why it's so much better. But basically, it's extremely cheap. And it has extremely minimal side effects. So off target effects. So if you if you want to edit one of the 3 billion base pairs, or one little region, in lots of genetic engineering techniques, they cause a lot of side effects, which those are mutations that cause cancers and all sorts of other things, right. So it reduced the cost a lot by orders of magnitude. So a small laboratory. So for example, Monsanto, I think it's called Bayer now in any case, big agribusiness were the only ones that were doing genetic engineering for decades, on any scale, because they were the only ones that could take on the fixed costs, right? CRISPR dropped the fixed cost massively. And so now it democratized in the United States, the main thing limiting CRISPR technology in laboratories is actually regulatory. Because you have higher, higher threshold for regulatory safety and whatnot, but you know, it's gonna, it's gonna significantly transform things like agriculture, in my opinion, because obviously, if you mutate goats or tomatoes, people don't care as much as if you cause a problem with a human. Now I mentioned cystic fibrosis, ALS, and sickle cell, because these are diseases especially, well, actually, all of them, that reduced lifespan considerably. So if our techniques are not initially perfect, the cost versus benefit is good enough. I have a friend who well, and he's an acquaintance whose daughter has cystic, she was born three years ago. And life expectancy, I think, is 40 to 50. Now with good, good treatment, but I told him, I am willing to bet 10s of 1000s of dollars, that she will live into her 70s Because that's like one of the first things that they're going to target because we know the gene. And, you know, so I mean, you know, we had like, kind of like a pessimistic culture, there's a lot of pessimism, at least from our political perspective, probably. But then there's awesome things that are happening. So we are we, as the gods, we are recreating the substrate of life. And then meanwhile, we're having these sociological food fights. That's the only way I can say it. So it's kind of like, you know, within humanity, you know, the oldest, the oldest texts of our species reflect who we are, you know, like Gilgamesh is looking for immortality. And kid who is being, you know, seduced by a prostitute. That's 5000 years ago, but stuff hasn't changed that much. All right. Well, it was great talking to you, Glenn, and I will keep listening to your substack and I hope the next time we talk, things are better. And hey, if you're in Austin, this summer, maybe I'll see you I know a lot of the guys at University of Austin so
yeah, I'm gonna be there in the last week of June.
Yeah, I figure like Rob Rob Henderson is gonna be here and stuff a lot of people so All right, it was great talking to you Glenn.
