Or for that matter, the EA case for removing an enormous source of economic energy in the form of immigrants – whose contribution to our economy is estimated by the CBO in the hundreds of millions over the next decade.
Simple: the CBO is wrong. Immigrants use a lot more in public services and pay a lot less in taxes than they assume, and the allocative benefits to the native populace are miniscule and dwarfed by the fiscal transfer effect. Reality, rather than the CBO's wrong models (looking at the economic underperformance of extremely skilled-immigrant-heavy Britain, Canada, and Australia, or the much better documented stats on immigrants vs natives from northern Europe) backs me up on this.
Also hundreds of millions is nothing in the scale of the US economy. I assume that's supposed to be billions.
Low iq brown trash doesn’t create economic growth. That’s why their countries are such basket cases and they flee them to come here and live of the government.
Actually the very high IQ Congressional Budget Office disagrees with you. And a racist comment like yours suggests that you may be the one suffering from intellectual deficit.
Do you know the people? Have you ever priced a CBO estimate as a member of private industry? Have you ever spoke to the Senate Finance Committee?
Cause I have. You know what I spent Thursday doing? I spent it on a call being told that the CBO estimate for the IRA impact on my industry was bonkers retarded, which I knew the second the legislation passed, and rather then admit that to the public as an October Surprise they are going to borrow a bunch of money from my kids and shower it on my industry to cover it up. This is far from the first time I've encountered this.
Low IQ people have low incomes. People with low incomes get *redistribution* from the government. This obvious fact doesn't change because they have brown skin.
High IQ people are people. They do what they got to do to make a living. Even if it means giving bogus CBO scores. The richest counties in the country surround DC. What do you think paid for it?
> Low iq brown trash doesn’t create economic growth. That’s why their countries are such basket cases and they flee them to come here and live of the government.
Oops you let your mask slip there for a second. If you're part of the substack alt-right you're supposed to cloak your blatant racism with terms like "hbd" and "dysgenics" for the sake of plausible deniability.
The United States, Germany, etc saw their high economic growth phases that brought them to global dominance when they had tariffs ranging from 30-50% or so. If I called tariffs a VAT you people would be all over using it to replace the income tax.
So here are two things you don't address in this post:
1. Trump is likely to try to arrest, imprison, and deport 10+ million peaceable people currently living and working in the US. The logistical barriers to carrying this out, and the cultural inclinations of those who are enthusiastic about trying it, are such that the attempt is likely to involve mass atrocities against civilians both citizen and not. These atrocities, beyond constituting a major welfare loss in and of themselves, are likely to shock and scare potential high skilled immigrants to the US in a way that negates the second order effects you are hoping for here. The sort of people we want and indeed desperately need to come to America are not going to want to come to Trump's America.
2. Relatedly, Trump is likely to try to be a personalist dictator and to gut the liberal democratic institutions that restrain him from being one. A Trump election in 2024 would substantially decrease the likelihood of free and fair US elections in 2026 and 2028. Inasmuch as you believe liberal democratic institutions are important contributors to long term growth and innovation, this again is a negative effect likely to swamp the positives of less drug price regulation, more market friendly housing policy etc.
Finally, what you dismiss as class prejudice should not be so easily dismissed. The man is in fact an obvious sociopath to an extent much greater than that of traditional politicians, and has in fact committed a lot of grave crimes, including but not limited to attempting to overturn, by both fraud and mob violence, the results of an election he lost. It is bad for human flourishing to elect people like that to powerful offices, and the difficulty of quantifying that badness does not mean we should weight it at zero.
These arguments lack evidence. They are typical of people who have spent the last eight years yelling about the terrible things that Trump will do… But to those not already convinced, they seem specious.
Trump will deport 10 million people? Funny how he didn’t do that his first term.
Trump will be a dictator… Obviously this depends on how you see J6. Still, with our n=1 experiment here it does not seem likely that he will indeed end democracy in the US. What does “substantially decrease the likelihood of free and fair elections” mean, in actual numbers? And if this rhetoric leads to more assassination attempts, killing Trump or future conservative politicians… Is that not also “decreasing the likelihood of free and fair elections” in the US?
Here goes the “the insurrection failed, so it’s not really a big deal” and even the “saying the bad things Trump did increases assassination attempts” arguments.
Trump’s threat to democracy and his overt willingness to break laws in order to hold on to power is NOT just about Jan 6. It is not n=1. There are multiple shocking and blatant examples of Trump’s attempts to undermine the election prior to the day of Jan 6. This includes use of false slate of electors (people illegally purported to be elected electors) to go to state governments to discount the vote of millions of Americans; the orders to members of his DOJ to send letters to states lying about corruption in the elections to have them overturned (in which DOJ officials en masse threatened to resign if Trump placed Clark as AG to do so); he called Raffensperger (Georgia’s SOS) as a private citizen for him to search for the exact number of votes he needed to win and threatened legal action; on the day of Jan 6, he told his VP to illegally throw out 81 million votes; and countless of many other examples.
Why is Pence not his running mate? How come many of the people he worked with before are not a part of his campaign? Because he made it clear that his 2nd term will have nothing but yes-men, and it is very unlikely they would have the courage like Pence or Jeffrey Rosen. Vance already said that Pence should have listened to Trump and throw out the votes. The "guardrails" that stopped him the first time wouldn't be there.
This is why a second term is uniquely a threat to liberal democracy in the US. This isn't dumb rhetoric
What’s your best guess of the plan Trump made hold on to power in 2021? This seems like a bunch of disjunct and dubious evidence, I’m not persuaded there was a plan that failed at all.
So much of this involved bad faith behavior during the events and certainly people have been engaged in bad faith incredulity after the event, and I don't know who you are, so I don't know whether you are seriously asking this question or if you're just rationalizing because you're a committed partisan. Nevertheless, it bears repeating, because somehow despite multiple lawsuits and reports and Congressional hearings there are still people who just don't get it.
It was a four pronged plan that included cooperation from a number of senior Republican Party leaders across the country.
The first prong was a series of frivolous lawsuits that were filed in bad faith by people who know what "laches" is and how standing works. The purpose of these lawsuits was to manipulate the public by creating an impression of a legitimate controversy over the election among laypersons who understandably don't know a frivolous suit when they see one and may be emotionally invested in the idea that there was still hope for a Republican victory.
The second prong were slates of phony electors who fraudulently claimed to represent various States. Many of these electors took false oaths and violated laws to do this.
The third prong was a violent attack on the capital which was promoted by Trump on Twitter. The attack was planned openly in Internet discussion groups like thedonald dot win as well as various Facebook groups. For some reason the people involved don't understand that their planning in these open forums was widely read by other people who are not on their side. Consequently they run around on the Internet today talking about how it was "a protest rally that got out of the control" as if we all didn't read what these same people were saying the day before the attack.
The fourth prong was the hope that the chaos of the attack and the phony electors and the engineered public perception of a legitimate controversy would enable Senate leaders to fail to pick a President through the Electoral College process. The Constitution provides that if the Electoral College fails, the President is selected by the House of Representatives, through a process in which each State gets one vote. That vote would have gone to Trump and he would have continued to rule the country after having lost an election.
If a Senator had been kidnapped or killed, which was VERY OPENLY the plan, that would have been the end of Democracy.
HamandCheese was once a person whose views I took seriously but no policy wonkery matters if we don't have healthy Democratic institutions.
"Hang Mike Pence!" does not ring any bells for you?
Granted, Pence was the VP rather than a Senator, but still.
I'm not necessarily saying that they could have abolished democracy, but they could have inflicted grave physical harm on Mike Pence, possibly even up to the point of killing him for the sake of their own Orange Jesus.
When people say repeatedly that they want to do a thing, and their supporters wave signs saying "PLEASE DO THE THING", how "specious" is it to believe that they're probably going to try to do the thing?
Trump didn't do mass deportation his first term because he wasn't sufficiently organized and focused yet to try, and was too consumed with his other unworkable stupid nativist idea, the Big Beautiful Wall (tm). At the RNC this year they literally handed out signs saying "MASS DEPORTATION NOW"; if that isn't evidence that the party as an institution wants to try to do mass deportation, I don't know what is. If you want more details on the evidence for, and the evil of, the plan, see e.g. https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/trumps-deportation-army
As for the decrease in likelihood of free and fair elections, it's not just about the J6 coup attempt, or the fake elector schemes, or even the guy's own avowed intent to be a dictator! You asked for numbers, so here's a pretty heavily traded prediction market giving a 32% chance that if Trump is elected, the US will no longer be a liberal democracy in 2028:
32% seems extremely, terrifyingly high to me-- and also roughly accurate. He will *probably* fail, but it's grossly irresponsible to let him try, especially now that he has appointed a bunch of judges who we know to be hacks in the tank for him, and made clear his intent to pardon people who commit violent crimes on his behalf.
See also this compilation of evidence and arguments, to which I am indebted:
I acknowledge that there are people who consistently refuse to believe that Trump will actually try to do the things he's repeatedly said he wants to do, and that his hardcore supporters sincerely want him to do. Those people are, to put it charitably, engaging in wishful thinking. History sadly records lots of examples of this kind of wishful thinking, including the many sober-minded people in the 1920s who looked at the Nazis and concluded that they couldn't possibly actually mean all that crazy stuff about Jews, and if only the right industrialists could whisper in Hitler's ear in the right way, he would save Germany from Communism. That line of thinking no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.
No, because it's a solution in search of a problem. There is no reason to believe that noncitizens vote in significant numbers in US elections today, and every reason to believe that ID requirements would be abused to selectively burden the voting rights of classes of citizens Republicans don't like.
Trump made serious efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, for which he has been indicted. The only sure way for Trump to avoid prosecution and punishment for the crimes he is charged with is to win control of the government and keep it in friendly hands after his term. He has a strong motivation to see that he is succeeded by a someone loyal to him regardless of who is elected. This motivation combined with control of the government and a friendly Supreme Court provides good reasons to believe that Trump will try to ensure this outcome in 2028.
I think there must be one of those personality axes - some people mind and some people don't, when someone lies about what they're doing. So we get years of Dems saying, don't say we opened the border, the border is not open, get those words out of your mouth! Then Biden comes along and quite literally figures out new ways to open the border, beyond previous imagining - and still - don't you dare say open border!
I don't care what Trump said on his or Nancy's dumb fake coup day. I don't care about these cosplaying nutters who have glommed on to Trump. Caring about these people would be like deciding all of a sudden to vote based on what teenaged girls on TikTok think.
I would of course actually love it if he would deport the 10 million people that the Dems lied about the government admitting. How awesome would that be - to get that much traffic off the roads, just the general trash everywhere because we have too many people and no longer the capacity to clean up after ourselves - imagine not having to make a reservation to go swim at the state park on the weekend - imagine there's not a kratom store on every corner - imagine how many fewer captives living a shadow life prostituting themselves at the fake massage place, doing stupid people's nails for no pay, being mysteriously dropped off all in a van at the Chinese restaurant - imagine the immediate strain that would be relieved on our overtaxed infrastructure - imagine how many fewer hideous sad red brick schools would have to be built. Imagine that the ER is not a madhouse. Sweet.
> And if this rhetoric leads to more assassination attempts,
The rhetoric didn't lead to any assassination attempts. There is currently no evidence that TMC, a Republican was motivated it, and the evidence points to the theory that he just wanted to kill any politician (he was looking for Biden events, too). The base rate of political assassination attempts actually being done for policy reasons is low, and "protect liberal democracy" is probably the least likely policy for someone to commit an assassination in favor of.
Trump's rhetoric, on the other hand, has led to a substantial amount of political violence, including J6, which actually was an attempt (at least for some of the people there) to assassinate political leaders, and was the direct result of Trump claiming the election was stolen.
I don’t think deporting people who come illegally and have low skills will dissuade people with high skills from coming in legally. I’d personally much more probably try to get US citizenship if US had closed borders; with less effectively closed borders like now that seems like a sucker’s game, no?
The impression that I get is that high-IQ (which often correlates with high skills) people are repulsed by bigotry, and Yes, that often includes bigotry towards dull and/or low-IQ people, especially immigrants who were born in countries that exhibited poverty, misery, and/or oppression through no fault of these immigrants' own and who came to the US illegally because there was no way at all for them to come over here legally.
I saw a study, but I don't remember where exactly, that showed that being pro-immigration was associated with high intelligence even more than support for legalized abortion was. Maybe you can ask Anatoly Karlin and/or Richard Hanania to try finding this study.
Personally, I would not want to come to the US illegally if I could come legally because if I come here illegally and get deported, then I'm back to square one and then I can't even come to the US legally for the next ten years. Why risk it if you can come over here legally?
FWIW, I do agree that there should be much more skilled immigration into the US. It was hard enough for my own skilled parents to immigrate to the US as it is. They left the Soviet Union in 1991 and had to move to Israel and live there for almost ten years because they only had the opportunity to immigrate to the US in 2001, not back in 1991. They had two children (myself and my younger sibling) in Israel in the meantime.
But I also don't think that being much more welcoming towards skilled immigrants should cause us to become intolerant of unskilled immigrants, even illegal ones, especially if they're culturally compatible. Israel was able to survive just fine after accepting almost a million mostly unskilled Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from the Arab and Muslim worlds after it (Israel) acquired independence back in 1948, after all. The one thing that I do want to ensure, though, is that the US will not become so dumpy that smart people (global cognitive elites) will stop wanting to move over here, but that seems like an extremely long way away and hopefully will never happen with the right policy-making decisions.
I'm more of a nationalist for Europe because I'm very wary of Muslim radicalism.
What you all are missing is that the act of immigration is in and of itself a screener. Leaving family and all things familiar behind is an act of bravery, determination, and optimism - qualities we surely want in America. And not every immigrant needs to be “high skilled”. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs in less skilled areas, and also many many jobs that mostly require ambition and a good work ethic. Again, these are qualities that are likely to be true of all those who undertake the perilous and arduous task of immigration.
Sometimes immigrants come to the US together with their families, no? My own dad certainly did.
But Yeah, I agree with this.
Honestly, I think that open borders with the Muslim world and Sub-Saharan Africa would be the most problematic given Western Europe’s difficulties in integrating Muslims and the US’s difficulties integrating black American descendants of slaves, but open borders with the rest of the world would not be as bad. But it would need to be managed and handled carefully to avoid a huge public backlash. A very, very gradual implementation of this.
I do want to ensure that the US and West would avoid becoming so dumpy that they stop being attractive for global cognitive elites, though.
I know a bunch of high skilled immigrants (mostly software engineers, some biotech) and a few high skilled folks who would like to be immigrants if they could get through all the bureaucracy.
I guarantee you none of them has ever or will ever ask themselves "why bother getting legal residency when I could just stay here illegally?" because that question is totally divorced from reality. The existing burden of immigration checks on actual citizens alone (e.g. stupid I-9 checks to verify you have work authorization) is sufficient to dispatch that delusion.
More seriously: there is no respect whatsoever in which cracking down on unauthorized immigration would make American life better for these people, and many respects in which it would make them worse off. They would be poorer materially because low skill and high skill immigrants are complementary. They would be poorer subjectively because, like most highly intelligent and productive people everywhere, they are liberal cosmopolitans, so they want to live someplace friendly to liberal cosmopolitans from everywhere, not someplace where racist yahoos will regard them as a dirty furriner and possibly assault them with impunity conferred by the sort of politician the racist yahoos vote for.
My most charitable interpretation of Sam is that he thinks these folks would find it easier to stay here under Trump because he would make a grand bargain where we would remove obstacles to high skilled legal immigration in exchange for a crackdown on unauthorized low skilled immigrants. That is a dangerous delusion, because there is no constituency for that bargain outside a few academics and pundits. Most of the people who want to crack down on unauthorized immigrants also want to reduce legal immigration, because they want fewer dirty furriners across the board.
“Low skill” people are not complimentary to anything. They are just a drain on the society they are in. Your illegal brown maid is heavily subsidized by the state just to exist. That cheap cleaning gets paid for with your taxes and through the cost of living. No place ever got wealthy flooding itself with low human capital.
The poster child for your mindset, California, is deeply dysfunctional and hemoraging people despite the huge advantages it accumulated in the 20th century before mass illegal immigration turned it into a dysfunctional state.
Smart people go where their lives will be best. That’s why they move from California to Florida. That’s why they go to places like Singapore, where LKY called brown immigrants the equiviliant of human trash and the punishment for illegal immigration is caning.
Revealed preference is that people want someone to keep the trash out but they don’t want to have to admit it.
Are Democrats even against increasing high-skilled immigration to the US? It seems like something that would strongly benefit them given that educated people have trended very strongly in a pro-Democratic direction over the last 20 years or so.
Cool now do Russiagate. It's a shame because if the Democrats actually respected the 2016 outcome and didn't use every means short of violence to undermine it, maybe you could actually make this point about how Trump is this big threat to democracy or whatever. But unfortunately they shot first. Even if we accept the narrative that Trump wanted to destroy democracy, his only crime by comparison to his enemies is that he really sucks at it. J6 was and still is a huge millstone around the neck of the right. Russiagate and other similar activities were far more successful in actually harming their intended target (indeed, the fact that we still have to hear this same "threat to democracy" thing ad nauseum is evidence of how successful the regime has been in undermining Trump's legitimacy by making people think he's Hitler).
1) Illegal immigrants have no right to be in the country and their presence is illegitimate. In fact, the existence of a significant illegal population makes a mockery of the idea of democracy and rule-of-law; what does 'rule-by-the-people' even mean if the people can be arbitrarily molded by the government itself? The Biden-Harris' deliberate non-enforcement of immigration laws is thus a much larger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done. And the logistical barriers are much smaller than you think; most of it could be done bureaucratically (employ illegals => get very large fine, illegal-headed households don't get govt benefits). Finally, skilled immigrants are much less beneficial than you imagine (see: the rest of the Anglosphere), and will keep coming as long as salaries are much higher in the US than elsewhere (which they will continue to be). No amount of deporting illegals will change that.
2) We actually have Trump's record from 2016-2020. We don't need to speculate. Scare stories about personalist dictatorship fall flat in light of that (especially because he'll be 82 by the end of his term - even if he wanted to and somehow got enough of the rest of the government to go along with it, which he wouldn't be able to, he wouldn't have the personal energy).
I think the biggest probable influence of Vance on pro-natalism is making it a hot button political issue and making highly educated people therefore less likely to want to have kids. No indication that any tweaks he would be able to make to government programs would matter.
Richard - You wrote an entire book (and a good one at that) on the impact of legal and political institutions on the culture (wokeism) so I’m confused as to why you think the fertility issue alone is this “cultural” phenomenon that can’t be affected by policy or law.
I argue that took a very long time. It’s not impossible pro-natalism can do the same, but Vance isn’t proposing anything particularly new here. Democrats are the ones who are more supportive of payments to families. The only thing Vance has contributed to the discourse is alienating rhetoric.
Would payments to families help or hurt though? Assuming the real barrier to children isn't financial (which I think is true), it seems likely to reduce the status of having kids by associating them more strongly with welfare, thus making upper classes even more reluctant to have kids.
Agreed. Rather then shaming childfree people, why not try presenting a logical case as to why their views and position are wrong? Honestly, if one cares a lot about one's own well-being, then being childfree actually does make a lot of sense, especially from a financial and effort perspective. It's the benefits to the country and to future generations that having children often consists of.
The only way to have more kids is to do nothing and let the trends continue?
I agree that national pro-natal policy should get more concrete, but at the state level all of the good policy is happening in red states.
The democrats aren’t really in favor of more payments to families. They support marginally higher tax credits usually means tested and flat dollar (dysgenic). The endless debates in congress are always how they demand they be refundable and not have a work requirement. That and more spending on children adjacent dem interest groups (education, etc) that don’t help. The fertility crisis isn’t going to be solved by giving welfare mammas bigger checks, and most of the dem platform is anti-natal.
False. All that is worth something in life comes from smart people making life not brutish, nasty, and short. The fewer of them there are, the worse life will be.
Dude literally the only first world countries are the high iq ones and the only individuals pushing forward the scientific and technological frontiers are the high iq ones. Africa is what you get with low iq.
Given most EA interventions are still focused on public health in the developing world, the lack of any mention of similar programs is striking. From an EA perspective George W Bush was probably the greatest president of our lifetime for establishing PEPFAR and tackling the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. The first Trump administration by contrast regularly called for cuts to PEPFAR in their budget proposals. I doubt a second Trump administration would be much different
To be honest this reads much more like "The EA case for Mitt Romney" or "The EA case for generic republican" than "The EA case for Trump" specifically. That not necessarily unreasonable, but I think it might be worth distinguishing between the two, especially because there are many ways that Trump seems noticeably worse than a generic republican from an EA (or really from any) perspective.
1. Trade: Trump and Vance are terrible on trade, especially if you care about citizens of foreign countries in addition to Americans. Beyond the immediate consequences of increasingly restrictionist trade policy, it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by a restrictionist faction.
2. Foreign Policy: Foreign Policy is obviously very complicated, and I don't feel comfortable talking authoritatively here, but I find it very hard to imagine how one could make the EA case for an American first foreign policy. We should care deeply about our international role, and work hard to cooperate constructively with other countries and promote democratic/liberal values. Again it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by an isolationist faction.
3. Immigration: Many republicans do favor increasing high skill immigration, but I do not think Trump is one of them. You cite a link to an article about Trump agreeing with a proposal to give green cards to foreign students who graduate (certain?) American colleges, but the same exact article says that Trump's campaign immediately walked that statement back. Trump has a habit of endorsing many different contradictory policy positions, which makes it easy for potential supporters to convince themselves that he will support their preferred policies, but I think that this impulse is mostly cope.
Furthermore, many of the people he is is likely to place in charge of immigration policy (e.g. Stephen Miller) seem completely opposed to all types of immigration. Maybe Trump would achieve the immigration equivalent of Nixon going to China, but I think it's unlikely, especially if it requires bipartisan legislation (Trump seems uniquely good at scaring democrats away from working with him). Perhaps most importantly, Trump has really awoken and strengthened a nativist portion of the Republican Party that opposes immigration full stop, and I think that anyone who cares about increasing any type of immigration should want to see this faction discredited within the Republican party. I find it extremely hard to imagine that republican legislators who secretly want to pass some sort of bipartisan immigration reform package that includes increases to high-skilled immigration will be able to do so when Trump has control of the Republican party
4. Long term survival/health of important American institutions:
You write that "longtermism ... is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures."
I would be inclined to agree, and if you take this seriously, it suggests to me that you should care a lot more about preserving institutions than short/medium term policy (even important policies). Trump has done a huge amount of damage to our institutions with his stop the steal stuff, his attacks on the press and basic truth in general, and also through the partisan response of many liberal institutions to his presidency.
There is probably more to say on climate change as well, but this comment is long enough already.
To recap, I think this article does a good job of making the case certain republican policy positions, but Trump is leading the faction of the Republican Party that wants to move away from almost all of their policies that I actually like. The Republican Party and the country would be much healthier without him, and that requires him losing.
Related to this - Trump introduces a lot of unpredictability into government and world affairs. That’s his personality and skillset. Every longstanding rule, norm and institution is up for grabs. He’s mercurial, willing to turn on a dime, in response to developments in his personal relationships etc. One of his priorities is being the leading news story every day, which incentivizes unpredictability.
From a consequentialist perspective, this introduces potential upside, but also a lot of tail risk, which you don’t find with a more institutionalist president.
I don't dispute absolutely everything in this post, but there are a number of things that strike me as obviously wrong, and the post doesn't even address many of the EA arguments against Trump, except for ones on immigration and AI. I think Trump significantly increases the probability of authoritarian backsliding in the U.S., which, aside from being bad for everyone living in the U.S., would also be devastating for the whole world: Western liberal democracies lose their strongest ally and may backslide themselves, an authoritarian U.S. would likely reduce innovation and economic growth, hurting everyone worldwide, etc. He also increases the risk from climate change (I know you wanted to address this, but you didn't, and I don't see any plausible argument that he wouldn't). And, while he might decrease the already tiny probability that the Russia-Ukraine war escalates into WWIII (although even this is not clear - he might make it easier for Russia to get more ambitious with how much they think they can take from Ukraine), he more than makes up for it by increasing the probability that China invades Taiwan or Russia invades more countries, including NATO countries, which creates a much bigger risk of WWIII. Plus, he's already increased the probability of nuclear war in the middle east.
Aside from existential risks, his economic protectionism is directly counter to EA goals, as is his anti-immigration stance. I don't find the counterarguments you made on immigration very convincing: The stuff about culture even you admitted was not convincing, and the idea that restricting immigration now will lead to liberalizations later requires some serious intellectual gymnastics. More likely, changing the status quo to be more restrictionist will just lead people to remain restrictionist in the future because people generally follow the status quo.
A few more specific points:
- Roe v. Wade isn't a sunk cost. A Harris administration could pass a law codifying it, and even if she doesn't, she can at least prevent the courts from being even more stacked with right-wing judges who make similar decisions. It's not as if Dobbs is the only recent SCOTUS decision that EAs are against - they've made tons of terrible decisions, and will continue to do so for decades. The Supreme Court is one of the most important issues from a longtermist perspective since they serve for life.
- The reasons that people find Trump repugnant aren't just superficial. They're about his character, which affects what he does in office, and sometimes just direct disgust over his policies. Re-electing the arguably most corrupt president of all time is not a good EA bet, unless you have a myopic focus that ignores the negative downstream consequences of doing that.
- Operation Warp Speed was one of Trump's best policies, but now his base hates him for that. As you said, we shouldn't vote based on sunk costs. We also shouldn't vote based on good policies whose benefits have already played out and which we have good reason to believe won't be replicated in a second term. If anything, Trump might pass policies that make it less likely for future people to be vaccinated against diseases.
- OWS may have been good, but the Trump admin was unprepared for a pandemic in 2020. I agree that we shouldn't overweight this due to the sunk cost fallacy, but we also shouldn't ignore the possibility that he will be unprepared for a future crisis. This should increase our credence that he will prepare badly for existential risks, too.
Support for abortion is strongly associated with dysgenic fertility at the individual level and legalized abortion is correlated with dysgenic fertility.
Trash gets pregnant and has kids regardless of the legality of abortion. “It just happens”. But the ideology of abortion (anti child) has a strong negative impact on the fertility of smart people.
Smart people don’t get abortions, it’s a total non-issue for them. They use birth control and don’t get pregnant in the first place.
Being pro-abortion is just “I don’t like kids” vibe and being pro-life is just “I like kids vibe”. Smart conservatives have a TFR of around 2 and smart liberals have a TFR of around 1. If we restricted it to top 20% iq very liberal the TFR drops to 0.6.
It’s about the vibes. Pro abortion sends the message that kids are bad and it’s ok to murder them if they are inconvenient. Smart people respond to that message by using birth control to limit their fertility.
You suggest that Trump-Vance's offensiveness/repugnance is like Kamala's laugh and has little to no direct bearing on society-wide outcomes. I'm surprised since you're a guy who sees the importance of social norms. Why leave this out of your analysis?
Rooting for Trump-Vance's pro-technology/market positions and ignoring how they're fraying the social fabric is peak (wait for it) "neoliberalism."
So to your second point, keeping Trump to a one-term failed president is still an important goal. It sends a strong and important signal that we don't let bullies take power. And that's a good thing for society.
Strange series of posts lately. The likes of Foucault, Rorty, Taylor, and Zizek show that you can critique the Left without selling out to neoliberalism...
I’m confused? Do you not feel bullied by the left?
I felt really bullied when they locked down my whole society, rioted in the streets, spent so many trillions threat is caused double digit inflation, and held Maoist struggle sessions at my workplace.
The very last thing I want to validate is someone like Kamala Harris and everything she represents.
Larry Summers and a host of economists advised Biden against this course of action which he rammed down the countries throat with no bi-partisan support. It predictably caused a huge surge in inflation.
I bet it wouldn’t be remembered as “bullies” failing, but broader, as “only Washington functionaries need apply”. It’s not like Trump is running against a courteous well mannered political outsider.
EHC hasn’t been doing all that well imo but odd to say you’d like to alienate them. What good does it do to a movement or ideology to deliberately alienate smart successful people?
I think EHC needs to have less power over people’s lives because their ideas are bad and make life worse.
Let’s take Covid, the most recent big EHC failure.
“Suck up to EHC people” would have told you that we needed to give into EHC hysteria because only by giving in could we assuage their worries and bring them around. Tyler Cowen wrote about this line all the time when it came to Covid or wokeness or basically anything.
But it never worked. The more you gave into their hysteria, the more hysterical they got. The best way to be free of their covid hysteria politically was to elect republicans and the best way to be free of it personally was to stand up to them.
It’s kind of like how the school choice movement kept trying to be bi-partisan EHC movement for decades, then one day realized EHC was never going to put a ring on it and just decided to get anti-woke republicans to pass vouchers.
We know what EHC is. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to wake up one day and go “you know, this thing I’ve opposed all my life is actually correct and I’m going to pay a high price to change it.”
Obviously, standing up to them and taking power away from that is going to be alienating! Just like your not wearing a mask was alienating. If you want to get things done and make the world a better place, you’re going to have to alienate people who don’t want to see you succeed.
The problem is EHC is that their smarts haven’t given them the right answers, just the power to impose them on others.
I strongly disagree with this article's view on immigration for simple political reasons (Hispanic, Asian, and African immigrants, high-skilled or otherwise, are consistently anti-capitalist relative to white Americans, and as such the pro-capitalist, pro-immigration position held by many libertarian and rationalist-adjacent people is self-defeating, and I think Canadian, Australian, and British economic underperformance should put a dent in pro-skilled-immigration libertarian orthodoxy), but I appreciate it being written and basically agree with the central point.
In particular, I think a lot (maybe even most) punditry and writing on Trump's appeal has fallen victim to the populist mirage, the idea that the real core of Trumpism is unions, welfare, and 'industrial policy.' This article correctly points out that this is totally wrong, almost 180 degrees opposite of the truth*, and that Trump's actual record as POTUS was by far the best since Reagan (or possibly earlier) on supply-side issues and deregulation (see: https://paultaylor.substack.com/p/federal-regulatory-trends-part-1). Even if Harris were a replacement-level Democrat rather than solidly on the left of her party on regulation/taxes/Affirmative Action, Trump would be by far the superior pro-market choice. Hell, even if Harris were a replacement level Republican (pre-2016 or present), Trump would still be the pro-market candidate in the race.
*The one sort of true part of this is that Trump stopped years of empty Republican talk about the deficit, for the good reason that ending the deficit means cutting entitlements and that's electoral suicide. No point in bleeding support for something that you can't fix anyways. To be an honest budget hawk requires embracing the end of democracy.
The author writes "Trump has expressed a moderate position on abortion, opposing a ban and supporting nation-wide access to mifepristone. Abortion access is thus unlikely to be substantially affected by the outcome of the election"
This is wrong. Trump frequently lies. Hence his statement do not carry and evidential value. Fortunately, we have what he does. As with most people what they do is much more indication of what they think than what they say, And, what he did was create the situation that got rid of Roe, which is a strongly anti-abortion action. There is no reason to believe the author's conclusion.
Calling it “deliberate “ seems uncharitable and also implausible. Deliberate naïveté is performative - do you think pro Trump tech folks are hiding their real reasoning? I think it’s more likely they’re looking at things differently from you and me
Trump said repeatedly that he was going to appoint pro-life judges, which is what every single Republican has said for like fifty years. So I don’t see how he lied.
Liars don't exclusively tell lies. If they did, then they would be truth tellers since all one would have to do is insert a NOT operator in front of what they said to get the truth. Actual liars tell a mixture of lies and truth. In Trump's case the judge promise was the truth, whereas with previous Republicans it was a lie.
Medical innovation - Trump didn't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Seems like warp speed was motivated by covid.
Housing - Trump did't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Not sure we know Harris' policy here yet.
Immigration - I don't really trust Trump to manage some sort of clever compromise here
AI - Yeah, trump being worried could be better, but it's a random roll, against Biden being pretty sober.
This feels more like a desire to be controversial, than really weight the pros and cons. I think it's plausible that Trump is better, for AI reasons, and I don't think it's that unlikely, given the uncertainty, but I think it is unlikely.
Yes, but it was Trump's supreme court nominations that did it, and he may be able to make more supreme court nominations. If he can ditch the social conservatives then he becomes a more reasonable option.
Also, the guy is really old. We have clearly established that 80 year olds should not be running for president.
I’m not an American or particularly interested in EA but given that the damage to liberal democratic institutions will likely have knock on effects in Europe I think I have an interest. “Trump will try to gut liberal democratic institutions” is not merely an imaginative or partisan point but an accurate description of Trump’s fairly unprecedented actions in the wake of his election loss. He did try to gut the key institutions rather than hand over power in a way no previous modern president has. All the N=1 logic means is that Trump should be given a second chance. If you want to give him a second term in office, the burden of proof is on you to show he has changed enough to avoid a future destabilising constitutional crisis. I would also note that the failure was in part the result of actions by Mike Pence and other high level officials who will not be involved in a second Trump term.
While this piece focuses on domestic effects, my greatest concerns are related to foreign policy:
1. Trump is more likely to accept a peace proposal favoring Russia, which could encourage aggressors to violate the sovereignty of other countries.
2. Trump has made various statements regarding NATO. A complete withdrawal from NATO would be disastrous, but pushing European countries to strengthen their defense capabilities could be beneficial in the long run.
3. lthough Trump is the first U.S. president to take a firm stance against China, he is much less predictable than the Democrats when it comes to a potential invasion of Taiwan. See this article: https://substack.com/home/post/p-147040140
Cool. Now lets see the EA case for 10% universal tariffs.
Or for that matter, the EA case for removing an enormous source of economic energy in the form of immigrants – whose contribution to our economy is estimated by the CBO in the hundreds of millions over the next decade.
Simple: the CBO is wrong. Immigrants use a lot more in public services and pay a lot less in taxes than they assume, and the allocative benefits to the native populace are miniscule and dwarfed by the fiscal transfer effect. Reality, rather than the CBO's wrong models (looking at the economic underperformance of extremely skilled-immigrant-heavy Britain, Canada, and Australia, or the much better documented stats on immigrants vs natives from northern Europe) backs me up on this.
Also hundreds of millions is nothing in the scale of the US economy. I assume that's supposed to be billions.
Low iq brown trash doesn’t create economic growth. That’s why their countries are such basket cases and they flee them to come here and live of the government.
Actually the very high IQ Congressional Budget Office disagrees with you. And a racist comment like yours suggests that you may be the one suffering from intellectual deficit.
Have you ever dealt with the CBO?
Do you know the people? Have you ever priced a CBO estimate as a member of private industry? Have you ever spoke to the Senate Finance Committee?
Cause I have. You know what I spent Thursday doing? I spent it on a call being told that the CBO estimate for the IRA impact on my industry was bonkers retarded, which I knew the second the legislation passed, and rather then admit that to the public as an October Surprise they are going to borrow a bunch of money from my kids and shower it on my industry to cover it up. This is far from the first time I've encountered this.
Low IQ people have low incomes. People with low incomes get *redistribution* from the government. This obvious fact doesn't change because they have brown skin.
High IQ people are people. They do what they got to do to make a living. Even if it means giving bogus CBO scores. The richest counties in the country surround DC. What do you think paid for it?
> Low iq brown trash doesn’t create economic growth. That’s why their countries are such basket cases and they flee them to come here and live of the government.
Oops you let your mask slip there for a second. If you're part of the substack alt-right you're supposed to cloak your blatant racism with terms like "hbd" and "dysgenics" for the sake of plausible deniability.
You let your mask slip as a passive aggressive that can’t make an argument.
The United States, Germany, etc saw their high economic growth phases that brought them to global dominance when they had tariffs ranging from 30-50% or so. If I called tariffs a VAT you people would be all over using it to replace the income tax.
So here are two things you don't address in this post:
1. Trump is likely to try to arrest, imprison, and deport 10+ million peaceable people currently living and working in the US. The logistical barriers to carrying this out, and the cultural inclinations of those who are enthusiastic about trying it, are such that the attempt is likely to involve mass atrocities against civilians both citizen and not. These atrocities, beyond constituting a major welfare loss in and of themselves, are likely to shock and scare potential high skilled immigrants to the US in a way that negates the second order effects you are hoping for here. The sort of people we want and indeed desperately need to come to America are not going to want to come to Trump's America.
2. Relatedly, Trump is likely to try to be a personalist dictator and to gut the liberal democratic institutions that restrain him from being one. A Trump election in 2024 would substantially decrease the likelihood of free and fair US elections in 2026 and 2028. Inasmuch as you believe liberal democratic institutions are important contributors to long term growth and innovation, this again is a negative effect likely to swamp the positives of less drug price regulation, more market friendly housing policy etc.
Finally, what you dismiss as class prejudice should not be so easily dismissed. The man is in fact an obvious sociopath to an extent much greater than that of traditional politicians, and has in fact committed a lot of grave crimes, including but not limited to attempting to overturn, by both fraud and mob violence, the results of an election he lost. It is bad for human flourishing to elect people like that to powerful offices, and the difficulty of quantifying that badness does not mean we should weight it at zero.
These arguments lack evidence. They are typical of people who have spent the last eight years yelling about the terrible things that Trump will do… But to those not already convinced, they seem specious.
Trump will deport 10 million people? Funny how he didn’t do that his first term.
Trump will be a dictator… Obviously this depends on how you see J6. Still, with our n=1 experiment here it does not seem likely that he will indeed end democracy in the US. What does “substantially decrease the likelihood of free and fair elections” mean, in actual numbers? And if this rhetoric leads to more assassination attempts, killing Trump or future conservative politicians… Is that not also “decreasing the likelihood of free and fair elections” in the US?
Here goes the “the insurrection failed, so it’s not really a big deal” and even the “saying the bad things Trump did increases assassination attempts” arguments.
Trump’s threat to democracy and his overt willingness to break laws in order to hold on to power is NOT just about Jan 6. It is not n=1. There are multiple shocking and blatant examples of Trump’s attempts to undermine the election prior to the day of Jan 6. This includes use of false slate of electors (people illegally purported to be elected electors) to go to state governments to discount the vote of millions of Americans; the orders to members of his DOJ to send letters to states lying about corruption in the elections to have them overturned (in which DOJ officials en masse threatened to resign if Trump placed Clark as AG to do so); he called Raffensperger (Georgia’s SOS) as a private citizen for him to search for the exact number of votes he needed to win and threatened legal action; on the day of Jan 6, he told his VP to illegally throw out 81 million votes; and countless of many other examples.
Why is Pence not his running mate? How come many of the people he worked with before are not a part of his campaign? Because he made it clear that his 2nd term will have nothing but yes-men, and it is very unlikely they would have the courage like Pence or Jeffrey Rosen. Vance already said that Pence should have listened to Trump and throw out the votes. The "guardrails" that stopped him the first time wouldn't be there.
This is why a second term is uniquely a threat to liberal democracy in the US. This isn't dumb rhetoric
What’s your best guess of the plan Trump made hold on to power in 2021? This seems like a bunch of disjunct and dubious evidence, I’m not persuaded there was a plan that failed at all.
So much of this involved bad faith behavior during the events and certainly people have been engaged in bad faith incredulity after the event, and I don't know who you are, so I don't know whether you are seriously asking this question or if you're just rationalizing because you're a committed partisan. Nevertheless, it bears repeating, because somehow despite multiple lawsuits and reports and Congressional hearings there are still people who just don't get it.
It was a four pronged plan that included cooperation from a number of senior Republican Party leaders across the country.
The first prong was a series of frivolous lawsuits that were filed in bad faith by people who know what "laches" is and how standing works. The purpose of these lawsuits was to manipulate the public by creating an impression of a legitimate controversy over the election among laypersons who understandably don't know a frivolous suit when they see one and may be emotionally invested in the idea that there was still hope for a Republican victory.
The second prong were slates of phony electors who fraudulently claimed to represent various States. Many of these electors took false oaths and violated laws to do this.
The third prong was a violent attack on the capital which was promoted by Trump on Twitter. The attack was planned openly in Internet discussion groups like thedonald dot win as well as various Facebook groups. For some reason the people involved don't understand that their planning in these open forums was widely read by other people who are not on their side. Consequently they run around on the Internet today talking about how it was "a protest rally that got out of the control" as if we all didn't read what these same people were saying the day before the attack.
The fourth prong was the hope that the chaos of the attack and the phony electors and the engineered public perception of a legitimate controversy would enable Senate leaders to fail to pick a President through the Electoral College process. The Constitution provides that if the Electoral College fails, the President is selected by the House of Representatives, through a process in which each State gets one vote. That vote would have gone to Trump and he would have continued to rule the country after having lost an election.
If a Senator had been kidnapped or killed, which was VERY OPENLY the plan, that would have been the end of Democracy.
HamandCheese was once a person whose views I took seriously but no policy wonkery matters if we don't have healthy Democratic institutions.
> If a Senator had been kidnapped or killed, which was VERY OPENLY the plan, that would have been the end of Democracy.
I'm sincerely ignorant of this. Where can I read about this plan?
https://www.justsecurity.org/79446/the-absence-of-the-donald/
"Hang Mike Pence!" does not ring any bells for you?
Granted, Pence was the VP rather than a Senator, but still.
I'm not necessarily saying that they could have abolished democracy, but they could have inflicted grave physical harm on Mike Pence, possibly even up to the point of killing him for the sake of their own Orange Jesus.
When people say repeatedly that they want to do a thing, and their supporters wave signs saying "PLEASE DO THE THING", how "specious" is it to believe that they're probably going to try to do the thing?
Trump didn't do mass deportation his first term because he wasn't sufficiently organized and focused yet to try, and was too consumed with his other unworkable stupid nativist idea, the Big Beautiful Wall (tm). At the RNC this year they literally handed out signs saying "MASS DEPORTATION NOW"; if that isn't evidence that the party as an institution wants to try to do mass deportation, I don't know what is. If you want more details on the evidence for, and the evil of, the plan, see e.g. https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/trumps-deportation-army
As for the decrease in likelihood of free and fair elections, it's not just about the J6 coup attempt, or the fake elector schemes, or even the guy's own avowed intent to be a dictator! You asked for numbers, so here's a pretty heavily traded prediction market giving a 32% chance that if Trump is elected, the US will no longer be a liberal democracy in 2028:
https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti
32% seems extremely, terrifyingly high to me-- and also roughly accurate. He will *probably* fail, but it's grossly irresponsible to let him try, especially now that he has appointed a bunch of judges who we know to be hacks in the tank for him, and made clear his intent to pardon people who commit violent crimes on his behalf.
See also this compilation of evidence and arguments, to which I am indebted:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/he-will-try/
I acknowledge that there are people who consistently refuse to believe that Trump will actually try to do the things he's repeatedly said he wants to do, and that his hardcore supporters sincerely want him to do. Those people are, to put it charitably, engaging in wishful thinking. History sadly records lots of examples of this kind of wishful thinking, including the many sober-minded people in the 1920s who looked at the Nazis and concluded that they couldn't possibly actually mean all that crazy stuff about Jews, and if only the right industrialists could whisper in Hitler's ear in the right way, he would save Germany from Communism. That line of thinking no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Do you support proof of citizenship for voters?
No, because it's a solution in search of a problem. There is no reason to believe that noncitizens vote in significant numbers in US elections today, and every reason to believe that ID requirements would be abused to selectively burden the voting rights of classes of citizens Republicans don't like.
Trump made serious efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, for which he has been indicted. The only sure way for Trump to avoid prosecution and punishment for the crimes he is charged with is to win control of the government and keep it in friendly hands after his term. He has a strong motivation to see that he is succeeded by a someone loyal to him regardless of who is elected. This motivation combined with control of the government and a friendly Supreme Court provides good reasons to believe that Trump will try to ensure this outcome in 2028.
I think there must be one of those personality axes - some people mind and some people don't, when someone lies about what they're doing. So we get years of Dems saying, don't say we opened the border, the border is not open, get those words out of your mouth! Then Biden comes along and quite literally figures out new ways to open the border, beyond previous imagining - and still - don't you dare say open border!
I don't care what Trump said on his or Nancy's dumb fake coup day. I don't care about these cosplaying nutters who have glommed on to Trump. Caring about these people would be like deciding all of a sudden to vote based on what teenaged girls on TikTok think.
I would of course actually love it if he would deport the 10 million people that the Dems lied about the government admitting. How awesome would that be - to get that much traffic off the roads, just the general trash everywhere because we have too many people and no longer the capacity to clean up after ourselves - imagine not having to make a reservation to go swim at the state park on the weekend - imagine there's not a kratom store on every corner - imagine how many fewer captives living a shadow life prostituting themselves at the fake massage place, doing stupid people's nails for no pay, being mysteriously dropped off all in a van at the Chinese restaurant - imagine the immediate strain that would be relieved on our overtaxed infrastructure - imagine how many fewer hideous sad red brick schools would have to be built. Imagine that the ER is not a madhouse. Sweet.
> And if this rhetoric leads to more assassination attempts,
The rhetoric didn't lead to any assassination attempts. There is currently no evidence that TMC, a Republican was motivated it, and the evidence points to the theory that he just wanted to kill any politician (he was looking for Biden events, too). The base rate of political assassination attempts actually being done for policy reasons is low, and "protect liberal democracy" is probably the least likely policy for someone to commit an assassination in favor of.
Trump's rhetoric, on the other hand, has led to a substantial amount of political violence, including J6, which actually was an attempt (at least for some of the people there) to assassinate political leaders, and was the direct result of Trump claiming the election was stolen.
I don’t think deporting people who come illegally and have low skills will dissuade people with high skills from coming in legally. I’d personally much more probably try to get US citizenship if US had closed borders; with less effectively closed borders like now that seems like a sucker’s game, no?
The impression that I get is that high-IQ (which often correlates with high skills) people are repulsed by bigotry, and Yes, that often includes bigotry towards dull and/or low-IQ people, especially immigrants who were born in countries that exhibited poverty, misery, and/or oppression through no fault of these immigrants' own and who came to the US illegally because there was no way at all for them to come over here legally.
I saw a study, but I don't remember where exactly, that showed that being pro-immigration was associated with high intelligence even more than support for legalized abortion was. Maybe you can ask Anatoly Karlin and/or Richard Hanania to try finding this study.
Personally, I would not want to come to the US illegally if I could come legally because if I come here illegally and get deported, then I'm back to square one and then I can't even come to the US legally for the next ten years. Why risk it if you can come over here legally?
FWIW, I do agree that there should be much more skilled immigration into the US. It was hard enough for my own skilled parents to immigrate to the US as it is. They left the Soviet Union in 1991 and had to move to Israel and live there for almost ten years because they only had the opportunity to immigrate to the US in 2001, not back in 1991. They had two children (myself and my younger sibling) in Israel in the meantime.
But I also don't think that being much more welcoming towards skilled immigrants should cause us to become intolerant of unskilled immigrants, even illegal ones, especially if they're culturally compatible. Israel was able to survive just fine after accepting almost a million mostly unskilled Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews from the Arab and Muslim worlds after it (Israel) acquired independence back in 1948, after all. The one thing that I do want to ensure, though, is that the US will not become so dumpy that smart people (global cognitive elites) will stop wanting to move over here, but that seems like an extremely long way away and hopefully will never happen with the right policy-making decisions.
I'm more of a nationalist for Europe because I'm very wary of Muslim radicalism.
What you all are missing is that the act of immigration is in and of itself a screener. Leaving family and all things familiar behind is an act of bravery, determination, and optimism - qualities we surely want in America. And not every immigrant needs to be “high skilled”. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs in less skilled areas, and also many many jobs that mostly require ambition and a good work ethic. Again, these are qualities that are likely to be true of all those who undertake the perilous and arduous task of immigration.
Sometimes immigrants come to the US together with their families, no? My own dad certainly did.
But Yeah, I agree with this.
Honestly, I think that open borders with the Muslim world and Sub-Saharan Africa would be the most problematic given Western Europe’s difficulties in integrating Muslims and the US’s difficulties integrating black American descendants of slaves, but open borders with the rest of the world would not be as bad. But it would need to be managed and handled carefully to avoid a huge public backlash. A very, very gradual implementation of this.
I do want to ensure that the US and West would avoid becoming so dumpy that they stop being attractive for global cognitive elites, though.
I know a bunch of high skilled immigrants (mostly software engineers, some biotech) and a few high skilled folks who would like to be immigrants if they could get through all the bureaucracy.
I guarantee you none of them has ever or will ever ask themselves "why bother getting legal residency when I could just stay here illegally?" because that question is totally divorced from reality. The existing burden of immigration checks on actual citizens alone (e.g. stupid I-9 checks to verify you have work authorization) is sufficient to dispatch that delusion.
More seriously: there is no respect whatsoever in which cracking down on unauthorized immigration would make American life better for these people, and many respects in which it would make them worse off. They would be poorer materially because low skill and high skill immigrants are complementary. They would be poorer subjectively because, like most highly intelligent and productive people everywhere, they are liberal cosmopolitans, so they want to live someplace friendly to liberal cosmopolitans from everywhere, not someplace where racist yahoos will regard them as a dirty furriner and possibly assault them with impunity conferred by the sort of politician the racist yahoos vote for.
My most charitable interpretation of Sam is that he thinks these folks would find it easier to stay here under Trump because he would make a grand bargain where we would remove obstacles to high skilled legal immigration in exchange for a crackdown on unauthorized low skilled immigrants. That is a dangerous delusion, because there is no constituency for that bargain outside a few academics and pundits. Most of the people who want to crack down on unauthorized immigrants also want to reduce legal immigration, because they want fewer dirty furriners across the board.
“Low skill” people are not complimentary to anything. They are just a drain on the society they are in. Your illegal brown maid is heavily subsidized by the state just to exist. That cheap cleaning gets paid for with your taxes and through the cost of living. No place ever got wealthy flooding itself with low human capital.
The poster child for your mindset, California, is deeply dysfunctional and hemoraging people despite the huge advantages it accumulated in the 20th century before mass illegal immigration turned it into a dysfunctional state.
Smart people go where their lives will be best. That’s why they move from California to Florida. That’s why they go to places like Singapore, where LKY called brown immigrants the equiviliant of human trash and the punishment for illegal immigration is caning.
Revealed preference is that people want someone to keep the trash out but they don’t want to have to admit it.
Are Democrats even against increasing high-skilled immigration to the US? It seems like something that would strongly benefit them given that educated people have trended very strongly in a pro-Democratic direction over the last 20 years or so.
Cool now do Russiagate. It's a shame because if the Democrats actually respected the 2016 outcome and didn't use every means short of violence to undermine it, maybe you could actually make this point about how Trump is this big threat to democracy or whatever. But unfortunately they shot first. Even if we accept the narrative that Trump wanted to destroy democracy, his only crime by comparison to his enemies is that he really sucks at it. J6 was and still is a huge millstone around the neck of the right. Russiagate and other similar activities were far more successful in actually harming their intended target (indeed, the fact that we still have to hear this same "threat to democracy" thing ad nauseum is evidence of how successful the regime has been in undermining Trump's legitimacy by making people think he's Hitler).
1) Illegal immigrants have no right to be in the country and their presence is illegitimate. In fact, the existence of a significant illegal population makes a mockery of the idea of democracy and rule-of-law; what does 'rule-by-the-people' even mean if the people can be arbitrarily molded by the government itself? The Biden-Harris' deliberate non-enforcement of immigration laws is thus a much larger threat to democracy than anything Trump has done. And the logistical barriers are much smaller than you think; most of it could be done bureaucratically (employ illegals => get very large fine, illegal-headed households don't get govt benefits). Finally, skilled immigrants are much less beneficial than you imagine (see: the rest of the Anglosphere), and will keep coming as long as salaries are much higher in the US than elsewhere (which they will continue to be). No amount of deporting illegals will change that.
2) We actually have Trump's record from 2016-2020. We don't need to speculate. Scare stories about personalist dictatorship fall flat in light of that (especially because he'll be 82 by the end of his term - even if he wanted to and somehow got enough of the rest of the government to go along with it, which he wouldn't be able to, he wouldn't have the personal energy).
I think the biggest probable influence of Vance on pro-natalism is making it a hot button political issue and making highly educated people therefore less likely to want to have kids. No indication that any tweaks he would be able to make to government programs would matter.
Richard - You wrote an entire book (and a good one at that) on the impact of legal and political institutions on the culture (wokeism) so I’m confused as to why you think the fertility issue alone is this “cultural” phenomenon that can’t be affected by policy or law.
I argue that took a very long time. It’s not impossible pro-natalism can do the same, but Vance isn’t proposing anything particularly new here. Democrats are the ones who are more supportive of payments to families. The only thing Vance has contributed to the discourse is alienating rhetoric.
Would payments to families help or hurt though? Assuming the real barrier to children isn't financial (which I think is true), it seems likely to reduce the status of having kids by associating them more strongly with welfare, thus making upper classes even more reluctant to have kids.
Do you feel like you are on welfare when you list dependents on your tax return?
I just feel like they are taking slightly less of my tax dollars from me.
I've got a pretty good idea of what another kid would cost me a year. If the government ponied that up, I would be more likely to have another kid.
I mostly feel the reduction in childbearing is an attempt to win red queen races amongst the middle and upper middle classes for positional goods.
Agreed. Rather then shaming childfree people, why not try presenting a logical case as to why their views and position are wrong? Honestly, if one cares a lot about one's own well-being, then being childfree actually does make a lot of sense, especially from a financial and effort perspective. It's the benefits to the country and to future generations that having children often consists of.
The only way to have more kids is to do nothing and let the trends continue?
I agree that national pro-natal policy should get more concrete, but at the state level all of the good policy is happening in red states.
The democrats aren’t really in favor of more payments to families. They support marginally higher tax credits usually means tested and flat dollar (dysgenic). The endless debates in congress are always how they demand they be refundable and not have a work requirement. That and more spending on children adjacent dem interest groups (education, etc) that don’t help. The fertility crisis isn’t going to be solved by giving welfare mammas bigger checks, and most of the dem platform is anti-natal.
There is no fertility crisis. Less humans is net + utility.
False. All that is worth something in life comes from smart people making life not brutish, nasty, and short. The fewer of them there are, the worse life will be.
That works to a point we surpassed 150 years ago. Since then it certainly hasn't been a lack of smart humans that has held back moral progress
Dude literally the only first world countries are the high iq ones and the only individuals pushing forward the scientific and technological frontiers are the high iq ones. Africa is what you get with low iq.
Interesting case – though there are several pro-Harris considerations like animal welfare and (perhaps) foreign aid that deserve consideration.
Given most EA interventions are still focused on public health in the developing world, the lack of any mention of similar programs is striking. From an EA perspective George W Bush was probably the greatest president of our lifetime for establishing PEPFAR and tackling the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa. The first Trump administration by contrast regularly called for cuts to PEPFAR in their budget proposals. I doubt a second Trump administration would be much different
To be honest this reads much more like "The EA case for Mitt Romney" or "The EA case for generic republican" than "The EA case for Trump" specifically. That not necessarily unreasonable, but I think it might be worth distinguishing between the two, especially because there are many ways that Trump seems noticeably worse than a generic republican from an EA (or really from any) perspective.
1. Trade: Trump and Vance are terrible on trade, especially if you care about citizens of foreign countries in addition to Americans. Beyond the immediate consequences of increasingly restrictionist trade policy, it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by a restrictionist faction.
2. Foreign Policy: Foreign Policy is obviously very complicated, and I don't feel comfortable talking authoritatively here, but I find it very hard to imagine how one could make the EA case for an American first foreign policy. We should care deeply about our international role, and work hard to cooperate constructively with other countries and promote democratic/liberal values. Again it seems like there is a serious long term risk from letting the Republican party get taken over by an isolationist faction.
3. Immigration: Many republicans do favor increasing high skill immigration, but I do not think Trump is one of them. You cite a link to an article about Trump agreeing with a proposal to give green cards to foreign students who graduate (certain?) American colleges, but the same exact article says that Trump's campaign immediately walked that statement back. Trump has a habit of endorsing many different contradictory policy positions, which makes it easy for potential supporters to convince themselves that he will support their preferred policies, but I think that this impulse is mostly cope.
Furthermore, many of the people he is is likely to place in charge of immigration policy (e.g. Stephen Miller) seem completely opposed to all types of immigration. Maybe Trump would achieve the immigration equivalent of Nixon going to China, but I think it's unlikely, especially if it requires bipartisan legislation (Trump seems uniquely good at scaring democrats away from working with him). Perhaps most importantly, Trump has really awoken and strengthened a nativist portion of the Republican Party that opposes immigration full stop, and I think that anyone who cares about increasing any type of immigration should want to see this faction discredited within the Republican party. I find it extremely hard to imagine that republican legislators who secretly want to pass some sort of bipartisan immigration reform package that includes increases to high-skilled immigration will be able to do so when Trump has control of the Republican party
4. Long term survival/health of important American institutions:
You write that "longtermism ... is best thought of as a civilizational project, as our capacity to coordinate across generations and survive Black Swan events is largely downstream of competent institutions and high-functioning cultures."
I would be inclined to agree, and if you take this seriously, it suggests to me that you should care a lot more about preserving institutions than short/medium term policy (even important policies). Trump has done a huge amount of damage to our institutions with his stop the steal stuff, his attacks on the press and basic truth in general, and also through the partisan response of many liberal institutions to his presidency.
There is probably more to say on climate change as well, but this comment is long enough already.
To recap, I think this article does a good job of making the case certain republican policy positions, but Trump is leading the faction of the Republican Party that wants to move away from almost all of their policies that I actually like. The Republican Party and the country would be much healthier without him, and that requires him losing.
Related to this - Trump introduces a lot of unpredictability into government and world affairs. That’s his personality and skillset. Every longstanding rule, norm and institution is up for grabs. He’s mercurial, willing to turn on a dime, in response to developments in his personal relationships etc. One of his priorities is being the leading news story every day, which incentivizes unpredictability.
From a consequentialist perspective, this introduces potential upside, but also a lot of tail risk, which you don’t find with a more institutionalist president.
I don't dispute absolutely everything in this post, but there are a number of things that strike me as obviously wrong, and the post doesn't even address many of the EA arguments against Trump, except for ones on immigration and AI. I think Trump significantly increases the probability of authoritarian backsliding in the U.S., which, aside from being bad for everyone living in the U.S., would also be devastating for the whole world: Western liberal democracies lose their strongest ally and may backslide themselves, an authoritarian U.S. would likely reduce innovation and economic growth, hurting everyone worldwide, etc. He also increases the risk from climate change (I know you wanted to address this, but you didn't, and I don't see any plausible argument that he wouldn't). And, while he might decrease the already tiny probability that the Russia-Ukraine war escalates into WWIII (although even this is not clear - he might make it easier for Russia to get more ambitious with how much they think they can take from Ukraine), he more than makes up for it by increasing the probability that China invades Taiwan or Russia invades more countries, including NATO countries, which creates a much bigger risk of WWIII. Plus, he's already increased the probability of nuclear war in the middle east.
Aside from existential risks, his economic protectionism is directly counter to EA goals, as is his anti-immigration stance. I don't find the counterarguments you made on immigration very convincing: The stuff about culture even you admitted was not convincing, and the idea that restricting immigration now will lead to liberalizations later requires some serious intellectual gymnastics. More likely, changing the status quo to be more restrictionist will just lead people to remain restrictionist in the future because people generally follow the status quo.
A few more specific points:
- Roe v. Wade isn't a sunk cost. A Harris administration could pass a law codifying it, and even if she doesn't, she can at least prevent the courts from being even more stacked with right-wing judges who make similar decisions. It's not as if Dobbs is the only recent SCOTUS decision that EAs are against - they've made tons of terrible decisions, and will continue to do so for decades. The Supreme Court is one of the most important issues from a longtermist perspective since they serve for life.
- The reasons that people find Trump repugnant aren't just superficial. They're about his character, which affects what he does in office, and sometimes just direct disgust over his policies. Re-electing the arguably most corrupt president of all time is not a good EA bet, unless you have a myopic focus that ignores the negative downstream consequences of doing that.
- Operation Warp Speed was one of Trump's best policies, but now his base hates him for that. As you said, we shouldn't vote based on sunk costs. We also shouldn't vote based on good policies whose benefits have already played out and which we have good reason to believe won't be replicated in a second term. If anything, Trump might pass policies that make it less likely for future people to be vaccinated against diseases.
- OWS may have been good, but the Trump admin was unprepared for a pandemic in 2020. I agree that we shouldn't overweight this due to the sunk cost fallacy, but we also shouldn't ignore the possibility that he will be unprepared for a future crisis. This should increase our credence that he will prepare badly for existential risks, too.
What exactly is the EA case for abortion being legal?
It makes fertility patterns more eugenic than they would have otherwise been?
Absolutely no evidence of this.
Support for abortion is strongly associated with dysgenic fertility at the individual level and legalized abortion is correlated with dysgenic fertility.
Trash gets pregnant and has kids regardless of the legality of abortion. “It just happens”. But the ideology of abortion (anti child) has a strong negative impact on the fertility of smart people.
Without legalized abortion, would smart people breed more? Or would they simply travel to wherever abortion still remains legal?
Smart people don’t get abortions, it’s a total non-issue for them. They use birth control and don’t get pregnant in the first place.
Being pro-abortion is just “I don’t like kids” vibe and being pro-life is just “I like kids vibe”. Smart conservatives have a TFR of around 2 and smart liberals have a TFR of around 1. If we restricted it to top 20% iq very liberal the TFR drops to 0.6.
It’s about the vibes. Pro abortion sends the message that kids are bad and it’s ok to murder them if they are inconvenient. Smart people respond to that message by using birth control to limit their fertility.
hard to distinguish cause and effect with "vibes"
Birth control sometimes fails, you know?
Are most pro-natalists pro-life? Or is there a sizable minority of pro-choice pro-natalists as well?
how many abortions are smart people getting anyway? smart people use contraception
Which occasionally fails.
You suggest that Trump-Vance's offensiveness/repugnance is like Kamala's laugh and has little to no direct bearing on society-wide outcomes. I'm surprised since you're a guy who sees the importance of social norms. Why leave this out of your analysis?
Rooting for Trump-Vance's pro-technology/market positions and ignoring how they're fraying the social fabric is peak (wait for it) "neoliberalism."
So to your second point, keeping Trump to a one-term failed president is still an important goal. It sends a strong and important signal that we don't let bullies take power. And that's a good thing for society.
Strange series of posts lately. The likes of Foucault, Rorty, Taylor, and Zizek show that you can critique the Left without selling out to neoliberalism...
I’m confused? Do you not feel bullied by the left?
I felt really bullied when they locked down my whole society, rioted in the streets, spent so many trillions threat is caused double digit inflation, and held Maoist struggle sessions at my workplace.
The very last thing I want to validate is someone like Kamala Harris and everything she represents.
Spent trillions? Double digit inflation? Seems you have Republican prevarication disorder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Rescue_Plan_Act_of_2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act
All of these were passed on party line votes and costs trillions of dollars.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/544188-larry-summers-blasts-least-responsible-economic-policy-in-40-years/
Larry Summers and a host of economists advised Biden against this course of action which he rammed down the countries throat with no bi-partisan support. It predictably caused a huge surge in inflation.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/CPI-Blog_figure1.png
I am very skeptical that there were struggle sessions or even diversity trainings at your workplace, although I’m sure you saw them on Fox News
I bet it wouldn’t be remembered as “bullies” failing, but broader, as “only Washington functionaries need apply”. It’s not like Trump is running against a courteous well mannered political outsider.
How would Trump fray the social fabric any more than Harris would?
He'd alienate elite human capital, which Harris would not do.
Elite Human Capital has done a terrible job and needs some alienating.
EHC hasn’t been doing all that well imo but odd to say you’d like to alienate them. What good does it do to a movement or ideology to deliberately alienate smart successful people?
I think EHC needs to have less power over people’s lives because their ideas are bad and make life worse.
Let’s take Covid, the most recent big EHC failure.
“Suck up to EHC people” would have told you that we needed to give into EHC hysteria because only by giving in could we assuage their worries and bring them around. Tyler Cowen wrote about this line all the time when it came to Covid or wokeness or basically anything.
But it never worked. The more you gave into their hysteria, the more hysterical they got. The best way to be free of their covid hysteria politically was to elect republicans and the best way to be free of it personally was to stand up to them.
It’s kind of like how the school choice movement kept trying to be bi-partisan EHC movement for decades, then one day realized EHC was never going to put a ring on it and just decided to get anti-woke republicans to pass vouchers.
We know what EHC is. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to wake up one day and go “you know, this thing I’ve opposed all my life is actually correct and I’m going to pay a high price to change it.”
Obviously, standing up to them and taking power away from that is going to be alienating! Just like your not wearing a mask was alienating. If you want to get things done and make the world a better place, you’re going to have to alienate people who don’t want to see you succeed.
The problem is EHC is that their smarts haven’t given them the right answers, just the power to impose them on others.
How so?
I strongly disagree with this article's view on immigration for simple political reasons (Hispanic, Asian, and African immigrants, high-skilled or otherwise, are consistently anti-capitalist relative to white Americans, and as such the pro-capitalist, pro-immigration position held by many libertarian and rationalist-adjacent people is self-defeating, and I think Canadian, Australian, and British economic underperformance should put a dent in pro-skilled-immigration libertarian orthodoxy), but I appreciate it being written and basically agree with the central point.
In particular, I think a lot (maybe even most) punditry and writing on Trump's appeal has fallen victim to the populist mirage, the idea that the real core of Trumpism is unions, welfare, and 'industrial policy.' This article correctly points out that this is totally wrong, almost 180 degrees opposite of the truth*, and that Trump's actual record as POTUS was by far the best since Reagan (or possibly earlier) on supply-side issues and deregulation (see: https://paultaylor.substack.com/p/federal-regulatory-trends-part-1). Even if Harris were a replacement-level Democrat rather than solidly on the left of her party on regulation/taxes/Affirmative Action, Trump would be by far the superior pro-market choice. Hell, even if Harris were a replacement level Republican (pre-2016 or present), Trump would still be the pro-market candidate in the race.
*The one sort of true part of this is that Trump stopped years of empty Republican talk about the deficit, for the good reason that ending the deficit means cutting entitlements and that's electoral suicide. No point in bleeding support for something that you can't fix anyways. To be an honest budget hawk requires embracing the end of democracy.
Also I didn't know you considered yourself a rationalist!
The author writes "Trump has expressed a moderate position on abortion, opposing a ban and supporting nation-wide access to mifepristone. Abortion access is thus unlikely to be substantially affected by the outcome of the election"
This is wrong. Trump frequently lies. Hence his statement do not carry and evidential value. Fortunately, we have what he does. As with most people what they do is much more indication of what they think than what they say, And, what he did was create the situation that got rid of Roe, which is a strongly anti-abortion action. There is no reason to believe the author's conclusion.
//This is wrong. Trump frequently lies. //
It was incredibly shocking to see the author just...take Trump's statements at face value.
I'm not surprised. An entire small army of Silicon Valley's "brightest minds" have taken Trump's word for everything.
At this point, it's more of a deliberate naïveté than simple deception.
Calling it “deliberate “ seems uncharitable and also implausible. Deliberate naïveté is performative - do you think pro Trump tech folks are hiding their real reasoning? I think it’s more likely they’re looking at things differently from you and me
Trump said repeatedly that he was going to appoint pro-life judges, which is what every single Republican has said for like fifty years. So I don’t see how he lied.
Liars don't exclusively tell lies. If they did, then they would be truth tellers since all one would have to do is insert a NOT operator in front of what they said to get the truth. Actual liars tell a mixture of lies and truth. In Trump's case the judge promise was the truth, whereas with previous Republicans it was a lie.
Medical innovation - Trump didn't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Seems like warp speed was motivated by covid.
Housing - Trump did't really do a lot here last time he was in office. Not sure we know Harris' policy here yet.
Immigration - I don't really trust Trump to manage some sort of clever compromise here
AI - Yeah, trump being worried could be better, but it's a random roll, against Biden being pretty sober.
This feels more like a desire to be controversial, than really weight the pros and cons. I think it's plausible that Trump is better, for AI reasons, and I don't think it's that unlikely, given the uncertainty, but I think it is unlikely.
Great summary
> Roe v. Wade cannot be overturned twice
Yes, but it was Trump's supreme court nominations that did it, and he may be able to make more supreme court nominations. If he can ditch the social conservatives then he becomes a more reasonable option.
Also, the guy is really old. We have clearly established that 80 year olds should not be running for president.
I’m not an American or particularly interested in EA but given that the damage to liberal democratic institutions will likely have knock on effects in Europe I think I have an interest. “Trump will try to gut liberal democratic institutions” is not merely an imaginative or partisan point but an accurate description of Trump’s fairly unprecedented actions in the wake of his election loss. He did try to gut the key institutions rather than hand over power in a way no previous modern president has. All the N=1 logic means is that Trump should be given a second chance. If you want to give him a second term in office, the burden of proof is on you to show he has changed enough to avoid a future destabilising constitutional crisis. I would also note that the failure was in part the result of actions by Mike Pence and other high level officials who will not be involved in a second Trump term.
While this piece focuses on domestic effects, my greatest concerns are related to foreign policy:
1. Trump is more likely to accept a peace proposal favoring Russia, which could encourage aggressors to violate the sovereignty of other countries.
2. Trump has made various statements regarding NATO. A complete withdrawal from NATO would be disastrous, but pushing European countries to strengthen their defense capabilities could be beneficial in the long run.
3. lthough Trump is the first U.S. president to take a firm stance against China, he is much less predictable than the Democrats when it comes to a potential invasion of Taiwan. See this article: https://substack.com/home/post/p-147040140