Links 40.2024
On a Personal Note
Last week, someone asked me why I make my life harder by putting in all the effort, even devoting my Sundays to producing content—which I don’t even monetize (their words, not mine). It’s not like I have too much spare time, right?
And sure, they’re correct. I don’t have much free time. But on the other hand, there are very few things I enjoy as much as writing my weekly newsletters, selecting topics, putting priorities, reflecting on my own takes, and responding to the messages I receive afterward (which, honestly, is an underrated way of staying in touch with people). Of course, some weeks it’s harder to find motivation, but I always draw inspiration from this quote (I think, it’s Joshua Citarella but it certainly has an Ernest Becker vibe):
“The lesson here is that we often don't know what the important work is while we’re making it…you may look back a decade from now and realize that the real work was actually what you were putting online.”
Alright, after that somewhat self-indulgent thought, here’s some more shameless self-promotion. We’re already in the mood, right? This week, I didn’t just release one podcast… but two! o.O
In our German podcast Weltanschauung, Philipp and I discuss the recent news that Turkey has applied for BRICS membership. As both of us have lived in Turkey, we had some insights on how to contextualize the debate. And no, the answer ain’t that BRICS is the new super alliance with a gravitational pull so strong that even NATO countries can’t resist lol
Additionally, we’ve finally launched our English-language podcast with the International Academy for Leadership: IAF Continued Conversation. Bettina and I will be hosting some excellent guests in the coming months, and we’re kicking things off with the one-and-only Tom Palmer. He joins us to discuss 'The State of Liberalism in 2024'—some hopeful stuff, some less hopeful stuff. But the podcast surely is the good stuff. Hence, like and subscribe. 5-stars all ze way. Küsse gehen raus!
BTW, my Sunday Being (Sonntagsdasein*) in just one picture:
* okay, I made that one up lol
Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated
This is exactly the kind of project that classical liberals all over the world need to champion: taking ownership of progress studies. Unfortunately, too often liberals find themselves either lamenting about populism or getting overly entangled in some stupid culture war issue. In other words, we are stuck in our very own sclerosis. The excellent Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman (the latter two I had the pleasure of hosting in Gummersbach in recent years) show us how it can be done differently. Send this to your favorite liberal think tank now! Because we need more of this, especially a German version </3
If you read one thing this week, make it this. Lots of interesting insights and charts to simply scroll through…and be astonished by the decline of a nation. Great stuff!
Here are some facts to set the scene about the state of the British economy.
Between 2004 and 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the industrial price of energy tripled in nominal terms, or doubled relative to consumer prices.
With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
Per capita electricity generation in the UK is just two thirds of what it is in France (4,800 kilowatt-hours per year in Britain versus 7,300 kilowatt-hours per year in France) and barely over a third of what it is in the United States (12,672 kilowatt-hours per year). We are closer to developing countries like Brazil and South Africa in terms of per capita electricity output than we are to Germany, China, Japan, Sweden, or Canada.
Britain’s last nuclear power plant was built between 1987 and 1995. Its next one, Hinkley Point C, is between four and six times more costly per megawatt of capacity than South Korean nuclear power plants, and four times as expensive as those that South Korea’s KEPCO has agreed to build in Czechia.
Tram projects in Britain are two and a half times more expensive than French projects on a per mile basis. In the last 25 years, France has built 21 tramways in different cities, including cities with populations of just 150,000, equivalent to Lincoln or Carlisle. The UK has still not managed to build a tramway in Leeds, the largest city in Europe without mass transit, with a population of nearly 800,000.
At £396 million, each mile of HS2 will cost more than four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line. It will be more than eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992. Since then, Britain’s population has grown by 10 million.
Despite huge and rising demand, Heathrow annual flight numbers have been almost completely flat since 2000. Annual passenger numbers have risen by 10 million because planes have become larger, but this still compares poorly to the 22 million added at Amsterdam’s Schiphol and the 15 million added at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle. The right to take off and land at Heathrow once per week is worth tens of millions of pounds.
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
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The fundamental thesis of this essay is that Britain can have rapid economic growth in the near future, swiftly catching up with the world’s most prosperous countries. It can do this because the sources of its current sclerosis are easy to identify and straightforward, in principle, to fix. The problem is not too little investment by the state. It is that the state has prohibited most of the investments we need to make. The solution is to remove these obstacles to investment, mobility and trade, in a politically viable and durable way. […] To do so, it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do: build homes, bridges, tunnels, roads, trams, railways, nuclear power plants, grid connections, prisons, aqueducts, reservoirs, and more.
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The short-term effect, then, would be a surge of economic activity as these investments were made. But the real benefits come when those investments begin to pay off.
The medium-term effect would be to dramatically increase productivity growth in the UK, driven by agglomeration. It would mean more people accessing high quality jobs, allowing productive companies to hire more people and scale up, and to operate cheaply thanks to cheaper commercial premises and lab space, and cheaper energy. Services companies would expand rapidly, and new companies would be set up. The cheaper energy would rejuvenate many of the traditional industries of the North of England, including manufacturing.
In the long run, cheaper housing in particular would have a range of knock-on effects. Cheaper housing means more affordable childcare and bedrooms, and less of a trade-off between having children and staying in the city to be close to friends and job. All of these will help families to afford more children, if they want them, making it easier to bear the costs of an ageing population.
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Fundamentally, making building possible would unlock the promise of the British economy. All the ideas, entrepreneurs, researchers, and skilled workers we have are being held back from being as productive as they could be, and the aggregate cost is that the country is much poorer than it should be. If we address this, Britain could be once again among the richest of nations.
In its turn, affluence would – if wisely used – begin to solve many of Britain’s other problems. Public services could be given more generously funded, facilitating reforms to make them more efficient. Aided by planning reform, we could build new and better resourced hospitals, yielding shorter waiting lists and better patient outcomes. We could adopt the generous family policies of places like France and South Tyrol to allow younger couples to have children sooner if they wish to, widening the choices available to the British people while helping to secure their long-term future. Elderly Britons could receive the finest care in the world, delivered through immigration only if we wish, and not as a substitute for adequate funding. Britain could have a new generation of schools, like the great board schools that rose over the cities of the nineteenth century. We could expand our prison, police and prosecution services, becoming again a virtually crime-free society such as our grandparents knew, and such as Japan remains today. We could have the finest armed forces in Europe, playing again a decisive role in defending the law-governed world order that Britain did so much to bring into being.
In Politics, Don’t Aim to “Win,” but Rather “Win Over”
This is a wonderful little essay by the always-excellent Aaron Ross Powell—one I wish had been published earlier. Because it offers such useful terminology, especially when discussing toleration or Habermas’s idea of the ‘unforced force of the better argument' in an open society. The goal of deliberation in a liberal society is epistemic and moral progress, not “owning the other side.” It’s about ‘winning over,’ not simply ‘winning’—despite what spin doctors would have you believe.
We like to win arguments and don’t particularly care for losing them. But the point of arguments isn’t the mere fact of “winning” or “losing.” They’re not games where winning is the whole point. Rather, the reason to have an argument, or to otherwise seek to persuade, is to change your interlocutor’s mind about something, and the reason to change their mind about something is because there’s value—at least as you see it—in that revised belief compared to the prior one.
This is certainly the case in politics. Political beliefs matter because they’re what people act on when they engage in the political process, through voting, advocacy, policy-making, or however else. If we think our own political views are correct—in that they’ll lead to a better world if acted upon more widely—then our goal ought to be something more than “defeating” the other side’s case. It should be convincing others to shift their thinking to look more like ours. Unfortunately, our political environment, and especially the rhetoric of political debate online, focuses far too much on the former, and far too little on the latter.
Some time ago, I half-drafted an essay about how I’d lost much of my interest in arguing. Or, at least, lost my interest in arguing for argument’s sake. But I gave up when I couldn’t find a clear way to express the distinction I was aiming at. […] Fortunately, I spent the tail end of September in New Delhi, speaking at a seminar for young Indian liberals, and there I met someone who put into words, with great clarity, the precise distinction I’d been trying, and failing, to articulate. Barun Mitra, a thoughtful and insightful scholar interested in the political theory of Mahatma Gandhi, told me that our goal should be to “win” but instead to “win over.”
And that’s precisely it. The difference between “winning” and “winning over” is that “winning” emphasizes defeating those interlocutors by destroying their arguments. (And by destroying them, in, for example, an “own the libs” sense.) “Winning” is about combat and victory. The goal is to leave your opponent vanquished. Perhaps they then come to your side, but against their will, the victim of successful conquest. […] But politics isn’t a game. Or, at least, that’s now how we should approach it if our goal is to actually improve the state of the world. The point, again, isn’t winning arguments. It’s changing minds. That’s why we should instead seek to “win over” those who disagree with us. “Winning over” persuades people to want to take your side. This isn’t grudging change, but willing.
Succeeding at winning people over takes more than good arguments, however. Your political ideas don’t exist independently in the world. Rather, someone always gives them a voice. Namely, you. That means people hearing your ideas aren’t hearing them as free floating concepts, but instead as expressions by you, and so judged, in part, by how they judge you. If you’re a jerk, you might “win” an argument, but you’re unlikely to win anyone over. (Except, perhaps, other jerks.)
Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings Inequality
Well, the Britney Army always knew that the cure to all social ills is: Work, b*tch!
On a more serious note, this is a great paper showing the importance of work and employment—not necessarily because of the lifetime earnings but because of its impact on skills development and hence, human capital formation.
By the way, what happened to the Protestant work ethic in Europe? This is from a Tyler Cowen column:
“In France, for instance, work is limited to 48 hours per week, with a standard week of 35 hours. That reduces average earnings and inequality in earnings, since it is harder for the top achievers to keep making more money. This research finds that the losers from this regulation are found at all parts of the wage distribution, not only at the top.”
In his own words: Work is underrated.
Abstract
We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital accumulation that allows for heterogeneity in preferences for work, initial human capital and learning ability, as well as idiosyncratic shocks to human capital throughout the life-cycle. Our calibrated model implies that almost 20 percent of the variance in lifetime earnings is accounted for by differences in lifetime hours of work, with 90 percent of this effect due to heterogeneity in preferences. Higher lifetime hours contribute to lifetime earnings via two channels: a direct channel (more hours spent in production at given productivity) and a human capital channel (more hours spent investing in human capital, which increases future productivity). Between a third and a half of the effect of lifetime hours on lifetime earnings is due to the human capital channel. Our model implies that policies that limit long hours have important effects on both the mean and variance of lifetime earnings.
Losing Faith In Contrarianism
Let’s be honest: This essay was written for (and because of) people like me—the notorious, often self-proclaimed contrarians. They’re so annoyingly self-righteous that even their friends (Heyyy there, Hussam!) secretly hope for their downfall. But more importantly, they’re often wrong—and that’s what led to my own disillusionment with the contrarian corner of the internet over time. This article perfectly captures that sentiment. And Those of you who read similar stuff online will be able to relate!
But in the end, I must admit, this blog post still frustrates me because it’s too vanilla. (Yes, guilty as charged, put me in contrarian jail.) But honestly, what’s the main takeaway? That the boring, high-IQ academic types are mostly right, and the bold, outlandish contrarians are misguided? Well, wait a minute. That’s not quite it either. In a proper dialectical way, both need each other. Unlike the mainstream intellectuals, though, contrarians need social permission to push boundaries. That’s why we should always lean toward an ethos of contrarianism. It’s annoying and probably wrong more often than we’d like, but it’s the only path forward.
If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ll find a great deal of people expressing contrarian views. If you hang out in the circles that I do, you’ll probably have heard of Yudkowsky say that dieting doesn’t really work, Guzey say that sleep is overrated, Hanson argue that medicine doesn’t improve health, […], Caplan argue that mental illness is mostly just aberrant preferences and education doesn’t work, and various other people expressing contrarian views. Often, very smart people—like Robin Hanson—will write long posts defending these views, other people will have criticisms, and it will all be such a tangled mess that you don’t really know what to think about them.
For a while, I took a lot of these contrarian views pretty seriously. […] Over time, though, I’ve become much less sympathetic to these contrarian views. It’s become increasingly obvious that the things that make them catch on are unrelated to their truth. People like being provocative and tearing down sacred cows—as a result, when a smart articulate person comes along defending some contrarian view—perhaps one claiming that something we think is valuable is really worthless—the view spreads like wildfire, even if it’s pretty implausible.
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There are various topics where arguing for one side of them is inherently interesting, yet arguing for the other side is boring. There are a lot of people who read Austian economics blogs, yet no one reads (or writes) anti-Austrian economics blogs. That’s because there are a lot of fans of Austrians economics—people who are willing to read blogs on the subject—but almost no one who is really invested in Austrian economics being wrong. So as a result, in general, the structural incentives of the blogosphere favor being a contrarian.
Thus, you should expect the sense of the debate you get, unless you peruse the academic literature in depth surrounding some topic, to be wildly skewed towards contrarian views. And I think this is exactly what we observe.
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It’s easy for contrarians to portray their opponents as the kind of milquetoast bureaucrats who aren’t very smart and follow the consensus just because it is the consensus. If Bryan Caplan has a disagreement with a random administrator, I trust that Bryan Caplan’s probably right, because he’s smarter and cares more about ideas.
But what I’ve come to realize is that the mainstream view that’s supported by most of the academics tends to be supported by some really smart people. Caplan’s view isn’t just opposed by the bureaucrats and teachers—it’s opposed by the type of obsessive autist who does a lit review on the effect of education. And while I’ll bet in favor of Caplan against Campus administrators, I would never make a mistake like betting against the obsessive high-IQ autists.
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The contrarian’s enemy is not only random conformists. It’s also ridiculously smart people who have studied the topic in incredible depth and concluded that they’re wrong. And as we all know from certain creative offshoots of rock, paper, scissors, high-IQ mega autists beats public intellectual. […] I’ve seen the contrarians be wrong over and over again—and this is what really made me lose faith in them. Whenever I looked more into a topic, whenever I got to the bottom of the full debate, it always seemed like the contrarian case fell apart.
How Hot Girls Became the Right's New Obsession
I keep a tracker on the Sydney Sweeney sentiment to track the mid-decade vibe change (see my comments here and here). It goes without saying that I only follow Sydney Sweeney content for purely professional reasons… obviously! And as I take this responsibility very seriously, this sometimes leads me to investigate very weird stuff, including this piece linking Sydney Sweeney and the Hawk Tuah girl to… well, fascism. Enjoy!
(Some might argue this is one of the dumbest pieces of journalism ever, where the academics involved essentially discredit the entire university system; others might simply say that my heteronormative white male perspective is doing whatever it’s doing…and is the problem itself.)
It all began with Sydney Sweeney's cleavage.
In March, the 27-year-old actress hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, wearing low-cut outfits during the start and close of the show, which featured a number of jokes about her physical appearance, including a sketch where she played a Hooters waitress.
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The actress had become a so-called conservative hot girl—a pin-up for the modern day right-wing movement as it attempts to expand the appeal of conservatism beyond the confines of its largely older, white, male base.
Sweeney and other conservative hot girls don't necessarily have any tangible involvement with politics (though some have strong political affiliations), but they have been claimed by right-wing public figures as their own, whether they appear to like it or not.
Who Is the Conservative Hot Girl?
The conservative hot girl "isn't a particularly new phenomenon," Victoria Cann, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., told Newsweek. "Women have been positioned through the lens of the masculinist imagery in conservative, populist politics for a very long time."
Sweeney appears to have kicked off the latest wave of conservative hot girls, at a time when conventional beauty standards have been adopted as a purported antidote to "wokeness." That word was initially associated with progressive movements but has since been co-opted by conservative critics to mock what they perceive as excessive political correctness, virtue signaling, or a tendency to overemphasize identity politics.
Amy Tatum of Bournemouth University told Newsweek that "this focus on 'hot girls' is a way for the right in the U.S. to fight back against perceptions of 'wokeness,' holding up women in a sexualized fashion could be a tactic to reinforce gender stereotypes around women's appearances."
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"Men don't ONLY like Sydney Sweeney for her boobs, they like her bc she's the first starlet in a long time to unrepentantly and cheerfully chase the male gaze," Stepman wrote on X after Sweeney's SNL debut. "She is clearly giving permission to ogle and enjoying that feminine power. An oasis for men in a nut vice culture lol."
In early August, Sweeney posted a series of photos to Instagram, with the caption "I think they call this a thirst trap."
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Sweeney isn't the only young woman getting the conservative hot girl treatment. Haliey Welch, better known as the 'Hawk Tuah' girl, shot to fame in June after she appeared in a TikTok interview in which she offered sex advice.
When asked by the interviewer: "What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?" Welch replied: "You gotta give 'em that 'hawk tuah' and spit on that thing."
"Hawk tuah" is the sound someone makes while spitting.
The 22-year-old from Tennessee has no obvious link to any political party, but this hasn't seemed to matter. The top comment on a Instagram post of Welch's, where she is posing in a red-white-and-star-spangled cowboy hat for the Fourth of July, reads: "We did it internet, we finally made the RIGHT person famous."
Her "Hawk Tuah" catchphrase has been adopted by conservatives and put on merch that is a similar style to former President Donald Trump's, and is often emblazoned over an American flag. Merch of this style, with the catchphrase "Hawk Tuah '24," printed in red and white on a blue or black backdrop, is also sold by Welch's official merchandise store.
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Victoria Cann of the University of East Anglia said, "Sydney Sweeney and Haliey Welch have actively distanced themselves from those right-wing politics, but [have] nevertheless become entangled within them because of what they represent, not what they actually think."
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Conservative hot girls have one thing in common, besides implied or explicit political values, according to Erin Cassese of the University of Delaware.
"[These] aren't just 'hot women,' they're white women," she told Newsweek. "It's a narrow and conventional definition of sex appeal, or 'hotness.' It runs counter to cultural change reflecting an expansion of beauty standards to be more inclusive in terms of body size, race, and ethnicity, for example."
What's Behind the Hot Girl Obsession?
The focus on the conservative hot girl comes at a time when the political gender divide in America is wider than ever. A poll previously conducted for Newsweek found that more men (26 percent) have become more conservative than women (19 percent). Slightly more women (18 percent) have become more liberal than men (17 percent).
The Pew Research Center released an analysis in April which showed that Republicans tend to skew older than Democrats: two-thirds of voters ages 18 to 24 (66 percent) associated with the Democratic Party, with the largest Republican voter demographic being over 80 (58 percent).
Goldsmiths' Catherine Rottenberg said, "Like advertisements that sell objects by objectifying women and their bodies, this seems to be a similar strategy. Attractive women are good for business."
"By having 'hot' young women as their icons, multiple messages are sent: that if you align yourself with the movement, you will be able to 'hang' in the company of these gorgeous young things; that the movement attracts attractive people – and not just old white men," she said.
The Republican Party is predominantly male. The Center for American Women in Politics reported that in 2024, around 16 percent of Republican nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives are women. This is lower than the Democratic Party, where nearly 46 percent of the nominees are women.
Cassese said that the conservative hot girl is, "A way of appealing to other men on the basis of the male gaze. Attractiveness and power have always gone hand-in-hand. The presence of 'hot girls' makes conservatism look appealing." She added that this is, "coinciding with reporting that conservative men are struggling on dating apps."
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What Does This Say About American Conservatism?
Does the conservative hot girl's rise symbolize a more liberal thinking about sexuality, or is it the installation of women as objects for political gain? "Definitely the latter," Rottenberg said. "There is no liberal thinking about sexuality here."
"Patriarchy and populism go hand in hand," Hannah Yelin of Oxford Brookes University in England told Newsweek. "Policing women, their appearance and their bodies is an integral mechanism of the American right."
Cann said that the women involved in this movement who "actually readily align themselves with right-wing populism oftentimes represent a profound interest in traditional gender norms and an explicit rejection of feminist politics."
Cassese pointed to the fact that the reification of the hot girl is "coinciding with the erosion of women's reproductive rights" and that this, "points to a regressive tendency to prioritize men's sexual gratification over women's agency."
The University of Delaware academic added, "The 'hot girl' is the opposite of the 'childless cat lady' being invoked by leaders like JD Vance. These two competing images of womanhood arising in conservative rhetoric are two sides of the same coin, and they say a lot about what conservatives value about women."
Peace,
SG