245. The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Economic Inequality | Glenn Loury

[0] Welcome to episode 245 of the JPP podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson.

[2] In this episode, Dad and Dr. Glenn Lori talked broadly about IQ, race, and the economics of inequality.

[3] Dr. Lori is an academic and economist who in 1982 famously became the first black tenured professor at Harvard School of Economics.

[4] Dr. Lori is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American and values.

[5] Also covered in this episode are topics like the Pareto Principle, Market Failures, Charles Murray's infamous book The Bell Curve, Christianity, Dad's Genius Mathematician Client, AA meetings, and climate change.

[6] As always, you can get rid of ads and you can get rid of me telling you how to get rid of ads by going premium at jordanb peterson .supercast .com.

[7] That comes with a bunch of perks like exclusive show notes and monthly Q &As.

[8] Check out the whole list of benefits at Jordan v. Peterson .supercast .com.

[9] Without further ado, Dr. Glenn Lorry.

[10] Hello, everybody.

[11] I'm pleased today to have as my guest, Professor Glenn C. Lowry, Merton P. Stoltz, Professor of Economics at Brown University.

[12] He holds a BA in mathematics from Northwestern and a PhD.

[13] in economics from MIT.

[14] He's published widely as an economic theorist and researcher has lectured throughout the world and is one of America's leading analysts of racial inequality.

[15] He's been elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and of the U .S. Council on Foreign Relations, and is a fellow both of the economic, sorry, econometric society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[16] His YouTube channel, The Glenn Show, often co -hosted with Professor John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia, and a recent guest on my YouTube channel, has attracted an increasingly wide audience.

[17] I'm hoping to talk with Professor Lowry about income distribution, the Preeto Principle, his shifting political and religious beliefs, racial inequality, etc., as well as his public presence on YouTube and via podcast.

[18] Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me today.

[19] I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.

[20] Good to be with you, Jordan.

[21] I'm excited.

[22] Great, great.

[23] So maybe we can start by, I'd like to get to know you a little bit.

[24] So how did you, how did it come about that you developed an academic career?

[25] Well, I was a working class kid in Chicago and got to a junior college.

[26] I married quite young.

[27] I dropped out of college.

[28] I found my way back to school at a junior community college in Chicago and had a math teacher, calculus teacher.

[29] who saw that I was really, really good at differentiating and integrating, you know, that I was good at these little mathematical puzzles.

[30] He said, you're a smart kid, you know, and it was 1970.

[31] It was right, you know, at the height of the Vietnam protest and the black power and all of that.

[32] Northwestern University wanted to recruit black kids from Chicago to come and study there.

[33] And I got recommended it to their attention.

[34] And I ended up with a full scholarship at Northwestern where I discovered a serious quantitative study in mathematics and in economics.

[35] I took graduate courses while an undergraduate at Northwestern in both math and econ and found myself at MIT as a graduate student in the early 1970s, took a PhD there.

[36] Did you know that you had a mathematical bent before you were discovered, so to speak, at the community college?

[37] I did.

[38] I was always good at math.

[39] I was doing slide rule and logarithms and stuff when I was in the sixth grade.

[40] I was teaching my fellow eighth graders from an algebra problem set book after class because it was just a hobby that I loved.

[41] I was always good at math.

[42] But I had not had the opportunity to get a really serious education until I got to Northwestern, and that's when things took off for me. In MIT, you know, it was probably the best economics department in the world in the early 1970s with students from all over who were quite outstanding scholars.

[43] And I really found my niche, found my niche there.

[44] What I loved about it was formal modeling applied to social.

[45] social questions.

[46] I liked math, but it was arid and abstract, and it was the early 1970s.

[47] One wanted to be working on social issues somehow.

[48] And economics was exactly right for me, because I found that you could explore these questions with a kind of rigor and a kind of disciplined, quantitative specification and, you know, deductive logic and applied mathematics.

[49] Not deep, not really, really deep mathematics, but, you know, serious applied mathematics.

[50] So it was a natural fit for me. I took a clinical research degree and I liked the science a lot, the research science, but I really like the fact that my clinical practice enabled me to sort of nail that down to earth all the time.

[51] So that was a lovely balance as well.

[52] And also sort of fed my interest in social issues more at the individual level than say the sociological level.

[53] Did you become convinced me you've got this mathematical bent and you were trained, at least at the bachelor's level in mathematics per se.

[54] How convinced are you that the application of mathematics to economic models produces results that are actually applicable to the real world?

[55] Oh, well, that's a big one, applicable to the real world.

[56] I mean, I think what you're doing in formal economics, this is a big question early in the 20th century, when people like Paul Samuelson, who was one of my teachers, was beginning to apply the kind of mathematics that you would see in theoretical physics on dynamical systems or, you know, this kind of apply.

[57] And it was basically differential and integral calculus and differential equations and so on, apply it to classical problems and economics.

[58] And a lot of people thought, well, that's kind of taking us away from the real world.

[59] And that's a kind of, you know, counting angels on the head of a pin, a kind of, you know, abstract.

[60] And it's true that one can get lost in the abstraction.

[61] But I think there are deeper insights that can be generated through the application of mathematics that are closely connected to the real world.

[62] This is not empirical science.

[63] This is theoretical, but you kind of get to the bottom of it.

[64] I mean, I could give an example.

[65] So the invisible hand theorem from Adam Smith, this is the late 18th century, as you know, is, if you let people pursue profit their own interest at prices that are commonly observed by everybody and they're in competition with one another, then the outcome is going to be socially efficient.

[66] It's going to be Paretoefficient.

[67] You were talking about Pareto just a minute ago.

[68] It's going to be Pareto efficient.

[69] Now, that's kind of a deep insight.

[70] And what does it depend upon?

[71] And I think that the 20th century characterization of what we mean by competition, what we mean by prices being common to all people and profit -seeking and self -interested on the part of consumers, it kind of crystallizes exactly what you have to be assuming about the behavior of individuals and about the institutional setting in order for confidence in the efficiency of capitalist enterprise.

[72] eyes to be justified.

[73] Now, it turns out that those conditions in people like Kenneth Arrow, the late great Kenneth Arrow, the economist, he was at Stanford at the end of his career, and others formalized this at mid -20th century.

[74] Turns out that those assumptions are fairly rigid.

[75] Those assumptions are fairly demanding.

[76] There's plenty of reason to believe that they may fail.

[77] And seeing what the consequences of the failure of those assumptions are is something, that is facilitated by formalizing the problem.

[78] And I mean, I could give other examples.

[79] In political theory, Kenneth Arrow, again, he has a famous book called Social Choice and Individual Values, and then that book is a theorem, which he has to employ rigorous mathematics to demonstrate.

[80] But the theorem says that if you're looking for a mechanism that for just about any kind of society can aggregate individual preferences in a coherent and rational way, in order to formulate a social decision rule rooted in those individual preferences, unless your rule is dictatorial where you designate one person to be the decision maker for everybody else, you will be looking in vain.

[81] It's an impossibility theorem.

[82] There are no mechanisms.

[83] Majority rule doesn't satisfy all the rationality requirements, et cetera, et cetera.

[84] Okay, so that's confusing to me in some ways and enlightening and others.

[85] Let me see if I can rephrase that and question you a little bit about that.

[86] So, well, when I think about these sorts of problems psychologically, in terms of how people are able to make decisions to act successfully in the world, I see that we're always contending in some sense with genuine uncertainty.

[87] And the future is in some sense actually unpredictable.

[88] And so none of us are smart enough to figure out exactly what's coming and what we should do.

[89] And so I tend to view the free market as a giant computational device that.

[90] that does the best job that we can of computing what's valuable at any given point across the, you know, as vast a number of individuals as we can possibly manage.

[91] And it isn't exactly that I think that that works.

[92] It's that I think I can't see how anything else that we could possibly do could work better.

[93] And so I'm not an economist and I'm certainly not a mathematician.

[94] There might be all sorts of problems with that sort of line of theorizing.

[95] but I see it as distributed decision -making that's, you know, a consequence, at least to some degree, of the maximum free choice among the individuals concerned.

[96] Now, I know there's such thing as market failures and, et cetera, but am I way out to understand?

[97] No, no, you're exactly right.

[98] You're in Friedrich von Hayek territory.

[99] I mean, you're who, you know, makes this argument in a very classical way because information is diffuse in society and the idea that a central bureau of government, Fiat could effectively manage all the different tradeoffs and coordination problems and relative valuations and so forth, you know, the computer's not big enough to be able to do that.

[100] And moreover, the information is not in one place.

[101] Information is in the hands of many, many different decision makers.

[102] But the engine that makes that intuition of yours work is prices.

[103] the fact that people are seeing prices.

[104] The prices carry all the information they need about the relative merits of one or another course of action for themselves, already incorporating the kinds of calculations that a central decision maker would find it impossible to carry out.

[105] So I think the way you summarize the problem of the market being a mechanism for calculating very difficult allocation problems to the best effectiveness that's available to us, not perfect to be sure, I think that's correct.

[106] And yes, market failures are when that process goes wrong, and it's usually when the prices don't reflect all the different costs, as, for example, in the climate change debate.

[107] Yeah, well, that's a problem of temporality to some degree, right?

[108] Because we can't compute costs across all possible timeframes simultaneously.

[109] And so when you're talking about something that might have a long -term cost, it's like, well, how long -term a cost can we expect to adapt to?

[110] You know, if it's 150 years in the future, well, we're all dead, and it's very difficult for us to take such things into account.

[111] And also our prediction, our margin of error expands terribly as we move out into the future.

[112] So, okay, so I want to reverse that for a second.

[113] This will have some bearing on our later discussion, maybe.

[114] So I kind of like the idea that the future is unpredictable per se and that you need to, distributed decision -making power, but I also spent a lot of time studying cognitive ability and personality.

[115] And so what researchers have concluded, essentially, is that if you study cognitive ability, which is something like the ability to manipulate abstractions at some rapid rate, you find that it collapses statistically into a single dimension, whereas personality collapses into five dimensions.

[116] And this is G, this is G essentially.

[117] Yes, G essentially.

[118] Yes, and it's not much different.

[119] You can get a pretty rough approximation of G by taking any set of 100 questions that require abstraction to solve and just averaging the score.

[120] It'll be correlated with G at like 0 .7 or 0 .8, which is a whopping correlation by social science standards.

[121] And so, but anyways, you know, the thing about...

[122] Let me ask you a question.

[123] I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'm not a psychologist.

[124] Here's my sort of statistically trained understanding of that, which is that while we may not be able to put our finger on any particular neural pathway or any particular biological process of activity going on in the brain, nevertheless, we think that there is an ability or an aptitude that manifests itself in the solution to these abstract kinds of cognitive problems.

[125] We're going to call it G, and we're going to measure it by the confluence of a person's performance across a range of different kinds of tests.

[126] a factor analytic kind of extraction of a vector of, and you're saying that no matter what the test are kind of, it all collapses down to this one.

[127] It doesn't matter what the tests are.

[128] You could take any set of 100 random questions that require abstraction to solve, and you'll pull out something that will be correlated with G if you average the scores at about 0 .7 or 0 .8.

[129] It's remarkably unitary.

[130] It's stunningly unitary.

[131] When someone like Stephen J. Gould, as I recall him, the link.

[132] Yeah, he's wrong.

[133] Okay, and here's why, you know, he took issue with factor analysis.

[134] He said, well, that's not real.

[135] It's like, well, is the average real?

[136] Yeah, yeah.

[137] It depends on what you mean by real.

[138] If it has a one -factor solution, it's basically identical to the average.

[139] Not exactly, because all the questions aren't related to that average equally.

[140] But in the case of G, for all intents and purposes, it's indistinguishable from the average.

[141] And any random set of 100 questions will do.

[142] I mean, I looked into this deeply because we built personality models.

[143] research team, and they'd be reasonably influential in the field of personality.

[144] So I understand that there are phenomena, they're associated with human psychology, they don't have a unidimensional solution, but gee, man, it's a killer, it's a black hole, it sucks all cognition into it, and there's no escaping it.

[145] So it's very, now, and so why I brought that up, we'll go back to that, but why I brought that up is because it's kind of weird to see that there is this cognitive ability that does allow for prediction of the future, that is associated reasonably, strongly, statistically, with long -term, say, life economic success, in some ways that flies in the face of the idea that a central authority can't model the future because we have a central authority.

[146] And I could speak about it biologically for a second.

[147] So you move your body voluntarily with your motor cortex.

[148] And the prefrontal cortex grew out of that over an evolutionary time frame.

[149] And what the prefrontal cortex does is represent action in abstraction.

[150] action so that you can assess, well, it's mechanisms, but also its likely outcome before you implement it in action.

[151] And that seems to be, it's not a specifically human skill, but we've developed that far more than any other creature.

[152] And so, and it seems to work because people with higher IQs tend to do better, say, economically, well, they do better across a large variety of measures.

[153] So, well, that's sort of that.

[154] But it does fly in the face of that need for distributed decision making.

[155] I don't see that.

[156] I don't see how it is that the ability to predict a person's, I don't know, income or whatever, on the basis of their cognitive ability, correlates or connects to the ability of someone sitting in an office somewhere to know how much, you know, farm material should be shipped here and what kind of crop should be planned.

[157] Yeah, maybe it's a matter of complexity, you know.

[158] And diversity.

[159] And the fact that it's not a one -dimensional thing, what we're after when we ask what people are.

[160] want.

[161] They have preferences that are complex and they, and I don't know who is the person who wants a cool room or a warm room in the winter time.

[162] They have to reveal that to me by the actions that they take, something like that.

[163] Yeah, well, so maybe it's a, maybe it's the case that the central IQ authorities, so to speak, has a bounded universe that's basically private in which it can make reasonable predictions.

[164] But once you scale the problem up to a certain degree of complexity, you have to switch to more distributed forms of cognition.

[165] That could easily be the case.

[166] Can I predict whose marriage is going to survive based on G?

[167] Not that I know of.

[168] You can predict whose marriage is going to survive to some degree based on trait neuroticism, which is the negative emotion dimension.

[169] And so higher levels of neuroticism increase the probability of divorce, and that's part of the reason why most divorces are initiated by women.

[170] That's going to get you in trouble, George.

[171] Yeah, whatever.

[172] I get in trouble all the time.

[173] But look, I mean, it's not a sexist thing to say.

[174] I mean, there's reasons that women are more sensitive to negative emotion.

[175] They're smaller.

[176] The cost of sex is higher for them, and they have to be finally attuned to the dangers posed to infants.

[177] And so it's an evolutionary.

[178] There's nothing wrong with the fact they have higher levels of negative motion.

[179] It's costly for them as individuals to some degree because it's unpleasant and physiologically demanding.

[180] But it makes perfect sense, given that the world's probably more dangerous for women, especially when they have infants.

[181] Everything you said makes a lot of sense to me. Why is it so difficult to make statements such as the ones that you've made about the intrinsic or natural differences between men and women based on the very argument that you gave that there's good evolutionary reasons why?

[182] Well, I can play devil's advocate for that.

[183] So as a psychologist, I do see a technical reason in some sense for separating biological sex from the concept of gender.

[184] And the reason for that is that I think the best description of gender is probably in personality.

[185] And men and women's personality are more the same than they are different.

[186] So the curves overlap more than they differ.

[187] The biggest differences are a negative emotion and compassion slash politeness, which is agreeableness.

[188] And women are higher in both reliably.

[189] But there are no shortage of women who have a masculine temperament and no shortage of men who have a feminine temperament.

[190] They're in a minority, but the diversity is there.

[191] And so when you say something like, like, well, on average, females differ in this way.

[192] It's hard for people who don't think statistically to sort of separate that out from, well, that means everyone's like that.

[193] And well, they're not.

[194] There's tremendous individual variable.

[195] Five dimensions of variability is a lot of variability.

[196] And so, and there is more similarity between men and women than there are differences.

[197] The biggest difference is in interest, actually.

[198] And this is kind of interesting for someone mathematically minded, because there isn't much evidence that women and men differ in mathematical ability at a cognitive level.

[199] Maybe boys have a slight edge in spatial reasoning, and that might, yeah, yeah, might be linked to testosterone.

[200] And I think that's probably true, but it's slight.

[201] But they have a whopping difference in interest.

[202] And women are reliably more interested in people and men are reliably more interested in things compared to the other sex.

[203] I read Charles Murray's book, Human Diversity, and the section of that book on Jindar, is etched very powerfully into my mind.

[204] I thought he made many strong arguments there and around this point about differences in interest.

[205] And then, of course, that causes people to invest in different kinds of behavior.

[206] And that leads to differentiation in their occupational profiles and other...

[207] Well, it's especially true at the extremes.

[208] Because, you know, even if the curves overlap to a large degree in the middle, so that most men and women are, you know, roughly the same, And if the great mathematicians, let's say, are 1 % of the population, which is probably an overestimate, then they're almost all going to be men, despite that huge overlap and despite the lack of cognitive difference.

[209] I've been a chess player, a chess player, I'm just going to say, all my life.

[210] And the dominance of men amongst world -class chess players is, you know, it's very, very prominent.

[211] I mean, they basically are very few women who play at the.

[212] top rank of chess players.

[213] Yeah, well, you have to kind of be obsessed with something like chess, too, to get that far, right?

[214] I mean, it's a real specialization at that level.

[215] And so if you're not compelled by your interest, you won't do it, despite your ability.

[216] A relatively small difference in ability at the right tail of the distribution and spatial cognition, for example, might lead to a very large difference in the number of hours people allocate to developing their chess playing skills, and then that would account for the gender difference and top chess performance.

[217] Yeah, well, and you also see this.

[218] I got in trouble for this a lot, but it's true, so that's life.

[219] In the Scandinavian countries, it's proved very difficult to get women into engineering and men into nursing.

[220] And as those countries have become more gender equal in their legislation and their social policies and likely their society, those differences have got bigger, not smaller.

[221] So it's a stunning, it's a stunning finding.

[222] I wonder what you would say to this argument, which is, okay, okay, maybe you guys have a point.

[223] But the main political imperative is equality for men and women.

[224] That's a political imperative, and that means that we have to sustain majorities in favor of the kinds of laws and regulations we need to achieve that.

[225] when you talk candidly and casually, as Lawrence Summers did when he was president of Harvard University, I'm sure you know the incident that I'm talking about Larry Summers about women and why there aren't so many at the top of mathematics and the STEM disciplines, when you talk casually about that, you give aid and comfort to the forces that want to resist equality, and you kind of feed or fuel something that needs to be opposed, not to be encouraged.

[226] So you ought to censor yourselves a little bit.

[227] Have some modesty in the way in which you talk about these issues because the stakes are very high, something like that.

[228] Do you find that?

[229] Yeah, well, I agree.

[230] Oh, yeah.

[231] But, you know, the way I deal with that, as I don't speak casually about such things.

[232] Like, I did my research on these topics.

[233] This is years of research.

[234] And I was dead serious about partly because we built practical tools to assess personality and cognitive ability, as well as I studied it as a researcher.

[235] and, you know, as an interested clinician.

[236] And so none of this is casual.

[237] And no, I don't think that censoring myself is the right idea because I think to really say, if we wanted to eliminate those gender differences in occupation, the intensity of government intervention that would be required would tilt things towards something that's too much, too totalitarian.

[238] You'd have to interfere with people so much to accomplish that.

[239] It's a one standard deviation, at least difference in interest between men and women and people and things.

[240] And then if you do foster social equality, like the Scandinavians have clearly, they've clearly done that by any reasonable measure.

[241] And the fact that those differences get bigger.

[242] It's like you just can't walk away from that.

[243] It's not what anyone expected on the left or the right.

[244] No one expected that.

[245] And what seems to happen is if you give men and women every opportunity, in some ways they get much more different.

[246] And so, you know, hey, we didn't expect that, but that's science, isn't it?

[247] All very, very frequently things that you don't expect happen.

[248] Yeah.

[249] Okay, well, you persuade me on that one.

[250] Yeah, well, it's not easy to see how you could set up government policies that would violate people's intrinsic interest.

[251] And one of the things you do learn as a personality researcher is that those interests are deep.

[252] They're biologically rooted in many ways.

[253] an open person, so that's creative, that's creativity dimension.

[254] That's deep, deeply rooted inside of you.

[255] It's a fundamental element of who you are.

[256] It can't be easily trifled with or safely trifled with by, well, let's say by political interests.

[257] And I really saw that as a clinician because I'd have people who were creative as clients, and if they weren't doing creative work, they could hardly stand to be alive.

[258] Well, this is a theme that might apply across a number of areas.

[259] is the theme being a pursuit of a faux egalitarianism, an equality in a place where the natural order of things would not have equality be expected.

[260] But the ideology of egalitarianism is set against the objective reality of the difference that we're talking about.

[261] And people want to make equal in any case.

[262] We want to have, we want to force, we want to force engineering departments to recruit women so that they have a 50 -50 balance or whatever it might be.

[263] we want to subsidize or tax or discourage and encourage people's behavior so as to bring about this equal outcome.

[264] Well, you know, as a heuristic, you know, as a heuristic, you might say that if you look at outcome and you see gender differences or ethnic differences or racial differences, sometimes you can reliably infer barriers and prejudice.

[265] And so as a heuristic, it's not bad, right?

[266] Because that points to a place where there might be a problem.

[267] but then we do have some areas where we have high resolution knowledge like let's say with regard to interest in people versus things and so then we can say well wait a sec that difference doesn't look like it's a consequence of arbitrary prejudice so but I think I don't like look one of the things I was interested in talking to you about you've written a fair bit about racial differences in incarceration in the United States and you've made a case and I don't want to put words in your mouth but I'm trying to sum up what I understand that the fact of those differential incarceration rates not only has a variety of negative, medium and long -term consequences for everyone, but that it does point to a kind of systemic problem that's fundamentally discriminatory.

[268] And to some degree, that's use of that heuristic, I would say, and perhaps in an entirely appropriate way.

[269] It's complicated, but have I got your argument reasonably?

[270] I wouldn't have said, or I wouldn't say today, in any case, fundamentally discriminatory without unpacking that.

[271] Yeah.

[272] I would say that the disparity, here you have the state that deprives people of liberty.

[273] It's a very massive footprint, the incarceration in the United States, and there's a huge racial disparity in it.

[274] There's also a racial disparity in criminal offending.

[275] I would make the case that even if you could account for every single person incarcerated by reference to, well, they broke the law, they did the crime, they're doing the time.

[276] And even if you could count roughly that the African -American over -representation in prison is commensurate with their over -representation amongst criminal offenders.

[277] Still, the fact that this is the state coming down with a hammer on people and confining them and depriving them of their liberty at the scale that it's engaged in, given the history of our society where, racial difference is such a fraught and sensitive matter, given the existence of stereotypes in the minds of people that are buttressed by the overrepresentation of African Americans in prison, given the political alienation in the communities from which the prisoners are coming, and all that can be loaded onto that in terms of a lack of the granting of legitimacy to the forces of order in the society, Given the history, which is a history that is marred by racial, et cetera, et cetera, that it would be a bad thing for that disparity to persist.

[278] And it's an outcome that government ought to work to counteract, not because they think it's mainly a consequence of discrimination, at least ongoing current contemporary discrimination, but because the ultimate stability of our social order depends upon not, allowing that to fester unattended.

[279] I've said a million cases, each one rightly decided, can still add up to a great and historic wrong.

[280] And that's the sense in which I lamented this is years ago.

[281] I don't write so much about it anymore.

[282] But in any case, I lamented the racial disparity in incarceration.

[283] I thought it was bad for our society, even if it reflected mainly disparity in criminal offending.

[284] because, of course, criminal offending doesn't fall from the sky either.

[285] It's a consequence of social structure and social organization to some degree, as well as the personality and moral characteristics of different individuals in society.

[286] But, yeah, I was concerned about mass incarceration primarily because I thought it made solving the American dilemma all that much more difficult to accomplish.

[287] Yeah, well, you also wrote to some degree about its effect on disrupting families, you know, on an ongoing and continuing basis.

[288] And, you know, I've spent a fair bit of time trying to wrestle with the potential role that fathers play in families in relationship, let's say, to the disciplinary structures that are applied both to young men and young women.

[289] And it certainly seems to me that these differential incarceration rates are tremendously destabilizing for the fundamental family structure among, well, when you've looked at that, Let me ask you two questions.

[290] What do you think the data show about the severity of sentencing for blacks versus whites in the U .S. for crimes of the same magnitude?

[291] And I know that's not bottom -level data, but how do you see that?

[292] Because you talked about criminal offending.

[293] Yeah.

[294] Now, you can find studies where they are going to see some modestly more severe punishment, conditional on the crime for the black offenders.

[295] But my general sense of the matter, and I rest here on my service on the Committee of the National Academy of Sciences that reported maybe seven or eight years ago causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the United States.

[296] My understanding of that literature from people like he's up in years now, but he's been very influential Alfred Bloomstein.

[297] He's a statistical criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, who's kind of the godfather of these studies.

[298] there are many other studies.

[299] My understanding is that you can account, cannot account for more than 15, 20 percent of the racial disparity in people in prison by reference to differences in the length of sentence or the likelihood of being convicted in sentence conditional on offense.

[300] Okay, so that's not nothing.

[301] No, it's not nothing.

[302] It's not nothing.

[303] But it's the great bulk of the disparity is differences in offending.

[304] What about probability of being arrested for an offense?

[305] Okay, I don't know.

[306] Is that another 15 or 20 %?

[307] I don't know.

[308] I don't know.

[309] Yeah.

[310] These things are going to be hard to estimate, aren't there?

[311] Probably, you're not observing the non -arrested offenders.

[312] You're observing user surveys of people who have been offended against.

[313] And in those surveys, there'll be reports about the perceived race of the, the person who's offending.

[314] So maybe you could attempt back into some estimate of the conditional likelihood of being apprehended, given race.

[315] And there might be some racial difference there.

[316] 15 % sounds like that could be a lot.

[317] Yeah, well, it could go the other way, too, because it isn't obvious to me whether the black community in the U .S. is over -policed or under -policed.

[318] I think you could make a theoretical argument for either.

[319] What do you think?

[320] Indeed, and reporting, the reporting of offenses is also going to differ by social location.

[321] Domestic violence, for example, may or may not be reported with the same degree of fidelity across social class and racial identity.

[322] I actually don't know this to be the case, but it's certainly plausible.

[323] So it's pretty slippery.

[324] But I'd say the majority of the racial disparity is a reflection of disparity in offending.

[325] The difference in sentencing conditional on the fence may differ by race, disfavoring blacks.

[326] Now, in the drug area, that's a specific thing where it's observed that drug use patterns don't differ nearly as much by race as drug incarceration patterns do.

[327] But I explain that in my mind by reference to the fact that open -air drug markets are going to attract on the selling side, people from the, you know, who don't have many positive alternative opportunities to use their time.

[328] It's a low -paying and very dangerous trade.

[329] It's no surprise that I have to go to the wrong side of the tracks in order to engage in a prohibited commerce, then the people who are going to be engaged in that commerce will be disproportionately from disadvantaged communities, so on.

[330] I talked to some psychologists for a fair bit of time.

[331] It was Margot Wilson, and unfortunately, I can't remember the name of her.

[332] her, uh, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, they've done an interesting work looking at the relationship between economic inequality and crime and what they've showed state by state and country by country is that, and county by county in the U .S., is that the higher the rates of inequality, economic inequality in a given geographical locale, the higher the rates of aggression and criminality.

[333] And what they, and they studied Chicago, the inner city of Chicago, specifically in relationship to this research.

[334] And their hypothesis was that young men, it's very important for the sexual success of young men to be on an upward path in relationship to status.

[335] And in places with high inequality, that's an indication that their upward mobility is truncated in various ways.

[336] And as a consequence, they're highly likely to turn to violence and criminality as an alternative means of obtaining status.

[337] and that's part of what's driving the sorts of things that you're describing.

[338] And they show very high correlations between income inequality, county by county, and rates of male aggression, especially among young men.

[339] And like the correlations are 0 .6, 0 .7, unbelievably high for social science.

[340] Well, that's interesting.

[341] That's news to me, but that's seeking status.

[342] And when you can't do it by high income, then you do it.

[343] it by uh you do it by hook or by crook because it's so fundamentally important and especially for young men because for there's here's another gender difference they're competing for the services of young women is that is that absolutely well and young women use status as a marker for competence way more than young men do so young women are much choosier as sexual partners for obvious reasons this cost of sex is a lot higher for them and what they are looking for is something like competence in climbing social ladders.

[344] And then they use social status as a marker for that.

[345] So I have a question.

[346] If there are these deep psychologicals, it's social psychological dynamics at work, how much influence can culture, you know, play in affecting people's behavior?

[347] Can we change the script?

[348] Or are we locked in?

[349] Are we locked in by these kind of very deep imperatives of the sort that you would just describe it?

[350] I would say that we're constrained, but within that constraint, there's no shortage of room for choice.

[351] You know, it's sort of like chess.

[352] There's rules.

[353] But, man, there's a lot of ways to affect a chess game.

[354] And these more biological factors are more like, they're more like game rules.

[355] And it doesn't, in some real sense, doesn't decrease the range of choice.

[356] It shapes the game.

[357] And then socially, well, status is going to be more important as a marker for male desirability than for female desirability.

[358] We're not going to change that.

[359] But what we can do is restructure social systems so that nonviolent means of obtaining status are available as much as possible to everyone.

[360] And that's sort of the equality of opportunity argument, except maybe from a biological perspective.

[361] And it's also, the inequality issue is also extremely interesting, as far as I'm concerned, because what their work suggests, and it's pretty damn solid, I believe, that economic inequality as such poses a destabilizing threat to societies as such.

[362] And the reason for that is that it promotes young male violence, particularly.

[363] And so whether you're on the left or the right, it's like inequality is a problem.

[364] If it gets too extreme, things get violent.

[365] So it lasted for conservatives as well as people on the left.

[366] Okay, but inequality is inevitable, is it not?

[367] Well, that's another thing I wanted to talk to you about.

[368] Well, let's talk about that because I had this client, who was a mathematical genius, a clinical client.

[369] He taught me a lot of things I didn't know.

[370] I hadn't learned as a statistician.

[371] And one of the things he talked to me about was the Pareto principle.

[372] And so I went and looked into that in some depth.

[373] And so I found, for example, that it's such a strange phenomenon, it's like the square root of the number of people operating in a specific discipline produce half the output.

[374] That's the law.

[375] And so there's a thousand scientists working on a particular, in a subdiscipline, 30 of them publish half the papers.

[376] And you can look across, it's the same with basketball, hoops successfully managed, hockey goals scored, soccer goals scored.

[377] records produced, books written, books sold.

[378] Records sold.

[379] It's like everywhere, this law, this weird square root law.

[380] Sometimes people sum that up as the 80 -20 principle, but it's way worse.

[381] I heard it.

[382] Yeah, it's way worse than that.

[383] It's way worse than 80 -20.

[384] Yeah, well, it implies, for example, if you have an organization with 10 ,000 people, a hundred of them doing half the work.

[385] Now, if you have 10, it's three, and that's not so bad, but at 10 ,000, it's 100.

[386] And you think, no way.

[387] It's like, well, if you meet some of those people who might be in that hundred, you might think differently.

[388] So, and this looks like there's some fundamental rule.

[389] And so you're interested in income distribution.

[390] And so what have you make of this sort of thing?

[391] Well, it reminds me of a classic paper by the late economist Sherwin Rosen, University of Chicago, called the economics of superstars.

[392] And he starts it out by observing 80, 20.

[393] like observations by, you know, let's look at the earnings of tennis players and look at the rank.

[394] So how much total prize money is won by tennis players and what proportion of it goes to people based on the rank?

[395] And he gets something like an 80, you know, the top, you know, 20 or 25 tennis players are taken in, you know, the vast majority of the winnings.

[396] And, you know, record sales by musicians in various genres of musical, pretty much.

[397] and what not.

[398] Similarly, the top ones are getting those.

[399] So he says, how can we account for this?

[400] And this, I think, should be a part of anybody's effort to explain the Pareto principle, as you've defined it, or the 80 -20 rule.

[401] He says, look, to produce something that people want to see, you need talent, but you also need other resources.

[402] And so it's the combination of the productivity, of the talent, which is scarce and distributed in the population, and the effectiveness of their ability to command other resources, which taken together determine what they will be able to produce.

[403] So you need a combination.

[404] So imagine one distribution would be talent, and so you need to be in, say, the top 10%, but that's not enough.

[405] You also need, I don't know, you need to be in the top 10 % of education, say, to be a successful research scientist.

[406] And the juxtaposition of those two curves produces a real fractional percentage.

[407] And those people are hyper qualified for that particular enterprise.

[408] It's something like that.

[409] Now, he adds another element, which is, let's take opera singers.

[410] He uses this example.

[411] So in the old days, before you had high quality sound reproduction, such that you could sit in your living room and listen to a recording of an opera singer through your speakers that produced an effect that was almost as good as being in the opera house.

[412] Before that, before that, you had to actually go to the opera house to hear opera.

[413] Now, the opera house can only accommodate a couple of thousand people, Max.

[414] So the very, very, very best opera singers could still only command an audience of a couple of thousand, 100 ,000 people in any given performance, which leaves plenty of room for the second, third, fifth, and 30th best to be able to travel to the small towns and still make a living.

[415] But once it becomes possible for the best to record their performance and the distributed in that way, the person sitting in the small town has a choice.

[416] Do I go to hear a 20th rate opera singer in the local hall, or do I put a recording of the best one on my device?

[417] Now, often they would choose to go with the recording rather than to go to the 20th best.

[418] And that means that the top opera singers are not going to command an even greater share of the market and the insight there is that technological change which permits the most talented to lever their talent to a larger audience is the key to understanding why they get so much of the of the take compared right right well you can so it's like the smaller the game the less the gain at the top but we expand the games continually with technology and recording is an excellent example of that and so i guess what we hope is that we produce enough new games so that everybody can win at something, but we're still funneling a tremendous number of resources to people at the top of whatever the game is, especially as these games become big.

[419] So, and you see that particular, well, it's really obvious with money, and people complain continually about the top 1%, but the problem is, is that there's a book called Big Science, little science, that was written in about 1962, and the author escapes me at the moment, but he did exactly the same sort of analysis for the scientific literature.

[420] exactly the same story.

[421] So hyper dominance of a tiny minority of people.

[422] And so there's a natural, it's something like positive feedback loops too, isn't it?

[423] And I've noticed this as I've become more famous, I suppose, is that you get known and so more people know you and so more people are likely to attend to you.

[424] And then more people are willing to talk to you because you have an audience.

[425] And so that drives the expansion of the audience.

[426] And your connection network grows at the same time.

[427] you have more resources and so it just it's a positive it's a bunch of positive feedback loops moving upward i think the word network is very important there and i think what with social media and whatnot and the magnifying the ability of individuals to have influence and to have influence on people who have influence the the density of that network is a is a tremendous asset for you know Yeah, so it makes a competitive position.

[428] Well, it makes the problem of inequality a real tough one from the political perspective, right?

[429] Because we could, and conceptual for that matter, because we could perhaps agree that regardless of whether you're on the left or the right, you might view inequality on the right as a threat to social stability.

[430] So I know there's this native Canadian tribe on the West Coast, Haida, the Quack Quackowaks did the same thing.

[431] you know, in their societies, they'd have big chiefs, and the big chiefs would just accrue everything.

[432] And then, now and then, they'd have a potlatch and give it all away.

[433] And then their status was dependent on their ability to give a lot away.

[434] And that stabilized their society.

[435] Now, those were made illegal by the Canadian government, I think, about 70 years ago or so.

[436] But, you know, they were thought of just some pagan, an unnecessary pagan ritual, I suppose.

[437] But I do believe that that was one of their so -called evolved solutions to the problem of the terrible problem of inequality, the fact that goods tend to accrue in the hands of a few.

[438] And the lefties that I see, the left political thinkers, economic thinkers as well, especially the ones on the extreme left, they tend to associate that with capitalism.

[439] But that's a fundamental underestimate of the magnitude of the problem in my thinking.

[440] And that's a real problem if you're concerned about, you know, comparatively poor or actually poor people.

[441] It's way bigger problem.

[442] I wonder if we could apply the same kind of thinking that we used to explain why an athlete or musician or even an entrepreneur might end up at the very right end of the distribution garnering for themselves a great bulk of the reward.

[443] it, to apply that to the huge financial fortunes that are accumulated, either through, you know, savvy in the marketplace, you know, I'm a hedge fund guy.

[444] I know what to buy and win and win to sell, or to the fortunes of landholding, you know, family fortunes and things of this kind.

[445] I wonder whether those simple insights extend to the institutionalized wealth -generating process.

[446] Well, I think they do to some degree.

[447] I mean, I studied entrepreneurial success as a researcher for quite a long time, too, because one of the personality factors that predict entrepreneurial ability is this trait openness, which is essentially creativity.

[448] And what defines creative thinkers in part is, so here's a simple, creativity test.

[449] And it actually is reasonably predictive of creative capacity, both in terms of originality of thought and creative productions as assessed by experts.

[450] How many uses can you think of for a brick in three minutes?

[451] You're going to write them down.

[452] Or even how many four -letter words can you think of in a minute that start with C?

[453] That'll be correlated at about point three or four with your creativity, depending on how it's measured.

[454] Very simple test.

[455] And what seems to happen is that creative people, when they think of one idea, the probability that that will trigger an associated ideas higher, especially a distally associated idea.

[456] So that likely means that creative people have more erroneous ideas as well.

[457] And then they have to, you know, what would you say?

[458] Edit them and select.

[459] But one of the things that makes creative entrepreneurs successful is that they produce a large variety of creative products.

[460] And then they throw them out in marketplace and most of them fail, but you just need one to hit that Pareto point and then you're successful.

[461] So you throw, you know, it's you throw some, what do you throw a mess at the wall and see what sticks essentially.

[462] And most entrepreneurs before they're successful have had a very large number of failures.

[463] Because even if you're intelligent and creative, the probability that you'll build a product that's actually timed for the market is extremely low.

[464] So, well, what do you do?

[465] well, you create more, and that's what happens.

[466] That's what creative people are essentially biologically predisposed to do.

[467] So I think that, yeah, I think that principle, that underlying principle of positive feedback loops and, you know, the combination of scarcity of ability and resources, I think it accounts for all those inequalities.

[468] So, you know, a question is, what do we do about that?

[469] Well, you were saying something I thought interesting a moment ago about how even a right -winger ought to be able to see that inequality unrestrained could be dangerous to the stable social order because the losers are going to end up having to say one way or the other at the end of the day.

[470] And you better watch out because if they don't have a stake in the system and they're feeling aggrieved and without status and dignity, they may act out in ways that are harmful.

[471] Oh, they will, especially if they're young men.

[472] Absolutely, they will.

[473] Absolutely they will.

[474] And that is definitely dangerous.

[475] And so, you know, partly we've tried to solve that.

[476] so to speak, we in the West, by trying to ensure something like equality of opportunity across a wide range of games.

[477] That's not a bad sort of meta -solution, right?

[478] It's like, well, we can't predict, we know that there's going to be wild disparities in outcome, and we can't really do anything about that, but maybe we can give people something approximating an equal shot at winning some game, and that would be better for everyone, too, because then we can harness their creative resources.

[479] And it isn't obvious to me that there is a better solution, technically even, I can't see, like I don't understand.

[480] I don't know what a better solution could be.

[481] Now, what does that mean in a world where the people who have engineering degrees or got to law school or got a good, you know, education and are connected, are making six figures and living comfortably?

[482] And someone who dropped out of high school is working for $30 ,000 a year and just barely getting by.

[483] What is that latter guy's venue where he or she can feel like, they're winning the game?

[484] Well, I think it depends to some degree on each individual.

[485] You know, I mean, you can find status and meaning in your family.

[486] You have your pursuits outside of your work.

[487] I'm not saying that money isn't a good singular marker of relative status.

[488] It's probably the best singular marker there is.

[489] But it's not the only one, right?

[490] There are diverse, there are diverse places where you can attain status.

[491] And so, and you know, you can be poor and dignified.

[492] You've certainly met people like that.

[493] You can be poor and admired within your family.

[494] You can be poor enough decent or outstanding character for that matter.

[495] And so, and that's how that that's not exactly a domain that's regulated socially like the economic domain, but it's not nothing.

[496] And so, and by the same token, you know, you can sacrifice a lot of those things to economic pursuit.

[497] And then you'll have lots of money, but man, your life sucks and in 50 different ways.

[498] So I don't know if that's a sufficient solution, but it's not nothing.

[499] But this is not constantly laissez -faire, if I understand it.

[500] It's not saying the government should just withdraw and let the chips fall where they may. It could be advocating for a policy of some kind of, you know, everybody needs work that's meaningful.

[501] You know, everybody needs a kind of sense of security, you know, that they're not going to get sick and not be able to pay the bill, or they're not going to get old and not know where the next meal is coming from.

[502] Let's guarantee, let's try to guarantee to the extent that we can.

[503] We know the world's not just perfect, and we may not be able to solve all these problems.

[504] Let's try to make sure that there's decent housing for someone that's not so they don't have to sleep on their bridge, et cetera, et cetera.

[505] And then we can let the chips fall where they can.

[506] Yeah.

[507] Well, it seems to me that societies like, well, the U .S. to some degree, but more specifically, I would say the Scandinavian countries and probably Canada would more or less fall into that what ballpark and we fall into a ballpark's pretty bad metaphor but you know that's kind of what what those democratic socialist countries have tried to establish now it seems to be easier to do that in a smaller country that's more homogenous in its ethnic and racial grouping and maybe also technically it's easier with a smaller population you the u .s it's so damn big it gets very complicated to try to do the same thing, you know, that those smaller polities have managed.

[508] And then, of course, there's, because you might think of something like a guaranteed, a guaranteed income.

[509] Let me ask you something about that.

[510] Yeah.

[511] Maybe it'll bolster the idea.

[512] So when I was a clinician, I worked with a lot of people who were impaired in their cognitive ability.

[513] So they probably had IQs around 80 or lower.

[514] And so, and if, if you're, if you have cognitive ability at that range, it's, it would be hard for you to or something like folding a letter to get it into an envelope.

[515] And that's way harder than you think, because you have to fold it exactly in thirds.

[516] You can't be out by more than about an eighth of an inch.

[517] And so I had one client, I probably trained him for 30 hours to do that well enough so that the letters would go through an automated machine so that he could keep his volunteer job.

[518] But anyways, the U .S. military has been doing cognitive testing since World War I about, and they determined, I don't remember when, and this is part of American legislation, that you cannot be inducted into the armed forces if you have an IQ, I think, less than 80.

[519] And the reason they determined that is because they couldn't find any military job of any sort that someone who is that cognitively impaired could manage proficiently.

[520] And you think about that's a killer issue because it's not like the military isn't highly desirous of pulling people in.

[521] especially among from say the working class so they were motivated to find the opposite and that's like 10 % of the population and so here we have a problem and no one will face this as far as I can tell liberals are conservatives 10 % of the population can't really function in the complex cognitive environment and that's what we're producing for everyone to live in and we don't we can't have a conversation about that because you know the liberal types think well everyone can be trained to do anything we're we which is complete, bloody rubbish.

[522] And the conservatives think, well, you know, if you just buckle down and work, away you go.

[523] And there's some truth in that, because conscientiousness does predict long -term economic success, but that doesn't deal with this other issue at all.

[524] It's 10 % of the population.

[525] 10 % of the population are so impaired in terms of their cognitive functioning that there's no useful work for them.

[526] In the military.

[527] Well, you can take that for what it's worth in the military.

[528] Well, the reason I think the military example is so compelling is for two reasons, is that, you know, America in particular has used the military as a means of social mobility, right?

[529] Because it moves people from the working class upward.

[530] And that's been a conscious policy decision in part.

[531] So there's that.

[532] But the other part is, you know, often the military is pretty damn hungry for people.

[533] And so if they've decided that, well, this doesn't work, it's hard to see well, I buy it, and that's partly well, because I know how much intellectual variability there is between people.

[534] It's stunning and terrifying at the same time.

[535] It's not a positive thing.

[536] It's really harsh.

[537] I'm just resisting this idea that we can't find anything for them to do.

[538] I mean, and to what extent does...

[539] Do you remember the bell curve?

[540] Yeah, who could not remember the bell curve?

[541] I was at Harvard when that came out, and Hernstein was still a professor there.

[542] So, and I only want to talk about a little bit of it.

[543] I read the bell curve a couple of times.

[544] And one of the things Hearnstein and Murray said in that book that really stuck in my mind is that academic types like you and me, we virtually never encounter anyone in the lower 50th percentile of the cognitive distribution.

[545] You know, when we think in undergraduates dim, they have an IQ of 110.

[546] And that's like 80th percentile.

[547] And so you get blinded as you move up the, especially the academic ladder, you get blinded to the bottom 15 % of the cognitive distribution because you just never, those people are not in your purview.

[548] They're not in your circle.

[549] Okay, I'll take that point.

[550] I can't use my personal experience.

[551] But what I'm chafing at is that, okay, I'm wearing glasses because I don't see very well without them.

[552] And I'm undoubtedly in the distribution of visual acuity in the bottom, I don't know, 10, 15%.

[553] But when I put on a pair of glasses, I am able to function.

[554] And what I'm missing here is a consideration of whether or not we can't adapt our institutions of productivity or human service or education or whatever.

[555] So as to meet this minimum requirement, which is taking everybody or almost everybody, giving them something to do, giving them something to do.

[556] Yeah, well, that needs to be done.

[557] And look, I only add a couple of things to this.

[558] in the IQ literature, because you might think, well, that's biology and it's immutable.

[559] Okay, no, not exactly.

[560] This Flynn effect has shown that over the last 100 years, IQ on average, has been rising, and a huge part of that is probably better nutrition in the lower quartile of the population.

[561] So that made a huge difference.

[562] People got smarter because they weren't starving, essentially.

[563] They weren't malnourished.

[564] And then there is evidence, too, that...

[565] So it's not like this is exactly unremediable, but the distribution doesn't seem to change much.

[566] You know what I mean?

[567] It doesn't pack tighter into the middle.

[568] You still have the problem that some people are extremely smart and fast and some people aren't.

[569] And so, well, it's a very, very hard problem to solve.

[570] I'm not saying that we shouldn't solve it and that we shouldn't pay some attention to the people who are struggling at the bottom.

[571] We absolutely should.

[572] But it isn't obvious exactly.

[573] It isn't obvious how to do it.

[574] it.

[575] So this guy worked with, I mean, like I said, he probably had an IQ, maybe something around 80, I would have estimated, you know, and I tried to find him a job.

[576] Now, it was really hard.

[577] He had a volunteer job in a bike shop for a while, and it was a bike book shop, a real, you know, small enterprise, and he could sort of put books in the shelf, although he couldn't sequence them very well, and then that place couldn't pay him.

[578] And so then I got him a volunteer job at a charity, and he couldn't do it well enough they were going to fire him and I went and talked to the director of the charity I said you can't fire this guy because he's going to kill him it's like think about this he's 40 he's got a volunteer job at a charity and he's going to get fired it's like how the hell do you recover from that now he quit two months later anyways and then he got a job with someone who trained dogs and that worked out just fine but you get my point It's like it was virtually impossible to find him a niche.

[579] And I tried for with his mother, who was extraordinarily devoted to him in a very positive way, we tried for three years really to slot him in somewhere.

[580] And it was virtually impossible.

[581] So are you thinking that our homeless shelters and the prisons of the country and so on are basically populated by people such as this who are, unable to get their foot on the bottom wrong?

[582] No, I wouldn't.

[583] The evidence for a relationship between IQ and criminality, that's not very strong.

[584] So I wouldn't say that in relationship to incarceration.

[585] I would say it's more likely, in homelessness and that sort of thing, that's more likely where people, you know, they fall out of the economy because there isn't anything they can find that will pay them a wage that will enable them to live.

[586] But the IQ relationship, with criminality isn't very high.

[587] I'm keenly aware of how politically incorrect this whole conversation you and I are having.

[588] I just read a piece in the Atlantic, I think it was, about a woman.

[589] I believe she's a cognitive psychologist.

[590] I don't recall her name just now.

[591] She was at the Russell Sage Foundation and met with a fierce pushback when she had just attempted to assert that variation in human intelligence was associated with variation in human populations with other kinds of...

[592] Oh, genetics.

[593] It was genetics, I'm sorry.

[594] Genetic variation.

[595] It wasn't just intelligence.

[596] It wasn't just intelligence.

[597] But she was saying, look, people are different.

[598] The ability first understand the genome much better now allows us to document that to some degree.

[599] There's distribution in the population, and it's associated with the distribution of outcomes that we're concerned about.

[600] And there was a firestorm approach.

[601] Oh, yeah.

[602] Well, it's no wonder, man. You can't dive into the IQ literature without coming away like shell -shocked in 15 different dimensions.

[603] I mean, because certainly a huge part of G, proficiency is biologically, what would you say?

[604] It has a biological foundation.

[605] I mean, I was reading about John von Neumann the other day, you know, and people who knew him and Einstein thought he was way smarter than Einstein, and that's not nothing.

[606] He could multiply eight -digit numbers in his head when he was 10, two eight -digit numbers.

[607] Oh, that's a prodigy.

[608] Yeah, yeah.

[609] Well, he, exactly, you know, he might have had the most, he might have had the most magnificent mathematical mind ever.

[610] And like, that's way out on the distribution, right?

[611] I mean, he had a huge impact on economic theory, by the way, and that was just a hobby.

[612] It was something he was doing out of his back pocket.

[613] It wasn't even one he really cared about.

[614] Yeah, exactly, exactly.

[615] And you meet people like that now and then, but not very often, you know, and they're so damn smart, you just can't bloody well believe it.

[616] And, and that's the case, you know, and then with regards to.

[617] socialization, you know, well, it's pretty easy to make someone dumber, but it's not that easy to make them smarter and for obvious reasons, you know, it's a lot easy to wreck something than it it is to improve it.

[618] And so that is the fact, this fact of that predetermination in some sense really is a sorrowful, what would you call it?

[619] It's a sorrowful fact.

[620] Yeah, a tragic reality might be one way of putting it that it's simply a given in our, in our nature, that we have to reckon with and the temptation to want to not see it and not accept it can be very powerful.

[621] Well, and I can understand exactly why, because, well, first of all, generally the people who discuss such things don't have a lot of hands -on experience with people in the bottom cessile, let's say, the bottom one -sixth.

[622] So they just don't know how much difference there is in the range.

[623] And I've administered IQ tests to all sorts of people, and you can't believe what people.

[624] people don't know and can't compute.

[625] It's it's beyond comprehension in some ways at the bottom but then also at the top I had a graduate student at Harvard.

[626] She didn't know anything about statistics when I first met her and four months later she was teaching statistics at a graduate level.

[627] She was unbelievable and she was almost that gifted verbally as well.

[628] Now she had some social problems that might have been associated with her remarkable cognitive ability.

[629] But you know, it was unreal.

[630] She made more progress in four months in the statistical realm than I did in 15 years.

[631] Okay, so there are differences amongst us at both ends of the spectrum, and we need to learn how to live with them.

[632] Yeah, well, part of it is to admit it, and to see if we can do that politically without getting, you know, bogged down in accusations and the weeds, and that's a real difficult thing to do.

[633] And it's not like I know exactly how to do it, but I'm not going to ignore what I learned, and I'm not going to ignore the social consequences of it.

[634] It's like life's a lot harder for people in the bottom 10 % of the cognitive distribution.

[635] There's no doubt about that.

[636] The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Charles Murray as a white supremacist.

[637] This is an organization that is a watchdog for a extremist.

[638] A white supremacist.

[639] I mean, not a lot of people are going to stick their head up out of the Fox if that's what's waiting for.

[640] Yeah, that's for sure.

[641] That's for sure.

[642] Well, you know, I would also say one other thing that, you know, would probably make me unpopular among psychologists, too, mostly.

[643] But there isn't a single phenomenon documented in the social sciences that we know more about than the psychometrics of cognitive ability.

[644] If you throw that out, you throw everything else out, because not the people who established psychometrics of intelligence also established all the statistical techniques that all social scientists use to assess and evaluate their data.

[645] You just don't get to throw it out.

[646] And that's also unfortunate because it's a dismal literature in many ways, because the differential between people is so unbelievably extreme, and it matters.

[647] Well, here's where we are in economics.

[648] There are people who are arguing in popular press and magazines and so forth that you shouldn't put a cognitive ability measure on the right -hand side of your regression.

[649] equation when you're trying to explain wage variation in the population.

[650] They think that that is a morally objectionable thing to do.

[651] Differences amongst people in earnings are to be understood in any way that you can other than by attributing them.

[652] It's completely idiotic.

[653] It's completely idiotic because part of, look, part of what puts you up in that upper end of the distribution is something like speed, right?

[654] So imagine there's some desirable place to get economically.

[655] Maybe you're designing computer chips.

[656] That's a good example.

[657] Well, if you're faster, you're going to get there sooner, and then you're going to reap the economic rewards.

[658] And that speed is assessed with G. It's a function of G, that computational speed.

[659] And so, and then, you know, you also might say, well, these damn tests are culture loaded.

[660] And that's a reasonable potential objection.

[661] But I've never seen a culture fair test that has the same validity.

[662] No one's ever been able to produce them.

[663] And basically, people gave up in the 1960s.

[664] The best they've ever come up with is the Ravens progressive matrices.

[665] And it's a pretty good...

[666] So imagine it took a bunch of single tests of intelligence, and then you got the manifold, which is the average across all tests.

[667] You could pick the test that correlated best with that manifold.

[668] And that's the Ravens Progressive Matricies.

[669] And so, and it produces differences.

[670] So, I don't know what to do with that.

[671] You know, you can't throw your hands up and say, well, it's insolvable, but you can't not take it into account because then you underestimate the burden that people at the bottom end of the distribution carry when they're trying to struggle uphill.

[672] You know, and you say, well, all you have to do is work hard because that's the conservative attitude.

[673] And conscientiousness is an indicator, it's personality trait.

[674] It's an indicator of work ethic, and it's correlated with economic outcome at about 0 .25.

[675] something like that.

[676] But cognitive ability is correlated at about 0 .5.

[677] So, yeah, hard work really matters, but doesn't matter as much as intelligence.

[678] So, yeah, you don't have to convince me. I'm, again, just struck by the political climate of the time and the fierce resistance to this kind of causal attribution to intrinsic characteristics of individuals, especially those under genetic control.

[679] And when you put it in a racial disparity context, then all bets are off.

[680] I mean, it just becomes impossible.

[681] Yeah, well, or it compels you to look for a deeper reason.

[682] You know, let me give you an example, a research example.

[683] I worked with Richard Tromblay, and he is one of the leading experts on the development of aggressive behavior, and he was trying to ameliorate it among children.

[684] and used interventions that got into younger and younger kids, and finally decided that to really ameliorate, it's a small minority of kids who produce all the aggressive acts, predidistribution, the same thing.

[685] They're almost, so it's quite cool, actually, if you're a scientist, I suppose.

[686] If you look at two -year -olds, you put them in a room, a small proportion of the two -year -olds will kick, bite, hit, and steal.

[687] It's only 5%, and almost all of them are male.

[688] now if you track those kids over the next two years most of them get socialized out of that those that don't tend to stay antisocial and develop criminal behavior later so it's socializable it can be rectified between two and four the problem was is that if that's the case imagine a government enterprise set up to ameliorate that gets pretty damn invasive when the government has to start figuring out how you're going to raise your two -year -old right So, and this cognitive ability problem might be something that's quite similar.

[689] Like, one of the things that's interesting about kids that become literate versus kids that don't, is that the kids that become literate are exposed to so many more books and words that you can hardly believe it.

[690] It's another perito distribution.

[691] And I see, you know, my kids, they were dragging books around when they were 12 months old, well before they could read, but they were familiarizing themselves with the objects.

[692] you know, and becoming friends with them in a kind of non -verbal way.

[693] And we don't know the, we don't know the pathway to that kind of, that kind of literacy or the nature of the relationship between that and the development of cognitive ability.

[694] Well, this is a much more hopeful vision, isn't it, a one in which there are perhaps not yet fully determined interventions that can ameliorate or compensate?

[695] That's like the glasses that I'm wearing that allow me to see despite my genital.

[696] genetic disability.

[697] I thought the spirit of Charles Murray and Richard Hearnstein in 1994, when the bell curve was published, was that sorry, but the best that we could determine these interventions, early childhood education, or whatever there might be, don't seem to be able to have much of an effect.

[698] So I studied that for about 20 years, looking at exactly that.

[699] And so the Head Start programs, they, what happened to kids who went through Head Start, the hope was that if you got kids early enough, you could give them a Head Start cognitively and that that would spiral upward, you know, in one of these positive loops.

[700] But that didn't happen.

[701] What happened was the kids who went to Head Start leapt ahead of their peers cognitively, but the peers caught up by grade 6 and all the differences disappeared, except the Head Start kids were less likely to drop out of school, to become criminal, and to become pregnant, you know, young.

[702] So it wasn't nothing, but it didn't work cognitively.

[703] But I looked into Head Start in more detail, you know.

[704] It was also a make -work program, so the people who were the Head Start teachers weren't necessarily particularly trained.

[705] It's really hard when you're dealing with, say, three -year -olds to get one -on -one time with them and teach them something like basic literacy because there's so many, if you have five, three -year -olds, It's like you're spending 90 % of your time making sure that they're alive, you know, dressing them and so forth.

[706] So the amount of time in Head Start that was actually devoted to cognitive training was minimal.

[707] And so we don't know, actually.

[708] We don't know yet.

[709] I don't think.

[710] Now, what about the ability to enhance other traits, not cognitive ability, but I don't know, perseverance or, you know, resilience or...

[711] Well, resilience.

[712] And compensate for the fact that they're not going to get any smarter at the cognitive thing, but they might actually get to be much more effective people by enhancing these other dimensions of their performance.

[713] Well, the fact that the Head Start kids didn't drop out of school probably reflected at least to some degree the fact that they behaved better.

[714] So they were more socialized.

[715] And the theory was that some of those kids were removed from pretty terrible environments and protected a bit by the fact that they were going to head start.

[716] They got socialized earlier, so they're able to interact in groups better.

[717] They weren't as disruptive in classrooms.

[718] So at the same level of cognitive ability, they were still more likely to get through school.

[719] And that wasn't nothing.

[720] And so, yes, some of those things are perhaps more ameliorable.

[721] Still not a simple thing because a lot of, you know, if that window for the socialization of aggressive behavior among aggressive boys is between two and four years of age, then that's, that's a tough place for governments to or society as such to intervene gets, you know, because it gets invasive.

[722] That's, and that's a big problem because you also don't want to encourage government overreach.

[723] Yeah.

[724] So, okay, let me ask you some more questions here.

[725] Yeah, one of the things I really got curious about when I was reading about you, you claimed in a speech to Oxford, not a claim, you said, you know, that your political views had really shifted a lot in your life, from left to center to right, and then back, I think, farther left than you were when you started.

[726] Is that an accurate description?

[727] Yeah, and then back right again, and I don't know if I'm farther right when I was when I was right before I was left.

[728] yeah that I have I have vacillated a little bit over the years and so what's what's driven that and what do you make of that because I've noticed as my political opinions have changed that I was just as convinced that I was right when I thought the opposite thing as I am now and so you know that sort of says more about me than the beliefs I suppose but what do you make of that shift well I think it's this is personal to me I think the story that I'm telling uh in the in the memoir that I'm working on now is that I needed to, let me start at the beginning.

[729] So I come up as a working class kid in Chicago, and I'm black, and it's the 1960s, 1970s.

[730] I'm sort of naturally a liberal Democrat by disposition or by, you know, osmosis, by the atmosphere.

[731] Everybody was.

[732] I get to graduate school and get a training in economics, and I get a green ice shade on, and I start, like wanting to do my sums.

[733] You know, I started like recognizing there's no free lunch, you know, that there are incentives, that, you know, there's unintended consequences that there's cause and effect.

[734] There's not a program for everything that we have to worry about inflation, that, et cetera.

[735] So I become more of a neoliberal, what they would call today, a neolera.

[736] I've become more of a free market economist.

[737] I've become more conservative.

[738] And Ronald Reagan comes along in early 1980s, and I'm one of the few black people on the planet who thought that he had it right more than he had it wrong about a lot of these questions.

[739] At the same time, I am observing what's going on in inner city America, in the big cities across the country.

[740] I grew up in Chicago, but I taught at the University of Michigan.

[741] I happen to know a little bit about Detroit.

[742] I can read the newspaper.

[743] I can see what's going on in Baltimore or St. Louis or Cleveland or Pittsburgh or New York or Los Angeles, whatever, the inner city, the ghettos, the violence, the schools that don't work, the out -of -wedlock berths, the low employment numbers, the culture that's coarse, and that's leading to a lot of dysfunction and a lot of problems.

[744] And I'm looking at the rhetoric of the Democratic Party or of the civil rights leadership, which seems to me to be kind of completely out of touch with reality.

[745] This is the early 1980s.

[746] And I find myself moving further and further to the right, and I end up a Reagan Republican.

[747] This is going to be short, the short version.

[748] I go through some profound life -changing traumatic experiences.

[749] I have a big public fall.

[750] I was up for a government job.

[751] I had to withdraw amid sexual scandal.

[752] I have a drug addiction problem.

[753] I get caught by the police and possession of illicit substances.

[754] I need to go into rehab.

[755] I spend months at a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.

[756] that's trying to learn how to not use cocaine.

[757] I come out of that through a religious conversion.

[758] I mean, the plot thickens.

[759] I'm a born -again Christian now.

[760] I'm a recovering cocaine addict.

[761] I'm a, you know, a bad boy, black conservative who was given his comeuppance with his public humiliation.

[762] And I begin to rethink my politics moving in the left direction, in part, I think, under the pressure of just wanting to be, able to go home again, just wanting to find a place where I could be comfortable within my own skin, in part, perhaps because I had some misgivings about some of the, you know, dimensions of the conservative political frame that was writing off people at the bottom and not thinking hard enough as you and I have been trying to think in this conversation about what could really be done.

[763] So I find myself moving back to the left again.

[764] But then we get to like 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 14, things like the Michael Brown thing and Ferguson, Missouri, and the Trayvon Martin thing in Sanford, Florida, and the Eric Garner thing, in Staten Island, New York, and the Tamir Rice thing in Cleveland, Ohio, and all of that.

[765] And the Black Lives Matter movement comes up.

[766] and the woke anti -racism movement comes up.

[767] And now I find myself, it's like deja vu all over again.

[768] I find myself a throne back to the 1980s, and the instinct within me is to resist, resist, resist the political correctness.

[769] So some of that is you moving in your life, but some of that is the political landscape also shifting around you, which is continuing.

[770] So on racial issues, the political landscape shifts hard to the left.

[771] And I find myself, again, I find myself lamenting some of the earlier changes when I said, you know, my feelings about affirmative action, which I was instinctively against before I was for it, before I was against it, my feelings, maybe they were right all along in the first place.

[772] Maybe I should not have broken my friendship with Justice Clarence Thomas over the California Civil Rights Initiative of 1996, which banned affirmative action in the state.

[773] The Justice and I, who were friends, decided that we were not going to talk again because I could not support the anti -affirmative action move at that time.

[774] Ten years earlier, I would have supported it.

[775] Today, I would support it.

[776] Yeah, well, it's a tough question that, and that's a really tough question.

[777] So it's no wonder, you know, that a thoughtful person might vacillate on that because there are profound things to be said on both sides of that argument.

[778] Can I ask you, and you don't have to answer this, but I guess it's the clinician in me. So I studied alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction as my primary research topic when I was a grad student.

[779] And one of the things that was well known among alcoholism researchers at that time and hard -edged researchers was that religious transformation was about the only reliable treatment, so to speak, for alcoholism.

[780] No alcoholism treatment programs work.

[781] And that's still the truth today, no matter what people say, they just don't work.

[782] That doesn't mean people don't stop because they do.

[783] but spiritual transformation seems to be a ticket out of drug addiction.

[784] And it's interesting in that regard, for example, that Roland Griffiths and his team investigating psychedelic mushroom psilocybin have shown that one dose producing a mystical experience produces 75 % permanent cessation in smokers.

[785] Most powerful pharmacological intervention.

[786] It's unbelievable.

[787] And that's not, he's done all sorts of other interesting, and he's a hard -edged research scientist.

[788] This guy's no, like, pie in the sky, mystic.

[789] It's really something.

[790] There's really something to this that we don't understand.

[791] And could I ask you, you said you were struggling with addiction problems, that's a catastrophe.

[792] And you had this religious transformation.

[793] What was that exactly?

[794] And why do you think it was relevant to the drug abuse issue?

[795] Well, why did it help you stop?

[796] Okay, I'm not sure I know the answer to the question, but I understand the question.

[797] And there were really two dimensions to my spiritual experience in the late 1980s when I was a cocaine addict, and it was killing me. It was killing me. One of them was explicitly religious.

[798] I was born again.

[799] I became a born again Christian.

[800] I was baptized at the age of 40.

[801] I came to believe that our Lord and Savior, Jesus.

[802] Christ, as we would have put it, died for me personally, Glenn Lowry, and that there was a path to my having a relationship with Almighty God through my belief in Jesus Christ.

[803] Now, I'm not trying to proselytize here.

[804] I actually don't have the same degree of religious fervor contemporary in my life now as I did at that time.

[805] But I came to believe that.

[806] The other thing that was of spiritual significance for me was the Alcoholics Anonymous program, you know, the 12 steps.

[807] You know, that I was an alcoholic in my life had become unmanageable.

[808] I came to believe that a power greater than myself could restore me. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood him.

[809] And one day at a time, I was going to not drink.

[810] I was going to talk to my sponsor.

[811] I was going to go to my meetings.

[812] I was going to deal with whatever came up in life without drinking because I know that I'm an alcoholic and my life had become unmanageable and et cetera, et cetera.

[813] Right, right.

[814] Yeah, well, that was a program has a strong spiritual slash religious underpinning.

[815] And that's part of the influence of.

[816] Carl Jung, who was instrumental as a thinker.

[817] Yes, yes.

[818] The person who set up AA was in correspondence with Jung quite intensely.

[819] And so it's influenced a lot by his thoughts about the psychology of religion.

[820] And if you ask, I just want to respond to your question, which was what did the spirituality do for me?

[821] And it took me out of myself.

[822] It made me humble.

[823] And it made me patient.

[824] And it made me wanting to stifle, stifle myself and to just, you know, you know, let go and let God.

[825] That was another one of the bumper stickers that we used to have, that I was my own worst enemy, that I needed to surrender, that it was a kind of radical humility in it.

[826] Yeah, well, you need that radical humility if you're dealing with an addiction problem.

[827] There's no doubt about that, because that's a wicked devil to have in your head.

[828] And if there's any arrogance and pride in you, that's going to be a real obstacle to any healthful recovery.

[829] that's for sure.

[830] Yeah.

[831] I'll tell you a story if you've got time.

[832] I'm in the halfway house and it's run by this grizzled old Irishman.

[833] Bob Brown is his name and he's been getting men sober for a quarter century and I'm in this halfway house with drunks who've been sleeping in boxes in the subway station and people just come out of prison and just get out of the detox and whatnot and I'm the only professor in the halfway house.

[834] So one day, Bob Brown is listening to me interact with a consular and I'm snowing the consular with how much I know about the 12 -step program because I know because I'm a professor and I have read the book and I know it all.

[835] Okay.

[836] And Bob Brown, he turns to me, the director, he overrides the consular and he says, you know what, Professor Lowry?

[837] If you're so smart, answer me this.

[838] What were you doing out there in the streets of Boston showing your ass just like an N -word from the projects.

[839] He didn't say N -word.

[840] This is a white guy.

[841] He's an Irishman.

[842] He confronted me with this slur and this insult.

[843] I'm a professor at Harvard University, and this guy is talking to me like I was, you know, an N -word from the project.

[844] And my first instinct, this is just the point about stifling yourself and about radical humility.

[845] My first impulse was to strike him, but then I looked at he stood 6 '3 and he weighed 280 pounds, so I decided against that.

[846] That seems wise.

[847] My next alternative was to blow from the house.

[848] I didn't need to be there.

[849] There was no law keeping me there to hell with him.

[850] I'm not going to allow anybody to talk to me like that.

[851] But my Christian teaching allowed me to see that I did not know the answer to the question.

[852] The question was, what was I doing?

[853] out there doing what I was doing.

[854] I had no idea what I was doing.

[855] Yeah, well, and a more specific question, right, is like, clearly you're smart.

[856] And so how do you reconcile the gap there?

[857] And that's like, that's a big question.

[858] And intelligence is not wisdom.

[859] That's for sure.

[860] Okay.

[861] And so I decided that I had better stay put right where I was in that halfway house.

[862] I took it.

[863] I took the insult without comment.

[864] I stayed there for another five months, and I haven't used cocaine since.

[865] That was 1989.

[866] How did you have the confidence to regain your position and to re -adopt it after having gone through that cataclysmic experience?

[867] I had the loving support of my wife, Linda Lowry, who is no longer living.

[868] She died 11 years ago.

[869] I had the very strong support of Harvard University and of my colleagues and friends there who continued to afford me the opportunity to show that I was worth it.

[870] damn and that I could get it back together again.

[871] I ultimately left and moved across the street to Boston University, a very fine place, and I had a good job there.

[872] And I left in a way because they were so nice to me at Harvard.

[873] I couldn't bear it.

[874] I mean, I felt like I didn't deserve it.

[875] Yeah, exactly.

[876] I didn't deserve their forgiveness at some love.

[877] I wanted to strike out and start again someplace on my own.

[878] I didn't want to let them be as nice to me as they were being.

[879] But I had support is one thing that I'm having.

[880] The other thing is I got back to science.

[881] I had been drifting into a political, I was a big public intellectual in the 1980s.

[882] I was writing in Commentary Magazine and in the New Republic magazine when it was a place worth writing in.

[883] And other such venues.

[884] And I had friends in the Reagan administration.

[885] I was friends with people like the would be soon to be Justice Thomas.

[886] and many others.

[887] I was a high -flying, conservative, black intellectual.

[888] And, you know, I, actually, I forgot, I forgot what I was saying.

[889] You were saying you got back to the science.

[890] Oh, that's it.

[891] Exactly.

[892] Exactly.

[893] I said to hell with all this newspaper stuff, to all these arguments with all these people, let me just try to remind myself what I, what I, what I fell in love with when I became an economist in the first place.

[894] I had four papers in the American Economic Review in 1993.

[895] You know, I mean, so that's basically the equivalent for those who are listening.

[896] That's kind of like the equivalent of doing a whole PhD in one year, I would say, because you can get a PhD with three papers if they're well crafted.

[897] So that's about what that is.

[898] And I was publishing up a storm between 93 and 96, 97.

[899] I published, you know, six or seven really strong papers that got thousands of citations and stuff like that.

[900] Even to this day, these papers are cited.

[901] So I went back to doing economics, and that, I think, allowed me to get my feet under myself and get grounded again.

[902] And I eventually have come back to doing public intellectual work, obviously.

[903] But in those years, I...

[904] Why have you come back?

[905] And, like, you have a YouTube channel, and maybe we can close the discussion with this.

[906] This is kind of where I wanted to close.

[907] You are a public figure again.

[908] You have a YouTube channel and a podcast, You're trying to speak directly to the public again.

[909] And why are you driven to do that?

[910] And how is it going?

[911] It's going okay, I think.

[912] The Glenn Lowry Show, it's the YouTube channel, and glenlawry .substack is the newsletter.

[913] And, yeah, we're putting out content every week, and we've got, you know, some followers and whatnot.

[914] I, you know, I'm able to see that if Brown University were to somehow find a way of getting me off the payroll, I might still be able to make a living out here in the world because there are people who are following and who want to support.

[915] So that's all good and it's gratifying.

[916] I'm on a mission, Jordan, and I'm glad you asked.

[917] I do collaborate with John McWhorter.

[918] He's a five guy.

[919] He writes for The New York Times.

[920] He teaches at Columbia University.

[921] And twice a month, he and I hold forth.

[922] The other two weeks a month, I will have other guests.

[923] We call ourselves the woke busters.

[924] Now, some people object.

[925] They say, oh, that doesn't rhyme with Ghostbuster.

[926] But it captures the idea.

[927] The idea is the world has gone mad.

[928] The race questions on diversity, equity, and inclusion, on systemic racism, on cultural appropriations, on microaggressions, on whatever.

[929] The world has gone mad, completely mad.

[930] The universities are in danger.

[931] This is me. I don't want to speak for John McWhorter, but I don't think he disagrees with this because the barbarians are at the gates.

[932] No, they've overrun the gates and they approach the Citadel.

[933] They are a threat to the great tradition.

[934] I got some good news for you then.

[935] Yeah, help me out.

[936] Well, you know, I got disinvited to Cambridge University two years ago, two and a half years ago.

[937] I was going to go there and study with some of their experts on Exodus because I wanted to do a public lecture series on Exodus.

[938] and a picture of me surfaced with this guy.

[939] I had like 15 ,000 photos of me taken with people that year, by the way.

[940] Anyways, he wore a T -shirt that had criticisms of Islam on it, and that surfaced, and they disinvited me, and I found out about it on Twitter, which wasn't the best way to find out about it.

[941] In any case, people have been working behind the scenes since then to modify the free speech policies at Cambridge, to make it impossible to disinvite someone unless they're doing something illegal.

[942] And that passed with a full vote of the faculty.

[943] 85 % of them voted in favor of it, and it looks like there is going to be similar adjustments made to UK law.

[944] Oh, that's fantastic.

[945] Was it Oz Guinness that you were going to work with?

[946] No, it was James Orr and Nigel Bigger primarily.

[947] Oh, I see.

[948] I just saw a book of Oz Guinness called the Man. Magna Carta of Humanity, which argues about the book of Exodus, that it's a foundational Oh, oh, I should know that book, then I should write that down.

[949] What's it called?

[950] It's called the Magna Carta of Humanity, and the author is Oz Guinness.

[951] Oz Guinness.

[952] Okay, I will look that up.

[953] Yeah, well, it's a fundamental transformation narrative Exodus, and it was, I wouldn't have been able to go anyways because I was too ill, and so was my wife, but that's beside the point.

[954] But, you know, this is a very positive thing, this development.

[955] And hopefully, well, hopefully it will become UK law.

[956] That is the plan, whether the legislation will pass.

[957] And that will also set up an ombudsman, as I understand, outside the university system.

[958] So if a professor gets nailed by the politically correct types or right -wing conservatives, for that matter, it won't matter.

[959] And he or she will have recourse to this ombudsman to see if the fundamental right to free speech at UK universities has been violated.

[960] and so it'll well so that's all part of it and so this is good news and well you're a trailblazer in that regard and may whatever has struck in Cambridge catch over here i just heard about this guy from chicago uh the planetary scientists it was given a lecture at to give this big name lecture at MIT who was canceled because he had spoken out in a magazine about affirmative action which he says, you know, let's not do that by race.

[961] Let's, you know, do it on the basis of individual qualification.

[962] This is a defensible position, it seems to me, but certainly not something a person should be canceled for, but so sensitive are the guardians of virtue at these places that they're able to get away with that kind of thing now.

[963] Yeah, yeah.

[964] Well, it's become bureaucratized to a large degree, too.

[965] And, you know, part of that's the faculty's fault, too, because my observation of universities is that faculty, the faculty has allowed administrative creep for about three decades without doing anything about it because it was easier not to.

[966] And so, you know, I think as a faculty member, I regard all of us to blame for precisely this, this tremendous growth in administration and the evolution of these DEI empires, especially in HR.

[967] Yeah, well.

[968] You asked me, you know, what I was, why I was being a public intellectual again and what I hope to accomplish.

[969] And I just wanted to add that after George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, the police officer in Minneapolis, and there were protests that broke out in cities around the world, and especially cities around the United States.

[970] And some of those protests turned violent.

[971] And there was riotous behavior and assaults on police officers, and there was arson and looting.

[972] and there was general disorder and it's a big political football and people are on all sides of it and they're defenders of it and so forth and so on.

[973] But it occurred to me that I did not even know that the incident that happened with a white police officer and the black gentleman who died, who was killed, was a racial incident.

[974] I say I did not know that it was a racial incident.

[975] All I knew was that the police officer was white and that the man who was killed was black.

[976] It didn't follow from that that it was a racial incident.

[977] We were making it into a racial incident, we being all of us here in the United States, we were making it into a reenactment of old American dramas of lynching and the murder of black people by rogue police and so forth and so on.

[978] We took that thing and we said, yes, see, here we have proof of the knee on the neck of black America.

[979] That's what Al Sharpton, the act.

[980] activist said at the funeral of Joyfully, he said, America has its knee on our neck.

[981] And I thought this great country of 330 million people with 40 million black people.

[982] And here we are 150 years after slavery and a half century since Martin Luther King was killed.

[983] Really, that's going to be the narrative for our country's politics for the next decade, for the next 15 years.

[984] This is what we're going to teach to our children.

[985] This is how we're going to arrange our media coverage of these events.

[986] This is, that's a disaster for this country.

[987] Okay, so how can you say that when you also have spoken so eloquently on topics such as the differential incarceration rate?

[988] This is not an assault on your statement, by the way.

[989] I'm very curious because obviously, you know, you've spoken profoundly about the danger of that differential incarceration rate.

[990] And you can see that it's not that easy to concept.

[991] disentangle, especially if you're politically motivated, but even if you're not, an event like that from that broader narrative that something, you know, something's not right structurally, and perhaps this is a reflection of it.

[992] But, well, so I don't know how to reconcile those two viewpoints.

[993] I don't know how you reconcile them.

[994] With difficulty, I suppose I could say, because they do point in slightly different, maybe even more than slightly different directions, but I'm trying to keep my perspective.

[995] Right.

[996] I do think that the advent of what they call mass incarceration, two and a quarter million people under Lock and Key on a given day, half of them are 45 % of them being black people when we are 12 % of the population as a way of doing business going forward without any sense of urgency of reform, without any revisiting of our drug laws or our sentencing or whatever, without any attention to what is.

[997] supposed to happen when someone is in prison, rehabilitation, and whatnot, without any exploration of alternatives to incarceration as ways of responding to criminal offending is bad for our country.

[998] I do believe that.

[999] And I believe the racial aspect of that echoes with our history in ways that are dangerous and that we dare not neglect.

[1000] I'm the same guy.

[1001] On the other hand, I think if you racialized the discussion of crime and punishment, there was the woman who was murdered at Columbia University a few years ago.

[1002] And her, she was killed by these kids who were just trying to rob her and they ended up stabbing her to death.

[1003] She was white.

[1004] She was, you know, I'm sorry, I don't remember her name offhand.

[1005] But, you know, she was a lovely young woman and innocent is how she's going to appear in the photograph.

[1006] And she certainly did nothing to deserve what befell her.

[1007] She was white.

[1008] The kids who killed.

[1009] That's the other side of it.

[1010] Yeah, right.

[1011] Tessa.

[1012] Tessa, something, is her last name, I can't recall.

[1013] The kids who killed her were black kids from around Harlem.

[1014] They were in the park.

[1015] They were looking for a quick score.

[1016] They had a knife.

[1017] The woman is lying.

[1018] She bleeds out.

[1019] Now they've convicted.

[1020] One of them has been convicted.

[1021] And I'm looking at the photo in the newspaper.

[1022] Here's this black kid.

[1023] He looks like a black kid who's 16, 18 years old.

[1024] He's a kid.

[1025] He's from this impoverished neighborhood.

[1026] He's black.

[1027] And the woman is white.

[1028] I don't want that incident processed in terms of black kid murder is white woman.

[1029] Yeah, yeah.

[1030] Okay.

[1031] So maybe it's an issue.

[1032] Maybe it's an issue of careless conflation of levels of analysis, hey, because you're talking about a high -resolution analysis of structural problems in the penal system.

[1033] And to put that George Floyd event, to cram that into the same narrative, sort of be speaks of undifferentiated thought.

[1034] And so, and then you point out that the danger of that is, well, if you're going to racialize the white cop against the black, black victim of the, of the homicide, well, then why can't the same thing be done exactly the same way when the reverse happens?

[1035] And maybe we shouldn't do any, or we should do as little of that as we possibly can.

[1036] That doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look at these bigger structural issues, but we shouldn't cram it all together in one thing, because it's not.

[1037] That's very well put, Jordan.

[1038] That's exactly what I'm trying to say.

[1039] said it better than I did.

[1040] Well, I listened to you, so that was a big help.

[1041] By the way, if we do cram it all in the one thing, God help us because there are people, and they're not going to speak out.

[1042] There are people who will see it, process it just as I hope they would not do black, thug, murderous, innocent white girl, and harbor a resentment and nurse that resentment.

[1043] And that's a tinder box, that's a powder keg waiting to be lit.

[1044] And we can dismiss it if we want to, but those people are not entirely wrong in their sentiment.

[1045] They need to be disabused of that instinct, that instinct to conflate those levels of analysis.

[1046] Yeah, yeah.

[1047] Yeah, well, that's part of the problem I have with ideology is that that's, ideology is so low resolution.

[1048] It does that conflation, it doesn't notice.

[1049] And when you get educated, you start differentiating.

[1050] It's like, and that's kind of what you said happened to you when you became more conservative.

[1051] Once you got more educated, it's like, oh, oh, this is, when I take this apart and see all the moving pieces, this is way more complex than my low -resolution representation guided me to believe to begin with.

[1052] And that's, I mean, I've experienced that many times in my life when I tried to take problems apart so they could be solved instead of just discussed, let's say.

[1053] You have to make a high -resolution model before you can get anywhere.

[1054] That's true in clinical practice, and I think it's true in public policy.

[1055] And partly what we're doing when we're educating people, if we're doing it right, is saying, hey, you know, you've got a map of the world, but it's not very detailed.

[1056] And when you really look at it, well, you know, here's the complexity.

[1057] And that's what we're actually contending with.

[1058] People don't like that because, well, it's complex, right?

[1059] You have the simple solution at hand to begin with.

[1060] But the problem is it, it isn't the right tool for the job.

[1061] You've got to make it high resolution.

[1062] Now, it takes a lot of work.

[1063] So thank you very much for talking to me today.

[1064] It was a real pleasure discussing things with you, and I probably talk too much because I usually do, but I apologize for that.

[1065] I enjoyed you very much.

[1066] Nice to meet you, Jordan.

[1067] Thank you.

[1068] It was a pleasure meeting you, and good luck with your endeavors in the future.

[1069] Hopefully we'll meet at some point, and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again and say hi to Dr. McWhorter for me. I will do that.

[1070] All right.

[1071] So long.

[1072] All right.

[1073] No, no.