In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Amanda Ripley, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams explore whether Trump has succeeded in remaking American culture in his image, the rise of white identity politics and its psychological drivers, and how America might break free from cycles of political revenge and backlash.

Amanda Ripley is the founder of Good Conflict. Her latest book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.

Jesse Singal is the co-host of Blocked and Reported and the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is Summer of Our Discontent.

Will you be in London on Sunday, September 6? I’ll be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought to mark the publication of his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the Sekforde at 5pm. Find out more and book tickets here. Paying subscribers can access a code for free tickets here. —Yascha

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

NEW: You can now watch the episode below! All episodes of The Good Fight are now on the Persuasion YouTube channel.

Yascha Mounk: It strikes me that we’re in a strange, frenetic moment in American culture that also is a kind of weird interlude. Around 2024 and 2025, there was the much-discussed vibe shift, which is part of what got Donald Trump elected. When I look at other countries in which figures who resemble Trump in certain ways came to office, some of them were really able to enjoy a kind of cultural victory—imposing their values on a large swath of the public and becoming the default mainstream way of thinking about the country. I would argue—and I’ll see whether you disagree with me—that in the second year of his presidency, it is already quite clear that Trump has failed at doing that. Whatever the vibe shift felt like 14 or 15 months ago, with a lot of young people, a lot of Latinos, et cetera, voting for Trump, it does not feel like Trump is remaking all of America in his own image. Obviously his administration is using executive orders and his power very aggressively to change institutions and do all kinds of things, but it doesn’t feel like Trump is managing to remake the country in his image. So where is American culture going? Thomas, how should we think through this?

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Politically, I agree with you, but on a cultural level, I think one of the lasting impacts of this new Trump era—Trump 2.0—is that white Americans have gone all in on claiming a standpoint position for themselves. They are getting involved in the kind of battle royale of identity and declaring that they’re not neutral, that white culture and white identity is not the atmosphere that everybody moves in. White identity is racialized, and they want to advocate for themselves as such. Jeremy Carl’s testimony before the Senate, when he was asked by Senator Murphy of Connecticut what he meant by white culture and white identity, is instructive here. He said he was advocating for heritage Americans and that they had been really harmed by immigration. I think this is going to be a lasting change: white Americans—a diminishing majority, but still a large numerical part of the population—are now going to be participating in the game of anti-racism that was really installed in the past 10 to 15 years during the Great Awokening. I think that is going to be, lastingly, to the detriment of society.

Mounk: That’s really interesting. Eric Kaufmann has this point in Whiteshift where he talks about asymmetrical multiculturalism. The idea is that there’s this kind of encouragement of taking pride in your group for all of the minority groups, and Kaufman’s point was that that’s unsustainable—eventually, the white majority group is going to say that’s the way the game is played, and they’re also going to take pride of place. I think Eric felt that was a kind of natural downstream effect and we should just embrace that. I was always much more worried about it. But perhaps it turns out that he’s right about the natural tendency of society. That’s kind of what we’ve been saying, Thomas—that we’ve now gotten to the point where multiculturalism is no longer asymmetrical, and whites as an identity group are playing the same game. Amanda, that would be bad for a modern society, would it not?

Amanda Ripley: What we’re saying is that in some ways Trump has imposed potentially lasting cultural shifts on the country, and in other ways he has not. I think one of the biggest challenges of dealing with someone like Trump is that in trying to oppose him, you can end up playing the very same game and thereby perpetuate it. It’s very tricky not to do that.

More than anything else this cycle, the thing that I’m frustrated by in the way that we’re covering culture and politics is that we’re not talking about the psychology of it. The psychology of Trump is about the addiction to revenge-seeking. It’s not just Trump. This is why Fox News is successful. It’s why many media outlets are successful. It’s less about outrage and more about revenge. Revenge operates in a really interesting way in the brain, and we’re just starting to understand this. It is addictive. There is a way in which you can see everything as a grievance and then, feeling aggrieved, seek revenge. A lot of our media outlets and politicians on both the right and the left are now not just giving us grievances—which they’ve done for a very long time—but also serving up a revenge fantasy.

That’s what you see with the gerrymandering race to the bottom. That’s what you see with the coarsening of the rhetoric: if you did it, then I’m going to do it—this tit-for-tat cycle that leads to endless revenge. The research is also very clear that to get out of that, you have to play a very different game. You can’t just do the same thing, or you perpetuate it. The ways in which Trumpism is likely to endure have to do with that psychological piece as much as the bigger, more obvious changes he’s imposing on our norms and institutions.

Jesse Singal: On this whitelash question, I may be skeptical of the extent of it. Persuadable voters who voted for Trump voted for him for a lot of reasons, and I think a lot of those reasons are a little bit obscured to people like us. This won’t be news to the panel or to anyone listening, but voters just make these decisions in a very different way from the way we do. It’s less ideological and more vibes-driven. Looking at the graph of Trump’s disapproval rate on Nate Silver’s website, he’s having an extremely bad presidency from a public opinion standpoint. So I think if there were any real appetite for asserting a white identity—maybe I’m just skeptical—I think there are some bad actors in and around his administration who want that, and there are certainly some online influencers who want that, not least the vice president. The memes alone posted by DHS and others are very creepy and white nationalist-coded, and I say that as someone who is often skeptical of claims of racism. They’re bizarre and they harken back to an America that never really existed. But I think there’s this problem that a lot of politicians have between telling the difference between what the people want and what their creepiest online fans want. I don’t think there’s a huge market for this stuff among the general public.

What we’re seeing is what feels like an exhausted democracy that’s going to keep barely electing people, then quickly getting mad at them, then moving on to the next person. It’s all pretty dark, but I think it’s maybe more complex than white identity reasserting itself.

Mounk: Let’s separate out two different things. One point is that the vibe shift, when it was happening, was remarkable in part because it went beyond white voters. The number of black voters who voted for Trump in 2024 was double the number who had voted for him in 2016. The number of Asian-American voters who voted for him was going up a lot. Numerically, the most important group that increased the vote for him was Latino voters. There was a feeling that the whole society was sufficiently disappointed in the Biden presidency and perhaps saw something in the second promise of Trump that made them willing to make that jump.

The second point is that perhaps we have to distinguish between the kind of white nationalist, creepy DHS images and so on—which I think is a very real theme of this administration—and a broader kind of social logic. I’d agree with Jesse that that’s certainly not the driving force of most of the people who voted for Trump. It’s just become such a part of American life—this natural reference to identity all the time—that perhaps it becomes natural for white people to identify themselves in that way. It doesn’t have to be as creepy as the DHS memes. The form that white self-identification takes doesn’t need to be as extreme as that. But I would still be quite worried if that becomes the default form of expression in the country in general, and particularly for the white majority group, even if it doesn’t take the form of the craziest meme on the DHS Twitter feed.

Williams: That’s right. I think that’s what JD Vance is trying to slip into the common parlance when he talks about heritage Americans—this desire to be able to speak as a heritage American and make claims to grievance that then get you special privileges or consideration in the zero-sum competition for status and prestige in the society. I think it operates along the lines of the logic of mimetic desire that René Girard talks about. After all of this time that groups have been advocating for themselves as a group, a lot of white Americans want that too now. That desire has become mimetically replicated among a lot of whites. I think Trump really did act as a kind of tribune for these people, even as he excited some working-class and downwardly mobile minorities and less educated minorities as well.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Whiteness is really much more complicated in the 21st century than it was in previous eras of American history. One of the most prominent spokesmen for white nationalism is Nick Fuentes, who admits to his followers that he’s not only part Mexican but may very well have African ancestry. This stuff is complex.

Mounk: Jordan Bardella, who may well be the next president of France, is mostly an Italian immigrant to France. It’s already interesting that the leader of the far right is an immigrant from a neighboring European country. A little known fact in the United States is that he’s also partially of North African ancestry.

Williams: This stuff is going to get weirder and weirder. I think that Trump—and some of the voices of white identity would agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates on this—is the first white president.

Singal: What concerns me, in terms of trying to figure out how this happened again, is that some of this talk may distract from one of the biggest drivers of Trump’s second election, which was the border crisis. There was a genuine border crisis, and wanting a secure border is not just a white point of view. Most Americans want a secure border and are perhaps comfortable with some deportations, but are not comfortable with what Trump is doing. There is a lot of talk about the connection between Trump and white nationalism, and I get that, especially in this second and creepier term. But perhaps one of the lessons is that we simply need a normal, moderate immigration policy—which people in Biden’s orbit, by the end of his presidency, realized they had gotten catastrophically wrong. That framing brings the conversation down to something more tractable: what can Democrats do, and how should they message? The white identity framing, which I agree is menacing and weird, is perhaps a little tricky to pin onto specific political outcomes.

Ripley: What Thomas said earlier—about zero-sum thinking and the search for status—is important. That can take a lot of different forms. In our country, it is often about race; in other countries, it’s more about religion, class, or other things.

To bring us back to reality: Jesse, I think you’re right. Lee Drutman, a political scientist whose Substack I really love—he wrote Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop a couple of years ago—was recently arguing that the biggest mistake Democrats are about to make is thinking that a backlash against Trump and the GOP means endorsement of the Democratic Party. This is what we keep seeing over and over: this nauseating swing back and forth. Public opinion always moves against the party in power. Every president since FDR who has had control of Congress has also lost seats in the midterms.

So then what? What does anyone who cares about this country and wants to get out of this never-ending cycle do? We know a couple of things. We know that about 80% of Americans believe we’re in a political crisis. Almost half the country now identifies as independent. Americans don’t just dislike both parties—they want more of them. This is what Lee has been arguing for a very long time: that one way to exit this roller coaster is to promise—whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat—that if elected, you will give Americans more parties and move toward proportional representation, which is actually achievable. It doesn’t require a constitutional amendment.

Mounk: Lee is an old friend and we were colleagues at New America for many years. I think the idea of proportional representation in America is deeply foolish for two reasons. The first is that the causes of political fragmentation are much deeper than the electoral system. You see it just as strongly in Germany, in Spain, obviously in Israel, obviously in Italy—countries that have systems of proportional representation, or, in the case of Italy, ran away from a system of proportional representation because of the chaos it was causing. More fundamentally, it is a complete pipe dream to think you can have proportional representation in the United States, because the only chamber in which you could have it is the House of Representatives. To have proportional representation in one chamber—the least powerful chamber—would probably mean five, six, or ten different political parties in the House, while the Senate would still be controlled by two parties, since by definition you’re electing one senator per state per election. The presidency would have a very bimodal outcome. I think that would make America far less governable than it already is.

The more profound question is this. I agree on the thermostatic voting—which is the political science term for this, though I think it’s a dumb term; I’m not sure what a thermostat has to do with it. The idea is that public opinion always moves against the president. Because of gerrymandering, the primary system, social media, and the donor class, each party always goes way overboard, putting in place what the activists want rather than what average voters want. Voters say they hate the people in power, give the other side a try, the other side goes too extreme, and then voters say they hate that even more and put the original people back. That is a huge problem and a huge danger for Democrats in 2028. At this point, I think Democrats will likely win the midterms and may well win 2028. I’m very worried about what is going to happen in 2032 if they get it wrong once again.

I have a more fundamental question: has the basis for any kind of social cohesion just gone away? In my optimistic moments, I look at the opinion polls on immigration, on America’s relationship to its history, on what should be taught in schools, on trans rights, and on all of these issues, and the average American has a very reasonable opinion. The average American is pretty tolerant and pretty sensible. Perhaps we can finally find somebody who actually governs in the name of that majority and escape this spiral of polarization. In my less optimistic moments, I think our society is now so fragmented—with so many different ideological tribes, so many people getting information from such different sources—that the basic mechanisms of our public discourse are driving people toward polarization to an extent that we’re never going to have a mainstream big enough to keep our parties together again. What do you think?

Ripley: I totally agree, Yascha, that our problems run way deeper than a winner-take-all system. In many countries that have proportional representation, you still see very serious polarization. On average, countries that have multiple parties and proportional representation are less polarized than countries that don’t—but there are so many factors there, to your point. It’s not the solution. It’s one of many things we need to do to get outside of the game we’re in. We can’t keep doing this. We have to do something very different that Americans can see is very different, because average Americans are not represented in Congress. That’s not how primaries work. One of the reasons primaries are the way they are is because of gerrymandered districts.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

The phrase gerrymandering comes from a Massachusetts Democrat whose last name was actually Gerry, who carved up the districts into something that a political cartoonist thought looked like a salamander—combining those words to make “gerrymandering.” This has been going on for a long time. But there are three big differences now. One is the sophistication of the mapping and the tools used to carve up districts. The second is our profound contempt for one another—these revenge cycles that make us very vulnerable to thinking the only option is scorched earth and extreme measures like gerrymandering. The third is the Supreme Court, which has abdicated any role in keeping campaign fundraising and gerrymandering under control. A lot of these things need to get fixed. One way to prevent the splitting we are doing—dividing the world cleanly into good and evil—is to mix it up and have more than two choices.

Mounk: Jesse, Thomas—you can choose to speak to this more narrow institutional debate or to the broader point. Is there still a kind of American mainstream, a reasonable voter that some political force could successfully speak to and mobilize? Does the center still hold in American society more broadly?

Williams: Whether the center holds is really dependent on having the right kind of politician who can articulate ideas in a way that reaches that broad and sensible center. There is a center-left and center-right that’s not entirely comfortable with the extreme rhetoric and constant warfare of contemporary political culture. But it would require somebody who has a lot more talent than what we’ve been seeing.

Barack Obama was clearly able to reach Americans on a rhetorical level that inspired a certain amount of hatred and animosity, but also really inspired a lot of Americans to exercise their better tendencies, especially in the first term. He’s still quite popular. That’s asking a lot of a candidate, and I don’t see that kind of talent on the Democratic side at all. A lot of Americans could also be relieved to vote for somebody with the sensibility of Mitt Romney, if that were on offer from the right. I think a lot of people would like to turn the temperature down. What do you think, Jesse?

Singal: It’s interesting that a lot of the most charismatic politicians—and I’d put folks like AOC and Mamdani in that camp—have a lot of baggage from having said radical things, and they don’t really do the Obama style. They’re probably capable of that sort of rhetoric, and I think we’re going to see them shift toward it as their ambitions get higher. Obama is a generational political figure, but to answer the question: we’re not so broken that we couldn’t see another Obama type who talks in sweeping, unifying terms from a center-left perspective. In other ways, though, we’re experiencing runaway fragmentation that is not going to get better. The idea of a truly shared culture—beyond the Super Bowl and Bad Bunny—seems increasingly remote. There will be a few super-culture attractors that most people know, but I don’t think we’re going back to any sort of shared culture in terms of people’s day-to-day consumption of music, art, political figures, and so on. To the extent there are superstar political streamers, they tend to be hyper-partisan, which is a problem. So mostly I’m pessimistic about this whole America thing.

Mounk: There are surveys which show that in the 1980s, when you asked people who the most famous actor was, the answer was someone in their 20s. The same was true in the 1990s. Then the age started going up. The reason is that when Matt Damon, George Clooney, and those figures were first in the big movies, everybody was talking about those movies—they were central to American culture, and so those actors reached a degree of celebrity that goes beyond what Timothée Chalamet now enjoys. The common basis for that shared culture has eroded over the last few years because of technological developments.

I want to segue into the second topic I loosely thought we would talk about today, which is how the Democrats are reacting to all of this. We have the failed vibe shift of a few years ago and the recognition—which I think is valid—that Trump is actually starting to fade. He’s perhaps managing to remake a part of Americanism, but he’s not winning an all-out victory where it feels like everybody is now on board with Trump. There were a few months when it felt like that might happen. I think that danger is now quite clearly banished.

Subscribe now

How have the Democrats reacted? During the first Trump administration, part of the reaction was to fully embrace a new identity ideology on the left that felt very new and exciting and was able to sweep through institutions quite quickly. This time around, it doesn’t feel like Democrats have explicitly gone back to fully fighting for woke. In some ways they’ve superficially surrendered on some of those issues. It’s surprising that not many Democrats are going around saying the first thing they will do is nominate Supreme Court justices who are going to put affirmative action back in place. Perhaps that is in fact what they would do, but it’s not a prominent calling card.

At the same time, it feels like they’ve inverted Michelle Obama’s line—”when they go low, we go high.” One of the lessons the Democrats seem to have taken from the Trump era is that he won because he went low, and this time they’re going to go low as well. We see them campaigning with people like Hasan Piker, who is, in the old-fashioned description of the left, someone who actually defends the dictators of tanks rolling over other countries. We see Democrats making excuses and getting very angry at people who criticize them, like Graham Platner, who had a Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for over ten years before it became a campaign issue. You even see it in some of the institutional fights—on gerrymandering, the attitude seems to be: if the Republicans are gerrymandering as hard as they can, we’re going to gerrymander as hard as we can as well.

How should we think about the evolution of the Democrats? Is it fair to say that’s the lesson they’ve taken, and how do we feel about that?

Williams: It certainly is the lesson that Gavin Newsom has taken, at least stylistically, and I find that extraordinarily off-putting. The strength would be to model the kind of political behavior that many of us would recognize from the past and miss, as opposed to mimetically replicating Trump’s online behavior—the trolling and the extraordinary vulgarity. I find that deeply depressing.

I’m a little more agnostic about whether you have to accept that people are flawed and find ways to reconcile with previously flawed candidates if they have a chance of winning and have rejected the previous behavior you find problematic. Someone like Graham Plattner doesn’t stand by the Totenkopf. He says—whether we believe it or not—that it was a mistake, that he got rid of it, and that it’s not what he stands for now. Realistically, there has to be a path towards reconciliation, especially when somebody has momentum, because the alternative is that you don’t support him and you empower Donald Trump to have one more advocate in the Senate. There’s not one response to that question—it depends on the situation. Gerrymandering also presents another set of calculations.

Ripley: It’s hard to generalize about Republicans or Democrats, but if you look at some of the loudest voices—House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries keeps referring to maximum warfare everywhere all the time when it comes to gerrymandering—this is literally, as Thomas said, mimicking the behavior of your opponents. It doesn’t get you out of the trap you’re in.

Plattner is a really interesting example. We know from the research on human behavior in these revenge addiction cycles that one way out—and I know this is going to sound incredibly squishy, and it sounds squishy to me too, but it is backed up by the research—is that you have to start forgiving people. That is the only way out. You have to do it even internally. Even if you never say it out loud, it actually has an effect on that kind of addiction cycle. Plattner has spoken enough to the whole issue of the tattoo. We just can’t keep doing this.

Mounk: Has he, though? When Barack Obama had the most serious crisis of his primary campaign in early 2008, tapes of Reverend Wright were released in which he was saying “God damn the USA,” et cetera. Obama gave a major speech in which he laid out his relationship to race. It wasn’t Obama who was on tape saying these things—it was the pastor of the church he attended. He said: let me take this really seriously. I understand why a lot of people are going to be upset about that, and they will be right to be upset. Even so, he laid out what the pastor’s perspective was and where he came from. He threaded the needle in both a beautiful speech—which I often assign to my students—and in a serious way: not hiding who he is, not debasing himself, but explaining it and recognizing why it was so upsetting to people.

I have seen nothing like that from Graham Plattner. All I’ve seen from him is the claim that this is trolls on the right weaponizing something he didn’t know about. His story does not add up. His chief of staff has said that he referred to it as “my Totenkopf” years ago, and yet he later claims he never knew what it was. He hasn’t explained that in a satisfactory way.

I’ve said many times that I’m against cancel culture. But being concerned about a candidate who literally had a tattoo of a symbol associated with the SS on his chest for ten years, covered it up once it became a national political issue, and never addressed it seriously—that’s a different matter. Ninety percent of what he has said about it is that this is just right-wingers trying to exploit it against him. I’m open to him perhaps one day being a great senator, and I’m open to forgiveness. But has he actually, in a serious way, explained what it is, where it comes from, why it’s upsetting to people, and what it means for the Democratic Party? Aren’t we being deeply hypocritical? If somebody on the right had a Totenkopf tattoo for ten years, would we really be saying it’s perfectly natural to forgive that?

Singal: It does seem disingenuous. David French complained about the slide in decency and standards, writing that “the slide begins when you tell yourself that the stakes are just too high for normal politics”—that of course you wouldn’t support this candidate in better times, but now American democracy is at stake. He’s saying: don’t go down that road. I understand the argument given how tight the Senate is and what one seat means. But I find it demoralizing that people act like it’s a crazy cancel culture campaign to be concerned about a Nazi tattoo. In many cases, it’s the same people who, before the vibe shift, were calling for people’s careers to be ruined over much lighter offenses. There’s a degree of disingenuousness on display that I just don’t like.

Mounk: The same thing applies to Hasan Piker, where people completely mix up two different things. When somebody has a big media platform, should you go and make your case in front of that platform? Sure. Should Democrats go on Fox News? Should they go on Joe Rogan? Should they go on those shows and be authentically themselves and try to reach those audiences? Yes. If somebody wants to go on Hasan Piker’s stream and argue for their political views, I don’t have a problem with that—even though I am deeply concerned about Piker’s views and have some strategic questions about whether that is actually going to be very useful, given that his audience is very different from the mostly apolitical audience of Joe Rogan. But let the consultants make that call. That’s different from campaigning with him. That’s different from saying he’s the future of the Democratic Party.

Ripley: Litigating the tattoo back and forth at this point is not super helpful. What I find revealing about Plattner is that while he has apologized for that—and I think in a more believable way apologized for some of the things he said about sexual assault in the military—he still uses the tool of revenge-seeking. It’s just different subjects, different scapegoats, different targets of blame, but it’s still the same mindset of splitting the world into good and evil, with the conviction that you are on the side of good and that anything is justified because the other side is so evil. That’s the piece of his behavior today that gives me pause. I know people who have gotten idiotic tattoos in their 20s that they didn’t know the meaning of. We perhaps can’t expect an Obama-level reflection from this guy, but we could expect people to start thinking a little more critically about this constant cycle of oversimplifying and blame.

Williams: I understand the arguments that Yascha and Jesse just made and the point Amanda is making. But at the end of the day, if you are actually concerned about things like anti-Semitism—and if you have any familiarity with German culture—look at the memes coming out under the banner of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. These are not things being rejected or covered over. They are deliberate emulations of actual Nazi propaganda and rhetoric. If anti-Semitism is your concern, Graham Plattner is not where you should be channeling all of your outrage. Unfortunately, in some situations, we do have a binary choice.

Mounk: That’s where Amanda is saying: why do we debase our standards in that way? Why can’t we both be outraged at the DHS Twitter feed and the symbolism of Trump and all of that, and also say—excuse me—the party that was, as Jesse was saying, canceling people, is now telling us how dare we be upset about a man who had a Totenkopf tattoo for ten years? I wrote about an electrician in San Diego who was actually of Latino heritage, who had his hand dangling out of a truck and somebody thought it looked like the OK sign, which they took to be a white supremacist gesture. He lost the best job he ever had. Those same people are now telling me I have no right to be upset about Plattner. Excuse me if I find that a little galling.

Williams: There’s hypocrisy to go all the way around and excuse me if I got Amanda’s point wrong. I just solely disagree with Jesse.

Ripley: People will justify anything because they want to feel right and because the other side feels threatening. It never ends. I do it too. When I think about one of the things that has most made me ashamed of this country—a country I was born in, am a citizen of, and love—it was the way we withdrew from Afghanistan. At the time, I was angry at the Biden administration about that, but I didn’t necessarily blame Biden personally in the way I now very quickly catch myself blaming Trump for most things personally. You can catch yourself doing this, and the trick is to at least notice it and try—as Yascha is pleading with us to do—to reflect on the ways in which we are debasing ourselves, extending a huge benefit of the doubt to our own side while denying it to the other.

Mounk: Two more thoughts on Maine, and it’s not about the tattoo. The first is that it shows the really terrible field in so many of these Democratic races. On the one hand, you have a candidate who doesn’t have any very clear achievements, has a history of erratic political opinions, and looks like the image that people drinking coffee in Brooklyn have of what appeals to the country—in a way that I’m not sure it actually does. On the other hand, you have a governor who by all accounts is perfectly competent and decent, but who is 78 years old and has no charisma and no real ability to articulate what the campaign is about. Given those two choices, I understand where some primary voters ended up going for Plattner. I felt something similar on the day of the midterms when a couple of pretty reasonable governors were elected in New Jersey and Virginia. I tried to watch the victory speeches and they were really quite boring. Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani has a bunch of policies I disagree with, but he’s clearly a talented and charismatic politician. That’s a real concern for where the Democratic Party is.

The other question I want to raise is whether “when they go low, we go low” is actually a sensible electoral calculus. It relies on the idea that what drives Trump’s appeal is that he goes low, and it’s not clear to me that that’s what people like about him. Perhaps it is, but it deserves thinking through. If you embrace the same style without the same charisma, the same political cause, or the same political coalition, it’s not obvious that’s going to benefit you. Gavin Newsom going around signaling his social media dominance clearly appeals to the base, but is that going to win over independents in the way that Trump, for whatever reason, was able to in 2016 and particularly in 2024? I have my doubts.

Williams: For the people that style does appeal to, they can get it from Trump, and he does it better than anybody who’s trying to mimic that behavior—he certainly does it better than Gavin Newsom. So if that’s your thing, replicating it will not convert anybody to your side. What it can do is repel a lot of people who don’t like that quality in Trump but put up with it because they like certain other things he’s delivering.

Ripley: Is the lowness what people are actually attracted to? Some people are genuinely attracted to it. It feels authentic. It feels like this is a fearless person, because people feel—and they are not wrong—that the whole system is rigged. They’re finding the wrong solution, in my view, but they’re not wrong that there’s something deeply wrong, that there’s distortion and corruption and dishonesty in the dealings between the political class and the American people. So Trump’s lowness functions as a proxy for honesty and courage. It’s a false idol, and a dangerous one, but it looks courageous even when it’s deeply cowardly.

All sides can play that game and have tried, but as Thomas said, Trump is much better at it for a number of reasons, including his addiction to vengeance. This is not a healthy person, and it’s easy to forget that. Most of us were not involved in 4,000 lawsuits before 2016. Before he even ran for president, Trump was using the justice system as a tool of revenge. If you talk to any seasoned lawyer, they know people like this. In modern history, we do not have another example of a president routinely suing news organizations he doesn’t like while in office. He has sued Trevor Noah, the BBC, the Washington Post, and on and on. This is not normal behavior, but it is what Trump has always done, and his behavior is not going to change. He is a very fragile person, and lawsuits function like self-medication—a way to temporarily feel better.

That is the behavior we need to be looking for. The party affiliation matters less to me than the pattern itself: this conflict entrepreneurship behavior, and our collective failure to recognize it and become less vulnerable to it.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha, Amanda, Thomas, and Jesse discuss the state of free speech in the United States, whether Trumpism will continue beyond the presidency of Donald Trump, and what America will look like in 2030. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Alvin E. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. His latest book is Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Al Roth discuss the impact of moral disgust on solving economic problems, whether we should allow financial payments for organ donation, and what the rise of OnlyFans tells us about changing attitudes towards the self and economic transactions.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Economists have a lot of influence on our lives, but a lot of the time that influence is less direct. As we’re recording this, there was a decision by the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates constant—and that’s going to influence the lives of people listening to this podcast in all kinds of complicated ways. But you have had influence on the world in a much more direct way. If some of the people listening to this are doctors in the United States, where they went to residency was probably decided by a procedure that you helped to put in place. If you have children who go to public school, there’s a good chance that which public school your children ended up in was decided by a mechanism that you helped to put in place. Tell us about the class of problems that you started to tackle in your academic work, and that then had this huge influence on the world—how to allocate scarce goods to people under particular kinds of circumstances.

Al Roth: Economists study marketplaces, broadly defined, and game theory gave us a way to study the rules by which marketplaces are organized. That opened up the possibility that economists could start studying the design of markets—and I’m using the word “design” there as a noun. Markets have designs, and you can study them. After I’d studied some market designs, I started to get asked to help design and redesign some markets. Now “design” is a verb. That’s part of a pretty new movement in economics called market design.

Of course, market design itself is an ancient human activity. People have been creating markets of various sorts, with or without money, for a long time. Stone tools distributed in the archaeological record, far from where they were quarried, tell us that our prehistoric ancestors knew something about trade. They knew something about markets. They could move goods far across the world. Markets are a little bit like languages—they’re tools that human beings build to cooperate and coordinate and communicate and compete with each other. Often we treat markets as if we just received them, but of course markets are built, and they can be fixed when they’re broken.

Mounk: Tell us about some of these examples. How should we think about what good or bad design looks like? Even when we’re not thinking about designing markets, you’re saying that laws, rules, cultural expectations and habits effectively design a market. But when you’re going about trying to design them in a more conscious, more explicit way, what kind of criteria should we apply? How should we assess whether they are doing a good job or a bad job?

Roth: Sometimes markets are broken in a very obvious way. That is, the people trying to transact with each other are having trouble making connections. That’s often where market designers get called in.

Mounk: Give me an example of that.

Roth: A lot of labor markets—like the market for new doctors—once had all sorts of problems with the timing of offers. People would get offers that they had to answer very quickly, exploding offers, before they knew what other opportunities they had. That market, in the first half of the last century, had unraveled to the point where doctors were getting offers of their post-graduation jobs very early in their education—too early for them to really know what kind of jobs they wanted, and too early for the institutions hiring them to be able to tell who was going to be a good doctor and who was not. That was a problem that the medical establishment tried to solve in various ways.

Today, there’s a centralized clearinghouse for how new doctors get their first jobs. I was involved in redesigning that when it ran into some problems. Sometimes there are operational difficulties in a market that make it clear it needs some help and redesign. Also—and this is part of the subject of my current book—markets need social support to work well. When you design a marketplace to operate in some big economic environment, people have other options. They could make their transactions outside the marketplace. So you have to attract people to participate and come to the marketplace. That starts to involve questions of equity and transparency—making the market work well so that people want to support it and participate in it.

Mounk: This speaks to a broader confusion about the relationship between economics and ethics, economics and morality. Since its inception, economics has sometimes been known as the dismal science—the science that is amoral, perhaps even immoral. There was a time in which economists claimed that the principles they followed were in some sense free of moral choices. I don’t think that is how most sophisticated economists think about these questions today. But your disciplinary hat is that of an economist, not that of a political theorist or a moral philosopher. To what extent are you making normative choices? Where do those normative choices come in? How explicit are they?

Perhaps you can tell us about a concrete system you were involved in designing or advising on, in which there was a moral fork in the road—where you had to explicitly choose one kind of market design that would serve one set of moral goods, or another kind that might serve a different set of moral goods, and it wasn’t obvious which was preferable on purely economic grounds.

Roth: One way to answer that is to say that this book on moral economics that’s just about to come out is my second book aimed at a general audience. The first one was called Who Gets What and Why?—a somewhat cheerful book about designing marketplaces where the questions were relatively straightforward, where they were technical, where it was about helping people make transactions that they wanted to make. This book is about markets that are also broken, but that are harder to fix because we can’t agree on what we want. These are morally contested markets where people have very different visions of how the market should work.

One thread that connects them is my work on kidney transplantation. Right now there are about 130,000 cases of kidney failure a year in the United States, but we only do fewer than 30,000 transplants a year. Transplantation is the treatment of choice for kidney failure. So most people who could benefit from a transplant—whose lives could be saved and whose healthy lives could be made much longer—are going to die without getting one. One of the questions was how to help people get more transplants.

A topic I talk about a lot in the current book, Moral Economics, is the widespread feeling around the world—codified in many laws—that it is illegal to pay a living donor to donate a kidney. Kidneys are a little bit special because healthy people have two and can remain healthy with one. So it’s possible, if you love someone who has kidney failure, that you might be able to save their life by donating a kidney to them. That happens about 7,000 times a year in the United States. But if someone wanted to pay you for a kidney, the two of you would be involved in a felony. It’s against the law to be paid for a kidney, although you’re allowed to give one.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

What I’ve done with my economist colleagues—and how we’ve helped our surgical colleagues—is make more efficient the idea of kidney exchange. Perhaps you want to give a kidney to someone you love and you’re healthy enough to do so, but you can’t give it to the person you love because kidneys have to be well matched and yours is incompatible with your intended recipient. Perhaps I’m in the same situation. It used to be that the two of us, as potential donors, would be sent home—sorry, but no thank you—and that would deprive our loved ones of living donor transplants. But now it might be that I can give a kidney to your patient and you can give a kidney to my patient. That’s a way in which each patient can get a compatible kidney from another patient’s intended donor. That’s called kidney exchange, and it has blossomed in many ways. A lot of transplants are now done that way that couldn’t be done before. An essential part of this, when you’re talking about morally contested markets, is that the donors are not paid. That avoids the repugnance that much of the world feels towards the idea of paying for kidneys.

Mounk: This is obviously an amazing win-win solution. It means that a lot more kidney transplants are facilitated every year through this process. By and large, people who have moral objections about the buying and selling of kidneys are perfectly fine with it because it still operates as part of a kind of gift economy—people saying they want to donate a kidney without a financial reward. There’s just a more complicated chain of transactions, which means that a donor can thereby assure that their loved one survives even if they are not directly giving them the kidney.

What about the underlying question? Should we in fact allow the buying and selling of kidneys? This mechanism that you were involved with is saving thousands of lives in the United States every year—a fantastic thing. I don’t often have a distinguished podcast guest of whom I can say with some confidence that they helped save thousands of lives in the United States and around the world every year. But as you’re saying, a lot of people still die from kidney disease without having received a transplant. Many of these people would be able to pay for a kidney. Perhaps if we collectively decided that buying and selling kidneys should be allowed, and health insurance covered that, even people without significant means who now die would be able to survive. How should we think about that moral question?

Roth: That’s a question I have a chapter devoted to in my current book, because although we’ve had some good achievements in increasing the number of kidney transplants, these are victories in a war that we’re losing. There are more people who need kidney transplants today, and the gap between how many transplants we can produce and how many people need them is growing.

A natural thing to think about is whether we can increase the supply of kidneys so that there won’t be almost 100,000 people on the waiting list for a deceased donor kidney, as there are today. When economists see a long queue of people waiting for a scarce resource, they wonder if prices could increase the supply so it wouldn’t be so scarce anymore. Kidney exchange increased the supply, but not enough to solve the problem. We still have this terrible shortage.

One of the things that people worry about is that we might not want, or be able to get support for, a market in which only rich people could get transplants by buying kidneys from poor people. A lot of the designs that have been proposed get around that by, for instance, proposing that only the federal government could pay for kidneys, and that we’d continue to allocate kidneys based on need—the way we now allocate deceased donor kidneys, not that that’s a perfect process either.

There is legislation being proposed in Congress that would allow at least a small experiment in that direction. The particular legislation currently seeking a hearing is called the End Kidney Deaths Act. It proposes simply to give a tax credit, over a period of time, to non-directed donors—people who donate a kidney anonymously to someone they don’t know, rather than having a particular patient in mind. Those donors help facilitate a lot of kidney exchange transplants because, as you alluded to, they allow long chains of transplants to be effectuated. There are about 500 such donors a year in the United States at the moment.

Mounk: To be clear, the much more common case is that a parent, child, or spouse needs a kidney, and a loved one happens to be a match—or, as part of a kidney exchange, is willing to give somebody else a kidney if it causally results in their loved one receiving one. The rarer case is that of a healthy person with two functioning kidneys who decides to save the life of a stranger by going to the hospital and having one removed. That is obviously a very altruistic act, and the number of people willing to do that is about 500 a year.

Roth: There is a proposal to experiment with whether that number might be increased if we were more generous to those donors through the tax system—a more grateful nation, so to speak. It’s an incremental proposal. On the other hand, if it substantially increased the number of non-directed donors, it would not only increase transplants, but would serve as an indicator that we might start to think more generally about being more generous to donors than we are now.

Mounk: Should we do that? I think this kind of proposal is interesting, but it’s quite limited. The broader question remains very urgent. Even if this proposal means that 700 rather than 500 people a year give a non-directed kidney, that doesn’t seem to actually grapple with the most fundamental problem—the tens of thousands of people who don’t get a kidney every year. Should we abolish any limit? Obviously it needs to be regulated, but should we in principle allow the buying and selling of kidneys?

Roth: If an experiment like the one proposed by the current legislation works well, then we’ll be able to garner support for broader programs of generosity to donors. As a practical matter, even small legislative steps like this have failed in the past. So I think it’s probably necessary, as a matter of practical public policy, to start small—with these very generous non-directed donors—to see if we can express our gratitude to them for all they do. Opponents of paying for kidneys worry that it will lead to the exploitation of poor people in ways that we would regret. But if that doesn’t happen, then I would certainly be in favor of pursuing a much broader program.

Mounk: Let me go through some of the obvious objections to this scheme. One you just mentioned is the exploitation of the poor. Presumably you could also imagine terrible cases of exploitation in a system where you can’t buy and sell kidneys. One of the things a free market often does is alleviate scarcity. At the moment we have an artificial scarcity in kidneys because it is impossible to pay people for them. Presumably, if we had a liquid market in kidneys, it would also be much less dangerous to donate one. One concern is: what if I donate a kidney and my remaining kidney later becomes diseased? In a world where buying and selling kidneys is allowed—and where, if you’re poor, the state steps in to ensure you can get access to a kidney—that danger would be much lower, because I could in that circumstance receive a kidney myself. You could also imagine cases of exploitation arising precisely because of the current scarcity. If you have a loved one who says they will die unless you donate your kidney, there can be enormous pressure exerted on people—in a life-or-death situation—over whom they might have some power or influence. That danger too would be mitigated if you had a liquid market in those organs.

Roth: The whole point of making kidney transplants more available is to make kidney disease less deadly and therefore reduce the danger of this life-or-death decision. Given that paying a donor for a kidney is illegal almost everywhere in the world—with the single exception of the Islamic Republic of Iran—there are black markets. Because it’s illegal to be paid for a kidney, these black markets often operate outside of the traditional medical establishment, with surgeries being done outside of hospitals. That means very low quality medicine and very serious dangers both to donors and recipients.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

One of the ways to fight black markets is with legal markets. One of the examples I use in Moral Economics is prohibition. When we had prohibition of selling alcohol in the United States, there were lots of black markets and organized crime grew up to mediate them. When we ended prohibition in the early 1930s, alcohol remained problematic—there’s still alcoholism and drunk driving—but you can no longer buy moonshine whiskey from gangsters. We eliminated the organized crime component that prohibition had produced.

If we want to fight black markets and make kidneys more available, those two goals go together. Many opponents mistakenly, I think, believe otherwise. They look at the black markets and say these markets are very bad because donors are being paid for their kidneys. But really they are very bad because they deliver very low quality medicine in very inequitable ways. If we could design an acceptable market in which we could pay donors for kidneys, kidney disease would be much less a cause of death and criminality.

Mounk: What about another objection that people might make, which comes downstream from a book that I think is fun, interesting, and insightful, but that has perhaps overly influenced people’s understanding of economics—Freakonomics? A Freakonomics-style argument that you could make about this, and I’ve heard moral philosophers make similar arguments, is that sometimes when you pay people for something, they stop giving it for free. If there are 500 people who think of themselves as moral actors and want to give a kidney to save somebody’s life out of altruism, giving them minor tax incentives—or perhaps even paying them a significant amount—might cause some of them to say: I’m not the kind of person who sells a part of my own body for money. That seems like a very different kind of moral act than donating a part of my body so that somebody else may live. How sure can we be that compensation would actually help alleviate this shortage?

Roth: That’s an empirical question. There is vast evidence from the world’s economies over centuries that while paying for things might stop people giving them away for free, that effect is more than compensated for by the fact that if you pay enough, people are willing to be paid providers. There’s a famous passage in Adam Smith that says it’s not through the generosity of the butcher and the baker that you get your food—that’s how they earn their living. They sell food. By and large, we are not short of food.

Blood plasma is a good example. I was an early adopter of COVID, and when I recovered I went to Stanford Blood Center, where you can donate blood plasma without being paid, because there was a demand for convalescent plasma. Once my antibody levels fell below a certain threshold, they let me go. I still give whole blood, because we do that for free in the United States and that’s how we get whole blood. But I no longer donate plasma, because there’s plenty of plasma in the United States—we pay plasma donors, and there’s no shortage. In fact, the United States exports about 70% of the world’s plasma, because it’s in short supply in the many countries that consider it immoral to pay plasma donors. Those countries can always buy plasma from the United States. So yes, I’ve been crowded out of the plasma market. It’s awkward and not particularly enjoyable to donate plasma, and I don’t need the $70. I also don’t want to take that option away from people who are supplementing their income by donating plasma, which is plentiful here.

Mounk: There is another kind of argument that a number of moral philosophers have made: that there is a way we should value our bodies and our organs, and that making them the kinds of things that can be bought and sold is to dishonor what our bodies are. It is simply valuing them in the wrong kind of way. My doctoral advisor made this argument, among others. How would you respond to that?

Roth: Millions of people are dying of kidney disease. I would want to at least weigh that idea against the cost of all these deaths. You would have to be very sure that this aesthetic judgment was more important than millions of deaths a year around the world. In most places, kidney disease is among the top ten causes of death, and it’s growing—as we beat back infectious disease as a cause of death, kidney disease becomes relatively more prominent. You have to be very sure that you find the idea of people selling their kidneys objectionable before you condemn so many people to death.

Mounk: To show my hand: I want to make sure I run through the devil’s advocate arguments in a fair way, and I think those are some of the main ones people make against these kinds of transactions. I agree that there is something queasy about the buying and selling of organs, and I absolutely understand why a lot of people—probably many listeners—have a deeper objection to it. But one of the fundamental things in politics is that you always have to think in trade-offs and understand what’s on the other side. In cases like this, the trade-off—not in some theoretical or distant way, but in a very immediate, everyday sense—is people needlessly dying. You need to be really sure that the moral arguments you make against a practice that could alleviate untold suffering are sufficiently weighty to justify persisting in that position.

To make a meta-ethical point, which I try to refrain from on this podcast: I think this is actually an instructive way of thinking about utilitarianism. In the broader debate in moral philosophy between consequentialist outlooks—which evaluate actions and rules by their consequences, of which utilitarianism is the most prominent, measuring policy in terms of whether it increases the balance of happiness over pain—and more deontological notions, which hold that certain things are in themselves wrong and that rights obtain irrespective of consequences, I am not a straightforward consequentialist. I don’t think it is obviously true that in every realm of our lives we should simply look at what increases the balance of happiness over pain. But I do think that when the consequences of a rule or an action are very obviously very bad—as they obviously are in the case of prohibiting the buying and selling of organs, leading to tens of thousands of people needlessly dying in the United States and many more around the world—you had better have really weighty arguments on the other side. Consequentialism is not necessarily the right philosophy in every context, but it makes a sensible default in policy situations when the consequences of a rule are as disastrous as I believe the consequences of not allowing the buying and selling of kidneys to be.

Roth: I agree. The market design question also requires us to be very careful to make sure that bad things don’t happen to paid donors. That is a matter of high importance in the design of any eventual market that might relieve the shortage of kidneys.

Mounk: That leads to my next question. Let’s imagine that Congress finally changes its mind and decides to allow the buying and selling of kidneys—and asks you to come in and help design this market. How would you go about doing that?

Roth: Any market you design would have to be constantly monitored, and if bad things were happening you would want to change the rules to try to avoid them. A good way to start would be to say: we’re not going to have a laissez-faire market for kidneys. Rather, we’re simply going to amend the law so that the federal government can pay for kidneys. The kidneys obtained in this way would be regarded as the same kind of national resource that we now regard deceased donor kidneys, and would be allocated according to need. Medicare would pay for the costs so that the rich and the poor alike would be able to get the suddenly more abundant kidneys.

Some of the payment to donors might involve coming back for annual checkups for the next ten years, because we would want to be really sure that donors are doing well, and if there’s something that can be fixed about the way we’re dealing with them, we should fix it. One of the problems now is that it’s a little bit hard to keep track of donors because they’re healthy—they’re off skiing somewhere. The goal would be to incentivize donors not just as an expression of gratitude for providing a kidney, but to make sure that they continue to allow their health to be monitored, so that donating a kidney becomes a very well-understood and desirable thing to do.

Mounk: Kidneys are a fascinating case that has allowed us to make concrete a lot of these broader questions. Let me ask a different one. What should we do about kidneys today, while they remain scarce? And setting kidneys aside, even if we solved that problem, there will still likely be a scarcity of livers, hearts, and other organs that might be transplanted. How should we think about the best algorithms and decision-making procedures for determining which patients get those organs and in which order? Obviously, we likely don’t want the richest person to get priority, or for allocation to be based on discriminatory criteria such as race. But how should we think, beyond those baseline assumptions, about designing systems to distribute these very scarce goods?

Roth: That gets squarely into the area of technical difficulties in allocating deceased donor organs, because you can’t do living donation of hearts. Livers are different—you can donate a lobe of a liver—but hearts will always involve deceased donation.

With deceased donation, you first have to decide when the donor is dead. That’s a little controversial because we have two criteria that in ancient times were the same: brain death and circulatory death. The reason those used to coincide is that once your heart stops beating, your brain very quickly dies. The special thing about transplantation is that death isn’t exactly binary. A donor can be dead while some of their organs are still viable enough to be transplanted—but you have to work very quickly, and an organ doesn’t stay viable for long outside the body. So organs have to be allocated quite quickly.

Subscribe now

There are many more people who need a heart transplant than there are hearts, and similarly for other organs. Some of the questions involve efficiency and how it relates to equity. Consider a waiting list for hearts that depends either on how long you’ve been waiting or on how sick you are—those are different ways to prioritize patients. In the United States, the idea is that a deceased donor organ should be offered first to the highest priority person on the list, then to the next highest, and so forth, with priorities depending on many things including location. But the problem is that it takes a little while for an offer to be considered and accepted or rejected. If it’s rejected, the heart has a little less chance of reaching someone who will accept it while it’s still transplantable.

Sometimes you have to reckon with the fact that a particular organ is hard to place. It’s a marginal organ—it will save somebody’s life, but many high-priority patients may choose to wait for a better one. Can you skip over people with higher priority and offer it to someone you think will accept it now? Some organs are offered too many times, rejected repeatedly, and then are no longer usable. Among the things we have to think about is how to balance efficiency and equity: how strictly must you follow a predetermined priority list, or can you expedite an organ through a different process? That is a matter of current debate.

Mounk: There is obviously a black market for organs, and it is significant. But transporting an organ requires a lot of attention—many people involved, a great deal of infrastructure. The prohibition on buying and selling organs has not been perfectly enforced, but it has had a very real effect in suppressing those transactions.

There are other areas where the state’s ability to suppress transactions is much more in doubt. Drugs and other illegal substances are probably the prime example. There must be many, many transactions every year involving the buying and selling of methamphetamine, cocaine, or heroin in the United States—many more than there are of people buying and selling organs. The harms from drug prohibition are straightforward and obvious: people going to jail, enormous resources spent on enforcement, users being criminalized and potentially unable to access help. But the dangers of completely opening up those markets—of potentially having very sophisticated corporations advertise and sell drugs in ways that could have hugely damaging consequences for individuals—are also very real.

From my philosophical perspective as a philosophical liberal, this case pushes harder against my usual framework than organs do. With organs, you can invoke the harm principle and argue that nobody is clearly harmed by allowing buying and selling, as long as certain side conditions are met—that people can’t be coerced, and that no one is so destitute that selling an organ is their only alternative to starvation. In the case of drugs, a strict harm principle reading might say: if an adult chooses to use heroin, the person being harmed is themselves—why should we intervene? But drug use can lead to significant rises in crime in neighborhoods and imposes real costs on society at large.

Yesterday, walking back from dinner with conference participants here in Boston, we came past a gentleman who was crying for help and appeared to be in the grip of addiction. We stayed and called 911. When the EMTs arrived, they recognized him immediately by his first name—he was clearly a frequent user of that service. I’m very glad he got help, and he seemed to be a decent person in a very desperate situation. But it is also obvious that that imposes costs on the broader community. You can try to argue that even on the harm principle, drug prohibition is justified. But it’s not clear to me how clean that argument is, because the primary harm is to the individual. This is a topic on which I am genuinely torn. How do we puzzle through it with more clarity?

Roth: One thing I say in the conclusion to my book is that when we think about the things we are morally obligated to do, they have to be things that we can actually do. Even if we feel morally obligated to prevent heroin use, we have to recognize that there is still a great deal of heroin, fentanyl, and crystal meth in circulation. Our prisons are full of drug offenders, and yet the drugs remain. One of the thought experiments I discuss in the book is why it is so easy to buy drugs and so hard to hire a hitman. I think it has to do with the social attitude towards drugs on the one hand, and towards killing for hire on the other.

Mounk: A more obvious explanation may be this: every time someone uses a drug, they may be breaking the law, but there is no immediate external victim—which is the point I was making about the harm principle—and the state has no immediate way of knowing it has happened. Every time a hitman kills somebody, they are harming another person, and it is likely that someone will notice the victim is missing and the state will begin an investigation. Part of why drug crime is so prevalent is that it is quite easy to get away with, at least at a low level or as a user. You can violate a drug law and the state has little way of knowing. It is quite difficult to violate the prohibition on murder without the perpetrator eventually going to jail.

Roth: That is largely true. But there have been years in which there were more than 100,000 opioid overdose deaths, which vastly exceeds the number of homicides from any cause in the United States—I believe fewer than 20,000. Drugs kill far more people than murder does. And yet murder for hire is so rare in the United States that it doesn’t even appear in the national crime statistics.

Mounk: If you think that you’ve successfully hired a hitman, 99 out of a 100 times, it’s an FBI agent who’s about to arrest you.

Roth: If someone told me they wanted to hire a hitman, I might call the police, and they would say, why don’t you go back to Professor Roth and tell him there’s a bar where he can find one—and that’s where I’d end up trying to hire an FBI agent. Whereas if someone called the police and said Professor Roth is thinking about trying heroin and wants advice on where to get it, the response would be: why are you calling us? We’re a busy police department.

Part of the conclusion I draw in the book is that not only do markets need social support to work well, but so do bans on markets. The ban on drugs doesn’t have enough social support to work well—we have a great deal of drugs even though they’re against the law. We are losing the war on drugs. But it also turns out it’s not so easy to accept our surrender. In places like Portland, where they’ve tried decriminalizing use, the result has been open-air drug use that is also very distressing and makes cities difficult to live in. That is a real cost to citizens, and Portland has walked that back.

Drugs are the market about which I have the least ability to make helpful suggestions, except that we should continue to experiment. In many places we allow clean needle exchange, and at least we’re not seeing as much HIV transmission alongside drug use as we used to. That seems to help a little. We may find that incarceration remains among the options available for dealing with addiction, but it will certainly have to be combined with more medical approaches to help people deal with it. We don’t know the answer yet, but that calls for more experimentation and more search for solutions, not less.

Mounk: What does success actually look like in this case? Laws against jaywalking, which I think are largely silly, presumably succeed if fewer pedestrians die in car accidents—that’s the actual ultimate goal. You wouldn’t say the goal of the prohibition on jaywalking is that nobody ever jaywalks. Perhaps the prohibition actually does lead to fewer pedestrian deaths, in which case it’s a sensible law. I suspect that it doesn’t, though I haven’t seen empirical studies on it, and if it doesn’t, I think we should abolish it.

When you think about the success of a prohibition on theft, part of that is allowing a thriving economy with economic exchange and sparing the costs of extremely elaborate safety procedures. Part of it is reducing the number of thefts, because it is upsetting to have something stolen from you. We can consider the law against theft in the United States broadly successful even though things are obviously stolen every day. We don’t need perfect compliance for a law to be successful.

When we think about the prohibition on heroin or methamphetamine, what is the criterion of success, and how are the laws doing relative to that criterion?

Roth: Jaywalking isn’t a bad example, because I believe that in New York City, jaywalking has been decriminalized. One reason it was decriminalized is that it gave too much discretion on enforcement and was enforced inequitably against people of lower socioeconomic status. Part of having laws is asking whether we support the way they are enforced.

To come back to drugs: part of the reason it’s hard to move forward is that we have deep disagreement about what our goals are. There are people who think it is simply wrong to allow sales of drugs like heroin or fentanyl for private use—though fentanyl, of course, is an essential drug in medicine. I’ve been given fentanyl during surgeries. It’s a quick-acting anesthetic.

Mounk: I was astonished when I had a wisdom tooth out—which turned out to involve relatively minor pain, perhaps I was lucky—and my dentist prescribed me an opioid without telling me it was one. When she handed me the prescription, I Googled it and asked whether it was an opioid. She said yes. I asked if I needed it, and she said I could just try some Advil instead. So I never filled the opioid prescription, partly out of caution. If I had been in terrible pain, I would have. But the ease with which opioids were being prescribed in those circumstances—and this was only a couple of years ago—is astonishing.

Roth: Consider alcohol. We ended prohibition because it turned the United States into a nation of lawbreakers—whenever you had a drink, you were aiding and abetting whoever sold it to you. Prohibition didn’t have a big effect on alcohol consumption, but it did have a big effect on creating organized crime. Ending prohibition didn’t solve the problem of alcohol, though. There are still alcoholics, organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous that try to help people with addiction, and people who drive drunk and kill others. The problems that caused people to support prohibition didn’t go away—prohibition just didn’t solve them.

That’s essentially where we are with drugs. The problem of addictive, lethal drugs is very large. It’s not even entirely clear, from the libertarian point of view, that people are choosing to take these addictive drugs freely—you may choose to take one initially and then find yourself enslaved by it. So there’s also a distinction worth drawing between what I call repugnance and what’s called paternalism. Sometimes we’re trying to protect people from mistakes that will harm themselves. We have many laws that do that, like prescription drug laws. Before you got that opioid prescription, it would have been more difficult to obtain opioids without one, but your dentist judged that you might need them, and on that advice you were legally allowed to buy them. We require prescriptions for a vast array of drugs because we believe you need expert advice before consuming them safely. Going forward on drug use, we may move in the direction of treating addicts more like patients than like criminals—but it’s not simple, because addiction is complicated and enslaving.

Nicotine is a useful drug to think about in this context, because tobacco causes a lot more deaths than opioids do, and even more than legal alcohol does—though some of those deaths are delayed. Cirrhosis of the liver is not quite as dramatic as someone collapsing on the sidewalk. Tobacco is legal, but heavily and increasingly regulated. Americans smoke much less than they used to. There were large advertising campaigns—you mentioned not wanting heroin advertised by some corporate equivalent, but Big Tobacco ran extensive ads. The Virginia Slims campaign told women “you’ve come a long way, baby,” and tried to convince more women to smoke. It was, I think, largely successful at the time, at least among those women who didn’t mind being referred to as “baby.”

Mounk: We tend to think in terms of fully open markets or fully prohibited markets, but there are many regulatory arrangements in between. One strange irony is that in many contexts now, smoking a cigarette is very poorly viewed—at the very least a breach of a taboo, and often against the rules. Meanwhile, in many places, smoking a joint has become far more morally acceptable. In Brooklyn, you probably see more people smoking joints on the street than smoking cigarettes, which is rather astonishing. There is very little open advertising of cigarettes because of extensive regulation, but in my neighborhood there are three or four shops very aggressively advertising marijuana.

Marijuana is an important case. It is the drug where the war on drugs clearly went too far and was most damaging, because it is less immediately dangerous and deadly than many other drugs, and yet many people went to prison for selling it—and sometimes for consuming it, though that was rarer. The case for overturning prohibition on marijuana was very strong.

At the same time, we are seeing some of the damaging mechanisms you might have feared. Marijuana is much stronger now than it was even twenty years ago—the nature of the drug has actually changed. There are some suggestive findings that heavy use is very bad for users and may be bad for those around them. One recent study suggests that if you are a significant user of marijuana in the months before a pregnancy—even as a man—the likelihood that your offspring has autism or another serious developmental challenge is significantly increased. The mechanism by which organized commercial interests are now spreading this product, marketing it, perfecting it, and making it more powerful—in ways that also make it more addictive and more dangerous—is fully in motion. We are in the middle of an experiment whose results aren’t yet clear. How do you feel about how marijuana legalization has gone? What are the positive elements, and where are you concerned?

Roth: Marijuana is becoming more like tobacco—legal, with companies perhaps perfecting its addictive qualities, as tobacco companies apparently did quite consciously. They understood the addictive properties of nicotine. But the laws against consuming marijuana were not effective. If the point of those laws was to make marijuana unavailable, they failed. They also had the consequence of sending people to jail, forcing them to deal with criminals, and turning them into criminals themselves—producing widespread law breaking. Recent surveys suggest that the number of Americans who use marijuana every day now exceeds the number who have a drink of an alcoholic beverage every day. What you’re observing in New York is easy to verify with your nose when you’re near a cannabis user.

Cannabis is now much more potent. There was an organization called the California Growers Association—and California has many organizations with similar names, though normally they have a vegetable in the title, like the California Artichoke Growers Association. The California Growers Association was ambivalent about legalizing marijuana. People who grew marijuana illegally talked about how many plants they had—hundreds or thousands of plants. But farmers talk about yield per acre. The artisanal growers who were hiding their crops in national forests to avoid raids by the Drug Enforcement Agency have been largely put out of business.

We haven’t reached equilibrium yet. It’s not a crime to smoke marijuana or consume edibles, but we don’t yet know how cannabis will compare to alcohol, tobacco, sugar, or other things we consume. It remains to be seen. We shouldn’t regret that marijuana is now more available, because it was also available when it was a crime. The question is how to manage it—and leaving the management of these difficult questions in the hands of criminals is not the best way to do so.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Al discuss the ethics of surrogacy, if sex work should be legal, and whether the rise of OnlyFans is concerning or empowering. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe and writes the newsletter History of the Present. His upcoming book, Europe in 7½ Chapters, will be published in October 2026.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss the crisis of Labour and rise of Reform, why Europeans are struggling to adapt to a new political, cultural, and technological age, and the future of the war in Ukraine.

Will you be in London on Sunday, September 6? I’ll be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought to mark the publication of his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the Sekforde at 5pm. Find out more and book tickets here. Paying subscribers can access a code for free tickets here. —Yascha

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I thought we would do a little European tour with you. I didn’t tell you that we had hired you as a tour guide, but you are our historically and politically informed tour guide. We are going to do a little trip from the northwest of the continent to the southeast in rough geographical order. We will start with local elections in Britain. That does not sound particularly exciting.

The results are coming in as we speak, and they seem to herald a very significant political shift in British politics. What is your read on what is happening?

Timothy Garton Ash: The motto for my intellectual tour company is, of course, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” That goes on the brochure. These elections, which are both local but also Scottish and Welsh national elections, are absolutely fascinating. What they show you is that this country, which voted to leave Europe just about 10 years ago on the 23rd of June 2016, is now becoming ever more European in its politics.

Number one, by far the biggest winner in England is Reform UK, which is a classic hard-right populist nationalist party of the kind we basically did not have in British politics for decades, if not centuries. It is very like Fratelli d’Italia, or Rassemblement National in France, or Alternative for Deutschland. I sometimes like to call it Fratelli d’Ingleterra, the Brothers of England. They are sweeping the board, taking votes both from Labour and the Conservatives.

Finding number two, it is also becoming very European: tremendous fragmentation. This used to be the country of the two-party system: Labour and Conservatives, His or Her Majesty’s Government, and His or Her Majesty’s Opposition. Now we have a five-party system in England; and if you take in the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, both of whom are doing very well, you have a seven-party system.

Thirdly, as in Catalonia and the Basque Country, the discontents that flow into a populist vote also flow into votes for separatists, nationalists, or regional parties. The Scottish National Party does spectacularly well in Scotland and, for the first time ever, Plaid Cymru seems to be doing pretty well in Wales. Welcome to Britain, a very typically European country.

Mounk: We are in this strange situation where the Conservatives have been discredited by a long and very chaotic stretch in government. A whole bunch of different prime ministers struggled to deliver on Brexit in the way they promised. They now have a rather impressive new leader in the form of Kemi Badenoch, who has been improving in the polls a little bit in the last months. However, that last decade-plus of chaotic government is really hanging around her neck like a millstone.

We have a Labour Party, the other big traditional party in that two-party system you invoked, that was elected on a huge parliamentary landslide in the general elections about two years ago, but not with a huge share of the vote. Already at that point, part of the reason for its landslide victory was the fragmentation of the political system, but they managed to concentrate enough of that vote on themselves to have this huge parliamentary majority.

They came in with a leader, Keir Starmer, who is a little bit of a chameleon. He was a loyal adjutant to Jeremy Corbyn when the Labour Party was extremely far left. He managed to win the leadership of the Labour Party by being somewhat acceptable to different wings of the party. Then he became very moderate as the leader of the Labour Party and clearly expelled the Corbyn wing from the party, but he never really seemed to have a positive program. The British public has soured on him very quickly once he got into office.

So perhaps the first question is, why is it that Labour has fallen from grace quite so quickly? And why is it that the Conservatives have not been able to pick up the slack of an unpopular incumbent political party, as might be expected in a top two-party system that still has a hold over the country?

Garton Ash: Remember that Labour’s “landslide” victory was, to a significant degree, because the right was split between the Conservatives and Reform UK. Actually, the Labour share of the vote was slightly down from the previous election, so it was not a landslide in that sense.

Secondly, it turns out that Keir Starmer is not a very good politician. He has made a series of often foolish mistakes and an endless series of u-turns. These involve apparently trivial matters, like appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington. Then, more material from the Epstein files is released, and it turns out that Mandelson was deeply compromised and even sharing inside information from the Cabinet table. That in itself seems trivial, but there has been a whole series of those incidents.

Above all, what are they doing with power? What are they doing with this enormous parliamentary majority? It is totally unclear to everyone where they are going. That is partly because it is difficult to work out where a post-Brexit Britain goes when it is being abandoned by its “best friend,” the United States, and has very little money left in the kitty. With soaring public debt, deficits, and an overburdened welfare state, it is difficult to work out what you would do in those circumstances; but whatever it is you might do, they are not doing it.

Mounk: What about the Conservatives? Why is it that they have not been able to pick up the slack? Is it just the fact that they have been in government for ten-plus years and people are sick of them, and not enough time has passed for them to be able to represent themselves? Is it that Kemi Badenoch is not effective as a leader, or that she has not figured out a way forward for a center-right party?

Is it part of a broader trend? We used to talk about the slow death of social democracy in the 2000s and early 2010s, but it turned out that the slow death of social democracy was just a precursor to the slow death of the old catch-all parties. Christian Democrats and Conservatives across Europe and other countries are now declining in the way that social democrats were, and the Tories are just one instance of that.

Garton Ash: I incline toward the second explanation because that is what we are seeing across Europe. One could even go more broadly than Europe. What was peculiar, not just to Britain but to Europe post-1945, was liberal conservatism, called Christian Democracy on the continent. Now, as we see everywhere, the barrier between that and hard-right nationalist populism is breaking down. If anything, the voters are going off to the hard-right populists, so I would favor that structural explanation.

On top of that comes 14 years of Tory misrule. People have not forgotten that from 2010 to 2024, we had a Conservative government which implemented stark austerity. For many people, even Conservative remain voters, they took the country out of the EU, and everyone can now see that was a terrible mistake.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Then there is a slightly sensitive issue, which is that on the right, and particularly for populists, immigration is the key issue. Immigration is not just immigration; it is about deeper cultural changes in the country. People feel they do not recognize their country anymore. If you have voters like that who are, say, elderly, white, and middle class, you have a leader who is extremely impressive in her own way, Kemi Badenoch, but who actually grew up in Nigeria and did not know she was a British citizen until the age of 14. She is up against Nigel Farage, the bluff, pint-of-beer-quaffing man from the 19th hole in the golf club. That is an uncomfortable subject to point to, but I do think that for an elderly electorate—and the Tories have an elderly electorate—that is a significant part of the explanation.

Mounk: If I am remembering correctly, Kemi Badenoch was born in the United Kingdom, then grew up mostly in Nigeria until she was a teenager and came to Britain. Unlike Kamala Harris, who claimed to have worked in McDonald’s, but I think there was never any very strong evidence that she had, she did indeed work in McDonald’s and work her way up in a very impressive way. I met her once when I was giving a presentation in Parliament when she was a backbench MP and I had never heard of her. She came and asked a number of somewhat aggressive but very perceptive questions. I remember being very impressed with her at the time and have been following her rise with interest since. There are many things I disagree with her on, but from that first meeting, I thought that she was a very impressive person.

I am a little skeptical about the role that race plays in this for the following reason. I had a debate with a good friend who knows British politics well when there was the leadership election for the Conservative Party. The way it works is that the Members of Parliament narrow the field down to two candidates, and then there is a choice among the membership of the Conservative Party. The membership of the Conservative Party skews old, very conservative, and somewhat away from London. I thought that Kemi Badenoch would win that election quite clearly. My friend was making the same argument that you just made, which is to say, those old Tory Party members are very conservative and quite wedded to an old vision of England. Are they really going to pick somebody like Kemi Badenoch over Robert Jenrick, a white guy who went to university at the same time as me in Cambridge?

Kemi Badenoch won that election very clearly. In that case, it seems we have quite strong evidence that this was not so strong an obstacle to her. It seems to me more broadly that when you look at even right-wing populist movements, people are very open to voting for ethnic minority candidates that they feel represent their views and that actually reassure them that immigrants to the country are able to stand up for the values of their homeland as they see them. Kemi Badenoch, of course, is not averse to a little bit of culture warring. She does very loudly represent what people on the right of politics would think of as traditional English values.

To me, it is not obvious. Surely there are going to be some people who are not going to vote for her because she is Black, because they are out-and-out racist. There are also going to be a lot of people who actually find that very appealing, who say that she is able to make a very full-throated, persuasive case for those values precisely because she is not the stereotype of the person who might make those claims. Why do you think that she was able to win the membership vote in the Conservative Party so strongly? Is that a very different electorate? What is the difference?

Garton Ash: First of all, I really do not want to put too much weight on this particular factor. I think the other two factors are significantly more important. Secondly, I was very impressed when they went for Kemi Badenoch. A party which had the first Jewish prime minister in British history, Benjamin Disraeli, the first female prime minister in Margaret Thatcher, and now they go for a woman of color. Very impressive.

The fact is that an awful lot of Conservative voters have gone to Reform UK. The man you mentioned, Robert Jenrick, who was effectively the runner-up and a leading figure in the Conservative Party, is now a leading figure in Reform UK, along with several other former Conservative ministers.

Let us put to one side the question of race, which in Britain means something slightly different than in the United States and for Kemi Badenoch. The fact is that at the drop of a hat, not just voters but also ministers and senior politicians from the Conservative Party are going off to Reform UK.

Mounk: As a side note, Robert Jenrick was at university with me studying history as well and nobody can remember him, which is a very strange thing.

Garton Ash: It is said—although I am not sure if this is a reliable authority, but according to the columnist Matthew Parris—that he is the only person to have lost an election in which he was the only candidate.

Mounk: I can disconfirm that because the same thing happened when I was an undergraduate in my college. There was a women’s officer for the Students Union for which the electorate was exclusively women. The candidate who ran had electoral posters which were slightly ill-conceived in general, and perhaps particularly ill-conceived given that the electorate was exclusively female, which read: “Vote for me because I’m gorgeous.”

She lost to the option RON, which is short for Reopen Nominations. There is at least one other election I can remember in which that happened.

Garton Ash : Robert Generic is his nickname, and the point is that he is so transparently opportunistic and chameleon-like that it helps explain why he lost to Kemi Badenoch. That is by the by. I think these are secondary issues.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

Now, just one further word on England specifically: let us remember that the Conservative Party is the most successful party in modern political history bar none. I would still not want to write it off. When the memory of 14 years of Tory misrule is a bit more remote and Reform UK starts getting some scandals, which it is bound to do, it may be a different story by the time of the general election, which has to happen before 2029.

Mounk: Speaking of Reform UK, tell us a little bit more about Nigel Farage and Reform UK. Earlier, you compared the party to Fratelli d’Italia, to the Rassemblement National, and to the Alternative for Deutschland. I increasingly think that we may need to make finer distinctions between different right-populist movements. I certainly think that Reform UK is a right-populist movement.

I see the resemblance in certain respects to Fratelli d’Italia, though Italy and Britain are very different countries. I also see the resemblance to someone like Marine Le Pen or even Jordan Bardella, who are clearly in the right-populist camp but have also distanced themselves from the post-fascist roots of what used to be the Front National and the figure of Marine’s father, Jean-Marie.

It does also seem to me as though there is a different wing of European right-wing populism which retains a deeper flirtation with the past and which is more deeply uncomfortable with any form of ethnic and religious diversity. I want to see to what extent you stand by the idea that Reform and the AfD in Germany are comparable, or to what extent it is helpful to think of those as really part of the same families of political parties.

Garton Ash: I think it is. It is certainly more like those classic continental populist hard-right parties than anything we have seen in mainstream British politics for a very long time. Such parties have been absolutely marginal in British politics. In that sense, it is more like them. Its major themes, like immigration, are very much the same, as is the mix of cultural conservatism and nationalism with more left-wing social and economic policy ideas, such as generous provision for welfare state pensions.

In its basic morphology, you are right that it is a more moderate or civilized version of some on that spectrum. It is very much more to the Meloni end of the spectrum than the Orbán or the East German AfD. That is undoubtedly the case.

An important point is that the effect of all this is not necessarily that we see a Nigel Farage Prime Minister, but that either we have a coalition of Conservatives and Reform UK—which is exactly what we are seeing all over Europe, the temptation for the center-right to go with the hard-right because there is no alternative—or we get a reform of our electoral system. If the only party that is doing well out of the electoral system seems to be Reform UK, and the former big parties—Labour and Conservatives, along with Lib Dems, Greens, and others—all go down to under 20%, then suddenly there might actually be a majority for the reform of the electoral system.

Mounk: That would be remarkable. Historically, in the United Kingdom, we had a two-party system between Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals were supplanted by Labour. When Labour was weakened and far to the left in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a rejuvenation of the liberal movement through the Liberal Democrats. The Labour Party and the Conservatives, as the two major political parties, were traditionally against electoral reform because “first-past-the-post” was most likely to give them periods of consolidated rule, as it continued to do until recently. It was the lone voice of the Liberal Democrats, along with scattered smaller parties, that wanted electoral reform.

It would be quite a turnabout for Labour, and possibly the Conservatives, to now vote for electoral reform. In the British system, which has very few checks and balances, Labour could just decide to do it; they have a parliamentary majority to put it in place. But it would be an extraordinary anticipatory capitulation, would it not? It would be a recognition that we have no chance of being re-elected or even of having a period in opposition for five or ten years before roaring back to be the governing party. We are giving up on the historic place that we had in the electoral system. Whether you can get the strategic initiative within the party and the willingness to bear that public humiliation is a very interesting question.

I want to cover the other part of the electoral transformation. We have talked about the weakness of Labour, the struggles of the Conservatives, and the rise of Reform. We are also seeing in many opinion polls, including those for the next general election, Labour running more or less head-to-head with the Green Party, which is led by Zack Polanski. In these local elections, another political force has gained significantly: Muslim independent candidates. These are basically sectarian candidates in largely Muslim parts of the United Kingdom running, in part, on issues regarding the Middle East and Israel, but also on deeply conservative social policies.

Subscribe now

You have two trends. The first is a form of sectarianism of which we have started to see inklings in different European countries. In the Netherlands, which has a system of proportional representation and a low electoral threshold, you had the rise of the Denk Party, which is a kind of Erdoğan-esque, mostly Turkish-Dutch party. Secondly, the Greens look very similar to the La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. What the French sometimes call islamo-gauchisme is a strange mixture between a bourgeois, highly educated, urban environmentalist left and a deeply conservative, if not reactionary, Muslim identitarian movement under the flag of one political party.

How do you assess the threat that the Green Party poses to the Labour Party, its prospects of establishing itself as one of the major forces on the left, and what do you think about these Muslim independent candidates?

Garton Ash: I do not think the comparison with La France Insoumise really holds up. I would say that Zack Polanski’s Greens are what the French call bobo, or bourgeois-bohemian. His appeal is that he is radical—significantly to the left of Labour on many issues—and, of course, very strong on Gaza.

The classic green issues are also a factor. I am talking to you from Oxford, where the Greens have just had a tremendous success in the local elections, and those are not the kinds of voters you are talking about.

What I would say is that Gaza, and then Trump’s war—or the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran—are not only making us in Europe, including Britain, seem utterly hypocritical through the question of double standards—Ukraine versus Gaza and the Iran war, respect for international law, and so on—but are really damaging what have been relatively good inter-community relations.

In a country where the figure for London is well over 40% foreign-born and nationwide is over 20% foreign-born, with large Muslim communities but also significant Jewish communities, we have had horrifying, repeated antisemitic incidents and stories of antisemitic violence. The Middle Eastern element is a very important part of the story; that is what is helping to tease our politics apart. But that said, Yascha, I think the situation here is nowhere near as bad in that respect as it is in France.

Mounk: You know both countries well, and I have spent a significant amount of time in both as well. I am more pessimistic than you are. When I look at what Zack Polanski has said as leader of the Green Party and how he has positioned himself—he is himself Jewish, but there are members of La France Insoumise who are Jewish as well.

After the terrible terrorist attack in Golders Green recently, in which someone stabbed two visibly Jewish men in a very Jewish neighborhood of London, deliberately targeting Jews, the response of the leader of the Green Party was remarkable, even after other attacks on British Jews in the preceding weeks and months. He had doubted whether a feeling of unsafety among British Jews was rooted in reality or merely perception. His first response after this terrorist attack was to retweet somebody criticizing the police response for subduing the attacker too harshly. Again, we’re talking here about somebody who is in the process of stabbing people, grievously injuring them in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in a terrorist attack and Polanski’s first response was to criticize the police for doing too much to stop this attack.

This is, to me, a level of denial of a very clear and present threat to Jewish life in Britain which is every bit as bad as what Jean-Luc Mélenchon has done in France.

Garton Ash: It is indefensible what he said; I could not agree more. For me, it is utterly shocking that ordinary British Jewish families are talking about needing to emigrate because they do not feel safe in this country.

Where I want to push back a little bit is that La France Insoumise is a major electoral and political force in France. Indeed, there are scenarios in which the second-round runoff might be between someone from La France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National. The Greens are nowhere near that, so I think their larger political significance is much less. However, we are absolutely in danger of attracting the kind of politics in this country from which we have been relatively free.

Mounk: In Oxford, the appeal of the Green Party is to students and left-leaning academics. It is a bobo party—the party of the bourgeoisie bohémien, a term David Brooks invented. I have an episode with him on the podcast about that. In other parts of Britain, the appeal of the Green Party is very different. You see a political coalition in the mix of candidates for local elections: socially progressive students in Oxford and socially conservative Muslim candidates who care about the Middle East. The Green Party is trying to keep this together, but it is not clear how long it can last.

Perhaps that is the natural transition to France. In polls for the next general election—though there are questions about sustainability in a first-past-the-post system—the Greens in Britain currently get between 15% and 20% of the vote. That puts them on par with Labour in some polls. In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is around 10% in preferences for the first round of the presidential election. It is not obvious that the Greens are that much weaker than La France Insoumise is in France.

Regarding France, we have important presidential elections coming up in the spring of 2027. Emmanuel Macron cannot run again. Interestingly, there is no lifetime limit on presidential ambitions in France, so Macron can run again in the future, but he cannot run this year. It is not clear there is an obvious centrist candidate to stand in for his movement. The likely candidate for the center is Édouard Philippe, or perhaps the young former prime minister.

The frontrunner is on the right: either Marine Le Pen, if she is allowed to run—which will be determined in a court appeal this summer—or her 30-year-old stand-in, Jordan Bardella. Bardella is an interesting figure who grew up in the suburbs of Paris. Then there is a chaotic left with candidates ranging from the “red-green” Jean-Luc Mélenchon to more moderate candidates like Raphaël Glucksmann in the center-left. How would you describe the political situation in France today?

Garton Ash: As it looks at the moment, the likely next president of France is either Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella. If Marine Le Pen is not allowed to stand, the chances may be even better for Jordan Bardella for the simple reason that his name is not Le Pen. In the last quarter century, the French have voted three times in the second round of a presidential election to keep out a candidate called Le Pen: twice to keep out Marine Le Pen, and once before that to keep out her father. There is something about that name which raises a certain allergy. Bardella is presenting himself as the very model of a modern populist.

As every presidential candidate must do in France, he has published a book. There was reporting of business leaders meeting discreetly with him for a nice dinner. I think that is what it is looking like, unless a candidate like Édouard Philippe or another unites everything from Macron’s liberal center to the center-left. It does not look likely at the moment.

The question becomes: how does a Europe with a President Bardella look? Is he more like Meloni or Orbán? If he were really Viktor Orbán, trying to put a spanner in the works at every step in Brussels and simply pursuing the French national interest coûte que coûte, that would be disastrous for the EU. This comes at a moment when it faces an unprecedented triple challenge: under attack militarily from Russia, politically from the United States, and economically from China.

If it seems more likely that it is a Meloni option, maybe that could work. We might actually work out some way of strengthening European defense rather rapidly, because we know we can no longer rely on Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin might have a go at Europe in the next two to three years. We will then have a rather consolidated transition of the European right. The European right will be something different from what we thought it was 15 years ago, when it was center-right, Christian Democrat, and liberal conservative.

Mounk: That is very interesting. I absolutely agree with you about the electoral prospects of Jordan Bardella. Interestingly, nobody I talked to in France agrees with that. In the Macronist camp, they all think they can beat Marine Le Pen because they have done it before. For some of the reasons you mentioned, they are convinced that Bardella is too young and unproven, and that he would fall apart in an electoral campaign. They think it is all hype and TikTok, and that he would fall apart in the debate between the two remaining candidates between the first and the second round. I have heard from quite senior people that they are reassured about the prospects of Bardella running. To me, that gives me echoes of what a lot of Democrats were saying in 2016: “Give us Donald Trump; this is going to be great, and we are going to beat him easily.” It did not turn out to be that way.

Tell me more broadly about how you see the shape of France and perhaps Germany at this point. These remain—despite the enlargement of the European Union and the fact that this Franco-German couple is much less at the center of the EU in political and economic terms—the two most important countries in the European Union, even more so now that Britain has left the bloc. They both seem to be in a deep malaise in different ways.

Germany, it seems to me, had a postwar model that worked very well for decades. In certain respects, it has squandered that model; in others, it has failed to update it in a world where it no longer applies. France, in certain respects, has never quite had a model that worked, at least in a number of decades, and is struggling to find one now. It feels as though there is just this significant weakness at the heart of Europe in economic terms and in terms of a self-understanding of what role the countries of the continent can play in the world.

Perhaps we should raise our eyes a bit above the political battle and think about why it is that, from Germany to France to the United Kingdom, citizens have this deep feeling of economic stagnation, of fear of the future, of growing irrelevance, and of a social contract no longer really holding up.

Garton Ash: Germany is a different matter from France. France is a matter of slowly accumulating problems over a long period of time—an ancien régime which Emmanuel Macron attempted to change and failed to change. There is massive social spending, and the French Revolution is repeated because they want to raise the retirement age to 63 or 64, whereas in other countries people are working to 68 or 69.

Mounk: The striking fact according to the Financial Times is that the average pensioner in France has a higher income than the average working person.

Garton Ash: Yes, and by the way, it creates a beautiful, wonderful way of life which many Brexit-voting Brits love to enjoy in their retirement.

The German case, as you know very well, is one of an incredibly successful national business model which has been blown out of the water by the triple challenge I just mentioned: the famous triad of cheap energy from Russia, cheap security from the United States, and easy exports to China. Crash, crash, crash. All three have gone. Actually, China is doing to Germany what Germany did for much of the world—the mercantilist model of export, export, export—and now it is turning the other way around. China is actually catalyzing a rapid deindustrialization of Germany. Tens of thousands of jobs are being lost in the car industry. The situation is dramatic in the German case.

Unlike France and Britain, what Germany has is money in the public purse. Friedrich Merz has roughly a trillion euros to spend over the next few years on defense and infrastructure. The question becomes: why is Merz not doing so well? I do not think it is so much about the individual. It is true that he does not have much government experience, so he does not always know exactly what levers to press, and sometimes he “shoots his mouth off,” but I do not think it is primarily that.

I think it is what Jarosław Kaczyński, the Polish populist leader, used to call “impossibilism”—the impossibility of making things happen. It seems to me that there is a real structural problem in Germany. This system, which was designed to prevent the emergence of another Adolf Hitler—a federal country, decentralized, with lots of checks and balances—has in the meantime acquired so many more bureaucratic and party-political checks and balances, including a complicated coalition, that it is actually very difficult to change things in a big way. Even a Maggie Thatcher, arguably, would be frustrated in the German system.

The answers are to hand. The big European problem is quite simply the gulf between our huge potential and our actual. Mario Draghi in his report and Enrico Letta in his report have told us what to do: make it a proper single market; have a unified capital market; have a single digital space; have a Europeanized defense industry. There are ways in which we could get much more dynamism back into Europe economically as well as politically, but at the moment the politics, which are still national, are simply preventing us from doing so.

Mounk: I have a few thoughts on this. First, it strikes me that if you talk to any leading French politician or civil servant, they are very impressive people. They are often somewhat provincial—many of them do not have much experience outside of France and do not necessarily speak good English—though that is changing in the younger generation. But they are intellectually brilliant, highly educated, erudite, and hardworking; they are elites in a self-conscious way, with the education to show for it. Yet, France has, by and large, been quite badly governed for the last 60 years.

You speak to German elites and, while there are exceptions, they are mostly provincials. Of the three candidates Germans could choose from for Chancellor in 2021, Olaf Scholz, who became Chancellor, had what I think Churchill said about Baldwin: a “municipal mind.” He had been a somewhat successful mayor of Hamburg, but was far from an impressive visionary or leader, with no charisma. Armin Laschet, whom I spent an evening with at a conference recently, is a very pleasant guy—he drinks five shots of schnapps, smokes three cigarettes, and is very jovial—but he really does not have a great understanding of world politics. He simply does not know or understand basic things about the United States, for example. Annalena Baerbock was pushed as an exciting figure—she is now the Secretary-General of the UN General Assembly—but I think she has very deep political and other weaknesses as well.

It is striking that you have a country like Germany, an impressive place with so many smart, hardworking people, and yet the top political personnel is just far less impressive than that of most peer countries. There are structural reasons for that, such as the federal system, but it is striking because Germany has been quite well-governed for most of the postwar period. However, I think that is because they stumbled upon a model that worked. As long as that model did not need changing, things were okay.

The German political intellectual class has learned the slogan with which Konrad Adenauer won a number of elections in the 1950s and 1960s: Keine Experimente—no experiments. Let us just stick with what we have because the alternative is “who knows what.” Now, they have in part demolished that model. Angela Merkel’s decision to switch off nuclear reactors and instead import coal from Poland—which is effectively what happened—has led to very high energy costs that are strangling German industry.

In part, the model just does not work anymore. As Constanze Stelzenmüller has said, Germany used to outsource its energy needs to Russia, its market to China, and its military needs to the United States. None of those three parts of the model work anymore. There seems to be a lack of serious conversation about this in Germany. People are talking about it, but not in a serious way, and there is a lack of imagination for what the new role of Germany in the world could be. There is a complete failure to recognize that these changes need to happen.

That is where the second point comes in: the coalitional math. Because the populists are now strong on the right and, to some extent, on the left, you never have an ideologically coherent government anymore. It is always some form of “grand coalition.” At the moment, it is technically a Große Koalition—a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, the two traditionally dominant Volksparteien in Germany. Before that, it was an effective cross-ideological coalition between the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats. You always have someone blocking change in any direction. In the current government, a big part of the reason for Merz’s failure is the complete immobility of the Social Democrats, who have just not understood anything about this moment and are blocking any attempted reform.

Garton Ash: I have to say, I think you’re slightly over-egging the pudding in your description of the German versus the French elites and political elites. I’ve met some very impressive people in Germany; traditionally post-1945, the most impressive people have been in business or science. That was traditionally the way it worked.

Actually, Berlin—I was just there a couple of weeks ago—is a very interesting, lively place with a very interesting think tank landscape. If you look at the rethinking on Russia and on security and defense policy, I would say it’s more impressive than that in London and Paris, partly because more rethinking needed to be done. But above all, what I want to say is this: I don’t think the perennial slogan of the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany was “no experiments.” Schröder’s labor market reforms in the early 2000s were quite expensive. I think the slogan or the motto was “change through consensus.” That was the key to the success of the German system—not just consensus within Parliament or consensus between the federal government and the Länder, but also, of course, between capital and labor.

It’s a phrase that I owe to my good friend Michael Mattis: “change through consensus.” The problem is, as you rightly point out and as I was saying a moment ago, that the system has become so complicated with the fragmentation of the party landscape—which is absolutely characteristic of Europe in our time—plus this accretion, sort of barnacles on a ship’s hull, of not just constitutional checks and balances, which are already very large, but regulatory and bureaucratic and procedural checks and balances. “Change through consensus” is just proving extremely difficult to achieve, even if you have a trillion euros to spend.

The larger point I just want to make—I think I’ve made this to you before, but I want to make it because it’s so important to understand: in most European languages, there is no separate word for “policy.” The key structural problem of Europe—I mean the European Union—is that the policies we need are European, but the politics are still national. We need European-scale defense industry, defense policy, capital markets, etc. But the politics keep holding us back because they’re always national. For me, the future of Europe hangs to a large degree on how we manage that tension. Obviously, the logical answer would be to say, well, let’s make the politics European. Let’s have European political parties and direct elections to European Parliament. Been there, tried that; it hasn’t got us very far. So my view is just get on with it and try and make it work.

Mounk: That is a huge structural challenge where a lot of important decisions are now taken at the European level, but it is very hard to muster the will for some kind of coherent change at any of the national levels, and even harder to then bundle that at the European level.

Garton Ash: One consequence of that is that you only need a single veto player in Brussels in the decision-making of the European Union. This brings us on our little tour to Hungary because the prime minister of one small European country, because it was a member state of the EU, could hold up packages of sanctions that everyone else wanted against Russia. He could hold up 90 billion euros, which are crucial to the future of Ukraine for the next two years, until he exacted his price.

The unique structural nature of this voluntary empire, which is the European Union—this empire by consent which empowers small and medium-sized countries—enables them to block larger countries because of the requirement for unanimity. It is a beautiful thing and something new in history, but it does mean that national politics can put an enormous spanner in the works of a very big machine.

Mounk: I see on American lists of “great German words” many phrases that would not be instantly recognizable to most Germans. They might understand them in the sense that they can scan the components and grasp the meaning, but they are not existing idioms. However, there is a lovely German phrase that really does exist: Besitzstandswahrung.

It is the idea that people are motivated by preserving what they have—the protection of vested rights or acquired status. It applies to the German political scene and society, and it is one reason for the current lack of imagination. It applies in France as well. I took part in an exercise called France 2050, which was forward-planning by the French government. An interesting poll found that most French people think things will be a little worse in the future than today; they are pessimistic, but they think things will not change that much.

It strikes me that this is the attitude of many Europeans today outside of France as well. I do not think it is realistic. Either Europe reforms itself properly—in which case things might be better in 20 or 50 years—or it fails to reform, and things could really get a lot worse.

To what extent is Besitzstandswahrung the real condition of Europe? We see it in Britain with the triple lock on the pension system. We see it in France with the rage at Macron for attempting reforms. In Germany, perhaps some think-tank people in Berlin are starting to understand the need for change, but certainly it is not translating into policy, and it is not really translating into a demand for real change from voters either, other than perhaps relative to immigration with people migrating over to the Alternative for Germany. To what extent is Besitzstandswahrung the real condition of Europe, and can the continent overcome it?

Garton Ash: I think that is the question of questions. Because we are still, in spite of all the multiple crises, on the whole—in most, certainly, Western European countries—too comfortable. And look, the largest war in Europe since 1945 has been going on just next door for more than four years, longer than the Great Patriotic War, Russia in the Second World War. I think as of June 11th, it will be longer than the First World War. And most of life just goes on as normal in Western and Central Europe.

What I have just written is a new book, a very short introduction to Europe. One of the points of the book is precisely to say to Europeans: wake up; learn from history. If you do not change, then things can collapse quite suddenly. Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard said, “Things must change so they can remain the same”—the famous, oft-repeated line. I think that is exactly where we are.

I think there is an intellectual understanding of that among a lot of the European elites. If you go to a policy intellectual conference, people will absolutely understand that. But does it translate into our politics, which are all about defending our pensions, defending the welfare state, and defending this and that? I think not. And therefore, the quite possible, perhaps even probable scenario is that Europeans in their majority, particularly Western and Central Europeans, will choose gentle decline and suddenly one day find out that, like the old joke about going bankrupt, it is not gentle; it is quite sudden.

Mounk: That is my fear as well: that there is this option of gradual, genteel decline in the minds of a lot of Europeans that may turn out not to exist.

We briefly alluded to Hungary. I feel like a good conversation makes people depressed and gives them some hope, so let us try and give people some hope about Hungary and perhaps about Ukraine for the rest of this conversation. Viktor Orbán ruled for 16 years. He clearly undermined democratic institutions in a very serious way. There were huge amounts of personal corruption with a great enriching of the entire environment of Viktor Orbán, including old friends and relatives. You had a genuinely unfree media landscape. I remember when I was doing some reporting in Hungary, seeing every newspaper reporting on a speech by Orbán with the same flattering photograph and the same positive write-ups—something quite striking to see. A lot of people thought that it would no longer be possible to displace Orbán from elected office at the ballot box.

He finally overstayed his welcome, in part because of some straight-up scandals of governance—pardons for people who were running institutions in which child abuse had taken place and things like that. There was, ironically in part because of electoral rules that Orbán introduced to boost his majority, a particularly strong majority against him in the new parliament.

I have two questions about this. First, is democracy more resilient than we thought? Is the fact that the opposition was able to displace Orbán at the ballot box—that he did not call out the military or somehow try and sustain himself in power, and that the opposition now has a two-thirds majority—a sign that democracy is more resilient than we have given it credit for in the last 10 or so years?

Secondly, what are the dilemmas of post-populist rule? The new government will have a choice: either tolerate a lot of Orbán loyalists who are not committed to democratic rules and norms and who often are not qualified for their positions—keeping them in place, which has obvious downsides—or try to throw them out of office. But that, of course, just normalizes the rule that every new government comes in and throws out the old guys. It could even, at the extreme, lead to an over-consolidation of power in the hands of a new prime minister.

In general, should we be more optimistic about the resilience of democracy? And can the new government deal with this post-populist dilemma?

Garton Ash: I booked my ticket to Budapest many months ago because I have known Viktor Orbán since 1988. I first met him when he was a seemingly idealistic student leader, just three months after they had founded this wonderful new party called the Young Democrats, Fidesz. I still actually have the notes in my notebook where they were telling me about the rule of law, multi-party democracy, and all these wonderful things that he proceeded to destroy. I wanted to be there to see his fall.

The day and the evening in Budapest were magical; they even exceeded my wildest dreams because it was not a level playing field. For all the reasons you have given—gerrymandering, media control, abuse of the state administration, and abuse of state funds—it was an uphill battle. But there was such a massive outpouring of popular will and a sense that it was time for a change that it just swept all those obstacles away.

What you had was this overwhelming sentiment, mainly about social and economic conditions, meeting a seemingly credible change. Péter Magyar had a very clever campaign. He only gave one interview to the international media. He did virtually nothing in Budapest. He did not touch the classic urban liberal themes; he just went from small town to small town and village to village talking about social and economic issues and corruption. The “time for a change” sentiment met what looked like a credible change, and it was a fantastic moment.

Now, to the question you posed: you and I have for some time been saying—or I, at least, have certainly been saying—that Hungary is no longer a democracy. We have a member of the European Union which is no longer a democracy; it is a competitive authoritarian or electoral authoritarian system. So how come he could win an election? I think there is an answer to that. Elections are dangerous moments, even for competitive authoritarian regimes, even with all those advantages. Remember Slobodan Milošević was toppled by an election in 2000. Remember the spark for the Orange Revolution in 2004 was an election.

Elections in competitive authoritarian systems are unpredictable. On the day, it was relatively clean—it wasn’t massively rigged like an election in North Korea. They thought they had the system under control, as they had for many years. The difference from other cases is that those often involved an element of violence. To our astonishment, at about 9:20 p.m. on election night, a message flashed on Péter Magyar’s Facebook page: “Viktor Orbán has just rung me and congratulated me on my victory.”

I think you have to say that being inside the EU was a constraint. Were you really going to send in the thugs and use the Russians to try and falsify what was clearly a landslide result through force and fraud? It remains true that it was a competitive authoritarian system, but it was overcome by the combination of a “time for a change” sentiment, a credible alternative, and the external constraint of the EU.

To your second question: it is absolutely fascinating because, as you know, in Poland, we had another wonderful electoral moment when Donald Tusk was re-elected in autumn 2023, and this has gone completely pear-shaped. We have what is now famously called the “post-populist trilemma.” There are three things you want to be: rapid, effective, and legal. The trilemma says you can only be any two of them at once. Poland is now completely stuck in a situation of legal chaos, something almost like what Trotsky called “dual power” between Donald Tusk’s government and the Law and Justice president.

Fortunately, there is very good news about Hungary. Because the incoming TISZA government has a constitutional majority, and because of the way Orbán built his system—wanting formally to comply with EU rules while violating the norms—it is in a much better position. It can, with a bit of luck, restore the legal order and a neutral civil service, and legally replace the people Orbán put in place. It will not be easy. There will be local power holders in place and massive issues with corruption. But for me, if you can undo such far-reaching state capture by essentially legal and constitutional means, that will be a very positive sign for the rest of Europe and perhaps even for the United States.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Timothy discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and the future of the relationship between Europe and the United States. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Laurenz Guenther is a political economist at the Toulouse School of Economics and a Fellow at the Institute for European Policymaking at Bocconi University. His research and Substack focus on representation, populism, and immigration in Western democracies.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Laurenz Guenther discuss why there’s a massive representation gap between political elites and voters on cultural issues, how this explains the rise of populist parties like the AfD in Germany, and whether new parties can successfully occupy the economically left but socially conservative political space.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: You managed to write one of these papers that goes viral quite quickly because it really shows something interesting. Often in the social sciences, the best kind of papers show what we all already kind of knew, but actually demonstrate it in a thorough and methodological way. What you show is that there is a significant gap in representation, particularly of representation on cultural issues, between political elites and ordinary people. To me, the most striking graph in this paper came from Germany, and it looked at attitudes about immigration among members of the Bundestag, among elected politicians, and ordinary voters—I believe in 2013. Tell us a little bit about that specific data and what it shows us.

Laurenz Guenther: What we have is answers to surveys of representative samples of citizens and also of parliamentarians. These two groups answer the exact same question, which enables comparability. The example that you mentioned is about immigration—to what extent immigration should be facilitated or restricted. What one can see in this graph is that Germans, of course, have heterogeneous preferences, but most Germans want to restrict immigration to Germany. What I show is the average response of the members of all the parties that were relevant at this point in time in Germany, and all of these parties—measured by the average position of the member—wanted to facilitate immigration. There was a huge mismatch, even in the direction, in the sense that most people wanted to go to the right on immigration, but all the parties wanted to go to the left.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Mounk: One of the striking things about this is that this is before the rise of the Alternative for Germany, which I think was founded right about then, but was not yet represented in the Bundestag. The most right-leaning political party in the Bundestag was the Christian Democratic Union, which was led at the time by Angela Merkel. The view of the average parliamentarian—not just in the Bundestag, but in the Christian Democratic Party—was way to the left of where the average view in the population was. Is that right?

Guenther: Yes, this is right. All of these people who are right-leaning on immigration—from their perspective, it must have looked like everyone, even the supposed right-wing politicians, were much more left-wing. They had absolutely no representation on this topic. This is one of the ideas of this paper: this provided fertile ground for the AfD, which then subsequently also rose.

Mounk: Over half of the population didn’t really have their views represented in the Bundestag. What happens? The AfD was founded as a political party by these slightly stodgy economics professors who were really worried about the euro and opposed the single currency. But the longer the party existed, the more it focused on issues like immigration. By the time it managed to get elected to the Bundestag in 2017, its main focus really was on restricting immigration. What this paper strikingly shows is that there was all of this fertile ground in which it could fish for voters, because so many voters weren’t represented by the pre-existing political parties.

How general is this? That is a really striking data point about Germany. To what extent do you have similar data about other countries? To what extent can we generalize from the existence of this kind of cultural representation gap in the German case to the existence of similar cultural representation gaps in other countries in Europe or beyond?

Guenther: The aim of this paper is to do that more systematically—to look at other countries and other issues. This can be generalized across European countries, and across cultural issues. Looking at 27 European countries, I find the same patterns on cultural issues for all of them. By cultural issues, I mean immigration, but also issues like gender relations, punishment for criminals, assimilation, and multiculturalism. On all of these, voters are much more right-wing than the parliamentarians of their countries. On economic issues it is much more mixed and the gaps are smaller. Notably, there is a great article in the Financial Times where this analysis was also extended to the United States, and there you find a similar pattern.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about each side of this. On the cultural representation gap, what other metrics do you look at where the views of ordinary citizens tend to be quite far apart from the views of parliamentarians?

Guenther: Immigration is certainly one of the issues where you have one of the largest differences. Another issue where the difference is similarly large is punishment for criminals—should sentences for criminals become harsher? Here again, majorities in basically all European countries say that this should be done, but parliamentarians disagree. This is a directional disagreement: majorities of parliamentarians disagree with that position, while around 70% of the population say that it should be done. There are also big differences on gender relations and European unification. European unification, however, is not so directional. Parliamentarians seem to be very strongly in favor, and voters are also somewhat in favor, but apparently want a much slower unification.

Mounk: There is an interesting contrast here. On some issues, political elites feel really strongly about something, but they are actually going in the same direction as ordinary voters. But when talking about things like immigration in particular, and to some extent assimilation and how strong criminal sentences should be, they are not just far apart—they are going in opposite directions. The average view of a parliamentarian is that immigration is a good thing for the country. The average view of a voter is that immigration is a bad thing for the country. That feels like a more significant gap. Even if on a 1 to 10 scale the gap is three points on each of them—and I don’t know exactly what the gap is on your scale, I’m making these numbers up—if that three means that overall preferences go in different directions, that seems to matter more than if three means one set of people is very enthusiastic and the other is somewhat enthusiastic.

Guenther: In the public discourse, people sometimes don’t use that term, but this idea often comes up that there may be differences between parliamentarians and voters. It is always framed in the sense that parliamentarians are somewhat ahead and voters want everything to go a little bit more slowly—which, of course, adds a normative dimension, and that is a whole different issue. But it also does not really address these findings. Because, as you say, this is not just a matter of everyone in principle wanting the same thing, with some wanting it a bit more quickly and others a bit more slowly. It is really that parliamentarians and the average voter disagree on the goal—on where we should be heading as a society. That is indeed a very different thing.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

Mounk: Tell me a little bit about those economic metrics, because I think that especially on the left, a lot of people want to think the real disjuncture between voters and the people is on economic issues. People want redistribution, they want a robust welfare state, and then there are the evil political elites—probably from a much more affluent milieu, who have to find donations for political parties, especially in the United States, but also in Europe—who are moving in fancy circles and don’t want any redistribution. That is really where the gap lies. Your data seems to suggest that the story is much more complicated. There are obviously some gaps on various issues of economic policy as well, but they seem to be much smaller on average than on cultural issues. Tell us about the extent to which the views of ordinary people and of political elites match up on economic issues.

Guenther: On economics it depends a bit. On redistribution, there is an item that asks people about redistribution, and qualitatively this is indeed what people on the left would think: ordinary people are a bit more in favor of redistribution than parliamentarians. Notably, wealthier ordinary people—those above median income—have similar preferences to the average parliamentarian of their country, and the gap is driven by the poorer half of the population, who really want much more redistribution. That makes a lot of sense.

But this gap—and I would have to look up the exact numbers—is much smaller than on cultural issues, by a factor of roughly five. The gap on immigration is really about five times as large as the gap on redistribution. On other economic issues it depends a bit more. Generally speaking, it looks like people want a bit more redistribution than parliamentarians, and they want less state intervention.

One thing that is missing here is trade. In the dataset that I use, there are no questions on trade, so there may be a representation gap there—we don’t really know.

Mounk: We would expect political elites to be probably more pro-free trade and ordinary people probably less so. There is another way of thinking about this, which is a two-dimensional graph where you look on one dimension at where people are on social and cultural issues and on the other dimension where they are on economic issues. What tends to be well represented, particularly in two-party systems but to some extent even in systems of proportional representation, is the things that go on the axis from the bottom left to the top right. On the one hand, there are right-leaning political parties that want less redistribution and are reasonably restrictive on migration. On the other hand, there are left-leaning political parties that are quite open to immigration, or even want more immigration, and are also pro-redistribution.

On one side, there are libertarians who are very socially liberal but want less economic redistribution. Those tend to be overrepresented in elite political discourse, but they are actually a relatively small part of the population. There is a much larger part of the population that occupies what is often called the populist quadrant—people who actually want a reasonably high level of redistribution, who do not oppose the welfare state and are not libertarians on economic policy, but who are quite conservative on social issues.

How does your research intersect with that line of thinking? Do you think it is basically right that it is that last quadrant—the people who are socially quite conservative but economically and fiscally reasonably progressive—that are most underrepresented?

Guenther: If you think about these four quadrants, this is the group that is least represented. In this two-dimensional space, the parties in most countries fall along a diagonal. The more you condition on political knowledge or participation in politics, the more you get a strong correlation to that line.

Subscribe now

Mounk: People who are very engaged in politics, if they are economically liberal, are also likely to be socially liberal. But people who are not very interested in politics are going to have views that are more all over the place, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are less coherent. They are just not bundled in the way that our political system conditions us to bundle our views.

Guenther: For the general population, views are more dispersed—it looks more like a circle, like a two-dimensional normal distribution. What my paper shows is that this line of the politically active has actually shifted downward. If you think about that, you can see that the people who are socially conservative and economically left-wing are particularly far away from the closest party in many countries. There is no major party that bundles their views, which I would predict would be an opportunity for new parties.

The populists that are very successful in many countries usually supply this policy position for the upper-right quadrant—that is, for people who are socially conservative and also economically right-wing, even though they are often quite flexible on economics. If you plot them over time in this space, you can see how they move around somewhat to attract more voters from the left.

Mounk: The one thing that defines right-wing populism today in most contexts—perhaps excluding Argentina or certain other countries—is not economics. It is those social and cultural issues. The AfD is interesting in that sense because it was founded on an economically populist issue, but over time it really became defined by those social and cultural issues much more than economic ones.

The economic views of populist parties are a little bit all over the place in different countries. A party like the AfD, in part because of its roots, is probably mostly right-leaning on economic issues, though it certainly isn’t a radical libertarian party and doesn’t want to abolish the welfare state. But a party like the Rassemblement National in France is much more left-leaning on economic issues. They have promised in many ways to preserve the welfare state and opposed Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform, wanting to preserve those entitlements for people. Even Donald Trump plays a strange role in this. On the one hand, a lot of the economic policies he has passed have been quite right-leaning economically—huge tax benefits for the rich, much less for ordinary people. But when you look at how he distinguished himself from his Republican competitors in the 2016 primaries, it was in part by saying things like, perhaps the state does have a responsibility to make sure that everybody has access to healthcare, which was something that the other fifteen Republican candidates did not say.

Why is it so hard for populist parties, particularly in systems of proportional representation, to really appeal to that quadrant? There is something surprising about the fact that you don’t see more political movements move squarely into the space that is economically relatively left-wing and socially right-wing. We have seen an attempt at something like that in the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany—a party that for all kinds of reasons I personally don’t particularly like. They nearly got into the Bundestag in the last elections but fell just short by a few thousand votes and now seem to be falling apart. It seems to be hard for political parties to move into that space, even though that clearly is where a significant portion of the electorate is. Tell us a little bit about who Sahra Wagenknecht is and what this party is.

Guenther: Let me answer this in two steps, looking at two parties that may have moved into that space: the AfD and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.

The AfD was founded as an economically right-leaning party, largely driven by economics professors opposed to the European Union, and then became very anti-immigration during the refugee crisis. At that point it was probably already positioned, just because of its members, as an economically right-wing party, and it is difficult to move from there. This plays a big role: it is difficult to completely change your position over time, which I think is also one of the reasons why established parties don’t do that. To really capture this quadrant, a party would have to move so much that it risks a split. It would have to make much bigger moves than, for instance, Merkel did during the refugee crisis, which was already a big stress test for the party.

One thing worth mentioning briefly is that in Germany, the quadrant of economically right-wing and socially right-wing people is quite a bit larger than the quadrant of socially right-wing and economically left-wing people. The latter—the quadrant we are interested in—is still a big quadrant, larger than the libertarian quadrant. But if you want to be the socially conservative party and you are simply thinking about maximizing votes, it makes sense to first go after the people who are right-wing across the board, then perhaps move to the center, and then take the second quadrant. The AfD does seem to be trying to do something like that.

Now, turning to Sahra Wagenknecht. She was for a very long time one of the most prominent members of Die Linke—the left-wing party that is basically a descendant of the former Communist Party of East Germany. It is a minor party, polling around five to ten percent, that is very economically left-wing but also very socially progressive and liberal. Wagenknecht distanced herself from this party, largely driven by her views on cultural issues, in particular immigration, on which she was more conservative than much of the rest of her party. This ultimately led to a split in which she left the party together with a few other members of parliament and founded her own party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht.

This party initially did very well in the polls and was seen as considerably more successful than the original left-wing party. In the election, however, they nearly failed to clear the 5% threshold required for parliamentary representation, while Die Linke did make it into parliament. In some sense, it was a respectable performance—it is very rare for new parties in Germany to clear that threshold, and it was the party’s first election. Now they seem to be falling apart.

My sense is that on cultural issues they were not right-wing enough to capture the quadrant of socially conservative, economically left-wing voters. I think in the beginning people expected Wagenknecht to be more conservative on social issues, and that position appeared to be significantly watered down over time, which I think was a problem for the party.

Mounk: That is interesting. She is also a very charismatic but polarizing figure, and there is always a tension between a political party really just being a personal vehicle for its leader. The party’s name, BSW, literally consists of her initials—Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht. She has now distanced herself a little from the party, and that probably means it is not going to survive. But it was an interesting attempt at trying to capture that quadrant of the electorate.

Let me present to you a reading of your paper which I know you deliberately don’t put in the paper, but which I think is how a lot of people have read it. Tell me to what extent, speaking as a private citizen rather than a scholar of social science, you agree with that interpretation.

Here is the first part. Here is the real explanation of populism. We have been having this debate for ten or fifteen years about why populism is rising around the world, and people point to this explanation and that one. The one thing nobody has really been talking about is whether the problem is simply that the established political parties aren’t listening to what voters want. You might agree with the views of the established parties, or you might agree with the views of voters. On many things, I’m probably closer to the views of members of a political elite, because having a PhD in political science, I’m virtually by definition a member of the political elite. But when we collectively become so distanced from what ordinary people think, they are going to get upset. What happened here is that over time, this cultural representation gap increased. People no longer listened to voters. Election after election, people said they wanted more controls on immigration. Elite political parties did not deliver on those preferences. Finally, voters rebelled by voting for the one party willing to give them what they want.

The second part is a more provocative statement. Perhaps one of the things that established political parties need to do in order to deal with the rise of populism is to actually listen to what people want and adopt some of those policy positions. Not every single established party needs to do this. In the German context, it probably makes sense for the Green Party to continue to be very pro-immigration, because its electorate is very pro-immigration—and that is the virtue of a system of proportional representation. But if the Christian Democrats or even the Social Democrats want to compete with the AfD for the many voters who have shifted towards it over the last few years—a party that now polls roughly equal with the Christian Democrats in first place, having grown from less than 5% of the vote in 2013, around the time of your paper, to around 23 to 25% in polls today—the straightforward thing to do is to get closer to what a lot of ordinary people want. Is that a plausible interpretation of your paper?

Guenther: I think that is a plausible interpretation. The first part stays relatively true to the paper. The previous literature has done a lot of very valuable work, and what I do is not a substitute for that—I’m not saying everyone else was wrong. I have the impression that the previous literature just didn’t really look at this specific part of the puzzle. It looked more at how the financial crisis contributed to making people vote for populist parties, what the loss of manufacturing jobs did, and so on. But there was less focus on the choices of mainstream parties and in particular how they would respond. That ties into the second question, which I also think is a fair interpretation.

This paper is also interesting because it looks at a variable that can be easily influenced. We have all of these variables in mind when it comes to populism—lack of trust, slow economic growth, certain cultural characteristics, and so on. But these things are more or less given and very difficult to change. If you take the estimates seriously, winning back voters by increasing economic growth would require growth rates that are just completely unrealistic. What this paper—and several related papers—does is look at the positioning of parties, which is a variable that can be adjusted relatively easily. In that sense, I do agree that if mainstream parties want to win back voters and weaken populist parties, they have to move their political positions.

Importantly—and this is often a point of confusion—they need to deliver on policy outputs, not just rhetoric. There are some papers that show it backfires if parties merely shift their rhetoric. There was a famous speech by Starmer—“island of strangers” and so on—and the analysis of that suggests it probably backfired.

Mounk: The idea here being that if politicians say they have heard the voters and are going to do something about immigration, and then there is no action to follow up on it, voters conclude that the politicians are simply being hypocritical and cannot be trusted.

Guenther: The facts on the ground must change. In some sense, this is a chance—and maybe the last chance—for the mainstream parties, because populists are often not that good at delivering real results or delivering on their promises, at least in their first attempt. During the first Trump administration, for instance, there was no major deportation effort. The second time, Trump is delivering on that: immigration has fallen dramatically and deportations are proceeding at scale. He learned from the first term and delivered on those promises in the second.

Something similar may be happening in Europe. Often, in their first time in power, right-wing populists don’t really deliver. We have seen this with right-wing populists in Austria, with Meloni, and others. Mainstream parties therefore have a chance to deliver now, or even if populists come to power, to use that period to develop a new strategy and new policy positions. If mainstream parties then win the election after the populists leave power, they have another chance. But I do think it is an increasingly difficult situation for mainstream parties across Europe. They have one or two election cycles to deliver. If they don’t, populist parties could, in the medium term, simply outperform them and come to dominate European policymaking.

Mounk: What do you say to people who claim that when mainstream parties try to emulate populists, it actually only reinforces the populists? This is a strand of research that I have seen repeatedly, and more than anything else it seems to be conventional wisdom among a lot of political scientists—that there are these studies, sometimes somewhat dubious studies I think, that demonstrate that when mainstream political parties start to use the verbal register of populists or emulate some of their policy positions, voters are simply going to vote for the original. This is an argument you hear a lot. How convincing do you find it, and why does it sound like you don’t agree with it?

Guenther: This depends a lot on whether you deliver results or whether you do something else—which is why I made the rhetoric versus results distinction. There are a lot of studies on this and they show mixed results. Some find that people vote for the original populist party if a mainstream party moves toward the populists. An example is the analysis of the Starmer “island of strangers” speech that I alluded to before. Other papers show the opposite: that if a party moves to the right on immigration, voters shift toward that party and away from the populists. There is a study in Denmark that shows this, and we also have a study done in Germany just before the most recent election that finds that if the CDU moves to the right and fills the representation gap, the AfD loses voters and the CDU gains voters.

I do think it depends, and it depends most strongly on whether actual policy positions change. If the policy positions really change and the output is delivered, people do not simply vote for the original.

One thing that is often forgotten in this context is that right-wing populism in Germany is only in some sense a third wave. There were early right-wing populists just after the foundation of the German republic who were strong in the 1950s. Then there were the Republikaner—the Republicans—in Germany in the 1980s, who were in some sense similar to the AfD. In both cases, the CDU—the centre-right party—accommodated them, moved toward their positions, and in the 1950s under Adenauer even gave them ministerial posts. Later, in the context of the asylum wave from Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, immigration had become a major issue and people wanted less of it, and the constitution was actually changed to limit asylum immigration significantly.

Mounk: Your point is that it worked at the time—the Republikaner really were a kind of insurgent populist force in the 1980s and 1990s. They had some significant successes, ended up being represented in a number of state parliaments, but never quite made it into the Bundestag. What you are saying, I take it, is that the Christian Democrats moved to the right in order to limit the oxygen for that political party. Rather than people saying that this somehow reinforced their impression that the Republikaner were onto something and they should vote for them, they said that some of their concerns were being taken care of by the political party they traditionally voted for and moved back toward voting for the Christian Democrats.

On this telling, it was Angela Merkel’s very deliberate strategy of capturing the political center—and no longer covering the right of politics—that allowed this insurgent movement to establish itself as a permanent political force. There are two ways of thinking about this. Strauss, a very influential Bavarian prime minister, always used to say that between the Christian Democrats and the right, nothing should be able to fit—meaning that he always wanted to make sure that the Christian Democrats, as a democratic political party, would cover the flank on the right far enough to prevent any party to their right from establishing itself. Merkel’s approach was very different: she would make the Christian Democrats into the party of the political center. But of course, that raises the question of who deeply conservative people—those who don’t think of themselves as being in the political center—should be voting for.

One way I have sometimes put this about German politics—and I am obviously a German citizen—is the following. I have been politically socialized on the left and continue to think of myself as being on the left, even though I have significant criticisms of the shape that the left is taking in many countries today. If I look at Angela Merkel and find that I share a lot of her basic value coordinates—even if I think she made a lot of bad decisions—we have a problem, because there are a lot of people in Germany who are considerably more conservative than I am. If the leader of the most conservative democratic political party in Germany holds views that someone on the left feels broadly comfortable with, that may be fine as long as that person is in charge. But it leaves a huge segment of the German electorate without political representation. What happens? They go and vote for the AfD.

There is another line of argument, which is that left-wing political parties in particular have not made sufficiently large redistributive demands. There was a period in which the left and the right had very similar positions on economic policy. If you look at Germany today—the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats—or at Britain—Labour and the Conservatives—they are not that far apart on a lot of economic policy issues. People therefore no longer invest significance in economic policy, and that is why cultural issues become so salient. Why are we debating immigration? Because if there are no deep ideological differences in economic policy, that is the only thing left to debate. On this argument, what is really explaining the rise of right-wing political parties is the convergence on economic policy, and one way to fight that—particularly for left-wing political parties—is to move to the left on economics, making that a more charged political issue and shifting the public debate away from issues like immigration. This is an argument that has been made by a number of political scientists and that I often hear in the debate. I imagine that you are skeptical about that line of argument as well.

Guenther: I am indeed skeptical about that line of argument. It leads to an interesting deeper question, which I will address first. I do believe that in principle the theoretical argument is correct. All else being equal, if left-wing parties moved further to the left, we would probably talk more about economic topics and, because people’s attention is limited, they would probably think a bit less about cultural issues. However, I would guess—and I don’t think we have particularly strong studies on the relative importance of this effect—that it is a relatively minor thing. That is my main criticism. I’m sure the effect probably exists; all kinds of effects exist. But how big is it?

I don’t think people will stop caring about immigration because talk shows discuss economics more, or because the policy options on offer are somewhat more distinct from each other. This belief is driven by two things. The first is simply talking to Germans. I am German, most of my friends are German, and I do a lot of interviews and survey work where people tell their stories. Immigration and issues related to it is such a huge issue, and touches on such fundamental fears about identity and belonging, that I think it will always be salient for these people as long as immigration is high or looks like it could increase further.

The second thing is that if you look at the immigration that people say they care about—specifically immigration from the Middle East and Africa—the actual numbers of arrivals from these groups are extremely highly correlated with how much people care about the issue. During the refugee crisis, for instance, people were asked how important immigration was to them, and that line tracks extremely closely with the actual number of asylum applications in Germany. This suggests that concern about immigration is tied to things that really happen on the ground.

Notably—and this is an argument that is often made, but I think it is close to a straw man—how much people care about immigration is not really predicted by overall immigration numbers, that is, by how many people come to Germany in total. Most people don’t really care about, say, a French student coming to Germany to study. It is about very specific groups, and the correlation with real-world arrivals of those groups is clearly there.

Mounk: You said a little while ago that perhaps the last chance for established political parties to win the race against the populists is not just to shift their rhetoric, but to actually show results. The problem is that especially in systems of proportional representation, this becomes more and more difficult the higher the share of parliamentary seats populists hold. In Germany now, it is barely imaginable that there will be a right-wing governing majority in the Bundestag that excludes left-wing political parties while also maintaining the Cordon Sanitaire—the Brandmauer—the separation between the traditional democratic parties and the new right-wing populists.

The last German government was a left-leaning coalition in which the Social Democrats and the Greens governed alongside the right-of-center Liberal Party, the FDP. Now there is a conservative chancellor in power who is in various ways more conservative than Angela Merkel, but his coalition partner is the Social Democrats, the left-of-center political party. Even though Merz was talking a great deal about the need to curb immigration during the election campaign, it is actually very difficult for him to deliver on those policies because his coalition partners in the Social Democrats are opposed to many of them.

Do you think realistically that traditional political parties are going to be able to rein in immigration to a sufficient extent to make voters feel that their preferences are being represented? Or do you think we are now in a structural situation in which the inability of mainstream political parties to deal with that issue is simply going to lead to their continued decline in vote share and to parties like the AfD continuing to grow?

Guenther: This depends a lot on the country. In Germany, also for historical reasons, the resistance to accommodation is particularly high, even though as we discussed, it did happen in past episodes. I would guess—and this has to be taken with a grain of salt—that the current coalition has the last real opportunity to deliver the legislation needed to genuinely reduce asylum immigration and pursue deportation efforts.

After that, I would guess the AfD will be stronger in the next election than in this one, and it will then be very difficult to find a coalition that addresses immigration effectively while leaving the AfD aside. If efforts don’t increase significantly—and I would guess they won’t—the next government will probably also fail to deliver, the AfD will be even stronger, and it will probably eventually become part of the governing coalition. That is my guess. We can check in perhaps nine or ten years.

For other countries, the picture is a bit different. Populists are participating in or supporting governments in several countries. In Sweden, for instance, with the support of the Sweden Democrats, immigration policy has changed quite significantly—net asylum immigration is now reportedly negative. It is possible. Germany tends to look mostly at itself, but in other countries, such as Denmark, these things have happened.

Mounk: Let me ask you about how this theory applies in some other contexts. We haven’t talked much about the United States. America actually, on a lot of the generic questions about immigration that are asked cross-nationally, continues to have more pro-immigrant attitudes than most European countries, which is interesting. The failure of the Biden administration to deal with the southern border with Mexico is clearly one of the big reasons why Donald Trump won reelection in 2024. It was even one of the reasons why new voting groups like Latinos shifted to the Republican Party. At the same time, as you said earlier, the current administration is in some sense very successful in its policies—it has reduced the number of immigrants coming to the United States very significantly. But it has done that using cruel and indiscriminate tactics that turn out to be very unpopular. The immigration enforcement agency is very unpopular, and Donald Trump’s approval ratings on immigration are quite low.

Is that an American specificity, where American attitudes about immigration are simply somewhat more permissive than European ones? Or do you think that if, say, Marine Le Pen—or if she is not allowed to run, Jordan Bardella—became the next president of France and effectively cracked down on immigration, deporting large numbers of undocumented people, they might face a backlash as well? Not just from people with more progressive attitudes who become activated by those policies, but perhaps from some of the swing voters who helped them get into power in the first place—as, according to polls, seems to be happening in the United States.

Guenther: You can always overdo it. The vast majority of Europeans want lower immigration levels, but you can also have levels that are too low. The amount of cruelty—for lack of a better word—that voters are willing to tolerate is certainly limited. I do think that voters will support severe actions to reduce immigration, but there is some limit. The threshold in Europe might be a bit higher than in the United States, so Europeans might be willing to accept more severe measures than Americans, but even there some limit exists. It is possible that populists, when they come to power, overdo it to some extent—one could argue that Trump somewhat overdid it.

Relatedly—and this is a slightly different point—it also depends on how efficiently these policies are carried out. Some degree of severity may be necessary to achieve a goal, but there is also cruelty that is arguably indiscriminate and serves no purpose in achieving the desired outcome. I would guess that because populists are considerably less experienced, they will tend to be less efficient. There will be problems when they come to power and pursue immigration policies. This is something that mainstream parties can exploit by shifting their positions but then arguing that they are the professional alternative—that they will pursue these goals in a more targeted and discriminate way, and that they won’t overdo it. I think that is one way that mainstream parties can make their case.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Laurenz discuss whether journalists and politicians have as much impact on public thought as they think they do, to what extent self-censorship has increased in recent years, and the impact AI will have on the media. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Lant Pritchett is a development economist from Idaho. Having now thrice retired, he is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics in the School of Public Policy and the co-founder and Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP).

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Lant Pritchett discuss why the traditional foreign aid approach to development is fundamentally misguided, how countries actually achieve prosperity through organic national transformation, and whether the classic path to development remains viable in the 21st century.

Will you be in London on Sunday, September 6? I’ll be interviewing Francis Fukuyama about his life and thought to mark the publication of his memoir In the Realm of the Last Man at the Sekforde at 5pm. Find out more and book tickets here. Paying subscribers can access a code for free tickets here. —Yascha

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: When I talk to people who care a lot about economic development, they love to talk about inclusive development, about sustainable development. They tend to focus on how much more affluent countries should donate to less affluent countries, perhaps figuring out what the best intervention is—whether foreign aid should be spent on this kind of thing or on that kind of thing. Not to simplify, but you think that whole approach is basically wrong. Why is that?

Lant Pritchett: What I think of when I think of development is what we call “getting to Denmark.” There was a historical process whereby many countries—not just Western countries, but other countries—had a fourfold transformation. They had a transformation from a low productivity to a high productivity economy, and it was mostly broad-based. That is economic growth, and inclusive economic growth, if you want to add the adjective. They also went through a transformation of acquiring state capability—the ability of the public sector to do things that needed to be done, like regulation and providing certain services. They also went through a transformation from subject to citizen, to a polity that was based on responsiveness to the needs and wishes of the citizen rather than vice versa. They also went through this harder-to-describe transition of equality under the rule of law, whereby kith and kin and other identities became reduced in importance and everybody was treated equally.

That is what development meant in the post-decolonization era, after World War II, as countries became independent from their colonial overlords. It meant this big fourfold transformation. Foreign aid can be modestly helpful with that, but it is not very central to it. The more you think about donors and what donations should be and what the right interventions are, the more you lose the plot.

In my papers, I show that if you get to what I call national development—this fourfold process—that is a machinery for producing good things. We are worried about whether people have clean water, decent housing, and all of these material things that are really good for people to have. But if you get to national development, you get to that, and vice versa.

There is a big question of whether what we talk about as foreign aid is aid to the process of national development, or whether it is aid to mitigating the worst consequences for human well-being of that lack of national development. The latter is not a strategy for the former. By and large, a lot of the development agencies lost the plot completely and became essentially charity organizations focused on mitigating the worst consequences of the fact that many countries had not acquired national development.

There is nothing wrong with that. Mitigating terrible things that happen to human beings because they live in a country that is underdeveloped is a good thing. But it is not development. Too much attention to the latter detracts attention from the core issue.

Mounk: Is the concern here simply that this money is being spent on things that don’t actually help to solve a problem in the long term—that the most effective use of that money would be to invest in things that actually help solve these underlying problems, and therefore make the country more affluent so there is not as much poverty or human desperation that you need to buffer with these donations? Or is it more profound than that—that those donor dollars in some ways make it harder for that process to take place, that they might in some complicated way backfire? Is the concern mostly about efforts wasted, or efforts that might in some complicated way impede the country that is supposedly being helped from solving its long-term problems?

Pritchett: The big problem is more about ideas than it is about the concrete use of money. I have what I call the “bird on the elephant” theory of development. Development agencies are spending all this money, financing projects—some of them economic projects like roads and bridges and power plants, and some of them charity-like projects funding health interventions and the like. But that is in some sense secondary to the fact that this creates a global discourse about development and about how countries can do development.

I am much more worried about the waste of effort on ideas. We have geniuses—truly stunning geniuses—devoting themselves to charity work as opposed to thinking about development strategy. Ideas are supremely important to the fate of nations, and the ideas that get transmitted via a global discourse of research and practice, to government officials, to people in power, to people who have influence—that is a huge deal. Obviously the most consequential thing that has happened in the last 50 years is the leadership of China changing its mind about what to do in China and how to make China a better place to live. That was, fundamentally, a change of ideas. By losing the plot on national development in favor of mitigation, we also draw the discourse, the research, and the ideas away from big questions: How do we get states to be more capable? What is the right sequencing of state capability and democracy? How does democracy interact with the creation of economic growth—does it impede it or not? The number of people in the world who can produce new, original, and correct ideas is very few, and drawing those people onto small issues is a huge loss.

I don’t think aid is often counterproductive. Some of my friends—Bill Easterly, Angus Deaton—think that aid can sometimes foster mentalities and practices that impede development. I think the elephant is mostly neutral. But if the bird, who sits on top of the elephant and sees what is going on, warns the herd of impending dangers, and can provide a vision—if that gets messed up, then the whole elephant is diminished.

Mounk: Let’s take a step back. One of the intuitive things about what you’re saying is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and France didn’t become rich because some much richer countries said, we’re going to give you a bunch of development aid. These were mostly internal processes, obviously with an international component—trade with each other and so on. So it stands to reason that if we want to think about how countries like India or Kenya might become rich in the future, it would probably be by following some of the same kind of processes.

Now, a certain kind of progressive critic would respond by saying that there is an economic structure in the world and that these countries are in some ways interdependent. If you’re one of the most developed countries in the world, you can specialize in high-return services, for example. If you are much poorer than those countries, then you can’t follow the same development path as those that developed historically, because you occupy a different niche in the economy. The other difference, of course, is just the stage of development. A lot of the countries that grew rich in the 19th and early 20th century did so through industry and manufacturing. But nowadays most wealth is not created in factories—it’s created in the knowledge sector, in the service industries. Perhaps the same kind of path to development just isn’t open anymore. When I was in India, a lot of people were worried about whether the traditional path to development is still available in the 21st century.

What do you think about that? Can you broadly follow the same playbook that made the rich countries of the world rich in the past? Or do we actually need to look for a different path, either because of a change in the nature of the world economy or because of the different relative standing of the poorest countries in the world within it?

Pritchett: Your question brought up two very different strands that we shouldn’t conflate. One is the path being organic and being driven by a country’s own dynamic. If you take, say, Dieter Mikloski’s work, the key to all of this was creating an environment in which you can give it a go. That is distinct from the question of specifically what, economically, a country is going to do. The question of whether the path that Denmark took is open to Kenya has two very different components.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

One is the deeper question: can Kenya develop an organic dynamic within its polity, society, and economy such that the actors find a path for Kenya to become prosperous? That is the true endogenous process. The second question is, when Kenya organizes itself to find that path, will it look like the specific economic path that Denmark followed? The answer to the latter is certainly no—and no in both a good way and a more challenging way.

The first way the answer is no: what happened—and I wrote a paper a long time ago called “Divergence Big Time” that emphasized this—is that the rich countries in 1870 were not that advanced relative to the most lagging countries, because there is a floor. There is only so poor you can be. What has happened in the world is that the rich countries have done this through exponential growth. They have created the basic hockey stick graph.

The rich countries collectively grew at 2% a year for 120 years, and the power of compound exponential growth means they are manifold richer than they were in 1870. But in the process, they invented and discovered a great many things—in science, in practice, and in all kinds of domains—that weren’t available in the world in 1870 but are available in 1970 or 2026. This means the countries that enter this process later have the potential to grow incredibly faster than any rich country grew.

None of the countries that were rich in 1970 or 1980 were rich because they grew fast. They were rich because they grew steadily. But that created the possibility that later countries could accelerate their growth enormously. The fast-growing countries in the world are growing much faster than they did historically. China, Korea, Vietnam—growing at 6% per capita wasn’t an option for Denmark, which just had to stay on 2%. That is the good news. Countries that, in whatever way, manage this endogenous process that creates an organic drive for prosperity can discover ways to grow faster than was available to the old countries that had to make their own way.

We have seen incredibly good news, and we don’t want to lose the plot on that. The years since World War II have been the best years for improvement of the material condition of humankind by a multiple of any prior period. I work some on education. The average person in the developing world had roughly two years of education in 1950 and has eight now. From whoever your mythic forebears were—Adam and Eve, let’s say—to 1950, humanity had accumulated two years of education. In just 60 years, it added six. Three times more education was added in 60 years than in all of human history combined. That is true of health. That is true of a whole range of things. Just fantastic progress.

Take child mortality. There were all kinds of countries in the world 50 years ago where basically one in five children was dying before the age of five—a rate of around 200 per thousand. Worldwide, that is now down to around 30. Many people in the world in 1950 were living in material conditions not that much different from ancient Greece or ancient Egypt. Even today, if you compare Egypt in AD 1—when Joseph and Mary went to visit—to some of the poorest African countries today, they are at roughly the same level of GDP. For a very long period of human history there was very little progress, and then it accelerated dramatically. From all of human history, we got to still one in five children dying around 1960, and now that figure has fallen enormously. If you look at the people with access to electric power, people with access to water and sanitation—it has just been an amazingly good run.

These questions always start from the assumption that the global order is preventing progress, and that is just surreal when you look at the world over the last 60 years. There has been amazing progress in many places on many things, and this isn’t just a matter of measuring GDP.

Mounk: One illustration of that from my own life: when I was an undergraduate in England in the early 2000s, there were big debates about the World Trade Organization. The shape of the debate, and I remember this vividly, was always whether this was going to screw over China and India—whether the World Trade Organization was just a smart way for the rich countries of the world to keep the poor countries from developing. Today, when you look at the critiques of letting China into the WTO, it is exactly the opposite. The question is whether America screwed itself over, or screwed its working class over, by letting China in—which led to a huge increase in wealth in China and rapid deindustrialization in parts of the US.

You can take seriously the idea that there were some mistakes made in how that was done and what impact it had on the working class in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other places. But if you have to choose, from the standpoint of humanity, between those two scenarios, we have ended up with the much better one. We have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty to genuine middle-class status in China. Perhaps we could have done that a little bit better, with less disruptive consequences for the already pretty affluent people in the United States. Perhaps that’s a red herring. But it is striking to what extent the progressive case against things like the WTO in 2000 has completely flipped on its head in terms of how we talk about it today.

Pritchett: One of my favorite colleagues and friends at the Kennedy School was Dani Rodrik. If you look at Dani Rodrik’s intellectual trajectory, his most recent book is about shared prosperity, which is hugely concerned about the prosperity of the middle class in America and how the global system hasn’t been good for it—versus his earlier concerns about the WTO and whether its trade structure was truly open to facilitating the growth of poor countries. It turns out we had the opposite problem from the one we thought we were going to have.

Absolute poverty in the world has just amazingly declined. Every discussion of the world and how it’s going needs to start from that factual basis. Hans Rosling wrote a book called Factfulness—the fact is, on nearly every measure of material well-being, things are just fantastically better. In many dimensions, by the way, better than we would have expected even from the economic growth that we got. Sometimes people say, you economists focus just on economics, and we really should have focused on these other things. But if you look at the expansion of schooling, for instance, schooling expanded not by less than we would have expected from the economic growth we got, but way more. Just getting kids into school was one of the most phenomenally transformative things in history, and it happened more than we would have expected given the growth, not less. All of development was focused on expanding schooling. So you cannot say that economists focused on growth at the expense of these other things. That is just not true.

Mounk: Let me push you on that—it’s a question I was going to pose in any case. There are a lot of people who are very skeptical of GDP as a metric. They think we can be incredibly rich and yet people are miserable. Society can be very rich in the aggregate, but only because a few people are incredibly rich and everybody else is incredibly poor. There are these standard examples that come up in conversation all the time. If I’m stuck in a traffic jam burning gas and not getting anywhere, that’s increasing GDP—so GDP is a really bad metric.

You believe that GDP is in fact a very good metric of human well-being and that it correlates very strongly with things that we care about more directly. When listeners next encounter somebody who says GDP is a terrible metric we shouldn’t care about, what should they respond?

Pritchett: I want to be clear: I don’t think GDP is a good metric of human well-being. GDP is a very good metric of the net production of a society, and that production creates the material basis for human well-being. GDP per capita is just factually very highly correlated with nearly everything we care about in terms of material well-being.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

But here is the response you should make. The relationship between GDP and most things we care about in terms of material well-being is concave—meaning those things get better as GDP gets better, starting from poor levels to middle levels. By the time you reach a GDP per capita of roughly $40,000, you have met most of the basics of material well-being, and hence the relationship flattens out. It doesn’t go away necessarily, but it does flatten out.

The real danger in the world discourse is that people unhappy sitting in traffic in Luxembourg—which I use as an example because the only time I went to Luxembourg I got caught in traffic—are right that their overall well-being is not that highly correlated with GDP, because their GDP is so high in the first place. But we shouldn’t extrapolate that back.

Mounk: To put this point a little more polemically: it is very easy—and I grew up in that kind of milieu, not particularly affluent, but among artists and musicians in Germany living in pleasant towns—for people to say that the important thing in life isn’t to drive a big car and go on a fancy holiday, that there are things much more important than material well-being. Of course, if the floor of your society is that you have a decent apartment with heating and running water and you eat three meals a day, then that is probably true. But if you are sitting in a mud hut in a developing country, that is most assuredly untrue.

Pritchett: One of the fundamental insights of economics is declining marginal utility—the more you have of something, the less important it is to you. If you say the West is suffering a paucity of purpose and people are unhappy because they don’t have some driving purpose, well, that is because they have already satisfied the purpose of having material things like a hot shower, a heated home, and the ability to go 300 miles in a few hours. Whereas most of humankind, for most of history and even today, is nowhere near that.

I am happy for German artists to have angst about what their purpose in life is and whether they are really happy and whether more material goods would make them happy—and it probably won’t matter that much to them. But don’t project that back onto Africa, or conclude that India doesn’t need growth, or Bangladesh doesn’t need growth, or that we don’t really need to worry about whether those countries grow.

The right response to the claim that GDP is a bad metric for improving the human condition is to ask: where are you on this spectrum of existing progress? Since you are likely having this conversation with people who are materially fantastically well off relative to any period in human history and relative to most of humanity, they should be sensitive to the fact that yes, that may be true for them, but it is not true for six billion other people on the planet. Don’t project your life and concerns onto theirs, because you have diminishing marginal utility precisely because you have so much.

Mounk: Let’s go to those poorer people in the world. You are pointing out that GDP per capita is very strongly correlated with the other things we care about—child mortality, life expectancy, education, and so on. What does that tell us about what we should aim for? Does it suggest that we should just aim to increase GDP per capita and assume the other things are likely to follow? Or could the association go the other way around—that what we need to do is have all of those specialized interventions to improve the local hospital and the local school, and that is what will then correlate with increases in GDP? Which way around do we read the correlation?

Pritchett: This depends on where you are in the spectrum. I have done a paper where I try to disentangle this question. One of the things that GDP does, by the way, is create a broader tax base. People often get engaged in a very strange discussion as if focusing on GDP growth means ignoring the need for government services. But you cannot have government services unless governments have revenue, and government revenues are mostly tax buoyant—meaning they grow more than proportionately with growth.

Mounk: So GDP growth actually is what enables you to have all those government services?

Pritchett: At one point I did the calculation: Ethiopia’s government spending per head is around $300 per person per year. What can you do with $300 per person per year? Ethiopia’s GDP per capita is so small that if the government started taking bigger proportions of it, they would be eating into expenditures on food. Sixty percent of a poor household’s budget is on food. You cannot just say Ethiopia’s government should fund all these specific interventions—how are they supposed to do it?

When I argue in favor of GDP per capita, it is not because GDP per capita exclusively funds private goods. It is also the basis for funding public goods and public service provision. Getting that mix right is complicated, but economists are not out there saying there should be no government and everything will take care of itself if we just have high GDP per capita. The argument is that high GDP per capita reflects a high productivity economy, and a high productivity economy creates the material basis for both private and public expenditures.

National development is about the process of creating both the material possibilities and the mechanisms for doing that—hence my fourfold definition of development. You could call me a growth fanatic, but I am not a growth-only person. You also need a decent government. In all of the empirical work, you can look at Equatorial Guinea—a few kleptocrats dominating a bunch of oil, with the rest of the economy completely disarticulated from that. Can you get to high GDP per capita and still have low levels of living? Yes, if all of that is being captured by relatively few people.

Mounk: You probably need a natural resource for that as well. It would be very hard to imagine a case where 0.1% of people have an incredibly productive company that doesn’t rely on natural resources and doesn’t rely on broader education and so on. It probably takes a somewhat special case—like kleptocratic control over natural resources.

Pritchett: The way I like to describe the goal—the way we should think about how countries can make progress—is what I call “inclusion into productivity.” The reason human beings are this amazing species is that we have learned how to cooperate to create value. A large part of the development process is getting more and more sophisticated ways in which people can cooperate over time and space to create value. When I look at a great big corporation with tens of thousands of employees, this is a mechanism of cooperation to create value—a cooperation across people with all kinds of different skills and contributions.

Subscribe now

The process of development is getting more and more people out of being engaged in activities where they work a plot of land and attempt to eke out a living in low cooperation, and into more and more sophisticated value chains. That is inclusion into productivity. What I am actually concerned about is the productivity of individuals—but they are going to be more productive not by being more separated from a sophisticated modern economy, but by being more embedded into it. That dynamic, which leads to indicators of inclusive growth, is how I think about the fundamental dynamic on the growth side. Growth should be a process of more and more of the population engaged in higher and higher productivity, with more and more people included into these mechanisms.

Mounk: To go back to those two different challenges I posed earlier: one is whether poor countries can still grow at the same speed that others did, and your answer is yes—in fact, a lot of them are growing more quickly. There is a strange thing in the premise of that argument, which somehow implies that we haven’t seen examples of poor countries developing very quickly. That is partially because people who think about this tend to drop successful countries out of their sample. They don’t remember that China in 1980 was an incredibly poor country. Today we no longer think about China as being part of that sample because it has grown out of it. That in itself is evidence that rapid development is possible. If China was able to do that, there shouldn’t be an in-principle reason why Kenya or India couldn’t achieve the same feat.

The other question is what that looks like in the 21st century, when some of the historical development path is no longer available. My understanding is that your answer is going to center on those four development factors. Why are those so hard to implement in places where they are not in place? Ideas are really important, as you said earlier. If only the right people adopted the right ideas, they should be able to put those four things into place. But clearly it is more complicated than that. It is not just that the rulers of these countries have never had the right ideas. There must be obstacles beyond that.

Pritchett: One of the obstacles is that the process of growth of inclusive productivity is a transformational process. A transformational process requires winners and relative losers. In many places, economic, political, and bureaucratic structures congeal. They congeal because there is a certain way in which a country produces value, and that way of producing value often produces certain ways in which the government extracts value. That can lock into an equilibrium that resists change rather than encourages it.

There are low-level equilibrium traps—ways in which countries get stuck. We already alluded to one of those. In resource economies, if you are relatively well endowed with certain point-source resources—and by point-source I mean not land, which is diffuse and requires a geographically distributed population, but oil or diamonds—you can see how the people who mine the diamonds and the people who control the country get embedded in a relationship where, as long as that elite bargain can survive off the extraction of value from diamonds, it is not looking for anything else. It is not looking to solve the problem we are talking about, which is how a country comes to be embedded in more and more sophisticated value chains. If an elite can generate a bargain that sustains itself politically over time with just diamonds, it is not looking to do anything else, and that becomes an obstacle.

Economies and countries get stuck in an elite bargain that is more worried about the threats from new industries creating new power structures than about stagnation around the parts of the productive structure they are already in. You can easily get stuck in the dynamic between economy, polity, and bureaucracy in which an elite bargain undermines the rule of law and undermines the expansion of new opportunities, in the interest of playing defense around where they are. Finding countries that can handle this dynamic of change is very hard. That is why we see so few transformational successes, even though the global order makes them possible.

Mounk: Is there some way to change that, to contribute to that? If economists at the moment are focused far too much on whether giving people in this village one kind of intervention or people in that village another kind of intervention will lead to a little bit more growth—and you think that is fundamentally the wrong question to ask—do we have better answers to how we can help a country like Nigeria, with a very fractious political system and an elite bargain that is very bad for the country, get out of that trap?

Pritchett: Many of your questions have two sophisticated halves to them. Let me dwell on the first half—the premise that people are wasting their time. I want to emphasize that they are not just focused on the wrong question. They are focused on ontologically the wrong question.

The word ontology is not one I like to use, but what it means here, at its fundamental roots, is this: the problem with the world is not poor people. The problem is that people are in poor places. If you are studying the dynamics of how to make people less poor, you have to be ontologically studying the characteristics of the system, not the people. The methods being deployed by economists to study how to make people better off are focused as if the person were the unit at which we should be studying this. That is ontologically wrong.

Mounk: Let’s stay with this half of the question before moving on to the other half. Take a step back and explain to us what the dominant paradigm in development economics has been for the last 20 years and how that dominant paradigm is particularly vulnerable to the critique you’re making. I take it you’re mostly talking about what are called RCTs. What is an RCT? How did it become so dominant? Why do you think that’s the wrong way to ask this question?

Pritchett: If you characterize what development actors are doing as carrying out interventions, then you can get obsessed with understanding whether the particular intervention you’re undertaking has a truly causal effect. We can’t just evaluate a project on a before-and-after basis—we need to really separate out the causal impact. For separating out the causal impact, doing a randomized controlled trial is the best way to do that.

The problem is, if I’m trying to do a randomized controlled trial, I need some group of individuals to receive the treatment and some individuals to be the control group. That means I have already ontologically assumed that the important causal effects are individuated, as opposed to being country-wide or market-wide phenomena. This is as plain as I can make it.

Mounk: Let me try to put this in plain terms to see whether I understand correctly. The idea is: I study Village A and Village B, I give Village A deworming medicine and Village B nothing, or perhaps some other kind of treatment. If what I’m trying to figure out is how to spend a hundred million dollars for a charity, that is a very reasonable question to ask. The problem you are pointing to is that what actually explains why both Village A and Village B are very poor—versus Village A and Village B in England being relatively affluent—is these country-level characteristics: in particular, whether they have managed to figure out the rule of law and all the other things we have been talking about. You are defining the interesting stuff out of the question if you are just comparing two villages within the same country that are meant to be as similar as possible, and then seeing whether this or that kind of treatment is going to marginally improve the lives of people in each of them.

Pritchett: Let me take what I consider a paradigm example—one that, when you encounter it, should make you realize something has gone badly wrong. There was a paper in Nature—the most highly reputable scientific journal in the world—about carrying out an experiment in Niger where a cash transfer was given to some people and not to others. Bundled with that cash transfer was a psychosocial intervention, and the study then looked at whether this psychosocial intervention independently and causally caused individuals in Niger to see their incomes rise.

This was Nature magazine’s characterization of what development economics was doing, with 11 prominent development economists as co-authors. When you see that, you should immediately think: this is madness. People in Niger are poor because they are in Niger. Niger, on every indicator of national development, is a basket case. If you are not fixing Niger, thinking that you are doing good in the world by making tiny tweaks to psychosocial interventions at the individual level, you are assuming that a large part of the low standard of living there must be a characteristic of the people in Niger. That is just wrong—wrong by orders of magnitude. People in Niger are poor because they are in Niger. If you allow a person in Niger to move to France, their income will converge to that of people in France almost instantaneously, because France is a high productivity place and Niger is a low productivity place.

If Niger as a country had national development at the level of France, all of these problems would be addressed, because national development is a machinery for endogenously identifying and solving problems. If you don’t have that, attempting to solve these problems at the individuated level is wildly, ontologically wrong. You are not taking into account that the outcomes individuals have are determined not by their own characteristics, but by the characteristics of the political, organizational, economic, and social system they live in.

Mounk: The other thing that strikes me about this study is the theory of action lurking in the background. I have no doubt that people who encounter psychosocial problems are less productive, and I am moderately optimistic that the right kind of psychosocial intervention might reduce those problems and therefore make people more productive. But how on earth are you going to deliver psychosocial intervention at scale in one of the poorest countries in the world? It is not going to happen because an army of therapists is flown in from Brooklyn, New York to treat everyone.

How do you actually reduce the amount of psychosocial problems that people have? How do you increase access to therapy and other support for people who do have serious psychosocial problems? By making the country a lot more affluent. If the country is a lot more affluent, perhaps your child doesn’t die at age three and you have fewer psychosocial problems to begin with. You are less depressed about the fact that your child just died. You will have the money to afford a therapist, or perhaps the government will have the money to fund a mental health service. You are asking the question from the wrong end.

Pritchett: Then you get obsessed with cost effectiveness, which means reducing both the numerator and the denominator. In this study, per capita income went from $1.80 a day to $1.85 a day. If you look at Vietnam, in 1990 it had a per capita income of about $1.80 a day—similar to where Niger is now—and it has since gone up to around $7.50 a day. That is development. None of that in Vietnam came from people becoming psychosocially more capable first, with everything else following from that.

Mounk: It’s not that USAID or the Ford Foundation sent an army of psychologists to Vietnam.

Pritchett: It was because the development actor and discourse helped Vietnam change its mind about its development strategy. Vietnam said: we can embody Vietnamese labor into global value chains in a way that is going to radically change the productive possibilities and the inclusion into productivity of Vietnamese people. They did it successfully, and extreme poverty disappeared in Vietnam right before our eyes through a process that involved almost no direct anti-poverty interventions.

So that is the first point: this isn’t just wrong, it is ontologically wrong. Ontologically wrong means you cannot fix it by doing slightly better experiments on this or that. It is looking at the wrong set of ways in which prosperity actually happens. Prosperity happens through the inclusion of individuals into productivity—a cooperative endeavor involving artifacts and institutions whereby large numbers of people can cooperate to create value: markets, governments, bureaucracies, and large organizations. Not whether I am a more go-get-em person. That was the first part.

Mounk: The second part then is: if RCTs are the wrong thing to look at, if that is not how we are going to make change, if we shouldn’t be obsessed with whether it is this intervention or that intervention at the level of the village or the town—but rather should be asking how we help countries choose successful development paths like Vietnam, paths that put in place the institutions needed to actually develop—how can development economists or other social scientists help with that?

Is the problem fundamentally that the people in Nigeria just don’t get it? Or is it, as you were saying earlier, that the people in charge have their own interests and want to preserve the privileges they have? They are worried that in the process of development they might be displaced from power, and so they would rather continue to be the kleptocratic elite in a relatively poor country than be displaced in a much more affluent one. Is development economics, or more broadly the field of social science, actually going to be able to help in that process? Or is that a hopeless endeavor?

Pritchett: It is not a hopeless endeavor, because after all, it has happened. The strange thing about saying it is a hopeless endeavor is that it has to ignore that Korea happened, and Taiwan happened, and Vietnam happened, and China happened, and Indonesia happened, and India happened.

Mounk: But did it happen because those places, for whatever reasons, had more favorable circumstances where they were more able to challenge their elites—or did we just get lucky that they put a few of the right reforms in place? Or did it happen in some way because social scientists helped guide them?

Pritchett: Yes, social scientists helped guide them, because social scientists created the data—like GDP per capita—to show that some countries have had really rapid growth by doing certain things and other countries have not. Deng Xiaoping didn’t just decide on moving towards a path of unleashing incentives for people to engage in private enterprise—perhaps too strong a word for what happened in China in 1978—in an intellectual vacuum. He looked around the world, brought in experts who had studied economics and the relative performance of economies, and was convinced that there was an alternative path from where China was to where China wanted to be.

The idea that ideas are irrelevant and that social science hasn’t had an impact is surreal. In the case of India, which I know relatively well—I have been going back and forth to India since 1992 and have spent time living in different cities there—there was a debate in India in 1991 about how to respond to an incipient macroeconomic crisis. That debate drew on decades of social science about the relative importance of market versus government-led development, and of import substitution versus export orientation. It drew on a body of empirical science that had been generated over time, and it led the country to do different things. You cannot act as if India decided what it did in the reform period in an intellectual vacuum. It is surreal to say that social science cannot in principle affect the way governments act, because it has demonstrably done so in specific instances. Maybe it has not always been as successful as one would hope, and let’s admit that oftentimes social science is pushing against direct material and political interests.

But let me answer your question. The answer is what I call full Trinity growth diagnostics. If development economics were focusing its time, effort, and capabilities on the development of full Trinity growth diagnostics, I think we would be in a radically better place to help countries with their organic, country-level development strategies.

What do I mean by full Trinity? For something to be successful, it has to be technically correct—it has to have a correct causal model of how, if actors undertake this action, working perhaps through a complex adaptive system, a particular outcome will result. It is not direct cause and effect, because markets are complicated and complex adaptive systems. But the technical question is: if I do this, will this be the result?

The second element of the Trinity is organizational. If I am asking a government to undertake actions to promote a given outcome, does the government have organizations capable of doing that? If I say I am going to do industrial policy to promote high-tech industry, do I have government organizations capable of identifying and promoting high-tech industry?

The third element is that it has to be politically supportable. I have to be able to assemble and sustain a political coalition to support the implementation of these actions.

The first step of this is a growth diagnostic—a process that I and colleagues at the Kennedy School developed over time—of asking, in a given place, what are the binding constraints to having more rapid growth than we are currently experiencing. The binding constraints matter because when we ask what is good for growth, we tend to produce a very long list. If you say “get to Denmark,” you can say Denmark has this and Denmark has that. But you cannot do everything that Denmark now does. You have to do the right thing. Identifying the right thing involves an analytical process of prioritizing among the many things you could do—asking which would have the biggest impact on the prospects for a rapid, sustained, and inclusive episode of growth. We have mechanisms for trying to adjudicate among contesting claims about what the binding constraint is.

But then we have to supplement that by asking: of the things that should be priorities and would have a big impact on economic growth, which can we actually do? Saying that if you had Korea’s current capabilities you could do a certain thing is not very helpful if you have Niger’s capabilities. We have to ask which of the binding constraints can realistically be addressed. Then you have to have a realistic, positive model of the politics—which of these can the existing elite be persuaded to engage in? None of those questions poses an intellectual challenge anything like reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics.

Mounk: But it’s an art rather than a science, I imagine. What might that look like concretely? Let’s say there is a new government in some country—genuinely reforming in certain ways, perhaps a little corrupt in others. They have just come to power, perhaps through election, perhaps in some other way. They can make some changes, but they cannot make a million changes at the same time. It is hard to drive change across sectors simultaneously, and there is a limited amount of money to invest because it is a very poor country. Should they invest in education or in the judiciary? Should the first big push be to reform the judiciary—so that who wins a dispute is driven more by the facts and creates stable expectations, rather than by bribes or family relations? Or should they start with a big push on schools, making sure teachers are competent and actually show up? I imagine that is the kind of choice a government might realistically face. How should you go about making that decision?

Pritchett: There are analytical tools for addressing this, and this is where we get into the mechanics of what a growth diagnostic would do. Partly what a growth diagnostic does is ask: if it were the case that a proposed action were the binding constraint to growth, what should we observe about the economy?

There are four or five things we look for. First, if we think X is a binding constraint—say, corruption—then when we see relaxations or improvements in corruption, we should see more growth. If I have my arm in a sling and the movement of my arm is constrained by that sling, then if I remove the sling, I should be able to move it a lot more. If I can’t, maybe it was the shoulder injury all along and there is a different cause. Changes in the constraint should cause changes in outcomes.

The second is what we call bypassing. If finance is a constraint and I could otherwise be productive and profitable, we should see firms actively engaged in creative ways of raising finance. We should see enterprises actively adapting around the constraint.

The third involves what we have given the quirky name of camels and hippos. Different industries in an economy are more or less intensive in a particular proposed constraint. If we say water is a constraint, then we should observe camels—animals well adapted to a lack of water—and we should not observe hippos. If we look at the economy and the industries that are thriving are ones that economize on the proposed binding constraint, that is evidence in favor of its being the binding constraint.

These are plausible, sophisticated ways of analyzing the current situation of a country. They can produce answers like: putting more kids through school really isn’t a binding constraint here, because we don’t see changes in that producing changes in growth, we don’t see firms desperately engaged in training because they are short on skills, and we don’t see labor-intensive, non-skill-intensive industries thriving because they are economizing on the lack of skill. That means we need other explanations.

This technique has been deployed and it produces interesting results—not clean RCT-looking results, nor should one expect that. To me, the key test of a growth diagnostic is whether it comes to different answers for different countries. If you come to the same answer for every country, you have an ideology. If every country you go to produces the answer that reforming the trade system would accelerate growth, you are an ideologist. Maybe you are right sometimes, but you are not always going to be right, because there are going to be societies in which that is not the most important binding constraint. When we do these growth diagnostics in different countries, we come to demonstrably different answers. The data and the evidence line up around different things.

This is a promising technique, but it has been radically under-invested in—because the resources in the world have been devoted to deworming studies rather than to creating a global community of practice that does technical growth diagnostics. More support to a global community of practice focused on honing the art and science of growth diagnostics would be a tremendous way the world could support the organic process of countries finding their own development paths. It would allow you to engage with countries and actors within countries in a radically different way than coming to them and saying: you lack these 50 things, all of which would be good if you did them—when you know they are going to be able to do two, maybe three.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Lant discuss migration, how to build a fair asylum system, and what the destruction of USAID means for the future of development. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Predicting Donald Trump’s political demise has typically been a fool’s errand. Some of my smartest friends have declared his definitive fall from grace again and again, only to be proven wrong each and every time.

If you watch MSNBC or listen to NPR, you may over the past decade have believed that Trump’s presidential campaign is a hopeless publicity stunt; that the Republican Party is about to turn on him because of the Access Hollywood tape; that he has no chance of winning against Hillary Clinton; that his presidency will be so chaotic that he’ll be forced to resign within his first year in office; that Robert Mueller’s investigation into his relationship with the Kremlin will result in his impeachment; that his mishandling of the COVID pandemic will make him toxic to voters; that his loss against Joe Biden has ended his career for good; that he is about to be impeached over the January 6 riot at the Capitol; that he is sure to lose the race for the Republican nomination against Ron DeSantis; that he is sure to lose his bid for reelection against Joe Biden; that he is sure to lose it against Kamala Harris; and so on.

Ten years into Trump’s political career, the most avoidable mistake pundits can make is to underestimate his powers of survival and resurrection.

And yet, I have come to the tentative conclusion that this time may, finally, be different. For the past decade, Trump has dominated American politics like no other president in living memory; now, signs of that era coming to a close are suddenly multiplying. It is, as Saturday’s appalling assassination attempt on the president reminds us, impossible to see around the next historical corner. But it sure seems as though Trump’s hold over the country is finally slipping. This, to misquote Winston Churchill, no longer feels like the end of the beginning; it may be the beginning of the end.

A minority of Americans has always been drawn to Trump because of his most extreme actions and statements. They loved his coarseness, reveled in his taunts, and unhesitatingly embraced his radicalism. This group made up a significant share of his most devoted base—but it was never big enough to explain how he could have won two presidential elections.

Many of the voters who twice put Trump over the top have, all along, had a more conflicted view of him. Trump swore that he would make Americans far richer. He would cut taxes and curb inflation. The costs of health insurance would fall. There would be peace in the Middle East. The country would return to its former grandeur. It is not hard to see why those who were inclined to believe that he might actually turn these promises into reality, at least to some extent, found them to be very enticing.

Want to hear me in conversation with leading thinkers of our time? Sign up for ad-free access to full episodes of The Good Fight by becoming a paying subscriber today!

To listen on your favorite app, click “Set up podcast” below. Once your personal link is properly installed, you should see “PREMIUM FEED” in the top-left corner of the podcast icon. If you are having trouble setting this up, please email support@substack.com.

Set up podcast

During his first term, Trump did celebrate some genuine successes, from Operation Warp Speed to the Abraham Accords. But when he predictably failed to bring about most of his outsized promises, he proved shrewd at making up excuses. He had only just taken power. The deep state was standing in his way. The “Russia hoax” had made it impossible for him to govern. The global pandemic had messed everything up. The share of Americans who were genuinely excited about Trump shrank rapidly towards the end of his first term; and yet, the thought that it might be worth giving him a second chance in 2024—even if he just delivered on some tiny fraction of his promises—lingered in the minds of a surprising number of voters.

But the fulfillment of promises can’t be deferred forever without voters starting to lose patience. As Viktor Orbán learned to his chagrin in Hungary, there comes a time when leaders are measured by their results rather than their rhetoric. And that time has now come for Donald Trump.

The immediate reasons for Trump’s travails lie in his ill-fated war with Iran. The contention that foolish “foreign entanglements” had repeatedly led America astray was central to his political persona from day one. In his second inaugural address, he announced that “we will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” This makes it especially damaging that he pursued a war of choice in Iran without bothering to make a coherent case for it to the American public or ensuring that there would be a real exit strategy. The one major promise that Trump actually honored in his first term was that he would start no new major wars; that too now looks like empty self-promotion.

Subscribe now

The knock-on effects for Trump’s other areas of traditional strength have been brutal. Americans voted out Joe Biden’s Democrats in good part because of the persistently high level of inflation after the pandemic, which had been fueled by the administration’s generous stimulus programs. Now, Trump’s failure to anticipate that Iran would choose to block oil tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has led to a renewed spike in inflation, putting the president’s approval ratings on inflation and the cost of living underwater by a remarkable 40 points.

Trump is also in trouble in some historic areas of strength that are less directly connected to the war in the Middle East. Most Americans grew furious with Biden’s inability to control immigration at the southern border. But in his second term, Trump has embraced a deportation policy that is so pointlessly cruel that, in many polls, a clear majority of Americans now disapproves of his handling of the issue.

The result is becoming increasingly clear in the data: Overall support for Trump is at or near record lows.

Trump has often been far more popular with the American public than his detractors cared to acknowledge; today, his approval ratings are genuinely dismal. Nearly 58 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s job performance (most of them strongly) while only 39 percent approve (most of them weakly), according to statistician Nate Silver’s polling tracker. His net approval is as low today as it was in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 assault.

In the past, Trump has been hated by liberals, seen as divisive among independents, and (the complaints of a small band of principled columnists notwithstanding) enjoyed popular support among conservatives. Declines in Trump’s poll numbers were usually precipitated by independents abandoning him. Today, Trump remains toxic among liberals, has come to be viewed negatively by most independents, and is newly divisive among conservatives.

Trump’s ironclad grip over the Republican base is starting to loosen. In the past, conservative critics of Trump have usually complained that he has sold out the views and values associated with figures such as Ronald Reagan. Now, criticism of Trump within the conservative camp is for the first time being framed as a betrayal of the supposed values on which the MAGA movement was founded. Some of the biggest influencers on the American right, such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, have recently expressed regret for supporting Trump. For the first time since 2016, his hold over the MAGA movement may actually be weakening.

The political costs from these developments are likely to compound over the course of the coming months. Betting markets give Democrats about a 6-to-1 edge to win the House of Representatives in the midterm elections this November; despite a daunting electoral map, they also have slightly more than even odds to take control of the Senate. If Trump’s party really does suffer a serious shellacking in the midterms, his inability to push major legislation through Congress and the impending end of his term will further weaken his control over his own party. With attention turning toward the 2028 primaries, the White House may suddenly see its power slipping away, as happened after the 2006 midterm elections, in which Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, rendering George W. Bush largely powerless during the last years of his term. Sooner than we can now imagine, Trump may come to be seen as a lame duck.

When Trump was reelected with a bigger, younger, and more diverse electorate in 2024, it seemed as though he might actually manage to impose his vision and his values on the country. In the first months of his second term, the administration was moving with impressive speed. Resistance to its ascendancy was conspicuous by its absence. It felt as though America might stand at a genuine tipping point.

The window of opportunity for Trump to reshape the country in a significant way was, I think, real. But he responded to the cultural excesses of the Democratic Party—and the broader progressive establishment with which it is increasingly associated in the public mind—with even more extreme cultural excesses of his own, provoking a broad counter-reaction which extended well beyond those who partook in resistance marches during his first term. Therefore, it now seems increasingly safe to say that he has squandered it. Trump’s second term will leave behind an America that is weakened, cheapened, and fractious; but it seems increasingly unlikely that he will leave behind an America shaped in his own image.

Subscribe now

This is cause for optimism, an indication that America has proven to be more resistant to the appeal of authoritarian populism than many feared. It would take someone who is much more popular and disciplined than Trump to change the country in a fundamental way.

And yet it is far too early to celebrate. Trump will, after all, remain in office for another 32 months. That is enough time to do a lot of damage to democratic institutions, to engage in a great deal of corruption, and perhaps to start more reckless wars. In all likelihood, a President Trump who is starting to sense that the tide is turning against him will turn out to be more, not less, dangerous to the American republic—and the world.

Some danger will persist even after he leaves office. When demagogues leave office—even when they are booted from office in disgrace—it rarely spells the end of their movement. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection and was imprisoned for trying to impede the peaceful transfer of power, and yet his son Flávio has close to even odds of becoming the next president of Brazil, according to prediction markets. Alberto Fujimori was hounded out of Peruvian politics due to massive corruption and human rights abuses nearly three decades ago, and yet his daughter may be about to lead the country.

In Brazil, Peru, and many other democracies around the world, voters may decide to give populist movements a second (or third or fourth) chance because they were so disillusioned with the hapless alternatives. Given that the popularity of the Democratic Party remains at record lows, it would be deeply naive to rule out a similar future for the United States.

Trump looks likely to start fading from American politics over the coming years. But the broader threat of Trumpism may well outlast its creator.

This piece was originally published by the Dispatch.

David Bromwich has taught literature at Yale University since 1988. His books include Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, How Words Make Things Happen, and Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Bromwich discuss why Americans have lost faith in universities, how grade inflation and political conformity undermine academic credibility, and whether the opacity of elite admissions processes can be reformed.

Note: David Bromwich asked us to be clear that the views he expresses are his own and not those of any institution or group within an institution.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’ve been hoping to have you on the podcast for a long time, and we have a good occasion now because you were on the faculty committee at Yale University that was tasked with trying to figure out why people have lost faith in higher education in significant numbers in the United States, and what universities—and particularly Yale—can do to regain the trust of the public.

What do the findings of the committee suggest lies at the heart of this loss of faith in universities in the United States?

David Bromwich: Several things. You use the word “faith.” The official name of the committee was Trust in Higher Education. But trust, as anyone who has studied moral philosophy or just speaks English knows, is mutual. It depends on a shared understanding of what the purpose is of this or that institution, this or that custom or ritual.

The understanding that was lost is how public higher education—and specifically liberal arts education—prepares you for life in a way that will serve students well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens. There is some effect from the education that they wouldn’t get just from reading a lot of books or even watching a lot of television.

Some of the causes of waning trust that we looked at were the process of admissions. Yale is an elite school, so this is particularly dealing with the loss of trust in schools that have that sort of prestige. The price of the school is very high, although most people don’t pay the sticker price. That relates to a lack of transparency in things like how you pay, what tuition costs are, how it may be deferred, what loans are available, and how much tuition can be covered for people who aren’t rich.

Recently—and this overlaps with the work of the committee—an announcement came out about a month or two before our report was put into its final draft. The president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, announced that families making $200,000 a year or less, per household, would not have to pay any tuition. If you know how low on the scale of disposable income $200,000 for a whole household actually is, that’s not surprising. It’s not extraordinarily generous, but it is more generous than most people imagine the Ivy League schools are.

Mounk: For probably most of the households that send kids to Yale, that threshold is above their income. The median household income in the United States is something like $70,000 a year, so for the median American family that is able to get their child into Yale, they are going to have a free ride.

Bromwich: There is what we should call opacity rather than transparency. I like the 18th century word for it: publicity—making public, in a neutral sense, the criteria that are used by a university like Yale to accept or not accept students. This is all the more important because we’ve acquired an excess of bogus prestige from rejecting a lot of students. There are more and more applicants, more and more people think they might make it, but admissions are now lower than 5% at Yale and at places like Yale.

So how to account for the distrust? There seems to be a kind of false advertising in which the institution has been unconsciously indulging.

Mounk: The report is also quite explicit about the problem of grade inflation. In Yale, the median grade is now an A or an A minus, I believe. How is that contributing to the loss of trust in universities?

Bromwich: A student reporter writing for the campus newspaper, the Yale Daily News, found in an article published about a year and a half ago that the average grade given at Yale was in the A family—meaning As or A minuses—something like 70% of grades. As a teacher in the humanities (and we are usually charged with being the great culprits on grade inflation) I was shocked to discover that even in the natural sciences, grade inflation of this sort prevails. In order to distinguish among students—non-invidiously, but to discriminate—some much greater separation of degrees of distinction would seem desired.

That is one of the suggestions made in the final section of our report, which is called “Recommendations.” There are 20 recommendations, and one involves making it easier to calibrate how well students are doing against the cohort of people in that class. If a class is 80% A’s, your A in that class is going to count less than an A in a class where there are 30% A’s. That can seem like a small recommendation, but it may mean that students demand classes where distinction can show up. If they demand classes like that, they may gravitate more towards courses that have some real rigor and be a little less shameless about attending big lecture semi-gut courses in the social sciences or even the humanities that assure them of a good grade, thereby mingling with the respectable crowd of Ivy graduates.

Mounk: One topic that has been broadly discussed in the media, but also felt by many professors—including left-leaning professors at universities—is a sense of political conformity and a fear that one may, in some explicit or implicit way, be punished for expressing unpopular views. The report mentions that the number of students and faculty members at Yale who fear sharing a political view is quite substantial. How has the problem of political conformity contributed to a loss of trust in universities?

Bromwich: It is a reductive way of framing this, but not without its own revelations, that 90% or more of faculty at universities like this tend to be registered Democrats and to have, let’s just say, left-liberal politics. Why is that? That’s a long story. I have my own speculative explanations. But there’s no doubt about the enormous, sharp divide in the political culture of the United States right now. It’s a 51-49 politics, counting it simply as Democrat versus Republican, and it keeps going back and forth. So it’s about even, and what these two parties stand for is not quite clear very often, even to themselves. To have it all leaning with great imbalance on one side doesn’t seem an adequate representation, or an adequate preparation for society, among the students who go to college.

That’s not to say that there’s a great deal of political indoctrination that is just part of the ethic of campus life. I don’t think that’s true at Yale. I think it’s been overplayed as a problem about universities in general. But there’s no doubt that the actual disproportion of political tendencies among faculty members was a factor in creating more distrust.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Then there’s the question of free inquiry and free speech—related to politics, but related to cultural and social issues too. Are there questions that could be important moral topics for discussion in a university that are pretty much off limits, or where it’s understood—with nobody having to say so—that there’s one right answer, one right response, one right side to take, so that students are, imperceptibly but nevertheless, discouraged from getting into animated discussions about these things in class or outside of class?

Mounk: Part of what makes students afraid to speak up in class is the threat of social media. If a student says something that a classmate finds offensive, that classmate may go on TikTok or some other social media platform, perhaps misrepresent what was said, and call it out—leaving that student with no friends, with nowhere to sit in the dining hall, and so on.

Broomwich: Students are wary of saying something controversial because it might be reported in such a way as to harm their reputations early on, and how that affects people’s willingness to speak is pretty easy to guess. One of the recommendations—and it is one I’m most proud of on behalf of this committee—is a no-gizmo classroom: no laptops, no iPhones, no recording. It was suggested that we propose Chatham House rules for all classes, which means you can report things that were said, but you must never report who said it. I don’t think we went that far, and I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. But you want to stop well short of permissiveness towards creating gossip around comments made in class, either by a teacher or a student.

Mounk: I want to double-click on a few of these because there are a lot of interesting things in there. I’m struck by your first observation that there is a lot of opacity. I don’t think that opacity is by design exactly—in some areas perhaps more than others—but it has been created over time.

It’s true that a lot of the things that universities do, that supposedly are meant to serve worthy goals like equity, in fact have the result of favoring the people who know how to play the game. Personal statements are meant to give admissions officers a richer view of a personality and allow students to share when they’ve dealt with some kind of genuine hardship. In reality, it is often the most privileged students, from the most privileged backgrounds, who have the cultural knowledge to understand what you do and don’t say in a personal statement, and who have had the money to go volunteering on some wonderful project somewhere.

With the financial aid system, there are some really strong reasons why universities have embraced the models they have. The logic is that students who come from very rich households pay a lot, and students who don’t come from rich households are not charged any tuition, or are perhaps even given full living expenses. The top universities with big endowments are now very generous in that regard. But the result is that if you come from a genuinely underprivileged background, you may not know that. You may only have heard in general conversation that going to Yale now costs about $100,000 a year all in. So you may not even apply.

Not to mention that there are surely some parents who are smart about how they plan their finances and income—if you’re self-employed, you might frontload some losses to your business in the year your kid goes off to one of these schools, and because you really know the system, you’re able to come in under $200,000 that year, even if in the years before and after your kid attends college you’re way over $200,000 a year.

These are all examples in which a system—often designed quite earnestly, for example to make college accessible, which it now factually is for most people who are not very affluent—remains so opaque that people may not know it. If your kid gets into Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and so on, you do actually get tremendous aid. But the system is so opaque that people may not know it. How did that come about, and is it fixable?

Bromwich: I don’t know how it came about. As the scholarship process became more intricate, with more kids from public schools being admitted to elite schools—the Ivies, Chicago, and so on—I suppose they found it difficult to explain the intricacies. There is also the gradual advent of what came to be called the holistic approach. This is what Harvard got hit very hard for in the fairness in admissions case before the Supreme Court, because the holistic approach could be shown to disfavor Asian students on personality criteria that are very obscure. They kept receiving low grades on those criteria to compensate for their high SATs, so that the university wouldn’t have to admit too many.

Mounk: To expand on this for a moment, there is a dark history here. Those personality scores were explicitly introduced to keep down the number of Jews at these schools some 50 years ago, and now they are being used to keep down the number of Asian students. The figures were just remarkable. I believe it was on a five-point scale, and the personality of the average Asian applicant was determined to be more than a standard deviation lower than that of any other racial group. Basically, Harvard University’s institutional judgment is that, on average, Asian students have remarkably terrible personalities—and all of this is just part of this opaque system.

Bromwich: It’s all a cultural and racist cliché, but it fits all the old models. Black people are just more interesting, more animated, more lively than everyone else—they have personality. Asian people, on the other hand, are harder to read; they all seem to have, somehow, not enough personality. White people are somewhere in between. It was absurd what came out of that.

All these schools have been practicing some version of holistic admissions. That system depends on the spontaneous judgment and tact of the people working in admissions when reading an application. They should presumably be people who have been taught some basic rules: what are the good schools, what are the hard schools, what are the districts where, if a student has really done something exceptional, it means a lot—and so on. Nevertheless, that system, because it is so personal and so subjective, is liable to particular abuses. No doubt about it.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

A well-meaning democratic desire to present a welcoming face to students of all kinds is also largely responsible for some of the obscurity of the process. One recommendation from our report is that schools not advertise sticker price alone, but actually go into some of the intricacies, showing just what kind of chance an applicant has. But a subjective element remains. There will be students who feel prompted to try their chance at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or elsewhere, but who, on objective measures such as the SAT, aren’t quite up there with the best students—students who do come from more privileged backgrounds but are more academically prepared for a difficult university.

Mounk: One of the interesting things that the report suggests is that over time the mission of the university has broadened explicitly, and with it the criteria for the kind of students you want to admit. The report suggests that the university should refocus its mission much more narrowly on the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge, rather than those vague goals of educating future leaders and all kinds of other things. Going with that, it suggests that academic merit should be the core criterion for admissions, in a way that evidently it is not always now.

How far should we go with that? Why shouldn’t we do what other top universities in most other countries do? The report acknowledges that in most other countries, universities like Yale and Harvard—as we have recognized in the last year during the Trump administration’s attacks on these universities—are private universities with large endowments, but they do actually receive a lot of public funding. One obvious way to preserve trust in them is to have a very transparent, clear academic metric for who should get in, whether that is a national entrance examination or a university-specific entrance exam—something where people are graded without knowledge of their identities. The people who come out on top are admitted. That is broadly speaking the system that most other democratic countries in the world use. Why not go the whole way and get rid of holistic admissions altogether?

Bromwich: I am probably closer to that view than some of my colleagues on this committee, but we went a distance towards it. As you mentioned, what these mission statements import is a hard thing to say. They started becoming inspirational—part of the brochures sent out to prospective applicants—about 30 years ago or so. For example, all of these elite universities will speak of their virtues as being a “second home.” The word “home” is used, I would say, even half as often as the word “community”—as if the university is a whole separate community. That leads to some fallacies about the sort of concord or comity that ought to exist among everybody, fallacies that are very hard to erase but should be erased. If you want what John Stuart Mill called the clash of ideas to happen in a university, that clash means friction, some abrasiveness—not necessarily wounded feelings, but surprise, startlement, shock, the feeling of being rubbed the wrong way in an argument, hearing for the first time an argument made well that you didn’t think you had to take seriously. You want that to be part of what goes on in universities.

As a University of Chicago philosophy professor once told me, we respect you here if you can defend your ideas. That’s a nice way of putting it—maybe a little less forbidding than “clash of ideas.” Students, by the time they are some way into university life, should be interested in defending their ideas. If they are going to, for example, a lecture or a political speech by a person whom they dislike, distrust, and are opposed to, they should have some pride in their ability to ask a hard question instead of shouting the person down. Why? Because it’s a university.

That seems to me to move towards wanting people who are qualified. Are the people who are qualified the people who score the highest on these merit tests? On the whole, I think that should be a guiding line. I believe it is one of the recommendations in our report: that a baseline be set explicitly—which is not there yet in Yale’s advertisements for potential applicants—that if your SAT score is below a certain threshold, and it’s going to be a pretty high one, you are not encouraged to apply because you’re probably only in for disappointment. They don’t do that yet. In fact, in previous outreach to potential applicants, they say don’t worry too much about SATs.

As you know, schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, around the time of the George Floyd protests and COVID in 2020-2021, abandoned the SAT for a while and then gradually took it back because it was so impractical not to have it be a factor at all. There shouldn’t be a hangdog attitude about using this test—it’s merely objective. It should be a good test, one that tells you something about the student.

Mounk: One of the interesting things about the SAT test is that it went test-optional in most of those universities, which of course meant that if you had a very good score, you would include it. But if you had a bad score—yet otherwise had a great experience volunteering in Ecuador, or teachers who were really pushing you—you would omit it. The effect of that in the incoming class was, in many universities, very negative: there was a serious drop-off in intellectual quality.

The other thing this speaks to is exactly the nexus of admissions and opacity, and perhaps—I don’t like the term too much—a form of mollycoddling that has just become the background hum of the American elite class. There is a very odd mix of a highly meritocratic culture, with outsized returns for getting into Yale or into the investment bank you want to work for, and a culture that is very reluctant to be explicit about criteria. You see that in admissions and you see that in grading.

Part of the advantage of not having minimum SAT cutoffs, let’s be clear, is that you can do all kinds of social engineering. That’s one reason why universities are reluctant to adopt them. But part of it is simply that it feels mean to tell people that if your SAT is below 1300, you probably don’t stand a chance of getting into Yale. So let’s not say that explicitly—even though in reality, I’m sure these admissions offices that claim to read every file holistically probably discard every application below certain criteria without looking at it for more than two seconds. By not writing it on the website, you are actually inviting lots of students to spend a great deal of time on these applications, to get their hopes up, to think that perhaps they are such a unique student that their wonderfully neglected talents will be recognized—only to be disappointed six months later. It’s a kind of fake niceness.

Subscribe now

That is related to grade inflation. I am a relatively soft teacher in the sense that I don’t want my students to be punished for taking my class rather than the class of some colleague of mine. Because grade inflation has become the practice, my grades are about as inflated. I try not to make them more inflated than those of my colleagues, but I don’t think they’re less inflated either. There is just no individual incentive to hold firm. But I think that’s also fake niceness. My students deserve to know whether the piece of writing they have handed in is poor, decent, good, or exceptional. At the moment we don’t have the signals to send them for them to know that about themselves. At the moment that feels nice, but it isn’t actually nice if we take intellectual development seriously. Universities should have a stronger sense of mission and be able to stand up against this better than they have. But it’s a downstream effect, I think, from a broader set of cultural attitudes that have become very widespread in the American professional-managerial class.

Bromwich: There is a well-meaning and rather innocent democratic idealism reflected here: we want all kinds of people, we don’t want to feel that we discriminate, we don’t want to feel we’re an aristocratic country. As the Ivy League—which was an aristocracy if anything was—began to become more democratic, at least in its surface presentation, holistic considerations began to take hold: find a student who has overcome an obstacle, a student who is a fascinating, strong personality and intellectually good enough. That kind of exception started to be made, and it is one form of diversity.

The word “diversity,” before Trump—who uses it to cover everything having to do with civil rights, gender, and whatever else—really meant devoting special attention to race, gender, ethnic background, immigration status, and cultural and ethnic issues. But diversity is also just wanting different types of people, and that impulse goes far back.

This is touched on briefly in the preface to our report. Anti-intellectualism—or, to put it more politely, non-intellectualism—has been a major strand of American life. It seems wrong for the academy to present itself as participating in this unprejudiced non-intellectualism, but there is a little bit of that too. It leads to unfortunate effects when you try to have a popular face while not really being a popular institution.

Mounk: I find the idea that you need to put together a diverse class very strange. I was an undergraduate in England at Cambridge, and the admissions system is so fragmented that there’s no chance of putting together a unified class for the whole university, because colleges do their own admissions per subject. There’s no real way of doing that. Yet the university orchestra somehow always had a second violinist. The idea in America is that you need to make sure that you have this kind of student and that kind of student. But there is a law of large numbers in statistics: if you admit the smartest students, you’re going to end up having one student who happens to be interested in music and one student who happens to be interested in sports. I just don’t buy the premise that active curation is necessary to create a diverse class. My class at Cambridge was every bit as diverse in terms of interests, talents, and the way students spent their free time as a class in America—without any constituency being able to say, we need to make sure we have somebody who can do this sport or that.

The report rightly calls out all kinds of special categories that continue to be given preferential treatment. These include athletes, the children of alumni, and—this is a minor point numerically, but one I find very striking—the children of faculty and staff, who explicitly get a leg up. That is really quite remarkable.

The one thing the report does not include is a treatment of race. That is partially because officially we no longer have affirmative action at Ivy League universities in the wake of recent Supreme Court judgments. But that is where the opacity comes back in. When you look at some of the amicus briefs that various universities wrote in the Supreme Court litigation about affirmative action, they said that the number of black students would decline radically if they were not able to practice affirmative action. In the case of Harvard, one of the calculations presented by Harvard’s side said that without affirmative action, the number of black students at the university would go down from about 14% to something like 2%. Yet after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action, the number didn’t budge—or it budged only a tiny bit. At Yale, it went from 14% before the Supreme Court judgment to 14% a couple of years later, and I think it has since fallen a little to 12%.

Bromwich: The desire to have the percentage of students in an entering class reflect the percentage in the population goes with, I think, a fallacy that Michael Oakeshott talks about in some of his essays on education, which he calls the reflection theory of culture. That is to say, the idea that higher education and universities should, in all possible respects, reflect the society they are meant to serve. But institutions are good at functioning for different purposes. If you’re thinking about an activity—call it an institution—such as classical music, or engineering at a high level of specialization, or the armed forces, the kind of abilities needed for one thing or another aren’t necessarily going to reflect the distribution in the population. Universities are a large institution and you should perhaps strive to make them as representative as possible. But the reflection theory also carries the trouble that it makes the university think it should reflect attitudes in society as well as populations. Again, I think that’s wrong.

Mounk: That brings us to the question of intellectual diversity. You alluded to this briefly earlier: the vast majority of faculty at the leading schools lean left, many of them registered Democrats. That in itself need not be a problem. But I do think it’s indicative of a deeper problem—that the debate at these universities lies, as I see it, between the identitarian left and the liberal left. There is probably a slight preponderance of the liberal left on most campuses, not necessarily in every department or every field. But everything that falls outside of that range is hard to formulate at those universities without experiencing significant pushback.

Some of the solutions to this problem I view somewhat critically. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t hire colleagues at our universities in order for them to be intellectually diverse. First, it’s very hard for one person to be intellectually diverse in themselves unless they hold a very incoherent view of the world. Second, it’s rather odd to have a colleague who is just there to have a different opinion. But the truth is that political criteria are currently a very large part of the selection process, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, where the quality of work certainly matters, but where people whose views fall too far outside the consensus in a particular department often aren’t even considered in the first place. There is an effective application of ideological criteria that is covert and sometimes not even self-conscious—it’s simply that this person falls outside a reasonable fold, and so they are not considered. That is a very effective implicit political filter.

Unless you are able to upend that, perhaps the only alternative is to sometimes hire people who fall outside that consensus. It’s very hard to know how to fix this. As in the case of a broader reluctance to state criteria explicitly, this too is downstream from a larger transformation of the professional-managerial class. A lot of the problem today is that the Democrats have simply become the party of the professional-managerial class. As professors, university administrators, and (to a significant extent) students are recruited from the ranks of the professional-managerial class and its offspring, there is always going to be some lean in that direction, as long as that is the nature of our political cleavage.

So how can universities improve on intellectual diversity and foster genuine debates on campus, in a way that doesn’t itself run counter to the principles of free inquiry and that avoids political litmus tests for faculty hiring?

Bromwich: It’s very hard. What you’re describing is a standoff between two desirable goods. On the one hand, the intellectual autonomy of departments: departments should be able to choose to hire, and then possibly to tenure, the scholars they consider the best in a given field. On the other hand, if you have very little variety of opinion in a field such as politics—where there is in fact great variety outside the academy—there is something lacking in the education students are going to get.

This is called, by people who do the kind of study this report was working at, the pipeline problem. The pipeline problem of having so few black people represented in the academy was addressed by affirmative action, but affirmative action is no longer constitutional and may have run its course in any case.

Where the left-liberal side got its strongest foothold was in certain departments in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the studies programs—black studies, ethnic studies of various kinds, immigration studies, gender studies, and so on.

Mounk: Is that where the left-liberal or the identitarian left got its foothold? My sense—and I know Harvard much better than Yale—is that at Harvard, the government department and the main faculties have a left-liberal predominance.

Bromwich: Correction taken. I meant consciously political and consciously left, but you’re right—that would better be described as identitarian.

In any case, if you want a pipeline going the other way, you can’t do it by political affirmative action. That is, as you said, a litmus test. But universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, and so on—have created what they call centers or institutes, which aren’t quite academic programs, let alone full departments, but where people can have a permanent presence on campus and teach credit-bearing classes. It is imaginable that, at some places, if done with imagination and scruple, these centers could provide more room for people with academic training to hold views that inform their teaching without becoming dogma—or to hold views that are libertarian in ways that fall outside the usual range. That is one solution, but it is a standoff. It is a hell of a problem, how to change the composition of faculties without somehow compromising intellectual and departmental autonomy.

Mounk: What about the student side of this? The report refers, at surprising length I thought, to the famous Halloween incident, in which there was an email from the office of intercultural affairs urging people to be very sensitive in the Halloween costumes they chose. There was then a response to that by Erika Christakis, who was—as it was then called—the master, along with her husband Nicholas Christakis, the associate master, of one of the residential houses at Yale. Her response suggested that students should be able to think for themselves about these kinds of things. There was a huge eruption of anger that did look rather like some form of cultural revolution—an effigy of Nicholas in the courtyard and so on. A subsection of students, but an influential subsection, saw it as their calling to impose a certain identitarian orthodoxy on campus. That included intimidating senior faculty members, as in this instance, and sometimes intimidating their fellow students. There is some discussion in the report about the norms that should be established so that people feel free to share their opinions in class without the fear of being canceled afterwards on social media or in other ways.

I have personally found that that moment has somewhat passed. For the last few years of teaching, I’ve been struck by the fact that for many students, these ideas are now the received wisdom of what they’ve been told in high school, middle school, and sometimes elementary school. It depends a little on where they grew up—if they grew up, for example, in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area like New York, Los Angeles, or Boston, these are largely just the ideas their teachers have always taught them. As a result, they tend to take them for granted. It’s the world they’ve grown up in. But they no longer think of themselves as bearers of a flame whose goal is to impose it on others. It’s more that this is what their teachers told them and, like most things their teachers told them, they assume it’s true—until somebody has a different opinion, which surprises them, and they find they want to talk about it. It feels somewhat less fraught.

What is your impression of campus culture at Yale—has it somewhat improved? And more broadly, how big is the challenge today and what are some possible solutions? One of the recommendations in the report is to remove electronics from the classroom. The report also entertains but ultimately dismisses the idea of a Chatham House rule prohibiting attribution of remarks made in class. Where do things stand and what can be done?

Bromwich: I agree with your impression that the pressure zone, so to speak, has lifted somewhat in the last two or three years. A person I’m very close to in this household, who is a psychologist, speculated that in the year 2020 this country had a nervous breakdown—the whole country had a nervous breakdown. COVID was an element of it, but so were the George Floyd protests and the disorders in cities. The Halloween event you mentioned came in 2015-16, so that is an earlier BLM moment, and it had been going on for a long time—really from Obama’s second term into recent days.

But I do agree that there is more tolerance and interest in the exchange of ideas, and more animated talk and susceptibility to humor in the classroom, as far as I am able to discern. That is a good thing. It means that younger teachers, who tend to be cautious because they worry about student evaluations, will not constantly develop twenty different tones of voice for saying that’s interesting—and may instead learn how to say, I don’t really think that’s true and here’s why, or that’s absolutely true but let’s go further with it. That kind of give and take in a classroom is very important.

One of the things you could hear from conservative students in the worse recent years—here at Yale, which is not as badly off as other places because it has a conservative political union and a conservative presence in the background, so those students don’t feel entirely isolated—is that sometimes in class, when they made a remark that showed their traditionalist sympathies, they would not get denounced or shamed by anyone in the class or by the teacher, but the teacher would be silent for thirty seconds and then move on to something else. That’s not good. A greater openness that reflects a community with divergent, somewhat disharmonizing points of view is a good thing, to the extent that it really is coming back. I think it may be.

Mounk: Is one challenge not explicitly mentioned in the report that there is a minority of faculty who really do abuse their power in the classroom to impose their ideological views? My impression is that most faculty members do not do that, and I certainly think most of my colleagues do not. But I am struck, speaking to students, that they very consistently bring up experiences of this.

I go out of my way, when I explain what I think a good essay is for my class, to make clear that I don’t care whether students agree with me or not. The last thing I want is for somebody to badly parrot my views back to me—that’s not going to earn a great grade. If you write something I agree with, I want to feel that it is a really strong, interesting representation of that view. If you write something I disagree with, the question is not whether I am going to come to agree with you—that is unlikely. What I want to feel is whether the pull of that argument in my mind is a little bit stronger after reading your essay than it was at the beginning. Have you made a case for a point of view I may happen to disagree with, where I find myself thinking: I still probably disagree, but I see the force of that—I see why somebody might believe that.

Because I am very explicit about this, students sometimes say that they feel they can say what they think in my class, because it is not always the case elsewhere. I always listen up at that. When is it not the case? I remember one recent instance in particular where a student said that in high school, a teacher had a set of views—actually a rather woke set of views, views the student largely shared—but the student chafed at the fact that any disagreement was clearly going to be punished.

Are there ways that universities need to reckon with that, even just in terms of training teachers and setting clear expectations? You don’t want to be too intrusive, and you certainly don’t want auditing of every grade, which would be open to abuse in all kinds of other ways. But even if it is one in twenty faculty members, that is an experience most undergraduates are going to have once or perhaps twice during their college career. Is that one of the things that damages trust in higher education, and something we need to deal with?

Bromwich: I don’t know if it is one in twenty teachers, but I agree that it goes against the ethic of teaching. If you have anything resembling a Hippocratic oath as a teacher of the liberal arts and sciences, it should be that a view that is well defended gets the respect of the teacher, and a view that is earnestly and genuinely meant but not well defended receives a response that is not crushing or personally harsh, but reasonable—an example of how to point out the fallacies or the loopholes in a rival argument. Teachers should be exemplary in that way and it should be part of their training. But what is involved in acquiring a PhD is so specialized in other ways that that element of pedagogy is often neglected.

Some of it is intuitive. Some of it is, as I’m sure you have experienced, getting to know what your classroom presence is like and what it’s like to teach different kinds of classes. I remember in my early days teaching at Princeton—I was in my 20s—being morbidly worried about what I thought of as dead time, what disc jockeys call dead air: nothing being said. If I asked a question and there was no answer for ten seconds, I got very anxious. But as a teacher you learn that if a question was well asked, you simply wait.

Mounk: The best piece of teaching advice I’ve ever gotten was in graduate school. The department put on a little meeting for people who were going to be teaching assistants for the first time, and the best piece of advice—which I follow very often—is this: if you ask a question and you look anxious that people might not answer it, and you look like you’re going to jump in yourself, students think they can just sit back and let the teacher do their thing. What you should do instead is lean back, look comfortable, and let an awkward silence arise. Some student always can’t bear the awkwardness and jumps in, and suddenly you have a real discussion. I don’t generally have trouble getting my students to talk in the classroom, but on the occasions when that happens, I do that. Sometimes I even call it out explicitly: I’m happy to sit here in awkward silence for as long as you like. When you do that, somebody always jumps in.

Bromwich: Sometimes you haven’t asked the question well, and that shouldn’t lead to too much self-consciousness either. You learn to listen to yourself and say, a few seconds later, you know what? I posed that badly. Let me try again. There was a philosophy professor at Princeton—modal logic and philosophy of language and other such things—David Lewis, who spoke perfect paragraphs and was an excellent lecturer. When he would walk back and forth on the stage and, in the middle of a sentence, realize he was about to talk nonsense, he would stop and say so, then go back and say the whole thing again. Teachers, in a quieter way, should be able to do that.

Let me read a passage from a British education master of the 19th century that is quoted by Oakeshott, because I think it speaks to exactly what we’re talking about—the kinds of habits and manners that go with thinking in the context of higher education:

A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain, nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits, for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms.

That last part is obviously what has become most challenging for students in the last generation or so.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss why the number of students choosing humanities subjects is declining and how colleges and universities can regain public trust. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Luis Garicano is Professor of Public Policy at the London School of Economics.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Luis Garicano discuss the economic magnitude of AI’s transformative potential, whether artificial intelligence complements or replaces human workers, and why Silicon Valley predictions about automation consistently miss the mark.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: There are many things I would love to talk to you about, but the topic I have been thinking about a lot is artificial intelligence. I have had conversations on this podcast about the technology itself with people like Geoffrey Hinton. I have discussed the dimension of existential risk with people like one of the co-authors of If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies. I have also thought about some of the broader public policy angles.

However, I have not yet had a conversation specifically about the economics of artificial intelligence. It would be really interesting to try to get a handle on those questions. We will focus particularly on the labor market, but before we get there: what, in general, do you expect the impact of AI to be? Is it going to be major, middling, or minor? Is it going to lead to the vast economic growth some are predicting, or is it going to really decimate the number of jobs out there for humans? Is this going to be an economically revolutionary time, or is it just one of many developments that are interesting but ultimately not that consequential?

Luis Garicano: I don’t have a crystal ball—anticipating things is always hard. But let me give you my best take based on what we see. It is clear that a lot of knowledge work, even if the technology stopped tomorrow, could be automated—a lot of knowledge tasks. It is already very clear that tasks which are routine, tasks that have to do with diagnosis, writing, crafting documents, doing research—the AI is already doing these perfectly. Coding work is really spectacular. In terms of whether it is going to be big, I think it is going to be huge. It is probably as big a revolution as the industrial revolution—that is a very likely thing—except that instead of automating physical work, it is for cognitive work. Everything points to a large impact, and also an accelerating one.

There were people who were doubting, people who were wondering if AI would be a big deal or not. I don’t think any of those people could still be doubting, given what we have observed in the last six or eight weeks. The explosion of new models, the way they work—Claude Code is really taking the world by storm. Everybody has noticed that software firms’ valuations are plummeting in the stock market, showing that people believe many functions, many verticals, and many software products that were accommodating one particular use case can be replaced by AI.

So yes, a big deal, and in many segments. On the question of growth: yes, if this is as big a deal as it appears, we will see big productivity growth and an acceleration—though not the kind of growth that many people in Silicon Valley predict, because most economists think in terms of O-rings and bottlenecks and weak links. Meaning: you can invent as many compounds to solve cancers as you want, but if you need to go through years of clinical trials and regulatory approvals, that is not going to suddenly accelerate massively. Those weak links will constrain growth everywhere.

On the question of labor: the evidence so far is that AI is more complementing than replacing. In the three areas where we expect the largest impacts, translators haven’t dropped—everybody thought translators were going to be decimated, translation seems like a solved problem, and yet the amount of translation work hasn’t dropped according to world labor statistics. Customer service agents: some people get let go, some get rehired to do different jobs; again, the BLS doesn’t see much. Even computer programmers—we are not seeing big drops. There were a couple of papers earlier in the year. Erik Brynjolfsson has a paper with co-authors called Canaries in a Coal Mine which was starting to see drops in more exposed segments for more junior employees, and we do see a bit of that. But there is a lot of discussion on whether that has to do with COVID and so on. For employment at the moment, it looks like AI assists more than it replaces.

It is clear that AI can do many tasks. My main quarrel with the Silicon Valley interpretation of things is the belief that if a computer can replace the tasks most easily done by a machine, then the job is gone. Jobs are more than their most automatable tasks—a radiologist, for instance, spends only 30% of his time looking at scans. The job of a radiologist is much more than just diagnosing scans.

Mounk: I was in a meeting with Sam Altman in, I believe, 2018—I barely knew who he was at that time. I remember him pointing outside the window of a hotel in Silicon Valley, saying that in three or five years there were going to be robots building homes there. None of that has materialized. There is a very real tendency of people in Silicon Valley not just to overpromise on the technology, but to underestimate the obstacles to real-world adoption of technology. Those obstacles are particularly evident, as you recently pointed out, in something like house construction, where the constraints are not actually the inability to build homes—we know how to build homes. It is regulatory approval, zoning laws, concerns about whether the nature of a neighborhood is going to change, and all of those kinds of things.

Garicano: Two points about the comments you made. One is about the Silicon Valley position. I am very surprised that they are not just hyping the technology—which I understand, because you want to sell enterprise subscriptions—but they are also hyping the risks of the technology, and all the time threatening people with extinction, saying AI will take all their jobs. I don’t see the point of this tactic. I can see that if you want to justify the valuations, they need to say that all these things are incredibly transformative—and they are transformative.

The other day, Mustafa Suleyman—the ex-DeepMind co-founder and Microsoft AI head—was saying to the FT that they are going to automate all white-collar work in 18 months. I was joking: does anyone really believe that Microsoft will actually get Outlook or Word to work properly in 18 months? I don’t think they can fix their two pieces of terrible software in 18 months. We all hate Outlook—we’ve hated it for 15 years, and I’d bet we’ll hate it in 18 months. So they’re talking about automating complete, complex jobs, and they cannot fix their own software. That’s just completely ridiculous.

Mounk: Before we dive into the substance of this, I would love for you to help us establish the premise you’re operating on. A lot of my listeners are tech-forward, and a lot are not. I still find many people in conversation who experimented with ChatGPT when it came out three or so years ago and have gone back to use it every now and again—perhaps using it instead of Google to search for certain things, or for a translation need, or for very specific tasks. They are still convinced that it hallucinates a lot, and they feel the limitations of what it can do are very strong.

Part of that, I think, is that the most commercially used ChatGPT products are not very good compared to some of the competitors now—in part because they route your requests sometimes to a really powerful model and sometimes to a not very powerful model at all. Part of it is that a lot of people use free versions of these AI tools, which are much less powerful than the ones for which you need to pay at least $20 a month. Part of it is that probably only a fraction of people who listen to this podcast have used tools like Claude Code.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

So, just to motivate what we’re talking about: when you say there has been tremendous progress over the last few months, and more broadly over the last few years, what are these tools able to do today? How are people using them in ways that are so different from what you might expect if you’re just using the free tier of ChatGPT?

Garicano: Let me give you a Claude Code example and a deep research example.

The Claude Code example is the following. What is interesting is that the machine can talk to you and it can deploy tools—it can put Python tools to work. Let me explain this in a very clear way. I did a paper: I was a member of the European Parliament, and after returning to academia, I wanted to do some research on how narratives work in the European Parliament—I wanted to show there are no trade-offs in the narratives. What I did was collect 46,000 speeches, all the speeches, downloaded them, put them in a spreadsheet. Each speech goes to ChatGPT through an API—which means it goes through a special pipe—gets processed, comes back into a spreadsheet, gets classified in certain ways, and then we analyze that classification with statistical tools. That took six months. It is a lot of work: getting each speech, sending it, bringing it back, and so on. I had done this for climate.

I then decided to use Claude Code to do all of that work—six months of work—for the topic of AI. How is the discourse in the Parliament evolving on AI? I told Claude Code—in text, no programming—here is my directory, where I had all these files, and I told it to write the entire same pipeline: get the speech, send it, classify it, analyze it, but instead of for climate, as in the original files, do it for AI. There are many Python programs involved, multiple programs I had to run. Six months of work. Six to ten hours later, there was a complete analysis by Claude Code—all the directories, all the tables, every single figure, from start to end. The difference is that you talk to it, but it can deploy all these tools, do all these things, go over the web, run code.

The second thing I would tell your listeners about, which they would very much enjoy using if they are not already, is the deep research tools. On the highest-end research frontier of these models, you ask it to research a question—for example, you might say: populism has been growing, and there are two explanations, cultural and economic. I want an in-depth literature review of all the evidence comparing those theories. I want you to spend a lot of time collecting hundreds of papers, classifying them, telling me the prevalence of the evidence, and writing a thorough research report. This is now better than what a research assistant could do over several months.

Those are two examples of what is possible at the higher end. Why are they useful for the world? Think of a lawyer. A transactions lawyer is essentially comparing a situation to existing precedents and existing case law—drafting, for example, an intellectual property agreement or a contract to buy a house. They go and find similar contracts, upload the relevant knowledge, and convert it into a new contract. If a law firm incorporates all its contracts into Claude Code and asks the system to use that knowledge to automate contract drafting, compliance, and verification, it is definitely able, right now and without any question, to handle that complete task.

Mounk: I started to use Claude Code about a month and a half ago. I have basically no coding background—I had a couple of group lessons of C++ in middle school, did a little bit of programming in statistical software in graduate school, but very limited. I was mostly a political theorist. I then took a few weeks of CS50, the famous online computer science course on edX—a very good course, and that was ten years ago. If you had set me an entry-level coding task, like programming a number guessing game, I would not have been able to do it. Now, with this tool, I have been able to program five different things that are of concrete use to me. It is just astonishing what it can do.

More broadly, some of the pitfalls that AI used to have until a few years ago are not really there anymore. When ChatGPT 3.5 launched, it didn’t have an extended thinking modality. It’s as though I ask you a challenging question and it’s part of a game show where if you don’t start answering within one second, or if you hesitate more than one second between any two words, you lose—that answer is not going to be very coherent. Now the systems, at the higher tier, talk to themselves and walk you through the process by which they attempt an answer. They try one answer, check whether it makes sense, and then say, no, actually I made a mistake, I should do this. By the time they give you output, they have thought through it in a much, much bigger way.

On the problem of hallucinations: I wrote a post on Substack about asking Claude to write a publishable paper of political theory. A number of senior colleagues in the field wrote to me after I published it saying it would absolutely have been published in a top journal if it had been submitted. I looked through some of the references—not every single one—and it was not hallucinating. It now knows, by and large, how to ensure that something actually exists, and it flags when it is uncertain. It told me: I have put in the page numbers for the canonical translations of Tocqueville—I’m not sure about those, please go and double-check them, I don’t have access to that full text. If I upload the PDF of that book, it will do it for me. So it knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. A lot of those problems have been fixed.

Now we go into the realm of economics. I don’t know whether we have reached superintelligence as defined by Dario Amodei—where we suddenly have the equivalent of a whole country of geniuses. But we certainly have the equivalent of a whole country of middle-class professionals. Suddenly the number of people who can competently draft a legal contract, and do so in ten seconds for very little money, is vastly larger than it used to be. So what does that do—first for growth? If economic growth was in some ways constrained by human capital, constrained by the number of well-trained people with access to a lot of knowledge able to carry out that work, that should mean we are going to see a real increase in economic growth. Or is it more complicated than that?

Garicano: The first-order approximation is that you have an increase in productivity and an increase in growth—that is a reasonable place to start. There are two or three caveats that I think are important in trying to figure out how big that increase is.

The first is organizations. The organization of work is intensely human. As you were hinting from my recent post on London housing: the reason 23 out of 25 boroughs of London are building zero housing this year—in 2025, there were zero housing starts—has nothing to do with technology. Giving them better technology is not going to solve the problems with the neighbors, with the NIMBYs, with the Greens, with the land regulation, the lawyers, and all the other things that stop construction that we already know about. So the first caveat is organizations and all-too-human obstacles, which mean that even when the technology is there, many other factors have to collaborate.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

There are entire sectors which have Baumol characteristics. Baumol had an observation in the 1960s—and maybe you have discussed this with your listeners—that a string quartet would still take one hour to play a Mozart piece, the same exact hour as it would have taken 200 years ago: four people, one hour, no productivity gain.

Mounk: This is a very old point because nowadays, no economist would talk about string quartets.

Garicano: This observation holds for a very large share of the economy. For hairdressers, cooks—technology doesn’t play any role. It’s not just that there are bottlenecks, but that productivity growth is very small because there is really no actual technology and no actual AI involved.

What is interesting is that in the sector of the economy that enjoys technological change, as prices drop, it is perfectly possible—and we will talk about demand elasticity in a moment—that people reach satiation and that sector becomes smaller. Think of agriculture: it became technologically fantastic, but it became smaller and smaller as it grew more productive, because people’s stomachs didn’t grow. The amount of workers employed went down. What that means is that the sector with the technological expansion reduces its size, and the other sector—the one with the violinists—expands its. As a result, the weighted average of growth depends not just on how much the productive sector is growing, but on the fact that the sector that is growing may itself be getting smaller.

Mounk: One way of thinking about this is that everything that can be automated suddenly becomes plentiful. To that extent, it might not fully show up in GDP figures, but it does fundamentally remake the world. When I think about the agriculture case: as a result of the successful mechanization of agriculture, that has become a much smaller part of the economy and we are paying vastly less for food than we used to. You will understand the technical details better than I do, but that sort of underplays the degree of that change in the way we track GDP.

What it does mean is that whereas for most of human history, even people in affluent countries—if you weren’t at the very top of the hierarchy—were deeply constrained in how much food they could consume, were malnourished as a result, and died earlier as a result, nowadays, if you are anywhere outside the bottom 20% of a medium-to-affluent country, food is not your primary expense. It is a significant expense if you like nice food and shop for nice things, but if all you want is to feed yourself on ramen and a few supplements in such a way that you avoid malnutrition, that is going to be a tiny part of your budget. That is a fundamental positive transformation of human life, even if it doesn’t fully show up in GDP figures.

Garicano: Economists like to talk about welfare as the sum of consumer and producer surplus. In this case, the consumer is enjoying the biggest gain. A lot of what happens with AI is that the gains are going to consumers and not showing up in GDP figures.

Let me give you an example. We have a dishwasher that is broken. We take a picture, upload it to ChatGPT and ask what is going on. It says this part is stuck and you should just remove it. We remove it. Our welfare has gone up—we are happier, we solved the problem. Now, there is a transaction that would have taken place—some person coming to our house to fix the dishwasher—that didn’t happen. The GDP would have been higher if that person had come and we had paid him. But our welfare increased. If we can diagnose our own illnesses, if we can assess whether our diet is good or bad without going to a dietitian, if we can do our own contracts—all of those things increase our welfare but do not show up in GDP. In fact, some of them could reduce GDP.

I was talking to a CEO from China who told me he thought a lot of the gains were being “smoked in the corridor.” I asked what he meant. He said he observed all his IT people becoming more productive—solving problems faster—but that it wasn’t showing up in better numbers at the end of the month. Each person in IT was more productive, but they were going home earlier or playing video games. Those are real gains that need not increase GDP.

The other thing I would mention is the difference between the short and the long run. Imagine there are two sectors, and sector A gets fully automated—let’s say lawyers, even if that example is imperfect because lawyers have a lot of regulatory protection and there are many contexts where you are required to use one. Imagine we no longer need any lawyers and we solve our legal problems ourselves. All the people in sector A that gets automated need to move to sector B. All the demand that is now consumer surplus—money we no longer need to spend on legal problems—can go and be spent on the other sector. But that reallocation doesn’t happen instantly. The capital has to be moved, the labor has to be relocated, the demand has to be redirected. There is a moment when GDP could be dropping, because we are not consuming legal services or dishwasher repairs, and the transition to new consumption patterns hasn’t yet occurred. In the meantime, capital is being written down, labor is being relocated, and there may not be sufficient demand either. All of that transition could definitely look nothing like smooth, continuous growth.

Mounk: I’m trying to figure out what the aggregate effect of these changes might be. On one hand, agriculture—historically a huge part of human activity—mostly gets automated, the number of people working in agriculture is now astonishingly low, output goes up a lot, and as a result prices go down a lot. Most of the consumer surplus is captured by consumers, and so it is a very good thing.

What I don’t fully understand is what actually provides the basis of ordinary people’s bargaining power. In the agricultural world, the answer is that the production of agricultural goods becomes very cheap, but it turns out that humans are necessary for running all kinds of other elements of the economy. There is a strong demand for human labor, and that is what allows people to continue to consume.

Now, if we get to a world—and this still sounds a little like science fiction, but I am trying to imagine the scenario—where AI can fully run agriculture without any humans, and can fully run the systems needed to manage agriculture, and can fully run the law firms needed to efficiently allocate capital to agriculture and ensure the most efficient firms are tilling the most land, it may be that there are still elements of a human economy where human work is needed. It may be that humans still prefer human teachers, or that humans continue to be required in medical decisions—perhaps because we don’t trust AI systems to make them, or perhaps because of regulatory obstacles to fully automating those decisions.

Subscribe now

But if all of the underlying productive processes that actually generate material wealth no longer require humans, is there a kind of perpetual motion in the circular economy of humans that is enough to sustain affluence on its own? Or does there need to be some relation back to material production for the whole construct to sustain itself? If all of the demand for human labor is produced by the fact that it is extremely expensive to look after old people, by regulations that prevent us from building houses, by the willingness of capital owners to pay a lot for housing because they need somewhere to live, and by some people continuing to be employed in human-facing roles because of regulation—is that actually enough to sustain affluence for human workers if all of the genuinely productive processes can be done by non-human workers?

Garicano: Let me break this down into a few parts. First, the satiation case we are discussing—where the sector gets smaller as it becomes more efficient—doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. In fact, in many sectors, as technology gets better and things become more efficient, the sector actually grows in size. This is called the Jevons effect, after William Stanley Jevons, an English economist who observed that machines using coal were getting more and more efficient and yet were consuming more coal rather than less. Why? Because as they got better, they were being used for so many more things that total coal consumption was going up. In many sectors—think about health, think about energy—as things get more and more efficient, it is unlikely that the sector as a whole will shrink. In fact, it is more likely that it could grow in size and demand more humans. The sectors most likely to grow when prices go down—those with the most elastic demand—would be things like health and energy, just to give two simple examples.

The second important point is the idea of complements, which you were clearly hinting at in your question. There are many situations where a human is needed at a bottleneck. Even if the first 99 tasks can be automated, if the 100th task requires a human, the 99 automated tasks are abundant but the scarcity is still the human—and the human is going to capture the rent and the labor income.

Mounk: That depends on the human being scarce. If that task requires a very high level of qualification and you need millions of humans to do it because they are so productive, then a lot of people are going to be in relatively decent employment. But if you only need seven people to do it and they have to be excellent, then those seven people are going to capture huge rents—some of that economic gain is going to go to them, but only to them.

Consider that something like 5% of the male workforce globally is employed as drivers. The rent from the need for human drivers is very broadly distributed—each of those drivers is probably not very affluent, but the rent for that activity is widely shared. Now say that ten people have to supervise all of the self-driving cars, and they have to be incredibly qualified with very few people able to do it. Perhaps they capture a lot of that rent, but that is only going to be ten people who get that money. Or say it needs a thousand people, but a million people are able to do that job—in that case, the wage for those thousand people is going to be really low, because any one of them can be fired and there are 999,000 waiting outside the door willing to take their position. So it depends a lot on those kinds of details.

Garicano: I am writing a book on this point—it is called Messy Jobs. The argument of Messy Jobs is that there is a big difference between a task and a job.

Geoffrey Hinton, whom you have had on your podcast, is famous for having said in 2016 that nobody should study radiology because radiology was just an expert system that could scan photos—and of course any expert system was going to be better, trained on hundreds of millions of breast cancer scans and perfect at detecting those cancers. The truth of the matter is that demand for radiologists has never been higher. Their salaries are growing, their numbers are growing, and it is the third highest-paying medical profession in the United States. Why? Because the task is very different from the job. The technologist imagines a radiologist just looking at scans. But only 30% of a radiologist’s time is spent looking at scans—they have to develop the diagnosis plan, talk to colleagues, talk to patients, and do many other things.

The first crucial obstacle to your dystopia is that automating parts of jobs—tasks—is not automating the job. I invite all your listeners to think of what they did today and consider which of those things could be replaced by a machine. I went to a workshop, had a job market seminar, had a meeting with colleagues, had students walking in, worked on a paper—and if you think through how many of those tasks you could replace with a machine, you will discover that many of them can’t be. The task we are doing right now—having a human conversation about something—can’t be. A job and a task are really very different things. Many aspects of a job can change without the whole bundle disappearing. It will get re-bundled, it will look different, but it will not go away.

There are specific reasons for that. One is the need to direct the AI. You cannot just let it do its thing. The AI is sycophantic—it tends to agree with what you say. If you want to direct it to the left, it says yes, left is great. If you want to direct it to the right, it says yes, right is the best, you’re the smartest. What you tell it is going to matter, and that means somebody is going to have to exercise judgment. Crucially, this is not a problem that is solved by AI getting smarter and smarter. Think of managing a family—everything you do in the morning with the kids, moving around, deciding. A lot of that is not automatable because a lot of the knowledge of what is going on is tacit. It is in your head. No machine can tell you whether the kid has to wear these boots or whether today is the day they need this or that particular thing. Authority is inherently human. Making difficult decisions is inherently human.

Being the consultant who does PowerPoint presentations—yes, that can be automated. But does the consultant only do PowerPoints, or does he or she go to the company, listen to the workers, figure out where the problems are, and determine how to improve things? A lot of that is tacit. So I would push back against the idea that entire jobs are going to be done autonomously.

You are right that self-driving cars passed the autonomy threshold—the cars can essentially drive themselves, which means the supply of drivers suddenly becomes infinite and the wage floor collapses. That is a good example, but it is an example where the task is very clearly defined and very repetitive. Is that the majority of jobs? The claim of Messy Jobs is that if you think about demand elasticity, many sectors will grow; if you think about complementarities, there are going to be crucial scarcities that humans can exploit—and there will be many such scarcities. This is without even getting to the question of demand for human services, about which I am actually not sure. I am not sure that people, when they are old, will necessarily want a person bossing them around asking “are we well today?”—I might prefer a robot taking care of me. So it is not obvious that human-ness in itself is always the preferred option.

Mounk: Including a lot of the more intimate tasks involved in elder care—would you rather have another human wipe your ass, or would you rather have a machine do it? You certainly want some human company. Once your ass is wiped, you would love to have a conversation with a human.

I have a middle position in these debates, and I want to push back on a couple of the things you said—though I am not coming from a maximalist position. I agree that a lot of the predictions that all jobs are going to be gone in two years are testimony to people who haven’t thought carefully about politics or the real world. But some of the examples you gave leave me a little less convinced.

To give one example: can AI outsource the management of a family? Part of family life is that you are negotiating between human beings, trying to come up with a plan together. Even if the AI can make a plan that is Pareto superior to whatever plan you would have arrived at, part of what it is to be a family is to make those plans together—to decide what you are doing today, and so on. On an emotional level, you might not be able to outsource those things. On a purely planning level, though, I think AI absolutely could handle the tasks you described—and in fact, many feminists would say that is precisely what they have been arguing for for a very long time, because it is often women who do the emotional labor and the second shift: keeping track of the fact that Timmy has to go to the dentist tomorrow and Tammy has to go to ballet the day after, and whether the dress she needs for ballet has already been washed. It would require an invasion of privacy—an AI that is party to all of these conversations and immediately notes down when Tammy says, don’t forget I need X or Y for my ballet practice next week. But can AI do all of those things? Absolutely. Could it, in fact, save some marriages in the process? Probably yes.

Garicano: Here is why I disagree. There are information processing tasks—and you are right that a lot of information processing tasks can be automated. We synthesize information, put it in a form that can be processed, and make a decision. But there are other tasks that have nothing to do with information processing. Your wife or your kid is upset—someone needs to talk to the kid, someone needs to understand why he is upset, and someone needs to decide: yes, the optimal plan from the perspective of the family was that you couldn’t stay home, but I listened to you and I decided that you are staying.

A lot of it is not information processing. You understand your kids. You understand what a look means—from your wife, from somebody else. When a look means yes, I will do it. When they say yes but in fact they mean no. There is a lot of tacit, local knowledge that goes into management, into family life, and into business. We are not just talking about politics or emotions—we are talking about interpersonal knowledge. You have known your wife for many years and you know when you can push and when she knows she can push. You might say the machine could know those things—I honestly don’t think it could.

Take the contractor: you know which electrician is reliable and which one played tricks on you last time. Can the AI know whether you can use some piece of leverage to get that electrician to show up on time? We are talking about a level of interpersonal and tacit knowledge that is extraordinary—and also, think about this: a lot of the tacit knowledge within jobs is knowledge that employees have that gives them power. They are not going to be happily sharing it with AI. You should know that my colleague so-and-so has this problem with the boss and never wants to work with him—that kind of thing is going to remain in the heads of humans.

So yes, information processing tasks can and will be automated. But a lot of what remains has to do not just with emotional and social skills, but with tacit knowledge and personal knowledge that the machine will probably never fully gain, because it cannot capture it.

Mounk: I have two different lines of questioning about this. The first is: if we move away from the extreme predictions, and if we recognize that advanced AI tools are clearly capable of doing a lot of the tasks involved in knowledge production, that presumably means some jobs are going to go away. The idea that AI is incompetent, that it can’t do any of those things, that it’s all hype and a bubble—we agree that is wrong. But I think we also agree, at the other end, that real-world frictions are very real. Jobs are messy because the world is messy, and therefore the idea that the moment Claude beats doctors on a bunch of stylized medical questions—which it more or less does now—we should expect there to be no doctors tomorrow, is naive and doesn’t understand the real world.

But what happens in the middle space? What happens if the demand for white-collar work is suddenly reduced by 25% or perhaps 30%? It doesn’t have to happen between today and tomorrow—it happens over the course of 10 or 20 years. You just see a continuing, gradual reduction in the demand for that kind of high-skilled work: as existing firms automate work away, as firms that are too stubborn or unable to do that are outcompeted by new entrants that are AI-native—in the same way that in many areas of the economy, it took internet-native companies to outcompete old ones before you really saw productivity gains come online.

That is going to be a significant process, and it is not going to happen all at once. In a way, that raises an equally troubling possibility: that the job market is going to slowly slump for an extended period, and that we face the famous, somewhat apocryphal, boiling frog scenario. If everybody lost their job over the course of two months, perhaps we would all organize and demand some way of being made whole. But if this shows up as decades in which the bargaining power of ordinary people diminishes gradually—because the demand for human labor just continues to fall in a messy, haphazard way—that could still be an incredibly painful period ahead for ordinary people.

Garicano: You are more or less describing my scenario of the transition between sector A and sector B. We know that during the Industrial Revolution, what was called the Engels’ Pause—roughly between 1790 and 1840—this was happening: wages were stagnating or dropping and workers were in trouble. Then GDP roughly doubled over the following decades to 1900. So yes, it could happen that over a period of time the transition is hard.

I would think instead about the combination of factors working in the other direction. First, there are sectors where nothing is going to happen because they are outside the reach of this technology entirely. Second, in the sectors with elastic demand, there will be enormous growth—think of medical scanning. If AI handles all the routine scans, perhaps we would all be getting whole-body scans every year or every six months. The demand is extremely elastic and the sector could grow much, much larger, with radiologists needed to oversee far more machines. I think this is true for many sectors. Third, within the sectors that are getting automated, there are still messy jobs—humans directing, judging, making decisions, setting direction. If you count all of this together, you don’t have a catastrophe. You have a transition that is more significant in some subsectors and less significant in others.

We will also discover entirely new sectors—who would have predicted TikTokers and Instagramers? If you add up the sectors where nothing is happening—from public sector jobs to arts, music, barbers, hairdressers, cooks, and pet care, which alone accounts for roughly 1% of the U.S. population and is of course entirely unaffected by AI—and then add the sectors with very elastic demand that are going to grow, like health and energy, and then add the messy jobs where even though some tasks are being automated the jobs continue—from managers to entrepreneurs—and then add the complementarities, there is also David Autor’s idea of the new middle class: think of a nurse who is empowered with a genius in a box, who can now diagnose really complicated illnesses, hold the patient’s hand, do all the other parts of the job, and solve more problems than ever before. Of course, as you said, then maybe everybody wants to be a nurse, and we have to think about the supply of nursing and other skilled trades. But when you add all of this up, you move away from the feeling that there is a cataclysmic change ahead, and more toward the view that yes, this is automation, yes, it is going to be a bigger revolution than what we have seen in the last 50 or 60 years, perhaps more similar to the Industrial Revolution—but no, it is not going to cause widespread, long-term unemployment. We are going to see new jobs we wouldn’t even think of today, from TikTokers and Instagramers to dog walkers. Who would have told you that you were going to be a podcaster?

Mounk: I don’t know if the vision of the future is that humans are going to be fine because we’re still going to be TikTokers and Instagrammers and dog walkers.

Garicano: No, I was not saying that. I was saying that the pet care sector is 1% of the population. It’s nurses and people who take care of the pets and all these other things.

Mounk: Let me ask you about the dog walkers. One interesting thing that has happened over the last ten years—which just shows how epistemically modest we should be about all of this—is that I remember all of the conversations about drivers losing their jobs, and how that was somehow linked in the conversation about populism to why the Midwest went for Trump. The proposed solution was that they should all learn to code. Now it turns out that AI is really good at coding. Meanwhile, because of a set of technical issues that ended up being harder to solve for a while—though mostly solved now—Waymo is very efficient and much safer than human drivers, yet there are still significant regulatory obstacles. The number of rides Waymo is offering is going up exponentially, but it is still a very small share of the market and most human drivers are still fine. This is going to take longer to play out than many people think.

But we are now in a world in which coders appear to be losing their jobs—though I understand the economic data on that is mixed—and in which knowledge workers are seemingly about to lose their jobs, while all of the manual trades are assumed to be safe. The plumbers are going to be fine. The dog walkers are going to be fine. Well, I watched, as many others did, the quite remarkable display by Chinese robots at the annual Chinese state television gala. The progress in their dexterity from a year ago to today is just astonishing. The ability to combine the manual dexterity of these machines with visual processing and understanding of the world is advancing very quickly as well.

I am personally waiting for the ChatGPT 3.5 moment in robotics. I don’t think it will take very long for there to be some consumer product that is actually usable—we are getting close to that. The applications in the industrial sector are likely to increase as well. Again, I don’t think that is going to happen tomorrow, and it will take time to be fully implemented in the economy.

But when we are talking about a timescale of decades—when you say that in 20 or 30 years, more and more knowledge work tasks are going to be automated because those skills can already be performed by AI, and perhaps it will take a long time for firms to reorganize and for new entrants to come in, but that is okay because perhaps we will all be in the pet care sector—well, that assumes that in 20 or 30 years we will still not have figured out household assistance robots. That if you are out at the office or doing whatever you do during the day, you cannot have a little robot walking your dog in your stead. Given the rate of progress of this technology, that seems to me like a pretty significant background assumption to be making.

Garicano: Physical AI—robotics, let’s say—is not that far off. What we have seen in the past is that capital is in what we call elastic supply: you can always invest more in capital, which means the rents on capital eventually get competed away and the robot gets sold at a competitive price. That means people can use robots for care. Remember, we have significant fertility problems and population growth problems when it comes to paying our pensions, and having robots could be a solution to all of that—it is like having more population growth.

In a world where those returns are competed away, we are back to consumer gains. The capital doesn’t earn extraordinary returns because there is an infinitely elastic supply of capital—more people can invest in making more robots. What is the scarce resource? It is going to be land, it is going to be energy, and it is going to be whatever human labor is still needed. That human labor could mean we work fewer hours, that we are able to enjoy more leisure, or that human labor is employed in a whole range of jobs which, as you rightly say, we cannot anticipate.

What we should not imagine is an economy that works without humans, because all value is generated for humans. What does the economy generate value for if nobody is buying the products? Value, by definition, is something that is worth more to humans than it costs to make. If there is no human who can buy things because they are all poor, there is no value. The way the economy works is that the return to capital gets pushed back down to the competitive return, and the rents get captured by the scarce resources—in this case, the complementary human labor that is still needed.

Nobody can anticipate what happens in 30 years. Both physical robotics and cognitive AI are going to represent a major revolution. I don’t think we should be thinking of this as an apocalypse. There are a lot of complementarities, a lot of scarcities that still favor human labor, and a lot of areas where this doesn’t really bind at all.

Mounk: Tell me a little bit about the state of the empirical literature. I understand that there is a real distinction between micro and macro studies—a real distinction between studies that look at the extent to which particular tasks can be automated and studies that look at how the overall job picture has changed.

When I look at the fields I know a little bit, I worry that the absence of change so far is an indication of what is yet to come, rather than an indication that AI won’t have a big impact. You mentioned translation earlier. Another thing I have been thinking about is index-making in the publishing industry. In all of those fields, there has been basically no change in the economic flows—so far as I can tell, my next book is going to be translated by human translators. Well, perhaps they don’t actually do it and privately send it to Claude and capture the consumer surplus by going on a nice vacation while they pretend to be working on the book. But in terms of the actual economic flows, nothing has really changed, and I don’t know how long that is going to continue to be the case.

It is very sticky and very complicated to change those processes. Somebody needs to be willing to fire all the translators and deal with the backlash—the agent saying the author doesn’t like the idea of AI doing the work, the risk of a newspaper story, the possibility that customers will be upset. There are all kinds of reasons to be risk-averse about being the first mover to make that change.

What I will tell you is that one of the things I have built for myself with Claude Code is a personalized translation tool, because I publish my articles—including some podcast transcripts—not just in English but also in German and French. It is not just better than the off-the-shelf tools; at this point it is better than all but the very best translators I have worked with. The very best translators—particularly in France, for whom I am deeply grateful—I think are still better. But 90-plus percent of the professional translators I have dealt with, people who have translated famous books by famous authors, are now significantly outperformed by it.

For now, if economists tell me that translators haven’t lost their jobs and none of this has changed that much, I believe it—I can see that. But given that AI has existed in its current form for only about three years, and that for two of those three years it really wasn’t yet at the level it is reaching now, and that people have not yet integrated these tools sufficiently into their processes—I would say: come back to me in 15 years and let’s see whether those translators still have jobs in the way they do today.

Garicano: Nobody is predicting that translators will still exist in their current form indefinitely. I said “so far, so good”—but perhaps like the person falling past the window. Jobs do go away. Newspapers went digital, and there were lots of people working in printing presses, paper, and all the associated industries, and all of that was automated away.

Mounk: Including my grandfather, whose job it was to, as a young man, to lay the newspaper letter by letter. He helped to manage the printing side.

Garicano: This is human history all the time. On the question of empirical evidence: the evidence up to now is positive. When randomized controlled trials have been conducted—giving AI to workers in a controlled setting—the results are consistent. In customer support, the most junior agents achieved performance similar to more senior ones. In writing tasks, the worst writers achieved performance similar to the better writers. When it was given to software programmers across three different tasks, the less skilled programmers were brought closer to the level of the better ones. Micro studies seem to be finding complementarities rather than substitution, consistently.

At the aggregate level, there is much more confusion and much less clarity. We don’t see big drops in demand. There are some canaries—as I mentioned from that paper, Canaries in the Coal Mine—some preliminary evidence that there may be drops in junior roles. When we think about the research task, the PowerPoint task, the Excel task—those are the obvious things to automate—we have to imagine that junior lawyers, junior consultants, and junior investment bankers will not be recruited as much, because you can do a research task without a junior person. Yet it turns out the McKinsey class this year is bigger than before. They keep hiring. So far, so good.

I agree with you that this is not a forecast of the future—I don’t mean to say that because we haven’t seen much yet, we won’t. That is not the point. The point is that there are indications that complementarities are important, that people who use AI produce better work, and that substitution is still limited. It is hard not to think that tasks involving basic PowerPoint work and research are going to be fully automated at some point. But I agree—we should not try to make this a 15-year forecast.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Luis share advice for young people at the start of their careers, why AI won’t kill off bullshit jobs, and whether companies run by AI would be more successful than those run by messy, emotional humans. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University, as well as a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. His latest book, with Jeff Kosseff, is The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jacob Mchangama discuss why we’re experiencing a global free speech recession despite technological advances, how hate speech laws are being weaponized against their original intent, and whether democracies can resist the authoritarian playbook for controlling online discourse.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: In one sense, we are in a golden age of free speech. The ability for people to make their voices heard is much greater than in the past. It is much easier for a lot of ordinary people to participate in the political discourse in a meaningful way. The access to information that we have as citizens is in many respects probably better than it ever was. In earlier periods, it would have been much harder to get specialized information about things, even to do things like read a court judgment that interests you.

All of that is now available at the click of a button. That is partially a result of social media, partially a result of Google, partially a result of artificial intelligence that can now go into a lot of very interesting research for you and distill a lot of the material that you’re trying to understand. If there’s a technical document that previously perhaps you weren’t expert enough to understand, you now have an assistant that can help you do that. So in many ways it seems like we are actually in quite a good time for free speech. Why do you argue that nevertheless we should think of this period as a “free speech recession?”

Jacob Mchangama: I think you’re absolutely right. The World Wide Web, social media, and now AI—in many ways, it is true that if you compare our ability to share and access information to that of Enlightenment heroes, or even after the immediate adoption of the First Amendment or the French Declaration on the Rights of Man that did away with entrenched censorship, we have a lot more options, at least in democracies around the world. If you’re in China, it’s probably a different story, even though you could have certain tools that help you.

I think the huge difference is that for a very long time, there was this sense in democracies that free speech was part of a winning formula that entrenched freedom and democracy—that so-called third wave of democratization that washed the shore in all parts of the world—and a sense that technology was extremely helpful with that. That calculus has changed dramatically, both in democracies and authoritarian states. Authoritarian states were at one point extremely concerned about the World Wide Web and its ability to circumvent official propaganda and censorship. You see that very clearly in the so-called “Document Number Nine,” which is an internal communiqué from the Chinese Communist Party circulated shortly after Xi Jinping comes into power, which talks about how there’s a need to really crack down on western concepts of constitutionalism, press freedom, and so on.

You also see it in 2012 in Russia, after Putin essentially fakes the presidential election and comes back into office. There’s a coordinated effort to say: we don’t want the kind of street protests that were coordinated on social media, on Facebook and V-Kontakte in Moscow. That really was a bad look for Putin when he was triumphantly coming back into the presidency. At that time, democracies were still looking back at the Arab Spring and saying the internet is mostly a good thing. Then you have Brexit, you have the 2016 election, and prior to that, terrorist content from ISIS spreading on social media—and then the mood sours. Suddenly free speech is being seen not as a competitive advantage for democracies against their authoritarian counterparts, but as a Trojan horse that allows the enemies of democracies, both from within and without, to chip away at the foundations of democracy.

There is then this attempt to say we need a new conception of free speech, one that is more militant, and where we need to reimpose some kind of top-down control of the public sphere, because with the internet, it’s basically the lunatics who are running the asylum in terms of the public sphere.

Mounk: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t quite thought about the relationship between these two things in as clear a way. There’s a period in which there’s naive enthusiasm about how the internet and social media are going to lead to an expansion of democracy around the world, and so that makes people a little bit naive—thinking that China is sure to liberalize and perhaps even become a democracy within our lifetimes.

That story turns out to be wrong, in part because dictators learn how to control the internet and how to control social media for their own purposes, and they’ve become very good at that. But you’re right that along with that, you’ve also had a real inversion in how a lot of reasonable, middle-of-the-road people think about free speech within democratic societies. At the period where people thought social media leads to Occupy Wall Street and the Green Revolution in Iran, they thought free speech is therefore a left-wing value. I remember even causes that always seemed to me to be somewhat minor from a free speech perspective—like net neutrality, defined as no internet service provider could possibly prioritize a video file over a text file, or the whole principle of the internet would be broken—being the cause célèbre of people like John Oliver on Last Week Tonight when that show started on HBO. It was a time in which the left was, at least in this respect, quite instinctively for internet freedom—perhaps not for free speech in every respect, but for internet freedom at least.

Now, after 2016 and Cambridge Analytica and the election of Donald Trump, as well as the erection of a great firewall in China and other things, there’s this feeling that domestically what social media brings you is Donald Trump, and internationally what it brings you is dictatorships being able to sow disinformation and so forth. Suddenly we’re in a world in which the “right-thinking people” on the left, but also a lot of the middle-of-the-road people in the center, are saying social media is what’s polarizing our societies, what’s destroying our societies, and we need all of these new regulations in order to deal with it.

It’s remarkable how quickly that paradigm shift happened. It now feels as though this is the world we’ve been in for a long time, but ten years ago the discussion was still quite different.

Mchangama: Absolutely. I would say it’s not even confined to the left. People who I admire a lot and respect, whose liberal democratic credentials are impeccable—like Anne Applebaum and Francis Fukuyama—have also, I think, changed their tone on this, certainly Applebaum has, in terms of wanting more stringent social media regulation. Jonathan Haidt is another one.

Another thing, of course, is that especially in the United States, culture war issues have infused this topic, which makes it very easy to pick positions depending on those fault lines. The free speech position, especially when it comes to online speech, gets equated with right-wing populism, for instance, or being in favor of disinformation, or not caring about the spread of hate speech and so on—which I think is pretty lazy argumentation.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

On the other hand, I also think it is incumbent on free speech advocates—those who think it’s extremely important to hold on to a principled, robust conception of free speech in the online age—to acknowledge that free speech is not an unalloyed good. It comes with harms and costs. That’s not unique to the digital age. If you go back and look—and it would be an interesting experiment to look at the writings of the first 300 years of the printing press—how much of that would reflect values that we appreciate today? How much of it would be deeply hateful and full of misconceptions and lies and propaganda? Probably a lot.

Mounk: Let us get a little more concrete and understand what measures some of this background shift in the debate you’ve been talking about have actually led to. I’m less interested here in the straightforward dictatorships—we can get to those. Obviously, the ability of authoritarian governments around the world to very quickly censor what their citizens are posting, to have much greater insight into what’s going on on social media platforms at all times, to block content from outside the country that they find unfavorable, and even to shape—in the case of China—the development of chatbots by the leading AI labs within the country in such a way that they will be politically reliable: all of that has advanced very far, and it has narrowed the space for free speech, which was always very restricted, in an even more extreme way.

But what I’m interested in is the countries that are democracies, that claim to care for democratic values, that aren’t even captured by the most illiberal populists. I’m not talking here about Turkey, which has a horrible record on free speech, or Venezuela, which has a horrible record on free speech—but countries where over the last years we’ve seen the real introduction of rules, regulations, and sometimes criminal laws that make it much more dangerous to express your political opinion. I imagine that a bunch of European countries fall into that category. The United Kingdom, outside the EU but still within the geographic entity of Europe, falls within that realm, and countries like Brazil might be counted among those places as well. What are some of the concrete changes that have happened there in the last decade or more that have restricted the scope of free speech?

Mchangama: A very prominent example would be hate speech. Hate speech is generally criminalized or prohibited in most countries outside the United States. There are even human rights conventions that oblige you to do so, but it has been unevenly prohibited and enforced in many countries. There has definitely been a huge move in the digital age to crack down further on free speech, and there have been even further efforts, I think, after October 7, to crack down on hate speech in the shape of anti-Semitism.

Canada has had hate speech law since 1970. Their courts have been quite reluctant to give an expansive interpretation of hate speech law, so they’ve put quite a bit of emphasis on free speech. But in 2022, the hate speech law was expanded with a specific crime targeting antisemitism through essentially denying and trivializing the Holocaust. Right now, there’s a new bill in Canada that is aimed at going after hate crimes and hate speech and further restricting free speech in Canada.

In Australia, actually shortly before the horrific antisemitic terrorist attack in Sydney in Bondi Beach, the government had criminalized certain forms of hateful expression. Immediately after the attack, the reaction of both state governments and the federal government in Australia was to crack down further on hate speech.

Germany, which you know better than anyone else, has these coordinated days against hate speech where police will show up in different locations to confiscate devices, sometimes arrest people—and people are convicted for really vague categories of hate speech. One of the things that we use as an example in our book is the case of Iris Hefets, a far-left Israeli Jewish activist who lives in Berlin. She moved to Germany as a protest against Israeli policies. She’s an anti-Zionist, but an Israeli Jew. She’s been arrested on four occasions for essentially walking around Berlin with placards that say, as an Israeli Jew, “Stop the genocide in Gaza”—or variations thereof.

Now, you can agree or disagree with whether there’s a genocide in Gaza—that’s a political position. But I think this shows the absurdity and danger of these kinds of laws: that in the capital of Germany, where these laws are, above anything else, meant to protect Jews against anti-Semitism, a Jew is arrested for hate speech for criticizing not only the policies of Israel, but also what she sees as complicity on the part of the German government. This is, I think, an unavoidable consequence. There are a lot of other crazy cases coming out of Germany.

Mounk: Just to stay with Germany for a moment, there are also a whole number of cases where the prohibition on the use of Nazi-era symbols—which I think on balance I oppose, but I certainly understand why, given Germany’s particular history, they were adopted—are then used and applied in such ways that they obviously go against their original purpose.

There’s a German journalist called Jan Fleischhauer. He wrote for Der Spiegel for a very long time, which is one of the country’s leading magazines; now he works for Focus. He’s a little bit more right-leaning. He was criticizing the youth organization of the AfD, the leading right-wing populist party, which is called Generation Hoffnung—“Generation Hope.” He was criticizing them for playing with Nazi ideas in various ways, and saying perhaps they should rename themselves Generation Deutschland Erwache—“Awaken Germany”—which is a Nazi slogan. He was obviously using—or rather, mentioning—that slogan in a way that implied criticism of this organization, by insinuating that it was in some way too friendly to Nazi ideology.

The state prosecutor started a formal investigation of him because of the use of Nazi symbols. There was an outcry and eventually they dropped it, but it just shows you that there is absolutely no common sense in how these laws are used, and they end up stifling political speech that is clearly—right or wrong, agree or disagree—clearly legitimate.

Mchangama: There is simply no evidence that Germany’s hate speech laws work. It’s one of the things that I try to go into in depth in the book. If you look at the German domestic intelligence service, they have very detailed reports about political extremism and violence in Germany that go back several years, and they break it down by right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, religious extremism, and so on. Over the past decade, there has been a constant increase in right-wing extremism—including right-wing violence, antisemitism, and so on—all the while successive governments have done more and more to crack down on hate speech: whether it was the NetzDG, passed in 2017 to try and ensure that social media platforms remove illegal content; whether it’s expanding existing hate speech laws; or whether it’s ensuring that authorities do more to enforce existing hate speech laws by conducting these coordinated raids.

You could point to the AfD’s Björn Höcke, who won a local election in Thuringia. He was twice convicted, I think, for essentially using Nazi slogans in his speeches. It did nothing to minimize his appeal with voters—the elections were in July and he’d been convicted in May. This is one of the problems that I have with Europe, where the European Commission is proposing that hate speech law should be strengthened and harmonized across all 27 member states, so that the European Commission would essentially be the body that could go after member states if they don’t do enough to enforce these laws. But there is no empirical attempt at asking whether these laws actually work. If you look at the European Union’s own data, they say that over the past decades there has been a huge increase in hate speech and hate crimes—but during that same time, you’ve actually done a lot to criminalize and crack down on hate speech.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

So why are we wedded to this concept of militant democracy? If you adopt the logic that every time there’s an outbreak of intolerance, hate crimes, or antisemitism the only political solution is to adopt further speech-restrictive laws, where does it end? There have already been a lot of laws and restrictions adopted that, if you had asked people 15 or 20 years ago, they would have said were way too much. But it has been normalized that this is just the way you do it.

Mounk: Tell us a little bit about the situation in countries other than Europe. There’s a big debate, for example, in Brazil, where there was a genuine threat to democracy with an attempt at storming the Congress after Jair Bolsonaro was ousted from office in elections that echoed in a strange way the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

There is a kind of attempt to try and strengthen democratic institutions, for which I have a lot of sympathy. But it seems as though in the process of that attempt, a lot of power has been given to one prosecutor to make decisions about what speech is legal and what speech is illegal, in ways that really restrict the space for free speech in the country in some striking ways. Tell us a little bit about the developments there.

Mchangama: The interesting thing in Brazil is that the Supreme Federal Court in 2019 essentially gave itself powers to conduct a fake news investigation. A particular judge called Alexandre de Moraes would spearhead this effort. He then expanded its scope—it was initially looking at attacks on members of the Supreme Court, so a Supreme Court judge would look at fake news attacks on Supreme Court judges. It’s a very complicated backstory, because as you well know, there was the so-called “car wash” corruption scandal, which implicated huge parts of Brazilian politics and business. Parts of that investigation pointed perhaps in the direction of Supreme Court members, and when that happened, they established this inquiry.

Moraes says that he is fighting for democracy, but the methods he has employed have been to essentially be the prosecutor, judge, and jury in these cases—determining on very vague standards what constitutes fake news and even hate speech. It has overwhelmingly been aimed at the populist right. Bolsonaro and some of his supporters have certainly done things that are illegal and expressed sentiments that are anti-democratic. But these powers have also implicated, for instance, a communist party that attacked the Supreme Court, where he ordered their social media accounts to be shut down, as well as criminal investigations of statements made in closed WhatsApp groups. There is also a federal election court, of which Moraes is a part, which essentially gives itself powers to police political speech—it will say that a statement by a politician is misleading in a certain way and therefore should be removed.

That has had huge consequences for political speech in Brazil. But again, what is interesting here is that the elites—especially on the center left, who would not that long ago have been suspicious of these kinds of things—have said this is a necessary price for combating right-wing populism. You can understand the anxiety in Brazil because Bolsonaro has a military background and strong ties with the military, and it’s not that long ago that Brazil had a military dictatorship. But of course, what was one of the main tools of the Brazilian dictatorship? Heavy-handed censorship. And so this is one of the paradoxes.

Mounk: The other interesting thing about Brazil is that it has been, for the last five or so years, cited as this shining example of militant democracy—and perhaps we need to get into the concept of militant democracy a little bit further in the next part of the conversation. People are saying: look, in Brazil, they are actually dealing with this toxic speech; they have this prosecutor who is able to go after politicians who make false statements; they put Bolsonaro in jail. This is the way that you can fortify your democratic institutions.

But as you were saying in the European context, there’s not a lot of evidence that all of that hate speech legislation in Germany actually means that people are less likely to take extremist points of view or to engage in racist beliefs—or at least to vote on them. The same is true in Brazil. There was a promising right-leaning governor of São Paulo who was not closely allied with Bolsonaro—he was part of Bolsonaro’s movement, but there was some political room between them—who was widely expected to be the right-wing candidate. Jair Bolsonaro, from jail, basically anointed his own son, who is a full loyalist, as his successor. That son is now running against Lula, the sitting president, in the presidential elections. Looking at opinion polls at the moment, Lula is ahead by a couple of points in the first round according to opinion polls, but in polling for the crucial second round—for which both of them would be very likely to qualify—Bolsonaro’s son is either even or ahead in a lot of the polls. The latest ones seem to have him ahead by between one and three percentage points.

Brazilian democracy is as much on a knife’s edge as it was at any previous point. The idea that all of these measures would somehow help you to miraculously shut this political movement out of contestation has simply not worked out.

Mchangama: An even stronger empirical check on this is to note that the fake news investigation started in 2019 and was then expanded—and then the attack on Congress came years later. So if this fake news investigation was necessary to crack down on conspiracy theories and polarization fueled by lies and disinformation, it quite clearly did not work, given what actually transpired in Brasília on that day.

I think one of the problems for free speech advocates—and one that I grapple with myself quite a lot—is that politicians will say: we have to do something about this; this is a huge problem; perhaps they view it as an existential problem. For most politicians, their motivations and incentives are probably mixed. But I think it’s certainly the case that there are a lot of reasonable liberal democrats who restrict free speech out of good intentions, who don’t have Machiavellian plans to do away with democracy and lock up their opponents.

The problem you have as a free speech advocate is that when these things hit the headlines and you feel this threat coming from the other side—a threat that resonates with the wiring of us human beings as quite tribal and very acute to senses of threat—that makes it very, very difficult for what then seems an abstract principle of free speech to override our sense that we have to do something. The question being shot back at free speech advocates is: what’s your solution? Very often we don’t have a good solution other than saying that John Stuart Mill warned against this—and John Stuart Mill was great and eloquent, and he and Madison should still be read and inspire us, but they’re not likely to convince people who feel that democracy is on the edge, or that we’re standing in 1932, figuratively speaking.

Subscribe now

There are certain dynamics in the world we live in right now that favor militant democracy—that favor this idea that you have to be intolerant towards the forces of intolerance in order to safeguard democracy. This is not the time for talking; this is the time for doing, because otherwise the enemies of democracy will win and things will get much worse.

Mounk: Let’s talk about some of the things that people are proposing that we do. Many of these laws are being discussed at the moment in the European Union, in Britain, in Canada, and some of them even in the United States, where the scope for some of these policies is much narrower because of the First Amendment. One idea is to make sure that children don’t have access to social media, or more broadly don’t have access to all kinds of forms of damaging content—whether that might be extreme pornography or extremely violent content online—and to accomplish that with an age verification law.

In principle, that seems like something that even free speech advocates should be open to, in the sense that, certainly as a good philosophical liberal, I believe that adults should be able to consume as much pornography as they want, even if that’s perhaps not always good for them and not always a good idea—but that’s part of having individual freedom and not having the state be the moral guardian of what it is we can and can’t do. But I do think that it’s perfectly appropriate to have restrictions on ten-year-olds having access to that kind of content.

The problem with these laws, of course, is that they also impose a requirement on adults to prove that they’re adults, and that can chill their speech and their access to information in other ways. What do you make of these laws that require age verification in order to access main parts of the internet, as they have been rolled out and written in other places over the last years?

Mchangama: Concerns about the corruption of children obviously go back a very long way. It’s part of the charges against Socrates in 399 BC that he was corrupting the youth. Today we don’t fear dangerous philosophy, but harms to children. The thing of course is that in ancient Greece, acts with youth that we would frown upon today were seen as perfectly normal, whereas certain ideas being taught were seen as beyond the pale. But I digress.

I have two teenage children myself—a daughter of 13 and a son of 16. I have fought with them about screens and devices. I wish that I had introduced them to devices later, and I now have pretty stringent controls on their devices in terms of time limitations and certain types of content that they can’t access at all. But I also think that there are benefits for children in having online access. Children have human rights as well, and one of those is access to information. For instance, three years ago my family moved to the United States. My children would not be as proficient—not only in the English language, but also in the cultural idioms of their peers—if they had not been watching content on YouTube, for instance. That’s a huge benefit for them. Younger people, whether you like it or not, consume news and ideas through new media. If you cut them off from that, you cut them off from a lot of relevant information.

Then you have the problem, as you mentioned, of adults giving up their private information in ways that governments can potentially use and abuse to identify them and compromise their anonymity. It is now at least a policy goal of certain democracies—including Germany, I think—to eliminate the right to anonymity on social media online. German Chancellor Merz has said that he does not think that you should have the right to be anonymous on social media. Now, think about the historical implications of that.

Mounk: I want to hear your argument against it. You might say that we believe in free speech for people—that you shouldn’t be under any threat of being prosecuted or put in jail for what you say, even if it’s very unpopular—and that would already be a big improvement in places like Germany and the United Kingdom relative to the laws as they stand at the moment. But why should we give free speech rights to bots? Why should we give free speech rights to foreign intelligence services that create fake accounts in order to influence debates in Germany, Britain, or the United States? Why should we allow people to go online and insult anybody who has a different opinion in the most vile possible ways—perhaps even threatening them—and hiding behind the cover of some kind of avatar?

Why shouldn’t we say: yes, you have as a citizen full rights of expression—or as a visitor, for that matter—but you need to actually prove who you are, so we know that we’re actually having a conversation among real human beings? I can see the arguments on the other side, and I’m not endorsing what I just said, but just to steelman the position: if somebody like Friedrich Merz believes that, is he wrong?

Mchangama: I can understand the argument superficially. I think it is probably true that it is easier for conversations online to derail when you can hide behind anonymity—when you don’t have your full name attached—because you feel more comfortable trolling and so on; there’s less inhibition, less incentive to think about what you say before you blurt it out.

But let me be a bit facetious here with an argument in a German context. Was it wrong of the members of the White Rose to spread their anti-Nazi pamphlets anonymously? During Nazi Germany, they obviously ended up being arrested and executed. But that shows you why people have resorted to writing anonymously or pseudonymously throughout history—because there were repercussions when you wrote in your own name. If you’re a dissident, it is much easier to identify you and then you can face legal consequences.

Now, if you’re Chancellor Merz in Germany—who, according to some reports, has used NGOs and law firms to launch lawsuits against people for insulting him; someone called him a “racist asshole,” and to me, if you’re a politician who has positioned himself as wanting a firmer immigration policy in Germany, doing away with the mistakes of the Merkel era, you can’t on the one hand say you want to be tougher on Islamists and the mistakes of immigration, and on the other hand be unwilling to be called a “racist asshole”—why should Germans who disagree with him be compelled to give their details so that he can instruct his lawyer to have them criminally prosecuted?

You also need only look at European history. I saw Ursula von der Leyen in an interview rather smugly saying, in response to criticism of the American attack on European free speech: We know quite a bit about free speech in Europe—we’re actually the place of the Enlightenment. Well, did Spinoza publish his Theological-Political Treatise under his own name? No, he did not. Did Montesquieu publish his Persian Letters under his own name? No, he did not. Did Voltaire publish Candide under his own name? Were Cato’s Letters published under real names? Of course not. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was not written under his name. The Federalist Papers were written using pseudonyms.

Mounk: It’s actually a remarkable list. I was aware of each of those individually, but once you put them all next to each other, that is a huge share of the most important writings of the Enlightenment that were published pseudonymously.

I believe that the Two Treatises of Government—and I’m trying to remember this arcane piece of knowledge from my undergraduate degree, which was unfortunately a few years ago now—survived the civil war under a false book cover, stowed away in some library under the title of a work on the “French disease,” which was a contemporary appellation for something like syphilis. So it looked like a sort of medical treatise, but the “French disease” was meant to be authoritarianism.

Mchangama: So many of the literary works that have shaped Enlightenment values, democracy, and so on depended on anonymity to be able to spread and to save their authors, at least temporarily. When you add to that, in the digital age, the fact that the very same politicians who say we can’t have anonymity are also busy adopting laws that criminalize and prohibit ever larger swaths of speech—I think that in and of itself shows why this is an extremely dangerous development.

When it comes to the whole child protection issue, we should also look at authoritarian and illiberal states. I mentioned Russia’s crackdown on online speech in 2012—that’s when they built out their so-called “Red Web”—and the pretext for this was, you guessed it, protecting children. I saw Jonathan Haidt in February praising Indonesia for adopting its own version of Australia’s pioneering law banning under-16s from social media. Indonesia is a country that has used child protection to ban gay dating apps, and has recently proposed a bill that would give its broadcasting commission broader powers to crack down on LGBT content in order to protect children. Indonesia is often praised as a model Muslim-majority country that has democratic institutions and is relatively moderate—it is not an outright authoritarian state. That makes all of these examples all the more instructive as to why this sounds superficially great on paper but carries grave implications for free speech and privacy.

This is especially true in our day and age, where every time you log on to the internet—or certain parts of it—your data is collected in ways that are much more intrusive than the days where you needed to show a library card to take out a book. It gives whichever entity collects it—whether a private company or the government—troves of data that could produce a very forensic picture of who you are: your interests, your social connections, and so on. It would essentially shield the government from criticism and dissent and make citizens much more transparent to the government. That is an inversion of what I understand to be at the core of liberal democratic societies.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Jacob discuss how to make the case for free speech, the surprising effect of the Community Notes feature on X, and the future of free speech in America. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Michael Shermer discuss conspiracy theories from the plausible to the wild, how to assess whether a conspiracy theory is accurate, and discovering the truth in a convoluted world.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’m really interested in learning all about the truth, which you expound upon in your new book. But there was something that interested me about you, which is that you spent an enormous amount of time looking into conspiracy theories and arguing with conspiracy theorists. You’re kind of the self-appointed Batman. If somebody comes up with a terrible conspiracy theory somewhere, you rush in to put them right.

Michael Shermer: The previous book, Conspiracy, and the new book, Truth, are sort of a two-book project. Conspiracy asks why the rational believe the irrational. Truth is basically why anybody believes anything at all and what we should believe.

Conspiracies have always been in the wheelhouse of skeptics and scientists who study fringe ideas, because they’re always right on the margins. You can’t quite make out what’s going on. If it’s obviously a government operation or a corporate scam, then it’s not really a conspiracy theory. It’s just a scam or an operation. So conspiracy theories are always like—we can’t quite make out what’s going on, here’s what I think might be going on. It’s a little bit like the UAP/UFO phenomenon. The pictures are always blurry and grainy. It’s always on the margins, on the borderlands.

Many conspiracy theories are like that. You can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Therefore, that opens the door for anybody and everybody with their personal opinions. So I just undertook to explore why that is. Since we started Skeptic back in 1992, we’ve been covering JFK and moon landing conspiracy theories, all that stuff ever since, because it’s super popular.

Mounk: What drew you to that? These theories are out there, and it’s tempting for a smart person to ignore them and to say, these are just crazies going around making up all of these stories. Certainly back in the day, they probably felt less central to the political discourse than unfortunately they do now. So why doesn’t it make more sense to just ignore them and actually focus on the stuff that’s true and that matters in the world? What’s the case for actually going to battle with conspiracy theorists and trying to engage them in the details—often in the weeds of the claims they make about the world?

Shermer: It matters what’s true. I embrace universal realism—there is a reality, we can figure out what is, more or less, small-“t” truth. That’s true with conspiracies. Conspiracy theories are theories about actual conspiracies, whether the theory is true or not. There are real conspiracies. Watergate was a conspiracy. Iran-Contra, all the MKUltra and all the CIA shenanigans in third world countries in the 50s and 60s and 70s—these are all true, and they were covered up. These were not approved by Congress or the president, who may not have even known about many of them.

So one of the things I’m debunking in Conspiracy is that calling it a crazy conspiracy theory, or calling someone a crazy conspiracy nut, is not an answer. The question is: but what if he’s right? He may be a nut, but what if he’s right? So what’s the actual truth?

When we started Skeptic, I was initially debunking the creationists—evolution deniers. Then the Holocaust deniers came on the scene and they were making the rounds on major talk shows. I thought maybe that’s something we can look at in Skeptic. So I went around to some Holocaust scholars and historians with a list of things that these Holocaust deniers were saying are not true. How many bodies can you burn in 24 hours in a crematory at Auschwitz? Why does the door not lock at the gas chamber at Mauthausen? They had a list of like 39 unanswered mysteries and anomalies about the Holocaust. A lot of these historians would just tell me, they’re just a bunch of anti-Semites. That may be, but what’s the answer? Most of them didn’t know the answer.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

It reminded me a little bit of biologists who would debate creationists. They would lose because they didn’t realize the creationists are doing something different. The Holocaust deniers are not actually studying the Holocaust—they’re doing something different. They’re challenging the narrative because it’s based on Israel and American foreign policy, and that’s really what it’s about. It has nothing to do with calculating how many Jews exactly died, how many were alive in 1939, how many were alive in 1945. That actually isn’t what they’re interested in.

In addition to exploring their motives, I wanted to ask: what is the answer exactly, what do we know? The Holocaust denial claim—that it didn’t happen, or didn’t happen the way we think it did—is a kind of conspiracy theory, the theory being that the Jews made up the story to gain sympathy or funding from Germany, or whatever the theory is. So the question is: is it true or not? In addition to, what are their motives? I just apply that to everything. What actually happened with JFK? What happened on 9/11? Why do people think the Bush administration pulled it off—not just that they’re anti-Bush or anti-Republican, but what is the explanation for why Building 7 collapsed? What do we know about the early purchases of airline stocks? That kind of thing.

Mounk: I have two competing responses to this. One response is that they’re making factual claims. One of the interesting things about conspiracy theorists is that often they know a lot of details—they’ve studied a lot of elements of this, and so they’re able to make all of these claims about the world. As somebody who is generally motivated to understand the truth about the world, when somebody makes a factual claim, that’s something that is worth responding to and worth looking into—the claim that it would take much greater heat to make the World Trade Center collapse, for example. Presumably, if you go and talk to a physicist or a material scientist, they can help give you answers to those questions. Those answers are either convincing or not, and that seems like a sensible response.

There is a competing instinct, though, of: what is actually the purpose of this? Do you find that some of the time you’re able to convince people in these discussions—that these conspiracy theorists end up saying, now that I’ve heard from Professor So-and-so at the Department of Material Science at Caltech that the point at which a steel beam melts is actually this degree of Fahrenheit rather than that degree of Fahrenheit, I think you’re right? Or do they just make up the next claim—that obviously Caltech is bought and paid for and this professor is a liar, and so on and so forth?

What is actually the purpose of this conversation? Is it just to have some counter-speech in there so that people who have not yet made up their mind can see that there are responses? Or do you think the people with whom you’re engaging are actually going to change their mind? What is the end goal for you?

Shermer: The end goal is to convince the undecided voters, as it were. The hardcore conspiracy theorists are not going to change their mind—they never do. I had Oliver Stone on the podcast and he basically almost hung up on me when I challenged him with specific facts. He’s not going to change his mind. But the average person who is aware of the JFK conspiracy theories, or 9/11 was an inside job, or whatever—they might be thinking, what is the explanation for that? They go to Skeptic Magazine, just like they go to Snopes or PolitiFact or any of these fact-checking sites. That’s what we do.

As for the alternative—I’m a big free speech advocate, so I don’t want the government to censor David Irving and his claims about Auschwitz. I defend his right to speak. He was actually arrested in the early 2000s in Austria at the airport, for going there to give a speech to a group of right-wing neo-Nazi types about the Holocaust. I thought, well, that’s not right. He should be free to speak his mind and I should be free to debunk him. I have debunked him many times. I would rather have people go online and see, here are David Irving’s claims and here’s why he’s wrong, as opposed to not being able to find David Irving online at all because he’s been censored.

The reason I defend free speech absolutism is this: in America, there’s a debate about how many Native Americans died after Columbus. How many were here when Columbus arrived? How many died two centuries later from guns, germs, and steel, as it were? The extreme claims are something like 100 million; the much more moderate claims are more like 10 million. If I side on the side of thinking it was only 15 or 20 million, am I a Holocaust denier? That’s a legitimate debate. We should be able to have those debates. I don’t want people labeled a “denier” just because they don’t go with the mainstream—just in case the mainstream is wrong.

Mounk: Let’s think a little bit more systematically. You were saying earlier that a conspiracy theory in the literal sense is just a theory that some kind of conspiracy happened. Of course, there have been conspiracies in the history of the world, so just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn’t mean that we can debunk it. Part of the answer is to look into each conspiracy theory in detail—actually go and call up all of the experts and try to research the factual claims that people on the internet make about them. For ordinary citizens, that’s not going to be possible. We’re busy people, we have jobs, we have families to raise. We’re not going to be able to look into every conspiracy theory that’s out there.

So one thing we can do is outsource our judgment to institutions that we might trust, like Skeptic Magazine. But of course, people who are quite inclined to believe in conspiracy theories are going to think, “Places like Skeptic Magazine are just CIA ops to obscure the truth.” Is there a principled way of distinguishing between allegations of conspiracy that are worth taking seriously and allegations of conspiracy where, without even looking into the details, you immediately say, that smells kind of off?

One obvious point—one that I apply when I think about the world—is to ask: who is the collective agent who is supposed to have committed this conspiracy? If the idea is that this company suddenly had a bunch of money missing in its accounts, to say, perhaps there’s a conspiracy by the CFO and some kind of accountant to steal a bunch of that money, doesn’t seem crazy. It only takes a few people, they have a very clear self-interest, and it’s easy to imagine that they could solve the collective action problem of actually acting in concert.

When you’re saying all journalists are going along with some kind of crazy lie about the 2020 election, I can imagine that a lot of them would go along with that—stretching it a little bit. But if you break the story that the U.S. presidential election really was stolen, you go into the annals of journalism as one of the greatest investigative reporters ever. Out of the thousands of journalists in the United States, not a single one is going to break rank, not a single one is going to pursue the very clear self-interest to break the story—over whatever political preference they have, or over whatever fear of being looked at weirdly at a dinner party. That’s a conspiracy theory that’s much harder to sustain. How do these thousands of journalists coordinate? Why does nobody break ranks? Do they all actually share the same interests? That seems much less plausible.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

Is that how you think about it as well? How do you eyeball a conspiracy theory before you’ve looked into all of the specific detailed claims—to distinguish the kind of circumstance under which a conspiracy might plausibly happen in the world from the kind of circumstance in which it’s very, very unlikely that people could carry off a conspiracy?

Shermer: I do make a distinction between realistic conspiracy theories and quite fringe, lunatic, or grand conspiracy theories—that Bill Gates is trying to control the world, or that there’s a group of 12 people in London called the Illuminati running the world’s economy. That sort of thing doesn’t merit our attention as much as more realistic conspiracy theories.

Take the claim that big pharma makes money off of drugs—well, they do. They’ve captured the regulatory state, like in the opioid crisis. That actually happened. Just like big tobacco, we now know that they knew these drugs were addictive and they lied, and then they hired the regulators themselves to work for the company. That’s a real conspiracy. The conspiracy theory turned out to be true, and the government then did something about it through the regulatory state and lawsuits against the Sackler family, just like with big tobacco. Those are important because they matter to millions of people.

On the question of offloading—yes, all of us offload most of what we believe about things, because who has time to fact-check everything? In the case of the 2020 rigged election conspiracy theory, what convinced me was that Attorney General Bill Barr—a lifelong Republican, someone who voted for Trump twice—said, as head of the Department of Justice, we’re going to look into this. We have the resources to do it. I looked into it, we spent months examining all this stuff, and we didn’t find any significant fraud at all. The election is over. To me, I don’t have to go myself to Atlanta or to Phoenix to look at that building—that grainy video on YouTube of a truck pulling up at two in the morning pulling boxes out. The Department of Justice has the resources to do that. I don’t have to worry about it.

Christopher Hitchens once famously said: when the Pope says he believes in God today, you think, well, that’s the Pope, he’s doing his job. If the Pope says, I’m beginning to doubt God’s existence, you think, well, he might be onto something, because he’s supposed to believe in God. So when Attorney General Bill Barr says, I looked into it and didn’t find anything, that’s him doing his job. If he had said, there are some questionable things here, that would get my attention. That’s all offloading, and that’s mostly what all of us do.

Mounk: Tell me more about the structural features of these different kinds of conspiracy theories. You said you distinguish between realistic and unrealistic conspiracy theories, and we probably each have an instinct for what is a potentially realistic one and what is one that just seems off the bat. But do you have a more systematic way of thinking about the criteria you apply to determine what is a potentially realistic conspiracy theory and what is an obviously unrealistic one?

Shermer: One criterion is: how many people would have to be involved? Real conspiracies don’t involve that many people. The more people that are involved, the more likely they are to screw up, or tell somebody, or whatever. Take JFK—all the people that would have to be involved or accused of being involved: the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, the mafia, the Russians, the Cubans, and so on. Not one of them wants to go on 60 Minutes to tell their story. Not one of the women who slept with one of the guys who knew about the assassination of JFK wants to tell the story. It’s the same thing with all these UFO/UAP whistleblowers—I saw the spacecraft, or I know somebody. Not one of them wants to go on 60 Minutes or tell a journalist. This would be the breaking story of the century, or the millennia.

Mounk: Even if they might be afraid of being killed, what about one of them who doesn’t have children, who’s on his deathbed, right?

Shermer: That’s the funny thing, Yascha—they always say they can’t speak out because they’re afraid of being killed. But they go online and post videos and articles, and they freely speak to podcasters all the time about this. Why aren’t they afraid of being killed for saying this? Because they’re not. That’s not actually going on.

But back to your original question, because I think this will interest you. I originally got interested in this when I was in college. I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu—I was in the first graduating class of the Malibu campus, in 1976. It was fairly conservative. I was a Christian at the time, in a Republican leadership crowd. President Ford came to speak there, everybody was reading Atlas Shrugged, and I got into objectivism and all that stuff and kind of became a libertarian. Then I started going to libertarian-type meetings and reading a lot of their literature, and a lot of it was just nonsense. My roommate and I went to one of these you don’t have to pay income tax seminars—the whole thing was a fraud, the premise being that the IRS doesn’t actually have the legal right to tax your income. It may have even been a sovereign citizen kind of thing, though I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I remember getting back to the dorm room thinking, if this was actually true, nobody would pay their taxes and there’s no way the government is going to allow this. My roommate disagreed—he didn’t file for like 15 years, and they caught up with him and he got penalized pretty heavily.

Then I started reading things like climate change is a hoax, big pharma and all the doctors want you to be sick, there’s a carburetor that gets 200 miles to the gallon but the oil companies are keeping it secret—all these kinds of things. I thought, well, it could be true, but this is too big, too grandiose. There’s never anything to it. Nobody goes on 60 Minutes and says, I found the carburetor, here it is, it gets 200 miles to the gallon. A lot of the stuff I was discovering as a libertarian was not serving me well. There’s a lot of nonsense in it for a political agenda. I’m still a small government kind of guy, but you have to temper this with reality.

Mounk: What do you think attracts people to conspiracy theories? Obviously, different kinds of conspiracy theories are likely to serve different kinds of psychological purposes. Whether you are inclined to believe in conspiracy theories probably depends in part on how far you feel from centers of power. It’s much easier to think everybody in the U.S. government is in on the same thing if you’ve never been very close to Washington, D.C. and don’t know anybody in the U.S. government—you think they’re all kind of similar types of people who are very different from you and me. If you’ve lived in D.C. a little bit and you know some of those people, you realize, first, that they’re not really competent enough to pull off this kind of large-scale conspiracy, and second, more importantly, that they all kind of hate each other and disagree with each other and are trying to get ahead and run over each other. The idea that they can all agree on this very complicated set of actions and nobody ever defects just seems wholly unrealistic. But that’s easy to say when you’re in those circles and you know some of those people. When you’re very far away from it, it’s easier to imagine.

Subscribe now

The other point is that at least some of these conspiracy theories are actually quite comforting. To think there are 12 people sitting in London who are the Illuminati and who are running the world is superficially scary—these evil people are making decisions about the world. But in a more profound sense, I think it’s reassuring, because it’s an explanation for why things are scary in the world, for why some things don’t work. If only everybody could agree to recognize the existence of the Illuminati, dethrone them, and put good people in place, suddenly everything is going to be much better. There’s actually something very comforting about a lot of these conspiracy theories.

Shermer: One of my favorite quotes in the book is about this idea—it was something to the effect that 12 guys running the economy is a little scary, but at least you’ve identified the enemy. What’s scarier to most people is the idea that no one is running the economy, that no one’s in charge. That’s even worse than having identified the enemy.

There are a lot of motives. I was on G. Gordon Liddy’s podcast in the 90s—Mr. Watergate, the guy himself. I asked him about this, and he basically said people are incompetent and they can’t keep their mouth shut, and once you work in government you realize most people can’t do much of anything.

In terms of the motives for why people believe in conspiracy theories, there are several. There’s what they call “conspiracy theories are for losers”—that is, the losing party usually thinks the other party cheated. That’s very common. Trump is not unusual that way. Hillary thought something like that happened.

Those out of power tend to think that people in power have more power than they actually have, both in government and in corporations. People that are low in status think that people higher in status are pulling things off. People who are more anxious by personality and temperament, or more risk averse, feel that something’s going on and that they need a more predictable future. The future is largely not predictable, so those who need higher structure are more likely to think conspiracy theories are true. There’s also a big power dimension—a lack of trust in authority.

My favorite paper on this is called Dead and Alive. People who tick the box in surveys saying they think Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to tick the box saying she faked her death and is still alive. Well, she can’t be both dead and alive. She’s living in South America with Elvis.

Mounk: What’s going on is that if you have a general inclination to believe in conspiracy theories, you’re just more likely to say things aren’t as they’re telling us, things aren’t as they appear. Even if those two things are mutually exclusive, you’re more likely to say, who knows? All I know is they’re lying to us—perhaps they’re lying to us because she was murdered, perhaps they’re lying to us because she’s still alive, but something’s got to be different from what the official story is.

Shermer: I wrote about the Deep State and QAnon and the Pizzagate business—that ping pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Do Republicans really think Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks and Beyoncé are running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria? I don’t know if they really believe it. One guy did—Edgar Welch. He went there with his gun to break up the pedophile ring, got to the pizza place, and there was no basement, which is supposedly where the pedophile ring was operating. It’s just people in there eating pizza. He shot up the place, no one was hurt, he went to prison for a couple of years, and he apologized later.

I suspect the average Republican voter didn’t really believe it, but they were operating more along the lines of what I call proxy conspiracism. It’s a stand-in—well, maybe Hillary didn’t do that one, but it’s the kind of thing the Democrats would do, and so that’s why I don’t like them. A lot of conspiracy theories are like that.

My type specimen is the OJ trial. OJ was acquitted based on a conspiracy theory that the LAPD planted the bloody glove and the blood evidence on the car. But if you look at the history of the LAPD’s interaction with African Americans post-World War II, through the 1950s and 60s, it’s pretty bad—they did do things like that. So when a black jury in the 90s hears this conspiracy theory, it’s a stand-in. I don’t know what was going through their minds, but it’s something like: well, I don’t know if OJ did it or not, he probably did, but planting evidence against blacks by the white LAPD is the kind of thing they have done and probably could have done, so I’m going to stick it to them. That’s a kind of proxy conspiracism.

Mounk: The interesting thing about the Pizzagate controversy, I just realized, is that it has a remarkable similarity to one of my favorite news stories of recent weeks—which also involves a kind of conspiracy. The police force in, I believe, Adams County, Ohio, was told that a well-known local resident, an artist by the name of Afroman, had kidnapped women and hidden them in his basement. They raided his home in ridiculous fashion, only to find that there was no basement in which he was holding the supposedly kidnapped women.

This set off a hilarious set of responses by Afroman, including the wonderful Lemon Pound Cake—a song describing, over video surveillance footage of the raid that he captured, the moment in which the sheriff of his county does a double take towards the lemon pound cake sitting on the kitchen table, which he clearly has a desire to eat. It’s a wonderful song; I recommend you look it up on YouTube after listening to this episode. The police then sued him for defamation and emotional damages, and Afroman delivered a wonderful and passionate speech in defense of the American right to free speech—and won on all counts.

Shermer: That’s one more motive—and it cuts across left and right. The left thinks the government is up to no good against their causes, and the right thinks the same. During the Obama years, for example, there were claims that the government was making concentration camps in Texas for gun owners. Whatever your political causes, you think the other side is up to no good and trying to take them away from you. Both sides are equally conspiratorial that way.

Mounk: Let me ask you one last question about conspiracies, and then I want to get into what I suppose is the obverse of conspiracy theories—which is the truth, the subject of the new book. I think I have a very sophisticated audience: highly educated, an audience that really seeks out in-depth conversations about pretty demanding topics. I’m sure that nobody in this audience thinks of themselves as being particularly drawn to conspiracy theories. But the temptation, I think, is always there. So what are the warning signs for smart people—people who are usually responsive to evidence—that something is just so tempting that they may themselves be giving it a pass, that they may be falling foul of conspiracy theory even though, on most days and about most subjects, they are rational thinkers?

Shermer: I have a chapter on this—a conspiracy detection kit. It’s essentially a signal detection problem. You have a two-by-two matrix: the conspiracy is true or false, and I believe it’s true or false. That gives you four options. The problem is that we’re fallible and we’re often wrong about these things, so it depends on the facts and the evidence in each particular case. Some might be true, some might not be true.

As I said, the more realistic conspiracy theories are ones like my type specimen: Volkswagen cheating the emissions standards in Europe. It’s obvious, it’s targeted, they do it for an obvious reason—to make money. Companies often try to cheat the regulatory state in all countries; it’s pretty common, as with big tobacco and big pharma, as I mentioned.

Mounk: That presumably actually involved a lot of people. The number of people involved is one criterion, but another criterion is how organized they are. It’s easier for 50 people within a secret service agency to coordinate—50 employees of the CIA, for instance, find it easier to keep a secret, in part because there may be crimes involved if they tell somebody else. That’s different from 50 people randomly drawn from the population. It’s also somewhat easier to convince 50 employees of a company to go along with a conspiracy than 50 journalists who are all working for competing outlets. But still, in the Volkswagen case, presumably a lot of people were involved in building the machine needed to fool the regulators into understating the emissions figures.

Shermer: A lot of employees of both corporations and government agencies are siloed—they may not know what’s going on. You don’t have to have that many people involved to pull off a conspiracy. Usually, what happens when we find out about them is that some insider whistleblower comes forward. That’s how we know about scientific fraud, for example—it’s always some grad student who works in the lab, not an outsider examining the data sets. It’s usually not the regulatory state that discovers a corporation cheating. It’s usually some insider, a whistleblower, which is why we need whistleblower laws. That’s also why I don’t think the UAP/UFO thing is going to pan out—we have whistleblower laws, there are lots of opportunities for these people to come forward, and no matter how siloed some government agencies may be, there’s surely somebody who will come forward. That’s usually how we find out about these things. It’s always a matter of: what’s the paper trail, is there some evidence?

This brings up what’s called the problem of anomalies—anomaly hunting. If you don’t have positive evidence in favor of your conspiracy theory, you fall back on well, how do you explain X? There are always half a dozen weird things you can point to about JFK or 9/11 or the moon landing or whatever, and so you just point those out as if that’s evidence. But anomalies are not evidence—they’re just anomalies. No theory of anything, no scientific theory or any kind of theory, explains every last thing. There are always going to be some weird things that you can point out. But those aren’t positive evidence in favor of your theory; they’re negative evidence against the accepted theory. You then have to ask: if your theory is right and the accepted mainstream theory is wrong, can you explain all the facts that the mainstream theory explains, in addition to the anomalies that your theory explains? The answer is usually no. Science is fairly conservative because most alternative theories to the accepted one simply don’t have much evidence in their support. So we set them aside.

Mounk: We’ve talked a lot about conspiracy theories—let’s talk about the truth. Truth is strange because it’s such a simple concept, such a fundamental concept to how we talk about the world. Is this true?—these are words we use without deep reflection in everyday conversation all of the time. Yet the moment you think about it from a philosophical point of view, it turns out to be much more complicated. What is truth? What is the right definition of truth? How do we know what is true? These are questions that have deeply shaped philosophical fields from epistemology to ontology and so on.

Once you raise it to that level, a lot of ordinary people who may not be doing a lot of academic philosophy, and who perhaps don’t think of themselves as particularly philosophically inclined, start to say, well, is there really such a thing as the truth? Suddenly popularized forms of postmodernism—“my truth” and “your truth”—become a big part of how people think and talk about this. A lot of people therefore end up being somewhat incoherent: on the one hand, they take for granted relatively straightforward conceptions of truth, and then, in certain contexts, they suddenly say, well, nobody can really know the truth—there’s really only such a thing as my truth and your truth.

How should we think in a more systematic, rational way about what truth is and what kind of role truth claims should play in our political discourse?

Shermer: I define truth as something confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer our provisional assent. “Provisional” is key—it’s truth with a small “t,” it could be wrong. I do endorse universal realism: there is a reality out there, there is a truth to be known. But we also embrace fallibilism—we could be wrong about what we think is true, and therefore we need a system in place by which we can all agree on the route we take to get to the truth as best we can.

From there, you can start building on evidence. In epistemology—the study of knowledge—knowledge is defined as justified true belief. What is justified? Evidence. What should I believe is true? Evidence. The more evidence you have, the more likely it is you should believe something; the less evidence, the less likely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. This goes back to David Hume. I take a Bayesian approach—that is to say, never put a one or a zero on any proposition, never 100%, never 0%, somewhere in between. Most propositions are somewhere in between, and that allows you some epistemic humility to say, at the moment, I believe with 60% probability that X is true, but I’ll change my mind—just show me some counter-evidence and I’ll make it 50% or 40%. In other words, it allows you to be flexible instead of being so committed in your identity to a particular thing being true that, if it’s not, it’s going to shatter your sense of self and you feel compelled to defend it.

Most of the cognitive biases—motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, my-side bias—are based on this un-Bayesian approach to truth, where my truth is something I’m going to defend to the death. There’s another distinction to be made here, between internal subjective truths—“my truth”—versus external objective truths, what’s actually true. When I say I like dark chocolate and you say you like milk chocolate, these are just internal preferences, subjective tastes—there’s no way to determine the right answer. That’s very different from what all of us want, which is objective external truth.

My example is this: if you say meditation makes you feel better, that’s an internal subjective truth—good for you. But people like Deepak Chopra and others claim that meditation actually works under specific conditions: 20 minutes a day, six days a week, producing measurable effects on health, lowering stress hormones and blood pressure. That’s an attempt to move from meditation makes me feel better to it actually works for most people under these conditions—an attempt to make that transition from internal subjective truth to external objective truth.

I’ve been applying this idea to the trans movement recently. When somebody says, I feel like I was born in the wrong body, I feel like I’m a woman—an adult man in their 30s, let’s say—that’s an internal subjective feeling or truth: this is who I feel like I am. The problem that’s happened in the last decade or so is that people have attempted to make that an external objective truth—that you can actually change sex, that it’s a real thing. That’s where scientists like me say, hang on, that’s not the case—here’s what the biologists tell us and here’s what we actually know. You can’t make that transition from internal subjective truth to external objective truth.

The same goes for consciousness and altered states. People take ayahuasca or magic mushrooms and say, I went to this other place, I had this completely different experience. My sense is: good for you, if it makes your life better, that’s fine. But that’s still an internal subjective truth. When they say, but it’s really there, you’ve got to try this—how do I know that this other world exists, that the doors of perception have been opened and there are spirit beings out there? They say, well, if you take the ayahuasca, you’ll see I’m right. But if I take the ayahuasca, I’m still in my head—it’s still an internal subjective truth. This is the problem we all face: we want to know what’s externally, really true, something we can point to that both of us can see, with agreed-upon methods for verifying it—versus these other things that people get confused about. I feel like my truth is...—okay, that’s nice, but how can we tell if it’s really true?

Mounk: There are a lot of really interesting things in there, and I think I broadly agree with you on the philosophical approach. But let me try to steelman the other side of this. You’re saying there’s an objective reality that doesn’t depend on my truth or your truth or on the way that we look at the world. Let me make two arguments that I think are right insofar as they go—and then explain the inference that people draw from them, which is that objective reality doesn’t exist in the way you’re saying. I think the inference goes perhaps a little bit too far, but you’ll have to explain to us why.

The first is this: it seems like I perceive the world in a very clear way. Unless I’m really drunk or on drugs, I look around my room and I see that there’s a lamp to my left and my glass to my right, and there’s an objective reality that I seem pretty able to recognize—a pretty immediate, reliable, and perhaps complete guide to what’s going on in the world. But we know from scientific studies that there are lots of things we don’t perceive about the world. The room seems very quiet to me right now, but there are sounds too high-pitched for humans to hear that a dog would absolutely hear. If my dog is going crazy and acting weird and I insist there’s no sound, I may simply be wrong—there may be a sound that is audible to my dog that is absolutely real, but my sensory apparatus doesn’t allow me access to it. This is an old problem in philosophy, predating Immanuel Kant, but a lot of Kant’s ideas about the world are based on this distinction between the phenomenal realm—the world as I have access to it—and the noumenal realm—the world as it really is. Perhaps there is a reality out there, but are we humans actually able, in any meaningful sense, to get access to it? And if not, what follows from that?

The second objection is this: perhaps there really is such a thing as an atom out there, or a rock, or a tree. But a lot of the time when we talk about truth, we talk about social entities, which are somewhat more complicated. Is this a democratic institution? Is the way in which this politician is acting democratic or not democratic? When the ancient Athenians talked about democracy, they had something very different in mind than we do today. When people in Germany have democratic elections, the way in which they organize those elections is very different from the way we organize them in the United States. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to go around saying their country and their system is democratic—as they do—how can I say that I understand objective reality and that this is just objectively wrong?

How do you take these two points—which I think are true insofar as they go—and resist the inference that a lot of people draw from them: that the world is a lot fuzzier than we realize, that we can never really know what’s going on, and that the moment we get into any interesting social or political question, we’re just in the world of social constructs where my truth is as good as your truth, and we can throw up our hands and collapse into vulgar postmodernism?

Shermer: The problem with vulgar postmodernism—just throwing our hands up—is that if I say so, then you’re telling me the Holocaust denier’s theory that the Holocaust didn’t happen is just as good as mine that it did. Most postmodernists will say, well, let’s not go that far, and find a place to draw the line. As I point out at the beginning of the book, even the claim that we cannot know the truth is itself a truth claim. The moment you open your mouth to make that argument, you’ve lost it—because you’re saying there is a truth, namely that there’s no truth to be known. This is the old liar’s paradox problem.

That’s why I like the Bayesian approach, because everything you said could be true. Maybe atoms don’t actually exist—although I think at this point we’re pretty confident they do. Same thing with the Big Bang Theory, which has been well settled since I was in high school. Now the James Webb telescope is finding galaxies that are fully developed a billion years too early for what the Big Bang Theory says, according to inflation theory, about how long it takes elements to form into stars, then planets, then galaxies. Now people are saying maybe the Big Bang Theory is not correct. And that’s just within my lifetime. Five hundred years from now, who knows—what we think is obviously true today, the theory of evolution or the germ theory of disease, could all be changed. If you go back 500 years, pre-Newton, pre-Copernicus, pre-Galileo, pre-Scientific Revolution, pre-Enlightenment—the medieval worldview was just so wholly different from ours that it’s hard to even imagine what they were thinking. Our descendants centuries from now may look back at us the same way. That’s why it’s good to acknowledge fallibilism: recognize there is a reality, recognize we could be wrong, and hold that this is what we think at the moment.

Now, you’ve also touched on something else. The physical and biological sciences are much easier in this regard. But take something like IQ in the social sciences—people immediately equate it with intelligence. They cite the Flynn effect: IQ scores going up three points every decade for almost a century, though that has now stopped and is actually reversing slightly. But what do we mean by IQ? It’s a score on a test. What is the test? It’s a constructed, human-made thing that reifies intelligence in the brain—and it may not actually capture that. So there are legitimate challenges to those kinds of social constructs. Gender and sex, and some of these other things, would fall into that category as well, and so would democracy.

But here’s how far I push it in the book. Take immigration: what percentage of foreigners should a nation allow to become citizens? There’s no right answer per se. In a way, democracy is a kind of experiment—we put these people in power for four years, they run the agenda they told us they wanted, and we see how it goes. If we don’t like it, we throw them out and bring in the other party. There are 50 different states in the United States, each with different gun control laws. Social scientists use the comparative method and natural experiments—we can’t force people to buy guns or not buy guns, but we can look at which counties have more guns, which have fewer, which have more crime, which have less, controlling for socioeconomic variables and other factors. It’s an attempt, and it’s better than saying nobody knows. So we don’t want to go there.

As far as I can tell, there is a centuries-long moral progress toward more democracy and less autocracy, and for good reason. As I put it in the book:

It is my hypothesis that in the same way Galileo and Newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there, so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature in society that really do exist. Just as it was inevitable that the astronomer Johannes Kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits—given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements, and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits, he could hardly have discovered anything else—scientists studying political, economic, social, and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry. For example, that democracies are better than autocracies, that market economies are superior to command economies, that torture and the death penalty do not curb crime, that burning women as witches is a fallacious idea, that women are not too weak and emotional to run companies or countries, and most poignantly, that blacks do not like being enslaved and that Jews do not want to be exterminated.

From there, I ask: why don’t blacks want to be enslaved? Why don’t Jews want to be exterminated? Maybe there’s some society in which blacks want to be slaves, or women want to be lorded over by men, or Jews want to be shoved into gas chambers. Maybe—but I doubt it, because look at history. Look at what people actually do, look at how people vote and vote with their feet. Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather have lived in East or West Germany before unification? Everybody knows the answer. How do they know? Because it’s in our nature to want to be satiated rather than hungry, to be free rather than enslaved, to be healthy rather than diseased. That’s in our human nature, which we evolved. So I’m claiming that we can actually discover things about the social world that are really true, based on human nature. That’s my argument.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Michael discuss what it means for something to be a social construct, whether conspiracy theories pose a threat to society today—and which conspiracy theory is most likely to be true. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss how Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in Hungary came to an end, why democratic institutions proved more resilient than many expected, and what lessons this holds for understanding the limits of competitive authoritarianism.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Well, Ivan, it’s always a special pleasure to have you on the podcast, but today is also a joyous occasion, because of the defeat of Viktor Orbán after 16 years of leading Hungary. It’s striking that he had such total control of Hungarian politics for a long time and now clearly lost control in the last months, and was defeated very roundly. The opposition Tisza party is going to have a two-thirds majority in parliament.

He conceded the election, something that not everybody expected. How are we to understand this moment in Hungarian politics, and what’s its relevance beyond Hungary?

Ivan Krastev: This is interesting because this is an irony of history. If you’re looking at people on the streets of Budapest, it was really very much like 1989. If you see the profile of the constituencies voting for Mr. Orbán, they very much look like the constituency of the old Communist Party. He was in power for too long, and this is also one of the reasons that he lost. In democratic politics, there is a certain type of limit. Democracy cannot tolerate governments staying for too long.

This is going to be more and more of a problem for leaders who believe they can live long and remain in good health. You remember the old dictator game, where you have a hundred dollars and you should offer the other side some money, but if they don’t accept, both sides get nothing. Scholars have discovered that if you offer the other person less than $20, they’re never going to agree.

Mounk: The idea here is this: I get $1,000 and my task is to distribute it between the two of us. You can then accept or decline. Rationally, if I give you 10 cents, you should accept—because 10 cents is better than nothing. But it turns out that people have pride and they don’t want to feel cheated. So below a certain threshold, they say, “Screw you,” even if it means they themselves lose money.

Krastev: In my view, there is something like this in democratic politics. There are certain limits beyond which people start to feel it’s too much—the idea of change, of rotation, becomes very important. What is most interesting from Magyar’s point of view is that one of the things he is going to propose as a constitutional change is that nobody can be prime minister for more than two terms, which is normally what you do with presidents. That is rotation of power, and the dynamics, in my eyes, are quite interesting.

There is a circle and an irony here that is quite striking, because everything came back to your earlier point. Revolutionaries rarely age well in power. Orbán is a case in point. As you know, he started his political career in 1989 at the reburial of Imre Nagy, the leader of the 1956 revolution. Before the reburial, all the leaders of the opposition met and decided not to raise the issue of Soviet troops in Hungary, afraid that doing so might provoke reactionary forces on the Soviet side and make the transition more difficult. Then a 25-year-old Viktor Orbán broke the taboo and said, “Russians, go home.” I mention this because in these elections last weekend, it was the 45-year-old Péter Magyar who, in the wake of leaks about elite Russian interference in the Hungarian elections, used the same phrase: “Russians, go home.” So you have this kind of cycle in which 1989 comes back.

But there is also an element here that may surprise many. When the communists left power in 1989, many of them—in places like Hungary—adopted much more liberal economic policies. In the same way, Magyar is not so different from Orbán in many of his policies. In a certain sense, Orbán may leave, but that does not mean you are going to have a wholly new foreign policy consensus or wholly new economic policies. It is very much about cleaning the system, dismantling the model, and changing the personnel. This is interesting to watch, because unlike in Poland, Magyar has a constitutional majority, so he can undertake measures that are much more radical than anything post-populist governments have done elsewhere.

Mounk: I have a couple of questions. One is about something I remember you explaining before—the evolution of Hungarian politics and politics in a number of Central European states. You argued that we sort of misunderstood the 1989 revolutions. One easy narrative about someone like Viktor Orbán is that he became a traitor to the 1989 revolution—that he ultimately turned his back on everything he stood for in 1989, and that’s why he is bent on undermining democracy, why he is against Brussels, against internationalism, and all of those things. But the way to understand 1989, you argued, is as having three different strands: a liberal, universalist, democratic strand; a nationalist, anti-imperial strand; and a religious conservative strand. We should therefore understand Central European politics not as people betraying the revolution, but as a civil war between its different strands. Orbán, as it turned out, really belonged more to the religious conservative or anti-imperialist tendency.

But how do we square that with his strange embrace of Russia in recent years? Is this simply a convenience of power? Because it is striking—as you’re saying, his entry into politics was defined by telling the Russian troops to go home. Yet by the end of his rule, he is aligning Hungary in many ways more closely with the Kremlin than with Brussels. That really does seem like a betrayal of the central promise of his entry into politics.

Krastev: You are totally right that there were all these trends in 1989, and what is interesting about Orbán is that he was dancing with all the different wings of that revolution. He entered as a liberal, but a liberal from the countryside—not a Budapest liberal. He is somebody who does not come from a political family, who does not come from a strong dissident tradition.

The major answer to your question is how he redefined what it means to be sovereign. Sovereignty for him in 1989 essentially meant getting out of the Soviet bloc, joining NATO, joining the European Union—and he was firmly in that camp. The problem came with what sovereignty meant for him within the European Union. He came to conclude, step by step—particularly after 2010, and especially after the migration crisis—that it was Brussels that was the major threat to Hungarian sovereignty. He then redefined sovereignty to mean having geopolitical options, and began investing in relations with Russia and China—China, to be honest, even more than Russia.

He started doing something quite remarkable: selling his veto in the European Union—to the Chinese, to the Russians. His importance to them derived precisely from the fact that he was a member of the European Union. He could veto sanctions against Russia. He could veto economic policies against China. Suddenly, a small country that has no geographical or other reason to be so central to European politics became pivotal.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

But his model rested on three things that were in fundamental contradiction with each other. To be successful, Orbán had to be anti-Brussels and anti-EU. At the same time, he needed European Union money, which amounted to as much as 4% of Hungarian GDP. And he needed to remain important within European politics in order to be able to sell his influence to the Chinese and the Russians. In the beginning he managed this—he himself called it a “peacock dance,” making a step in one direction, then another. But with the passing of time he radicalized and radicalized. He lost access to European money, and economic issues proved very important in his losing the elections. He also moved closer and closer to the Russians, to the extent that some of the leaked memos that emerged were genuinely humiliating for somebody who had cast himself as a rebel speaking truth to power.

And yet, here was this same Orbán trying to present himself to his voters—and to the world—as a rebel, even as Putin was reportedly telling him, “You are the lion and Trump is the mouse who wants to help you.” That destroyed the rebel image. The relationship with Trump didn’t help either.

The paradox of the elections is this: Orbán had run as the sovereign fighting globalism—that was his central platform. But he turned out to be a globalist. At his own campaign rallies, the Vice President of the United States was showing up, foreign countries like Russia were trying to help him win, and against him stood one of his former supporters who largely refused to give interviews to the Western media, who did not want to talk about big international issues, who simply said to Hungarians: “I care about you, I care about your salaries, I care about what is important in your life.” By the end of his career, Orbán had ended up embodying everything he had spent his life fighting—first authoritarianism, and at the end, globalism itself.

Mounk: To add to the irony: he changed the electoral system to benefit himself, by giving a large bonus of parliamentary seats to the party that gets the most votes under normal circumstances. He assumed the opposition would always be divided—that while he might not win outright majorities, he would always have the single biggest party. Of course, it is precisely because of that electoral system that the opposition is now going to have a two-thirds majority in parliament, and will be able to unravel some of the safeguards he put in place to keep himself in a position of influence even after losing the election. So there is one more irony there.

Krastev: What you’re saying is extremely important institutionally. All of these populist leaders hated liberal democracy because in liberal democracy, when you’re winning, you’re not winning enough. So they tried to radicalize—they came up with majoritarian systems, but as a result, every election starts to look like a regime change. That is attractive when you’re in the opposition. But suddenly you understand that you have created a system in which when you’re losing, you’re losing a lot.

It was very important that Orbán conceded so early. The margin was simply too large, and Orbán is a strong enough politician that the fact of losing the election does not change my view of him—he understood that he simply could not contest the results. Add to that the fact that two-thirds of opposition voters were people younger than 30. He could not rely on street protests on his side.

This is very important, and I say it having met both Orbán and Magyar. I had the feeling that Orbán, to some extent, was expecting what happened. But what was interesting is that many colleagues and pollsters who knew the data—who knew the opposition was doing much better—were afraid to predict the results, because they were no longer sure that Hungary was a democracy. Only in a democracy can a government lose an election, and those who lose power relinquish it peacefully. So you had this incredible schizophrenia in which people were predicting a 15 to 20 point advantage for the opposition, and yet when asked who was going to win the election, they said, “I cannot be sure.”

Mounk: What do you think the lessons of this election are beyond Hungary? One set of questions is about what this tells us about the resilience of democratic institutions. Hungary was in many ways the key example of why an older consensus in political science seemed shaky. There was an idea in the 1990s and early 2000s that once a country reaches a standard of living of about $15,000 to $16,000 of GDP per capita in today’s terms, and once it had changed government through free and fair elections a couple of times, it would basically be safe. Hungary seemed to disprove that, because it fulfilled those conditions and yet Viktor Orbán clearly made it an “illiberal democracy”—his own term, which he embraced—really undermining freedom of the press and marginalizing the opposition through all kinds of institutional tricks, pushing out institutions like Central European University from Budapest.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, we must now say that it wasn’t an authoritarian regime. It was a kind of competitive authoritarianism, or semi-democracy, or flawed democracy, or dirty democracy—the terms proliferate—but somewhere in which the playing field may have been uneven, yet the opposition retained an ability to win elections, to displace the government at the ballot box. Which is what they did.

So should that make us more optimistic about the United States and other countries where we see strong forms of democratic backsliding? Does it turn out that truly capturing a system so thoroughly that elections become meaningless is a very hard thing to do in an affluent place with a long democratic history? Or do you think Hungary is too sui generis to jump to those kinds of conclusions?

Krastev: We cannot draw conclusions based on Hungary alone, but there are certain things we can observe. One is that if you allow people to vote, you cannot ignore the possibility that—however much you control the media, however much you control economic power, if you’re not going for outright political repression—people can decide to speak. From this point of view, the agency of the voters was very much reconfirmed.

Being in the European Union also puts certain constraints on Hungary, not least because it is a small country. I would not, for example, draw a direct comparison between the United States and Hungary when people say Trump is trying to adopt the Hungarian model. Yes, you can borrow policies, but the countries are so different institutionally—in size, in culture. Hungary, for example, is an extremely ethnically homogeneous place.

A second point: we like to talk about ideas and programs, but political leadership matters. Orbán could probably have lost in 2022 as well, had there been a strong political leader who managed to do what Péter Magyar did. In political science, we tend to favor institutional explanations and ignore the talent and the risk-taking of individual politicians. If you look at Magyar’s biography, you would never have predicted this. He was a cadre of Fidesz—there was nothing dramatic about him. The most heroic thing he had done was divorcing his wife, who was a minister under Orbán, and making public recordings about government corruption. And yet he resonated with people—precisely because he had been part of the Orbán system. A classical liberal candidate could not have done this.

On the other hand, I don’t think it would be entirely wrong to conclude from what we saw in Hungary that European right-wing populism faces a fundamental problem: it cannot win elections once it becomes the establishment. Populism in Europe was rooted in a very strong anti-establishment sentiment, and it was that anti-establishment sentiment that ultimately destroyed Orbán. Most far-right parties in Europe are not currently in power, so they are not the establishment in the way Orbán was—and that distinction matters.

The symbolism and psychological impact of this election were considerable. Orbán was also the intellectual, financial, and institutional hub of the European far right, so his fall will have very practical implications for how these parties cooperate. One impact, in my view, is that far-right parties in Europe will increasingly go their own way. This type of far-right solidarity can backfire. That is also true of the Trumpian effect.

One of the most interesting questions here is not why Orbán lost, but why JD Vance, Vice President of the United States, in the middle of a war in which he is going to be a negotiator, decided to come to Hungary and spend three days at a rally—knowing what the opinion polls were saying. In my view, there are two explanations. One is that they were treating Orbán not as an ally of the state, but as an ally of the Trumpian revolution. Magyar is not anti-Trump, he is not anti-American—so why does it matter so much? But if you see yourself and your government as a revolutionary government, you support Orbán the same way the Soviets supported revolutionary leaders in other parts of the world. The second explanation is that they believed Orbán was important for their European policy—that they wanted an East European leader who was not merely pro-Trump, but also pro-Putin. Such an explicitly pro-Putin leader is not easy to find.

Mounk: I agree that they see Hungary as a revolutionary ally. I would add the wrinkle that for the most part, the Soviet Union was the first nation with a communist revolution, and so it cared about the revolution in Vietnam, it cared about the revolution in Albania—but those were children of the revolution. When you have many children, you can split your attention and each one matters a little bit less. For the people who are trying to give some intellectual coherence to Trump—which is an impossible task—Orbán was the father. It’s not just that he was a revolutionary relative. He is an antecedent, with all of the reverence that that deserves.

Mounk: And I don’t think that Trump cares. I have no insight into his psyche, but I don’t think that Trump was sad when he heard that Orbán is out, whereas I think that JD Vance and a lot of the MAGA intellectuals probably did care, because Trump is fundamentally not an intellectual, unlike many people around him.

Krastev: What you’re saying is very important because, of all these leaders, Orbán was the only real intellectual among them. Meloni is a very good politician, but she is not going to spend her time talking to influencers and conservative professors. Orbán was still very much coming from the culture of the 1980s, when ideas mattered and when you needed certain constituencies. If you’re thinking in tweets, consistency doesn’t matter—what matters is intensity, everything in capital letters. Orbán, by contrast, wanted a classical ideology, and that probably alienated some of these people.

This raises one of the big questions for me: what is going to be the impact of these elections on the choices that new right parties in Europe are going to make? They had genuinely admired him—he was the model. And for Orbán himself, in my view, the model was Bibi Netanyahu. It was never Putin. Putin cannot be your model if you don’t have the oil and the nuclear arsenal. But for nationalists in Eastern Europe, Israel was in many ways the most successful East European country. It was ethnically defined, but it was a democracy—an ethnic democracy. It was economically very successful, with very high technology and nuclear capability of its own, and influence totally beyond its size. Most of its people were, two or three generations ago, former East Europeans. Orbán was even using Netanyahu’s consultants—not in these elections, but in previous ones.

Subscribe now

This is the story of small countries with big dreams about their history and their role in the world, and in this Orbán occupies a league of his own in Europe—for the French far-right and others, it is different, they are a big country. But Orbán was never just interested in running Hungary. He wanted to run Europe. Paradoxically, that did not help him in the elections.

Mounk: What lessons do you think we should draw from Hungary for electoral politics? You already said that you don’t think this means right-wing populism is on its last legs, because what drives it is anti-establishment sentiment. When you’re in Hungary, after 16 years of rule by Viktor Orbán, anti-establishment sentiment means you want Orbán out. When you’re in France, anti-establishment sentiment may well mean you want to vote for Jordan Bardella or Marine Le Pen, if she is allowed to run.

What about people who are running against populist incumbents? Do you think that, as some have argued, the lesson of Hungary is that you need to distinguish yourself on rule of law, on corruption, on actually delivering for people—but that you also need to embrace some of their political stances? Because what is striking about Magyar is not that he is the liberal, progressive alternative to Orbán. It is that he is able to eat into Orbán’s electorate by saying: “I am a conservative, I disagree with Brussels on many things, I am going to protect Hungary from immigration more than Orbán did—and by the way, I am not corrupt and I don’t have all these scandals to my name.”

Krastev: The most important thing Magyar did was the most simple thing a politician of 50 years ago would have done: he went to the people, physically. When you have been in power for a long time, even when you go to see people, you’re not really seeing them anymore. What Magyar did was simply go to villages that opposition politicians normally never visit, because they assume these villages are controlled by Orbán. He went there and he listened.

On corruption, too, he did something interesting. Normally when politicians talk about corruption, they talk about big companies, they talk about billions. But ordinary voters outside the big cities don’t think in terms of billions—billions do not exist for them. Magyar focused on corruption in the health system, corruption in things that people can actually understand. On that level, he was a very traditional politician, going to people and saying, “I am doing what you asked me to do.” But he also knew very well where the consensus lay.

The clearest example: Orbán kept trying to cast Magyar as a traditional liberal candidate, because he knows how to defeat liberal candidates. So the government came up with extremely outrageous anti-LGBT legislation, expecting Magyar to jump up and protest the way opposition candidates before him always had. He could have done so—500,000 Hungarians protested the legislation—but Magyar said nothing. He said, “This is not my priority.” That is precisely why Orbán found him so difficult to deal with: Magyar stayed focused on the core issues.

There is another dimension that matters for anyone running against a populist incumbent: it is not easy to tell voters who have been supporting that incumbent for years that they share the blame for the system. Magyar managed to make victims of them—just as he made a victim of himself. He said, “I was one of you. He cheated us. We believed we were doing something good.” He was the honest insider who said, “He cheated all of us—we didn’t sign up for this.” Suddenly people felt innocent. Suddenly they were victims of the regime rather than participants in it. As a result, 500,000 fewer people voted for Orbán in these elections—he bled his core voters. It wasn’t simply that Magyar mobilized more opposition votes; he also collapsed Orbán’s base.

Then there is the generational dimension. Almost two thirds of voters under 30 voted for Magyar, because he knows how to speak to that generation. There is something generational about the charisma of political leaders—it is very difficult to remain charismatic across different generations over a long period of time. Orbán’s charisma simply did not work on younger people. He is a good speaker, he had worked well with crowds, but a new generation came that did not find his jokes funny, did not find his references mobilizing. That generational dimension, I think, is also very important.

Mounk: A lot of the time, previous political moments prized different things. In the 90s and early 2000s, the medium prized the sound bite. There were news cycles, you needed to dominate each one, and the way do that was to have the right 15-second clip on the evening news. People like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were masters of that. This moment prizes authenticity. It matters much less than it used to whether you say what people agree with, as long as they feel that you are honest, that you are being yourself. That means a lot of young people who have grown up in this environment find it easier to adapt, while older people who were raised in the age of the sound bite and who have been in office for a very long time find it harder. Though, of course, there are some older people who play very well in this age of authenticity—Bernie Sanders is an obvious example.

Viktor Orbán is an interesting case in this regard. Say what you will about him—he clearly was willing to be honest about his beliefs in many ways, to go against the mainstream and challenge people. All of that could have given him an appeal to young people. But I wonder whether in the end the hypocrisy got too much. The opposite of authenticity is hypocrisy. When you’re claiming to stand up for the Hungarian nation threatened from outside, but you’re cutting deals with Putin, at some point—even if you’re a good speaker—the tension between what you claim to be doing and what you’re actually doing gets too big to preserve authenticity. People start to think you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth, and charisma doesn’t save you. Trump says whatever he thinks, he’s deeply corrupt, but he never talks out of both sides of his mouth. That is not the right description of what he does.

Krastev: You’re right, and this is very important. The problem with Orbán is that he stayed in power for so long that he really became a king. He moved the government to the old palace, and you can see that he became the symbol of power itself, such that people stopped seeing the person. He put on extra weight—everything that comes with aging—and to some extent that added to his troubles. Suddenly they could not see the person anymore.

His rebel story worked when he was seen as one man against everybody. But when Trump came along, Orbán became the ally of the strongest player in the game, and pretending to be a victim all the time—young people didn’t buy it. There is also something about his brand of conservatism that worked against him. He is conservative in the way an old man is conservative, and old men who are conservative rarely have much tolerance for the next generation—how they look, what they believe. He became a kind of disapproving old uncle, and that cost him with younger voters.

What he is going to do now is, for me, a very interesting question. If the law limiting a prime minister to two terms in their career passes, Orbán cannot become prime minister again. That law will have strong popular support—Magyar is young and will clearly embrace the constraint himself, and that will appeal to people. So how does Orbán position himself? Does he simply become a bitter figure, somebody like Berisha in Albania, spending whatever remains of his political life fighting the people who drove him from power? Or does he try to carve out a role as the intellectual leader of the European new right?

Then there is the question of his relations with Trump and Vance. Are they going to see what they did as a mistake? Are they going to forgive him for losing? Because Trump is not famous for his tolerance of losers—and unfortunately, that is how Orbán looks right now.

Mounk: Perhaps Orbán can become a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute on the West Coast and enjoy some Californian sun. But I want to make sure that we talk about the broader world. We are recording this on Monday, April 13, as the American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is beginning. It is too early for us to know how that blockade is going to play out in military terms. Help us think through this extraordinary war that has now been going on for months. What sense can we make of how America got into this war and whether it is going to be able to get out of it? How is this changing the world?

Krastev: I am not a specialist on the Middle East, and I do believe that modesty is quite important—these days we try to pretend that we understand everything. But there are three or four things that, precisely as a non-expert, make a strong impression on me.

One is that part of the problem with this war was the previous special operation in Venezuela. It worked too easily, too well. In the same way that nobody is going to fully understand what was in Putin’s mind in 2022 without knowing how he experienced the annexation of Crimea—how easy it was, how glorious it felt—something slightly similar happened with Trump. There were of course other factors: the Israeli factor, and his personal history with Iran. If you go back to Trump’s biography, his politicization very much coincided with the hostage crisis in 1980, and so Iran has always been important to him. There is also his obsession with nuclear weapons—he wanted to be the one who solved that. But then you have a war in which it was never very clear what success or failure would look like.

This is where something important for political scientists comes in. Trump does not have an understanding of a regime as an institution. For him, a regime is simply the leader and his friends—because that is also how he understands the American system. So when Israeli intelligence told him that in one day they could kill the Ayatollah and some key commanders, he believed that was regime change.

There are two things about this that will stay with me and that are not discussed enough. The first is how the decision by the Americans and the Israelis to kill a leader—and particularly a religious leader—is going to affect the behavior of others. What I follow in discussions on the Russian side is many people are now saying: why are we not doing this, why are we not targeting key Ukrainian commanders? We are creating a wholly different understanding of what constitutes permissible conduct in war.

The second is what you do when you don’t know what to do. Here I think Trump is doing something that was beautifully described to me by Stephen Holmes, drawing on the ideas of Niklas Luhmann—the great German sociologist—who asked what it means to be powerful. Power, in his conception, is the capacity to offload your problems onto others. What is the blockade? You don’t want to risk a military operation, you’re not prepared to lose people. So you make the problem much bigger. Your problem becomes a Chinese problem, an Indian problem, a European problem, because the oil is not going to move. Oil prices will rise so sharply that others are forced to solve your problem for you. That is a wholly different understanding of what power is—the power to make a problem bigger, to make your problem everyone else’s problem. The blockade is really going to hurt others much more than it is going to hurt the United States.

Mounk: The blockade is a fascinating piece of tactical thinking. Trump is often capable of tactical brilliance, and sadly he often completely lacks strategic vision. We went into this war assuming, first, that the real goal—toppling the regime—would be relatively easy to achieve. That obviously turned out to be wrong. We assumed, second, that there was an easy exit plan: we start this war, we can stop this war, we throw a bunch of bombs, we destroy a lot of Iranian military capacity, we degrade the nuclear program, and hopefully the regime topples. That would have been an incredible outcome. If not, we stop the bombardment, come to some kind of ceasefire, and get out when we choose.

Neither assumption held. Iran was able to impose costs on its neighbors through sustained bombardments—not just of Israel, but of the UAE, the Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia—and mostly by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. The administration found itself in a very serious bind. The logic of the blockade is: you think you have leverage because you’re blocking our ships from getting through the Strait of Hormuz—we’re going to get leverage over you by blocking all ships from going through the Strait of Hormuz.

Part of what makes this work is that you need to be ruthless enough, and perhaps crazy enough, not to care too much about the consequences. This is where the schoolyard bully dynamic comes in—Trump is many things, including a schoolyard bully, something he has been since he was a very small child. Part of what gives a schoolyard bully his power is that he is impervious to consequences. If you know that the boy threatening you at recess cares about being reprimanded by teachers, or cares about being thrown out of school, you have a kind of protection—you can think, “I’m not going to give you my lunch, because if you beat me up, you might get expelled.” A lot of the power of a schoolyard bully comes from the credible signal that he is crazy enough not to care what the consequences are.

Trump can project that he doesn’t care much about the consequences of this blockade—in part because the U.S. is now basically energy independent, so the real impact on America is much more limited than on other countries. But also in part because he doesn’t care about American alliances with Europe, East Asia, and other places where the blockade is going to have the biggest economic impact. That is a consequence previous American presidents would have worried about. Trump is a lot less worried about it, and that gives him a lot more power.

Krastev: There are three other elements here that are very important. One is that Trump believes that to be powerful means that you can do what you want. We normally know that this is not the case—that power is very much based on the constraints you operate within.

The second is the timeframe in which he works. People like to compare Putin and Trump, but when it comes to timeframes, these are two of the most different people you can imagine. Putin thinks in centuries—consulting the dead Russian tsars on what to do in Crimea, reading 19th-century books and manuscripts to decide his next move.

Mounk: There’s a famous Tucker Carlson interview where Carlson asks him one question and Putin starts in the 12th century and goes for 45 minutes.

Krastev: For Putin, the 12th century is as relevant to the conversation as what happened yesterday. Trump, on the other hand, cannot imagine anything longer than four weeks. Every time he uses timeframes, it is either something he is going to do in one day, two weeks, or four weeks—he thinks in weeks. He is never going to say, “In two years we are going to do this,” particularly when it comes to conflicts. As a result, he cannot imagine something going on for a long time. That kind of time-framing—how you manage time—is critically important.

The third element is that he also became a victim of not understanding the power of words. He was so good with words, and he managed to mobilize this idea of civilizational destruction. The Iranian regime is genuinely unpopular—it is really awful, and many Iranians wanted to get out of it. But the moment somebody starts talking about destroying your civilization, there is no longer any language available to defend what the Americans are doing, if you are Iranian. This is very different from the Cold War. During the Cold War, American governments tried to claim the cultural tradition of the other side as their own ally—you talked about the Soviets and claimed that Pushkin was your ally, that Tolstoy was your ally, that you were on the side of their culture against their regime. For Trump, that does not exist.

This creates a very strange situation that helps explain why Europeans are not joining. Technically, of course, it is not easy for them to do so. But beyond that, they understand that everyone facing Trump is also facing a question of identity—who are we? The British, who are very much hurt by what is happening, the French—everyone is now using Trump simply to tell others who they are. There is no real relationship with Trump anymore, only a theatrical one. That theatrical nature of power on the Trumpian side is going to create a very serious problem for any future American president, Republican or Democrat—the problem of how to restore meaning to the words that carry weight in politics.

Mounk: This relates to a broader question I’ve been asking myself. When Trump won re-election and was moving very fast in the first couple of months of his administration, it felt as though the old order had collapsed and any hope of restoring it seemed deeply naive. Trump is clearly making big changes in the world, including this reckless war in the Middle East. But his ability to impose his vision on the United States—and in many ways on the world—is being revealed as very limited.

He has not transformed American culture. He has degraded it in various ways, but he doesn’t enjoy nearly the dominance over American culture that Viktor Orbán enjoyed in Hungary for a good number of years. A lot of his institutional initiatives are running aground. They wanted to either transform or destroy higher education in the United States. I know from conversations with university leaders that life is certainly not easy for the top American universities at the moment, and there is some genuine damage being done, but I don’t feel the difference day to day at Johns Hopkins, where I teach. For all of the protestations, I don’t think professors at Columbia or Harvard do either—if you are a faculty member at one of these universities, you are not worried about criticizing Donald Trump. On the contrary.

So what does that do to the old order? There are clearly parts of it that are going to be impossible to reestablish. There may be others that return relatively to how they were before. Or perhaps we have to wait for the truly world-historical figure who is able to leave the old order behind and put something new in place—and we are still in what Gramsci would call the interregnum, that strange long moment where the old has died and the new cannot yet be born.

Anyone who thinks we can simply turn back the clock and return to the Obama years is completely wrong. But the birth pangs of a new order—the impossibility of actually putting something different in place, rooted partly in the incompetence and anti-intellectualism of Trump, and partly in the strength the old order still retains in certain ways, even as it is clearly on its last legs—that is also an important factor. So how does this movie play out?

Krastev: One year after Trump came to power, the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted opinion polls in 11 European states and a number of major countries beyond—Brazil, the U.S., Turkey, India, South Korea. The view of Trump had of course changed—he had lost support here and there. But the biggest change was not about Trump at all. Suddenly, after one year of Trump, in every single country, a majority or plurality of people declared that they expected Chinese influence to increase over the next decade. What is even more important, China had stopped being perceived as threatening.

I believe one of the things Trump did was to dismantle a crucial distinction that the old order was based on—not a distinction of power, but of legitimacy. We knew that China was powerful, economically impressive and admirable in certain ways, but we maintained the distinction that there was something wrong with their political system, that we didn’t want to live there. What Trump managed to do was to create a world in which power is the only currency of identity.

If there is something you can call a Trump doctrine—not about any particular place, but about the world as a whole—it is not that he sees it as a clash of great powers. He sees the world more like Greek mythology: there is one supreme figure, Agamemnon, and then there are other powerful figures—the Chinese, the Russians—and then everyone else who basically doesn’t matter. This is a hierarchy without order. He constantly expects others simply to demonstrate that they know how powerful he is. In doing so, he has deprived America of everything that is not an identity based on raw power.

He is not even a conservative leader, if we’re being honest. In his world, migration is the most important issue—and yet his major allies are the Gulf countries, where migrants make up 80% of the population? This lack of any real political conviction, where everything reduces to “I am powerful and you should treat me accordingly,” creates a very real vulnerability. Everyone else is trying to do only one thing: tell him that he is not as powerful as he believes. That is what the Iranians did. He was right that the destruction of Iran has been incredible—but they said, “You destroyed us, but you cannot change us. You are not as powerful as you believe.” Europeans are telling him the same thing.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ivan discuss whether Trump has a future, and the European identity crisis. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Viktor Orbán, who has governed Hungary for the past 16 years, turning the small Central European country into an international model for (as he himself proudly put it) “illiberal democracy,” just suffered a crushing defeat at the polls. According to preliminary results, the main opposition party, Tisza, will win over two thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. The victory by Péter Magyar is so unequivocal that Orbán conceded his defeat within hours of the polls closing, congratulating his likely successor on his victory.

This victory is such a big achievement in good part because Orbán has for the past decades proven extraordinarily effective at dominating Hungarian public life. He has built up a huge network of clients whose wealth depended on his goodwill. He has anointed himself an effective spokesperson for the conservative values shared by a large part of the country’s voters. And he has proven extremely adept at portraying himself as the only politician who can protect Hungary against its enemies.

These enemies kept changing according to the needs of the moment. They variably included George Soros, who was raised in Hungary and paid for Orbán to attend Oxford University; the European Union, which grew vocal about Orbán’s blatant abuses of power after initially tolerating them for a shamefully long period; and Ukraine, which according to the most extreme claims in the latest election campaign had plans to invade Hungary. What never changed was Orbán’s insistence that the threat was existential, and that he alone was able to protect the Hungarian nation.

But after many years in office, leaders tend to be judged on their record rather than their rhetoric. And Orbán’s record increasingly looked abysmal.

Subscribe now

Once one of the most affluent countries in Central Europe, Hungary is now the poorest in the European Union; over the last years, the standard of living of a typical Hungarian has fallen behind that of countries that had historically been much poorer, such as Romania and Bulgaria. Corruption runs so deep in Hungary that it started to affect the lives of ordinary citizens; the evident impunity enjoyed by Orbán allies who broke serious laws was a big part of the reason why erstwhile allies distanced themselves from him in droves over the last months. And on the international stage, a country that suffered brutal domination by the Soviet Union for half a century—most notably in 1956, when a reforming government was violently quashed by tanks sent by the Kremlin—found itself more aligned with Moscow than with Brussels, a development many Hungarians came to resent.

The man who was able to seize upon these failings has himself for most of his adult life been an Orbán loyalist. Magyar rose to prominent political positions, running a public student loan program and sitting on the board of state-owned corporations, thanks to his close ties to the government. His break with Orbán did not come until 2024. When a presidential pardon for an accomplice in a child sex abuse scandal drew widespread outrage, Magyar broke with his political allies by giving an interview to a independent YouTube channel that went hugely viral. Within weeks of the interview, he was leading mass rallies; within months, the new party he put together had won 30 percent of the vote in elections for the European Parliament. Magyar has since positioned himself on the center-right, allying his newly founded party with Christian Democratic parties like Friedrich Merz’s CDU.

The victory of the opposition gives Hungarians a crucial opportunity to heal their ailing democracy and return their country to economic growth. It will make it much easier for the European Union to act with a united voice, especially regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine. And it is a humiliating defeat for the many American conservatives who have over the last years chosen Hungary as the projection screen for their political fantasies. (Evidently, it was so important to JD Vance to boost Orbán’s chances at reelection that he made a remarkable stopover in Budapest amid his negotiations with Iran.)

All of these are reasons for genuine joy. But to this expression of joy, I want to add a few more sober observations from the perspective of a political scientist.

Hungary has such outsized importance in part because it has long been seen as a test case for the stability of democratic institutions. Political scientists once believed that countries which are as affluent and have as long a democratic tradition as Hungary should not be vulnerable to sliding into dictatorship. Orbán’s ability to undermine key democratic institutions like a free press thus seemed to suggest that even countries in the traditional heartlands of democracy might be vulnerable to serious “democratic backsliding.” This makes it remarkable that the opposition was able to oust Orbán at the ballot box, and that he conceded defeat rather than trying to rig the elections. The outcome of Sunday’s vote should thus make us a little more optimistic about the prospects for democratic resilience in other countries in which demagogues are daily attempting to circumvent constitutional limits on their power, including the United States.

The stakes of politics have risen sufficiently high that, from Hungary to the United States, it is widely said about every major election that it is “the most important of our lives.” But the opposition’s success at ousting Orbán on its fourth try reminds us that the process of demagogues trying to win office and consolidating their power is very lengthy. A single election rarely allows them to concentrate power in their own hands. Despite all of his attempts at entrenching his rule, Orbán evidently failed to do so over the last 16 years.

Conversely, a single defeat rarely banishes the danger such movements pose. In the United States, a demagogue who had been widely written off after his first electoral defeat succeeded in returning to power. In Brazil, a demagogue who had been widely written off—and even put in jail—after an electoral defeat could soon help his son ascend to the presidency. The fight for democracy is a marathon, not a sprint.

Subscribe now

For similar reasons, it would be premature to conclude that the threat to Hungarian democracy has now been banished. Magyar has won a commanding victory, and the fact that he enjoys a two-thirds majority will make things much easier for him. But the impressive coalition he put together is so diverse that it will struggle to agree on how to govern, and he himself remains in many ways an ideological cipher.

Even if Magyar proves to be sincere in his commitment to govern in a way that is more respectful of the rule of law, he will face what I’ve come to call the “post-populist dilemma.” Orbán has put so many of his own people in so many positions of power that, even with his party reduced to a small rump in parliament, he will retain the ability to torpedo the work of the government in a million ways. This means that Magyar faces two equally unappetizing choices. He can choose to play completely by existing rules; but if he does, he is leaving many of Orbán’s corrupt appointees in key positions in the administration and the state media, making his work all but impossible. Or he can fire anybody who appears more loyal to Orbán than to the constitution; but if he does, he will effectively normalize the idea that each new prime minister simply fires anybody appointed by their predecessor. The difficulty of navigating the post-populist dilemma is one reason why even a big setback for demagogues doesn’t always spell the end of their political career.

Finally, there is a delicious irony to how lop-sided Magyar’s victory is. During his 16 years in power, Orbán repeatedly changed the electoral system to tip the balance in his party’s favor. Because the opposition was divided and he counted on always retaining the most votes of any single party, he adopted an electoral system which strongly boosts parliamentary representation for the numerical victor. Now that Hungarian voters have finally turned on Orbán, he is a victim of his own machinations. Despite winning about 40 percent of the vote, his party will hold less than a third of seats in parliament.

Demagogues always try to manipulate political institutions in their own favor. But as Orbán’s crushing defeat illustrates, doing so successfully is very hard. Again and again, tomorrow’s electoral arithmetic turns out to be vastly different from today’s. And so the frequency with which attempts at manipulating the electoral system backfire is one of the small ways in which democratic institutions have proven to be more resilient than we might have expected a few years ago.

Over a decade into a political era defined in large part by the threat that demagogues pose to democratic institutions, it is time to recognize that some of the simplest narratives conceal more than they reveal. Most countries are neither perfect democracies nor outright dictatorships; they fall on some point along the messy continuum between the two.

For that reason, the most likely threat for most countries is not that they are about to slide into outright dictatorship. It is that incumbents severely tilt the playing field without quite being able to banish the opposition.

This implies an important lesson for those of us worried about the state of democratic institutions in our own country. The real risk for the United States today is not that the country will soon resemble the world’s most extreme dictatorships. It is that America turns into a “dirty democracy,” in which those in power are able to rewrite the rules of the game in their own favor without ever quite rendering democratic elections meaningless.

Subscribe now

Whether in Hungary or in the United States, a clear view of the situation requires us to adopt a more messy model of how democracies rise and fall. The fate of longstanding democracies is unlikely to consist either in a full victory or in a full defeat for the forces of freedom; and it is determined by choices made over the course of decades, not days.

But such a refined understanding of the complexities of this political era should not impede our ability to celebrate when there is a rare piece of genuinely good news. And anybody who cares about basic values like the rule of law should welcome Orbán’s defeat as a big step in the right direction. Sunday’s election was a good day for Hungary and a good day for democracy.

Andrés Velasco is the Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the co-editor, alongside Tim Besley and Irene Bucelli, of The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Andrés Velasco discuss whether the Middle East war will trigger a 1970s-style economic crisis, why AI valuations could spark the next financial meltdown, and what signs to watch for in predicting future market crashes.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I really look forward to talking about the big questions of principle about what we should be trying to achieve with economic policy. But it’s hard not to start by talking about the current economic situation. The war in the Middle East has led to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and to the destruction of a lot of oil and gas infrastructure in the Middle East. Energy prices are up, and some people are starting to say that the shock that this will cause will turn out to be equivalent to the oil price shock of the 1970s. How permanent and how bad do you think the impacts of this war are likely to be at this stage?

Andrés Velasco: Clearly the picture is not pretty and we need to worry for several reasons. The first one is that the economy hates uncertainty, and today we’re facing uncertainty on so many fronts—tariff policy, the war, pretty much everything that the United States does today. So the headline is terrible.

Secondly, I think the war has revealed something we should have known all along, but we hadn’t really, which is that Iran can impose a massive cost on the world by simply controlling that one point. Many people, as I’m sure you know, worry that this may be a playbook, of course, for China and Taiwan. That is not a pretty picture.

The good news, I think, is that per unit of GDP, we depend less on oil than we used to. Oil remains very important, of course, and it’s politically very important because people hate to go to the gas station and find that prices are up, but to produce the stuff that we need to produce, oil is less necessary. The other reason why I don’t think that we’re quite back in the 70s yet is that back then you had really bad monetary policies. You didn’t have autonomous central banks. You didn’t have a track record of low inflation. Central banks are easy to hate, but they’ve done a pretty good job. I think they will be a stabilizing force going forward, even if the price of oil remains high.

Mounk: In a lot of the debate, there’s a question of whether the obvious temporary spike in oil prices is going to prove very long lasting. The assumption in the background seems to be: if the spike in oil prices proves long lasting, then we’re back in the 1970s. What you’re saying is that we’re not going to be back in the 1970s because oil was just much more important to an economy that still was in very large parts industrial.

The other thing to note here is that the United States in particular, which is a huge share of the global economy, has just become virtually independent and autonomous on oil and gas. The fracking revolution really means that most of the energy consumed in the United States today does not come from the Middle East, and therefore the American economy is less exposed to those effects.

Velasco: I think that’s right, but let me add two caveats. One caveat is that we need to be precise about what it is that we mean by being back in the 70s. In the 70s, the crucial word was stagflation—that is, stagnation and inflation. Stagnation could be an issue. The world economy outside the United States hasn’t been growing a lot. China grows a lot less than it used to. India does pretty well, but of course Europe doesn’t grow very much, Latin America doesn’t grow very much, much of Africa doesn’t grow very much. So slow growth is a danger.

The other component of stagflation, of course, is inflation. There I think we are on safer ground. You can have a one-time spike in prices, and that means higher inflation over a month or two or three. But a return to high inflation, I think, is pretty unlikely. The reason is that we have these institutions called central banks, and they showed us—for instance, in the inflationary episode after COVID—that you can have a spike in inflation. We had a year of very high inflation: the United States, the UK, other countries at 10, 11%. But without a big cost, inflation went down. It’s not guaranteed they can pull it off again and again and again, but I think monetary policy is much better run and we have many more monetary policy tools than we did a generation ago. So on that account, I think we are in reasonably good shape.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

The other thing I was going to say is that the real danger is not so much inflation. The real danger is that this moment of craziness, from the point of view of American policymaking, could trigger other things that today are under the rug, but which can blow up in a big way. That is finance. Ultimately these crises become crises not if you have a little bit more inflation, and not if you have half a point less of growth—it’s when the financial sector implodes. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but there is a list of things that people worry about.

One of them, of course, is AI. Nobody doubts that AI will be good for productivity, but it’s not clear that the current valuations of AI stocks and technology stocks are reasonable. It’s also not clear that the investment boom in data centers is justified. It’s also not clear that other areas of the financial picture—particularly what Wall Street calls the private credit market, which are not banks, but other people providing private credit—are on solid footing. One can tell a story in which a lot of those institutions are vulnerable and they could take a hit. So I think the real danger—and again, we’re not quite there yet, but we should be thinking about it—is a financial multiplier. When finance gets out of whack, as it did in 2008/9/10, then we really have to worry.

Mounk: We’re trying to read tea leaves, and I think you’ve set out really nicely what the factors of stability are—why perhaps the oil price shock is not going to be as bad as the 1970s—but also what the tail end risks are. What the kinds of things are that could get us into a recession that could, in theory, spiral out of control. Of course, the old joke is that economists have successfully predicted 17 out of the last three recessions, and also that sometimes they fail to predict the recession that’s around the corner.

Velasco: I should point out that I’m recording this from the London School of Economics, where the late Queen Elizabeth came to cut the ribbon on a building in the middle of a financial crisis and asked one of my colleagues here—who was two doors down from me—how come you didn’t see it coming? The Queen wondered in 2008, how was it that so many economists had missed the big financial crisis? The answer is: ex post, we can tell you what went on, but ex ante, we’re not so good at predicting these things.

So could it be that around the corner we are going to face another financial blow up? Yes. As an academic, I specialize in financial crises. One thing I can tell you is that somewhere in the world there is one every five years. We haven’t really had one for about 15 now, so maybe it’s time for one.

Mounk: That’s very interesting. Since it is your academic specialty, what are the signs to look for in advance of a financial crisis and why is it so hard to predict them?

Velasco: The great Stanley Fischer, who was the vice chair of the Federal Reserve and the governor of the Bank of Israel and a professor at MIT, used to say: all my students are writing papers on the last crisis, nobody’s writing papers on the future crisis. The reason for that, of course, is that we don’t know what it will look like. Finance is a many-headed monster.

Nobody would have predicted that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 would begin in the mortgage market. Mortgages were supposed to be boring, were supposed to be safe. But there was an innovation in mortgage markets, and mortgage markets became something called asset-backed securities. Suddenly that very safe asset became unsafe. The first large institution to go under in 2008 was AIG—an insurance company—and people thought insurance companies were big and boring, that they cannot go under. But AIG came very close to the edge.

So where will the thing blow up next time around? If I knew, I’d be rich, but I’m not. The obvious two candidates are everything connected to technology, and particularly people who have made bets on these massive valuations of technology companies. Let me put it this way. If in fact the stock price of every major technology company—including Nvidia and Apple and Alphabet and everybody else—is right, the increase in GDP in the United States and the increase in exports by the United States is humongous. So ten years from now, the question will not be about the U.S. trade deficit, it will be about the U.S. trade surplus. That is if these valuations are right. But the truth is we have no idea if they’re right.

Mounk: The idea is that the valuations of these companies are so enormous. Valuations, of course, are based in large part on the expectations of future returns. So effectively, when you look at how much Nvidia is worth, how much some of these other tech companies are worth today, these are bets that they’re going to be selling enormous amounts of chips—in the case of Nvidia, for example. That can’t just be domestically in the United States, given the size of those bets; they have to be selling to countries around the world. The United States for a long time has had this huge trade deficit. Either the valuation of Nvidia just crashes down to levels that are much lower than they are today, or it basically implies arithmetically that the United States is suddenly going to have a trade surplus. Which of those two things do you think is going to happen?

Velasco: Again, it’s very, very hard to say, but let me spell it out in a bit more detail because the point you’re making is very important here. The price of a stock today, as you pointed out, is dependent on our guesses about how much the company will make—what the return on that company will be next year and the following year into the indefinite future. So if I look at the price of the stock of any large tech company today—and this includes not just the AI companies, Amazon for instance and others—they are suggesting humongous profits.

So one of two things must be right. If the people pricing these stocks today are correct in what they’re doing, the boom in productivity and in output and in U.S. exports is going to be gigantic. The issue of the 2030s will be how the world accommodates that. How can the rest of the world pay for these massive American AI-led services? But there’s an alternative scenario: that the calculations are wrong—I shouldn’t say calculations, these are educated guesses. One day we will wake up and realize that this stock is not worth 100, it’s only worth 50. At that point, a lot of things could go wrong, because people have borrowed against these stocks, they’ve used them as collateral, they’ve made investments based on these guesses. At that point, the stress on the financial system would be huge. Which one of the two will it be? I have no idea. As usual, something in between—but I couldn’t tell you exactly where in between.

Mounk: What about fears of an AI bubble more broadly? One company whose valuation is now very high is OpenAI. They have gigantic expenditures to keep training new models, and some people think their revenues so far are relatively modest. So in order for OpenAI to keep going, they need to either keep raising unprecedented sums from private investors over and over again, or they eventually need to vastly increase revenue beyond levels anything close to what they have at the moment. I take it that there is actually a reasonable possibility that OpenAI will prove to be unsustainable.

I’ve heard different arguments about this. Some people say that if that happens, it could be a systemic shock to the economy—that the bursting of the AI bubble could really be the beginning of the next financial meltdown. Other people say no, that’s a problem for OpenAI, it’s a problem for some of the people who’ve invested in OpenAI—some of the sovereign wealth funds, some of the VC firms—but most likely the valuable remains of this company would be taken over by Microsoft or Google or one of the other tech giants, and it’s not going to be a systemic shock to the economy. Do you have any way of helping us think more intelligently through what the consequences of a bursting of the AI bubble might be?

Velasco: Two thoughts on that. The first one is that I wouldn’t focus on a particular company because if in fact AI is not as productive as some people are claiming it will be, that will not affect one company. It’ll affect all of them. So, my first point is that if you look at the seven big tech companies, they account for a humongous share of the valuation of the American stock market.

Mounk: And since the U.S. stock market is a majority of the valuation of all of the world’s stock markets, it means that they’re a humongous share of the world economy.

Velasco: What’s happened in the last three or four years—it’s changed slightly in the last month or two, but let’s take the trend over the last five years—is that two things have changed. First, tech is a much larger share of the U.S. stock market, and second, the U.S. stock market is a much larger share of the world. So we’re all more exposed to American risk.

Now, that’s the financial picture, but let’s go to the core question, which is a very hard one: how large will the productivity increase linked to AI be? I don’t know the answer to that, but we can look at history. When big revolutions in technology happened—think of the arrival of electricity and the electrification of factories a century ago, or think about the arrival of the personal computer and the internet 30, 35 years ago—the gains eventually arrived, but we know two things. It took companies a long time to figure out how to use these technologies, and as a result of that, the productivity numbers took a decade sometimes to reflect the technological innovations.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

I’m sure you’ve heard the quip by a famous American economist who said computers are everywhere, but not in the productivity statistics. When the personal computer arrived, we all had it, we all used it, we were all thrilled—but it wasn’t showing up in the numbers. So my guess is that AI will show up in the numbers, but it’s not going to be tomorrow. We don’t quite know which companies will use it in which way, and where the productivity gains will pop up. So anything that we do today is based on the belief—but at this point it is no more than a belief—that it’s going to be big. Big when, big where, how soon? The honest answer is nobody can be sure.

Mounk: Help me think more broadly about how much of a turning point in economic history this juncture is. There has started to be a consensus—we’ll see whether that turns out to be right—that we are at a turning point in the political order. The actions of Donald Trump as president, along with a number of other developments that have been happening over the last years, really mark the end of what we want to call the international liberal order, or whatever it was. The world is much less predictable. A lot of the rules that seemed to govern the international sphere no longer hold. We can no longer be sure that NATO is an effective organization that can provide deterrence to enemies of Western Europe and North America. The survival of the transatlantic relationship is in many ways in doubt.

On the economic front, you could make a parallel argument. The United States—one of the architects of the World Trade Organization and of the growth of free trade over the last decades—has now put up enormous tariffs, at least until a recent Supreme Court ruling, which is complicating that question. Somehow the country that is the wealthiest large country in the world, whose companies represented something like 60% of the world stock market valuation, seems to have decided that all of this order is not in its interest and is tearing key parts of it down. You could proclaim the end of globalization, as some people have. At the same time, we see that other countries are rallying to sustain free trade as best they can. Global trade has not declined significantly over the last years, and parts of the economic order are clearly proving resilient to the attacks that Donald Trump is making on them.

It’s an impossible question to answer, of course, but when people write the economic history of the 20th and 21st centuries, is what we’re living through going to be an interesting little chapter, a sort of fascinating side note, or is it going to be a major turning point?

Velasco: First, on globalization: globalization is not going away, and I think it is not going to go away for one very simple reason—because in much of the world, working-class people can walk into a supermarket and get themselves a pair of sneakers, or trainers, call them what you wish depending on your side of the Atlantic, for $10, when a generation ago the same pair of sneakers cost $30 or $40. The benefits to the average consumer in any country—whether in Asia, Latin America, or Europe—are tremendous. I don’t think any politician is going to drive us away from that. You pointed this out in passing, but I want to underscore it: in spite of all the crazy stuff being done by the United States, and in spite of the fact that China doesn’t always play a constructive role either, world trade has not shrunk. There’s a recent report by McKinsey that shows that American exports are up, Chinese exports are up, and trade among countries in the rest of the world without China and the United States is also up. So globalization is not going away—globalization is morphing and changing. You’re getting more trade among countries that are politically similar and less trade among countries that are political rivals, like China and the United States. Is this good or bad? I think in many dimensions it is bad, but globalization is not ending.

Now, what is changing? Every period of history and every international economic arrangement needs an anchor country. Shopping malls have an anchor store, an anchor department store. The post-1945 world economic order has had the United States as the anchor country—not only because the United States was large and rich, but because the United States stood for a set of rules and helped enforce those rules, and also because the United States provided something very important: a financial system and the U.S. dollar. What I think is true, even if globalization is not ending, is that the set of rules has been rubbished and is not going to come back anytime soon, and that those financial arrangements are not disappearing, but are clearly under attack.

I’ll give you one example. In every crisis that I have ever seen in my lifetime as an economist, whenever people got scared, the dollar rose. The old joke is that an emerging country currency is one from which you cannot emerge in an emergency—and when you try to emerge in an emergency, what do you do? You buy U.S. dollars. The one moment when this rule was broken was Liberation Day, almost exactly a year ago, when the United States said we’re going to increase tariffs. The standard textbook says an increase in U.S. tariffs should cause the dollar to strengthen, and instead the dollar weakened. Why is that? Because people in Beijing and in Johannesburg and in Brasilia said the Americans have gone crazy, and therefore the United States is no longer an anchor of stability.

The dollar is not going to be dethroned as the world’s reigning currency simply because there are not that many alternatives. China is a much bigger country, but I don’t think you are about to put all of your life savings into Chinese RMB. China does not have a liquid capital market, and more importantly, China does not have a trustworthy judicial system—if you ever end up in a fight, you’re not going to go to a Chinese judge to settle it. As a result, China does not provide an alternative, but increasingly other currencies—like the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the Swiss franc—are stepping into the breach. The big question is whether the euro will really step into the breach. I live in the UK, not in continental Europe, but I keep thinking this is a moment for the euro to really leave adolescence and come into adulthood. But this requires the European Union to really want that. There are a number of reforms that you need—you need to make the euro more readily tradeable, you need to have a very liquid market in European bonds, not in German bonds or Italian bonds or French bonds, but European bonds. That can be done. It’s not that difficult to imagine a world in which the euro rivals the dollar—not tomorrow, but in five or ten years’ time. But this will require political will.

Subscribe now

Last but not least, there’s the security issue. NATO was mentioned earlier. Kyiv is what—two hours away by plane from Berlin? So this is not an imaginary threat. It’s a very real threat that is very close. From a security point of view, for people living in Europe, the world is very, very different. A massive question is whether Europe will get its act together when it comes to defense and really become autonomous from a security point of view. Europe is not autonomous from a security point of view today, but it needs to be.

Mounk: Let me dig a little bit deeper into this question of a reserve currency. The first general question to ask is: what are the advantages and disadvantages of effectively being the world’s reserve currency? I think that’s part of a political debate in the United States. Obviously, one of the advantages is that it makes it much easier to issue debt and it means that you can borrow at much lower cost—those are significant advantages. Is there a disadvantage, especially when you’re talking about smaller countries like Canada or Switzerland partially stepping into the role of reserve currency? Are they appreciating the local currency in ways that can have negative consequences for citizens of those countries? Or am I making a wrong economic assumption here?

Velasco: Let’s start with the United States, because today in the United States there are many people—mostly linked to the Trump administration—who claim, erroneously in my view, that the United States pays for being the world’s reserve currency. That makes absolutely no sense. Money is a bunch of pieces of paper that cost nothing to produce. There’s an amazing fact that the world wants to hold these little pieces of paper that cost nothing to produce. So the United States collects a tax on the rest of the world. It’s not an explicit tax—it’s not legislated or mandated anywhere—but every time I take a green piece of paper in exchange for a good that I made, I am giving the United States a break. That’s one big advantage.

The second big advantage is that the United States borrows massively internationally in its own currency, and whenever things get tougher in the United States, the dollar depreciates and therefore the real value of the outstanding debt goes down and Americans get a benefit. That happened, for instance, after World War II, and it happened during the Vietnam War. At points of stress when the U.S. economy is in trouble, the dollar depreciates, and therefore if I’m holding American debt, I—as a resident of Europe or as a resident of Asia—lose.

So this is really a pretty win-win situation for the United States. Some people say this means that the dollar is too strong. First of all, it’s not clear what it means for the dollar to be too strong. And if that is a problem, there are ways of dealing with it. One reason why the dollar has been strong is maybe that the United States has a fiscal policy that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the United States could correct that. But bottom line, the idea that the world is ripping off America because we all hold dollars makes absolutely no sense. That’s simply MAGA nonsense.

Mounk: What about smaller countries? Part of this is that the United States is such a big country and such a big economy that people from around the world wanting to hold U.S. dollars may not have as big a distorting impact on the currency. If the whole world suddenly flooded into Canadian dollars, presumably that would make a much bigger difference to the valuation of that currency. Could that distort things in ways that would actually be a problem for the Canadian economy, or is that not a serious concern either?

Velasco: Yes, maybe, but let me qualify it in ways that are important. Most countries, in fact, worry about the opposite problem—most countries worry that they issue currency and nobody wants to hold it. So having the rest of the world want to hold your own currency is 99% of the time a great thing. Why does a country like Argentina often get into trouble? Because nobody wants to hold the Argentine currency, not even Argentines. So when people say they want to hold Swiss francs or Canadian dollars, the first line of argument must be: what a great thing.

Now, there is a danger in what economists call sudden surges of capital inflow. It could well happen that interest rates in the United States are suddenly low and people are looking for some other place to park their money. A lot of money comes into your country and all of a sudden your currency appreciates. You can find episodes in history—not only in Canada or in Switzerland, but even in emerging markets—where people are getting out of the United States because interest rates are too low and they come to your country and appreciate the currency. That can be a problem. But it’s a nice problem to have. It means that people trust your currency and trust your country. There are also tools for dealing with it—you can cut your own interest rates, or you can impose some disincentives to capital inflows. Countries have done that; countries have taxed capital inflows. So if that is a problem, you can deal with it. But believe me, 99% of the time, it’s a problem you really want to have.

The more serious problem is the opposite: people dump your currency, people don’t want your currency. That’s bad for your currency, for inflation, for domestic residents. That’s not the problem of Canada today, Australia today, or Switzerland today.

Mounk: Let’s get to the book that you’ve just published, which is really interesting. It’s called The London Consensus. That, of course, is a play on The Washington Consensus. What was the Washington Consensus? What’s wrong with it and why do we need to supplant it?

Velasco: The Washington Consensus was a set of ideas that emerged—predictably—out of Washington around 1989, 1990. There was a conference at a place called the Institute for International Economics, which is still around under a slightly different name. A big fat book came out edited by a man called John Williamson, a British economist living in Washington. It became a bit of a blueprint for a certain kind of economics. Some people like to call it neoliberal. I don’t particularly like that label, because neoliberal has become really a bit of an insult.

Mounk: It’s not just that it’s an evaluative term—there are many evaluative terms that are fine. I think “fascist” is in my mind an evaluative term. I think that anything that is rightly called fascist is bad; it does, even though it’s often overused, have a core meaning that actually makes sense. The problem to me with how people use “neoliberal” is that it’s just a way of saying, it’s something I don’t like, and beyond that, I don’t think there’s a clear meaning.

Velasco: When you say “fascism,” you’re thinking of concentration camps. But when you say “neoliberal,” it’s not clear what you’re talking about. So let us go back in history. The conference was held in Washington. The book was presumably about the world, not about Washington, but it was mostly in response to the Latin American debt and financial crisis, which mattered to the United States at the time because the people holding that debt were American banks. People around Washington were wondering: what’s wrong, why did this happen, and what do we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? So predictably, at a time when the problems were high debt, weak banks, high inflation, and big government deficits, the medicine was: stabilize the public finances, increase interest rates, bring down inflation, maybe shrink the government a little bit, liberalize prices.

At the same time, this happened more or less coincidentally with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the liberalization and reform of countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. There, obviously, the problem was too many controls, a state that was too large, and in some countries like Poland, high inflation and high debt. So the solution was the obvious one. People like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, of course, took these ideas and applied them, and the World Bank and the IMF also took these ideas and applied them around the world. In some places, they made sense—clearly in Latin America in the 1980s, government deficits were too large, public debt was too high, and something had to be done about it. The problem was that this set of commandments—and Williamson really came up with a list of ten things to do, and it looked like the Ten Commandments—were not universally applicable. So all the criticisms about one-size-fits-all economics really were relevant. Secondly, the problems of 35 years ago are not necessarily the problems of today.

So what did we do? An LSE colleague, Tim Besley—a very influential British economist—and I and another colleague, Irene Bucelli, asked ourselves: what is it that we have learned in the last 35 years, we as in the world at large and we as in the economics profession? We invited a number of colleagues, most of whom are LSE-based or studied here or have taught here, and said: tell us, in your subfield—whether it’s international trade or finance or fiscal policy or whatever—what do we know today that we didn’t know 35 years ago, and what is it that we should do differently? Which bits of the Washington Consensus merit keeping, and which bits were completely wrong and need to be thrown out the window? Tim and I wrote an introduction which doesn’t try to summarize the book—the book is huge, it has 670 pages—but tries to extract some themes.

Let me give you two ideas broadly, and then we can dig deeper. One idea is that certain things in the Washington Consensus remain true. You want to be careful when it comes to fiscal deficits and debt, because you don’t want to end up like Argentina—you don’t want to be a country that is always teetering on the verge of collapse. It is also true, and a lot of research has shown, that international trade does bring benefits. The gains from trade—to use the phrase by David Ricardo—remain large. So overall, it is a good idea to trade. The idea that you’re going to become Cuba or North Korea, close your economy, and become prosperous makes absolutely no sense. But the gains from trade are unequally distributed, and those gains also mean that some people lose. One big mistake that we made back in the 80s and 90s is that many countries—especially the United States—did nothing, or close to nothing, to address the plight of people who lost.

Let me mention another idea. Some people say that economic growth is a bad thing, that we should embrace degrowth. We don’t think that. Certainly, if you come from a developing country, you want to grow—economic growth is important. You only hear degrowth ideas from citizens of rich countries; you don’t hear that in India or in Africa or in Brazil. People want to grow. But what we have learned is that growth is a lot more complicated than the Washington Consensus suggested. The cliché from the 1980s—the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher line—was: get the government out of my way and private businesses will get the economy to grow. We know today that many countries followed the Washington Consensus, liberalized, opened up, and didn’t grow very much.

Colleagues like Philippe Aghion—the French economist who won the Nobel Prize last year, a colleague here at the London School of Economics—have explained why. Growth is all about productivity, and productivity is all about innovation. To innovate, you need to invest, and in order to invest, you need a very delicate ecosystem in which the private sector has to do its bit, universities and researchers have to do their bit, and the government has to provide some key inputs for that research to be fruitful—because the bets are risky. Not every country has this ecosystem. The United States has one. Europe, remarkably, even though it is a rich region, doesn’t have much of one. Mexico is an example: Mexico followed the Washington Consensus to the letter and has low inflation today, but doesn’t grow very much. So we need to be less ideological about growth and think about what forms of collaboration between the government and the private sector get innovation going. That’s a very relevant debate—not just for the Mexicos of the world, but for Germany and much of Europe today.

Mounk: What I think is really interesting about this project is that you’re clearly trying to replace an old framework with a new framework—that’s implicitly, and I guess explicitly, the goal of this project. But you’re not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You’re not saying that everything about that old project was wrong or that we didn’t get anything right in the last 30 years. You’re replacing a framework in a way that’s still building on some of the enduring wisdom in it.

I’d love to get an overview of where this new framework would differ, and then to dig into some of the specific points. A very simplistic summary of the Washington Consensus is that it has ten points. It wants you to have fiscal discipline; to reorder your priorities in public spending, shifting away from subsidies towards more broadly beneficial investments like education and healthcare; to reform the tax system to broaden the tax base; to liberalize interest rates; to pursue competitive exchange rates rather than protecting your currency; to liberalize trade; to make it easier for foreigners to invest in your country; to privatize state-owned enterprises that aren’t very efficient; to deregulate sectors like telecommunications that used to be highly regulated in many countries; and finally, to secure property rights, making sure that there are better legal protections for them.

I imagine that a number of these you still agree with—securing property rights, fiscal discipline, and probably some of the tax reforms—still make sense. Some of this has become a victim of its own success. It probably was right in the late 80s and early 90s for many countries to deregulate. But just as I’m skeptical of the idea of ever closer union in the context of the European Union—because it has no logical endpoint, and surely there’s a right level of closeness—the same is true about deregulation. Some deregulation was good, but perhaps in some ways we went too far, and clearly we don’t want to always keep deregulating. Some things need to be regulated.

So where do your disagreements lie? Where was this perhaps wrong all along, now that we know a little bit more? Where have we done enough of the right steps that emphasizing them today just isn’t helpful? Where do you think we really need a new departure—a completely different set of principles to guide our actions?

Velasco: This is not black and white—it’s not Washington all bad, London all good. Pessimism is fashionable, but we have to recognize that the world did certain things reasonably well over the last 30 years. I’m old enough to remember the 70s and 80s, when inflation was high pretty much everywhere. Today—leave Venezuela and a couple of other countries aside—inflation is mostly low everywhere. That’s a big achievement. There are things about the Washington Consensus that of course have to be right.

Mounk: One thing I remember is that when I was in college, the big debates about the World Trade Organization were that this is going to screw poor countries—that the World Trade Organization was just a way to exploit India and China and make sure that they stay poor forever. Today, when you hear criticisms about the World Trade Organization—including from the progressive left—it’s that they screwed over steelworkers in Michigan. That is a very real concern, as we were talking about the inability to compensate some of the losers. We had David Autor on the podcast recently, who spoke about this—and that’s a serious topic. But it’s very different from what people were saying back when I was in college, which was that this is going to screw over those countries that have actually grown enormously over the last 25 years, significantly reducing poverty in them.

Velasco: The paper that we have in the volume makes exactly that point—that the benefits from free trade today, we know how to measure them better than we did before, and they’re humongous. You’re making a very interesting political point, which I agree with and not many people make, so I want to underscore it here. Because free trade has become controversial in the American Midwest or in the north of England, many people jump to the conclusion that free trade today is controversial everywhere. That is not true. The people calling for a more closed economy are not in India, not in South Africa, not in Nigeria, not in Turkey, not in Brazil—not in the emerging or developing world. They’re mostly in the United States and the UK and bits of Europe. So the idea that free trade is bad for the poor is one idea that simply did not resist the test of time.

Of course, when you liberalize—I said it already, but I want to repeat it—there are winners and losers and you need to address that. But a more open economy, Ricardo could have told you this a couple of centuries ago, is going to be good for the people making products that you can export. If you’re a farmer in Africa or a farmer in Latin America who couldn’t export that product before and now can, you are going to be better off. We’ve seen a lot of that. The last 35 years brought hundreds of millions out of poverty in India and China, and that’s a massive increase in human well-being.

So that’s the past. Let’s now move to the present. Where do we think that the Washington Consensus got it wrong? Let me mention two or three areas. One is that precisely in having that set of ten commandments, it oversimplified reality and sometimes provided the wrong medicine. Yes, privatization is justified much of the time, but it is not justified all the time. For instance, we learned during the world financial crisis that having state banks can be a stabilizing force, because state banks can do the things that private banks don’t do in the middle of a panic. Yes, deregulation of many over-regulated industries was probably called for in the 1970s, but having a well-regulated financial sector is absolutely crucial—and if you don’t have a well-regulated financial sector, you’re going to have crises like the one the world had 15, 20 years ago. The Ten Commandment approach—do this regardless of who you are, where you are in the world, what your level of development is—that’s bad economics, period.

The second thing where I think the Washington Consensus got it wrong is that it misunderstood the sources of human well-being and human frustration, because it said what really matters is financial payoffs. If there are no jobs in your town or in your province or in your part of the world, just move elsewhere. What we have learned in the last 35 years is that when people leave places like the American Midwest or the North of England or bits of Spain or bits of India, what is left behind are regions that go into a tailspin of decay—crime sets in, deaths of despair set in. Politically, these are the people who end up voting for Trump or voting for Brexit. We know today something we should have known all along: that people care about their paycheck, but people also care about belonging to a community that feels respected, and about identifying with a group that is felt to be respected. We care about belonging and we care about the wellbeing of the people around us. In our rush to decentralize and open up and deregulate, we forgot that. We paid a price economically, and we paid a huge price politically—because this is one of the sources, not the only source, of populism and rising authoritarianism around the world.

The Washington Consensus also got growth wrong. Growth is not simply about getting the government out of the way. Yes, government can sometimes overdo it, but government needs to provide many very crucial inputs. I’ll give you a concrete example from my own experience. I was the finance minister of Chile when Chile signed a trade deal with the European Union, which is still in force today. Part of Chile is in Patagonia, and Patagonia has a lot of sheep, so people were very happy because they could export mutton to the European Union. What did Chilean farmers who produce mutton learn very quickly? That their mutton was very high quality, but before you could export to the European Union, you needed slaughterhouses that were up to European Union standards. You had to guarantee that the animals had not been given medicines outside European codes, and that the transport was safe so that the meat would arrive in Europe without spoiling. Who provides those guarantees? Who certifies the quality of the vaccines that the animals are given? Who certifies that the slaughterhouse is up to a certain standard? Who provides the roads and the ports and the airports through which that product gets exported? That’s the government. So if you don’t have a state that is working with the private sector to identify those needs and those regulatory structures, you’re not going to export anything.

Countries that really had an exporting revolution—think of Ireland in the last generation, think of Singapore, think of Uruguay—these are countries with able states. Which takes me to my last point. Because the Washington Consensus felt that the state really has to be gotten out of the way, it forgot that a capable state is at the root of everything. You don’t have a thriving financial sector like the City of London—four blocks away from where I am—unless you have the best regulation in the world. You don’t invest in a market that is not well regulated; you’re going to lose your shirt. You don’t invest in a country where the judicial system is not up to par, because they’re going to steal your money and you can’t get it back.

Let me give you an example from the pandemic. Many countries spent a lot of money on vaccines and people died—there were hundreds of thousands of deaths because they didn’t have the state capacity to reach the last town in their territory and vaccinate the last person who needed it. This is not rich versus poor. In Latin America, some countries vaccinated everybody very quickly because they had the state capacity to do so—because they have been vaccinating people for the last 50 years. The country next door, perhaps a richer country, didn’t have that state capacity, and people died as a result. So it is not that we want to go back to the 1950s and argue big state against small state—this is not Thatcher against Marx. The question is: how do we get states to be able to do the things that states need to do? Guarantee private property, regulate finance, build good infrastructure, get people vaccinated before a pandemic. That requires a certain kind of policy and a certain kind of attention that the Washington Consensus entirely missed.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Andrés discuss the policy implications of the London Consensus and what artificial intelligence will mean for the economy. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Kathleen Stock is a contributing writer at UnHerd, a frequent columnist at The Sunday Times and The Times, and a co-director of The Lesbian Project, which she runs with journalist and activist Julie Bindel.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Kathleen Stock discuss why liberal arguments for assisted dying are less coherent than they appear, whether palliative care offers a more merciful alternative to medically assisted death, and how different legal regimes around the world reveal the practical challenges of institutionalizing end-of-life choices.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I’ve really looked forward to this conversation, though the topic is obviously somewhat somber. You’ve written a book about medically assisted suicide. You end up arguing against it, but I wonder whether, before we can get into those arguments, you can lay out the basic liberal argument for the practice. Because I think from a philosophical liberal perspective, there are some obvious arguments for empowering people to make their own decisions about the body, their own decisions about how to live and possibly how to die, that are quite powerful. What would you put sort of on that end of the ledger?

Kathleen Stock: Well, it’s part of the argument of my book that what look like powerful arguments from a liberal perspective actually are pretty incoherent. So it’s going to be difficult for me to convincingly lay out the case, since I spend so much of the book attacking these so-called liberal arguments.

Basically, there are two different argumentative strains, which are not often distinguished and are often sort of ventriloquized together, so people get confused. One of them is freedom and one of them is mercy. The freedom one, I guess, is the one that you would associate with liberalism—in my view, pretty illegitimately. That would just say something like, look, it’s my right as an autonomous human being to do what I want with my body. So it tries to tap into a long tradition within liberalism of having rights over one’s body and doing what one wants with it, and tries to justify an argument for state-assisted suicide or state-assisted euthanasia from that basic liberal right. For reasons we can go into, I don’t think that works at all as a justification for state-assisted suicide. It’s really about non-interference, and that’s not what most people who want assisted dying are asking for. Actually, I call it “assisted death” to make it clearer what we’re talking about.

The other argument is mercy. I don’t know if you’d call that a particularly liberal argument. I think it comes from a Christian tradition of relieving heavy burdens from people—of pain and suffering in this case. Everyone can understand that motivation. I do too. Those on my side of the fence have no desire to see people in pain or suffering. We just disagree about the best means of organising the relief of suffering in that way.

Mounk: So let’s go into each of those a little bit to steelman those cases. I really look forward to hearing and engaging with the arguments for why those are less coherent than might meet the eye.

On the first one, at the moment, in most jurisdictions, there are two kinds of obstacles. The first obstacle is that we can go to often state-provided, or at least partially publicly funded, medical services in various countries in order to get all kinds of health services, but we can’t get those services for assisted death. The second one is that in most jurisdictions, a doctor, or even a friend or family member who helps carry out your clearly documented desire to die at the end of a long disease, is going to be put in jail, is going to be prosecuted by the state. That’s where the kind of core liberal argument lies.

Now, you might say that liberal argument shouldn’t go so far as to say that taxpayer money should be used in order to facilitate this. I think that is an interesting argument to make, and we can get into what the particular moral considerations should be to use collectively funded pools of money in order to do something that some people have very strong moral objections to. I’m quite receptive to that, though it has interesting knock-on effects on other debates, like abortion potentially.

But at the very least, there seems to be a strong liberal case, prima facie, to say, well, we should stop criminalizing this. When somebody has a clearly documented desire to stop their suffering, the state shouldn’t be allowed to interfere and say, no, you’re not allowed to render them that act of mercy.

Stock: So that’s the best version of the liberal argument, which basically treats a contract with one other person as if it’s an extension of the individual’s right to do what he wants with his body. It says, look, this person has agreed and they know what they’re doing and I know what I’m doing. So the right of non-interference should come around us both and see off the state from our joint enterprise. So that’s an argument for lack of criminalization. It’s not an argument for state-organized, state-supplied medically or doctor-supplied death through the health system, and particularly the public health system. That’s a massive structure for what is being presented as a much smaller problem.

Now in the UK, and as I conceded at the end of my book, in 2008, the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, who is now our prime minister, basically decriminalized assisted dying, assisted death. It’s now very, very difficult to prosecute it, and I think there have been five prosecutions since 2008. So effectively, that’s where we are in the UK. I actually say that’s probably okay. I still think that there should be a criminal deterrent. I think that the state should be able to investigate, because obviously, if it’s completely decriminalized, then that opens up opportunities for coercion, particularly of elderly and vulnerably ill people.

Mounk: At the very least you would want an investigation to make sure that it in fact does assist the death and is not just murder, right?

Stock: I have a whole chapter on those sorts of cases, or at least a part of a chapter on the cases where it looks like it’s supposed to be benevolent, but actually the husband cut his wife’s throat or something. There’s something savage going on. But I would not have written an entire book against the decriminalization of private acts of assistance.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

What is happening is bureaucratized, organized, institutionalized assisted suicide and euthanasia, often within the context of public health, free at the point of use, and then filtered into the medical system, the legal system, changing social norms across the country, being advertised as a good thing, feeding into equality law. If this group has it, why can’t this group have it? There are all sorts of ramifications there ethically that just do not get covered when you treat it as a private individual act.

Mounk: So let’s dwell for a moment on the second argument for the practice—the argument for mercy. It doesn’t come in any particular way from the liberal tradition, but it is certainly something that the liberal tradition can also speak to. It is simply the recognition that a lot of people have horrible diseases. In many cases, it is extremely likely that the disease will lead to death within a clear time frame, and a lot of the time, some of the worst hours on earth that we spend are in those last days and weeks and months. So it does seem merciful in some cases to allow people to pass away two weeks, perhaps two months, before they otherwise would, having been spared some of the worst hours, having been spared some of the most extreme suffering and pain that they’re likely to undergo during that time period. What do you make of that argument? Do you see the force of it, or do you think that it’s confused in some way?

Stock: Well, what I’ve tried to do, and what I think we all should do, is talk about the systems we have rather than the ones in our heads. There’s no system I know of that says two months. They all say something like six months at a minimum, if not twelve months. Quite often they say, reasonably, “death is reasonably foreseeable,” which could mean anything up to three years. That’s one of the major problems with that formulation.

So we’re not necessarily talking about people in pain. They need not be in any pain at all. Nearly all the systems I can think of—in fact, all of them—talk about psychological suffering, or allow that psychological suffering, effectively allowing that no pain, just a kind of torment about the prospect of mortality or incapacity or whatever it is, may also be a reason. When you say death is definitely going to happen, well, if you’re trying to give a prognosis of six months, that’s actually really quite difficult to do. There’s not necessarily a definite in these systems. There’s a prediction which may or may not be correct.

But having made those qualifiers, yes—once you pursue this kind of argumentative line, you are saying that assisted suicide is a means to the end of relieving pain and suffering, and also some other stuff that we can get into about so-called “dignity.” But let’s just take pain and suffering as the general descriptor. My point is that we should not be zooming in and trying to think about the individual person who’s in pain and asking, well, is it right that this person here who is suffering has a quick death? We need to zoom out and constantly remember that we’re talking about a massive system. The question is not whether this person should have it. The question is whether the government, the state, should try and provide this en masse for people.

At that point, I say, well, there’s an alternative and it’s called palliative care. It’s a technology that few people really know about, and it’s certainly very imperfectly delivered, because it’s more expensive than providing death. But technologies in pain control and the secondary effects of pain control like nausea have really come on. Britain started the hospice movement and it should be a jewel in our crown—the idea that you provide places where the goal is not to get better, but to have a good death.

If your aim is to relieve pain and suffering, you’ve got two choices: palliative care or killing people, basically. I think the merciful system is the one that pursues the former, not the latter, for reasons that I go into—the effects on the whole. So it’s not that I’m unmerciful. I think I’m particularly merciful. I’m just trying to take a wider view on the effects of bureaucratizing death rather than the one that’s traditionally taken by my opponents.

Mounk: I have one more thing I’d love for you to do to situate us in this debate before we really get into the meat of our thoughts on this. What is actually the legal regime around the world?

Obviously you’re writing this because there’s a change of legal regime that is underway at the moment in the United Kingdom, but a lot of our listeners are outside the UK. What is the law of the land in most places in the United States, in Canada, in Britain, in continental Europe? What kind of range are we talking about? How is it that some of the actual developments in countries like Canada and the Netherlands motivate a lot of the concern around this topic?

Stock: Well, my initial impetus for writing was Britain, because it looked like, very suddenly, over the last year and a half, we were about to get assisted suicide delivered through our National Health Service. It now actually looks like that threat has been seen off for the moment, because the legislation is basically being held up in the House of Lords and the Scottish legislation has just failed. I’m relieved, because precisely the things that I’m worried about were the things that objectors talked about. Across the world, the picture is very diverse, and I really do try to summarize all the different trends. Jurisdictions are coming up pretty much with their own versions. Broadly speaking, you get three kinds of eligibility conditions.

The first is that you just need a terminal prognosis of some length—in some places it’s six months, in some it’s twelve, and in some it’s “reasonably foreseeable.” In those sorts of regimes, there’s no further qualification. This applies to Oregon, and I think most of the United States states where they have it—there’s no further requirement of pain or suffering. You just need the terminal prognosis. You need to establish that you’re not being coerced in some totally perfunctory way, and then you can get it. That of course means that you could be chronically depressed, you could have tried to kill yourself several times throughout your life, you could be homeless—you can be doing it for any reason whatsoever. The prognosis is what gets you through the door. After that, no one really cares about why you’re doing it or whether it’s actually related to your illness at all. The background rationale there is autonomy, and I have some doubts about that. In other regimes you need both. In Australia, in some states, you need both a prognosis of the right length and a diagnosis of intolerable suffering that cannot be remedied otherwise, or something like that.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

In Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands—this wasn’t always the case in Canada, but gradually, as is well known there, the law has extended and become wider in its remit through various legal challenges—all you need to access assisted suicide or euthanasia is a diagnosis of irremediable suffering. You do not need a terminal illness. That’s where you see, particularly in Belgium and the Netherlands at the moment—and actually indeed in Spain today, there’s been a case that’s just hit my newsfeed—young people with no underlying physical illness that would make them die anytime soon, or at all, but with chronic depression, personality disorder, and so on, being euthanized by the state. There are obviously a lot of differences in all of this, but I try to pick out some common themes.

It has basically become the case that assisted death is being used for any disease that might have a natural death as its outcome, because it will include cases, for instance, where the person is not taking their medication. So a person can get diagnosed with something like diabetes, or chemical sensitivity to cigarette smoke, or in one case I can think of, deafness—in these Canadian cases. Maybe they’ll have had a stroke at some point, so they have partial mobility. There’s this massive gray area where people are not fully well, but not dying by any means, and yet the state has and still will consider that their death is reasonably predictable, or that they are suffering enough to pass the test.

There are also people with learning disorders in Belgium and the Netherlands being euthanized. There’s a whole spate of anorexics who basically become so ill through self-starvation that they then get the requisite terminal prognosis, or someone says, well, your suffering is clearly intolerable—and either way, they then get euthanized.

These cases strike most people as horrific, and not what you imagine in the paradigm of the person in terrible pain in the last few days of a fatal illness. That’s not what’s happening.

Mounk: Just to cite one example that crossed my radar over the last few years—a woman called Zoraya ter Beek, who was 29 years old in the Netherlands. She’d been diagnosed with chronic depression, borderline personality disorder, and autism, had tried numerous treatments which clearly weren’t effective, and she was euthanized at her home in May 2024. This is somebody who clearly was in severe psychological distress, but it was a case in which death was not reasonably foreseeable any more than it is for you and me and for every human. Clearly, what was a much more restrictive regime earlier on got expanded and expanded in a way that then made assisted dying available to somebody who clearly wasn’t in physical pain in the last stretches of a fatal illness.

Stock: That’s an interesting case—I talk about it in the book. There’s also a case that came up today, as I say, in Spain: a young woman who seems to have been gang raped, who then became depressed—I’m not sure at what point, whether she was depressed before that, but she certainly was depressed afterwards. She tried to kill herself, then became paraplegic, and she’s being euthanized today.

I did actually, unexpectedly, have a related experience. I was giving a talk in Berlin last year, talking about the Zoraya ter Beek case, and as it happened a Belgian minister was in the audience—it was a gender conference and he was there to see what Belgium could do about youth gender medicine. He said, “I’m a doctor, I have euthanized people and I am partly responsible for the Belgian law.” I said something about 30-year-olds being euthanized for mental illness, and he said, “Listen, we don’t want our young people jumping in front of trains.” The implication being that the state will do it more cleanly. The trains will run on time, as far as I can see. You can get into that mentality quite quickly once you’ve got this mechanism in your system to deal with suicidal ideation, basically.

Mounk: So we have the arguments for some of these practices on the table. You don’t find them fully convincing. I have to say that they have a certain amount of moral pull on me. You’ve started to make some of the case against it. How do we balance between those different considerations? Why is it that rather than trying to restrict the practice, or trying to come up with more restrictive terms for it, you by and large conclude that the arguments are just muddled—that they ultimately don’t carry the weight of a burden of proof here?

Stock: Well, let me focus on the freedom arguments, because they are probably the ones that for some reason seem most attractive to people. I think they are fundamentally confused, because we’re not talking about a liberal right of non-interference—we’re talking about assistance, and we’re talking about assistance from the state, not just from your friend who’s agreed. The demand from the pro-assisted death lobby is that the state, in the form of doctors, should help. That’s not non-interference, and that’s not I want to be left to get on with my own suicide in my own way. Unfortunately, most of us still have that opportunity—not everybody, but most. It’s a grim fact, and one that I do not celebrate.

Generally, we don’t act as though there’s a right of non-interference in suicide. Generally, we have suicide prevention, we have suicide watches. But we’re not talking about someone’s individual right to do what they want with their body—and particularly not before we’ve brought the legislation in. So in Britain, we don’t have it. Now we’re in a public conversation about whether to get it, and before we bring it in, it’s somewhat incoherent to say, just leave me alone to have what I want. That’s not freedom—that’s just a demand that the state do something that I want. It gives us an extra choice, but so does extra breakfast cereals. It just sounds to me, from the perspective of a country which has yet to get it, that people going on about their freedom and their demands that their autonomy be respected are just not making sense.

Subscribe now

Now, if they were genuinely interested in freedom to die for everyone, why are they focusing only on the ill? In a way, the Belgian government might have the best idea if it’s really about freedom—anyone who wants to kill themselves should be facilitated by the state. But that’s never the argument. The argument is always about suffering, the ill. That suggests to me it’s not really about freedom for that cohort at all. It is about compassion—or at least that’s certainly a useful defense that opens the door to this sort of legislation. The freedom argument on its own really doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Because of course, once the institutions are in place, someone might be stopped from using them—maybe that’s going to be an inhibition on their freedom. But before the institutions are in place, their freedom has not been curtailed by the lack of them.

Mounk: Those are really interesting arguments, and I want to deal with the connection between the freedom and the compassion argument in a moment. But to stick with the freedom argument—within the very specific context of the United Kingdom and the law that was being discussed there, I think you have a point. But there is a way for liberals to restate the argument in slightly broader terms, which is to say that at the moment there’s, for good reason, a prohibition on murder. We often use the prohibition on murder in order to restrict every form of assisted dying as well. Obviously this is a very complicated issue, because in many cases there are going to be gray zones where we don’t know whether somebody really was in a state where they could request to die, or whether somebody is using this as a cover to commit murder. We obviously want to be very careful so that this doesn’t just become an end-run around the most vile crime there is, which is murder.

But as long as we fulfill those conditions, there could be lots of circumstances where we do want various forms of assisted dying to be permissible on freedom grounds. This could just be being allowed to access the kind of medication that you can take yourself. In general, the state needs a reason to prohibit me from buying all kinds of things, and the state’s reason to prohibit me from buying some kind of cyanide capsule—or whatever it might be that will have the intended effect of killing me if I take it—shouldn’t necessarily be there. One may also say, why shouldn’t I be able to entrust my friend or my relative with helping me die, if that’s what I wish? They need to be free from criminal prosecution if it’s obvious that there really was an agreement between us to do that. And in places where medical services aren’t necessarily state-funded, private insurance should be free to offer plans which include, as part of their provisions, financing for those forms of assisted death.

None of that would fall under your concerns about why it should be a responsibility of the state to provide this—which I take seriously. They would all do an end-run around that and fall more cleanly into the zone of non-interference.

Stock: I don’t think we need to get into the arguments about whether it’s freedom or not freedom. It’s not freedom to die anyway—you already had it. It’s freedom to make contracts with people who are going to help you to die, and it’s freedom to help others without going to jail. If you’re successful, you’re not going to jail. So let’s just say we’re now talking about a different kind of freedom to the one commonly used by the pro-assisted death lobby, which is freedom from pain, or freedom from the burden of your life, or freedom to choose. I think that’s just misleading rhetoric.

Mounk: I’m not part of the pro-assisted death lobby. I’m just a political theorist rooted in liberal values who’s trying to puzzle this through. The way that I would puzzle it through is from this perspective of non-interference.

Stock: I understand, but ultimately, in my experience, people really, really want this and they’ll find any argument that works for them to get it. Maybe we need to, instead of thinking about the arguments, also be thinking about the deep fears and unconscious motivations that are making this seem such an attractive option. That’s part of the book too.

But generally speaking, as I say, I wouldn’t have written a book against mere decriminalization. Some of the arrangements that you’ve just described would still need to be extremely carefully handled, and they start to shade into some of the worrying areas that I go through—for instance, coercion. There is a huge worry about coercion as soon as you have suicide pills floating around elderly, vulnerable, disempowered, ill people, with carers who have financial interests in freeing up their own time or getting their hands on a house or whatever. The courts are extremely familiar with the kinds of motives that lead to murder or manslaughter in this area. Whatever arrangements were put in place, it would have to involve the right kind of investigation, which would be expensive.

In Switzerland, I believe every death through assisted suicide has to have an associated investigation, and that’s enormously expensive for the Swiss state—in fact, it’s becoming so expensive that they can’t really deal with it anymore. Whatever arrangements were put in place, they never just affect the person who wants it and the person who’s helping them. This is the big message: they have knock-on effects for other people who want to carry on living.

Mounk: But something similar is true in lots of cases of non-interference where we still think that there is a compelling case for erring on the side of liberty. Alcohol consumption has all kinds of downstream costs for society. But I think we rightly reject the prohibitionist argument that because somebody who’s drunk is then more likely to lead to other kinds of social costs—from diseases they might suffer, to behaviors that might impose other kinds of costs on society—we should just ban alcohol altogether. So if you allow any kind of claim to non-interference, any claim to “this is something that I’m choosing for myself, for my own life, for my own body,” the fact that it might have certain kinds of downstream harmful social consequences shouldn’t be allowed to trump that liberty interest. Otherwise, we should be able to coerce people to go to university, and we should be able to coerce people to not get a divorce, and all kinds of other things.

Stock: My argument doesn’t depend on the general shape of some things that we allow people to do that have some bad consequences. My argument completely depends on the specific bad consequences of this thing. They are far greater, I can tell you, than allowing people to drink alcohol. We also do not let under-18-year-olds drink alcohol in most countries. I’d rather we just honed in on the actual implications for society rather than say, well, in these other cases we let you do things that are bad for you.

Now, we’re not just letting people die—we’re helping them. We’re deliberately bringing death into a health system. We’re making the very same doctor who in the morning gives you pain control, in the afternoon gives you poison. We are potentially changing the attitude of a population to their healthcare providers, particularly people who are already frightened of going to the doctor. Some of them will be terrified—no matter how often you tell them it’s all fine, they are still going to be frightened. We are placing a burden on every single person with a terminal diagnosis, because now they have to make a choice that was socially unacceptable to think about before, but now it’s there—it’s in the waiting rooms, it’s on the posters, it’s in the news—and they have to explain to themselves or others why they’re not taking that choice. None of this applies to alcohol. Let’s just focus on the problems that this would bring, and is bringing, in countries where they have it.

Mounk: The shape of the argument I’m making is not that these specific bad consequences are there, but that there are lots of other circumstances where individuals making choices—some of which might be bad choices—have harmful downstream social consequences. I’m just nervous about saying that in any case in which there are harmful downstream social consequences, that justifies us interfering with the liberty of the individual.

Stock: I’m not saying that though. So we agree.

Mounk: Well, I’m not sure we do, because there’s a question about... I just worry that when we’re talking about a case in which an individual makes a decision that’s primarily about their own life, but there are secondary and tertiary consequences for society that are complicated—you’re saying that, because of those secondary and tertiary consequences, that liberty interest should be superseded. I’m saying that if we acknowledge that principle in general, I worry that we’re going to be able to limit all kinds of other freedoms that we take for granted in a liberal society.

Stock: My principle is not the general one—it’s the specific one in this case. It’s perfectly acceptable for some attempts to instigate legislation to say, no, we’re not going to bring this in, not necessarily just because of the bad effects on the people it would directly affect, but also because of secondary effects. It’s perfectly fine to take those decisions on a case by case basis, and we do already.

I guess I’m just not getting it, because my argument is entirely directed to this particular case. I think assisted death is a Rubicon. It introduces state-sanctioned killing into societies which don’t even have the death penalty, and that in itself should give us pause. We need to look properly at all the implications—not just at what happens at the deathbed, but what happens across the system. The book is an attempt to get people to think about those things and to ask, is it worth it? Is it going to be worth it, particularly when you have palliative care that could be funded, that would achieve many of the same ends, perhaps even better?

There’s a range of problems—from the potential for coercion, to changing attitudes towards medicine, to slippery slope problems, to what we do with people who will probably be judged to have mental capacity but where we might not feel comfortable about that, like learning disabled people. Are they going to get it? Pregnant women—are they going to get it? There are just so many issues here to be thought through carefully, and they’re not going to be solved by a quick people should be free to do what they want.

Mounk: I feel very torn about this issue and I don’t know what I actually think about it. There’s a reason why a lot of people feel so torn. On the one hand, it does feel like if you suffer from a terrible disease, being able to decide what happens to you—being able to decide whether you want to go through that suffering or be able to cut it short—is an important form of choice we should have available to us. At the moment, in many jurisdictions, there are all kinds of things that are actively keeping us from being able to make that choice, such as being able to contact somebody to buy a pill that I myself can take that would put me out of my misery.

On the other hand, there are all of those very real concerns that I take seriously when I read about some of those cases of assisted death for people who don’t have a mortal disease, or older people who might feel pressured by their families. I read an interesting account recently by a priest who said he was in favor of assisted dying until, in his service, he spoke to a family that said, “Can’t we try and do this by Sunday, because we’re flying off on a skiing holiday on Monday?” That changed his mind. A lot of people have the interests of their loved ones at heart, and some people don’t—and that’s obviously a problem here.

I feel very torn about this, but I guess the way to get to the bottom of it is to try and size up those competing circumstances. One way that I think about this—and I wonder how you respond to it—is that the main way in which I’ve changed my mind about the world over the last ten years is that I’m much less confident about institutions. Ten or so years ago, I had a relatively high level of confidence that in countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany, where I grew up, our social institutions are relatively functional, work relatively well, have the interests of people at heart, don’t get captured by extreme ideologies, and don’t have deep forms of internal dysfunction. In that kind of world, I think I would have been much more open to legislation introducing something like assisted death, because I would have assumed that the doctors and others who make those decisions would act in a reasonable way.

One of the reasons why I’m much more sympathetic to your argument than I would have been ten years ago is that both from seeing some of those actual examples in the Netherlands, Canada, and elsewhere, and in my general assessment of these institutions, I’m now much more worried that there might be extreme ideologues in charge of some of those decisions who don’t take seriously the case for the other side, or that straightforward financial incentives may drive some of those decisions—with doctors realizing they could be helpful by freeing up a hospital bed. So perhaps we have a conversation with the patient again, and so on and so forth.

For you, is part of what’s driving this a fundamental distrust of our institutions? Do you think that in a place that had much more functional institutions, you would be more open to this case? Or is that not a big part of what’s driving you?

Stock: It’s definitely a big part of what’s driving me. In fact, it’s part of the point I keep making in this book—let’s stop thinking of utopias and let’s look at the systems we actually have, because that’s where we’re going to get assisted death.

In the UK, for numerous reasons, I’ve become more distrustful of institutions. In my previous book I talked about a total, catastrophic failure of the medical and psychiatric professions towards the bodies of teenagers and young people. I’m very aware of how institutions can be captured by glamorous moral precepts that are totally shallow, and as soon as they become bureaucratized, they just become not fit for purpose.

I’m also highly aware of the collapsing health system we have in the UK. People on trolleys in corridors for hours and hours, unable to get an appointment with their GP, care homes not being inspected for years, hospices closing because they haven’t got enough funding. Hospices are only 30% publicly funded—the rest is charity donations. The birth rate is declining, people are living longer, and that pension system is going to collapse soon. Put deliberate assisted death into a system like this and you will effectively have a cheap, quick outlet for many social problems—and the people involved will not be complaining about it afterwards, because they won’t be here. You will inadvertently funnel people towards taking this option, because as soon as assisted death is in a system, there is less momentum towards palliative care. That will actually speed things up.

Can I just go back for a second to the first part of your question, about fear? I think it’s really important and we haven’t covered it yet. The fear that able-bodied people have about terminal illness is often about pain, incapacity, loss of bodily function, inability to move around—things that disabled people live with now, and which are not necessarily terminal. As soon as you say those things are fundamentally undignified—so undignified that if the person wants it, we’ll kill them to get them out of that position—it is impossible to take that attitude and inject it into society in a way that’s sequestered from the rest of it, without having knock-on effects for disabled people. Effectively you are saying, you are in a fundamentally undignified position, and great that you want to carry on, but lots of people don’t, so we’re going to kill them or help kill them. That’s just a terrible message to send to disabled people.

I understand the fear, I’m human, and I also have experiences that are relevant to this. But I just don’t think personally the cost is going to be worth it. We’ll end up with a society that many of us will simply not recognize in about 50 years’ time. That’s my biggest fear.

Mounk: Speaking of some of these institutional failures, to what extent are there safeguards in place to make sure that when patients say they agree to die in this manner, that is actually the case? That doctors don’t try to pressure them because they could really use that hospital bed, that families don’t pressure the medical staff because perhaps they would like to go on that holiday—and one horrible case I read about where the inheritance tax was going to go up on January 1st, and therefore it would be useful if a relative died by December 31st. Those are the things that activate the fear on the other side—that these systems can get so out of control that you get these horrible cases.

There’s an argument I’ve heard from people who defend assisted death, that as long as the laws are drafted in a smart way and as long as they’re sufficiently robust to introduce genuine safeguards, those kinds of cases can be avoided. How would you respond to somebody making that case?

Stock: I’d like to see what they think these laws would look like, because as far as I can see, having looked extensively, they’re not like that at all. There’s very little attention paid to the background circumstances of the applicant. Ideally, in order to eliminate the possibility of coercion, you would want to know the financial status of this person, the family situation, whether there’s been any domestic abuse in their background, any convictions—and you’d want to know their history of chronic depression. None of that you’re allowed to know.

This is the influence of the specter of freedom and autonomy coming in to hollow out the safeguarding process. Every time someone tries to make an appropriate safeguard—saying, for instance, we should have a reasonable time of reflection before we administer the poison, or maybe we should look into whether there’s any domestic abuse charges against her husband—someone will come in and say, no, it’s none of our business, it would be an infringement of their autonomy. What you get is reflection times reduced systematically through various challenges. It starts off being administered by doctors, ends up being by nurses or pharmacists. Access gets wider, safeguards get smaller, because they are presented as obstacles to freedom. That’s the case in all the systems I’ve looked at.

Add into that the basic lack of money floating around most systems, and the fact that doctors really don’t know whether to say yes or no. Somebody comes in and says they’re homeless, or they’re alcoholic, but they’ve got cancer. They’re also dyslexic and can’t fill out the forms to get social housing. They say, I want to die. The doctor is not going to try and argue them out of it. They’ve got several months of life ahead, but the doctor is just not going to look for a reason to say no.

What you do get in Canada, perversely, is doctors feeling pressure to say yes—because if they don’t immediately get the MAID team in when somebody starts saying, I can’t live like this anymore, relatives may start accusing them of holding the process up. In Britain at the moment, I think doctors sign off something like ten million sick notes a year. Doctors don’t seem to be able to say no to people who want things, and I suspect there’ll be no incentive for doctors to say no to people who say they want death. They will just think, well, I’m just part of a bigger system, I’ll just sign it off.

We will not know whether that person was being coerced financially, physically, or whether they just want to get out of a horrible life—and I don’t mean horrible because of illness, I mean horrible because someone’s beating them up at home or whatever. None of that is going to come to light. I just don’t think there are systems that are financially well-resourced enough to establish it.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Kathleen discuss the decline of gatekeeping, why there are parallels between the arguments for assisted death and youth gender medicine, and the gender wars in the United States and UK. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books including The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sebastian Mallaby discuss why AI developers simultaneously fear and advance potentially dangerous technology, whether open-source AI models pose unacceptable security risks, and how China and the United States differ in their approaches to AI safety.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: There’s something that struck me about Silicon Valley in general, and that in your book you really get to the heart of through the lens of one specific character, which is that so many people in Silicon Valley both seem to believe that artificial intelligence is a miraculous technology with lots of good things, but also a really dangerous technology—technology that could potentially kill all of humanity. Some of the major efforts at advancing artificial intelligence were actually motivated by trying to understand this technology and make it develop in such a way that it would be safe. Yet those same people seem to be at the forefront of developing the very technology that they warn could destroy the world.

How should we think about that? If it was just one person, you might think it’s slightly schizophrenic, but you see it emerging again and again as a theme in different contexts—through the founding story of OpenAI and Sam Altman, but obviously also in the story of DeepMind, which you tell in your new book

Sebastian Mallaby: Yeah, you’re quite right. It was stunning to me that if you think about any of the early labs—like DeepMind, founded in 2010—the two scientific founders, Shane Legg and Demis Hassabis, meet each other at a safety lecture. Then you look at 2015: the early discussions between Elon Musk and Sam Altman about founding OpenAI were all about safety, about being responsible, being more safe than DeepMind. It was like a competitive safety thing.

Then you go forward and the next lab that gets started is Anthropic, which is started as a splinter group that thinks that OpenAI is not safe enough. So they kind of repeat the story that had happened earlier in the rivalry between OpenAI and DeepMind. Each of these labs began with the idea that they were going to be safer. Even Elon Musk, when he does Grok or XAI, he comes in with a record of having proclaimed his terror of existential risk from AI, going back to 2012 when he first met Demis Hassabis.

So you’re right, they’re all schizophrenic and it’s a pattern. How do we think about that? Well, in the end, my feeling is that it’s an enlarged version of all of us. You and I are excited by technology and also scared by it. Yet we take the trade, we move ahead. Why do we do this? Because we’re human. If we didn’t do it, humans would still be living in caves. We do accept technological risk, and that’s what these guys are doing.

Mounk: One of the leitmotifs of your book is this line that Geoffrey Hinton—a past guest of this podcast—says, alluding to Oppenheimer, that the thrill of discovery is so big that even if you’re very worried about its implications, it’s impossible to resist. I wonder, from your conversations with Demis and with others in the space, whether there is an ability to govern this technology.

I was really interested when I had Nate Soares on the podcast—co-author with Eliezer Yudkowsky of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. He seemed to me to be too pessimistic about the prospects of technological annihilation; he basically thought AI is definitely going to try and kill us. Then I thought he was really optimistic about our ability to stand up to that through public policy—that we’ll get just the right incentives in place so that nobody builds the machine that definitely would kill us if we did build it. I was struck by how pessimistic he was on the first point and how optimistic he was on the second point.

OpenAI gets founded to be really safe, Anthropic is a spin-off of OpenAI in a sense, a hostile spin-off of people who get worried about OpenAI, and now Anthropic is in some ways the leader of the pack. Does it just mean that our fate depends on what the natural tendency of this technology is going to be?

Mallaby: No, I think that’s too fatalistic. I agree with you that there is, in the Yudkowsky view, an extreme caricaturing of both the level of the risk—a 100% probability of doom, which to my mind is just ridiculously high—and at the same time, too much optimism about the ability of our policies to do something about it. It reminds me of Jeffrey Sachs arguing about development aid 20 years ago, where he would always stress how deeply poor and dysfunctional developing countries were, and then he would say, but if you give them a lot of aid, we can fix all of it. Both sides were wrong. I think that’s a classic posture of somebody who’s arguing for radical government action: to exaggerate the problem and then underplay the policy challenges of getting it right.

But I don’t think it’s correct to say we are hostage to some technology over which we have zero control, because there are ways of controlling it—you can control both the coding of it, the algorithmic design of it. There’s a whole field of alignment research to make large language models align with human priorities, and if more investment was going into that, we would have a better shot at aligning them better. That is something that can be done and worked on.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

An example of this would be the UK AI Security Institute, which does some of this alignment research. They once discovered a way that you could hack any of the leading large language models with a specific phrase that would unlock it to do things that were supposed to be off limits. Once you discover that, you tell the labs and they fixed the loophole, they fixed the security vulnerability. The point is you can do something on that algorithmic front. You can also do things in policy terms.

Open source and open weight AI models are ridiculously dangerous. Why would you ever allow this kind of technology to circulate without any ability to call it back if somebody starts to use it for a massive cyber attack on infrastructure? It’s crazy.

Mounk: Can you explain to people a little bit about open source? I think people may not be so aware both about what it is in general and what it is in relation to AI.

In general, open source has always been the idealistic, do-gooder approach to software—you can customize it yourself, you’re not in the hands of some corporate conglomerate. We’ve seen a tendency towards the AI labs that are perhaps not at the very cutting edge—that can create very powerful models, but models that are just a little bit less powerful than the most cutting edge ones—going open source, because it is a way to attract people to those models and make them use them.

As you’re saying, it means that basically you can download a model to your own machine and run it off your own machine in a way that is no longer subject to control by its original creator. In lots of contexts, that’s going to have positive elements—it makes it cheaper to use the technology. It means that, for example, if I wanted to handle some really sensitive information, if I wanted to create an index for a publisher and they don’t want to have any risk of somebody being able to train their AI models on that information, I can do that with an open source model because it would be closed loop. I know that the information is not being communicated back to anybody because I’m not running it on the internet.

So there are lots of positive things. But you are saying, interestingly, that in terms of risk mitigation, it’s really bad—because those same exact features also mean that if somebody starts using this to develop a really potent bioweapon, there’s no way that anybody can track that that’s what they’re using it for, or stop them from doing it.

Mallaby: There was a cyber attack in Mexico recently on a mass scale—pretty much everybody’s electoral records were hacked. This was done with the help of Anthropic. I’ve heard accounts that it was more than just help; basically a group used Claude to carry out this attack and Claude did most of the hacking for them. There was a bit of OpenAI being used as well, the ChatGPT model. Once the labs discovered that this attack was going on, they shut it down, because they had the ability to do that—it was not open weight. It was not on the machine of the bad guys; it was being used through a server controlled by the labs. That’s a real-life case of how you could shut down an attack.

I’ve been to war-gaming exercises organized by the RAND Institute, and the classic nightmare scenario is that you have rolling waves of attacks on Western infrastructure by some unidentified attacker—it could be the Chinese government, it could be a terrorist group, you just don’t know. All you know is that all your infrastructure is not working: nobody has clean water, nobody has electricity, everybody’s panicking, and you don’t know how to stop it because you don’t know who the assailant is.

Why would we risk this? We have war games telling us how this would work. We’re staring this in the face and we should be doing something about open weight models. It’s not easy because they circulate already, but at least stop the more powerful ones which are going to be created starting now.

Mounk: Llama, the models by Meta, have been open source. The Chinese have released a lot of open source models as well. Companies like DeepSeek, as well as the many other companies in China that now have pretty powerful AI models, have created models that are very capable and very powerful, but they’re not as capable as the latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. There is a kind of competitive reason to release open source models if you’re a little bit behind, because nobody is going to pay a premium dollar to have access to your model—they’re going to use the most high-performing one. But these models are powerful enough that if you can make them available to people much cheaper, they’re going to get a lot of use, and that’s good for visibility and all kinds of other things.

It is striking that the Chinese government, which in general is obviously quite conscious about its ability to control what’s going on in its country and in some ways around the world, has allowed that to go forward. That speaks to a broader conventional wisdom: that one of the dynamics here is a competitive race between the United States and China, and that supposedly China is less interested in AI safety than the United States is. I think you’re not so certain about that conventional wisdom.

Mallaby: A standard view in U.S. government circles is: the Soviet Union and the United States lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, they understood the existential risk of nuclear technology, they get that some weapons can be existential. The Chinese, on the other hand—their idea of catastrophic 20th century risk is the Great Famine, the Cultural Revolution, a politically-originated disaster. It’s not technological near-misses. To the contrary, in China, technology is associated with miraculous growth over the last 25 years. They want technology, they love technology. That’s the classic story, and if you try to talk to them about limiting technology, forget it.

I just spent eight days there and was really struck by how both top research academics and leaders of the industrial AI companies were talking about safety. When I was there, there was this furore over Open Claw—an agent you can download onto your computer and let it do agentic things: manage your email, do your shopping, whatever. It’s pretty good technically, but it’s also dangerous because you have to make your computer naked to this agent and you don’t know what it’s going to do with all your data. It’s some sort of open source code, so who knows what it’s going to do.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

All of the Tsinghua professors and other AI researchers I was talking to were saying people shouldn’t be downloading this—and yet there were lines of ordinary Chinese people outside the Tencent headquarters, waiting for engineers to help install it on their laptops. In the end, the government weighed in and said people should not be installing this. I think the debate is tipping in China. The Chinese state is not averse to regulating things—it has regulated the internet a great deal. Why wouldn’t they want to control open source models, which could become dangerous? It seems to me too defeatist to just assume they won’t.

Mounk: Part of the point here may simply be that the word “safety” is a very broad and capacious term, and the argument has been made that people just mean very different things by it. Part of it is that the United States is very influenced by science fiction, and so the kind of safety we imagine is the rise of the robots—will the robots try to kill us? Even at a slightly lower level, things like the risk of engineered bioweapons and so on.

In China, when people talk about AI safety, part of what they mean is political safety—that these machines need to be aligned with a particular set of views, not give too much information about particular historical events, and portray a positive image of the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, a lot of what happens in post-training in the United States is to make sure that Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and so on don’t step on various social and political taboos as well. A lot of the work in post-training goes into making sure that chatbots know not to use certain kinds of slurs and not to wade into territory that might be politically sensitive.

But have you found in your conversations in China that when you say the words “AI safety,” people just mean something different by it? Or do you think that difference has been overstated?

Mallaby: There are lots of definitions of safety, but I was talking specifically about alignment risk—the idea that the robots will not be aligned with what humans want and will actually act against humans. That’s what people were talking to me about. That was the point about the Open Claw thing: people were installing an agent which might just take it upon itself to do something which is not good for the user.

It’s not about political debates on what the large language model should or shouldn’t say. It’s actually about this more existential thing. Closely related to that is the point that it’s not just the machine that can be a bad actor—a human bad actor can get hold of it and use it to make a bioweapon or something of that kind.

Mounk: Those two risks are obviously interlinked but important to distinguish. What kind of levers does public policy have to govern the existential risks of AI safety, or the more day-to-day, bread-and-butter risks?

One problem is simply one of competition. I’ve had conversations with people in the European Union who I found to be slightly naive about this—who believe that the Brussels effect, which allows them to set a standard for how a car works and thereby creates a big incentive for car manufacturers to apply the same standards across different manufacturing contexts, means that the EU as a significant market can force a regulation that will by and large be listened to in the United States and other places as well. In the context of AI, where there simply aren’t very significant European AI companies so far—certainly not on a global scale—that logic breaks down. DeepMind is an interesting case because it started in the UK, but it’s now owned by a US conglomerate. Certainly when we talk about members of the European Union, there aren’t many significant AI players. There’s Mistral, and there’s the new venture that Yann LeCun is founding, but relative to US and Chinese entities, these are very small players. If somebody designs a bioweapon on one of those open source machines, that’s not going to stop at the frontier of the European Union.

There’s also a broader problem of how do you actually make the technical rules. What kind of rules would allow us to achieve alignment? Do you have a view on how to even begin thinking about this policy space?

Mallaby: These are two very different points. Let me just focus on the open source question.

The first thing to say about the Europeans is that they’re happy to tolerate open source because Mistral is producing open source—Mistral is in precisely the position mentioned earlier: if you’re not at the frontier and you can’t compete on quality, you compete on availability and you make it open source. That is the French strategy. They haven’t even got to the threshold of being serious about open source before they start proclaiming the extraterritoriality of their regulation.

Trying to stop open source is non-trivial. There’s a huge lobby of companies like Facebook Meta that create it, and in Europe, the French government wants Mistral to succeed and so wants to support its open source tactics. But if there was a policy shift and governments decided they wanted to control it, you would simply say to labs that were in your jurisdiction, or that wanted to do business in your jurisdiction, that they can’t be open source—at least if it’s a frontier model. There are going to be academic models that are experimental and much smaller, and those will be open source, and that’s probably fine. But the big frontier models are a different matter.

If you’re Mistral and you want to sell to U.S. consumers, you probably want to raise capital in the United States—you have lots of touch points with the United States, so you’re going to comply with an American regulatory decision. The big problem is you have to get China on board, because they are an ecosystem unto themselves. The assumption in the United States is there’s no point even trying that conversation. Based on just having been there, I’m saying: no, there is a point. I don’t think Trump is going to pursue that, because he’s not interested in anything other than AI acceleration.

Mounk: He also fundamentally believes in a zero-sum world, right? He thinks that most deals have a very clear winner and a clear loser, which doesn’t make it very appealing to try and strike a deal the point of which would be that both sides can win from it.

Mallaby: There’s an opportunity here for a Mark Carney-style middle powers initiative. He made a famous speech at Davos where he said that Canada and the Europeans can’t rely on the United States—they need to get together and act collectively rather than wait for America, because that’s just not going to be useful for the next three years. On AI, that is something where Europe, and maybe Britain in particular, could start a discussion with the Chinese about how to think about open source. The UK has some credibility on this, both because DeepMind is based there and because their AI Security Institute is extremely good. You begin the discussion—you can’t consummate it until there is a new American president, but that will come at some point. It’s worth getting that conversation started.

Mounk: Open source is one element of this. What about more broadly? If you imagined a real deal between a new U.S. president and perhaps a new leader in China—both serious about these things and recognizing that this is a genuine risk to humanity across borders—what could actually govern these technologies? We probably don’t want to shut AI down: it’s not feasible, and there are also tremendous benefits that can come from it, in medicine and science more broadly, that we don’t want to foreclose. At the same time, the people who have created these technologies are themselves extremely worried about how harmful the technology could be to humanity.

Subscribe now

Put aside for the moment all political constraints and imagine that we can write the deal and it will be approved. Do we actually know what that framework would entail? Because it feels like there are very, very knotty intellectual questions even about what kind of rules and regulation would, A) effectively control those existential risks, and B) do that without forestalling all of the potential benefits from the technology.

Mallaby: Demis Hassabis, the central character in my book about AI, has for quite a long time advocated what he calls a CERN—as in the Centre for European Nuclear Research—a kind of governing body which would oversee AI on a multilateral basis, propose policies and enforce them, or at least set the policies while national governments do the enforcing.

The elements of that policy would be: no open source, at least not for big models; and more investment in alignment, a branch of science and engineering that needs resources. You might also need tax incentives to require that private labs, whenever they spend a billion dollars on a training run to make a model more powerful, set aside, let’s say, 20% of that specifically for safety research.

The point is that safety is both a private good and a public one. If you’re Google, you don’t want your customers to feel the technology is unsafe, so you have some private incentives to invest in safety. But there are also spillovers into broader societal risk—infrastructure collapsing, terrorist groups being empowered—which are public goods, not private ones. Therefore the public authority needs to ensure that the level of investment in safety rises to the socially optimal amount. That implies either government spending on research and engineering into alignment, or taxing the labs and nudging them to do it.

So there are two important things: don’t do open source for frontier models, and do more research on alignment. The third thing is that, just as the Food and Drug Administration looks at drugs and determines if they’re safe to be released to market, there should be an equivalent body for AI models—they should be assessed, red-teamed, and only then released to consumers. That doesn’t exist anywhere in the world at the moment, which is crazy. But I think we’re going to get there in the end, because either governments will change their minds and do it, or there will be a Three Mile Island-type disaster and the public will demand it. It’s really a question of whether we do it before or after we suffer some AI catastrophe.

Mounk: You mentioned P(doom) earlier—the probability that this incredibly capable new technology will lead, however you want to define doom, at the most extreme level to the death of humanity, or at the somewhat less extreme level to the enslavement of humans by our new AI overlords, which ironically we ourselves as a species have created. Where do you put P(doom) after thinking about these topics for the last few years?

Mallaby: I’ll tell you a little bit about the journey. I began researching my book on DeepMind right around the time ChatGPT came out in late 2022. I already thought that machines were obviously going to be more intelligent than humans, and that normally more intelligent beings or agents will dominate the less intelligent ones. I could see that there was a theoretical risk, but I consoled myself with the idea that although the machines are more intelligent than us, or will be soon, they don’t have an incentive to dominate us. We have evolved over centuries and centuries to want to survive, pass on our DNA, and to fight viciously to be able to do that. Machines don’t reproduce in that way, they’re not evolved in that way, they don’t have a survival instinct—therefore, even if they’re cleverer, they won’t dominate us.

The moment I lost my faith in that argument was when I went to see Geoffrey Hinton, who was on your podcast, and sat in his kitchen in Toronto for two hours. What he pointed out to me is: you’re going to have a powerful AI in the future, and you’re going to be worried that your enemy is going to mount a cyber attack on it. As a human, you’re way too slow to respond to a cyber attack, so you’re going to empower your own AI to defend itself. Once you’ve done that, you’ve necessarily given it a sense of self-preservation, a sense of pain, a sense of fear, a sense of proactive defense. You’ve erased the distinction on which I had based my confidence. Now it does have a survival instinct—and it’s cleverer than us.

The bottom line on the P(doom) question is really a Rorschach test. People give a high P(doom) if they are temperamentally pessimistic about life and the world. Hinton—one of his former PhD students told me—was always worried about bioweapons finishing off humanity before he thought AI would do it. He always had doom about something. In my case, analytically I see the case for being very worried; temperamentally and emotionally, I just can’t get there.

This came up when I was writing my book. I wanted to explore what it feels like to be creating an existential technology—what is the sensation that you might be destroying humanity with what you’re doing? What was at first crazy, but on reflection not surprising, is that people would give safety lectures describing the possibility of human annihilation while smiling, even laughing at points. Contemplating the annihilation of humans feels absurd, and the absurd is a close cousin of humor. There is a sort of fascination—people are drawn like moths to the fire by catastrophe scenarios. It’s something deep in the human tradition: all the second coming predictions, the apocalypse, the religious iconography.

The first revelation of my book research was that not only Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, but all the other labs began—as we said earlier—with a strong perception that this could be disastrous. At the same time, they processed this feeling of disaster sometimes with laughter, and at other times, even when they were being serious and trying to think about how to fix it, they would go through experiment after experiment, hypothesis after hypothesis about how to safeguard it—and none actually worked.

With Demis, he wanted to negotiate with Google when Google bought DeepMind in 2014. He wanted to oblige them to have an independent safety oversight board that would have the final say on the rollout of AI, so that it wouldn’t be in the hands of a corporate board driven by profit. Initially Google agreed and held a first meeting, but that was a disaster because it was chaired by Elon Musk, who had set up OpenAI to compete with DeepMind. What followed was a secret negotiation—something called Project Mario—which I discovered and was given leaked documents about from inside the company. What you see there is three years of negotiations between Mountain View and DeepMind in London on how to put AI governance in place within a for-profit company. In the end it didn’t work, because the for-profit company couldn’t accept the idea of empowering outside independent figures who would have a say over their proprietary technology. There are other iterations of these experiments throughout the story of DeepMind—how do you make AI good, how do you make it beneficial for the world? It’s extraordinarily difficult. That’s why, in the end, we correctly talk about governments intervening. It needs to be policy, and it needs to be policy on an international level, with the U.S. and China talking to each other.

Mounk: One of the things that strikes me as interesting is that humanity has always thought that doom is upon us. From the story of the flood in the Bible to basically every junction in history, there has been some kind of millenarian cult saying the destruction of humanity is upon us—and often probably with a smile on their face. There is probably something in the human psyche which makes that thought both scary and exhilarating. Part of what’s exhilarating, of course, is that you stand at the cusp of history, that it’s your generation that is going to be involved in the final battle, and therefore your life matters. There’s a strange set of assumptions there.

It would be easy to use the historical context to ridicule any of these concerns. Humanity has been around for however many million years—human history is at least 10,000 years old—why should it so happen that you and I are alive at the very moment when the technology that is literally going to bring about doom is being created? Isn’t that just our ridiculous need for significance in the world seducing us into making those assumptions?

At the same time, you look at how quickly this technology is evolving, how powerful it is, the fact that it is the first time there is—or is going to be, depending on your exact interpretation—a technology that is objectively more capable than humans. The thought that that could all go horribly wrong is not exactly far-fetched. It’s hard to reconcile this fear of chronocentricity—the tendency to center our own time as the most important in the world—with the very cold, rational recognition that humanity now, from nuclear weapons to biotechnological capabilities to AI, has created tools and machines so vastly more powerful than anything that existed for 99.9999% of human history that there is real reason to think that this time it may actually be different.

Mallaby: Chronocentricity—we exaggerate the importance and uniqueness of our own time. It’s a kind of “this time is different”-ism.

The reason why this time could be different is precisely because this technology is different. It’s a new form of cognition—we haven’t had that before. A machine that can invent more machines is something we haven’t had before. Even if we downgrade our estimate, in my book I suggest this could be the biggest thing since the arrival of the human ability to do abstract thought, which is thought to have emerged around 70,000 years ago. Now we have a second form of cognition that can do abstract thought.

But even if you think that’s exaggerated and say it’s more like the Industrial Revolution—that’s still pretty big. The Industrial Revolution brought about social and political convulsions that led to Marxism, The Communist Manifesto in 1848, and a slew of revolutions across Europe. I’m willing to be Marxian in the sense that technological change drives social and political change, and it can be fairly revolutionary and bloody. We shouldn’t be sitting here in the 21st century forgetting the lesson of the 19th: that the Industrial Revolution was highly disruptive.

Mounk: Speaking of the Industrial Revolution, I want to ask you not about P(doom), but about the probability that our society gets really screwed up—which is the other obvious analogy to the Industrial Revolution and previous technological transformations.

The first thing to say about many of these previous technological transformations is that they were in fact terrible for many people at the time. In retrospect, the Industrial Revolution is a very positive thing—humanity is thriving across a huge number of dimensions to a vastly larger extent than before it. But for about 50 years, the living standards of average people did not go up, there were huge economic disruptions, and many people whose skills were displaced suffered greatly. Certain kinds of craft skills were automated away, and people who had invested real energy into learning those skills—often to a very impressive standard—no longer had a use for them.

But there was always a reservoir of demand for the kinds of things that humans could do. If you lost your job as a peasant or a hand weaver, you or your children could attain a higher level of schooling, and move into the rapidly growing number of jobs in offices or, more broadly, involving cognitive skills. Now we’re at a point where that escape route may no longer be available. There is obviously a huge debate—from some people in Silicon Valley who think every job is going to be gone in three years, which I find very naive, to certain economists who think it’s not going to have any impact on the job market at all.

What do you think the economic impact of all of this is going to be, including on the job market? How has talking to Demis and other people in the space shaped and perhaps changed your view on this?

Mallaby: One thing to start with is that this debate has been going on inside AI circles for a long time. When DeepMind was acquired by Google, they did have one safety oversight meeting, which took place in 2015. At that meeting, Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, made the argument that the pitchforks were going to come—that people were going to be displaced from their jobs and would come after the makers of AI. Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google at the time, said: no, you don’t understand economic history—when you displace some jobs, new ones get created. That familiar argument. This is not a new debate, and it’s worth recording that, because we’re still having it and we need to move to actually do something about it.

My view is that humans can retain a role in some areas of the economy and also in some areas of living. Human-to-human interactions are probably something we’re going to be better at. AI can be actors and therapists, but I think humans probably provide better quality companionship. That bleeds into things like enterprise sales—I suspect humans will retain an edge in areas where emotional intelligence and being a biological intelligence who sits down next to somebody and looks them in the eye remains powerful. Then there’s goal setting: we don’t want machines setting goals for us. Whether that’s a political leader or a volunteer organizer at a local level, goal-setting up and down society will remain a human thing. Entrepreneurship is clearly another good example.

Then there’s going to be a whole range of changes in how we spend our time, which have the character of chess. A computer defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, so we’ve run the experiment over almost three decades of computers being better than humans at chess. The number of chess players has gone up. The number of people who watch human chess players has gone up. No human fans watch machines play against machines. Instead, human champions train with the help of machine champions, get better that way, and discover new strategies thanks to AI. People’s passion for chess and the time they spend on it has gone up, not down. I think we’re going to be quite good at discovering new hobbies, activities, ways of competing with each other, ways of getting fulfillment and finding meaning in life that are not in the traditional category of paid activity—not a job, but a passion that can keep us going.

Mounk: We do need jobs, at least in our current economic system, in order to have a livelihood. I really don’t believe the line that all jobs are going to go away—I think that’s terribly naive about both what actual jobs consist of and about all the regulatory and other obstacles to many of those substitutions. But it would be enough for two things to happen: A) that a lot of people who are now in very well-remunerated employment lose their jobs and are upset about that; and B) as a result, there is now an oversupply of highly skilled human cognitive labor, which depresses the wages even of those who do retain a job, because the number of people who could plausibly substitute for them has gone up significantly.

If you imagine that playing out for even 50 years—which would roughly equal the duration of the disruptive phase of the Industrial Revolution, let alone forever—that would have profoundly troubling consequences for our political system, for our ability to sustain social peace, and for people’s sense that institutions are working. How should we think about that?

Mallaby: A key point that more people need to understand is that you don’t need to posit that all people in some category lose their jobs. If only 20% lose their jobs, they will compete down the wages of the others, and that will create mass unhappiness. Think about COVID—unemployment spiked to something like 10 or 12 percent at some point, and that triggered an enormous fiscal response from the government. Stimulus checks were mailed out to every single American. We’re saying that even if just 12% of the workforce lost their jobs, that is politically and socially unacceptable, judging by what the government’s response was during COVID. So yes, I think it’s very troubling.

In a funny way, this is actually the reason I got to write my book. I went to Demis Hassabis at the beginning of my project and said: you may not particularly want to spend 30 hours speaking to an author so they can get deep access and write a book about you, but you don’t have a choice. First, if you’re right—as you say in all your speeches—that AI is going to be the most important technological invention in human history, it follows that you, as its creator, are one of the most important people in human history. If that’s the case, there will be a book about you. Furthermore, you should welcome a book because if you’re going to disrupt people’s lives with your technology—change the way they bring up their children, change the way they conceive of themselves as human, because there are now machines that can think—you had better explain your motives for doing this to the world, because otherwise it won’t be accepted.

If I go down the list of the leading AI lab leaders: Sam Altman at OpenAI, especially following the debacle with the Pentagon, is viewed by many as a slippery opportunist—perfectly willing to undercut safety principles in order to snag another government contract. Elon Musk has his own vainglory, and I don’t think most people would trust him. Dario Amodei does stand out for principle, but is very focused through a scientific lens. He’s a very deep scientist, very smart—but I think he sometimes underweights the difficulty of turning what he calls “a database full of geniuses” (his expression for AI) into actually using that intelligence for positive effects on economic productivity or whatever else you want to do with it. There are so many social and institutional frictions, and perhaps that is not what he thinks about because he’s such a pure scientist.

Demis Hassabis, who I wrote about, is by far the most relatable, normal, and reassuring figure in the field. It’s good that people should get a chance to understand what it’s like—it perhaps makes it easier to accept what’s going to happen.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Sebastian discuss the broader economic changes triggered by AI, what would happen if OpenAI went bust, and why there isn’t an AI bubble. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Ruy Teixeira is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter, The Liberal Patriot. His latest book, with John B. Judis, is Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ruy Teixeira discuss why The Liberal Patriot is shutting down after five years, how the Great Awokening is still driving the Democratic Party, and whether the Democrats have learned the right lessons from Trump’s 2024 victory.

Persuasion is a registered non-profit and relies on paying subscribers to pay the bills. If you would like to make a donation, please click here. We’re so grateful for your support!

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I have to say that I would like to talk to you under more pleasant circumstances. You are one of the co-founders of The Liberal Patriot, which I have been reading religiously for the last five years. I am sure that many of my listeners are well-acquainted with The Liberal Patriot. I, like many of your readers, was shocked to learn a few days ago that you are closing down the shop. Tell listeners a little bit about the publication and why you saddened our weekends with this news.

Ruy Teixeira: Well, it started about five years ago. It was started by a group of people who either left or were in the process of leaving the Center for American Progress. They were worried about the state of the Democratic Party and that they did not seem to be absorbing the lessons they should from the rise of Trump and right-wing populism, and some of the other ways politics had evolved in the country. It was weakening the support sustained among working-class voters and moving to the left, quite severely, on cultural issues and a lot of other things.

We were just disquieted about that. We thought we would start a Substack where we put forward a different philosophy and a different approach, and had a no-holds-barred attitude toward the problems of the Democratic Party. Sometimes we summed it up as “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America.” Sometimes we looked at it as a combination of social-democratic economics and cultural moderation. But it was certainly different from the mainstream of the Democratic Party and where it was going.

Given that we started this five years ago, as you can figure out from the math, this was right as Biden was coming into office and right on the heels of the “Great Awokening.” Well, the crest of the “Great Awokening” in 2020—the George Floyd summer and all that. As a longtime observer of Democratic politics and someone who was actually hanging out at the Center for American Progress at the time, it was like, “What the hell is going on?” I could not believe the things people were saying, the causes they were taking up, and the intolerance and “cancel culture” type attitude toward anyone with a different point of view.

Mounk: Take us back to that moment. We do not need to go through all of the summer of 2020, but the Center for American Progress was founded by the center left, right? It was founded, I believe, by the Clintonite faction within the Democratic Party. It was a very center-left establishment think tank and was dominant in the 2010s. How did CAP evolve in the years before your departure?

Teixeira: Well, when it started out it really was a more conventional center-left think tank. They were pretty focused on—just because it started in 2003—getting rid of the Bushies and managing to move the Democratic Party back into power and not really pushing the envelope on cultural issues necessarily. But that really changed over time. The two things the center did that were most well-known to begin with were that they laid some of the basis for Obamacare and they basically did a lot of stuff around the Iraq War and how we needed to get out of it. It was pretty unradical kind of stuff, really.

As time went on, and as the Obama administration came into office and went through its second term, you could see that the nature of the party was starting to change, and CAP fully reflected that. People really were moving to the left on a lot of cultural and other issues. They really were becoming more intolerant of the other side. Black Lives Matter started in 2013. It may have crested in 2020, but those kinds of ideas were already out there, and they really were infecting the minds of people in the Democratic Party infrastructure—the think tanks, foundations, the arts world, legacy media, you name it. You could already see the hints of it evolving.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

As people who have a more small-c conservative attitude toward cultural issues in the sense of being for equality, anti-discrimination, and tolerance, we are not really on board with a lot of this more radical stuff. That is just going to scare off a lot of voters. Besides, what is progressive about racial preferences, for example? But that became a harder and harder thing to sustain at a place like CAP, and indeed within the center left in general. I think things really had a phase change after 2016 because Trump won, as we all remember.

People could not process it on the center left, in my opinion. That was very true at CAP. All they could think of was that this was a result of racism, xenophobia, and all the other things that “deplorables” of our nation believe in and that Trump managed to mobilize. That was really all there was to it, and we must resist, resist, resist. As someone who followed American electoral politics for a long time, I just did not think that was an adequate understanding of why the Democrats did lose, and why working-class voters deserted them so severely, particularly in the Midwest.

It was, in a sense, at least partly a revolt against neoliberal economics in trade, in manufacturing, and a lot of other things in many left-behind communities. People were not too happy with the way the country was going. All the Democrats could think of was how awful these people were—just beyond the pale. Of course, things just got worse over the course of the first Trump administration.

Like I say, it’s a phase change. By the time you get to the lead-up to the 2020 election and the George Floyd summer, that’s when things really got out of control. You saw this incredible group-think on a lot of these cultural issues.

Mounk: For those four years, you are trying to stay a loyal soldier of the center left. You stay within CAP. You are trying to push the Democratic Party to address some of these issues, both because you disagree with some of the policy positions they are embracing, but more broadly because you think that this kind of stuff is going to lose them elections, that it is not what is needed in order to defeat people like Donald Trump.

What finally pushed you and some of your co-conspirators to say, in order to actually push the Democratic Party to reform in these kinds of ways, we have to leave CAP, we have to start this new publication? What were your hopes for what this publication would accomplish in 2020?

Teixeira: Well, it is true what you say, Yascha, that for years I was more in the loyal soldier position. I was always tugging at people’s sleeves at CAP. Well, don’t forget about the white working class. Don’t forget that we are really doing pretty badly among this demographic. They are still pretty big. They do not really think the Democrats are their party, and this could really hurt us.

Mounk: For people who do not know the backstory and who have not listened to the excellent earlier episodes with you on The Good Fight or read the work you published in, I believe, 2002, you had some authority on this. You are one of the people who coined the concept of the “emerging Democratic majority,” which emphasized that Democrats could build on the diversification of the United States. They were doing very well among knowledge workers and people who have gone to college, but also among racial minorities that are growing as a share of the population.

When you say, Democrats can build on all of that, but if they fall below a minimum level of support among the white working class, the electoral math is not going to work out, that carries weight. It comes from somebody whose strategy all along was not just that Democrats need to build in the white working class. You were saying Democrats can win thanks to these new voters, assuming that they retain significant support among their historic constituency, which was the white working class.

When you go to people saying, our policies are so alienating us from rural voters and the white working class that we are not going to be able to win, that carries more authority than it would coming from some random policy analyst.

Teixeira: In my book with John Judis, The Emerging Democratic Majority, we framed things in terms of a progressive centrism that would be consistent with the way the country was changing, but would not be obviously too far to the left. They would have to retain a core of white working-class support that could not afford to shrink much.

The reason 2016 is a phase change in all this, Yascha, is because I had been reminding people of this over and over in my role as a loyal soldier. Nobody was paying any attention. Then, after 2016, they are taking this event that I more or less predicted and, instead of trying to remedy the weakness, they are making it worse. They are paying no attention. They are consigning all these voters to the eighth circle of hell. How are you going to win people over on that basis?

When you fast-forward to 2020 and the peak of the “Great Awokening,” obviously this stuff was not going to go well with many of these voters. This was not the way they were going to win any of them back, even if Biden did manage to win the election. In the process, I noticed a very important thing, which a lot of other people did as well: non-white working-class voters were starting to weaken their support for the Democrats. That was what really led us to think this is ridiculous. If they do not realize they have a problem when they are losing support not only from white working-class voters, but from non-white working-class voters as well, what can we do?

As you know, Yascha, from the way the Biden administration went down, he ran as a moderate, but he did not govern in a particularly moderate way. It was symptomatic of the way the center of gravity of the Democratic Party had changed dramatically, both in cultural and other ways. The kind of people who are staffing his administration, and their supporters outside of the administration—what John Judis and I called in our other book the “Shadow Party”—were pushing the party very strongly to the left. The Biden administration was responsive, and it did not seem like that would go very well, either.

That is the kind of stuff we started to write in 2021 and onward to warn that the way the Democratic Party is going at this point is like being on a train bound to hell and not realizing it. This is not going to end well; bad things will happen. We wrote a lot and made some cogent arguments, but people did not really want to believe that the problem was as deep as we said.

Then, in the 2022 election, the Democrats did better than they thought they would. They now clean up in special elections where their turnout advantage among higher-education, more engaged voters is typically operationalized. You have a formula for the “Great Forgetting”—the great refusal to engage. I think we are seeing it again. That is really what my latest piece is about.

All Democrats should consider it a cataclysmic defeat. This guy who they anathematized and thought would never come back won the popular vote. He won all the swing states. What is it you do not understand about the danger you are running? How quickly they forget. For a few months, there was some moderately serious effort to engage in it, but now people have completely forgotten about it. They just want to oppose Trump. They are doing great in the special elections and did well in 2025. Unless something drastically changes, they will do quite well in 2026, I think. It is just like: why change? Why bother? We have them on the run. Trump is so terrible that the masses of honest workers and peasants have finally woken up and rejected right-populism forever. I think that is not true.

Mounk: The steel-man argument on the other side is that some of the most toxic practices of the period around 2020 have subsided—that not just the Democratic Party, but more broadly progressive institutions, have walked back some of the most absurd outrages of that time. People are no longer getting fired for referencing a Chinese filler word that has a passing resemblance to an American swear word. Electricians in San Diego are not getting fired because they have a hand dangling out of the truck and somebody thinks they made the “OK” symbol, which they somehow associate with white supremacy.

I was at a dinner with people who have broadly heterodox views yesterday and someone said, “I just don’t feel afraid that somebody is going to try and cancel me in the way that I did five or six years ago.” It does not feel like when I voice my perfectly tolerant and reasonable opinion out loud in a cafe or restaurant, I have to take my voice down a notch.

Of course, the unpopularity of Donald Trump is real. Trump has come in and governed in such an extreme and irresponsible way that perhaps the Democrats do not need to change all that much in order to win the midterm elections. They are likely to win the House; they may even win the Senate, which would be a remarkable feat given the map. Why shouldn’t Democrats just keep going the way they are? As you know, I do not fully agree with the steel-man version, but I am trying to give you that version here.

Teixeira: I do not think Democrats need to change anything to do well in 2026. You could argue that if they change a few things they might do even better than they are likely to do, but given the nature of this upcoming election—the way the out-party tends to do well in these midterm elections anyway—and how unpopular Trump is, I do not see how they do not take back the House. I do think they have an outside shot of taking back the Senate. Broadly speaking, it will be a very good election for them.

The longer-range issue is how the Democrats change their pretty toxic image among tons of working-class and rural voters around the country, where they are still viewed as being pretty out of the mainstream in terms of these other culturally freighted issues. As I pointed out at the end of my piece, Democrats’ economic program is nothing to write home about, either. They will do well in 2026, but I think their brand is still pretty terrible, particularly among working-class voters. You need to change that if you are going to succeed on the presidential level, and more generally in terms of forming a more stable majority coalition.

Mounk: There was an amazing poll recently, which mostly was paid attention to because of what it found about artificial intelligence. But it revealed something interesting about the Democratic Party: artificial intelligence is now very unpopular in the United States. The two things that are less popular than artificial intelligence are the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic Party.

Teixeira: Nothing has been unsolved in terms of those underlying problems. The problem is that Democrats do not want to solve their underlying problem and feel they can get away without doing much about it at the current time. In terms of the specific stuff you were mentioning about race and cancel culture, I do think that at the elite level, it is harder to cancel people and they are less interested in doing it than they once were. You are a bit safer in terms of saying particular things in particular contexts.

The fact remains that people who are very culturally liberal—the radicals—still have control of the commanding heights of cultural production. They are still ensconced in universities, newspapers, foundations, the infrastructure of the Democratic Party, and NGOs. I think they are all still there; they have just sanded off a few of the rough edges. The question becomes: if you really want to change people’s perception of the party, its image, and its fundamental commitments, do you not actually have to change some of your positions instead of just not talking about them?

As I pointed out in that article, and as Lauren Egan mentioned in an article in The Bulwark, the typical approach of the Democrats now is to “shut up and pivot.” Do not talk about what your positions are on unpopular issues. Just immediately attack the billionaire class and say this is a diversion from the rich fat cats picking your pockets. I think that is the party line now, and it is not a very promising way to change your image in a fundamental way. It is a way to win the next election by deflecting.

Where are the Democrats who are willing to say forthrightly, actually, I think DEI programs are a terrible idea. I think race-based affirmative action is a bad idea and I do not support it? With a lot of these issues—trans rights is another one—you find that they are either not talking about it, or they might mutter something about how some of this stuff may have gone a bit too far, but it is basically noble stuff.

Mounk: I want to go into some of those positions in detail and really think through what the reasonable positions would be. I guess my position on this is that we are in a two-party system. That means that if one party is really unpopular, it allows the other party to be pretty damn screwed up and do relatively better. That always goes to the benefit of the opposition party.

The Biden administration was sufficiently dysfunctional and Joe Biden, of course, was sufficiently mentally unsound. People looked at that and said, I don’t want that. They went back to Donald Trump despite everything we knew from his first term about how irresponsible he was. Now that Trump has come in, he had a great opportunity to actually turn the Republican Party into a multiracial party of the working class. He has completely squandered that opportunity.

He has been culturally extreme in ways that go well beyond the American mainstream and has made significant blunders, like the current war in Iran. I think he is going to be so unpopular that, in the midterm elections, Democrats are going to do very well. Probably even in 2028—if you asked me for a point estimate right now, if I had to place a bet on one of these betting markets—I would say the Democrats probably retake the White House in 2028. I do not want to be certain about that because Trump is term-limited.

Teixeira: What would your probability estimate be?

Mounk: 60/40. The reason for that is I think Republicans have an ability to rebrand; they have an opportunity to rebrand. Primaries are unpredictable once the person who has been dominating the party for a very long time is out of the way. I do not think it is unimaginable that Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and perhaps Donald Trump Jr. compete for the mantle of the MAGA movement and they split the vote. Perhaps someone like Spencer Cox somehow manages to win the nomination, and suddenly the Republicans go into 2028 with a much more palatable face, which would be great.

Teixeira: I think Marco Rubio would be actually a fairly forbiddable candidate. We could argue about that, but that’s what I think.

Mounk: Yeah, I agree. He would have real strengths. Anyway, I do not think the shadow of Trump will remain that strong. I think that if the administration keeps going the way it has for the first year and six weeks of being in office for the next nearly three years, people are going to be so sick of them. The Democrats have a good chance of winning.

But there are two fears that I have. Number one is the Keir Starmer scenario. The Tories were in power in Britain for ten-plus years, and people got deeply sick of them. That was enough for Keir Starmer—who was never charismatic and never had a substantive political vision of his own—to come into office. Because he did not have a coherent governing program and because he did not solve some of the underlying problems of the Labour Party, within a few months he was deeply unpopular. Now it looks like Reform is likely to win at the next election.

A broader way of putting this is that it depends on what you are solving for. If you are solving for getting Donald Trump and his chosen successor out of the White House in 2028, perhaps Democrats do not have to do that much. It is a risky strategy. It would be much more likely to succeed in that crucial undertaking if they changed more, but perhaps it is not necessary.

But that is not the problem for me. The actual challenge for me is that we are at a moment when people who are very dangerous to basic democratic norms and institutions have the commanding heights of the Republican Party. We need to lastingly and convincingly beat them to force the Republican Party back to the negotiating table—to make sure that they have to expel those extremists from the commanding heights of the Republican Party in order to win elections. That has to happen not just in 2026 and 2028, but for long enough for the Republican Party to make those reforms to themselves because of the wilderness they are in. That, I think, would take much, much more than being, in the eyes of many voters, the lesser evil in 2028.

Teixeira: Well, just to clarify what I was going to say about “necessary”: are you satisfied with a 51–49 or 52–48 chance of winning, or do you want to maximize your probability of victory? If the situation is as dire as you say it is, then Democrats should view it as a necessity to maximize their ability to win that election. You do not just want 60–40; you want something like 75–25.

May I recommend the report I wrote with Yuval Levin, Politics Without Winners? It is all about the idea that we are now in a very peculiar political space where we basically toggle between the two parties. They do not get to hang around very long before they are tossed out because people get sick of what they are doing, and there is no stable, dominant majority coalition.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

What you want to do is get to that point. You do not want to just alternate with right-populists for another 20 years; you want to have a stable coalition that can govern effectively, make the country prosper, and gain the default allegiance of the American voter. Conversely, if you were the Republicans, you should want the same thing.

As you are pointing out, there was a brief moment where, if Trump had played his cards right and the Republicans had governed in a different way, they really could have grown their coalition. They could have been much more moderate on cultural issues and avoided a weird, tariff-heavy economic regime.

Mounk: Well, if they had secured the border with Mexico and even done some deportations, but not gone after people who’ve been here for a long time…

Teixeira: They did not need to do that. It was a way of manufacturing bad publicity for the party and not doing anything very effective. Everything they did, they overdid. If they had played their cards right, they had a chance to sustain a fairly high level of popularity, consistent with Politics Without Winners.

As you say, let us say the Democrats do get back in in 2028. What is the guarantee that they are not going to have a light version of what Biden tried to do that would wind up being very unpopular? It is very unclear what they would do on the border, on the economy, on DEI, or on trans issues. I think the fundamental radicalism of some of the left agenda that the Democrats have adopted in the last 15 years would actually come out because they have not changed. Their underlying positions are roughly the same.

If they want to maximize the probability of not only winning in 2028, but sticking around for a while, they would be well advised to change some of these underlying positions.

Mounk: The only smart way to think about the future is in terms of scenarios, and I am going to defy that and give you a point estimate. I think it is less than 50% that this exact scenario will play out—it is probably less than 5%—but I think the Democrats are going to win the midterms: definitely the House and possibly the Senate. I think they will eke out a victory in 2028 unless they really self-sabotage.

Then you are going to have the Keir Starmer problem. Very quickly, they will become unpopular because they will overreach and because they have not actually developed a substantive vision for how they want to govern. In 2032, we will see the Republicans romp back into power. Whether the leader at that point is J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, or Donald Trump Jr., it will be potentially even worse than the current Trump term.

I am conscious of the fact that in this conversation we have presumed both a substantive case that Democrats are in the wrong place on a bunch of these issues, and that people are going to agree with that. I want you to lay out really clearly, in a few of those areas, how concretely Democrats are actually in the wrong place. We can go through the valedictory piece you published with the lovely title, No Learning, Please, We’re Democrats. You say they have a cultural problem. What concretely is that problem? What are some cultural positions the Democrats have that they need to move away from, and what should the position on those issues be?

Teixeira: There is a long list of issues with cultural content where Democrats are much farther to the left than they used to be. We recently discussed DEI and racial issues; clearly, the Democrats are too far to the left on these. People do not really believe in DEI, except in the sense that everyone should have an opportunity. Equal opportunity is popular; equal outcomes are not.

The fact that there is not a completely proportional representation of different racial or other groups in a professional setting or for a given set of rewards is not prima facie evidence of racism. However, that became a widely-accepted position within the Democratic Party and remains so today. The solution should not be racial preferences. People should be judged on the basis of merit—how good they are at a task, how well they did on a test, and how competent they are. This is a fundamental principle of fairness that Americans deeply believe in.

By soft-pedaling or outright opposing the idea of merit-based rewards, Democrats have gone far out of the mainstream. Where are the Democrats today who are willing to say that DEI is not written into the Constitution, as Hakeem Jeffries suggested? Where are those for merit-based rewards and jobs who do not believe in racial preferences, but want everyone to compete on an equal playing field while remaining against discrimination? I do not see them.

The immigration situation is also extraordinary. In the late 20th century, Democrats had a very different attitude toward immigration. They were unafraid to say the border should be enforced or that people here illegally should be deported. They were willing to entertain the notion that there might be negative aspects to open immigration, such as pressure on the low-wage labor market and unions. This changed drastically in the 21st century, culminating in the spectacle of quasi-open borders under President Biden, where every lever was pulled to make it easy to enter the United States and stay indefinitely. This resulted in the biggest wave of immigration since the early 1900s. This was not what people in the United States wanted; quasi-open borders were not popular.

Subscribe now

Tied to that was the culturally radical position that anyone objecting to this surge or the gaming of the asylum system must be a racist or a xenophobe who dislikes immigrants. This was the hegemonic point of view in huge sectors of the Democratic Party, and it was divorced from how most people look at the world. People believe borders count and that if you come here, you should do so the right way. They did not hate immigrants, but they did not like a wave of illegal immigration.

Another example is the trans issue, which hurtled to the top of the Democrats’ litmus tests within about ten years. It became de rigueur to say trans rights are the preeminent civil rights issue, despite the fact that it was not historically controversial to say there should be no discrimination in housing, employment, or marriage. Instead, there was a push for everything from personal pronouns to gender-affirming care for minors and biological boys in girls’ sports. Underneath it all is the concept of gender identity—the idea that everyone has an innate identity that should frequently trump biological sex.

The idea that biological sex is real and that there are two sexes became a marker of transphobia. Anyone who believed that was labeled a transphobe. Look at what happened to Representative Seth Moulton, who said he was unsure about having biological boys on girls’ sports teams. He was hammered; his staff quit, and he was denounced as a Nazi.

That is an example of something far to the left culturally that became the dominant tendency in the party. It remains hard to dissent from the trans rights agenda, including gender-affirming care for minors, even as much of the world moves against the idea of medicalizing children with gender-nonconforming behavior. In the 2024 election, Trump’s most successful ad was “Harris is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” This is a loser in public opinion and does not make sense as policy or science, yet the party tenaciously holds onto it. To the extent anyone raises a question, the approach is to “shut up and pivot.” If someone mentions trans issues, the consultant-approved reply is that the billionaire class is trying to divert you.

Mounk: That is the line taken by the moderates in the party. The progressives are very loud on these issues and double down on them, while the moderates—like Abigail Spanberger in her race for governor in Virginia—might say that an issue like people who have gone through male puberty playing on women’s sports teams is something local school districts should regulate on their own. It is a way of bowing out of the discussion and having a talking point you can repeat over and over—I think she repeated it three times in a single minute of a debate—to avoid taking a substantive stance.

People like her feel completely boxed in. On one side is the realization that this is an 80-20 issue where a huge majority of independents, and actually most Democrats, are on the other side of the official party line. On the other hand, if you take a position that deviates from what highly engaged activists want, you make yourself so toxic that you are attacked aggressively. It takes a lot of courage to go against that.

When I speak to Democratic electeds, this is the issue on which I most often hear, I would love to vote for a particular bill that a more moderate Republican has introduced, but if I do, I will be primaried tomorrow. I just can’t. I have heard that from many electeds, as I am sure you have. Is there any way of changing those incentives, or are they so baked in that there is no moving them? What would it take for someone like Abigail Spanberger or the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee to speak in a more forthright manner on these issues?

Teixeira: Someone has to break the mold on this. I have used the term myself to describe what is really needed: a “Sister Souljah moment” where the hegemony of the Democratic Party’s professional-class activists is challenged on some of these key issues in an unapologetic way. Rahm Emanuel probably comes closest to that at this point.

Underneath what you have to contend with in the Democratic Party is the unavoidable fact that the professional class, which now votes heavily Democratic, holds a very radical point of view on many of the cultural issues we have discussed—and on climate issues as well. That makes it very difficult for someone to break the mold. It is not clear to me that it is impossible, however. If it happens, it will likely occur around the 2028 presidential cycle.

Mounk: Is this the sort of thing where, actually, if you are any candidate below the presidential level, the heat you take for taking a position like that is so big that you cannot afford it? You have to be the presidential candidate in order to make that break?

Teixeira: I think it is pretty common for parties to change their image in and around a presidential election cycle, where the person is going to define the image of the party. The presidential candidate takes a different position. Everything from “compassionate conservatism” back to Clinton and his approach. I think it is not out of the question that someone could do that in and around the 2028 cycle.

My fear, actually, is that everyone will be herded toward the same positions—maximum resistance to Trump and defending all the basic Democratic positions on these cultural issues. Otherwise, they will get hammered in the primary context because people to their left will attack them. Maybe there is an opening there for someone who is willing to do and say something different and see if there is a lane within the Democratic primary electorate for that.

The problem is that doing what you and I might recommend—if I may take the liberty of assuming we are similar in some of this stuff—would be great in the general election. The problem is getting through the primary electorate, the kinds of voters who show up in primary elections, and the political dynamics that are peculiar to them. To navigate that would be difficult. Right now, you are going to have Gavin Newsom and people like him.

Mounk: That might be easier for a presidential candidate than a lower-level candidate because, if you run for state representative, such a huge share of your electorate consists of people mobilized by local teachers’ unions and other Democratic interest groups. If they give the directive that you are “bad,” there is really no way of winning against it. If you are running at the presidential level, there is so much public attention on you and you have so much free media to put forward your ideas that, if they are compelling to a lot of people in the country, you can build your own kind of coalition.

In some of those issues where Democratic voters are split 50/50, or even less, you might be able to move. Even if a majority of the people who vote for a local state representative in the midterm elections agree, for example, with the recent ruling by the International Olympic Committee that transgender women are excluded from the female category in the Olympics, it is going to be really hard to get the nomination in a primary if you take that position very proactively. Because the share of people who participate in that election is so low, it is difficult to make your argument, since people are not paying a lot of attention. At a presidential level, that might be easier.

Teixeira: I think you’re right. There are two big factors there. One is just that it’s a wider primary electorate, even though it is still a primary electorate. The other is what you said: an enormous amount of free publicity is available for an aggressive candidate for the presidential nomination, which could be leveraged to try to move the conversation in their direction. There is a possibility there.

But where is the profile in courage? Where is the Democrat who is willing to do that and who is also a viable candidate? I like Rahm Emanuel; he has come closest to really raising serious questions about the Democratic approach. Can he get the traction necessary to do that? Maybe. One thing he may do is force the other candidates to reckon with some of these things. There will be debates, and if he is aggressive about raising these issues, maybe someone more viable will move toward his position. Perhaps it will create a lane for “normie” Democrats.

Mounk: Why is he not viable?

Teixeira: Well, I think he is viewed as too much of an operative. There is not a lot of money behind him. He is actually not close to the center of gravity of the Democratic Party today, particularly its more activist segment, but maybe he will be by the time things really develop in terms of the cycle. I do not want to completely disparage his chances; I would love it if he had better chances than he does. I am just trying to be realistic about who he is now and where the debate currently is. I do not know what his betting market rate is at this point, but I bet it is pretty low. I know where it is good—it was a very cheap buy. Gavin Newsom is probably too expensive now. Maybe everyone out there should buy Rahm Emanuel in the betting markets; that is my advice.

Mounk: I want to ask you a strategic question. One of the most striking stats I saw about the 2024 election—and I therefore talked about it repeatedly, including on this podcast—is that when you look at the socioeconomic coalition put together by Kamala Harris and compare it to the socioeconomic coalitions put together by Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and also by Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Clinton, the one it most resembles is not her Democratic predecessors. It is the coalition put together by Bob Dole in 1996, the Republican candidate, which is to say that the Democrats are now the party of the highly-educated and the relatively affluent.

There is a way of thinking about two demographic problems the Democratic Party has. The first is that they have become hopeless among rural voters. They have gone from getting a majority of the white working-class vote in the past, to getting a significant minority of it for many years, to just bleeding votes in that demographic in an extremely rapid way. That is one of the demographic problems.

The other demographic problem is that, as you predicted back in the 2000s, the diversification of America was meant to buoy the prospects of the Democratic Party. States like Florida, which was the decisive state in 2000 with the hanging chads and all of that, were meant to become solidly Democratic as they became more diverse and majority-minority. What has happened is that Florida is now solidly Republican, and even Texas has not moved strongly toward the Democratic Party. There is a Hispanic, to some extent Asian American, and even black working-class problem that the Democratic Party has—bleeding rather than building its electoral base among those voting groups.

To what extent does the Democratic Party need a distinct strategy for each of these demographic groups? To what extent is this downstream from the same problem? Is there one set of fixes that would actually buoy the prospects of the Democratic Party among both of those demographic groups, or does it take different approaches to strengthen its positioning with each?

Teixeira: The good news for the Democrats is that they have the votes of these influential professional-class voters; the bad news is that this very fact makes it hard for the party to strike a different tone. The solution is to recognize how toxic your image has become in many areas of the country. You need to break from priorities that people see as out of whack with their worldview and culture. That will be tough and will invite blowback, but it is the only way through. If you want to stop the ongoing bleeding among working-class voters, including non-white working-class voters, that is what you have to do. It will take time and you will get flack, but otherwise, you are stuck with a professional-class-driven coalition.

Occasionally, you will pick up working-class voters when they are dissatisfied with the incumbent party, but they will not stick around. We see this in the polls as Trump’s popularity has declined. As I mentioned in my article, voters who are disaffected with Trump and are not necessarily voting Republican in 2028 do not like the Democrats either. The fact that they are no longer down with Trump does not mean they see the Democrats as their party.

You must make a conscious effort to reach voters outside the professional-class mainstream; if you do not, they will never come back. You have to be willing to take some flack and have “Sister Souljah moments” that accept the reality of contemporary class divisions. I wish I could be more optimistic that they will do this soon, but there is evidence they think they can manage the problem just by talking about affordability and kitchen-table issues. They think that by saying the billionaire class is picking your pocket, they can fix problems that have developed over twenty years. I think that is delusional, but it is what people believe.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ruy discuss whether a third party presidential bid could be viable, what happened to The Liberal Patriot, and what this means for the Democrats. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

David Autor is the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, and codirector of the NBER Labor Studies Program and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Autor discuss whether the economic pessimism of the 2010s was justified, what lessons we failed to learn from the China trade shock, and how artificial intelligence will reshape the American job market.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I was thinking in preparation for this talk about how the broader shape of the economic conversation has changed over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. It strikes me that there was a period of deep pessimism in the 2010s. This came from Thomas Piketty’s work on rising inequality, and from Branko Milanovic’s famous “elephant curve,” which suggested that while the global very rich gained the most from globalization, the global middle class did not gain much at all. It also came from your work regarding the “China shock” and the declining middle of the American job market.

Ten or 15 years on—and all of this is before we even get to the subject of AI—it feels like there is a little bit more optimism. Piketty’s work has been critiqued quite widely. Milanovic has updated his chart, and it seems to be much more positive, showing much more broad-based gains from globalization. You also published an interesting paper a few years ago saying that, at least since the COVID-19 pandemic, less affluent American workers have actually done comparatively better than more affluent ones. Was the pessimism of the 2010s a mistake, or does some of it remain?

David Autor: I do not think it was a mistake, but it is good that there is positive news as well. Something we learned from the work I did with Gordon Hanson and David Dorn on the China trade shock was how scarring rapid labor market change can be when it involves the loss of critical sectors or career jobs.

What has been very positive since around 2015, at least in the United States, has been relatively robust wage growth in the bottom half of the wage distribution. This has been pretty pervasive; it started before the pandemic, but then it really took off. In the United States, a lot of what was going on before the pandemic was the rise of minimum wage laws across many states. We did not actually see much wage compression outside of states that did not raise their minimum wages. Starting with the pandemic, however, there was just across-the-board tightening. That has been really dramatic and positive. I think a lot of that has to do with running tight monetary policy and having demographic tightening—real labor scarcity has contributed to that.

Simultaneously, I think many things remain concerning, even before we get to the present era. A lot of the job growth among workers without a college degree is not in stable career jobs; much of it is in hourly service jobs that are comparatively low-paid, not very economically secure, and lack high lifetime returns on specialized skills. Growing income concentration has been with us this entire time.

The China trade shock, in the form that David, Gordon, and I studied, was a very concentrated period that ran its course in its own way. However, the competition from China is now actually much more significant. It is not just about jobs making commodity products, but competition in the core leadership sectors of technology that have both civilian and military applications. This will affect the prosperity of the United States, Western countries, and democracies very broadly.

Mounk: Let us hit a couple of those points. First, we were talking about how scarring the China shock was. There are two elements here. One is that economists say there are gains from free trade and, of course, winners and losers. They argue this is fine because, since there is an aggregate gain, you can redistribute some of those gains from the winners to the losers. In practice, of course, redistributing those gains is very hard and tends not to happen.

The second point is that even if the losers might be made whole in some material sense—even if we found mechanisms where a worker with a union job in a car factory who is now unemployed is given enough money to avoid an income shortfall, which seems unlikely—there is probably a psychic scar. There is a sense of no longer being necessary that remains.

To what extent do you think those were genuine policy mistakes which explained the China shock and made it as bad as it was, with all the political consequences that followed, and to what extent was it inevitable? To what extent was it good and necessary to get China into the global economy? Would forms of automation perhaps have taken some of those jobs if the China shock had not happened? With the benefit of hindsight, were real mistakes made there, or were some of those disruptions inevitable?

Autor: First, let me address your point about the nature of the losses. You are completely right to distinguish between pecuniary losses—lower income—and broader psychic scars about identity, status, and purpose.

Both of those are first-order issues. Many people losing manufacturing jobs were in areas exposed to the China trade shock. Just so your listeners are aware, the China trade shock largely accompanied China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 and led to a huge contraction of U.S. manufacturing. About 4 million jobs were lost in the course of seven years. Not all of that was due to the China trade shock, but an important part of it was.

That is not a huge number of jobs on the scale of an economy of 155 or 160 million workers, but it was very geographically concentrated in certain industries and places. The people who lost work could not just go to other manufacturing work; it simply did not exist. Either they hung on, left the labor force, or joined typically much lower-paid service employment. While the pecuniary losses were significant, there is also the issue of identity. These workers usually did not have high levels of education or broadly portable skills. Recent work by my colleague Amy Finkelstein finds that manufacturing job loss during the China trade shock and NAFTA was associated with higher excess mortality among non-elderly men. That was not true for non-manufacturing job loss. These were high-wage jobs for non-college men with steady hours and long-term prospects. They were the anchor of a certain family structure, and nothing comparable was available. I do not mean to sound nostalgic; the data supports this.

Economists like to invoke the “second welfare theorem,” which says you first expand the pie and then divide it. It assumes you can just compensate people with money. I do not think that is true. You cannot give someone back their injured self-esteem by writing them a check. People do not love the notion of being compensated for losses; they would strongly prefer unions, minimum wages, and things that make their jobs pay well—not a consolation prize for what they lost.

Regarding your second question: was this inevitable and was it necessary? Inevitably, U.S. manufacturing employment in labor-intensive sectors would have declined eventually. These were legacy activities that would have faded over a couple of decades. However, they would not have cratered in the time period they did. In labor markets, it is not just how much change you want, but how fast you want to get there. The market has a natural ebb and flow; you can accommodate a 10 percentage point change over 10 years, but if it happens overnight, it is much more challenging.

Even if we accept the idea that we had to do this, we could have done it at a more gradual rate. The merchandise deficit as a share of GDP was enormous at that time, meaning manufacturing had to decline very rapidly. The labor market was simply not geared to change that quickly. We bungled it by not slowing it down or regulating China’s currency manipulation. We could have also had better compensatory policies; Trade Adjustment Assistance was very limited and directed toward training. We now know that wage insurance policies are more effective, but the belief at the time was that there was nothing to worry about.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

Finally, was it necessary? That is a much harder political calculation. It was difficult to foresee how things would turn out. It was reasonable to say that China was a rising power and the world’s most populous country, and we should help it open up. The fact that it became more autocratic and less tolerant of democratic norms was not something we could have easily forecast. If we had prevented China from joining the WTO, we might now be saying, if only we had let them in, they would not have turned into an adversary. While it is hard to blame people for not knowing the future, I believe that—conditional on the decision—we bungled the policy badly.

Mounk: Excellent answer to all four of my explicit and implicit questions. I am going to try and be more disciplined in the questions I ask you going forward. To pick up on one of the strands of our conversation: do you think that we have learned from the mistakes of the China shock in such a way that if we suddenly faced, completely hypothetically, a bunch of jobs disappearing because of a technological shock, we would be much smarter at thinking about how to minimize the social and downstream political costs?

Or do you think that it is just incredibly hard to do that, even with the lessons we might take from that shock? This might be in part because of questions of rational choice, where the people who have just lost their jobs are not necessarily the people who can best advocate for their own interests. It may also be because it requires significant redistribution, which is always hard to do, and because of all kinds of other structural obstacles that stand in the way of implementing even the smart lessons we may have drawn from those bad decisions.

Autor: I can give you a simple answer to the question: have we learned anything? The answer is no. Our political system has learned nothing. In fact, to the degree it has learned anything, it has learned the wrong lessons. Again, I speak of the United States in particular. The United States has eliminated the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program—the only thing we ever had in place to help people displaced by trade. It is no longer funded by Congress. That is a mind-blowing fact.

The only lessons we seem to have taken about trade policy are that we should across the board harm our neighbors and our adversaries simultaneously, and protect sectors that do not need protecting while failing to invest strategically in those that do. It is crazy to think we should be making tube socks or assembling iPhones in the United States; there is never going to be high-paid work in that, and we are just taxing ourselves by doing it.

On the other hand, we should be thinking very strategically about sectors like semiconductors, fusion, artificial intelligence, drones, electric vehicles, power generation, and robotics. Yet the United States is not doing that. Moreover, we are not big enough to contend with China on all those fronts alone. We used to have allies in Canada and in Europe. Collectively, we were an incredibly large economic strategic bloc, and yet we have fractured those relations.

Like so many things in the Trump era, it is exactly the right question followed by a terrible answer. I do not want to say no one has learned anything; I think both our political process and the economics profession have done some rethinking and concluded that we should not be so laissez-faire on trade. I agree that is the “hit me over the head with a sledgehammer” lesson. But in terms of what to do about it, I think our responses have been counterproductive, unwise, short-sighted, and harmful in the long run—both to the United States and to our allies.

Mounk: Obviously, a lot of the economic discussion now is about the effect that artificial intelligence is going to have, and you have written very interestingly about that. I want to get to that in a moment. But before we do, how would you characterize the pre-AI state of the American economy and the American job market more specifically? I do not know whether you want to address that by looking at what it looked like the day ChatGPT-3.5 was released, or what it looks like today.

Autor: I would say that from 2015 through the spring of 2020, the U.S. labor market was actually in great shape. Wage growth was robust, and productivity growth was pretty strong. There was a significant reduction in inequality among “normal mortal” earners—those between the 10th and 90th percentile. At the very top, things were still growing explosively, which one can have mixed feelings about, but in terms of the people I am most deeply concerned about—those without college degrees earning at or below the median—things were looking very good.

The U.S. labor market was in great condition. If you want to put it this way, the Trump labor market was a great labor market, especially for blue-collar workers. This provided a substantial basis of support for Trump. If you ask why so many Hispanic and Black voters supported him in 2020 and even more so in 2024, it is partly because things were going very well for American workers outside the elite.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

I do not think most Americans appreciate that only two countries have had economic miracles over the last 20 years: the United States and China. The notion of “American carnage” is misguided; productivity growth has been robust, unemployment has been low, and wage growth has been relatively strong. I do not mean to imply it was a utopia—there are many things to be unhappy about—but it was overall going very well.

Then, of course, we had the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a huge setback. However, the U.S. economy recovered more rapidly than almost any other country. We did have significant inflation, which was partly due to COVID and partly because the Biden administration overstimulated the economy. But that was coming down even before 2024, and we managed to land it without a recession, which is remarkable. One could call this the “immaculate recovery”—to recover from that type of inflation without a recession is almost without precedent.

We were already coming back into pretty good shape in 2024 and 2025 when Trump took office. Since then, we have been awash in incredible uncertainty regarding tariff policies and shifting energy sectors—whether oil, gas, solar, or coal. We are facing multiple wars of choice and the political persecution of our leading technology companies, universities, and elected officials.

I am not an expert in this specific area, but Nick Bloom has done a lot of work on the cost of uncertainty itself. How do you invest when you do not know what prices or tariffs will be, or whom you will be at war with? The U.S. economy and labor market have been remarkably robust in the face of all that, but job growth has slowed enormously. In fact, the jobs report from last month was quite negative. While those numbers fluctuate, the irony is that the United States did not recognize how good it had it. In responding to that misperception, it implemented policies that arguably made things much worse.

Mounk: It is striking that there was that gap between the data and the perception. One thing I am really struck by is that China, and to a lesser degree India and other populous nations, have had phenomenal economic growth over the last few decades. While that is obviously easier to do when you are coming from behind, it is a phenomenal success story.

Autor: China’s growth over the last four decades is miraculous, and not just for China. It is the creation of a global middle class for the first time. China’s growth has created prosperity, not just in China by bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, but also in Central and South America and Sub-Saharan Africa. It has been the best event in world economic history for poverty reduction worldwide. It has created challenges, and I am not saying it is all upside, but the world has never seen anything like it.

Mounk: One of the impacts of that has been a significant reduction in global inequality. If you look at the global Gini coefficient, it has come down significantly because hundreds of millions of people have been lifted into the global middle class.

What is striking is that while the share of global GDP taken up by China—and to a lesser extent by India and other countries—has risen significantly, and Europe’s share has declined rapidly, the United States has actually held on. It has seen some decline in its share of global GDP, but given the background of that incredible economic miracle in China and significant progress in nations like India, it is astonishing how little America’s share has declined.

Yet people still feel very unsettled, negative, and pessimistic. What explains that disjunction? Is it just that once a nation becomes very affluent, it becomes much harder to generate growth that translates into a tangible improvement in life prospects? Is this a “disease of affluence” we will have forever? Does it have to do with political changes or a shifting technological environment? What explains that gap?

Autor: Okay, so I need to be clear: I am now just going to be giving you an uninformed opinion in the sense that I am an economist, not a sociologist or a philosopher. Why are people’s perceptions so negative given that there are so many outward indications that things are so positive?

I would say two things. One is, unfortunately, Americans are very ill-informed about where we stand relative to others. If they are told that America used to be great and is no longer great, that we are being taken advantage of by everyone else, that we are the laughing stock of the world, and that we have given up all our power, they begin to believe that things are very bad.

The other thing, which I think has more foundation, is that there is a ton of economic insecurity in the United States. I do not think this was true in the first three post-war decades—a period of really rapid economic growth combined with very robust, even growth for people at all education levels. That era saw rising living standards for everyone.

Today, the average in the United States is not very informative because very few people are near the average; the outcomes are so dispersed. I think many people—the majority of Americans who do not have four-year college degrees—felt that their horizons were shorter than they were 40 years ago. They do not see a secure pathway into the middle class, and it is not obvious that their children will do better than they did.

Subscribe now

That is real. You could say the United States created a lot of wealth on average but did not distribute it very evenly. Some would argue that is how it got so wealthy—by not “squandering” it on redistribution or the welfare state. I do not personally believe that, though I could not refute it immediately. I think the United States could have used its prosperity differently to create more economic security, which would have resulted in less dissatisfaction.

In terms of the China trade shock, it certainly was not negative for everyone; it lowered many prices and may have been positive in the aggregate for the United States. However, the distributional consequences were so adverse that they made it very scarring. It would have been possible to use some of those resources more effectively; even if you cannot make people entirely whole, you certainly could have made them better off than they were without that assistance.

Mounk: I feel like we’ve been working up to the topic, and now I want to grab the bull by the horns. What kind of technology is artificial intelligence? When we think about artificial intelligence in the context of other historic technologies that have had a major economic impact, what do you think is the right comparator? What level of change and disruption are we talking about?

Autor: Well, let me try to describe what makes artificial intelligence distinct from other technologies. Prior to the computer, we were in eras of mechanization where we had better tools that could do amazing things like facilitate chemical reactions or pull plows. The computer was the first commercial symbolic processing tool—something that could take information, stored symbols, and instructions, and then act upon, process, and analyze that information. We never really had any tools for that other than our own minds, pens, and paper.

That gave us enormous power to take repetitive, complicated, and difficult tasks—everything from calculating space trajectories to playing chess—write them down as code, and have increasingly inexpensive machines do them with perfect accuracy and incredible speed. That was an amazing breakthrough.

From the 1980s to 2020, we were in this era of computerized automation. That was very displacing for people who did work that was often relatively expert but followed well-understood rules and procedures. It was very complementary to professionals who could take time-consuming parts of their work—retrieving information, looking things up, or calculating—and make those tasks incredibly efficient so they could focus on what they were really good at: making expert decisions. It was not especially helpful for blue-collar work, where it wasn’t very applicable.

However, for everything we computerized, we had to understand the rules of how to do it. We had to understand it formally so we could write down the procedure for a non-sentient, non-improvisational machine to follow. That turns out to be a huge limitation because, as the philosopher Michael Polanyi said, “We know more than we can tell.” There are many things we do without knowing exactly how we do them.

We don’t know the “code” to write a funny joke, make a persuasive argument, develop a hypothesis, or ride a bicycle. These are all things people do based on tacit understanding learned inductively. We never write down the rules.

AI overcomes that “Polanyi paradox” because it can learn things without us telling it. It can know more than it can tell us because it learns inductively from examples and data. It can learn from unstructured information and solve problems we don’t know how to solve. It can perform tasks we would think of as creative if done by another person. This moves technology into a whole new domain of cognitive and physical activity that machines simply couldn’t enter before.

It is qualitatively different from traditional computing. To use an analogy: if traditional computing is like an orchestral musician reading notes exactly in sync, AI is much more like a jazz musician who can solo, improvise, and extrapolate. That is incredibly powerful, and we are only beginning to figure out how to use it well.

One thing AI is not, however, is simply a better, cheaper, or faster version of something else. In many ways, AI is not as good at many tasks as traditional computing. You probably saw the story in the New York Times about not using AI to do your taxes; it’s not reliable. No one ever said, I wouldn’t use Excel for that problem, it might hallucinate. That was never a concern with traditional software.

Mounk: That is really fascinating. It makes me wonder about the terms in which we should think about the economic impact artificial intelligence is going to have. For good reasons, social scientists like to look to the past for guidance about what might be around the next historical corner, while being very careful about making projections. When a new technology arises, the natural thing to do is to look at what happened when other major technologies emerged. That may be an imperfect way of reasoning through the problem, but it is the best we have.

In the past, we have typically seen a phenomenon that economists call “job reinstatement.” This is where a machine or some form of automation takes away a bunch of jobs that can now be done more efficiently, but new roles are created in their wake. As we discussed, this can be deeply disruptive to the people directly affected; they may be too old or too set in a particular range of skills—or a way of life, like that of farmers or peasants—to really accommodate these new jobs. This can have deeply disruptive consequences. Yet, the children and the children’s children simply adjust to this new world and learn the skills necessary for new tasks, many of which might not have existed beforehand. Therefore, over time, we have not seen the phenomenon of mass-scale job loss.

One of the background conditions for that was what I call a “mental reservoir”—a reservoir of tasks that machines could not perform. First, this was because there was no way of automating cognitive tasks. Later, even when we could automate some cognitive tasks, we could only automate those that followed the steps of an algorithm in the way a computer can.

Now, for the first time, we have a machine that potentially rivals us in carrying out all of those cognitive tasks—as it does to some extent today, and likely will to a much larger extent in ten, five, or even one year. Is that going to make this metaphor of job reinstatement obsolete? Or do you think that is a timeless mechanism which will persist even as this new machine penetrates deeply into an area of human skill that, until now, only members of our species were able to carry out?

Autor: First, let me say that although we have been through multiple technological eras, not all the transitions are smooth or painless. The first Industrial Revolution was an era where valuable artisanal skills were wiped out. People who did textiles and weaving saw their expertise become valueless; they were replaced by indentured children and unmarried women working in what William Blake called the “dark satanic mills.” It took decades before new work began to appear that actually utilized the numeracy and literacy of the next generation of workers. There is no guarantee that it ever goes smoothly. Usually, even in the best case, there are winners and losers, much like the China trade shock where some expertise is devalued while new expertise is reinstated.

We have seen a lot of this over the last four decades. Computerization has been decidedly non-neutral for the welfare of different skill groups. It has been great for educated adults, but, on average, it has not been good for people without college degrees. It hollowed out the middle of higher-paying jobs in production, clerical work, and administrative support, and moved many people into services: food service, cleaning, security, transportation, and home healthcare. Although those services are socially valuable, that work is relatively inexpert. Most people can do it without much training or certification, meaning it won’t pay well because there is no scarcity of labor.

AI changes the game again, and there are two things we want to think about simultaneously. One is how this changes human comparative advantage. What will the machine make too cheap to meter? You wouldn’t want to do those tasks anymore because you can’t compete with a machine that does them instantly at almost zero cost. The second question is: what will it make more valuable because humans are really needed to do those remaining tasks?

We don’t have a very good answer to that yet. For now, we can say there is plenty of physical, hands-on work that will require labor for decades, even if we make tons of progress in robotics. I am very confident that there will be many people working as doctors in medicine, in education, and in the trades. In many settings, humans will continue to provide an intermediary layer between formal bodies of expertise and other people. We will look to other people to guide us in decision-making in every high-stakes domain.

That may mean there will be fewer people who are more expert, or in other cases, many more people who are less expert. Technology can be very bifurcating. Take ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. That really changed the occupation of taxi and chauffeur drivers, not just because it allowed more people to do it, but because being a taxi driver had two components: driving the car and knowing the routes. Ride-hailing meant you no longer needed to know the routes; you could drive in a city you had never visited immediately. That reduced the expertise requirements, simplified the work, and allowed many more people to do it. It simultaneously created new opportunities and unwelcome competition for incumbents.

In other cases, technology eliminates the simple part of the work and leaves the expert components remaining. Many people would say that in their professions, the part they actually have to do is much harder because the grunt work is done for you; you have to focus on diagnostic skills, software architecture, or solving hard problems in contracting.

We have to ask: where will we re-specialize? Which expert tasks will be de-skilled, and where will human expertise become more valuable because it is the central piece remaining to put everything together? That is a very hard question. It is not sufficient to say something is “exposed” to AI, with the implication being that it is at risk of shriveling up and dying. Exposure could mean it gets simpler and more people do it at lower pay, or it could mean it becomes more specialized because the technology does the easy part and the people who remain perform more abstract, increasingly demanding tasks.

We have seen this happen before. Accounting has gone from bookkeeping to planning and forecasting. In the professions, computers have taken away a lot of the simple work and made us focus on the high end. That is very hard to forecast.

There is a second component to this: will there simply be less work for people to do? I don’t want to be a Pollyanna and say that can’t happen. Wassily Leontief famously said that humans are like horses; they will soon be put out to pasture. Why aren’t horses being used anymore? They are just as productive as they ever were, but they cannot compete with an internal combustion engine. They are fundamentally too expensive; you have to maintain them, have a stable, and have land for them to graze on. There are cases where a factor of production simply cannot be competitive. Similarly, there is no wage at which a human could compete with a computer to do a set of calculations.

The amount of calories a human would have to burn just to do those calculations couldn’t support the food consumption required compared to a microprocessor. It is possible to have circumstances where the pure cost of hiring a person would not be justified when you could get a machine to do it. It is not impossible.

One indication that this could be occurring is that the labor share of national income is falling. It has been declining for a couple of decades, dropping from above 60% by about eight percentage points in the United States. While the majority of every dollar used to go to workers and the minority to capital, it is now getting closer to parity.

That is a possibility. I do not think we are going to enter a world where labor has no value or where we have no more labor scarcity. I think that is a long way away and unlikely. On the other hand, if labor’s share of national income falls by even a substantial number—say, 20 more percentage points—that is going to be pretty seismic.

Mounk: I have a few follow-ups on this. The first is about the example of horses, which is really interesting. The primary reason, you are saying, is that keeping and maintaining a horse is just very expensive, which is why the number of horses has gone down radically.

I think there may also be a second reason. I recently visited an Amazon warehouse, which is a fascinating thing to do. One of the things that becomes clear is that there are these very efficient robots which move produce around, install them, and bring them back out to the person who wants to pick them out when they are needed. Sometimes these machines malfunction in some small way because a piece of lint gets attached to their wheels, and a human needs to come and clean that up. That is very costly because, to avoid accidents, they have a special vest which makes all the robots around stop until the human is out of that area and they can resume their operation.

There is a significant cost to that human-robot interaction. An additional reason why it may be bad to have horses in the street is that there are cars around, and horses and cars do not mix very well. The handover cost from machine to human and back may be so high that even in tasks where humans have a small comparative advantage, it may be easier to push them out of the loop for that reason entirely.

The other point I wanted to make is about judgment. You are assuming that in areas like medicine, for example, human judgment will always be required. On many benchmarks, AI bots are now very close to the judgment of humans on those decisions. They do not yet have sufficiently large context windows to take into account all of a patient’s medical history, so we probably still want high-stakes decisions to be made by doctors. Quite plausibly, machines are going to have even more powerful models within a few years, so their acuity and judgment will be even higher. We are going to continue moving toward being able to solve those kinds of external constraints by giving them larger context windows and finding smarter ways for them to understand more about the patient. We already know that humans actually tend to trust AI bots quite highly. Why are we so sure that those most high-stakes medical decisions are not going to be made by machines eventually?

The real question I want to ask you, based on your academic expertise, is that it seems to me there is a world of Silicon Valley technologists who do not really understand the constraints of the real world and who think all the jobs are going to disappear tomorrow. That is deeply naive. On the other hand, I think there is a strain in parts of economics where people are looking at studies of productivity gains from using ChatGPT-3.5 in highly constrained circumstances two years ago and projecting forward from that. I think that tends to give you far too-low estimates.

If we think that for 50 or 100 years, there is a significant decline in the demand for high-skill labor, what happens then? If the world we are entering is perhaps one where there are some jobs that are highly specialized and new, and a good number of jobs that are not very specialized for which we now need people, that is going to be a pretty bad outcome for most. There is a little bit of the lawyer who no longer has to do the grunt work and just makes the decisions, and a little bit of the ride-hail worker who actually has been de-skilled.

If there is a small caste of people who are highly skilled and make these high-stakes decisions, and then there is a big pool of not-very-differentiated labor that can do these relatively low-skilled jobs, that could be enough to radically decrease the wages of a lot of people. It could lead to pretty deep economic disruptions. You are the economist who can model this, and I am just a political scientist who is speculating.

Autor: I do think you certainly raised the point that there may be many domains where we currently think we need humans involved, but ultimately we will not. Medical diagnosis might be one of them, where the costs of error are so high and you have machines that could be trained on millions of cases. Maybe they will just be better. I think in many cases they will work collaboratively. I do not think it will be full automation for quite a while.

However, let me take your question on its premise. It is quite possible there are areas where we have labor now and we just will not want it. For a while, ATMs were complementary to bank tellers; bank teller employment actually grew. Banks began branching because they could do it at a lower cost. They built more branches and hired tellers not just as cashiers, but as salespeople to introduce you to other products like loans and investments. Now, teller employment is declining. People have decided they can just do it all online and do not need a person. Most of the people who still stand in line to see bank tellers are elderly individuals who are used to that way of doing things.

There may be a period where there is collaboration, followed eventually by encroachment. The other side of this is that if all this is happening, we are getting very wealthy all of a sudden. That means we are doing a lot of stuff very cheaply; there is a productivity side implied by this.

Why did this happen to horses so fast, while it has not happened to people so far? There are a few different reasons. One is that people are much more flexible than horses. We have a capacity to educate ourselves and do many different things. As my co-author Anna Salomons likes to say, people are not “one-trick ponies.” Two, of course, people own capital. We own the machines, whereas horses do not, so we get the fruits of those productivity benefits. The third reason is that we vote. Democracy buffers the effect and shapes how these things bear out.

When you say we could all end up jobless yet with high productivity, I am reminded of what the science fiction writer Ted Chiang said. He noted that fears of AI and automation are not really fears of the technology; they are fears of capitalism. We are afraid of what the economic system will do once we have those capabilities. If people do not need to hire workers, then the fruits of that productivity will not be distributed evenly.

That is a very significant concern. The biggest concern I have about the technology, at least from the labor market perspective, is the threat it implies for democratic function. In my view, the labor market is one of our most important social institutions. It works hand-in-glove with democratic institutions because most people are considered both contributors—through their labor and taxes—and claimants, through their retirement, education, and social insurance.

If labor were suddenly devalued, most people would be claimants without being seen as contributors. The political economy of that is a nightmare. To say we will just have a few rich people, tax them, and redistribute the rest has not historically tended to work out.

I do not see this as the most likely scenario, but it is sufficiently plausible that I would not dismiss it. People are very polarized on this. There are many “doomers” and many utopians. I think we should recognize that a range of possibilities is plausible—some quite good, some quite bad. Many of them will co-occur; we will make some terrible mistakes even as we see big gains. We should be adopting policies that help us ensure a better transition if such a transition is needed.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and David discuss what a world without employment would really look like and how we can harness technology to complement jobs for humans rather than destroy them. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

David Goodhart is a journalist, author and think tanker, and currently head of the demography unit at the Policy Exchange think tank. His latest book is The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family and Fertility.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and David Goodhart discuss why the triumphalist worldview of the early 2000s has collapsed, how the “anywhere” versus “somewhere” divide explains contemporary populism, and whether meritocracy is creating an insulated professional class that damages the communities it leaves behind.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: I have been thinking for the last few months about the different ways in which the worldview that I had—and that I think the political mainstream had in the year 2000, when I was 18 and went to university—has started to come apart, to fall apart. Part of that is the belief that nationalism was the ideology of the 20th century and would not have much impact on the 21st century.

There is also the assumption that the arc of justice is long but would bend toward justice, especially on questions of civil rights, and the idea that cranks would object to significant levels of immigration but would not prevail. At the heart of it, I think, are some of the concerns you have written about over the course of your last three books: the slightly triumphalist idea of a global, educated, rising middle and upper-middle class, for whom access to good degrees and educational opportunities would pave the way to a future that is better for them and better for their societies as well.

What happened to those assumptions? Why did that broad idea feel so natural until quite recently in our politics, and why has it, as you would argue, now been proven wrong in many ways?

David Goodhart: I wrote this book in 2017, The Road to Somewhere, that talked about the value divide—the education-based value divide is between the people I call the “anywheres” and the people I call the “somewheres.” These are real. The book was based on the UK, but I think it has application to all rich countries. I invented the labels, not the worldviews—they are there in the British Social Attitudes surveys and other sources.

The anywhere–somewhere value divide clearly contributed enormously to both the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK and Trump’s first election in that same year, and indeed his reelection. The anywhere worldview, as you implied, is that of the highly educated, people comfortable with mobility, partly because they have often experienced it by attending residential universities. They are part of a world where change is something they can take in stride. Openness and autonomy come naturally because of their experiences as mobile graduates. It leans toward a natural kind of liberalism. Of course, they then go on into jobs that pay them well and confer high status.

It is a basic psychological point, isn’t it? The more secure you are, the more open and liberal-minded you are likely to be, and vice versa. The somewhere grouping is larger but less influential. These are people who tended to be less well educated, more rooted, and whose identities were often much more connected to place and group, making them more susceptible to being discomforted by social change, in contrast to the anywheres who are more adapted to it. That had been brewing beneath the surface for 20 or 30 years, probably since the late 1980s or early 1990s, and the inchoate somewhere pushback erupted in 2016.

Populism itself is a revolt of the somewheres against the overdomination of the anywhere worldview. I want to be clear that both worldviews, in their mainstream form, are perfectly decent. It is not as binary as the distinction might imply. If you read the book, you will see there are many different kinds of anywheres. There is an extreme version. One of the experiences that prompted me to write the book came in 2011, when I went to an Oxford College dinner. I found myself sitting between the two most powerful non-elected people in the UK at the time: the head of the British Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, and the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, who went on to manage The New York Times.

I was chatting with Gus O’Donnell and told him I was writing a book about immigration—I later published The British Dream in 2013 about the successes and failures of postwar immigration. Gus O’Donnell said to me, “When I was at the Treasury as the chief civil servant, I used to argue for the most open door possible. I think it is my job to maximize global welfare, not national welfare.” I am reasonably liberal-minded, but I thought, coming from the head of the national civil service, this was extraordinary. I turned to Mark Thompson and said, “Did you just hear what Gus O’Donnell said—the head of the national civil service said it was his job to maximize global welfare?” And Mark Thompson said, “Well, I agree with him.”

That impelled me to write The Road to Somewhere. Mark Thompson and Gus O’Donnell are not representative of all anywheres—anywheres are 25–30% of the population, while somewheres are closer to 45–50%. There is a range, and that was an extreme anywhere position. The problem is not the anywhere worldview itself but its overdomination. The so-called “uniparty,” whether center-left or center-right, has generally followed the same path: pro-globalization, pro-expansion of higher education (while neglecting apprenticeships and technical education), prioritizing managerial, professional, and financial jobs, and being indifferent to deindustrialization, immigration, and national sovereignty.

That worldview has produced a set of policies that tended to benefit the anywhere class. They have validity in their own right, but there has also been a degree of self-interest behind them. The somewhere pushback would promote a very different set of policies.

Mounk: So tell me a little bit more about this distinction. I think the distinction between anywheres and somewheres is really evocative, and I do recognize something in it that I think is true. I probably count as an anywhere—someone who has lived in many different countries, and so on. But I wonder how many anywheres there really are. It may be one of those situations where there are a lot of weak anywheres, but not that many strong anywheres.

Yes, there are people who will move abroad at the drop of a hat—to Japan, the United States, or France—for academic opportunities, for studies, or for certain job opportunities. But how many people like that are there really? How many are not firmly rooted in a national community and, in many ways, in a local community? If you look at the United States, levels of geographic mobility are actually much lower than they used to be in the past.

Goodhart: Yeah, absolutely. This is one of the points I was making with the Gus O’Donnell quote—that there are varieties of anywheres and varieties of somewheres. When I was doing the work on the UK and looking at the British Social Attitudes surveys, I estimated that the mainstream anywhere worldview was fairly large at 25–30% of the population, with many of them holding much milder versions of the anywhere worldview than the Gus O’Donnell one I quoted.

I also talked about an in-betweener group—about 25% of the population—who held significant elements of both worldviews, and then a more core somewhere group of perhaps 40–45%. So yes, you are right. Of course, somewheres and anywheres often agree on a wide range of subjects. On many of the old left–right issues—size of the state, market versus state, levels of public spending, redistribution, and so on—anywheres and somewheres can fall on both sides. They would obviously agree on many basic things: everybody wants the government to be uncorrupt and efficient, and the health services to work well. There is plenty of overlap in our politics.

But I do think one of the problems, and one of the reasons why politics is more difficult now than it used to be, is that when politics was primarily socioeconomic it was easier to reach compromises. It is easier to split the difference on issues like public spending or redistribution. When it comes to issues of identity, immigration, and national sovereignty, it is much harder to compromise.

I should also say, I am not in favor of the overdominant somewhere rule. Although my book was seen as a kind of moderate defense of populism—a defense of the somewheres in light of the overdomination of the anywhere worldview—what we absolutely do not want is for overdominant anywhere rule simply to be replaced by overdominant somewhere rule.

Mounk: Would you say that something like Donald Trump is the over dominance of the somewhere?

Goodhart: Yeah, “I am your revenge” is exactly the opposite of “we need to find a new balance between anywheres and somewheres.” We need a better balance between the two worldviews. We need a new generation of politicians, who I think have yet to emerge. They could come, using the old categories, from either the center-left or the center-right, who can find a balance—a bridge, if you like—between the two worldviews.

Mounk: How similar or different is your view to that of Michael Lind, who would argue that the problem is that a broader professional managerial class has come to be dominant in Anglo-Saxon societies and perhaps some Western European societies as well? This professional managerial class is educated at a similar set of elite institutions that inculcate in them particular values. Institutions that were meant to be politically neutral—whether a public broadcasting service like the BBC in the United Kingdom, a national radio station like NPR in the United States, universities themselves, courts, or even some corporations—start to reflect the background assumptions that this broader social milieu has come to hold about the world.

These institutions slowly erode their own legitimacy because that legitimacy was premised on being guided by longstanding principles like neutrality or the investigative, skeptical ethos of traditional journalism. They now appear to be firmly on one side of the most salient political divide, which increasingly separates the professional managerial class and its values and interests from the rest of society. Do you see your framing as similar, complementary, or in conflict with this?

Goodhart: I think he is using different language to describe something relatively similar. Mike is a friend of mine. Indeed, I introduced him to British audiences when I was editing Prospect magazine a few years ago. I am a fan. I think the movement to the left of the professional class is one of the key shifts that really took off in the 1980s. There is an old saying from that period, and I think this applies to the United States as well as the UK, that the right won the economic argument—perhaps even the economic–political argument, since it tended to win elections—while the left was gradually winning the social and cultural argument. I think we have seen the truth of that over the last few decades.

I think this is one of the most significant political factors, and it relates to my argument about the overdomination of the anywhere worldview. The most significant political fact is the movement to the left of the professional class, and large swathes of the middle. What we even think of as the middle class has changed. Today we tend to think of a professional—an accountant, a lawyer, a medic of some kind. Forty or fifty years ago, a middle-class person was often a shopkeeper or a businessperson. They would still have been classified as middle class, of course.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

The expansion of higher education, which happened in Europe a little later than in the United States, has had a profound impact. As recently as the 1990s, more than half of people in the professional managerial class in the UK did not have a university degree. They would have had professional qualifications acquired while working. The fact that you now have that long period of three or four years in a separate institution—moving away from your hometown, your family, and the people you grew up with—means that you are inculcated into a different worldview in many cases. Not everyone who goes to university is on the liberal left, but for historical reasons universities exist partly to challenge tradition and authority. There is therefore an institutional bias toward liberalism in those places.

We have now seen this play out in the “long march through the institutions,” and liberal-inclined professionals dominate our society.

Mounk: Yeah, this is something I have long been ambivalent about with universities and with the idea of meritocracy more broadly. Obviously, I think meritocracy is incredibly important, and I am skeptical of some of the easy dismissals of meritocracy. I always find that writers who say that meritocracy is unimportant or troublesome should go to places in the world where there generally is no meritocracy and see both what that does to people’s aspirations and to the ability of those countries to achieve economic growth and deliver on basic goods. When the alternative to meritocracy is in place—being hired because you are somebody’s relative or because you bribed someone—that is a lot worse than the meritocratic ethos that thankfully exists in much of the West.

I do also agree that at the moment we have elements of fake meritocracy, where people believe they deserve everything even if they attained their positions through significant social or other advantages, and this contributes to the formation of an insulated meritocratic class. That brings us to universities and the role they play. Of course, it is good for elite universities to look as broadly as possible, to find people from disadvantaged backgrounds, to give them good degrees, and hopefully propel them into the meritocratic class. That is part of the point: to give them the ability to hold positions of influence and responsibility in society.

The side effect, however, is that every year universities go into deprived communities and take the top 10, 5, or 2 percent of the most talented 18-year-olds. They carry them off to a lovely college campus where they make friends with the children of great families, with their talents and connections—and they never go back. Perhaps they return for Christmas, or for Thanksgiving in the United States. Perhaps they draw on the story of triumph out of adversity for “social justice points” in the language of the new professional managerial class. But most likely, they are being taken out of the very communities that most need their talents.

I think this is the terrible dilemma at the heart of meritocracy, and it is difficult to know what to do about it.

Goodhart: That is an interesting point. I think we have seen a merger of traditional financial and economic elites with, as it were, the meritocratic elites. Often the traditional elites themselves have to pass the exams, but they benefit from private education, tutors, or other forms of help. There is a merger between those heavily assisted people from traditionally privileged backgrounds and the new privileged who have earned their way. It is one of the ways in which the elites legitimize their continuing rule through the concept of meritocracy.

Of course, we are all meritocrats in the basic sense. We want the most able people in the appropriate jobs, particularly at the top of society. Nobody wants to be operated on by someone who failed their surgery exams. As one wag put it, of course we want the clever guy in charge. That is automatic. But when the clever guy’s child and grandchild are also in charge, we think something is not working.

Mounk: I have two thoughts about meritocracy, which I guess are somewhat controversial, the second probably more than the first. The first is that I wonder whether we have overstated and exaggerated how much social mobility we have had. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the ranks of the middle class hugely expanded. If you were at the 50th percentile of German, British, or American society in 1930, you were a manual worker. Probably if you were at the 70th percentile in those decades, you were also a manual worker.

By the year 2000, if you were at the 50th percentile, you were a white-collar worker with a high school diploma or perhaps an associate’s degree. If you were at the 70th percentile, you probably had a college degree and were a white-collar worker. The experience of being at the same level of society was completely transformed over those decades. That does not mean there was so much movement from the bottom to the top, though that also existed. It was never the main motor of the feeling of social mobility. That kind of mobility is much harder because, by definition, for someone to move from the bottom to the top, someone else must move from the top to the bottom. There are losers, and losers are always hard in politics. Incumbents work very hard to avoid losing.

The second point is that there may have been a one-time window for a huge amount of social mobility because of background conditions. It is relatively uncontroversial that there is some amount of heritability of intelligence at the individual level. This has nothing to do with groups. Simply, the child of two exceptionally intelligent parents is likely to experience some reversion to the mean but still be more intelligent than the average member of the population. In the past, when opportunities for mobility were so limited, there was a tremendous amount of talent at every level of social station. In this more open moment of genuine social mobility, much of that talent has already been sorted.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

There is also much more assortative mating now. People are more likely to marry partners at a similar level of socioeconomic achievement. Put these factors together and you would expect somewhat lower levels of social mobility. At the same time, there is no longer a similar expansion of white-collar jobs. A huge share of the population already works in white-collar jobs, and there is a limit to how quickly that can expand. Some of the natural motors of social mobility have not disappeared but have attenuated.

The combination of these factors means that the promise of social mobility—that if we send enough people to college, everybody will be better off and will have the social values of the anywheres—has proven to be a chimera.

Goodhart: Of course, that is the most controversial thought, which is that we have already redistributed ourselves according to ability and that many of the people at the top are the people who should be there. I think you are quite right that we had a huge expansion in the United States and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with a huge expansion of white-collar employment, professional employment, education, and health services. There was “more room at the top,” as the sociologists say, and people rose.

On the contrary, I think our societies have been much more socially mobile than they are usually given credit for. It is true that mobility has slowed to some extent, and what we attribute that to differs. The pessimistic argument is that the sorting has already taken place. The more optimistic argument is that there is simply less room at the top, and people are very good at preserving their position in the social hierarchy.

One of the arguments in my book following The Road to Somewhere, which was called Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, was directed in part against people like Michael Young and Michael Sandel. My argument was not against meritocracy itself but against the definition of merit in meritocracy, which has been far too focused on a certain kind of human aptitude: the exam-passing, analytical-intelligence kind. We may have gone as far as we can in assigning those roles fairly.

What we need to do now is recognize that, yes, clever people are needed to solve the world’s problems—climate change, for example—but we have overvalued cognitive skills. There is a long tail of people in the knowledge economy who contribute no more than those who work with their hands or their hearts. The use of emotional intelligence in care jobs, for example—being able to bathe someone or help an elderly person dress in a way that is respectful—is an extremely skillful emotional and physical act. Yet people who do that work tend to earn minimum wages.

I argued for a shift in status away from cognitive intelligence toward practical and emotional intelligence, at least in the long term. It is difficult to think of practical ways this could be promoted, but I think that is the direction of travel we should consider.

Mounk: One of the interesting things about that is that, in a sense, I would say we reward and value manual skills a lot in our society. You can actually be a plumber and work hard and make a really good income. The problem with plumbers, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, is not that they are not making a good amount of money. There are many trade jobs where you can leave high school at 18 and, if you are talented and hardworking, train in a particular skill needed in a relatively high-tech industry. In the United States, you can make six figures in your early or mid-20s.

So it is not the case that we generally undervalue manual skills or manual labor, though in some cases that does happen. The problem seems to be one of cultural recognition. Even if you are doing highly skilled work that helps a company be productive and make a real contribution, when you go to your local bar or a party and the person next to you says they are a lawyer, and another says they are a teacher, and you say you are a plumber or have a specialized skill in a craft, you probably feel like the odd one out—the “loser,” so to speak, in that round.

What is interesting is that I recognize what he is saying. I think you are right about that point. But it is not necessarily a question of money. It is a question of cultural respect and recognition.

Goodhart: Yeah, I think there is interesting evidence for this from dating apps. People in relatively low-level knowledge economy jobs are doing better on dating apps than people in very highly paid blue-collar jobs. So maybe we have a problem with a kind of female selection bias here.

Mounk: With some amount of social pressure, it is certainly out of fashion nowadays to judge people for who they date, except on two dimensions. One is age gaps, which have become much more moralized than they used to be. The second is educational gaps.

That can be the case for the male lawyer who marries a woman without a great degree, and he may be accused of dating a “bimbo.” But it also works the other way around. If you are a young professional woman in your 20s in New York and you date a firefighter or a plumber, there might be an initial reaction of “he’s hot” or something like that. But quite quickly there would likely be judgment from your social circle: do you have anything to talk about? How can you stand spending time with somebody who would not have anything to say? Those assumptions, I think, would quickly come to the surface in many social circles.

Goodhart: I argued in Head, Hand, Heart that we are reaching “peak head.” But I have not seen much evidence yet for a better spread of the kind of status we have been talking about. I do think sometimes these things continue in a half-life for decades after they have ceased to be economically or even culturally valuable.

The kind of biases we have been discussing—the anywhere worldview bias—hold that the successful person is someone who, from whatever background, does well at school, goes to an Ivy League university, and has a high-status professional job. That is the model for society, and that is what everyone should aspire to. In earlier decades—the 1930s or 1950s—there were many little ladders up. There were opportunities for social mobility. Then we moved into a hegemonic period of higher education, where there was one big ladder up: do well at school, get onto the college track, and climb that single ladder. I hope we can move back to a world of many ladders, with a better spread of cultural value across head, hand, and heart.

One of my fears, though, is social media. There used to be the relative deprivation thesis, from a British sociologist who wrote a book in the 1950s or 1960s called Relative Deprivation. The idea was that people judged themselves against those a few rungs above or below them on the social ladder. That is why many were not dissatisfied with ordinary lives, since they compared themselves only to neighbors or people in the next street. But the open, transparent world introduced first by television and now magnified by social media means that everyone compares themselves to the most beautiful or the cleverest people on the planet. That is damaging for mental health and contributes to demoralization, particularly for the 50% of people who are left out.

Subscribe now

This connects to Tony Blair’s famous 1999 speech that 50% of school leavers in the UK should go to university. An extraordinary statement, and clearly nobody helping him write that speech thought for one moment that their own children would not be in the 50%. There has often been this anywhere lack of empathy, or assumption that everybody is like them. That creates two problems. First, the 50% who do not go to university feel like demoralized second-class citizens. Second, even those who do go to university often find there are too few higher professional jobs, since the number of graduates has risen far faster than the number of such jobs.

The result is two sets of dissatisfied people: those who never went to college, and those who did but are stuck in low-paying, back-office jobs. This is the “elite overproduction” problem.

Mounk: I like this idea of “peak white-collar jobs” or “peak college-educated dominance.” We have seen some early signs over the last years that incomes at the top end of the distribution have stagnated, while incomes at the bottom have grown more quickly. We have also seen that some people with college degrees are finding it harder to get jobs, either because the skill level of the marginal extra person who has gone to college in the last 10 or 20 years does not always justify high wages, or because of structural changes. Even graduates of coding programs at elite universities are suddenly finding it hard to secure jobs.

That relates to artificial intelligence. Ten years ago, when people talked about AI, they often focused on drivers being displaced. That is coming, when you look at Waymo’s rapid increase in miles driven and its astonishing safety record. It is clear we will see more self-driving cars, which is likely to be a good thing for humanity, even just in terms of reducing deaths. But because the main advance of AI so far has been with GPTs—with chatbots rather than embodied robots—it now looks as though white-collar jobs are at much greater risk, and faster, than blue-collar jobs.

There is a theory, whose name escapes me, that the hardest things for AI to do are those that took evolution the longest to create. Those are our motor skills and our vision—things we think of as basic because all humans can do them, and many animals can as well. What is easier for AI to replicate are the abilities at the very end of evolutionary history, the “cherry on top,” which has a shorter evolutionary past.

So the spread of AI, at least in its first phase, may decimate white-collar jobs—HR jobs, for example, or many other contexts that can suddenly be handled by GPT agents. Blue-collar jobs, however, remain in demand because embodied AI is still lagging. Is AI another contributing factor to “peak white-collar” or “peak college graduate?”

Goodhart: Yeah, I hope so. AI is now coming for the lower end of the cognitive class in a way that automation came for factory work and blue-collar work many decades ago. I talked about the future being in coding and caring. Coding is now done effectively by AI, so it may turn out to be only caring. These developments are all pushing toward a better balance between head, hand, and heart capabilities.

It will be fascinating to see where we end up in terms of the revaluing of emotional labor and care, because that work has historically been associated with women and often done for free in the home. Care produces positive externalities for society that are very hard for the carer—whether in the domestic realm or the public economy—to capture.

This was once a problem solved by limiting women’s opportunities and forcing them into care jobs. Now that those constraints have largely been removed, society has to rethink how to provide enough of the care that we say we want—for old people, for young people, for those having babies and for those looking after them.

This is one of the issues I wrote about in what I call the Anywhere Trilogy, in my book The Care Dilemma: Freedom, Family and Fertility. It is about rebalancing the tension between freedom for men and women—particularly for women over recent decades—not to be defined only as a mother or housewife, and to have financial autonomy. The question is how to preserve those freedoms while also ensuring enough investment in care. We are not there yet.

Mounk: Tell us about how the status of care work has transformed in our society over the last decades and why we are now at an impasse with it. As you were saying, there was one unjust but coherent solution until about the 1960s, which was that half of humanity was not invited into the workplace except in very particular roles or in time-limited ways. They were the ones who provided the care work. It was women who raised children and looked after elderly relatives. Since they were excluded from the workplace, there was plenty of that work to go around. There were also certain kinds of institutions for people who fell between the cracks. But the biggest component of the solution was that women did the care work.

For a number of decades, we were somewhere in between. As women entered the workplace in greater numbers, while older conservative norms still held, society had a mix of different models. Increasingly, though, it looks as if we are in a more feminized world. I am struck by the fact that, in what I think is a normative scandal that virtually nobody talks about, American universities now discriminate against women in admissions. At the same level of achievement, there are so many fewer men that women need much better grades and records to gain entry into the Ivy League or other top schools. Universities are worried about gender ratios—whether because of institutional preference or student preference—and they tilt toward admitting men. That shows both the success of women in the knowledge economy and the crisis it creates for the care system.

So what is the solution? Is it a complete professionalization of the care system, so that more and more forms of care are monetized and brought into the market, with welfare state institutions helping to finance them for those in need? Is it robots and AI that will solve the problem in 20 or 30 years? Or is it a change in social norms, so that more people—perhaps more men and, more likely, more women—go back into caring vocations, paid or unpaid?

How do we meet the evident need for care in our society in a way that avoids the current gaps and also avoids the injustices and exclusions that women suffered in the past?

Goodhart: I think it undoubtedly requires men to step up more in the care domain. They are actually stepping up more than they are often given credit for, at least in the UK. In the last 20 or 30 years, the distribution of domestic labor has shifted from about 70% female and 30% male to something closer to 55–45, even in more educated households.

I also think it is a matter of shifting social norms. What has happened is a kind of feminization. Various institutions have become heavily feminized—education at all levels, from primary through higher education, is dominated by women. The health sector is increasingly dominated as more women move into professional medical jobs, while they have historically dominated nursing. Many hospitals are 80–85% women. Publishing is also very female-dominated. More institutions are becoming female-dominated.

What we have experienced so far, and what may change, is what one might call a kind of “male-default feminism.” The structures of status have not changed. Both men and women are equally status-seeking, and when all the status remains in the public realm of professional jobs—the anywhere public realm—women will compete equally with men there, which is fair enough. But we have not had a form of feminism that has raised the status of traditionally female areas of life.

In my book, I argue that we are not feminized enough in some respects. We have not adapted GDP, even though politicians are slaves to GDP when making economic policy. GDP fails to capture much of the productive work done in the home. Family policy is essentially childcare policy, aimed at making it possible for both parents to spend less time in the family and compete equally in the public realm.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a prominent American feminist who worked for Hillary Clinton and now runs the New America think tank, put it well. She said: “My generation of feminists was raised to think the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did. Women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men, but as we attain that power, we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view, actually the view of a minority of men, about all classes.”

That is wise, and it highlights one of the biggest gaps between the political class and ordinary opinion in both the UK and the United States. Nobody wants to go back to the 1950s. In the British Social Attitudes Survey, when people are asked if they agree with the statement “a man should go out to work and a woman should stay at home and look after the home and children,” only 6 or 7% agree. But when asked what the ideal form of childcare is for preschool children, only about 8 or 9% say both parents working full time.

People would actually like more support for one parent to stay at home when children are very young. That is not yet seen as desirable by the political class, but it would be extremely popular if it were made easier to afford. One reason families are in such a mess is that nearly half of children in the UK are not living with both biological parents at age 14. The situation is probably even worse in America.

Mounk: I’m going to read you a couple of messages from my excellent producer, Leo, who is very much enjoying the conversation. She is saying: Yet most managers are men even in feminized industries. We’re not really feminized enough until there’s quality, affordable childcare for all. Perhaps it’s not really surprising that we don’t value feminists or women’s work.

So how do we balance those concerns? On the one hand, young women are doing much better than young men. At this point, about 60% of recent college graduates in the United States are women, which is astonishing. On the other hand, it is still true that at more senior levels women often drop out of the workplace.

I heard secondhand—so I will not name the school—remarks from a dean of a major business school in the United States who said that five years out from graduation, half of the women who graduate from this business school end up out of the workplace. They often marry very successful and affluent men from similar backgrounds. Once they have kids, they decide to stay at home. Perhaps that is good for raising children and has advantages, but it also replicates a world in which, at the highest levels, the managers—even in workplaces that might be 60–65% women—may continue to be men.

So is there a way of fighting for the interests of both men and women that is not rivalrous? Or are we inevitably going to end up with some amount of rivalry between those interests?

Goodhart: Well, I don’t think this is so much about men versus women. I think it is about listening to all kinds of women. The British sociologist Catherine Hakim conducted a survey of adult British women in which she found that 20% were very work-focused—mainly educated, professional, career-oriented, often wanting families as well. Another 20% were very family-focused. The remaining 60% were what she called “adaptive,” meaning they wanted both decent jobs and families but were prepared to put family first when children were very young and to put careers on hold if necessary.

To the extent that we have family policy or a debate about family in the UK or the United States, it tends to be dominated by the 20%—the very career-focused women. That is fine up to a point, and huge strides have been made in terms of equality. In the UK, 47% of all public appointments are now held by women, and 40% of MPs are women. Large areas of the economy, including medical schools and law schools, are now dominated by women. In that respect, we have done well.

I do not think we should be pursuing the rigid ideal of 50–50 everywhere. Feminists 20 or 30 years ago might have argued that men and women are not only equal but essentially the same. You no longer hear that from mainstream feminists. For example, Helen Lewis and Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women, do not make that claim. The debates around trans issues and the defense of women-only spaces have reinforced the idea that men and women are different in important respects.

We should respect motherhood and value family more, rather than insisting that everyone leave the home as quickly as possible to join the GDP economy.

Mounk: I have two thoughts about this. One is from a sociology paper that I read about 15 years ago. These things may have changed somewhat, but I found it quite striking at the time. It looked at different gender norms and expectations about motherhood in Southern Europe, Western Europe, and Northern Europe.

In Southern Europe and places like Italy at the time, the expectation was that, yes, as a woman you should work, but once you have children, you should probably stay at home with the child. That is very constraining on the choices that women could make. It helps to explain the incredibly low fertility rate in those countries because many women feel like they have to choose between work and having children. A number of them choose not to have children. But at least there is a coherent way of living up to the norms, which is to say that if you have kids and stay at home, society sees you as having done the right thing.

There are some countries like Northern Europe and Scandinavia, which have a genuinely permissive set of attitudes that tell people, do whatever you want. Have kids, don’t have kids. If you have kids, stay at home, go to work. We’re going to try to make any of those models work. It’s really up to you. It’s genuinely your choice. That, of course, seems like the right approach to me.

There is also a set of countries, including Germany and Austria, which have norms where you basically can’t win either way. The idea is that if you don’t have kids, then you’re a childless woman and there’s something wrong with you. If you do have kids and continue to work, then you are a Rabenmutter—a raven mom—who isn’t really looking after her kids in the way that she should. If you have kids and stay at home, then you’re a weird housewife who doesn’t really have full social respect, because to be a modern woman, you need to be in the workplace. If you’ve taken yourself out of work, there’s something wrong with you.

So there is a set of inconsistent gender norms in such a way that whatever you do, you’re going to end up having judgment passed on you. That is, I think, an interesting point. The other point relating to this is about places like Scandinavia. Alice Evans talked about that when she was on the podcast. It’s quite a well-known finding now that has been replicated in a number of studies, and that’s the global gender paradox.

You would think that women choose, for example, “male-coded” professions where there’s more gender equality—that women in Sweden are more likely to end up being doctors or engineers than women in Iraq or in other more patriarchal societies. But what actually happens is the opposite: the more gender-equal a society is, the more women tend to cluster in professions that have often been thought of as rather feminized.

That seems to indicate that genuine choice is not going to lead to what my mother’s generation—my mother was a conductor, a musician in a generation where there were not many, and a single mother in a generation where that was not true of many people—may have expected. Once we have genuine equality, you’re going to have 50% of conductors be women, and women will be in the workplace as much as men, and very few women will choose to stay at home.

It’s not clear that if we generally give people more choice, that will be the outcome. It obviously will be the outcome for some, like my mother, who I think would always have chosen to do those things, but it’s not going to be the answer for others.

Goodhart: All the opinion polls in the UK say that women, when asked, would work less if they could afford to. Their ideal arrangement is that they would work far less or not at all in the first few years of their children’s lives and not hand their child over to a nursery at the age of six months or nine months. There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that it is also not good for the child to start at such a young age.

Clearly, we need, in order for it to be possible for women to combine family and career—we have not got there yet. We have made quite a lot of progress towards better, particularly in Europe, less so in America, maternity arrangements and better support at work. But we need to go even further, I think, and have almost as an assumption that in the reproductive years, women and men will have a bias towards part-time work.

We need a culture of part-time work for people when they are at their most reproductively able. One of the optimistic things here is that these are bridging issues between liberals and conservatives. If we assume, for the sake of argument—it is not really true, but the idea of “strong families” and “higher fertility” are coded as conservative ideas—but actually, to have strong, stable families, you need liberal means. You need a generous family policy that makes it possible for one parent—probably usually the mother, but maybe increasingly the father as women start to earn more than men in many households—to be the stay-at-home parent in those years.

We need a policy that makes that possible. We need a more equal distribution of domestic labor between men and women in the household. We also need more well-paid, decent jobs for non-college-educated men, which makes them a better prospect for women to settle down with and have children with.

In this conversation, Yascha and David discuss concrete solutions, the roles of college degrees—and why only British humor, rather than American, can save a dour German. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

Shashank Joshi is Defence Editor at The Economist, where he writes on a wide range of national security, defence and intelligence issues.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss how the war of attrition between the United States, Israel, and Iran is unfolding, whether military successes justify the enormous economic and strategic costs, and why Iran’s nuclear program remains largely untouched despite being a primary justification for the conflict.

Note: This episode was recorded on March 18, 2026.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Yascha Mounk: Whenever there is something going on in the world that I am really confused about, I call you. I thought I would do that since I feel like the longer this war goes on, the less sure I am what to think about it. Part of this is that the war is extraordinary in the extent to which the U.S. administration just has not made a very clear case for what exactly its goals are and what exactly motivates the United States. Going not by what Trump has actually said, but going by what you take to be the smartest justification for starting this conflict now, how is this war going for the United States and for Israel?

Shashank Joshi: I think that it helps to think about this as a war of attrition and each side is trying to attrit something different, and they are each having some success in doing it. For the U.S. side, it is clearest that the aim is to attrit Iran’s military strength, its ability to project power from its base throughout the region. The most obvious metric of that is Iranian missile capability. What you have seen over the course of this conflict is that the United States has had some great success in not just striking, but also suppressing Iran’s launches of ballistic missiles, the stockpiles of those missiles, and the most important bit, I think, for U.S. strategy, the production facilities for making more of those missiles, including all of the supply chains.

Think about the propellant that goes into a missile. If you destroy the factory that makes it, you deny Iran the ability to make these missiles for some period of time. In addition to that, they have also destroyed the Iranian Navy, which of course has implications for the way in which Iran could project power into the Strait of Hormuz in the future, as well as certain types of other military capabilities.

The Israeli war, I think, is a little bit different. I think the Israeli war at the operational level is about political attrition as well as the other things I talked about. It is about attriting the Iranian leadership to the point where the regime is weak, degraded, and ultimately much more susceptible to a popular protest movement that could then topple it at the conclusion of hostilities. That is not what the Israelis say in public; this is my supposition, but I think it is a reasonable supposition based on everything they have said at the beginning of the conflict and a reasonable supposition based on the sorts of things and people they are striking, which includes Ali Larijani, a very senior official in the Iranian regime, as well as individual checkpoints of the besieged paramilitary militia.

If I am right in saying that these are the objectives, the United States has met with great operational success. Iran is going to be in a really rough position with its missile capability for some time to come when the guns fall silent. On the Israeli side, I think there has been mixed success. If the aim is to topple the regime or to leave it effectively incapable of standing on its own two feet, I think that is very much in doubt. I think the regime will be standing at the end of this and I have my doubts it will be toppled by a protest movement.

The big issue, Yascha, is if that really is the aim, then it is not just how much damage you have done; it is how much damage you have done relative to the cost you have paid. That cost includes disruption to global energy markets. It includes things like the closure of Hormuz and the huge impact on the global economy. It also has to factor in how quickly Iran could rebuild these capabilities after a conflict. When I take all that into account, I come up with my view, which is that the United States and Israel have been extremely successful at the military level, but their objectives politically are still confused and shifting. Ultimately, to me, the cost they have paid for achieving those has been extremely high. This war could not have been fought in the way that it has; I think the same things could have been achieved by other means.

Mounk: I want to get more deeply into the costs that the United States, Israel, and the world economy as a whole are paying for this war in a moment. Before we get there, if part of the goal of this war is to dismantle the ability of Iran to threaten its neighbors with rockets and other forms of attacks, if it is to really weaken the ability of Iran to sponsor various terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis that do damage in the region, to what extent has this campaign actually succeeded?

If you are looking at these strategic objectives, have you dismantled their ability to do that in the short run? In the long run, is this going to make a significant difference? Do you think that five, 10, 15 years down the line, we are going to think Iran is a really diminished actor in the region because of the events of the last few weeks?

Joshi: I think that is a great question and a difficult one. I think in 10 years’ time, we will look at an Iran that is fundamentally diminished in terms of its relationship to regional militant Islamist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and so on. Here is the important thing. Most of that diminution was done prior to this conflict. Most of that was achieved in the years prior, after October 7 and the attacks of 2023. We saw the great demolition of Hezbollah by Israel. We saw Hamas significantly weakened. We saw Iran’s ability to connect to those groups greatly weakened by the collapse of the regime in Syria, which was both a physical and a diplomatic pivot point for Iran’s ability to project its influence towards the Mediterranean Sea. It was a greatly diminished actor in my view.

We hope you’re enjoying the podcast! If you’re a paying subscriber, you can set up the premium feed on your favorite podcast app at writing.yaschamounk.com/listen. This will give you ad-free access to the full conversation, plus all full episodes and bonus episodes we have in the works! If you aren’t, you can set up the free, limited version of the feed—or, better still, support the podcast by becoming a subscriber today!

Subscribe now

Set Up Podcast

If you have any questions or issues setting up the full podcast feed on a third-party app, please email leonora.barclay@persuasion.community

That was the case before this war began on February 28. If you look at this war itself, what it has achieved is great damage to Iran’s missiles. The Israel Defense Forces say they have destroyed about 70% of Iran’s missile launchers since the beginning of the war. You can see that in the levels of missile launches towards the Gulf States, towards Israel; they have come down significantly. You are not going to see Iran reach the same level that it had pre-war in the next 12 months. In the next five years, I am not so sure about that. If you keep bombing Iran, you could sustainably keep stripping it away of these capabilities. My concern is if each time you do that, if each time you “mow the grass,” to use that rather macabre phrase that has been used by some Israeli analysts and others, if you precipitate a global crisis each time you do it, that to me is not a viable approach for keeping the Iranian regime in check.

Yes, it is weakened. There is a possibility it will stay weakened for years to come, but only with remedial action at great cost. The last thing is that we still have, of course, the Iranian nuclear program. Ostensibly, that was the rationale of the conflict. I do not believe that was the real rationale of the conflict. I think the administration is, I will be quite honest with you, lying when it says this. I think it is being dishonest in its public statements about this question. I was just listening to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, talk about this today. She was of course a known opponent of war with Iran prior to her appointment. She said very clearly that Iran had made no great steps in its enrichment program. Iran had a lot of enriched uranium. It was buried under rubble at various sites that were bombed last year. It was moving no closer to being able to weaponize that.

My big concern is that there is a chance, a small one, but there is a chance that what you are left with is a weakened but aggrieved and wounded regime led by people who are more radical than those who have been killed, who will now double down on the nuclear program even if their path to getting to a bomb is still exceptionally difficult.

Mounk: Tell me a little bit more about the nuclear program, which obviously is one big part of the justification of people who are advocating for this war. Part of the absurdity here is that Donald Trump, of course, claimed that he had completely dismantled the nuclear program with the strikes that he did last June. At the time, there were intelligence assessments that the nuclear program had certainly been damaged by that much briefer bombing campaign, but that it was not fully dismantled.

That led to the absurdity that now he could not really say that he was starting this war because of a nuclear program, since he had claimed seven or eight months earlier that he had completely destroyed the nuclear program. Realistically, where is Iran at with a nuclear program? It used to be said that they were very close to breakout; if they really make a sprint for wanting to produce atomic weapons, they would be able to do that within a very short span of time. Was the ability of the Iranian regime to do that sufficiently damaged last June? Is it being further damaged in the bombing campaign now? Does it not make a difference? How should we think about the threat of this in the future?

Joshi: Regarding Trump’s public comments last year and now, he is not constrained by the need to be particularly consistent across these issues. The truth is that Iran last year suffered grave damage to its enrichment facilities, which are the places where it spins uranium gas, uranium hexafluoride, turns it into the more enriched kind that is comprised of a greater proportion of the most fissile isotope of uranium and that can be used in a nuclear bomb. Its enrichment facilities were damaged very badly. It had them at Natanz and in Fordow inside a mountain. Its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which was enriched to about 60%, is very close to 90%, which is weapons grade. That was buried under rubble mostly at Esfahan at a place called the uranium conversion facility, but some of it also at Fordow and Natanz.

Iran did have other routes to a bomb. It could have set up new enrichment facilities somewhere else, but it is not clear whether it really had the centrifuges to do that or whether it could have done it without being detected. It would have had to go and get that uranium from under the rubble. Instead, what did it do? It effectively piled dirt over the tunnels of the entrances of those facilities, perhaps in fear of the potential for a U.S. or Israeli ground raid on those facilities. Those were effectively out of bounds. You still have this 400 kilograms of enriched uranium sitting underground inside Iran, capable of being used in a bomb, but it was in no way imminently accessible. There was no indication Iran was setting up enrichment facilities elsewhere.

The expertise necessary to turn those things into a usable weapons device—to shape it into a sphere, to have explosives around it, a triggering mechanism, a neutron initiator to set off a chain reaction—are all of those other things you need for a bomb. Many of the people and the places involved in that enterprise, which we know Iran was engaged in in the preceding 15 to 20 years, were killed or destroyed or bombed by Israel. Iran was not imminently about to make any substantial steps towards a nuclear weapon and it would have been some time away.

Auf deutsch lesen 🇩🇪

Lire en français 🇫🇷

What has happened in the current war? Basically, Iran’s nuclear program has hardly been bombed to our knowledge. Natanz, one of those sites I mentioned, I think the tunnels have been bombed and there has been one other site called the Taleghan 2 complex outside of Tehran, which is where Iran supposedly did some nuclear weapons related work, which has also been struck by Israel. We have seen dramatic satellite pictures of that with holes in the roof. Fordow has not been touched. As far as I am aware, Isfahan has not been touched. A war that is ostensibly about the nuclear program actually has seen very little to do with nuclear forces so far. Perhaps that is yet to come. We are only three weeks in. President Trump has suggested this is a four to five week campaign. Perhaps there is still more to come.

Mounk: It is remarkable that a war, the most compelling rationale for which is to try to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, has so far not done much to further damage Iran’s ability to pursue that program. At least part of the stated rationale is complicated by the fact that Trump claims it had basically been dismantled last June. We have been looking at one side of this war of attrition.

Tell us about the other side of the war of attrition. Tell us about the damage that Iran has been able to do to the world economy because of its attempts to block shipping and increase the price of oil. Tell us about the impact on the reputation and security of various places around the Gulf, including Dubai and many of the Emirates, as well as on Israel.

Joshi: Well, I do not need to tell you the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, which is this critical waterway; about 20% of the world’s oil passes through Hormuz. We know it includes not just oil, but also liquid natural gas, which is absolutely vital to Europe in particular. Not from the Gulf, but the restrictions in the Gulf changed the global gas price. The bit that people tend to forget is that the Strait of Hormuz is also incredibly important for commodities and certain types of critical commodities. The ones I think about here are things like iron ore pellets, aluminum, urea used in fertilizers, and other certain types of other critical minerals. There is this huge knock-on effect on manufacturing and not just on energy, but also on the food supply.

The immediate shock has really come in the energy markets where oil has been pushed to more than $100 a barrel. This is partly a supply shock. It is a limitation in what you can get out if you are producing it. In some senses, that is bad, but it is not the end of the world because you will make up for that lost supply once it reopens. There is also a production shock. You also have loss of production from gas fields and oil fields that have effectively been shut down amid direct attacks. That production will never come back. That is lost production. This has a direct impact on global growth.

For me, the interesting thing is that there is a kind of externality here. The United States and Israel have launched this war for their reasons. They have their own reasons for doing so. But the predominant cost is felt by others. It is felt by Europeans and it is felt by Asians. It is Asians who depend on the majority of energy coming out of the Strait of Hormuz: China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Pakistan. Pakistan is very vulnerable right now. It is Europeans who do not get their gas from Hormuz.

Subscribe now

Mounk: One of the very interesting sub-stories here, which Quico Toro has written about in the pages of Persuasion, is that fracking really killed Khamenei. His somewhat provocative thesis is that because of fracking, the United States has become basically energy independent and is much less affected by the global price of oil and gas than it used to be. A lot of the energy sources that the United States now consumes are not really part of the global energy market; they are produced and consumed in the United States. That is one of the reasons why this increase in the price of gas and oil has affected the United States so much less than other countries, and perhaps one of the reasons why the Trump administration was willing to wage this war in the first place.

Joshi: I think you are right. The United States is far less exposed to energy shocks coming out of the Gulf than America would once have been. In the 1970s and 1973 oil price shock, this had a much more profound impact on the United States. Indeed, I think there was energy rationing, speed limit restrictions, and all that kind of stuff. This time around, it is different. That said, just because America is less exposed than the rest of the world does not mean it is not exposed.

You are still seeing an impact on petrol prices and gas prices at the pump in the United States. For this to be done six months before midterm elections is really quite serious for Donald Trump. His polls have worsened; his prospects of losing the House and the Senate have grown. He is not completely immune to the consequences of the war he has unleashed at all.

Mounk: It is very interesting that Donald Trump’s standing in the polls does not seem to have budged very much over the last 14 days, according to analysts like Nate Silver. While the war is very unpopular, and while any lasting damage to the economy is likely to undermine his chances in the midterms even further, we are not really seeing any negative trend for Donald Trump’s standing in the polls over these last two weeks.

What is the future of these oil flows? This is also part of this game of attrition. The world is paying a very high price for these increased costs, which is damaging to the United States in less direct ways and to many of America’s allies who are going to try to pressure the United States to make sure that the price of gas and oil goes down. Obviously, if this somehow triggers a world recession, that is something from which the United States would suffer as well.

At the same time, my understanding is that a lot of Iran’s income is dependent on some of those same straits that they are currently blocking. How long could this blockade continue? Will it continue basically for as long as rockets are flying and this war is hot? Could Iran continue to block those waters even after the end of a war? What does that mean for the extent to which an end of this war still depends on the United States? If Donald Trump wakes up tomorrow and says that we have accomplished our objectives, can he basically end the war and have it be over a week from now? Or is that no longer in the hands of the United States in the way it might have been before the bombing started or two or three days into this conflict?

Joshi: First of all, we are still seeing escalation on the energy front. As we are speaking, we have just seen an Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field in Iran. That is a gas field that Iran shares with Qatar; I think it is the world’s biggest, if I am not mistaken. That is a big escalation. Israel has struck Iran’s oil storage tanks, but America was unhappy about that. In striking the gas field, Israel has reportedly done so with American approval. I think it is inevitable the Iranians will try to intensify attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab oil and gas production facilities. You are going to see a tightening of this. I think in the coming days, it is inevitable Iran will try to aggressively go after more of the oil facilities.

On Hormuz itself, here is the interesting thing. Iran has constrained the flow for other countries; however, it is not a complete blockade. Between March 1st and March 15th, there were about 89 ships that got through Hormuz. About 20% of those were Iran-affiliated. Many of the others were Chinese or Greek-affiliated, but they were done with deals with Iran. They were basically allowing some through. It did a deal with India to allow a couple of Indian vessels to come out.

Iran is playing a very clever game. Actually, what surprises me is that Donald Trump has not said, I am going to seize Iranian oil coming out of Hormuz myself and sell it, just like his approach to Venezuela. I am surprised he has not done that because that would keep oil flowing and keep prices down, but it would also choke off that revenue to Iran. I am not recommending it, but I am saying I would have expected Trump to do that.

To get to your core point: could Trump stop this now and Hormuz reopens? My feeling is that no, he could not. He can call a halt to this; he can stop this. But it is now in Iran’s interest to exact a heavy price for the rest of this war, if nothing else, to deter future attacks like this—to deter that purpose of periodic, sporadic “mowing of the lawn” that I described. For that to happen, they need to show they control the tempo of escalation. Right now, I think that they have shown that very well. If Trump declared a ceasefire today, I think Iran would keep the strait closed for a certain period and then say, now we are opening it; now it is our choice to reopen the strait. Reopening the strait by force is a very difficult proposition. That is something that takes weeks and compounds the duration of this major energy shock on global markets.

Mounk: Why is it that Iran has not used this weapon in the past? What has changed, which means that Iran now is saying, we have control of this incredibly important waterway for the world economy? Why do we not use that as an incredibly potent bargaining tool? If they are able to do that now, why did they not do that earlier?

Joshi: Well, they have done it to some extent. If you think back to the 1980s, you had the Iran-Iraq War, and as part of that, you had the tanker war in which Iran did go after shipping in the Persian Gulf region to the point where America was eventually drawn in in Operation Ernest Will, escorting tankers. When one of those ships was attacked and destroyed, America then bombed Iran’s navy, destroying about half of it. That was called Operation Praying Mantis.

The core of the point is that in the wars of the last 15 years—whether that is last year’s attack on nuclear sites or the kind of shadowboxing we have seen in other parts of the region—Iran has not felt its back to the wall. Iran has not been desperate. The reason it has gone after Hormuz is because it feels the regime is at risk and anything is worth trying. Of course, Iran is paying a cost for this as well. It has permanently alienated all of its Gulf allies, including those who tried to moderate or have a functioning relationship with Iran, like Saudi Arabia in recent years, and those who mediated on behalf of Iran with the United States, such as the government of Oman.

What it is going to result in is a permanently militarized, very angry set of Gulf neighbors who will then also diversify their oil and gas exports to pipelines overland to the West. This is a very costly decision for Iran. That is why it has not done it. It has basically pissed off a lot of countries, and not just regional countries but also countries like China and India. They are not delighted by the shock to their own economies. But if you are desperate, the regime is at risk, and you are going to fall, why not do it? Why not pull the temple down with you?

Mounk: Speaking of that, what is the situation within Iran? Part of the ostensible purpose of this war originally was regime change. It is clear that the Iranian regime is very unpopular among large sections of the Iranian population. Of course, they also do have pockets of support, particularly among the people who profit from the regime in various ways. We saw this extraordinary wave of protests against the regime, unlike anything else that has happened in the now 50-year history of the regime, which ended in the slaughter of tens of thousands of protesters. The regime is now very weakened. Many of the leading figures in the regime have been killed or seriously wounded. It is unclear to what extent there is a coherent command structure that is capable of actually delivering on a strategy. Yet, the regime for now seems to be relatively firmly in the saddle, perhaps more firmly in the saddle than it was about two months ago. It is clearly able to exact a lot of costs from the other side in this war of attrition that you have described for us so eloquently. How should we think about the extent to which the Iranian regime is itself now in existential danger? Is there any hope of genuine political change in Iran after this conflict ends?

Joshi: Well, here again, we have to keep in mind the baseline—the pre-war baseline—which is that the Iranian regime was weak. It was weak in every sense: economically, politically, and ideologically. It had lost legitimacy at home, as you described, having to kill tens of thousands of its own people to survive. It was despised widely. It was economically destitute and unproductive, having squandered the wealth of its people.

It was in really poor shape. The war has, in some ways, weakened it further. Reports from my colleagues from inside Iran say there are indications that growing numbers of the security services are staying at home, as you would expect them to when bombing is happening. We have seen a sense of decentralized command. Command and control in Iran is weakened because you cannot communicate with different branches of the government. Commanders lower down have to make their own decisions, so it is a more fragmented regime.

The problem is that it is also fundamentally a more hardline regime than it was two weeks ago. That is the nature of decapitation. You often see that—think about Hassan Nasrallah from Hezbollah. He came about because Israeli assassinations of his predecessors led to more coherent, organized, and capable figures rising to the top. Look at the example of someone like Ali Larijani, who was just assassinated. He was a really interesting guy. He was the head of the country’s security council. He was the figurehead of the regime in recent days when Khamenei had been killed and Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, was keeping a low profile. He was probably injured and did not want to show his face. Larijani is a really fascinating guy because he taught philosophy and specialized in the Western Enlightenment.

Mounk: He was a scholar of Immanuel Kant, I think, which confirms all the bad things I always thought about Immanuel Kant. I’m joking.

Joshi: He was also an IRGC veteran. But if you look at his death and what it has done in the day after, just like in other areas, you have hardliners maneuvering to try to put in people like Saeed Jalili, who is a more hardline ideological figure. Are these people going to be more or less likely to negotiate a deal with the United States in terms of handing over nuclear material or abandoning their nuclear commitments? What are they likely to do on these issues?

That is what concerns me. You have a brittle regime, a weak regime, but it is not about to fall apart—although I wish it were. It is full of people who, in some ways, are younger, more radical, and more ideological than the people who have been killed in large numbers in previous days.

Mounk: The last time I had you on the podcast, I asked you to make a prediction about what might happen. You hemmed and hawed a little bit and emphasized the difficulty of doing so. Then, you predicted nearly perfectly what was in fact about to happen. So would you care to repeat that feat?

Joshi: In Iran, I think this regime is still likely to survive. When the bombs fall silent, you will see enormous pent-up anger in Iran over what this regime has invited upon the country. I have no doubt about that. I do not think there is a huge rally-around-the-flag effect in terms of a sudden outpouring of support for the regime. But the population has also gone through profound turmoil.

If these attacks on energy infrastructure continue, the Iranian people are going to suffer a really rough time because they rely upon this gas for domestic electricity and production. I worry that Iranians will turn inwards. They will focus on survival as beleaguered populations often do. While you may see pockets of protest and unrest as the Israelis are calling for—in fact, they are calling up individual IRGC commanders, telling them to stand aside and saying, if you stand aside, you will avoid death; if you stay in service, we will kill you—the Israelis are trying to clear the way for this.

I still, unfortunately, would say protests will be crushed with brutal, overwhelming force. I see a regime that will continue to atrophy and be weak, but will not necessarily crumble and dissipate, not least because there is still the lack of a coherent, organized opposition that could take over. If you are Iranian, what do you fear the most? Is it the regime and its brutality and its tyranny, or is it the prospect of becoming Syria—a state that is coherent and repressive, but functioning, and that then falls apart to result in warlordism, gun smuggling, and ethnic warfare from Baluch, Azeri, and Kurdish minorities? I think that the Iranian population is deeply afraid of that.

Mounk: What about the broader conflict? How long is this conflict going to go on? What is the off-ramp and what is the region going to look like in its wake?

Joshi: Well, this is the really tough one. President Trump suggested four to five weeks, but we know there is no real point in putting too much weight on anything he says. I think he failed to anticipate the scale of Iran’s response rooted in desperation, the intensity of its attacks on the Gulf States, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the level of military response that would be required to reopen it.

He can now do that, but you cannot just put ships in the Strait of Hormuz right now, even military ships. They would be struck by missiles; they would face an onslaught of drones, cruise missiles, and fast attack boats. You need to degrade those Iranian missile launchers on the Persian Gulf coast. You might then be in a position in a week or two to put some destroyers and escorts in—although without European assistance, as they seem very reluctant to do this—and you may begin to get some energy flowing out of Hormuz.

If President Trump wants to avoid a situation in which it looks as though he has terminated the war with the Strait of Hormuz closed on terms favorable to Iran, then he has to do that. That means a conflict that will stretch well into April to achieve those objectives. At the same time, you have to contend with a situation in which Iran will be in extremely bad shape, but it will still be firing missiles at the Gulf States, and they will be running low on the interceptor missiles necessary to shoot them down. You may see more damage in the Gulf States in places like Dubai, Bahrain, and Riyadh than you do today.

My baseline scenario is a war that stretches into April, but I think you have a pretty good prospect of a pause, if not a full-fledged ceasefire, by the end of April. If it gets into May, the shock to global energy markets will be so severe that it would begin to have real, nasty political ramifications for Donald Trump at home. There are implications for his domestic administration, as seen with the departure of Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center and a close ally of Tulsi Gabbard from the restrainer camp of American foreign policy. I do not think the president has the stomach for that.

Mounk: We haven’t talked very much about Israel and its campaign in Lebanon and what situation all of this will leave Israel in in the Middle East. It seems that for the last few years, Israel has achieved a lot of its military objectives, but it also is politically weakened and isolated in a way that it hasn’t been in a long time.

Tell us about how you’re seeing the war aims from the perspective of someone like Benjamin Netanyahu and whether Israel is achieving them.

Joshi: I think the Israelis feel pretty happy about their war aims. I think they have done lasting damage to the Iranian regime, but their attempt to try to weaken the regime to the point of collapse is looking unsuccessful at this stage. That does not mean it won’t be successful, although I am skeptical as I have just said. I think they understood that Trump could have pulled the plug on this on day three, so they struck their priority targets in the first few days.

Then they accepted it could end at any time, so they have had a careful hierarchy of targets. I think at the end of this, they will have a weak Iranian regime and they can live with the possibility of having to attack it again, because it is the region that pays the cost of that. I am not saying Israelis do not pay the cost—let’s acknowledge the fact that Israelis have died. Iran has launched cluster munitions over Tel Aviv and other cities. Israel has paid a substantial cost for this in that sense; we should always recognize that civilian cost inside Israel. But it is really the Gulf region and those countries that have borne the brunt of retaliation. From Israel’s perspective, they are also, to a degree, insulated from this. From the Israeli mentality, the goal has always been to buy time; it has never been to solve a problem for good. In that respect, they would see this as a success.

In Lebanon, they have had a situation where Hezbollah is very badly weakened, but it did join the war on behalf of Iran. By the way, the Houthis in Yemen did not, which is very interesting, because they could have caused real disruption to the Red Sea, and that would have made life even worse for oil shipments. But they didn’t; Hezbollah did. Israel basically sees an opportunity to say to the Lebanese state, look, either you control Hezbollah and disarm this parastatal group, or we go in and we do it. That is why you have seen these really destructive strikes in the heart of Lebanon in Beirut.

There is a debate in Israel about the extent to which they can do this, because it requires going in on the ground in southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, occupying some of that territory, and going into many Lebanese Shia villages to find and destroy Hezbollah arms caches and strongholds. That carries a huge cost to those northern communities in Israel who live under rocket fire and to the reservists who are called up to conduct those missions. Southern Lebanon is Israel’s Vietnam. They recall that decades-long occupation of southern Lebanon and the enormous cost that was paid by the IDF and by Israelis. There are many people in Israel saying, look, call it quits. Let’s draw a line under this. We’ve had a lot of success. If you get sucked into southern Lebanon in the pursuit of trying to destroy Hezbollah for good, this will be disastrous for Israel’s long-term security and it will bog us down.

That debate is underway in Israel. But the final thing to say is Bibi hasn’t really paid a price politically. His support is slightly up, I think. He is still unpopular, of course, but the war is broadly supported in Israel. Indeed, on the first day, we had Yair Lapid, who is leader of an opposition party, write an op-ed for my colleagues at The Economist in support of the campaign.

Mounk: You have been following this campaign very closely for The Economist. You wrote a really interesting article about how the way in which people now follow campaigns generally relies on a lot of open-source intelligence. Some of that open-source intelligence has disappeared over the course of the last weeks under pressure from the U.S. administration. How have you been trying to keep up with all of these developments? How has the United States tried to roll back some of the publicly available information to make it harder for its enemies, among others, to use that information?

Joshi: First of all, let’s begin with the fact that the internet has been shut down in Iran. That’s a huge problem for those of us who want to get news out of Iran. You can still get some of it. There are Starlink terminals too—and by the way, that’s one of the great things that Elon Musk and the United States government have done, which is try to get Starlink terminals inside Iran. It is a great commitment to openness and freedom of communication that I think is one of the few steps I really applaud the administration for in this process.

But that is not enough. We rely on commercial satellite images to see a lot of what is happening. To see when there was an American strike on a girls’ school in Minhab in Iran, which was a catastrophic error of targeting, I relied on satellite images to see the damage that was done. What has happened is satellite companies in the United States, like Planet Labs and Vantor, formerly called Maxar, have realized the risk is that by publishing these things—in the past, that was not a big deal because you had single, one-off Iranian missile strikes, like against Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq in 2020 after the Soleimani assassination, or last year after Operation Midnight Hammer, an attack on Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar. Publishing an image of the strike wasn’t a huge problem because Iran was doing the strike in a very symbolic way and wasn’t doing follow-on strikes.

Now, in a campaign that is lasting weeks and weeks, when you publish that image, the risk is that Iran can use it to refine its targeting. It can say, look, I know I hit that building right to the left of the American radar. I am now going to aim slightly differently next time. Satellite companies have worried about this and are trying to be responsible, so they have shut down the flow of images. They have put a two-week delay on this in the case of Planet, and other companies will not even release any images, including of Iran itself.

That is a huge problem at the same time because it makes it much less amenable to scrutinizing the conduct of all sides in this conflict, including the Iranians, but also the Americans and the Israelis when they conduct targeting inside Iran. It shuts off our ability to see that conflict. The Trump administration has been putting pressure on satellite companies to say, stop doing this, stop publishing these things, we don’t want you to do it. Of course, they have enormous regulatory control. I think the interesting question in the longer run, is to what degree Chinese and Russian companies step into the breach. Right now they do not have an awful lot of imagery, but we are beginning to see them publish some quite interesting stuff.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Shashank discuss how the rise in oil prices is benefitting Russia, what this means for the Ukraine War, and why a ceasefire remains unlikely. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…

Read more

It is sometimes hard to know which pieces will attract wider interest and which won’t. For whatever reason, last week’s article did. And among the many interesting responses to it, there was one by one of my favorite writers: Michael Lind.

In the article, I argued that we are living amidst a strange “Paradox of Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds.” On the one hand, the social media revolution has vastly increased the ease of expressing our opinions, leading to a much more variegated public sphere (in ways both good and bad). On the other hand, those of us who are in some sense members of the professional class are part of a milieu in which the breadth of acceptable opinion is much more narrow than it was in the past. Part of the reason for this paradox, I argued, is a process I called the “Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie.” The affluent, credentialed class has shifted sharply leftward over the past decades. And since they hold outsized sway over the culture as a whole, this has opened up a cultural representation gap between this milieu and the rest of the country.

Lind’s response, which I am sharing with you today, makes a strong point: that we should, really, be distinguishing between two different segments of the middle class. The first segment includes lawyers, doctors, academics, and others who have advanced to their positions by accruing formal meritocratic credentials; the German term for it is the Bildungsbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the educated). The second segment includes business owners and prosperous artisans who have advanced to their positions by competing more directly in the free market; the German term for it is the Besitzbürgertum (roughly: the bourgeoisie of the owners). Without preempting Michael’s fire, I will just note that the way in which I used the term “bourgeoisie” in last week’s essay was primarily meant to refer to the first group, since that—perhaps to the detriment of our collective conceptual clarity—is how that term now tends to be used in the United States.

While I am at it, I should also own up to another synecdoche of which I was rightly found guilty by some thoughtful correspondents last week. When I wrote about the “Brooklynization of the Bourgeoisie,” I of course had in mind the parts of Brooklyn that are home to the Bildungsbürgertum; everything I wrote should be taken to apply to Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope but not to Brighton Beach or Sheepshead Bay; I formally apologize for unduly bringing the latter neighborhoods into disrepute.

One last note: If you have not yet added The Good Fight to your favorite podcast app, now is the time to do so. And if you are (or become!) a paying subscriber, you will have access to full versions of all recent episodes—from my conversation about the war in the Middle East with Francis Fukuyama, to my occasionally contentious interview with Ibram X. Kendi to my abortive attempt at a conversation with Klaus Schwab.

But now, without further ado, here is Michael Lind’s response to last week’s piece.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

—Yascha

Subscribe now

Set up podcast

The Two Bourgeoisies

Yascha Mounk’s essay “The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides” is as insightful as his phrase “the Brooklynization of the bourgeoisie” is memorable. His analysis could be elaborated by acknowledging that there is more than one bourgeoisie in the contemporary West.

In Germany, there has long been a distinction between the “educated middle class,” or Bildungsbürgertum, which includes lawyers, doctors, academics, clerics, and civil servants, on the one hand, and the “propertied” middle class, or Besitzbürgertum, which includes business owners and independent bankers (large and small), and prosperous, self-employed artisans, on the other.

This social division, if not the terminology, is familiar in the United States. The politics of “expert progressivism” has been based in America’s educated bourgeoisie, who since the 1900s have favored variants of would-be enlightened technocratic government as an alternative to the dreaded extremes of mob rule and plutocracy. Meanwhile, for a century, American businessmen and the politicians and pundits they have funded have denounced “meddling bureaucrats” and “long-haired professors” in pseudo-populist campaigns to delegitimize rival non-capitalist elites.

The growth of giant corporations run by managers rather than founders, and the bureaucratization of higher education and philanthropy in the United States and Europe, has greatly expanded the offices that can be filled by professionals educated and credentialed as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. These meritocratic managers can easily circulate among the bureaucracies of business, banking, government, and the nonprofit sector, and they tend to share common values instilled in them by prestigious universities.

Today’s propertied bourgeoisie is made up both of small business owners and of entrepreneurs who found companies that grow to immense size. Big and small owner-operators alike tend to share the view that their firm is their personal property. They feel attacked and insulted by government regulators, tax authorities, and workers who try to organize unions or simply demand higher wages.

Subscribe now

Right-wing populists on both sides of the Atlantic claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” when in fact they merely represent the propertied bourgeoisie in its century-long battle against the managerial-professional overclass. A model for today’s anti-intellectual, anti-tax, anti-state demagogic populism can be found in postwar poujadism—the revolt of small proprietors in France in the 1950s led by Pierre Poujade. While demagogic populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage can win over working-class voters upset with immigration or alienated by cultural progressivism, their core constituents and donors are the petty bourgeoisie as well as super-rich tycoons who answer only to themselves, like oil men and tech-company founders, as opposed to the CEOs and other temporary, professional managers of bureaucratic corporations and megabanks with many stakeholders.

If I am right, the pattern that Mounk has described so well can be described as a clash of the two bourgeoisies. On one side, technocratic professionals in large organizations of all kinds appeal to science and reason as they define them. On the other side, small capitalists and big entrepreneurs hire demagogic politicians to represent them while posing as anti-system populists. Except in the run-up to elections when they need working-class voters, both of the two bourgeoisies tend to ignore working-class majorities in the West.

Michael Lind is a contributor to Unherd and author of “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.”