Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment and the Future of Liberty
Guests: Charles Murray
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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i was not only convinced by that time that um religiosity was extremely important to the particularly christian religiosity extremely important western civilization and what had gone on uh i was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs hey folks i hope you enjoyed this interview i just quickly wanted to say that this is a new and a small podcast as you
can see from the subscriber count below on youtube so i would really appreciate it if you could share this on social media and with your friends um that that kind of stuff is really helpful so if you can subscribe on youtube if you can leave a review on itunes and especially if you can tell people about this podcast it helps out a lot especially at this stage in the channel and we got a lot of great interviews coming up i think you're gonna really like them so just stay tuned and i hope you enjoy this interview
charles murray needs introduction so let's begin with human accomplishment the pursuit of excellence in the arts and sciences i first want to ask you what motivated you to write this book well a lot of times while i was writing it i wondered that myself it was an incredibly difficult book to write the short answer is that back in the 1980s mid-1980s i read a book by daniel porsten called the discoverers i think it was and borsten you know when i picked it up i thought it was going to lay out this panorama of
human accomplishment over the centuries and it was really just a set of many biographies of a lot of major sciences and so forth and there wasn't anything wrong with that but it's not what i wanted to read i wanted to see the whole thing as a panorama and as has been the case with other books i've written i had a book i wanted to read and the the way to do that was to write it and so i set off uh on writing this and it was a five-year task all together very intense
five years clearly you can see that from the book itself um i've always had this question when i read books like this that seem to integrate every single domain of human knowledge how does a human being write a book like this like how do you consolidate so much information and integrate in these new explanations well i don't do it the way a lot of people do a lot of people a lot of people pretty much map out the book ahead of time and they know which chapters are going to follow which chapters
and so they go ahead and do a lot of their research and then they start to write human accomplishment was different from me because in one sense i couldn't start writing until i had done a lot of this historiometric research people who have not read the book should know that i establish inventories of events and inventories of people in the arts and sciences and i use a technique that's quite well established it's been around for a long
time whereby you go to the index of the book and you count up uh the number of pages that of a given person is referenced and the logic behind it is this that if you are writing a history of music you are going to end up spending a lot more time on beethoven than you do on prokofiev uh and the reason you're going to do it is to explain his music beethoven's music takes more time and he looms larger in
the story of music the same thing goes with science uh that einstein gets a lot of space same thing goes with the arts all right so so in order to accumulate inventories and i have something like 16 or 18 of them i have one for western literature uh i have one for indian literature too and for uh indian philosophy and for chinese art and you know that i just had a whole bunch of separate inventories
well i spent two years basically doing nothing but going through these indexes of books and writing down the the data there was a book called you know a set of books called the dictionary the scientific biography it's a wonderful resource in that it is supposed to be the definitive catalog of the important figures in in science it took me 17 10 hour days at the hood college library which is
about 20 miles away from me to do that one source so in one sense i had to do an awful lot of research beforehand but then when i started out uh i did what i always do which is i get interested in some particular aspect and i dig into that and i write and then i go on to another topic and there's no particular rhyme or reason to it it's very idiosyncratic
and i for for a while i have a lot of stuff in my head so my wife would say as i was finishing human accomplishment that for a few shining moments there you knew everything but then of course you start to forget it all immediately as i went back to the book today to remind myself i found myself in the position of reading a passage and saying that's really interesting because i completely forgotten it was in there anyway the answer is i go about this stuff very
very personally and the analogy that comes to mind is the guy who was a fine sculpture uh and he asked how do you do it how do you make a sculpture of a of a horse and he says you have this block of wood and you cut away everything that isn't a horse and when i'm doing a book i i have this idea in my head of what it ought to look like a very vague idea and i cut away everything that doesn't
look like what i hoped it would be did you write it one chapter at a time or did you bounce around between them uh pretty much one chapter at a time because uh that one thing would lead to another for example i've realized that if i'm going to talk about this measure this way of measuring stuff using the historio metric method that i need to describe to my readers what these distributions
of things look like and then i started to find out about the latke curve whereby with great accomplishment it is not a bell curve at all it is a very very left skewed curve here's here's the example i ended up using uh in golf in golf you will have a lot of people who win one tournament and the number of people who win two tournaments in professional golf just plunges the number of people who win three you're getting down towards the bottom
and when you get out to the greats they are all by themselves at the end that's true in almost every field of human excellence well all of that was new to me i didn't know that when i started writing the book and it just was an obvious topic i had to take up so i took it up wrote it up went on to the next chapter yeah what i found most fascinating about that chapter on the locker curve is the inputs in those uh you know wins where actually bell curves uh whatever contributed to it and the consequence was the locker curve
um i actually wanted to ask you about a related um phenomenon of just excellent performance by one individual which is excellent performance by one individual in one year there's a phenomenon of the anus mirabilis it seems like einstein had one in 1905 where he did special relativity and brownian motion and the photoelectric effect in one year uh noon had one uh optics gravity motion calculus play gear huh it was a year he's isolated because of the plague exactly yeah it makes us makes me seem uh pretty lazy
but what is behind not just a locker curve but it's consolidation in short intervals like this part of it is if you are at a very productive part of your life it spills over and that productive part of your life is probably going to be well if you're a hard scientist if you're a mathematician that may be in your 20s all right there are an awful lot of great mathematicians and everything that they did that was important they did by the age of 26.
uh because if you're operating at the far end of mathematics you need every single neuron you know clicking at full full force and you start to lose them and if you're into something like the soft sciences or policy like i am the nice thing is that you actually first place you don't need that many brain cells to be a decent social scientist compared to being a mathematician and and also the judgment and experience
works into it so whereas judgment and experience is no help whatsoever to a mathematician it's a great help if you're if you're dealing with issues of history and public policy and so forth so you can be in the 40s and 50s but but it's in my own case which i'm not comparing to newton's uh miraculous year but in my uh in my 40s i was clearly doing my best stuff in terms of uh sort of a combination of of youth and experience and that fits in
with what they have found with age distributions so age is one thing it's very unlikely you're going to have a miraculous year in your 70s also if you think about newton and about einstein and their miraculous years the different things they were doing did feed into each other in a lot of ways so you can see that if you had somebody at the peak of his powers and he was dealing with one important
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thing which also required him to do another important thing uh or look at another important thing you can see that if they're just being burst there also it's mysterious and that's part of the answer uh these things just come out of nowhere in some cases and knows how let me ask you about um whether it how mysterious the different patterns and habits of these um a great accomplishment the people who made these accomplishments are or if there's some
some consistency between their lives and their habits have you noticed that these are people just uh it doesn't seem to have a rhyme or reason to the way they love their lives or they're all over the lot in terms of personality you have lots of stories about the mad genius and you have lots of people who are under the impression that when you get a really super high iq for example you become pretty odd and don't have many per interpersonal skills and so forth that's actually an illusion you notice
the brilliant people who are also also oddballs you don't notice the people who are brilliant but but aren't oddballs and so in music you have the contrast between beethoven and bach beethoven who was phenomenal he's tied with mozart in music inventory not surprisingly but he also acted as if he were god's gift to the world
in his case he was right he was god's but not very many people are and he sort of set the standard of the artist genius who has no time for ordinary people and uh don't get in his way because he has to express himself okay in his case it was justified unfortunately everybody who came after him thought oh this is the way you're supposed to act contrast that with ba number three right after mozart and beethoven and i have lots of people who
say that's ridiculous he should be number one he created not just spectacularly wonderful music he created an incredible uber of it i mean he was writing a cantata every week for the church in which he played and he also saw something like 22 children he was this german family man with one woman with his wife and and he was this classic german burger you know uh uh who you know
very stayed looked like a prosperous german middle-class person he was a genius so you've got you you've got all of these ranges of personalities hard work is the common theme uh you know it's there is no such thing as the person who was really great in their field who sort of did it with their left hand
while they were or waited for the muse the the thing that ties everybody together i'm not the first person to observe this with other historians who've looked at genius have noted the same thing incredibly hard work over very long periods of time their whole lives six seven days a week they and that includes by the way mozart mozart is is one of the people that a lot of he has the reputation of having tossed
off these things uh while he was writing one piece of music while he was playing another the stories about mozart and his his incredible facility of music are legendary but he also worked fanatically hard now so are there any other common themes in these people
it's i i guess that is i'm thinking about art about literature and the great writers and you have everything from the very staid you know trollop writing his 2500 words every morning and then stopping and starting a new book the same day finished a previous one and then you have tolstoy who was as weird as they they get in his old age they're all like they're all over the lot you can't you can't say much as a generalization what do you think contributes to um the
common narrative that these are people who are just it's it's also true of as well as mozart of feynman in physics that this was just an incredibly playful person he just uh whenever curiosity struck him he would just go there um but in fact when you look at his life there's incredible amounts of hard work and tediousness what do you think contributes to the narrative that it's not hard work but just kind of innate skill paired with uh just with tepid curiosity
well first place you'd have to give me an example of who did it that way so that i can react to it because anybody that comes to mind did work really really really hard and and i have to say that this is one of the things that i think is way underrated right now where there is a tendency for people to
want to have a balanced life and uh i'm always struck when i am talking to people your age you're what your 20s 20 you are 20 2-0 okay and i'm thinking about when people are looking for jobs at the american enterprise institute or other places and and the people who are interviewing them come back and report to me and then you know they say he's this person's really worried about
uh you know the vacation days and that are they're going to be asked to work late and so forth and part of what i go into in the curmudgeons guide which we may be talking about later is you're 20 years old what do you want a balanced life for in your 20s is the time you should be going you know flat out in pursuit of what you love to do and finding out what you love to do but you shouldn't be looking to have balance
and if you want to be at the top of your field eo wilson the biologist has a striking paragraph in this regard he says if you want to be a top scientist not a not a just a good one but a top scientist if you've got 40 hours a week that you will spend on your teaching and ordinary university duties and then you will have another 15 hours that you will spend on this he said then you'll have another 15 hours you spend on that and at the end
of the paragraph he's outlined basically an 80 hour a week and he said this is just sort of basic you aren't going to get there from here unless you're willing to do that and in my experience that's the answer the people who drives to the top work their asses off and hardly anybody does i was going to ask you this when we talk about convergence guide but i'll bring it up now um this seems to contradict your other advice of spending your 20s either in the military or in some far-off country and place should
you focus in your 20s on your pursuit and vocation or should you spend it uh doing these other things well i've been you've caught me in a way in a contradiction there i did say pursuing the thing you love and learning what you love so in your 20s what you don't want to do is to go directly to law school above all else from undergraduate actually you don't want to go to graduate school at all because you are 20 years old 22 years
old if you're graduating perhaps uh you've proved one thing in life you're good in the classroom that's your comfort zone not only uh have you proved already you can deal with that environment it's quite possible that you have never dealt with any other environment in your life you've gone to good elementary and secondary schools you've gone to a good college all your life you've been one of the smart people you haven't the least idea what's out there in terms of of the different options in
life and you've got to be proactive in jerking yourself away from your comfort zone and the two best ways to do that are to go into the military if you're a new graduate or for that matter to get on an airplane with a one-way ticket get off the other end and make a living in that strange country for a couple of years don't be a backpacker hanging out with the expats get a job teaching english or attending
bar or whatever and get to know another really alien country you can't go to london and paris and do this you can go to bangladesh you can go to thailand the way i did you can go to nigeria but you've got to you've got to see what's out there before you can decide how you want to spend your life once you start once you find something you want to do that's the point at which you go into high gear and pursuing that
thank you for asking for that clarification uh well let me ask about your time in thailand and we'll get back to human accomplishment eventually uh but in thailand uh other than contributing to your political sensibility as you explain it in pursuit um how did it contribute in a way that you could not have gotten it or in an american town or that it was especially efficient to get it in thailand in a different country well let me let me illustrate it with with
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the early days in thailand i was assigned when i first got there to a town called lampang which is in the northern part of the country and i didn't know it at the time i was being assigned to one of the most wonderful assignments i'd get it's just gorgeous up there i was the only male farong foreigner in the entire province except for an elderly french priest and i had culture shock just
like the classic case i was miserable i would be walking down the street of lampang and i would just be exhausted because i i spoke the language sort of they gave pretty good training in peace portraying the social cues the social cues are such that if you walk down the street in the united states you know what's going on around you you walk down a street in rural thailand uh
in your first days there you have the least idea what's going on and it's very tiring and uh i who prided myself on loving every kind of cuisine didn't like thai food i did just listen i was miserable but i still remember the day maybe three months in and i was in the back of a pickup truck and uh we were heading out to a village we were doing building wells and privies was the
project and the sun was rising and the mist was coming up over the patties and uh the i said you know this isn't so bad and and i had i had become comfortable in an environment where i had been utterly convinced i could never be comfortable and an environment in which i eagerly sought to escape i couldn't without losing my pride
go home but i really wanted to okay so what's what good is that subsequently anytime i've been thrown into a really strange environment i've been able to look back in my own life experience and say that's okay you can deal with this uh and that's what i mean by having three years later i was glad i stayed in town and six years old again but by three years later i'd be going down a street in bangkok and i was just absolutely cocky at that
point i understood everything that was going on around me i was completely at home and that kind of accomplishment translates it generalizes that's why i want more people to do it also that's where i learned what i love to do it turns out i'd love to play with dave to try to make sense of patterns in numbers and i didn't know that when i went to thailand i didn't know it by the time i came back
let's talk about the patterns then of human accomplishment and the causes of it um you mentioned in the book that there are very few golden ages of human accomplishment in times of peace why do you think that is partly it's an artifact because the world has usually been at war and it's even much more common to have periods of war than periods of peace
well i'm in danger here of speculating in a way that i didn't in the book as far as i can remember it's possible that you have a relationship between a country that is fighting a certain kind of war wars of expansion wars of which where which is part of a culture which is very vital and alive and aggressive and confident which is the way the torah
you know twenty characterizes a society on the rise a a civilization that is in the full flush of of of uh growing is also likely to be a not very good neighbor to uh to the countries around it that goes under the category of speculation that you should not take to the bank but there's probably some relationship um and let's talk about wealth here um you write in the book
whether wealth was a direct cause of florence's artistic accomplishments or whether the wealth and the artistic accomplishments were both effects of some other cause is difficult to entangle what would this other cause be here's where you're asking me a question i could have answered a lot better 15 years ago when i was working in the book that i can now um human capital can't here's here's some things that can't be very
easily it can't be human capital because the human capital in florence uh 50 years before the renaissance was basically the same as the human capital in florence during the renaissance models make a huge difference so that you get socrates and but socrates piquette's plato and plato begets aristotle you've got great models you have you have in music uh bach and some of the other great
composers the baroque and they established this very rich uh musical structure theory of harmony that others could could feast on for the next hundred years and that's true both in the sciences and in the arts you have a great novelist in the country that novelist inspires other novelists that's an important feature you've read the book more recently than i have what
else do i say is important oh there's the thing about purpose and autonomy which we haven't gone into but here's where it's a bit interesting to compare east asia and europe and i say east asia instead of south asia because i don't know as much about south asia as i know about east asia but i think probably a lot of what applies
to east asia applies to south asia you had in china this incredibly stable society throughout all the invasions of the manchurians and this and that the other thing is incredibly long-lived civilization and it functioned at a very high level for a very long time um even though at the top in the politics things were were unsettled they were extremely stable within the country one of the
costs of that is that people were more willing to subordinate their own interests to others in the family especially the the family the family ties were very tight and that was that that was a huge contrast to the west to the modern west where individualism became very strong and it was okay to
walk away from your family and to devote yourself to your passion when you have that kind of autonomy you are more you have better chance of pursuing excellence in the field you aren't tied down in any way and the other thing that the west had that east asia did not have in the same form
was a sense of purpose in life and here i think christianity's role in the west is just crucial uh in a time of secularization i don't think that the generations today studying history have any idea what a what a huge cultural force christianity was in the west and in europe and one of the and one of the ways in which it uh it fostered so much accomplishment was not the protestant
reformation which played a role i mean the protestant reformation emphasized the individualism even more but it goes back to thomas aquinas and thomas aquinas said very powerfully in his theology drawing a lot from it from aristotle as well as christianity that it is pleasing to god to have his creations understood so that to
explore the universe and the workings of the universe is is uh is a way of expressing your love of god and god himself is enthusiastic about this contrast that with uh with islam in its certainly its earlier forms whereby it is blasphemous to to explore um of the universe and at this point whenever i start to talk about islam
uh then people say yes but you had the center of scientific development was in baghdad and in the middle east for centuries and and in spain when spain was under uh uh islam and i do discuss that somewhat in uh in human accomplishment the short story being that basically the theological leaders sort of looked the other way but it was never it was never
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enthusiastically embraced by the theology and they just allowed a lot of more freedom at some points in history than they did at others but it's a very different it's a very different environment for fostering individual accomplishment islamic and taoist and buddhist outlooks on life versus christian and i'm not saying this in as a believer in a religious tradition i'm
talking about its consequences culturally for certain kinds of accomplishment um so i mean the islamic golden age was only golden in comparison to the dark ages that europe was going through but then this as a wrinkle to both of the arguments uh the one you were defending and the one that that um claims that islam had a similar golden age which is that why did europe have a dark age following uh the rise of christianity
that caused the fall of the roman empire or contributed to it um what took so long between that and the enlightenment and you know the counter narrative is of course that the enlightenment resuscitated europe from christianity to promote future excellence what's wrong with this narrative i think you have to distinguish between two periods of christianity christianity started out as a very communal almost communistic um religion people
living together in common sharing things in common uh and also it had put huge emphasis on the world to come and for centuries and this is why you had it was so popular to have hermits and monasteries and so forth this life is the preparation for the next and it's unimportant in a way and that's where aquinas was so
important because he flipped that and said no using this life to accomplish these great things is pleasing to god that was a huge change and it it probably was a major factor in changing the cultural um setting for the renaissance why did it last so long well aquinas didn't come a lot rout along until what now i used to know this it's around the end of the first
millennium all right so until then you had a collapse of all sorts of civilized civilized apparatus the roman roads the aqueducts the the functioning cities a lot of that went away so you had a life that was very fragmented very not many universities except a few in italy and they were very rudimentary and they didn't come along until
the middle ages so there wasn't really any foundation on which to build uh the universities started to find provide a little place to stand for some kinds of things to get started you had specific inventions that had a huge effect why did you get this outpouring of art
great art 14th century oil paints made a difference oil paints made things possible that when possible before but mainly perspective you know three-dimensional recreation of three-dimensional spaces on a two-dimensional canvas was a huge new thing on which people could build and the other thing was the gradual development of the scientific method which took a long time but every step in
that just opened up a new increment so to start building that foundation and that as a foundation got built it became easier to build upon that and you had the outpouring of the renaissance the enlightenment did not rescue europe from christianity uh uh i'd remind you the enlightenment didn't come along until the 18th century an awful lot had happened before the 18th century things were
really you know at a very high velocity at the time that the enlightenment occurred i admire steve pinker i think that his infatuation with the enlightenment is a little overstated uh it occurred to me while you were talking uh that there's there's an interesting pattern here that you talk about more in the by the people which is um the institutional sclerosis is only evaded when there's something that just causes the downfall of everything that came before
and it seems like that's what happened in europe where you had nothing to start off with and that just caused immense rates of accomplishment after for for people who are not familiar with uh institutional sclerosis this is the contribution of mancer olsen an economist who wrote a couple of seminal books back in the 1960s and 70s which said look what's that what happens with any society is that over time you have sclerotic institutions because it's
like barnacles in a boat that slow it down in the case of institutions it is that special interests get things worked out to their advantage where uh so they want to keep it that way and then another a special interest gets another you know twist in the law or whatever and over time you get hundreds of these these um inefficiencies these barriers that get put up it's very
very hard to get rid of them i'll give you the classic example uh is the sugar subsidy in the united states that we still have a subsidy for sugar farmers in the united states which leads americans into a situation where they're paying twice the world price for sugar this benefits a very small number of sugar farmers why can't you get rid of it because you can't get the entire nation excited about paying twice the world price for
sugar but the sugar farmers are really really excited about keeping their sugar subsidy and so every time congress tries to repeal it you have this very effective powerful lobbying uh that can go into uh operation in washington and they manage to convince enough people to keep it that it never never goes away okay take the sugar subsidy multiply that 500 times a thousand times and you have institutions that really can't get much done
and does that remind you of any institutions in the united states today such as the cdc and so forth um and and answer olson said well there is one way and that's to lose a total world war and so he he contrasts the economic recovery of japan and germany with the economic recoveries of england and france after world war ii and he says what's the difference germany and japan had no choice but to
start over from scratch and the french and the british were not required to do the same thing and germany and japan just cruised right on past them within a few years this kind of sclerosis also sounds like not just contemporary us but also your account of antonine rome where you talk about uh civilization that had accomplished a great deal already but was now stagnant sclerotic secular am i reading too much into this or
are you in part describing the as it is today yeah uh ross stout that the new york times columnist wrote a book called i guess the title is the decadent society and he's basically making the point that that's where we are now and he he makes the point as well that you can have a society that is decadent that is still a very pleasant place to live and rome in the antonin period was still
at least if you had money it was still a very pleasant place to live and you can even have um certain kinds of accomplishment go on but they tend to be more derivative and well the the case that uh the example that ross method gives is actually going to the moon which the united states did a long time ago as opposed to having
movies that spend vast sums of money in creating an utterly wonderful simulation of going to the moon uh that's it's a it's a real you know the genius of the uh the people who create these special effects is real the artistry of what they do is real it's a very different accomplishment from actually taking the saturn v out on the launch pad and lighting that mother up and then sending it to the moon
yeah you're in an especially good position to talk about this because you wrote with your wife the book on apollo um to what to what extent has the decline in the rate of caution accomplishment contributed to our society being decadent or is it the other way around that because our society became decadent the rate of accomplishment declined the decline in the rate of accomplishment is in the sciences partly a function
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of maybe inevitable decline in certain fields so that anatomy used to be a scientific uh subfield that had a lot going on within lots of learning there's nothing to learn about human anatomy anymore uh contrast that with genetics where we are in a golden age and there's all sorts of things being discovered all the time and so you have different fields at different stages development
in the sciences there's a number of fields that are extremely well developed and there's only so many fundamental discoveries that you can make you know once you once you've discovered uh newton's laws yeah you can then get quantum mechanics but it's getting harder and harder to have basic new discoveries of things that have already been done so to some extent you've gotten the science is an inevitable
decline in the arts it's a different thing there is no reason why we still couldn't be composing great music in c major uh there's no it's not as if beethoven and brahms and haydn and so forth wrote all the great music there was to be written there but it's not going to happen and it's not going to happen because the cultural milieu simply is not going to produce that kind of accomplishment and similarly you are not
going to have certain kinds of great literature written anymore because again of the cultural milieu the the the kind of culture that produces uh the english novel of the 19th century requires a fundamentally different sensibility from the cultural milieu in which writers of today live so there i think you've got a case that
a society that has become decadent in some ways changes the milieu which impedes artistic accomplishment i'm not sure i can say the same thing about scientific accomplishment but i could certainly say it about social science accomplishment whereby what we are witnessing now in the social sciences is a collapse of the principles
that my generation of social scientists grew up believing were absolutely inviolate such as i disagree with what you say but i will defend to the death you're right to say it such as that there's that if there is science you don't agree with the answer to that is to have better science that refutes the bad science and the idea of safe spaces of getting triggered of being cancelled
because you say things which are factually true but are hateful or whatever that is a sign in the social science of not just evidence but pervasive corruption that's a case of a culture having enormous effects not in the hard sciences but in the soft sciences although there are people working in the google who will tell you that it's having effects in the hard sciences
as well yeah um i i and it's not only just culture of responding to arguments but of actually engaging and try to understand what you disagree with in the first place um you're going through an episode right now with harvard uh inviting you you um you shared an op-ed from the hardware crimson crimson that explained why you shouldn't be invited and it implied that you think that innocent people should be shot down or that you don't
think people are created equally in a moral sense and the idea that anything you have ever written even implies anything like that is so absurd it just does not engage with who you are as a person well this has been happening to so many people for so long i mean it was going on when the bell curve came out and that was 26 years ago that the belka curve came out it wasn't the same level of vitriol it wasn't at the same level of uh sort
of completely quilling anybody standing up for academic freedom the time bell curve came out you still had people who said this is a legitimate scientific inquiry now it's it's uh i don't even think i'm the most egregious example of being misrepresented what's even scarier is examples of people who have made factually accurate statements
about something involving race or gender nobody is saying that the fact was wrong they are saying that it shouldn't be said that it's wrong to say it whereas in my case they're saying that dick hernstein and i said things in a balcory we never said uh or subsequent to dick's death that i've said things that i just simply never said and the idea of white supremacy or that it's okay for certain people to die
is just nutty yeah yeah uh i'm sorry to joke about it but it's so absurd you have to laugh at it i i want to ask you though why do sword and milieus contribute are innately better at contributing to human accomplishment uh you write in the book devotion to a human cause whether social justice the environment the search for truth or abstract humanism is by its nature less compelling than devotion to god
now you have people as you mentioned like pinker who have written books about how this narrative of human progress can promote um a future of growth and science and reason and everything good do you suspect that this narrative will not be strong enough to withstand the counter that this sort of counter and alignment forces yeah um i i've undergone an evolution by the way uh since over the last 20 years and i was kind of at the beginning of it
when i finished human accomplishment in 2004-2005 where i was not only convinced by that time that religiosity was extremely important to the particularly christian religiosity extremely important western civilization and what had gone on uh i was also beginning to think that secular humanism didn't have the staying power that it needs
um and this is my this is my question for the steve pickers of the world what is your ground for your moral beliefs what yeah well that's a a question that is very hard to answer if you do not
think that they are in no way given by god and by god i don't mean a little old man sitting on the mountain top in the clouds i'm talking about a much more realistic concept of whatever a god the god might be but the notion that rape is wrong murder is wrong they all will always be wrong they are irredeemably wrong they can they can never be justified
as human you know the ten commandments basically um what is the basis for that belief if it is the nature of the universe that's one thing if you're saying we have reached this through human association that's a much weaker um
a much a much weaker force to prop it up when times get tough and i think that in all sorts of ways right now i hope you don't ask me for a lot of specific examples because i'm not sure i can give them but you see people backing off of what used to be very firm moral principles because it's increasingly unpopular or inconvenient or unfashionable to believe them and the
examples of backing off the principles of moral and social science of the search for truth the the importance of the truth as trumping everything else the importance of um civil discourse and all that all sorts of things which you have professors who 25 years ago would have said this is the foundation my moral foundation for the way i conduct my life and my profession who now have backed
away from that big time when it comes to their professional obligations and i'm saying to myself doesn't this also spill over into your the firmness is the persistence of your moral principles in other ways so i think a secular society is not just that it's likely to be much less productive than then the west was previously uh i think
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that it has a false sense of security that it can never fall back into the bad old days of totalitarianism and barbarity of all kinds we can fall back into the bad old days very easily [Music] so um i could ask you some philosophical questions about how you know which philosophy better grounds its morals but let me ask you instead of
practical question which is we do see declining rates of religious adherence in america and across the world and it doesn't seem i mean it could be the case but it doesn't seem like a huge resurgence of christianity is coming anytime soon if secular humanism isn't strong enough to stay in the face of these um other totalitarian trends is there any sort of other philosophy that doesn't require christianity that is
second first place don't write off christianity quite yet and don't don't write off uh the other great religions uh quite yet either i use the analogy i think the first time i ever used it was in human accomplishment that the 20th century was kind of the adolescence of mankind
that the enlightenment had delivered some body blows to some very old ways of looking at the world you had the enlightenment and the the primacy of reason then you had darwin who dealt a body blow to the understanding about the biblical description of how the the universe and the world were created you had uh
relativism in all sorts of forms psychologically you had the discovery of the subconscious the unconscious you had relativity in physics which which uh spills over into the way you look about it at objective truth and all sorts of other things and i call it the adolescence because i think intellectuals in the 20th century were sort of like adolescents who have decided their parents have made mistakes that they didn't have realized their parents aren't perfect and they decide their parents are wrong
about everything and the rejection of religion i think was of that order so it was not the case that in the 20th century intellectuals carefully considered religion and rejected it religion became something that nobody's smart believed in that anymore and uh that that progressed throughout the century so that by the time i went to harvard in 1960 1961 um
it was just taken for granted it was in the air if you're smart you don't believe that stuff anymore and the fact is that these are ultimate issues that human beings really want to grapple with starting with the ultimate question why is there something rather than nothing and then going on into other questions about what are the foundations of human morality are we making all of this
up is this all a matter of evolved tendencies that had survival value over the course of hundreds of millions of years of the evolution of the species or is there something else at work my sense is that there is a resurgence of interest in those questions i have some friends who teach courses at places like harvard uh that raise them that are talking about religion specifically they are jammed or if there is a public
lecture on on one of these issues people are standing at the back of the hall there is sort of a i think a real i don't know about the university of texas i suppose you have the university of texas you probably have some kids who are straight from the bible belt and other kids who are your over-educated intellectuals who thinks it's all nonsense probably something in between but but certainly in the elite schools i think that there is a real sense of here are all these important subjects we haven't
been allowed to think about seriously so i am not i'm kind of optimistic about uh the resurgence of a more thoughtful way of thinking about religion whether that takes the form of uh christianity as we've known in the past i don't know but i think his vitality is out there uh but if i can express some skepticism about that optimism uh you yourself uh have in the past
called yourself an agnostic despite being convinced of the historical role of christianity and promoting human accomplishment and you i i i don't see how even if i did agree with the arguments that christianity was and continues to be uniquely powerful for um promoting a free society i i don't see how i could bring myself to agreeing with the actual theological basis of christianity uh how how do you reconcile the fact that you yourself
are agnostic with the idea that in the future other people who aren't even convinced of the value of christianity will turn to christianity i suppose the simple answer is i'm becoming a closeted believer but uh but apart from that i'd say don't give up on a thoughtful consideration of these issues you don't have to do it in the christian framework um you can do it in a variety of frameworks it would be
one of the things i did not realize until i uh just a little background here is that my wife is uh is a uh a quaker a quaker by convincement she came to this as an adult as well she was like me she was an agnostic in college and so forth and i through her i've been exposed to a lot of really brilliant writing about a lot of really difficult issues that that doesn't require you to
uh read uh chapters about the resurrection or things like that but they're talking about product theory theological issues and sometimes not even in a christian framework at all and the the thing about this literature is that it's really smart it's it's really subtle and thoughtful and smart and so you ought to expose yourself to that and that then i can't give you a reading list right now but i think it'd be perfect to to
pick up readings in a variety of traditions that are the sort of the best that has been said and thought in each of those traditions just so you can be sure that when you reject religion you are doing it on the basis basis not of saying i don't believe bible stories anymore or whatever the equivalent is in buddhism and islam and the rest of that it is uh you were saying no i i have given consideration to the reasons why some
very thoughtful smart people do believe this and uh with respect i simply disagree with them now you've got to give yourself the basis for coming to that conclusion yeah i predict that if you expose yourself to a fair amount of that material you will have planted a different sensibility that will do you good in in years to come and i should say you have um you have
given a reading list in the curmudgeons guide uh of such literature um yeah and i'm not sure if you were familiar with uh jordan peterson when he was doing his tour explaining his version of what he thinks god is and how that relates to the christian theology um well do you suspect that if christianity or to research it would be through somebody who isn't isn't bringing back
the old uh version of theology that required you know beliefs and actual metaphysical um existence of god but something like jordan peterson where it's not clear what he believes but it is motivating enough there's there doesn't be a purpose and some transcendental good that is being promoted well again since i don't know directly what he's said i can't comment on it i can i can describe my own sense
um well just a couple of observations one is that i have a much greater sense of mystery than i used to have about the universe and i don't think that's made up i think that contemplating all sorts of things that we see around us and you know that that all it wants to say that uh everything that can be known
can be known by the human minds that becomes a little more implausible because let's stipulate that there is a god it is absolutely impossible for us to avoid anthropomorphizing that god uh we we have to think in terms of the frame of reference that we have and a god that lives outside of time
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outside of history that permeates everything is not possible for us to understand uh we are if there is a god we are like my dog trying to figure out what i'm doing when i'm running a regression equation okay the dog can look at me and he can try to try to relate that to something he can understand he has the slightest idea and similarly when people say well how can there be a god because if there were gods they could never allow all the
suffering i mean that's sort of the level of of just a lack of appreciation for the intellectual challenge of trying to get your head around some of these questions now i will also make one other observation and this comes through my wife and and the people i have been exposed to uh over the years through her i think that that there is in religion something equivalent to being tone deaf
it doesn't mean the melody doesn't exist it means that they are impaired in in trying to hear that some people are colorblind doesn't mean color doesn't exist it means they can't see it i think there are differences in human beings in their ability to um
sense other ways of knowing besides the hyper-rational ways in which i try to know things and i have become convinced it is not that they're making stuff up it is that they aren't making it up and the fact i can't see it is because i'm the equivalent of tone deaf or colorblind uh and it's not my fault but it is incumbent on me to do the best i can to understand what the melody is like and understand what the color red
is like i uh i i suspect this might be the or hubris and naivety of my youth but i have read cs lewis and a few other people and obviously i haven't engaged with the literature in any serious way but it seems to me when statements like god is beyond time and place are made it they're not even wrong i'm not even sure what is being said but like you said it might be just me not understanding the way in which it's being said on the other hand if you start with
these stipulated truth that there is a god then in what sense would that god be time bound or space bound yeah but what does it mean to not be time-bound that's remember what i said it's hard to get your head around this stuff that's exactly what i mean yeah yeah exactly right i i i will go back and um try to talk about cs lewis is better than nothing i mean i'm glad you've read cs lewis
he's he's did you find him interesting i did and it was actually in the context of a debate i was having with a friend in high school and she convinced me to read i was making the same arguments by the pro the problem of evil and she convinced me to read one of those books um and i i mean he has a way he has a prose that's really captivating but i just didn't find the arguments that persuasive okay um you've exposed yourself yeah i'll expose myself some more on your recommendation um but
let me ask you now about the link between liberty and human accomplishment um china not only of course had the differences in world view and milieu that contributed to um lower purpose and autonomy but it was to go to some more uh physical differences it had it was easier to govern geographically than europe maybe that contributed to the fact that it was also easier to thwart innovation and new ideas um and now we're coming in a time when as you're describing by the people
they're just a tremendous burden on the average individual from the government to what extent do you suspect that this has dampened the rate of human accomplishment you know in working on human accomplishment i had to come to grips with the fact that so much basically liberty as conceived by the founders uh by luck and the 18th century tradition is very young it's very new and all of this vast
array of human accomplishment that i'm writing about came before that so i had to sort of accept to myself that you don't have to live in a libertarian world in order for great things to happen because they've happened in the past but i'd reconcile that to some degree by saying but the people who accomplished those great things had a lot of de facto liberty so that they might have been living under an absolute monarchy
uh they might be in fact they might have been living in france where which was much more uh authoritarian britain was but um you could still if you were one of the french intellectuals be given a lot of personal freedom to go ahead and pursue what you wanted to pursue and that was true elsewhere in europe as well having said that
there's got to be a link between the freedom to do what you feel this passion to do and being able to do it i mean it's just simply gotta be it's you've got to have uh more potential for great human accomplishment when in some ways you have created de facto freedom for people to pursue it and if you're going to have de facto freedom for a few this is the point at which i become a good constitutional medicine and say the great thing about the united states was
the united states said was everybody should have that freedom not just the people that the state will leave alone um so let's talk about your plan then about setting up these various defense funds to create this de facto autonomy okay this is a book that uh hardly anybody who's listening to us will have read it's called by the people and it spends the first four chapters detailing all the ways in which this society is becoming more abundant
in terms of the constitution which is now bears no resemblance to the constitution as it existed up until about 1937 of to the sclerosis in the federal government um here's i'll just give people a a quick sense of how much things have changed in 1960 hardly any corporations even had an office in washington dc
maybe the airlines did because they were regulated in the trains but most american corporations washington just wasn't important now not only does every corporation have a major presence in washington both directly and in employing lawyers and lobbyists and all the rest of that they run their businesses in large part by trying to get a
competitive advantage the way a regulation is written or a piece of legislation that's passed whereby the state is providing them with an edge over their competition just in complete opposition to what the free market economy is supposed to be like then you've got the regulatory burdens which are the main focus of by the people whereby i'm not worried about jp morgan and all the regulations that have been
foisted on it by uh by the post 2008 uh recession jp morgan can afford to have you know 500 lawyers jumping through all the hoops the government wants it to jump through and in fact by the way since i'm mentioning jp morgan it is uh the ceo of chase uh who said that it gives us a bigger moat referring to the legislative regulatory
bridge legislation it gives them a better protection against competition i'm worried about the guy who wants to open up a corner store and can't open up a corner store because of all the regulatory hoops he has to go through uh i'm i'm worried about the person who a bureaucrat can come to them and say oh you're in violation of such and such and if you try to fight this i'll put you out of business because you can't you can't resist the amount of pressure we can bring on and so i suggest why not have legal
defense funds for systematic civil disobedience and the proposition is federal government cannot possibly enforce these tens of thousands of regulations that it has piled up can't possibly do it they can only get away with all that if people voluntarily comply even with idiotic regulations and so why don't we not comply with
idiotic regulations let's go ahead and run our business the way we it should be run and then if the government comes after us we have defense funds perhaps funded by the profession perhaps funded by philanthropists which say to the government we're going to fight this and we understand that we are technically in violation of the stupid regulation and that sooner or later you will probably win you're going to have to invest a lot of resources in this you're going to have
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to invest the time of your your staff and your lawyers and the rest of that do you really want to do that and i think that you have the potential in this for getting the entire federal government to behave the way that the highway patrol does which is you know i don't know about the part of the country you live in texas okay texas you can still do lots of things in texas but in the part of the country i live in which is maryland
the speed limit is 65. and you go 75 and you're fine because uh on the major highways 75 is kind of the flow of traffic and those highways were designed for those speeds and they don't stop you we're violating the law there's no way the cops can start picking up everybody and uh and so why not have a regulatory de facto regulatory regime in which we have discouraged the government from enforcing the stupid
regulations and encouraged it to uh to focus on the important ones and i have more specific suggestions for how to do that but that's that's the that's the premise for developing the the uh defense funds um it's a fascinating idea and i want to ask you first about the circumstances which make it is a radical proposal and the circumstances which make civil disobedience uh seem necessary and part of it goes back to if we lose
or if we continue losing the sort of um liberty sensibility that america has had that a unique way of life will be surrendered can you describe what it was about the american founding that made it unique in charting a nation that was that prioritized maximizing the liberty of its citizens why has this not happened in other places in other times the british made progress toward it so that at the time of the founding you are
you already had a lot of of um de facto freedom there and you had a certain amount of constitutional freedom even though they had an unwritten constitution but coming out of the common law but you also had in that encumbered with an aristocracy you had that encumbered with all sorts of class lines and so forth and the the genius of the americans was that it said that all people should
be free to pursue happiness and that all people are capable of pursuing happiness that was a break with history no other government had ever been established on the premise that the individual human being should be allowed to live his life as he sees fit as long as he accords the same freedom to everyone else
nothing else remotely like that had happened and subsequently in subsequent revolutions including the french revolution it didn't happen again the the united states was the only the only one which which had a not only a statement of the freedom of people to pursue their own happiness they set up the government with explicit tortuous ways of constraining that government
from ever sliding down the slippery slope into an ordinary authoritarian government now the fact that at last two comments about that because i know the reaction out there but they were slave holders you had you had a large chunk of the american population that was enslaved it was the fatal flaw in the founding is sort of guaranteed that it would
collapse eventually uh because the evil was so great you can't you could not have this this expression of how human beings should be allowed to live in contradiction to this reality of slavery uh that was just never going to last forever but it was kind of amazing it lasted as long as it did of the so that you had from 1789 when the constitution was passed to
1937 the federal government was still incredibly highly constrained from interfering with the lives of its citizens and that's not a bad track record uh for uh for such an ambitious experiment what what is the cause of your pessimism that this basic idea um will not originate again uh of you know founding a nation based on this kind of charter
well i'm hesitating because i have been so surprised by the last four years um you know the the answer i would have given you in 2012 when i was writing coming apart was that we have reached a modus vivandi whereby the elites have
uh established a society that really works just fine for them but they are passing off enough benefits to the rest that you sort of buy them off and you aren't going to have any principled demands for get the government off our back uh because the working class which in the past was so central
to to this uh the strength of the american experiment uh has essentially been going down the tubes in terms of its own commitment to this way of life and so i i saw in 2012 the antagonism toward the elites that existed even then i didn't i way underestimated the depth of the anger the breadth of the anger
and in one sense that seems to indicate a potential for the resuscitation of an older way of looking at how american society should function but the last four years have also been a case where what was formerly known as the right has proved itself to be every bit as authoritarian in its own way as the left is and just as willing to engage in all
sorts of practices which uh in you know would ordinarily be considered and just antithetical to a conservative perspective in the world let alone a libertarian perspective in the world so we are now in a situation where there's way more energy in the middle class in the working class for radical change than i ever would have suspected existed i'm not happy about the kind of radical
change that they're in favor of too basically at this moment in history as i reach my 77th year now i'm in my 78th year um a movement that i thought had enormous vitality and potential just 10 years ago namely a practical libertarian form of politics practical libertarian needs
small libertarian willing it's madisonian i'm really thinking about madison's conception of the rule of government uh whereas i thought that really had a chance of regathering some strength uh i'm an oddball now what i'm all sorts of people on the right now i think people like me are were you know we're useless they're they're going to go beyond that so basically
if you can give me any reason not to be pessimistic i will grasp better yeah i don't think it happens strategically i think there's certain degree of optimism but not tactically not within the next couple of decades do you think that the um coalition that trump assembled could be recaptured to a more libertarian sensibility because right now you have what could be seen as the um voice of that coalition on tv tucker carlson
sometimes using the word libertarian as an epithet um you have the tea parties uh wing in the congress the freedom caucus being the strongest supporters of trump and higher deficits and whatever else can this movement be reconsolidated with the more libertarian sensibility gee if trucker carlson just could channel his former self uh he would have a potential for being a very effective political figure and by getting in touch
with his former self i'll tell you my reaction as i listen to tucker which i don't do very often but i used to know you know i used to know tucker uh not close friends but knew and admired his work and sometimes when i have listened to him in recent years i still agree with him and he is saying things with passion which which needed to be said and in a way tucker has had the same kind of experience i've had where i've i've
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decided i was way too cavalier about low-skill immigration that you know the economists say hey low-skill immigration is a net win win and they're not taking away jobs from uh from americans and all the rest and i just bought into that too clibbly and didn't think hard enough about how it feels not to be an economist going through the numbers and saying hey it's a win-win and instead being a carpenter who used to get 19
an hour and i've been undercut uh by low-skilling marines who were working for twelve dollars an hour with no benefits and no social security and all that and and i'd say how would i feel if i were in that situation i would be angry as could be if i were in that situation and so i think tucker has hold of some some uh growth that he has done where he has augmented his former positions which i
was very close to about liberty with some other truths that need to be taken into account what's happened is though you're right he uses libertarian as an epithet and uh he has gone too far in defending the indefensible with a lot of the things that trump has done uh but i would like to think that when uh trump is gone uh which i assume will happen after this election could be wrong that you might have people like him
who have a synthesis of some aspects of the populism that deserve to be part of the synthesis but a core that goes back to individual freedom and limited government and the the the one thing that you can be too dismissive of when you're being a pessimist like me is that you discount the effect that an individual can have
so if you had a ronald reagan type of personality or an fdr kind of personality that were were uh holding these views this time that person could be a successful politician problem is you can't manufacture that kind of person so i don't know if one's going to come along but you have manufactured for them i think a world view that would be incredibly helpful in shaping their policy agenda and their communication uh you i i think you could be analogous
to what hayek was to ronald reagan uh to whoever comes in the future but do you have in that position advice for people who want to preserve a remnant of the libertarian sensibility and mold this world view in a way that could be applicable and persuasive to current and future circumstances do i have let me go back to the beginning of your question do i have any ideas about what advice for uh
i guess at this point i'd hunker down and wait for the storm to pass now you're 20 years old so you're going to be hunkering down for a while anyway just as a matter of biographical necessity in the sense of i certainly hope you don't hit your peak at the age of 23 or 24. that would be a disaster um but suppose i were 30 years old 35 years old and interested in
being engaged in this sort of thing again i think i just accept that probably not much that i want to do is going to be possible to do for a while and that you could possibly do something like you could join a think tank you could you could run for office at local levels uh campaigning on your principles and probably get elected
but you're not going to to be in a position to run against the milieu in a big way the new year is really strong and the mil and it's really hostile to to the kinds of things that i think and you probably think right now and just sit back and wait for things to be less hostile i guess is what i would do
i don't have time to sit back and wait for things to get less hostile but i have all this time in the world um i i want to ask you about the methods of this civil disobedience what has come of the madison fund since you wrote this book nothing uh what what happened is the uh there were some people who were interested in starting one but remember the book came out i think in 2014 or 15.
and it hadn't been out very long until we were in the 2016 election cycle and all of this kind of stuff just nobody was paying any attention at all to it anymore um ux retro skepticism that these issues could be a result of the political process but somebody who's trying to make the case for trump might say he has done some amount of deregulation we're about to have six to three conservative majority on the court
to what extent has the political system been able to solve these issues well i wish i knew what the story was with regard to deregulation i've heard people say that there have really been some quite significant things that have been done uh i've also heard that actually there's more smoke than fire there but but is it are we better off with regard to the regulatory regime than we were four years ago
the answer is probably yes uh six to three majority on the supreme court does that make it conceivable that that the court would uh modify what's called chevron deference and um sorry to introduce the legal jargon but chef ron reference comes from a case involving the chevron company and the supreme court held then and by the way anthony scalia was in favor of this the the government the
supreme court has said that um the court should defer to what the regulatory agency has said in its regulation in cases where there is any doubt whatsoever in other words the court is not going to try to second guess the regulators well i sympathize with the notion that the courts should not try to become expert in these very arcane issues that a lot of regulations involve but there should be some
modification of that whereby if the administration of this regulation is clearly obviously idiotic translating that into some more acceptable legal language the court ought to be able to overthrow regulations without having to get into the minutia of all the technical things that that led to chevron deference well if that were overturned what you would basically be doing is putting a rain on the regulatory state which it has not
experienced for the last 23 years at least so is that possible the 63 court i guess it's not impossible that's better than nothing uh i i i if that doesn't happen and we have to stay with this bizarre system of regulations we have and by the way the first part of that was such a it was a great description but it was
incredibly frustrating to read that you have this everything uh if you want to appeal the regulation that the regulators are imposing on you you have to go to the regulators themselves um but if you were trying to battle them in this sort of legal war of attrition with the madison fund people will say how do you expect to beat the federal government what kind of resources could you possibly assemble that would be enough to combat their resources oh it's it's much easier than people think because you just take a look at the
budget of let's say the regulatory agency for workplaces i'm blocking on the name of it right now they're responsible for regulating every workplace in the country and enforcing regulations on and you're talking about thousands of regulations and they don't have that many inspectors so you will have companies that won't get inspected particularly small companies won't get inspected for years at a time and that they at an at the level of the
vehicle the they have taken on so much regulatory responsibility that there's no way that they can staff up to respond to that and when you appeal or let's say that you have let's say that you have knowingly violated a regulation they've come and they want to fine you for it and you say okay we're going to fight fight that you are not fighting the entire federal government you're
fighting the local office of that government agency which has maybe what 10 20 people in it max and you have bureaucrats who are not that eager to to get deluged with a lot of work that they can avoid and you are saying to a specific bureaucrat who is wants to bring you to book for this violation uh okay uh how do you feel about spending 100 hours 150 hours this next month dealing with all the stuff i'm going to
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load on to you because one of the things about the regulatory state which is you can you don't have to prove things you just have you can set things in motion which will cause an enormous amount of work just to deal with the the process that you've set in motion and that's what the lawyers would be doing for the madison fund the lawyers of the madison fund would be saying you know what we're just going to take this intricate legal system that you have developed and we are going
to exploit it um not with an eye to getting justice but with an eye to making life difficult for you and guess what we can do that so you're dealing with individual human beings who are given a choice do i want to pursue this or shall maybe i'd pick on an easier target and a lot of them are just going to pick an easier target particularly by the way here's what donald trump has shown us donald trump got a reputation for
litigating anything and so when when he said to the subcontractors that he stiffs you know about this practice of donald trump's but what subcontractors you know who were supposed to do the plumbing or whatever in one of the buildings and when they're done he says oh well you didn't do the work correctly i'm just going to pay you three quarters of what the contract says and when they say we're going to fight this trump would say you fight this and we will keep you in court forever
and he made good on it and so he actually could make that into a business model whereby he could systematically underpay his subcontractor because he'd establish the threat of that makes it not worth their while now why people still did subcontracting work with him i don't know that's another question but uh the fact is you can just a credible threat of litigation in defense of against the regulatory state could have an enormous impact i actually
didn't know about that that's astonishing um but when i was telling one of my friends about this idea and he said if this strategy could work you would be expecting big corporations to be working together to innervate the government in regards to the regulations that affect them and the fact that you don't see them doing this should be evidence for the fact that it's not workable what do you say to that well the big corporations don't have much incentive to do it the big incorporations like the regulatory state
because they they can afford it and they have the competitive advantage they talked about earlier so it's i'll tell you the kind of place it would work is in the professions like dentists um and by the way i raised this with my own dentist and he said yes uh the dental dentists are subject to all kinds of picayune things my dentist had once been fined because he had
inadequately instructed his staff in the use of the fire extinguishers in the office and he paid a fine because of that um so you have the dental the dentist legal fund and he contributes a hundred bucks a year to it in return for that there are a set of specified regulations that you can just go ahead and ignore and we'll defend you if uh if the government comes after you on those each little dentist office would have a lot of incentive to uh to be part of that the same could go for
physicians uh other small companies uh there could be lots of different organizational groups that would have an interest in combining because together they could pose a uh response to the government that no individual dentist could yeah and the added benefit there would be that there would be a number figure on the cost of regulation a dentist if if a dentist is willing to contribute 100 a year then you know you can say that this is actually the cost of the regulation you're imposing on
dentist offices if they're willing to pay that yeah but so here are some other issues that somebody might bring up with this scheme you say in the book that regulations that have a halo effect should be avoided because even though they might be insensible uh you're not going to get a majority of the people to back that cause aren't most regulations probably ones that have a halo effect behind them by a halo effect i mean uh the purpose of the regulation is to protect the environment
or an endangered species uh it's very hard to get if you if you are resisting regulations of that people say will create dirty air if you resist those regulations it's going to be a public relations disaster you'll be amazed how many don't have that halo effect i give some examples in the book about getting fined for
not having a sign saying poison on a storage place of beach sand and the reason is this is a brick making factory that in some conditions under some grinding operations beach sand can produce a now you can respiratory problem so you're supposed to label the room in which the beach sand is being kept with poison you know that kind of you have no idea if you have not been directly involved in this
how picky you so many of these regulations are and they don't have a halo effect they cannot stand the light of day i'm glad i went to computer science i don't know how to deal with the uh well you're one of you're in one of the areas which has the least regulation of anybody yeah and not if uh none of donald trump and tucker crosses know something to say about it yeah um yeah but so then this brings out the question if this method works why hasn't the madison fund taken off why have these defense funds taken off
um first place the answer i gave you before [Music] donald trump came along a few months after the book came out now even if donald trump hadn't come along the fact is not that many people read books like that you would have to have a couple of people who read the book that have big bucks and would start a trial fund all on
their own actually if you had one guy i mean suppose that a jeff bezos decided this this was uh something to try you have a variety of people in this country who are so wealthy they can undertake significant uh innovations like this all on their own they don't have to get a bunch of other donors but it would have to be that kind of effect i think um has to be somebody else who who is as crazy about the idea as i am yeah but who has lots more money than i have
i haven't helped that person yet um let's talk about the future of uh liberty you in the last part of the book you talk about your optimism that in 200 years when we've grown much wealthier we'll find this sort of interference in the government unnecessary and even absurd but we were much wealthier than we were 100 years ago and yet we're still impinging on the lives of other americans what makes you optimistic that as you grow wealthier we'll see lesser need of these regulations part of the the driving thing is
increasing wealth one of the things that makes you wonder about the importance of public policy is if you plot uh per capita gdp in constant dollars over the last century it basically goes up like this and you can see that you can see the uh the depression of 1929 but it's a little tiny blip in terms of this this longer term curve you take a look at 2008 it's a little blip and then we go back up so unless you
have policy of you know stalinist stupidity of soviet stupidity presumably we're going to continue to get richer and that might be lower growth rates than we've had before but even if you growth have a growth rate of one or two percent from the base we have now you're still getting richer reasonably rapidly at some point when per capita gdp is a hundred
thousand dollars per person the idea that we need this vast elaborate bureaucratic apparatus to let's say deal with poverty it's really silly i mean for a long time a lot of us have been saying well if you just took the money and gave out the money you get rid of poverty and it's a lot easier but but we've never been at a point of national wealth where it is so
obviously idiotic that we are using this uh complex machinery so i think that time will come that that wealth wealth will be enough that we can afford free riders you know we can have some people that will take a guaranteed basic income which i have written a book in favor of and they will use it to live their lives off the backs of their fellow citizens but by that time the backs of their fellow citizens won't
feel the burden anymore and we already have a lot of people behaving that way anyway and so who cares it would free up the rest of us from all of this stuff we have to put up with uh with public policy in in terms of other kinds of technological changes however actually policing which is such a big deal now with the black lives matter thing in many ways policing is being transformed by technology and so is our vulnerability to crime so
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that uh you're much more invulnerable to property crime than you used to be and uh the police with the body cameras and so forth do we expose terrible behavior in the part of the police uh sometimes yeah we do that's a good thing in terms of a deterrent effect in the future and it's uh also much a way that you need far fewer governmental oversights if you have more transparency without the government oversight
and an awful lot of the transparency on policing is coming not from anything the government is doing to oversee the police it's the public overseeing the police with video cameras so you take all of these things even ones which are in the sectors like crime which are the subject of so much angst and so forth probably technology over time is going to make the central government powerful presence less important rather than more
i hope so um by the way you were absolutely right in the last chapter when you said that even liberals will have to recognize that local the public unions in their local governments are um causing problems and of course this has happened with police unions and you know the the claim which is true is that they protect people from accountability they don't reward good behavior and prevent punishment and bad behavior and this raises the question what about the other public sector unions uh should they be given the same treatment so hopefully that
lesson will permeate do you think that's gonna happen well two things at the local level a lot of these unions behave differently than they do at the national level or i should say in small cities and towns they behave differently so then let's take the public schools for example and the teachers union uh the teachers unions are incredibly destructive in big cities in terms of the ways in which they protect themselves at the expense of the students in
valley elementary school six miles from out here where my kids went to elementary school i think the teachers are members of a union but they don't behave that way they behave as teachers have traditionally behaved and they are nurturing and very concerned about the children and so a lot of the de facto evils of public unions are concentrated in big cities but that's true of so many other things i think it's also in one of the final chapters of by the people
that i make the argument which i'm more and more convinced of that this divide between daily life in the big cities and austin is a big city in this regard um but chicago and dallas and houston and los angeles are even more like this it's just so different all of your per all of your relationships are way different if
you are dealing with a plumber in new york city um and you're dealing with a plumber in a town of 15 000 people the the the ways in which the problems of daily life are utterly different in big cities in small cities and towns i think is behind an awful lot of the political polarization has taken place the people in the big cities look at problems in public unions they look at the problems of the police they look at these and
and they have one set of characteristics and you look at the police and the unions and the rest of the small cities have completely different characteristics by the way you mentioned the universal basic income what did you think of andrew yang's candidacy in 2020 well i got to tell you i don't pay much attention to day-to-day politics so people would tell me that uh andrew yang had the proposal for basic income and i really should learn about it and i was
busy with other things so i don't know much about what he said sorry i i'm probably for example i did not listen to a word of the debate last week between biden and trump uh the degree to which i isolate myself from politics is hard to exaggerate trust me you're better off for it uh i know that i have better mental health uh than a lot of my friends who did watch yeah that that's almost a guarantee um so usually i end interviews by asking for
what advice you would give to a 20 year old now you've written a book on this topic so i'll just ask you about that book instead the last chapter of that book is about uh the movie groundhog day what do in your view makes it uh such a profound moral fable for people who have never seen groundhog day it's kind of hard to explain but let's assume we're talking to people that have watched around that day if you watch and let's say you watched it once
i imagine that your impression if you watched it once was mine it was funny there was great chemistry between andy mcdowell and bill murray it was a rom-com with a happy ending really enjoyed it if you go back and watch it a second time you start to see the ways in which his character changes over the movie that are more subtle than you realize the beginning and the things that were
just mostly funny at the beginning begin to take on a different cast such as when bill murray is tries to commit suicide by every known means and can't and fails because he wakes up the next morning well it was funny but then all once you start to realize the degree to which this guy who initially reacted by saying well if you know i'm immortal and i'm going to have the same i will eat whatever i want to eat i will have whatever kind of sex i want to do
there's no consequences to anything i do and that is deeply unsatisfying to him to the point that he tries to commit suicide and can't and then you start to see the ways in which he is changing and it's very gradual it's very subtle and you will see more the third time you saw the second more the fourth you saw the third you were watching this guy transformed from a jerk into a good human being good in the aristotelian sense of being good
and it's done without preaching but the evolution he goes through is one of deeper and deeper moral insight that's my argument and you will never have a less painful lesson in how you evolve moral insight than by watching that movie again and again i'm looking forward to watching it the second time and then a couple more times after that i only watched the first time it didn't occur to me at that point she made uh that the suicide is a consequence of
that uh lifestyle he was living in the beginning um let me ask you another question you say in the book that getting noticed is easier than you think because good help is hard to find and what do you think explains the fact that there are young people with talent who are trying to get noticed who are trying to get opportunities at the same time there are cummagins who are looking to hire people who are qualified and talented and yeah both of them are frustrated
why are the young people who are looking for how are they frustrated are they not able to get jobs where they think they can do that i'm not sure but i i think that's the common perception that it's harder to get noticed and get uh your first break and your opportunity well i guess that you're just going to have to take it on trust that because i felt exactly the same way when i was 20 years old and i was thinking i was thinking gee how will i get ahead am i going to go work for a
company and sort of hope that somebody will notice me and i really can't overemphasize the degree of which if you look at it from that point of view it just looks like the luck of the draw and if you look at it from my end of it now which is you you're hiring people or i used to hire people
i used to when i had when i used to interview people to hire back in the late 1970s that's a long time ago but i was looking for a hint that they were anal compulsive what i wanted was some sort of in the course of the questions some sort of a sense that they weren't just making it up they weren't saying it to make me happy but they just cannot rest if there is an imperfection in something they're supposed to do
they just they they can't stand um not doing a good job on the thing some hint that they won't even roll their eyes if you said oh we're all going to work till 10 o'clock tonight because we got to get this thing out that though that they will jump in on that it is so hard to find someone who says i am going to work my ass off if you hire me no holds part if you can convey that
the number of people who will hire you like this instantly is very high but not only that look i've had lots of research assistants over well they aren't research assistants i haven't i gave up on using those a long time ago um but i have had some administrative assistants and they're doing mostly very simple things and a couple of them stand out enormously and the simple reason they
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stand out is that if they are asked to do something it happens that's really simple and and and unless you've hired people and had co workers that are people working for you you don't realize how rare it is to find somebody who will do it you know the nike slogan just do it yeah i know exactly where that comes from don't tell me about the storms at sea don't tell me about the traffic don't tell me about your dog being sick
just get it done you know and uh so you're going to do fine if you have that attitude yeah i'll i'll if i don't i'll try to cultivate it and i'll try to make sure i do uh this by the way reminds me of the final paragraph of human accomplishment and it if you happen to have the book around you i would uh love to hear you read that final passage
it's incredibly beautiful well thank you because i enjoyed writing that final passage there are some last paragraph yeah yeah the last one one of the things about uh going back to reread books is that i have friends of mine who write books and say they hate it um that they say oh i could have written this better i gotta say i go back and i re-read my books and i say this is really great okay here is the last paragraph of
human accomplishment a story is told about the medieval stone masons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great gothic cathedrals sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view invisible from any vantage point in the ground they sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down
their work would remain forever unseen by any human eye it was said that they carved for the eye of god that written in a thousand variations is the story of human accomplishment [Music] you