Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

How Has The American Political Process Produced An Openly Anti-American Political Party?

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Only time will tell if the Democrat insiders will be able to stop Sanders this time around. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. But in either case, it is now clear that Obama succeeded in fundamentally transforming America’s two-party system. We now have an openly anti-American party and an openly pro-American party.

The outcome of 2020 is not yet settled, obviously, but these two presidential election contests taken together already tell an amazing story.

The Democrat-Republican establishment had 2016 all planned out. According to the plan, 2016 would be another Clinton-Bush election, this time Jeb(!) versus Hillary. Hillary would win of course, and politics would return to normal. The majority party Democrats would keep pushing for bigger and more unaffordable government, the minority party Republicans would continue their project of steadily losing the fight, and the establishmentarians on both sides would continue feathering their nests.

But back to normal was not to be. Obama changed the game in ways the political establishment did not quite understand. What Obama did was the American political equivalent of walking on water; he had quite openly rejected America, and yet he was rewarded with a two-term presidency! As a result, it was not clear that politics in America was ever going to return to normal—and in any case, there was no chance 2016 was going to be a return to normal.

In 2016, the Republican party leadership looked on in disbelief as their voters stuck them with a candidate who had an excellent claim not to be a Republican. Meanwhile, the Democrats had a close call; their voters very nearly stuck them with a candidate who was not and had never been a Democrat. Republican voters rejected “their” party, and Democrat voters came close to rejecting “their” party, and they might have succeeded except for behind the scenes efforts by the party professionals to rig the system.

These were astonishing developments, but we need look no further than Barack Obama for the explanation.

For more than a century before the advent of Obama, the Left had adhered to a stealth strategy. They maintained a remarkable degree of party discipline over that long period, believing stealth was necessary and that it was the secret of their phenomenal success in overthrowing the Constitution incrementally, progressively. Instead of openly rejecting the Constitution, they had carefully installed in their voters a belief in what they called “the living Constitution.” A living Constitution is, of course, no Constitution at all; it is really a dying Constitution, a Constitution in the process of being murdered by a thousand cuts.

A few years ago, Encounter Books published a book of mine on the Constitution. Since then I have had many opportunities to be spoken to about the Constitution by Democrat voters. When they hear I have written on the Constitution, they unfailingly tell me right away that the important thing to understand is that we have “a living Constitution.” In general, that is all they “know” about the Constitution and all they want to know. The more outspoken ones insist that I agree with them that the Constitution changes constantly and must change constantly because of changing circumstances.

But Obama broke with tradition. To those paying attention on the Left, he did not hide his disdain for the Constitution, for America, or even for the flag—and the Left went wild. For the Left, Obama’s success meant the galling necessity for stealth was over, that they could let it all hang out because America was ready for a leftist revolution.  Many Democrat voters agreed. They were no longer willing to put up with a Democrat candidate mouthing platitudes neither they nor the candidate believed so that candidate could be elected.

Comes the hour, comes the man. Sanders was almost completely untainted by the strategy of stealth. Not only was he not a Democrat, but he had also honeymooned in the Soviet Union. In 2011, he wrote an op-ed in which he declared that the American dream is “more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina” than in the United States. At the Democratic candidates’ forum in New Hampshire on Friday night, he said America is “a racist society from top to bottom.”

As for Trump, we can say of him what Lincoln said of Grant: “he fights.” Trump’s voters wanted a fighter, someone who would not be rolled by the biparty establishment.

Many Democrat voters were as eager to rally around a candidate from beyond their party as Republican voters were eager to rally around one from beyond their party. Sanders’ enthusiastic crowds are the perfect counterpoint to Trump’s crowds chanting “U.S.A., U.S.A.” The anti-Americanism of Sanders and his voters is matched by Trump and his voters’ unabashed love for America. Sanders and Trump and their voters have this in common: they reject the old agreement according to which the majority party pretends to respect the Constitution while taking it apart and the minority party somehow never manages to mount a successful defense of it. Win or lose, we are in a new game now.

Only time will tell if the Democrat insiders will be able to stop Sanders this time around. Perhaps they will, perhaps they won’t. But in either case, it is now clear that Obama succeeded in fundamentally transforming America’s two-party system. We now have an openly anti-American party and an openly pro-American party.

Obama promised to bring about a fundamental transformation of America, and in this fundamental transformation of America’s political parties, he can legitimately claim he succeeded.

Robert Curry serves on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute and is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea

Voltaire’s Independent Mind Revolutionized the Accepted Policies on How to Create a Harmonious Society

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During the summer of 1987, a stockbroker in Kentucky told his colleague at a major Wall Street firm that one of his biggest clients was complaining. He had just hung up the phone with her; she had told him that “No one should have the kind of money I have.” His fellow agent offered condolences, “Well, at least she has the right broker!”

Black Monday came and went, problem solved, but the essential lesson is that markets bring people together for peaceful, and mutually beneficial exchange, regardless of political opinions, religious convictions, and ethnic origin. Over two hundred fifty years earlier, Poetic Justice Warrior François-Marie Arouet had written,

Go to the London Stock Exchange, you will see representatives of all nations gathered for the service of mankind. Jew, Mohammedan, and Christian deal with each other as if they were of the same religion, and give the name of infidel only to those who go bankrupt.

We know him as the French philosopher, writer, and historian Voltaire, who also poetically defended Freedom of Speech – “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” Religious Freedom – “In my life, I have prayed but one prayer: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it,” Limited Government – “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” and perhaps most self-aware of all, Reductio Ad Absurdum – “A witty saying proves nothing.”

Mr. Ralph’s Opus

Voltaire was not Arouet’s only pseudonym. His work was frequently censored and banned for its blasphemy and sedition, and his classic novella Candide is no exception. Published in 1759, Voltaire distanced himself from it for several years, attributing authorship to Mr. Ralph. The whimsical tale roasts the usual muckety-mucks such as priests, princes, generals, and philosophy professors.

Particularly, the German polymath Gottfried Leibnitz and the system of ideas he named Theodicy, no pun intended. It’s the rationalization of God’s perfection amid Man’s malevolence, and the justification of moral and physical evil for a greater good. In other words, Leibnitz’ Metaphysics of optimistic determinism, a philosophy barren of reason, purpose and pride,

I do not believe that a world without evil is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

Leibnitz is interpreting Aristotle’s Law of Causality –  actions are caused by the nature of the actors, while denying the reality of its predicate, the Law of Identity – attributes define the unique nature of the actors. Candide describes Leibnitz’ brand of optimism as “the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.”

A weary Candide finally asks, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?” For Voltaire, this was a rhetorical question, and Candide provides the truly optimistic answer, the one rooted in purposeful action, and the Ethics of self-creation,

I have no more than twenty acres of ground,” he replied, “the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils – boredom, vice, and want.

In Candide, Voltaire gave the world a great work of art, one whose philosophy is dedicated to the proposition that you can avoid reality, but you can’t avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.

Bastille Days

More than thirty years earlier, and already a well-know playwright and poet, Voltaire was imprisoned without due process for the second time. His first incarceration at the Bastille in 1717, for libelous poetry involving a government official, lasted eleven months. This time he had offended an aristocratic family after they arranged for his beating, and after a few days, Voltaire was able to negotiate his exile to England in 1726.

During the course of his nearly three-year visit to this strange land, Voltaire would discover a socioeconomic system that was much more liberal than in France. Upon his return in 1733, Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation were published, twenty four letters in all, first in English and then French, and was quickly quashed by French authorities.

While French snobbery dismissed England as a nation of shopkeepers, Upward Mobility was possible there, “You hear no talk in this country of high, middle, and low justice, nor of the hunting the property of a citizen who himself has not the liberty,” Religious Tolerance was more prevalent – “This is the country of sects. An Englishman, as a freeman, goes to Heaven by whatever road he pleases,” and the promise of Capitalism was respected, “The merchant justly proud compares himself not without some reason, to a Roman citizen.” Oddly enough, a Google search for Voltaire’s reviews of English cuisine is spartan.

However, Oxford University professor Nicholas Cronk discovered letters written in English by Voltaire and reports,

He came to England as a relatively unknown poet. While here, he was exposed to ideas of English writers and later took empiricism back to the continent. They show how Voltaire’s close interaction with the English aristocracy exposed him to Enlightenment ideas.

As Libertarian historian Wendy McElroy explains, “This difference in attitude was a large factor in explaining the extraordinary rise of the English middle class, their wealth deriving from trade.”

The Letters and Laws of Poetic Justice

The quality of Voltaire’s writing made him one of the easiest to read among great writers, and his subjects included the greatest minds of the Enlightenment – John Locke, Lord Francis Bacon, and Sir Isaac Newton. As historian Jay Winik writes, “He hated bigotry, intolerance, and superstition, yet he was less concerned with personal liberty. Thus, he was an ardent admirer of enlightened rulers.”

The “common good” was Voltaire’s ideal, not the individual. To him, “Aristotle was unintelligible,” he denied Locke’s blank slate of innate ideas, and believed that all great inventions and discoveries were merely accidents. He was also a close acquaintance of the Prussian King Frederick the Great, and inspired the short-lived “Enlightened Despotism” of Russia’s Catherine the Great. Yet McElroy asserts that Voltaire’s insight on the economic way of the English (what would become known as Adam Smith‘s “we expect our dinner from their regard to their own interest.”)

Was nothing short of revolutionary. It reversed the accepted policies on how to create a harmonious society. Traditionally, nations enforce a system of values to ensure peace. Voltaire argued the opposite. Diversity and freedom created a thriving and peaceful society.

As Winik continues, “In the end, he reflected the temper of the times. Even in his final days, Voltaire relished civilization in every form. In 1778, one month prior to his death, Voltaire embraced Benjamin Franklin. Here were two of history’s great bons vivants, one of the Old World, one of the New, one a patriarch of Europe, one a republican from America. Franklin was then the most famous American in the world, Voltaire, who had spanned the age of classicism right up to the revolutionary era, was the most famous man of letters in all of Europe. America’s John Adams was there to witness the spectacle.”

The event was recorded by America’s Adams and France’s Condorcet as “Solon embraced Sophocles,” (two classical Greek philosophers, one of letters and one of laws). It was the passing of the torch of Poetic Justice from the 17th century’s Age of Reason to the 19th century’s Artistic, Scientific, and Economic explosion of human flourishing.

 

 

 

 

The Stories We Tell Each Other Are A Far Better Forecast Of Future Economic Events Than Economists’ Models And Equations.

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Stories matter. It’s a truism for journalists, but not so much for economists. Robert Shiller, the Yale professor and Nobel laureate who predicted the housing crisis and also put behavioral economics on the map, aims to change that in a book dedicated to the thriving field of narrative economics.

While many economists are still busy creating mathematical formulas to decode and contextualise our supposedly “rational” behavior, people’s actions are more often based on human interest stories than hard data. “When we are asleep at night,” he points out, “narratives appear to us in the form of dreams. We do not dream of equations or geometric figures without some human element.”

The idea that human behavior can exert its own influence in the market is something that most traders would buy into (investor George Soros turned it into a theory that he called “reflexivity”). But in Narrative Economics, Shiller goes much broader and deeper, looking at how the stories we tell ourselves about the world drive our behavior — and thus the world itself if enough people buy into them. Economists, he argues, need to study this if they are to have any hope of doing a better job than they have in the past of predicting major events — such as recessions or asset bubbles — and how people react to them.

Consider, for example, the fall in stock prices that began after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. New York and the major European exchanges reacted by closing their doors. That only increased panic, contributing to activities such as the shipping of large quantities of gold from the US to Europe, which in turn increased the danger on major transatlantic shipping routes. This itself was driven by a narrative that took hold among jittery Europeans around the Panic of 1907, which many held up as proof that America was unstable and they should get their money out as fast as possible.

Given all this, why did markets not close after Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939? In part because of a widely shared story that the first world war had ultimately proved to be very profitable for investors who had kept their US assets, and thus were able to make money selling supplies to Europeans during the war. One result of this narrative was that the S&P index gained 9.6 per cent after war was declared.

All this seems so fuzzy — how can we sift through any of the millions of narratives floating around at any particular moment, particularly in our world of high-speed data, and find those that have meaning and will go viral? (Like diseases, narratives must spread widely in order to be economically relevant.)

It turns out that there is some connective tissue in terms of what spreads. Novelty often catches on — Shiller explains how the “Happy Birthday” song, which used the same tune as an earlier piece of music, was much more successful because it allows us to place our own name in the lyrics. There are also several timeless narratives that seem to come back again and again, mutating for each new era. Fear and hope around technology are both common, as are moral narratives such as the need for thriftiness, which Shiller believes helped prolong the Great Depression, or stories based on strong emotions such as anger against interest groups that are perceived to be selfish or out of touch — like corrupt unions in the past, or rich people today.

These stories, says Shiller, shape policy. In 1957, for example, a 3.7 per cent rise in inflation from the year before — significant in today’s terms but nothing like the 23.6 per cent rise in 1920 — created a strong crackdown by central bankers in the US and elsewhere, thanks in part to an LA Times editorial that detailed the misdeeds of selfish union bosses. Allan Sproul, the recently retired president of the Fed at that time, lamented that the “Federal Reserve System finds itself in the position of having to validate, however reluctantly, public folly and private greed by supporting increased costs and prices”. One might write a narrative of the past 10 years involving desperate central bankers trying to paper over the misdeeds of selfish and myopic politicians by keeping rates low and unwittingly brewing up a huge asset bubble and higher inequality.

But can we actually quantify the effect of narrative economics? Not easily, says Shiller. He calls for more data — in the form of interviews that question people about the stories they tell each other and themselves, and a database of sermons that capture the most important passion plays of the day. Believing that easy money will soon give way to a market crash is certainly one. If Shiller is right, the more we believe it, the more likely it will be.

Individualism Offers New Solutions To Hitherto Intractable Problems, Including Homelessness.

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“Something must be done about the homeless.”

That refrain seems to be the only thing people agree upon with respect to San Francisco’s tragic and intractable homelessness crisis. The city has lurched between the progressive and sometimes tolerant-to-a-fault policies for which it is known and periods of what reads and looks like urban warfare, encampments cleared all at once as blaring sirens sweep through.

Homeless people have virtually taken over the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, a trend that was becoming clear when I lived in the city a dozen years ago and that had become in all honesty unlike anything I’d ever seen when I visited last fall. Encampments come and go in still more neighborhoods, an almost unbelievable juxtaposition with the country’s most expensive city where a one-bedroom apartment averages $3,700.

The situation is ready-made for tired cliches of both the Left and Right. On the left, people point to the extraordinary wealth disparity and demand that the rich pay more for housing the homeless. The Right leverages San Francisco’s image as America’s city most tolerant of alternative living to document how the Left’s excesses have created a magnet for the homeless.

The president’s Council of Economic Advisers joined many free market advocates in advocating dismantling the city’s notoriously labyrinthine zoning rules, which often vary by neighborhood and no doubt contribute to sky-high rents. Doing so would be a huge step forward for the city in alleviating its housing shortage, and would almost certainly help the area’s middle class and those considering moving there. But it’s less clear it would help the homeless, often tied down by addiction and mental illness rather than high rent.

Everyone on all sides correctly stresses there is no magic solution for San Francisco’s homeless, but the discussion continues to sound like a contest between proposed magic solutions. Perhaps one problem is in the phrase “the homeless” itself. All the solutions I described above implicitly treat this population of at least 10,000 as a monolithic mass. We’re all guilty of falling back on it, but in doing so we collectivize and dehumanize thousands of individuals without a home for vastly different reasons and with vastly different lines of sight to a better life.

Smaller-scale organizations like San Francisco’s At the Crossroads provide a potential blueprint for greater progress. They’ve helped homeless youth in the city who have been kicked out of other programs and provide what they describe as unconditional support. But it isn’t the top-down unconditional support of programs often favored by the Left and anathema to the Right. They get to know the people they’re helping, and tailor that support to the actual people who need it.

They approach their clients on the ground in the city’s Tenderloin and Mission neighborhoods “without an agenda and without judgment, and focus on empowering each person to define their own goals at their own pace.” Their approach reflects an outlook that often isn’t but should be associated with the term individualism:

We walk the streets of the Downtown and Mission neighborhoods to reach disconnected youth on their own turf, handing out basic necessities like food, socks, and hygiene supplies, and slowly building counseling relationships with youth. We also meet with clients 1-to-1. We listen to them talk about anything they want, with no agenda and no judgment. Over time, we help them identify goals, figure out who they want to be, and how to become that person. When our clients want resources such as jobs, housing, education, health care, and mental health services, we partner with other organizations to meet their needs.

Measuring the success of more conventional programs is notoriously difficult, but the numbers they report for the 1,250 youth “they engaged last year — often kicked out of other programs — are promising.

It’s hard to even talk about a program that works so steadfastly at the individual level in terms of the Left and Right’s dance between justice and accountability. In a sense, it demands far greater accountability than any work requirement, clean drug test, or police presence ever could. The organization may have never kicked a client out, but that doesn’t capture the unique accountability inherent in relationships between actual people instead of social planner and the homeless.

Think of this type of local knowledge and interaction as generating countless small moments of accountability instead of a blanket rule. At the Crossroads’ clients aren’t being offered unlimited help; they’re people helped by other people who can react both socially and with actual aid in real time.

The beauty of smaller aid organizations or social entrepreneurs like At the Crossroads is they can offer new ideas and succeed, fail, or be emulated based on them. If I’m wrong about individual-specific aid, it would be easy enough for donors to observe relative to a large charity let alone a government.

Our political system may not have room for solutions that are both incremental and impossible to put on a bumper sticker. But people can invest time and money in many ideas, and this is a case where they can likely grow in parallel to lumbering government programs and erratic policing. The only truly robust and lasting way to roll back government is to outcompete it.

Max Gulker via AIER.

Economists Can’t Forecast The Future, But They Enjoy Pretending When It Helps Them Trash Opposing Views.

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The headline was unambiguous: “Brexit Is Done: The U.K. Has Left the European Union.” As of January 31, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act of 2018 has become law and the United Kingdom has begun the withdrawal process from the European Union. The transition process will continue throughout 2020 as the UK and EU governments negotiate the nature of the future relationship between the UK and the EU.

Now that the British exit from the European Union is a legal reality, the economic situation in the UK has been surprisingly sedate.

This will be a surprise for those who believed the assurances of media pundits and economic experts that the UK’s economy would become every more crippled as Brexit edged closer.

Yet economic turmoil has been sparse. Certainly, markets and companies have moved to adapt to the new coming reality of the UK as largely outside the EU’s common market. But it is hardly clear that the country is poised on the edge of a Brexit-caused economic disaster. This is true even though Brexit has clearly been all but inevitable since December’s general election.

Predictions of Doom

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

Opponents of a British exit—and the economists they employed—insisted that not only would the eventual withdrawal be disastrous for the UK economy, but that even the market uncertainty associated with an eventual withdrawal would cripple the British economy.

For example, the UK Treasury released a report in May 2016 stating:

A vote to leave would cause a profound economic shock creating instability and uncertainty which would be compounded by the complex and interdependent negotiations that would follow. The central conclusion of the analysis is that the effect of this profound shock would be to push the UK into recession and lead to a sharp rise in unemployment.

According to the report, this economic disaster didn’t require a completed exit from the EU. The mere act of voting in favor of leaving, Brits were told, would trigger enormous economic problems.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in an April 2016 report predicted that Brexit would cost Britain the equivalent of more then three thousand pounds per household and “would be a major negative shock to the UK economy, with economic fallout in the rest of the OECD.”

More nuanced analyses debated the effects of “no-deal Brexit” as opposed to a more “soft” Brexit. But in the lead-up to the election—and in the years following—the message was clear: Brexit is going to make Britain significantly poorer.

Yet investors, entrepreneurs, and consumers, appear unconvinced that the barriers to international trade raised by Brexit will be sufficient to send the UK economy into a tailspin. Investors have not abandoned UK investment opportunities, and entrepreneurs are not anticipating a crushing tariff burden. Even if the EU insists on being petulant, the UK has other important trading partners. Accordingly, by January of this year, The Telegraph reported, “The strength of the British economy is defying predictions of post-Brexit doom,” and Bloomberg reports that in spite of predictions of massive losses in the financial sector, “London has extended its lead in foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives trading since the referendum.” The Telegraph has also noted that as a finalized Brexit edges closer, hiring has increased and economic growth—as measured by economists’ usual methods, has increased.

“Transaction Costs” Include More Than Trade Barriers

The claim that Brexit would make everyone poorer was premised on an obsession with the idea that Brexit would drive up so-called “transaction costs” for British businesses in terms of tariffs and other barriers to the free movement of labor and goods. The assumption was that business with the Continent was streamlined and basically frictionless, while withdrawal from the EU would raise many new barriers.

This is a common argument among economists and politicians who favor greater streamlining of trade and migration through international agreements.

Certainly minimizing transaction costs in this way is always a good thing, all else being equal. It’s good when trade increases, and when countries—and the individuals within them—are able to take advantage of the the division of labor. It’s also good when consumers and entrepreneurs are left to choose for themselves what products they wish to buy and from where.

But the problem with economic integration of the EU sort is that it also tends to come with political integration.

Thus, economic integration comes with a host of strings attached in the form of bureaucratic management from above. That management has been extensive, and the regulatory burdens associated with it are significant.

Ralph Peters at the Hoover Institution refers to the EU as “a bureaucratic monster” that interferes absurdly with “the structures of everyday life.”

Even worse, trying to reduce this bureaucratic burden is extremely difficult for any single member of the EU. Any significant change to Europe-wide bureaucratic edicts requires an enormous amount of effort in marshaling support from other member states and pushing through reforms. The weight imposed on smaller businesses and entrepreneurs is especially damaging. As Peter Chapman noted at Politico, “the EU’s general antipathy towards entrepreneurs remains a huge barrier” to economic improvement. Although the nominal benefits of membership in the EU may be easy to see in terms of reduced trade barriers, the net benefits are far less clear to those who are aware of the true cost of the EU bureaucracy. Not only does EU membership come with high transaction costs in terms of added regulations, but the nature of the EU’s unelected and foreign institutions likely made the bureaucracy less responsive, less flexible, and more permanent. That in itself is an added burden above and beyond the regulations themselves.

Some anti-Brexit commentators have noted the obvious: namely that Brexit does not automatically bring relief from regulatory burdens. This is certainly true, but all this means is that British entrepreneurs and consumers are presently banking on the idea that at least some regulatory relief will come, and that the cost of international trade will not rise to crippling levels.  But it also means that if UK policymakers want to change or reduce these bureaucratic burdens, it’s not necessary to go to Brussels to beg for relief. In other words, the private sector appears to be taking a long-term view while the anti-Brexit pundits are obsessing over the immediate future.

Are Psychopaths Running The World? Or The Company You Work For? Here’s A Handy Checklist.

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Often when we think of the word psychopath, we think of deranged serial killers that are hopefully locked up in prison for life.

While there are many psychopaths who kill for reasons that are unfathomable to most of us and who are indeed in prison, there is an even greater number roaming free in our society and often using their condition to their advantage in any way possible.

In fact, it is very likely that you know some – they might even be your colleagues.

Most of us do not know or work with any serial killers, at least not that we are aware of. So, what exactly is a psychopath and how can we define them? The dictionary definition is as follows:

“A person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.”
As you can probably tell, a lot more than just serial killers will fit into this broad definition. In fact, according to Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, an estimated 1% of the Earth’s population is psychopathic and around 25% of the population of male inmates at federal correctional facilities are psychopathic.

Psychopathic Traits

It is important to note that, in contrast with the popular image of the ‘deranged psycho,’ psychopaths tend to be very well composed, take good care of their appearance and are very charming (think of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho). Because of this you may have a difficult time spotting them out, as they are masters of deception and are able to fake a lot of the qualities that define regular people. Some other psychopathic traits, according to Hare’s Psychopath

  • Glib and superficial charm
  • Grandiose estimation of self
  • Need for stimulation
  • Manipulative and cunning
  • Complete lack of remorse or guilt
  • Pathological lying
  • Have a parasitic lifestyle, often latching onto and taking from others
  • Have a history of early behavioral problems
  • Overly impulsive
  • Are very irresponsible
  • Unable to accept responsibility for actions
  • Unable to commit to long-term relationships
  • History of juvenile delinquency
  • Display criminal versatility
  • Experienced a “revocation of conditional release”
  • Lacks realistic long term goals
  • History of promiscuous sexual behavior
  • Have poor behavioral controls
  • Are callous and lack empathy
  • Have a “shallow affect” (psychopaths show a lack of emotion when an emotional reaction is appropriate.)

You can actually rate yourself to find out if you are psychopath. On each criterion, the subject is ranked on a 3-point scale: (0 = item does not apply, 1 = item applies somewhat, 2 = item definitely applies). The scores are summed to create a rank of zero to 40. Anyone who scores 30 and above is most likely a psychopath. Hare has used this test and checklist to detect which inmates are psychopaths.

Snakes In Suits

What many of us don’t realize is that psychopaths actually thrive in the corporate world. Hare has actually co-authored a book with Dr. Paul Babiak on this topic entitled, Snakes In Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. Psychopaths manipulate others to accrue power, sometimes pitting them against each other in an attempt to divide and conquer. They are often attracted to bigger, dynamic corporations with very little structure or supervision. They generally don’t work well in teamsbecause they don’t like to share information or skills and it brings them joy to watch others fail. They are addicted to power, status and money. Sound familiar?

Sadly, the corporate world is set up to favor psychopathic traits such as fearlessness, dominant behavior and immunity to stress. Because of this, psychopaths often find themselves in these types of positions, and then have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder and obtaining positions of great power. This is where they can do real damage to society.

Are Psychopaths Running The World?

Not only as corporate heads do psychopaths find success in our modern-day society, but also within our governments and political system — often as front-line politicians. This may come as a shock to you, but when you really look at some of the atrocities that are taking place on our planet, and if you’ve ever wondered how things that are so inhumane could actually be happening, well, therein lies your answer.

When you consider the war, genocide, senseless murder of civilians, treatment of the indigenous cultures of the world, chemicals in our food, air and water supply, acts of “terrorism”, war crimes and so many other unjust and cruel actions which are often instigated by our political leaders, it becomes easy to see how psychopaths actually fit the requirements for these types of roles quite well. As mentioned before they are masters of deception, pathological liars and often quite charming.

Many soldiers go to war and because they are conditioned to believe that they are fighting an enemy in the name of peace. They do as they are told and commit these heinous acts against other human beings. The reason why so many soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder is because it is not within human nature to murder other humans, and especially innocent civilians

We already know how many politicians are crooked, but perhaps its time to start looking at them with the psychopath checklist in mind so that we can be better equipped to protect not only ourselves but our society from their malicious acts.

But Can’t We Help Them?

It is natural for anyone who is an empath or those involved in spiritual work to have compassion for these individuals and feel compelled to help them overcome their psychopathic behavior. However, most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. This is one of the main differences that separates sociopaths from psychopaths. Another is that sociopaths have a conscience, albeit a weak one, and will often justify something they know to be wrong. By contrast, psychopaths will believe that their actions are justified and feel no remorse for any harm done. Sociopaths are made, and have a higher likelihood of overcoming their condition. However, many of those with sociopathic behavior will find themselves in similar corporate positions.

Hare’s research discovered that by attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you into believing that they are remorseful and understand how their actions were wrong.

The best we can do is learn to recognize the traits of psychopaths and be sure to stay clear of their actions and behaviors to protect ourselves from the wake of their inevitable destruction.

A Thoughtless Immigration Policy Leads To A Society That No Longer Believes In Its Own Traditional Values.

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“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

The Democratic Party has morphed into such a political organ. It’s responding to the fact that minorities in the United States will soon form a majority. This rising majority, as polling trends indicate, will speak in one political voice, for most immigrants to the United States are not from Europe and Canada, but from Latin America and Asia, south and east. And this cohort of immigrants is reliably progressive: It votes Democratic.

Likewise, the poor and the unskilled are well-represented among our country’s immigrant intake. It’s the way we roll. Poor immigrants favor the rearranging of the income curve in their new home.

The policy establishment preaches well-meaning pieties. Our ruling idiocracy, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, claims that all these energetically imported, fractious minorities will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, and adopt our U.S. constitutional design and “our values.”

Democrats know better. Oh, the founding population, they expect, naïvely will hitch its existential survival to a political dispensation called liberal democracy.

The duped, historic majority of the United States willingly will cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards—for the abstractions—offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, many legacy Americans are generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling about ourselves. But while Americans don’t see race; the people they’re importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian-Americans. They’re a relatively new addition to the United States’ top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian-Americans have “arrived in America over the past two decades.” But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

By the Economist’s telling, “Capitol Hill, for example, is crammed with staff and interns of Indian-American heritage. They also appear to be ‘over-represented’ in academia, the media and other influential posts.” And, it is their indisputable habit to deploy and grow “informal networks, as well-connected Indian-Americans find jobs for each other’s offspring.”

Caste and ethnicity: It’s what the scrupulously candid English magazine is here hinting at, ever so genteelly. As many in the corporate world know all too well—once an individual of South-Asian descent gets into a position of power, he is inclined to hire others of the same persuasion, talent be damned. Meek Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, hire by talent, not by tribe. They don’t seem to have that screw-or-be-screwed DNA to do battle with such flinty duplicity.

This mercenary, extractive approach to politics prevails among the immigrants being imported at a furious rate by the immigration-industrial-complex. Asians, aforementioned, are especially primed to seek, and aggressively extract, advantage from positions of power.

Take Kamala Harris. Although she “rarely mentioned the Indian side of her family while campaigning,” the senator’s mother migrated to California from Chennai, in southern India. Angry, anti-white, and highly receptive to theories that blacken the West and porcelainize the undeveloped world—Kamala and those who share her way of thinking cannot be trusted to relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a complete commitment to a constitutional design, in the America she and her progeny hope to inherit.

What about that seething Somali, Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota? Who will be the loser in her brave, new, tribal America?

In the context of democracy and its discontents, Anglo-American elites and policymakers have courted and engineered their own demise. No other group expresses such incontinent exhilaration at the prospects of turning their historic populations into minorities.

“The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world,” states Pew Research. “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 89.4 million people, or 28 percent of the overall U.S. population,” says the American Community Survey (ACS). According to the Migration Policy Institute, “One in seven U.S. residents is foreign-born.”

As stated, the foreign-born are, for the most part, from alien, often-hostile cultures.

“A century ago, more than 80 percent of [America’s] foreign-born population came from Europe; now the figure is only 10 percent. . . . America is becoming less European,” bewailed the Economist in one issue, inexplicably.

“Inexplicably,” because this (superb) news magazine usually glorifies the ethnic transformation of European societies through exotic immigration.

Confusion born of contradictions peaks in the next issue, where Robert Guest, of the same open-borders Economist, lectures and laments that, “The simplest way to make the world richer is to allow more people to move. Yet the politics of migration has never been more toxic.”

D’oh! While extolling endless migration to the West, the very same, November 16th-22 issue of the magazine depicts a world beset by unrest:

It is hard to keep up with the protest movements under way around the world. … only the global unrest of the late 1960s was similar in scope.

After much dissembling, it is eventually conceded that the global unrest is engulfing “well-functioning democracies” big time, too.

In fact, “a related phenomenon [in the unrest equation] is the weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy—that losers, who may represent a majority of the popular vote, will accept rule by the winners until the next election. The millions on the streets do not accept the patience that trade-off demands.” (Emphasis added.)

“A weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy”? I wonder why?

Because flooding western democracies with non-western people has created societies without social capital; societies that share no enduring bonds other than the quest to extract as much power and possessions possible from the political process.

Western nation-states are now imperiled entities. Their central authorities have worked to erode delicate sectarian and ethnic balance within, and thus hope for lasting comity among disparate communities.

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations—where are the referenda on mass immigration?—governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in western democracies, and, with it, the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Consider: Before Comrade Ted Kennedy’s coup of 1965, America was, by and large, a biracial nation. To quote author Ann Coulter, “From 1620 to 1970, the U.S. was demographically stable. . . . The country was about 85 percent to 90 percent white, almost entirely British, German, French and Dutch, and 10 percent to 15 percent African American.” In other words, America was largely a biracial compact; never a multicultural “nation of immigrants.”

Blacks and whites were only just beginning to come to terms with each other and with a shared, painful past.

Arguably, by opening the floodgates to mass, Third-World immigrants, the government of the day forever upset the teetering biracial balance within America.

Poetic Justice Warrior John Bogle Mines Economic Value in Markets and Reputational Value in Minds

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Free market economics is a misunderstood phenomenon. As a dynamic system, it is complex and defies computer modeling. It is emergent, having both micro levels of individual human action and macro global trading systems. Accordingly, capitalism is not a contrived system. It is organic, and to understand it we must identify the essentials. In the case of capital markets as a vehicle for mass human flourishing, Poetic Justice Warrior John Bogle understood the economics, identified the essentials, and communicated their efficacy. Bogle’s Vanguard Group delivered the goods in a way that revolutionized an entire industry, and his innovative leadership improved the lives of countless millions. It’s what entrepreneurs do, as Bogle explains,

Rely on the virtues that intelligent human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance. In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.

In 1803, the classical French economist Jean-Baptiste Say announced Say’s Law – production precedes markets and consumption. As the founding CEO of the Vanguard mutual fund business, Bogle highlighted the difference between entrepreneurs and markets, and announced that his clients will invest in businesses; markets are the natural manifestation of political freedom, which is essential.

Of Producers, Prices, and Profits

With this quote, Bogle declares the morality of profits through “enjoying the returns earned by businesses.” Not only is the pursuit of happiness our highest moral value, the pursuit of earned profit is a virtue; never at the expense of others, always through the delivery of value to others. As author, finance professor, and activist for capitalism Yaron Brook explains, along with Don Watkins in their book In Pursuit of Wealth, The Moral Case for Finance:

The profit motive is the producer’s motive. It is the desire to prosper, to spearhead the invention of new values that raise our standard of living. Each individual has to produce wealth in order to live and enjoy his own life.

Yet our postmodern culture scorns profits. Those who seek them are stigmatized as profiteers. In logic, there can be no contradictions, so what are the false premises behind this propaganda? Brook identifies three of them. First: “The motives of businessmen are fundamentally similar to the motives of criminals – material rewards for themselves. Second, the profit motive is dangerous and immoral – to be a manipulator or an exploiter. Third is to equate morality with selflessly serving society.”

Inevitably, those who preach self-sacrifice also proclaim that money is the root of all evil, but this absurdity is easily explained by journalist and satirist H. L. Mencken, “When somebody says its not about the money. It’s about the money.”

It should be about the money. As a unit of account, it’s why the Price Mechanism is essential to efficient markets, productive activity, and mass prosperity. As a medium of exchange, it’s how the most people are able to experience and voluntarily share their pursuit of happiness. As a store of value, it’s where John Bogle saw a marvelous opportunity for value creation – exploit the price mechanism of efficient capital markets for the benefit of small investors, and really exploit the highly regulated and expensive cost structure of an entrenched mutual fund industry that was ripe for innovation.

More, Better, Cheaper

And it’s about the savings. One attribute of human life is that our most productive years do not coincide with our consumption needs and desires. Accordingly, the heroes of finance have enriched our lives by their creation of financial instruments – cash, stocks, bonds, and derivatives, as a store of value, and of time, for our savings. Their businesses essentially monetize time, and individual ownership of it, by borrowing, lending and investing. This is life-changing, and like any industry, finance is subject to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s laws of Creative Destruction.

Capitalism is by nature a method of economic change. This evolutionary character of the capitalist process is due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment. Change alters the data of economic action.

For Bogle, his first economic action was to organize the Vanguard Group as a mutual corporation in 1975. Because his fund’s shareholders ultimately owned the company, he was able to align the interests of his clients with their money. It was their savings, no one else’s. In 1976, he launched the first mass market stock index mutual fund (now known as the Vanguard S & P 500 Index Fund) to allow his investors to avoid the underperformance risk the industry conveniently ignores. And in 1977, Vanguard abandoned the traditional broker/dealer sales network in favor of a no-load, direct distribution system. After all, why pay management and distribution fees for the opportunity to underperform?

Perhaps Bogle’s most profound innovation is rooted in the microeconomics of entrepreneurs running businesses and the macroeconomics of governments looting entrepreneurs who run businesses. As Watkins writes in Finance Isn’t Free and Never Really Was, “Macro instability is the result of government control of money, credit, wages, and prices. Micro instability is the result of government restricting financial freedom and subverting market discipline.” Economist Ludwig von Mises understands the role of the entrepreneur for peaceful human progress best,

An entrepreneur cannot be trained. A man becomes and entrepreneur by seizing an opportunity and filling the gap. No special education is required for such a display of keen judgment, foresight, and energy.

Yet the passive minds of the entrenched investment management industry, particularly their economic and market soothsayers, are merely government trucklers. Their medieval shiny object is to predict the Keynesian macroeconomic growth metric we know as GDP. Their stock analyst counterparts have their own holy grail – find mispriced companies and publish buy recommendations. Combined, they claim to earn their management fees by generating alpha (outperform the market) based on their conviction that capital markets are inefficient. It’s their cherished “information premium.” Friedrich Hayek’s essay The Use of Knowledge in Society (the most widely read in the history of finance) would be a good place to start.

True ESG Investing – Ethical, Scientific, and Gainful

Government economic planners demean capitalism and promote econometric models in order to stay relevant. Similarly, the Vanguard Group is a threat to investment committees who deny the price mechanism of Modern Portfolio Theory in order to stay relevant. As poetic justice would have it, the investment management industry is adapting for the benefit of everyone. For example, the proliferation of exchange-traded index funds and empirically sound factor-based strategies means more choice, quality, and profits.

Of course, the massive success of indexing has attracted the regulation loving looters and the subjective moralists who want to transform capitalism. A 2016 New York Times Op-Ed, authored by government cronies, simply declares index funds a monopoly that distorts the price mechanism. Fortunately, Nobel laureates Gene Fama and Ken French, who expanded the Efficient Market Hypothesis, have ethically and scientifically debunked the call for more intrusive governance,

Despite the increased popularity of index-based approaches, the data continue to support the idea that markets are working. Annual trading volume continues to be in line with prior years, indicating that market participant transactions are still driving price discovery.

John Bogle passed away a year ago, but his legacy thrives. In addition to the quality of life he earned for himself, family, employees, and investors, Poetic Justice Warrior John Bogle has proven that his forebears, the most reviled members of society in human history – value-creating money changers and lenders – deserve respect, recognition, and redemption. This is also a stunning achievement.

 

Economic Growth GDP

What Is Economic Repression? It’s The Squeeze On Our Individual Incomes Due To Excessive Regulation and Taxation.

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The U.S. economy may be headed for recession in the next year or two and policymakers are fretting about how to combat it even though an obvious answer stares them in the face — economic freedom.Why the worry? For starters, we are overdue for a downturn in historical terms. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the U.S. economy rarely goes more than a decade without backsliding for at least a couple of quarters and it has been growing, though often anemically, since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009.Moreover, uncertainty about election results and policy paths can impede business investment. Maybe the Senate will boot the President and his V.P. from office. Maybe Don John will survive his impeachment trial but lose re-election only to be replaced next January by … a socialist? A moderate? Maybe he will win and claim a mandate to justify yet more destructive economic policies. Nobody knows, so it may be best to hold off building that new headquarters, investing in that new computer network, buying that fleet of trucks, and so forth. Not good!In addition, a few technical warning signs, like the yield curve, have blinked yellow or red, further increasing uncertainty.Finally, panic over the coronavirus, even if overblown, may hurt too.The only consolation in all this is the knowledge that the economy will rebound automatically through standard economic processes. When recession strikes, the prices of equities, capital equipment, labor, and so forth decrease until somebody with cash says, “I’ll buy that!”

But for the last century or so, policymakers in the United States, like much of the world, have not been content to allow the economy to self-correct. They want to fudge around with tax and interest rates, even if that means countenancing absurdities like more rounds of quantitative easing, negative interest rates, or dropping money out of helicopters.

Cutting taxes is always a good idea and Trump’s tax cuts may have kept the U.S. out of recession thus far despite his onerous trade war. But fiscal and monetary policies are political minefields and hence cannot be relied upon.

Instead of cutting taxes or already super-low interest rates, many so-called progressives want to combat recession by increasing “automatic stabilizers,” like unemployment insurance and SNAP, and thus “save” an economy that does not need saving with their preferred social policies. While arguably preferable to another Great Corporate Bailout a la 2009, automatic bailouts to individuals redistribute resources rather than increaseing production.

So why not combat recession by increasing economic freedom (reduce economic repression) instead? After all, income redistribution does not cause economic growth. The world’s richest countries redistribute the most income because they can afford to, not because the redistribution helps their economies, which thrive due to the increases in productivity that occur wherever peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice reign.

Economic growth and economic freedom are also highly correlated but not because rich countries can afford to buy more freedom the way they can afford more redistribution. In fact, economic freedom causes economic growth by providing people with incentives to work longer, harder, and, most importantly, smarter.

Best of all, economic freedom can be increased today, before recession strikes, leaving us better off in recession than we would otherwise be without recession.

Policymakers usually talk about rates of economic growth or shrinkage but that is misleading in many ways. What ultimately matters to individual quality of life are income levels, not rates of change. You would rather live in a society with a $50,000 per capita income and 2 percent rate of growth than a society growing at 10 percent per year with a per capita income of $1,000, wouldn’t you? If you hesitated to answer for even a second, consider this: per capita income in the richer economy grew by $1,000 ($50,000*.02), while that in the poorer one increased by only $100 ($1,000*.10). More importantly, though, you would be better off living in the richer society even if per capita incomes were temporarily shrinking there.

A rich society that is not living up to its potential due to economic repression, i.e., restrictions on economic freedom, is a tragedy, even if it is more difficult to commiserate with people in such societies compared to those forced to live (often literally) in impoverished lands. As Bob Lawson and Ben Powell point out in Socialism Sucks, the victims of economic basket cases like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela are easy to pity because they have no beer, or it’s warm, or it tastes like an ass’s ass (to be as blunt as the authors are throughout their instructively hilarious tale!).

But it also sucks that even after a decade of economic growth, the per capita income of the United States today is much lower than it would have been if the New Deal, Great Society, and “wars” on this, that, and the other had never occurred. Compared to that counterfactual world where economic freedom remained sky high throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, America today is in a wicked economic slump. We still might not have flying cars, but our per capita income today could easily be north of $100,000 real dollars.

The economic costs of our nation’s many past policy mistakes are sunk, i.e., irrecoverable. The proverbial ship has sailed, and the water has passed under the bridge. But we do not have to continue making the same mistakes day after day forever and a day. Let’s fight the next recession today by ridding ourselves of the collected policy detritus of the past and allow human, financial, and physical capital to flow freely to their most highly valued uses.

Robert E. Wright is the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

We Are Close To Knowing Which Bits Of DNA Code Determine Which Human Traits.

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Almost all human traits are partly heritable. That’s been known for decades. But until a few years ago, no one knew what specific bits of DNA code determine any given trait. Now, however, geneticists have identified at least a few hundred variants in the DNA code that are statistically associated with important traits such as intelligence, depression and risk tolerance. Over the next decade, they are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. That achievement will open up the ability to score genetic potential on those traits and thereby revolutionize the social sciences.

The methods of scoring are improving almost monthly, but the essence is simple. Each variant has a version (more precisely, one of the alleles in a single nucleotide polymorphism) associated with a small boost to the trait in question. If you add up those small boosts, you have a score for that trait, in the same sense that you have an IQ score if you add up all the correct answers to the questions on an IQ test. In the case of DNA variants, it is called a “polygenic score.”

Polygenic scores are revolutionary because they are causal in only one direction. They don’t drop because tests make you nervous or rise because you grew up rich. They’re impervious to racism and other forms of prejudice. Socioeconomic and cultural environments can play an important role in how those bits of DNA are expressed, but they don’t change the codes themselves. That means polygenic scores will offer social scientists something they’ve never had before: a secure place to stand in assessing what is innate and what is added by the environment.

Progress during the past five years has been rapid for many traits. In the case of IQ, the share of the variation in scores that can be explained from genetic material alone went from zero in 2015 to 5% in 2018 and 11% in 2019. That doesn’t tell us much about any individual’s IQ, but it’s enough to be useful in addressing many important issues.

To illustrate, consider this fraught question that bears on public policy: What are the effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on IQ? Answers have been frustratingly uncertain. Measures of IQ in early childhood are not only unreliable but already contaminated by environmental effects before birth and during infancy. Polygenic scores for IQ are free of that contamination. They can then be compared with actual IQ scores.

Suppose that, a few years from now, it has been solidly established that adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds have IQ scores that average 10 points lower than their genetic potential would have led us to expect. Confident new knowledge of that kind will energize the search for effective childhood interventions in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Suppose instead it is found that the adolescent IQ scores of children from disadvantaged backgrounds are about the same as we’d expect from their polygenic scores. That will provide an incentive to foster human flourishing for people with lesser abilities—an issue that has been criminally ignored in our era’s insistence that all the children can be above average.

I expect that the results will be somewhere in between. They will nonetheless teach us much about untapped potential that we don’t know now. More broadly, we will be able to demystify the role of the environment. As matters stand, many social scientists believe that the environment interacts in endlessly complicated ways with genes. Is that true?

When the environment is a pervasive and complex force, the comparisons of polygenic scores and actual behavior will reveal that complexity and be a rich source of information for future research. But it’s also possible—at least for some traits in some populations in some situations—that the role of the environment is neither complicated nor significant. That too would be an important finding.

I don’t expect such analyses will be free of controversy. I am asserting that they are technically feasible, will be conducted within a few years, and will offer powerful tests of questions that have been argued for decades.

I have presented an optimistic view of the coming genomic revolution. Some prominent scholars adamantly disagree. They argue that science is about understanding causal pathways. Complex social behaviors such as marriage and divorce are known to be partly heritable but they do not have a specific genetic etiology. In the words of one of the leading pessimists, psychologist Eric Turkheimer, causal explanations are not going to be found in individual bits of DNA “any more than explanations of plate tectonics can be found in the chemical composition of individual rocks.”

That is certainly true now and may remain so indefinitely. But social science has never been about causal pathways at the molecular level. Rather, it has been about explaining enough variation to achieve predictive validity. It’s a common situation, even in the hard sciences. The landmark discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Maxwell were validated solely by their predictive validity. Predictive validity is what polygenic scores will give us.

We’re not there yet. I think the application of genomic data to social science questions is roughly where aviation was in 1908. The world’s best plane, the Wright Flyer, was little more than a toy. Yet within a decade, thousands of acrobatically maneuverable aircraft were flying high and fast over the battlefields of Europe.

The history of science allows one more prediction. When a scientific discipline gets a major new tool—such as the microscope or spectrometer—its eventual uses sprawl far beyond its original ones. Polygenic scores will be a similarly multipurpose tool, with open-ended potential for finding answers to questions today’s social scientists can’t even imagine.

Mr. Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class,” from which this article is adapted.

 

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