I bet Todd Proebsting $50 at even odds that I will NOT be “clearly mistreated” by George Mason University before January 1, 2031.
I think that the chances that the Woke mob will come for Bryan are pretty low, because he is under their radar. So at even odds I think he has once again made a bet he is likely to win. And I don’t think that extending the date out to 2031 helps Proebsting’s chances very much.
The Woke Tyranny train is moving very rapidly. I think that within two or three years the Woke mob will either have trampled its opposition or started to fade away. Completely trampling the opposition means that it is able to inflict what Bryan would call clear mistreatment on Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Peter Thiel, and Ross Douthat. I would not bet on that at this point. A better bet would be that there will be clear mistreatment of at least one of the them or one of the following between now and January 1, 2023: Coleman Hughes, Tyler Cowen, Megan McArdle, Joseph Henrich, John Cochrane, Ezra Klein.
What happens to your friends over the next few years isn’t the primary question with wokeness.
The question is what happens to my kids in elementary school and what world they have to navigate in 2050+. Does anyone think Texas going Blue is going to made Wokeness fade?
Imagine someone saying “PC will either achieve total dominance or fade away” in 1990. Measured by whether particular personalities go cancelled in 1991 who knows. Measured by what its accomplished in 2020 PC clearly won the long game.
The long game is demographics + education indoctrination.
Excellent stuff, thanks.
I would pushback on two points:
1) yes, in the longer term, we are completely doomed. It’s a tsunami of brown folks who have zero experience in building stable republics conducive to human flourishing and economic growth. Just look at the sorry record down south. But…both sides assume that there is this holy alliance between blacks and browns. I honestly don’t see it. The browns aren’t going to care or buy-in to the racial grievance theories of the blacks. They’ve got bigger issues to tackle vs. fixating on the largely unproductive and whiny 13%.
2) Texas will probably turn blue eventually. It’s just basic demographics as you aptly note, particularly if the borders are going to be held open. But…it’s probably going to take some time to turn blue. I watched California go from reddish, to purple and then to blue. It didn’t happen overnight. Texas has a popular red governor, red legislature and red senators. And, implementing a state income tax is going to be nearly impossible.
Sorry…one more thing. I’m thinking that the whites and browns are much more likely to intermarry, which might also offset or delay certain trends.
***
“The surge in mix-ing across ethno-racial lines is one of the most important and unher-alded developments of our time,” says Mr. Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He rattles off facts and figures: Today, more than 10% of U.S.-born babies have one parent who is nonwhite or Hispanic and one who is white and not Hispanic. That propor-tion is larger than the number of babies born to two Asian parents and not far behind the number of babies born to two black parents. “We’re entering a new era of mixed back-grounds,” Mr. Alba says.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/majority-minority-america-dont-bet-on-it-11612549609?st=arjqeh4045m45su&reflink=article_copyURL_share
The only group to blame is WHITE male landowner. He’s been pacified to the point of accepting heavy taxes and tiny toilets. Not sure if it was reconstruction, Gov schools, or most likely their own form of virtue signaling (my house is ur kingdom Mr Gov)
Yeah, I guess I’m much less interested in assigning blame for it (particularly along racial or gender lines) than just finding explanations for it and then predicting what is likely to come next. I don’t really care about skin tone and believe it to be overrated vs. class or IQ.
I’m seeing cultural and institutional “democide” in our future and this can probably be explained by the four forces (+ other factors). These four forces have had fairly broad bi-partisan support since at least 1960 to get us where we are today.
We have no clue how to build successful cultures or institutions, but we continue to delude ourselves that we can. So, we take the fragile equilibrium that we have for granted because in the short/medium term, it makes perfect sense to do so. But, in the longer term, we are doomed based on our current trajectory.
Hispanics get the same affirmative action, same government services their taxes didn’t pay for, and the same minority business loans as blacks. It doesn’t matter if they “buy in” to why. All that matters is that they want it and are willing to form political coalitions to get it.
Generally, the Hispanic vote has drifted between 20%-40% GOP. So if blacks are 10%, whites are 60%, 20%-40% seems about right. It’s basically consistent with the amount of white DNA that Hispanics have. And its no surprise that whiter Hispanics (like Cubans) vote more GOP then darker Hispanics.
That’s basically how it works in Latin America. There is a light skinned party associated with more upper class and a dark skinned party associate more with the underclass.
The problem is that 51% is enough to win elections and impose your way of life on others, so losing 60%-80% of a fast growing group is suicide. Hispanics don’t need to buy that blacks deserve anything, they just need to buy that they can be teamed up with to loot whites.
Hispanics benefit much less from affirmative action than black people, and are thus much less supportive of it (there was no correlation between county level Hispanic population and support for/against prop 16, while there was a correlation for black and white people. Hispanics may be aware of the fact that with a high enough Hispanic population (and low enough white population) what they gain at the expense of white people declines relative to what they lose to the benefit of black peoples.
You also overestimate people’s ‘racial self interest.’ In settings with a high Asian population (e.g. applying to top tier colleges or high schools in the northeast or Bay Area) even white peoples benefit from affirmative action at the expense of the Asian majority of qualified applicants, but most white people still oppose it in those circumstances.
What Mark said + have a look at the labor force participation rate for Black males vs Hispanic males. There is like a 12 point spread and we all know that the Hispanic rate is understated due to under the table employment.
Hispanics do the heavy lifting and hard labor that no one else is willing to do. And, you think that they are going to be sympathetic with welfare and other benefits to an underachieving Black population that has large segments that are unemployed and unemployable?
The polling on Prop 16 is that when Hispanics think it will help blacks over themselves, they oppose. When they think it will help them over whites, they support. It is largely a question of communication, and how you ask the question has a huge impact on the support levels. Unfortunately for Prop 16 proponents, outright saying in the text of the resolution that its designed to give Hispanics and unfair advantage would be unconstitutional under current law, so they have to give it this vague wording that doesn’t make clear the who/whom targets of the legislation.
“even white peoples benefit from affirmative action at the expense of the Asian majority of qualified applicants”
If affirmative action was eliminated, the white % would stay essentially the same, that’s what all the studies show. Asian would go up and Hispanic/Black would go down in almost exact proportion. It’s a wash for whites.
The primary effect for whites is that holistic admissions makes it easier to admit “the right kind of white people” within that white bucket. Like most racial justice issues, it’s about one group of whites using it to take advantage of another. Bones thrown to the front group is just the price of doing business.
For instance, we couldn’t give the vaccine to everyone over 65 because “too white” so instead the overwhelming beneficiaries have been middle aged degree holding white women who are part of democratic union constituencies. The face is racial justice, and substance is inter white power struggle.
I’m glad Prop 16 failed, but AA is already illegal under a different proposition and it hasn’t stopped AA. When the actual hard work of forcing these institutions to stop the practice comes, Hispanics don’t fight their own ill gotten gains. I don’t see Hispanics turning down their affirmative action spots, therefore they support it.
Moreover, everything is affirmative action. Do you think Hispanics pay enough taxes to fund their own schools? To fund their own healthcare? No. They are subsidized by whites. That’s just another kind of affirmative action. You get something you didn’t pay for and don’t deserve that you can’t even make good use of, and you vote for the party that delivers it.
Hans,
Hispanics are genetically superior to blacks, so I expect them to do better on things like employment and other statistics.
First generation Hispanics do “overperform” on metrics of “behave like good middle class bourgeois” , as do nearly all immigrants. The issue is that they don’t assimilate into middle class norms but underclass norms. Hispanics start “acting black” once they have been hear a generation or two. They stop overperforming their IQ when it comes to middle class norms.
I suspect overall affluence/welfare state has a uniform negative effect on the behavior of the low IQ, and growing up hardscrapple peasant stock can only buy you one generation of middle class norms before you revert to your underlying IQ.
The best example of this is how Puerto Ricans, the one group already hooked up to the US welfare state apparatus, behave badly in the first generation.
Moldbug wrote about this with Helots and Dalits:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/
In the Dalit caste, status among men is defined by power, wealth and sexual success, among women by attractiveness and popularity. The favored occupation of Dalit men is crime, preferably of the organized variety. However, Dalit criminals are not generally psychopathic; they perceive crime as guerrilla warfare against an unjust society. Dalit women may support themselves by crime, welfare (which they consider a right), or payments from men. Both male and female Dalits may occasionally support themselves by conventional employment, but this is usually in jobs that other castes (except Helots) would consider demeaning, and Dalits share this association. The Dalit caste is not monolithic; it is divided into a number of ethnic subcastes, such as African-American, Mexican, etc. A few white Dalits exist, notably in the Appalachians. There is little or no solidarity between the various Dalit ethnicities.
The Helot caste is an imported peasant caste, originating primarily in rural Central America. Status among Helot men is conferred primarily by hard work, money and power. Status among Helot women is conferred by attractiveness, motherhood, and association with successful men. The Helot value system does not seem to be sustainable in the US, and the children of Helots tend to grow up as Dalits. New Helots, however, can always be imported to replace them.
asdf,
I agree that we are doomed (as stated in my original reply). Only thing that I’m saying here is that it’s probably going to be more interesting and complicated than your simple IQ litmus test.
FWIW – I much prefer looking at it on a NPV (net present value) basis per family vs. focusing on IQ as the sole arbiter. We need (and I value) hard working people that may not have won the genetic lottery as long as they can pull their weight.
Woke mob will either have trampled its opposition or started to fade away.
I’m sure this is wrong, as wrong as Fukuyama’s idea that Capitalism beat Socialism “once and for all”.
Woke mob will continue trampling opposition, and getting pushback, which will often have it change focus but not its general anti-capitalistic, anti-Christian, and anti-democratic general focus.
Winning elections by illegal but gov’t allowed mail-in ballots is part of their anti-democracy (is it really illegal if the gov’t allows it? Like speeding only 10mph too fast?). The ruling oligarchs will be happy to have “real” elections, without cheating, when there’s a Tweedle-Rep vs a Tweedle-Dem and who wins doesn’t really matter to The Powers That Be.
This fine Roger Waters solo song is why Woke/PC never goes away – because Reality is Oppressive. So there will always be Powerful persons who can be accused of being Oppressors. And the current Democrat Party infatuation with Wokeness won’t leave until multiple electoral cycles of Dem Party losses – at least 2 consecutive Presidential elections with a President and a Congress actively and explicitly rejecting CRT and the worst of Wokeness. And obviously, those in power will claim that the “real oppressors” are somebody else (for last 4 years, Trump).
Those little people, and medium folk, who support Wokeness, are supporting it against injustice, and often calling the existence of poverty an injustice despite poverty behavior. As long as “capitalism” fails to solve the “why does poverty exist” problem, the capitalists will be blamed as oppressors for allowing poverty. [Rant of Job guarantee over UBI can go here].
Finally, Christianity is against libertine promiscuity, and rightfully so. But that’s very sexually repressive to horny, unmarried HS teens and college students, so it’s easy for anti-Christians to indoctrinate such “oppressed” horny teens against the “oppressive” Church. Which will certainly continue as long as Christian churches oppose unmarried promiscuity.
Reducing the power of the elites in colleges is a necessary, tho unlikely to be sufficient, step towards reducing the PC/ Wokeness current cancel culture.
And I see the college Woke administrators getting stronger, not at all fading – so I think Bryan will lose this bet. Hope I’m wrong.
Hoping enough of us who oppose Wokeism are able to organize enough to prophesize these bad things clearly enough that the prophecy becomes self-negating.
Getting good Thinkers enough power to avoid huge mistakes by self-negating prophecy is perhaps the most important good outcome to be hoped for with the FI Teams.
Don’t bet on stuff where the behavior of the counterparty influences the outcome. Not that $50 is going to weigh much into the equation, but what are the odds Bryan invites Charles Murray over to give a guest lecture when his new book comes out? Bryan is an admirer of Murray’s, if I recall, so why shouldn’t he try to bring Murray’s perspective to a wider audience? Because he’s not an idiot and he knows what his employer will and will not tolerate.
two points: Taibbi is a FAR more likely target than Klein, and:
Visibility is not really relevant. Meaning Caplan is just as likely a target as anyone else, without considering his topics of choice, which act as a focus magnifier for the WokeMob (hence why Taibbi is more at risk than Klein).
There have already been warning shots at David Reich, Robin Hanson, and Steven Pinker. Even Cowen got a tiny bit of the treatment in Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains.”
But in general “clear mistreatment” is not a good measure as a basis for wagering because of suppression, chilling, and strategic self-censorship. Most of these people are successful precisely because they are trying hard to avoid mistreatment, good at avoiding it, and can be expected to adjust as necessary.
That is complete triumph that doesn’t even need much mistreatment, just the credible threat of it, the occasionally hanged Admiral to encourage the others.
Think of it this way, would you place bets on people being crushed by steamrollers? A steamroller can smash you flat and may be heading right for you, but you can step out of the way. There are some careless people who got crushed or at least grazed, but by now, anyone who wasn’t savvy or fast enough to learn to avoid the steamrollers has been smashed. The survivors are going to continue stepping out of the way, so measuring people crushed is not telling us anything about the number of steamrollers, their speed, and the overall level of danger of the steamroller menace.
Hungarian economist Janos Kornai’s autobiography has an insightful discussion of self-censorship as a strategy for publishing his work and retaining the privilege of being allowed to travel to the West to meet with Western economists during the Communist era.
Caplan’s single issue crusade of immigration is aligned with the woke left. The woke cultural revolution sees Caplan as an ally, not an enemy, and they punish their enemies not their allies.
Caplan’s views on most issues align with the right: free market health care, defunding universities and separation of school and state, abolishing the welfare state. But Caplan has chosen not to engage in serious political activism on those issues. If Caplan did engage in serious political activism on his right wing ideas, the woke left would see him as an enemy and punish him accordingly.
Kling is mistaken when he says that Caplan is too low profile to attract the attention of the woke left. The issue is Caplan has generally chosen to ally with the cultural revolution rather than fight against it. BTW, I made these same points in the comment thread on the linked econlog post.
“Till through wise handling and fair governance, I him recured to a better will.”
– Edmund Spenser, The Farie Queene
Shamelessly lifted from the preface to F.H. Buckley’s excellent Fair Governance: Paternalism and Perfectionism. Reread last night for its deeply calming wisdom: “But let us now see ourselves as the paternalistic or perfectionist, well intentioned for the most part, not omniscient, bumbling at times, and animated by the most sincere concern for our subjects. More than concern, we feel kindness and have charity for them.”
Sure, we can all agree that the pendulum has swung too far in the perfectionist direction, yet the tech oligarchs did Trump a bigger favor than anyone ever had before in canceling his social media addiction: according to media stories the Freed-from-Twitter Trump is now enjoying life much more and finding better uses for his time. What if the worst thing about getting canceled is that it is a blessing in disguise?
Of your list, they will come for Klein. He is of the woke left, and as these revolutions go, they eat their own children. And unlike at Vox where they don’t get to cancel him or Matt Yglesias, he is at the NYT, where he has no institutional capital to avoid being canceled.
Not McArdle. WaPo seems slightly saner, and anyway she is their “reasonable conservative” and you can’t cancel the reasonable conservative. If you do then all you have are horned insurrectionists in raccoon hats, and that is too terrible to contemplate.
McArdle endorsed Obama in 2008, strongly endorsed Hillary in 2016, and Biden in 2020, and before Biden won the nomination, she loudly endorsed any Democrat that would win the nomination. She does have some right-wing views on specific economic issues, like health care, but she is never so serious about those views as to entertain the idea of voting for a Republican. WaPo also considers Jen Rubin and Max Boot “conservatives”… At this point that label “conservative” might mean a fanatical party line Democrat or it doesn’t have a coherent meaning.
This is not really right. McArdle has voted for Republicans, but really dislikes Trump.
Jen Rubin and Max Boot also have voted for Republicans, probably much more recently than McArdle. Rubin voted for Romney in 2012. McArdle endorsed Obama in 2008, and I believe she’s been very consistently Democrat. I’d consider her rather hard left like Rubin or Boot.
Well then, I would say you have a funny definition of hard left. Or you haven’t actually read her very much.
Honestly, the more interesting bet is whether Charles Murray’s forthcoming book will get cancelled from distribution by Amazon or other retailers. Caplan is a small player at a commuter university and, best I’m aware, he hasn’t taken too many controversial stands against woke culture (please correct me if I’m wrong).
There is probably a reason that Murray went with a conservative leaning publisher, but that won’t stop the woke mob from trying other avenues to get it banned.
https://whatkilledmichaelbrown.com/amazon-controversy
I plan on buying the book, and I want to support Charles Murray too.
However, I will be walking into a brick and mortar bookstore and paying cash. It’s not even a good idea just to browse the book’s page on Amazon, or to search for it, or even to start putting in the first few letters of what might look like a search for it.
Good idea, though I’m not sure how much longer stores will take cash. You might want to wear a hoodie so the store surveillance cameras won’t see you. I wish I was joking.
I’m thinking we might start to stockpile xerox machines or USB memory sticks so we can still trade ideas off the internet.
Heh, I have the hoodie ready! I figure between that, the facemask, and some sunglasses I should be fine. Maybe I should also park two blocks away and so that the license plates don’t face the cameras. Obviously gotta turn ‘off’ the smartphone and leave it behind. Can’t be too careful with books these days.
So, I guess it’s gonna be a similar experience to visiting an adult video store in the 80s or 90s or maybe worse? Has it come to that?
Pro tip: It’s not so much about your parking distance as it is about the quality of the surrounding cameras. Most cameras still aren’t HQ enough to pick up license plate numbers…but, they can certainly follow you and your hoodie from camera to camera to your parking spot. So, adjust your strategy accordingly as needed.
I’ve got cojones, so I’m going to purchase the book in the same manner that I’d get a 1/2 gallon of milk or some arugula (organic and locally sourced, of course).
If you’re going to do it that way, please go whole hog just for the fun of it. I’m thinking a beanie and some sunglasses at the least. Wipe down the bills and don’t leave any fingerprints anywhere else. And, as always, have your concealed carry on you at all times…just don’t be stupid about it and pull a McCloskey. There is an actual Barnes and Noble down the street from us, so I will give it a try.
Seriously though, I’m actively trying to dis-engage from companies that are openly hostile to my family’s values. Nike is already gone and so are ESPN and the NBA. Amazon is next (including Whole Foods). Only vacationing in red states. Deleting Twitter and YouTube is gonna be complicated and I haven’t figured that one out yet. Gotta vote with my feet, even if it’s mostly symbolic.
The mob is not going to pick on Caplan. Because Caplan will adjust his behavior so they don’t. In this way, he will be mistreated, but not clearly so.
At least he wins $50. Is it inflation adjusted?
The problem is that all three factors encourage Caplan to modify his own behavior to win the bet. The money (insignificant), his betting track record (important), and not getting cancelled (really important).
Instead, he should bet that he *will* get cancelled, only at 10,000 to 1 odds. So, if he loses the bet, he loses $50, gets a slight ding to his track record, and doesn’t get cancelled. If he wins the bet, maintains a perfect track record, gets cancelled, but wins $500K compensation.
At some point you could keep offering higher odds until he’s indifferent and you find his price, at which point you are basically paying him to pull some stunt which is sure to get him cancelled.
Tyler Cowen, the Blogosphere’s GOAT? Untouchable by the woke mob, at least I hope so.
John Cochrane: sufficiently self-assured to Just Say No to the woke mob, which is all that is required when one has tenure. Wasn’t Cochrane the one to finally say out loud that Covid vaccines should be distributed through the free market? Very un-PC in 2020 when even many libertarians seemed afraid to challenge the notion that, of course, government should control distribution of Covid vaccines (and masks, PPE, toilet paper, etc.).
Don’t know Coleman Hughes and Joseph Henrich. Of the others, I think Ezra Klein is most vulnerable. (Look what happened to Yglesias.) Klein seems to accept many woke notions: unequal outcomes are presumptively unjust, offensiveness is determined by the perceptions of the allegedly offended rather than by some “reasonable observer” standard, etc. Woke notions allow *anyone* to be labeled privileged and anything to be labeled offensive. In fact, the Woke literally say that everyone benefits from some sort of privilege. Under those principles, everyone is guilty of contributing to some sort of injustice and, since no injustice no matter how small is truly tolerable once subjected to scrutiny, uncancelled people are merely people that have thus far escaped the Woke mob’s attention. So, the only defense is to reject those Woke notions outright, i.e., to Just Say No. Klein seems unwilling to do that.
In what world would Ezra Klein get cancelled by the Woke Army?
Kaplan isn’t in any danger as long as he remains an open border supporter and doesn’t advertise all his other right leaning positions- something he already does, and has done for over a decade now. Cowen has already been mistreated to the point he isn’t the same person he was 10 years ago, but he doesn’t seem to even know it. Same goes for McArdle and Douthat. The only person the list who is in real danger of getting cancelled is Cochrane.
Bryan is writing a book with the title “Poverty: Who to Blame” and his answer appears to be “the poor.” I think there is a reasonable chance that this could win him some mistreatment, but I’m in no hurry to bet against Bryan.
It’s ok to blame poor white people, and I suspect that is what he will emphasize.