To celebrate 6 years of bringing data to discussions about controversial issues, we're summarizing 20 of our most interesting findings: (1/20) People Overestimate The Number of Unarmed Black Men Killed by Police Shortly after the BLM/George Floyd 2020 Summer unrest, we asked people to estimate how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. We found that though everyone overestimated the correct number, liberals overestimated to a much larger extent (see left graph): 53% of "very liberal" Americans, compared to 20% of "very conservative" Americans, guessed 1,000 or more (the actual number was 11). We also found that the more someone trusted news media, the more they overestimated the percentage of people shot by police that are black (~25%; see right graph). Learn more about this topic: research.skeptic.com/race-po…

It's possible that progressive causes attract the mentally ill. It's also possible that progressivism causes mental illness. Either possibility is worrying, but they're worrying for different reasons.

New pod: INSIDE THE MOST MIRACULOUS MONTH OF MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS IN ... YEARS? DECADES? The two leading causes of death in America are heart disease and cancer. Nothing else comes close. And in the last 4 weeks, we've gotten sensational news on unprecedented therapies that fight (even "cure") cardiovascular disease and take on previously "undruggable" cancers I went deep with @matthewherper on: - why the latest GLP1, retatrutide, works so well - is ~everybody is going to be taking low-dose GLP1s in the next 10-20 years because of the side-effect profile? - new evidence that GLP1s might significantly reduce some cancers - daraxonrasib, the miraculous new pancreatic cancer vaccine, and why it seems to do the impossible - promising, if experimental, new results for a one-and-done gene therapy to wipe out vast swaths of heart disease risk - where is AI in all of this? youtube.com/watch?v=Hwq6XM6o…

In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

That's it. They're not evil people seeking chaos. They're just wrong. They side with Angela Davis. Despite all the evidence, they refuse to believe that good policing and smart prosecution and even some incarceration can reduce and prevent crime. amzn.to/3QIUgy3

RT @JessicaBRiedl: Every one of these deficit-reducing policies in @MarthaGimbel's new piece in the Atlantic would make a great start on fi…

There are no academic fields with a "strong right wing presence"

Throwing more money at public schools, even doubling teacher salaries, has virtually no effect on student outcomes.

“IQ…is among the most robust findings…scores predict school performance, job performance, income, physical health, and even how long a person lives, across decades and across cultures, with a consistency the rest of social science can only envy.” psychology.humanprogress.org…

There was once a that socialism would work better than capitalism. This was mostly wrong and post-1989 it seemed like we'd agree on market economies plus a welfare state. But an injection of green degrowth has birthed "socialism will wreck the economy — in a good way!"

A lot of people seem angry that Elon is now a trillionaire, so it’s worth reminding them that he didn’t achieve this by making anyone else poorer. Wealth isn't zero-sum. Paul Graham explained it well: paulgraham.com/wealth.html

The world needs more, not fewer, trillionaires. Ironically, the socialist left needs them more than anyone. Who's going to create the wealth to fuel socialist waste, fraud, and redistribution? Who's going to pay down the $40T in debt in the U.S.? Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus estimates that entrepreneurs only capture about 2 percent of the value they create. Each new trillionaire represents a new $50T infusion of value into the economy.

Sneak peak. Most medical/technological innovation comes from a few places in the rich world. There is no scenario where we make the rich world poorer while enriching the poor world. We would starve them of life saving innovation.

I wrote about this reflex in “Blood & Progress.”

Six famous economists — @JosephEStiglitz , @PikettyWIL , @jasonhickel among them — published a manifesto in the @guardian last week: "growth is a doomed strategy." They say they've done the maths. I checked the maths. The claim that growth failed the poor is contradicted by the most uncontroversial dataset in economics: extreme poverty fell from 44% of humanity in 1981 to under 10% today — during the very decades they call a failure. China alone lifted 800 million people, not with a UN roadmap, but with growth. The "92% of excess emissions" statistic? It's one of the authors citing his own paper, without saying so — and it's not a measurement, it's a moral allocation dressed up as data. The policy toolkit — "public control of strategic assets," "credit guidance" — has a track record: Soviet collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban, which starved the poor it claimed to serve within eighteen months. What worries me most: degrowth is being marketed to young people who feel locked out — telling them their stagnation is virtue. It's a swindle. The young aren't victims of too much growth. They are the first victims of its absence. Growth is the only anti-poverty program that has ever worked.

A Scandinavian economist once boasted to Milton Friedman: “In Scandinavia, we have no poverty.” Friedman replied: “That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either.”

I wrote about the insanity of "medical privacy." It's hard now to do research that could cure major diseases because we are too worried about the handling of people's personal data, which they themselves appear not to care about. HIPAA was a mistake. richardhanania.com/p/privacy…

I find the political focus on inequality in this kind of work strange - as if one could make the poor better off just by making the rich worse off. Inequality can sometimes have negative consequences that we should care about, but it's ethically confused to care about equality as an end in itself. We should care about abundance, freedom, tolerance, beauty, knowledge, innovation, fairness, etc. - and only care about inequality when it threatens these other things.

Marc Andreessen just explained how the United States assassinated its own future. In the 1970s, the Nixon administration launched something called Project Independence. The mandate was absolute. Andreessen: “Build a thousand new civilian nuclear power plants in the US by the year 2000.” One thousand reactors. Unlimited, carbon-free baseload power. Enough electricity to move the entire country to electric vehicles four decades ahead of everyone else. But it went further than energy. Andreessen: “It’s called Project Independence because it means the US won’t have to be involved in the Middle East anymore, because we won’t need the oil.” No oil dependence. No Gulf Wars. No generations of soldiers stationed in deserts protecting supply chains that never needed to exist. A complete strategic withdrawal from the Middle East. Permanent. And none of this was hypothetical. Andreessen: “France ran for a long time almost entirely on nuclear power. Japan ran for a long time almost entirely on nuclear power.” Other nations proved it worked at scale. America had more capital, more engineers, and more ambition than all of them. Andreessen: “How many nuclear power plants were built out of the thousand? Rounds to zero.” Zero. Not because the physics failed. Not because something superior replaced it. Because the same administration that drafted the blueprint for unlimited energy also created the institution that killed it. Andreessen: “They never got built because the Nixon administration also created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which made it its purpose in life is to stop nuclear power plants from getting built.” Same government. Same decade. Same pen. One directive launching the most ambitious energy program in American history. Another creating the bureaucracy that would quietly dismantle it from the inside. Andreessen: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a new nuclear plant design for 40 years.” Forty years of zero approved designs. Not because no one submitted them. Because the institution built to regulate nuclear energy became the institution built to prevent it. That’s not oversight. That’s abolition dressed as due diligence. We spent the next fifty years fighting wars in the desert for a resource we never needed. Choked the atmosphere with carbon we didn’t have to burn. Terrified an entire generation with the illusion of scarcity. And the entire time, the physics already worked. The government didn’t fail to navigate the energy crisis. They took the densest source of energy in the universe and drowned it in paperwork. Every war fought for oil. Every carbon debate. Every geopolitical crisis of the last half century. All of it was a policy choice. We didn’t lack the technology to power the future. We let a committee outlaw the math.

Marine veteran fights off 4 hooded teens who tried to carjack him at gunpoint in broad daylight trib.al/82MDYEH