This is a deeply frustrating conversation. Samuel Moyn wrote a book about gerontocracy. Derek Thompson interviews him, and opens by telling us that 50% of the federal budget is shoveling money to old people. Yet across the entire conversation, neither the host nor guest advocates cutting Social Security and Medicare. They talk about politicians and professors being too old. Ok, but 99% of people will never be Senators or professors. They also focus on issues that indirectly favor the old over the young like NIMBY. But they never go: "You know how half our federal government is about shoveling money from young people, who have less of it, to old people, who have more of it? Maybe we shouldn't do that!" In fact, Moyn says the opposite! Give old people more money, and then they'll have less political power. Let's walk through the logic here: 1) Old people use political power to rig the economy in their favor 2) Let's just give them all the money in the hopes they'll stop doing that. I'm amazed by this. The most direct way government can advantage group X over group Y is to take money from Y and give it to X. Everything else is much less efficient in terms of adjusting people's material conditions. So Moyn is advocating continuing to give direct transfers to old people, even increasing those transfers, in the hope that the political system will lead to policies that indirectly help young people. By way of analogy, imagine you're worried about someone robbing you. So your plan is "I'll give him all my money. Then, there's a chance he might stop harassing me and do something that indirectly benefits me in the long run." This is not serious analysis. It's a desperate cope from someone who sees that we've become a gerontocracy and refuses to believe that the entitlement programs he likes are the main causes of it. Entitlements are headed toward a crisis, and we're going to have to make a decision soon about whether or not the federal government should exist mostly to make old people wealthier, crowding out everything else. There is no serious approach to tackling gerontocracy without pushing entitlement reform. Yes, it's politically difficult, but what's even the point if we're going to cower in fear from the actual issues facing the country?

I think there's always too much discussion of whether people should or should not go to college and not enough focus on the point that college should be *harder* slowboring.com/p/hard-work-i…

The most dangerous 77 seconds ever recorded by a psychiatrist just broke containment again. Thomas Szasz, the man the entire profession tried to erase, looked straight into the camera and said: “We do not have an epidemic of mental illness. We have an epidemic of psychiatry.” Too fat → illness Too thin → illness Too happy, too sad, too much sex, too little sex → all illnesses No free will, no responsibility left — only “chemical imbalances” fixed by products you can advertise on TV while alcohol cannot. This forgotten 1:17 clip is now exploding across every timeline for a reason. Jacob

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. It was a non-peer-reviewed invited lecture, which he used to finally publish findings he'd had from a few years before. Now it's his 4th most cited paper and perhaps the most cited paper in diversity research, and he never opinion on the issue ever since.