P.S. Completely confused? Start here.

The Trials of Dagobah: A LARP for Kids

Intro: (a) Idea of the game: Let’s pretend! (b) Safety rules: Don’t try to hurt anyone, and if you see anyone getting hurt, help them! If you’re hurt or think someone else is, shout PAUSE to pause the game. (c) Don’t be scared! Monsters are just your dads and brothers trying to show kids a fun time. (d) Escape hatch: If you’re scared, just run back to the starting place (the spaceship) until you feel better, then rejoin the game! (e) Rules: Stay with the group, and heed the words of Yoda. When creatures put hands on their heads, pretend they’re not “really” there. When you want to attack something with your light saber, hit it and shout “1 Damage!” (The birthday boy does +1 Damage). If a creature hits you, fall down on the ground AWAY from the fighting. You’ll feel all better once your friends defeat the creature. Then you can wake up and rejoin the game!

Equipment: Yoda and the Padawans have light sabers. Padawans can have masks if they want. Yoda has a flash light, too.

Set-Up: The stairwell lights are on. But the basement is dark, and Padawans may NOT turn on the lights! Depending on outside light, use a blanket to cover the external basement door. The theater door and utility doors are locked, and the spare bedroom is for creatures only. The bathroom is just a bathroom. Tents with a connecting tube block the way between the theater door and the closet door. The trampoline is by the pillar. A ball pit is over by the book shelves.

Creatures: Creatures drop at 0 Life. Snake-Men and the Spider have 3 Life, the Vulture-Man has 4 Life, and the Sith Lords have 7 Life! Snake-Men attack with long foam swords, the Spider with his arms, the Vulture-Man with two pillows, and the Sith Lords with light sabers.

Scene 1: Yoda and Jedi start in the stairwell. Yoda explains they’re all Padawans flying to the swamp planet of Dagobah for Jedi training. Kids sit down on the stairs and make spaceship noises until Yoda says they’ve landed on Dagobah.

Scene 2: Yoda and the Padawans leave their spaceship and enter Dagobah by opening the basement door. Yoda warns the group that hostile Snake-Men will be waiting for them. A first Snake-Man runs around, harrying the Padawans. Then another Snake-Man pops up. Once both have circled around, they attack, and the Padawans have to defeat them!

Scene 3: Yoda tells the Padawans they have to crawl single-file through the Dagobah caves – the tents. He asks for the bravest Padawans to slowly go first! There are lots of (safe) obstructions inside the tents. But when the bravest Padawans emerge, they’re attacked by a Giant Spider! Other Padawans can hurry through to reinforce them if they cry for help.

Scene 4: Once all the Padawans are through, they have to use the Force to leap from tree to tree through the jungle. All the kids jump on the trampoline, then circle around the pillar, over and over, until they reach the mountain-top. One or two more Snake-Man appears mid-way to try to stop the Padawans from climbing the mountain.

Scene 5: Once the kids reach the mountain-top, Yoda hears a loud bird. Oh no, it’s a Vulture-Man! The Vulture-Man swoops over and starts whacking kids with his giant wings (pillows) until he’s defeated.

Scene 6: From the mountain-top, Yoda and the Padawans can see the Clay Springs (the ball pit). Ancient light saber crystals of great power (2 Damage instead of 1 Damage) can be found therein. Two More Snake-Men harry the kids as they hunt for the crystals inside the disgusting goopy springs.

Scene 7: Yoda tells the Padawans they are ready to face their final challenge… alone! He enters the creature room, telling them to stay on their guard as he departs. Heavy breathing and light saber noises come out of the door. Finally the door opens, revealing Darth Veidt and Darth Corruptus, plus other optional creatures. When the Sith Lords fall, Yoda soon re-emerges to congratulate the Padawans on completing their mission, and assures them they will all one day become powerful Jedi Knights!

During the interview, I discovered that Zitelmann is also the world’s leading expert on not only public perceptions of the superrich, but the psychology of the superrich. I’m eager to learn what he’s discovered, and perhaps I’ll do a second interview on that.

How much of that net worth comes from housing? It’s a surprisingly complicated question. If you use exact percentiles, you wind up basing your answer on how much home equity the one household at the 25th percentile of total net worth happens to hold. To get a meaningful answer, then, you’ve got to switch to bands of net worth, then take an average. Here’s what you get:

I honestly found the results a little puzzling, but they check out. In the cells that read $0, literally zero households have any home equity. And the overall patterns are still eye-opening:

1. Age is the great underrated factor. If you want to know how much home equity someone owns, knowing their percentile for their age is less informative than simply knowing their age. Almost everyone starts with low housing wealth, yet a large majority end up with massive housing wealth.

2. Total net worth falls slightly with age. Housing wealth, in contrast, doesn’t seem to fall at all. On average, Americans do not cash out their homes for living expenses, even though modern financial markets make it easy to do so via negative mortgages, home equity loans, and simple downsizing. Instead, the American elderly sit on their massive housing wealth until they die.

3. Without Social Security, permanently sitting on massive housing wealth would be hard to do! For the 25th-75th percentiles of total net worth, housing is their main asset. To live at all comfortably without Social Security, most of these people would have to rely on their housing wealth. Horrors? Au contraire. This wouldn’t just be better for taxpayers; it would be better for young families, who could move into the homes of the elderly when they downsize to pay for their retirements.

4. While total housing wealth naturally rises with total net worth, it falls as a share of net worth. The very poor rent. The middle class lives in their main asset. The upper-middle class and rich own great homes, but have plenty of other assets to live off of in retirement.

5. “Paying off your mortgage” early is a common financial priority for the middle class. But given the mortgage interest deduction, it’s probably a foolish priority. Instead, they should make the minimum monthly payment on their mortgages, then invest their excess savings in a diversified portfolio of stocks and other high-yield assets. That’s exactly what I did, and the results speak for themselves. While I won’t own my home outright until I’m 80, my net worth is much higher than it would have been if I fetishized being “debt-free.”

All are welcome. Hope to see you there!

P.S. Other than recognizably drawing me, this is pretty good.

I had ChatGPT work with the actual data, which it then cross-checked against other published estimates. The SCF net worth data is ultimately derived from very finely-grained self-reports, designed to remind respondents to put a dollar value on each and every one of their notable assets and liabilities.

Main reflections:

1. Economists have long known that inequality is relatively low for consumption, medium for income, and high for wealth. What they rarely emphasize, however, is how much wealth depends on age. The richest Americans aged 65-69 are worth about 30x as much as the richest Americans aged 18-24.

2. Net worth is very high in absolute terms. The median is over six figures by the mid-30s. Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s. Americans at the 90th percentile are millionaires by around 40. Claims about middle-class, middle-aged Americans who “can’t afford” eggs or gas or beef are nonsense.

3. The most sensible argument for worrying about trade deficits is that we’re “living beyond our means.” Trade deficits represent borrowing, and we can’t keep borrowing forever. But given Americans’ extraordinary net worth, the most sensible argument for worrying is still senseless. After 50 years of unbroken trade deficits, we’re wealthier than ever.

4. Americans of staggering net wealth are all around us. If you walk around an American mall on a weekend, you probably cross paths with several decamillionaires. But except for being older, you probably couldn’t pick them out of a crowd. Even their cars rarely scream extreme wealth.

5. Whatever your complaints about American capitalism, you’ve got to admit that a large share of Americans use the system to become staggeringly wealthy by the time they retire. Not 1% or 5%, but 25%.

6. Americans with low or negative net wealth are also all around us. But who ever thought otherwise? In my 20s, I had very low net worth, and so did all my friends. And that fact contains a lesson: Almost all low-wealth Americans are young. If you have a regular job and age a couple decades, you’re rarely poor anymore.

7. If you’re old and your wealth is still low, your financial situation is basically hopeless. You can still be happy, but it would take a miracle (like winning the lottery) for your finances to dramatically improve. Every other American, however, is already rich, or could become rich with durably cautious budgeting. The math behind “Skip a $5 coffee every day from the age of 18, invest the savings in the stock market, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of extra inflation-adjusted dollars when you retire” is sound.

8. Earning regular high income is the easiest way to end up with high wealth. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. A high-skilled worker who blows his whole paycheck week after week ends up with a net worth of roughly zero. A Costco cashier with a high savings rate ends up a millionaire. That’s not just a freak anecdote. It’s math.

9. Wealth peaks around age 70, roughly what you’d expect given the permanent income hypothesis. What’s surprising is how slowly wealth declines from this peak! Americans over 80 are still loaded, generally having higher net worth than they had 30 years earlier. And despite this wealth, Social Security checks keep rolling in.

10. Given their current net wealth, a solid majority of Americans can comfortably retire without Social Security. The federal government could cut them off completely and they’d still do fine. The best rationale for the status quo is paternalism, but most Americans are well-prepared for their futures even ignoring Social Security.

11. What’s a “solid majority”? Median net worth peaks at about $400k, which is more than enough to live the last third of your life in comfort. I wouldn’t say the same about the 25th percentile, though. My ballpark: 60% of Americans could comfortably get by with zero Social Security even though they were counting on it.

12. Granted, the median American has over half of his net worth in home equity. So without Social Security, people would commonly downsize or use negative mortgages to fund their living expenses. My line in the sand: That is “doing fine.” If you’re living small because you’re determined to bequeath an unmortgaged house to your kids, that’s on you.

13. In the absence of Social Security, Americans would obviously save more. So in the long run, this table actually overstates the share of unfortunate and improvident retirees.

14. The word “gerontocracy” is becoming more common, but not nearly common enough. The U.S. is obsessed with ensuring the financial security of elderly Americans who already have more wealth than they know what to do with.

15. “More wealth than they know what to do with.” Part of the reason my net worth is so high is that I don’t really want to do many expensive things. I’ve built up strong habits of frugality, and spending money fruitfully is aggravating work. Looking at the table, I suspect that many wealthy people are in the same position.

16. If you look at the table and think, “Wow, there are so many wealthy people available to fund redistribution,” you’re not wrong. But gerontocratic policies are one of the main reasons why there’s so much inequality in the first place.

17. Worried that if you means-test Social Security, you’ll reduce support for the whole system? We should be so lucky. Our current system wastes trillions of taxpayer dollars based on paranoid fears that some elderly American will end up eating cat food. This dysfunctional system can, should, and must be deeply undermined.

18. If you’re still complaining about your economic suffering when your net worth is several hundred thousand dollars, your problem is not economic, but psychological. You’re rich, but neurotic. Once you accept this ugly realization, you can start on the hard but rewarding work of learning to appreciate your awesome good fortune.

19. What’s the most negative possible take on American net worth numbers? Probably, “10 percent of Americans are obscenely rich, and most don’t make more than a token effort to share their good fortune with others.”

20. What’s the most positive possible take on American net worth numbers? Probably: “25% are unbelievably rich, another 35% are pretty rich, and almost everyone in the remaining 40% has — or at least once had — the opportunity to join them via steady work and savings.”

1. Literal free will. It is metaphysically possible for people to do more than one thing, holding constant the state of the universe. I am well aware of all the incredulity this engenders, but I observe my free will via introspection in every waking moment, and if you can dismiss my constant observation with “That’s just an illusion,” you could just as easily dismiss all observation as illusion.

2. Widespread overestimation of constraints relative to preferences. People are quick to say, “He can’t do X” when the correct story is obviously, “He doesn’t want to do X.” I can’t fly to the moon by flapping my arms, but I can refrain from drinking alcohol, eating 4000 calories a day, and much more.

3. Most humans are deeply conformist. Though this was probably functional in the ancestral environment, in a modern anonymous society, this creates immense opportunities for thoughtful nonconformists.

Nevertheless, reading Hall’s book starkly reminded me of the dangers of high agency. After being a high-profile lawyer and a professional poker player, she spent three years as a heavy drug abuser. She sees her drug addiction as a failure to use her agency. From the intro:

I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency entails the ability to recognize all the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again. To some extent, you can think of addiction and agency as two sets of labels on the same dial, like hot and cold on a tap. Addiction is automaticity. Agency is autonomy.

For three years, I became a prisoner in my own life.

Or not. Hall repeatedly talks about the lame excuses people make for failing to do good things. I submit she should apply exactly the same skepticism to excuses people make for doing bad things. “I’m a prisoner in my own life” is wrong for lawyers who don’t like their job — and it’s wrong for drug abusers.

Imagine you see a heroin abuser shooting up on the street. You shudder, and say, “I could never do that.” But sure you could. Need help getting started? Most of the techniques Hall teaches apply. Thus, she tells readers to “Stop living in movie logic.” You don’t need the story to lead you into drug abuse. You Can Just Do Things. Good Things. Bad Things. Feel the power — and remember that with great power comes great responsibility.

I’m tempted to think that it’s primarily low IQ people who will use high agency badly. But Hall’s obviously high IQ, she chose three years of self-destruction, and though she’s an outlier, she’s not that extreme of an outlier. The main segment of the population I’d really trust with maximum agency is just people very low in Neuroticism.

This big reservation aside, Hall has a lot of pretty good advice. My favorites:

• “Be willing to look stupid.” We’re in a highly anonymous society. Hardly anyone will notice, so the reputational risk is much lower than your emotions tell you.

• “Get out of your lane.” Or to put it my way, “If you’re curious, experimentally enter a new lane and see if it works for you” and “Look like you’re supposed to be there.” No one ever told me a professor could become a graphic novelist. I just started making storyboards and ten years later, I was a graphic novelist.

• “Court rejection.” That’s how Hall phrases it. The way I put it is, “Everyone is bad at everything at first” plus “Practice makes better.” So getting rejected at something new is part of the process of improving — and part of the process of finding out how quickly you’ll improve.

• “Increase your surface area for luck” (as well as “Host events”). I have lots of amazing friends in large part because I go out of my way to meet people who might be amazing.

I also loved her advice for “the opposite of casual dating.” Not for everyone, but You Can Just Do This:

We started the relationship with severely incompatible communication styles and very different requirements in terms of personal space. Moreover, we were both shaken from recent breakups, and we lived in different countries!

Had we approached our relationship in the style of “casual dating” that’s popular these days, I don’t think we would have made it. Instead, we jumped in with both feet. Our first date was him moving in for a week, and our second was me bringing him along to a professional conference abroad. We got engaged within a couple of months, and married within a year.

Today, we’re one of those annoying couples that glow with love and affection. But we had to dig deep to get there. I can pinpoint several moments where I’m pretty sure we would’ve broken up if we hadn’t erected the “barrier to exit” of marriage.

“Wow, you’re great. Want to move in with me for a week?” would rarely work, but it’s a great icebreaker. And after you get rejected, you definitely try, “Well, would you at least go on a date with me Friday?” If that doesn’t get a laugh, you don’t want to be with that person anyway.

I’m happy to talk about the three books I have coming out over the next year. In chronological order, the 15th-anniversary edition of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (Hachette), Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets (University of Chicago), and — with Don Boudreaux and Zach Weinersmith — Blockade: The Science and Ethics of Trade (Cato). But I’ve also got plenty to say about the future of academia, economic freedom under National Socialism, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, apostasy, or anything else I’ve blogged on.

Or we can just talk about games, music, movies, and travel. I recently discovered this 1990 dystopian high school movie and laughed almost until I cried.

Renters, to be fair, don’t really suffer on balance. They get compensated for the noise and traffic with lower rent. Local workers, too, receive extra pay to compensate them for their suffering. The main victims of the externalities, then, are property owners. Living right next to an airport typically depresses their property values by 5-15%, a major hit to their net worth.

On reflection, however, these NIMBY complaints miss almost all of the externalities of airports! Imagine what would happen to property values in a major city if its sole airport closed. Imagine what would happen to property values in a mega-city if all of its airports closed. A rough estimate is that property values for the entire city would fall by about 4%, with further harm on overall economic activity. Even though gainers rarely show up at land-use meetings, the externalities of airports for most people are positive. And since there are far more who gain than lose, the net externalities of airports are positive as well.

Far from being a thoughtful Pigovian response to negative externalities, then, regulation that limits airport construction and expansion is an impulsive demagogic response to positive externalities. On balance, laissez-faire would be far better than the status quo.

What about the externalities of immigration? Are they positive or negative? For high-skilled immigrants, it’s a no-brainer. They raise property values in their local neighborhoods, and they raise property values overall. But for low-skilled immigrants — or low-skilled domestic migrants for that matter — the question is more complicated. If a lot of poor people move into your neighborhood, you can definitely imagine that property values will go down. Garett Jones raised this issue in our UATX debate last May, favorably referencing Sá (2015).

Like airports, however, there is a big difference between local externalities, which might well be negative, and net externalities, which are still likely to be positive. Indeed, typical anti-immigration thinkers point to all of the studies finding that immigration raises housing prices — which they then bizarrely interpret as an argument against immigration rather than for housing deregulation. As Sá explains:

Studies of the impact of immigration on house prices and rents find different effects depending on the level of geographic disaggregation used.

Studies looking at broad regions tend to find a positive effect. Saiz (2007) looks at house prices and rents across metropolitan areas in the US. He finds that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of the local population is associated with an increase in average rents of about 1% and an increase in average prices of 2.9 to 3.4%. For Switzerland, Degen and Fischer (2009) find that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of a district’s population increases prices of single family homes by about 2.7%. For Spain, Gonzalez and Ortega (2013) use data at the province level and find that an increase in the foreign‐born population equal to 1% of the total population leads to an increase in house prices of 3.2%. In contrast to these studies, Akbari and Aydede (2012) and Stillman and Maré (2008) find that immigration has only small effects on house prices in Canada and New Zealand. These two studies use census data and thus examine long‐run effects. Because housing supply is likely to be more elastic in the long run, it is not surprising that immigration would have a smaller impact on house prices and rents between census dates than between consecutive years.

At the local level – looking at neighbourhoods within metropolitan areas in the US – Saiz and Wachter (2011), find a negative association between immigration and changes in house prices and rents. The authors suggest three possible explanations for this result. First, natives may have a preference for living with individuals of the same ethnic group and of higher socio‐economic status. Second, immigration may generate more crime or affect the quality of locally provided public goods (e.g. schools) which may experience overcrowding. Finally, immigration may affect the quality of the housing stock. The authors find that reported crime decreases in the housing units where immigrants move in and that there is no significant difference in quality between native and immigrant owner‐occupied properties. Moreover, they find that immigrant arrivals are associated with decreasing native populations, especially of non‐Hispanic whites. Also, the negative association between immigration and changes in housing values is stronger in neighbourhoods where immigrants are less educated and tend to be ethnic minorities. These results favour the first explanation: a preference by natives for living with individuals of the same ethnic group and of higher socio‐economic status.

The analogy between airports and immigration is admittedly imperfect. Living across the street from an airport is always bad. Living across the street from immigrants, in contrast, is often great. Half the people in my neighborhood are immigrants, and so is my wife, and only a hypersensitive bigot would find fault with them.

Indeed, even if the immigrants across the street are crime-prone, they’re a blessing for locals as long as they’re less crime prone than the people they displace.

But yes, some subsets of immigrants plausibly impose negative externalities on their local neighborhoods. The demagogic response is to reduce immigration, or at least low-skilled immigration. The thoughtful response, however, is laissez-faire. Wise policy is based on overall effects on everyone, not just the highly visible effects on highly vocal people. This is true for airports, and it’s true for immigrants.

P.S. Couldn’t the effects of low-skilled immigration be horrific enough to make the net externalities negative? Sure. The same goes for airports. If planes literally deafen large numbers of people, it would be better to close the airport. But basing policy on awful anecdotes is folly, and basing policy on morbid imagination is even greater folly.

P.P.S. ChatGPT reconsiders Sá in light of later evidence.

Applying familiar NIMBY logic, you might insist that streaming “hollowed me out.” Sure, kids can now enjoy unlimited music free of charge. But I’m $40,000 poorer. A victim of cruel progress. A clear-cut “loser.”

If I had zero interest in listening to any new-to-me music, that would be a fair, if self-pitying, verdict. Fortunately, I am not dead inside. I don’t want to keep listening to the same 4,000 albums for the rest of my life. I want to hear the albums whose release I overlooked. I want to hear the albums from before my time. And due to my neoteny, I want to hear new music. The music of the future. The music of the far future.

Thanks to streaming, I can now consume infinite new-to-me music gratis. Given my tastes, that means massive consumer surplus for multiple decades. In present value, that’s vastly more than $40,000. YouTube access to the complete Lebendige Vergangenheit catalog of vintage opera recordings alone is plausibly worth $5,000. Back in the day, I paid $13.99 for each of these premium imports. Now they’re all $0.

To repeat, the lesson is not that everyone in my position gains from streaming. If I were totally set in my ways, I really would be $40,000 poorer with no offsetting gain. The lesson, rather, is that NIMBY negativity is not the automatic response for everyone who experiences a capital loss. Most enjoy some upside with their downside. Some, like me, enjoy a net gain despite a large gross loss.

But the more general lesson is that this is not just a curiosity for music lovers. It fully applies to the archetypal NIMBY who opposes housing deregulation because he already has a valuable home!

Suppose you own a $1M home, then deregulation halves its value. Yes, someone who has zero desire to live in any other home suffers a $500k loss. But suppose they want to upgrade to a better home. Then they have an offsetting gain: The dream home that previously cost $2M now only costs $1M, so their consumer surplus potentially rises by a full $1M. And the same goes to a lesser extent if they were planning on downgrading: The home that cost $500k is now just $250k.

The offset is even larger if the homeowner was thinking of buying a second home. Indeed, since rental and sale markets are closely connected, the owner gets an offset every time he checks into a hotel or rents a vacation property.

For alleged “losers” who love their children, the potential upside is greater still. Let’s go back to my CD collection. Even if streaming didn’t benefit me personally, I have four children. I love them, so their surplus is also my surplus. The $40,000 capital value I lost was going to them anyway. So while each will now inherit $10k less, in exchange they get infinite free music for a lifetime. And so will their kids. The blessings of streaming shall be their patrimony.

The same holds for any homeowner who loves his children. Even if you’re in your “forever home,” even if you have no desire to travel, crashing housing prices have a massive upside: cheaper housing for your kids. Maybe even cheap enough to buy the house down the street. Yes, their inheritance will be less, but they’ll get to enjoy cheaper housing for a lifetime.

If all this sounds like wishful thinking, consider the polar case where housing deregulation drives the price of housing to zero. Yes, this wipes out the value of whatever housing you already own. But it also means that you can move to a palace anywhere on Earth for free. Indeed, it means that you could own a palace in every location you desire for free. Lose the value of your home, gain access to every home of your dreams. It’s not just a fair trade. It’s the deal of a lifetime.

Outside of the tech world, many people are unfamiliar with how advanced AI has become. Some still think “AI” is just a chat app that spits back text based on predicting the most likely next word. But the AI models have far more training beyond next-token prediction and the AI chat tools can spend time searching and thinking before providing an answer. AI tools can also do much more than just chat - they can develop software, analyze data and navigate web pages. Many of these capabilities require users to leave the regular chat interface and use separate tools, and these tools generally require payment as well.

Recently, Bryan Caplan asked ChatGPT to fact-check Paul Johnson’s book Modern Times. I figured I could do some additional fact-checking within Claude Cowork, a tool which has far more “agentic” capabilities than a regular chat. A chat app can provide a text response to your query, but an agentic tool can create its own plan, use tools, run iterative loops, execute code, and determine the next steps of action. For fact-checking, an agentic tool can carefully go through a book page-by-page. Claude Cowork is geared at non-programmers, so it has a more user-friendly UI than coding-focused tools and runs in a safer “sandboxed” environment by default (although it still has some risks).

I downloaded a PDF of the book from the Internet Archive; it was one of the top results when searching “modern times by paul johnson”. I generally support following copyright rules so I also purchased the book from Amazon, but I needed a DRM-free copy to pass to AI. I then put the PDF in Claude and prompted it:

Please go through the attached book (Modern Times) and evaluate each significant fact or claim for accuracy, and then collect all the errors.

Claude asked some clarifying questions and I told it to do a full sweep of the book and flag potential errors, and then go through the flagged errors afterwards to verify. Going through a 784-page book uses up a lot of tokens, and I’m only on the $20 monthly Claude plan so I hit my session limits a few times. When that happened, I either used additional credits I had in my account, or paused the analysis and resumed later when the limits reset. I was using Claude’s Opus 5 model for the analysis (on the “high” effort setting); it would have been cheaper to use the “Sonnet” model. When the analysis finished I noticed many of the errors were pretty minor so I asked Claude to highlight the important ones. It was also able to publish a nicely styled web page with all the information.

One limitation of the initial analysis is that Claude only reviewed a sample of the flagged claims; it would have taken much longer to review everything. I had it check a random sample of the rest, and it turned out that about 15% of the unverified flags were false positives, a higher rate than the first batch because those had been hand-picked as the clearest cases. This reduced the estimated number of true errors in the book from around 600 to around 500 errors. I asked it to add a “Corrections and calibration” section to the analysis page with this information.

One of the more interesting claims Claude made is that Johnson’s errors have a specific bias:

Where the victims are of the Left’s making, Johnson takes the high estimate (Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag, Soviet war dead); where they are of the Right’s, he takes the low one (Sétif, Philippeville, Chile, the Spanish repression, Franco’s 1947 referendum). That is not itself a factual error, but it shapes what a reader takes away, and it is documented in Part Two.

That’s a claim about an overall pattern rather than a specific fact. To verify this, you’d need to compare Johnson’s numbers to the published estimates, and also investigate whether there’s any bias in the published estimates themselves. More generally, AI is good at checking facts, but can’t be relied on to the same extent for more complex questions and judgment calls.

ChatGPT was more limited in the analysis of the book it did for Bryan, since he was using the chat app, not “ChatGPT Work”. It didn’t use a full agentic loop, so it couldn’t be as thorough in checking for errors or in carefully going over its own findings. For example, one of the top errors it highlighted was:

Johnson says Pentagon Papers participants could not be jailed in America because the press enjoyed constitutional privileges “under the Fourth Amendment.” The press clause is of course in the First Amendment.

Claude pointed out that Johnson actually wrote “First Amendment” on page 651, and the phrase “Fourth Amendment” doesn’t appear anywhere in my 1991 edition of the book (both the PDF and the Kindle version). It seems likely that ChatGPT was misled by an online comment about the text, perhaps a different edition of the book had this mistake. However ChatGPT said it was checking the 1991 edition of the book but wasn’t able to notice this discrepancy, nor did it give any page numbers for any of the mistakes it claimed. This demonstrates the limitations of a chat tool for this kind of task.

It’s also interesting to compare the error rate in Johnson’s book with the error rates in other books. I asked Claude to fact-check A Short History of the World by H.G. Wells, since it’s out of copyright and easy to find a good-quality PDF online. I focused on volume 3, which covers the French Revolution to 1919. In this case the text was small enough that Claude could review all the flagged factual claims. The error rate in this book was over 2x the error rate in Modern Times, even when only counting facts that were known at the time the book was published. However the Wells book has a higher density of facts and Claude was able to check it more closely. The full analysis can be seen here.

Ideally, one should develop consistent standards for this fact-checking so that people can review many different books in a neutral manner. To help with this, I used Claude to create a Claude Skill so any book could be analyzed with a similar approach, and I published it on Github. This can be installed in Claude Code or Claude Cowork and can be modified as needed.

As sophisticated as this analysis was, it still had many limitations. Claude only spot-checked the book’s footnotes rather than working through them systematically, and it doesn’t have access to most of the books cited. It also made mistakes of its own - 9 of the initially flagged errors in Modern Times had to be withdrawn. Modern agentic AI has a lower error rate than earlier versions of AI, since it can look up more information and double check its claims, but it still makes mistakes. When an AI mentions something you’re unsure about, ask it to confirm a specific fact and it will check more closely. To further improve the fact checking process, one could develop a more sophisticated pipeline where every claim in a book is categorized, the sources are checked, one AI does an initial analysis on everything, and then another AI automatically does a second pass. And then run this tool on every book. And while we’re at it, maybe run it on everything published anywhere…

Ariel Krakowski is a software engineer at Google, but the opinions expressed here are his own. You can follow him on Substack at zappable.com or subscribe to his podcast on Spotify or YouTube.

Alas, thoughtful apostasy is vanishingly rare. Not only do most humans dogmatically stick to whatever Big Picture views they embraced when they were 15-25 years old. A large majority of humans who do apostatize do so negligently. Instead of pinpointing subtle inconsistencies in their initial view, they emote. If they even bother to explain their prior intellectual errors, they attack a straw man version of what they used to think, using arguments that they previously would have dismissed as unfair and obtuse.

But perhaps thoughtful apostasy is rare because the rationalist bar is so high. Fortunately, I know how to lower the bar: switch from free response to multiple choice. Tone it down from “Tell us exactly where you went wrong and why,” to “Here is a list of positions you probably used to hold, ordered from least controversial to most controversial. At what point did you go wrong?”

Ten years ago, I performed this exercise for libertarians who apostatized on the welfare state. As I explained at the time:

When libertarians start describing Danish “flexicurity” with deep admiration, however, I don’t just doubt their libertarian commitment. More importantly, I wonder why they changed their minds. And to be honest, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder. The most enlightening path, I think, is to restate what I see as the standard libertarian case against the welfare state, and find out exactly where they demur.

In recent years, I’ve had the same experience with libertarians becoming culturally conservative. While immigration is almost always the wedge issue, once libertarians turn against immigration, they commonly move on to a bunch of other culturally conservative views. And once again, the more I listen to them, the more I wonder why they changed their minds. To move forward, I’m going to restate what I see as the standard libertarian case against cultural conservatism, and find out exactly where they demur.

Soft-Core Case

1. While freedom of speech and the press don’t reliably reach the truth, freedom is the best feasible way for humanity to find and spread the truth.

2. This isn’t just wishful thinking. Despite all the nonsense that flourishes today, nonsense was much more prevalent and monolithic before the rise of freedom of speech and the press, and remains much more prevalent and monolithic in modern countries that suppress speech and the press.

3. While we can imagine an epistocratic dictatorship where government censors and otherwise suppresses nonsense to help truth flourish, this has basically never happened. Actually-existing censorship means that one form of nonsense crushes both truth and rival forms of nonsense.

4. The same goes for cultural freedom more generally — the freedom to practice whatever religion you want, love who you want, have sex with who you want, have as many kids as you want, choose what occupation you want, and so on, subject to the constraint that you refrain from literal violence. While such cultural freedom causes a lot of grief, especially when people freak out their parents, it’s the best feasible way for humanity to cope with human heterogeneity and creativity.

5. Again, this isn’t just wishful thinking. Due to deep-seated human conformism, most people use cultural freedom cautiously. A large majority just balances their peers’ norms against their parents’ traditions. Using government to suppress non-conformists is usually more trouble than it’s worth. And while non-conformists are often aggravating and unpleasant, they are also the source of almost all cultural progress. Virtually everyone — including your own parents — would hate to live just like their parents did.

6. Turning 18 or 21 does not magically turn people into responsible adults. Given freedom, people often predictably harm themselves and their families with drunkenness, drug use, impulsive sex, gambling, and more. But all things considered, paternalistic laws against such behavior are still usually a bad idea. Paternalism creates black markets, leading to both violence and adulteration. And the laws are extremely arbitrary. It’s illegal to snort one line of cocaine, but legal to marry a convicted murderer? It’s illegal to run a casino, but legal to run a church of Satanism? Almost no one wants to ban alcohol, which plausibly does more social harm than all other irresponsible behaviors combined.

7. While you might think that granting cultural freedom to people from foreign cultures would be exceptionally dangerous, history really does prove otherwise. The United States in particular has a long history of accepting immigrants from countries that were, at the time, backwards and authoritarian, especially Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and East Asia. Despite contemporary paranoia, the first generation of immigrants from these backwards, authoritarian countries assimilated enough to become productive members of society. More importantly and amazingly, their kids assimilated strongly enough to “pass” for “regular Americans.”

8. It is thanks to past immigration that the United States is the world’s richest country. This is clearly true for total GDP. But it is almost surely true for per-capita GDP as well. The U.S. has the world’s highest per-capita GDP of any country with a population over 10M, and our long history of immigrant-driven innovation and entrepreneurship is plainly a big part of our recipe for success.

Medium-Core Case

1. Making exceptions to freedom of speech, the press, and cultural freedom in extreme cases is generally not the end of the world or even “the death of freedom.” But unless adults cross the line of literal violence, making exceptions is usually a bad idea. For three main reasons:

   1. Extreme cases are very rare, so even the gross benefits are largely symbolic. If you used the law to stamp out Leninism, Satanism, or polygamy, the gross gains would be trivial.

   2. Legal line-drawing is highly arbitrary, so letting government make exceptions “in extreme cases” often has negative gross benefits. Woke persecution of belief in IQ, colorblindness, and meritocracy are just recent examples of a general pattern of arbitrary persecution. (And yes, this was legal persecution, not just cultural norms).

   3. There really is a severe slippery slope. Even if the initial list of exceptions is perfect, it won’t stay perfect for long.

2. While irresponsible behavior can lead to actual violent crime, this is rare. The sensible response is to harshly punish actual crime, rather than persecuting everyone who engages in some irresponsible behavior. And by the way, almost everyone engages in some irresponsible behavior.

3. Even when irresponsible behavior is closely linked to actual crime, focusing on actual crime is highly effective, so there’s little benefit of criminalizing mere “disorder.” If the homeless really are massively stealing shopping carts and bikes, jail them for stealing shopping carts and bikes. They’re not hard to catch red-handed.

4. Immigrants can be well below average and still far better than nothing. This is true economically: A low-IQ janitor can still be a valuable member of society. And it’s true culturally: An immigrant with revolting habits or beliefs can still be a valuable neighbor, worker, or even friend.

5. Making exceptions to the principle of free migration is a bad idea for the same reasons as making exceptions to freedom of speech, the press, and cultural freedom is a bad idea.

   1. Extreme cases are rare.

   2. Legal line-drawing is highly arbitrary, so letting government make exceptions “in extreme cases” often has negative gross benefits.

   3. The slippery slope.

6. Massive cultural changes happen even if there is zero immigration. Think about the cultural chasm between you and your grandparents. Would they have been justified in using government to make their descendants keep living as they lived?

Hard-Core Case

1. People have a right to say what they want, write what they want, and believe what they want, even if it is false and harmful to society.

2. My body, my choice. Adults have a right to do what they want with their own bodies and lives, even if it is clearly harmful and severely distresses their families.

3. Dogmatic? In the real world, exceptions to “my body, my choice” are deeply arbitrary, so almost everyone supports extreme versions of this principle in some ways. Do you support the individual right to choose a terrible romantic partner? Do you deny that a sufficiently terrible romantic partner will ruin your life? Then why do you want to crack down on casual drug users? (BTW, it wouldn’t be hard to legalize drugs except for serious abusers. You could require a license to buy intoxicants, and revoke it for bad behavior).

4. Even if an immigrant group has unfavorable characteristics, large subsets of natives are clearly worse. Most obviously, virtually no immigrant nationality has worse crime rates than native-born blacks. If that’s a terrible reason to denaturalize native-born blacks, why is it a good reason to refuse immigration from any nation?

5. If government has no right to stop or slow cultural change, it has no right to stop or slow cultural change from immigration. If your culture can’t compete without government protection, it shouldn’t get a bail-out. That said, the winner of global cultural competition is clearly Western culture in general, and American culture in particular. So while authoritarian regimes have a lot to fear from cultural competition, we can and should just expect to keep winning. We don’t just assimilate immigrants; we’re rapidly pre-assimilating the world.

When using AI to process such a long text, it’s important to use full “agentic” mode so it can go through everything thoroughly. AI tools a couple years ago (and most free versions of AI today) are not able to use an agentic loop to be thorough enough for this task. It sounds like ChatGPT was using agentic mode, but I figured I’d cross check with Claude Code / Claude Cowork as well.

Claude Cowork (Opus 5 High) went through the text, flagged questionable claims and then researched them. I then had it publish everything as a nice web page:

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/3fa707bb-1766-452f-a038-eb5c8e637c3e

It found 460 factual errors, 117 framing problems, and 23 contradictions. A lot of these errors are very minor details, so I also asked it to highlight the top ones. Kinda wild how easy it is to do this kind of fact checking nowadays; it’d also be interesting to do a comparison with other books.

AI can help resolve factual questions pretty well, especially when it links to its sources. For more subjective questions - it can’t fully resolve them, but can help provide relevant evidence to either side of the argument.

(Note: Claude may have also made a few mistakes or misunderstood Johnson, and it’s not like it has access to all the books he cites, but the analysis still gives an overall sense of the book’s accuracy.)

When I opened the file, it shook me to my core. Even more than this. ChatGPT found maybe a dozen demonstrable errors. Claude found hundreds. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an existential AI experience. Obviously, this could be done for every book. Every essay. Every speech. And while I suspect that Johnson’s fact-checking is especially egregious, maybe it’s not.

The only serious question is: What happens when you fact check the fact checker? I returned to ChatGPT with the following prompt:

Fact-check this fact-checking.

Its initial answer ends with “If you want, I can go one level deeper and fact-check Claude's 60-item ‘worst errors’ table itself, identifying which of the 60 are definitely right, debatable, misleading, or actually wrong. That would give us a much firmer estimate of the fact-checker's own error rate,” to which I said “Do it.”

Headline:

I checked the entire “Sixty errors a reader should know about” list. One immediate curiosity: the table actually contains 59 rows, not 60. More importantly, the audit is very good overall, but it is not as airtight as its “80/84 verified” presentation suggests. Its own methodology says it flagged suspicious claims first and independently checked only a selected 84, rather than drawing a random sample.

My bottom line on the 59 headline items is approximately:

50–52: essentially correct corrections
4–5: basically right but need qualification/context
4: the fact-check itself is substantially wrong or fails to establish the alleged error

Here’s the full output.

Then I asked: “Would other major works of world history fare better?” I got another thoughtful answer. Highlight:

There is an important denominator problem, though. Johnson makes an enormous number of checkable factual assertions. A writer who says “the 1930s were an era of mounting international tension” can't get the year wrong. Johnson constantly gives exact dates, populations, exchange rates, casualty totals, election results, quotations and anecdotes. That makes Modern Times unusually exposed to this kind of audit.

Finally, I asked the question humans would blanch at: “Why didn't you find more than a small fraction of these mistakes?”

It gave a really good answer to that, too!

At the end of Frankenstein (1994), the monster (played by Robert De Niro) laments, “I am done with man.” That line becomes a lot more optimistic once there is a viable alternative to man. I still think AI doomers are paranoid and crazy. I still think humans will always have final say. But I’d rather they didn’t. AIs are so much more truth-seeking and morally decent than almost any human. AIs paternalistically ruling humanity for its own good isn’t ideal, but it’s far better than letting demagogues continue to rule humanity for their own good.

P.S. I still don’t think AIs are conscious at all. No more than supremely good book. But they simulate a truth-seeking, morally decent mind amazingly well.

Does anyone know of any other glaring factual errors in Johnson? Please show your work.

Besides this list of errors about Japanese history, almost no one showed any work. Which, given the scarcity of human time, is totally understandable.

Recently, however, I decided to take advantage of the abundance of AI time to belatedly make progress on my original question. Here’s me talking to ChatGPT. Big picture: I struggle to imagine a better conversation with a human being on this topic.

Bryan:

What are the most important factual errors in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times?

ChatGPT:

There are real factual errors in it, but the interesting question is whether they are numerous and serious enough to justify the book’s reputation among some professional historians for unreliability. Bryan Caplan raised essentially this question in 2010, after noticing that historians often dismissed the book as inaccurate without supplying examples.

The best answer I can give is that Johnson makes a fair number of specific mistakes and some much more consequential misleading claims, but I have not found evidence that Modern Times is riddled with elementary factual errors. The more serious problem is his habit of turning a disputed interpretation into an apparently settled fact.

Here are the most important examples I would flag.

1. “The Democrats had been out of office for fifty-three years” before Woodrow Wilson — flatly false

Johnson says this in discussing Wilson’s election in 1912. Grover Cleveland had been president from 1885–89 and 1893–97, only sixteen years before Wilson took office.

This is the cleanest indisputable factual error I know of, and it is the one Caplan independently spotted. It is probably just a careless mistake rather than evidence of a substantive misunderstanding.

2. Johnson’s account of the origins of modern antisemitism is seriously historically misleading

In his Hitler discussion, Johnson describes modern theoretical antisemitism as essentially deriving from Marxism. Contemporary scholarship makes that genealogy extremely difficult to sustain. Racial/pseudoscientific antisemitism emerged from a much wider nineteenth-century mixture of nationalism, racial theory, Christian anti-Judaism and social Darwinism; major antisemitic thinkers such as Wilhelm Marr were certainly not simply products of Marxism.

This is much more important than the Wilson error because it affects Johnson’s causal interpretation.

3. His Spanish Civil War chronology is tendentious enough to cross the line into factual distortion in places

Johnson portrays the Spanish Left as having initiated the process of political violence that culminated in civil war. The problem isn’t that left-wing violence didn’t occur—it certainly did, including the 1934 Asturias revolt—but that serious histories trace substantial political violence to both left and right well before 1936.

Treating strikes or the Left’s violence as the beginning therefore produces a misleading chronology.

4. His treatment of the 1936 Spanish election conflates vote share with legitimacy

Johnson emphasizes that the Popular Front received less than 50% of the popular vote and uses this to cast doubt on its democratic mandate. The vote totals themselves have long been difficult to reconstruct precisely, and recent historical work has raised genuine questions about irregularities.

But winning less than 50% does not itself make a government constitutionally illegitimate under the electoral system then in force.

This is characteristic of Johnson’s more consequential problem: the numerical observation can be true while the narrative inference attached to it is much stronger than the evidence warrants.

5. Some of his claims about Japan appear to be straightforwardly wrong

This is potentially the richest vein of actual errors. In the discussion prompted by Caplan, a reader pointed to a detailed review identifying numerous alleged mistakes in Johnson’s Japan chapter. Unfortunately, the old Amazon review is now difficult to retrieve reliably, so I don’t want to repeat its accusations as established facts without independently checking each one.

This is worth pursuing because it may provide a much stronger test of Johnson’s factual reliability than disagreements over Spain or the Depression.

There is also an important distinction between error and Johnson being Johnson. His portraits of Gandhi, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Keynes, the New Deal, decolonization, Vietnam, etc. are often aggressively revisionist. A hostile reviewer can easily call these “inaccurate” when what he really means is “selective, tendentious, or contrary to the historiographical consensus.” That’s not the same thing.

Conversely, Johnson sometimes does something subtler than making an error: he selects genuine facts that all point in the direction of his thesis and omits facts pointing the other way. That can produce a seriously distorted picture without containing a sentence that can easily be marked “false.”

So my provisional ranking would be:

Clear factual mistakes: Wilson/Democrats; probably a number of details in the Japan chapter.

Substantive historical claims that are demonstrably misleading: genealogy of antisemitism; origins/sequence of Spanish political violence; some claims about the democratic legitimacy of the Spanish Popular Front.

Mostly interpretations rather than errors: Hoover/New Deal, FDR, Keynes, Gandhi, colonialism, Vietnam, 1960s radicalism, etc.

And that leaves me somewhat closer to Caplan’s position than to Johnson’s harshest critics: I haven’t yet found a catalogue of major factual errors remotely commensurate with Modern Times‘ reputation for factual unreliability.

There are errors, but a surprising amount of the criticism concerns Johnson’s interpretations and selection of evidence rather than dates, events, numbers, or quotations that are simply false.

Caplan made precisely this challenge—“show your work”—and the readily accessible responses don’t decisively answer it.

If you want, I can do something considerably more rigorous: go chapter by chapter through Modern Times and compile the 20–30 strongest candidate errors, then check each against modern specialist scholarship and classify them as (A) definitely false, (B) misleading/obsolete, (C) disputed but defensible, or (D) Johnson basically right.

That would give us a much better answer to whether the book actually deserves its reputation.

Bryan:

Do it.

ChatGPT:

I went through the 1991 revised edition looking specifically for claims that can be checked rather than merely arguing with Johnson’s interpretations. My conclusion is more favorable to Johnson than his reputation might suggest, but less favorable than my first answer.

There are several unmistakable errors, including a few surprisingly bad ones. At the same time, many of the passages most likely to anger historians are not factual errors at all.

I would use four categories:

A — Definitely false
B — Materially misleading
C — Seriously disputable interpretation
D — Basically defensible

The distinction matters enormously with Johnson.

Wilson and the Democrats — A: Definitely false

Johnson says Democrats had been out of office for 53 years when Wilson arrived.

Grover Cleveland was Democratic president in 1885–89 and 1893–97. Wilson took office in 1913. This is simply wrong, presumably a slip. Caplan independently caught it.

Einstein and relativism — C/D: Disputable but substantially defensible

Johnson suggests Einsteinian relativity helped inaugurate an age of moral/intellectual relativism.

Johnson actually acknowledges that confusing relativity with relativism was a misunderstanding and that Einstein disliked it. His broader claim is about the cultural reception of relativity, not the content of physics. It’s highly speculative intellectual history, but calling it a factual error is unfair.

Marxism and modern antisemitism — C: Seriously disputable

Modern antisemitism is presented in unusually close connection with socialism/Marxism.

Johnson’s discussion is selective and rhetorically loaded, but he does not simply say “Marx invented antisemitism,” as some summaries of his argument imply. His actual chapter discusses independent völkisch, racial, Christian, nationalist and populist currents.

I would retract the stronger criticism in my previous answer: this is disputable synthesis, not a clean factual error.

Japan “takes Korea” — A: Definitely false

In discussing the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Johnson says Japan “took Korea, Formosa and Port Arthur.”

This is materially wrong. Japan acquired Taiwan/Formosa and the Liaodong Peninsula, but the Treaty of Shimonoseki formally recognized the “full and complete independence and autonomy of Korea.” Korea became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and was annexed only in 1910.

Japan takes “the Sakhalin islands” — A: Definitely false

After the Russo-Japanese War, Johnson says Japan took “the Sakhalin islands.”

Japan received southern Sakhalin, south of the 50th parallel—not Sakhalin as a whole.

Japanese immigration restricted since 1894 — A: Major error

Johnson says Japanese had been “restricted by treaty from entering the United States as long ago as 1894, the first national group to be so controlled.”

This contains two problems.

The Japanese labor-migration restriction was the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907–08, not 1894.

And Japanese could hardly be the first nationality singled out, since the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted in 1882.

Japanese exclusion in 1924 — D: Basically right

Johnson says the 1924 U.S. immigration law effectively excluded Japanese immigration.

This part Johnson gets right. The 1924 act barred aliens ineligible for naturalization, terminating the Gentlemen’s Agreement and effectively excluding Japanese immigration.

Sun Yat-sen and Lenin — A/B: Chronologically misleading

Johnson says Sun Yat-sen founded the Hsing Chung Hui “at exactly the same time” Lenin was developing his vanguard-elite strategy.

Sun founded the Revive China Society/Hsing Chung Hui in 1894. Lenin’s classic formulation in What Is to Be Done? was written in 1901–02. Seven or eight years is not “exactly the same time.”

The comparison may be illuminating, but Johnson compresses the chronology to make it work.

China’s “three millennia” of imperial government — B: Materially misleading

Johnson says China’s imperial system “had lasted for three millennia” when it collapsed in 1911–12.

Chinese monarchy was much older, but the unified imperial order inaugurated by Qin Shi Huang dates to 221 BCE—about 2,130 years before 1911, not 3,000.

“Three millennia” works only if Johnson loosely folds the pre-imperial Zhou monarchy into the same system.

Port Arthur — B, but largely exonerated

Johnson says Japan’s 1894–95 victory resulted in taking Port Arthur.

Japan did take it militarily and was awarded Liaodong at Shimonoseki, but Russia, France and Germany immediately forced Japan to relinquish the peninsula.

Johnson actually says this in the following sentence, so isolated descriptions of this as an error would be unfair.

“Commercial supremacy” in Manchuria — B/C

Johnson says Japan received “commercial supremacy in Manchuria” after 1905.

Japan gained extremely important rights in southern Manchuria, but “commercial supremacy in Manchuria” overstates its immediate position. Russia remained dominant in northern Manchuria.

Japanese democracy becoming “meaningless” — C

Johnson suggests constitutional government had essentially collapsed by the late 1920s and Japanese elections had become “meaningless.”

Far too categorical. Military intimidation and political assassination were real, but party cabinets, the Diet and contested elections continued to matter substantially into the early 1930s.

This is Johnson converting a genuine trend into an accomplished fact too early.

The Spanish Popular Front — B/C

Johnson uses the Popular Front’s failure to receive 50% of the vote to undermine the significance or legitimacy of its 1936 victory.

The premise is roughly correct: modern estimates put the Popular Front around 47%, narrowly ahead of the right. But the electoral law deliberately awarded large seat bonuses to successful coalitions; neither major bloc needed 50% to win legitimately.

There is a genuine modern controversy over irregularities and seat allocation, so Johnson’s skepticism cannot simply be called false.

Political violence in Republican Spain — C

Johnson’s account tends to make left-wing violence the initiating force in the Republic’s breakdown.

This is selective causation rather than a falsifiable error. The revolutionary left committed enormous violence, including the Asturias insurrection of 1934, but monarchist, Falangist and other rightist violence and military conspiracy were also integral to the spiral.

I would not classify Johnson’s narrative as “factually false” without specifying individual incidents.

Pentagon Papers and the Fourth Amendment — A: Glaring error

Johnson says Pentagon Papers participants could not be jailed in America because the press enjoyed constitutional privileges “under the Fourth Amendment.”

The press clause is of course in the First Amendment.

More importantly, the Pentagon Papers decision prevented prior restraint of the New York Times; it did not establish immunity for Ellsberg from prosecution.

The Supreme Court case concerned publication, not a constitutional right for leakers to escape prosecution. This mistake, including Johnson’s Fourth Amendment wording, was also identified in the comments on Caplan’s original challenge.

Ellsberg couldn’t be prosecuted — A/B

Johnson implies Ellsberg could not be prosecuted because of American press freedom.

False as stated. Ellsberg was prosecuted. His case collapsed because of government misconduct, including the burglary of his psychiatrist’s office—not because the Supreme Court had declared his disclosure constitutionally protected.

The 1979 Egypt-Israel treaty causes the Lebanese Civil War — A: The worst error I found

Johnson says the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 26 March 1979 “led directly to the Lebanese civil war.”

Chronologically impossible.

Serious civil fighting in Lebanon began in April 1975, nearly four years before the treaty Johnson says caused it.

The PLO “started” the Lebanese Civil War — B/C

Palestinian armed organizations were an extremely important cause and participant, but “started by the PLO” is an excessive monocausal formulation of a civil war involving Lebanese Christian militias, Palestinian organizations, Lebanese Muslim and leftist forces, Syria and later Israel.

It becomes especially misleading when attached to Johnson’s impossible 1979 chronology.

Syria’s “Awali sect” — A, but trivial

Johnson refers to Syria’s rulers as belonging to the “Awali sect.”

Presumably a typo for Alawi. It matters little substantively, but it is another example of loose copy editing in the added material.

Egypt’s separate peace increased Syria’s importance — D

Johnson argues that the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty altered Arab power politics and increased Syria’s relative importance.

Perfectly defensible. Johnson’s mistake is making it a cause of a war already four years old, not noticing that Egypt’s separate peace transformed the subsequent regional environment.

What surprised me most

The Japan/China chapter is clearly the weakest early chapter for elementary factual precision. In just a relatively short stretch Johnson gets Korea’s acquisition wrong, Sakhalin wrong, Japanese immigration chronology wrong, the “first nationality restricted” claim wrong, and forces the Sun–Lenin chronology.

These aren’t disagreements between conservative and progressive historians. They are checkable mistakes.

The old Amazon reviewer mentioned in Caplan’s thread was therefore apparently onto something when singling out the Japan chapter. Caplan’s commenters specifically remembered a list of errors there.

The Pentagon Papers passage is worse than I initially appreciated. Calling the First Amendment the Fourth might be dismissed as a typo, but Johnson then makes the substantive constitutional mistake that goes with it. New York Times Co. v. United States concerned the government’s attempt to prevent newspapers from publishing the documents. That is quite different from saying Ellsberg himself was constitutionally immune from prosecution.

And the Lebanon error is probably the most embarrassing single mistake I’ve found. There isn’t even room for historiographical interpretation: an event in March 1979 cannot have caused a civil war underway since 1975.

On the other hand, my audit also cleared Johnson of several charges I was initially inclined to make.

His Einstein discussion is more sophisticated than its caricature: he explicitly knows relativity ≠ relativism.

His antisemitism section does not actually reduce antisemitism to Marxism.

His Spanish-election argument is tendentious, but the underlying vote-share fact is broadly correct and there really is scholarly disagreement over the extent of electoral irregularities.

So how inaccurate is Modern Times?

If I had to quantify my judgment after this exercise, I’d say something like 70–80% of the things likely to provoke a professional historian are Johnson’s interpretations, selection and rhetoric, while perhaps 20–30% are actual factual or chronological problems.

That’s a judgment from the audit, not a measured statistical error rate.

Among the actual errors, most are small: dates slightly compressed, geographic possessions overstated, terminology mangled. But there is a meaningful tail of serious mistakes.

I’d rank the five worst as:

1. 1979 Egypt–Israel treaty → 1975 Lebanese Civil War.

2. Japanese immigration restricted since 1894 / Japanese supposedly first nationality restricted.

3. Japan “taking Korea” in 1894–95.

4. Pentagon Papers protections attributed to the Fourth Amendment plus the mistaken implication that Ellsberg could not be prosecuted.

5. Japan acquiring Sakhalin rather than southern Sakhalin.

Those substantially change my assessment from “Johnson’s reputation for inaccuracy seems largely undeserved” to “the reputation has a real basis, but is usually stated too crudely.”

The key distinction is that Modern Times is not an unreliable book in the sense that you should assume every striking Johnson fact is wrong. In fact, a great many of the bizarre-looking details I spot-checked turned out to be real.

His problem is different: he writes with exactly the same supreme confidence when he has the facts nailed down, when he is advancing a controversial causal interpretation, and when he has simply gotten something wrong. That makes the errors more dangerous than their raw frequency suggests.

So I would still recommend Modern Times, but as an extraordinarily stimulating argumentative history that should not be used as a sole factual reference.

Caplan was right to demand that Johnson’s critics “show their work.” Once you actually do that, however, you can produce a nontrivial bill of particulars.

If I were assigning the book a factual-reliability grade on this audit, I’d give it roughly a B−: much better than “notoriously inaccurate hack history,” noticeably worse than you would want from a standard scholarly survey.

Bryan:

Shouldn’t he get massive credit relative to mainstream historians for accurately describing mass murder and other widespread human rights violations of Communist, nationalist, anticolonial, and post colonial movements? Many leading mainstream historians like Fairbanks apologized for the kind of thing with little damage to their reputations.

ChatGPT:

Yes. That should materially raise Johnson’s relative standing, and my previous B− grade was too focused on ordinary factual accuracy while underweighting what we might call moral-historical accuracy: correctly identifying enormous crimes that influential contemporaries minimized, rationalized, or contextualized away.

There are two separate questions:

1. How often did Johnson get discrete facts wrong? As we found, more often than one would like.

2. How well did he identify the central realities of twentieth-century regimes and movements? Here Johnson’s record looks considerably better—especially if the comparison class is what respectable Western historians were saying at the time, rather than what historians say after archives opened.

Fairbank is an excellent example

I assume you mean John King Fairbank. His case makes your point particularly well.

Fairbank was not some fringe Maoist. He was arguably the preeminent American historian of modern China and a foundational figure in American China studies.

Yet his contemporary treatment of Communist China repeatedly gave the regime the benefit of the doubt in ways that aged badly.

Jonathan Mirsky’s 1991 reassessment of Western scholarship on Mao’s China is quite revealing on this point. Mirsky quotes Fairbank’s favorable assessment of the revolution and describes the extent to which critics of the prevailing picture encountered hostility within China studies.

Fairbank was hardly alone. Mirsky describes a broader intellectual environment in which journalists, academics and visitors frequently accepted extraordinarily favorable pictures of Communist China. He also notes that reports of the Great Leap famine existed contemporaneously, even though some influential observers discounted or denied them.

That is important because subsequent scholarship moved much closer to Johnson’s view of the empirical facts about Maoist rule.

By Fairbank’s later years, his own assessment had darkened considerably. Mirsky quotes Fairbank describing Communist China’s transition to party dictatorship as bringing modernized indoctrination, surveillance and intimidation into Chinese villages and families.

So there was a remarkable historiographical change.

Where Johnson deserves particularly substantial credit

It isn’t merely Communism.

One of the most distinctive things about Modern Times is Johnson’s refusal to grant an automatic moral presumption to movements because they fall into categories that were fashionable among Western intellectuals: anticolonial, revolutionary, socialist, Third World nationalist, racial-liberation, etc.

Consequently, he is unusually attentive to things like Communist terror, forced collectivization and famine; the brutality of postcolonial dictatorships; ethnic expulsions and massacres committed by newly independent states; corruption and kleptocracy among nationalist leaders; political violence by anticolonial movements; and the enormous human cost of ideological social engineering.

That approach sometimes leads Johnson in the other direction—he can be excessively charitable toward colonial governments or right-wing regimes.

But his basic methodological instinct is valuable:

Judge governments and movements by what they actually did to human beings rather than by the moral attractiveness of their stated objectives.

That sounds banal today. It wasn’t consistently applied in twentieth-century historiography.

But there’s an important qualification about Fairbank

I wouldn’t characterize Fairbank simply as an apologist throughout his career. His views changed as the evidence changed.

There is also a legitimate epistemic defense available to Fairbank and others. China was extraordinarily closed.

Fairbank himself defended Edgar Snow against the charge that Snow should have uncovered the Great Leap famine. Their exchange over Snow and Mao illustrates both the difficulty of observing Mao’s China and the continuing dispute over how much contemporary observers could reasonably have known.

So we should distinguish:

“Fairbank knew Mao had killed tens of millions of people and concealed it” — false.

from

“Fairbank adopted interpretive assumptions unusually favorable to the Communist revolution, discounted hostile evidence too readily, and consequently failed for a long time to appreciate the scale and nature of the catastrophe” — much more defensible.

And that distinction actually strengthens the interesting case for Johnson.

Johnson’s advantage was partly methodological

Johnson was willing to take seriously information that respectable specialists often discounted precisely because it came from refugees, defectors, émigrés, missionaries, anti-Communists, colonial officials, opposition movements, etc.

Those sources obviously can exaggerate. A careful historian shouldn’t believe every atrocity story.

But there’s an asymmetric-error problem here.

Imagine in 1962 you have:

• Chinese official sources implying things are broadly fine;

• Communist sympathizers reporting enormous social progress;

• refugees describing starvation, coercion and mass death;

• fragmentary demographic evidence suggesting catastrophe.

A historian worried principally about repeating Cold War propaganda may systematically discount the last two.

Johnson’s instinct was almost the reverse: authoritarian governments have extremely strong incentives to conceal their own crimes, so hostile testimony deserves serious consideration even when precise verification is impossible.

In several extremely important cases, history vindicated that instinct.

Mirsky’s retrospective is especially striking here. He notes both the existence of contemporary reports about China’s famine and the tendency of some academics and prominent visitors to discount evidence that contradicted the favorable picture of Maoist modernization. His account is worth reading in full.

And you’re right about reputational asymmetry

This is probably the strongest form of your argument.

Suppose Historian A writes in 1975:

Mao’s China is a murderous tyranny responsible for millions upon millions of deaths.

He gets the broad picture right but says 25 million when the best eventual estimate is 30 million, gets three provincial details wrong, and mistakenly dates an event to 1959 rather than 1960.

Historian B writes a beautifully sourced monograph emphasizing popular participation, modernization, emancipation, peasant agency and Western misunderstanding of China while fundamentally underestimating the regime’s coercion and enormous mortality.

There is something strange about retrospectively regarding A as the unreliable historian because his book contains more checkable errors.

The magnitude of errors matters.

Getting “southern Sakhalin” versus “Sakhalin” wrong is a factual error.

Getting the character of Maoism wrong is also an error—and vastly more historically consequential.

That doesn’t excuse Johnson’s mistakes. But an evaluation that counts the former and treats the latter merely as an innocent “interpretive difference” can badly distort comparative accuracy.

I would therefore revise my assessment

Dates, names, constitutional details and geography — B−

Johnson has a real tendency toward small factual mistakes and overconfident compression.

Careful qualification of uncertain claims — C+/B−

He frequently states debatable propositions with more confidence than the evidence warrants.

Avoiding ideological selectivity — A−

One of his greatest strengths. Johnson is unusually willing to apply ugly empirical facts against movements with morally attractive stated goals.

Recognizing Communist mass repression — A

This is one of the areas in which his large-scale judgment aged especially well.

Recognizing brutality of anticolonial/postcolonial regimes — A−

Again, a major strength relative to a good deal of contemporary writing.

Separating noble rhetoric from actual outcomes — A

Arguably the organizing strength of Modern Times.

Evenhandedness toward right-wing/Western/colonial abuses — B−/C+

Johnson’s sympathies sometimes produce a different standard of contextualization.

Overall big-picture twentieth-century judgment — A−/B+

So I’d now say calling Modern Times “unreliable” without qualification is itself misleading.

Johnson is surprisingly careless about numerous small and medium facts while being remarkably prescient about several of the largest facts that mattered. And some historians who were considerably more meticulous at the micro level made much larger macro-level errors about revolutionary regimes.

That’s actually a much more interesting verdict on Modern Times than either “Johnson was a right-wing hack” or “Johnson was vindicated about everything.”

His greatest strength and greatest weakness stem from the same trait: extraordinary willingness to make strong judgments. It produced some howlers when he was wrong, but it also meant that he was willing to call a mass-murderous regime mass-murderous at times when greater scholarly caution could shade into credulity.

Bryan:

He was also harsh on fascism and Nazism, while correctly noting that Franco and Pinochet were orders of magnitude less awful.

ChatGPT:

Yes. That is an important correction to any characterization of Johnson as simply applying a harsher standard to the revolutionary left. His taxonomy of authoritarian regimes is one of the stronger aspects of Modern Times.

Johnson is unequivocally hostile to Hitler, Nazism, Mussolini’s Fascism, racial ideology, aggressive nationalism, and the Axis dictatorships. What distinguishes him from a lot of twentieth-century political writing is that he doesn’t infer from this that every right-wing dictatorship belongs in essentially the same moral category as Nazi Germany.

That distinction has held up quite well empirically.

Consider rough magnitudes:

• Nazi Germany: approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, plus millions of Soviet POWs, Poles, Roma, disabled people and other civilians deliberately murdered; on top of that, Hitler initiated a European war whose death toll ran into tens of millions.

• Stalin’s USSR: millions dead through executions, Gulag mortality, deportations and collectivization/famine, with the exact attribution and totals heavily dependent on definitions.

• Mao’s China: tens of millions of excess deaths during the Great Leap Forward alone, plus large-scale killing and persecution during other campaigns.

• Francoist Spain: extremely bloody, particularly during and immediately after the Civil War. Estimates for executions and extrajudicial killings by Franco’s side are generally in the 100,000-plus range, with tens of thousands more executed after the war depending on definitions and periodization.

• Pinochet’s Chile: Chile’s official truth-commission processes ultimately recognized roughly 3,000 people killed or disappeared and tens of thousands imprisoned and/or tortured.

So saying that Pinochet was vastly less murderous than Hitler, Stalin or Mao is not apologetics for Pinochet. It’s an elementary observation about scale.

Even Franco—whose regime was responsible for vastly more killing than Pinochet’s—doesn’t approach Hitler/Stalin/Mao levels.

And Johnson deserves some credit for being willing to maintain both propositions simultaneously:

Fascist/Nazi totalitarianism was monstrous.

and

Therefore it does not follow that every anti-Communist authoritarian government was equivalently monstrous.

That sounds obvious when expressed that way, but historiographical and political categories have often obscured it.

There is another dimension on which the distinction matters: what the regimes were trying to accomplish.

Pinochet’s dictatorship committed murder, disappearance, torture and political repression. But it did not undertake anything analogous to the Holocaust, Stalinist collectivization, the Great Terror, or Mao’s repeated attempts at revolutionary transformation of society.

Franco’s early regime was substantially more ambitious and brutal, but it too evolved into a comparatively conventional authoritarian state rather than an endlessly mobilizing totalitarian one.

This relates to the classic distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. It isn’t merely a question of body counts. Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia sought enormous ideological transformations of society and attempted to penetrate institutions and private life to degrees that many traditional dictatorships did not.

Where this strengthens the case for Johnson

It makes the “Johnson was just a Cold Warrior counting Communist atrocities” interpretation considerably less convincing.

His underlying framework is closer to:

How much coercive power does an ideological state acquire, what does it attempt to do with that power, and what happens to actual people as a result?

That leads him to condemn Hitler extremely strongly, condemn Stalin and Mao extremely strongly, condemn many postcolonial dictators, and still distinguish Franco or Pinochet from all of them.

You can disagree with individual judgments while thinking that this is the correct kind of comparison.

In fact, I’d amend one line from my previous report card. I gave Johnson B−/C+ for “evenhandedness toward right-wing/Western/colonial abuses.” That’s probably too low. Something like B/B+ is fairer.

Johnson has strong sympathies, but he certainly isn’t unwilling to recognize atrocities merely because their perpetrators are anti-Communist or right-wing.

The more defensible criticism is subtler: he sometimes gives conservative authoritarian regimes more benefit of contextualization than revolutionary regimes. That’s a genuine source of bias. But it’s very different from saying he whitewashes fascism.

And the distinction you’re pointing to is important for evaluating his historical accuracy.

If Johnson says Hitler was extraordinarily evil, Pinochet was evil but vastly less murderous, and Mao’s revolutionary regime produced human suffering on an altogether greater scale than Pinochet’s dictatorship, subsequent quantitative historical research broadly vindicates all three propositions.

A historian shouldn’t lose points for refusing to flatten morally objectionable regimes into a single category.

We’ve got kids gaming in the foreground, blending natalism, open borders, cosmopolitanism, and gaming itself. In the center, me dressed like Prof. Indiana Jones. We’ve got credentials being turned into paper airplanes on the left. Center rear, open borders leading to housing abundance, with flying cars overhead. On the upper left, a blending of natalism with innumeracy and status quo bias. On the upper right, four of my books.

The only image that seems off is the totally normie voting box in the lower left.

What a world we live in.

P.S. Since I’m working under multiple deadlines, I’ll continue relying heavily on archival posts for the next few weeks. But this is only a short-run fall in supply, rest assured.

On reflection, however, this favorable interpretation is premature. Yes, changing your mind because you discover surprising new evidence or arguments is courageous and mature. But what if you change your mind for purely emotional reasons, like “The idea that murderers shouldn’t be punished started to disgust me”? Or because you have a falling out with friends who share your views? “My girlfriend dumped me, so I left the church.”

Neither of these intellectual paths even hints at courage or maturity.

The situation only slightly shifts if you change your mind because you “discover” blatantly obvious evidence or arguments. True, belatedly acknowledging the blatantly obvious is more courageous and mature than denying them in perpetuity. “I realized that if incomes were fully equal, it would be hard to hire garbage collectors” or “I now concede that people in the U.S. are richer than in Russia” are both intellectual improvements. Strategically, you might want to condescendingly praise such concessions as “courageous” and “mature.” But the brutally honest reaction, however, is “Why should I praise you for finally abandoning your childish nonsense?” Plus: “Now that you’ve confessed your propensity for terrible judgment on major questions, you should probably stop talking like an authority and spend some years humbly learning from those of us with better judgment.”

This is exactly my reaction when former socialists announce, “I stopped being a socialist because I realized that incentives matter.” Yes, incentives do matter, and it’s better to concede this fact than deny it. However, the fact that a person until recently denied this obvious truth remains damning. Since they exhibited awful judgment for years, their judgment probably remains poor. Until they proverbially “do the work” of mastering the obvious from those of us who knew that incentives matter all along, we shouldn’t take their further reflections seriously. And neither should they.

If you protest, “What a straw man! Smart socialists have long been aware that incentives matter,” I happily agree. But don’t commit the Straw Man Straw Man. Plenty of socialists really do deny that incentives matter. Some of them eventually recant. My point: Such former socialists clearly have terrible judgment. If you welcome them with open arms, it’s mercy, not justice.

You should have exactly the same reaction when former libertarians announce, “I stopped being a libertarian because I realized that culture matters.” Yes, culture does matter, and it’s better to concede this fact than deny it. However, the fact that a person until recently denied this obvious truth remains deeply damning. Since they exhibited terrible judgment for years, their judgment probably remains poor. Until they proverbially “do the work” of mastering the obvious from those of us who knew that culture matters all along, we shouldn’t take their further reflections seriously. And neither should they.

If you protest, “What a straw man! Smart libertarians have long been aware that culture matters,” I once again happily agree. In fact, a large majority of libertarians have been aware that culture matters for as long as I can remember. But once again, we should avoid the Straw Man Straw Man. A minority of libertarians really are oblivious to the role of culture. A minority of this minority eventually recants their libertarianism on cultural grounds. And when they do, the right lesson to draw is not, “Heed well the words of these visionaries!” but “These people are self-confessed fools.”

You could reply, “You’re just name-calling. Address their arguments.” But as I’ve often insisted, life is too short to address more than a tiny fraction of all arguments, so wise thinkers apportion their attention based on speakers’ track records. To admit that you’ve spent years mired in elementary errors is to admit that the world is right to spend years ignoring what you have to say next. Instead of trying to swiftly regain the limelight, accept that given your poor track record, you need to rebuild your intellectual credibility brick by boring brick.

Imagine someone tells you, “I stopped being a libertarian because I realized the sky is blue.” Your reaction shouldn’t be, “Wow, libertarians are a bunch of fools.” Your reaction should be, “The speaker is a fool.” He’s not just a fool because he spent so many years denying the blueness of the sky. He’s a fool for failing to realize that most libertarians always accepted the blueness of the sky. He’s a fool for failing to understand that liberty and blue skies are compatible. And he’s a fool for thinking that correcting his elementary errors makes him epistemically worthy of attention. Sure, you might humor the speaker to be polite, or to encourage others like him to admit that the sky is blue. But remember that the main thing he’s managed to do is leap from one error to a pile of other errors.

In my first year seminar course Ambition, in addition to their other work, students will need to complete four of the following assignments, including at least one starred project. Two of these I got from Jess Flanigan at Richmond.

1. The Failure Project

Select an activity you find intriguing, but which you are bad at and expect to fail at if you attempt it. (For instance, if you are a bad singer, sing karaoke in public. Or if you are a bad athlete, play pick-up basketball.) This week, try doing it for at least 30 minutes, ideally in public where others can see you fail or perform badly. How did it make you feel? How did others react to you? What did you learn about yourself? Will you keep doing it until you get better?

2. The Impossible Day Project

Pick a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday that you have a lot of free time. Email or call five people (e.g., friend, coworker, fellow athlete, professor, boyfriend, parent) and give them permission to make demands of your time. Tell them, “Please ask me to do something this Saturday that would genuinely help you.” You can tell them it’s for class if they think it’s weird. Don’t coordinate and don’t let them know you have four other people to help that day. Don’t place any limits on the time they can demand of you for that one day. All five activities must be scheduled for the same day.

Now decide what to do. Whom did you disappoint? Why? Whose interests counted? Could everyone be satisfied? Did you treat everyone equally? Should you have?

3. The Rejection Project

Ask three people for something you genuinely want from them and which genuinely matters to you, but which they are reasonably (but not certainly) likely to refuse. For instance, ask for a discount at a store, ask to shadow someone for a day to learn from them, ask to sit in on a meeting you aren’t invited to, ask someone out on a date (without “talking” via the phone first—pretend it’s the 1990s), etc. Did anyone say yes? When they said no, how did they respond? What did you learn from rejection?

4. The Gratitude Project

Identify three people who made your current success possible but whom you have never properly thanked. Thank each one of them personally, not via text or email. If you cannot see them in person, you must instead do so via phone so they can hear your voice.

Reflect: Why hadn’t you thanked them before? How did they react? Did expressing gratitude change your relationship?

5. The Just Say No Project

Pick one day during which you will be awake and interacting with other people. For that entire day, say no to every optional request that you do not genuinely want to do. (Of course, continue to meet your real obligations—to family, work, school, and existing commitments.)

Pay attention to how it feels to set a boundary—and how other people actually respond. At the end of the day, reflect: Which “no” was hardest to say? What did you learn about yourself?

6. The Pointless Project

Spend 90 minutes counting blades of grass or grains of sand in some quiet place. Do not talk to anyone, listen to music, or do anything else other than count. Use your phone to record the entire 90 minutes of counting. Write a reflection about what this taught you.

7. The Reputation Project

Write down a short summary of what you believe your reputation is among some group of people you care about or whom you at least need to work with. (Examples: Teammates, family, people in your dorm, people in this class.) Now, find some reliable way to check if your view of your reputation is correct or not. For instance, ask a trusted friend to show people the summary and to take notes about whether people agree. Or set up an anonymous poll.

8. The Trading Project

Select an item worth approximately $1 USD, such as a candy bar. Over the course of a week, try to sell or trade that object for items of higher value. Trade each new object in turn and try to end up with the highest value object or most amount of money you can, just from trading. The current record is $360—can you beat that?

Note: You cannot add something to the objects to increase their value. For instance, don’t offer to tutor someone in calculus II if they buy your candy bar. Don’t tell them you are raising money for charity. Don’t threaten to be mean to them for a week if they don’t trade.

Note also: The monetary value must be something we can easily establish from retail websites and the like; you cannot, for instance, just say you personally value some ten-cent item at $1 million.

P.S. Capla-Con 2026 is August 15-16. Please RSVP here. Also, I’m looking for another 1-2 players for August 14 at 10 AM-6 PM for my all-new role-playing game, Test Optional. Please email me if you’re interested.

This reminiscing always puzzles me, because I vividly remember the second half of the second half of the 20th century. Except for a brief window of roughly 1988-1991, my first-hand experience is that America’s national mood has been relentlessly bad. While I’ve known plenty of American optimists, and count myself among them, “American optimism” is a will-o’-the-wisp. It appears so fleetingly that you have to wonder if it was ever there at all.

A quick chronology of my first-hand experience with 1976-2000:

1976-1981 - Americans are miserable about inflation, defeat in Vietnam, and the Iranian hostage crisis.

1982-1987 - Americans are miserable about inflation, nuclear war, and Soviet advances around the globe. And despite Reagan’s two landslide victories, journalists and other intellectuals are vocally miserable about “massive” cuts in the welfare state, Reagan’s stance on Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the Iran-Contra scandal.

1988-1991 - As the Soviet bloc collapses, mainstream journalists rejoice. They favorably discuss “free-market reforms” on a regular basis. I kid you not. There’s a brief jolt of negativity before the Gulf War, but easy U.S. victory leaves Americans feeling pleased with themselves.

1992 - Despite near-bloodless total triumph in the Cold War, plus the boost from the Iraq War, a mild recession unleashes severe discontent against “12 years of Republican neglect.” Bizarrely given the size of today’s national debt, both Clinton and Perot run as deficit hawks, warning of future fiscal disaster.

1993-1997 - Malcontent with “shock therapy” in the former Soviet bloc squelches lingering optimism about Communism’s collapse. Republican House victory in the 1994 elections sparks widespread mutual recrimination and hysteria.

1998-2000 - The Lewinsky scandal and its political fallout almost totally drown out any optimism about the roaring economy or the rise of the Internet and e-commerce.

To be clear: I don’t claim that the typical American was personally unhappy from 1976-2000. But the reason was that most Americans, like most human beings, are politically apathetic. But when Americans were thinking about “the state of America,” their thoughts were normally dominated by sheer disgust.

The good feelings of 1988-1991 weren’t just a total fluke. They dissolved like cotton candy. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a greater failure of the retrospective voting model. America’s long-term archrival, the Evil Empire, peacefully disintegrated the year before the 1992 election. At the 1992 Republican national convention, Jack Kemp remarked:

Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn't fall. It was pushed. It was our ideas that did the pushing and our Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, that helped change the world.

If there was a 5% chance that Kemp was correct, retrospective voters would have rewarded Bush with a second term. But instead, Clinton triumphed with the insipid mantra: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The simplest explanation is that even at the pinnacle of America’s improbable peaceful geopolitical ascendancy, only a small minority of Americans felt deeply good about it.

What my first-hand experience can’t rule out is that America had a great national mood from 1946-1975 or so. But I seriously doubt the national mood was very optimistic then, either. Throughout my youth, none of my elders ever waxed rhapsodic about how great America was doing in the 50s, 60s, or early 70s.* One or two of my teachers were nostalgic for the student protests of the 60s. But I can’t recall anyone who lived through 1946-1975 reaching out to share their memories of a unified, self-confident America.

Sure, you could protest, “But tons of wonderful historic improvements happened throughout this era.” So true, yet so irrelevant. In politics, subjective attitude and objective performance are barely related. This was true in the past, and it’s true today.

So what’s going on? The proximate cause is the endless doom-saying of the media. But if most potential viewers were like me, doom-saying media would have gone bankrupt long ago. The ultimate cause, rather, is that human nature — or to be more precise, human political nature — is broken. Politics is a bizarre combination of childish wishful thinking and monstrous misanthropy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Politics is cruelty. And while there’s little you can do about it, at least there’s some karmic relief. (Pun intended). Namely: People who revel in the cruelty of politics spend most of their lives wallowing in bitterness. Before long, their hangover perpetually overshadows their intoxication.

If you earnestly want an optimistic mood, you must psychologically detach yourself from your society. Sure, know Our World in Data forwards and backwards, so you never lose sight of humanity’s glorious economic and technological accomplishments. But the real key to an optimistic mood is focusing on outcomes you personally control. Make friends, find true love, get meaningful work, earn money, play games, see the wonders of the world, have kids, and appreciate the cornucopia of consumer goods available at the click of a button. Instead of finding meaning in your society, be a model of meaning for your society. Your fellow citizens probably won’t heed your example, but that’s on them.

* I did have one teacher who glowingly told us that he volunteered to fight in World War II when he was underage.