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.

Time: Wednesday, July 22, 8 PM

Location: Steve’s Korean BBQ, 2521 Durant Ave F, Berkeley, CA 94704

All are welcome. Please RSVP in the comments.

1. Los Angeles Meet-up on July 23 at 7 PM. Venue: Hook’d Fish Grill, 10176 Reseda Blvd, Northridge, CA 91324. Please RSVP in the comments.

2. Capla-Con 2026 on August 15-16, noon-midnight both days. Venue: Carow Hall at GMU Fairfax. Please RSPV here.

3. I’m speaking at the Affordable Housing Crisis Symposium at Xavier University in Cincinnati alongside Mayor Aftab Purevalon September 17, 8:30 AM-1:30 PM. Please register here.

4. Garett Jones and I will be having a Heterodox Conversation on immigration at the University of Wyoming in Laramie on October 15. Registration not yet ready. I’ll be touring Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons the week before. Let me know in the comments if you’ll be in the neighborhood.

P.S. If you had any sound issues with the livestream, I don’t hear any problems on this recording.

Professor Caplan,

Fair question. I am a very real person, but I did use an AI tool to polish my drafts.

I'm an attorney by day and this framework is a solo hobby of mine. Because I don't have a research staff and was drafting these in my spare time, I used AI as an editor to clean up my prose.

But the ideas, the policy research, the concessions, and the genuine shift in my thinking were entirely mine. I reached out because I wanted my framework stress-tested by the person most likely to break it. Your math did exactly that, and your point about immigration sequencing completely changed my outlook.

I'm glad the exchange was worth publishing, even if the prose was a little too clean for its own good.

Now, here’s the original exchange.

After receiving this email from an anonymous reader, I was pleasantly surprised by how productive our dialogue became. If most aspiring politicians were this numerate, the Great Political Stagnation would already be over.

Here is the whole exchange, reprinted anonymously with the sender’s permission.

Reader

Professor Caplan,

I'm a practicing attorney in [redacted], and I want you to tell me where my plan stops being libertarian.

I've been developing a comprehensive policy framework for a libertarian president whose sole objective is maximizing well-being for the bottom 50th percentile of Americans. Six executive orders, six bills. The libertarian mechanisms are real: deregulation, occupational licensing reform, housing supply deregulation, drug decriminalization, civil asset forfeiture moratorium, FDA reciprocal approval, criminal record expungement. These are standard libertarian policies that happen to disproportionately benefit the poor because government-imposed barriers fall hardest on those with the fewest resources to navigate them.

But the framework also includes a UBI ($12,000/year, consolidating seven programs, phasing out at 20 cents per dollar above $50,000), an expanded EITC, a payroll tax exemption funded by lifting the payroll cap, a 36% APR cap on payday lending for FDIC-insured institutions, postal banking, and federal spending conditions on local zoning reform. A purist would say at least three of those cross the line from libertarian reform to progressive redistribution with a liberty label.

You've written books on three of the plan's domains (Open Borders, Build Baby Build, The Case Against Education). You're the person who follows the logic to its conclusion regardless of political palatability. So I'm asking directly: is a framework that combines genuine deregulation with a UBI, a payday lending cap, and federal zoning spending conditions still libertarian in any meaningful sense? Or is it liberaltarianism (Lindsey's term), which is to say, progressive policy that borrows libertarian rhetoric?

The libertarian case I make is that every dollar currently flowing through the welfare bureaucracy that reaches a recipient as unrestricted cash is a net increase in individual autonomy, even if the cash itself is a transfer payment. Is that coherent, or am I defining libertarianism down until it means nothing?

Me:

That UBI will probably end up dwarfing the cost of the seven programs you're abolishing, so it's not even really liberaltarian. Think about the math. Under your plan, a family of 4 would pay no taxes at all until it's earning $290k ($48k/.2 + $50k).

Reader:

Professor Caplan,

The math is right and I hadn't run it to the end. A family of four receiving benefits until $290K isn't a safety net. It's a universal entitlement that costs multiples of what it replaces.

The design trap I walked into: a 20% phase-out avoids the poverty trap (which was the whole point) but extends benefits so far up the distribution that the program becomes unaffordable. Steepen the phase-out to 50% and you solve the cost problem but recreate the marginal rate problem the plan was designed to eliminate. The poverty trap and the cost problem are the same variable viewed from opposite ends.

Is there a phase-out design that keeps marginal rates below the current 60-80% implicit rate without extending benefits to the 95th percentile? Or is the honest answer that a UBI generous enough to replace the programs it consolidates and gradual enough to avoid poverty traps is inherently more expensive than the programs it replaces, which means the "consolidation saves money" claim is false?

Me:

My compliments for listening! I’ve been reviewing this math for over a decade without getting UBI proponents to take it seriously.

The truth is that the only way to make a UBI affordable is to make it very small. See this and this for starters.

Reader:

Professor Caplan,

Read both. Dolan’s $4,452 ceiling settles it. If that’s what consolidation can fund, then $12,000 isn’t a consolidation. It’s a new entitlement three times the size of what it replaces, and the entire premise of Bill 1 is false.

Your thesis 9 (welfare states provide the rationale for immigration restriction) is the one I hadn’t connected. Cutting the welfare state and opening immigration aren’t separate proposals. Each makes the other politically sustainable. That changes how I sequence the framework.

Thank you for being the person who made me run the numbers to the end.

Which is the rational position.

Murdering and enslaving fellow human beings really are evil, and you don’t have to be a moral visionary to realize it. Even kindergarteners can grasp the moral challenge, “Would it be alright if someone did that to you?” Sure, you can add, “People who pioneer a massive expansion of murder and slavery are morally even worse than people who merely accept a pre-existing way of life based on murder and slavery.” But the latter is still terrible. And yes, Columbus, like Hitler, really was a pioneer of murder and slavery.

Sadly, wokeness aggressively refuses to universalize its own universalism. If we should hold people in the past to universal moral standards, we should also hold people in the present to universal moral standards, not credulously accept lame, lawyerly excuses like, “In their culture, this is normal” or “Given their life story, we mustn’t blame them.”

Most obviously, if one group has much higher murder rates than another, it is ridiculous to forgive their murderers on account of poverty or poor education or “racism.” If you’ve got actual evidence that the murder rate gap is driven by piles of false convictions, by all means share your evidence. But if “He would have been a gentle soul in a world free of racism” is all you’ve got, spare us.

The same goes for economic and educational success. If you’ve got actual evidence that racial or gender earnings gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share the evidence. If you’ve got actual evidence that grade or test score gaps are driven by sheer bigotry, by all means share your evidence. But if “She would have founded a unicorn company in a world free of racism and sexism” or “Racism reduced his SAT score by 300 points” is all you’ve got, spare us.

Yes, you can always try to shift moral responsibility to strangers. Instead of blaming murderers, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to murder. Instead of blaming the homeless, you can blame “society” for failing to teach them not to live prudently. But these are absurdly high standards. And if you take these high standards seriously, why not use them to excuse Columbus or Hitler? Hitler did have a pretty bad childhood, after all. Maybe he wouldn’t have turned to genocide if the Jews had funded after-school programs for at-risk anti-Semitic youth.

The stronger critique of my position is that I’m giving the woke too much credit. They don’t actually hold people in the past to universal moral standards. Instead, they hold historical Western societies to strict standards while holding the rest of the world blameless for its horrors. Fair enough, but morally condemning a large fraction of the murderers and slavers of the past is still a lot closer to moral truth than giving all of history’s murderers and slavers a pass. To quote the timeless Western words of Lord Acton:

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual.

Location: Carow Hall on GMU’s Fairfax campus

Time: August 15-16, noon-midnight both days. Open house format: Show up whenever you like, and stay for as long (or as little) as you like.

As usual, we’ll have all kinds of games, conversation, minor celebrities, karaoke, and abundant food. A few attendees even find true love! If you want to play a time-intensive RPG with me, email me and I’ll give you a menu of options.

Please RSVP in the comments on the Capla-Con Substack! That’s where all further discussion of this event will be housed.

P.S. As the time nears, I’ll post separate threads for game organizers and carpooling.

P.P.S. If you feel the urge to reciprocate for all the value you get from Capla-Con, consider becoming a paid subscriber. ;-)

1. I have many hundreds of vivid, detailed memories about my childhood, starting from around the age of 3. The earliest memory: Pleading with my mom to let me skip preschool. “Why?” she asked. “Because of the mean kids!” I whimpered. She still made me go.

2. When I got satellite television around 1997, I routinely pressed the “Info” button to learn the release year of every movie I watched. During the next ten years, I memorized the release years of about a thousand movies. During my childhood, the only reliable way to see a movie was to watch it during its original theatrical release. Since I also have vivid, detailed memories about most of the movies I saw in theaters during my childhood (and adulthood, too), I often use movie release years to organize careful chronologies of my life. For example, I saw WarGames (1983) with my brother at the theater on Parthenia Street the same day that my best friend suffered a horrible family tragedy. So that happened sometime during the summer between grades 6 and 7.

3. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t extraordinarily arrogant by disposition. Even when I was five years old, I felt like my mom was making glaring mistakes and should take orders from me. And I bluntly told her so! When I started collecting minor accomplishments, my inner sense of self-satisfaction grew stronger and stronger. Now it’s sky high.

4. My main saving grace: I eventually acquired a good sense of humor about my deep-set megalomania. I know how ludicrously inflated my self-image is. But in all candor, self-love is the Wagnerian leitmotiv of my life. I feel totally incapable of feeling any other way. My secondary saving grace, according to my best friend from Princeton: I have absolute megalomania rather than relative megalomania, so I’m also delighted by the company of other ludicrously arrogant people. Primarily if, like me, they have a sense of humor about it.

5. In high school, I clearly had the lowest IQ of my four closest friends. Two were math prodigies of local legend. Another could almost immediately do detailed volume problems in calculus in his head. (“You just have to think about it,” he unhelpfully told me). In contrast, I have never been smart enough to “figure out” complex math on my own. To get A’s on high school math (and a 5 on Calculus BC), I had to spend about two hours on homework every weeknight year after year.

6. If I wasn’t even the smartest kid in my high school, why do I feel so intellectually awesome? The deepest reason is probably pure personality psychology. I am built to feel like a genius even if the facts don’t support that judgment. But in my own mind, my truly superlative intellectual trait is not my intelligence, but my creativity. All self-serving bias aside, I am the most creative person I have ever met. Original ideas constantly pop into my head, far more than I could ever write up. Google and AI routinely confirm that, whatever their merits, most of my “original ideas” in economics, philosophy, political science, history, and psychology are indeed novel to me. And when I decided to write my first graphic novel, I really did manage to recruit my favorite world-famous artist for the job, and the book really was a New York Times bestseller. Is it risible that I have this superlative self-assessment for a trait with no well-accepted standardized test? Absolutely, but I struggle to believe anything else.

   

7. In junior high, I created a vast fictional universe for my Dungeons and Dragons game, where I served as the Dungeon Master for all three years. (Notice the map behind me in most of my podcasts? I made that in junior high). My D&D universe (Endalagon) was admittedly highly derivative of Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, but the adventures in my high school game (every Saturday evening, prom night included) were all Caplan originals, never canned modules. In the 21st century, I’ve written about seventy original role-playing game scenarios in almost every genre of fiction to play with my kids and friends: fantasy of course, but also historical, horror, sci-fi, Western, action, absurdist, conspiracy, espionage, crime, and even Japanese baseball manga. I am not confident that I can write dialogue at a professional level, but I think my current skill at plotting stories is well above the median of top novelists and screenwriters.

8. I have wanted to be a professor since junior high, but until the summer after high school graduation (when I went to the Mises University summer seminar at Stanford), I personally knew zero professors. What did I want to be a professor of? The subject shifted dramatically over time. English literature was my first imagined field. I kid you not. I loved the classics, and daydreamed about being a latter-day Mark Twain or Edgar Allan Poe. But even in my youth, I knew that becoming a successful novelist was a long shot, and — knowing nothing about academia — assumed that being an English professor was a safe fallback. I didn’t drop my English professor plan until 12th grade, when I discovered both philosophy and economics via Ayn Rand.

9. I’ve never even tried to learn an instrument, but I’ve enjoyed music since the age of 11, when I started listening to L.A.’s KIIS FM. My 7th-grade music appreciation class alerted me to the existence of classical and opera, but it wasn’t until high school that I embraced them. Around 11th grade, I started obsessively consuming classical and opera. I started my CD collection in 1988, when my parents gave me a CD player for Christmas. Now I own about 4000 CDs, with roughly three-quarters in classical and opera. I listen to music 6-8 hours per day, and actually have trouble focusing without it. Part of the reason I studied German in college was to follow German libretti in the original language. (The other reason is that I falsely believed that I needed a foreign language for a Ph.D., but I caught that mistake before starting German 1). While classical and opera are the cornerstones of my music consumption (I’m coincidentally listening to Wagner’s Siegfried on my retro Sony 200-CD jukebox right now), I keep exploring new genres. For the last few years, I’ve mostly been listening to heavy metal, punk, and emo (assuming My Chemical Romance counts as emo).

10. Ayn Rand all but killed my sense of humor when I was 17-19. While I wasn’t especially comedic in my childhood, her stoic heroic style inspired me. Over the next few years, however, my sense of humor re-emerged, much stronger than before. By the time I was in my late-20s, daily life started seeming hilarious to me, and still does. When I go to the movies, I am often the only person in the theater laughing hysterically at top volume, usually at lines that no one else even chuckles at. While I’m clearly subpar for a professional comedian, I was pleased that when I performed alongside eight professional comedians at the Comedy Cellar, I was not obviously the worst.

11. During college at UC Berkeley, I vacillated between wanting to be a philosophy professor and wanting to be an economics professor. When one field started to disappoint me, I switched to imagining my future in the other. In the end, I had an epiphany that led me to swear myself to econ. The epiphany: While I cared more about the big questions of philosophy than the big questions of economics, I cared more about the small questions of economics than the small questions of philosophy. Since, my epiphany continued, professors are largely limited to small questions, econ was the discipline for me. Ironically, I drastically underestimated the latitude that professors enjoy, so I’ve been able to work on the big questions of both economics and philosophy ad libitum for decades, while drawing an economist’s salary rather than a philosopher’s.

12. I have never been drunk. Unless you count NyQuil, I have barely even tried alcohol. And to this day, I am not sure I have ever smelled marijuana. Apparently I give off a strong narc vibe, because no one even tried to get me to try drugs until 2020 when some of my friends in Austin pushed psychedelic mushrooms on me. (“All smart people do mushrooms, Bryan.”) Why not try these fabled substances? For one thing, because I’m already highly uninhibited, and worry about what I would do if I became any less inhibited.

13. When I was in college, I wasn’t sure I even wanted kids. What changed my mind? Besides growing up: meeting Sheldon Richman and reading Julian Simon. Once I actually became a father, however, my first-hand experience mattered most of all. Being a dad (x4) really is the most meaningful thing I have done with my life, the key life choice where I feel zero ambivalence. Honestly, I think that the average kid just has a much better personality than the average adult.

14. I have one best friend per school I’ve been at. K-9: Matt Mayers. High school: Kevin Hatanaka. UC Berkeley: Fabio Rojas. Princeton: Jim Schneider. GMU: Robin Hanson. I had a girlfriend in kindergarten. I went on roughly three arguable dates with three different girls in high school and college. But the sole woman that I ever unambiguously dated is my wife, Corina Caplan (nee Mateescu). We had our first date in December of 1990, and got married in June of 1994.

15. I’ve known that being a U.S. professor is a sweet gig since the summer after high school. But only after becoming a professor did I realize how absurdly plush these sinecures are. Yes, a tenured professorship is literally a dream job for life. Economists in particular earn a lower-upper (not “upper-middle”!) class income in exchange for about 30 weeks of actual work per year. And during those weeks, you only have to spend about 5 hours in the classroom! To fully capitalize on this opportunity, to be clear, extreme non-conformism is a must. Otherwise, you’ll keep researching topics that bore you because “that’s what serious scholars are supposed to do,” assigning and grading essays because “that’s what dedicated teachers are supposed to do,” and toiling on silly committees because “that’s what decent colleagues are supposed to do.”

16. Selfishly speaking, the most important trait any human can have is “being good at lunch.” People who are good at lunch are bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. If they don’t present their own ideas, they at least eagerly engage the ideas of others. High intelligence is necessary but far from sufficient. In fact, my go-to negative verdict on other scholars is “smart but useless.” Smart but useless thinkers excel on standardized tests and academic publishing, but are low in creativity, agency, and non-conformity, so they waste their lives applying their mighty intellects to questions that barely matter.

P.S. If anything I’ve said here makes you like me less, I’m sorry to let you down. But this is the real me.

P.P.S. I also love showtunes, including…

Subscribers will get a link around 4:29 PM, and we’ll strive to save time for your live questions!

P.S. If there are serious sound problems, please let me know immediately. Sound in the final videos always sounds good to me, but some listeners have problems with the live transmissions. If the problems are insuperable, we’ll switch to zoom.

• The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be a nightmarish totalitarian despotism, a dystopia of mass slavery and mass murder.

• The USSR, by conquest and imitation, spawned dozens of additional nightmarish totalitarian despotisms.

• These despotisms included the jaw-dropping hellscape of Maoist China, the world’s most populous country at the time.

Yet as long as Nazi Germany was not socialist or even anti-socialist, the socialist can find solace in the fact that the Soviet Union was the primary agent in the defeat of an even more nightmarish totalitarian despotism. While there’s some dispute over whether the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany had the higher body count, Nazi Germany definitely had a higher annual murder rate for territory under its control. As long as you charitably interpret the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as “Stalin was just buying time to prepare for the inevitable war,” you can tell yourself that socialism saved civilization despite its Dorian Gray-level transmogrification.

On the other hand, suppose that not just Nazism, but fascism generally, was a Marxist heresy. Suppose you accept, as A. James Gregor argues in Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, that Mussolini was the Lenin of Italy until he was excommunicated from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914. Suppose, as Paul Johnson claims in Modern Times, that socialists proverbially “can’t handle the truth” about fascism:

By the mid-1920s there were fascist movements all over Europe. One thing they all had in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind. They fought revolution with revolutionary means and met the Communists on the streets with their own weapons. As early as 1923 the Bulgarian peasant regime of Aleksandr Stamboliski, which practised “agrarian Communism,” was ousted by a fascist putsch. The Comintern, the new international bureau created by the Soviet government to spread and co-ordinate Communist activities, called on the “workers of the world” to protest against the “victorious Bulgarian fascist clique,” thus for the first time recognizing fascism as an international phenomenon. But what exactly was it? There was nothing specific about it in Marx. It had developed too late for Lenin to verbalize it into his march of History. It was unthinkable to recognize it for what it actually was—a Marxist heresy, indeed a modification of the Leninist heresy itself.

From this perspective, socialism looks truly beyond redemption. Even if the Soviet Union “saved civilization,” this is only a case of one terrible socialist regime saving civilization from an even worse socialist regime. None of which would have been necessary if socialism had never existed in the first place! Verily, you could just tweak the title of David Benatar’s anti-natalist Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence and turn it into Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Socialism’s Coming into Existence.

Once you accept that Nazi Germany was socialist, how could you even escape this Benatarian evaluation of socialism? “Socialism also inspired the modern welfare state, which is better than laissez-faire capitalism” is probably your best way out. But for this defense to work, you’d have to commit to, “The welfare state is so awesome that it was worth World War II, the Holocaust, the Russian Civil War, Lenin’s famine, Stalinism, dekulakization, Stalin’s famines, the Chinese Civil War, Mao’s mass-murderous Land Reform Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge, and much, much more.” Which is crazy even if you think that the welfare state rescues the poorest 10% of the First World from Third World poverty.

Yes, socialists could fairly protest that the “better never to have been” verdict is so gratifying for anti-socialists that they would gladly twist the facts to reach it. Fair enough, but that cuts both ways. This verdict is also so soul-crushing for socialists that they would gladly twist the facts to deny it. The specter of motivated reasoning looms over us all. But if you have no dog in this fight, and calmly read what I’ve been writing about this, I think you’ll end up concluding that Nazi Germany was, livid socialist protests notwithstanding, deeply socialist in both theory and practice. Which in turn leads straight to the philosophy of history I now place before you.

ChatGPT’s default political output is best described as center-left to left-libertarian / culturally progressive, especially on environment, civil rights, immigration/diversity, inequality, and gender/sexuality issues. It is not best described as Marxist, party-loyal Democratic, or consistently economically socialist.

Given this orientation, I wondered how many questions I’d have to ask to get the model to reach what I consider the correct interpretation of the historical facts. It’s like the classic ‘80s question, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” The answer, for both ChatGPT questions and Tootsie Pop licks, turns out to be exactly... three.

BC: What does this suggest about the debate on whether National Socialism was indeed socialist?

GPT: It suggests a limited but important pro-“yes” point: National Socialism was plainly anti–free-market, anti-liberal, and highly collectivist/statist. My estimated EFW trajectory would make Nazi Germany fall from merely unfree in 1933–35 to below the bottom of the modern EFW distribution by the late 1930s, mainly because the regime crushed sound money, trade freedom, legal security, and economic regulation scores.

But it does not by itself prove that Nazism was “socialist” in the orthodox Marxist or social-democratic sense… So the fairest conclusion is:

National Socialism was not laissez-faire capitalism; it was not orthodox Marxian socialism; it was a racially nationalist command-and-control economy with private titles often left in place but private economic decision-making heavily subordinated to state objectives.

In the debate, the EFW-style reconstruction supports the claim that the Nazis were economically collectivist and anti-market. It weakens the common rebuttal that “they were just capitalists with racist politics.” But it also supports the historian’s caveat: they generally preferred state direction over state ownership, which makes “socialist” a defensible but potentially misleading label unless carefully defined.

BC: Don’t most modern socialists prefer state direction over state ownership? It seems like the Nazis deserve the name socialist at least as much as they do.

GPT: Yes, that is a strong point. The argument “the Nazis weren’t socialist because they usually left private title in place” is too crude. Socialism has often meant social or state control, not necessarily 100% state ownership. Britannica’s current definition explicitly says socialism involves major productive property being “owned or controlled” by the state, and adds that socialists have long disagreed over how much must be publicly owned and how control should be exercised…

My bottom line: Nazism deserves the “socialist” label about as much as many state-direction versions of socialism if the criterion is extensive political control over economic life. It deserves it much less if the criterion is worker ownership, egalitarianism, internationalism, or democratic control. The cleanest label remains something like racial-nationalist state socialism or fascist command capitalism, depending on which feature one wants to emphasize.

BC: But then modern socialists would have to deny that Marxism-Leninism was ever socialist, right?

GPT: Yes. That is the basic inconsistency.

A modern socialist can coherently say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not democratic socialism.”

But it is much harder for him to say:

“Marxism-Leninism was not socialism at all.”

Why? Because Marxism-Leninism checks nearly every conventional economic box for socialism: public/state ownership of the means of production, central planning, suppression of private capital, anti-profit ideology, collectivized agriculture, and one-party rule justified in the name of the proletariat. Britannica’s broad definition of socialism is public rather than private “ownership or control” of productive property, and the Stanford Encyclopedia describes socialism as centrally involving social ownership of the means of production. Soviet law made public ownership of the means of production a key feature, and the 1936 Soviet constitution explicitly called the USSR a “socialist state of workers and peasants.”

So if the anti-Nazi argument is:

“Nazism was not socialist because it was dictatorial, nationalist, anti-egalitarian, anti-worker, and not genuinely democratic,”

then the same test would also exclude Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc. That is a very high-purity definition of socialism. It may be morally attractive to socialists, but it is not how most historians, political scientists, or ordinary language use the term.

The better distinction is:

Socialism as an institutional family: yes, Marxism-Leninism is socialist; Nazism has some socialist/statist features but is less centrally socialist because it preserved more private ownership and was not oriented toward class abolition.

Socialism as a moral ideal of democratic worker control: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism both fail, though Marxism-Leninism at least claimed continuity with that ideal while Nazism explicitly rejected egalitarian Marxism and class internationalism.

Socialism as state control over economic life: Marxism-Leninism clearly qualifies, and Nazi Germany comes much closer than anti-Nazi semantic defenses usually admit.

This is why the “Nazis weren’t socialist because they weren’t democratic/egalitarian/worker-controlled” move proves too much. It protects socialism from Nazism only by also protecting it from most real-world socialist regimes.

Since the end of World War II, mainstream culture had energetically covered Nazi crimes, but largely gave the Soviet bloc a pass. Yet in the late 80s and early 90s, a long list of long-forgotten Soviet crimes loudly entered the Western conversation: Lenin’s coup against Russia’s first democratic government; Stalin’s agricultural collectivization; the Gulag; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the Katyn massacre; mass deportations to Siberia; and more. Once there was widespread recognition that self-righteous Soviet socialists had committed many Nazi-level crimes, the etymology of “Nazi means ‘National Socialist’” intrigued me. If the world’s most famous brand of socialists turned out to be total monsters, could the world’s most famous brand of monsters turn out to be total socialists?

Most responses to this question were, as usual, driven by ideology. Conservatives and libertarians gleefully underscored the etymology: “I keep telling you, ‘Nazi’ means ‘National Socialist’!” Liberals and socialists scoffed at the childish naivete of the question: “Of course the Nazis called themselves ‘socialists.’ They were a bunch of liars!”

Even as a teen, I knew enough socialist history to scoff at such scoffing. After all, socialists have a long history of denying that other socialists are socialists. In the late 1920s, for example, the Comintern started insisting that so-called “social democracy” was actually “social fascism,” the “moderate wing of fascism.”* Democratic socialists, for their part, routinely retroactively strip revolutionary socialists of their socialist credentials once things turn ugly enough. Stalin wasn’t really socialist, Mao wasn’t really socialist, and neither is North Korea.

Upshot: Even if the Nazis were the sincerest of socialists, mainstream socialists would almost certainly deny them the label regardless of the facts.

During the 90s, I tracked down some major economic histories of Nazism, especially Hitler’s Social Revolution by David Schoenbaum and Nazi Economics by Avraham Barkai. Both books seemed to strongly confirm that the Nazis were indeed highly socialist in both theory and practice. Unlike Marxist-Leninists, the Nazis had enough common sense to refrain from general expropriation. But the same goes for Germany’s non-Leninist Marxists during the Weimar Republic. Indeed, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) remained officially Marxist until 1959, and still claims to be “socialist” to this day. At least according to Schoenbaum and Barkai, Nazi economic policy implemented a much more draconian system of state economic control than the SPD ever had.

Still, I felt lingering doubts. Qualitative history lends itself to confirmation bias. Even when you have some quantitative measures of economic policy, it’s easy to put extra weight on the measures that deliver the answer you’re looking for. I’m not immune to motivated reasoning. I loathe and despise both socialism and Nazism, so it’s pleasant for me to equate them. I freely admit it.

What to do? I could spend a year reading more about this topic. I could even spend a few years getting to the research frontier so I could credibly publish on the question, “How socialist was Germany under National Socialism?” But while this is a fascinating issue, the opportunity cost of seriously deepening my understanding is just too high.

Or to be more precise, the opportunity cost was too high. AI has drastically slashed the costs of quantification — and simultaneously drastically increased the credibility of quick quantification. So instead of spending years on this topic only to be dismissed as ideologically biased, I asked ChatGPT to score Germany from 1910-1960 using the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index. I further asked: If Nazi Germany existed today, where would it rank compared to the 165 countries currently in the sample?

Here’s the output.

What do we see? Germany had fairly high economic freedom before World War I. This collapsed during World War I and the subsequent hyperinflation. By modern standards, Germany 1916-1923 would be virtually the most socialist country on Earth — though remember that due to lack of credible data, Fraser doesn’t score Cuba, Eritrea, or North Korea.

After the end of the hyperinflation, German economic freedom briefly recovers, peaking at 6.6 right before the Great Depression. Then there’s a total collapse. When the Nazis take over in 1933, Germany is already down at 4.1. If it were a modern country, that would be just freer than Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.

Measured in rank order, Nazi Germany keeps falling, hitting rock bottom — #166 out of 166 — by 1936. But in absolute score, Nazi Germany falls every single year, from 3.6 in 1934 to 0.7 in 1945. What’s going on? Here’s ChatGPT:

Germany’s 1931 crisis brought extensive capital controls, bilateral clearing, and official exchange-rate management, hurting the trade/capital-mobility area. The Nazi Four-Year Plan centralized labor mobilization, restricted imports, imposed wage and price controls, allocated raw materials, and systematized expropriation of Jews, which crushes Fraser’s legal/property, trade, money, and regulation areas. The 1948 rebound reflects the Deutsche Mark reform and the broad elimination of price controls in the western zones.

It’s tempting to blame total warfare: “Any country fighting a major war will get rock-bottom Fraser scores.” But Germany’s average economic freedom score during World War I (4.3) exceeds its peacetime score under Nazi rule (3.1). The Nazis were not “forced” to accept socialism to fight World War II. They embraced extreme socialist policies as soon as they gained power.

What if we look at the breakdown by Fraser subscore? Again, the Nazis do terribly on five out of five, a pentafecta: Size of Government, Legal System & Property Rights, Sound Money, Freedom to Trade Internationally, and Regulation.

Most objections to these results will be thinly-veiled sectarian dogma. Most notably:

1. “The Nazis didn’t nationalize everything, so they weren’t socialists.” By that standard, even Stalinism wasn’t socialist, because Stalin allowed private agricultural plots. The sensible synthesis is that capitalism versus socialism is, per the Fraser index, a continuum. The Nazis were very close to the pure socialist pole of that continuum. If Nazi Germany doesn’t qualify, then almost no self-styled socialist regime would.

2. “The Nazis weren’t democratic and egalitarian, so they weren’t socialists.” This excludes history’s leading self-styled socialist regimes, all of which were inegalitarian dictatorships. While plenty of modern socialists are only too happy to bite this bullet, they’re not just rewriting history; they’re rewriting socialist intellectual history. As Kristian Niemietz explains in Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies, democratic socialists have a long-standing habit of accepting and apologizing for dictatorial socialist regimes for years or decades. Seriously, if “dictatorial socialism” is a contradiction in terms, why bother even coining the redundant phrase “democratic socialism”?

The best objection to the ChatGPT scores, honestly, is an unrelated dilemma: “The Nazis had years of stunning military success. So either socialism is actually a tolerably productive economic system, or the Nazis weren’t socialists. Choose one.” My response: While socialism is terrible for consumer welfare, it’s pretty good for military success. Why? Because total government control is the only feasible way to maximize the production of “guns” over “butter.” It’s a crude system well-suited to the crude goals of conquest, slavery, and mass murder.

War Socialism was especially effective when combined with the famed conscientiousness of the German people. Most nationalities under socialism would have been far more prone to slacking, cheating, and corruption, especially in the absence of Soviet-style terror. But the Germans were deeply obedient and loyal to their regime. Only in the last half of World War II did the Nazis start executing thousands (and, by 1945, tens of thousands) of ethnic Germans per year to maintain discipline. Mark this under the “dark side of trust.”

If anyone wants to re-do my questions using other LLMs, I’ll happily post your results. But given the quality of modern models, I strongly expect my findings to replicate. When mainstream socialists deny that the Nazis were socialist, we should take that as seriously as Catholics denying that Protestants are Christian. To a true believer, these marginal theological differences mean the world. To a reasonable person, however, such hypersensitivity is yet another symptom of true believers’ petulant fanaticism.

* In 1935, the Comintern added that fascism was “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” implying that democratic socialists are actually the moderate wing of the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.

1. The students at UATX are academically fantastic, a great package of high IQ, sky-high curiosity, and intellectual engagement. The only school I’ve taught at that’s in the same league is the University of Chicago, especially Agnes Callard’s Night Owls program.

2. UATX spurns holistic admissions, automatically admitting students with a 1460+ SAT, 33+ ACT, or 105+ CLT. But by my lights, their students had much better personalities than top schools that officially put high weight on personality! Curiosity and intellectual engagement aside, UATX students were strikingly cheerful, gregarious, agentic, and enthusiastic. Attendance at my on-campus game nights and karaoke parties was high — and since quite a few of my students are based in Northern Virginia, you’ll probably get to meet a few at Capla-Con 2026.

3. As a GMU professor, I’m used to low student attendance. At UATX, attendance is mandatory, enforced with preset grade penalties. Even so, absenteeism was fairly common. But strikingly, students with poor attendance were still highly engaged wherever they chose to show up. Why? UATX students skip classes not because they’re lazy, but because they literally have something better to do. One student was busy running a start-up. Other students were rehearsing for Hamlet. Good for them!

4. While we’re on the subject of Hamlet, the UATX drama club’s performance was profoundly moving. Overall, I preferred Ian McKellen’s (Gandalf/Magneto) live 2022 production, where the famed octogenarian played the title role. But as I told the UATX cast, they were all — McKellen aside — better than their counterparts in my favorite Hamlet production. My epiphany during the play: Contrary to many English teachers, Hamlet is not a tragic hero. He is a full-fledged anti-hero. Remember, after he manslaughters Polonius, Hamlet shows no regret. Instead, he sadistically hides the body from his heirs!

5. While I met scores of students, I only closely interacted with two of UATX’s full-time workers. Not coincidentally, both are my metaphorical brothers, men I’ve called close friends for many years. The first brother at UATX is the new president, Carlos Carvalho. I’ve been very close with Carlos since Covid, and I enthusiastically attest to his stellar IQ, lovable personality, and steely integrity. I’m thrilled to associate with any institution that would put Carlos at the helm. The second brother at UATX is Tim Kane, dean of social sciences. I’ve known Tim for twenty years; I even made this short comic book about our friendship origin story. Tim is a classic economist, adept at making the unseen seen, and even more positive about life than I am. A role model for students, colleagues, and all who know him. Also, it’s very fun to call him Dean Kane.

   

6. Students gave me lots of inside information on how UATX is doing. Even the relatively disgruntled students are quite chipper compared to normal, lazy, apathetic undergrads. I repeatedly urged my students to sit in on a few classes across town at the University of Texas to encounter ordinary college students, because at UATX, ordinary is virtually non-existent. UATX students often openly asked, “How can we make UATX better?” A great question… that few normal college students would bother to pose, because they’re both incurious and resigned.

7. The UATX humanities students are the happiest, because UATX delivers exactly what they want: a totally retro boot camp of reading, discussing, and writing about the Great Books, our Western canon. The entrepreneurship students are the least happy. They clearly care far more about our dizzying economic future than our glorious literary past, yet they’re still academically obliged to spend many precious hours on the Great Books. Still, compared to normal business and STEM majors, UATX entrepreneurship students get ample face time with uber-successful entrepreneurs.

8. Isn’t single-minded dedication to the Great Books a bizarre fetish in the age of AI? I’m definitely inclined to say so, but even I think the Western canon is awesome enough to keep training a few hundred new enthusiasts per planet every year. Given today’s top universities’ low interest in our Western canon, it makes sense for UATX to pick up the slack.

9. What will UATX’s humanities majors do after graduation? I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them ended up working for top UATX donors like Jeff Yass and Joe Lonsdale. I can also see some of them partnering with friends over in entrepreneurship to start businesses. Most college students fail to gain valuable human capital, useful career connections, or intellectual joy. At least UATX humanities students get the latter two.

10. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one unicorn company came out of UATX, though I wouldn’t bet on it.

11. Critics have decried UATX as hypocritical, politicized, and otherwise terrible. After three-and-a-half weeks at UATX, I really have no idea what they’re talking about. Or to be more precise, I think the critics have impossibly high (double) standards and are hungry to find fault. And as usual, almost all of the shocking anecdotes reported in the mainstream media are, according to my knowledgeable and trusted insiders, deeply misleading.

    

12. Does UATX invite some speakers who are deeply in error? Sure. Does UATX invite some speakers that are not merely wrong, but intellectually weak? Sure. But the average quality of their speakers far outshines top mainstream colleges. At least they’re not totally boring and irrelevant. Ahem.

13. Are there MAGAs at UATX? Almost surely, but they weren’t vocal. MAGAs are about 20% of the U.S. adult population, so even if you think their views are uniquely awful, it would be pretty weird if they were entirely absent. As a professor at a normal woke university, I’m totally comfortable with being on the same campus as people with deplorable views. And even amicably conversing with them, if they’re so inclined.

14. My litmus test of the intellectual openness of UATX: I didn’t just write Open Borders. I assigned the book to my students, and debated in favor of open borders before the whole school. And not only did they joyfully hire me; they made me feel supremely welcome during my stay. This is what “right-wing counterculture” ought to be.