2026-05-17 17:00:12
Well this is a strange thing to write about on an economics blog, isn’t it? When I started this blog, I made a deal with myself that I’d write about whatever I felt like writing about, even if it doesn’t fit my usual output. I’ve given my sci-fi and anime recommendations, talked about my clinical depression, and even published a chat with a robot. I also did one self-help post, about how to have friends past age 30:
But today might be the strangest post of all — I’m going to give some dating advice for men. If that doesn’t interest you, my apologies; I’ll be back with more econ-ish content in the next post.
For what it’s worth, I do think dating advice is an important topic of public concern. Data on romance and relationships is always iffy, because it’s based on surveys where definitions change, people lie, and samples tend to be biased. But it sure looks like young Americans aren’t dating as much anymore. Here’s Shadi Hamid in the Washington Post:
Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex, according to a report on America’s “dating recession” from the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies…If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids.
Anecdotally, from talking to younger people and looking at other data sources, this seems to be the general trend. And I think it’s a negative trend, because having done happiness research in grad school, I’m well aware that romantic relationships are one of the most important predictors of long-term happiness.1 Young Americans have become much more unhappy, so I think if people had better dating lives, some of that could be reversed. Better romantic relationships could also help the fertility rate — these days, birth rate collapse is due mostly to fewer and fewer people forming couples at all.
So here’s a blog post with my dating advice. I realize that many of my readers will not find this post particularly useful. It’s specifically aimed at men, so if you’re a woman, I apologize — as a man, I’m just much more qualified to talk to other men about this. Also, most of my male readers are probably already married or in relationships, so they probably don’t need this advice. So I hope that even if it’s not useful, this post will still be entertaining to the people who don’t need it.
Also, before you read this post, please be warned: I’m going to talk very matter-of-factly about sex and sexuality. If you think sex is a topic unbecoming for a serious econ blogger to talk about, or if you feel it’s taboo or sacred, then please skip this post and accept my apologies. Personally, I think our society’s romantic problems are well past the point where we can afford to treat sex as something mystical that will just take care of itself without us needing to think or talk about it explicitly, but if you disagree, I respect that.
Additionally, please be warned that although I will sometimes use the word “girls” to mean “women”, in keeping with the American colloquial usage of the term “girls” to refer to adult women in a romantic context, everything I say should be taken to only apply to adults and adult relationships. (And now is a good time to say — and it should also go without saying — that the most important piece of advice when dating is to always obtain consent.)
You’ll also notice that my advice is very general stuff. It’s not about techniques for getting a date or getting someone into bed. It’s about how to think about dating — who to get advice from, what to expect from a normal dating life, how to be comfortable about various aspects of the process, and so on. I view specific techniques for attracting women as less important — they’re heavily dependent on cultural context, personality type, and a bunch of other factors. In general, I think once you have the right mindset about dating and romance, you can just experiment to find the specific methods that work.
My basic pieces of dating advice for men are:
Think carefully about what you actually want from dating and romance.
Be very distrustful of people who talk to you about dating and romance on the internet; these people rarely have your best interests in mind.
It’s crucial to realize that sex and romance are achievable by regular, average men — not just by hyper-attractive or high-status “Chads”.
Women want regular, average men for lots of reasons — for companionship, for sex, and for helping to raise kids.
Being attractive is important, but so are A) actually wanting romance, and B) learning to communicate with women.
First, let’s talk about why you would even want to take advice from me.
There are a lot of guys on the internet and in the media who will offer you dating advice — on forums, in self-help books, even in coaching sessions you can sign up for. These gurus almost invariably tout their expertise in the matter — they pick up hot chicks with ease, they’ve slept with hundreds of women, and so on.
I’m definitely not one of those guys. I’m an unmarried man over 40, and my “body count” is certainly not in the hundreds. In fact, for a decade, I was uninterested in sex and dating (probably as an aftereffect of depression). If you want to learn how to walk into a party and go home with the hottest girl in the room, or hook up with 100 women on dating apps, I’m not someone who can tell you how to do that.
Instead, despite my long period of asexuality, I’m basically a normal, average guy. I’ve had a number of long-term relationships — I’m in one right now — and some shorter-term hookups too. I’m pretty unexceptional. As a lonely single man, why would you take advice from an average shlub like me?
Well, maybe you wouldn’t. If you really want to be the charming hot guy who gets all the girls — the “Chad”, as they say — you should go get advice from one of those guys. (Having read a few of those books, I think Mark Manson’s Models is probably the best.) Or maybe you should just practice until you get good enough to write a seduction guide of your own.
But is that really what you want? I think most men just don’t think about this question very much. A lot of men assume that getting laid is very hard, so they should just aim to become as good at it as humanly possible. Others simply accept the old stereotype that men want to sleep with as many women as they can, without considering whether they themselves fit that stereotype.
The truth is that lots of men wouldn’t actually like to be a Chad. Sleeping with hundreds of women might sound awesome if you’re currently sleeping with zero women, but once you start actually making a bit of progress in that direction, you quickly realize how soul-crushing and lonely that lifestyle can be. A lot of men — maybe even most men — get emotionally attached to our sex partners. There are well-known natural mechanisms for this. For those guys, going through one woman after another, again and again, for years and years, is just making and breaking those attachments again and again. That’s not fun, that’s self-punishment.
So if you wouldn’t really enjoy the Chad lifestyle, why would you want advice from a guy who does enjoy it? If you were looking for your dream home — or even just for a place to live for the next few years — would you really want to take house-hunting advice from a guy who switches apartments every week and lives out of a suitcase? Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe it would also help to get advice from some average, regular guys. In the days before the internet, most of the male role models in any guy’s life — fathers, athletic coaches, teachers, bosses — would be average, regular guys. When we all went online, we lost that. I don’t want to set myself up as a role model, but perhaps the internet could benefit from more average-guy input.
Another thing to consider is this: A lot of the people on the internet offering romantic advice are trying to exploit you. Seduction gurus, of course, make money from getting you to buy their books, watch their videos, take their courses, or attend their seminars. That’s just typical capitalism; some of them are probably offering good products, while others are probably just slick salesmen.
But most of the people on the internet are trying to exploit you in less obvious ways. Twitter trolls want your likes and retweets, and redditors want your upvotes. Political activists want you to attach yourself to their cause. Lonely people want your company, while sadists just want to enjoy your suffering. Very few of the people online who make pronouncements about sex and romance are doing it because they want you to get a girlfriend and be happy. If you did that, you might get off social media, and they’d be left all alone.
So why am I any different? Because this is just a one-off blog post, for one thing. I usually write about economics, and I have no plans to pivot to writing about sex and dating. I don’t actually care if you view me as an expert here, or if you agree with me — after this I’m going to go back to writing about interest rates and industrial policy.
My reason for writing this is simply that — as regular readers of this blog are probably aware — I want to see more people in this world be happy, well-adjusted, and fulfilled. Sex and romance are a big part of that. If just one or two people get a healthier outlook on that aspect of life from reading this post, then my time won’t have been wasted.
It’s impossible to be on the internet these days without encountering “incels”. The term is short for “involuntary celibate”, meaning a guy who can’t get laid even though he wants to.2 In recent years, the term has come to mean a specific ideology. You can read an academic summary of incel ideas here, or a more simplified account here. I can try to summarize the basic worldview here.
Essentially, the incels believe that women are only attracted to a very small number of men — guys who are extremely handsome, extremely high-status, extremely rich, etc. This, they believe, naturally shuts almost all men out of the dating market and condemns them to involuntary celibacy. All the girls go for the top few guys (the “Chads”), leaving all the other guys out frustrated and alone.
For a lonely or sexually frustrated man — especially young men, without much sexual experience — this is an incredibly seductive and powerful idea. I would bet that most young men at least toy with ideas like this at some point in their lives. For about a year and a half while I was in college, I independently came up with ideas fairly similar to this. (I changed my mind when I got a girlfriend, but that’s precisely the problem — guys who believe the incel canon often get “blackpilled” into not even trying to find a girlfriend at all, which only seems to confirm their beliefs.) In fact, you can find instances of men making incel-adjacent claims for centuries.
It’s also natural — and not necessarily unhealthy — for men to get together and complain about their romantic difficulties as a way of bonding with other men. Women do this too. Getting together with your same-sex friends and saying “Men, amirite?” or “Women, amirite?” is a time-honored activity, and I think it’s probably usually benign.
The problem emerges when this activity moves onto the internet. When frustrated young guys gather in forums for like-minded people, they amplify each other’s worst fears and become an echo chamber. They also expose themselves to trolls — sadists who go on those same forums and tell naive young men that they’ll never get laid, just to laugh at their misery.
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to talk about dating and romance on the public internet without being attacked by incels. Freddie DeBoer wrote about this a couple months ago, in an excellent post called “The Incel’s Veto and Other Observations”:
He writes:
The incel’s veto is the specific prohibition against men ever frankly discussing sex in any positive way that directly reflects the fact that they have sexual experience and thus have earned the consent of women…[I]n the 2020s we live in a weird discursive space where our perceptions of romantic and sexual behavior are constantly being filtered through the lens of the people who have experienced very little of either. The incel’s veto helps spread the ubiquitous online assumption that nobody is getting laid, anywhere, ever, and that it’s inherently pathological to treat sex and romance as not just healthy aspects of human life but as mundane and achievable.
I recently got a taste of the “incel’s veto”, when some incels found a video of my birthday dinner from 2025 and got very mad at the various happy couples in the video.
Incel ideology is certainly not the only toxic, unhelpful package of beliefs about sex and romance that’s going around on the internet. There are many others. But I find that young men are especially susceptible to this one.
And incel ideas also contribute to a peculiarly toxic strain of right-wing politics. Some percent of incels turn to the “red pill” — they believe that if women can be barred from having jobs, it will force them to accept lower-status men as mates out of pure economic necessity. Have you ever read a fairy tale about a prince who tries to force a poor girl to marry him, even though she clearly hates him? Red Pill ideology basically thinks we can scale that approach up to industrial levels, so that every regular guy becomes the evil prince.
None of this is good for our society. We shouldn’t want men getting “blackpilled” into despair or “redpilled” into right-wing nonsense. Fortunately, the incel worldview just isn’t true — it’s based on a hodgepodge of exaggerations, bad assumptions, and misreading of the data.
For example, the claim that only a few men get all the women is just empirically false. The blogger Maximus at the blog The Nuance Pill has documented this exhaustively:
For one thing, according to surveys, although sexlessness has risen among young Americans in recent years, it’s about the same for young men and young women:
And when we look at who’s had sex in the past year, the picture is the same:
Sexlessness rates of ~30% for young people is pretty bad news, in my opinion, but the number is pretty equal for men and women. And in any given year, most men and women are monogamous, with only a few people having large numbers of sex partners. Other surveys like the General Social Survey show the exact same pattern, reducing the likelihood that these results are being driven by bad survey technique or large-scale lying.
It turns out that the tendencies that the incels believe drive all of sex and dating are real, but pretty weak. Yes, male sexlessness is more common than female sexlessness, but only a little bit. Yes, there are more men than women who report a large number of sex partners, but the difference is very small. A majority of young people are just having sex with exactly one other person — no more, no less.
The same principle holds when we look at other standard incel beliefs. Maximus has a good X thread laying out the evidence of inequality on dating apps. Incels will often tell you that a few men get all the likes and matches on apps, while most women get both. In fact, it’s pretty gender-equal. For Hinge, men show a little more inequality, but not a lot more:
And the same is true of Tinder matches:
As the thread goes on to show, the fact that the average woman gets much more attention on dating apps than the average man is due not to inequality of interest, but to A) the fact that there are a lot more men on dating apps than women, and B) men are a lot more likely to initiate contact than women.
Other common incel talking points are similarly exaggerated. It’s true that in modern rich nations, men are somewhat more likely than women to never have children, but the difference is just a few percentage points in most rich countries:
(And some of this difference may be due to more women wanting children.)
The same was usually true throughout human history. Before agriculture, more women reproduced than men, but the ratio was not large, and in some regions it was flipped. There was a period after the invention of agriculture where the ratio was very high, due to things like war, kings siring tons of kids, etc., but it’s hard to argue that this was due to women’s choices.
Anyway, this is only the tip of the iceberg; I can do a longer post about incel tropes if people want. The short version is that almost every incel trope is grounded in a slight statistical tendency that incels exaggerate wildly. When you look at the actual numbers, the same simple fact asserts itself again and again: Most men have sex, most men and women are both pretty monogamous, and most men reproduce.
It might seem like I spent a long time here debunking some fringe online ideology in a post about dating advice. But I did this because it gave me a chance to show, with data, the central fact that motivates the rest of my advice: Dating and sex are very achievable for a regular guy. You do not have to be 6’5”, work in finance, or have a trust fund. You just have to be a regular, normal, typical guy.
Are there guys who have some special problem that prevents them from dating? Yes, of course! There are men with physical disabilities that prevent sexual function. There are men with depression (which basically prevents you from doing anything), and other mental illnesses. There are men with erectile dysfunction. There are some men for whom the struggle for economic survival absorbs all their time and money. There are men in prison. There are men who are gay and in denial about it. There are asexuals who just don’t want to date.
My advice, unfortunately, is not going to work for those men. There are doctors, psychotherapists, and other professionals who can help with some of those problems, but not all of them. Some men really do draw the short straw and get screwed over by circumstance.
But for the average, typical guy, dating is a very possible mission. That’s who my advice — speaking as a guy who is fairly average in this regard — is aimed at.
As I said above, my general advice to men is to think less about what women want, and more about what you want from dating and romance in the first place. But OK, why would women want a regular, average man?
A lot of men genuinely have no idea how to answer this question. They have no idea what a regular, average man has to offer to women. You hear guys joke that they “tricked” women into sleeping with them, or dating them, or marrying them and spending the rest of their lives with them and bearing their children. That joke is based on a core of real insecurity — the idea that the average guy is fundamentally undesirable to women, and that to get a woman to want him, he has to either be exceptional — a Chad — or to pull the wool over women’s eyes and get them to act against their best interest.
This is crazy. As we saw from the chart above, most men have sex in any given year. That means some women must want them. They can’t all be super hot or super rich or super famous. Most of them must be regular, average guys. Short guys, ugly guys, poor guys, nerdy guys — most of them are getting laid. And it’s just not realistic to think that most women are “tricked” into sleeping with these men.
Freddie DeBoer puts it well:
Though it opens me up to criticism, I still believe that men getting women to engage in consensual and enthusiastic sex is not the moon landing. It’s not a feat of engineering requiring years of specialized training and a jaw that could cut glass. It is, in fact, one of the most democratically distributed activities in the entire history of our species, something that nervous people, ugly people, broke people, awkward people, people with bad teeth and worse haircuts and zero social media presence have been managing to do, successfully and repeatedly, for roughly three hundred and fifty thousand years of anatomically modern human existence.
The numbers simply don’t lie. Most women must have some reason to desire sexual, romantic relationships with regular, average men.
What are those reasons? In my experience — especially from having lots of female friends and watching them with their boyfriends and hookups and husbands — it boils down to three basic things:
Companionship
Good sex
Help with raising kids
Companionship is far and away the most important of the three. Once a woman stops living with her parents, her life becomes a lonely enterprise. If a man doesn’t keep a woman company, who will? She has friends, but most of them eventually move away or withdraw into their own families, and have less time for her. She has coworkers, but she’ll change jobs (or they will). Her romantic partner is the only person who sticks with her — who moves with her, who always sees her at the end of the day, who will be there for her at the end. Consider this chart:
Now consider this poll:
Companionship means keeping a woman company — going to dinner, cuddling on the couch, talking about life, etc. But it means a lot more than that. It means helping with unexpected challenges, like health problems or finances. It means giving her advice on her job or her personal problems. It means throwing spiders out of the house when she’s too scared to grab them in a cup.
This, from what I can see, is the main reason women want men. And the Chad who’s going to be on to a different woman next week, or who’s sleeping with five women at a time, just isn’t going to provide this sort of steady companionship.
The second thing women want from a man is good sex. Sex is a very important part of romantic relationships — there’s a reason we don’t marry our platonic friends. A lot of men seem to think that women are inherently asexual, or at least have much lower drive than men, but this is just wrong. Research shows that the strongest predictor of sexual satisfaction in women is just how often they have sex. Men do have stronger libidos than women on average, but the difference is small — by some reckonings, it’s less than half as big as the male-female difference in height.
For a man, this basically means two things:
You should learn to be comfortable about sex, including the idea of sex and the actual act itself.
You should learn to be good at sex.
A lot of guys have hangups about sex. Sometimes these are religious, sometimes they’re related to feelings of inadequacy, sometimes they’re related to simple squeamishness and modesty. But women have these hangups too! And more, in fact — women have the risk of pregnancy, and they run the risk of having a man get violent during sex.
Men have to help women out by being as comfortable about sex as they can. You basically just have to get over your hangups as much as possible. That’s easier said than done, of course. Obviously, one way to get comfortable with sex is to do it a whole bunch of times (but if you can do that, you probably won’t need my advice). But there are other ways. You can talk to friends about it. You can read stuff that people — especially women — write about sex on the internet. You can even go to therapy.
But the important piece of advice here is about the goal: to make sex something that you’re not scared of, disgusted by, mystified about, or overawed by.
You should also be good at it, of course. Being good in bed won’t just help you keep a girlfriend; it’ll make you more confident about the value you can provide to women, as a man. The most important way to be good in bed is simply to pay attention to your partner and observe what makes them feel good. It’s kind of astonishing how quickly this will make you a good lover.
Incidentally, this is why a woman might want to have sex with a regular, average guy, instead of a Chad type who has slept with a million women. The Chad type won’t have as much time for her, for one thing — he’ll be off with one of his other girls, or he’ll get bored and dump her. That doesn’t make for a great sex life. And despite his extensive experience, the Chad’s approach to sex will be pretty standardized and generic, since A) he’s calibrating to the average of a bunch of different women, and B) he’s not going to spend much time with any one woman so he doesn’t need to invest much time and effort learning what she likes.
Anyway, if you haven’t had much sex, there are still ways you can prepare. One thing you can do is read things women have written about sex, to get some ideas.3 If you do this, you’ll quickly learn what a huge variety of different things women desire.
In 1973, the author Nancy Friday asked a huge number of women about their sexual fantasies, and compiled them into a book called My Secret Garden. This book is incredibly eye-opening, because what you realize is that different women want a huge variety of different things. In fact, if you’re the kind of guy who thinks women are all the same, my advice is to read My Secret Garden and realize how incredibly different they actually are.
Anyway, a third thing many women want from men — eventually — is help raising kids. Most women want to have kids at some point, and being a single mom is very difficult, both financially and time-wise. They want to find a good, dependable man to help shoulder the financial, logistical, and physical burden of child-rearing. (This doesn’t mean a dad needs to make more money than the mom does — even if she makes $200,000 and he makes only $80,000, that’s a 40% boost to family income. That’s a lot.)
Most Chad-type guys aren’t going to be good dads. And so lots of women are just bored with these kinds of guys, since they can’t fantasize about being together for the long term. Hooking up with Chads might be convenient, or even fun, but for lots of women it’ll feel empty because they know it’s just a fleeting dalliance.4
Anyway, I’ll quote Freddie DeBoer’s essay one more time:
The woman across from you at the coffee shop may be someone who will never ever want to fuck you - that is often the case - but she’s also not a jewel locked in a vault that only a six-foot-three hedge fund manager with a Greek statue’s bone structure can crack. Rather, she’s a human being with free will and a body that wants things, a mind that gets lonely sometimes, a heart that may like very much to find someone else to press against in the dark… a person, in other words. Just like you, you absolute disaster, with your anxieties and your weird hobbies and your fridge that only has condiments in it! Just like you. Just like you.
Yes.
Biologist Frank A. Beach described three types of female sexual behavior: attractivity, proceptivity, and receptivity. When I took a class on human behavioral biology from the famous Robert Sapolsky, he noted that these terms could also describe three very general things that anyone — men or women included — needs in order to actually have sexual success.
You can think of attractivity as how attractive you are, proceptivity as how much you want sex and romance, and receptivity as how easily you can tell who wants you back.
Most dating advice for men focuses on attractivity. There’s the easy stuff: Stay at a healthy weight, go to the gym and get in shape, learn to dress well. I think you should definitely do all that stuff! Being hotter won’t automatically make women like you, but it certainly won’t hurt, and it’ll make you feel more confident.
There’s also a ton of stuff about “game” — pickup lines, flirtation, seduction techniques, and so on. This is definitely a part of being attractive, for both men and women. Attractiveness isn’t just physical — a hot-looking person who sits silently in a corner is probably not going to have as much romantic success as someone who goes out there and tries to talk to people in an attractive manner. My view on this is that each person should develop their own method of flirting — it’ll feel more authentic than trying to copy someone else’s canned routine. But really, I’m just not an expert in this at all.
Proceptivity, on the other hand, is incredibly neglected. As someone who spent a decade not wanting sex or romance at all, I can guarantee you that if you don’t actually want these things, you’re not going to get them.5 You might want a girlfriend in the abstract sense, but if you don’t have the raw drive to go out and get one — to ask out the girl at the coffee shop, to get on the dating apps, to have your friend set you up, etc. — the desire is likely to remain abstract and unfulfilled.
How can you make yourself want sex and romance more? Well, I do put some credence in the research showing that porn overuse decreases libido, so I advise men to cut down or eliminate their use of porn. But usually, I think the main problem with proceptivity is that men don’t think carefully about what they want from sex and romance.
If you think that dating means you have to approach a million women in bars or on apps, like the seduction gurus do, then it might not sound appealing — especially if you’re shy and introverted. If you’re a romantic kind of guy who just wants one special girl, and you think dating has to be about having one-night stands with dozens of people, you might just avoid the whole thing.
A good way to increase proceptivity, I think, is to sit around and imagine what your ideal dating and romantic life would look like. It probably won’t go exactly like that — reality rarely matches our fantasies — but it’ll help you envision a dating process that you would actually enjoy doing, rather than one you think you have to go do because someone told you to. The more clearly you can envision your ideal romantic life, the easier it’ll be to figure out the first steps toward that life, and the more motivated you’ll be to take those steps instead of sitting at home watching YouTube.
Another impediment to proceptivity is the fear of rejection. In American culture, men are expected to take the lead romantically, and this means they’ll often end up getting rejected. A lot of guys are so scared of this rejection that they dread even trying to date in the first place.
I don’t have any silver bullet to eliminate the fear of rejection; it’s something a lot of people struggle with, and nothing I say is going to magically make it fine. One thing you can do, of course, is just bite the bullet and practice asking people out and getting rejected until you get used to it. But a lot of guys who are shy or introverted aren’t going to be able to do that.
For those people, I think the only solution is to try to get a healthier perspective on rejection. One such perspective is: Rejection is not a bad thing. If a woman doesn’t want you, that’s fine; you’re in the same situation you were in before you even thought about asking her out. And if you keep getting rejected by a bunch of different women, that’s useful feedback — it helps tell you that you’re doing something wrong, and that you need to adjust. Thinking of rejection as some sort of personal humiliation is pointless. It doesn’t mean you’re a loser, or inherently unattractive, or destined to be alone, etc. It’s not some test that you should have passed. I realize it’s easier to say these things than to believe them, but I think it’s a healthy perspective to aim for.
Anyway, this brings us to receptivity. As a man, being able to figure out when a woman is interested in you is incredibly important. If you aren’t good at this, women might get scared by you, or think you’re a creep. But it’s hard! Most men aren’t born with the magic ability to know whether a woman likes them. You can get good at this, but it requires lots of practice — and in the meantime, it’s easy to make mistakes.
But I think there is a way to compensate for low receptivity, especially when you’re just starting out dating. It’s to be clear and explicit. If you are romantically interested in a woman, ask her on a date, and use the word “date”. Say “Would you like to go on a date with me?”.
This accomplishes several things. First of all, dating apps have made women very accustomed to using the word “date” all the time, so if you don’t use the word, they might feel strange or confused. Second of all, saying “date” removes ambiguity from a situation — instead of having to sit there wondering whether someone likes you or not, you can just ask them out and find out immediately. If she’s not interested, you can just move on quickly and not waste your time, instead of agonizing for weeks over the uncertainty. Third, saying “date” avoids the dreaded “friend zone”, because it makes it clear that you want something other than friendship.
In fact, this is really my one and only piece of concrete advice about how to get a date. There’s a heck of a lot more to it, of course, but I think that if men have the right mindset toward the whole thing, then learning how to do it in practice will be fun and exciting instead of heartbreaking and terrifying. If you start with the right attitude toward dating and romance and sex, the other pieces will eventually fall into place.
Correlation isn’t causation, but the mechanism is well-understood.
A female incel is called a “femcel”.
Another is to have platonic female friends who you’re close enough to that you can talk openly about sex. But please don’t use this as a way to try to hit on your friends. The purpose of having platonic female friends is to have friends, not to get laid!
In fact, I have friends who are Chads who keep getting dumped every time they try to give up their promiscuous ways and settle down with one special girl. Women just don’t take them seriously, even when they want to be taken seriously. If you’ve slept with 200 women, it’s very difficult to convince the 201st that she’s different.
Well, not very often at least.
2026-05-15 15:55:22
Which society is a better place to live: the U.S., or Europe? This is a very difficult question, for several reasons. For one thing, “Europe” can mean several different things — it can mean the richest northwest European countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, or it can include slightly poorer West European countries like Spain and France and the UK, or it can include East European countries that are still catching up after the fall of communism.
More fundamentally, though, the comparison is hard because life in the two countries is so different. If you like living in an urban apartment, strolling past picturesque old buildings to cute cafes, and taking a lot of vacation every year, then Europe is obviously for you. If you like living in a giant suburban house and having a bunch of friends drive over to barbecue and watch TV on your giant screen, then America is obviously the right pick. If you want to work 80 hour weeks building the future of AI, you should probably live in the U.S. If you want government health insurance and job security, I recommend Europe. There are also differences in politics and culture.
In general, my intuition is that all rich countries are about equally good places to live. One reason to believe this is that migration between rich countries is generally pretty small — it’s not that hard to move between Europe and the U.S., but not that many people do it. Here’s a map of the net migration difference between some European countries and the U.S., as a percent of each country’s population, for 2024:
This means that if you take the number of Germans living in America in 2024, and subtract the number of Americans living in Germany, that net migration number is 1.17% of Germany’s population. In other words, the amount of migration between Germany and America is pretty small.
One thing to notice here, though, is that you don’t see any negative numbers on this map. There aren’t any European countries where significantly more people move from America to Europe than the reverse (for Switzerland it’s about equal). That means that to the extent that people vote with their feet, they choose America over Europe, even if they don’t do so in large numbers.
That’s not a slam-dunk case that America is better off, of course. The people who have the money and skills to move between the U.S. and Europe are probably disproportionately highly paid professional workers (who can earn more in the U.S.), while working-class people who would like to take advantage of Europe’s urban safety and generous welfare states find it harder to move. If there were open borders between America and Europe, we might see a different pattern.
If you ask people how satisfied they are in life, America comes in around the middle of the West European pack:
So my general impression is that Europe and America are about equally good places to live, and it mostly comes down to your own personal taste and your own personal circumstances. I believe that’s about the best answer we’ll ever get.
But an easier question to answer is: Who is richer, America or Europe? This is the subject of a recent debate in the econ blogosphere. It started when Joseph Sternberg wrote a WSJ op-ed entitled “What Happens When Europeans Find Out How Poor They Are?”. Paul Krugman responded with a widely read post arguing that Europe is not in economic decline:
Krugman followed this up with a technical post about how to measure different countries’ growth over time. Pieter and Luis Garicano responded at length to Krugman:
In fact, as Krugman notes, there are two very different questions here:
Is the U.S. richer than Europe?
Has the U.S. been growing faster than Europe in recent years?
The answer to this first question is: Clearly, yes. America is considerably richer than most European countries, although a few top European countries are only a little bit poorer.
The answer to the second question is: Maybe. In terms of living standards, Europe has kept pace with America, remaining a bit behind. In terms of productivity, though, Europe has stagnated while America has grown strongly.
This isn’t a great result for Europe, to be honest. Rich countries should ideally converge to the same level of income; the fact that Europe has failed to catch up with America is a real failure, even if it isn’t falling further behind. And America’s far faster growth in output per hour should be sounding alarm bells.
And even more fundamentally, the main point of comparison for Europe shouldn’t be America — it should be China, which is bankrolling the new Russian imperial project and threatening to outcompete European industry. Given the threats Europe faces, it can no longer afford to be the shabby, comfortable aristocrat of the world economy.
2026-05-13 17:40:06
Donald Trump is headed to China with a whole bunch of top U.S. CEOs in tow to talk about trade. There is probably a post to be written here about how Trump is creating a new kind of “America, Inc.” centered around his own person, using a combination of tariffs, export controls, federal government equity stakes, and personal bullying. But this is not that post. Instead, this is a post about decoupling. Trump was elected in 2016, and again in 2024, on promises to reduce American economic dependence on China. How well has he succeeded?
First, some background. In the mid-2010s, when Trump came to power, the U.S. and China had a pretty well-understood economic relationship. America did R&D and designed products, then shipped the designs to China where they were manufactured — often using components from Japan/Korea/Taiwan, but sometimes using Chinese components. China would then ship the products back to America, where they were marketed and sold and serviced by the American companies.
Both countries chafed at this arrangement. Americans complained that the relocation of labor-intensive assembly to China put American factory workers out of a job (which was true) and worried that outsourcing assembly would eventually lead to the outsourcing of more valuable activities (which was probably true), while Chinese leaders were annoyed at being stuck in the low-value-added middle of the production chain. So both countries implemented policies to break up this arrangement and create a new trading system.
China used industrial policy to onshore high-value component manufacturing and create its own “national champion” brands, while U.S. Presidents Trump and Biden strove to reduce U.S. trade dependence on China.1 I wrote about this breakup in 2022:
Everyone agrees that China has succeeded in its half of the decoupling — far more Chinese-made goods are now made with Chinese components. The country has climbed up the value chain, and developed top brands like BYD, Huawei, Xiaomi, DJI, CATL, and so on.
Whether the U.S. has succeeded in reducing its dependence on Chinese manufacturing, however, has been a subject of hot debate. On one hand, the percentage of America’s imports that it gets from China has plummeted:
That’s from a WSJ story in February of this year, entitled “The American and Chinese Economies Are Hurtling Toward a Messy Divorce”. A few more details:
Some businesses have moved production from China to the U.S. to avoid tariffs, but the flow is still modest. Mexico and Southeast Asian nations are more common destinations for manufacturers leaving China…About 9% of Ohio manufacturers in a recent survey said they had reshored some production to the U.S. in 2025, up from 4% in 2021. About 60% of the reshoring in 2025 relocated from China[.]
It’s clear that tariffs have had an effect on the shifting of U.S. imports away from China. Even Trump’s far weaker tariffs in his first term showed results — America started buying tariffed goods from countries other than China, even as it kept buying non-tariffed goods from China:
Despite all the hullabaloo of “Liberation Day”, Trump’s tariffs on China — which built on previous tariffs on China by the Biden and first Trump administrations — dwarfed his tariffs on friendly countries:
Where have the imports shifted to? Mostly to other Asian countries, and to Mexico:
Which kind of products is America no longer importing from China? Trump’s first-term tariffs mostly hit low-value products like furniture, shoes, and clothing (where China’s share was slowly declining anyway as its labor costs rose). But more recent tariffs have hit China’s sales of electronics — PCs, phones, etc. Two years ago, most of America’s PCs were made in China; now, most of them are made in Vietnam.
It’s not just trade, either; on the investment side, too, decoupling has been very apparent. There were a whole bunch of stories in 2025 about U.S. businesses wanting to relocate their production out of China. These anecdotes represented a trend that was highly visible in the data — the collapse of foreign direct investment into the Chinese economy:
Much of this investment was shifting to Southeast Asia, though in advanced manufacturing it shifted to Europe.
Why has investment shifted? Tariffs are one reason. Traditionally, a lot of what the U.S. imported from China was made by American companies — for example, Apple manufacturing iPhones in Shenzhen and shipping them back to the U.S. Tariffs make this a more expensive thing to do, so they provide an incentive for American companies — and any multinational companies that sell stuff to the U.S. — to stop investing in Chinese factories.
A second reason is what I call the “China Cycle”. Multinationals have learned the painful lesson that when they put their factories in China, their technology will be appropriated by Chinese indigenous companies — often with the help of the Chinese government — and then later used to outcompete them in global markets. Again and again, companies fell for the lure of the huge Chinese domestic market, only to lose their technological crown jewels to fierce Chinese competitors who rarely played fair. This has naturally chilled the desire to invest in China.
A third reason, of course, was the threat of war. As China grew more bellicose over Taiwan and the South China Sea, multinationals began to realize that having their factories in China, where they would be either blockaded or expropriated in the event of a conflict, posed a big risk.
So it’s possible to tell a pretty coherent story here. U.S. companies had plenty of reasons to move out of China, but tariffs gave them a big extra push. And with the exodus of those companies, China’s exports to America plunged.
But in fact, there are lots of people who don’t believe the decoupling is real. One group — call it the “macro camp” — has argued that because U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses are still about the same size (or larger), there must be some sort of hidden conduit by which Chinese products are still reaching American shores, possibly by a circuitous route.
The macro camp included some strange ideological bedfellows — people like Brad Setser and Robin Brooks who were frustrated with tariffs’ inability to curb global imbalances and wanted to see sterner protectionist measures taken, and free-traders like The Economist and the Peterson Institute who seemed to think that if Trump & co. can be convinced that tariffs are futile, the free-trade consensus will reappear. I had some ferocious battles2 with some of these folks back in 2023:
My key argument was that you can’t just look at macro imbalances — China’s trade surplus with the whole world, and America’s trade deficit with the whole world — and conclude that Chinese goods must be making their way into America. It just doesn’t follow. China could be finding alternative markets for its exports, while America found alternative sources for its imports, and these could roughly be the same countries. The macro imbalances would persist, but China and America would have decoupled.
That said, it’s also possible that the macro camp was right — China might be finding some way to get around tariffs. And sure, multinational companies are divesting from China, but that doesn’t mean China’s exports to America have to fall; China’s indigenous companies, like BYD and Huawei, are perfectly capable of selling their own products to America.
So before we conclude that decoupling is definitely real, we need to actually check the data in greater detail.
How might Chinese goods be sneaking into America? Decoupling skeptics often posited transshipment — basically, the idea that Chinese companies responded to tariffs by slapping a “Made in Vietnam” label on their products and sending them through Vietnamese ports on their way to American shores. But while a little of this probably did happen, Gerard DiPippo estimates that transshipment is minor — at most 18% of China’s lost exports to America, and probably a lot less.
He got this estimate by looking at specific products — examining what China stopped selling to the U.S., and what it started selling to Vietnam, in the wake of tariffs. If products are being transshipped through Vietnam, the two numbers should line up. But they usually don’t — the things China has started selling to Vietnam since Trump’s tariffs went into effect are, by and large, not the same products Vietnam has been selling more of to America. Transshipment can’t be the big story here.
A more convincing argument is mismeasurement. There is a gap between how much the U.S. says it imports from China, and how much China says it exports to the U.S. As of 2024, the latter had fallen by much less than the former:
The biggest reason for this was probably the “de minimis” exemption, which let China ship small packages to America without paying tariffs. Chinese manufacturers took advantage of this rule by breaking down their shipments into a bunch of small packages:
But Trump closed the de minimis loophole by executive order in the summer of 2025. So that loophole can’t explain the continued collapse in China’s exports to the U.S. over the last year.
There is one far more believable way that Chinese-made products might still be flooding into America: intermediate goods. Just as a “Made in China” iPhone was mostly made out of Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese parts back in 2011, a “Made in Vietnam” iPhone today will contain a lot of Chinese parts. Since complicated components represent a lot more of the actual value of an electronics product than the actual final assembly, this means that it’s still mostly China selling stuff to America. Hsu, Peng, and Wu estimated in 2024 that this effect was substantial:
Utilizing transaction-level customs import-export data, we develop a novel measure to assess firm-product-level indirect dependence of U.S. importers on China via their suppliers in Vietnam and Mexico. Our findings indicate a substantial increase in indirect dependence on China post-Trade War…suggesting that despite efforts to reduce dependence on China, U.S. supply chains remain indirectly dependent on China via third-party nations.
Annoyingly, however, this data is only through 2022. In fact, we also have another data source on indirect trade — the OECD’s value-added trade numbers. But that’s also released very slowly; the most recent data set also only goes through 2022.
Looking at that data is still interesting, though. In fact, before the pandemic, America’s share of imports from China was falling on a value-added basis. The pandemic bumped it back up, but then it started to fall again in 2022:
The pandemic throws a wrench into the trend, making it hard to see if there’s been a recent drop that mirrors the recent drop in gross import flows. It’ll take some time to get that data. But in the meantime, it looks like Trump’s first-term tariffs really did reduce America’s import dependence on China a bit — and that decoupling might have resumed in 2022.3
Intermediate goods trade changes the basic story about decoupling. Tariffs and other factors broke the old arrangement between the U.S. and China, where American companies outsourced production to China and sold the products back to American customers. That old world is gone. In its place is a new relationship, in which Chinese companies sell parts and components to assemblers in other countries, who then sell the goods to America.
This is not a trivial change. On one hand, it shows how Chinese companies have moved up the value chain, becoming direct competitors to multinationals. On the other hand, final assembly of goods isn’t trivial or meaningless. It’s the least profitable part of the value chain, but it’s still important — after all, China industrialized in the 1990s and 2000s while doing mostly that sort of work.
So the fact that American tariffs are causing that assembly work to move out of China is significant. It doesn’t remove U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing, but it reduces it. China itself started out doing assembly but later moved into component manufacturing; there are some signs Vietnam may be starting to do the same. And if Vietnam can do it, so can India, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on. China doesn’t have some magic secret sauce that makes it the only country that can make physical objects; other countries can learn, just like China did.
A non-Chinese supply chain won’t be built quickly or easily, and it hasn’t been happening as fast as the headline numbers suggest. But we’ve made a promising start, and the tariffs on China were part of that. A lot of Trump’s protectionist policy has been haphazard, misdirected, stupid, and downright corrupt, but this one — which was continued by Biden and the Democrats — was actually starting to yield some results. It would be a shame if Trump throws that all away on this trip in exchange for the promise of a few soybean purchases or whatever.
The U.S. also started using export controls to limit China’s development in key strategic industries like semiconductors, and China eventually followed suit with its own export controls on rare earths.
OK, fine. I wrote some blog posts criticizing them, which they pretty much completely ignored. But in my mind, the battles were ferocious indeed.
One additional note of caution here: Even when the components are also made in Vietnam or Mexico, they may be made by Chinese-owned factories, meaning that some portion of what America pays to its Vietnamese and Mexican suppliers flows through to Chinese shareholders. Those profit flows won’t show up in any trade numbers at all.
2026-05-11 16:36:24
“And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence.” — Enoch Root
“In human life it's also true/ The strong will try to conquer you/ And that is what you must expect/ Unless you use your intellect” — Merlin
Five years ago, I wrote a post about the wave of authoritarianism sweeping the world:
That unhappy trend has continued. Freedom House’s 2026 report is subtitled “The Growing Shadow of Autocracy”, and finds that freedom continues to decline across the globe:
V-DEM’s 2026 report, subtitled “Unraveling the Democratic Era?”, delivers the same message:
Both organizations note the rapid deterioration in freedom under Donald Trump’s second administration, including attacks on free and fair elections, persecution of critics in the press, and the rise of a violent and unaccountable security state. In the 20th century, the U.S. was the Arsenal of Democracy — as the world’s most powerful country, and one of its most free, it often used its industrial might to support liberal democracy around the world. In the 21st century, America is increasingly incapable and unwilling to play this role.
Instead, the industrial powerhouse of this century is China. In addition to its own rapidly growing military power and technological supremacy, it supports various autocratic satellite powers to keep potential rivals off-balance — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and so on. This geopolitical grouping has been given various names — I called it the “New Axis”, and others have called it things like the “Axis of Autocracy”. But Trump has shown that Cold War 2 will not be a clean contest of liberal democracy versus totalitarianism; instead, it’ll be a hodgepodge of amoral competing power blocs, more reminiscent of the time before World War 1.
Liberal democracy hasn’t been defeated, but it’s definitely the underdog again. The hope that regular folks would rise up and overthrow the one-party states, petty tyrants, and populist strongmen is fading; the Hong Kong protests of 2019, the Belarus protests of 2020, and various waves of Iran protests all failed to make headway against autocratic regimes, while America’s protests in 2020 did little to halt the country’s slide into strongman rule.
That’s all very sad and disturbing. But we’re starting to see another trend quietly emerge — tyrants are losing wars.
The first example of this was the Syrian Civil War. After brutally crushing various rebel factions for over a decade with the help of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, the Assad regime suddenly collapsed in late 2024. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over whether Syria’s HTS militants would bring jihadist rule to Syria, the country’s new leaders seem reasonable, pragmatic, and a lot more tolerant than any of the alternatives.
The second example was the collapse of Iran’s shadow empire of proxies in the Middle East. In addition to Assad, they lost Hezbollah, whose catastrophic defeat by Israel in 2024 belied its fearsome reputation, and mostly lost Hamas. The Israelis are not exactly liberal democrats at this point, but they’re certainly less illiberal than Iran and its proxies.
But the most important loss for the Axis of Autocracy, or whatever you want to call it, is shaping up in Ukraine. It’s still early days, but there are clear signs that the tide has turned against Russia. Ukraine’s drone industry has really hit its stride, producing several million drones a year and innovating all kinds of new and deadly weapons.
This has enabled the Ukrainians to fight a successful defensive war while taking fewer and fewer casualties. Some sources estimate that Ukraine is now killing 5 Russians for every Ukrainian lost. Even if that’s an overestimate, the ratio certainly seems to have tilted significantly in Ukraine’s favor. The Russians are taking horrendous losses — over 30,000 each month in recent months, probably more than the Russians can currently recruit. Russia’s total estimated losses in the war were over 350,000 killed and 1.4 million at the end of last year; by now the numbers are significantly higher.
Russia’s territorial gains, meanwhile, have slowed or even reversed, despite all the bodies Putin is throwing into the meat grinder. Here’s The Economist:
Not only has Russia’s expected spring offensive been a flop, but in April Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory for the first time since August 2024…By our calculations…Russia has lost control of 113 square kilometres over the past 30 days.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s long-range drones are inflicting more and more pain on Russia. Ukraine is destroying Russian oil infrastructure and closing Moscow’s airports. Russia’s air defenses can’t even protect the capital; Putin was so afraid of Ukrainian drones that he had to scale down his recent annual “Victory Day” parade, removing military vehicles from the procession, appearing only briefly in public, and asking Donald Trump to persuade the Ukrainians to declare a temporary ceasefire to allow the parade to happen:
Ukraine’s long-range drones are so powerful that they could soon even be able to cut off Crimea from Russian resupply.
None of this means that Russia or its military is about to collapse. But even if Putin declares a full mobilization and throws millions more Russians into the Ukrainian drones, it’s not clear what that’ll win him except further depopulation of his country. This is probably why Putin has recently declared that the war is “coming to an end”:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end…"I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters of the Russia-Ukraine war, Europe's deadliest conflict since World War Two. He also said he would be willing to negotiate new security arrangements for Europe, and that his preferred negotiating partner would be Germany's former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
This is still wildly over-optimistic on Putin’s part — he seems to think he can just end the war on favorable terms any time he wants, choose Russian patsies as negotiating partners, and dictate the future of European security. Most of that is highly unlikely to happen; barring an unforeseen Ukrainian collapse, the Ukrainians will simply keep hammering away at Russia’s troops and infrastructure with their drones. But Putin’s sudden willingness to talk is very significant — it means he knows he’s starting to lose the war, and wants to beat some kind of face-saving retreat.
Ukraine is the clearest and most important example of how 21st century autocrats, having triumphed in the streets and on social media, are losing on the actual battlefield. Trump’s losing war in Iran is part of the trend too — although the Trump regime isn’t technically part of the Chinese-led Axis, he’s definitely cut from the same cloth as the other populist, illiberal strongmen who have proliferated around the globe in recent decades.
What’s going on? Why are tyrants suddenly getting their butts kicked? I see several reasons.
First, the defender usually has the advantage. The strategic advantages are well-known. Almost by definition, the attacker’s forces are far from home and have to be resupplied, which incurs cost and risk. Conquering and subduing a whole country is also just an inherently more complex and difficult task than halting an invading army’s advance.
But I’m talking about something deeper — the moral advantage that you get from defending your homes and families against an invader.
Ukraine never threatened Russia at all. The whole Russian cause in this war is based on the notion that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO and the EU was threatening Russia’s “sphere of influence.” But the idea of “spheres of influence”, while sometimes a good factual description of how powerful countries operate, is not a good moral principle. The idea that countries deserve “spheres of influence” is just the claim that powerful countries ought to dominate their weaker neighbors. In other words, it’s just imperialism.
Morality doesn’t field divisions, of course…or does it? Putin can pay desperately poor people to fight in his wars, or empty his prisons of criminals, or buy mercenaries, but can he persuade regular middle-class Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg to die for the glory of the New Russian Empire? Not really, no — which is why as soon as casualties get too high to replace without general mobilization, he starts to think about ending the war.
Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.
This lesson is useful in explaining why Trump’s war on Iran has failed. When Iran was the attacker — trying to control the Middle East through a network of armed proxies — its aggression provoked a backlash from people in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and elsewhere who didn’t want to be ruled by foreign powers. But when Trump attacked Iran without direct provocation, Iran’s cause suddenly shifted to the defense, and its fortunes improved.
The people of Iran have no love for their regime — it recently mowed down tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and the country’s economy is in a state of protracted collapse. But even so, they refused to rise against their rulers when Trump’s bombs started falling. Meanwhile, most Americans disapprove of the Iran war, and have no desire to endure the economic hardship of high gas prices just to topple someone else’s dictator.
This provides us with an important lesson. Reality is not Star Wars — dividing warring sides into “good guys and bad guys” is never really accurate. But “invaders vs. defenders” is a lot less ambiguous. If America ditches Trumpism and goes back to the principle of upholding territorial integrity, we’ll see our military fortunes improve, because we’ll associate ourselves with causes that people want to fight for.
The second reason tyrants are losing wars is because democracies tend to cooperate more than strongman regimes. The liberal democratic ideal is of a peaceful, positive-sum world, where people are free to get rich and express themselves. But for dictators like Putin and Xi, or populist strongmen like Trump, the goal is to dominate everyone else — including the other autocrats.
This was vividly illustrated in World War 2. Hitler started off the war by making a pact with Stalin to divide up Poland. But he ended up betraying his erstwhile ally, because he couldn’t suffer the idea of another dictator more powerful than himself. The Nazis cooperated only very loosely with Imperial Japan, if at all, and probably would have fought them in the end had the USSR fallen. Meanwhile, Roosevelt and Churchill were highly pragmatic and would cooperate with any power they thought would help stabilize the world — even the USSR.
It’s not a universal principle that democracies cooperate more than autocracies — in fact, democracies are often reluctant to come to each other’s aid directly in wartime. But personalist systems — the type that Trump, Putin, and increasingly Xi all favor — are less likely to cooperate than other types of regimes. Someone has always got to be the Big Man.
So although Trump may be drawn to the ideologies and the absolute power of Xi and Putin, and though he might entertain the notion of carving up the world with them, his ego will get in the way. So you see Trump currying favor with Putin, but then taking out Russia’s ally in Venezuela and seizing Russian oil tankers. And you see him going to war against a Chinese proxy and Russian ally in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has survived thanks to staunch support from European countries, who recognize that if Ukraine falls, they’re next on the menu for the empire next door. But while Russia has gotten some help from its ostensible Chinese ally, China has been extremely circumspect with this aid — not providing direct military assistance, gouging Russia to the bone on oil purchases, and halting cooperation as soon as U.S. sanctions loom.
Under Trump, the U.S. has put itself in a very perilous position by throwing its alliances overboard and going it alone. The U.S. alone has little chance to achieve the scale of production needed to match China. And when Trump alienated his European allies by throwing up huge ridiculous tariffs and threatening to conquer Greenland, he lost any chance for assistance with the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, there are signs that defenders — even some autocratic ones — are starting to band together against big empires. Ukraine is selling anti-drone technology to the Gulf states, and informal quiet connections are growing between Ukraine and Taiwan. An unofficial global anti-imperialist alliance would not be a bad thing.
The third reason tyrants are losing wars is that the civilizations they’re attacking are usually technologically superior. Hezbollah lost to Israel when Israel blew up their pagers and killed their leaders with pinpoint decapitation strikes. Russia is starting to lose to Ukraine because the Ukrainians are more inventive — with their world-beating drone industry, they’ve created an entirely new form of warfare just to defeat the Russians. Russia tries hard to keep up, but so far it hasn’t succeeded.
Much has been made, especially in rightist circles, of Russia’s supposed warrior culture. Their ads emphasize macho masculinity and show soldiers working out in the gym:
Ludicrously, the Trump administration has tried to copy the Russian example instead of the Ukrainian one. Hegseth constantly emphasizes warrior ethos and masculine toughness:
But big muscles don’t do much against exploding drones, nor do they help plan the complicated logistics that modern militaries depend on, nor do they produce innovative new technologies. Hegseth may be able to do a bunch of pushups, but the whole country is now recognizing that he’s dangerously incompetent.
Now, it’s not universally true that autocratic countries value innovation and technology less than democratic ones. China is arguably now the world’s leading technological nation — or at least on par with the U.S. In a war over Taiwan, China’s advanced drone and electronics capabilities would be a powerful asset.
But the autocratic regimes that have been the aggressors in the 21st century tend to value a warrior ethos, or religious fervor, over innovation and cleverness. In Neal Stephenson’s terminology, they worship Ares instead of Athena.
I hope people don’t interpret this post as a claim that liberal democracies are inherently stronger than autocracies. Trump is a fool, but the New Axis might yet rally, backed by the awesome technological and industrial might of China. Or even if autocracies continue to fail in their foreign military adventures, the natural disruptiveness of social media might simply bring down every liberal democracy from within, leaving the world to be fought over by incompetent tyrants.
But if current events have convinced you that tyranny is on the march and freedom is forever in retreat, you should probably look at the actual battlefield, and feel a little encouraged. If the wave of illiberalism that began in the mid-2000s is going to break and roll back, battlefield losses will probably have a lot to do with it — just as they did in previous eras.
2026-05-09 17:58:53
A few days ago I wrote a post about why Democrats can’t build a welfare state by taxing only billionaires:
I wrote:
Once upon a time, class politics pitted the middle class and poor against the upper classes; now, American politics may reflect a status conflict between millionaires and billionaires. If Democrats have become the party of the millionaires-against-billionaires, that would explain why their tax policies are focused on soaking the ultra-rich while easing the burden of the merely-rich.
As if to emphasize this point, just a couple of days later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “There’s a certain level of wealth that’s unearned…You can’t earn a billion dollars.”
This immediately raises the question: What amount of wealth does AOC think you can “earn”? A hundred million dollars? Ten million? Presumably there’s some number of millions that she thinks can be earned. That definitely fits the “party of millionaires-against-billionaires” framing from my post.
But the more important question is: Is AOC right? Can a billion dollars be “earned”?
It depends on what “earned” means, of course. To most people, the word probably means something very vague — basically, “I think you deserve this amount of money.” You can come up with more specific definitions if you want. For example, if you’re a socialist, you might define only labor income as “earned” and capital income as “unearned”. If you’re a free-marketer, you might define “earned” income as your marginal product — i.e., the amount by which society would be poorer if you had never been born. And so on.
But I’m not sure how useful that sort of exercise is. The socialist idea that capital income is unearned is just a moral judgement, so it leads to endless emotional debates over whether taking risk, making capital more available, etc. are things people ought to get paid for. The free-market concept is more interesting, because it’s objective, but it’s pretty unknowable — unless you’re in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, you can’t really run the natural experiment of removing someone from the timeline.1 On top of that, most people simply won’t accept such simple, restrictive definitions of “earned” and “unearned”. So these arguments just never resolve.
But when AOC says “unearned”, she seems to mean something else:
You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that, right?
AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can’t get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.
The obvious rebuttal here is to invoke Taylor Swift. The singer’s net worth is estimated at $2 billion. She got those billions from her share of ticket sales, merchandising, and music sales; unlike many artists, Swift owns her entire music catalog.
Formally, AOC is right in this case — Swift did become a billionaire with market power. Intellectual property — the ability to own your own music catalog and charge people to download your songs — is a form of government-granted monopoly. But would AOC really claim that every writer, every photographer, every artist isn’t earning their income? I doubt it. Meanwhile, Swift didn’t obviously break any rules, abuse labor laws, pay anyone less than they’re worth, etc.
But OK, Taylor Swift is the exception here. Most billionaires are more traditional types of businesspeople, who don’t obviously have celebrity superstar appeal or sell their personal artistic output. How should we think about the typical billionaire? Is AOC right that they only amass vast fortunes by either breaking the law and/or hurting the economy?
If so, it means that the vast majority of the U.S. economy — along with both the wealth and the jobs that economy has generated for the middle class — is built on illegality and unfairness. That’s a breathtaking indictment of the entire capitalist system, and it goes way too far. We do need to think about how much to tax the super-rich, but that discussion should absolutely not start from the assumption that all great fortunes were ill-gotten.
2026-05-08 14:22:14
I sat down today to write a post about how Barack Obama was a good President, and then I remembered that I already wrote it, back in 2022:
What’s funny is that back in 2022, I was aiming my defense of Obama at progressive critics, but today I was going to write in response to his conservative critics. And yet the post I was planning to write today is very similar to the one I wrote before.
The commentariat has a very interesting relationship with the 44th President. Obama is still incredibly popular — far more popular than Trump, Biden, Bush, or Clinton:
And yet among hyper-engaged politics enthusiasts, almost everyone bashes Obama. Progressives bash him for not being the left-wing hero of their dreams, moderate liberals bash him for not being successful enough at building the foundations for enduring Democratic electoral success, and conservatives basically view him as Satan.
The latter group of critics is by far the most rabid and irrational. The political right seems to have made up a fantasy Obama out of whole cloth to blame for everything that has gone wrong in America since 2008. Obama’s administration was probably the most scrupulously clean in American history — the exact opposite of Trump’s — and yet you see right-wing people claim to this day that Obama ran America like a Chicago political machine:
When Obama criticizes wokeness, as he frequently does, you see conservatives say wild things like this:
This is nonsense. Obama has never given a speech about “whiteness” that I’m able to find. In 2019 he was criticizing cancel culture, in 2020 he was bashing “defund the police”, and in 2021 he was back to criticizing wokeness.
In fact, Matt Yglesias wrote a very good thread about how Obama was a moderate:
And yet the ultra-woke leftist Fantasy Obama lives on in the right-wing imagination.
It was seeing these nonsense criticisms that made me want to write a pro-Obama post.
It’s always good to remind people of the facts. But ultimately the rebuttal to the right-wing anti-Obama revisionism should be the same as the rebuttal to the left-wing version: Obama was a good President who did lots of good policies. That’s why the bulk of the American populace remembers Obama fondly. And that’s why commentators of all stripes should discard their fashionable anti-Obama hipsterism and acknowledge the strengths — and the actual weaknesses — of our country’s last truly popular leader.
So anyway, here’s that post from 2022.
Among conservatives, it’s an article of faith that Barack Obama was a terrible President. But who cares — of course they’re going to say that. What’s more interesting is many progressives — not just leftists, but also mainstream liberals — also regard Obama’s presidency as a failure.
To me, this is a case study in how expectations get over-inflated. In 2008, when I was a grad student attending Obama rallies, the atmosphere was electric. Stadiums were packed. Everyone had a T-shirt and a sign. In the lines outside, everyone was talking about how Obama Was Going To Change Everything.
I was pretty enthusiastic about Obama — I had the T-shirt and the sign too — but I remember thinking at the time that a lot of these people were bound to be disappointed. The fact that Obama was the first explicitly progressive President since at least Carter (and really since LBJ) didn’t mean that our economy was going to be transformed. And the fact that Obama was Black didn’t mean that racism was over in America. But I indulged the effusiveness, because I thought hope was always a good thing to have.
Now I’m wondering whether the inflated expectations of 2008 helped contribute to an overly pessimistic appraisal of Obama’s legacy more than a decade later. No, our economy was not fundamentally transformed, nor racial equality achieved. But as President, Obama really did produce an unusual string of accomplishments. He may not have justified the “hope”, but he really did bring some “change”.
Obama was dealt a very difficult hand coming into the presidency, for two reasons. First, we were in the middle of a financial crisis, and heading into the start of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression. Secondly, we were in the era of the unrestrained filibuster, which makes legislation much harder to pass than in FDR’s day even with a congressional majority.
But nevertheless, Obama came into office determined to do his best FDR impression. To be fair, George W. Bush and the Fed had already cooperated to halt the financial crisis with a series of bank bailouts and emergency lending programs. But Bush had been hesitant to go for big fiscal stimulus. Obama was not. As a percentage of GDP, the fiscal stimulus plan he passed through a reluctant Congress in 2009 was bigger than anything other rich countries were doling out:
Compared to the entire New Deal, the spending was not as large. But in terms of how much money it borrowed, Obama’s stimulus went beyond the New Deal:
How effective was this spending? Economic estimates of the effect of fiscal programs are always hard to gauge, since they depend on assumptions. But most researchers who looked into the matter concluded that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act saved millions of jobs, with the infrastructure construction and green investment portions of the bill being particularly effective.
It’s certainly undeniable that the Great Recession ended up being much less painful than the Great Depression, despite being precipitated by financial shocks of approximately equal severity. Unemployment reached 25% in 1933, while unemployment and underemployment combined hit only 17% in 2009-10. And it took us only 6 or 7 years to recover from the drop in per capita GDP inflicted by the 2008 crash, while it took 11 years to recover from the Great Depression.
Of course, a lot of the credit also goes to the Federal Reserve here. But Obama’s bold fiscal action was part of the reason we got a lost half-decade instead of a lost decade. By 2014, the engine of American growth was humming again — and unlike in previous expansions, this time more of the fruits of that growth were going to the people at the bottom of the income distribution.
The ARRA also left behind positive long-term economic legacies that outlasted its recession-fighting effects. The spending fixed a lot of our creaking infrastructure. And its support for the solar and wind industries helped make those technologies cheaper, pushing them down the learning curve and paving the way for the cheap green energy revolution of the 2020s.
There have been three big criticisms of Obama’s recession recovery efforts. First, people allege that the stimulus was too small. Second, many complain that Obama failed to help homeowners enough, allowing massive middle-class wealth destruction. And some believe that Obama wasn’t tough enough on the culprits of the 2008 financial crisis, letting too many bank execs and managers stay in their jobs even after their institutions were bailed out.
I generally agree with these criticisms. Obama could have done better (at least, with a willing Congress). But the same is true of LBJ, FDR, or any successful progressive President in our history. The fact is, Obama’s stimulus had a big positive effect, it was significantly bigger than equivalent efforts in Europe, and it was bigger than anything George W. Bush or John McCain or Hillary Clinton would have done.
But Obama didn’t stop with recession-fighting; like FDR before him, he resolved to use a moment of crisis to make long-term progressive transformations to the way the U.S. economy worked. And one of the biggest problems with our economy was our health care system, which by 2009 was clearly failing us.
Obamacare was meant to be a compromise between national health insurance and the quasi-privatized patchwork mess of America’s existing system. It took its inspiration loosely from the so-called Bismarck Model of health care, where health care is universal but can be provided through either public or private insurers, and more directly from Mitt Romney’s health insurance reform when he was governor of Massachusetts. The main goal of Obamacare was to reduce the number of Americans without health insurance, and it succeeded in this goal:
The reform was not incredibly popular when it was first enacted, but gained popularity in the years after it went into effect:
Now, Obamacare is not a smashing success. It largely failed to restrain the upward trajectory of health care costs; in my opinion, high costs are our system’s biggest problem because they make it politically and economically difficult to increase spending or broaden coverage. A public option, which was dropped from the bill, would have given the government expanded leverage to negotiate down our anomalously high prices. And the Obamacare system did leave 10-11% of Americans uninsured.
But Obamacare is still a landmark achievement. It’s the most significant and sweeping health care reform since Medicaid in 1965. And with the complete failure of Bernie Sanders’ push for nationalized health care, Obamacare is also the most significant and sweeping health care reform we’re likely to see in the current political era.
And despite claims that Obama preemptively compromised away his leverage in a doomed effort at bipartisanship, Obamacare’s passage was a very close-run thing; the recent failure of the Build Back Better bill, and its replacement with the more targeted Inflation Reduction Act, should demonstrate that the ideological diversity in the Democratic party makes truly bold progressive legislation very difficult. FDR’s experience with the cancellation of his “Third New Deal” programs by Southern Democrats is another parallel here.
One of these was the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. After the crisis of 2008 it was clear that finance needed to be reined in once again. Dodd-Frank, enacted in 2010, was a sweeping bill that transformed financial regulation in the United States. It created new government agencies — the Financial Stability and Oversight Council, the Orderly Liquidity Authority, the Office of Financial Research, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It endowed the Fed and the FDIC with new regulatory powers. And it created the Volcker Rule, which bans many kinds of proprietary trading by systemically important banks.
All of these measures were aimed at curbing the excesses of the pre-2008 financial system, and making sure that a similar crisis doesn’t happen again. Normally, it’s hard to evaluate the success of such restrictions, because crises that don’t happen are the proverbial “dog that didn’t bark” — if you wash your hands every day and don’t get sick, should you keep washing your hands, or stop? Etc. etc. The financial sector definitely seems to have calmed down and become less excessive since 2008, but this could also be due to the chastening effects of the crisis itself.
But in the case of Dodd-Frank, we can say a little bit more, because only a decade after the act’s passage we got the Covid shock. Yes, emergency lending programs kept the economy afloat, but there was no giant wave of defaults on bank loans even after the emergency programs ended. There was no overhang of toxic assets on bank balance sheets, whose uncertain value kept banks from lending and kept counterparties from knowing whether banks were solvent.
Meanwhile, banks are lending and business is booming. There was great fear that Dodd-Frank would lead to a decline in business formation, which had already been anemic for years. But new business formation started actually trending up after Dodd-Frank came into effect. And it spiked in the pandemic and has remained high since then:
Meanwhile, mortgage lending is robust and there has been another homeownership boom, but this time to borrowers with better credit than in the 2000s.
So the banking sector seems to be more robust, and it seems to be doing its job. I’d call that a win for Dodd-Frank and for Obama — and one that very few people talk about these days. Just like in the Depression, reining in an out-of-control finance sector seems to have had long-lasting salutary effects.
No President can do very much without the cooperation of Congress. FDR was stymied by a conservative Congress in the late 1930s, while Reagan was frustrated by Congressional Democrats. In 2010 the Tea Party Congress roared into power and made further big legislation impossible during Obama’s final 6 years in power. Obama was forced to fall back on executive-branch regulatory authority to make further policy changes, and this is simply much less powerful than Congressional legislation (as it should be).
But even so, Obama managed to get some important things done. There is a piece of un-passed legislation called the DREAM Act, that would shield from deportation anyone who was brought to America illegally as a child. This is an extremely popular idea, but nativists consistently manage to block the legislation in Congress. So in 2012, Obama used his regulatory authority to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, basically refusing to deport anyone who would be protected by the DREAM Act if it passed. This protected hundreds of thousands of people from undeserved deportation.
In his second term, Obama also implemented the Clean Power Plan, which used regulatory authority to order states to reduce carbon emissions by whatever means they chose. The plan was canceled by Trump after just a couple of years, so it didn’t have a chance to make a big short-term impact on carbon emissions. But it probably did spur states to start taking a harder look at solar and wind power, which had come down in price enormously in the years before the plan was released. And it seems plausible that that nudge helped accelerate us toward the renewable transition that is now gathering force.
DACA and the Clean Power Plan were modest but real (and in my opinion, positive) achievements.
On domestic policy, the combination of the ARRA, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank represent greater policy accomplishments — and more progressive accomplishments — than any Democratic President since LBJ. They were done in 2 years, which is a lot faster than LBJ or FDR accomplished their reforms. And they were accomplished in the face of a difficult institutional environment, where the unrestrained filibuster makes it nearly impossible to pass truly bold legislation with a simple majority.
Overall, Obama effectively addressed the severe domestic policy challenges he inherited from the previous administration. He restrained the financial sector and cleaned up the damage it had done to the economy, restoring us to robust growth. And at the same time, he managed to make long-term headway on the hard problem of healthcare, while also using regulatory authority to effect minor progress on immigration and climate change.
I call that a major success on domestic policy. People who think Obama’s domestic record represents a failure are simply experiencing the letdown from their own impossibly high expectations.
On foreign policy, however, Obama’s record is more mixed. On the War on Terror, Obama was mostly successful — he killed bin Laden, extricated the U.S. from the pointless peacekeeping operation in Iraq, and drew down most of our presence in Afghanistan. He handled the emergence of ISIS effectively as well, leading to its relatively swift defeat. As a result, the War on Terror was effectively concluded, though of course terrorism as a military tactic will remain and Islamic fundamentalist regimes like the Taliban will not entirely vanish from the Earth.
On the Arab Spring and the wars that followed, Obama’s record is more mixed, but I’m not convinced there’s much more he could have done. U.S. appetite for further military adventures in the Middle East was nil. Obama gets criticized fairly equally for failing to intervene more in Syria and for intervening too much in Libya. So I don’t agree that this represents a dramatic failure for Obama, even though it was hardly a success either.
But it turns out that both the War on Terror and the Arab Spring were largely distractions from the true looming foreign policy threat — the reemergence of great-power conflict. Obama’s weak response to Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory ultimately ended up encouraging Putin’s further adventurism and leading to the current catastrophic war. In Asia, Obama refused to acknowledge the importance of Xi Jinping’s accession to power and the country’s concomitant aggressive, nationalistic turn. He remained overly enamored with the failed Clintonian idea that engagement would make China more progressive, and his “pivot to Asia” was too little, too late. Obama might possibly have used the exigency of the Great Recession to revive U.S. industrial policy and start competing effectively with China in high-tech manufacturing, but — apart from a few minor, halting efforts — he didn’t even really try.
He was so occupied with fighting the problems of the present that he wasn’t able to concentrate on the problems of the future. And so now we find ourselves racing to catch up.
But as I see it, the verdict on Obama on domestic policy has to be that he made great headway on the problems he inherited from Bush — a devastated financial sector, a collapsing economy, a large number of uninsured people, and a still-scary Islamist threat. He was a crisis President, and he beat back the crisis. The bitterness and regret that many progressives now feel toward his administration is a function of their own inflated expectations going in.
