Richard Hanania

Great thread. Science is mostly fake because people don’t want to admit we don’t have the tools to find small effects in the complexity of the real world. We should focus on making policy around big obvious facts that don’t need complex methods, a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

This new paper is the best academic treatment I've seen of how civil rights law led to wokeness. Framed the issue in ways I hadn't thought of before. Must read for those interested in the topic. From @GailHeriot

Great listen. Not many people are discussing the war with anything resembling objectivity, indispensable work. Highly recommended.

John Shifrinson wrote an important paper on how the US broke a no NATO expansion pledge to the Soviet Union, which led us here. He’s apparently been driven off Twitter by the mob that only heard of Ukraine last week. Very fitting for the current moment.

Must-read on the relationship between Zelensky and the Ukrainian far right. These forces would not let him make peace in the East. Think of the relationship between McFaul types and Biden, radicals are driving the conflict.

Good read. The view put forth of Iraq is correct, even less sympathetic than normal decision making because it was completely a crisis of choice. This captures the emotional and fast paced nature of decision making in crises, and how it can go wrong.

Anne Applebaum is worth reading not because she's insightful, but to see how self-deluded and lacking in self-awareness elites can be. Take this description of modern dictatorships, which are run by elite networks. Like this doesn't describe all regimes.

I think one of the best is a review article by my colleagues Avshalom Caspi and his partner, Terrie Moffitt.

For those who are unfamiliar with the behavioral genetics literature, Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption is still a great resource, although it was written before the era of cheap DNA sequencing.

Her book is great because as a mother she said, well, she’s an economist and empiricist and so she thought she’d look at the data and she saw how little empirical basis there was for what people were saying you should do.

Good thread. Thinking in terms of creating jobs for some small privileged groups and then having efficiency be an afterthought instead of the opposite is what’s wrong with a lot of economic policy.

Great discussion of GDP, and why it’s pretty much useless for making comparisons over long time periods.