The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Economic Inequality | Glenn Loury | EP 245

i had this client who was a mathematical genius clinical client he taught me a lot of things i didn't know i hadn't learned as a statistician and one of the things he talked to me about was the pareto principle and so i went and looked into that in some depth and so i found for example that it's so such a strange phenomenon it's like the square root of the number of people operating in a specific discipline produce half the output that's the law and so there's a thousand scientists working on a particular in a sub-dis in a discipline 30 of them publish half the papers and you can look across it's the same with basketball hoops successfully managed hockey goals scored soccer goals scored records produced books written books sold records sold it's like everywhere this this law this weird square root law sometimes people sum that up as the 80 20 principle but it's way worse yeah it's way worse than that [Music] hello everybody i'm pleased today to have as my guest professor glenn c lowry merton p stoltz professor of economics at brown university he holds a ba in mathematics from northwestern and a phd in economics from mit he's published widely as an economic theorist and researcher has lectured throughout the world and is one of america's leading analysts of racial inequality he's been elected a distinguished fellow of the american economics association a member of the american philosophical society and of the u.s council on foreign relations and is a fellow both of the economic story econometrics society and the american academy of arts and sciences his youtube channel podcast the glenn show often co-hosted with professor john mcwhorter a linguist at columbia and a recent guest on my youtube channel has attracted an increasingly wide audience i'm hoping to talk with professor lowry about income distribution the pareto principle his shifting political and religious beliefs racial inequality etc as well as his public presence on youtube and via podcast thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me today i'm very much looking forward to this conversation good to be with you jordan i'm excited great great so maybe we could start by i'd like to get to know you a little bit so how did you how did it come about that you developed an academic career well i was a working-class kid in chicago and uh got to a junior college i i married quite young i dropped out of college i found my way back to school at a junior community college in chicago and had a math teacher calculus teacher who saw that i was really really good at differentiating and integrating you know that i was that i was good at these little mathematical puzzles he said you're a smart kid you know and it was 1970 it was uh right you know at the height of uh the vietnam protest and the black power and all that northwestern university wanted to recruit uh black kids from chicago to come and study there and i got recommended to their attention and i ended up with a full scholarship at northwestern where i discovered a serious quantitative study in mathematics and in economics i took graduate courses while an undergraduate at northwestern in both math and econ and found myself at mit as a graduate student in the early 1970s took a phd there um did you know did you know that you had a mathematical bent before you before you were discovered so to speak at the community college i did i i was always good at math i i was doing slide rule and logarithms and stuff when i was in the sixth grade i was uh teaching my fellow eighth graders from a algebra you know problem set book after class because it was just a hobby that i that i loved i was always good at math but i had not had the opportunity to get a really serious education uh until i got to northwestern and that's when things things took off all for me and mit you know it was the best probably the best economics department in the world in the early 1970s with students from all over who were quite outstanding scholars and and i i really found my niche found my niche there what i loved about it was formal modeling applied to social questions i liked math but it was arid and abstract uh and it was the early 1970s one wanted to be working on social issues somehow and economics was exactly right for me because i found that you could explore these questions with a kind of rigor and a kind of disciplined uh quantitative specification and you know deductive logic and and applied mathematics not deep not really really deep mathematics but uh you know serious applied mathematics so it was a natural fit for me you know i liked i took a clinical research degree and i liked the science a lot the research science but i really liked the fact that my clinical practice enabled me to sort of nail that down to earth all the time so that was a lovely balance as well and also sort of fed my interest in social issues more at the individual level than say the sociological level where did you become convinced i mean you've got this mathematical bent and and you were trained at least at the bachelor's level in mathematics per se how convinced are you that the application of mathematics to economic models produces results that are actually applicable to the real world oh well that's a big one applicable to the real world um i mean i think what you're doing in uh formal economics this is a big question early in the 20th century when people like paul samuelson who was one of my teachers was beginning to apply you know the kind of mathematics that you would see in uh theoretical physics uh on dynamical systems or you know this kind of apply and it was basically differential and integral calculus and differential equations and so on apply it to classical problems and economics and a lot of people thought well that's kind of taking us away from the real world and that's a kind of you know counting angels on the head of a pen a kind of you know abstract and and it's true that one can get lost in the abstraction uh but i think there are deeper insights that can be generated through the application of mathematics that are closely connected to the real world this is not empirical science this is this is theoretical but it's it's a you kind of get to the bottom of it i mean i could give an example so the invisible hand theorem from adam smith this is the late 18th century as you know is uh if you let people pursue profit their own interest uh at prices that are commonly uh observed by everybody and they're in competition with one another then the outcome is going to be socially efficient it's going to be pareto efficient you were talking about pareto just a minute ago it's going to be pareto efficient now that's kind of a deep insight in what does it depend upon and i i uh think that uh the 20th century characterization of what we mean by competition what we mean by price has been common to all people and profit-seeking and self-interested on the part of consumers it kind of crystallizes exactly what you have to be assuming about the behavior of individuals about the institutional setting in order for confidence in the efficiency of capitalist enterprise to be justified now it turns out that those conditions and people like kenneth arrow the late great kenneth arrow the economist he was at stanford at the end of his career and others uh formalized this at mid 20th century turns out that those assumptions are fairly rigid those those assumptions are fairly demanding there's there's plenty of reason to believe that they may fail and seeing what the consequences of the failure of those assumptions are is something that is facilitated by formalizing uh the problem and i mean i could give other examples in political theory that kenneth arrow again he has a famous uh book called social choice and individual values and then that book is a theorem which he has to employ rigorous mathematics to demonstrate but the theorem says that if you're looking for a mechanism that for just about any kind of society can aggregate individual preferences in a coherent and rational way in order to formulate a social decision rule rooted in those individual preferences unless your rule is dictatorial where you designate one person to be the decision maker for everybody else you will be looking in vain it's an impossibility theorem there are no mechanisms majority rule doesn't satisfy all the rationality requirements et cetera et that yeah it's cetera to me in some ways and and enlightening and others let me see if i can rephrase that and question you a little bit about that so well when i think about these sorts of problems psychologically um in terms of how people are able to make decisions to act successfully in the world i see that we're always contending in some sense with with genuine uncertainty and the the future is in some sense actually unpredictable and so and none of us are smart enough to figure out exactly what's coming and what we should do and so i tend to view the free market as a giant computational device that does the best job that we can of computing what's valuable at any given point across the you know as vast a number of individuals as we can possibly manage and it isn't exactly that i think that that works it's that i think i can't see how anything else that we could possibly do could work better and so they did and i'm not an economist and i'm certainly not a mathematician there might be all sorts of problems with that sort of line of theorizing but i i see it as distributed decision making that's you know a consequence at least to some degree of of the max maximum free choice among the individuals concerned now i know there's such thing as market failures and et cetera but am i way up way out exactly right you're you're in friedrich von hayek territory i mean you who you know makes this argument in a very classical way uh because information is diffuse in society and the idea that a central bureau of government uh fiat could uh effectively manage all the different trade-offs and coordination problems and relative valuations and so forth you know the computer's not big enough to be able to do that and moreover the information is not in one place the information is in the hands of many many different decision makers but to the the the uh engine that makes that intuition of yours work is prices it's the fact that people are seeing prices the prices carry all the information they need about the relative merits of one or another course of action for themselves already incorporating the kinds of calculations that a central decision maker would find it impossible to to carry out so i i think the way you summarize the problem of the market being a mechanism for calculating very difficult allocation problems to the best effectiveness that's available to us not perfect to be sure i think that's correct and yes market failures are when that process goes wrong and it's usually when the prices don't reflect all the different costs as for example in the climate change yeah well that that's a problem of temporality to some degree right because we can't compute costs across all possible time frames simultaneously and so when you're talking about something that might have a long-term cost it's like well how long term of cost can we expect to adapt to um you know if it's 150 years in the future well we're all dead and it's very difficult for us to take such things into account and also our prediction our margin of error expands terribly as we move out into the future so okay so i want to reverse that for a second this will have some bearing on our later discussion maybe so i i kind of like the idea that the future is unpredictable per se and that you need distributed decision-making power but i also spent a lot of time studying cognitive ability and personality and so what researchers have concluded essentially is that if you study cognitive ability which is something like the ability to manipulate abstractions at some rapid rate you find that it collapses statistically into a single dimension whereas personality collapses into five dimensions and that's c this is g s g essentially yes and it's not much different you could you can get a pretty rough approximation of g by taking any set of a hundred questions that require abstraction to solve and just averaging the score it'll be correlated with g at like 0.7 or 0.8 which is a whopping correlation by social science standards and so but anyways you know the thing about let me let me ask you a question but i'm not a psychologist here's my sort of statistically trained understanding of that which is that while we may not be able to put our finger on any particular neural pathway or any particular uh biological process of going activity going on in the brain nevertheless we think that there is an ability or an aptitude that manifests itself in the solution to these abstract kinds of uh cognitive problems we're going to call it g and we're going to measure it by the confluence of a person's performance across a range of different kinds of tests there's some a factor analysis analytic kind of distraction yes exactly and you're saying that no matter what the tests are kind of it all collapses down to this this one uh it doesn't matter what the tests are you could take any set of 100 random questions that require abstraction to solve and you'll pull out something that will be correlated with g if you average the scores at about 0.7 or eight it's it's remarkably unitary it's stunningly unitary when someone like stephen j gould is i recall him yeah he's wrong okay like and here's why you know he took an issue with well he took issue with factor analysis he said well that's not real it's like well is the average real yeah it depends what you mean by real if if it has a one factor solution it's basically identical to the average not exactly because all the questions aren't related to that average equally but for in the case of g for all intents and purposes it's indistinguishable from the average and any random set of 100 questions will do i mean i looked into this deeply because we built personality models my research team and and and they'd be reasonably influential in the field of personality so i understand that there are phenomena that are associated with human psychology they don't have a uni-dimensional solution but gee man it's a killer it's a black hole it sucks all cognition into it and there's no escaping it so it's very now and so why brought that up we will go back to that but why brought that up is because it's kind of weird to see that there is this cognitive ability that does allow for prediction of the future that is associated reasonably strongly statistically with long-term say life economic success in some ways that flies in the face of the idea that a central authority can can't model the future because we have a central authority and i can speak about it biologically for a second so you move your body voluntarily with your motor cortex and the prefrontal cortex grew out of that over an evolutionary time frame and what the prefrontal cortex does is represent action in abstraction so that you can assess well its mechanisms but also its likely outcome before you implement it in action and that seems to be it's not a specifically human skill but we've developed that far more than any other creature and so and it seems to work because people with higher iqs tend to do better say economically well they do better across a large variety of of measures so well that's sort of that but it does fly in the face of that need for distributed decision making i don't see that i don't see how it is that the ability to predict a person's uh i don't know income or whatever on the basis of their cognitive ability correlates or connects to the ability of someone sitting in an office somewhere to know how much you know uh farm material should be shipped here and yeah maybe it's a matter of complexity you know it maybe that's what and diversity and and the fact that it's it's not a one-dimensional thing what we're after when we when we ask what people want they have preferences that are complex and they they and and i don't know who is the person who wants a cool room or a warm room in the wintertime uh they have to reveal that to me by the actions that they take something like that yeah well so maybe it's maybe it's the case that the central iq authorities so to speak has a bounded universe that's basically private in which it can make reasonable predictions but once you scale the problem up to a certain degree of complexity you have to switch to more distributed forms of cognition that could easily be the case can i predict whose marriage is going to survive based on g not that i know of you can predict whose marriage is going to survive to some degree based on trait neuroticism which is the negative emotion dimension and so higher levels of neuroticism increase the probability of divorce and that's part of the reason why most divorces are initiated by women that's going to get you in trouble george yeah whatever i get in trouble all the time but look i mean it's not a sexist thing to say i mean there's reasons that women are more sensitive to negative emotion they're smaller the the cost of sex is higher for them and they have to be finely attuned to the dangers posed to infants and so it's an evolutionary there's nothing wrong with the fact they have higher levels of negative emotion it's costly for them as individuals to some degree because it's unpleasant and physiologically demanding but it makes perfect sense given that the world's probably more dangerous for women especially when they have infants everything you said makes a lot of sense to me why is it so difficult to make statements such as the ones that you've made about the intrinsic or natural differences between men and women based on the very argument that you gave that there's good evolutionary reasons why well i i can play devil's advocate for that so as a psychologist i do see a technical reason in some sense for separating biological sex from the concept of gender and the reason for that is that i think the best description of gender is probably in personality and men and women's personality are more the same than they are different so the curves overlap more than they differ the biggest differences are a negative emotion and compassion slash politeness which is agreeableness and women are higher in both reliably but there are no shortage of women who have a masculine temperament and no shortage of men who have a feminine temperament they're in a minority but the diversity is there and so when you say something like well on average females differ in this way it's hard for people who don't think statistically to sort of separate that out from well that means everyone's like that and well they're not there's tremendous individual very five dimensions of variability is a lot of variability and so and there is more similarity between men and women than there are differences the biggest difference is b is in interest actually and this is kind of interesting for someone mathematically minded because there isn't much evidence that women and men differ in mathematical ability at a cognitive level maybe boys have a slight edge in spatial reasoning and that might yeah it might be linked to testosterone and i think that's probably true but it's it's slight but they have a whopping different difference in interest and women are reliably more interested in people and men are reliably more interested in things compared to the other sects i read charles murray's book human diversity and uh the section of that book on jitter is etched very powerfully into my mind i thought he made many strong arguments there and around this point about differences in interest and then of course that causes people to invest in different kinds of behavior and that leads to differentiation in their occupational profiles and others well it's especially true at the extremes because you know even if the curves overlap to a large degree in the middle so that most men and women are roughly the same if the great mathematicians let's say are one percent of the population which is probably an overestimate then they're almost all going to be men despite that huge overlap and despite the lack of cognitive difference i've been a i've been a chess player a chess player i'm just going to say all my life and the the dominance of men amongst the world-class chess players is you know it's very very prominent i mean they basically are very few women who play at the top top rank of uh of chess players yeah well you have to kind of be obsessed with something like chess two two to get that far right i mean it's a real specialization at that level and so if you're not compelled by your interest you won't do it despite your ability a relatively small difference in ability at the right tail of the distribution and spatial cognition for example might lead to a very large difference in the number of hours people allocate to developing their chess playing skills and then that would account for the gender difference and and top chess performance except yeah well and you also see this i got in trouble for this a lot but but it's true so that's life in in in the scandinavian countries it's proved very difficult to get women into engineering and men into nursing and as those countries have become more gender equal in their legislation and their social policies and likely their society those differences have got bigger not smaller so it's it's a stunning it's just underwater i wonder what you would say to this argument which is okay okay uh maybe you guys have a point but the main political imperative is equality for men and women that's a political imperative and that means that we have to sustain majorities in favor of the kinds of laws and regulations we need to achieve that when you talk candidly and casually as lauren summers did when he was president of harvard university i'm sure you know the incident that i'm oh yes about women and why there aren't so many at the top of mathematics and and uh the stem disciplines when you talk casually about that you give aid and comfort to uh the forces that uh want to resist equality and and you kind of feed or fuel something that needs to be uh needs to be opposed not need not to be encouraged so you ought to censor yourselves a little bit have some uh modesty in the way in which you talk about these issues because the stakes are very high something like that do you find that yeah well i'd agree with oh yeah but you know the way i deal with that as i don't speak casually about such things like i i i did my research on these topics this is years of research and i was dead serious about partly because we built practical tools to assess personality and cognitive ability as well as i studied it as a researcher and you know as an interested as an interested clinician and so none of this is casual and no i don't think that censoring myself is the right idea because i think to really say if we wanted to eliminate those gender differences in occupation the intensity of government intervention that would be required would tilt things towards something that's too much too totalitarian you'd have to interfere with people so much to accomplish that it's a one standard deviation at least difference in interest between men and women and people and things and then if you do foster social equality like the scandinavians have clear they've clearly done that by any reasonable measure and the fact that those differences get bigger it's like you just can't walk away from that it's not what anyone expected on the left or the right no one expected that and what seems to happen is if you give men and women every opportunity in some ways they get much more different and so you know hey we didn't expect that but that's science isn't it all very very frequently things that you don't expect happen so yeah okay well you you persuade me on that one yeah well it's not easy to see how you could set up government policies that would violate people's intrinsic interest and one of the things you do learn as a personality researcher is that those interests are deep they're biologically rooted in many ways so if you're an open person so that's create that's creativity dimension that's deep deeply rooted inside of you it's a fundamental element of who you are it can't be easily trifled with or safely trifled with by well let's say by political interests and i really saw that as a clinician because i'd have people who were creative as clients and if they weren't doing creative work they could hardly stand to be alive well this is a theme that might apply across a number of areas the theme being a pursuit of a faux egalitarianism an equality in a place where the natural order of things would not have equality be expected but the ideology of egalitarianism uh is set against the uh objective reality of the of the difference that we're talking about and people want to make equal in any case we want to have we want to force we want to force engineering departments to recruit women so that they have a 50 50 balance or whatever it might be we want to subsidize or tax or discourage and encourage people's behavior so as to bring about this equal outcome well you know as a heuristic you know as a heuristic you might say that if you look at outcome and you see gender differences or ethnic differences or racial differences sometimes you can reliably infer barriers and prejudice and so as a heuristic it's not bad right because that points to a place where there might be a problem but then we do have some areas where we have high resolution knowledge like let's say with regard to interest in people versus things and so then we can say well wait a sec that difference doesn't look like it's a consequence of arbitrary prejudice so but i think i don't like well look one of the things i was interested in talking to you about you've written a fair bit about dif racial differences in incarceration in the united states yeah and you've made a case and i don't want to put words in your mouth but i'm trying to sum up what i understand that the fact of those differential incarceration rates not only has a variety of negative medium and long-term consequences for everyone but that it does point to a kind of system systemic problem that's fundamentally discriminatory and to some degree that's use of that heuristic i would say and and in a perhaps in in an entirely appropriate way it's complicated but am i have i got your argument reasonably i wouldn't have said or i wouldn't say today in any case fundamentally discriminatory without unpacking that yeah i i would say that the disparity uh here you have the state that deprives people of liberty it's a very massive footprint incarceration in the united states and there's a huge racial disparity in it there's also a racial disparity in criminal offending i would make the case that even if you could account for every single person incarcerated uh by reference to well they broke the law they did the crime they're doing the time and even if you could count roughly that the african-american over-representation in prison is commensurate with their over-representation amongst criminal offenders still the fact that this is the state coming down with a hammer on people and confining them and depriving them of their liberty at the scale that it's engaged in given the history of our society where racial difference is such a fraught and sensitive matter given the existence of stereotypes in the minds of people that are buttressed by the over-representation of african-americans in prison given the political alienation in the communities from which the prisoners are coming and all that can be loaded onto that in terms of uh of a lack of a pers of the granting of legitimacy to the forces of order in the society given the history which is a history that is marred by racial etc etc that it would be a bad thing for that disparity to persist and it's it's an outcome that government ought to work to counteract not because they think it's mainly a consequence of discrimination at least ongoing current contemporary discrimination but because the ultimate stability of our of our social order depends upon not allowing that to fester uh unattended right i've said i've said a million cases each one rightly decided can still add up to a great and historic wrong and that's the sense in which i lamented uh this is years ago i don't write so much about it anymore but in any case i lamented the racial disparity in incarceration i thought it was bad for our society even if it reflected mainly disparity in criminal offending because of course criminal offending doesn't fall from the sky either it's a consequence of social structure and social organization to some degree as well as the personality and moral uh characteristics of different uh individuals in society but yeah i was concerned about mass incarceration primarily because i thought it made solving the american dilemma all that much more difficult uh to to accomplish yeah well you also wrote to some degree about its its effect on disrupting families you know on an ongoing and continuing basis and you know i've i've spent a fair bit of time trying to wrestle with the potential role that fathers play in families in relationship let's say to the disciplinary structures that are applied both to young men and young women and and it certainly seems to me that in these differential incarceration rates are tremendously destabilizing for the fundamental family structure among well what and when you've looked at that let me ask you two questions do what do you think the data show about the severity of sentencing for blacks versus whites in the u.s for crimes of the same magnitude and i know that's not bottom level data but how do you see that because you talked about criminal offending yeah now you can find studies where they are are going to see some modestly more severe punishment conditional on the crime for black offenders but my general sense of the matter and i rest here on my service on a committee of the national academy of sciences uh that reported maybe seven or eight years ago uh causes and consequences of high rates of incarceration in the united states my understanding of that literature from people like uh he's up in years now but he's been very influential alfred bloomstein he's a statistical criminologist at carnegie mellon university he's kind of the godfather of these studies there are many other studies my understanding is that you can account cannot account for more than 15-20 percent of the racial disparity in people in prison by reference to differences in the uh length of sentence or the likelihood of being convicted and sentenced conditional on offense okay so they're great nothing great no it's not nothing it's not nothing but it's the great bulk of the disparity is uh differences in offending uh uh what about the probability of being arrested for an offense okay another 15 or 20 percent these things are going to be hard to estimate aren't they probably oh yeah you're not observing the non-arrested offenders uh you're observing you're observing user surveys of people who have been offended against and in those surveys there'll be reports about the perceived race of the person who's offending so maybe you could attempt to back into some estimate of the conditional likelihood of being uh apprehended given uh race and there might be some racial difference there 15 sounds like that could be a lot yeah well it could go the other way too because it isn't obvious to me whether the black community in the u.s is over policed or under policed i think you could make a theoretical argument for either what what do you think in reporting the reporting of offenses is also going to differ by social location uh domestic violence for example may or may not be reported with the same degree of uh fidelity uh across social class and racial uh identity i actually don't know this to be the case but it's certainly plausible that so it's it's it's pretty slippery um but i'd say the the majority of the racial disparity is a reflection of disparity and offending the difference in sentencing conditional on the fence may differ by race disfavoring blacks now uh in the drug area that's a specific thing where it's observed that drug use patterns don't differ nearly as much by race as drug incarceration patterns do but i explain that in my mind by reference to the fact that open-air drug markets are going to attract on the selling side uh people from the you know who don't have many positive alternative opportunities to use their time it's a low-paying and very dangerous trade it's no surprise that i have to go to the wrong side of the tracks in order to engage in a you know prohibited commerce then the people who are going to be engaged in that commerce will to be disproportionately from disadvantaged communities um so on do you i talked to some psychologists for a fair bit of time it was margo wilson and and uh unfortunately i can't remember the name of her her uh martin daley margot wilson and martin daley they've done interesting work looking at the relationship between economic inequality and crime and what they've showed state by state and country by country is that and county by county in the u.s is that the higher the rates of inequality economic inequality in a given geographical locale the higher the rates of aggression and criminality and what they and they studied chicago the inner city of chicago specifically in relationship to this research and their hypothesis was that young men it's very important for the sexual success of young men to be on an upward path in relationship to status and in places with high inequality that's an indication that their upward mobility is truncated in various ways and as a consequence they're highly likely to turn to violence and criminality as an alternative means of obtaining status and that's part of what's driving the sorts of things that you're describing and they're they're look they show very high correlations between income inequality county by county and rates of of male aggression especially among young men and like the correlations are 0.6 0.7 unbelievably high for social science so well that's interesting that's news to me but that that's a seeking status and when you can't do it by uh high income then you do it by uh you do it by hooker by crook because it's so fundamentally important and especially for young men because for there's here's another gender difference they're competing for the services of young women is that is that yeah status as a marker for competence way more than young men do so young women are much choosier as sexual partners for obvious reasons this cost to sex is a lot higher for them and what they are looking for is something like competence in climbing social ladders and then they use social status as a marker for that and so that question if there are these deep psychological social psychological dynamics at work how much influence can culture you know play in affecting people's behavior can we change the script or are we locked in are we locked in by these kind of very deep imperatives of the sort that you would just i would say that we're constrained but within that constraint there's there's no shortage of room for choice you know it's sort of like chess there's rules but man there's a lot of ways to to to affect the chess game and these more biological factors are more like they're more like game rules and it doesn't in some real sense doesn't decrease the range of choice it shapes the game and then socially well status is going to be more important as a marker for male desirability than for female desirability we're not going to change that but what we can do is restructure social systems so that non-violent means of obtaining status are available as much as possible to everyone and that's sort of the equality of opportunity argument except maybe from a biological perspective and it's also the inequality issue is also extremely interesting as far as i'm concerned because what their work suggests and it's pretty damn solid i i believe that um inequal economic inequality as such poses a destabilizing threat to societies as such and the reason for that is that that it promotes young male violence particularly and so whether you're on the left or the right it's like inequality is a problem if it gets too extreme things get violent so adolescent for conservatives as well as as well as people on the left so okay but inequality is inevitable is it not and well that's another thing i wanted to talk to you about well let's talk about that and because i had this client who was a mathematical genius clinical client he taught me a lot of things i didn't know i hadn't learned as a statistician and one of the things he talked to me about was the pareto principle and so i went and looked into that in some depth and so i found for example that it's so such a strange phenomenon it's like the square root of the number of people operating in a specific discipline produce half the output that's the law and so there's a thousand scientists working on a particular in a sub-dis in a discipline 30 of them publish half the papers and you can look across it's the same with basketball hoops successfully managed hockey goals scored soccer goals scored records produced books written books sold records sold it's like everywhere this this law this weird square root law sometimes people sum that up as the 80 20 principle but yeah it's way worse way i heard it yeah it's way worse than that it's way worse than 80 20. yeah well it's it implies for example if you have an organization with ten thousand people a hundred of them doing half the work you know if you have ten it's three and that's not so bad but at ten thousand it's a hundred and you think no way it's like well if you meet some of those people who might be in that hundred you you might think differently so and this looks like this some fundamental rule and so you're interested in income distribution and so what do you make of this sort of thing well it reminds me of a classic paper by the late economist sherwin rosen university of chicago called the economics of superstars and he starts it out by observing 80 20 like observations by you know let's look at the earnings of tennis players and look at the rank so how much total prize money is won by tennis players and what proportion of it goes to people based on the rank and he gets something like an 80 you know the top you know 20 or 25 tennis players have taken in you know the vast majority of the winnings and it you know record sales by um musicians in various genres of musical production and whatnot similarly the top ones are getting most so he says how can we account for this and uh this i think should be a part of anybody's effort to explain uh the pareto principle as you've uh defined it or the 80 20 rule he says look to produce um something that people want to see you need talent but you also need other resources and so it's the combination of the productivity of the talent which is scarce and distributed in the population and the effectiveness of their ability to command other resources which taken together determine what they will be able to produce all right so you need a combination so imagine one distribution would be talent and so you need to be in say the top ten percent but that's not enough you also need i don't know you need to be in the top ten percent of education say to be a successful research to scientist and the juxtaposition of those two curves produces a real fractional percentage and those people are hyper qualified for that particular enterprise it's something like that he adds another element which is let's take opera singers he uses this example so in the old days before you had high quality sound reproduction such that you could sit in your living room and listen to a recording of an opera singer through your speakers that produced an effect that was almost as good as being in the opera house before that before that you had to actually go to the opera house to hear opera now the opera house can only accommodate a couple of thousand people max so the very very very best opera singers could still only command an audience of a couple hundred hundred thousand people in any given performance which leaves plenty of room for the second third fifth and thirtieth best to be able to travel to the small towns and still make a living but once it becomes possible for the best to record their uh performance and to distribute it in that way the person sitting in the small town has a choice do i go to hear a 20th rate opera singer in the local hall or do i put a recording of the best one on my device now often they would choose to go with the recording rather than to go to the 20th best and that means that the top opera singers are now going to command an even greater share of the market and the insight there is that technological change which permits the most talented to lever their talent to a larger audience is the key to understanding why they get so much of the of the take completely right right well you can so it's like the smaller the game the less the gain at the top but we expand the games continually with technology and recording is an excellent example of that and so i guess what we hope is that we produce enough new games so that everybody can win at something but we're still we're still funneling a tremendous number of resources to people at the top of whatever the game is especially as these games become big so yeah and you see that you see that particular well it's really obvious with money and people complain continually about the top one percent but the problem is is that there's a book called big science little science that was written in about 1962 and the author escapes me at the moment but he did exactly the same sort of analysis for the scientific literature it's exactly the same story so hyper dominance of a tiny minority of people and so there's a natural it's something like positive feedback loops too isn't it because and i've noticed this as i've become more famous i suppose is that you get known and some more people know you and so more people are likely to attend you and then more people are willing to talk to you because you have an audience and so that drives the expansion of the audience and your connection network grows at the same time and you have more resources and so it just it's a pause it's a bunch of positive feedback loops moving upward i think the word network is very important there and i i think what with social media and whatnot and and uh the magnifying the ability of individuals to uh have influence and uh to have influence on people who have influence the the density of that network is a is a tremendous asset for uh uh you know yeah so it makes its competitive position well it makes the problem of inequality a real tough one from the political perspective right because we could and conceptual for that matter because we could perhaps agree that regardless of whether you're on the left or the right you might view inequality on the right as a threat to social stability so i know there's this uh native canadian tribe on the west coast haida the quack quackwacks did the same thing you know in their societies they'd have big chiefs and the big chiefs would just accrue everything and then now and then they'd have a potlatch and give it all away and then their status was dependent on their ability to give a lot away and that stabilized their society now those were made illegal by the canadian government i think about 70 years ago or so but you know they were thought of just some pagan an unnecessary pagan ritual i suppose but i do believe that that was one of their so-called evolved solutions to the problem of the terrible problem of inequality the fact that you know goods tend to accrue in the hands of a few and and the lefties that i see the left political thinkers economic thinkers as well especially the ones on the extreme left they tend to associate that with capitalism but that's a fundamental underestimate of the magnitude of the problem in my thinking and that's a real problem if you're concerned about you know comparatively poor or actually poor people it's way bigger problem i wonder if we could apply the same kind of thinking that we use to explain why uh athlete or a musician or even an entrepreneur might end up at the very right end of the distribution garnering for themselves a great bulk of the of the reward to apply that to the huge financial fortunes that um are uh accumulated either through you know savvy in the marketplace you know i'm a hedge fund guy i know what to buy and when and when to sell or to uh the the fortunes of land holding you know family uh fortunes and things of this kind um i i i wonder whether those simple uh insights uh extend to the institutionalized wealth generating process well i think i think they do to some degree i mean i studied entrepreneurial success as a researcher for quite a long time too because one of the personality factors that predict entrepreneurial ability is this trait openness which is essentially creativity and what defines creative thinkers in part is so here's a simple creativity test and it actually is reasonably predictive of creative capacity both in terms of originality of thought and creative productions as assessed by experts how many uses can you think of for a brick in three minutes gonna write them down or even how many four-letter words can you think of in a minute that start with c that'll be correlated at about point three or four with your creativity depending on how it's measured very simple test and what seems to happen is that creative people when they think of one idea the probability that that will trigger an associated idea is higher especially a distally associated idea so that likely means that creative people have more erroneous ideas as well and then they have to you know what would you say edit them and select but one of the things that makes creative entrepreneurs successful is that they produce a large variety of creative products and then they throw them out in the marketplace and most of them fail but you just need one to hit that pareto point and then you're successful so you throw you know it's you throw some what do you do throw a mess at the wall and see what sticks essentially and most entrepreneurs before they're successful have had a very large number of failures because even if you're intelligent and creative the probability that you'll build a product that's actually timed for the market is extremely low so well what do you do well you create more and that's what happens that's what creative people are essentially biologically predisposed to do so i think that yeah i think that principle that underlying principle of positive feedback loops and you know the combination of scarcity of of of ability and resources i think it accounts for all those inequalities so you know question is what do we do about that well you were saying something i thought interesting a moment ago about how even a right winger ought to be able to see that inequality unrestrained could be dangerous to the stable social order because the losers losers are going to end up having to say one way or the other at the end of the day and you better watch out uh because if they don't have a stake in the system and they're feeling aggrieved and uh without status and dignity uh they may act out in ways that are hard oh they will especially if they're young men absolutely they will they absolutely they will and that is definitely dangerous and so you know partly we've tried to solve that so to speak we in the west by trying to ensure something like equality of opportunity across a wide range of games that's not a bad sort of meta solution right it's like well we can't predict we know that there's going to be wild disparities in outcome and we can't really do anything about that but maybe we can give people something approximating an equal shot at winning some game and that would be better for everyone too because then we can harness their creative resources and it isn't obvious to me that there is a better so technically even i can't see like i don't understand i don't know what a better solution could be now what does that mean in a world where the people who have engineering degrees or gotta got to law school or uh got a good uh uh you know education and and are connected are making six figures and living comfortably and and someone who dropped out of high school is working for thirty thousand dollars a year and just barely getting by what is that ladder guys venue where uh he or she can feel like they're winning the game well i think it depends to some degree on each individual you know i mean you can find status and meaning in your family you have your pursuits outside of your work i'm not saying that money isn't a good singular marker of relative status it's probably the best singular marker there is but it's not the only one right there are diverse there are diverse places where you can attain status and so and you know you know you can be poor and dignified you've certainly met people like that you there you can be poor and admired within your family you can be poor enough decent or outstanding character for that matter and so and that's how that's not exactly a domain that's regulated socially like the economic domain but it's not nothing and so and by the same token you know you can sacrifice a lot of those things to economic pursuit and then you'll have lots of money but man your life sucks and in 50 different ways so i don't know if that's a sufficient solution but it's not nothing but this is not counseling laissez-faire if i understand it it's not saying the government should just withdraw and let the chips fall within may it could be apollo advocating for a policy of some kind of you know everybody needs work that's meaningful uh you know everybody needs a kind of sense of security you know that they're not gonna get sick and not be able to pay the bill they're not gonna get old and not know where the next meal is coming from uh let's guarantee let's try to guarantee to the extent that we can we know it's the world's not just uh perfect and we may not be able to solve all these problems let's let's try to make sure that there's decent housing for someone that's not so they don't have to sleep on their bridge et cetera et cetera and then let then we can let the chips fall with it yeah well it seems to me that societies like well the u.s to some degree but more specifically i would say the scandinavian countries and probably canada would more or less fall into that what ballpark and we fall into a ballpark it's pretty bad metaphor but you know that's kind of what what those democratic socialist countries have tried to establish now it seems to be easier to do that in a smaller country that's more homogeneous in its ethnic and racial grouping and maybe also technically it's easier with a smaller population you the u.s is so damn big it gets very complicated to try to do the same thing you know that those smaller qualities have managed and and then of course there's because you might think of something like a guaranteed a guaranteed income let me ask you something about that yeah maybe it'll bolster the idea so when i was a clinician i worked with a lot of people who were uh impaired in their cognitive ability so they probably had iqs around 80 or lower and so and if if if you're if you have cognitive ability at that range it would be hard for you to master something like folding a letter to get it into an envelope and that's way harder than you think because you have to fold it exactly in thirds you can't be out by more than about an eighth of an inch and so i i had one client i probably trained him for 30 hours to do that well enough so that the letters would go through an automated machine so that he could keep his volunteer job but anyways the us military has been doing cognitive testing since world war one about and they determined i don't remember when and this is part of american legislation that you cannot be inducted into the armed forces if you have an iq i think less than 80. and the reason they determined that is because they couldn't find any military job of any sort that someone who is that cognitively impaired could manage proficiently and you think that's that's a killer issue because it's not like the military isn't highly desirous of pulling people in especially among from say the working class so they were motivated to find the opposite and that's like 10 percent of the population and so here we have a problem and he and no one will face this as far as i can tell liberals are conservatives 10 percent of the population can't really function in the complex cognitive environment and that's what we're producing for everyone to live in and we don't no we can't have a conversation about that because you know the liberal types think well everyone can be trained to do anything which is complete bloody rubbish and the conservatives think well you know if you just buckle down and work away you go and there's some truth in that because conscientiousness does predict long-term economic success but that doesn't deal with this other issue at all it's ten percent of the population of the population they're so impaired in terms of their cognitive functioning that there's no useful word for them in the in the military well you can take that are we talking about in the military well the reason i i think the military example is so compelling is for two reasons is that you know america in particular has used the military as a means of social mobility right because it moves people from the working class upward and that's been a conscious policy decision in part so there's that but the other part is you know often the military is pretty damn hungry for people and so if if they've decided that well this doesn't work it's hard to see well i buy it and that's partly well because i know how much intellectual variability there is between people it's stunning and and terrifying at the same time it's not a positive thing it's it's it's not i don't know existing this idea that we can't find anything for them to do i mean uh but it and and to what extent does you remember the bell curve yeah who could okay yeah i was at harvard when that came out and hernstein was still a professor there so and i only want to talk about a little bit i read the bell curve a couple of times and one of the things hernstein and murray said in that book that really stuck in my mind is that academic types like you and me we virtually never encounter anyone in the lower 50th percentile of the cognitive distribution you know when we think in undergraduates dim they have an iq of 110 and that's like 80th percentile and so you get blinded as you move up the especially the academic ladder you get blinded to the bottom 15 of the cognitive distribution because you just never they're those people are not in your purview they're not in your circle okay i'll take that point i can't use my personal experience but what what i'm chafing at is that okay i'm i'm uh wearing glasses because i don't see very well without them and i'm undoubtedly in the distribution of visual acuity in the bottom i don't know 10 15 but when i put on pair of glasses i am able to function and what i'm what i'm missing here is a consideration of whether or not we can't adapt our institutions of uh you know productivity or human service or education or whatever so as to meet this minimum requirement which is taking everybody for almost everybody giving them something to do giving you something to do yeah well that needs to be done and look i i only add a couple of things to this so in the iq literature because you might think well that's biology and it's immutable okay no not exactly there's this flynn effect has shown that over the last hundred years iq on average has been rising and a huge part of that is probably better nutrition in the lower quartile of the population so that made a huge difference people got smarter because they weren't starving essentially they weren't malnourished and then there is evidence too that so it's not like this is exactly unremediable but the distribution doesn't seem to change much you know what i mean it doesn't pack tighter into the middle you still have the problem that p some people are extremely smart and fast and some people aren't and so well it's a hard pro it's a very very hard problem to solve i'm not saying that we shouldn't solve it and that we shouldn't pay some attention to the people who are struggling at the bottom we absolutely should but it isn't obvious exactly it isn't obvious how to do it so i'll get this guy worked with i mean like i said he probably had an iq maybe something around 80 i would have estimated you know and i tried to find him a job now it was really hard he had a volunteer job in a bike shop for a while and and it was a bike book shop a real you know a small enterprise and he could sort of put books in the shelf although he couldn't sequence them very well and then that place couldn't pay him and so then i got him a volunteer job at a charity and he couldn't do it well enough they were going to fire him and i went and talked to the director of the charity i said you can't fire this guy because he's going to kill him it's like think about this he's 40. he's got a volunteer job at a charity and there he's going to get fired it's like how the hell do you recover from that now he quit two months later anyways and then he got a job with someone who trained dogs and that worked out just fine but you get my point it's like it was virtually impossible to find him a niche and i i tried for with his mother who was extraordinarily devoted to him in a very positive way we tried for three years really to to slot him in somewhere and it was it was virtually impossible so are you thinking that our homeless shelters and the the prisons of the country and so on are basically populated by people such as this who are uh unable to get their foot on the bottom rung no i wouldn't the evidence for a relationship between iq and criminality that's not very strong so i wouldn't say that in relationship to incarceration i i would say it's more likely in homelessness and that sort of thing that's more likely where people you know they fall out of the economy because there isn't anything they can find that will pay them a wage that will enable them to live so but but the iq relationship with criminality isn't very high i'm keenly aware of how politically incorrect this whole conversation you and i are having i i just read a piece in the atlantic i think it was about a woman i believe she's a cognitive psychologist i don't recall her name just now she was at the russell sage foundation and met with a fierce uh pushback uh when she had just attempted to assert that uh variation in human intelligence was associated with variation in human populations with other kinds of oh genetics it was genetics i'm sorry genetic variation wasn't just intelligence it wasn't just intelligence but she was saying look people are different the ability for us to understand the genome much better now allows us to document that to some degree there's distribution in the population and it's associated with the distribution of outcomes that we're concerned about and there was a firestorm approach oh yeah well it's no wonder man you can't dive into the iq literature without coming away like shell shocked in 15 different dimensions i mean because certainly a huge part of g proficiency is biologically what would you say by it has a biological foundation i mean i was reading about john von neumann the other day you know and people who knew him and einstein thought he was way smarter than einstein and that's not nothing he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head when he was 10. two eight-digit numbers oh that's that's a prodigy yeah yeah well he exactly you know he might have had the most he might have had the most magnificent mathematical mind ever and like that's way out on the distribution right i mean he had a huge impact in economic theory by the way and that was just a hobby it was something he was doing out of his back pocket it wasn't even what they really cared about yeah exactly exactly and you meet people like that now and then but not very often you know and and they're so damn smart you just can't bloody well believe it and and and that's the case you know and then with regards to socialization you know well it's pretty easy to make someone dumber but it's not that easy to make them smarter and for obvious reasons you know it's a lot easier to wreck something than it is to improve it and so that is the fact this fact of that pre-determination in some sense really is a sorrowful what would you call it fat it's a sorrowful fact yeah a tragic a tragic reality might be one way of putting it that uh it's simply if given in our in our nature that we have to reckon with and the temptation to want to not see it and not accept it uh is can be very powerful well and i can understand exactly why because well first of all generally the people who discuss such things don't have a lot of hands-on experience with people in the bottom success tile let's say the bottom one-sixth so they just don't know how much difference there is in the range and i've administered iq tests to all sorts of people and you can't believe what people don't know and can't compute it's it's it's beyond comprehension in some ways at the bottom but then also at the top i had a graduate student at harvard she didn't know anything about statistics when i first met her and four months later she was teaching statistics at a graduate level she was unbelievable and she was almost that gifted uh verbally as well now she had some social problems that might have been associated with her remarkable cognitive ability but you know it was unreal she made more progress in four months in the statistical realm than i did in 15 years okay so there are differences amongst us so both ends of the of the spectrum and uh we need to learn how to live with them yeah well part of it is to admit it and and to see if we can do that politically without getting you know bogged down in accusations and the weeds and that's a real difficult thing to do and it's not like i know exactly how to do it but but i'm not going to ignore what i learned and and i'm not going to ignore the social consequences of it it's like life's a lot harder for people in the bottom ten percent of the cognitive distribution there's no the southern the southern poverty law center has classified charles murray as a white supremacist this is an organization that is a watchdog for uh a white supremacist yep i mean not a lot of people are going to stick their head up out of the foxhole if that's what's waiting for him yeah that's for sure that's for sure well you know i would also say one other thing that you know would probably make me unpopular among psychologists too mostly but there isn't a single phenomenon documented in the social sciences that we know more about than the psychometrics of cognitive ability if you throw that out you throw everything else out because not the people who established psychometrics of intelligence also established all the statistical techniques that all social scientists use to assess and evaluate their data you just don't get to throw it out and that's also unfortunate because it's a dismal literature in many ways because the the differential between people is so unbelievably extreme and it matters well here's where we are in in economics there are people who are arguing in popular press and magazines and so forth that you shouldn't put a cognitive ability measure on the right-hand side of your regression regression equation when you're trying to explain wage variation in the population they think that that is a is a morally objectionable thing to do differences amongst people in earnings are to be understood in any way that you can other than well that's totally true it's completely idiotic it's completely idiotic because part of look part of what puts you up in that upper end of the distribution is something like speed right so imagine there's some desirable place to get economically maybe you're designing computer chips that's a good example well if you're faster you're going to get there sooner and then you're going to reap the economic rewards and that speed is assessed with g it's it's a function of g c got computational speed and so and then you know you also might say well these damn tests are culture loaded and that's a reasonable potential objection but i've never seen a culture fair test that has the same validity no one's ever been able to produce them and basically people gave up in the 1960s the best they've ever come up with is the ravens progressive matrices and it's a pretty good so imagine it took a bunch of single tests of of intelligence and then you've you got the manifold which is the average across all tests you could pick the test that correlated best with that manifold and that's the raven's progressive matrices and so and it produces differences so i don't know what to do with that you know you can't throw your hands up and say well it's insolvable but you can't not take it into account because then you underestimate the burden that people at the bottom end of the distribution carry when they're trying to struggle uphill you know and you say well all you have to do is work hard because that's the conservative attitude and conscientiousness is an indic it's personality trait it's an indicator of work ethic and it's correlated with economic outcome at about 0.25 something like that but cognitive ability is correlated at about 0.5 so yeah work hard work really matters but doesn't matter as much as intelligence so yeah you don't have to convince me i'm i'm again just struck by the political climate uh of the time and the um the fierce resistance to this kind of causal of attribution to intrinsic uh characteristics of individuals especially those under genetic control and when you put it in a racial disparity context then all bets are off i mean it just becomes impossible yeah well it or or it compels you to look for a a deeper reason you know let me give you an example a research example i worked with richard tremblay and he is one of the worst leading experts on the development of aggressive behavior and he was trying to ameliorate it among children and used interventions that got into younger and younger kids and finally decided that to really ameliorate it's a small minority of of kids who produce all the aggressive acts predo distribution same thing they're almost so it's quite cool actually if you're a scientist i suppose if you look at two-year-olds you put them in a room a small proportion of the two-year-olds will kick bite hit and steal it's only five percent and almost all of them are male now if you track those kids over the next two years most of them get socialized out of that those that don't tend to stay anti-social and develop criminal behavior later so it's it's socializable it can be it can be rectified between two and four the problem was is that if that's the case imagine a government enterprise set up to ameliorate that gets pretty damn invasive when the government has to start figuring out how you're going to raise your two-year-old right so and this cognitive ability problem might be something that's quite similar like one of the things that's interesting about kids that become literate versus kids that don't is that the kids that become literate are exposed to so many more books and words that you can hardly believe it it's another pareto distribution and i see you know my kids they were dragging books around when they were 12 months old before they well before they could read but they were familiarizing themselves with the objects and you know and becoming friends with them in a kind of non-verbal way and we don't know the we don't know the pathway to that kind of that kind of literacy or the nature of the relationship between that and the development of cognitive ability well this is a much more hopeful uh vision isn't it a one in which there are perhaps not yet fully determined uh interventions that can ameliorate or compensate that's like the glasses that i'm wearing that allow me to see despite my genetic disability i i thought the spirit of of charles murray and richard hernstein in 1994 when the bell curve was published was that sorry but the best that we could determine these interventions early childhood education or whatever that might be don't seem to be able to have much of an effort so i studied that for about 20 years looking at exactly that and so the head start programs they what happened to kids who went through head start the hope was that if you got kids early enough you could give them a head start cognitively and that that would spiral upward you know in one of these positive loops but that didn't happen what happened was the kids who went to head start leapt ahead of their peers cognitively but the peers caught up by grade six and all the differences disappeared except the head start kids were less likely to drop out of school to become criminal and to become pregnant you know young so it wasn't nothing but it didn't work cognitively but i looked into head start in more detail you know it was also a make work program so the people who were the head start teachers weren't necessarily particularly trained it's really hard when you're dealing with say three-year-olds to get one-on-one time with them and teach them something like basic literacy because there's so many if you have five three-year-olds it's like you're spending 90 percent of your time making sure that they're alive you know dressing them and so forth so the amount of time in head start that was actually devoted to cognitive training was minimal and so we don't know actually we don't know yet i don't think now what about the ability to enhance other uh traits not in cognitive ability but i don't know perseverance or uh you know uh resilience or uh well well resilience and compensate compensate for the fact that they're not going to get any smarter at the cognitive thing but they might actually get to be much uh more effective people by enhancing these other dimensions of their of their performance well the fact that the head start kids didn't get didn't drop out of school probably reflected at least to some degree the fact that they behaved better so they were more socialized and the theory was that some of those kids were removed from pretty terrible environments and protected a bit by the fact that they were going to head start they got socialized earlier so they're able to interact in groups better they weren't as disruptive in classrooms so at the same level of cognitive ability they were still more likely to get through school and that wasn't nothing and so yes some of those things are perhaps more ameliorable still not a simple thing because a lot of you know if that window for the socialization of aggressive behavior among aggressive boys is between two and four years of age then that's that's that's a tough place for governments to or society as such to intervene gets you know because it gets invasive that's that's and that's a big problem because you don't also don't want to encourage government overreach so okay let me ask you some more questions here i you're yeah one of the things i really got curious about when i was reading about you you claimed in a speech to oxford not a claim you said you know that your political views had really shifted a lot in your life from left to center to right and then back i think farther left than you were when you started is that is that an accurate description yeah and then back right again and i don't know if i'm farther right when i was when i was right before i was left yeah that i have i have vacillated a little bit over the years and so what what's what's driven that and what do you make of that because i've noticed as my political opinions have changed that i was just as convinced that i was right when i thought the opposite thing as i am now and so you know that sort of says more about me than the beliefs i suppose but what do you make of that shift um well i think it's this is personal to me i think the story that i'm i'm telling uh in in the uh memoir that i'm working on now is is uh that i needed to let me let me start at the beginning so i come up as a working-class kid in chicago and i'm black and it's the 1960s 1970s i'm sort of naturally a liberal democrat by disposition or by you know osmosis by the atmosphere everybody was i get to graduate school and get a training in economics and i get a green eye shade on and i start like wanting to do my sums you know i started like recognizing there's no free lunch you know that that there are incentives that you know there's unintended consequences that there's cause and effect there's not a program for everything that i we have to worry about inflation that yet etc so i become more of a neo-liberal what they would call today in the era i become more of a free-market economist i become more conservative and ronald reagan comes along in the early 1980s and i'm one of the few black people on the planet who thought that he had it right more than he had it wrong about a lot of these questions at the same time i am observing what's going on in inner city america in the big cities across the country i grew up in chicago but i taught at the university of michigan i happen to know a little bit about detroit i can read the newspaper i can see what's going on in you know baltimore st louis or cleveland or pittsburgh or new york or los angeles whatever the inner city the ghettos the violence the schools that don't work the out of wedlock burst the low employment numbers the uh culture that's coarse and that's that's leading to a lot of dysfunction and a lot of problems and i'm looking at the rhetoric of the democratic party or of the civil rights leadership which seems to me to be kind of completely out of touch with reality this is the early 1980s and i find myself moving further and further to the right and i end up a reagan republican um this is going to be short the short version i go through some profound life-changing traumatic experiences i have a big public fall i was up for a government job i had to withdraw amid sexual scandal i have a drug addiction problem i get caught by the police in possession of illicit substances i need to go into rehab i spend months at a psychiatric hospital in belmont massachusetts trying to learn how to not use cocaine i come out of that through a religious conversion i mean the plot thickens i'm a born-again christian now i'm a recovering cocaine addict i'm a you know uh a bad boy black conservative who's given the uh you know his comeuppance with his public humiliation and i begin to rethink my politics moving in the left direction in part i think under the pressure of just wanting to be able to go home again just wanting to find a place where i could be comfortable within my own skin uh in part perhaps because i had some misgivings about some of the uh you know dimensions of the conservative uh political frame that uh rita was writing off people at the bottom and not thinking hard enough as you and i have been trying to think in this conversation about what could really be done so i find myself moving back to the left again but then we get to like 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013-14 uh things like the uh michael brown thing in uh ferguson missouri and uh the trayvon martin thing in sanford florida and the eric garner thing in staten island new york and the tamir rice thing in cleveland ohio and all of that and the black lives matter movement comes up and the woke anti-racism movement comes up and now i find myself it's like deja vu all over again i find myself thrown back to the 1980s and the instinct within me is to resist resist resist the political correctness yeah so some of the so some of that is is you moving in your life but some of that is the political landscape also shifting around you which issues the political landscape shifts hard to the left and i find myself again i find myself lamenting some of the earlier changes when i said you know my feelings about affirmative action which i was instinctively against before i was for it before i was against it my feelings maybe they were right all along in the first place maybe i should not have broken my friendship with justice clarence thomas over the california uh civil rights initiative of uh 1996 which banned affirmative action in the state the justice and i who were friends decided that we were not going to talk again because i could not support the anti-affirmative action move at that time ten years earlier i would have supported it today i would support it yeah well it's a tough question that and that's a really tough question so it's no wonder you know that a thoughtful person might fascillate on that because there are profound things to be said on both sides of that argument hey can i ask you and you don't have to answer this i guess it's the clinician in me so i studied alcoholism and drug abuse and addiction as my primary research topic when i was grad student and one of the things that was well known among alcoholism researchers at that time and hard-edged researchers was that religious transformation was about the only reliable treatment so to speak for alcoholism no alcoholism treatment programs work and that's still the truth today no matter what people say they just don't work that doesn't mean people don't stop because they do but spiritual transformation seems to be a ticket out of drug addiction and it's interesting in that regard for example that roland griffiths and his team investigating psychedelic mushroom psilocybin have shown that one dose producing a mystical experience produces 75 percent permanent cessation in smokers most powerful pharmacological intervention it's unbelievable and that's not there he's done all sorts of other interesting and he's a hard-edged research scientist this guy's no like pie in the sky mystic it's really something there's really something to this that we don't understand and could i ask you you said you were struggling with addiction problems that's a catastrophe and you had this religious transformation what what was that exactly and why do you think it was relevant to the drug abuse issue well why did it help you stop okay i'm not sure i know the answer to the question but i understand the question and um there were really two dimensions to my spiritual experience in the late 1980s when i was a cocaine addict and it was killing me it was killing me one of them was explicitly religious i was born again i became a born-again christian i was baptized at the age of 40 i believed came to believe that our lord and savior jesus christ as we would have put it died for me personally glenn lowry and that there was a path to my having a relationship with almighty god through my belief in jesus christ now i'm not trying to proselytize here i actually don't have the same degree of religious forever contemporary in my life now as i did at that time but i came to believe that the other thing that was of a spiritual significance for me was the alcoholics anonymous program you know the 12 steps you know i admitted that i was an alcoholic in my life had become unmanageable i came to believe that the power greater than myself really restored me to sadly i made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of god as i understood him and one day at a time i was going to not drink i was going to talk to my sponsor i was going to go to my meetings i was going to deal with whatever came up in life without drinking because i know that i'm an alcoholic and my life had become unmanageable and etc right right yeah well that's when the program has a strong spiritual slash religious underpinning and that's part of the influence of carl jung who was instrumental as a thinker yes yes the person who set up a a was in correspondence with young quite intensely and so it's it's influenced a lot by his thoughts about the psychology of religion and i just want to respond to your question yes was what did the spirituality do for me and it took me out of myself it made me humble it and it made me patient and it made me wanting to stifle stifle myself and to just um you know let go and let god that was another one of the bumper stickers right that we used to have that i was my own worst enemy that i needed to surrender that i that it was a kind of radical humility uh in it yeah well you need that radical humility if you're dealing with an addiction problem there's no doubt about that because that's that's a wicked devil to have in your head and if there's any arrogance and pride in you that's going to be a real obstacle to any to any healthful recovery that's for sure yeah i'll tell you a story if you've got time i'm in the halfway house and it's run by this grizzled old irishman uh bob brown is his name and he's been getting men sober for a quarter century and i'm in this halfway house with drunks who've been sleeping in boxes in the subway station and people just come out of prison and you know just get out of the detox and whatnot and i'm the only professor in the halfway house okay so one day uh the bob brown is listening to me interact with a counselor and i'm i'm snowing the consulate with how much i know about the 12-step program because i know because i'm a professor and i have read the book and i know it all okay and bob rowley turns to me the director he overrides the consular and he says you know what professor lowry if you're so smart answer me this what were you doing out there in the streets of boston showing your ass just like a n-word from the projects he didn't say n-word this is a white guy he's an irishman he he confronted me with this uh slur and this insult i'm professor at harvard university and this guy is talking to me like i was you know an n word from the project and my first instinct this is just the point about stifling yourself and about radical humility my first impulse was to strike him but then i looked and he stood six three and he weighed 280 pounds so i decided against that that seems wise my next alternative was the boat from the house i didn't need to be there there was no law keeping me there to hell with him i'm not going to allow anybody to talk to me like that but my christian teaching allowed me to see that i did not know the answer to the question [Music] the question was what was i doing out there doing what i was doing i had no idea what i was doing yeah well and a more specific question right it's like clearly you're smart and so how do you reconcile the gap there and that's like that's a big question and intelligence is not wisdom that's for sure okay and so i decided that i had better stay put right where i was in that halfway house i took it i took the insult without comment i stayed there for another five months and i haven't used cocaine since how was 1989 how did you have the confidence to regain your position and to re-adopt it after having gone through that that category i had the loving support of my wife linda lowry who is no longer living she died 11 years ago i had the very strong support of harvard university and of my colleagues and friends there who continued to afford me the opportunity to show that i was worth a damn and that i could get it back together again i ultimately left and moved across the street to boston university a very fine place and i had a good job there and i left and way because they were so nice to me at harvard i couldn't bear it i mean i i i felt like i didn't deserve their uh forgiveness at some level i wanted to strike out and start again someplace on my own i didn't want to let them be as nice to me as they were being uh but uh i had support is is is one thing that i'm having the other thing is uh i got back to science i had been drifting into a political i was a big public intellectual in the 1980s i was writing in commentary magazine and then the new republic magazine when it was a place worth writing in and and other such venues and you know i had friends in the reagan administration i was friends with people like would be soon to be justice thomas and many others i was a high-flying conservative black intellectual um and and uh you know i i yeah actually i forgot i forgot what i was saying you were you were saying you got back to the science oh that's it exactly exactly i said to hell with all this newspaper stuff to uh all these arguments with all these people let me just try to remind myself what i what i fell in love with when i became an economist in the first place i had four papers in the american economic review in 1993. you know i mean all right so that's basically the equivalent for those who are listening that's kind of like the equivalent of doing a whole phd in one year i would say because you can get a phd with three papers if they're well crafted so that's about what that is and i was publishing up a storm between 93 and 96 97 i published you know six or seven really strong papers that got thousands of citations and stuff like that even to this day these papers are cited so i went back to doing economics and that i think allowed me to get my feet under myself and get grounded again and i eventually have come back to doing public intellectual work obviously but um in those years i why have you come back and like you have a youtube channel and maybe we can close the discussion with this is kind of where i wanted to close is you are a public figure again you have a youtube channel and a podcast you're trying to you're you're trying to speak directly to the to the public again and why why are you driven to do that and and how is it going it's going okay i think uh the glenn lowry show it's the youtube channel and glennlowery.substack is the newsletter and yeah we're putting out content every week and we've got you know some followers and whatnot i you know i'm i'm able to see that if uh brown university were to somehow find a way of getting me off the payroll i might still be able to make a living out here in the in the world because there are people who are following and who want to support so that's all good and it's gratifying i'm on a mission uh jordan and i'm glad you asked uh i do collaborate with john mcwhorter he's a fine guy he writes for the new york times he teaches at columbia university and twice a month he and i hold forth the other two weeks a month i will have other guests we call ourselves the woke busters now some people object they say oh that doesn't rhyme with ghostbuster but but it captures the idea the idea is the world has gone mad uh the race questions on diversity equity and inclusion on systemic racism on cultural appropriations on microaggressions on whatever the world has gone mad completely mad the universities are in danger this is me i don't want to speak for john mcwhorter but i don't think he disagrees with this uh because the barbarians are at the gates no they've overrun the gates and they approach the citadel they they are a threat to the great tradition i got some good news for you then yeah yeah help me out well you know i got disinvited to cambridge university two years ago two and a half years ago i was going to go there and study with some of their experts on exodus because i wanted to do a public lecture series on exodus and i a picture of me surfaced with this guy i had like 15 000 photos of me taken with people that year by the way anyways he wore a t-shirt that had criticisms of islam on it and that surfaced and they disinvited me and i found out about it on twitter which wasn't the best way to find out about it in any case people have been working behind the scenes since then to modify the free speech policies at cambridge to make it impossible to disinvite someone unless they're doing something illegal and that passed with a full vote of the faculty 85 percent of them voted in favor of it and it looks like there is going to be similar adjustments made to uk law oh that's fantastic was it oz guinness that you were going to work with no it was uh james orr and nigel baker primarily oh i see i just saw a book of oz guinness called the magna carta of humanity which argues about the book of exodus that it's a foundational oh oh i should know that then i should i should write that down what's it called it's called the magna carter of humanity and the author is oz guinness oz guinness okay i will look that up yeah well it's a it's a fundamental transformation narrative exodus and it was i wouldn't have been able to go anyways because i was too ill and so was my wife but that's beside the point but you know that this is a very positive thing this development and hopefully well hopefully it will become uk law that is the plan whether the legislation will pass and that will also set up an ombudsman as i understand outside the university system so if a professor gets nailed by the politically correct types or or right-wing conservatives for that matter it won't matter and he'll he or she will have recourse to this ombudsman to see if the fundamental right to free speech at uk universities has been violated and so it'll well so that's all part of it and so this is good news and well you're a trailblazer in that regard and may uh may whatever has struck in cambridge uh catch over here uh i just heard about this guy from chicago uh the planetary scientist who was given a lecture at to give this big name lecture at mit uh who was cancelled because he had spoken out in a magazine about affirmative action which he says you know let's not do that by race let's you know do it on the basis of individual qualification this is a defensible position it seems to me but uh certainly not something a person should be counseled for but so sensitive are the guardians of a virtue at these places that they they're able to get away with that kind of thing now yeah yeah well it's become bureaucratized to a large degree too and you know part of that's the faculty's fault too because my observation of universities is that faculty the faculty is a has allowed administrative creep for about three decades without doing anything about it because it was easier not to and so you know i think as a faculty member i regard all of us to blame for precisely this this tremendous growth in administration and the the evolution of these dei uh uh empires especially in hr yeah well you asked me you know um uh what i was uh why i was being a public intellectual again and what i hope to accomplish and and i just wanted to add that after george floyd was killed by derek shoving the police officer in minneapolis and there were protests that broke out in cities around the world and especially cities around the united states and some of those protests turned violent and there was riotous behavior and assaults on police officers and there was arson and looting and there was there was general disorder and it's a big political football and people are on all sides of it and they're defenders of it and so forth and so on but it occurred to me that i did not even know that the incident that happened with a white police officer and the black gentleman who died who was killed was a racial incident i i say i did not know that it was a racial incident all i knew was that the police officer was white and that the man who was killed was black it didn't follow from that that it was a racial incident we were making it into a racial instead we being all of us here in the united states we were making it into a reenactment of old american dramas of lynching and the murder of black people by rogue police and so forth and so on we took that thing and we said yes see here we have proof of the knee on the neck of black america that's what al sharpton the activist said at the funeral of joyful he said america has its knee on our neck and i thought this great country of 330 million people with 40 million black people and here we are 150 years after slavery in a half century since martin luther king was killed really that's going to be the narrative for our country's politics for the next decade for the next 15 years this is what we're going to teach to our children this is how we're going to arrange our media coverage of these events this is that's a disaster for this country okay so how how can you say that when you also have spoken so eloquently on topics such as the differential incarceration rate this is not an assault on your statement by the way i'm very curious because obviously you know you've spoken profoundly about the danger of that differential incarceration rate and you can see that it's not that easy to conceptually disentangle especially if you're politically motivated but even if you're not the an event like that from that broader narrative that something you know something's not right structurally and perhaps this is a reflection of it but well so i i don't know how to reconcile those two viewpoints i don't know how you reconcile them with difficulty i suppose i could say because they do point in slightly different maybe even more than slightly different directions but i'm trying to keep my perspective right i i do think that the uh advent of what they call mass incarceration two and a quarter million people under lock and key on a given day half of them are 45 of them being black people when we're 12 of the population uh as a way of doing business going forward without any uh sense of urgency of reform without any revisiting of you know our drug laws or our sentencing or whatever without any uh attention to what is supposed to happen when someone is in prison rehabilitation and whatnot without any exploration of alternatives to incarceration as ways of responding to criminal offending is bad for our country i do believe that and i believe the racial aspect of that echoes with our history in ways that are uh that are uh dangerous and that we dare not neglect i i'm the same guy on on the other hand i think if you racialized the discussion of crime and punishment um there was the woman who was murdered at columbia university a few years ago and her she was killed by these kids who were just trying to rob her and they ended up stabbing her to death she was white she was a you know i'm sorry i don't remember her name offhand uh but you know she was a lovely young woman and innocent is how she's going to appear in the photograph and she certainly did nothing to deserve what befell her and she was white the great the other side of it yeah right tessa tessa something is her last name i can't recall the kids who killed her were black kids from around harlem they were in the park yeah they were looking for a quick score they had a knife the woman is lying she bleeds out now they've convicted one of them has been convicted and i'm looking at the photo in the newspaper and here's this black kid he looks like a black kid who's 16 18 years old he's a kid he's from this impoverished neighborhood he's black and the woman is white i don't want that incident processed in terms of black kid murders white women yeah okay so maybe it's an issue maybe it's an issue of conflation careless conflation of levels of analysis say because you you you're talking about a high resolution analysis of structural problems in the in the penal system and to to put that george floyd event to cram that into the same narrative it sort of be speaks of undifferentiated thought and so and then you point out that the danger of that is well if you're going to racialize the white cop against the black the black victim of of the of of the of the homicide well then why can't the same thing be done exactly the same way when the reverse happens and maybe we shouldn't do any or we should do as little of that as we possibly can that doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look at these bigger structural issues but we shouldn't cram it all together in one thing because it's not that's very well put jordan that's exactly what i'm trying to say you said it better than i did well i listened to you so that was a big help by the way if we do cram it all into one thing god help us because there are people uh and and they're not gonna speak out there are people uh who will see it process it just as i hope they would not do black thug murders innocent white girl and and and harbor a resentment and nurse that resentment and that's a tinder box that's a powder keg waiting to be lit and we can dismiss it if we want to but those people are not entirely wrong in their sentiment they they need to be disabused of that instinct that that that instinct to conflate those levels of analysis yeah yeah yeah well that's part of the problem i have with ideology is that that's ideology is so low resolution it it does that conflation it doesn't notice and when you get educated you start differentiating it's like and that's kind of what you said happened to you when you became more conservative once you got more educated it's like oh this is when i take this apart and see all the moving paces this is way more complex than my low resolution representation guided me to believe to begin with and that's that i mean i've experienced that many times in my life when i tried to take problems apart so they could be solved instead of just discussed let's say you have to make a high resolution model before you can get anywhere that's true in clinical practice and i think it's true in public policy and partly what we're doing when we're educating people if we're doing it right is saying hey you know you've got a map of the world but it's it's not very detailed and when you really look at it well you know here's the complexity and that's what we're actually contending with people don't like that because well it's complex right and you have the simple solution at hand to begin with but the problem is it isn't the right tool for the job you got to make it high resolution now it takes a lot of work so thank you very much for talking to me today it was a real pleasure discussing things with you and i probably talk too much because i usually do but i apologize for that but i enjoyed it very much nice to meet you jordan thank you it was a pleasure meeting you and and good luck with your endeavors in the future hopefully we'll meet some point and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again and say hi to dr mcquarter for me i will do that all right all right [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,778,734

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, pareto principle, equality, pareto distribution, inequality, glen loury, glenn loury, jordan petersen, economic equality, economic inequality, bell curve, intelligence vs wisdom, Stephen Jay, Stephen Jay Gould, George Floyd

Id: pRTU6IEepPM

Length: 105min 31sec (6331 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022