New York magazine had an interesting story on the rise of Vanderbilt as a prestige university that helps shed light on this. It’s an illustration of the compounding geographic advantage of the South over less dynamic areas of the country.

Back in the 1980s, people and businesses moved to the South because it was cheap. The facilities companies located there were often back office operations facilities and the like. Over time, that compounded and the South began to draw more headquarters, with cities like Houston among the top centers for Fortune 500 HQs. Now, the South’s rise has started compounding into growing prestige as well. You can think about ultra-wealth and high finance pouring into South Florida, top Silicon Valley players like Elon Musk going to Austin, and non-country music celebrities choosing to base themselves in Nashville.

The steep rise in the desirability of SEC schools is part of this. Vanderbilt is a bit unusual in the conference because it is a private school, but as a case study it is still instructive.

Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8 percent, which would make Vanderbilt almost as hard to get into as Yale was last year. The school consistently ranks in the mid-teens in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual lists of best colleges.

The author notes that this is a sea change from when he attended there:

But this reputational makeover has been in the works for decades. I know this because I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2004, back when 38 percent of high-schoolers who applied to Vandy got in — and watched from afar as the university spent the next 20 years becoming fancier, less southern, and considerably more selective. It had a plan to become popular, and that plan worked.

As with trying to aggressively lure companies, Vanderbilt aggressively targeted high prestige students from Northeastern prep schools, as well as top Jewish talent:

The brunt of Vanderbilt’s recruitment strategy was focused on the Northeast, specifically on high schools that sent a lot of students to Ivies. “I’d been visiting those boarding schools when I was at Brown: Andover, Exeter, etc. So I started doing that,” Gee said. He also began “targeting Jewish students,” as he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002, explaining that “Jewish students … make a university a much more habitable place in terms of intellectual life” and were key components of his “elite strategy” of turning Vanderbilt into a direct competitor of the Ivy League.

This is an inversion of the midcentury era. Instead of putting quotas on Jewish students, they are actively recruiting more. It was a smart strategy.

Part of its plan to lure them in involved getting rid of Southern identity elements that might be considered retrograde:

Not everyone was comfortable going to school in the South. “My grandparents were like, ‘It’s not the same down there. You need to be careful,’ ” Taylor Thompson, who is Black and grew up in Chicago, told me. So Vanderbilt became less southern. In 2002, the university stripped the word Confederate from the name of one of its dormitories. “We had a growing Black population, and a number of students were uncomfortable staying in the hall, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s rename it,’ ” Gee told me. The decision caused an outcry among a certain type of white southerner — in fact, Gee says he made the name change without consulting the university’s full board of trustees because he believed it would disapprove.

People think that the South is the last region of the country that still has a historic, authentic culture, or that it is steeped in Lost Cause-ism or clinging to its past in other ways. In my observation, it’s basically the opposite. No region is more ready to jettison its past in order to make more money (or win football games). Try getting people to change something in New England or the Midwest and you can really see the difference. The extreme generic sprawl of Southern cities shows how unsentimental they are when it comes to this. The battles over Confederate monuments and the like show this dumping of history in progress - and the preservationist arguments usually seem to turn out to be a minority position.

There were many other initiatives the school undertook, such as reducing the role of the Greek system in campus life. I can’t possibly do justice to all their strategies and the entire article here, but I do want to also highlight their push to open campuses in elite coastal locations like San Francisco, New York, and West Palm Beach.

The university announced that it would invest $300 million in athletics, redesigned its logo, and committed to opening four additional campuses that would extend the university’s reach beyond Nashville. Last year, it finalized a 99-year $44.3 million lease with New York’s General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal Church’s oldest institution of this type, taking over its campus in Chelsea….To expand its presence in the tech scene, Vanderbilt also purchased the campus currently occupied by California College of the Arts, a private art school in San Francisco that was running out of money. A third campus was planned for West Palm Beach (it’s for people who want to go into finance or aerospace).

This article shows the growth and prestige flywheels that the South has operating. Nashville, pretty much a backwater 35 years ago, became a hot city. Being in a hot city makes it easier for Vanderbilt to recruit higher-rated students, which raises its prestige, whic then accrues to the prestige of Nashville, and so on.

The same effect is in action with these coastal elite cities. Their economic clout and prestige attract prestigious or rising schools like Vanderbilt or Cornell to set up shop there, which makes them even more desirable, etc.

This article also shows the high levels of ambition and dynamism that characterize the growing cities of the South. I’m reminded of the former CEO of the Charlotte Chamber once saying, “To understand Charlotte, you have to understand the scale of our ambition. We don’t want to be number two to anybody.” They want to grow, to change, to rise in stature.

This spirit of boosterism and dynamism once characterized America in general, but it is largely absent from much of the country today. Restoring dynamism in America generally, and reversing those geographic inequalities, is going to require injecting a more ambitious and dynamic spirit into those left-behind places. This can be hard to kickstart because the people who’ve chosen to remain in them like things the way they are, whereas the South has many newcomers who aren’t wedded to the past there at all.

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The Coming American Population Bust

But a more dynamic attitude alone is unlikely to turn around left-behind places. That’s because demographic decline in the United States will exacerbate geographic inequalities. It’s harder to attract people when there are fewer people being born, or even future people period. And as I’ll explain, it might well make places like Nashville and Vanderbilt even stronger.

Demographer Lyman Stone had a recent op-ed in the New York Times where he talked about how the population bust is coming sooner than we think (gift link).

If America’s population does decline, it will strain our entitlements system, damage the economy, reduce innovation and entrepreneurship, and cause serious labor shortages. But the majority point of view — held by major institutions like the Census Bureau, the United Nations and the Social Security trustees — is that the United States probably won’t face population decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100.

That forecast is far too optimistic. The more accurate projection, which I outlined in a recent report for my organization, the Institute for Family Studies, sees the American population beginning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a forecast so grim, it could upend American budgeting and, thus, American politics.

Modern industrial capitalism does not seem to function well in the absence of growth. It’s not just recessions. Places that demographically stagnate or decline typically start to become distressed, which often precipitates a downward spiral. Significant fixed costs that become more burdensome per capita or per household with decline are a part of this.

Stone is very pro-immigration I believe, but he doesn’t believe immigration can solve the problem:

There are two major pieces of wishful thinking in the flights of fancy that underpin American population forecasts. The first is immigration. The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible. Net migration under President Trump will most likely turn out to be near zero, and he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office. Moreover, birthrates are collapsing across the entire planet, not just here at home.

Stone also believes birth rates will continue to decline rather than stabilize, meaning population forecasts are too optimistic:

Up until quite recently, the Social Security trustees’ main scenario assumed that fertility rates will rise from now until 2050 and stabilize at 1.9 children per woman…What evidence supports these predictions? Birthrates have fallen almost continuously for nearly 20 years, an entire generation. They have fallen through good economies and bad, through Republican administrations and Democratic ones, through every tax credit and child-care subsidy.

It’s a grim forecast, and Stone argues that only interventions equal to the scale of the problem can turn things around:

Closing a gap this size will not happen through a few thousand dollars of tax credits sprinkled on young families; we have tried pocket change, and pocket change has failed. It will take serious money aimed at the people doing the work of raising the next generation of Americans, an end to the marriage penalties woven through our tax and welfare codes, a surge in building family-size houses on par with the one during the last baby boom and a culture that treats children as a future worth having rather than a lifestyle expense. Those are big asks, but they are things Americans can achieve if they set their minds to it.

Click over to read the whole thing.

What we see in places with demographic decline is that population concentrates in fewer remaining zones of dynamism and opportunity. Look at Japan, for example, where people poured into Tokyo as the countryside saw the emergence of ghost towns.

Demographic decline might thus actually benefit places like Nashville and regions like the South that are well-positioned to be the last man standing. Simply put: demographic weakness will make it very difficult to address geographic inequalities, in addition to the other challenges it will pose to the country.

The Draw of Eastern Orthodoxy

We read a lot about young people, especially young men, turning towards Eastern Orthodoxy. This short clip by Paul VanderKlay, who is a pastor in the Christian Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed) from Sacramento, sheds some light on that phenomenon, and also a mode of public engagement I want to highlight.

In brief, Orthodoxy offers both historically-rooted solidly, and also an immanent experience. I thought his comparison of Orthodoxy to Pentecostalism in terms of experience was particularly interesting.

This shows how VanderKlay is a good example of the high-minded Protestant man. He fits the bill of what I’ve called the New Trustee archetype. Notice his desire to get at the truth, not just propagandize for his own position. He has a generosity of spirit in noting what is praiseworthy in Eastern Orthodoxy, and acknowledging the downsides of his own tradition.

While certainly not limited to Protestants, there’s something about the way Protestantism, with its belief that everyone needs to read and understand scriptures themselves and the lack of belief by its denominations that they are the one true and infallible church, particularly forms people in this way. This is a spirit that we associate especially with the mainline tradition.

Best of the Web

WSJ: Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream (gift link) - One thing I’ve noticed about Gen Z is that many of them are deeply allergic to traditional 9-5 employment.

The Cut: 11 Rounds of IVF, $250,000, and No Baby - Clinics are seeing more patients over 45 trying to get pregnant. It’s not as easy as celebrities make it look

Harper’s: Republican Machines - Can the GOP save the humanities? - An interesting article about the rise of “civics centers” on college campuses. I previously interviewed Paul Carrese, who was the founding director of the center at Arizona State, the model for these departments.

WSJ: China Is Devastating the Last Stronghold of German Industry (gift link). Europe is now experiencing the same industrial disruption from Chinese competition that the United States went through.

New Content and Media Mentions

My article on the New Trustees was reprinted in the Free Press.

I got a mention from Rod Dreher and Patrick Brown.

I also wrote an article this week on the end of the populist style in American politics.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Peabody Library at Vanderbilt University by Dansan4444/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

By July 2020, 52% of young Americans age 18 to 29 lived with at least one parent, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. It was the first time a majority of young adults in the country had lived with parents since the Great Depression. That share has likely dropped since then, but for some people the arrangements have stuck.

Almost half of adults under the age of 30 are living at home today, down a bit from the pandemic year of 2020 but up 12 percentage points since 2019.

The actual level is probably overstated, since the data doesn’t distinguish parents living with children - which has likely also increased due to our aging society - from children living with parents.

The high cost of housing is a big factor. But some of them aren’t doing it out of necessity but out of choice:

Samantha Stobo was fresh off a breakup and unable to afford her Manhattan two-bedroom alone. So the 29-year-old decided to move in with her mom in Miami until she could get back on her feet. She told herself it would only take a few months. Now 33-years old, Stobo has no plans to move out. “I thought it was going to be temporary,” Stobo said. “But it’s been three years now, and I love it.”

This seems to be leading to a change in social norms in which the stigma of living at home is declining:

Young people say that living at home in 2026 doesn’t carry the stigma it once did because of how unaffordable life has become….Far from hiding it, some now broadcast their lives as “stay-at-home daughters” or “stay-at-home sons” on social media. Stobo says posting about her mother-daughter living situation on TikTok has earned her a friendly comment section filled with others in the same position—and makes her some money. “No one ever judges me,” she said. “The conversation tends to be more like, ‘That’s awesome, and I bet you’re saving money.’”

Living at home for a time to pay off college debt, help save for a downpayment, etc. isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But living at home is in line with other trends showing a failure to launch among younger people, or greater delays in achieving the markers of traditional adulthood.

Traditionally in American culture, kids left home early. This goes along in part with our entrepreneurial, go-getter spirit. It’s true that in other cultures like Italy, it’s common for unmarried children to live with parents for an extended period of time. But those are not particularly dynamic societies either.

One of the factors related to housing prices remaining high, and especially a lack of affordable family housing, is that Boomer retirees are increasingly not downsizing as expected. Instead, they are often upsizing. The Wall Street Journal also had another interesting piece (gift link) about this phenomenon.

Well-off boomers are increasingly upsizing their homes as they age, either buying bigger ones or financing additions to their existing properties. They are building guesthouses for family members and gourmet kitchens for entertaining, alongside such features as high-end grab bars and first-floor primary bedrooms for aging in place. In the process, they are rewriting the rules of retirement and aging, when people are expected to move into smaller homes to save money.

Boomers make up the largest share of home buyers in the U.S.—an aspect of a housing market that is out of reach for younger buyers, but well within the economic powers of an older generation that controls the bulk of the nation’s wealth. Downsizers account for a slightly larger share of older home buyers, but the upsizers are quickly gaining momentum.

Not only are they buying large homes with 3+ bedrooms, they are often doing so in towns with the best school districts, pricing out families. This is a good thing in some ways, as these are often parents moving to be closer to children and grandchildren. But it still adds to the pressures on young families in buying a house, and one in a quality school district. I previously wrote a piece looking at this specific issue that may be of interest.

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The Loss of Ambient Belonging

The housing story is about private space, but part of the dynamic underlying this is what’s happened to our public and semi-public ones.

Jeff Giesea just walked the Camino de Santiago, a popular pilgrimage route in Spain. After the experience he wrote a piece talking about “ambient belonging,” the loss of which contributes to our loneliness epidemic:

On the Camino, belonging wasn’t something I had to work for. It was just there, like the weather. Every pilgrim climbed the same hills, slept in the same albergues, and nursed the same blisters. We recognized one another by the scallop shells on our packs and the dust on our shoes. When I was alone, I’d walk up to a table of pilgrims and ask, “May I join you?” The answer was almost always yes. The Camino didn’t make friendship automatic, but it made conversation almost effortless. Belonging was in the air.

I call this ambient belonging. Ambient belonging is the degree to which an environment lowers social friction between people. It’s not the thick, durable belonging we find in family, lifelong friends, or close-knit communities. It’s a social atmosphere where membership is presumed and connection requires less effort.

Ambient belonging is about the level of friction involved in establishing connection or relationships:

In April, I argued that the loneliness crisis is really a belonging crisis and that belonging is structural. Ambient belonging names the ingredient that makes connection easier in some environments than in others. It changes the question from How do we make friends? to Where is friendship easiest to make? Belonging becomes a design question, not just a psychological one.

That realization is making me rethink my own life. Maybe my belonging deficit isn’t just a personal failing but also a function of my lifestyle and environment. I felt more ambient belonging in my walkable neighborhood in Washington DC than I do in my car-dependent one in Florida. Back then, I walked to work and was a regular at neighborhood bars and coffee shops.

He also makes an important point about the role money plays in ambient belonging:

Money cuts both ways. It can buy us out of ambient belonging through McMansions, remote work, private rooms, and frictionless convenience. But it can also buy us access to it through private clubs, schools, camps, churches, and experiences that create repeated contact and shared identity. As more of American life has become private, ambient belonging is often something we buy our way into.

This is related to our K-shaped society. There have been many reports about the growth in pricey private clubs in cities like New York. As civic life has declined, trust has eroded in our society, and it has become difficult to enforce standards of behavior in public spaces, money has come to play a key role in two ways. First, it allows people to buy insulation from environments whose ambience is negative or undesired. Second, it then allows people to buy into privatized ambient belonging, at the private club, for example. Those without money cannot pull this off as easily. They are stuck where they are.

Related to the K-shaped society, the WSJ also has a piece on how Las Vegas became a luxury destination (gift link). More and more businesses are now oriented towards serving the people with lots of money, ones often insulating themselves or buying private or semi-private ambient belonging.

The Public Intellectuals America Needs

My essay earlier this week on the New Trustees drew quite a bit of interaction.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that it was, “An epoch-defining essay. Wholeheartedly agree.”

Farrell Gregory of the Foundation for American Innovation shared some interesting thoughts on moralizing:

I’m not sure about the distinction that he draws between public intellectuals having “moral weight” vs moralizing. In his description, he seems to associate moralizing with scolding people who disagree with you. I’m not a fan of scolding, but maybe this distinction is just stylistic or rhetorical. I do appreciate the weight Aaron places on having humility, respect for opposing arguments, and having an even temperament.

That said, if he uses moralizing to describe the zealous (or even over zealous) advocacy for moral truth, I personally don’t see the issue with a public intellectual being moralistic. We don’t have nearly enough.

A strongly-held view of mine is that we should be far more concerned about indifference, self-interest, and tolerance for suffering among public intellectuals. I don’t think we have nearly enough people (especially professionals in DC/SF/NY) who are overly strident. My favorite Will Manidis [line] is, “We live in age of great moral panics about things that don’t matter and zero moral outrage over some of the most egregious societal sins we’ve ever seen.”

It takes some restraint on my part not to retweet it on a daily basis in response to a constant barrage of evidence: scams, anti-social behavior, gambling, corruption.

Contra Aaron, I don't think we have nearly enough moralizing. It is insufficient to carry a personal moral weight. if you are a public intellectual, you should be in a state of moral outrage over modern public virtue.

These are good points and I agree with much of what he says. I’m personally not going to stop calling out the problems with normalization of gambling, for example. In my piece was reacting against what I often see, which is moralizing or demonizing directed at one’s opponents or people one does not like. Moral language can work well for the public intellectual, but it depends on how it’s used.

Titus Techera also wrote some reactions, and the piece was linked by Doug DeVos and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Best of the Web

X user @smirkley posted a graph suggesting that Trump voters will inherit the earth because they are having more kids, and the gap is widest among the youngest voters.

An interesting new academic study looks at divorce in households where the woman out-earns the man. Among their findings is a very consistent international trend in which female breadwinner couples are more likely to separate than male breadwinner couples.

Institute for Family Studies: America Was Built on Taking Risks. Today’s Teens No Longer Do

Ryan Burge: The Purists Are Losing: How American Catholics Are Rewriting the Rules - American Catholics increasingly see moral doctrine as a matter of individual conscience rather than church teaching.

The Gospel Coalition: The Little White Church Is Empty - on the struggles facing rural churches.

Jake Meador: Is the era of mere Christianity over?

New Content and Media Mentions

In addition to the New Trustees discussion, I also got a mention in Commonplace.

New this week:

• The Public Intellectuals America Needs - Americans no longer trust institutions. They trust individuals. That makes a certain kind of thinker a critical national resource

• My podcast this week was with NYU professor Arpit Gupta on whether AI can save cities from the “urban doom loop.”

• And my podcast for Members only is about the new vibe shift - where I see culture and politics going next.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: John Delano/Wikimedia, CC BY

I was also delighted to be asked to contribute to a First Things symposium on places that people associate with America. I wrote about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

And when it comes to America 250 celebrations, I’d like to specifically highlight this superb “speech” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times (gift link).

If you liked my piece this week on the end of cool cities, you might also enjoy my more detailed reflections on Portland, Oregon that I posted as an article on X.

If you are in Southern California, you might be interested in this forthcoming event at Chapman University on science and religion. It’s coming up on July 24th.

Can Scouting Still Raise Boys?

The Dispatch ran an interesting essay by LuElla D’Amico on the Boy Scouts, and the downward trajectory of her son’s troop.

A few weeks ago, the Scouts BSA troop my 11-year-old son belongs to faced a decision. With many of its older scouts graduating, there were not enough adult volunteers to keep the all-boys troop running as it had—or even to send all of its younger scouts, including my son, to summer camp this year. For an 11-year-old who had spent months looking forward to camp, the disappointment was palpable.

Our local issue is indicative of a larger trend. Between 2019 and 2020, scout membership fell by 43 percent—from nearly 2 million youth to around 1.1 million. Faced with this reality, our troop's leaders and families, like many others, found themselves confronting a difficult question: What would it take to preserve this community for the next generation of scouts?

One proposal quickly rose to the top: convert our traditional boys-only troop into a “Family Troop,” or one that included both boys and girls.

The organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts is one of the many core social formation and educational institutions in the country that has gone into major decline. Some of this is demographic - there aren’t as many young boys as there used to be. But there are other general and specific factors at work. Institutions are in decline generally. The Boy Scouts had a major sexual abuse scandal. And participation in institutions like the Boy Scouts likely no longer carries the cachet - say for getting into college or getting a job - that it used to. A young striver may be better off from a college application perspective creating their own (quasi-bogus) non-profit rather than becoming an Eagle Scout. I noticed that my local newspaper has more profiles of people doing the former than the latter these days.

The Scouts have responded by doing basically what mainline Protestantism and any number of other institutions did. It evacuated its traditional religious core, adopted standard issue liberal positions du jour, and started allowing girls to join (in the way the mainlines allowed female clergy). This isn’t likely to work out any better for them than it did for the mainline churches.

D’Amico talks about some of what she hoped to gain for her son from scouting, especially exposure to a range of high quality adult male role models.

Part of the reason we chose my son’s troop was that I wanted him to grow up around different types of men whose lives were worth imitating. As I write this, I find myself thinking about those men: our easygoing scoutmaster who leads with the type of confidence I wish I could emulate; the engineer who can fix nearly anything and throw an ax to boot; the retired pilot who seems to know every trail and tree on our hikes; the student-athlete Eagle Scout who comes home from college to mentor younger boys. From them, my son and his troopmates learn about masculinity.

Of course, my son is also learning what it means to be a man from his father. But fathers have never raised children alone. Plus, it bears mentioning that, while my family is in a two-parent home, today nearly one-third of American boys are growing up without a father in their house– and that boys as a whole are struggling across nearly every educational measure….

Now, it matters that my son is also surrounded by extraordinary women leaders. He is taught by women at school, sees women lead in our parish, is encouraged by aunts, grandmothers, and cousins, and—though he’ll have to render his own verdict on this last one someday—is mothered by a rather strong personality. What is far rarer in contemporary American life is a community of unrelated men who voluntarily give their evenings, weekends, and vacations to boys simply because they believe that young men are worth investing in. Teachers are paid. Fathers have obligations. Scout leaders choose to be there.

These are things that would, to some extent, be compromised if her son’s troop decided to admit girls, something that’s already happening across the country. I will let you read the entire piece to find out what happened.

I don’t want to suggest that change wasn’t needed in the Scouts. It was. Or that they needed to double down on being “based” or something. That wouldn’t work either. But its actions, none of which were anything other than conventional wisdom, are signs of an organization where the fire has gone out, structural integrity has failed, and which has turned into yet another piece of institutional flotsam drifting downstream.

The Boy Scouts today can’t turn boys into men because it isn’t run by men or in accordance with masculine principles. Part of being a man is about making your mark on the world, not just having the world make its mark on you. It’s about having agency and the ability to, when necessary, defy convention and external pressure and withstand the heat for doing so. Nothing about the Scouts suggests that the organization itself operates on that principle.

Yuval Levin emphasizes how our institutions form us. How are the Scouts forming boys? When the DEI wave swept America, the Scouts made a DEI badge a requirement for Eagle Scout. Four years later when there was pressure from the new the Trump administration, they reversed that decision. What do these decisions teach the boys who’ve been part of scouting? By the very way it operates itself, the Boy Scouts forms boys into men who believe the way to get ahead in life is to go along to get along, even as the institution you are responsible for is in steep decline.

D’Amico also has some interesting thoughts on the stay or leave question when it comes to declining institutions:

Too many essays about scouting end with the same refrain: It isn’t what it used to be, so I’m leaving. Sometimes, that’s the right decision. Institutions can lose their way, and there are moments when fidelity to conscience requires us to walk away. But increasingly I wonder whether our first instinct has become departure rather than stewardship. Progressives are often criticized for believing institutions can simply be rebuilt from scratch. Yet conservatives sometimes make the opposite mistake: assuming that once an institution has changed, it is beyond salvaging. Both forget that institutions become what people make of them. Stated simply, institutions endure only when people remain long enough to preserve what is good and patiently reform what is not.

I don’t believe there’s any single right answer on the stay or exit question. I’ve heard from many people who still say their local Boy Scout troop is doing amazing things. If you feel confident that it works for your family, then by all means stay. Don’t let my pessimism cause you to leave. And showing institutional loyalty is itself another kind of lesson being imparted to our children.

I’m also mindful of Redeemed Zoomer’s thesis about the mainline churches, that their future belongs to those who show up. He argues that if younger theological traditionalists are the ones sitting in the pews, they’ll eventually inherit the keys. That may or may not be true, but it does show that decline, once it reaches a certain stage, opens up new possibilities.

But RZ has a concrete vision of change and renewal. Staying in a failing institution without such a vision to me seems questionable. Staying in order to “sustain institutions,” as D’Amico argues is sometimes what’s needed, is not in itself a solution to institutional decline. These institutions are troubled not simply because of numeric or financial decline, but because of what they’ve become and what they are doing - and because they are no longer fulfilling the necessary functions we once relied on them to carry out. A vision or program of institutional reset is a critical component of institutional loyalty. In a absence of that vision, and the fortitude to pursue it, exit begins to look like a better choice.

Click over to read the entire essay at the Dispatch.

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On Demographic Transition

The Boy Scouts are just one institution feeling the pressure from demographic decline. In a follow-up to my piece yesterday on the demographic implications of low birth rates, here are a couple of interesting videos exploring other aspects of the fallout.

The first is a conversation with the interesting and creative thinker Samo Burja of Bismarck Analysis on gerontocracy and what to do about it. One of the key points is that we need a revolution for the young but not a revolution of the young. Because by the time youth revolutionaries succeed, they are no longer young. See: the Boomers

Burja is always worthwhile to listen to. You definitely won’t get standard issue thinking from him.

The other is this three-minute “Comeback City” promotional video for San Francisco. It feature’s a number of bigname people like Stephen Curry, former mayor Willie Brown, and Joe Montana. It strikes me as very desperate, like something a Rust Belt city would have produced.

But what’s really noticeable is the demographics portrayed, which are also traditional Rust Belt. The video features overwhelmingly white and black people, even among its non-legacy celebrities, as if it were representing America of the 1980s or something. In reality, San Francisco is down to only 6% black population. But it’s over 36% Asian, equal to its white population, something you’d never know from watching this video. (And also 17% Hispanic).

This shows that even in very liberal cities, leaders really don’t get it in their gut how different America’s demographics are than what they were a few decades ago.

Best of the Web

There’s an interesting research project and report on friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees. It’s called “Nobody to Call.” You can read commentary on this at the American Institute for Boys and Men.

NYT: Where Testosterone and the Bible Are the ‘New Punk Rock’ (gift link) - Thousands of men and boys gathered in central Washington for masculinity, Christianity and right-wing politics

Rob Henderson/City Journal: Want More Babies? We Need More Friends - If Americans are to revive our sagging national birthrate, we must rebuild the ordinary social structures that made children thinkable and natural

NYT: Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth? (gift link).

Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale and pace that they’re exploding previous notions of what a family is. At a moment when so many people say they feel priced out of having even one child, these adventures in prolific fatherhood are emerging as a stark example of inequality made flesh.

The Gospel Coalition: Why Every Society Needs Faith - A nice review of In Good Faith by Ryan Avent, a great economics writer I’ve followed for nearly two decades.

Avent’s In Good Faith achieves something genuinely difficult: a synthetic account of human belief, cultural evolution, and social meaning that takes religion seriously without being religious. He writes candidly about his own losses and uncertainty, giving the book an unusual intellectual honesty.

NY Mag: The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA - For J.D. Vance and his co-religionists in Washington, faith is a powerful means of ascent - “In some ways, conservative Catholic networks in Washington function like the Communist Party in China. You don’t have to be a member. But if you’re ambitious and want to get ahead in your career, it surely helps.”

The Wall Street Journal profiled Redeemed Zoomer and his quest (gift link) to retake mainline Protestantism for traditional Christianity, and the New York Times has a great profile (gift link) of friend-of-the-newsletter Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Rachel Lu and from Twin Cities Business magazine.

New this week:

• The End of the Cool City - What a trip to Seattle and Portland taught me about commodified cities, collapsing downtowns, and why conservatives keep losing the culture they refuse to build

• The Revenge of “Keep Portland Weird” - My X essay on the city

• Most of America Is Pittsburgh Now - Deaths now outnumber births across most of the country — and the effects are just beginning to arrive.

• Happy Birthday, Whoever You Are - On its 250th birthday, America no longer agrees on who it is — and a nation that forgets its story cannot stay one people - A guest essay from Dr. John Seel.

• My Member only Zoom session this month was on the future of churches.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image by Noah Wulf/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

This week I’m featuring several stories about meaning and formation - and what happens when we don’t have them.

The Self-Optimization Cult

Derek Thompson is a former Atlantic writer who left for Substack. He co-authored the widely discussed book Abundance with Ezra Klein, which I’d love to get him on the podcast to discuss at some point.

He has a great new piece out on self-optimization that asks, when does it become unhealthy to become overly obsessed with health?

The [Oura] ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

He talks about the decline in alcohol consumption, then writes:

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides (injectables that affect inflammation and gut health and are also the “P” in GLP), and the continued growth of supplements. More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life. A record 77 million Americans belonged to a gym or studio in 2024, up 20 percent since before the pandemic. Running clubs on the fitness app Strava nearly quadrupled in 2025 alone. If you don’t believe the industry data, perhaps you’ll believe the federal government: according to the American Time Use Survey, Americans today exercise and play sports more than at any period on record.

He links this obsession with health and personal optimization to declines in socializing.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism. At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization, which I have previously called the anti-social century. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming—and I am positive that these are highly social events for at least some of their participants—nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

I’ve drawn a distinction between what I call the Techno-Industrial Stack, or Acceleration, and the Human-Social Stack, for Formation. With his focus on topics like Abundance, Thompson seems mostly focused on Acceleration. But he’s also attuned to Formation questions as well. So far as I know, he’s not a religious person, but he sees how previous eras of self-improvement derived from a religious or moral background that channeled them in pro-social ways that transcended the isolated individual.

These earlier iterations of self-improvement drew their power from religion, community, or characterological projects to promote civic virtue. Temperance, for example, was not just about individual health; it was a social movement to improve the culture, to rescue women and children from alcoholic husbands, and to build a better republic. (That it failed in myriad ways is not to deny that some of its goals were virtuous.) The Muscular Christianity movement of the 19th century paired New Testament virtues with an ethic of manly strength in a way that wouldn’t be so out of step with modern MAGA and MAHA machismo.

But the age of the Enhanced Self is different, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s—including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners—but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self. For all its sins, the temperance movement was focused on national change. But the typical adherent to the Enhanced Self—say, a 50-year-old with a peptide stack and a Whoop—is not trying to improve the country. He’s just trying to improve his score.

The history of alcohol abstention offers another way to see how the Enhanced Self is a truly modern phenomenon. For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection.

He goes on to talk about what he calls the “three pillars of the enhanced self” and “enhanced selfishness.” There’s a lot of good material in there, so I’d encourage you to click over and read the whole thing.

I’ll just conclude with some of Thompson’s final thoughts about the meaning of death in our culture.

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgård once wrote that an irony of the modern world is that we are obsessed with cultural representations of death and yet terrified of the real thing…At bottom, enhancement culture is a disposition toward death—thinking about death, calculating distance from death, worshipping death like some Aztec priest offering sacrifices to appease the angry sun god. Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and company-and-book-inspired Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives. But when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic—how much time will this drink cost me? how much time will that supplement buy me?—many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

We live in a world where all too many people have lost a belief in the transcendent, or connection to any larger sense of cosmic or moral order and meaning. This kind of purely materialist condition produces an outlook that is at some level nihilistic. Perhaps some people can find that larger sense of purpose and meaning from immanent matters like relationships. But empirically, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

Again, read the whole thing.

Forming Priests

I saw the trailer for a three-part docu-series called Traditio, after it made a stir on Twitter. It might have been the most impressive piece of Catholic content I’ve ever seen, so I decided to watch the first installment, which was about the formation of new priests.

This video was put out by SSPX, which is a traditionalist Catholic sect that is viewed as “canonically irregular” (in reality, de facto schismatic) by Rome. This video has drawn 1.1 million views, which is incredible. You can see why this group is successful just from watching this. A Catholic friend wrote to me, “You have to wonder why a tiny and controversial traditionalist order is able to put out a more appealing documentary on the Catholic Church than one of the Church's larger institutional arms. Robert Barron's Catholicism series was nice but nothing like this.”

The two-tier system in Catholicism, with its concept of higher spiritual vocations, lends itself to a heroic conception of the priesthood. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear these young seminarians talk about devoting their whole life to the fullest to something bigger than themselves. You also learn about the rigorous, intense, and holistic six-year process they have to go through to become a priest. It’s very institutional and communal as well as individual. Though not discussed in the documentary, apparently only a small minority of initial seminary enrollees make it all the way to ordination.

I’m cueing this up to a ten minute section on the SSPX US seminary in Dillwyn, VA. I highly recommend sampling at least this section. Be sure to turn on the subtitle captioning.

It’s very impressive, even if listening to these young men talk about their conception of what the priesthood is reminded me once again of why I’m Protestant.

The Political Economy of AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted some interesting thoughts on AI. His take is related to Brent Orell’s admonition to make sure AI doesn’t become the next NAFTA in terms of its human, social, and political impact. Nadella writes:

The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see. If all the value is accrued by only a few models, the political economy will simply not tolerate it. There is no societal permission for an AI future that hollows out entire industries.

Think about what happened in the first phase of globalization where entire industrial economies were hollowed out by outsourcing. The GDP numbers looked fine on the surface, but the displacement was real and the consequences are still being felt. Let us not bring that dynamic into the AI era, with a small number of AI systems capturing all the economic returns, while entire industries find their knowledge commoditized right out from underneath them.

In my view, our priority has to be building a frontier ecosystem, not just a frontier model, so value flows broadly across every company, every industry, and every country.

Nadella’s company does not have its own frontier model, so this is somewhat self-interested. Nevertheless, it does get at the potential for political disruption if there’s too much industrial and labor force disruption.

Globalization primarily hurt industrial workers without college degrees. AI appears to be more likely to impact the higher educated. This group of people is much more able to mobilize politically in favor its interests, so the political impact of AI driven white collar disruption could actually be much greater than that of blue collar displacement.

The Future of Online Intellectual Discourse

Very popular economics writer Noah Smith has some interesting reflections about being an online intellectual in an age of populism and AI, wondering if anything he writes matters anymore. He notes that being an intellectual is a liability in an age of populism.

This [Trumpist] state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.

But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.

This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.

Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.

This is completely correct. I’ve noticed that America is now factionalism all the way down. There’s very little of the high-minded spirit that used to exist - or at least was aspired to - in the era in which a mainline Protestant ethos still shaped the country.

Smith goes on to talk about AI, the impact of Substackification, etc.

I’m of course interested in this because I work the same territory. The reality is that every aspect of our society is very dynamic. I’m not going to be able to keep doing the same thing I’m doing now for the next 20 years, anymore than anyone else in this economy is. We all have to figure out how to adapt with the times. I was pleased to see that the tool he used to track influence in AI weightings has me in the top 4%. That’s not bad. My influence will increasingly show up via the output of AI models. In fact, I’ve noticed rising referral traffic from AI chatbots at the same time traditional search traffic is going down.

Even though it’s a bear market for high-minded intellectualism, that’s what I’m going to continue to aspire to create. My goal is to help people build lives, institutions, and a society that flourish in today’s world. My focus is the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of that flourishing. I want to be committed to discerning and aligning with the truth, providing deep insight you can’t get anywhere else, building up not just tearing down, and trying to be constructively forward looking during a time of American transition. I want to model the kind of person and thinker we need to see in this world. I don’t always get it right, but I at least want to aspire to that.

I hope you value what I do. And I hope you’ll financially support me by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. Paying subscribers are the only way that I’m able to continue doing what I’m doing. Thanks so much for your support.

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Best of the Web

NYT: ‘Both Parties Kind of Get It Wrong’: The Young Men Who May Swing the Midterms (gift link) - Many Gen Z men who voted for Donald Trump are dismayed by his time in office. But they say they are not hearing an appealing pitch from Democrats, either

Priyanka Desai: The Millennial Midlife Crisis is Going to be a Barbell - Millennials are hitting the dip with no Corvette, no house, and, for the first time in consumer history, no appetite (see: peptides)

Oren Cass: ‘The Vibes Are Not Good’ - Two college students discuss America’s broadest challenges.

Helen Andrews: How Yuppies Changed America

New content from me this week: The Evangelical Business Mindset - Evangelicals are remarkably good at making money and remarkably bad at turning it into cultural power.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: Bryan Johnson by Katriece Ray/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

Blue families certainly do exist. I live among them. Specifically, my family lives in the District of Columbia, where Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump 90% to 6% in the last election. Essentially all the families in my kids’ elementary school are Democrats, and most are liberal Democrats. These families also have some remarkable features: marriage is virtually universal, while divorce is virtually nonexistent. Almost every kid is growing up in a two-parent married family. And if we’re going to highlight the general retreat from marriage and parenthood in Blue America, we should also look at the circumstances where Blue Americans buck the trend.

…

Given that Blue Americans tend to favor egalitarian gender roles over traditional gender roles, you might assume that deep-Blue families in a deep-Blue city like DC fall squarely on the egalitarian side. But that’s not what you see among the families in our social circle. Instead, you see a more surprising mix of egalitarian and trad lifestyle markers.

On the egalitarian side, virtually every family has two working parents. Stay-at-home mothers are unheard of, for the most part. Educational attainment is equal between spouses. And some of the more symbolic lifestyle markers also fall on the egalitarian side. For example, based on the parent lists for my kids’ classrooms, only 9 kids out of 50 (18%) have parents with the same last name. If the traditional American default is for wives to take their husbands’ last name, these families cheerfully go the other way.

But on the trad side, income hypergamy is alive and well among these families. Most fathers out-earn mothers, and it’s rarely the other way around. To generalize slightly, there are three main career buckets among these well-educated DC parents. At the top of the income scale are the private-sector for-profit workers. In the middle are the government bureaucrats. And at the bottom are the non-profit NGO workers. Most fathers are in the top or middle bucket, while most mothers are in the middle or bottom one. For example, among my kids’ close friends and classmates, there’s one family where the husband is a private-sector lawyer and the mother runs a literacy nonprofit. There is another family where the father is an engineer for a large tech company and the mother is a government lawyer. And another family where the father is a real estate executive and the mother is another government lawyer. Even in the one military family, the father out-earns the mother. And, yes, my wife and I practice some income hypergamy, too.

These families have other traditional markers as well. For example, they’re surprisingly religious. I’d estimate that almost a third of my kids’ friends go to church on a weekly basis.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s another example of how if you want to see conservative values in practice, you’ll often find them among people who vote Democrat and align on the cultural left. They are quite often the ones renovating historic architecture, reviving small towns or neighborhoods, patronizing the fine arts, conserving natural beauty, etc. As I once wrote, Vermont is the state that most embodies a certain conservative ideal that you see championed online. This can also extend to some family practices as well.

This might be one reason that conservative elites like Sohn very frequently choose to live in deep blue areas rather than ones where they’d be surrounded by Republican voters.

This piece also gets at something I’ve noted over the years, namely the inability of evangelicals to articulate a compelling role for women other than wife and mother. This is unappealing to those who have talents and inclinations beyond that, or who are single. This story about families on the cultural left - presumably most of whom are not evangelical - shows traditionalism (including religion for many) combined with a broader vision. I’m not saying its perfect, but it is showing in the real world marketplace that it has an appeal.

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Evangelicalism and the Single Woman

Speaking of evangelicalism and single women, a video clip posted on X from a book interview with Rebecca VanDoodewaard stirred quite a bit of controversy online. (You can also watch the entire interview). It’s about women and singleness.

VanDoodewaard articulates common positions here, so this is representative of a sizable strand of evangelical thinking. Ligonier, the outfit that posted this video, is a very large evangelical ministry. The latest 990 I could find for them showed a budget of around $25 million. This is not a fringe or niche organization.

I only want to note two things about it. First is the use of “idolatry of the family” language. I highlight this to show that I’m not inventing or exaggerating this language. In the face of declining family formation and fertility, evangelicals heavily stress that a strong desire by single people for marriage and children is often bad and sinful.

Second is the lack of any practical advice for single women who desire marriage to help them find it. Waiting for marriage is treated as an entirely passive endeavor. The only recommended actions are to not waste the time she is single, and instead deploy it for things like getting a graduate degree or working on her career or serving the church.

The contrast with the messages men receive is jarring. The foundational principle of the manosphere is self-improvement. It dispenses a vast array of practical insight and advice to help men get what they want and navigate life. This is also true of more mainstream figures. Scott Galloway’s book is full of it. Even evangelicals like VanDoodewaard’s husband dispense self-improvement advice to single men.

For women, the secular world likewise has a wide array of tactical advice and self-improvement tips to help women get what they want.

But the evangelical world doesn’t seem to offer its single women who desire marriage much beyond admonitions not to be too unhappy about their condition. Their hoped-for futures are being sold out, and by a class of leaders who are overwhelmingly married with children themselves - people who wouldn’t trade their own families for all the gold in Ft. Knox. We have to do better than this.

Related in NY Mag: Yes, Straight Women Are In Trouble

Best of the Web

The film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released 40 years ago. A decade ago I wrote an essay called “Gentrification on the Big Screen” contrasting it with The Blues Brothers, a film released just six years previously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off contained many of the elements of gentrification and the Creative Class in embryonic form.

NYT: Behind Every Dad Bod Is a Healthy Dad Brain (gift link) - “When it comes to brain health and mental fitness, becoming a father is one of the best things you can do.”

WSJ: Making Sense of America’s Low Fertility Rate (gift link)

Ezra Klein: Your Kids Are Not Doomed (gift link)

Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one question more than any other. It comes up at speeches, at dinners, in conversation. It’s the most popular query when I open my podcast to suggestions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face? The second: Should I have kids, knowing they will contribute to the climate crisis the world faces?…But one thing I’ve noticed, after years of reporting on climate change: The people who have devoted their lives to combating climate change keep having children.

New Content and Media Mentions

I promised to specifically highlight the Youtube version of my conversation with Jacob Siegel about his book The Information State. I solved my upload problems and here it is:

I was mentioned this week in Real Clear Books and Culture, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and by Tim Challies.

New this week:

• From Titans to Technocrats - Today’s urban leaders are more polished, more inclusive, and more powerless than the Titans they replaced — which is why the hardest problems go unsolved

• My podcast this week is with Jacob Siegel on the 100-year rise of the information control state.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash.

Here’s the reality I am thinking about: human beings are far wealthier than they have ever been and are, on average, living far longer than they ever have in the past. This is leaving vast amounts of wealth and power in the hands of people who are not merely senior citizens, but who are often well into their 80s or 90s.

He talks about the implications in terms of inheritance. I was particularly struck by his observation that if current trends continue, we may end up in a world where wealth is passed down from old person to old person to old person.

While lifespans have increased dramatically, our traditions for passing wealth through the generations have remained relatively static. In the early 1900s, when the average person died in their 40s or 50s, a man would most often be leaving an inheritance to his children when they were quite young. They were probably still in the years of grinding and building—the stretch of life when they had not yet reached their peak earnings, but when expenses were elevated as they bought and paid for a home, raised and educated children, built a business, worked their way up the corporate ladder, and so on. An inheritance came to them at the period in life when they needed it the most and when it would do them the most good.

Today, though, that same man may not die until he is well into his 80s or even 90s, which means his children may already be in their 60s or 70s when they receive an inheritance. In many cases, they will have already passed through the most difficult life stages and already stored up wealth of their own. Most of them will presumably add that inherited wealth to their own accumulated wealth, then pass it down a generation when they themselves are 80, 90, or even 100. It is not hard to imagine ever-growing sums of money being passed from one elderly generation to another, with a lot of that money never accomplishing much other than offering an ever-increasing sense of security.

He also shares his thoughts on how we should respond to this situation, so click over to read the whole thing.

Yes, Cheating Is Bad

Freddie deBoer is out with a new piece about why we should in fact shame students who cheat and hold them accountable for that.

After all, in every class there is that inconvenient kid who didn’t cheat, the kid who turned down the chance to use the easy machine and sat with the blank page and produced something worse than what the cheater produced, because that’s what learning looks like - it looks like producing worse things slowly until you can produce better things. Sadly that kid’s watching and learning, watching his peers and his teachers, and this white-knuckled dedication to never judging cheaters is teaching them the worst possible lesson. That kid sees the cheaters get the same grades, or better ones, and witnesses the adults who rush to explain that the cheaters are the real victim here, and that kid learns the actual lesson of contemporary American education: integrity is a sucker’s bet, a tax that only the honest pay. I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.

And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Normalized cheating is an example of where bad social practices can drive out good. When people have to pay a penalty in order to do the right thing, only the most morally committed are realistically going to do that.

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Quakerism as a Superpower

Speaking of cheating and more commitment, I periodically bring up that in pre-20th century England, the Quakers were unusually successful in business, in part because in an era when “buyer beware” really meant just that, the Quakers were counterparties you could trust.

Will Manidis and Nabeel S. Qureshi wrote a great essay earlier this year taking a look at how this developed. (Manidis himself was raised Quaker). They note the unusual level of success Quaker businessmen had relative to their small numbers:

The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England’s commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians.

The Quakers were unusually honest, and unusually devoted to doing business fairly.

Quakers are a strange people….The Quakers earnestly enforced a near-militant allegiance to the truth. Through meetings, through discipline, through expulsion, a friend who cheated a customer or misrepresented a product faced not only civil liability but spiritual reckoning before his entire community.

Everyone knew this, and everyone could trade with them safely as a result. You could trade with a Quaker even across the ocean with minimal contracts because the contract was already written in something more binding than paper: a spiritual agreement. In a place like early England where transaction costs – entire apparatus of verification, enforcement, legal recourse – were extremely high, and which in turn made long-distance commerce expensive and slow, the Quakers were able to drive that cost to nearly zero.

The trust was inherited by the faith and carried into every transaction before the partners even met. Even things like fixed pricing were a Quaker invention. Before Quakers, commerce meant haggling. Every transaction consisted of a negotiation and every price was a contest. Quaker shopkeepers posted a single price and held it. You paid what everyone else paid. And you never worried about being cheated because the man behind the counter believed that cheating was a mortal sin, not in the casual way that most people believe in sins, but in the way where he ordered and structured his entire community and his life such that he could remain true to his word. Customers came in enormous numbers. Of course they did.

As America becomes a lower trust, more scam ridden society, I can’t help but wonder if this type of reputation for probity will end up paying increased dividends in the future. As much as I’d like to think it will, I also think we have to be honest that today’s world is still rewarding people who falsely claim to be disabled to get more time to take tests at Harvard, promote conspiracy theories, or “ensh*ttify” some previously reliable business experience. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

The Quakers also cultivated personal habits that were good for business, which you may recognize as being related to the Protestant work ethic.

Quakers also refused ostentatious behavior and conspicuous consumption. Quakers did not display wealth because display was vanity and vanity was a sin. What other businessmen extracted to furnish lavish estates and carriages and display the visible performance of success, Quakers treated as excess cash flows to reinvest in their businesses. They built for the long term because they understood their work to be stewardship, a core Quaker value. The businesses existed to participate in God’s purpose.

The essay goes well beyond Quakerism, talking about the lack of moral purpose in today’s institutions, criticizing effective altruism, and much more. Highly recommended, so click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

As a follow-up to my recent piece on the lack of a playbook for marriage and the consequences of aging alone, Steve Eide sent me his 2024 piece from the Institute for Family Studies on how a lack of family can contribute to a risk of senior homelessness.

The Guardian: Euphoria mirrors the nihilism of a generation raised on Andrew Tate and Bonnie Blue - A very good piece that’s in line with John Seel’s essay on nihilism with a business model.

Ross Douthat: Graham Platner and the Amoral Center (gift link)

Ryan Burge: The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ledger Doesn’t Balance

Anthony Bradley has a great piece on the coming reckoning for evangelical colleges.

New Content and Media Mentions

This week I got mentions from Conor Friedersdorf, Scott Greer, American Reformer and File 770.

New this week:

• There’s a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage. - The costs of putting off marriage and children don’t show up for decades — and by the time they do, the window to choose otherwise has often closed

• My podcast this week is with AEI Senior Fellow Brent Orell on how AI might be the next NAFTA.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

First, author Michal Leibowitz describes the problem our higher education institutions have had:

The last few years have not been kind to American higher education. There are the academic problems: widespread artificial-intelligence-enabled cheating; digitally castrated attention spans; rampant grade inflation. There are the political tensions: the collapse of public trust; the protests, encampments and counterprotests that were so mishandled on college campuses after Oct. 7; now the Trump administration’s research funding cuts and threats. And there’s the demographic cliff, finally here…These challenges have, rightly, occasioned some soul-searching for American higher education.

…

These reflections are a start, but they ignore a core problem at the root of so many campus and social issues. It is not just that we lack civility and the capacity to respectfully disagree, but that many of us live as collections of strangers, each pursuing our own ends, and that our college education does almost nothing to develop the sense that what we do in our day-to-day lives resonates with people beyond ourselves.

Oh, our schools claim to foster community. They advertise residential communities and student clubs and intellectual fellowship. But, in reality, many are opaque bureaucratized customer-service institutions that offer students little stake in a common life.

She then goes on to talk about Deep Springs College, and how it’s different:

“We all, technically, legally own the place,” Will Xu told me last year. We were sitting at a picnic table on the campus of Deep Springs College, a tiny, experimental school in the California desert where he is a student. The White and Inyo Mountains were ringed around us.

The college was founded in 1917 by a hydroelectric tycoon, L.L. Nunn. Today, Deep Springs educates about 26 students each year, offering them a free, two-year liberal arts education on a working cattle ranch. Many go on to elite colleges like the University of Chicago. After Mr. Xu graduates in June, he plans to work in tech policy.

The students of Deep Springs are the sole beneficiaries of the Deep Springs trust. This college is theirs to look after and to safeguard.

This isn’t a symbolic position. Of course, millions of American students work part or full time while trying to get an education. But the students at Deep Springs have an unusual kind of responsibility for their collective lives: They work as cowboys and butchers, they mow the lawns, and they serve on the board of trustees, the curriculum committee and the communications committee. They staff a team of volunteer firefighters, responding to accidents on the twisting roads beyond the school. They help make the food that feeds everyone here — students, faculty, staff members and their families.

And they care for the animals that share the ranch with them — the chickens, cattle, pigs and horses. Rebecca McMillin-Hastings, who graduated last year, described the process of cleaning an infected wound on the flank of a dairy cow named Euclid: “You just kind of have to get your soap in your water and, just like, push on the wound. And it really hurts her.” She described throwing her entire body weight against the animal, knowing that she was hurting her, feeling that she was hurting her, but also knowing that it had to be done.

Students aren’t just mixing manual labor with intellectual studies. They are intimately involved in running the college, learning how to steward an institution.

David Neidorf has filled just about every role there is at Deep Springs College over his many years at the school: lecturer, professor, dean, vice president of operations, president and interim dean again. He told me that most students come here to live up to some kind of demanding ideal. “They wanted more responsibility than they’re going to get — for their individual lives, for their communal lives — elsewhere,” he said.

The students must choose not only which classes to take but also which ones will be offered to the college at large. They help to pick the professors and to run the admissions process, and are involved in ever bigger decisions about the future direction of the college, like whether to hire someone for fund-raising.

There’s a lot more in this great piece, including a briefer look at Berea College. Be sure to read the whole thing.

Is It All About the Phones?

Birth rates have declined substantially, not just in America, but around the world. This suggests that falling fertility can’t be related to simply US domestic factors, since the same thing is happening in a wide range of countries, with a diversity of cultural and religious backgrounds, in every region of the world.

John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times took a look at this, and suggests that the advent of the smart phone played a big role. First, he notes the global nature of fertility trends:

In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 that keeps populations stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is now closer to one than to two. In some, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero.

He then hits a point I’ve referenced before, namely that a decline in marriage/partnering rates at least partly underlie this, not merely an across the board fertility decline.

In previous decades, the world’s fertility rate went down because couples had fewer children. Now the main reason is that there are fewer couples. Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation remained constant over the past decade, the country’s total fertility rate would be higher today than it was 10 years ago.

A pioneering study by demographer Stephen Shaw shows that in the US and most high-income countries, the number of children that mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. But the proportion of women who have any children at all has fallen steeply in the past 15 years.

The decline in partnering among young people is really incredible, as his chart shows.

He goes through various explanations ranging from economic stresses to rising female accomplishment before dialing in on the key factor of the smart phone:

Dissatisfied with purely economic explanations, researchers are beginning to point the finger at a new culprit — the digital devices and platforms that play an outsized role in young people’s lives across the world.

Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo of the University of Cincinnati published a paper last month looking at birth rates through the lens of the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.

The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The authors argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.

For example, US, British and Australian birth rates for teens and young adults were broadly flat during the early 2000s but began to fall markedly from 2007.

The same slide began in France and Poland around 2009, and in Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia around 2012. What had been steady declines in fertility in Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal became precipitous drops between 2013 and 2015.

All of these inflection points coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones in local markets — as measured by Google searches for mobile apps.

In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn — a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.

Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, says it is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling”.

This is a longform FT “big read” piece that’s well worth reading in its entirety, if you can get past the paywall.

I can’t help but contrast the intentional and highly physical formation of young people at Deep Springs College with the more purely digital formation shaping most of our young people today - a formation with profound consequences for their lives and our society, as the FT piece shows.

Related in the NYT: They Started I.V.F., Then Split. Now Who Gets Custody of the Embryos? (gift link)

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Catholic vs. Protestant Culture

Another interesting data post from scholar Ryan Burge sheds additional light on Protestantism as a superior engine of human capital development.

I’ll start with Burge’s conclusion:

What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.

Let me state this a different way: in Protestantism, there’s a high standard for the laity. They are expected to both believe the full teachings of the church, and put them into practice in their own lives. Whereas Catholicism, practically speaking, has much lower expectations of the laity. Culturally, lay Catholics feel free to dissent from the teachings of the church.

If this is true of theological matters, how much more is it true of secondary matters such as the famed “Protestant work ethic”?

Burge illustrates this by looking at social conservative beliefs. He has previously shared data showing that Catholic views on social issues are often not aligned with the teachings of their own church. This drew critiques from Catholics who argued that these results were only because he’s including nominal Catholics or some such. His new post attempts to take that critique seriously.

So let’s test out this idea that Catholics are just as socially conservative as evangelicals by pulling in both things that we’ve learned. I am going to show you three graphs: the entire sample of evangelicals and Catholics, only weekly attenders of those two groups, and finally only weekly attenders who also identify as politically conservative. That way we can control for those differences as much as possible.

There are some very interesting charts in there, but I’ll just share this one. It’s the share of people who believe pre-marital sex is always wrong. I think this is an interesting point to look at because while believing that will make someone look culturally retrograde or strange, it’s not one of those “third rail” issues that can get you cancelled.

Even when looking at just weekly white attenders who are conservative - and keep in mind, that excludes the larger share of Catholics vs. Protestants who attend weekly but aren’t conservative - still less than half of Catholics believe pre-marital sex is always wrong.

Evangelicals are far from perfect when it comes to believing their church’s nominal teaching, let alone practicing it, yet Catholics score worse. Again, being unable to convince even half of its regular, explicitly conservative attendees to even believe its own teachings, I’d argue Catholicism is much less likely than Protestantism to function as a broader engine of human capital uplift. Protestantism is more transformational of people’s beliefs and practices.

Catholicism has many positive attributes, as I’ve highlighted in my book and elsewhere, but this is an area where Protestantism shines. The decay of Protestant culture is thus very consequential for the country, and its role cannot be plausibly replaced by Catholic culture, even were some great religious transformation to occur.

There’s a lot of great material in Burge’s post, and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

I should note that this analysis only looked evangelicalism. Mainline Protestantism may have lost some of this traditional function. It’s a bit harder to say using the same analysis, since many of these churches no longer promote traditional moral teachings, at least not with any vigor.

But mainline Protestantism is a repository for other virtues that are in increasingly short supply in our country. Just look at Burge himself. He’s an archetype of the high-minded mainline Protestant man who is interested in truth, fairness, and getting it right above merely championing his own team or cause. If you read him, you know that his analysis is not sectarian. He may not always be right. He’s not above criticism. But you see all too few people even trying these days. The production of this type of person is another thing Protestantism historically did well in America, and we feel keenly today the loss of that ethos.

What It Takes to Shape Culture

I wrote earlier this week about the meaning of the cancelation of CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But there’s another lesson to learn from this. CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted this picture of the staff of Stephen Colbert’s show gathered on the Late Show stage:

This prompted an outpouring of contempt from conservatives, who mocked what they see as the show’s bloated staff, and how it was losing an estimated $40 million per year on a budget of $100 million.

I’m sure the show could have been produced with fewer staff on a leaner budget. But this is consistent with a longstanding observation that I’ve had that conservatives have no idea the amount of talent and money it takes to produce compelling and impactful media and cultural products. Hence, their efforts are chronically understaffed and underfunded, limiting their broader cultural impact.

Best of the Web

In last week’s digest, I mentioned conservative institutional neglect of libraries. A librarian wrote to me to agree that few conservatives become librarians. But he did want to point me at the Association of Library Professionals, a new association of librarians who want the profession to stay true to its historic mission and avoid the turn towards social activism.

Samuel Abrams/AEI: Civic Knowledge Is Returning. Civic Formation Is Not.

NYT: What to Know About the New Obsession With Testosterone (gift link) - From politics to influencers and beyond, the hormone is being used not just for medical reasons but in pursuit of a new masculine ideal

WSJ: More Dads Are Scaling Back at the Office for Kids and Housework (gift link) - College-educated men lead the way among dads sacrificing hours at work for time at home

The Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, one of the most prestigious awards in film, went to “Fjord.” This film is apparently about an evangelical family from Romania that moves to Norway, where child protective services tries to take their children away from them. It’s very interesting to see a film with this theme win such an award, and I wonder what the political subtext is. (For example, is the real meaning a commentary on how the much larger Muslim immigrant population of the Nordic countries are treated?) But interesting regardless. I hope this film shows near me so I can go see it.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from Fortune magazine and from Tim Challies. I was also a guest on the Immanuel Network Podcast.

New this week:

• Stephen Colbert Didn’t Get Cancelled - Mass Culture Did - From 55 million to 6.7 million viewers in 34 years — and what that tells us about the end of America’s shared mass-media, mass-consumer culture

• Nihilism with a Business Model - The gig economy didn’t just change how we work. It changed how we imagine ourselves. A guest post by John Seel.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Buying these teams and keeping them local would be a rounding error on the net worth of multiple Silicon Valley tech figures. Yet things like this don’t even seem to be on their radar.

Contrast this with Mel and Herb Simon, founders of what’s now the largest shopping mall owner in the country. The Indiana Pacers were originally an ABA team, maybe the most successful of the ABA franchises. They were one of four ABA teams that joined the NBA when their league closed. The Pacers struggled in the NBA. In the 1970s they had to hold a telethon to sell enough tickets to save the team from closure. In 1983, the Pacers were still not financially viable, having gone 20-62 the previous season, playing to mostly empty seats. They were going to either go out of business or relocate.

Then Indianapolis mayor Bill Hudnut asked the Simon brothers to buy the team. Even though it looked like a bad investment, reputedly one of the Simons said to the mayor, “I guess I have to do this, don’t I?” They bought the team for $11 million and it’s still in the city today. The team and its arena have played a key role in Indianapolis building one of the nation’s most lucrative franchises in hosting major sporting events.

This also turned out to be an incredible investment for the Simons. The Pacers are worth an estimated $4.2 billion today, far more than the total Simon family net worth back then.

Today’s tech elite need to expand their vision of their civic role, locally and nationally. Delivering amazing new technologies will always come first. But with the rewards of that come obligations that are not always freely chosen.

Sometimes you choose your duties. Sometimes your duties choose you.

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Conservative Institutional Neglect of Libraries

Apart from public schools, libraries are arguably the most important government formation institution for children, and even adults. Libraries are well known for being very culturally and politically leftist in their orientation. But this is not a case where the left had to “capture” an institution. It is one that conservatives have largely neglected.

People say “conservatives don’t read.” That’s not entirely fair. There are segments of the conservative world that are very into books. Christian homeschooling family types are big users of libraries around here. But I think it’s fair to say that liberals are more interested in books than conservatives, which we see in the very leftist skew of independent bookstores as well.

Conservatives don’t typically become librarians, even though this could be an ideal profession - similar to teacher - for a significant number of conservative or religious women. It’s not a field that is valorized or put into the imagination of conservative children.

I’m also not aware of a single scholar in the conservative think tank or policy space who is chartered with studying libraries and developing policies for them as their main job. Stephen Eide is the closest person I know of, and he has a great essay on libraries in the new issue of National Affairs. But this is mostly a personal passion project for him and is not the focus of his day job. Perhaps this lack of conservative policy interest is because there’s little federal policy action, or because there are no conservative funders willing to underwrite library policy research.

Given the importance of libraries as a formation institution, conservatives should have greater interest and engagement with them.

In light of the Yglesias post above, it’s worth noting that America’s library system was originally built out through the generosity of the Gilded Age elite Andrew Carnegie. Many Carnegie library buildings are still standing, and some are still even used as libraries.

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Personal Standards in Today’s World

How to raise general standards and elevate our people without imposing crushing and cruel judgments is one of the challenges of our age.

Liana Graham and Scott Yenor have an interesting essay in First Things on repentance and forgiveness in a pornified age that illustrates this in one domain of life:

In 2012, one of us asked two dozen young conservative women in San Diego—most aged twenty-five to thirty—whether they were married. Only one was. When pressed for reasons, the answer came quickly: “The men are addicted to porn.” That moment revealed a quiet crisis. If committed, attractive, faithful young women hesitate to marry because of pornography, the pro-marriage project is in deep trouble.

…

Today, women rightly sense that many men under forty have warped expectations shaped by endless visual novelty. They are jealous, suspicious, and increasingly unwilling to risk marriage with men whose loyalties seem divided. Porn explains why women are more skeptical about and less interested in marriage and dating than men. Porn is a significant source of conflict in nearly 20 percent of married and engaged couples. For more than a third of women, frequent porn use is a marital deal-breaker.

…

Women are encouraged to be tolerant of male sexual impurity today because some girls have gone wild. For nearly every porn video there is a female “porn star.” Call Her Daddy, a podcast where the girls brag about getting around, is wildly popular. Women are reading erotica, watching more porn than in the past, and posting highly suggestive and borderline pornographic photos of themselves on social media. At best, women today are torn between the desire to settle down and have a family and the career pressures of feminism, extraordinary sex positivity, and a dating culture built on premarital sex.

Today’s world, where many of the standards of the past are pervasively violated and thus long gone, puts people, and institutions, in a bind who want to set a higher bar than what society has on offer.

Porn is an obvious example. A woman who demands a man who doesn’t watch porn, at least on occasion, is going to narrow her pool of prospects considerably. Similarly, you see many men on the internet proclaiming women damaged goods because of their “body count,” but if they insist on only marrying a “debt-free virgin without tattoos,” they are setting a standard that excludes a majority of younger single women.

Men and women can make those choices, but they come with greater tradeoffs than would have been the case in the past. As Graham and Yenor put it:

Before the sexual revolution, men and women could more easily hold one another to high standards of premarital conduct, but these novels instruct us not to glorify the good old days. As sixty years of sexual revolution have compromised both men and women, both must balance standards with realistic expectations.

I’ve also noted similar effects in other domains. It’s hard for anyone to be too judgmental these days when it comes to things like substance abuse problems, divorce, a suicide, etc. because everybody’s family now has somebody in it - maybe more than one somebody - with big life problems.

Best of the Web

WSJ: How Defending Prostitution Became a Progressive Cause (gift link) - ‘Sex-worker’ rights have become a rallying cry on the cultural left. But not everyone agrees that the sex trade should be getting a pass.

More Births: A shocking new study finds that the desire for children has collapsed among young people in China

Scott Greer: The Irrelevance Of Pro-Lifers - America has largely moved on from abortion, to the chagrin of people who make their living off the issue. Note: Greer is a dissident right figure who likely doesn’t care about abortion personally.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

New this week:

• The End of the Moral Majority - The pro-life movement is one of the first casualties of a political architecture built for a country that no longer exists

• My podcast this week was with Seth Barron on the left’s institutional capture of institutions.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: New York Public Library by Vallue/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

First, the New York Times recently published a list of their top 30 living American songwriters. It was a source of tremendous controversy and discussion, which of course makes it a huge success from the Times perspective.

One of the critics of the Times list was the popular and very knowledgeable music Youtuber Rick Beato, who recorded an interesting short video looking at the background of the Times critics who selected the list:

Beato notes the prevalence of Ivy League and elite degrees among the critics, pointing especially the lack of any degrees in music. Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica went to Harvard and got a B.A. in English, for example. I ran the list of six critics through Claude, which indicated none of them have any formal musical training.

I don’t think one needs to have a degree in music or be a musician to be an effective pop music critic. But Beato’s complaint about the Times critics’ educational backgrounds does illustrate something about the changing nature of education and meritocracy in America.

It used to be that prep schools and elite colleges took people who were already destined to become top leaders due to family background, and formed them with a particular ethos. Now those schools provide those who would not otherwise likely become top leaders with the credential that allows them to obtain those positions.

We call this new system meritocracy. But listening to Caramanica complain about white male songwriters and dismiss Billy Joel, I ask myself: is he really the best person in the entire country in understanding and writing about pop music such that he should be a major critic at the New York Times based on merit? When I see that over 700,000 people watched a Rick Beato video breaking down some subtle elements that make Toto’s “Africa” a megahit, or note that almost 300,000 people subscribe to the deeply knowledgeable Ted Gioia here on Substack, I’m not convinced.

It’s great for Caramanica that he got that gig. I’m sure he has real talent or he wouldn’t be there.

But this illustrates the way that our present system of credentialing, filtering, and elevating people is not producing the results we would necessarily expect from a system that’s supposed to be organized around skills, competence, and merit.

The next piece will take a deeper look at this topic, looking at the question of what the right model is for elite formation and structuring.

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The Best Model for an American Tech Elite

Palantir’s Alex Karp wrote a widely-discussed book called The Technological Republic about the role he advocates Silicon Valley play in our society. I previously highlight a review essay by Tanner Greer that is very critical of Karp, and which lays out a history of the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern aka WASP Establishment that he views as the real model of fusing new technology with national development and leadership.

Geoffrey Kabaservice at the Niskanen Center did his doctoral dissertation on the last generation of the WASP establishment, which he adapted into an excellent book I’ve mentioned before, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment.

He is out with his own long and interesting essay interacting with Greer. He is something of a friendly critic, arguing that instead of the Gilded Age establishment, it was actually the later 1940-1970 establishment that provides a better model for Silicon Valley.

Greer’s analysis of the Eastern Establishment offers real insight into the realities of power and influence in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that same analysis also complicates his argument in significant ways. Taking a page from E. Digby Baltzell — the sociologist who popularized the term WASP — Greer describes this establishment as the postwar fusion of a New England-centric patrician class with a rising group of industrial magnates…Baltzell believed that American society benefited from the creation of this establishment. In his view, the wealthy industrialists reinforced the power and standing of the upper class while also putting them in touch with the realities of a modernizing world. At the same time, the upper-class code of conduct operated as a check on the magnates who otherwise might destroy the republic through their greed and lust for power.

Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account is overly New York centric, and downplays the important role played by the Boston tradition:

Grant, however, emphasized: “Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality.” Greer’s account, in my view, generally underestimates the importance of moral and egalitarian ideals (including the principle of racial equality) in the formation of the post-Civil War leadership. He believes that “The key city in [the Eastern Establishment] constellation was always New York City,” and that the scholarship of historians and sociologists like Baltzell “is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.”

But this is to dismiss the genuine struggle within the establishment, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, between American commercial impulses embodied by New York and the ideals embodied by Boston. Conservatives who believe that politics is downstream from culture should consider how the post-Civil War histories written in Boston, for example, influenced Americans’ perceptions of national identity and national priorities. Historian Mark Peterson has demonstrated how the South’s defeat in the Civil War allowed Boston “to put its impress on the future of the United States,” not least by enabling Boston’s pioneering historians (including Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley) to construct new narratives.

Kabaservice is critical of the brand of rapacious capitalism practiced by Gilded Age elites. He also points to conflicts within the governing class of America, such as over the scope of corporate power:

And while many people believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have been a laissez-faire era, governments at all levels (including local and state as well as federal) took action not only to support economic growth but also to limit corporate excesses. Landmarks along this path included antitrust legislation and regulatory action, civil service reform, and the institution of progressive taxation as well as the creation of a rudimentary social welfare safety net. The Supreme Court affirmed the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and Congress created the Federal Reserve two years later in order to ensure the nation would not have to depend on the good graces of individual bankers to survive the next financial panic. Many of these initiatives were advanced by Republicans with the support of GOP presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which calls into question the idea of an all-encompassing political establishment.

One of the points Baltzell makes is that the WASP establishment stood as an affront to the Marxist conception of class. Here you had a class in which its own class interests did not straightforwardly determine its politics. There were people of different parties and different persuasions within the establishment itself. This ability of the establishment to make space within itself for high-stakes conflict, while regulating the conduct of that conflict, and ensuring its participants retained personal relationships and ties, was one of the establishment’s core functions. In our age of no-holds-barred, zero-sum, winner-takes-all political and cultural wars, we feel keenly the lack of this establishment function today.

Kabaservice here also emphasizes what I call the “human-social stack,” focused on making sure that techo-industrial acceleration worked well for America and Americans broadly, not just a narrow stratum of industrialists. So much focus today is on how we accelerate new technologies, build more housing or energy, etc. But the social structures and institutions in which this is embedded and deployed are of equal importance.

In general, Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account makes the establishment appear too unified and monolithic.

He also argues that the Great Depression did not mark the establishment’s decline as Greer claims, but that it continued into the postwar era. In this, I should note that Greer follows Baltzell, who sees the decline of the establishment in the 1930’s, viewing its postwar reflowering as, in his words, an “Indian summer.” Kabaservice writes:

There is no doubt that the Depression did discredit the Republican Party and many of the policies it had upheld since the 19th century, which the considerable majority of Americans came to believe had brought on the economic collapse and which offered few solutions for the widespread misery that resulted. Some Old Guard Republicans continued to cling to Gilded Age nostrums. But the party as a whole moved toward moderation during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, endorsing parts of the New Deal social welfare safety net as well as policies to educate and empower the workforce — and the result from 1940 to 1970 was both a much faster rate of growth (measured in output per person) and a more egalitarian and cohesive society than in the period from 1870 to 1940.

The Eastern Establishment pivoted in response to the Depression, away from knee-jerk association with the GOP and toward the model of Henry Stimson and his acolytes, who offered dedicated public service to both Republican and Democratic administrations as an expression of placing the interests of nation above class. Although many today would dismiss this idea of noblesse oblige as a myth, it was reinforced by the high rate of World War II casualties among graduates of elite prep schools and universities as well as the service of dollar-a-year men in government and the wholesale conversion of American industry to wartime production. The postwar era also saw the movement toward meritocracy in Ivy League universities under leaders like Harvard’s James Conant and Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., largely because they believed that elite institutions had national responsibilities that transcended the interests of the class into which they had been born.

I see two basic models of thinking about governance modernization in America. One is the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. The other is the era from 1933-1964, running from the New Deal through to the postwar institutions (like the UN and NATO) to the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, America was creating a new set of institutions to deal with new challenges. Kabaservice is very enamored of the latter era.

FDR is an archetype of the kind of leader who can operate within the American cultural and political tradition, and yet still carry out major institutional reforms. Not everything he did was positive, obviously, but transformation was definitely necessary.

But Greer’s choice of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era may be a better parallel to our own time due to the rapid development of disruptive technologies with the potential to radically reshape society, depending on how AI turns out. Our Silicon Valley style startup world that can create stupendous wealth and power for founders is definitely more akin to that era than say the 1950s “organization man” one.

Kabaservice also has to reckon with the fact that in his preferred era, the establishment failed to accomplish the most critical thing it needed to do, namely perpetuate itself.

Also missing within the accounts of Greer, Kabaservice - and me - is a look at the streak of self-critique and even self-loathing within the WASP class that emerged in the early 1900s. This is over-emphasized by non-WASPs with an ethnic ax to grind, like Michael Knox Beren in his book Wasps, and I have not yet come across a good modern treatment of it.

Greer and Kabaservice agree on a key point that is very relevant today, namely the importance of the establishment being willing to make personal and class sacrifices for the sake of the nation in order to perpetuate their own dominant position.

Tanner Greer is correct that the Eastern Establishment played an outsized role in American history over a decades-long span because it aligned industrial wealth, political power, and a culture sustained by upper-class rituals and institutions. But what made the establishment durable — and indeed gave it legitimacy — was less lockstep agreement on political issues than an ethos that subordinated class interest to national interest. At its heart was a compromise that involved not just the negotiated mutual absorption of two rival groups but their adjustment to a higher national creed. The New England aristocracy allowed the “crude but vital America” into its ranks, while the industrialists agreed to Puritan-inspired limits on their pursuit of profit at all costs. The establishment that emerged did, at its best, prove willing to incorporate talented outsiders, to adhere to an ethos of disinterested public service, to abide by norms of liberal democracy, and to build institutions that ultimately undermined its own dominance — even while helping to make the United States the most globally competitive society the world had ever seen.

This echoes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in his Prison Notebooks:

Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.

This is a critical element missing from the worldview of Silicon Valley elites, Wall Street financiers, and other would-be dominant groups like “the 9.9%” upper middle class.

You can click over to read Kabaservice’s entire essay.

Related: The newsletter Upper Middle - targeted at the anxieties of the urban upper middle class - has a fun online game called “The Elite Game” in which you try to perpetuate your ruling class over the generations by deciding which people to include or exclude.

Best of the Web

Mere Orthodoxy: The Forgotten Evangelicals of Colorado Springs - One of the most important things to understand about evangelicalism is that it is deeply shaped by the geographic and cultural periphery - Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Lynchburg and Virginia Beach, and the suburbs (not the city) of Chicago.

More Births has an interesting X thread on how divorce affects fertility in future generations. Answer: it decreases it.

NYT: U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops (gift link) - With fewer students, many public school districts are confronting unfilled classrooms, and hard choices about school closures

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a link this week in Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter. And the crew at Theology Pugcast had an interesting discussion about my essay on the link between the decline of Protestantism and the decline of literacy.

New this week:

• There Is No Boomer Succession Plan - How a generation that didn’t form its successors is structuring around its own absence

• The Three Ages of Boss Rule - The era of political machine bosses is remembered as one of corruption. It was also one that mastered important parts of politics and governance that we’ve forgotten. A guest essay by Stephen Eide.

Desecration and the Negative World

Speaking of my book, Carl Trueman also has a new book out called The Desecration of Man. Trueman writes:

“Desecration” is a strong word, stronger than others have been used to describe the modern world such as “disenchantment.” It implies the intentional abuse or destruction of something holy, something of more than ordinary significance.

The idea here is that the modern world has not simply adopted an atheist-materialist metaphysics, in which we can go about our days without thinking much about religion. Rather, the modern world desires to explicitly transgress or profane old religious standards and values. This implies an underlying hostility to them. So while Trueman has his own framework, I see it as very compatible with and affiramatory towards my ideas of the “Negative World,” that American elite culture now views traditional Christianity as a negative rather that positive force in society.

Again, if you haven’t read my book yet, pick it up.

Men Can Have Standards Too

A video clip from the Dave Ramsey show became a viral topic of debate on X. A woman who supposedly has $90,000 in student loan debt called in because her boyfriend says he won’t propose to her until she’s debt free.

Ramsey tells her, “If you were my daughter, you know what’s I’d tell you? Dump him.” He goes on to say that her boyfriend is trying to make her prove her worth to him with money, that money disputes are the leading cause of divorce, and that this is a money dispute. Ergo, she should walk away from this relationship.

You can make a case for what Ramsey is saying, but what we are really seeing here is an example of the pervasive idea in our society that men are not allowed to have standards for women.

You may recall the furor several years back over a trollish post by a woman that, “Men prefer debt free virgins without tattoos.” The very idea that men have standards and some women don’t meet them is anathema to a lot of people - and especially to many Boomer men like Ramsey.

The giveaway here is when Ramsey tells this woman, “You’re a princess, and you deserve more than that.” Ramsey knows nothing about this woman but is sure she is a “princess” - the kind of person any guy would be lucky to have deign to pay attention to him.

Women are encouraged to set very high standards and reject men who aren’t worthy of being with a princess like her, but people get outraged if men set standards for women. Social scientists talk about men being “unmarriageable,” but never apply that label to any women.

Just as women can set standards for men, men can have standards for women too. Particularly today when we read a lot about how women are getting significantly more college degrees than men, how men are falling behind or failing to launch, etc., those men who have their act together need to recognize the value of what they bring to the table. They are not beggars who would be lucky to have any woman pay attention to them.

In truth, it’s completely reasonable for a man to not want to marry into a pile of debt - or a lot of other things. Men should think more about what their own non-negotiables are.

In this case, the man actually is helping her pay off the debt. While I don’t recommend pre-marital cohabitation, he’s letting her live with him for free so that she can devote the majority of her income to paying down debt. Her boyfriend makes $250,000/year, which puts him in the top echelons of income earners. If she simply dumps this guy as Ramsey suggests, how likely is it that she’ll find another guy who makes that much money to let her live rent free with him - and marry her with $90,000 in debt? It’s not impossible, but in this dating and marriage market, it’s very far from a sure thing.

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Falling Fertility

Melissa Kearney is an economist known for her book on the “two-parent privilege.” She was just a guest on a fantastic Financial Times podcast about the implications of falling fertility for the economy. Here is some of what she said:

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist and put this close to 10, but I definitely am gonna put it above the median of five. And the reason is because if this is something we don’t address, we will be facing potentially very large changes in our society and our economy that have sort of, it seems, snuck up on us. So I don’t wanna sound like I’m saying, oh my goodness, this is definitely gonna cause an economic crisis. But it is something that people should be paying attention to and the consequences are potentially quite massive.

…

Now, the more sanguine demographers say, you know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. They might catch up. For me, when I’m looking at the data, I don’t see any reason to think that that’s likely to happen. What we know from other high-income countries that have experienced a decline in births before the US is that more recent cohorts of women are not catching up, that birth rates are down in a sustained way.

None of the pressures or cultural changes or reasons that seem to be driving these declines look like they’re gonna reverse anytime soon. So to have the current sort of cohort of people in their twenties and thirties catch up, we’d have to have a really dramatic increase in childbearing post-age 30 that would have to happen for reasons that we can’t quite anticipate. And so I’m less optimistic than some other demographers. 

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So that puts pressure on our fiscal systems. How do we take care of all these older people? How do we continue to pay for Social Security and Medicare? It also has the potential to mean less economic growth and less economic dynamism. And so we worry about that too. We worry that an older shrinking population is one with less innovation, fewer new ideas, fewer technological breakthroughs, and that has the potential consequences of decreasing living standards for all people.

The worry is about a shrinking population in a less dynamic economy that delivers the continued increase in living standards that we’ve become accustomed to. 

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So we already spend 35 per cent of federal outlays on mandatory spending on people over the age of 65. Meanwhile, we’ve got young families struggling to make ends meet, right? And we’ve got a decline in fertility, and our government’s spending 5:1 on a per capita basis on the elderly to kids…Certainly, it’s not surprising that our healthcare spending on the elderly is more than it is on kids, because you’re exactly right, their healthcare needs are greater. But the income that we redistribute to the elderly, no. It is absolutely not true that they have greater needs than kids. Our child poverty rates are high, and there are very, very long-term consequences of child poverty.

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What’s very interesting is that, in a paper in this new Aspen Economic Strategy Group, Jeff Clemens points out that as local areas continue to experience a decline in births and a decline in K-12 enrolment, and ultimately a decline in the number of people available for the local tax-based and working age population, towns are gonna have to unwind their commitment to public goods and services, and that is a really hard thing to do.

So specifically, let’s just think about schools. In a lot of local areas, well, rural areas in the US have been dealing with declining school enrolment for the past quarter century. That’s going to become more and more common across the US as birth rates decline. It’s really hard to figure out how to consolidate schools, how to close schools.

More local areas are also going to encounter this when it comes to hospitals and local transit systems. Those are all systems that have very large fixed capital and labour costs. And as you have fewer people, the per capita cost of running these types of public goods and services increases non-linearly.

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These older workers are holding on to higher-paying managerial positions for longer, and that’s crowding out opportunities for younger workers to advance and earn higher wages. This is well documented now in the US labour market and in other high-income countries. The older generation, people over age 50 who are holding on to their jobs for longer are the winners in this context, and the ones who are losing are the ones who are delaying their career advancement, not advancing into managerial positions.

The wage gap between older and younger workers has widened in favour of older workers in recent years. Relate this to what we also know is happening outside of firms. Younger adults are having a harder time entering the housing market and increasing wealth, and others have shown that the wealth gap has also increased in recent decades, favouring, again, the elderly.

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I think this is top of mind because The Harvard Crimson recently had an article showing that now, I think it was like 40 per cent of tenured faculty at Harvard were above the age of 65. And that is a dramatic change from just 20 years ago. Again, it’s not like Harvard’s a growing company necessarily, but they’re not just gonna keep adding to their number of tenured faculty slots.

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I think fundamentally, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that a few extra thousand dollars or a few additional months of leave when a kid is born doesn’t really meaningfully change the calculus for somebody trying to decide, “do I wanna commit to a parenting lifestyle and be responsible for another person for at least 18 years?”

So these incremental things really haven’t worked. Now, what I’m about to say next requires some humility on my part as an economist. It’s hard to imagine this turning around without sort of a cultural shift or changes in social norms. So my read, again, with my colleague Phil Levine, we’ve done a lot of work on this. What we suggest is probably the single best explanation, which is like a catchall explanation for why fertility is down in the US and other high-income countries is because of shifting priorities. This isn’t a value statement. This is when you look at the way the more recent cohorts of young adults are choosing to spend their time and money in their twenties and thirties, they’re spending more time and money on establishing their career, on working, on leisure pursuits, and they’re choosing parenthood to a much lesser degree.

Click over to read the whole transcript. If you get stopped by a paywall in reading the transcript, you can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts.

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NYT: The Many Love Lives of Ted Turner - Known as a playboy, the media mogul gave his paramours and three ex-wives plenty of stories to tell. He also managed to stay friendly with many of them

NY Mag: Can You Really Choose Your ‘Best Baby’? - Silicon Valley-backed companies are selling $50,000 genetic tests to anxious parents, despite shaky science

WSJ: Young New Yorkers Have a New Hot Spot: Sunday Mass (gift link) - Gen Z is flocking to church for community, faith and dates thanks to meetup groups such as ‘Pizza to Pews’ and ‘Holy Girl Walk’

Ryan Burge: Who Marries Whom? Faith, Partners, and the Unequally Yoked

NYT: Speak, Yuppie (gift link) - A look back at the original 1980s yuppie phenomenon. A great read.

But perhaps we were too dismissive of the yuppies. So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s. In that moment, they fashioned a bargain that we are still living with: An increasingly diverse professional class signed up for a life of hard-won affluence, at the cost of deep inequality for everyone else.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the podcast of the Show-Me Institute in Missouri discussing city-county merger in St. Louis. This is one of the best and most nuanced looks at this type of government merger that you are likely to see.

New this week:

• The Lives We Won’t Give Up - We mourn what we’ve lost to modernity, yet we won’t surrender what replaced it.

• Protestantism’s Institutional Problem - A guest essay from Jordan Cooper on a serious hurdle to Protestant academics

And if you haven’t already read my original Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture, be sure to read that too.

Also, a heads up that the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture is giving out $5000 journalism fellowships to fund reporting of stories on the changing nature of American religion. The due date is May 4, so right around the corner.

What Is a City Without Children?

A recent essay in the Financial Times explores the implications of the trend of falling birth rates and the disappearance of children from cities.

The school, Colvestone, is in Hackney, east London. It is one of four schools that closed in the borough in 2024. Four more closed last year. But not even that accurately shows the declining numbers of schoolchildren here. Earlier this week, parents of four-year-olds across the UK learnt where their child has been accepted to primary school, but in the capital many seats will remain empty. Last year, it was roughly one in five places in Hackney alone — nearly 500 in all.

The falling numbers of children in London is mirrored across cities in Europe and the US. In Paris, primary school enrolment has fallen by a quarter in the past decade. First year elementary school enrolment in New York fell 18 per cent in the decade to autumn 2024, while in Barcelona, preschool entry (three to six years), the main entry point into the school system, fell 16 per cent between autumn 2016 and autumn 2024. 

Much of this change can be laid at the feet of falling birth rates. But in cities, rising housing costs, the growing use of homes for short-term rentals and housebuilding strategies geared away from families are fanning the demographic imbalance — it’s not just that fewer children are being born, many are moving away. In the UK, eight of the 10 fastest-shrinking boroughs for primary school children in the past five years were in inner London, according to the Education Policy Institute.

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The problem is being compounded. In the decade to 2025, more than three-quarters of homes built under the Greater London Authority’s Affordable Homes Programme (the majority in the sector), had just one or two bedrooms. In London’s private rental sector over the past five years, that share was even greater, according to Molior, which specialises in London’s new-build data: 92 per cent were homes with fewer than three bedrooms….As a result, despite the capital growing by 543,000 residents between 2014 and 2024, its population of under-nines fell by 107,000, according to Trust for London.

Many argue that these divergent lines are not inevitable. In Vienna, where primary school numbers are not declining, the city provides large numbers of family-sized homes, especially through large-scale subsidised or municipal housing. Helped by high migration to the city and strong childcare and parental leave policies, Copenhagen is another city to buck the trend of falling child numbers.

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As more children move away from cities around the world — San Francisco’s elementary school intake is projected to drop from 56,000 to 49,000 in the next decade, according to the California state government — the question becomes more pressing: what is a city without them?

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Saffron Woodcraft, urban anthropologist and research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity, points to other knock-on effects: fewer children using local services such as community centres or church halls makes them more likely to close, which comes at a cost to everyone. “My local Bermondsey village hall, as well as toddler groups and children’s music classes, hosts the polling centre, puppy training, music classes, exercise classes for people of all ages — and you can rent it for a party or a wedding. We would lose all that,” she says.

Closing schools severs deeper psychological ties, too. “When a school I went to or grew up with closes and is standing empty — and may be redeveloped — I will ask, do I belong, do I have a future here, how will I fit in?” says Woodcraft. “When that architecture is dismantled, people are dislocated or dissociated,” she notes. 

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Perversely, children are disappearing from our cities at precisely the time that great efforts are being made to make them more child-friendly. Street and park design for children is improving across Europe and the world, and lower inner-city speed limits are making streets safer. 

School streets — which close off streets for parts or all of the day — are increasingly common; in Paris, where many roads have been rebuilt as fully pedestrian areas, residents last March voted to add 500 more. There are 78 school streets in New York and more than 500 in London. Recent UK research found a 63 per cent fall in traffic on school streets as more parents opt to walk to school with their children. 

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Efforts to create child-friendlier streets seem wasted if fewer and fewer families can afford to live on them. Growing concentrations of young adults in inner-city areas and neighbourhoods increasingly siloed by age rob residents of the enriching effects of encounters with those of different generations, says Markus Moos, from the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada. ‘’With age segregation on the rise in European and North American cities, we are losing the intergenerational exposure that helps with mutual understanding across generations and lifecycle stages.’’

Click over to read the whole thing. Unfortunately, the FT has a very hard paywall and a very stingy article share system. I included as much of the article here as I could justify.

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The Cost of Kids

The New York Times ran a widely-discussed article about Gen Z people who are choosing not to have kids because of the cost (gift link).

Growing up in Utah, where big families are part of the culture, Rilee Stewart and Brock Goodwin always imagined having several children. Ms. Stewart has four siblings and Mr. Goodwin has two, so having three or four children felt like the natural next step after getting married last year.

But that vision shifted once they settled into their new home in Mapleton, about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. The 2,000-square-foot house came with a $20,000 down payment and a $3,200 monthly mortgage. That financial pressure, combined with other rising costs such as gas and groceries, made them rethink parenthood. They realized that even with one child, they would most likely need more space, and moving to a bigger house in their price range would probably mean leaving Utah and their families behind.

Mr. Goodwin, 25, works as a firefighter, and Ms. Stewart, also 25, is a nail technician. Adding a child would push them into living paycheck to paycheck, they said. Ms. Stewart said she would need to take on extra shifts, and Mr. Goodwin would have to give up hobbies he enjoys, like golfing. One of them might even need to stay home full time to care for a child.

After weighing all the costs, they decided not to have children at all.

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Many couples who once imagined larger families are scaling back or deciding to remain child free. About three in five Gen Zers and millennials said financial concerns influenced their choice not to have any or more children at this time, or caused them to be unsure about it, according to new data from Credit Karma and the Harris Poll that surveyed adults ages 18 through 45. Sarah Hayford, the director of the Institute for Population Research at Ohio State University, said that while many people in their teens and 20s still reported wanting two children, falling short of that goal suggested that external factors were making parenthood more difficult to attain.

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For Imani Menard, 29, and Austin Cunningham, 31, the decision not to have children came down to the life they’ve built and what it would take to change it. Married in 2023, they have shaped their relationship around exploring new places together, such as Japan, Bali and Morocco.

But that lifestyle has become more expensive. In the wake of the war in Iran, airlines have been raising prices and checked-bag fees to cover soaring fuel costs. The couple have felt it firsthand: A flight to France for a wedding in September cost them $1,600 round trip. Around the same time the year before, a similar trip was just $400 round trip, they said. With a child, they added, going to that wedding would have been more difficult and meant fewer trips this year.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The people they used as illustrations reveal that a big factor driving the decision not to have kids isn’t absolute cost but lifestyle. The cost of children would require lifestyle sacrifices they don’t want to make.

This is absolutely a real tradeoff. A lot of people online criticized the first couple for thinking a 2,000 square foot house isn’t enough for a child. This is certainly true. Our house is smaller than that, and we have plenty of space.

At the same time, attacking other people’s life preferences is not a winning strategy. We do need to understand the extent to which expectations of what it means to have a middle class or upper middle class life have changed.

We aren’t living in 1955 or even 1985 anymore. And it isn’t realistic to expect people to embrace the constrained lifestyles of those eras. Raising birth rates requires us to first understand and address today’s life preferences as they presently exist.

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NYT: More Young Men Say Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to Them, Poll Finds (gift link) - “Gallup’s survey, which combined polling data across multiple years, seems to confirm that young men are indeed becoming more religious. But it has found that religion is dropping in importance among young women, widening a surprising gender gap for young adults.”

The Guardian: How “wife schools” are shaping submissive Christian women.

This interesting short podcast with Collin Hansen talks about the “Young, Restless, and Roman” trend of striver conversions to Catholicism. He notes that many of those converts are in what the Reformed people called the “cage stage” of rabid enthusiasm. This is good to keep in mind, as the highly obnoxious and low consciousness converts who populate social media these days are not representative of Catholics as a whole.

Show Me Institute: St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval - a wonky but important look at the demographic trends affecting all too many American cities.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy. I was also a guest on the Veritas Vox podcast.

New this week:

• The State of America’s Downtowns (paid only) - Field notes from four downtowns, where schlubby workers, empty storefronts, and shrunken corporate footprints tell a complicated recovery story

• AI’s Infinite Economy - A guest post by Kristian Andersen exploring the rise of a new class of economic participant, why the next economy will not belong to better copilots, and why this future economy’s most important layer will still be human.

• My podcast this week was with Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on America’s “Hebraic Christianity” Culture.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Cover image: empty playground by Rick Obst/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0

State School Upper Middle Class

A writer who goes by the name “Drunk Wisconsin” wrote a viral essay back in February around what he called the “State School Upper Middle Class.” or “runner-up elites.” Don’t let his nom de plume or other saucier essays turn you off, there’s some great insight in here. People like this are all over suburban Indianapolis (and the suburbs of most other cities).

For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics. We’ve talked about how the Ivory Tower has descended into navel-gazing wokeism. We’ve talked about the sense of spiteful anger that fuels the lower classes to revolt against the elites in a populist backlash. But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.

As the middle class disintegrates, it recombobulates in two new segments of society: a downwardly-mobile lower middle class that has more in common with “the poor” and an upper middle class, which can be viewed as either upwardly mobile or as static in their relative socio-economic position. It’s clear that the former make up a large segment of the Trump/MAGA political movement, but who are the latter group? What do their lifestyles look like? What are their political leanings? This post is intended to reflect on this new group, who I call the state school upper middle class, in an attempt to start asking questions I don’t see getting answered.

You know these people. His name is Tyler or Ryan or something, her name is Lauren or Megan, but maybe it’s spelled a little stupid. They met in college—University of Michigan, unless I’m remembering it wrong, maybe it was Minnesota….They gave the city life a good try after graduation—living in an apartment, going out all the time, living the life of a twenty-nothing. But they’re sensible people and they instinctively follow the success sequence, which means they had a weird nagging feeling pushing them to get engaged, get married, buy a house, get a dog, and have kids. That’s exactly what they did, in exactly that order. He proposed on vacation somewhere abroad—Italy or Ireland or Iceland—and their wedding was as large as it needed to be to accommodate her mother’s preferred guest list. The dog is a doodle, his name is Huxley. They now live in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area somewhere in the US. Hard to tell exactly where, the parking lots all look the same. They have two of the 2.5 children they will have, on average.

You know these people. State schools across the country are pumping them out by the thousands annually. They are the descendants of the middle class from the 1950s—not only in the sense that many of them have ancestry in the American middle class from seventy years ago, but also in the spiritual sense. There is no longer a true middle class. Instead, the middle has split into lower and upper sections that are increasingly foreign to one another. The separation is powered in large part by the fact that the UMC goes to college to obtain a four year degree, a mechanism that shaves a portion of society off and isolates them within a bubble of people from similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and similar IQ levels.

Like the middle class from the ’50s, they are content. They have a house and two cars and their lives are generally fairly stable. Their 401k is funded and their kids have a 529 account the grandparent throw some money in every Christmas. Their student loans, car payments, and mortgage are not a burden that will cause them bankruptcy. They’re prudent, so they pay off their debts and only use credit cards as intended—for cash back rewards. Unlike the lower middle class, they’re going to be fine and they feel it deep in their bones. That sense of doing okay is why they are the spiritual descendants of the old middle class, and it’s why the have-nots that happened to end up in the other category cause a disproportionate amount of concern in the pundit class.

The state school upper middle class are not rich in the traditional sense. They haven’t inherited large sums from their parents, they had to take out some student loans to pay for college, and they can’t afford to live a life outside of their means. Instead, their within-the-means lifestyle is perfectly mediocre: shopping at Trader Joe’s and buying a new Toyota. Compared to the old middle class from the last century, they’re undeniably more wealthy; their houses are bigger, their TVs are flatter, and they can afford to throw away the plastic toys their kids get from the grandparents so that the kids aren’t tempted to stop playing with those expensive wooden Lovevery toys their pseudo-crunchy millennial mother bought them. In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms.

That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have. Even if the actual individuals that make up the millions of people who inhabit this zone are from immigrant backgrounds like myself, or moved up from being born in a trailer park, they are the inheritors of the American dream, the torch has been passed to them. Through hard work, good decisions, and a heavy dose of sheer luck, they managed to find themselves working an email job that pays them enough to go on vacation twice a year. As a result, they have none of the grievance their lesser halves hold. They don’t feel an intrinsic need to revolt against the powers that be. Why would they? They’ve got it good.

The writer correctly describes their socio-political outlook as “left of center, right of woke.” They are the heirs of the suburban Reagan Republicans, but today they are essentially moderately center-left. Because they live in functional communities, are doing well personally, and still basically have middle-class ideas about decorum, they are revolted by Donald Trump’s style and the general affect of today’s GOP. Trump and state GOPs are not the underlying cause, but are an accelerant of this group of people moving left.

The Great Realignment that American society has undergone has upended our old definitions, and we’ve struggled to find new labels that appropriately describe what people currently believe. As part of that split, small-C conservatism is now found more often among politically blue-leaning Americans. (See LastBlueDog for more on this line of thinking.) These people don’t want massive disruptions, they don’t want revolution. They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.

This UMC is moving to the suburbs and buying real estate with 30-year mortgages with the school district in mind. As such, many suburbs are turning purple or blue-ish like the WOW counties of suburban Milwaukee in my home state of Wisconsin. I know some of these people personally. As a matter of fact, I am them, which is why I find this group of people interesting to think about. What I see among my peers is a generally moderate disposition that, according to the current balance of the political scales, means that they prefer to vote for Democrats, regardless of any admitted excesses on the left. In my opinion, this is largely cultural. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you drive a truck and think Applebee’s is the pinnacle of cuisine, you’re Team Red. If you wear a Patagonia vest and dress sneakers to the office, you probably know what (actually good) restaurant to book a reservation at for Valentine’s dinner, and you’re probably Team Blue.

This shift has profound implications for politics. Although neither Republicans nor Democrats are governing well at present - except perhaps in places like these state school upper middle class suburbs - the Republicans have a bigger problem in that the leftward shift in educated voters leaves them without the human capital needed to govern or run institutions. Even if they decided they wanted to govern, they don’t have the horses to do it.

Also, it’s undeniable that more educated and affluent people are better able to mobilize politically to get what they want. So the concerns of this increasingly left-leaning group will have significantly more influence in society than the Republican working class, even if it is smaller.

This is why in his famous 1994 essay, Edward Luttwak believed fascism was likely to come to America because of a white collar rather than blue collar squeeze. His prediction of that squeeze was early, but with the potential for large AI disruption to white collar employment, the conditions for radical politics of many stripes in the US may end up being much greater than anyone imagines. In our day, this is manifesting in various forms of neo-socialism, which has of yet not come to these suburbs, but might if the state school upper middle class really starts getting hit hard.

Drunk Wisconsin goes on to say:

The state school upper middle class shops at Costco and is concerned about their exposure to microplastics. They drive a normal gas-powered car and try to minimize screentime for their kids. That time they spent at college was the entry point for receiving the trickle-down cultural preferences that are held in more extreme versions by coastal elites. They haven’t gone full Erewhon, but they certainly avoid Walmart. My guess is that a large part of Instagram’s ad revenues come from the woman in the state school upper middle class family clicking on algorithm-fed ads for Montessori toys, merino wool clothes, and guides on how to correctly discipline their kids without causing long-term trauma. The purchasing and consumption habits of this cohort reflect their moderate, slightly-left-of-center politics.

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These people are the reason so many cleaning products are now “natural.” They are the reason children’s toys are now pastel-beige-colored. They are the number one source of Peloton’s monthly memberships. What I’m trying to say is that, while the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.

The state school upper middle class is a significant portion of the top 10% of the households in our K-shaped economy that now control half of all consumer spending. Think a dual career couple in Carmel, Indiana where the husband works for Eli Lilly and the wife works for Roche.

Click over to read the whole thing. It’s an important piece.

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The Young Angry Women

The UK magazine New Statesman had a cover story on Britain’s rising new radical feminism. One of the authors of the paywalled piece shared some of their key points on X.

• Young women are 26 pts less favourable to capitalism than young men, and feel much more positively towards communism than capitalism.

• Women u25 dislike capitalism so much, they view it as (un)favourably as fascism.

• UK should pay slavery reparations by a 2-1 margin

• They think 43%-40% ‘it is unfair some people have more than others and we should redistribute wealth’ over ‘people deserve to keep what is theirs, even if it means others have less’

• More negative than young men about their careers, earning potential and property

• 6 in 10 (58%) say they would find it difficult to date someone who disagreed on Gaza

• 3 in 4 (74%) say the say the same about views of Donald Trump, with even more saying they wouldn’t date someone who disagreed about social justice

And this one: “Under 30 women are 3x as likely to hold a negative view of young men than the other way around.” Check out this graph.

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The Savannah Enlightenment

I have said that someone needs to write a Plutarch’s Lives type book about American Protestant elites, because today’s American Protestants, especially evangelicals, have no idea what one looks like.

First Things magazine supplied a chapter in that book this month, with an article in their new print edition about James Oglethorpe called “The Savannah Enlightenment.” Oglethorp was principally an Englishman, but he’s very notable in America as well as the founder of Georgia and Savannah.

Oglethorpe’s greatest legacy, however, would be far from England. On November 16, 1732, he sailed from Henry VIII’s old docks at Deptford with a group of 114 men and women of various trades and stations in life. They were beginning what history has called “the Georgia Experiment.” To Parliament, Oglethorpe had proposed a new colony to serve as a military buffer state between wealthy Carolina and Spanish Florida. To subscribers, he spoke of planting a colony on the principle of philanthropy, led by “a noble Tenderness for the Miseries of others.” Oglethorpe had led an unsuccessful penal reform effort in England, after a close friend of his, a publisher whose books had failed to sell, was thrown in debtor’s prison. It is said that, while visiting the jails, Oglethorpe saw his fellow Englishmen, “chained neck to neck and hand to hand,” being led off to servitude in the American colonies. Scholars estimate that more than half of the white immigration to the American colonies before independence—270,000 out of 500,000—occurred in the form of indentured servitude. Oglethorpe decided he would lead England to a better way. There would be no slavery in Georgia. There would be no aristocratic class either, and to prevent its arising, no amassing or sale of property: All shareholders would hold equal-sized plots of land, which they were powerless to alienate. They would bring seed plants for a whole new economy based on the warm climate: wine, ­mulberries (for silk), olives, citrus.

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[Benjamin] Franklin’s criticisms were very nearly inevitable. His personality was at odds with Oglethorpe’s. They were the two most remarkable men then active in British North America. Franklin worshiped hard work, industry, success, virtue; Oglethorpe wished for kindness, benevolence, philanthropy, redemption. Oglethorpe was a soldier, Franklin a burgher. Franklin was cunning, practical, and conscientious; he counseled great leaders but never quite counted as one himself. Oglethorpe was idealistic, impulsive, given to the grand gesture; he attained positions of leadership again and again, and men followed him.

Franklin’s prudence might have made the Georgia Experiment a success. Franklin’s thought began with the task, and considered which means might help him achieve it; Oglethorpe started with people, and sought for them a purpose. Franklin observed the world in order to discern where a profit might be had; Oglethorpe sought a wrong to redress. Both believed in progress: Franklin pursued it by rewarding success, Oglethorpe by salvaging failure. Franklin adapted to the times; Oglethorpe clung to ideals. Franklin believed that actions could be assessed in dollars and that seeking financial gain was the wisest course most of the time. He did not personally approve of slavery, but he bought, owned, sold, and employed slaves, since doing so was legal and profitable. He could suspend moral judgments, which made his occasional moralistic interventions in American history—for independence and against slavery—all the more effective. (Pennsylvania prohibited the importation of slaves in 1780, and Franklin became the president of its Abolition Society.) Oglethorpe did not know how to yield. Nor did he know how to follow the dollar for an hour, and await a better season for his ideals.

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Then came war. The War of Jenkins’ Ear pitted Spain against Great Britain starting in 1739. Georgia became a front, and Oglethorpe’s presence was supremely opportune. He barely visited Savannah, where the malcontents prevailed, and instead lived mostly at Fort Frederica, a now abandoned frontier fort. For three years he crisscrossed the coastline, capturing Spanish outposts and fortifying Georgian ones. His excellent relations with the Creek confederacy secured them as allies for the English. Oglethorpe twice led an army against St. Augustine, but failed to take the great stone fort there. He proved his worth, however, at the Battle of the Bloody Marsh, where the Georgians massacred nearly to a man a small Spanish detachment, inflicting ten casualties for every one they suffered.

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Practical men are no greater than their successes; idealists, however, may leave behind treasures for future generations, however contemporaries undervalue them. Georgia would have to recover Oglethorpe’s moral wisdom about slavery later and at great cost. Oglethorpe left another legacy, written into the very landscape of Savannah: its urban plan. Simple yet surprisingly subtle, it has in this age of mass tourism and urban preservation made Savannah one of the most visited and beloved places in America. Three decades ago, the town attracted five million visitors a year; that number has tripled since. Forrest Gump rode the beauty of Georgia, and Savannah in particular, to the Oscars. John Berendt turned Savannah’s unique blend of Southern culture into Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction work that reads like a novel. The book became a publishing sensation for a quinquennium and remains the best introduction to the city. Aging Boomers flocked to the Georgia coast. But the main allure is the Oglethorpe Plan itself.

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But the real genius of Oglethorpe emerges when you take to your feet. For every forty-four lots he made a square, so that as you walk north to south, you arrive in a square every four blocks. The effect is magical. It is as if you were in the city when suddenly your path diverges in a wood, and now you must go right or left under a canopy of trees. Live oaks fill the sky; hints of buildings glint through the boughs. The squares are a repeating element in the grid, but they function as a counter to its normal effects. In places like Oklahoma City or Omaha, grid lines lead monotonously off into the distance. In Savannah, you leave leafy Chippewa Square and walk four blocks north past houses, churches, apartments, and shops to Wright Square, where you exit the streets and enter a park. You may turn right or left or keep straight, as at any grid intersection, but you may also go diagonally, or sit under a tree, or lie on the grass. If you are driving a car, you have to take a detour around the square. The square interrupts the grid’s monotony without compromising its geometry.

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He lived to see the American Revolution, and history records that he met with John Adams while the latter served as ambassador to Great Britain. In their meeting it is said that Oglethorpe spoke admiringly of the Revolution, suggesting that Parliament was given over to the love of money, and gave his blessing to the new nation. He died shortly afterward. Inscribed on a tablet near his burial site were words we do not find often boasted of: “He was the friend of the oppressed Negro.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

This is a very good article, but strangely underplays Oglethorp’s Anglican Christianity. Oglethorp seems to have had Christian motives for much of what he did, and was connected with John Wesley, who briefly served as rector of a church in Savannah.

Author John Byron Kuhner chose instead to talk about Oglethorp as a freemason, which to a modern ear would make him sound like he was not Christian. This would not have been the case in that era in England, however.

Best of the Web

The New Yorker: Saving a Lost Generation of Men With Chop Saws - The College of St. Joseph the Worker, which combines the trades with a liberal-arts education, is trying to restore its students’ sense of their own competence, and to revive the city of Steubenville, Ohio, along the way

Veronica Clarke/First Things: A Whole New World of Disney Adults

Ryan Burge: This is Not Simple Generational Replacement - Can Millennials or Gen Z Save the American Church? The Data Says No.

James Wood/First Things: In Defense of Cultural Christianity

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• Post-Protestant, Post-Literate - The collapse of Protestant culture is degrading American human capital — and literacy is just the beginning.

• My podcast this week was with Margarita Mooney Clayton on art, beauty, and human creativity.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

If you liked my repost of Anthony Bradley’s post about evangelical “cubicle men,” be sure to go read part two in his series and sign up for his Substack.

Market Failure and the Mansophere

Last week’s Financial Times weekend essay was one of the best things I’ve seen in mainstream media about the rise of the manosphere. It’s about the market failure beneath the manosphere.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

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American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever. 

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

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I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

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There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

…

At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

…

Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

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If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

…

Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can try to click over to read the whole thing. I excerpted as much as I could justify.

There’s clearly something to this. Society at large seems indifferent if not outright hostile to male success. Instead, men are delivered hectoring Man up! lectures about how they need to be less toxic or sacrifice more for other people.

As I’ve said before, in most evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert and no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold.

Even this piece hits similar themes. He author says men should find “a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction.” This is good so far as it goes. But I wonder how many people in our society would be willing to qualify women’s ambitions similarly, to say that they are only legitimate if they lead to someone else’s flourishing? I rarely hear female ambitions talked about this this way.

Related in the Dispatch: The Dispatch: The Rise of the “Gentlemanosphere”, the Anti-Manosphere - While some of these people like Richard Reeves and Arthur Brooks clearly deserve the title of gentleman, the main person featured in this piece, Prof F-Bomb Galloway, certainly does not.

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The Old Guard

The new issue of Harper’s has a great essay on the crisis of America’s gerontocracy called “The Old Guard.” It’s very much worth reading. Some excerpts:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.

The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.

In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.

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America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

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That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.

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Elder power in the public realm has a private foundation: above all, old Americans are disproportionately rich. Gerontocracy overlaps with plutocracy—­or more precisely, it is one of its most consequential forms. Of course, poor old people exist, just as rich young people do. You can imagine, just barely, a society in which elder rule is not so intertwined with wealth. But that place is not America today, and the correlation of age with wealth is anything but random.

According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-­seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-­five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-­four fell by 68 percent during the same period.

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It’s no mystery why the old want to retain their privileges. That they can keep them so easily is in large part because the age of gerontocracy has been an age of tax revolts on behalf of the propertied. A house isn’t just a place to live; older people also have fanatical attitudes toward the disturbance of their property. “They are not generous,” Aristotle noted, for “they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.” Beyond blocking development that would benefit those who do not yet own homes, the old evince a hostility to taxing property for the sake of social goals. Americans in their final decades go even further than the libertarian American default. Not only do they feather their nests; they also secure them against predators, even though they hurt their own young in doing so.

The primary agenda for old people has long been avoiding property taxes, even when the immunities they win are regressive in the extreme, as in the case of California’s Proposition 13….The purported rationale for property-­tax relief is that old people no longer have the salaries coming in that they would need in order to pay their share to the state. But this is mostly a smoke screen, because of just how much property wealth many older Americans control.

Property-­tax limits have further abetted the elderly’s monopolization of housing. Places with higher property taxes predictably have lower house prices, leading to younger ownership. After all, it’s easier to pay even a high tax bill than to make a giant down payment. So it follows that when property taxes are held down, and home prices rise, young people are kept away.

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The effects on all levels of American government are tremendous. It has been estimated that various property-­tax breaks for seniors cost states the equivalent of 7 percent of their income-­tax revenue.

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If we want to counter their power, it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much. It won’t work, either, to paper over the enormous differences between the precarity of some seniors and the situation of the mass of younger people living without the specific privileges correlated with, and often reserved for, older people. Those differences imply that seniors will sometimes be allies of progress, but not always, and opponents more often. Age-­related class advantages are in many cases far more profound than the intersection of class with gender or race. There is no way to ignore them if we want a fairer future.

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Legally, it became possible for workers to stay longer and longer, and many do, clustering in elite professions, in contrast to manual or menial work that people leave if they can or because they must. America’s corporate leaders exemplify the situation. The average hiring age for CEOs at the top American companies—­those included in the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500—­has risen dramatically, from forty-­six to fifty-­five in the past two decades. That is the same period during which executive compensation has soared, with direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today. It is not hard to think of leaders who stay on and become hard to eject even for sound business reasons, as they control their own companies or stand symbolically for them.

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There is no known reason to believe that corporate performance has improved as a result. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that there is a price to pay, and it is not borne only by younger workers who are unable to break into the upper ranks. The market speaks clearly about the profitability of younger leadership. According to a recent study, stock prices decline when younger CEOs die unexpectedly, while the sudden deaths of the doddering and wizened drive price spikes.

According to their official purpose, corporations should be engines of change and novelty; part of what drives profits is the creation of new and better products that consumers will buy. But corporate America is hampered in this mission by its laboring gerontocracy, and by the conversion of society into a static domain for hoarding seniors. While Monsieur Grandet eventually dies in Balzac’s novel, his successors are alive and well in America today.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s interesting that almost all of the discussions about the implication of gerontocracy, such as incredible generational inequality in favor of largely Boomer seniors, is happening in secular society but not in the church.

There’s frankly enormous injustice in wealthy, selfish seniors who continue to push for policies that benefit themselves at the expensive of younger generations and the future of the nation. This form of selfishness is basically never called out by pastors as near as I can tell, however.

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Foreign Influence in American Universities

Kite and Key is a great media non-profit that produces informative explainer type videos designed for social media. The recently turned five years old, and just released this really great video about the way foreign governments like China have acquired undue influence over our universities.

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The Federalist: Project Hail Mary Is The Masculine Christian Film You’ve Been Waiting For - See also Joseph Holmes’ review if you missed it.

The Guardian: Despite their bad reputation, parenting group chats are – for some – the village that never sleeps

NYT: Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (gift link) - Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

WSJ: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (gift link) - Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• When Bad Social Practices Drive Out Good - Why it’s getting harder to do the right thing — whether hiring legally, waiting for sex, or running for office — as bad social practices take over

• Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” - Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions - A guest repost by Dr. Anthony Bradley.

Be sure again to check out Bradley’s second installment in this series.

Cover image: Andrew Tate by James English/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0

I’ll again highlight the pending release of a new Canon Press book with people engaging with my “Negative World” idea. It’s called Welcome to Negative World: How to Read the Times You’re In, and you can now order it on Amazon.

I also want to make you aware that Real Clear Investigation is accepting applications for $20,000 grants to fund investigative reporting projects. Details await at the link.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m presently in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m speaking at a small conference. This is part of an intense stretch of travel and speaking. I’ve got three events in three different cities the week of April 20, then hopefully a bit of a break.

I wanted to share pictures from some of the events I’ve done so far this year.

Back in January I spoke at the David Network conference. The David Network is a great group of faith-based Gen Z people from Ivy+ institutions. I was on a panel on the future of conservatism with Robert George from Princeton University, Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame, and Margarita Mooney Clayton from Princeton Seminary.

I previously had George on my podcast talking about the future of conservatives in academia, a topic he not only talks about, but has done a lot about. I’m planning to have Margarita Mooney Clayton on very soon, and Patrick Deneen is on my list.

I also spoke at an event sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I was on the keynote panel about troubled young men called “The Lost Boys.” The other speakers were Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of the all boys school The Heights. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated.

The video of our entire panel is also available to watch.

I have not gotten any photos from my Hephzibah House event in New York, but here’s one from a luncheon event I did at the Manhattan Institute while I was in town.

I was also in Washington, DC recently for a salon dinner hosted by American Affairs to discuss a recent article of mine. While there I was able to spend some time talking with my Senator Todd Young.

I’ve known my other Senator, Jim Banks, since he was in the House, but this was my first time meeting Sen. Young.

This isn’t even all the events I’ve done recently, just the ones I’ve managed to get pictures from so far.

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Visions of Biblical Womanhood

The New Yorker ran an interesting piece comparing the visions of Christian womanhood in books by Jen Hatmaker and Emma Waters. The author, Emma Green, used to be the religion reporter at the Atlantic, and so knows this beat.

Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.

…

At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.

Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I’ve known Emma since before she married Jack. It’s exciting to see Gen Z people like her get such great press. I believe she’s also been included in NYT cover stories twice as well.

I had her on my podcast to talk about her new book.

All the Single Ladies

The NYT ran an interesting piece (gift link) about single women who are throwing themselves 40th birthday parties that are designed as if they were weddings.

For some single women, the milestone 40th birthday is more than a party. Instead of waiting for a partner to justify a celebration, women are using the moment as a declaration of empowerment and self-love, complete with wedding attire, a curated guest list of their closest friends and family and the joy and excitement of a wedding.

“People are getting married later in life,” said Sarah Adair, the founder of Social Bliss Events in Nashville, who has planned several wedding-style 40th birthdays for clients. “Women deserve to celebrate such a milestone with or without a partner.”

…

“So much of our adult lives are spent marking the traditional milestones you hear about your whole life — engagements, marriages, babies, first homes,” Ms. Bart, 43, said. “For women who aren’t partnered, there’s often no external occasion prompting this kind of celebration, so creating one yourself is a genuine declaration of self-worth.”

Alyssa Pettinato, the owner of Alinato Events in New York, helped her best friend plan a blowout wedding-style 40th birthday in March 2025. “Millennials like to party,” she said. “We like to show up and show out.”

Ms. Pettinato estimates that her friend, who is single and childless, spent nearly $50,000 on her 75-person affair at Le Jardinier in New York, which drew friends and family members from across the country.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related:

NYT: Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever (gift link) - From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common

The Times of London wrote a piece about why women aren’t having babies. You’ll never guess who they blame.

And the Wall Street Journal wrote on the women who love the manosphere (gift link).

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How We Gave Up on Forgiveness

The Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper, and has the best lineup on columnists, one of whom is Jemima Kelly. Her new piece on how we gave up on forgiveness is stellar. Since the FT has a very hard paywall, I’ll quote as much of it as I can justify.

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” These words, spoken by Jesus on the cross at Calvary, according to the Gospel of St Luke, constitute the apotheosis of one of the most important virtues in Christianity.

At the time of his greatest suffering and as his mortal life was about to end, Jesus was asking God to show love and mercy towards those who had wrongfully condemned him to his imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of Easter’s central messages. The sinless Jesus died on the cross in order to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we may be forgiven by God.

Indeed, forgiveness is a key theme throughout the New Testament, and thus forms an important part of what it means to be a Christian (and to be a follower of many other major religions, too). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged his followers to not only love their enemies as they would love their friends, but to pray for those who might persecute them. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, connecting divine forgiveness of us imperfect humans with our own commitment to forgive others.

And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue appears to have gone out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer much spoken about, or even held up as something to aspire to. In fact, it often seems to be considered as quite the opposite: something akin to moral weakness, or even altogether immoral.

Bizarrely, this is often the case when someone has not done the wrong thing but has said or even implied the wrong thing. The problem seems to be that they have thought the wrong thing; once they’ve said the wrong thing, they’re out. If you dare to “platform” them so that they might explain themselves or apologise, and in so doing “let them off the hook”, that can mean you’re out too. Guilt by forgiveness, you might say.

And so, faced with no route to redemption, those who are deemed to have done, said or thought the wrong thing are left in moral Mantua with their fellow deplorables, and often drawn into more extreme positions with no incentive to do otherwise, their voice amplified on one side of the spectrum by their very banishment from the mainstream.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

If you didn’t see this new essay in American Reformer from Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on the Reformation in America, it’s a very important and thought provoking essay. It inspired an entire newsletter edition from Ross Douthat interacting with his thesis, as well as mentions and comments from others too. I may write more about it, and hope to have Mitchell on the podcast to discuss it, but I wanted to flag this for you now with a very high commendation.

New Yorker: The Camps Promising to Turn You - or Your Son - Into an Alpha Male.

IM 1776: The Food Guidelines They Wanted

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Andrew Sullivan (actually about Joseph Holmes’ article) and Commonplace.

New this week:

• Things That Are Getting Better - A hopeful counterpoint to the endless online negativity: modern life is advancing in surprising and practical ways

• Love, Loss, and Land - In a cynical age, The Madison dares to portray good men, great marriages, and the healing power of place - A guest post by John Seel

Head’s up for those of you in the Bay Area. I’m going to be in San Francisco next week for some meetings, and we are hosting an American Reformer event on Monday at 8pm if you are interested in coming. Here’s the signup link.

Last week I was delighted to be at the University of Virginia to participate in a discussion about the challenges facing young men today. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated a panel with Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Alvaro de Vicente of the all-male school the Heights, and me. Here’s the recording of this great event.

The Gen Z Male Attitude

In yesterday’s look at a new Institute for Family Studies survey of young men, I noted in the findings that Gen Z men are emphasizing being financially independent but not having a full time job as a marker of adulthood.

When I took an Uber to the airport yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my 28yo male driver.

He’s very into the hustle culture. He likes to trade crypto and forex with high leverage. Has a mentor in Mexico and is planning to go visit him soon. That guy runs a discord server for traders. My driver is hoping they can spend some time traveling the world and open some pop-up stores.

He’s not averse to MLMs or any other way to make money, preferably quickly. He want to “get ahead” of AI because getting ahead of trends is how you make money. Has been scammed himself a few times, but doesn’t seem bothered.

He said he’s been to therapy, which sounds more like mindset coaching. He’s not interested in worrying about anything, says money is “just a tool” and is confident that if he keeps working at it, success will come his way - because he knows he has the work ethic.

He’s a trade school product. Has some tattoos, a couple of them crypto related. At no point did he express interest in getting a traditional job.

You can’t read too much into one person’s story - especially when I didn’t validate how much of it was true. But this is very resonant with what I see and hear in Gen Z, particularly those who are not part of the most elite, educated spectrum. (I previously wrote about how I’m bullish on this upscale segment of Gen Z).

Gen Z men just have very different views of the world from previous generations.

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Working at Home and Fertility

The Financial Times had a recent piece asking, “Could working from home solve the global fertility crisis?”

With an 18-month-old babbling and wailing in the back of a car outside her daughter’s primary school, Nicole Greene laughs at how “on-brand” she is to discuss how working from home could help increase fertility rates.

The 39-year-old founder of a communications consultancy says the decision to shift her agency entirely to remote working was a major factor not just in attracting talent in a predominantly female industry, but in deciding she could have another child.

…

Drawing on data from 38 countries, academics from King’s College London, Stanford University and Princeton University concluded that working from home could play a significant role in addressing sliding fertility rates.

“Flexibility over where we work is emerging as one of the most promising and cheapest ways to help people have the families they say they want,” says Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King’s and lead research economist on the report. “In richer countries women still say their ideal family size is a little above two, but actual fertility is stuck closer to 1.7 or 1.8. That gap between desired and realised family is at the core of today’s demographic problem.”

Drawing on data gathered between 2023 and early 2025, Aksoy’s study found total fertility — including realised births and stated plans for more children — among more than 11,000 surveyed adults was “systematically higher for those who work from home at least one day a week”.

For couples where both partners worked from home at least once a week, total fertility was 14 per cent higher compared to when neither did — equivalent to 0.32 children per woman. The findings hold when controlled for other factors such as education, age or marital status.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can click over to try to read the whole thing.

The Barbellization of Venture Capital

There was an interesting recent interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in which he was asked about starting his firm a16z and the research that went into it. It starts around 22:00, and the video embed below should be queued up to the right spot.

The process he describes here is an important one. He studied the trends that were occurring in other industries that were related to VC, and extrapolated those to the industry he aspired to be in.

This sort of study of industry dynamics is key to understanding much of what is happening in the world economically.

I remember once listening to the former CEO of a telecom company talking about how he had hired McKinsey to advise him on the likely future of his industry. McKinsey noted that many industries were consolidating towards a “two towers” model: Walgreens and CVS, Home Depot and Lowes, etc. Telecom was likely to consolidate in the same manner into AT&T and Verizon. This man’s own firm was not going to be a long term survivor, so the management strategy was to build it into the most attractive acquisitions candidate. (In reality, cell phone service at least ended up with three major competitors, but the trend was still correct).

This is a more business than cultural or policy item I know, but I wanted to give you insights into one small way that top business leaders think about and model the world. Obviously there are insights to apply to other fields as well.

Best of the Web

The Atlantic: The Death of Millennial Feminism (gift link) - Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

Helen Roy: Marriage Is Not a Meme

South Korea’s fertility rate has been infamously low. Apparently, January was the highest level of births in seven years, with the birth rate now reaching 1.0. That’s far below replacement, but progress. He’s an article (in Korean, but my browser could translate it) with more details.

Michael Foster: You Will Own Things, and Actually Care - “The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum.”

Walter Russell Mead: The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians - The political coalition that has formed under Trump’s banner has the potential to reshape American politics

The Liberal Patriot: No Learning Please, We’re Democrats! - This good publication from Democrats Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin (with 50,000 subscribers) is shutting down because donors no longer want to fund it. Despite reformist ferment across the left and right, few of these outfits have been able to obtain a lot of funding, particularly from traditional sources.

Rutgers published and interesting report and database on affordable housing built on religious property in the US.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from the University of Virginia. I was also a guest on the Too Mikes podcast.

New this week:

• Why America Needs to Pause Mass Immigration (paid only) - Once a source of high-agency newcomers and entrepreneurial energy, mass immigration now fuels division, scams, and economic harm

• Demoralized Men - A survey of how young men feel about themselves today.

• My podcast this week was with Emma Waters on modern Christian womanhood.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Leaving America

I’ve noted many times that one indicator to watch to see if America is really in trouble is expatriation. If we ever start to see a significant number of native born Americans leaving the country, that would be a warning signal not to ignore.

To date, most of what I’ve read on this suggests expatriation on only a small scale, often for what seem like (likely temporary) lifestyle reasons. For example, there’s been articles talking about the growing number of Americans that have moved to Mexico City.

But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests the volume has been picking up, saying that Americans are leaving the US in record numbers (gift link).

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration?

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe…The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification.

…

On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania. The former Stalinist state offers a special visa allowing U.S. citizens to live and work there, with no tax on foreign income for a year, no questions asked.

“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” said Expatsi founder Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old Alabama native who moved to Yucatán, Mexico, in 2024.

“Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” she said as she ticked through growth numbers. In 2024 the company organized three group scouting trips for clients; this year it will be 57, she said: “Our goal is to move one million Americans.”

…

In nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states, the number of Americans arriving to live and work is at a record and rising. The total living in Portugal has jumped more than 500% since the Covid pandemic and grew by 36% in 2024 alone, official data there showed. In the past 10 years, the number of American residents has nearly doubled in Spain and the Netherlands, and more than doubled in the Czech Republic.

Last year, more Americans moved to Germany than Germans moved to America. The same was true in Ireland, which welcomed 10,000 people from the U.S. in 2025, about double those who came in 2024.

…

Or do these émigrés personify a loss of faith in America’s future and way of life? Across dozens of interviews, U.S. expats described their motivations as a tangle of economic incentives, lifestyle preferences and disenchantment with the trajectory of America, citing violent crime, cost of living and turbulent politics. Trump’s re-election was a factor for many—although others voted for him. But the structural and societal shift runs much deeper. When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008 recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10. Last year: One in five.

…

In his rallies, Trump has mused about attracting Norwegian immigrants. But the number of Norwegians living in the U.S. has fallen over the past 10 years, and in 2024, it crossed a symbolic milestone: There are now more natural-born Americans living in Norway than Norwegian-born residents in the U.S.

Click over to read the whole thing.

We shouldn’t read too much into this. As the article notes, there isn’t necessarily good data available. Also, many of these Americans may be immigrants or their children returning to their homeland. The growth in foreign passports is part of a general trend of people looking to collect multiple passports. Americans are richer now, so more of them can afford to live the expat life. Life in a lower cost country has appealed for a while to some retirees, and we have a lot of Boomer retirees right now. There are only about 100,000 annual moves by Americans to OECD (developed) countries.

Still, we’d do well to pay attention. The online zeitgeist has a lot of narratives about the desirability of leaving the country (e.g., “passport bros”).

One country that’s had a lot of out-migration is New Zealand. This just made a round of headlines as the country’s former prime minister just moved to Australia. Moving away is a longstanding trend for this small island country, but levels seem to be climing. The Financial Times recently ran a story on this. 200,000 people have left the country in the last three years, a big chunk to Australia. With 670,000 New Zealanders living there, that’s 12% of the entire population that’s moved to Australia alone. To put that in perspective, the official total foreign born population share of the US is 16%.

The country’s weak economy and high costs are cited as factors. But Australia isn’t exactly cheap. And New Zealand has been a poster child for “YIMBY” policies, as making it easier to build homes there was supposed to have brought housing costs down. Yet the exodus has accelerated.

The FT notes that New Zealand’s population is still growing due to in-migration by foreigners from places like Fiji, India and the Philippines. Undoubtedly these population shifts are going to change the skill structure of the economy, and maybe in ways that actually structurally reduce its economic potential, depending on the mix and education/skill structure of the newcomers.

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Any Lifestyle You Want, As Long as It’s Not Normal

I always like to say that the media love to rep every lifestyle choice except normal. Of course, these pieces also tend to be good for clicks. New York magazine is one of the publications that has figured that out, and had a number of recent pieces that went viral online.

One was about women who regret having children. It’s profiles of a handful of women talking about how they wished they hadn’t had kids. Here’s one sample:

It’s been a year. Genuinely, if there is a hell, I’ve been living in it since I gave birth. My son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair. I’ve tried so hard to do the things early intervention advised us to: I read the books, play the music, dance around, and nothing works. Every day, things get worse and worse. I wake up and count down the hours until my husband comes home. At some point, I thought, I can’t keep living like this, and neither can my son.

I noticed that every one of the mothers featured here were married when they had a baby. But if you want to be a single mother by choice, New York is happy to tell you all about it and how to find support. A sample:

Kelly always loved kids. Growing up in a rural part of Texas in a conservative, Christian environment, she worked as the camp counselor during vacation Bible school and volunteered to teach classes at her church. She knew she’d be a mother one day, she just had no idea how she would get there — especially once she understood she was queer. When, at 28, she eventually married a trans man, they got as far as making embryos together, but those embryos are set to be destroyed once their divorce is finalized this spring. Now living in Houston and working for an education nonprofit, she pondered how she might pursue her goal on her own. Kelly doesn’t use much social media, but she does use Reddit. About a year ago, she stumbled on a sub-Reddit dedicated to becoming a solo mother by choice and began poring over other would-be parents’ stories.

And if you want polyamory, they are happy tell you about the possibilities in their recent piece “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load? For some moms, non-monogamy is a way to reclaim more than just their sex drive.”

These days, it’s no longer shocking to hear parents negotiate who will handle homework and bedtime while the other meets a crush for drinks. Even momfluencers in Utah are posting about their throuples. The most obvious perk of an open marriage is getting to hook up with other people. But the more poly parents I meet, the more I hear ENM framed as a co-parenting hack. These moms aren’t venting about being stuck at home with the kids while their husbands woo other women. They don’t seem to be stuck keeping score of who handles the grocery shopping and takes the most days off when the kids are sick. And they don’t feel guilty about taking time for themselves. For these moms, non-monogamy seems to offer more than just a way to reclaim their libido. Could it also be the secret to raising kids without completely resenting one’s husband?

Of course, like every article about polyamory, they are forced to admit that it appears to come with problems in many cases.

Best of the Web

RIP: John Perkins - Perkins was a civil rights leader who was a pioneer in the evangelical racial reconciliation movement. I didn’t learn about him until 2014 when someone suggested I attend the Christian Community Development Association conference. I heard him talk there and was blown away by it. He was a very impressive man. And while I think it’s fair to say the CCDA approach never achieved what Perkins hoped it would, I respect it a lot as an attempt at a genuinely Christian attempt to address racial disparities and divides.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: The Post-Christian Condition - More sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, and more AI slop

Patrick Brown: Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing? This article isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Brown treats falling marriage rates as a matter of male deficiency, such as working class men not measuring up to the expectation of women. But it fails to mention female deficiencies. A significant share of working class women are themselves not viable marriage prospects to the kinds of men they would want to marry. How many men who have themselves put together are looking to marry a “dinergoth”?

McKinsey: At 250, sustaining America’s competitive edge - An interesting, readable report about the economic future of America. Not at negative as many takes, while acknowledging that there’s much work to be done.

Vanity Fair: The Founder of Anthropic Says He Wants to Protect Humanity From AI. Just Don’t Ask How.

New Content and Media Mentions

Someone wrote a letter to the editor about my recent Washington Post op-ed. I also got a mention in Touchstone magazine.

New this week:

• The Garden, the Tower, the Temple and the City - Leadership in a change of age - a guest essay by John Seel

• My podcast this week was with T. C. Schmidt on his Josephus scholarship.

• This month’s Member (more info) only podcast is about the Christian nationalist vision for America as expressed by its proponents.

Cover image: Jacinda Ardern by WEF, CC BY 2.0

Mass at the Drive-In Theater

My debut article for the Hedgehog Review is now online in their Spring issue. It’s a review of the book Crabgrass Catholicism (buy the book) about the suburbanization of Catholics on Long Island.

Before the war, American Catholics were largely concentrated in cities. Arriving through Ellis Island in the waves of immigration that reached its climax between 1890 and 1920, they formed strongly ethnic communities, whether in traditional territorial parishes or specifically national ones—Polish, Italian, Irish. Catholicism was thus deeply intertwined with ethnicity. Koeth writes, “In an era of rapid urbanization Catholic immigrants built American city life by fusing the neighborhood with the ethnic parish which was dominated by its priests and religious sisters, centered on its church and school, and bound together by its communal worship and devotions.”

In the suburbs, that old order could no longer hold. Suburban residential patterns were organized more on socioeconomic rather than ethnic lines, against a backdrop of racial exclusion of blacks. “Postwar suburbanization helped complete the amalgamation of various ethnically inflected forms of Catholicism into one religiously identified body of American Catholicism,” Koeth explains. This meant an end to the variegated forms of Catholicism that were ethnic specific in favor of adopting the Irish style of Church. It also meant a shift from thick networks of extended family in the ethnic city neighborhoods to a nuclear-family orientation in the suburbs. According to Koeth, “The suburbs were also comprised of single-family houses in which, especially in the earliest days of suburban development, a single generation of young veterans lived with their wives and children cut off from the extended family networks that long held the ethnic parish together.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

You may recall my podcast with Chris Briem, author of the economic history of Pittsburgh Beyond Steel. I also have a column taking a look at that book over at Governing.

A Year as a Degenerate Gambler

The Atlantic gave one of its writers $10,000 to gamble on sports sites. The result was a fantastic cover story on sports betting (gift link).

Laws varied by state and century, but the practice always came with a healthy social stigma, one rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom. To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.” As a result, gambling was largely contained to certain disreputable corners of society, such as riverboats, red‑light districts, and Nevada. For a time, it was the near‑exclusive province of leg‑breaking bookies and pin-striped criminals.

…

Virtually every sports-media outlet in America, from CBS Sports to your favorite niche football podcaster, takes sponsorship money from gambling companies. ESPN now recaps the day’s games by covering which teams beat the spread; gambling talk pervades pregame studio panels. Every major TV network now seems to employ a data whiz with glasses and rolled-up sleeves who can break down the betting angles for viewers at home.

The leagues, initially so opposed to legalized sports betting, embraced it to help reverse sliding TV ratings and lure back the younger fans who were drifting away. Before long, they found themselves beholden to the industry they’d helped create. Now the NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have large equity stakes in the data companies that power the sportsbooks. They license broadcast rights directly to sportsbook-operated streaming services, and hurry to defend their partners whenever a game-fixing scandal breaks. “Gambling touches everything,” the former ESPN reporter Joon Lee recently wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “The betting apps are in charge now, and everyone knows it. The leagues are hostage to the forces they unleashed.”

In 2017, Americans legally bet $4.9 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion—and once you’re hooked, the list of sporting events you can gamble on is seemingly endless.

…

Now, with the rise of “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket, gambling options are no longer limited to sports. Live-betting odds have been featured on the Golden Globes telecast and CNN’s election coverage. In 2026, you can gamble on how warm it will get in Los Angeles tomorrow, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and how much money Avatar: Fire and Ash will gross, and the date of Taylor Swift’s wedding, and Time magazine’s Person of the Year, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life being discovered, and how many people will be deported from the United States, and the prospect of Iranian regime change, and the chances that Donald Trump declares martial law before his term ends, and whether Jesus Christ will return to Earth this year.

…

In truth, I was beginning to wonder about what Annie had said to me at church. I had always told people that I didn’t have an addictive personality, believing that to be so. Now I had to consider a different possibility: Maybe I had simply constructed a life with strong enough guardrails that I’d never had to test the premise.

What would happen to me, I wondered, if those guardrails were removed?

Click over to read the whole thing.

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The Great Smoking Divide

There’s an interesting article in the Harvard Gazette on how smoking divides America. Apparently smoking is a big predictor in the life expectancy gap between places.

Working with colleagues from Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Ellen Meara of the Harvard Chan School sought to shed light on the gap in mortality among Americans 25 to 64, which widened from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019. The work included close scrutiny of several potential drivers, including “deaths of despair,” the changing composition of college graduates, and globalization. The variable that best fits the evidence, the researchers say, is tobacco use: “Smoking emerges as an exceptionally powerful predictor of mortality trends.”

…

“Deaths of despair” — largely understood as mortality linked to suicide and alcohol and drug abuse — is another hypothesis that you say doesn’t answer this question. Why not?

Deaths of despair are clearly an important cause of death at ages 25 to 64, but not as important in this “place” story. Even removing “deaths of despair,” the growing mortality divide by education and place remains large. In many high-income places, like here in New England, rising drug-related death offsets dramatic declines in deaths from other causes. Although deaths of despair contribute to premature deaths, these trends are swamped by trends in mortality due to causes like cancer or cardiovascular disease, especially among people older than 50. And since the vast majority of midlife deaths occur after 50, deaths of despair do not explain the growing mortality inequality across places.

…

We are very interested in rural-urban differences. Historically, rural areas were always healthier. This is part of the tragedy. We took the healthiest parts of the country — in a country as rich as ours — and not only are they not enjoying the same gains in longevity, but they’re seeing shorter lives. Smoking is a very effective marker for where places are struggling, that’s why we’re trying to understand the underlying factors that may explain strong links between smoking and deaths in those areas. There are likely underlying factors, alone or in combination, that trigger both persistent smoking and, in other ways we do not yet understand, lead to premature deaths among these populations.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

I was delighted to see Redeemed Zoomer featured in this Washington Post piece on the rise of Christian online influencers.

The Atlantic: Americans Should Stop Using the Term “Christian Nationalism” (gift link) - Now that the perfectly progressive Christian nationalist James Talarico is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, the press is changing its tune on Christianity informing public policy.

Rob Henderson: The Class Wars Come for Fertility (gift link) - “Antinatalism increasingly looks like a luxury belief—an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while imposing costs on those further down the socioeconomic ladder. If childbearing is a status competition, the logical move for those at the top is to succeed at it while persuading others to opt out.”

If you didn’t see, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks planned to do a themed night celebrating a famous local strip club called Magic City. The league cancelled the event, though the club stood by their desire to do it. Pro sports teams partnering with strip clubs is another good example of the cultural changes unleashed by the advent of the Negative World.

New Content and Media Mentions

I was a guest on the ReFOCUS podcast with Jim Daley, president of Focus on the Family.

I got mentions from SCOTUSblog, American Reformer, and Tim Challies.

New this week:

• My podcast was with Dean Ball on how AI skeptics are about to be left behind.

• How I’m Using AI - A piece on how I personally am using AI in my work

• How Hollywood Ruined Men for Dating - The death of the lovable loser hero and the rise of untouchable icons have men convinced rejection is inevitable — unless they’re perfect - a guest post by Joseph Holmes

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

And if you are near Charlottesville, Virginia, I have an exciting event at UVa on March 17th at 7pm called “Lost Boys: The Digital Revolution, the Retreat from Marriage, and the Decline of Men.” I’m going to be part of a great panel discussion on this topic with Richard Reeves and Alvaro de Vicente.

There’s been a lot of recent press for James Talarico, a liberal Christian who won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Texas this week. But if you’ve been a reader of mine, then you already know about Talarico as I wrote about him and his own variety of Christian nationalist vision back in 2023.

Evangelicals Missing from the Halls of Power

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Post on the lack of evangelicals in the halls of power (gift link). It’s another entry in the theme of the lack of an evangelical elite that I’ve been exploring.

Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.

This is just one of the many elite institutions in which evangelicals are absent or underrepresented. Evangelicals have excelled in politics, producing figures such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). They are also prominent in well-run and profitable businesses with relatively low cultural impact, such as food processing (Tyson Foods) and retail (Hobby Lobby). But they are all but absent from the leadership of prestigious universities, major foundations, Big Tech companies, leading financial firms and large media companies.

One response to this situation might be: Who cares?

Click over to read the whole thing.

My piece is slated to run in Sunday’s print edition as well.

In my view the lack of an evangelical elite is not primarily the result of anti-evangelical bias in institutions - though there’s some of that - but from evangelicalism’s own internal dyanmics.

Please see my longform essay on this in the First Things.

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Boomer Upsizing and Other Follow-Ups

I got a number of emails and replies to my article about the Boomer upsizing, that is, Boomer retirees buying large, multi-bedroom homes in prime suburban communities with top school districts.

I said one driver of this trend is Boomer parents moving to be closer to children and grandchildren. One woman wrote to say:

My parents (62) moved from DC to Winston-Salem, to live on my street and help with my kids. We moved my grandmother (81) from DC to her own home in a retirement community in Winston. My parents and grandmother now go to our church, where my sister and her family also attend. In our church, we have *multiple* examples of grandparents relocating to be close to grandchildren in a relatively low cost area, in a state experiencing a mini population boom. The downside is that our nuclear family can’t afford to move into a home the size we need - 4K sq ft- because they are filled with all-cash offer Boomers (like my parents, who own two homes). My extended family is part of the problem! What’s the solution? The boomers will age in place and not leave those big homes anytime soon.

Another woman told me:

We moved to Tennessee from the NYC area during the pandemic. When they retired, my parents took the proceeds from their home sale and bought the house next door. It’s been amazing for us. We are not the only family in the neighborhood in that situation. And every time here is a three or four bedroom. But I see my parents every single day, which wouldn’t happen if they were even five minutes away in a townhouse…

I suggested that Boomers retirees driving up housing prices in these prime suburban areas might negatively affect fertility. But she suggest the opposite, saying her parents move, “will likely give my parents a couple more grandchildren on the margin as well.”

And a retired male Boomer said:

We have met the enemy, and he is me! My wife and I wanted to retire to a walkable neighborhood in a town. The market was hot so we ended up snatching a house that, compared to the house we raised our kids in, added 1 bedroom and 400 sq. feet of space. I love it, it’s great for entertaining ... but I feel a bit guilty a family didn’t get it. We would have been happy downsizing but previously for a smaller house we were outbid by $40k.

In my piece from yesterday on the manosphere hitting the mainstream, commenter Sprouting Thomas posted this in response to my observation that the mansophere now trashes virtually every woman as too ugly to date.

Yes. I too have noticed this shift: every woman is “mid” at best. If a man online says out loud that a woman is attractive, then he’s either some sort of “simp”, or else demonstrating his own low value, that a “mid” is the best he can hope to attract. It’s exhausting just to read it…

I’m far from the most devoted observer of the manosphere, but to me this “every woman is gross and if you like them you’re a simp” mentality is a real change from the old manosphere to the new. The old one was more accepting of the way women are. “You know how you’re drawn to a good body and a pretty face? Well, women are drawn to superficial things too. Don’t waste time fighting it or moralizing about it, just operate with that knowledge in mind. Pick up some good clothes, a good haircut, good cologne. Get some exercise.”

Reasonable enough!

The new manosphere seems much more inclined to blame women for all the world’s ills. “This is the way women are, and that’s terrible. Letting them drive cars has been a disaster for the human race.”

Some of this may be due to the influence of incel culture, which Freddie deBoer wrote about today in a piece called “The Incel Veto.” As always with Freddie, it’s full of zingers. Here are some highlight pull quotes:

Simply acknowledging that I am a more-or-less heterosexual man who has had sex with a non-zero number of woman now provokes a kind of resentful reaction that I find annoying, strange, and honestly kind of anti-human.

The incel’s veto is the specific prohibition against men ever frankly discussing sex in any positive way that directly reflects the fact that they have sexual experience and thus have earned the consent of women. The incel’s veto weaponizes the natural and healthy inclination to stigmatize actual male bragging about sexual promiscuity (“I get so many girls, bro”) by spreading that stigma to any admission by any man that they have a sexual and romantic life.

The incel’s veto helps spread the ubiquitous online assumption that nobody is getting laid, anywhere, ever, and that it’s inherently pathological to treat sex and romance as not just healthy aspects of human life but as mundane and achievable.

A relative handful of alienated, internet-addled men, marinating in grievance and pseudo-Darwinian fatalism, have managed to inject into the bloodstream of our culture a bleak, hyper-strategized, market-based understanding of intimacy that treats human connection as a ruthless auction and desire as a rigged algorithm.

And in response to my article about it almost being a sin for an evangelical to be an elite, someone reminded me of the the old Keith Green song “Jesus Commands Us to Go.” Go meaning into missions. Green was a huge and extremely influential early contemporary Christian musician who died young tragically in a plane crash. He was very influential on evangelicals of my generation.

The song again basically says if that you aren’t doing some type of evangelistic mission work, you are probably being disobedient to God. The lyrics say, “Jesus commands us to go / It should be the exception if we stay / It’s no wonder we’re movin’ so slow / When His church refuse to obey.”

And Matthew Loftus wrote a related follow-up to my discussion of evangelical cultural cringe called “10 Reasons Evangelicals are Cringe.”

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Politicized Parenting

Psychologist Leonard Sax has a great article in Commonplace on the politicization of American parenting. It’s so good I want to just repost the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

20 years ago, I did not perceive a political dimension to parenting. Some parents were too strict, some parents were too permissive, and some parents were just right—and I saw no connection between parenting style and parental politics. Back then, I could tell you about parents who were left-of-center, ACLU-card-carrying liberals who were also strict, authoritative parents. Not anymore. Today, left-of-center parents are more likely to be permissive, and permissive parents are more likely to be left-of-center…Left-of-center parents are now uncomfortable exercising their authority as parents. Their kids are now more likely to be defiant and disrespectful. That wasn’t true 20 years ago, in my observation.

…

In response [to changes in the Boy Scouts], a cohort of men launched Trail Life USA, specifically as an all-boys alternative to Scouting America. “Our number one job is not to get kids into the program. Our number one job is to grow godly men,” said Trail Life USA CEO Mark Hancock. But Trail Life USA, which now has 1,500 locations across the United States, is an avowedly Christian and right-of-center organization. Fifty years ago, the Boy Scouts were not a political organization. Jimmy Carter, Steven Spielberg, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden were all Boy Scouts. But a left-of-center atheist Democrat would feel uncomfortable at a meeting of Trail Life USA, which proclaims that “salvation is by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ alone.” Likewise, a conservative Republican parent might be uncomfortable with the new requirement from Scouting America that anyone wishing to attain the rank of Eagle Scout must obtain a merit badge certifying that they understand the concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and intersectionality.

This is the choice which increasingly confronts American parents: secular/left-of-center or religious/conservative. The dichotomy is even more dramatic in our schools. Over the past 25 years I have visited more than 500 schools: public and private, urban, suburban, and rural, from Alaska to Florida, Hawaii to Maine. In 2001, when I first began these visits, I didn’t see much difference between schools in blue states and red states. There were good schools and bad schools, authoritative teachers and permissive teachers, and the variation did not vary by political affiliation. Not anymore. Today, I can tell you within five minutes, and with my eyes closed, the political affiliation of a school. If a teacher says, “boys and girls, please line up quietly!” then this school has a conservative, right-of-center affiliation. Guaranteed. Many urban, left-of-center school districts no longer permit teachers to use the phrase “boys and girls” because that term is not inclusive of nonbinary individuals.

…

Today, we need another scholar to write a new book documenting how Americans have become segregated by party affiliation. Researchers now find that Democrats and Republicans are choosing to live apart from each other. Harvard investigators Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos did a granular investigation of 180 million voters in cities across the United States. They found that “a large proportion of voters [now] live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment.” They emphasize that this sorting by political party is “distinct from racial and ethnic segregation.” Within the cities they studied, such as Chicago, Baltimore, Houston, Charlotte, Birmingham, Denver, and Columbus, Ohio, some neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Republican, others were overwhelmingly Democratic, and only a few were anywhere close to 50-50. This sorting means that even in public schools, kids are unlikely to encounter classmates from families of different political persuasions. The school will align with the political preference of the neighborhood. If you don’t like it, you can move.

Click over to read the whole thing.

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America’s “Diane Feinstein” Problem

There was a great piece this week from the Boyd Institute on America’s “Diane Feinstein problem,” or the negative effects of how our government institutions are overly driven by a seniority system. Among other things, this repels top talent.

This [lockstep seniority] structure also exists in the military where, under the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA), officers are promoted in cohorts by year of commission. You make captain around year four to six, major around ten, and lieutenant colonel around fifteen. There is some variation at the margins: if you aren’t selected for promotion twice you’re discharged (the “up or out” rule). But what does not exist is the ability for a brilliant officer to rapidly climb the ranks. The economist Tim Kane, who has written extensively on military talent management, called DOPMA “the root of all evil” in how the armed forces handle their human capital.

Ultimately, these seniority protections survive because insiders have captured the system, especially public‑sector unions inside the bureaucracy. But what this rent-seeking accomplishes primarily is chasing away the most capable people from a job in the government and staffing many of the public sector’s most important management positions with the mediocre.

…

An exception to the seniority system is the Federal Reserve, which sits outside the GS pay scale and can set its own compensation and promotion schedules. The Fed has meritocratic hiring and advancement based on ability — and for someone working there, such work experience grants them an enormous amount of private sector employment capital (regardless of which White House administration coincides with that work experience). As a result, the Fed is able to compete with top Wall Street firms for top economists and rising analysts.

The Fed is also, in my opinion, and by way of reputation and results, the most competent institution in the federal government — a status that flows directly from its freedom to hire, fire, and pay on merit.

…

All of this would matter less if the seniority system did not also undermine congressional oversight of the executive branch. This monitoring, in theory, should be done through the committee system, since committee chairs have subpoena power, control hearing agendas, and can direct investigations. But these roles are seldom filled by members with the cognitive sharpness the work actually requires….The late Dianne Feinstein sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — the body that oversees the CIA and NSA — at the same time that multiple reports described serious cognitive decline. She did not leave her seat before passing away in 2023, and there existed no reliable mechanism for removing her.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Shaid Hamid/WaPo: America’s dating crisis is getting worse. What went wrong? (gift link) - Young people are struggling to find love. It’s time to bring back the matchmaker.

If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids. Some cities are worse than others. In San Francisco, half of all men remain unmarried by age 40. As sociologist Brad Wilcox told me, “We’ve never been in a cultural moment where so many young adults are headed toward a life without immediate kin.” The implications are staggering: a generation of permanent bachelors — and bachelorettes — untethered from the bonds that have given life its deepest meaning.

Institute for Family Studies: Loneliness Isn’t for Cowards; It’s for the Institution-less

Gallup: Americans’ Religious Engagement Holds at Lower Levels - 47% consider religion very important, religious "Nones" tick up to 24% and religious service attendance remains low

Chris Arnade: What Holds America Together? - The importance of Place, the American Dream, and the under-rated Midwest

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Mere Orthodoxy and Tim Challies.

New this week:

• The Boomer Upsize - Baby boomers are ditching the downsizing myth to claim 4-bedroom homes near their kids and grandkids, sending home prices skyward.

• The Manosphere Hits the Mainstream (paid only) - From red pill blogs to Clavicular’s New York Times and GQ profiles, the manosphere has finally broken containment

• My podcast this week was with Dr. Albert Thompson on how to think about race.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

Locals should also mark their calendar for March 26th, when traditional church architect Duncan Stroik - he designed Hillsdale College’s chapel - will be giving a lecture on sacred architecture at Indiana Landmarks.

Sex Positive Conservatism

The Wall Street Journal ran a profile of Evie magazine (gift link), an online women’s journal known as the “conservative Cosmopolitan.”

Founded in 2019 and named for a modern take on the Bible’s original woman, Evie has struck a cultural nerve, animating young conservatives eager to make the movement feel fashionable and drawing detractors who believe its anti-feminist messaging is regressive. (Brittany Hugoboom, the face of the brand, holds that the magazine is “feminine, not feminist.”) After Donald Trump’s re-election, conservative values have been expressed more openly in liberal-leaning cities like New York. For this cohort, dressing well, hosting social events and embracing criticism has become a way to seize ground in a shifting media landscape.

“Evie started for women who didn’t feel represented by the mainstream media, for women who love beauty, romance, aspiration,” said Hugoboom, 34. “I didn’t have another outlet to get it from at the time.”

Shortly after this article, the magazine posted an announcement of a new themed issue called “the Sex issue,” one that features highly sexualized photos and other sexually explicit material.

On Sunday night at evie's EROS party, we unveiled the cover of our next print edition in front of the press and hundreds of guests. It's the first of many themed issues, and it's the most ambitious thing we've ever produced. For years, a recurring plea has shown up in our DMs, emails, and survey responses. Young married women asking us for real, honest, detailed guidance about sex….

Many young women, especially from traditional or religious families, have come into womanhood without learning anything about sex. They saved themselves for marriage and then realized the culture that told them to wait had absolutely nothing to say about what comes after the altar. They grew up with negative associations to intimacy, but were expected to become uninhibited the moment they said "I do." We believe sex is one of the most important foundations of a thriving marriage. You cannot call something sacred and then refuse to take it seriously. We talked to doctors, experts, and women who've been married for decades. This issue is specific on purpose, because vague advice is the same as no advice. There are beautiful hand-drawn illustrations for the explicit content and tasteful photography for the implicit content.

Some of you will read this and be surprised. In truth, this is the most Evie thing we've ever done. We've always said we want to celebrate femininity and help marriages thrive by giving women real advice that actually makes their lives better. Your sex life with your husband is arguably the most important part of your marriage. You asked for guidance, and we listened.

This spawned quite a bit of debate in conservative circles. Some said it was inappropriate. Others defended it as being a positive portray of sex within marriage only - one that rejected extramarital sex.

To me, there are a few ways to look at this. One is as another example of the old quip that, “Conservatism is just liberalism with a twenty year lag.”

Another is that it’s another example of the shifts in right wing politics in the Negative World. Traditionally, conservative politics would have rejected the idea of publishing sexually explicit content, regardless of whether or not it was aimed at married people. In country that’s culturally post-Christian, and with an increasingly post-Christian right, a more sexually expressive right wing politics emerging is not necessarily surprising.

Another option is that this is a manifestation of the increasing Catholic cultural domination of conservatism, particularly among the young and politically active. The main woman behind Evie magazine is apparently Catholic. While not all Catholics would approve the Evie issue by any means, I think it’s fair to say that such a thing would be much less acceptable in the evangelical world.

Whatever the case, this sort of thing is certainly a new development in the conservative landscape.

I can’t help but compare the reactions to this to those of a pinup calendar aimed at conservative dads. This spawned major blowback. It would be interesting to track those who rejected this calendar vs. those who rejected Evie. I checked one of the bigger names quoted in the anti-calendar article, and she did not say anything about the Evie issue that I could find.

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Cozy Girl Life

Freddie deBoer posted some interesting observations on the “cozy girl” lifestyle, and what it says about our society.

You’ve heard this song from me before many times: we live in an era in which the range of lives publicly regarded as worthy of living has contracted almost to nothing. Our culture confers esteem on a vanishingly small number of roles, and those roles are largely defined by being visible - that is to say, by attracting public attention, of which there is a necessarily finite supply. Success, as it is marketed to young people, means being a pop star on the order of a Sabrina Carpenter, a director with the cultural cachet of a Greta Gerwig, or at minimum a micro-celebrity “creator” whose daily routines are packaged for the algorithm. A contented life requires building a brand, cultivating a following, being legible to the feed. Everything else - teacher! paralegal! office manager! dental hygienist! retail supervisor! random white collar office email job that’s basically fine! - is flattened into an undifferentiated gray. These are necessary roles, some of them pay well, but they certainly aren’t glamorous ones, and young Americans seem increasingly convinced that a life that doesn’t inspire envy among others - when broadcast online, naturally - isn’t one worth living.

…

For Gen Z, this has all combined with a frankly pathological embrace of high-risk, high-variance speculation into something I find very scary; it’s a generation that seems to view all ordinary jobs as sucker deals for “NPCs,” pushing them towards more and more risky efforts to make money and escape the life of drudgery they mostly haven’t lived but have been taught to disdain. “Gen Z” is the empty, meaningless signifier that we’ve chosen for them, but it would be more apt to call them Generation Roulette Wheel. They never stop looking for a get-rich-quick hustle. Cryptocurrency manias rise and fall with the chaos of a fever dream; meme stocks explode and crater in a matter of days; sports gambling apps turn every game into a financial instrument, every friendship into a wagering pool. When your ambient culture tells you that the only meaningful victories are stratospheric and rare, it makes a certain perverse sense to chase stratospheric and rare outcomes. If stability isn’t honored, what’s left other than volatility?

…

The genius of the cozy aesthetic is that it identifies sources of pleasure that are widely accessible and modest and treats them as inherently worthy of serious cultivation: a soft sweater, a well-made cup of tea, a public library card, a crockpot recipe that reliably produces something warm and nourishing, a Saturday morning with nowhere to be. You may find any one or all of these more or less attractive based on your own preferences, but whatever they are, they’re not signifiers of elite achievement, they’re all available in low-cost forms, and they’re all reliable and attainable. They’re not blue-check credentials, they don’t require venture capital or viral reach, and you don’t need to chew your fingernails waiting for the wheel to spin to see if you’ve won them. These simple pleasures are, instead, elements of an ordinary life lived with intention.

Click over to read the whole thing.

The Decline of Creationism

Speaking of Ryan Burge, he had a recent interesting post looking at views on creationism. There are some limits in the survey he’s analyzing. It only deals with the development of human beings, so the view he assigns as creationist says, “Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” This doesn’t talk about creation more broadly.

Also, what Burge calls “intelligent design” I believe would more accurately be labeled “theistic evolution,” or evolution directed by God. My impression is that the people who label themselves as believers in intelligent design to do not believe evolution can account for the development of life as we know it, even with divine guidance.

With those caveats, here’s the chart:

Remarkably few people of any religious stripe believe in creationism as defined here.

Click over to read Burge’s entire post.

Best of the Web

NYT: The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing (gift link) - The political class is worried about the historic drop. But the biggest change is among the youngest women, who are the least ready to have children.

About half of all 30 year old women in America are childless. With women aged 30 without children having only about a 50% of ever having kids, that means a quarter of today’s 30 year old women will never have children - if demographic trends stay the same.

I actually agree in part with some of this birth rate decline being good. It’s good that there’s been a big decline in unwed teen mothers having kids, for example, given the big negative associations between single parenthood and a variety of negative life outcomes.

Scott Greer: The Conservative Golden Age Of… 2007? - Yet another example of conservatism being liberalism with a 20 year lag.

Block, formerly known as Square, is laying off 40% of its workforce, citing AI. Most corporate announcements of layoffs citing AI are probably just trying to portray their firm as successful adopters of emerging technology. In reality, they were probably just downsizing. That’s probably in part the case here as well, given that like many tech firms, Block’s payroll mushroomed during Covid. But AI actually is probably playing some role here as it is already ready for primetime when it comes to software development type tasks. I’ll have more to say about that in a future essay.

Harper’s: The Plot to Save America - Inside the movement to reindustrialize—and rearm—the country

Ryan Burge: The People Streaming Church Aren’t Who You Think - Education, income, and the hidden class pattern in religious attendance

Mere Fidelity: The Great Evangelical Hand-Off That Never Happened - This podcast discusses the lack of successful generational succession in evangelical institutions. In my view one of the biggest factors is that Boomer leaders never wanted to surround themselves with or invest in younger people who could ever plausibly match or upstage the boss one day - or who had their own ideas about the world. This was actually the subject of our Member Zoom this month. To learn more about my Member program for my closest supporters, see my Support page.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from the Niskanen Center, Noah Smith, Joel Kotkin, I was also pleased to see that I got a mention in one of the presbytery reports at last years general assembly of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

New this week:

• Old Orderists vs. New Orderists - Legacy vs. outsider institutions, restoration vs. reinvention: The fault line running through today’s politics.

• It’s Almost a Sin for an Evangelical to Be an Elite (paid only) - From “Radical” to “Seashells”: How evangelical rhetoric downgrades “secular” vocations to second-class—or worse

• This week’s podcast is on the Boomer paradox with Jeff Giesea.

• Why Boomers Never Produced a Next Generation of Leaders - The recording of this month’s Member Zoom discussion. Also includes thoughts on why conservatives aren’t creating art and culture.

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In City Journal, I have a short take on how Californication caught up with Colorado. Colorado was the Texas or Tennessee of its day, but has seen a remarkable reversal in its fortunes.

Migration from California has helped change Colorado from a libertarian-inflected reddish state into a solid-blue one. And now blue Colorado is starting to turn into California.

The state’s remarkable demographic reversal provides the clearest evidence of this transformation. Recent Census numbers show Colorado losing more than 12,000 residents to other states last year, while its total population growth is anemic. The metro area of Denver, once a city with buzz as hot as Austin or Nashville, is now growing more slowly than Midwestern cities like Indianapolis and Columbus. The state’s labor force has also started shrinking—something the Denver Post notes has “never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Not so long ago, Colorado was one of America’s booming destinations. During the 1990s, its population grew by over 30 percent, adding more than 1 million residents. Between just 1990 and 1997, Colorado attracted nearly 110,000 migrants from California, about six times the number from any other state. The state also grew in the 2000s and 2010s.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I also have a longer essay in American Affairs Journal on how we should think about transportation policy in an age of disruption. This one is a bit wonkier, but I call for, among other things, devolution of responsibility of most transportation funding from the federal to the state level, as well as increasing the discount rate used when assessing the benefits of proposed highway projects in light of the uncertainty introduced by the possibility of autonomous vehicles.

Waymo, the autonomous driving spin-off of Google, is fast at work turning driverless ride-hailing from a science fiction concept into a realistic transportation option for the public. In San Francisco, it has already captured as much as 27 percent of the rideshare market. In addition to the Bay Area, Waymo offers service in parts of the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas; its driverless cars can also be hailed through Uber in Austin and Atlanta. Amid this success and momentum, the firm is now looking to expand its operations throughout the United States, with Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando next on the list.

Not to be outdone, Tesla is now promising what it calls “full self-driving” to its customers, though its vehicles still require a driver to be ready to take control; it has begun offering driverless “Robotaxi” service in Austin and San Francisco, with more cities to come. The company is nearly at the production stage for its Cybercab, a car designed explicitly for robotaxi service.

While one segment of the U.S. auto industry is focused on going all in on driverless cars, another is looking at the threat of competition from Chinese EVs. Ford CEO Jim Farley has been driving electric vehicles from China, such as the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi is a Chinese conglomerate known especially for its mobile phones. He said of the SU7, “It’s fantastic. I don’t want to give it up.” He considers these low-cost, high-quality electric vehicles from China as the real challenge to Ford, and a genuinely existential one at that. He said, “We are in a global competition with China. And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford.”

The popular YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee was also impressed with the Xiaomi SU7. After driving it for several weeks, he said, “This feels like a preview of what Apple might have done if they’d made an Apple car.” Brownlee touted its high-quality build and materials, software, quiet ride, and more. He summed it up by saying, “Are we cooked? Not yet, clearly. This car is not available here in the US. But you can see how we could be soon. . . . There’s basically no question in my mind that if a car like this was available in the US for $42,000, that it would crush.”

Click over to read the whole thing.

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A Very Protestant Catholic Critique

While reading renowned sociologist Christian Smith’s lament about why he left Notre Dame, I couldn’t help but think that complaining that Notre Dame isn’t fully living up to its Catholic intellectual ideals is such a Protestant critique. Smith converted to Catholicism in 2010, and I think it’s a testament to him that he recognizes his essay may be a reflection of his Protestant enculturation.

Much of this is on me. I have ­never done well with institutions whose performances fall far short of their ­s­tated principles. It’s probably some residue of Protestant Reformation sensibilities in me. I also have difficulty not naming things frankly what they are. That’s my Philadelphia upbringing, no doubt. I own it. But at some point the personal costs became intolerable. [emphasis added]

It’s a generalization to be sure, but it seems like being Catholic has never come with the expectation that every person or institution fully embody all of Catholic thought, teaching and practice to the same extent that this is expected in Protestantism. We see this, for example, in surveys of Catholic laity, in which their views on a range of subjects align closer to mainline Protestantism than to the teachings of the Catholic church. The culture of Notre Dame probably is relatively close to what it means to be Catholic in actual practice.

The South and the SEC as Spectacle

Christopher Sandbatch is an interesting and provocative online writer, even though sometimes it can be difficult to understand exactly what he’s trying to say. He recently put up an interesting piece about the growth of SEC colleges as prestige destinations. It hits at some points related to topics I discuss here.

Elite schools of the Northeastern corridor have begun shedding their aspirant prestigees directly onto the Southern public colleges, and these institutions built to hold the region together (and, admittedly, to shield its inhabitants from the radiative effects of the Empire’s hegemonic culture) are being reimagined as destinations for people whose own regions have long served as the country’s default importers of credentialed youth.

…

The SEC school is increasingly constructed in national discourse as a cultural “elsewhere”: a place of spectacle, excess, ritualized sociability, and stylized gender performance; a place whose public meaning is carried less by laboratories and clinics than by tailgates, stadium light, and choreographed pageantry. It becomes legible as “The South” in quotation marks, a set of signs that can be consumed at a distance. One does not have to believe that the students themselves consciously think in these terms to see the structure. A region that is still treated as backward, parochial, or morally compromised is now (again) also alluring because it is imagined as unburdened by the neurotic disciplines of the Northeastern meritocracy. The difference is that the older contempt and the newer fascination share a common mechanism: both reduce an institutional world to an aesthetic object.

…

The tension between these frames, the SEC as aesthetic object on one hand and the SEC as functional institution [producing professional and technical graduates to staff the institutions of their states] on the other, produces many of the aggravations that now surround the “coolness” narrative. Observers who approach the South as a cultural novelty often speak as though these universities were newly invented as entertainment complexes; resorts that happen to have classrooms. Observers who approach prestige as a Northeastern monopoly often speak as though any influx of Northeastern students must be an error or a fad, because they cannot imagine legitimacy moving in that direction. Both positions miss what is actually taking place. The institutions are not becoming Northeastern; the Northeast is, in a limited but real sense, becoming institutionally dependent on the South for an increasingly large share of its own middle- and upper-middle-class reproduction.

In the previous regime, Northeastern schools produced prestige while SEC/land grant schools had a functional purpose to educate skilled technical graduates largely for their own states. He argues that what’s happened with the SEC is not just a transfer of the prestige function from the Northeast, but a hybridization of prestige + functionality as a response to a collapse in credibility of our elite.

To see this clearly is to return to the original purpose of the land-grant and flagship system, and to notice what has changed around it. The older American regime could tolerate regional specialization because it assumed the stability of the national core: prestige flowed from a small set of recognized centers, and the periphery sought recognition from them. But in a period when the centers increasingly appear as engines of moral and bureaucratic dysfunction, and when the costs of the credentialing path have become grotesque, the appeal of institutions grounded in visible competence and coherent social life grows. This does not mean that the SEC school is a new Harvard, nor does it mean that it produces the same kind of national elite. It means that the old prestige grammar no longer exhausts the ways Americans are now seeking legitimacy, security, and a workable adulthood. ….The SEC flagship, once an organ of regional self-maintenance, is becoming — by recruitment strategy and by the failures of other institutional ecologies — a site where legitimacy is redistributed. The observers who continue to read this through inherited prestige frameworks will keep mistaking it for spectacle. The more accurate reading is structural: an old apparatus of competence is being asked to absorb not only its own region, but a portion of the country that it once presumed it would never need to.

…

If the SEC flagship is becoming a site where legitimacy is redistributed, it is not because it offers a more pleasing youth culture. It is because the prestige regime that once monopolized legitimacy has grown detached from visible function. Its institutions still confer status, but the connection between certification and competence has become increasingly abstract. By contrast, the Southern flagship remains legible. It is still visibly tied to the reproduction of engineers, nurses, administrators, and the professional classes required to keep a society operational.

This distinction is difficult to state within the language of credentialism, because credentialism recognizes recognition, not function. Yet function is precisely what these institutions were built to preserve. Their authority was never meant to rest on symbolic superiority, but on their ability to reproduce competence for civic ends. [bold emphasis added]

Click over to read the whole thing.

I do believe at some level people are looking for credibility and competence today, and they haven’t been finding it in our prestige institutions.

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Best of the Web

The Atlantic has a great major profile of Rod Dreher (gift link) in its March issue.

Joel Kotkin has a new report out asking if there is a new religious revival.

Related in Comment: Not So Secular Sweden - One of the most irreligious countries on earth is getting religion. What’s going on?

In 2025, memberships saw their largest rise in decades. Between 2005 and 2010, five to six thousand people applied for membership in the Church of Sweden annually. In the early 2020s, that number surpassed ten thousand. In 2024, fourteen thousand new members joined—the highest figure in decades. And 2025 will top even that: By November, nearly eighteen thousand had already entered the church.

Kyle Smith/WSJ: No Boyz Aloud on BookTok (gift link) - The literary world has zero interest in publishing novels for heterosexual men

I mentioned the Brad Wilcox stat that if a woman doesn’t have a child by the time she reaches age 30, she has a roughly 50% chance of being permanently childless. Here’s a chart from IFS showing how those odds change with age.

The New Yorker: Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsayer Philosopher - Nick Land

Land’s writings from the nineties have a seductive danger, envisioning a sci-fi future of synthetic drugs, black-market brain implants, gene editing, and cyborgs. At that time, a world of true digital immersion was still decades away; like William Gibson, who wrote the eighties cyberpunk classic “Neuromancer” on a typewriter, Land, in his C.C.R.U. heyday, had a green-screen Amstrad computer, and was barely connected to the internet. But now a version of Land’s midnight future has arrived. While real-world infrastructure is left to rot, A.I. build-out floats the economy, accounting, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. And many of the fantasies that powered the online right during the mid-twenty-tens have become official policy under the second Trump Administration. The President hired the world’s wealthiest tech mogul to dismantle the government. The Department of Homeland Security posts deportation videos on TikTok that resemble the “fashwave” fan edits once spread on meme accounts inspired by Land and Yarvin. Out-of-control A.I. is not a fiction imagined by novelists but a reality financed by venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds. And you no longer have to go to the deepest crypts of the web to find Land: in October, on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show seen by millions, Carlson and the self-described amateur theologian Conrad Flynn discussed Land’s ideas about A.I. for close to half an hour. “We are building the demons from the Book of Revelation with A.I.,” Flynn explained, summarizing Land. “That’s Nick’s Land’s position?” Carlson asked. “It’s the position of a lot of these guys,” Flynn replied.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention in the American Conservative and Breakpoint. And I was a guest on Razib Khan’s podcast.

New this week:

• How We Engineer the American Transition - The playbook from America’s post-Civil War great reinvention—techno-nationalist acceleration paired with human-social formation

• Evangelical Cultural Cringe - Building the quiet confidence cultural engagement evangelicals need to critique the mainstream and create real influence

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.