00:00:24.820Quinn has a new book called Hayek's Bastards that caught my eye, particularly for his one chapter called Neurocasts, which he is here to talk to us about, exploring the neoliberal right wing's use of IQ and race science to further their economic vision.
00:00:46.040Quinn, thank you so much for being with us.
00:00:48.140So there's one theory of the Trump era that, you know, Trump is accelerating, but is also sort of the product of a kind of like epistemic collapse.
00:00:58.200This notion that the right wing elites and the sort of populist masses that they are harnessing have this broad based hostility to authorities of knowledge, right, towards professors, towards doctors, towards public health representatives.
00:01:17.600And you see this kind of thing like in Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Scrimetti, right, which is basically an attack on a medical authority.
00:01:25.940You see it in more or less anything that RFK does at the Department of Health and Human Services.
00:01:32.260And there's this notion that, you know, there is a new right-wing populist distrust of expertise and deferral to like the impulses and preferences of the people, the common man, right?
00:01:45.720It's easy to view this trend as a kind of reemergence of superstition and a distrust of empiricism.
00:01:54.780And Quinn, in your book, one of the things you argued, I thought, really compellingly was that this is kind of a misapprehension of what's going on with thinkers on the right wing regarding both their notions of like the people and also their relationship to epistemic authority.
00:02:10.280And one of the things that you say is that we are now experiencing the culmination of this history in which conservative economists turn to nature and to their own sort of distinct sources of science and empirical authority in the wake of the Cold War to make the case for their worldview.
00:02:26.680Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm a big proponent of the idea that there's science on one side and then just, I don't know, ignorant opposition to expertise on the other is a really bad framing.
00:02:36.760And for someone like RFK, actually, in particular, right? I mean, he is the master of, like, do your own research and part of this worldview that there's actually buried data out there that has been suppressed and needs to be brought to light and that they are the ones who are actually the most faithful to science.
00:02:52.640And they're holding that against the, you know, the woke distortions of the elites who are just bending the truth to reproduce their own power.
00:03:00.940So there definitely is this storyline about the appropriation of a language of science by the insurgent far right.
00:03:12.140And as I tell in the book, this becomes one of the territories where two groups of people who seem quite different from each other end up hanging out, mobilizing, allying.
00:03:23.640And those two groups are people who are mostly interested in questions of ethnic purity and national purity.
00:03:30.940what we call like an ethno-nationalist right. And those people who are mostly interested in
00:03:35.820questions of economic freedom, what you would normally call libertarians or neoliberals.
00:03:41.500And so that book is really about why it was that in the wake of the Cold War and in the 1990s,
00:03:46.840those two groups found shared ground on a revived science of human nature that grounded natural
00:03:55.180hierarchies in something that they thought was like beyond the reach of the social movements
00:04:00.420and the progressives that had long bedeviled them.
00:04:04.040I was so excited by this story you tell
00:04:06.080because I think you really touch on a few of our
00:04:09.340like in bed with the right bugaboos, right?
00:04:11.420So this is a story that casts a new light for me
00:04:15.360on sort of, you know, birth rate anxieties
00:04:23.220about the sort of like superiority complexes
00:04:25.760inherent in a lot of the masculinities of Silicon Valley,
00:04:29.520What we refer to in our little world as like the creep masculinity.
00:04:33.600And then it also made me think really differently, particularly in this one chapter that we're going to be talking about today, about the quasi-mythical status of IQ in the right-wing imagination.
00:04:43.600So I particularly wanted you to tell us about how like IQ testing, race science, and this like ethos of positive eugenics and sort of skepticism of, you know, social democratic welfare programs.
00:04:59.520have been feeding into an economic theory of what you call neurocasts, right? These people
00:05:06.580who are esteemed to be biologically suited for certain kinds of work and certain kinds of
00:05:11.800compensation. Yeah, I mean, people would probably be most familiar with the bell curve from 1994
00:05:18.340as something that seems to have, in recent history, revived discussion of IQ racism and
00:05:25.340became a really important touchstone for the far right up to the present and mainstreamed again
00:05:30.940the idea that these IQ tests were somehow meaningful ways of measuring people's worth
00:05:38.240in the economy and ultimately their worth as citizens. But the thing that I lay out in the
00:05:44.000book is an earlier prehistory of the IQ fixation, which doesn't short circuit all the way back to
00:05:50.680Lewis Terman, although there will be some Stanford racists in between, I promise you,
00:05:55.100so don't worry. It doesn't go all the way back to the stuff that Malcolm Harris has recently
00:05:59.940excavated. And the recent book, Predatory Data, has also done a nice job on this.
00:06:05.860But there's this one book called The Geography of Intellect, which I found really fascinating,
00:08:57.680This thing is written into the DNA, it's written into the genes, and these meliorist efforts are always doomed to fail.
00:09:06.520Right. There's something like almost kind of comforting in it for like the frustrated egalitarian, right?
00:09:12.780Like it's not that we have collectively failed morally or in terms of our imagination or in terms of our investment.
00:09:19.940It is that like this is a naturally preordained hierarchy that we bear no responsibility for.
00:09:27.680Yeah. And I would say in many ways, we're kind of still in that era, right? That deferral of blame to endowments that are beyond the reach of social policy sort of feels like the defeatist era of treatment of educational inequality that kind of reigns to this day.
00:09:46.100The other thing that strikes me as interesting about IQ is that you're kind of outlining why it was structurally so important for people's worldview, but it also becomes really, really interesting in their own biographies, right?
00:09:58.880And I'm thinking here about like how 19th century race science and sort of phrenology and physiognomy were often sort of practiced inside the home and on yourself.
00:10:07.080And I'm just thinking like, I feel like there's two kinds of people in the world, the kinds of people who know their IQ and people who have never, ever had any interest in like finding out any of that stuff.
00:10:16.100Like the way it sinks its claws into the individual biography and really becomes sort of the way someone makes sense of their own rise or not rise, their own career or the career they didn't end up having.
00:10:30.700Like the way it is this way of thinking about populations at this extremely large level and the scientificity such as it is, is all about vast numbers.
00:10:39.760But then when someone starts with it, it's like, oh, this is about you.
00:10:53.060Who was very worried about the falling standards in the Mensa Society and the existence suddenly of too many women in it, among other things.0.98
00:11:00.800And it was very true for Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, too.
00:11:04.580So, they were both from more humble backgrounds.
00:11:09.020So, Hernstein grew up pretty poor from a Hungarian immigrant family in Brooklyn, and Charles Murray grew up in Ohio. I believe his father was like a whirlpool repairman or something like that.
00:11:20.060And then had both, of course, made their way to Harvard through their own hard work and their own efforts and their own IQ. And it galled them, especially. And they talked a lot about that to see people who had been given a free pass to come in and get the things that they had rightly deserved because of their natural endowments.
00:11:40.820And Murray, doing the conservative thing, of course, flipped it around and said, it's not only bad for me to see, you know, a black kid on campus in Harvard Yard in the 1990s, but it's actually especially hard for the black kid because he now knows and is burdened with this fact that others look at him as illegitimate in his presence on the campus.
00:12:00.540So we need to restore, you know, erect that sense of individual certainty for everyone, not just for ourselves, although it's transparently just an expression of their own experience, for sure.
00:12:19.380So I'm interested in this blip of 1963 with the publication of The Geography of Intellect, because like how euphemistic is that versus how avowed is it in its scientific investment in white supremacy?
00:12:35.380Because, you know, one narrative I had about race science that I think you've done somewhere to debunk, but I think it's a common one, is that Darwin's theories were taken up as a means to justify various inequalities, right?
00:12:51.620Be it global imperialism or, like, race and gender hierarchies within Western countries.
00:12:58.000And that, like, in the late 19th and basically the first half of the 20th century, this leads to a big craze for eugenics that creates all kinds of sundry intellectual dishonesty and moral catastrophe in the form of things like, you know, sterilization campaigns.0.67
00:13:14.920But then I also thought that the embrace of the Third Reich had sort of put the brakes on that, right?
00:13:21.400And the horrors of the Holocaust, the affiliation of race science with the Nazis had done a lot to sort of push this line of inquiry out of respectability, even among, you know, conservative thinkers, right?0.52
00:13:39.400This is a telling in which race science has made a more recent comeback, right?
00:13:43.300But in your book, you narrate how it was sort of like, not even exactly peripheral, but like being cultivated in quieter ways in these think tanks.
00:13:55.600Do you want to like tell us a little bit of that like history of how race science survived after the Nazis?
00:14:01.460Yeah, so I think for the most part, the story that you had as an assumption is correct, that there was this counterattack by Franz Boas and his students, basically, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Sarah Neal Thurston, and the rise of cultural anthropology did put paid to the idea of essential physiological differences mapping onto a hierarchy of traits in some identifiable way.
00:14:26.620So, from the 1950s, really up to the 90s, it was really the high point of the idea that, as we were probably all taught in college, race is a social construct. It doesn't actually mean anything. It's invented by the powerful to justify and legitimize their own power.
00:14:44.000And the whole point of studying race and racism is to poke holes in it and undermine it and show it to be ideology and mythology, you know, history made into nature.
00:14:54.540However, in the shadows through that whole period, there was a kind of twilight version of race science and physical anthropology that continued to exist, sometimes in pretty shady and disreputable places.
00:15:10.680I give some of the background of that. Something called the Pioneer Fund in particular funded something called Mankind Quarterly, which did not have a huge subscription base, but had a very devoted one.
00:15:23.080And among the people who were very devoted to it were indeed some of the people connected to the main libertarian or free market think tanks of the 1950s and 60s.
00:15:33.180So the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a big Mankind Quarterly fan.
00:15:38.400The Institute for Humane Studies, this is where we get close to the Stanford races of when it was still in Menlo Park before it moved to George Mason University, was a kind of hub for trying to keep alive the idea of physical anthropology and racial difference as a way to counter what they saw as the socialistic civil rights movement.
00:16:02.060William Shockley, another denizen of the Valley, who famously was proposing that he would offer cash prizes or rewards to Black men to sterilize themselves, was someone who was in touch with the people at Institute for Humane Studies.
00:16:17.880So there was this race science community that continued to exist, sometimes overlapping with occultish neo-Nazi kind of circles.
00:16:27.520But at the same time, there was also more mainstream physical anthropology.
00:16:32.420So the kind of people who would study the bones of early man, so to speak, and Neolithic remains were part more of the genealogy that had been marginalized by Franz Boas and company.
00:16:45.720And they have had a major resurgence, obviously, since the 1990s.
00:16:49.620And that's one of the things I talk about in the book, too, is the context for why IQ and race science starts to come back into public discussion in the 1990s or become more like Zalon Fee, which Germans say, like ready for the salon, is because of things like the Human Genome Project, which restored the idea of population differences being something one can, you know, put your finger on.
00:17:14.180And the idea that there was a gene for this and a gene for that, again, something we probably remember from our childhood or teenage years since, you know, discredited.
00:17:23.320But the 90s were a real time when, as Rogers Brubaker and other people have talked about, race kind of got taken away from the humanities and given back to the scientists.
00:17:33.940And this idea that race was something that was real and that not only people on the right might be interested in that, the people on the left who are worried about things like the vulnerability of populations to things like sickle cell anemia or other kinds of disorders that are disproportionately represented in certain marginalized groups, then it might be good to actually to pay attention to self-identification of race.
00:17:58.940So the 90s are a real hinge moment where, you know, by now in the era of like consumer DNA tests and 23andMe, it's completely normal for people just to say like, oh, yeah, no, I'm like 2.5% Ashkenazi Jewish.
00:18:14.00035% Mongol, Asian, and my mother's kind of a bit proud about the fact that she has the
00:18:20.060highest possible Neanderthal DNA that you can have, because that's become now something that
00:18:24.880Stephanos Garolanos, in his new book about the invention of prehistory, has a great section about
00:18:30.800how the far right in Europe has reclaimed the Neanderthal as a kind of proto-white population.
00:18:37.620Maybe you should talk to him about that. So there's a way that that kind of science
00:18:43.120continued. But I think it's also worth mentioning, only because I've been razzed by this a bit,
00:18:48.060that's a polite way of putting it, but by some people who've been critical of the book,
00:18:52.140for saying that I made the IQ idea seem entirely the property of the right.
00:18:58.060So educational psychologists, including many on the left, have often deployed intelligence testing
00:19:04.720not to reinforce the idea that there's a natural hierarchy, but actually to try to carry out the
00:19:12.020very equalizing policies that the right is often opposed to. So there's a kind of irony or paradox
00:19:19.440at the heart of the book in a way, which is that eugenics, which has long been associated with
00:19:24.740interventionism and like statism of various kinds and often being carried out by people
00:19:30.540on the left in the early 20th century, actually, becomes more the property of the libertarian
00:19:36.820right? And the question is actually not easy to answer, which is like, how do you do libertarian
00:19:42.500eugenics, right? Because normally it would mean like the state needs to do something.
00:19:48.420But libertarian eugenics, especially in the mind of someone like Charles Murray,
00:19:53.060comes down to immigration policy. That's the simple answer is, you know, you do last,
00:19:58.660you let communities take care of themselves and let people get weeded out by social darwinist
00:20:02.860trends and then you create a new filter for who gets in based on your you know thumbnail back of
00:20:09.920the envelope idea of racial competence and endowments well it's an interesting thing too
00:20:15.020that like as you say there are uses of iq that kind of measure the individual and for instance
00:20:20.820show variability over time etc etc what's really fascinating is that the libertarian iq fixation
00:20:26.840is all about groups is it true in general that like a lot of this is about like this idea that
00:20:32.600Not just that IQ measures something, but also that IQ can be aggregated, where I'm always struck by the idea that, like, you then get, like, claims that a certain country has, like, an average IQ of 80.
00:20:44.480And I'm like, given the description of what that would look like, how they would ever land an airplane seems really difficult.
00:20:51.140So, like, this cannot possibly be correct.
00:20:53.740It would really strongly suggest that people don't know how to take the test, which then pulls down the number, right?
00:20:59.280But it's really interesting that they can conceive of themselves as hyper-individual, but people they don't like sort of become lumped together in these massive racial or ethnic groups.
00:21:09.520Yeah. Yeah. Now, the group difference idea is what then makes it possible to be used as a form of policy creation, right? If you can say, we can choose from the potential immigrant groups based on this and we'll more or less be right, even if we might lose some people on the left-hand side of the tail of the curve, then on average, we will be more right than wrong.
00:21:33.060So, yeah, the fixation on group differences is definitely, you know, you can't be taken out of its context of affirmative action, opposition, civil rights, backlash.
00:21:43.660But I think that the other interesting thing, though, about the fixation with IQ, and this is where the book, I think, kind of tees up but doesn't quite take the shot about Silicon Valley libertarianism and the way that this has now become such a fixation for the kind of techno-authoritarian right in your guys' part of the country, is that the latest interest for Silicon Valley people is actually genetic interventions, right?
00:22:13.380So the idea of gene editing, the idea of prenatal embryo selection for IVF, all really kind of advances in assistive reproductive technologies by which now you can customize, ideally, the child that you're going to have.
00:22:29.900And this is something where this is someone named Steve Su, HSU, who has a company called, I think, Genomic Choice or Genomic Sequence, which is right in the milieu with people like Balaji Srinivasan and Effective Altruists and so on.
00:22:47.000So there's an interesting kind of two-step where first you say, you know, intelligence is hardwired and it can't be changed.
00:22:54.440But you only say that to say that, but a very small elite of us who have access to cutting-edge technologies, however, can also intervene in those hardwired sort of circuitries.
00:23:05.220So for listeners who are not familiar with Shockley, right, he was a longtime denizen of Silicon Valley, came there in the late 50s, famous for Shockley's semiconductor.
00:23:15.920and for kind of accidentally creating Silicon Valley
00:25:16.040I don't know if you guys' kids are school age yet, but it's, like, basically gone now.
00:25:19.740Actually, the gifted child idea is absent.
00:25:23.360I mean, there's a lot of attention to kids with special needs, which is great.
00:25:28.080And somehow the educational philosophy has moved on from the idea that it's a good idea to, like, you know, pluck out children in public school and make them feel special.
00:25:36.640But I think that produced a childhood experience for a lot of people of the kind you're exactly describing, which has never left them and has left that sense of being specially endowed.
00:25:48.020But I wanted to just add one more thing, which is I did very early when I was researching this stuff, I did an event at Harvard with Stuart Schrader, who I'd written about Charles Murray's experience as a Peace Corps worker with, and Adam Van Arsdale, who is actually a biological anthropologist.
00:26:08.020And a woman who was a white elderly African-American woman professor at Boston College, whose name is escaping me right now, but she was an educational psychologist.
00:26:17.820And so we were assuming that we would all talk from our own disciplines.
00:26:20.560And then she would say, like, yeah, this IQ, what a bad idea.
00:26:29.320She's like, yeah, what we do is we racially weight it.
00:26:32.520So, we do IQ tests, and then we also do a second questionnaire, which is intended to measure your degree of racialization. So, to what extent were you made to understand yourself as Black, in particular, was the example that she was using?
00:26:50.300And then we adjust because we know that the experience of racialization in the U.S. is equivalent to a certain loss of IQ.
00:27:00.080This is how she said they utilize it in their discipline because of what you can assume are lost access to certain kinds of resources, forms of teaching, blah, blah, blah.0.58
00:27:09.560So rather than just undermine or deconstruct IQ, they took it and then tried to deploy it for their own purposes.
00:27:16.560right in the spirit of quantification and educational testing and all that stuff so
00:27:21.940she said if you want to know who is keeping the myth of IQ alive or the idea of IQ alive it's not
00:27:28.360people on the right it's ETS it's educational testing services oh yeah because that spirit
00:27:34.240of quantification is really what makes people so data hungry and that's also what makes them
00:27:39.600want to know like what's the average IQ of like Gabon so I can then like correlate that with
00:27:44.980GDP and have some bad quantitative results about the relationship between intelligence and economic
00:27:52.780development. And one of the things that really shocked me was to find Richard Lynn, who's one
00:27:58.320of these especially hardcore race scientists that I talk about in the book, at some point created
00:28:03.380this bad compendium of IQ for the world. And it was on that website, Our World in Data. So you0.87
00:28:10.960could access the data set there or look at a color-coded map of the world according to levels
00:28:17.100of IQ. And I was like, why in the world is this man's shoddy understanding of the world being
00:28:24.180given this status? I'm interested in part of the story of the rise of IQ racism on the economic
00:28:33.340right seems to be a little bit about people abandoning the willingness to entertain other
00:28:39.580causes, right? Like, you know, we talked earlier a little bit about how IQ sort of has the ability
00:28:50.300to distill this kind of ill-defined set of phenomena and characteristics of human beings
00:28:58.500into like one number, right, that can be measured and it's quantified and it's up or it's down.
00:29:04.520And then there's also sort of this similarly simplifying tendency in a lot of like the evolution of the thinkers of people like Charles Murray, who like begin their careers with like maybe more broadly encompassing theories of intelligence or of behavior.
00:29:25.220and sort of as they go on become more and more committed to this like group level
00:29:35.660Yeah, I know his case for sure, right?
00:29:37.280I mean, I actually thought that was quite interesting to see how he basically became it
00:29:40.920started out as a behaviorist and just thought it was all about incentives and pleasure and
00:29:45.740pain and people do things because they get away with them and are rewarded and so on.
00:29:49.840And he was really specific about that not being racially subdivided or coded in any way, and that this is simply universal human nature.
00:29:57.600So that was the kind of analogy of humans to animals of B.F. Skinner variety that didn't try to create a kind of a cod ordinal ranking of how people react to this or that.
00:30:10.680And he did well with that theory as well, which was used to argue against welfare programs, especially for single mothers in the 1980s.
00:30:19.320and indeed into Clinton's welfare reform, as Melinda Cooper writes about so well.
00:30:25.720But then when he found the IQ idea, you know, it was really off to the racism.
00:30:30.900That's actually still crazy because I don't know if any of you have ever held the bell curve in
00:30:34.880your hand, but it's like an 800-page book. It's a very long book, very strange as a bestseller.
00:30:41.220I suppose it was kind of its version of Piketty's like an equality capital in the 21st century
00:30:48.300in that it was, you know, rarely read, but often bought.
00:30:51.480I guess that's something we all aspire to as trade authors at the end.
00:30:56.540But I think it also tapped into something that we haven't mentioned yet,
00:31:01.640which is the rise of the focus on the information economy.
00:31:05.800And that's actually a parallel with the Geography of Intellect book, too,
00:31:11.420because the term, the knowledge economy, was coined in the early 1960s
00:31:16.520by Fritz Machloop, a Viennese economist who is part of the Mont Pelerin Society and so
00:31:21.060on, to say that, you know, as economies develop, you move away from manufacturing and industry
00:31:26.500and new kind of cognitive skills are required, not just, you know, working on the assembly
00:31:32.400line, but handling, I guess, complex problems of paperwork and things like that.
00:31:37.660And in the 1990s, there was a big burst of attention to knowledge workers and symbolic
00:31:44.420analysts and the idea that this was the future of the American economy was mind work and mediated
00:31:51.420by screens. So, they were well-timed there too, not just in the final nail in the coffin of a
00:31:57.720great society. Meliorism, not just as a way to kind of excuse the mass incarceration of the
00:32:05.000decade as being simply, you know, the warehousing of people at the wrong end of the bell curve,
00:32:10.120But also to say, you know, we're moving into an era where intelligence, in other words, sort of brainpower rather than body power or brawn, will be the average endowment that the employees in the brave new American economy will need to be deploying.
00:32:28.880So that is really then a direct line to, you know, like coding camps in Appalachia and these ideas of not much has changed in that regard.0.89
00:32:38.620And the kind of the move, I can't be racist because I'm saying I may be white, but I say East Asians are even more superior or something like that. It's like that comes straight out of the knowledge economy stuff.0.97
00:32:49.340Yeah. And that was very much part of the geopolitical competition of the 90s too, right? This insecurity about Japan outpacing the United States and then 10 years later, 15 years later, China. That was also one of the reasons to orient yourself to IQ.
00:33:05.140And from what I hear in China, there's a real fascination with IQ as well, and the idea of G as some sort of measurable general intelligence, not just as a kind of self-congratulatory narrative, because in that science, East Asians do indeed regularly come out on top along with Ashkenazi Jews, but also because it's seen as a way to kind of reprogram 21st century economy through allocation of educational funding and things like that.
00:33:33.320How did the, like, turn towards a knowledge economy and a sense of, you know, okay, we're going to need differently qualified workers with, like, different cognitive capacities and perhaps we can find those workers in different racial groups?
00:33:49.380Like, how did this thinking about the new economy interact with the explosion of, you know, the fields of genomics and neuroscience in the 80s and 90s?
00:34:00.120Because it seems like, you know, the tools to measure this thing you think you need are emerging very rapidly right alongside the articulation of the need itself.
00:34:08.240Yeah, I mean, I think that it wasn't, and we still actually aren't in a place where people thought that they could draw direct conclusions from certain DNA sequences and then certain intellectual endowments or assets.
00:34:22.280I mean, the interesting thing is to read someone like Nick Bostrom in his book, Super Intelligence, from 2014, that was a very, very big deal in Silicon Valley.
00:34:33.540In a way, it's what leads to the creation of open AI by Sam Altman and Elon Musk and others, because it was one of the first ones to raise this fear of the runaway AI.
00:34:45.120the famous example of the paperclip maximizer comes from Nick Bostrom, and that's usually
00:34:51.240what he's associated with, as well as the simulation theory. But the other thing he's
00:34:55.460talking about, actually, for a good half of that book is new forms of biological intervention that
00:35:01.180can be used to increase human intelligence. The book is set up as like, okay, we need to increase
00:35:06.960human intelligence. Intelligence is the only factor that really separates us from the animals,
00:35:10.960And so it's the variable we need to home in on.
00:35:14.680How much can we do with our, like, meat computers, like with our bodies?
00:35:19.300Okay, and then he spends 75 pages laying out ways of doing biological enhancement, which rely on something that doesn't exist yet, which is like being able to figure out, like, a gene for smartness or finding a correlation between the kind of people who tend to test high on IQ tests and the kind of DNA that they tend to have.
00:35:38.700But then the back end of the book is, OK, humans are useless. This has all got to go online. We have to do this with supercomputers and neural nets and so on. But the interesting thing that he observes kind of in passing in that book is how quickly certain kinds of assisted reproductive technologies had become available and then had become normal very, very quickly.
00:36:01.920Right. So the classic example, and this is writing with my friend Ben Tarnoff, a book about Elon Musk right now. And part of the reason I was reading it was because of this fact pointed out by Vivian Wilson herself that she had been sex selected as an embryo for implantation.
00:36:21.360And that that was, as she thought, pretty horrible because she felt like it treated her like sex like a commodity that, you know, felt like for her father was then like he didn't get what he asked for because he got a girl and he wanted a boy.
00:36:35.920But it turns out that the ability to do sex selection for embryos was made available almost the same year that she was born.
00:36:45.360And the kind of things like prenatal screening, which had been non-existent 10 years before, are now almost 100% of people do those things.
00:36:53.980So I think that what you're describing, the kind of rise of genetic and genomic knowledge and how it intersects with the knowledge work, still remains kind of in a speculative space.
00:37:05.120Like, it's not that yet that we've heard from, you know, David Sachs, as AI and cryptos are, that he's also going to be intervening in kind of like genetic selection for high IQ babies.
00:37:19.480But, you know, we're only in year one of the four-year Trump term, so, yeah.
00:37:23.700No, I mean more as a way of thinking, as a way of thinking about how human traits and behaviors and characteristics were imagined as being biologically embedded, right?
00:37:35.800This seems like a zeitgeist towards a kind of biological determinism emerging in the early 1990s, like right ahead of Murray's book, right?
00:37:47.460Yeah, well, the interesting thing is that race in the bell curve is frequently described as being genetic or, you know, the whole crux of the argument is that more of our intelligence is genetically determined than is usually accepted.
00:38:04.500So it doesn't say it all is. It still gives a lot of space for, you know, nutrition and education and so on, early childhood interventions, but that it's just more than, I think it's 60% or something is the number that they use.
00:38:17.460But their idea of race, and then they say, and those are, there are large and stubborn
00:38:22.800differences between racial groups, but their idea of race is not actually genetic, even
00:38:41.600When you get to the more recent Charles Murray stuff, then he's now leaning on the more recent developments in the field.
00:38:50.940So the examples that he gives is that we will have something like a genetic credit score or genetic audit that he believes will be necessary for all job applications, university applications.
00:39:04.460and selection for those kind of things will no longer be subjective or based on how well you
00:39:10.600wrote your college entry exam or essay, how many good anecdotes you roll out, but just the sheer
00:39:15.940numbers of your likelihood to succeed based on this genetic audit. The other idea that's quite
00:39:21.960exciting for people like that is the idea of epigenetics and the idea that you can, through
00:39:28.340these interventions also then produce inheritable adaptations in the genome. So to be honest,
00:39:36.080I'm actually, we've been talking about this as kind of a niche interest amongst, you know,
00:39:40.020the hyperactive EC class and posters and stuff, but I'm almost waiting for it to become a larger
00:39:46.980mass phenomenon. I mean, I do think that the time is ripe for, as we saw with RFK,
00:39:53.580like this sort of counter science becoming something that really mobilized people.
00:40:00.320And so it wouldn't surprise me if they're especially maybe even amongst, you know,
00:40:05.520parents of the upper middle class who are really keen on having their children succeed in tightening job markets,
00:40:12.160that this kind of boutique services and a kind of worldview based around intelligence and genetics
00:40:18.540is something that, you know, I would bet on
00:40:22.220if I had a betting market for future ideologies,
00:43:33.420You're not 117th Neanderthal and also the highway strangler from the 70s as your uncle.
00:43:41.220Was there never a podcast of like bad news from 23andMe?
00:43:46.020Because it always struck me as like the best idea.0.99
00:43:49.100You know, I feel like with 23andMe, the only two options are either like, you know, that is not your real father or yeah, you're mostly Irish.0.98
00:43:58.900You know, it's like either like life alteringly disturbing or kind of entirely banal, which, yeah, I can see what you're saying, Quinn, about the kind of low ceiling of the actual information on offer.0.90
00:44:11.820But that gets at something, I mean, I'm sorry, I always bring this back to 19th century phrenology and physiognomy.
00:44:18.940There's something interesting about that mode of explanation, but it's above all, there's something interesting about it as a mode of questioning.
00:44:25.320There's a kind of person and a kind of milieu that really seems to depend on being able to ask questions about itself in this biologistic way.
00:44:35.860And sort of to justify and locate itself in the social fabric by means of these kinds of questions.
00:44:43.440So it's really much more about cultural habits, isn't it?
00:44:45.920And I think it's as that that I fully agree with you.
00:44:48.820It's going to trickle down to very, I think we're going to get two kinds of people.
00:44:51.820People who under no circumstances have any interest in this and people for whom, you know, like having gone to CTY in the 90s is like the one thing they'll mention.
00:45:02.360I went to high school with a kid who went to CTY and he would not shut up about it.
00:45:06.180It was my first year in the United States.0.99
00:45:07.940What the fuck is this thing and why won't this guy shut up about it?0.99
00:45:12.740Yeah, Pierre Rosenvallon actually has a really interesting couple pages in his book, A Society of Equals, about phrenology being a specifically American fascination.
00:45:23.580He said it's not a coincidence that it was America where this became popular.
00:45:28.520And his argument is a bit counterintuitive, but interesting, because the whole argument of the book is basically like America was a much more equal society than France or Germany or the UK of the time.
00:45:38.580And so to appeal to like the bumps of the head was a way to actually like give some structure to what otherwise could seem like almost random, like who gets to succeed and who doesn't. If you could say like, no, no, no, it's grounded in my head shape, which is a window to the soul, then you could make sense of what could seem like the chaotic ups and downs of actually quite a wide open economic system.
00:46:05.060Yeah, I mean, it's really noticeable that a lot of Silicon Valley today is shaped by the kids of the professional managerial class whose main experience was massification, right?
00:46:17.340That like the middle class was swelling and the idea like I must be different from others and equality and sameness basically as something offensive, something scary, something threatening is clearly part of their very basic psychic structure.
00:46:33.160And the idea that, like, something needs to tell you that within that ambit, there are, for those who know how to look, salient and important differences is extremely important and is culturally important.
00:46:45.360Yeah. And even though it's kind of a tired callback at this point, you know, the Michael Young book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, is still so much fun to look back at. And there's a reason why I kind of lean on it in the beginning and the end of that chapter we're talking about. Because among other things, there's a computer called Pamela, which has an IQ of 100 that everyone is measured against, which is just a wonderful detail.
00:47:09.140But then the way that the system is brought down is a revolution of women on May Day who reject the idea that there should be a kind of scientific version of natural order determined by intelligence that says who's in power and who's not.
00:47:25.720And that really can't help but think about Silicon Valley and the sort of the fear of the revolting worker that is at the heart of something like the new Alexander Karp book, The Technological Republic, or Marc Andreessen's fear about the woke, you know, Skittles-haired, some term I heard recently mentioned, Skittles-haired, like Twitter employees, you know, daring to speak back to their bosses.
00:47:50.580I mean, it's really just reenacting, like, the final scene of the rise of the meritocracy.
00:47:55.640So, it makes sense why they feel like, no, like, reinstate Pamela, you know, keep the workers and the women down and make sure that IQ remains like the yardstick of who is in power.
00:48:08.120Quince Labodian, thank you so much for joining us.
00:48:11.180Really, really grateful for your time that you came to us standing in your closet and made this happen.