YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Hanania

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-02-24
most recent: 2022-02-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“can do but you can reach people who are motivated by anti-wokeness and that's a lot a lot of people on the right and if you explain to them how libertarianism can help them and what they want to do anyway i think that's a good strategy”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's a cause and it's a consequence of polarization, right? So these things work together. I think what libertarians should do, and I think I'm doing a part of this, is they should really make clear to me. So there's this idea on the populist right that we tried libertarianism and now wokeness has taken over it. And I'm like, okay, when did Republicans repeal the Civil Rights Act? Like, when did that happen? When did they defund public education? Like, no, you actually haven't done anything close to libertarianism. And now you're making libertarianism the scapegoat for all these negative trends. in my argument in my article about institutions is just civil rights law i try to make people make people clear like conservatives have a good libertarian enough they haven't even talked about this stuff or understood um the downstream effects that uh broad interpretation of civil rights law on business and the wider culture so you know i think people should have you know they should try because people really are motivated by anti-wokeness and some people are motivated by the idea of small government and what”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should hope for ridiculous polarization. They should hope for Americans to hate each other because libertarian ideas are unpopular. The only way you get them is you basically take over the Republican Party and then they just win 50% of the time no matter what they do. And they're going to have to control certain states no matter what. And they have a lot more freedom to do unpopular things. I think polarization is actually good for libertarianism, but I think they might have a good few decades actually.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, that matters a lot more of a poor person than a rich person. Now, if you do something like you cut how much they're paying in taxes, and I think they did this in Quebec, and I think the Hungarian sort of system works like this too, where if you're getting tax breaks, the rich people pay more taxes. It could potentially be worth more to rich people to have more kids. The structure of how it's set up would also matter quite a bit.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More dominant, and that elites don't have anybody to compete with or try to feel, try to defeat or feel superior to the western gap between the decades of the World War II, between the Westerners and the rest of the world was so large that they weren't really seen as competition. And that might change with the rise of China, but I don't think it's really registered as something that's fundamentally shaped people's outlook. So yeah, the composition of effects and sort of who's responsive to propaganda, these are fascinating questions. I think it's hard to predict in advance. You just have to sort of, you watch what people do. One thing, actually you brought up the economic point. If you make, like, say, a cash transfer for each child, right? Like $10,000.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends on what kind of Republican Party took power and said our biggest thing is getting the fertility rate up and it was like somebody like Trump would just trigger all educated people. Yeah, that would probably backfire. So in some place like China, I mean, I've seen some data that indicates that the elites and more educated are more nationalistic. So they could actually just, you know, they could be united in favor of they could be very potentially receptive to such a message. It's so complicated because it's like China, I think Chinese elites see themselves as part of a country that's competing with the US while US elites don't see themselves really as people competing with China. They see themselves as people competing with other Americans or competing with nature and trying to change the world social peace. So there's completely different dynamics there. And this might be one reason why sort of, you know, the West has become left-wing as it's become.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“potential one potential issue but i i historically um if you look at like the way nationalism came about it was the elites generally who who were nationalistic first and then it sort of trickled down to the masses so i don't think there's necessarily a sort of a rule of human nature that anything sort of nationalist or right wing propaganda necessarily only uh disproportionate appeals to the um to the less intelligent but it's a fascinating question like what the you know compositional effects are what it has or to predict that you know like just i think they get the birth rate on whether it'll be smart people or not smart people i don't know right”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think that, so if you, let's say the government went down the cultural path and just tried to propagandize people at the highest level to have as many kids as possible, right? Our smart people are stupid people more prone to propaganda. I think the argument could be made that smart people are. I mean, you look at wokeness. I mean, smart people tend to accept it a lot more than stupid people. So maybe it's the opposite. Maybe the smartest people will take the hint most clearly and change their behavior while the stupid people won't. Or maybe the stupider are just sort of more. It might be different kinds of propaganda appeal to different kinds of people. So something like this nationalistic might appeal disproportionately to stupid people and something like wokeness and like more idealistic and sort of divorced from reality might appeal to smart people. But I don't think that's one.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I give it 2031. I mean, I'm the only, you know, I talk to other smart people and I'm sort of out on the limb here. And the other one, you know, other smart people, they either think it's impossible or they think the will is not going to be there in the part of the Chinese government. But yeah, I take a different view and I explain it in my substat.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, as sure there is. You can ban all anti-natalist propaganda. You can make that education system just be nothing but about how you should have children for the fatherland. You could tax single people and people at 100% and give all their money to there's tons of stuff you could do, whether that's good, whether it goes to something like zero COVID is where the fact that China did it is pretty impressive, whether it was worth it, I think they've probably gotten overboard at this point, right? So you can debate whether it's worth it. But I think having a competent and authoritarian government sort of opens up different possibilities.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know Well, I mean, so you look at you step back and you look at sort of what correlates with high fertility levels, right? And it seems more clearly to be associated with culture than economic situation. As humans have become more able to afford kids, they've tended to have less of them, right? So this is a pretty strong argument against it being an economic issue, or largely an economic issue as a driver of differential fertility rates. And then you look at things like so religiosity are very important. And the question is, can government influence culture, right?”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to buy them a smartphone. I mean, they have friends if you can only afford to send them to a public school and everyone else is watching porn in the bathroom. I mean, I don't know that people are influenced by that, right? I don't think it's as easy as turn off the TV. I think we all exist within this culture. And there's what other people does affect you.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are really bothered by the direction of the culture and the fact that activists are propagandizing or people who basically are just the market. The media institutions and popular music and culture, if you're upset that they're selling sexual prosecution to children, for example, you might have a more forceful response to that. There's probably not an answer within the confines of libertarianism or it's very hard. I mean, you could set up your own private community and go off and do something. All right, you know, potentially there's something there. But, you know, you could potentially say, you know, I don't like what's considered art now. I don't like what's considered pop culture. And you might just say, well, that's the only potential thing you can do.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the lesson he took from my article basically, whatever you try to pass, you say the government has to be, yes, sir, it has to be like that. It's going to get around it. And one thing they can't get around is you cut off their funding. Do you stop giving money to the universities? They're not going to go out and they just don't have the funding anymore to do this stuff that they want to do. UPASA law saying they have to be politically fair and give conservatives a fair hearing. Well, I mean, who do you think is going to be interpreting that law and deciding what a fair hearing is and what political discrimination is and all that? So yeah, there's something to that. I mean, shrinking, like saying, you know, the government and sort of these institutions that are under the influence of bureaucrats and activists, just shrinking their role in society rather than remaking them, remaking those institutions. I mean, there's something to be said for that. But then it depends on what you want, right?”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So you're getting at sort of my motivation behind a lot of my writing on American politics, which I am disturbed by wokeness. And I think that the fight against wokeness has been confused and not very effective, which is almost like that has to be self-evident because wokeness has gone so far in won so much. And so I'm thinking about the different ways you can go about sort of working against it. I'm not saying I'm not coming down on, I think that like to just have one sort of thing that's either libertarianism or it's populist or authoritarian thought. I think that the words like those are very sort of selectively used. But whether it's like a more interventionist or non-interventionist, I don't think that the ideal response would be a pure version of either of these, right? So what you could say for the libertarian perspective is that Robbie Swovic agrees.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Amazon, you're working on logistics, right? I mean, Facebook and Google and Twitter are sort of more in the, you know, because they're not actually producing anything. You could say that they have to tell themselves a story about why they're doing something good for the world. And some people believe in that story. They convince themselves of it or they believe in it or they don't. So like this kind of like, you know, like the Google thing like don't be evil, right? I mean, this is sort of idea that they were doing something social and revolutionary, I think was part of the ethos from the start. Walmart, you know, they want to get you lower prices and make your life better. But I don't think it ever had that idea that you were going to fundamentally revolutionize society by having more Walmart's right.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so big tech is such an interesting case because until 2015 and 2016, there was a lot of calls for censorship from the media. And Twitter basically didn't censor anybody until 2015 and Facebook too. So basically the big tech was a lot less woke than the media wanted them to be. I think that there was”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Politically, or at least the bag, while I think Trump did a terrible job of sort of motivating people who are activists or sort of people who would be bureaucrats or lawyers or the people who actually make policy on a day-to-day basis, he really turned those people off and made them, if anything, made them more liberal. And so, yeah, I would say that changing engagement over time is part of the story.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, to a certain extent, yes. So in 2016, there was a huge mobilization effect on the left. So I do have an substack called 2016, the turning point. I just used 2016 for convenience. But basically, if you look at like 2010 versus 2016 to 2020, and your probability, for example, of having attended a protest or signed a petition if you were conservative versus liberal, it was maybe you were two or three times more likely as a liberal in 2010 by 2016 to 2020. I mean, it was multiple. So that was something like 10 times more likely to have done these things. So I think that national politics and sort of the mood has a lot to do with it. I think Trump mobilized a lot of people on the left. He mobilized a lot of voters on the right, like low-profined city voters who wouldn't otherwise vote came out and vote for Trump. It was pretty good for Republicans, and they were concentrated in certain states. And that tended to be good for Republicans.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gives certain people power who want to do things more sort of legitimacy to do things that are irrational. Now, I think that at a broader level, I trust things like prediction markets, like economic markets, things that don't rely on credentials, but rely on track records of getting things right. And I would agree with Robin Hanson and others who would cheer for these things to potentially have more of an effect on policymaking or the way we think about issues.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have some unambiguous finding. The people, there will always be criminologists who politicians who want to do something else will rely on, and they will go and they will find those people. So having this category called criminologists, unless we're going to survey the field and just do, you know, who knows if that will work, but unless you're going to survey the field and then just do whatever the consists of the field, you're going to end up the media politicians that are going to be selecting the people that they want during the COVID stuff. They always say experts say this, experts say that. But you look at the something like the Great Barrington Declaration. And just hurting media, I thought these people were kooks and nobody's. And then I went and I looked at their credentials, they were like Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School, and somehow when the media cites expertise, it's never these people, right? It's always the most hysterical person possible pushing for some kind of restriction. So I think the idea, you know, expertise potentially can be valuable. But the idea of expertise can be harmful and basically, you know,”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do we need expertise? Do we even need expertise at international relations or criminology or psychology? You know, I tend to believe that the costs are more that they outweigh the benefits actually here. I think if you rely on common sense for controlling crime and some basic statistics, I think you're better than the field of criminology. I would definitely test out that I think there's an idea in the public that if you want to stop crime, come down very hard on crime. And I think that's maybe more controversial among criminologists. But I think the problems, actually I wouldn't say that. I haven't done any survey of criminologists. But this is part of the problem in that you have this field called criminology. And even if it arrives at something that's true or logical.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, I mean, white males can have the same pathologies as any other group. Yeah, I think the international academia, I think is a problem. We're Kissinger and these guys, if you look at the Vietnam War, it's actually very interesting because everyone sort of knew from the Johnson administration, the Nixon administration, that basically that it wasn't winnable, that they were saying to the public wasn't true. And I think that if you look at the historical record of what politicians were saying personally, they were”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More stringent. I think that weeds out a lot of people. I think it's more of a sort of a, I think, there's a sort of, you know, there's complaints from other disciplines that economics is a little bit mean and aggressive. When I was in, I got my PhD in political science. I was surprised to find that sometimes, you know, somebody's theory would just fall apart and then everyone, like other people, would not just say, okay, this is wrong, go study something else. They would be like, oh, it's okay. Just, you know, adjust it this way. And then there was always, I always felt like people were creating others with sort of kid gloves, right? I think there was a culture in other fields and this is political science and probably much worse in other fields of not sort of this sort of willingness to really hurt feelings and to just willingness to be wronged. I think economics has done that better than other fields. And I think there's a movement to make other people in economics who agree with this. There's been a movement to make economics like other fields and that would potentially”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These physical things, right? People don't have strong beliefs about the way they want the world to work, right? And when it comes to the social sciences, people have very, very strong ideas about the way the world should work. And when you combine that with a lack of accountability, with a lack of any real world test in the form of markets or some kind of real experimentation, people can just believe whatever they want or believe whatever some kind of vested interest like the State Department and the Pentagon bureaucracy basically whoever's in power wants to believe. And so this is why social science is hard. And this is why social desirability bias is, I think, the enemy in the search for truth. Now, one thing about economics is I think it's more of a male-dominated field. It's a more, you know, they have a mathematical sort of requirements that are”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“could take it out of you know you can go even if you're rejected by the peer review paper you could take it to a pharmaceutical company they have an incentive to find out whether you're right it can go out there in the real world it can work and then that changes sort of the ideas in economics in in social science is a few things it's more complex so in some ways it's harder to know what actually works and what doesn't we don't we don't do like randomized experiments on big things we do like like polling questions but not on like you know you know the state have this economic reform and the state have this other economic reform we don't do it anything like that and i think part of the reason we don't do that and this is another this is the second big reason why social science is you know so hard is because there's not as much social desirability as people don't have you know deep seated beliefs about the best way to get a vaccine i guess some people do they say that RNA vaccine is scary but in generally about in general about”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economics works relatively well. I think, yeah, we could talk about why that's an interesting question too. But I think, so like Nassim Nicolas Talub would say that actually the peer review process doesn't work that well. He has some data on where the big innovations in science comes from and he tends to think it comes more from the private sector. So I don't know if that's right or wrong, but something, you know, if you look at something like it's complicated, something like the mRNA vaccine, you know, they couldn't get the publications. It was based on to the top peer-reviewed journals. And then it took Pfizer and Moderna. It seems like there was, it seems complicated because there didn't rely on some university research in some ways in government funding. I think one of the big differences between the social sciences and the hard science, I mean, there's a few differences. The first one is there is some connection to reality, right? You can design the mRNA vaccine.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think I do say in my experts piece, I think I say this, that it's basically I'm focusing on the social sciences because that's what I know best.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, even if it's not Picker's argument. Let's see, let's just be argument. Yeah, so NATO, I mean, the argument for NATO making the world safer. Okay, first of all, during the justification, I think the justifications for NATO originally were there was potentially a Soviet land invasion of Europe. And the Soviet Union is gone, right? And so the question is, like, you know, is there a potential for, oh, we're talking about is Russia? I don't know, like what else would we be talking about, right? Like that North Africa is going to Europe or something. The only potentially thing I think we're talking about.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I haven't, I wrote Pinker when it came out, Better Angels of Our Nature about a decade ago. I don't remember him having that argument about NATO. I don't recall, but I'll take your word for it.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Towards that view, but yeah, I'll acknowledge that sort of the Berkeley view of things have been working out relatively well. Let's not mess with it. I mean, another thing that hasn't been working well, actually, the number of being killed in civil wars and civil conflicts has not gone down the way international war has. And if you look at who's behind a lot of the civil wars that have the huge death rates, I mean, that's the United States. So not everything is actually working out well. I think keeping order within countries, you mentioned Latin America. A lot of these things are classified as high crime rates. They could theoretically be classified as civil wars. And if you think American foreign policy is having a negative effect in Latin America, I mean, that's another contributor to the violence abroad. So yeah, I think that's the response to it. But again, I acknowledge there potentially could be something to that argument.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that there's good reason to think that it's not necessarily the influence of the US that's behind the decline of violence because you look at areas even in countries which don't have diets where they don't have any relationship with the US on either side. Just war is just down basically across the board everywhere. And you could say, well, that's all the American system, but I think it's hard to figure out exactly how the US having a presence in East Asia or Eastern Europe that makes African stop fighting each other. And so the fact that everyone basically is not doing war anymore just gives you sort of this, I think, backs up John Mueller, what John Mueller thinks or what Stephen Pinker thinks that's basically, you know, we're in the realm of ideas and people just think war is stupid. And from that perspective, the US is sort of an outlier in how much it uses war. And then the US is potentially a source of instability. I think I would lean.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that you have to take different parts of American foreign policy and I would be more sort of open to get rid of doing away with certain of them than others. So for example, regime change wars. That's sanctions. I think those are the low hanging fruit. I don't think you can make the case that I think you can make the case that these are, you know, these have terrible effects on the world. And I don't think you can make the case that they contribute to global order or anything like that. Overthrowing governments is a huge source of international disorder. And then as far as the US hegemony has been keeping peace, then you would move on to say the commitments to NATO and the presence in Japan and South Korea. And you would say, okay, we've kept the peace in a relative way there. I mean, it's, you know, I think you have to sort of look.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that one I think is different because poverty is something we can look at and we can say it's always existed and now it's getting better. And so for nuclear weapons, it's not like we had an era of a lot of nuclear wars and now we don't, right? We had nuclear weapons. They were invented and that's consistent with a story where just these weapons were too horrible for anybody to use. But I think if you're going to have like a steelman argument of, say, the case for American Empire, it would be something along the lines of, you know, I don't believe that American hegemony has kept what basically has given us relative peace since 1945. But I think it would be a kind of like a Berkeyan argument that the international system is very complex and it's working out well and just don't change anything too radical because potentially there's just so much we don't know about what the consequences of that would be.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, I do think that. I think that the reduction in poverty has come from China first, and then India. And if you ask economists or Chinese and Indian policies better or worse than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, you could say they're definitely moving in the direction of sort of the consensus of economics. So I actually do think economics is a little bit more of a serious science than other fields. And so, yeah, I would agree with that actually. I think economics looks good in the context of the decline of poverty over time.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Domestic politics, I think the influence of money on politics has been sort of mixed. The idea of campaign finance reform, for example, is you get money out of politics. But if you get money out of politics, who gets the press coverage? Well, you know,”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I sort of throw those ideas out there as sort of institutional fixes that people can think about. I am not come down and say this is something to fix it. I just think that people should be thinking in terms of institutional changes rather than arguing, just sort of operating in the realm of ideas. I think that, yeah, and so I think I probably would support some limits on lobbying for people who worked in the government for like in the Pentagon. Should we do that for all of politics? There's not really, I don't think I have a principled answer here. I think that I think that the form, you know, the foreign policy basically the establishment has had a negative influence on American politics and sort of on domestic.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's basically media coverage. That's signal's coming from elites. And so it's, you know, you look at going back to the Iraq war, I mean, nobody was thinking about attacking Iraq right after 9-11, but basically the Bush administration had high approval ratings in the aftermath of the attack. There was a full-on basically PR campaign to not explicitly time to 9-11, but basically tied them to Al-Qaeda, make people be afraid of WMDs. I mean, even though the Bush administration never said this, I mean, there was, I think it was a majority or plurality of the public actually believed Saddam was personally involved in 9-11, you know, which there was never any evidence for. But it was easy to sort of lead people in that direction just because who knows anything about Saddam Hussein or Iraq, right? People have to sort of trust their leaders on these things. And maybe that's getting harder as polarization is more extreme and people don't trust their leaders anymore.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you needed public opinion to be on your site to go into Iraq. There was overwhelming support for the Iraq war at the time. Now one of the unique things I think about foreign policy that makes, gives leaders sort of more freedom of movement compared to domestic politics, and if you're going to say, what's the difference in sort of my understanding of politics between domestic issues and international issues, this is probably one of the most important. It's the fact that basically public opinion is more easily manipulated by leaders in foreign relations, right? I don't think there's a way to sell getting rid of social security that's going to work with the American public. You could easily sell some country as a threat to the United States because most Americans don't have experience with foreign countries. They don't have independent knowledge. You know, these places like Ukraine or Russia or Estonia or anything is basically exists as an abstraction and why we think of one country as a friend and one country as an ally and one country as an enemy.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, you know, whatever. I mean, the same thing in foreign policy with something like NATO expansion. I think this is basically both international domestic relations and domestic politics. The interest groups have a huge role to play. Now, when it comes to certain issues that are particularly salient. So the domestic context, this is something like Social Security. Like people aren't going to notice if you cut their social security benefits or their Medicare or something like that. There's not a lot of taxes, same thing. There's not a lot of issues that are exactly like this. But here public opinion matters. And here you have to tread carefully if you're a politician. And it's the same thing in foreign policy when there's a cost when you're going to do something that's potentially very costly to the country and it becomes a major political issue, then public opinion matters a lot more.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my view on domestic policy, I mean, so the level of the voter, there's, I think, very little in terms of objective interest because the voter doesn't have a stake of their vote doesn't determine the outcome of the election. So one of the consistent findings of political science is basically that people's economic circumstances do a very, very poor job of predicting their political orientation. So whether you're a Republican or a Democrat or whatever, your economic situation is not very predictive, not even close compared to demographic factors and cultural attitudes and things like that. Now, when it comes to policy, I think there's a few different kinds of policy. Most things, there is the public opinion is just not paying attention to. Does public opinion have a really strong view on the nature of the tax code or the exact details of environmental regulation?”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In what other countries are doing just because they're closer to the problem and it actually just matters a lot more to them.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so it's something I don't go into the book is, and well, me and you have just talked about it now, sir, what countries have can act like more like unitary actors and when they don't. And in the case of, I think that one of the determinants of whether a country acts with a strategy in a certain domain is how important the issue is to them, right? So Iran is much more important to Israel and Saudi Arabia than it is to America, right, by many, many times. And so you can imagine Israel and Saudi Arabia do have something resembling a strategy when it comes to Iran. And the US has a sort of open political system and is liable to be influenced by those countries. And often it's not even question whether it's always those countries or it's a faction within those countries. But yeah, I do take the point that often there's something closer to a strategy.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“didn't do that. I think that there's also a sense that a lot of US meddling as far as like democratization and human rights, which people think these are generally good things and all else being equal, they might be good things, but we are not in a position to know, like if you're a country that has a serious violence problem, right? That's the first, you know.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't forced to do it where there was nothing, there was no rebellion from below or civil war or anything. They just basically decided that the regime had lost legitimacy, even if not from the people, at least from those at the top, especially for the Soviet satellites. And so that doesn't mean that movement's going to be, you know, the movement is going to be consistent in the direction of markets all the time everywhere. So you have to understand sometimes some places are going to go in the opposite direction. I think one thing the US, the US does have to do some very harmful things to Latin America that I think they probably shouldn't do. I mean, the drug war. I mean, these countries, so much of their politics revolves around stopping the flow of drugs because that's what the US demands of like, you know, who cares about drugs? Is that worth having a civil war over? No, of course not. And Mexico and these other countries in Latin America would probably be much better off if we didn't.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are worried about is nuclear weapons and learn to live with the government. Now there's another school of thought on North Korea that says basically they want the US out and they want to conquer the South. I don't have insight into the thinking of the North Korean regime, so it's really hard to say which is the correct position. And then Venezuela, like, is there something we can do to counteract the terrible economic policies that the Maduro regime and for the Shamas regime have implemented, it's very, very hard. I mean, I think the move towards more open markets globally has been the result of basically people seeing that markets work much better than central planning. The Soviet Union, the elites in the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe realized that what they were doing was not working, and they basically moved to a capital assistance. It wasn't because the Gorbachev, you know,”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, each of these cases is sort of unique. So, I mean, North Korea, I mean, interventions work. I mean, if you just overthrow government, you can get rid of them. But obviously that would be very costly in the case of North Korea for nuclear weapons and even conventional weapons. They have a lot of a pretty big army. Yeah, can we do something about North Korean nukes? I think one school of thought is basically that North Korea wants nukes because it's afraid of the US, right? It's basically defensive. The US, if not, if it's not going to invade it at this point, it's because of the nukes, if they would like to see the regime fall anyway. And that's probably true. And the question is, the question is, do you accommodate sort of that fear?”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that didn't require any American casualties. It required a lot of suffering in the countries that were targeted. But it does seem that the American efforts were put towards certain goals. So yes, you're right, within certain limits, presidents do have freedom to do a lot, and people don't care about Iran and they don't care about that as well. So there was a lot of, yeah, there was a lot of freedom there.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends on the costs of what the Grand Strategy are. The grant strategy involves sending a lot of troops abroad and taking a lot of casualties. That's going to be really hard. If it's more along the lines of we're going to crush one nation and how we define grant strategy, there's grand strategy at the macro level and there's sort of at the, we can think about it as like, you know, approach to one country. And sometimes we do see that I think the last administration had a de facto basically not a de facto more than a de facto, sort of an intended policy of regime change towards Iran. They weren't open about that. But the idea was basically you just sanction them as much as possible and you just hope there is less power as possible and potentially collapse. And there was a more official strategy over June change that even recognized a different government in Venezuela.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so countries even without a lot of resources can often put a lot of efforts overseas. So Maoist China, I think, was one of the, you know, at least for its per capita level was the biggest provider of foreign aid in the world. By far it was giving us money for subsidies in Eastern Europe for countries that were richer than itself. So Maoist China was extremely poor and had an extremely interventionist foreign policy that had invested a lot in Russia today overinvests in foreign policy relative to its economic size. So the US certainly can't afford to do more than China by PPP terms. I mean, China has caught up or passed the United States. So China has the potential to do a lot more. I just think it chooses not to.”
2022-02-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Richard Hanania - Foreign Policy, Fertility, and Wokeness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source