Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men

24:15The plot to live forever, they'll have your brain hooked up to different devices, the form of artificial meat. You could take it as a satire on Silicon Valley today. And it's ridiculous, clearly it's ridiculous in Swift's eyes, even though some of it has happened or well happened. The version of, you know, we call now Chad G .P .T. of the books that write themselves. but that scientific society, it's the only one where there's not slavery. So when he goes to the little apputions, they enslave him. When he's the little figure, you know, a abrupt egg, they enslave him, they make him entertain them, it's on and on, and he gets tired of it, he begins to hate it.

24:50And then the women enslave the Ahus, and at the end they tell, you know, Gulliver, who's a stand -in for Swift, perhaps, well, where are they going to kill you or enslave you? You have to get out of here because in a planet of the apes like fashion, you could lead a revolt of the Yahos against us. And that too is based on slavery and caste. And it's only the scientific society where people are curious and wacky and nutty, where there's no slavery at all. And it appears the most ridiculous, the least well -ordered, the one most -based on dreams and fantasy. Swift isn't, in my reading, not quite endorsing that, but just saying like, look, give this a break.

25:28It's not as crazy as it seems. At least these people are running off with some other set of projects and not just brutalizing each other. So that's like my seventh reading of the book, but that didn't occur to me on any of the earlier reading, so I'm not sure how hard to push that. Yeah, it's hard because, I mean, if a gulliver's is standing in for Swift, which I'm not sure about, you know, he spends very little time there. He kind of gets out pretty quickly. He finds it kind of ridiculous. He describes the endeavors as, you know, kind of straightforwardly, but in a way that It's very clear that he does not find it a useful pursuit of time.

26:00It's almost just like these people have no grounding reason. And they're just sort of doing randomness. I mean, the way he describes the books that write themselves is literally just a bunch of random words, plates being moved around and stamping in different directions. It's not even supporting thoughts behind it. So I don't know. You're correct. That is the only one without explicit slavery in it. but at the same time he spends so little time there, relative to the other. You know, the first edition of Golevere's Travels, there's a frontous piece and a picture of Golevere. It's typically interpreted as Golevere looking a lot like Swift.

26:38That means, per se, he's a stand -in, but you're at least supposed to wonder that he is. I view Golevere as just a super curious person. Every time he gets home, basically within two weeks, he seems to have a nice wife, as a family, He's got to go off again and he's learned it's dangerous, but he can't resist and that sense he's like Chevik You read this you identify with him his troubles, but I think if you step back and ask is he really a nice person? Not so obvious. No, I mean he bend into his wife and children at the end he finds him disgusting Right. Yeah, because they're not you know horselike enough for him.

27:12Yeah, I don't know I think with Oliver I had a hard time deciding whether or not he was smart or not? Because he would obviously be extremely self -possessed when he would come across a new, either the giant species or the very tiny people. When he comes across, you can say all their names really well, but I feel like I can't. I'm not, I've never had a single problem. The lipputions is that that small people. So when he comes across to small people, he wakes up and he's been bound by all of them. And he's able to free one of his arm and then has this thought, after they shoot some arrows at him and it hurts.

27:44So they're around six inches tall each, but I guess it's like a good hypothetical, how many six -inch people would have taken to some two -person. But he has his wits about him enough to be like, I should just not present myself as a threat. And then again, when he comes across the other groups, he's very quick not to present himself as a threat. Interestingly, the only people that he doesn't do that with are the Yahoo's at the end, where those are the humans of the planet, but he've used them as beasts. And by this point, I suppose we're supposed to expect that Gulliver has a very low position of humanity and Swift has a very low estimation of people.

28:14But you know, it's in time, you know, he just, he does the weirdest things like he pees on the Queen's tower to To put out the fire because he's so much larger than the tower But then it becomes completely unusable because like why would she want to live in this home? That's been just urinated upon and it becomes a problem for him at the end And he keeps again going back out there and making decisions that end up with him Deserted it and I'm gonna share what the rates of you know being lost at CR at this point But it just seems like you know it's kind of wild with him So I don't know. Did you think he's supposed to be smart?

28:46I think he's maybe a reflection of the human condition, that he is smart in so far as he's deciding to do nothing or to exercise options or to wait. Like I'm in this new society, I don't know what's going on. I'm not going to try to take all the small lilyputians and crush them. That would be a mistake. It turns out in fact there was probably some way they could have poisoned him or done him in. So all the times he just plays weight and see, it eventually works at okay. Whenever he has impetus, he basically goes off into another misadventure and almost eyes tortured and slaved whatever. So I think it's kind of Pascal's version of Pascal's commentary on mankind that the fundamental problem of the human condition is we just can't sit still in a quiet room.

29:31And that's what Galover can't do either. Yeah, I mean, so by the end, I mean he is so enamored of the horse society, which he uses so full of reason and so full of goodness and just not even have words for lying because why would you communicate to lie? The whole point is to explain and get across ideas to one another and he's so disgusted by his own species that he faints when he's told he has to go back. I think he's considered or he attempts suicide when he's being taken home, even though the The person who's helping him is displaying all of the virtues that he's just said he loves about the horses.

30:08They're giving him their clothes off their back, they're giving him money, they're transporting him all the way back to England. And he gets back to his wife and she embraces him and he faints again because he's so disgusted by her. Again, obviously the satire, it's extreme. But even by the end, he's meant to still retain this extreme disgust towards humanity because of this experience with the horses. but the horse society is not good. Like they're enslaving a bunch of people. Yahoo, so you are probably descendant from Europeans, right? Yeah. But I take Swift to be quite critical of the winning him.

30:38And there he's being satirical. And he's so over the top in his praise that you just start thinking like, come on. And it's a bit like how the problems in the communal society and the dispossessed are revealed more and more. Well, the horses, it turns out they have this caste system. How lighter, how dark a colored horse are you? And today, certainly in Swift's time, Obviously, you realize what he's talking about. They don't make any progress, unlike the scientific societies, which at least try to make progress. All they're good at is poetry. They're entirely conformist. And I think he's just saying this is how things would have to be for these supposed utopian visions to be realized.

31:16Maybe it's a commentary on Thomas Moore and other such writers. To get to a utopia, things would have to be like this, truly communal. And that would be horrible because a communal society is wonderful at oppressing each other. And I think the best you can do for now Swift and even Golliver is actually the family unit. I mean, is Golliver happiest in the family unit? I mean, he's not, but that's maybe the best you can do. He's so restless at the end of the novel where never told does he feel he need to go off again. He did it a bunch of times with always bad results. And you don't get any feeling that he's been cured of his under last, right?

31:53I don't know. I mean, I think obviously the devil ends and we don't know if Golevard has any more travels or anything like that But at the same time, I don't know if Swift is making a commentary on, you know, the only way for these I mean, he's actually largely not that imaginative about these structures of society From place to place like there's always some sort of like oppressive king usually except for the you know the final society There's usually there's like just very weird bizarre punishments that they're being needed out there I mean obviously there he's kind of just satirizing just how ridiculous many of our own customs may look like That's the you can't escape your prisons point that I think is in the Gwinn very well and in Swift very well Because I mean again, it's I did not find the time with the Scientists or the universities to be as I honestly set that aside quite quickly because it was such a small part of a book to me And so when I look at the rest of them He's you know you have this king that's threatening to just drop an island upon his subjects if they are you know disobey, you have other bizarre articles of impeachment that are laid against him because someone in the court doesn't like him or something like that.

32:55So most of it seems like kind of just a rebuke of royalism and like courts, which of course Swift had his own. You know, the faction is inevitable is a striking perspective from a 2023 vantage point. The whole notion of cancel culture and that since Wift, you know, there's the people who open their eggs on the side of the big end or the little end and they're willing to go to war with each other, that to me is very 2023 or at least 2021. Or is that just a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture since it's just the same thing we've always been doing? I think it's a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture.

33:29It's always been with us. A faction is inevitable, which I take to be one of Swift's main points. All the more clear when you read his directly descriptive writings, like his actual policy pamphlets, he's obsessed with faction. It's a common theme in early 18th century writings. Oh, Britain, Ireland, it's all full of faction, and this is our fundamental problem. And the other eternal variety in Swift, I think, is war. And you see that in the different travels. So in his own time, it's basically a war every few years. The Dutch, the Spanish, the French, something. None of it to us now makes any sense.

34:02And I think one of the things Swift is showing us with these very odd societies, their wars to us make no sense. And he's saying the wars of his own time from any future vantage point won't make any more sense either. And that I thought he did very effectively. Yeah, I mean, he's a pacifist in real life. Clearly that's where he's going with this. You know, I was really interested. I couldn't tell whether he viewed women as better companions than men in this book. Or because I mean, in his own life, he has, it's unknown, I think, whether or not she was his, they were actually romantically involved.

34:33But he has like a female companion that he's had at least has a friendship with for a long time. And in the book, I mean, the person who treats him kindly in basically each place is like a woman, you know? There's this little girl that takes care of him when he's tiny compared to the giant people and she makes sure that he's safely being carried around. She actually cries when she knows he's gonna be taken away. I mean, this happens again and again. But sometimes he like describes women as grotesque and like very bizarre things happen with him in the giant land. And so I don't know, what did you kind of think?

35:06I've read quite a few of his letters to Stella, who's the woman you're talking about. They seem really quite affectionate, not at all misogynistic. I do definitely think they had sex. They use the word coffee. Maybe they were just drinking a lot of coffee. If they use it in such artificial ways, I think that's their stand -in word for doing it. And he views the man as the war makers and the troublemakers. I mean. But he didn't love Queen Anne either, right? He writes that satirical pamphlet that in Straussian fashion is a criticism. So it may be it's about incentives there too. Men are in the positions to make trouble.

35:37Yeah. And I don't know, like he's obviously, I mean, this is the, what's interesting about this book is that it's written. I mean, he's writing it as a, like, a letter to a reader. He addresses the reader multiple times in it. How do you think that he views the reader? A bit of weird resignation. Fear that the reader is is trapped up in the silly factions of the time as the reader probably was. But actually with some sense of hope, and I read Swift as a great humanitarian. He was extremely skeptical about moral progress and he thinks to evaluate all these other institutions. You need to understand the skepticism about moral progress.

36:11So keep in mind, he's from Ireland and the richest, like quote unquote, most advanced society of his time, is Britain. And Britain is treating Ireland very badly. He frequently refers to that as slavery. He calls it slavery. And he always wants to be giving the Irish a better deal. So I don't think he's entirely pessimistic, but he doesn't see the progress in front of him. A very surface level with the reader. It's interesting because he will say things like, obviously this will bore you, but then he'll just tell it to you in extreme detail. Like, I mean, things about like what he's eating or, you know, what he, I mean, very bizarre anecdotes always about his bowel movements.

36:47Yes, he's obsessed with that in many of his works. Oh, really? What is the, what is behind that? psychologists have speculated it was an actual psychological syndrome of so far, but of course we don't know. I don't know. I couldn't tell if it was again I've not read travel novels of this time and it's clear that you know there's some sort of like form to the genre that he's you know kind of making fun of at some points in the book where you know he's just like you know readers of these kinds of novels he'll like say that and then he'll like juxtapose that with a dear reader like as if you're supposed to be different but then he'll provide you with the exact same things as if he doesn't actually have that high of an opinion of you as a reader.

37:26All to talk about excrement and piss and all that, it's definitely a swift thing. See it all over. Just how he was. Yeah, but I mean, even beyond that, where he had, there's one passage where he goes into detail about the types of food that he was eating and then he goes like, well, no one's interested in that. But you've written this as like, you know, this is the letters, like you didn't have to include that. So that kind of indicates to me this level of kind of derision for the reader that he feels like this reader is going to be interested in these mundane details that aren't actually important to the broader story or moral or message of the book.

37:57And so, yeah. Swift himself was abandoned by his mother in his early childhood for a while. She went off to England, probably to work. And we don't really know what happened to him during those years. But Chevek also, he's upset throughout his life that he felt and indeed was partially abandoned by his parents for a lot of his early years. So the sense of alienation in both cases, the succession with the question, who are that we, you know, for Cheviks, is it the both worlds? Is it just my world? Do I really belong in the other world? For Swift, how much should I identify with these strange beings, creatures, societies that are enslaving me with whom should I identify?

38:33He's alienated from his family, for sure. He keeps on leaving them. But where exactly does he find his people? It's pretty clear that he never does. And I think maybe part of it is just in both of these novels that these men would not be happy anywhere, like in any context that maybe that's a part of what's going on here is that there's not a society that would make Shev a copy when he's amongst the Communitarians he's frustrated by by the strictures they put upon him but also he's frustrated with his friend Critiques them and he's angry at him and they get into a big fight over it and then go over everywhere He goes he has some sort of critique of the one place he does in as a place where he's treated Terribly and it's like unsustainable for him to stay there and you can't actually imagine him providing anything of use to that world, he's literally just like an oddity that gets pushed out everyone so well, like these kind of dinner parties.

39:19And part of it, I don't know, to me it's like kind of an indictment of this sort of like traveling in order to find yourself or find something important or true because in many ways, Gulliver does not end up like more enlightened by the end of the book. Chevek ends up right back where he was, his entire kind of goals to when he was moving there seemed like naive and hindsight. I think that there's like maybe slightly that's a little bit too much in the dispossessed world because, you know, we know later on that his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology that connects, you know, space, different planets.

39:52But at some time, like, you know, what was the point, you know? But still, Chevyek and Golever, they're the two people who know things that no one else knows, even reading about it, you can't really understand what it was like. And it's raising the question, you know, the ancient Greeks are not knowledge is everything. Like how true is that really? What does it get you? What does it get anyone else? What does it get your spouse? Both come home empty handed as I think I mentioned before neither seems happy at the end But they had to do it perhaps. I think I question whether they needed to travel to get the knowledge because you know Chevik is really pushed out of his framework of Viewing his own society as utopian by a friend who has this sort of realization never travels is within that You know community the entire time he just witnesses his own own inability to get you know his own research done He witnesses a childhood friend of theirs gets sent to a Satan's silent because you know He's kind of ridiculed after he does kind of a subversive musical performance or theater performance and to me You know like that knowledge was there and I don't know.

40:53I mean you're obviously a big proponent of travel But you know I don't think it makes people happier at the same time. You don't think it makes it pop You know not on average, okay, some people it clearly makes happier There's a desire to do it and you're unhappy if you don't satisfy that desire, but on average, people are happier at home. I strongly believe this. Well, is it because you think they travel badly? No, it's in the nature of travel. We're creatures of comfort, whether we like to admit it or not, and that's also partly a theme in Galover's travels. And when you're traveling, you're discovering all these new exciting things, but say if I went to Avertria, I would in fact be quite uncomfortable.

41:29There'd be a much higher level of background stress. Maybe two -thirds of the value is both the anticipation and the memories afterwards, and it's still worth doing. I want to go to Avertria. But no, I won't be happier when I'm there. Or even when you're back. I will be glad that I went. But that's partly investing in the memory and the experience. I wonder then, I mean to me, I've always had this opinion that most people... Well, I think a lot of people don't travel well for what they want to do. I agree. and they ended up getting sucked into doing things that would not actually make them happy.

41:58And there are things that, like, in many destinations that would have possibly made them happy. But that's endogenous. Let's go on. But the other thing is more like, I don't know, there is, I feel like a large cultural message that you're not gonna understand yourself if you don't, like, go travel in some way. And like, because of the ubiquity of that message, especially in, I don't know, in the US and in other, like, Western societies, especially when my friends, like, went to, I have friends who have gone to study in Europe. Like, it's very pushous an idea there. You know, part of me wonders that like you actually are happier because you can at least say that you You've fulfilled that cultural norm.

42:28You don't get embarrassed by saying I don't have a passport or I've never been outside the country Which you know maybe it's harder to understand yourself if you travel a lot in a good way Perhaps right, but you might rather have more questions than answers Understanding yourself is a kind of answer and if you just think I want the kind of life where I have all these open questions that bug me I would say go travel a lot. Why do you tell everyone to travel? I want them to have the kinds of lives with a lot of open questions that bug them. But if they're unhappier, don't you think that might make them bias them against the sorts of openness that you?

42:58There's plenty of inertia keeping them from traveling, so I don't feel like I'm misleading them. The behavioral bias is not to travel. So if I nudge them, I feel it's a better world, even though it's maybe not a happier world. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that if you were to buy the idea that, I don't know, happier is It's just a kind of a hard metric because, you know, I'm a happier if I'm more satisfied or more well -rounded, like I'm not really sure. It kind of depends on how that actually takes root. But, you know, at the same time, it's just like many of the things that I've gotten from really like productive travel experiences have also been analogous to sorts of experiences when I read very good books or like I hear a very smart argument or something like that.

43:37And those are much like lower cost things to attain. And there are like millions of those versus, you know, I don't know, obviously costly. I think in part we travel to read better. If you've been to a lot of places, there are many more things you can read and they make sense to you. If you've hardly been anywhere, so much stuff like I went to Kiev in 2019, coincidence. But now when I read about what's happening there, it really does make more sense to me. I don't pretend I figured it out at all, but I would have very little idea without that trip. Well, what particularly did you learn, just like visually understanding what city looks like?

44:10Well, partly that, but when I read, say, well, the Ukrainians have been quite fierce in defending their country. I have an emotionally vivid image that matches up with what I felt when I was there, like how people talked about what they did in 2014 and so on. Just a lot of it makes sense. The geography makes sense. It's religious importance to some of the Russians makes sense. Many things. Well, I feel like this is a particular way about how you travel. I think many people may travel and end up staying within very similar social groups or even only with Americans. or the people that are traveling with and have very little interaction with, you know, like people learning about their lives in any kind of meaningful way.

44:48I did hang out with an economist there, so maybe I'm not that different. Now, you mentioned this idea of men who just can't be happy no matter what. And that brings us, we can circle back to the other books as well, but our final book, Richard V. Reeves of Boys and Men. But you should do an overview of what this book is about. I'm very bad at overviews. As a reader, I'm so selective and focused. To me, the main point of this book, and to be clear, listeners, this is not an overview, but it's simply that for men, a lot of elasticity is zero. So there's that anecdote about the free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

45:23A lot more women go, no more men go, just zero. So at least for some public policies, the gender split on who responds to it is going to be immense. And I vaguely knew that before, but this book made that clear and vivid to me. That's a big contribution. There's good evidence for that. There's a lot of other different things in the book. But that's my key takeaway. What's yours? So the book kind of starts off with this kind of presentation of an idea where people have worried in recent decades about the plight of women. and now we need to also add to that the plight of men modern economies. It kind of relates a bunch of statistics around you know college completion rates or how well male students do in academia but also even earlier in like kindergarten or throughout their education and then it kind of provides a few prescriptions.

46:11The most you know, there are a couple ones that are pretty well known by this point whether it's you know paid leave for fathers or it's you know hiring more male teachers but But the one that's kind of different is red -shirting the boys, which is basically having a presumption of starting boys one year later than girls in kindergarten. And I find I feel the book, I don't know, it's hard because I sang this to you before we started this, but most of the book is trying to convince you that the idea is a very heterodox idea that we should care about men as well. He addresses most of the time, I mean Richard Reeves, he's a brooking, so a lot of his audience is obviously going to be at least central -aft liberal.

46:46And so he mostly spends most of his time addressing them and kind of excoriating progressives for having this large blind spot of men. And I don't know, it just feels like this is actually not engaging with a lot of work that's been done to talk about how men suffer under patriarchy. I mean, one of the very old feminist critique of patriarchy is that men are going to be harmed just as much, not as just as much, but are going to be harmed, even though patriarchy is going to privilege men in many ways. It talks about the fact that men are alienated as fathers. They don't get to have that caring persona that they're a castigated for showing emotions, that these things are gonna have real harsh effects on them.

47:21Of course feminism is primarily concerned with the pletive women, but I think that the equivalence there is what's not that he's saying that those are, that they're the same level of harm, but that the harm is of similar type feels incorrect, right? Because the things that were happening with the women's movement are things where there are legal barriers or physical barriers barring them from accessing academia or accessing the job market, or voting or from even being free and walking around in society. And the things that he's identifying that are barring men are not... They're in a law saying that he can't go to college.

47:52There's no like admissions. Actually, there's like a affirmative action for men. Like, it's trying to push men into college because otherwise, all colleges in the US and much of the West would be female dominated. And more so than they are already. And so, part of me is saying, okay, if we've identified that these two things are actually quite different in kind, then the question is like, like these responses have to actually engage with the cultural pushes, not just the institutional pushes. And he has this one line very early on, which I find pretty bizarre where he says, conservative say, men should be more like, like the old school fathers, and progress is to say, you should be more like your sisters, and both of these are wrong.

48:30But we tell women all the time, and like some of these are good lessons, you should try to salary and negotiate, men do it all the time. And that's a very productive lesson that a lot of women learn and have like transmitted amongst themselves. And we tell them, be more assertive, don't in conversation, and don't let people interrupt you. And these are all very important cultural lessons. These aren't like, these are norms that have been expressed and have allowed women to do well, and lurk because I mean, even lean in by Cheryl Sandberg is an entire book of this. But with, like in this book, there's no question about, like, you know, should men be given lessons as well?

49:00Like, hey, like the reason why you're doing better in school at a young age, if you're a girl, is usually because you're more willing to sit still. you're able to sit around and do the work and reading is the big place where there's a divergence. He talks about English scores a lot. And there's nothing stopping men from reading. It's like one of those things where I feel like there's a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be cultural shifts around what you should be telling young boys to do. I don't know Richard Reeves at all. I'm not saying these are his views. But when I read a book like this, I can tell you where my mind runs.

49:34And maybe there is even some chance he can't say everything he might think. The core message as I read it, again, not saying it's his intent, but just men in women or more different than we had thought. And I was already someone who thought men and women were pretty different. So if I pick up that message, he's really saying men and women are pretty different. More at the margin than I had thought, the policy recommendations, whatever one thinks of them, they're sufficiently predictable and anodine, that there's an alternative of reading, where even if you think they're fine ideas, you dismiss them a bit.

50:04And you wonder if he's not just saying, does not actually a way to solve that problem, to circle back to the other books, especially Ursula Laguin, on the capitalist society of Orros, men are clearly in charge and dominant, and they're only men or scientists, and it's a society based perpetually on war somewhere on the globe. And the notion that men do well in societies and relative terms when there's a lot of war, and it's better to get rid of war, but when you get rid of war, just a lot of men won't do that well because they're not well suited to that kind of society. That's the alternative reading.

50:44That to me is more on the table than arguing about the small, do we start the many or later, which I'm not opposed to. I don't Now, maybe we're just better off shifting into a society where a lot more men do worse. And suck it up and take the net gain of less war. I actually think this is incorrect for a couple of reasons. One is that he makes a comment that I think is meant to like flounder the radar very early in the book, which he's only talking about cis heterosexual men. And like obviously, like most studies are only going to focus on that because you have high enough numbers. But what's interesting is that there is some research showing that these gaps disappear with gay men and that on educational fronts they're doing as well as women.

51:23And that to me is just like, obviously there's questions about, you know, heritability and the genetics of it, but at the same time it's like, there's like, this idea that like men just cannot succeed in the society is also not true given that, you know, even within the world that we live in from country to country, men are able to be less violent in certain contexts and are more balanced in other contexts or, you know, institutions matter clearly. Some classes of men, like there's a distribution, some need some form of war, others become Mark Zuckerberg obviously do incredibly well. There's a kind of sublimation or reach -anneling where certain male instincts get put in other directions and that these people just have incredible lives.

52:00But in terms of the whole distribution, you know, wherever gay men may fall in that, maybe it's the case, 20 -25 % of men. In a society where there aren't that many manufacturing jobs, very few active wars that you might go fight in. Gang warfare is not a I'm not saying that's good for men. It's clearly more destructive than just sitting at home and watching porn or smoking weed. But nonetheless, there's some cultural vigor from the subset of men that is just sapped and we're not getting back. Just wondering how much do we need to write that off? I just am a strong believer that, I mean, obviously there's always going to be outliers.

52:36And but like as Reeves mentioned multiple times in his book, like even though on average, men may experience X or Y or C traits, whenever there's like remarkable overlap of the gender. There's tons of women who are, quote unquote, more aggressive than other men. So, or above the mean for, or median for male aggressiveness or things like that. And I think my question is like, yes, maybe there are like tail, you know, tail risks going on, but at the same time, you know, in some it does matter a lot. Like the fact that there are a lot of men who are wealthy and white who are able to, you know, escape this like, quote unquote masculinity trap, just indicates that like there's institutional things that you could do to affect large portions of the population.

53:17And I don't know, largely I found his prescriptions like for what to do at the end, like pretty in a dime, but I found red -shirting the boys to be like, not very well, like, thought through in many respects. I don't think he devotes any time to what it would look like to have a class full of 14 -year -old boys and 13 -year -old girls or kind of like dynamics that would create or how that would affect women's educational outcomes. So again, maybe you're right, and because he doesn't spend much time on that, that he's actually more making kind of a larger cultural message. But I don't know, I think that we're entering a time and maybe like the through point of all these books as you mentioned is just like this question of what is based in stinking what can be actually mediated by political or economic institutions.

53:55You know, we're entering a time now where people are like spending a lot of time talking about the heritability of traits and what that means. And, you know, I feel like to become that fatalistic about people would require a lot more action on like very low hanging fruit that we know we haven't done on policy matters. But in Goloverse travels, of course, we neutralize the destructive tendencies of men by having them do science, even if it's silly and having them build these dream worlds where you can supposedly, maybe you're actually visiting them, but it's at least the fantasy that you're visiting these data ancestors and talking with them, which is also in a weird way a little bit like some of the chat GPT models and their offshoots.

54:32I think this is a very low opinion of men that is being described by, if you think that's all these authors are sort of getting at, and that it's kind of intractable. Do you agree with Swift about the difficulty of moral progress? That it's difficult. I agree that it's difficult. I don't think that. I think he's much more pessimistic about it than I am. Given how quick the gains have been in my own lifetime around moral progress. So you're just even pinker, more or less? I don't know. I mean, pinker, I think that there have been obviously a lot of economic gains that have been made over the last century.

55:06And it's very possible to, I think that ideas are very powerful and that in general, that person over time, it really matters if those ideas are true or can be persuasive. And as a classical liberal, and I think that it's true that there's a quality across people. And so I think that those ideas end up winning out time and again because they're just unsustainable when you set up societies that don't work that way. They'll be beaten by other societies that are more egalitarian. that can take advantage of other people. And so I think moral progress goes along with kind of the economic progress, and those are the inextricably linked, and so you end up beating out other.

55:41So maybe moral progress is just feminization of you that Mill flirted with, right? Once we give women, if not quite an equal share of influence, a much greater share, they're less inclined to want to fight. That's a good thing, maybe more risk of us on average, given the destructiveness of war, that's a good thing. But perhaps it's the same process to some extent. And now with birth control, it appears permanent, this higher influence of women, right? There's no simple change that's going to reverse it anytime soon. I don't, I mean, I think it's hard because like moral progress and feminism were, you know, in extrobo linked at a time where there was like even more kind of like tons more gender -based violence or things happening in the United States.

56:25And so of course, moral progress had to point in the direction towards more liberation of women in that direction. The idea that it's just, you know, that would be totalizing seems incorrect. I mean, it really depends on the structure that are then set up once women are freer, but you can't get around sort of like biological sexism in some ways. Like the fact that women, you know, have these, I mean, the cost of the wage gap are largely explained by the cost of having children and what happens after you have kids. You know, people are having fewer and fewer children, but I also think that there's like counter -cultural reactions to that.

56:57and then people, I could see having more and more children response. And so I think it really does depend on what happens with technology around increased freedom from that work. Like I mean, we'd worse, the idea that we'd have artificial womb seems so far outside of my current technological horizon. But you know, at some level, like, you know, being pulled out of the workforce and being in many ways potentially have like your healthcare disabled long term seemed like things that such permanent facts about being a woman right now if you end up having kids that it seems hard to get to a level of moral progress where you have kind of like a quality of the gender's there.

57:35Does that summing up across all three books if you think, what did we actually learn by reading these, thinking about them, talking about them? How would you put that? Or maybe we don't know yet. I think it's interesting to me because I think you suggested Gulliver's Travels and I that's just a look -win. And then you suggested Reeves. Reeves, yeah. And I had not thought about these three as having very many connections before, I sat down and started reading them again. And I think one of the things that's very interesting all the time is we're having the same conversations in so many different contexts over decades, over centuries.

58:09And in ways that can, if you're like in a good mood, you can feel very unifying, right? You're just like, wow, I'm just like every other person that's out there. I'm like Jonathan Swift, we're all wrestling with the same questions. I'm like, win, all these people, Reeves. But I think that it can be very, Maybe it's their knock against moral progress that the same questions are being debated over centuries. It doesn't matter the format, it doesn't matter the style, it doesn't matter the background of the interlocutor. It's just like we're just forced into this one kind of circular human condition.

58:36So I think that's kind of my large. I was surprised by the amount of overlap in themes, honestly. Along those lines, one of my key lessons would be everything is much more connected with other things than you think at first. Even now, I keep on revising that upwards as I read more things. The same is true of travel. Going to a lot of different places, you appreciate each one more, you learn something about it by virtue of the fact that you've been to other places. Even if it doesn't make you happy, you get this neat form of knowledge. Travel is a form of knowledge as a key theme and lagoon and swift comes through to me all the more on these readings.

59:12And I feel the lack of that a bit in Reeves. I get that he's writing for which press for Brookings, he works at Brookings. I don't expect him to go off to some distant country and start doing field work, but that's what feels to me is missing. The kind of thing that Alice Evans is doing and her writings on gender, which is going everywhere, trying to learn things in a pretty speculative way that is not exactly a randomized control trial, but I think she's maybe more likely to get somewhere than these smaller investigations. Travel as a mode of knowing has gone up in my eyes, And it's something I think we should talk about, think about, read about, travel about all the more often.

59:49I mean, I think it's interesting because on one end, like I agree there are sort of like non -tantrable is that you learn from the sort of, you know, the speculative fiction on one hand, also like the travel that we're talking about here. But at the same time, like, if you're trying to affect things in concrete terms, or I think, I mean, my opinion Reeves is, I mean, he wrote, I think, article for The Atlantic, where the excerpt was just about the one policy prescription of keeping boys back one year. And to me, it's like, you know, I think it depends on what your theory of change is. Like as your theory of change that like sort of, whatever you can do to illuminate these like broader ideas or truths that you think you've discovered about the world and however you can make those things entertaining and accessible to as many people as possible is how you actually affect long -term change.

1:00:32Or is it sort of this like, here is a very succinct argument about how you can actually change, you know, a very clear policy problem that I currently have a problem with. And obviously, we want both of those things existing in a society at the same time, but I think it's a very unsettled question about which one of those things gets you further. I agree. It is striking to me if I go to Singapore or New Zealand, and I talk with policy people, usually the first question they ask is, what do other countries do? If you're in America, well, that question might come up, but in policy circles, it's not usually the first question, and certainly at the electoral level, it might be a negative.

1:01:08So I'd like to see that be a bigger question. I wonder sometimes if it's just about. America's so big, we have two neighbors. That's like bizarre. Most countries have like so many neighbors and are much smaller and so the proximity to them is so much larger that you're used to kind of that spread. And our state's kind of function like this, right? Like you see, it's one of the most interesting things that I realize as I do a lot of reporting at the state level and at the local level. And like the amount to which one state taking an action increases the likelihood of its neighbors like engaging with that question is just remarkable to me.

1:01:39Like even if a major like if California does something, that's much less impactful to New York than if New Jersey does something, or if Massachusetts does something. And so similarly, I think that's like the part of the problem with the US engaging with other countries. I mean, at the same time, I've done some infrastructure reporting on the researcher Alan Levy at the Merin Institute, like very much complaints often about how trans -authorities don't pay attention to how other countries are building infrastructure much more cheaply than we are especially, you know, rapid rail. And it's like a it's a problem across sector.

1:02:09So like the US doesn't look at anyone like if you look at like the UK They don't look at Spain and Italy even though they have like lower transportation infrastructure costs because why would you look at Southern Europe? It's absurd you get to Southern Europe and other areas. They don't look at East Asia They don't because as a model even though those places are often much better at building these infrastructures So it doesn't seem like a uniquely American problem. It just seems like we have fewer neighbors to look at Druselum Demsys, thank you very much. Thank you, glad to be here. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler.

1:02:41You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.