1) One boring meta-point: I believe that nobody should have much certainty about their beliefs. When I say I “believe” something, a truer statement in most cases might be something along the lines of “I think there’s a slightly greater than 50% chance that this is at least partially true”.
2) The way that we treat animals is a moral catastrophe that everyone should play some role in addressing. I’m referring specifically to factory farming, which Matthew has written about at great length.
This is a belief that makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I feel an enormous amount of guilt for my lack of costly action (I am not a vegan). I advocate for donating to animal welfare charities, and using FarmKind’s calculator to determine how much you should donate each month. I personally donate enough to offset my animal product consumption twice over, and would recommend that you do the same if you can afford it.
3) In most liberal democracies and developed countries, many people would be better off if it were much easier to build houses. The evidence that building more houses results in lower house prices is very strong. This may include social housing, but the priority should be on housing provided by the market and private developers. There is reasonable evidence that social housing can crowd out private developments. We should abolish the green belt.
4) The most important thing to internalise from reading history is that institutions and material conditions and technologies change dramatically over time, but personalities and emotional reactions to things remain surprisingly constant. If you read Sei Shōnagon’s ‘hateful things’ (completed over 1,000 years ago), they could almost pass for tweets today about things that someone hates:
“A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.”
“One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one’s own version is inaccurate—disgusting behaviour!”
“One is in a hurry to leave, but one’s visitor keeps chattering away. If it is someone of no importance, one can get rid of him by saying, “You must tell me all about it next time”; but, should it be the sort of visitor whose presence commands one’s best behaviour, the situation is hateful indeed.”
And yet, she was a lady of the Japanese court whose actual way of living was totally different to anyone alive today.
5) I am increasingly convinced that social media and internet addiction generally is more harmful than I initially thought. I’m still not fully sold on this position, and I’m essentially wholly unconvinced by the arguments that it should be made harder for people to access online content (read: the Online Safety Act seems a total disaster). However, I think that in your personal life, you should make an effort to reduce your social media consumption. I own the Duoqin F21 Pro instead of a traditional smartphone, and I use SelfControl to block social media sites on my laptop for much of the day.
6) What should you do with your spare time that you gain from declining social media use? I think it’s healthy to write, to read, to watch documentaries, to meet with friends, and to get on with your work. Most of all I think we should be reading more very good books. Here is James Marriott on how and why you ought to read. Henry Oliver is also good on the question of what to read, and of course Harold Bloom on the Western Canon.
7) On most of my political views, I remain very much confused. I don’t know which British political party I’ll vote for in the next election. I probably would just do whatever the Centre for British Progress recommends that we do (half-joking, but they are very smart).
8) If I have to comment (which I suppose I don’t, but I will anyway, hey ho!), I would say that I think that markets are extremely powerful for generating wealth, but some meaningful amount of redistribution makes sense. Whether the UK should be moving in the direction of more or less redistribution overall is unclear, but I think we should probably:
End the triple lock.
Move away from council tax and towards something more like a proportional property tax (or LVT).
Adopt a carbon tax + dividend.
Cut corporation tax and abolish stamp duty, and I think we should get rid of almost all VAT exemptions.
Fairly run-of-the-mill stuff, but worth stating. In fact, I suspect none of these will happen any time soon, and that a better option would be to pitch some sort of compromise to the electorate.
9) I think that there are clear paths towards meaningful ‘social progress’, and that these have been mostly neglected by Progress Studies.
Specifically, I think that a sensible criminal justice policy would probably result in repeat offenders going to prison more frequently and for longer, for incapacitation reasons rather than deterrence or justice.
I also believe that we should treat prisoners much more humanely than we do at the moment. I think it’s fine for people to get access to television and books and video games in prison, and that the rates of assault in prison are shameful.
I think that free speech is extremely important and that the UK should move towards legalising any and all opinions, regardless of whether or not they are ‘grossly offensive’.
I think that beautiful buildings are important. I don’t know what the best policy package is to make it much easier to build and to make a larger proportion of our buildings beautiful. My hope is that if we de-regulate, the fact it is easier to build beautiful buildings will mean we get more of them, but I haven’t looked into the evidence.
10) I think you should donate money to effective charities, and that this is probably the best way to do good in the world.
11) I think that Artificial intelligence is going to have an extremely profound impact on the world, and that most people who talk about AI are not really trying to think seriously about what might happen. For example, people talking about the climate impact of datacentres mostly don’t know what they’re talking about. Andy Masley is good on these issues in his piece ‘Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment’.
On AI, there are some people who you should pay attention to: Epoch AI, the Forecasting Research Institute’s (note: my former employer) panels of experts and Superforecasters, smart sceptics like Arvind Narayanan (read: ‘AI as normal technology’), and take serious notice of any inferences you can make from markets (see: Chow, Halperin, and Mazlish on whether markets are expecting TAI).
12) London is the greatest city in the world for living (if the cost doesn’t actually make living prohibitive for you), Tokyo is the greatest city in the world for visiting and eating, and NYC is the greatest city in the world for if you want to live somewhere incredible while making decent money, I suspect. Quality of life in Europe is generally higher than quality of life in the United States, although this may change if GDP trajectories continue as they’ve been doing.
13) I think that the great man theory is probably underrated by most people, although I’m not privy to the current view of most historians. Put simply, I think that lots of facts about the modern world are contingent on actions taken by individuals, and that to downplay them in favour of structural forces misses something important.
14) Many people are overly scared of modern technologies and medicines and underrate how beneficial they can be. Consider how mad it would be if someone decided not to book an appointment with the dentist if they had curable chronic tooth pain, because of a general scepticism of modernity. My view is that it is basically equally mad to forgo newer medications for curable conditions. Take psychiatric medications or fat jabs or vaccines or creatine or melatonin whatever else might make your life simpler and better.
15) The most important things to internalise from economics are: incentives matter, opportunity cost is important, and that most reasonable choices come with difficult trade-offs, free lunches do exist but are few and far between.
16) Economic growth is extremely important, and our lives can be so much better still. That being said, it might be somewhat overrated among people who care about it a lot.
17) I am mostly sympathetic to utilitarianism as a means of deciding what is right and what is wrong, but I am also sceptical that moral facts exist or that morality is in any way objective.
18) In general, people are good at making decisions that affect their own lives. There are a large number of serious counterexamples to this (see: behavioural economics), but as a general rule, you can trust people to make better decisions than any feasible alternative. Following this, we should give people cash rather than in-kind benefits, we should move towards giving people more choice about what drugs or medications they would like to take, and we should assume that there are hidden benefits to liberty that are not readily apparent at first glance.
19) The great cuisines of the world are Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Mediterranean. English cuisine and German cuisine are both quite underrated, as is West African. Overrated cuisines include Turkish, Cantonese food specifically (other Chinese cuisines are often better), and generally middle-eastern food is maybe slightly overrated.
20) Anna Karenina is the greatest novel ever written. All great books are not alike.
I enjoyed this! On point 12 about cities, I have two questions:
1) have you visited Sydney? imo it’s similar to London in terms of being expensive but is also pretty great in a bunch of other ways: beautiful nature, great weather etcetera. I think where London beats Sydney is that there’s more ‘happening’ in terms of events, gigs and social scenes, so I guess it depends on your preferences.
2) Is there any data on quality of life in Europe vs USA? I share the same competing considerations as you where on the one hand Americans are significantly richer but I also have this intuition that Europeans have better lives in terms of life satisfaction, social relationships, health and so on.
I was nodding along sagely to so much of this, thinking how many points were sensible and well put. But of course by the end all I can think about is the one point where you are deeply and concerningly wrong, which is naturally on the subject of Turkish food.