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Today I’m going to be joined by Yaron Brook, host of the very popular Yaron Brook show and a prominent advocate of free markets, individual liberty, and Objectivism.
Yaron, I want to talk to you this morning about a recent tweet by Matt Walsh, a very prominent American conservative. He’s the host of the Matt Walsh show and appears very frequently on the Daily Wire.
Here is what Matt Walsh posted on his Twitter: “It’s an empirical fact that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years. The quality of everything, food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, et cetera, has declined in observable ways. Even newer inventions, search engines, social media, smartphones, have gone downhill drastically. This isn’t just a random old man yells at clouds complaint. It’s true. It’s happening. The decline can be measured. Everyone sees it. Everyone feels it. Meanwhile, political pundits and podcast hosts, speaking of things that are getting worse, focus on anything and everything except these practical, real-life problems that actually affect our quality of life.”
So, Yaron, when you first read that tweet, what did you make of it? What was your first reaction?
Well, this was not new to me. I’ve been talking about Matt Walsh and the general populist attitude to human progress for the last 40 years. It’s a theme that the left used to advocate for. Now the populist right seems to have agreed on the idea that the 1970s were some kind of utopia where income was maximal, women didn’t have to work, you could buy a home, and everybody was happy.
I think Matt Walsh is just reflecting that deep-seated pessimism that exists today across the entire political spectrum. And of course, my response is that he’s wrong about almost all of the examples he gives.
Let’s first talk about this concept of American pessimism. What do you attribute it to?
One of my theories is that we’re experiencing a negative emotional contagion driven by competition within the media. We know that each additional negative word in a headline increases the click-through rate by about two and a half percent. And now you have traditional media competing with internet outfits, so if you want to get people’s attention, pessimism sells.
That’s definitely part of the problem, but I don’t think it’s the fundamental problem.
I believe that we are shaped by ideas, and therefore, we’re shaped by our intellectuals. And the intellectual class has completely betrayed Americans. They have rejected capitalism, which is the system that made us rich.
If you were a steelworker in Cleveland and you lost your job in the 1980s, what were you told? You weren’t told what we were told in America traditionally, which was “get in your car, drive to northwest Arkansas, and get another job.” You were told, “No, don’t worry, we’ll write you a check, and we’ll keep you on welfare while we, the intellectuals and the politicians, work on getting your job back.”
This has been the story that politicians have been telling workers for a long time. They’re lying; the steel job will never come back. And they’re destroying the worker’s self-esteem, that self-reliance that’s so core to the American ideal. So, 20 years go by, and the steel job doesn’t come back, and this person and the culture around him develop real resentments against the system. And intellectuals have told Americans that their job loss is a consequence of capitalism, that capitalism caused the great financial crisis, and that they’re looking for an alternative, something to replace free markets, private property, and the dynamism of the marketplace.
One area in which America really is declining is in education. We have K-12 education that teaches kids to trust their emotions rather than their reason. We saw this maybe 10, 15 years ago with microaggressions and political correctness, and then that evolved into the woke phenomenon, which was all about avoiding hurt feelings or causing offense. So, we’ve created generations of people who are very attuned to their emotions but can’t really think, and as a consequence, rely on their primitive human instincts.
People don’t understand the world because they haven’t been taught how to think about it conceptually, so they revert to perceptions. They’re afraid because perceptions don’t lead them to knowledge, and when people are afraid, they join tribes. There’s comfort in tribes. So, you get tribalism and perceptual-level mentality, and that combination is what drives this spiral of fear and pessimism.
Let me ask you questions specifically about the GOP.
Back in the day, during the Reagan Era, it was all about America being the shining city on the hill. That there was nothing that Americans could not do, and our best days lay ahead. Now all of that seems to be gone. What happened to the Republican Party and the conservative movement?
I think it’s a combination of two things, one ideological and one historical.
Ideologically, the GOP has changed its composition and who it’s trying to appeal to. And I think the change actually happened under Reagan, who made religion a crucial part of what it meant to be a Republican. And I think that religion undermines the ability to think about the future in a positive way. Many evangelicals, particularly when they see cultural phenomena like the gay movement, Roe versus Wade, and immigration, are afraid of the future. That fear was reinforced by three major events.
The first was 9/11, which was completely misinterpreted by the American right. Ultimately, the Bush administration lied to all of us and engaged in endless wars that didn’t achieve any of their goals. So, a lot of American idealism died in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then there was the great financial crisis, which collapsed the image of American capitalism as this amazing economic engine of prosperity. Instead of intellectuals coming out and saying, “Oh, no, you misunderstood. The crisis happened because of particular regulations and the Federal Reserve,” the intellectuals came out and said, “This was caused by capitalism. We need a new model.” And finally, we had COVID, which undermined the concept of America as the land of the free. We got locked up in our homes, and the political and expert class panicked and had no clue what to do except infringe on our individual rights.
Those three crises have led Americans to be skeptical of everything that’s uniquely American, and, in the GOP, revert to a kind of religiosity that they imagine the Founding Fathers had. Michael Knowles, for example, who is also on the Daily Wire, has said, “I want a culture of 1220.” So there’s a certain medievalism in some people on the right today. They long for the certainty of religious dogma and simple life, and none of this exposure to foreign cultures or people with different sexual orientations.
Evolutionary psychologists tell us that there are certain permanent aspects of human nature. And amongst the things evolutionary psychologists say are pretty firm in human nature are tribalism and zero-sum thinking. You already argued that the right is deeply tribalist, and the left is clearly very driven by zero-sum thinking.
So, are promoters of freedom and capitalism simply fighting a losing battle against human nature?
Absolutely not. And the evidence for this is in the work you do at Human Progress. Look how far we’ve come. Look at how rich we are. It’s stunning. We were hunter-gatherers once, and we established cities, agriculture, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Every single step in those achievements was a consequence of the rejection of tribalism and zero-sum thinking. Every single step came from the use of reason. So I think human history repudiates the idea that we have to be tribal and zero-sum.
Now, it’s true that when people don’t think, when they refuse to put in the effort to actually use their mind, the default is zero-sum. Tribalism and zero-sum thinking are defaults people revert to when they’re overwhelmed by emotion. And when you have an educational system and intellectuals who undercut reason and elevate emotion above all, you get zero-sum thinking and tribalism.
To me, it’s all about the intellectuals. The intellectuals shape culture. It’s not an accident that America is a consequence of an intellectual movement called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment sowed certain ideas, and those ideas flowered into the Industrial Revolution and the great wealth that we have since benefited from. Our intellectual class, though, has worked hard to undermine the Enlightenment for more than 200 years, basically since the Enlightenment ended. It is amazing how much we have progressed despite such lousy intellectual guidance.
So we need a new set of intellectuals who can guide Americans, and really all of humanity, towards an understanding of their own potential as thinkers, as reasoners, as builders and creators. And at whatever intellectual level you have, whatever IQ or whatever measure you use, you can produce, and you can be happy. If we can dominate the intellectual sphere, the world will change. But right now, what’s dragging us down are people like Matt Walsh and other intellectuals who are constantly feeding the public the exact opposite message: defeatism, anti-reason, anti-freedom, and anti-capitalism.
Well, the old intellectual lead has certainly disgraced itself and is on its way out because of Iraq, COVID, the great financial crisis and so forth. The problem is that the intellectuals who are waiting in the wings to replace them are worse. We are talking about people like, I’m sorry to say, Matt Walsh, Adrian Vermeule, and Curtis Yarvin.
Now we have to give the devil his due and talk about specifics. So, Yaron, is food in America now worse than it was in the 1970s?
It’s just funny to me to read something like that.
I mean, in the 1970s, the food was bland, and choices were minimal. Maybe there’d be one Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. Now, the best of the best different foods from all over the world are available in any major city in the United States. I’m a foodie, so the joy of eating new foods with new flavors and in new combinations is just amazing. And we have restaurants that are super cheap. In LA, you can go buy tacos that are some of the most delicious in the world at a food truck. And if you go into a supermarket, you can get fruits and vegetables that only grow in certain regions of the world all year round, and at very reasonable prices.
So, we have such a variety and such a selection in the United States today, of all the things to pick on, food is comical.
Another point raised by Matt Walsh is air travel.
In the olden days, you simply didn’t travel by air. Holidays would be spent near where you lived. There’s a fantastic bit in Mad Men where these rich guys from New York decide to go to California and fly across the country, and it’s a big deal. The whole Office is talking about it, and they are bringing a bag of California oranges back to New York because you couldn’t get them otherwise.
Now, it is uncomfortable in economy class, yet tens of millions of people take economy class flights every year. They are voting with their wallets. What’s the tradeoff here?
The tradeoff is to get to where you want to go. The ability to travel, the ability to see the world. And it’s unbelievably cheap. In the 1950s and 60s, nobody could afford to take a cross-country trip by air. Today, almost everybody can afford to do that. In addition, air travel was not as safe back then. In America, except for that one accident at Reagan, we’ve had no fatal accidents for like 20 years. So, it’s super cheap, and if you want to pay more money, you can sit in business class and be more comfortable.
And there are discount airlines that specialize in bare-bones service and very uncomfortable seats, yet they’re always full.
There is this meme about the ability of the American worker to support a family on one income. But even today, you can have a 1950s or 1960s lifestyle on one income. It will mean that you are never going to fly across the country. It will mean that you are going to be living in a much smaller home without basic appliances. It will mean that you will have access to 1950s or 1970s health care. So, the point is, people opt to have two-income families because life is just so much more amazing that way.
Matt Yglesias had a really good essay on this, in which he found a house that is the same size as it was in the 1950s—about 1500 square feet, versus today’s over 3000—and yeah, it’s easily affordable on one income. When I grew up, there were six of us, four kids and two parents, with one bathroom. If you want every kid in their own bedroom and bathrooms, two or more cars, and to travel to Europe and see the world, then yeah, you need two incomes.
But there’s something even more important than that: the 1950s really, really sucked if you were a woman. You were stuck at home. You didn’t have many employment opportunities. There was real discrimination against women. And because there were no washers and dryers and dishwashers and all of that, women spent a lot of time taking care of the house.
Now, the opportunity cost for them to stay home is huge. They have an opportunity to build a career, go to school, develop themselves, and pursue the life they want. The consequence of that is two-income families that raise the standard of living. It’s shocking to me that people think that there’s something wrong, A, with women pursuing their own dreams and B, with people actually being richer and living in bigger homes.
You’ve already noted housing, and maybe that is the subject that we can end on.
If you look at what Mark Perry from the American Enterprise Institute calls The Chart of the Century, it shows that housing relative to income is about 10 percent cheaper than it was 20 or 25 years ago. That means wages have been increasing faster than housing prices. So, even though housing is much more expensive than it used to be, wage growth has been higher and, consequently, housing is actually more affordable on average in America.
Another thing that people do not account for is the great improvement in housing. They also focus far too much on particular problems in metropolitan areas such as New York City, whereas in the rest of the country, things are going pretty well. What’s your take on all that?
First of all, there is massive geographic diversity. You can find relatively affordable homes in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and in much of the center of the country. Certain metropolitan areas have oppressive laws that have made it very difficult to build, and, as a consequence, rents have gone through the roof. I made a lot of money on homes in California, not because I’m a speculator—I believe housing should be a consumption good, not an investment—but because nobody was building in the neighborhoods that I lived in. Demand was high because of the weather and economic opportunities. So prices just took off. Why isn’t supply matching demand? We know that when demand increases, prices will go up, then supply will enter, and prices will come back down. That doesn’t happen in these areas for political reasons. Homeowners don’t want new houses built, so they vote for people who ensure no new supply is added.
But there are also lots of places in the country where it’s hard to sell a home because nobody wants to live there, or there are plenty of homes. You know, rents and home prices have been dropping significantly in Austin, Texas. During COVID, demand in Austin increased significantly, and supply couldn’t match it immediately because it takes time to build a home. So, prices went up a lot. Then supply came online, and since then, prices have been drifting downwards. And you see that in a number of cities across the country where politics don’t severely restrict housing supply.
The second thing you mentioned is that houses are very different today. They’re dramatically bigger. The average home in America today is over 3,000 square feet with amenities that you couldn’t have imagined in the 1970s. Three-car garages, air conditioning, dishwashers, and so on. The construction quality is also much better. For example, houses are far more resistant to fire. Many more people died from home fires in the 1970s than today because we’ve figured out how to make cheaper fire-resistant materials.
So Matt Walsh could be talking to America about the great successes in GOP-dominated states where housing was deregulated, and rents and house prices are actually coming down. He could be promoting those successes and saying, “Look, if this can be done in Right America, it can also be done in Left America.” But instead, he’s embraced negativity.
The modern American right doesn’t want to highlight those things because that would highlight the successes of freedom and capitalism. The new right are not freedom lovers. Freedom scares them. I think they see that if you advocate for economic freedom, why stop with economics? Shouldn’t individuals be free to make all kinds of choices in their lives? What god to worship or not to worship, who to love. If they can’t tolerate freedom in the realm of personal choices, long-term, they’re not going to tolerate freedom in economic choices. That’s what we’re seeing with the right today. They used to only want to regulate our social choices, and now they want to regulate everything, just like the left.
The great tragedy of America right now is that there’s really nobody in politics who represents freedom in both the personal and economic realms.
