Moral Mayhem

In this episode, we interview Garett Jones, an economist at George Mason University Our discussion, initially aimed at Garett's latest book The Culture Transplant ends up delving into themes across his works - IQ as an externality, mechanisms that drive institutional quality, cultural persistence in immigrant diasporas, theories of assimilation and more. We also take a ambitious short detour to speculate on Singapore's secret to success.

Here are links to Garett's books, all of which we couldn't put down:
The Culture Transplant
10% Less Democracy
The Hive Mind 

In this episode, Vaishnav presses Regan on her observations of India. We riff on food, arranged marriages, sexual conservatism , politeness vs niceness and more.

Guilty pleasure episode - we couldn't help but comment on the ongoing saga on twitter, catalyzed by Eliezer Yudkowsky's endorsement of buying a call option on love i.e communicating to your partner that the contract of marriage comes with an option to leave them for someone with mate value >=X.  

In this episode,  we try and bring you both an outside and inside view on EA.  We discuss both its features and its bugs but as general supporters of the movement, we take liberties to meditate on it's cultural ethos, ideological biases and inconsistencies.. 

In this episode, we ask two broad questions about immigration from the host country's perspective:

• What are the parameters that make immigration net positive for the host country?
• How should immigration policy change to maximize human welfare?

Resources and Links:
Net economic cost of immigration (Netherlands) : https://demo-demo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Borderless_Welfare_State-2.pdf
Review of Garrett Jones' Book: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-transplant-review-immigrations-legacy-11670794152
https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrants-and-USBorn
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/undocumented-immigrants-taxes-cec/index.html

In this episode, Regan and I get abstract about another topical talking point: Free Speech.  

We unpack our intuitions on the the cash value of free speech,  incitement to violence and offense as limiting principles, and the edge cases (no pun intended) of pornography and hate speech. We conclude by unwisely opining on anti-semitism and Harvard's new found first amendment absolutism.

In this episode, we dissect identity politics and its usefulness as political tool. Unfortunately, we don't stop there and ruminate on identity itself and ever ever so lightly brush against disability and fat activitism.

In our debut episode of 'Moral Mayhem,' we delve into the deeply contentious Israel-Palestine conflict, focusing on a critical yet overlooked perspective. We set aside the political details of the current conflict and focus on the underlying morality of advocating for Palestinian statehood, examining how the right to self determination trades off against individual liberty and welfare of future generations.