Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to Garett Jones and Gregory Clark, prominent economists whose research heavily explores the long-term, underlying drivers of prosperity, human capital, and social development. Jones, an American economist who earned his Ph.D. from UC San Diego, is a professor at George Mason University and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. He specializes in macroeconomics and monetary policy, and is well-known for books like Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant, which explore how national IQ, cultural norms, and institutional structures impact economic growth and productivity. Meanwhile, Scottish-born economic historian Clark earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University and spent much of his academic career as a professor at UC Davis. Clark’s work focuses on long-run economic growth, the Industrial Revolution, and intergenerational social mobility, topics he has extensively detailed in his highly debated books A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises.

The discussion mostly revolves around Clark’s new unpublished book, To Have and Have Not. First they talk about how the book uses centuries of British family records to argue that persistent social status is consistent with genetic inheritance reinforced by assortative mating. Clark highlights the similar predictive importance of maternal and paternal relatives, limited long-term effects of inherited wealth, and little evidence in his data that family size or birth order substantially affects occupational outcomes; Jones emphasizes how these findings challenge conventional explanations of inequality, while Razib explores their historical and cultural implications. They also examine Clark’s argument that publication bias exaggerates the benefits of additional compulsory schooling, the collapse of fertility among British elites, and the speculative possibility that European marriage patterns contributed to the Industrial Revolution. The conversation extends to selective immigration and its potential long-term consequences, before returning to academic freedom, ideological pressures on research, and the possibility that AI could help investigate neglected questions. Clark also announces that Polity Press has agreed to publish the book after earlier publishing difficulties.

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Razib, Josiah Neeley and their friend Tushar talk about the election results.

Razib Khan, Tushar, and Josiah Neeley discuss what they describe as a devastating Republican electoral defeat, including sweeping Democratic gains in Texas, attributing it primarily to high gas prices, the cost of living, and the Iran war, compounded by poor candidates, complacency, and gerrymandering that backfired. They criticize online right-wing influencers and inflammatory racial rhetoric for alienating voters and distracting Republicans from practical concerns, while worrying that Democratic control could undermine Texas’s pro-growth policies. Looking ahead, they anticipate congressional investigations, stalled appointments, and limited bipartisan cooperation, alongside a more open Republican presidential contest involving JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, and others as Trump’s influence weakens. They conclude that the right needs a positive agenda centered on economic growth, building housing and infrastructure, and making healthcare and education more affordable, particularly for younger Americans.

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Today Razib talks to Timothy P. Carney, an American journalist and author who serves as senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His work explores politics, corporate influence, religion, community, and family life, with particular attention to crony capitalism and the weakening of America’s civic institutions. His books include The Big Ripoff, Obamanomics, Alienated America, and Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. He has contributed to publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. Carney and his wife, Katie, have six children and live in the Washington, D.C., area.

First, they begin by talking but Carney’s time covering the Tea Party and the conservative revolution of the late Bush and early Obama years. He argues that voters often object more to perceived undeserved gains and cronyism than to government size or deficits alone. He says Trump widens debate on trade, immigration, and interventionism, but criticizes the party’s turn toward personal loyalty, arguing that a post-Trump conservatism should retain populist concerns while pursuing sound policy. Carney connects economic and cultural dislocation to the weakening of local institutions and relationships, suggesting that isolation drives people to seek answers through politics. He attributes declining birth rates mainly to cultural factors, including individualism and parenting pressures, rather than economics alone, identifying religious communities as an exception with stronger family formation. Looking ahead, Carney says Republicans risk losing both Trump’s voters when he is absent from the ballot and voters alienated by the party’s direction, while Democrats face pressure from their left wing. These challenges raise questions about whether a future conservative leader can build a durable coalition without simply imitating Trump and whether either party can offer a compelling vision centered on family and community.

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Today Razib talks to Kyle Harper, a historian, professor of classics and letters at the University of Oklahoma, and a member of the Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute whose work integrates the natural sciences into the study of the human past. A native of Norman, Oklahoma, he earned his bachelor's degree in letters from the University of Oklahoma before completing his MA and PhD at Harvard University. Harper's research spans late antiquity, the Roman Empire, environmental history, and the historical impact of infectious diseases and climate change on human societies. His authored books include Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (2011), From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013), The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (2017) and Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (2021). Today Razib and Harper talk about his latest book, The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction (2026).

In their discussion of The Last Animal, Razib and Harper explored the profound history of human-animal relationships and our ongoing influence on global biodiversity. Harper detailed how human activities—from early megafauna hunting and livestock domestication to modern industrial land use—have historically driven mass extinction events and fundamentally reshaped terrestrial and marine ecosystems. While dismissing de-extinction as an unscalable novelty, he emphasized that the future of conservation depends on practical re-wilding efforts and deliberate policy choices that protect natural habitats while balancing complex human needs.

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After finishing the last monologue on human origins about the stage-critical status of Out-of-Africa, I felt I should say more. That more needed to be said. In particular, what about the 80% of humanity that is non-African, and is part of the Diaspora that expanded 50,000 years ago?

This is my attempt to tell…

Related: Monologue: Out-of-Africa, from the IUP to the 38,000-year-old western explosion

Razib talks about David Reich’s new preprint, Hypothesis: A modern human range expansion ∼300,000 years ago had a critical role in Neandertal origins, along with another one from April, Genome-wide genealogies …

Today Razib talks to Jonathan P. Beauchamp, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, where his research focuses on applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, and the emerging field of "genoeconomics". He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and earned his undergraduate and master's degrees from Queen's University. In addition to his faculty position, he serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and an Associate Investigator at The Centre for Applied Genomics. Before fully transitioning into academia, Beauchamp gained professional experience as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and as an associate at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He is also a core researcher with the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC), contributing to large-scale genome-wide association studies on the genetic basis of economic behaviors, risk tolerance, and educational attainment.

Razib and Beauchamp explore genoeconomics, the use of genetics to investigate education, income, behavior, and inequality. Beauchamp traces the field’s evolution from unreliable claims about individual genes to large-scale studies showing that educational attainment, risk tolerance, and patience reflect thousands of tiny genetic effects. They discuss the promise and limits of polygenic prediction, how sibling comparisons help separate genetic effects from family background, and why larger, more diverse datasets and whole-genome sequencing could advance the field. The conversation turns to Beauchamp’s research on how increasingly accurate genetic predictions could destabilize insurance markets when consumers know risks that insurers cannot use in pricing. They also examine his work linking the Western Church’s marriage restrictions to weaker kinship networks and distinctive European social institutions, before discussing the professional pressures surrounding controversial research and new sibling-based estimates of heritability.

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Philippe Lemoine is a researcher and writer specializing in the philosophy of science, statistical analysis, and epidemiology. He is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Cornell University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI). Lemoine is best known for his detailed, data-driven critiques of COVID-19 epidemiological modeling, lockdown policies, and Western foreign policy, which he primarily publishes on his blog, Nec Pluribus Impar (he now has a Substack). In addition to his independent research, he has contributed analytical essays on science and society to publications like Quillette.

Razib and Lemoine discuss France’s unrest, demographic change, and political paralysis, with Lemoine arguing that the school riots reflect a volatile mix of teenage behavior, social-media contagion, immigrant integration problems, and far-left agitation rather than a centrally organized conspiracy. They examine how viral footage exaggerates outsiders’ perceptions of France’s ethnic transformation, overlooking regional differences and widespread intermarriage. Turning to presidential politics, Lemoine argues that Marine Le Pen’s prospects depend heavily on whether she faces Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the more competitive centrist Édouard Philippe. Beneath these immediate conflicts lies a deeper fiscal problem: weak growth, mounting debt, and generous pension commitments to an aging electorate make reform increasingly necessary but politically punishing. Lemoine anticipates that inflation and financial repression may prove more politically feasible than explicit spending cuts, while Razib emphasizes that the same tensions between retirees and workers increasingly confront the United States and other developed countries.

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Today, Ramez Naam returns 5 years after his original appearance on the podcast. In 2003, he wrote More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. Naam is also the author of three science fiction books: Crux, Apex, and Nexus. In addition, has also written The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. He also has an eponymous Substack, Ramez Naam.

First, Razib and Naam discuss how technological change is turning once-futuristic possibilities into everyday realities, beginning with the falling costs of solar power, batteries, and electric vehicles. Naam argues that economics increasingly drives adoption, with Texas illustrating how competitive markets and easy permitting can accelerate clean energy even in a fossil-fuel stronghold. Razib probes the implications for transportation, oil demand, and the Gulf states, while Naam emphasizes that the transition will take decades and that heavy industry remains difficult to decarbonize.

The conversation then shifts to AI, where Razib presses Naam on existential risk, industry concentration, and recursive self-improvement. Naam expects increasingly powerful systems but doubts an imminent intelligence explosion, pointing to diminishing returns, hardware constraints, and the difficulty of obtaining reliable real-world data. He sees concentrated corporate or government power as a greater threat than runaway superintelligence and favors broad access and competition.

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Today Razib talks to Jerry Z. Muller, a historian and professor emeritus of history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., specializing in modern European intellectual history, capitalism, conservatism, and German and Jewish history. His work explores how ideas shape economic, political, and cultural life, bridging history, philosophy, and public policy. His books include Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, Capitalism and the Jews, The Tyranny of Metrics, and Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes. Writing for both scholarly and general audiences, Muller examines subjects ranging from the moral arguments surrounding capitalism to the consequences of relying excessively on numerical measures to evaluate institutions and individuals. He has an eponymous Substack.

The conversation revolves to a great extent on a recent post by Muller, Rethinking Faculty Control Scholarly Norms, the Vanderbilt Report, and the Limits of Academic Self-Government. Razib and Muller discuss the challenges facing universities, the resilience of American capitalism, and the effects of AI on intellectual life. Muller argues that scholarship depends on “organized skepticism,” including peer review, replication, and engagement with different viewpoints, but that activism and ideological conformity weaken these practices in parts of academia and undermine public trust. They also tackle whether stronger university leadership can help address these problems while managing declining literacy and numeracy, shifting demographics, uncertain international enrollment, rising costs, and pressure to demonstrate results. Muller suggests that vocational training may increasingly separate from liberal arts education and research, raising questions about how universities can adapt while maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. He remains broadly optimistic about American capitalism, pointing to technological innovation, competition among states, immigration, and social supports. Both view AI as a powerful tool for skilled thinkers but a potential source of intellectual passivity for others, raising the question of how people can preserve their agency and sense of purpose as AI becomes part of everyday intellectual work.

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