re: "Humans have genuine prosocial instincts and an intuitive sense of fairness, ultimately rooted in the reputational benefits of appearing kind and fair-minded to others." While I agree that self-deception and self-interest underpin the actions of a good many people who falsely claim to be virtuous for its own sake, I think you have overdone the cynicism here. A large amount of virtue: goodness, beauty, and truth seeking and making - in this world is done by humble people who aren't much interested in reputational benefits at all -- except possibly their reputation in God's eyes. It's the people who are claiming to be virtuous you have to worry about, especially in situations where "appearing to be virtuous" is cheap. I wonder if this is one of the problems with social media, in that it makes it too easy to appear to be virtuous, while actually becoming virtuous remains difficult.
This presents as honest, reflective, and avoids polemic; the essay's serious weaknesses lie in:
* conflating the cultural/academic left with the entire political left;
* drawing political conclusions from evolutionary explanations that don’t logically follow;
* relying heavily on Economics 101 intuitions while overlooking other branches of economics;
* underplaying the role of power and institutions; and
* assuming that realism means the author's blend of modest market liberalism.
Perhaps befitting a former Corbynite, the critique focuses on romantic or utopian leftism (any utopian idea is an easy target) and so misses the mark on social democracy, labour politics, or any left-wing tradition with serious institutional and economic grounding.
The Darwinian cynicism is guilty of serious overreach because evolutionary psychology doesn’t dictate political conclusions, but instead explains constraints (e.g. humans are capable of selfishness, kin preference exists, and co-operation is conditional). Crucially, it does not have a veto on political ideas.
The economics section smuggles in ideological assumptions masquerading as empiricism. The story of global poverty is not "capitalism led to growth which created prosperity"; it is "industrialisation, together with trade, public investment, stable institutions, education, and technology led to the development of various mixed economies which then grew".
There's a naive belief that capitalism is a single coherent system with consistent virtues, which ignores the messy reality. Ideas that are not at all controversial (e.g. incentives matter, trade-offs exist, there's no free lunch) are presented as revelatory. But what about the structure of markets, power relations, market failures, global inequality, long-term investment, regulation, or industrial strategy?
While human nature may limit collective action, the problem is vastly overstated. Advanced societies have solved spectacularly challenging issues, including vaccines, welfare systems, taxation, the NHS, global banking standards, and climate treaties, among others. This problem doesn't lean right in the way the essay suggests, but tells us we need enforcement, monitoring, social norms, and institutions. In other words, a strong state.
It's an overlong essay, as is the style, and this allows the author to subtly redefine terms partway through. We begin with the idea that left/right are fuzzy bundles, but then track the American discourse by treating 'the left' as utopian, anti-incentives, anti-economics, anti-realism, anti-growth, and anti-evolutionary psychology. This is not relatable for those steeped in mainstream European leftism; the punches fail to land on German social democrats, French socialists, Swedish social democrats, the economically literate wing of British Labour, post-war Attlee-style institutionalists, and so on.
Politics is presented as a matter of psychology and incentives, not power relations. However, power is central to, for example, class, capital-labour relations, global inequality, media concentration, elite rent extraction, and regulatory capture. There is an acknowledgement that 'institutions and traditions often serve the interests of extractive elites', but this is a mere gesture towards an idea that is never integrated.
As a result, the essay makes the fatal assumption that capitalist elites are less problematic than activist utopians. While a critique of left-wing naivete may be fair, comparable scepticism should be shown towards billionaires, multinational corporations, landlords, financial institutions, political donors, and the revolving door between regulators and those they regulate. In other words, the Darwinian cynicism should be applied to the powerful, as much if not more than to the powerless.
The embrace of markets comes with all the enthusiasm of the recently converted. Some problems, like how many packets or crisps Walkers should manufacture, are best left to markets, but markets usually fail more complex systems, such as public health or housing.
Finally, while this personal journey is credible, it is not inevitable. See: Bowles, Gintis, Haidt, Sapolsky, Piketty, Stiglitz, Sen, Ostrom.
Dan, you’ll appreciate the parallel. Deng Xiaoping had a moment very close to the one you describe. He realised that staying on the old left no longer matched how the world actually worked. His shift echoed your line: “for all these reasons and more, one of the most dramatic changes in my intellectual outlook has been becoming less left-wing.”
Deng’s core insight was disarmingly simple. You cannot redistribute scarcity. You can only redistribute what a productive society creates. That meant unleashing incentives, tolerating inequality and allowing people to build, innovate and take risks. In effect, he embraced the Hayekian truth that prosperity emerges when individuals can act on local knowledge and self-interest.
Where he broke with Western capitalism is the structural part that often goes unnoticed. Deng refused to hand national development over to private land monopolies. Land remained commonwealth. Use-rights could circulate, but ownership stayed public. Without that reform, China would look far closer to India: extraordinary talent and energy held back by a system where rent and speculation outrun production.
Put together, the story is clear. China’s rise came from combining Hayek’s decentralised incentives with a land system that prevents rentier capture and renews itself generation by generation. Or, to borrow Deng’s own language, each generation gets to feel a stone rather than inherit a torrent.
Hi Dan, this is a great post. As I mentioned before, I feel very close to what you explain since I followed a similar path: I had a very systematic exposure to Marxian and left-wing economics and thought, and at some point I decided to learn "evil", mainstream economics. Now I even teach a course on game theory in the math department at Geneva. In spite of my "conversion", I still have a deep admiration for Marx and many contributions in the Marxian tradition. One aside comment: you describe Darwinian evolution as humankind's most important discovery. I would say that quantum mechanics is equally important.
Great post! It really resonated with me, as my own intellectual development followed a very similar trajectory.
One point re. "tragic" view of human nature. While you are spot on about interpersonal cooperation being a product of intergroup competition, etc, however, I feel you underestimate to what extent such cooperation has become hard-wired, and also the breadth of the distribution when it comes to innate "altruistic" preferences.
Just from the top of my mind, "trolleyology" & adjacent research proved the existence of hard-wired circuitry that greatly limits our capacity for interpersonal violence (highly recommend Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes" for a popular overview); Elinor Ostrom's research on water-sharing practices ("Governing the Commons") demonstrates that voluntary organizations are perfectly capable of exploiting a common resource without falling into "Tragedy of the Commons" trap, needing no incentives from authorities.
Finally, evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin uses rigorous mathematical analysis of large modern&historical data sets to explain why cooperation and inequality in human societies have such a convoluted history. Without supporting a single, more or less "tragic" view of human nature, he proposes some very plausible evolutionary mechanisms that explain how an uncentralized human society can escape the trap of Prisoner's Dilemma and stamp out free-riders and "upstarts" (see his recent "The Great Holocene Transformation" & its popular version, "Ultrasociety", as well as "War and Peace and War").
As you said yourself, human societies are highly complex, and human cooperation can be shockingly difficult to understand. However, there is solid empirical evidence supporting a less "tragic" view of human nature. Turchin explicitly demonstrates that Machiavelli was largely wrong about people. So take heart! :)
Good piece. I tend to disagree where you talk of ‘most rigorous, well-developed areas of modern social science’, in relation, apparently, to behavioural economics. For one, the field is plagued by a poor reproducibility record, which generated consternation in the same Kahneman. Additionally, when misused, which happens frequently, these tools are used to produce spurious quantifications that feed into the ‘highbrow disinformation’ that you discuss in your previous post, such as when the cost of climate change is computed in dollars one century into the future. The production of ‘funny numbers’, to use the title of an article by Theodor Porter, is a thriving industry, and the critique of the same is perhaps not a prerogative of the left, whatever the term means.
Thank you. Reading this feels very much like coming home after a miserable couple of years finding myself increasingly bemused, infuriated and otherwise at odds with everyone else in my left-wing-bubble family/life. I admire your clarity and bravery. Particularly appreciated the insight I have most struggled to communicate: that becoming less left wing is not the same as becoming more right wing. People are so seeped in the current bunfight that they seem to find it hard to even process the idea that a critique need not be partisan.
“He who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” This reminds me of the cautionary ‘word to the wise’ I would hear in rural Ireland: ‘look, it’s not the done thing.’
If I may digress a bit, I believe that our economy is an “emergent system.” By this I mean that it is a system that has evolved from causes and forces far too complex for humans fully to comprehend. As they evolve, emergent systems develop properties and spontaneous order that are not predictable based on the characteristics of their component parts. Often, as they evolve, they become even less comprehensible to human minds. . . . .
Because our understanding of emergent systems is profoundly limited, our efforts to change them must be marked by equally profound humility. We can make changes at the margin to improve the system by our own standards, but we can really have no idea what the unintended consequences of our actions might be. We can make an educated guess, but we simply cannot know for sure. We can try to reduce inequality, which is a laudable goal. But for the system as a whole, this effort could set in motion a chain of interactions that might make us all worse off. Above all, we must eschew heroic projects geared to change the system root and branch. We must avoid the very thing that Trump is now doing. Not only do such radical actions rarely produce the benefits we intend, but they could also bring on the collapse of the entire system.
To me, this is the essence of what it means to be a conservative; reverence for the system we have inherited and humility about our ability to change it to suit our will. But the predicate is first to understand as best we can the forces that got us here.
Trump and his enablers are the furthest thing possible from conservative. Authoritarian, certainly. Fascist, perhaps. But their overweening hubris betrays no respect for anything other than those things that will augment their own power. Their actions already have severely damaged our Republic - hopefully not irreparably. Given sufficient time and resources, they are likely to destroy it. It is highly ironic that the 2025 Project’s subtitle is “The Conservative Promise.” It was anything but.
re: "Humans have genuine prosocial instincts and an intuitive sense of fairness, ultimately rooted in the reputational benefits of appearing kind and fair-minded to others." While I agree that self-deception and self-interest underpin the actions of a good many people who falsely claim to be virtuous for its own sake, I think you have overdone the cynicism here. A large amount of virtue: goodness, beauty, and truth seeking and making - in this world is done by humble people who aren't much interested in reputational benefits at all -- except possibly their reputation in God's eyes. It's the people who are claiming to be virtuous you have to worry about, especially in situations where "appearing to be virtuous" is cheap. I wonder if this is one of the problems with social media, in that it makes it too easy to appear to be virtuous, while actually becoming virtuous remains difficult.
This presents as honest, reflective, and avoids polemic; the essay's serious weaknesses lie in:
* conflating the cultural/academic left with the entire political left;
* drawing political conclusions from evolutionary explanations that don’t logically follow;
* relying heavily on Economics 101 intuitions while overlooking other branches of economics;
* underplaying the role of power and institutions; and
* assuming that realism means the author's blend of modest market liberalism.
Perhaps befitting a former Corbynite, the critique focuses on romantic or utopian leftism (any utopian idea is an easy target) and so misses the mark on social democracy, labour politics, or any left-wing tradition with serious institutional and economic grounding.
The Darwinian cynicism is guilty of serious overreach because evolutionary psychology doesn’t dictate political conclusions, but instead explains constraints (e.g. humans are capable of selfishness, kin preference exists, and co-operation is conditional). Crucially, it does not have a veto on political ideas.
The economics section smuggles in ideological assumptions masquerading as empiricism. The story of global poverty is not "capitalism led to growth which created prosperity"; it is "industrialisation, together with trade, public investment, stable institutions, education, and technology led to the development of various mixed economies which then grew".
There's a naive belief that capitalism is a single coherent system with consistent virtues, which ignores the messy reality. Ideas that are not at all controversial (e.g. incentives matter, trade-offs exist, there's no free lunch) are presented as revelatory. But what about the structure of markets, power relations, market failures, global inequality, long-term investment, regulation, or industrial strategy?
While human nature may limit collective action, the problem is vastly overstated. Advanced societies have solved spectacularly challenging issues, including vaccines, welfare systems, taxation, the NHS, global banking standards, and climate treaties, among others. This problem doesn't lean right in the way the essay suggests, but tells us we need enforcement, monitoring, social norms, and institutions. In other words, a strong state.
It's an overlong essay, as is the style, and this allows the author to subtly redefine terms partway through. We begin with the idea that left/right are fuzzy bundles, but then track the American discourse by treating 'the left' as utopian, anti-incentives, anti-economics, anti-realism, anti-growth, and anti-evolutionary psychology. This is not relatable for those steeped in mainstream European leftism; the punches fail to land on German social democrats, French socialists, Swedish social democrats, the economically literate wing of British Labour, post-war Attlee-style institutionalists, and so on.
Politics is presented as a matter of psychology and incentives, not power relations. However, power is central to, for example, class, capital-labour relations, global inequality, media concentration, elite rent extraction, and regulatory capture. There is an acknowledgement that 'institutions and traditions often serve the interests of extractive elites', but this is a mere gesture towards an idea that is never integrated.
As a result, the essay makes the fatal assumption that capitalist elites are less problematic than activist utopians. While a critique of left-wing naivete may be fair, comparable scepticism should be shown towards billionaires, multinational corporations, landlords, financial institutions, political donors, and the revolving door between regulators and those they regulate. In other words, the Darwinian cynicism should be applied to the powerful, as much if not more than to the powerless.
The embrace of markets comes with all the enthusiasm of the recently converted. Some problems, like how many packets or crisps Walkers should manufacture, are best left to markets, but markets usually fail more complex systems, such as public health or housing.
Finally, while this personal journey is credible, it is not inevitable. See: Bowles, Gintis, Haidt, Sapolsky, Piketty, Stiglitz, Sen, Ostrom.
Dan, you’ll appreciate the parallel. Deng Xiaoping had a moment very close to the one you describe. He realised that staying on the old left no longer matched how the world actually worked. His shift echoed your line: “for all these reasons and more, one of the most dramatic changes in my intellectual outlook has been becoming less left-wing.”
Deng’s core insight was disarmingly simple. You cannot redistribute scarcity. You can only redistribute what a productive society creates. That meant unleashing incentives, tolerating inequality and allowing people to build, innovate and take risks. In effect, he embraced the Hayekian truth that prosperity emerges when individuals can act on local knowledge and self-interest.
Where he broke with Western capitalism is the structural part that often goes unnoticed. Deng refused to hand national development over to private land monopolies. Land remained commonwealth. Use-rights could circulate, but ownership stayed public. Without that reform, China would look far closer to India: extraordinary talent and energy held back by a system where rent and speculation outrun production.
Put together, the story is clear. China’s rise came from combining Hayek’s decentralised incentives with a land system that prevents rentier capture and renews itself generation by generation. Or, to borrow Deng’s own language, each generation gets to feel a stone rather than inherit a torrent.
Hi Dan, this is a great post. As I mentioned before, I feel very close to what you explain since I followed a similar path: I had a very systematic exposure to Marxian and left-wing economics and thought, and at some point I decided to learn "evil", mainstream economics. Now I even teach a course on game theory in the math department at Geneva. In spite of my "conversion", I still have a deep admiration for Marx and many contributions in the Marxian tradition. One aside comment: you describe Darwinian evolution as humankind's most important discovery. I would say that quantum mechanics is equally important.
Great post! It really resonated with me, as my own intellectual development followed a very similar trajectory.
One point re. "tragic" view of human nature. While you are spot on about interpersonal cooperation being a product of intergroup competition, etc, however, I feel you underestimate to what extent such cooperation has become hard-wired, and also the breadth of the distribution when it comes to innate "altruistic" preferences.
Just from the top of my mind, "trolleyology" & adjacent research proved the existence of hard-wired circuitry that greatly limits our capacity for interpersonal violence (highly recommend Joshua Greene's "Moral Tribes" for a popular overview); Elinor Ostrom's research on water-sharing practices ("Governing the Commons") demonstrates that voluntary organizations are perfectly capable of exploiting a common resource without falling into "Tragedy of the Commons" trap, needing no incentives from authorities.
Finally, evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin uses rigorous mathematical analysis of large modern&historical data sets to explain why cooperation and inequality in human societies have such a convoluted history. Without supporting a single, more or less "tragic" view of human nature, he proposes some very plausible evolutionary mechanisms that explain how an uncentralized human society can escape the trap of Prisoner's Dilemma and stamp out free-riders and "upstarts" (see his recent "The Great Holocene Transformation" & its popular version, "Ultrasociety", as well as "War and Peace and War").
As you said yourself, human societies are highly complex, and human cooperation can be shockingly difficult to understand. However, there is solid empirical evidence supporting a less "tragic" view of human nature. Turchin explicitly demonstrates that Machiavelli was largely wrong about people. So take heart! :)
Good piece. I tend to disagree where you talk of ‘most rigorous, well-developed areas of modern social science’, in relation, apparently, to behavioural economics. For one, the field is plagued by a poor reproducibility record, which generated consternation in the same Kahneman. Additionally, when misused, which happens frequently, these tools are used to produce spurious quantifications that feed into the ‘highbrow disinformation’ that you discuss in your previous post, such as when the cost of climate change is computed in dollars one century into the future. The production of ‘funny numbers’, to use the title of an article by Theodor Porter, is a thriving industry, and the critique of the same is perhaps not a prerogative of the left, whatever the term means.
Thank you. Reading this feels very much like coming home after a miserable couple of years finding myself increasingly bemused, infuriated and otherwise at odds with everyone else in my left-wing-bubble family/life. I admire your clarity and bravery. Particularly appreciated the insight I have most struggled to communicate: that becoming less left wing is not the same as becoming more right wing. People are so seeped in the current bunfight that they seem to find it hard to even process the idea that a critique need not be partisan.
Glad you re-upped this. I have restacked and look forward to part 3.
Nice post. You make many of the same points as Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
“He who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” This reminds me of the cautionary ‘word to the wise’ I would hear in rural Ireland: ‘look, it’s not the done thing.’
I thought I would share this excerpt from my May 2025 post "Vendettanomics"
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/vendettanomics-trumps-war-on-econ
If I may digress a bit, I believe that our economy is an “emergent system.” By this I mean that it is a system that has evolved from causes and forces far too complex for humans fully to comprehend. As they evolve, emergent systems develop properties and spontaneous order that are not predictable based on the characteristics of their component parts. Often, as they evolve, they become even less comprehensible to human minds. . . . .
Because our understanding of emergent systems is profoundly limited, our efforts to change them must be marked by equally profound humility. We can make changes at the margin to improve the system by our own standards, but we can really have no idea what the unintended consequences of our actions might be. We can make an educated guess, but we simply cannot know for sure. We can try to reduce inequality, which is a laudable goal. But for the system as a whole, this effort could set in motion a chain of interactions that might make us all worse off. Above all, we must eschew heroic projects geared to change the system root and branch. We must avoid the very thing that Trump is now doing. Not only do such radical actions rarely produce the benefits we intend, but they could also bring on the collapse of the entire system.
To me, this is the essence of what it means to be a conservative; reverence for the system we have inherited and humility about our ability to change it to suit our will. But the predicate is first to understand as best we can the forces that got us here.
Trump and his enablers are the furthest thing possible from conservative. Authoritarian, certainly. Fascist, perhaps. But their overweening hubris betrays no respect for anything other than those things that will augment their own power. Their actions already have severely damaged our Republic - hopefully not irreparably. Given sufficient time and resources, they are likely to destroy it. It is highly ironic that the 2025 Project’s subtitle is “The Conservative Promise.” It was anything but.