Skip to main content

Links and Thoughts #4 (April 2024)

– personal

AI-generated illustrations for the featured articles (Playground v2.5).

This month I was busy again, so I could only gather five articles worthy of sharing here. I also wrote a lot less than in last month’s post, in part because I had fewer things to say beyond summarizing the authors’ arguments and in part because I was busy.

Without further ado, here’s what I could gather for April’s post in my “Links and Thoughts” series.

Towards a Philosophy of Household Management

In this article, Brett and Kate outline a general philosophy of household management, inspired by two books: Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, 1 and Aristotle’s Oikonomikos. 2 As they explain, modern people live without context for why they do the things they do, from big things like work, marriage, and having children to smaller things like household management. Thus, the authors sketch out a philosophy to contextualize household management and explain its broader purpose.

The article is relatively short and well-written, so I won’t go into too much detail here, and I highly recommend reading it directly. I’ll summarize the article as follows: The ultimate purpose (telos) of a home is to help the individuals living within it achieve their personal telos. Household management 3 contributes to this purpose in two ways: it directly develops many virtues or excellences, and it creates a home environment conducive to the development of further excellences. The authors explain the virtues developed by household management and how a well-managed household helps develop further virtues. They conclude by exhorting us to embrace this philosophy and see household management as a means to a nobler end.

Review of J. D. Unwin’s Sex and Culture

In this article, “Arctotherium” reviews the 1934 magnum opus of English anthropologist Joseph Daniel Unwin, titled Sex and Culture. 4 First, he provides a comprehensive summary of Unwin’s methodology, model, and findings. Secondly, he applies Unwin’s model to a novel case (Japan) and then to modern Western countries to check that Unwin’s predictions hold up. Next, he compares Unwin’s explanation of his own findings with three alternative explanations that he thinks are much better. Finally, he gives his verdict to summarize his review of the book and concludes by briefly reflecting on the future implications of the book’s findings. I highly recommend reading the article, but I’ll briefly summarize each section.

In the book, Unwin conducted an inductive survey of 80 “uncivilized” societies and six “civilized” societies throughout 5000 years of history. 5 Unwin’s model classified societies based on their rites into four categories that tended to correspond to different levels of cultural achievement, as measured by their “social energy” and their historical memory. “Social energy” refers to a society’s display of those powers that are exclusively human, namely reason, creation, and self-reflection. Unwin also categorized societies based on their sexual opportunity, which is the inverse of the level of sexual restraint they observed. Of course, complex societies have different strata of people, which can fall into different categories; Unwin recognizes this and classifies complex societies by their dominant stratum.

Unwin found a perfect correspondence between the level of sexual restraint and the cultural category of societies; in other words, a positive correlation between cultural achievement and sexual restraint. Most importantly, Unwin found that a decrease in sexual opportunity always leads to greater social energy, and vice versa, though the implications of a change take about three generations to fully manifest themselves. Crucially, however, he found that reducing the sexual opportunity of men only matters if the sexual opportunity of women is at a minimum already. Depressingly, Unwin found that the process by which absolute monogamy is first modified and ultimately abolished is the same in every society; thus, it’s apparently inevitable that societies that become prosperous become increasingly liberal in their sexual morality, resulting in the decay and eventual collapse or conquest of the society due to reduced social energy.

Arctotherium evaluates Unwin’s findings by applying his model to a case that Unwin didn’t know much about, Japan from the Meiji restoration onwards, and concludes that Unwin’s predictions held up. Likewise, he shows that the trajectory of Western countries in the last 60 years or so seems to match Unwin’s predictions: decreasing sexual restraint (Sexual Revolution), particularly of women, has led to decreasing social energy and thus stagnation and decay across many metrics.

Next, he explains why Unwin’s explanation of his own findings is deficient. Unwin, based on then-current Freudian psychoanalysis, provides a straightforward psychological explanation: an inability to satisfy sexual desires causes people to display this frustrated energy as social energy. On top of all the deficiencies of Freudian psychoanalysis, which is now considered outdated, he points out that Unwin’s explanation completely fails to explain the crucial detail that men’s sexual restraint doesn’t matter until women’s sexual restraint is maximized.

Arctotherium then provides three alternative explanations for Unwin’s findings that are much more solid. He included the first two explanations in his article about the Western European marriage pattern, which I featured in my Links and Thoughts #1 (January 2024) post. 6 To summarize, these are his three explanations, which are not mutually exclusive:

  1. Paternal certainty incentivizes men to do great things for their descendants, both in terms of providing a material inheritance as well as a lasting legacy. Only absolute monogamy and absolute polygamy provide absolute paternal certainty, and less sexual restraint for women necessarily implies greater paternal uncertainty. 7 In particular, absolute monogamy is notably superior to absolute polygamy because it produces more cooperation since men don’t have to constantly compete with each other to take each other’s wives or constantly conquer neighboring societies to take theirs.
  2. Different regimes of sexual restraint incentivize and select for different traits and behaviors, affecting society’s trajectory in the aggregate. The effects on men seem particularly important. Absolute monogamy incentivizes and selects for productive, pro-social traits and behaviors that lead to economic success and great achievements. Absolute polygamy selects for prowess in military conquest and incentivizes men to defect on other men to get more women for themselves. Societies where women have a high degree of sexual choice incentivize intrasexual competition between men and select for attractiveness to women, which includes some good traits but also some unproductive and anti-social traits.
  3. Female emancipation directly causes both reduced sexual restraint and cultural decline, causing each one through independent mechanisms. A possible way in which female emancipation could cause cultural decline is through greater female cultural influence, considering that women are on average more conformist and sentimental than men. 8 On the other hand, while under absolute monogamy both sexes have to restrain their instincts, 9 a freer sexual marketplace benefits the average woman much more than the average man, so female emancipation incentivizes women to push for relaxing sexual restrictions. 10

His verdict for the book is that Unwin comes close to his ambitious goal of explaining the universal cause of cultural achievement and decline throughout all of human history. Even though Unwin’s interpretation of his own findings is flawed, his model and his empirical discoveries are sound. He adds that the biggest blindspot in the book is that Unwin doesn’t consider genetics as a factor in human cultural achievement; Arctotherium considers that the book shows that a society’s sex relations explain the direction of change but not the absolute level of its social energy, and that we have abundant evidence that heritable traits like intelligence play a large role in determining a culture’s achievements. 11 His last criticism is stylistic, explaining that Unwin is very verbose and often repetitive; he hopes that a new edition could clean up the style and perhaps expand the analysis to more civilizations.

Finally, in the last section of implications for the future, Arctotherium concludes with good news and bad news based on the book’s findings. The good news is that, apparently, re-establishing absolute monogamy and maintaining it for several generations would solve a lot of big modern problems simultaneously. The bad news is that all societies that attempted to re-establish absolute monogamy failed to do so on time, and more energetic societies conquered them. The glimmer of hope is that two civilizations, the Sumerians and the Anglo-Saxons, successfully re-imposed absolute monogamy after being conquered, and they rose again.

I liked Arctotherium’s summary and review of Unwin’s book. I thoroughly agree with his criticisms of Unwin’s interpretation of his findings, and I think his alternative explanations are much better. I don’t think any major Western country will re-establish absolute monogamy or something close to it any time soon. However, I think there’s at least potential for voluntary separation and concentration of like-minded people in intentional communities in order to live according to traditional sexual norms and marriages and to change local policy to not undermine their lifestyle.

Now, I want to explore some relevant considerations from a libertarian perspective. To start, in the anarcho-capitalist framework, marriages would be private contracts between the spouses that deal with their marriage vows, the management of their property, the custody of their children, conditions for separation, material penalties for breaching the terms of the contract, etc. Like any other contract, a valid marriage contract would require the voluntary agreement of the parties involved (i.e., the prospective spouses). 12 Furthermore, a binding contract would be defined as one or more transfers of title to alienable property; this means that only transfers of scarce external resources from one party to another would be legally enforceable, not the performance of specific actions. 13 Couples would be able to tailor their marriage contract to their particular preferences, with a myriad of possible conditions and arrangements, though of course we can expect that the vast majority of people in a particular region would tend to converge on a sort of standard contract template.

Obviously, this framework is not only compatible with a wide variety of sexual norms and marriage agreements, but it’s actually incompatible with a regime of genuinely absolute monogamy or historically-practiced absolute monogamy. A regime of truly absolute monogamy relegates women to being legal non-entities completely subjugated to their husbands or fathers; in many cases, women had no say at all in choosing who they would marry. 14 However, a marriage contract could be extremely traditional if the spouses agree to it. Likewise, people could voluntarily live by conservative social mores, enforce these social norms on their property, and form contractual covenants with their like-minded neighbors to enforce these norms in common. Thus, if an anarcho-capitalist community has an overwhelming preference for that type of marriage as well as a culture of absolute monogamy, so to speak, it would have all the desirable practical effects of historically-practiced absolute monogamy.

So, voluntary near-absolute monogamy is possible in anarcho-capitalism, but the question is how common it would actually be; my guess is that only a minority of people would choose to practice it. Let me be clear: I think that modern Leviathan states implement many policies that artificially dilute, distort, and disincentivize marriage and sexual restraint; I also think that repealing these policies would notably improve the status quo and perhaps even reverse the trends of declining fertility and increasing dysgenics. 15 Thus, I think it’s reasonable to predict that marriage contracts and social norms would be more traditional than the status quo, but I don’t think that most modern people would choose a very traditional marriage and lifestyle over a more moderate alternative. Based on Unwin’s work, this regime of modified monogamy would not be enough for a society to achieve its highest potential.

If we reasonably assume that most likely only a minority of people would practice near-absolute monogamy, and we also recognize that anarcho-capitalism and right-libertarianism more generally are evidently very unpopular ideologies, what can we do if we want a truly free, flourishing society? Massive cultural change through persuasion alone is very unlikely, for several reasons I won’t go into. An effective long-term strategy requires demographic change—in other words, absolutely monogamous right-libertarians must become the new majority instead of trying to convince the existing majority to be like them. In concrete terms, they must outbreed the population of a (necessarily small) region for several generations.

To summarize, for an anarcho-capitalist society (or something close to it) to emerge and achieve its highest potential, the best long-term strategy seems to be this: smart, absolutely monogamous anarcho-capitalists, or right-libertarians more generally, must intentionally cluster together in a particular region, form parallel private institutions, live according to their traditional sexual mores, and outbreed the general population for several generations. 16

Smart fraction theory vindicated

In this article, Kirkegaard summarizes the methods and findings of a paper he coauthored with Noah Carl in December 2022, titled Smart Fraction Theory: A Comprehensive Re-evaluation, which is fully available to read for free at ResearchGate. The purpose of the paper was to statistically test what’s known as “smart fraction theory,” which essentially claims that the cognitive ability of a country’s cognitive elite is generally more predictive than the average ability. Lewis Terman originally proposed the theory in 1916, and some authors mentioned it decades later, but no one quantitatively tested it in a comparative framework until almost 100 years later. According to Kirkegaard and Carl, the handful of quantitative studies on the theory have used inadequate statistical methods.

Kirkegaard and Carl’s study tries to fix the mistakes of previous studies by using a pre-residualization approach in order to properly test the theory against the simpler model of average ability. As Kirkegaard explains, the lower tail and upper tail ability levels are too correlated with the mean ability, so they can’t be directly used in a regression model; residualization solves this by producing a kind of tail deviation score that is uncorrelated with the mean ability and thus can be used together in a regression model. In line with previous literature, they used the 95th percentile IQ score as the benchmark for intellectual-class ability.

I actually found Kirkegaard’s explanation of how residualization works unsatisfactory, and I was left wondering if and how pre-residualization differs from residualization. 17 I’m obviously not an expert in statistics (otherwise, I would’ve known already), but I’m familiar with introductory statistics, so I could handle a more detailed explanation. 18 So I read the actual paper, and it turns out they explained it much better there.

Direct residualization consists of simply subtracting the average from the 95th percentile score, which only produces uncorrelated predictors if the shape of the distribution doesn’t vary across different levels of average ability, as it in fact does. 19 Pre-residualization, on the other hand, involves regressing the 95th percentile score on the average score and then using the standardized residuals as predictors. These residuals capture the degree to which the 95th percentile score is higher (positive) or lower (negative) than one would expect based on the average score. The pre-residualization approach is obviously superior, so they mostly focused on that one, though they ran their models again using the direct residualization approach and got pretty much the same results.

Kirkegaard and Carl’s main analysis consisted of predicting the Social Progress Index (SPI) general factor using four models with different variables: model 1 included the average score only; model 2 included the average score and the 95th percentile residual; model 3 included the average score and the 5th percentile residual; and model 4 included the average score and both residuals. They found that while average ability by itself is already a good predictor, adding the 95th percentile score to the model appreciably improves it, while adding the 5th percentile score doesn’t really do anything. These findings were statistically significant and are consistent with smart fraction theory.

As mentioned before, they ran their models using tail ability residuals obtained from both pre-residualization and direct residualization, and both approaches yielded pretty much the same results. Furthermore, since it’s widely known that national IQ data shows moderate to strong autocorrelation, 20 they controlled for the spatial autocorrelation of the SPI by adding a spatial lag for the SPI to the models: the predicted value of the SPI if one were to guess by averaging the SPI of the 3 closest countries. 21 Adding the spatial lag control variable, they found that the standardized coefficients of the original variables decrease somewhat, but the pattern of the result remains the same and is still strong.

The secondary analysis consisted of predicting each of the 40+ component indicators of the SPI using the same approach, and again, they found that the 95th percentile residual has incremental predictive validity over the average ability while the 5th percentile residual doesn’t. Furthermore, they applied the same analysis to predict six economic outcomes and found the same pattern in the results. 22 Finally, they tested the theory on a few other miscellaneous outcomes previously referenced in the literature, this time using only two models (average score only versus average score and 95th percentile residual), and most of their results supported the theory. 23

To summarize, Kirkegaard and Carl’s study provides comprehensive evidence in favor of smart fraction theory. Kirkegaard concludes his post with some thoughts on his takeaway from the study, which is that society should nurture its best and brightest. He laments that the opposite is happening, at least in Western countries: elite schools and programs are increasingly unpopular; meanwhile, governments waste resources trying and failing to raise the cognitive ability of the bottom 5%. He suggests making sure gifted programs are actually running and implementing universal screening to find all the gifted children to put in them. Obviously, I’m against any government involvement in education, but, as long as it exists, it would be better if it followed Kirkegaard’s recommendations.

Human Biodiversity: A guide

As the title implies, this article is a general introduction to the science of human biodiversity (HBD), which is nothing more than the straightforward insights obtained from studying humans using the standard lens of natural selection and evolution: namely, that all humans and, by extension, all human groups, are more or less different both physically and psychologically, and that these differences are at least partially genetic in origin.

All of this should be completely obvious and uncontroversial. However, as Winegard points out, most people today strongly reject the idea that human populations are different in socially consequential traits and/or that these differences are even partially genetic. Many people have suffered social and professional consequences for opposing or even questioning the orthodoxy of equality among human groups. 24 Furthermore, many academics in relevant fields try to avoid potentially controversial research or whitewash their findings for political correctness; meanwhile, scientific dissenters often find their research blocked from publication or retracted.

Winegard provides a concise yet thorough summary of the HBD position and the evidence for it. He explains the origins of modern human populations, the selection pressures they faced in different regions, how these pressures resulted in different traits, and the strong evidence we have for the heritability of psychological traits, the most controversial insight of HBD. Winegard then provides a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section in which he replies to common questions, objections, and accusations that many people make about HBD and its proponents.

I won’t go into more detail; the article is already concise enough for a general introduction to such a broad topic, and it’s well-written, so I recommend it. I’ll briefly comment on an important detail. Winegard notes that many or most modern people seem to hold as a sacred moral value the conviction that all human populations are equal in that they have roughly the same distribution of socially valued traits, and that’s why they have such a strong, unthinking rejection of HBD despite all the evidence. I’ll add that this is just a manifestation of egalitarianism, the false and destructive ideology or moral bias that has come to dominate the modern world. As Murray Rothbard argued in a 1973 essay, egalitarianism is a “revolt against nature” and against the structure of reality itself, and there’s no logical reason to presuppose that equality is inherently desirable or a moral imperative. 25

Beauty as a biological construct

This article concisely explains the evolutionary reasons for the traits that men and women find attractive and provides links to published research that supports each hypothesis. Many say that beauty is entirely subjective, but, as Garnås explains, this doesn’t make sense from an evolutionary perspective. One would logically expect there to be some universal markers of beauty related to what matters for reproductive success, and indeed, scientific evidence suggests that is the case.

I think everyone who is honest and thinks about it for a few seconds already knows that it’s obvious that beauty is to a great degree objective, or intersubjectively ascertainable with near universal agreement, though of course personal and cultural factors also influence each individual’s specific preferences.

The article is relatively short, well-written, and links to research to back its statements, so I highly recommend reading it, and I won’t restate each of his points. Instead, I’ll just quote the author’s conclusion:

Like all species, we are designed by natural selection to preserve and propagate our genes. By choosing a partner with nice skin, hair and teeth, symmetrical features, good posture and movement patterns, and a lean physique, we are inadvertently selecting for microbial, hormonal, musculoskeletal, nutritional and immunological health. This, in turn, enhances our reproductive success by enriching our life and endowing our offspring with beneficial characteristics.

Physical beauty isn’t just something we find pleasing; it’s a matter of survival and reproduction.

Footnotes

  1. Amazon link for Mendelson’s book, Home Comforts. ↩

  2. Amazon link for Aristotle’s book Oikonomikos translated to English (titled Economics). The McKays explain that while the book title is usually translated as Economics, the Greek word oikonomikos is better translated as household management, and Aristotle’s book deals precisely with that topic. I also found this free digitalized copy of an English translation of the book. For a summary and critique of Aristotle’s thought on economics across his many works, read this article by Edward W. Younkins, which analyzes it from the perspective of modern Austrian economic theory. ↩

  3. “[…] which includes cleaning, organizing, maintenance, and budgeting, as well as safety and home defense” ↩

  4. The author provides this link to a free digitalized copy of the book. I must warn that it’s more than 700 pages long. ↩

  5. The distinction between civilized and uncivilized societies is not a key portion of Unwin’s model, and he himself says that it’s just a rough, arbitrary classification. Unwin defined “civilized” societies as the following: “Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hellenes, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Sassanids, Arabs (Moors), Romans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (i.e. ourselves).” The six “civilized” societies that Unwin chose to study were the Sumerians, Babylonians, Hellenes, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and English, with a few comments about the Arabs and Moors. Unwin explains that he limited his survey to those societies for which he had reliable evidence, and he encourages the reader to check if his findings hold for other societies using alternative measures. ↩

  6. In fact, Arctotherium provided a link to this book review in his article about the Baby Boom, and that’s how I found it. I got around to reading it in March, but I didn’t have time to write about it until April. ↩

  7. Paternity tests were obviously not available until recently in the scale of human history, and thus men still have their natural evolved instincts in this matter. ↩

  8. Even if the difference is apparently small on average, we know that men have greater variability in many traits than women. Thus, men are overrepresented in the extreme ends of intelligence, risk-taking, unconventional thinking, etc. ↩

  9. Arctotherium encapsulates the sexes’ natural instincts perfectly in a footnote, which I’ll quote directly: “Men’s instincts tend towards polygamy, having sex with many women at the same time, ideally with exclusive sexual access and always retaining the option to branch out further. Women’s instincts tend towards hypergamy, having sex with the most attractive man, ideally while receiving investment (not necessarily from the same man) and always retaining the option to trade up.” Absolute monogamy restrains both sexes’ instincts in a socially beneficial equilibrium. ↩

  10. This effect is even more important now because modern contraceptives are widely available and effective, massively reducing the risk for a woman that a sexual encounter would result in her pregnancy. This has contributed to reducing women’s incentives for sexual restraint and judiciousness in selecting a partner. Additionally, in many jurisdictions, it’s legal for women to murder their unborn children. ↩

  11. For example, in last month’s Links and Thoughts post, I featured two articles about a paper that found that national average IQ is overwhelmingly the best predictor of economic growth. ↩

  12. It should be obvious, but I’ll clarify that, for this consent to be legally valid, both prospective spouses would have to be adults with enough mental capacity to independently understand and agree to the terms of the contract, as well as the nature and activities inherent to a marital relationship. It should also be obvious that voluntary agreement means there must not be any unjustified violent coercion or threat of unjustified violence. ↩

  13. Murray Rothbard famously explained and defended this title-transfer theory of contract in his book The Ethics of Liberty (1998, 2nd ed., chapter 19), though his explanation has some small deficiencies. Read Stephan Kinsella’s article A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, Inalienability for a more thorough, refined, and correct elaboration of the libertarian title-transfer theory of contract, as well as its implications and applications. ↩

  14. Genuine or historically practiced absolute polygamy is also obviously incompatible with the anarcho-capitalist framework for the same reasons, but I’m focusing on absolute monogamy since that is the most socially desirable arrangement. ↩

  15. In January’s Links and Thoughts post, I featured two articles by Arctotherium related to this topic. ↩

  16. For some time now, I’ve been thinking that something along these lines is the best and possibly the only realistic strategy to create a libertarian society. Many libertarian authors have advocated intentional geographical clustering of liberty-minded people, parallel voluntary institutions, secession, and similar strategies, so I was already familiar with and sympathetic to those strategies. Notably, the Free State Project is a real-world movement with the goal of getting libertarians to concentrate in New Hampshire to turn the tide against government there; despite not yet reaching the original libertarian population target, they’ve already achieved a noticeable, though not major, influence on the state’s politics. In the past six months or so, I’ve been reading many articles on sociobiology, and I’ve integrated many insights from them into my worldview, adjusting my expectations and opinions on strategy accordingly. Incidentally, I recently read the article The Extinction of the Dark Elves by Joseph Bronski, in which he elaborates a strategy, similar to the one I propose, for “dark elves” (right-wing, fit, high-IQ, white people) to cluster in a particular region, voluntarily practice traditional marriage unrestricted, reproduce, and flourish; the main differences are that he is not a libertarian, his criteria for belonging to his desired hypothetical community are too strict in my opinion, he completely excludes non-whites, and he supports widespread embryo selection while I have ethical concerns about it. ↩

  17. Part of my confusion was that I originally understood that they calculated the “tail deviation scores” by simply subtracting the average from the 95th percentile score, which would obviously produce only positive values. However, the map he included in the article showed zero and negative values. Once I read the paper, I realized that my initial understanding corresponded to the inferior direct residualization approach, while the map corresponded to the more sophisticated pre-residualization approach. ↩

  18. I would like to set aside some time to take a proper course in statistics. ↩

  19. They found that countries with lower average ability have much stronger IQ advantages for the 95th percentile over the mean. ↩

  20. In other words, countries near each other tend to have similar average IQ scores because they tend to have many relevant factors in common, most obviously geographical factors like latitude, climate, and language, among others. This obviously affects other metrics besides IQ, including the SPI itself, which the authors found to have a generally strong spatial autocorrelation (r = 0.61 on average). ↩

  21. In the paper, the authors explain that they quantified each country’s location using both the coordinates of its centroid and the coordinates of its capital; however, both methods produced almost identical results. ↩

  22. The economic outcomes used were: GNI per capita, GDP per capita, growth in GNI per capita for the period 1990–2019, growth in GDP per capita for the same period, median personal income, and median household income. ↩

  23. These other outcomes were: performance in international mental sports, winners of the International Mathematical Olympiad, and indicators of air safety, road safety, occupational safety, and technological safety. The results for the four safety indicators strongly supported smart fraction theory; on the other hand, the results for the other two outcomes were not statistically significant. ↩

  24. Winegard actually suffered this first-hand. He claims Marietta College refused to renew his contract as an assistant professor of psychology because he dared to talk about differences between ethnic groups. ↩

  25. I’m referring to the title essay in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays (1974, 2nd ed.). My favorite quote: “The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will—in short, that reality can be instantly transformed by the mere wish or whim of human beings.” ↩