INDIA IPPON DESU
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Why is African Teen Fertility So High?
By Alice Evans
Teenage fertility has fallen globally. Yet one region bucks the trend. Why is teen fertility still high in Sub-Saharan Africa, and what does it mean for women?
Fundamentally, economic stagnation drives Sub-Saharan Africa’s exceptional fertility trajectory. Without structural transformation and rising productivity, it is hard to envision let alone gain upward-mobility via skills.
Diverse cultural ideals then shape how individuals try to gain status and social inclusion. Teenage marriage and fertility are highest across the Islamic Sahel, where communities privilege large families, female seclusion and the afterlife. Further South, women exercise far greater independence. Navigating precarity, some look to men as providers, but this comes with vulnerabilities - such as transactional sex.
Systematically, this essay examines how failed structural transformation, limited technology and weak ideals of romantic love create a teen fertility trap. Sub-Saharan Africa is diverging from the rest of the world, with massive implications for women.
By 2035, 66% of teen births will be in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa differs in two crucial respects - explain Spoorenberg, Carlsen, Flatø, Stonawski and Skirbekk. Historical fertility means it has a large number of teenagers. Additionally, teenage pregnancy is high. Combined, these dynamics mean that by 2035, two-thirds of all teenage births will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Their analysis draws on several key data sources, primarily the UN World Population Prospects 2022, which synthesises censuses, demographic surveys, and vital registration systems.
Africa’s weak state capacity means we should treat statistics with caution. To strengthen our understanding, this essay incorporates a wealth of experiments, surveys, meta-analyses, and my own ethnographic insights from Zambia and The Gambia.
The Great Teen Divergence
Historical data reveals a dramatic divergence in teenage fertility. China's teenage fertility rate plummeted from 84 to 12 births per 1,000 females aged 15-19 between 1950 and 2020. India achieved an even more impressive reduction, slashing rates from 144 to 17 per 1,000.
Yet Nigeria charts a different course. Now leading globally in adolescent births, Nigeria's rate has declined only modestly from 122 to 102 per 1,000. By 2030, Nigeria alone will record more teen births than China and India combined.
Compared to 1950, most countries have reduced teen fertility by around 50-75%. Sub-Saharan Africa persistence demands a comparativist explanation
Why is Teenage Fertility so High?
Demographers typically highlight three key barriers: limited contraceptive access, low education, and early marriage. Let’s explore these and their underlying drivers.
Contraceptive access
Sub-Saharan Africans’ contraceptive use lags far behind the global average. Though we should also recognise progress (doubling from 14% in 2000 to 28.3% in 2020) and variation (from 2% in Somalia to 57% in Botswana).
This matters profoundly. As demonstrated by Goldin and Katz: the pill enables women to continue their education and pursue careers! Without it, women are trapped by their biology.
That said, ‘use of contraceptives’ isn’t just about supply, we also need to understand demand.
Education
Teen fertility is correlated with low rates of education. Countries with teen fertility rates above 100 per 1,000 tend to have female secondary school enrolment below 45%. By contrast, every nation that has reduced rates below 20 per 1,000 maintains enrolment above 60%.
Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa's youthful population, secondary schooling remains low. In Niger, Mali, and Chad, teenage girls average just seven years of education. Ghana meanwhile has higher education and lower teen fertility.
India is below the expected line - even though most girls are going to school, teen fertility remains low. This is because most are strictly cloistered, with prohibitions on loitering.
Early marriage
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 37% of young women married before turning 18, with 72% of births under 18 occurring within marriage.
Watch out for heterogeneity! Ghana’s rate of early marriage and teen fertility is well below Niger’s.
Are Teen Pregnancies due to the failure of Structural Transformation?
Without economic transformation, families and young women struggle to imagine skills-based pathways to status. Sub-Saharan Africa GNI per capita remains ultra low. Most people work on farms - which are usually small and unproductive. Only 3.5% of agricultural land is irrigated.
African firms tend to grow very slowly, constrained by expensive credit, relentless power cuts, and high transport costs. In Guinea-Bissau, entrepreneurs told me that power was so unreliable, they needed to buy a generator, but that was prohibitively expensive, invariably curbing labour recruitment and pushing up prices. Segue: that was also when I stayed on a friend’s mattress and got scabies. Still, poverty is not a full explanation. Bangladesh and Ghana share similar per capita wealth and secondary enrolment rates, yet Ghana’s fertility is nearly double. To understand this divergence, we must examine how poverty interacts with culture and technology.
Does Limited Technology hobble Cultural Leapfrogging?
Loyal readers will recall my suggestion that smart phones enable young women all over the world to hop online and culturally leapfrog to the egalitarian frontier. In Turkey, Malaysia, and Mexico, young women are using Instagram and Netflix to imagine different futures. Swiping past local traditions, they are exploring alternatives.
But barely half of Sub-Saharan Africans have access to electricity. Only 18% of young people have mobile internet. In rural villages, where electricity, phone signal and internet access are seriously patchy, people remain tethered to local ideas of prestige. As the Bemba say,
“umwana ashala atasha nyina ukunaya” (the child who doesn't travel praises their mother's cooking).
What about Religion?
Most Sub-Saharan Africans say that religion is extremely important and that they attend worship services every week. Thankfully, two brilliant papers have quantified how Christianity and Islam affect education and fertility in Africa.
It makes sense to study these issues concurrently, since communities that devalue girls’ education see little cost to early marriage and childbearing
How does religion shape educational mobility?
Alberto Alesina, Sebastian Hohmann, Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou examine educational progress throughout postcolonial Africa. Merging census data from 21 countries, they present strong evidence of religious differences. Christian Africans (compared to Muslims and traditionalists) typically have greater intergenerational mobility. This is partly because they have more educated parents and live in more prosperous places. However, when when controlling for parental education and location, they still find a Christian advantage.
How big is this difference?
Of Nigerian parents with no schooling, 80% of Christian children complete secondary school, but less than 50% of Muslim children will complete primary school. Of Cameroonian parents who completed primary school, 96% of Christians will complete primary, compared with 80% of Muslims. The Christian-Muslim mobility gap is larger in regions where many people are Muslims, and where there was a large Christian-Muslim gap in literacy during colonialism. Long-run effects persist partly because Muslims are less likely to move to areas of upward educational mobility.
What explains these religious differences?
Alesina et al’s evidence doesn’t allow them to speculate. They suggest it could be
1. Social norms
2. Religious educational infrastructure (like maktabs)
3. Political economy and the power of religious leaders.
All three seem plausible and likely mutually reinforcing.
In places where religious leaders are more powerful, enshrined Sharia law, and built more madrasahs, we might expect that people will be more Islamic. In Nigeria, districts that were once under the Sokoto Caliphate, where Sharia law is codified, have much lower rates of female employment outside the home compared to other Muslim areas.
72% of Nigerians say that one of the most important qualities for children is religious faith. This figure is much higher above Muslims (81%) than Protestant Christians (65%).
If religious devotion is widely esteemed, children may emulate their peers, thereby gaining social inclusion and status. Seldom seeing others advance through education, you may not necessarily see it as a route to upward mobility. Instead, you may take great pride in reciting scripture, being regarded as pious, and hopefully getting to paradise.
How does religion affect fertility?
If Muslim Africans are less likely to get educated or migrate to prosperous regions, this may also affect their view of Becker’s ‘quality-quantity trade-off’. We might expect Muslim Africans to have earlier marriages and larger families.
And that’s precisely what’s found by Phoebe Ishak and Mark Gradstein. Drawing on Demographic and Health Surveys for 24 African countries, they finding a strong correlation between religion and fertility. But maybe this reflects prior culture or geography, rather than religion?
Building on Micholopoulos et al 2019, they argue that Islam spread via trade networks. Proximity to ancient trade routes can thus be considered an exogenous shock, encouraging Muslim conversions. With this instrument, they find that contemporary Muslims typically have one more child.
The correlation also holds among co-ethnics. Muslim members of an ethnicity are more likely to have more children than Christians of the same ethnicity.
As a third battery of tests, they find that religious differences remain significant even after controlling for ancestral cultural practices like polygamy and bride price.
Religious community matters. Muslim belief is irrelevant in places where Muslims are a minority. It’s only where Muslims comprise more than half the population that religion is associated with fertility. This echoes Alesina et al’s finding that the Christian-Muslim mobility gap is larger in regions where many people are Muslims.
Why is fertility higher among Muslim Africans?
Drawing on DHS data, Ishak and Gradstein find that Muslim African women are less educated, marry younger, give birth earlier, are less likely to work, and less able to achieve their preferences.
Higher fertility among Muslim Africans does not reflect women’s preferences. Muslim African women have more children than they want. Muslim African husbands tend to want more kids, and are more able to realise their preferences
Religious Communities
These two studies on education and fertility indicate the importance of religious community.
Poor, precarious, informally employed people remain heavily reliant on peer networks. They don’t have the economic independence afforded by secure salaries or government pensions. Trust, respectability and social approval matter enormously.
Tight-knit communities may also eye individualism and deviance with suspicion - ostracising deviants. So it makes sense that the Islam effect is significant when Muslims are surrounded by other Muslims, collectively enforcing a particular set of values.
Paradise and Seclusion
In Northern Nigeria’s Hausaland, married women traditionally observe ‘kulle’ - seclusion. Married women of reproductive age are expected to remain hidden. High walls are built around a central courtyard, with offset entrances (zaure) that prevent outsiders from seeing inside. Houses for married women are ‘ba shiga’ (no entry), as unrelated men are forbidden. Within these walls, women undertake childcare and food preparation.
‘Kulle’ began in the fifteenth century among the elite in Kano - marking status, and later spread via conquest and slavery. Under the Sokoto Caliphate, seclusion marked Islamic piety and women’s status as free Muslims. In Sokoto’s extensive slave plantations (rimjis), farm work became stigmatised as slave labor, creating lasting associations between seclusion and free status. While there was historical diversity, by the 1950s, growing trade wealth and urban infrastructure (especially water access) made seclusion increasingly feasible for merchant families across the region. What began as an elite practice became a broader aspiration.
Recent surveys and observations suggest that married women rarely appear in public spaces like markets or mosques. When they venture out, it’s usually at night in groups, or during special occasions like naming ceremonies or religious festivals, and then only while veiled. While boys often attend mainstream schools, girls are typically sent to Islamiyya schools, which prepare them for a life of seclusion.
Teachings of wifely obedience can non-consensual sex - as one adolescent male explained,
“I want to tell you, it is good to beat her, because I’m already married to her and she’s obliged to satisfy my sexual needs as long as she lives with me”.
Robson, 2000, p. 192
Across the Sahel, adolescent fertility is seriously high Chad, Mali and Niger register Africa’s highest rates of teen marriage and teen pregnancies: over 70% of young women were married under 18.
In Nigeria, 23% of 15-19 year olds are already mothers or are pregnant with their first child. 40% of Muslim Nigerian women were married before turning 15.
In Kano, Northern Nigeria, only 7% of married women make informed decisions about their own use of contraceptives or sexual relations, and only 11% use contraceptives. The median woman first had sex at 16.
In Karu, the median female age at first sexual encounter is 14.8.
Importantly, none of this is entailed by religion. North of the Sahara, in Muslim-majority Tunisia, fertility has collapsed. Sub-Saharan Africa’s exceptionally high fertility reflects a potent combination: economic stagnation, limited education, and intense religiosity create mutually reinforcing constraints.
Permissiveness, Poverty and Fertility
Africa is not a monolith. Beyond former Islamic caliphates and conflict zones, teenage girls move freely, chatting with boys without brotherly reprimands. Adolescents in Ghana and Kenya run errands alone and socialise openly. All this is perfectly permissible. In Kitwe, Zambia, my host explicitly told me to greet everyone in the ginormous market so as to appear friendly and social! All this interacts with economic stagnation, weak states, low education and limited technology. If home is stressful, school is dull, and you have nothing else to do, then men’s gifts and affection may be relatively tempting.
Free to mingle, young women may pursue intimate relationships as a way to get ahead. ‘Transactional sex’ refers to relationships where parties exchange sex, gifts and money, but is not seen as ‘prostitution’. The remainder of this essay draws on a wealth of research, including my own in The Gambia and Zambia, to explore how this affects fertility and women’s autonomy. Transactional Sex
“You use what you have to get what you want” - say the young women in Abuja Nigeria. Other sayings include, “A tight hand is a tight pussy”; and “When you open your legs, you eat; When you close your legs, you starve”. In rural Mwanza, Tanzania, transactional sex underlies most non-marital relationships. One 1998 survey found that 75% of sexually active women received gifts or money at first intercourse, while 43% of men reported providing gifts. Another survey of Tanzanian adolescent girls and young women out of school found that 35% were engaging in transactional sex. But other estimates are much lower.
When men's primary contribution is material, desirability hinges on financial muscle. Teachers, government employees and business owners may be highly sought. When I was working in The Gambia, a male colleague had a wife in each of our ‘beneficiary communities’. In Malawi, female fish traders may exchange sex with fishermen for more favourable prices. In rural Tanzania, intimate relations are characterised by ‘tamaa’ (meaning desire, greed, or lust). As locals say,
“there are no unattractive men, only those without money”.
Is Transactional Sex a function of Poverty?
Poverty certainly drives these patterns. Across Africa, transactional sex is most common among women with less education. In Western Kenya, household shocks - like family illness - increase women’s likelihood of engaging in unsafe sex. But transactional sex isn’t just for survival. Research by Joyce Wamoyi and colleagues reveals that young women also pursue transactional sex for prestigious consumer goods - scented beauty products and fashionable clothing that enhance social status. Economic stagnation amplifies these dynamics. Without engaging education or viable employment prospects, what are the alternatives? Charismatic and generous men may seem extremely tempting. Cultural permissiveness also allows these relationships to flourish openly. We are not simply economically maximising agents. In African societies where teenage girls are not cloistered, they can move around without chaperones and forge relationships. But sexual permissivity does come with risks..
Transactional sex elevates risks of pregnancy When men provide money and expect sex, but feel little emotional attachment, intimate relations become extremely risky. Research across Sub-Saharan Africa reveals consistent patterns of unsafe sex, veneral disease, HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy and school dropouts:
Tanzanian women engaging in transactional sex were less likely to use condoms and more likely to have HIV;
In Soweto, South Africa, women who report transactional sex are more likely to have had early sex, experienced violence by male intimate partners, and have HIV;
In Kisumi, Kenya, women who receive larger amounts are less likely to use condoms; 17% of sampled Sub-Saharan African teenage girls said they sexually abused last year. This ranged from 6% in Zimbabwe to 28% in Malawi. Risks apply whether they are in or out of school.
Over 40% of first-time mothers are unmarried in Gabon, Namibia and Swaziland. In regions where girls move freely yet struggle to access contraception, transactional relationships often lead to pregnancy and school dropout. Once mothers, young women frequently face abandonment. Sub-Saharan Africa now shows the world’s highest rates of single motherhood.
To illustrate these dynamics in greater depth, I now present my ethnographic research from The Gambia and Zambia, which are respectively Muslim and Christian.
Lorretta Favour Chizomam Ntoimo & Nyasha Mutanda 2019 Ethnographic Insights from the Gambia
In 2008, I got my first research job - working for Sylvia Chant, by studying young love, sexuality and poverty in The Gambia. Over the course of six months, I chatted to young people in shanty compounds, markets and hairdressing salons. Although the overwhelming majority of Gambians are Muslims, at the time there was minimal Arabisation. In the entire country, I only met one woman who veiled. Most women wore sleeveless tops. In my youthful ignorance, I did not find this remarkable. But of course it reflects a culture without seclusion or segregation.
My Muslim Gambian host mother (a teacher) let me borrow her clothes for a party. Men expressed care with small gifts and favours. As Ramatoulie, a 22-year old hairdresser explained: “If you love someone, you have to spend”. Momodou, a 26-year old taxi driver likewise shared: “I like to spend for my girlfriend... just to show her that I love her, even not that, I like to help her”. Hadim, a 28-year old teacher, added: “Pride will not allow you to be seeing your girlfriend every day or every time and that she needs something and that you cannot at least solve one or two problems of hers … you will have to give her something to solve her problems”.
As young women pursued men with more financial muscle, poorer men got left on the shelf. Mohammed, a 24-year old who worked various jobs as a chef, electrician and plumber, expressed a common male perspective: “If you are chasing a girl, before she accept, she will like to know whether you are [financially] strong or not... They don't care for boys unless you get. That is the main problem here in The Gambia between the boys and the girls”.
Abdoulie, a 30-year old woodcarver who shared a bed with a male friend due to poverty, explained: “they will underrate because you've got nothing to give”. His friend Saul revealed that when he was unable to satisfy his previous girlfriend’s requests she would “change her face”, become “so stressed” and sometimes “not even speak with him”. Amid poverty, many women were economically shrewd - favouring more financially secure partners, or keeping many concurrently. As Soffie (age 21) advised: “This small, small [young and financially weak] boyfriends, she will love them. After, those boys they are going to find another person, every time your heart will break, it's better to find a big [financially strong] boyfriend who will give her, because if she has nobody she will go and have sex with them anyway so it's better for him [her] to have a big boy”.
In return for gifts, men usually expected sexual favours. Anne Marie, age 18, explained: “When the boy… keep on giving me money every day, one day he will .. tell me: ‘I want to sleep with you, you eating my money, every time, can't you sleep with me?’ You refuse, he’ll just force me ... When they're giving you money they want something in return”.
Not all women accepted this trade. Anne Marie prioritised study: “I don't like having boyfriends because they are not serious, and they used to force you for sex... I want to follow my education. If I stay here, have my good job and help my mum, that’s what I plan. Sometimes when I don’t have money I will think and think and think: What can I do? I will go and work! I will go and find a job so that I have money”.
Individuals vary, but the overarching story from my Gambian interviews is that young women strategically pursued relationships for economic gain, wherein they were often pressured to have sex. Me attempting to milk a cow, under the guidance of Mordor - in Kerr Gallo. 2008
Ethnographic Insights from Zambia
During my 18 months in Zambia, I lived in both urban shanty compounds and a swampy village - sleeping on the floor, making fire, and washing behind an old sack of maize meal.
Rural Insecurity
Rural life was quiet, isolated by lack of electricity, running water or phone signal. The nearest health clinic was two hours walk. Without TV or smartphones, there was little to see or imagine beyond the small, homogenous village.
When girls got pregnant, they usually dropped out of school and married. But they often lacked resources, support systems or much understanding of the world. Child brides are more likely to be abused. One morning, a doctor and I found a young bride by the roadside, her face swollen and body covered in cuts, as if dragged through the field. At sixteen, she wanted to escape her violent marriage - but where? With no job prospects or support systems, many women feel trapped.
According to Zambia’s Demographic Health Survey 2024, only 50% of women use contraceptives, while 46% of 19 year olds report having had a live birth.
Motherhood Gives Status!
Low use of contraceptives isn’t just about access, but demand. In Zambia, women become known by their first child’s name - if your son is Mwape, you become “BanaMwape” (mother of Mwape). During my fieldwork, women constantly encouraged to have a baby. Immersed in these ideologies, they may be taken for granted. Thus despite high fertility, most women want more children.
Zambia DHS 2024 But this comes with risks.
A couple of months ago, I received a message on Instagram. A Zambian friend (with 5 children) had been abandoned by her husband. He had re-married, and taken all their assets. Destitute, she was now living in a shack. She couldn’t simply make money because she didn’t have the capital to buy dried fish for re-sale. Obviously I wanted to send money, but even that was difficult since she didn’t have her own phone, and there was no local infrastructure for digital payments. Instead, another relative had to travel six hours to Lusaka to physically pick up the cash.
Urban Precarity & Women’s Vulnerability
I spent six months living in an extremely poor neighbourhood with a locally elected councillor. Walking home, it was pitch black - no street lights, tarmac roads, or indoor water. When I washed, I filled a bucket and threw it over my head behind an old sack of maize. One time it got nasty, there had been a toxic leak and my eyes stung. We cooked on fire and scrubbed our clothes by hand. Barely anyone had a salaried job. For three months, I sat at the back of several local classrooms. Absenteeism was rife. We had six classes in a day, teachers typically came to two. Rote learning was typical, lessons were written on the blackboard. Otherwise, teen had nothing to do. They were bored. One time, the neighbouring class was noisy and unsupervised. So our teacher beat them all with a hose pipe.
Mutinta - my host family’s teenage daughter - fared terribly in school, had recently become pregnant and moved out, but her boyfriend was awol. Having dropped out of school, Mutinta’s situation was precarious. When his new girlfriend passed, they had a bitter street fight - yanking hair and pounding each other on the dusty ground. Sexual permissiveness without contraceptives means serious vulnerabilities.
Marriage is no panacea. Women who have five children, and lack independent salaries, depend heavily on their husbands. This deters exit. Victims of male violence sometimes came - bloodied and bruised - asking the councillor for help. One had an engorged eye, her entire face was red, swollen and terribly disfigured. She asked for advice. But what were her options? Even if marriages are peaceful, women face enormous stress. Widespread youth unemployment and ‘sugar daddies’ generate heightened intra-female competition.
Women’s response? “Ukushipikisha” - to endure. Sub-Saharan Africa’s Teen Fertility Trap
Global fertility rates reveal a stark divergence. While most regions see rapid decline, Sub-Saharan Africa remains trapped by economic stagnation, poor schooling, and limited connectivity. Cultural heterogeneity shapes responses across Africa. In the Islamic Sahel, religious communities prioritise early marriage and large families. Teen pregnancies are thus especially high in Niger and Mali. Further south, adolescent girls move freely through public spaces, forging their own ties - but these strategies can include transactional sex, which carries risks including abuse and pregnancy. Sex without romantic love is dangerous - in both cases. If a man has the upper hand, yet lacks deep affection, then her wants and welfare matter less. Instead, he may impose his preferences for seclusion, multiple children, or unsafe sex.
Structural transformation, skills-based pathways of upward mobility, and internet connectivity could shift people’s aspirations. Ghana for example is making progress. But in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, climate breakdown and conflict create a teenage fertility trap.
Teenage fertility has fallen globally. Yet one region bucks the trend. Why is teen fertility still high in Sub-Saharan Africa, and what does it mean for women?
Fundamentally, economic stagnation drives Sub-Saharan Africa’s exceptional fertility trajectory. Without structural transformation and rising productivity, it is hard to envision let alone gain upward-mobility via skills.
Diverse cultural ideals then shape how individuals try to gain status and social inclusion. Teenage marriage and fertility are highest across the Islamic Sahel, where communities privilege large families, female seclusion and the afterlife. Further South, women exercise far greater independence. Navigating precarity, some look to men as providers, but this comes with vulnerabilities - such as transactional sex.
Systematically, this essay examines how failed structural transformation, limited technology and weak ideals of romantic love create a teen fertility trap. Sub-Saharan Africa is diverging from the rest of the world, with massive implications for women.
By 2035, 66% of teen births will be in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa differs in two crucial respects - explain Spoorenberg, Carlsen, Flatø, Stonawski and Skirbekk. Historical fertility means it has a large number of teenagers. Additionally, teenage pregnancy is high. Combined, these dynamics mean that by 2035, two-thirds of all teenage births will occur in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Their analysis draws on several key data sources, primarily the UN World Population Prospects 2022, which synthesises censuses, demographic surveys, and vital registration systems.
Africa’s weak state capacity means we should treat statistics with caution. To strengthen our understanding, this essay incorporates a wealth of experiments, surveys, meta-analyses, and my own ethnographic insights from Zambia and The Gambia.
The Great Teen Divergence
Historical data reveals a dramatic divergence in teenage fertility. China's teenage fertility rate plummeted from 84 to 12 births per 1,000 females aged 15-19 between 1950 and 2020. India achieved an even more impressive reduction, slashing rates from 144 to 17 per 1,000.
Yet Nigeria charts a different course. Now leading globally in adolescent births, Nigeria's rate has declined only modestly from 122 to 102 per 1,000. By 2030, Nigeria alone will record more teen births than China and India combined.
Compared to 1950, most countries have reduced teen fertility by around 50-75%. Sub-Saharan Africa persistence demands a comparativist explanation
Why is Teenage Fertility so High?
Demographers typically highlight three key barriers: limited contraceptive access, low education, and early marriage. Let’s explore these and their underlying drivers.
Contraceptive access
Sub-Saharan Africans’ contraceptive use lags far behind the global average. Though we should also recognise progress (doubling from 14% in 2000 to 28.3% in 2020) and variation (from 2% in Somalia to 57% in Botswana).
This matters profoundly. As demonstrated by Goldin and Katz: the pill enables women to continue their education and pursue careers! Without it, women are trapped by their biology.
That said, ‘use of contraceptives’ isn’t just about supply, we also need to understand demand.
Education
Teen fertility is correlated with low rates of education. Countries with teen fertility rates above 100 per 1,000 tend to have female secondary school enrolment below 45%. By contrast, every nation that has reduced rates below 20 per 1,000 maintains enrolment above 60%.
Across much of Sub-Saharan Africa's youthful population, secondary schooling remains low. In Niger, Mali, and Chad, teenage girls average just seven years of education. Ghana meanwhile has higher education and lower teen fertility.
India is below the expected line - even though most girls are going to school, teen fertility remains low. This is because most are strictly cloistered, with prohibitions on loitering.
Early marriage
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 37% of young women married before turning 18, with 72% of births under 18 occurring within marriage.
Watch out for heterogeneity! Ghana’s rate of early marriage and teen fertility is well below Niger’s.
Are Teen Pregnancies due to the failure of Structural Transformation?
Without economic transformation, families and young women struggle to imagine skills-based pathways to status. Sub-Saharan Africa GNI per capita remains ultra low. Most people work on farms - which are usually small and unproductive. Only 3.5% of agricultural land is irrigated.
African firms tend to grow very slowly, constrained by expensive credit, relentless power cuts, and high transport costs. In Guinea-Bissau, entrepreneurs told me that power was so unreliable, they needed to buy a generator, but that was prohibitively expensive, invariably curbing labour recruitment and pushing up prices. Segue: that was also when I stayed on a friend’s mattress and got scabies. Still, poverty is not a full explanation. Bangladesh and Ghana share similar per capita wealth and secondary enrolment rates, yet Ghana’s fertility is nearly double. To understand this divergence, we must examine how poverty interacts with culture and technology.
Does Limited Technology hobble Cultural Leapfrogging?
Loyal readers will recall my suggestion that smart phones enable young women all over the world to hop online and culturally leapfrog to the egalitarian frontier. In Turkey, Malaysia, and Mexico, young women are using Instagram and Netflix to imagine different futures. Swiping past local traditions, they are exploring alternatives.
But barely half of Sub-Saharan Africans have access to electricity. Only 18% of young people have mobile internet. In rural villages, where electricity, phone signal and internet access are seriously patchy, people remain tethered to local ideas of prestige. As the Bemba say,
“umwana ashala atasha nyina ukunaya” (the child who doesn't travel praises their mother's cooking).
What about Religion?
Most Sub-Saharan Africans say that religion is extremely important and that they attend worship services every week. Thankfully, two brilliant papers have quantified how Christianity and Islam affect education and fertility in Africa.
It makes sense to study these issues concurrently, since communities that devalue girls’ education see little cost to early marriage and childbearing
How does religion shape educational mobility?
Alberto Alesina, Sebastian Hohmann, Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou examine educational progress throughout postcolonial Africa. Merging census data from 21 countries, they present strong evidence of religious differences. Christian Africans (compared to Muslims and traditionalists) typically have greater intergenerational mobility. This is partly because they have more educated parents and live in more prosperous places. However, when when controlling for parental education and location, they still find a Christian advantage.
How big is this difference?
Of Nigerian parents with no schooling, 80% of Christian children complete secondary school, but less than 50% of Muslim children will complete primary school. Of Cameroonian parents who completed primary school, 96% of Christians will complete primary, compared with 80% of Muslims. The Christian-Muslim mobility gap is larger in regions where many people are Muslims, and where there was a large Christian-Muslim gap in literacy during colonialism. Long-run effects persist partly because Muslims are less likely to move to areas of upward educational mobility.
What explains these religious differences?
Alesina et al’s evidence doesn’t allow them to speculate. They suggest it could be
1. Social norms
2. Religious educational infrastructure (like maktabs)
3. Political economy and the power of religious leaders.
All three seem plausible and likely mutually reinforcing.
In places where religious leaders are more powerful, enshrined Sharia law, and built more madrasahs, we might expect that people will be more Islamic. In Nigeria, districts that were once under the Sokoto Caliphate, where Sharia law is codified, have much lower rates of female employment outside the home compared to other Muslim areas.
72% of Nigerians say that one of the most important qualities for children is religious faith. This figure is much higher above Muslims (81%) than Protestant Christians (65%).
If religious devotion is widely esteemed, children may emulate their peers, thereby gaining social inclusion and status. Seldom seeing others advance through education, you may not necessarily see it as a route to upward mobility. Instead, you may take great pride in reciting scripture, being regarded as pious, and hopefully getting to paradise.
How does religion affect fertility?
If Muslim Africans are less likely to get educated or migrate to prosperous regions, this may also affect their view of Becker’s ‘quality-quantity trade-off’. We might expect Muslim Africans to have earlier marriages and larger families.
And that’s precisely what’s found by Phoebe Ishak and Mark Gradstein. Drawing on Demographic and Health Surveys for 24 African countries, they finding a strong correlation between religion and fertility. But maybe this reflects prior culture or geography, rather than religion?
Building on Micholopoulos et al 2019, they argue that Islam spread via trade networks. Proximity to ancient trade routes can thus be considered an exogenous shock, encouraging Muslim conversions. With this instrument, they find that contemporary Muslims typically have one more child.
The correlation also holds among co-ethnics. Muslim members of an ethnicity are more likely to have more children than Christians of the same ethnicity.
As a third battery of tests, they find that religious differences remain significant even after controlling for ancestral cultural practices like polygamy and bride price.
Religious community matters. Muslim belief is irrelevant in places where Muslims are a minority. It’s only where Muslims comprise more than half the population that religion is associated with fertility. This echoes Alesina et al’s finding that the Christian-Muslim mobility gap is larger in regions where many people are Muslims.
Why is fertility higher among Muslim Africans?
Drawing on DHS data, Ishak and Gradstein find that Muslim African women are less educated, marry younger, give birth earlier, are less likely to work, and less able to achieve their preferences.
Higher fertility among Muslim Africans does not reflect women’s preferences. Muslim African women have more children than they want. Muslim African husbands tend to want more kids, and are more able to realise their preferences
Religious Communities
These two studies on education and fertility indicate the importance of religious community.
Poor, precarious, informally employed people remain heavily reliant on peer networks. They don’t have the economic independence afforded by secure salaries or government pensions. Trust, respectability and social approval matter enormously.
Tight-knit communities may also eye individualism and deviance with suspicion - ostracising deviants. So it makes sense that the Islam effect is significant when Muslims are surrounded by other Muslims, collectively enforcing a particular set of values.
Paradise and Seclusion
In Northern Nigeria’s Hausaland, married women traditionally observe ‘kulle’ - seclusion. Married women of reproductive age are expected to remain hidden. High walls are built around a central courtyard, with offset entrances (zaure) that prevent outsiders from seeing inside. Houses for married women are ‘ba shiga’ (no entry), as unrelated men are forbidden. Within these walls, women undertake childcare and food preparation.
‘Kulle’ began in the fifteenth century among the elite in Kano - marking status, and later spread via conquest and slavery. Under the Sokoto Caliphate, seclusion marked Islamic piety and women’s status as free Muslims. In Sokoto’s extensive slave plantations (rimjis), farm work became stigmatised as slave labor, creating lasting associations between seclusion and free status. While there was historical diversity, by the 1950s, growing trade wealth and urban infrastructure (especially water access) made seclusion increasingly feasible for merchant families across the region. What began as an elite practice became a broader aspiration.
Recent surveys and observations suggest that married women rarely appear in public spaces like markets or mosques. When they venture out, it’s usually at night in groups, or during special occasions like naming ceremonies or religious festivals, and then only while veiled. While boys often attend mainstream schools, girls are typically sent to Islamiyya schools, which prepare them for a life of seclusion.
Teachings of wifely obedience can non-consensual sex - as one adolescent male explained,
“I want to tell you, it is good to beat her, because I’m already married to her and she’s obliged to satisfy my sexual needs as long as she lives with me”.
Robson, 2000, p. 192
Across the Sahel, adolescent fertility is seriously high Chad, Mali and Niger register Africa’s highest rates of teen marriage and teen pregnancies: over 70% of young women were married under 18.
In Nigeria, 23% of 15-19 year olds are already mothers or are pregnant with their first child. 40% of Muslim Nigerian women were married before turning 15.
In Kano, Northern Nigeria, only 7% of married women make informed decisions about their own use of contraceptives or sexual relations, and only 11% use contraceptives. The median woman first had sex at 16.
In Karu, the median female age at first sexual encounter is 14.8.
Importantly, none of this is entailed by religion. North of the Sahara, in Muslim-majority Tunisia, fertility has collapsed. Sub-Saharan Africa’s exceptionally high fertility reflects a potent combination: economic stagnation, limited education, and intense religiosity create mutually reinforcing constraints.
Permissiveness, Poverty and Fertility
Africa is not a monolith. Beyond former Islamic caliphates and conflict zones, teenage girls move freely, chatting with boys without brotherly reprimands. Adolescents in Ghana and Kenya run errands alone and socialise openly. All this is perfectly permissible. In Kitwe, Zambia, my host explicitly told me to greet everyone in the ginormous market so as to appear friendly and social! All this interacts with economic stagnation, weak states, low education and limited technology. If home is stressful, school is dull, and you have nothing else to do, then men’s gifts and affection may be relatively tempting.
Free to mingle, young women may pursue intimate relationships as a way to get ahead. ‘Transactional sex’ refers to relationships where parties exchange sex, gifts and money, but is not seen as ‘prostitution’. The remainder of this essay draws on a wealth of research, including my own in The Gambia and Zambia, to explore how this affects fertility and women’s autonomy. Transactional Sex
“You use what you have to get what you want” - say the young women in Abuja Nigeria. Other sayings include, “A tight hand is a tight pussy”; and “When you open your legs, you eat; When you close your legs, you starve”. In rural Mwanza, Tanzania, transactional sex underlies most non-marital relationships. One 1998 survey found that 75% of sexually active women received gifts or money at first intercourse, while 43% of men reported providing gifts. Another survey of Tanzanian adolescent girls and young women out of school found that 35% were engaging in transactional sex. But other estimates are much lower.
When men's primary contribution is material, desirability hinges on financial muscle. Teachers, government employees and business owners may be highly sought. When I was working in The Gambia, a male colleague had a wife in each of our ‘beneficiary communities’. In Malawi, female fish traders may exchange sex with fishermen for more favourable prices. In rural Tanzania, intimate relations are characterised by ‘tamaa’ (meaning desire, greed, or lust). As locals say,
“there are no unattractive men, only those without money”.
Is Transactional Sex a function of Poverty?
Poverty certainly drives these patterns. Across Africa, transactional sex is most common among women with less education. In Western Kenya, household shocks - like family illness - increase women’s likelihood of engaging in unsafe sex. But transactional sex isn’t just for survival. Research by Joyce Wamoyi and colleagues reveals that young women also pursue transactional sex for prestigious consumer goods - scented beauty products and fashionable clothing that enhance social status. Economic stagnation amplifies these dynamics. Without engaging education or viable employment prospects, what are the alternatives? Charismatic and generous men may seem extremely tempting. Cultural permissiveness also allows these relationships to flourish openly. We are not simply economically maximising agents. In African societies where teenage girls are not cloistered, they can move around without chaperones and forge relationships. But sexual permissivity does come with risks..
Transactional sex elevates risks of pregnancy When men provide money and expect sex, but feel little emotional attachment, intimate relations become extremely risky. Research across Sub-Saharan Africa reveals consistent patterns of unsafe sex, veneral disease, HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy and school dropouts:
Tanzanian women engaging in transactional sex were less likely to use condoms and more likely to have HIV;
In Soweto, South Africa, women who report transactional sex are more likely to have had early sex, experienced violence by male intimate partners, and have HIV;
In Kisumi, Kenya, women who receive larger amounts are less likely to use condoms; 17% of sampled Sub-Saharan African teenage girls said they sexually abused last year. This ranged from 6% in Zimbabwe to 28% in Malawi. Risks apply whether they are in or out of school.
Over 40% of first-time mothers are unmarried in Gabon, Namibia and Swaziland. In regions where girls move freely yet struggle to access contraception, transactional relationships often lead to pregnancy and school dropout. Once mothers, young women frequently face abandonment. Sub-Saharan Africa now shows the world’s highest rates of single motherhood.
To illustrate these dynamics in greater depth, I now present my ethnographic research from The Gambia and Zambia, which are respectively Muslim and Christian.
Lorretta Favour Chizomam Ntoimo & Nyasha Mutanda 2019 Ethnographic Insights from the Gambia
In 2008, I got my first research job - working for Sylvia Chant, by studying young love, sexuality and poverty in The Gambia. Over the course of six months, I chatted to young people in shanty compounds, markets and hairdressing salons. Although the overwhelming majority of Gambians are Muslims, at the time there was minimal Arabisation. In the entire country, I only met one woman who veiled. Most women wore sleeveless tops. In my youthful ignorance, I did not find this remarkable. But of course it reflects a culture without seclusion or segregation.
My Muslim Gambian host mother (a teacher) let me borrow her clothes for a party. Men expressed care with small gifts and favours. As Ramatoulie, a 22-year old hairdresser explained: “If you love someone, you have to spend”. Momodou, a 26-year old taxi driver likewise shared: “I like to spend for my girlfriend... just to show her that I love her, even not that, I like to help her”. Hadim, a 28-year old teacher, added: “Pride will not allow you to be seeing your girlfriend every day or every time and that she needs something and that you cannot at least solve one or two problems of hers … you will have to give her something to solve her problems”.
As young women pursued men with more financial muscle, poorer men got left on the shelf. Mohammed, a 24-year old who worked various jobs as a chef, electrician and plumber, expressed a common male perspective: “If you are chasing a girl, before she accept, she will like to know whether you are [financially] strong or not... They don't care for boys unless you get. That is the main problem here in The Gambia between the boys and the girls”.
Abdoulie, a 30-year old woodcarver who shared a bed with a male friend due to poverty, explained: “they will underrate because you've got nothing to give”. His friend Saul revealed that when he was unable to satisfy his previous girlfriend’s requests she would “change her face”, become “so stressed” and sometimes “not even speak with him”. Amid poverty, many women were economically shrewd - favouring more financially secure partners, or keeping many concurrently. As Soffie (age 21) advised: “This small, small [young and financially weak] boyfriends, she will love them. After, those boys they are going to find another person, every time your heart will break, it's better to find a big [financially strong] boyfriend who will give her, because if she has nobody she will go and have sex with them anyway so it's better for him [her] to have a big boy”.
In return for gifts, men usually expected sexual favours. Anne Marie, age 18, explained: “When the boy… keep on giving me money every day, one day he will .. tell me: ‘I want to sleep with you, you eating my money, every time, can't you sleep with me?’ You refuse, he’ll just force me ... When they're giving you money they want something in return”.
Not all women accepted this trade. Anne Marie prioritised study: “I don't like having boyfriends because they are not serious, and they used to force you for sex... I want to follow my education. If I stay here, have my good job and help my mum, that’s what I plan. Sometimes when I don’t have money I will think and think and think: What can I do? I will go and work! I will go and find a job so that I have money”.
Individuals vary, but the overarching story from my Gambian interviews is that young women strategically pursued relationships for economic gain, wherein they were often pressured to have sex. Me attempting to milk a cow, under the guidance of Mordor - in Kerr Gallo. 2008
Ethnographic Insights from Zambia
During my 18 months in Zambia, I lived in both urban shanty compounds and a swampy village - sleeping on the floor, making fire, and washing behind an old sack of maize meal.
Rural Insecurity
Rural life was quiet, isolated by lack of electricity, running water or phone signal. The nearest health clinic was two hours walk. Without TV or smartphones, there was little to see or imagine beyond the small, homogenous village.
When girls got pregnant, they usually dropped out of school and married. But they often lacked resources, support systems or much understanding of the world. Child brides are more likely to be abused. One morning, a doctor and I found a young bride by the roadside, her face swollen and body covered in cuts, as if dragged through the field. At sixteen, she wanted to escape her violent marriage - but where? With no job prospects or support systems, many women feel trapped.
According to Zambia’s Demographic Health Survey 2024, only 50% of women use contraceptives, while 46% of 19 year olds report having had a live birth.
Motherhood Gives Status!
Low use of contraceptives isn’t just about access, but demand. In Zambia, women become known by their first child’s name - if your son is Mwape, you become “BanaMwape” (mother of Mwape). During my fieldwork, women constantly encouraged to have a baby. Immersed in these ideologies, they may be taken for granted. Thus despite high fertility, most women want more children.
Zambia DHS 2024 But this comes with risks.
A couple of months ago, I received a message on Instagram. A Zambian friend (with 5 children) had been abandoned by her husband. He had re-married, and taken all their assets. Destitute, she was now living in a shack. She couldn’t simply make money because she didn’t have the capital to buy dried fish for re-sale. Obviously I wanted to send money, but even that was difficult since she didn’t have her own phone, and there was no local infrastructure for digital payments. Instead, another relative had to travel six hours to Lusaka to physically pick up the cash.
Urban Precarity & Women’s Vulnerability
I spent six months living in an extremely poor neighbourhood with a locally elected councillor. Walking home, it was pitch black - no street lights, tarmac roads, or indoor water. When I washed, I filled a bucket and threw it over my head behind an old sack of maize. One time it got nasty, there had been a toxic leak and my eyes stung. We cooked on fire and scrubbed our clothes by hand. Barely anyone had a salaried job. For three months, I sat at the back of several local classrooms. Absenteeism was rife. We had six classes in a day, teachers typically came to two. Rote learning was typical, lessons were written on the blackboard. Otherwise, teen had nothing to do. They were bored. One time, the neighbouring class was noisy and unsupervised. So our teacher beat them all with a hose pipe.
Mutinta - my host family’s teenage daughter - fared terribly in school, had recently become pregnant and moved out, but her boyfriend was awol. Having dropped out of school, Mutinta’s situation was precarious. When his new girlfriend passed, they had a bitter street fight - yanking hair and pounding each other on the dusty ground. Sexual permissiveness without contraceptives means serious vulnerabilities.
Marriage is no panacea. Women who have five children, and lack independent salaries, depend heavily on their husbands. This deters exit. Victims of male violence sometimes came - bloodied and bruised - asking the councillor for help. One had an engorged eye, her entire face was red, swollen and terribly disfigured. She asked for advice. But what were her options? Even if marriages are peaceful, women face enormous stress. Widespread youth unemployment and ‘sugar daddies’ generate heightened intra-female competition.
Women’s response? “Ukushipikisha” - to endure. Sub-Saharan Africa’s Teen Fertility Trap
Global fertility rates reveal a stark divergence. While most regions see rapid decline, Sub-Saharan Africa remains trapped by economic stagnation, poor schooling, and limited connectivity. Cultural heterogeneity shapes responses across Africa. In the Islamic Sahel, religious communities prioritise early marriage and large families. Teen pregnancies are thus especially high in Niger and Mali. Further south, adolescent girls move freely through public spaces, forging their own ties - but these strategies can include transactional sex, which carries risks including abuse and pregnancy. Sex without romantic love is dangerous - in both cases. If a man has the upper hand, yet lacks deep affection, then her wants and welfare matter less. Instead, he may impose his preferences for seclusion, multiple children, or unsafe sex.
Structural transformation, skills-based pathways of upward mobility, and internet connectivity could shift people’s aspirations. Ghana for example is making progress. But in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, climate breakdown and conflict create a teenage fertility trap.
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Thoughts on Trump Ending Affirmative Action in Contracting
By richard hanania
I’ve recently done a few appearances on Destiny’s livestream where he interrogated me on voting Republican. Honestly, when supporting a party is only a 60/40 decision for you, it’s hard to debate someone who is completely convinced in the other direction. When I wrote about why I was voting for Trump before the election, I had to tell the truth about the things that make me uncomfortable about the conservative movement, and its leader in particular.
But yesterday I realized that there’s an obvious answer to the question of why I should be a Republican. They’re the only ones who might listen to me! My vote is insignificant, and won’t determine an election. The only way I can hope to have influence is through my ideas. So I could start identifying with the left today and encourage everyone to vote Democrat, and my influence over policy will slide towards zero. If Destiny thinks I have sensible ideas, he himself should want me to be in a position to make a difference.
All of that was made clear to me when Trump last night repealed and replaced Executive Order 11246. This is a big deal. I wrote about how this little known EO changed American society in The Origins of Woke:
While Johnson originally signed EO 11246, it was the Nixon administration that ironically created the affirmative action regime we see today, over the resistance of a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Under the Labor Department, the administration began by forcing affirmative action on construction workers, first in Philadelphia, and then nationwide. This was followed up in 1971 by Revised Order No. 4, which expanded the regulations beyond the construction industry to all contractors and subcontractors doing business with the government beyond a minimum threshold, forcing them to adopt goals and timetables whenever women or minorities were shown to be “underutilized” relative to the relevant labor pool...
Nonetheless, while its legal basis is murky, there is much less doubt about the reach of EO 11246 and its successor documents. Because of the extent to which government spends money and involves itself in the economy, its ability to regulate contractors has always been a major source of leverage. Employers required to have an affirmative action program must include all of their facilities, employees, and operations in the plan, even if the government contracts in question represent only a small portion of their business. Moreover, the biggest employers in the private sector are more likely than most other businesses to have federal contracts; about a third of Fortune 500 companies did so in 2015. Today, about a quarter of the American workforce is employed by a government contractor. It is important to note that, pursuant to EO 11478 of 1969, affirmative action also exists within the federal government itself, which employs another 2 percent of the workforce.
Under affirmative action guidelines as applied to government contractors, it is no exaggeration to say that businesses are forced to be obsessed with race and sex. Long before people noticed that identity-related issues had consumed American universities, something resembling modern wokeness had already been forced on big business. Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business. Government regulations specify that a “central premise underlying affirmative action is that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce, generally, will reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” If a contractor falls short in any particular area, it must take “practical steps” to make up for its deficiency.
One of the most sinister aspects of all this is that it forced managers at businesses who might want nothing to do with leftist ideas to become foot soldiers in the project of identity-based governance.
The employer is required to participate in a detailed process of identity-based classification and analysis. Middle managers for construction companies and retail store owners become social scientists. First, employers are forced to create an “organizational profile,” defined as “a detailed graphical or tabular chart, text, spreadsheet or similar presentation of the contractor’s organizational structure.” The contractor must break his business down into “organizational units,” and record the race, gender, and ethnicity of the supervisor of each one. Within each unit, the business must record the number of males and females of each of the following groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions. The next step is engaging in a “workforce analysis,” which divides the employees of a company by job title. Those with titles that are similar in terms of work and pay are combined into “job groups.”
This initial work is required to get to the “job group analysis.” This means comparing the number of women and minorities in each job group to their estimated availability in the population. And how does one determine availability? By coming up with a number for the “percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the reasonable recruitment area.” When a particular demographic is underrepresented in a job group, the employer must create “placement goals” to correct its deficiency…
Every aspect of employers’ analysis is reviewable by government bureaucrats. For the same reason that a contractor can always get around affirmative action requirements, the government can always find grounds to apply pressure on a business. From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble.
In my chapter on policy suggestions, I wrote that repealing EO 11246 was low-hanging fruit, but a more aggressive approach would involve banning government contractors from engaging in DEI policies.
I promoted my ideas to conservatives, including on Vivek’s podcast in early 2023, not long after telling him about EO 11246 for the first time. As Vox noted, he soon started promising to repeal the order on his first day in office if elected. Here’s a clip of me suggesting to him that a Republican president go further than that and use a new EO to ban DEI among contractors.
With Trump, it took two days. But we’ve gotten to the same place. Yesterday, the president signed a new executive order with the title “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 3 repeals Executive Order 11246, giving contractors only 90 days before they must stop acting in accordance with previous rules. It then lays out new requirements.
(ii) The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease:
(A) Promoting “diversity”;
(B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and
(C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.
As I suggested Trump do, it then goes on to mandate color blindness.
(iii) In accordance with Executive Order 13279 of December 12, 2002 (Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations), the employment, procurement, and contracting practices of Federal contractors and subcontractors shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws.
(iv) The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:
(A) A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and
(B) A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.
(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall:
(i) Review and revise, as appropriate, all Government-wide processes, directives, and guidance;
(ii) Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and
(iii) Terminate all “diversity,” “equity,” “equitable decision-making,” “equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,” “advancing equity,” and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.
Section 4 directs agencies to start looking for instances of violations of non-discrimination laws, as interpreted by the Trump administration of course, among private firms, non-profits, colleges and universities, and accreditation agencies.
It’s easy to say that a Trump administration would have done this even if I had never written my book. Maybe that’s true. The second administration is more serious about policy across the board. In 2016, Trump took over the GOP practically out of nowhere, nobody thought he would win the general election, and conservatives weren’t really prepared to do much of anything other than give him judges to confirm. The right has since then spent the last eight years thinking about how to make full use of the executive branch for when a Republican returns back to office.
But one thing this whole experience has taught me is that knowledge is fragmented and so much of politics, like life more generally, is about drawing attention. The Origins of Woke relies on the work of several scholars who are lesser known and have been hammering on some of the points I made in the book for decades, including Gail Heriot and Eugene Volokh, and many attorneys like Dan Morenoff and Alison Somin have done important work far from the public spotlight. And I think I probably originally learned about disparate impact from Steve Sailer. So there’s a kind of pipeline here, which in this case went Heriot et al-Hanania-Vivek-Trumpverse, from the most scholarly towards the most famous and attention grabbing. It’s been instructive to play a part in this process. One maybe can place Rufo in between Vivek and Trumpverse, or as part of an independent branch between Hanania and Trumpverse.
It’s possible no single person actually made the marginal difference here. If Trump hadn’t won the election, DeSantis certainly would’ve gone just as far. Vivek would have too, and even Nikki Haley opened her campaign with a video talking about wokeness as a threat to America, although in her case we can have doubts as to whether she would have taken decisive action on the issue. And maybe if Rufo and I didn’t exist, someone else would have filled our niches.
Yet for a long time, conservatives were completely asleep on the question of federal contracting. Consider that Trump’s first term head of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was on a Federalist Society podcast in early 2023 where he bragged about expanding affirmative action and even bringing “intersectionality” into the analysis. This was well after Trump lost the 2020 election, conservatives started realizing that they would need a new approach to effect change, and DeSantis had begun selling himself as the policy guy who could actually provide real victories. If I didn’t bring this issue to the attention of conservatives, who would have?
Note also that the original Trump EO banning diversity training in the first term was a direct result of the president seeing Rufo talk about the topic on Tucker. It’s not like Tucker had another guest lined up who would have said the exact same thing. If Rufo hadn’t been doing TV appearances, Tucker probably would’ve invited in his place a guy who claims to have made love to Bigfoot, or whatever other nonsense grabbed his attention that particular week. Trump’s DEI training ban was revoked after Biden came into office, but it set the stage for the executive orders we’ve seen over the last few days.
All of this makes me think that politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine all this happening without me or Rufo, but easy to imagine it happening without Trump.
As I discuss in the introduction to The Origins of Woke, I started thinking about the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law around 2011 while I was in law school. I then spent about a decade trying to convince people how important this topic was. Finally, I just wrote about it myself, and things started to change.
This book is the product of more than a decade of research and thought about American politics and culture. It was only in the mid-2010s that the subject of “wokeness” came to dominate political discourse. The phenomenon seemed to start on college campuses. Within a few years, it had migrated to other institutions. Those who critique what has happened to our institutions tend to think more of style than substance, pointing to instances of crying college girls demanding safe spaces, angry students yelling at their professors over “microaggressions,” and public debates litigating the definition of “woman.”
From this perspective, when wokeness seeps into policy, it is usually in the context of debates about standardized tests and crime prevention, but it is common to see a self-identified liberal who has an aversion to the aesthetic components of wokeness while accepting most of its policy agenda. Having followed these issues for years, I saw what was happening differently. To me there was always something off about the mainstream liberal worldview when it came to issues of race and sex, and the role of government in preventing discrimination on certain “protected” grounds. Such goals, I thought, naturally resulted in misguided policies that were destructive in terms of personal freedom, economic growth, and even the mental health of much of the public. I had gone to law school and spent a summer interning at the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest firm that fought against overreaches in civil rights law. When I saw the rise of what most educated people call wokeness, it seemed to be only the long overdue cultural manifestation of assumptions and beliefs that have in many instances been deeply embedded in American law for over half a century…
My thoughts about the relationship between wokeness and the legal system were spelled out in a June 2021 article called “Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law.” I was surprised to learn just how interesting the revelations in the piece were to conservatives, and to anti-wokes more generally. Those who had never been to law school did not know much about government regulations. At the same time, those with a legal background often had a superficial understanding of the issues involved but had not read or thought too deeply about how the law has shaped the wider culture. On more than one occasion, I have been talking to a highly intelligent conservative activist who was shocked when I told him that there is an executive order mandating that all large government contractors adopt affirmative action programs. The corollary is that an executive order could — at least in theory — also end such programs. Why hasn’t any Republican president even felt pressure from his base to undertake such an action, much less actually do it? Well, as it turns out, Ronald Reagan wanted to, and the story of how he was stopped, as told in chapter 6, offers interesting lessons for today’s politics.
Another lesson people can potentially draw from this experience is that it is possible to influence policy even if you’re starting out without much in the way of fame, connections, or money. Furthermore, my messaging hasn’t exactly been optimized to win over Republicans. Yet by making a compelling case in emphasizing the issue and bringing it to public attention, I was able to contribute towards changing the conversation on civil rights law. For anyone else who wants to influence policy, here’s a demonstration that it can be done.
Timing also matters. This could be the peak of my influence, at least in terms of directly changing laws and regulations. I was pushing anti-wokeness at a time when conservatives were obsessed with the topic and looking for answers. Now, I want to convince them to be pro-immigration, less nationalistic, and overall act like higher human capital, where the trends are in the opposite direction, so maybe nobody will listen to me anymore.
Whatever the case may be, Trump’s executive orders on diversity serve as a nice bookend to my work on wokeness. There are still other suggestions in my book, particularly eliminating disparate impact, that are yet to be implemented, but with Trump in office and conservatives in control of the courts I think it’s only a matter of time. Most political struggles end in failure or some kind of ambiguous outcome. But sometimes you advocate for an idea, and it just wins. I wanted conservatives to go to war against wokeness as a matter of policy, and the outcome has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. It’s a very satisfying feeling.
I’ve recently done a few appearances on Destiny’s livestream where he interrogated me on voting Republican. Honestly, when supporting a party is only a 60/40 decision for you, it’s hard to debate someone who is completely convinced in the other direction. When I wrote about why I was voting for Trump before the election, I had to tell the truth about the things that make me uncomfortable about the conservative movement, and its leader in particular.
But yesterday I realized that there’s an obvious answer to the question of why I should be a Republican. They’re the only ones who might listen to me! My vote is insignificant, and won’t determine an election. The only way I can hope to have influence is through my ideas. So I could start identifying with the left today and encourage everyone to vote Democrat, and my influence over policy will slide towards zero. If Destiny thinks I have sensible ideas, he himself should want me to be in a position to make a difference.
All of that was made clear to me when Trump last night repealed and replaced Executive Order 11246. This is a big deal. I wrote about how this little known EO changed American society in The Origins of Woke:
While Johnson originally signed EO 11246, it was the Nixon administration that ironically created the affirmative action regime we see today, over the resistance of a bipartisan coalition in Congress. Under the Labor Department, the administration began by forcing affirmative action on construction workers, first in Philadelphia, and then nationwide. This was followed up in 1971 by Revised Order No. 4, which expanded the regulations beyond the construction industry to all contractors and subcontractors doing business with the government beyond a minimum threshold, forcing them to adopt goals and timetables whenever women or minorities were shown to be “underutilized” relative to the relevant labor pool...
Nonetheless, while its legal basis is murky, there is much less doubt about the reach of EO 11246 and its successor documents. Because of the extent to which government spends money and involves itself in the economy, its ability to regulate contractors has always been a major source of leverage. Employers required to have an affirmative action program must include all of their facilities, employees, and operations in the plan, even if the government contracts in question represent only a small portion of their business. Moreover, the biggest employers in the private sector are more likely than most other businesses to have federal contracts; about a third of Fortune 500 companies did so in 2015. Today, about a quarter of the American workforce is employed by a government contractor. It is important to note that, pursuant to EO 11478 of 1969, affirmative action also exists within the federal government itself, which employs another 2 percent of the workforce.
Under affirmative action guidelines as applied to government contractors, it is no exaggeration to say that businesses are forced to be obsessed with race and sex. Long before people noticed that identity-related issues had consumed American universities, something resembling modern wokeness had already been forced on big business. Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business. Government regulations specify that a “central premise underlying affirmative action is that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce, generally, will reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” If a contractor falls short in any particular area, it must take “practical steps” to make up for its deficiency.
One of the most sinister aspects of all this is that it forced managers at businesses who might want nothing to do with leftist ideas to become foot soldiers in the project of identity-based governance.
The employer is required to participate in a detailed process of identity-based classification and analysis. Middle managers for construction companies and retail store owners become social scientists. First, employers are forced to create an “organizational profile,” defined as “a detailed graphical or tabular chart, text, spreadsheet or similar presentation of the contractor’s organizational structure.” The contractor must break his business down into “organizational units,” and record the race, gender, and ethnicity of the supervisor of each one. Within each unit, the business must record the number of males and females of each of the following groups: blacks, Hispanics, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and American Indians/Alaskan Natives. Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions. The next step is engaging in a “workforce analysis,” which divides the employees of a company by job title. Those with titles that are similar in terms of work and pay are combined into “job groups.”
This initial work is required to get to the “job group analysis.” This means comparing the number of women and minorities in each job group to their estimated availability in the population. And how does one determine availability? By coming up with a number for the “percentage of minorities or women with requisite skills in the reasonable recruitment area.” When a particular demographic is underrepresented in a job group, the employer must create “placement goals” to correct its deficiency…
Every aspect of employers’ analysis is reviewable by government bureaucrats. For the same reason that a contractor can always get around affirmative action requirements, the government can always find grounds to apply pressure on a business. From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble.
In my chapter on policy suggestions, I wrote that repealing EO 11246 was low-hanging fruit, but a more aggressive approach would involve banning government contractors from engaging in DEI policies.
I promoted my ideas to conservatives, including on Vivek’s podcast in early 2023, not long after telling him about EO 11246 for the first time. As Vox noted, he soon started promising to repeal the order on his first day in office if elected. Here’s a clip of me suggesting to him that a Republican president go further than that and use a new EO to ban DEI among contractors.
With Trump, it took two days. But we’ve gotten to the same place. Yesterday, the president signed a new executive order with the title “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 3 repeals Executive Order 11246, giving contractors only 90 days before they must stop acting in accordance with previous rules. It then lays out new requirements.
(ii) The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs within the Department of Labor shall immediately cease:
(A) Promoting “diversity”;
(B) Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking “affirmative action”; and
(C) Allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.
As I suggested Trump do, it then goes on to mandate color blindness.
(iii) In accordance with Executive Order 13279 of December 12, 2002 (Equal Protection of the Laws for Faith-Based and Community Organizations), the employment, procurement, and contracting practices of Federal contractors and subcontractors shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws.
(iv) The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:
(A) A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government's payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and
(B) A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.
(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall:
(i) Review and revise, as appropriate, all Government-wide processes, directives, and guidance;
(ii) Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and
(iii) Terminate all “diversity,” “equity,” “equitable decision-making,” “equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,” “advancing equity,” and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.
Section 4 directs agencies to start looking for instances of violations of non-discrimination laws, as interpreted by the Trump administration of course, among private firms, non-profits, colleges and universities, and accreditation agencies.
It’s easy to say that a Trump administration would have done this even if I had never written my book. Maybe that’s true. The second administration is more serious about policy across the board. In 2016, Trump took over the GOP practically out of nowhere, nobody thought he would win the general election, and conservatives weren’t really prepared to do much of anything other than give him judges to confirm. The right has since then spent the last eight years thinking about how to make full use of the executive branch for when a Republican returns back to office.
But one thing this whole experience has taught me is that knowledge is fragmented and so much of politics, like life more generally, is about drawing attention. The Origins of Woke relies on the work of several scholars who are lesser known and have been hammering on some of the points I made in the book for decades, including Gail Heriot and Eugene Volokh, and many attorneys like Dan Morenoff and Alison Somin have done important work far from the public spotlight. And I think I probably originally learned about disparate impact from Steve Sailer. So there’s a kind of pipeline here, which in this case went Heriot et al-Hanania-Vivek-Trumpverse, from the most scholarly towards the most famous and attention grabbing. It’s been instructive to play a part in this process. One maybe can place Rufo in between Vivek and Trumpverse, or as part of an independent branch between Hanania and Trumpverse.
It’s possible no single person actually made the marginal difference here. If Trump hadn’t won the election, DeSantis certainly would’ve gone just as far. Vivek would have too, and even Nikki Haley opened her campaign with a video talking about wokeness as a threat to America, although in her case we can have doubts as to whether she would have taken decisive action on the issue. And maybe if Rufo and I didn’t exist, someone else would have filled our niches.
Yet for a long time, conservatives were completely asleep on the question of federal contracting. Consider that Trump’s first term head of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was on a Federalist Society podcast in early 2023 where he bragged about expanding affirmative action and even bringing “intersectionality” into the analysis. This was well after Trump lost the 2020 election, conservatives started realizing that they would need a new approach to effect change, and DeSantis had begun selling himself as the policy guy who could actually provide real victories. If I didn’t bring this issue to the attention of conservatives, who would have?
Note also that the original Trump EO banning diversity training in the first term was a direct result of the president seeing Rufo talk about the topic on Tucker. It’s not like Tucker had another guest lined up who would have said the exact same thing. If Rufo hadn’t been doing TV appearances, Tucker probably would’ve invited in his place a guy who claims to have made love to Bigfoot, or whatever other nonsense grabbed his attention that particular week. Trump’s DEI training ban was revoked after Biden came into office, but it set the stage for the executive orders we’ve seen over the last few days.
All of this makes me think that politicians are in a sense less important than intellectuals and activists. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine all this happening without me or Rufo, but easy to imagine it happening without Trump.
As I discuss in the introduction to The Origins of Woke, I started thinking about the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law around 2011 while I was in law school. I then spent about a decade trying to convince people how important this topic was. Finally, I just wrote about it myself, and things started to change.
This book is the product of more than a decade of research and thought about American politics and culture. It was only in the mid-2010s that the subject of “wokeness” came to dominate political discourse. The phenomenon seemed to start on college campuses. Within a few years, it had migrated to other institutions. Those who critique what has happened to our institutions tend to think more of style than substance, pointing to instances of crying college girls demanding safe spaces, angry students yelling at their professors over “microaggressions,” and public debates litigating the definition of “woman.”
From this perspective, when wokeness seeps into policy, it is usually in the context of debates about standardized tests and crime prevention, but it is common to see a self-identified liberal who has an aversion to the aesthetic components of wokeness while accepting most of its policy agenda. Having followed these issues for years, I saw what was happening differently. To me there was always something off about the mainstream liberal worldview when it came to issues of race and sex, and the role of government in preventing discrimination on certain “protected” grounds. Such goals, I thought, naturally resulted in misguided policies that were destructive in terms of personal freedom, economic growth, and even the mental health of much of the public. I had gone to law school and spent a summer interning at the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest firm that fought against overreaches in civil rights law. When I saw the rise of what most educated people call wokeness, it seemed to be only the long overdue cultural manifestation of assumptions and beliefs that have in many instances been deeply embedded in American law for over half a century…
My thoughts about the relationship between wokeness and the legal system were spelled out in a June 2021 article called “Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law.” I was surprised to learn just how interesting the revelations in the piece were to conservatives, and to anti-wokes more generally. Those who had never been to law school did not know much about government regulations. At the same time, those with a legal background often had a superficial understanding of the issues involved but had not read or thought too deeply about how the law has shaped the wider culture. On more than one occasion, I have been talking to a highly intelligent conservative activist who was shocked when I told him that there is an executive order mandating that all large government contractors adopt affirmative action programs. The corollary is that an executive order could — at least in theory — also end such programs. Why hasn’t any Republican president even felt pressure from his base to undertake such an action, much less actually do it? Well, as it turns out, Ronald Reagan wanted to, and the story of how he was stopped, as told in chapter 6, offers interesting lessons for today’s politics.
Another lesson people can potentially draw from this experience is that it is possible to influence policy even if you’re starting out without much in the way of fame, connections, or money. Furthermore, my messaging hasn’t exactly been optimized to win over Republicans. Yet by making a compelling case in emphasizing the issue and bringing it to public attention, I was able to contribute towards changing the conversation on civil rights law. For anyone else who wants to influence policy, here’s a demonstration that it can be done.
Timing also matters. This could be the peak of my influence, at least in terms of directly changing laws and regulations. I was pushing anti-wokeness at a time when conservatives were obsessed with the topic and looking for answers. Now, I want to convince them to be pro-immigration, less nationalistic, and overall act like higher human capital, where the trends are in the opposite direction, so maybe nobody will listen to me anymore.
Whatever the case may be, Trump’s executive orders on diversity serve as a nice bookend to my work on wokeness. There are still other suggestions in my book, particularly eliminating disparate impact, that are yet to be implemented, but with Trump in office and conservatives in control of the courts I think it’s only a matter of time. Most political struggles end in failure or some kind of ambiguous outcome. But sometimes you advocate for an idea, and it just wins. I wanted conservatives to go to war against wokeness as a matter of policy, and the outcome has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. It’s a very satisfying feeling.
Nehruvian Policies
The article titled "Nehru’s Tryst with Economics" delves into the foundational economic philosophy adopted during the tenure of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and its long-term impact on the country's trajectory. Here are the key takeaways from the piece:
Key Themes:
Economic Vision of Nehru:
Nehru's leadership emerged in the aftermath of colonial exploitation. His focus was on building a self-reliant economy through state-led industrialization and planned development.
The policies aligned with a doctrine of welfare economics, emphasizing the primacy of the public sector.
Non-Aligned Economic Approach:
India pursued a nuanced neutrality during the Cold War era, steering clear of both capitalist and communist extremes.
Nehru laid the foundation for a mixed economy, combining elements of socialism and capitalism.
State-Led Industrialization:
Heavy industries and infrastructure were prioritized under the aegis of Five-Year Plans, with significant state intervention in sectors like steel, energy, and transportation.
This strategy aimed at reducing reliance on imports and building indigenous capacities.
Challenges and Evolution:
While the public sector led growth initially, the approach did not adapt swiftly to changing global and domestic realities.
The 1962 Sino-Indian War strained resources, stalling economic momentum and pushing India onto the defensive, both politically and economically.
Transition to Liberalization:
The article notes that India eventually shifted gears toward liberalization in the 1990s. This move sought to address inefficiencies in the public sector and unleash the potential of private enterprise. Lasting Impact:
Nehru’s policies laid the groundwork for India's industrial base and institutional framework. However, rigid adherence to socialist principles delayed reforms needed for a more competitive economy.
Reflections:
The article emphasizes that Nehru's vision was suited to the socio-political context of post-independence India. However, economic strategies need periodic recalibration. The transition to a liberalized economy in the 1990s corrected course, but Nehru’s contributions remain a critical chapter in India’s economic history.
This commentary serves as a reminder of the importance of balancing welfare with growth, flexibility with structure, and public good with private innovation
Key Themes:
Economic Vision of Nehru:
Nehru's leadership emerged in the aftermath of colonial exploitation. His focus was on building a self-reliant economy through state-led industrialization and planned development.
The policies aligned with a doctrine of welfare economics, emphasizing the primacy of the public sector.
Non-Aligned Economic Approach:
India pursued a nuanced neutrality during the Cold War era, steering clear of both capitalist and communist extremes.
Nehru laid the foundation for a mixed economy, combining elements of socialism and capitalism.
State-Led Industrialization:
Heavy industries and infrastructure were prioritized under the aegis of Five-Year Plans, with significant state intervention in sectors like steel, energy, and transportation.
This strategy aimed at reducing reliance on imports and building indigenous capacities.
Challenges and Evolution:
While the public sector led growth initially, the approach did not adapt swiftly to changing global and domestic realities.
The 1962 Sino-Indian War strained resources, stalling economic momentum and pushing India onto the defensive, both politically and economically.
Transition to Liberalization:
The article notes that India eventually shifted gears toward liberalization in the 1990s. This move sought to address inefficiencies in the public sector and unleash the potential of private enterprise. Lasting Impact:
Nehru’s policies laid the groundwork for India's industrial base and institutional framework. However, rigid adherence to socialist principles delayed reforms needed for a more competitive economy.
Reflections:
The article emphasizes that Nehru's vision was suited to the socio-political context of post-independence India. However, economic strategies need periodic recalibration. The transition to a liberalized economy in the 1990s corrected course, but Nehru’s contributions remain a critical chapter in India’s economic history.
This commentary serves as a reminder of the importance of balancing welfare with growth, flexibility with structure, and public good with private innovation
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Peter Thiel on Trump
A time for truth and reconciliation
Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets
Peter Thiel
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.
It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects — Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles — gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.
We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”
In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.
Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?
South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.
Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe but by 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.
Trump’s return to the White House augurs the ‘apokálypsis’ of the ancien regime’s secrets
Peter Thiel
In 2016, President Barack Obama told his staff that Donald Trump’s election victory was “not the apocalypse”. By any definition, he was correct. But understood in the original sense of the Greek word apokálypsis, meaning “unveiling”, Obama could not give the same reassurance in 2025. Trump’s return to the White House augurs the apokálypsis of the ancien regime’s secrets. The new administration’s revelations need not justify vengeance — reconstruction can go hand in hand with reconciliation. But for reconciliation to take place, there must first be truth.
The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won. My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) — the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight, the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he died by suicide, suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative.
It may be too early to answer the internet’s questions about the late Mr Epstein. But one cannot say the same of the assassination of John F Kennedy. Sixty-five per cent of Americans still doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Like an outlandishly postmodern detective story, we have waited 61 years for a denouement while the suspects — Fidel Castro, 1960s mafiosi, the CIA’s Allen Dulles — gradually die. The thousands of classified government files on Oswald may or may not be red herrings, but opening them up for public inspection will give America some closure.
We cannot wait six decades, however, to end the lockdown on a free discussion about Covid-19. In subpoenaed emails from Anthony Fauci’s senior adviser David Morens, we learnt that National Institutes of Health apparatchiks hid their correspondence from Freedom of Information Act scrutiny. “Nothing,” wrote Boccaccio in his medieval plague epic The Decameron, “is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.”
In that spirit, Morens and former chief US medical adviser Fauci will have the chance to share some indecent facts about our own recent plague. Did they suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?
Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.
Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently suggested on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the Biden administration debanked crypto entrepreneurs. How closely does our financial system resemble a social credit system? Were an IRS contractor’s illegal leaks of Trump’s tax records anomalous, or should Americans assume their right to financial privacy hinges on their politics? And can one speak of a right to privacy at all when Congress conserves Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducts tens of thousands of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications?
South Africa confronted its apartheid history with a formal commission, but answering the questions above with piecemeal declassifications would befit both Trump’s chaotic style and our internet world, which processes and propagates short packets of information. The first Trump administration shied away from declassifications because it still believed in the rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie. This belief has faded.
Our ancien regime, like the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, thought the party would never end. 2016 shook their historicist faith in the arc of the moral universe but by 2020 they hoped to write Trump off as an aberration. In retrospect, 2020 was the aberration, the rearguard action of a struggling regime and its struldbrugg ruler. There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past.
The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress in the US, the racket of crescendoing real estate prices, and the explosion of public debt.
Perhaps an exceptional country could have continued to ignore such questions, but as Trump understood in 2016, America is not an exceptional country. It is no longer even a great one.
Identity politics endlessly relitigates ancient history. The study of recent history, to which the Trump administration is now called, is more treacherous — and more important. The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today. The internet will not allow us to forget those sins — but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving.
Tuesday, January 07, 2025
Sunday, January 05, 2025
52 Things I learned in 2024 : Ken Hendricks
Here are some of the most interesting things I learned this year:
1. Employees who use Firefox or Chrome have a 15% higher retention rate and report more satisfaction at work than employees who use Internet Explorer or Safari. This is because they’re less likely to accept the default way of doing things. (“What your web browser says about you“)
2. Doctors are 14% more likely to diagnose a child with ADHD on October 31, not because there are more kids with ADHD, but because the kids are excited to go trick-or-treating. (“Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis“)
3. It takes nine out of ten Americans to agree on a policy in order for it to have a 50% chance of being approved. (Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America)
4. When men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle. (“Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis“)
5. Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%. (“Effect of swearing on physical performance“)
6. Every culture has a word for black and white. If a culture has a third word for a color, it is always red. If it has a fourth word, it is either yellow or green. (Wikipedia)
7. Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.“)
8. Indian Americans own about half of all motels in the United States. Of them, 70% have the last name Patel. (Life Behind the Lobby)
9. About 25% of the decline of casual sex among young men since 2007 can be explained by video games. (“Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?“)
10. ChatGPT caused a 2% drop in the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork. (“The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market“)
11. AI produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than humans! Humans emit 27g of CO2 in the time it takes to write three hundred words. ChatGPT, however, performs the same task in 4.4 seconds and produces only 2.2g of CO2. (“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“)
12. Russia fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking pro-Russia media channels on YouTube. The fine doubles each week it remains unpaid. After 219 weeks, Google will owe Russia a googol. (“Russia fined Google more than Earth’s entire GDP for a Millennium“)
13. For every 10% increase in missionaries to China from a Congressional district, a Congressman was 8% more likely to vote for foreign aid in subsequent decades. (“Missionaries and the Birth of International Development“)
14. In 2018, truckers in Maine received an extra $5 million in overtime pay because of the ambiguity created by the Oxford comma in a state law. (“Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million“)
15. After fluoride is introduced into a city’s drinking water, the number of dentist offices drops 9%. (“Equilibrium effects of public goods: The impact of community water fluoridation on dentists“)
16. Legalization of online sports betting generates an 8% increase in credit card debt among sports betters. The poor are disproportionately affected: low income households spend 32% more on betting than high income households. (“Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households“)
17. Fidget spinners do not work. (“Putting a negative spin on it: Using a fidget spinner can impair memory for a video lecture“)
18. It takes twice as long to cook a chicken today compared to 100 years ago because twenty-first century chickens get less exercise. (The Essential New York Times Cookbook)
19. American baby names trends shifted from family names a century ago to popular names a generation ago to popular endings today. A generation of people named Jason has given way to babies with -son endings: Mason, Jackson, Grayson, and Carson. Today, 48% of the top 500 baby names share only ten endings. (“The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names“)
20. Irish peacekeepers have been in Lebanon so long that some Lebanese are developing Irish accents. (“Irish peacekeepers stood their ground in the face of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.“)
21. In 1985, a black bear in northern Georgia died from a cocaine overdose. It was stuffed and is now at the Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky. Because of a loophole in Kentucky marriage law, it is allowed to perform legally binding weddings. (Wikipedia)
22. The Moon is part of the Diocese of Orlando, in accordance with the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which states that “any newly discovered territory was placed under the jurisdiction of the diocese from which the expedition which discovered that territory left.” (“Does the Church Have Jurisdiction Over the Moon?“)
23. Going to the moon was never popular. The only time a majority of Americans supported the Apollo program was right after the Apollo 11 landing, when 53% did. (“Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight“)
24. Women are more likely to recommend shorter haircuts to clients they believe are as attractive or more attractive than themselves. (“Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair“)
25. Heavy metal guitarists who play fast tend to have higher rates of intrasexual competitiveness, too. The main motivating factor behind becoming a heavy metal guitarist is not to impress women, but to impress other men. (“Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success“)
26. Pregnancy burns 50,000 calories. (Also, according to Claude, it also takes 50,000 calories to keep a small maple tree alive for one year; generate 12 pounds of honey; drive an electric car for 20 miles; run five marathons; heat a hot tub from room temperature to 104°; or dissipate the energy from a baseball-size meteor entering the upper atmosphere at 40,000mph. Happy Mothers Day!) “Metabolic loads and the costs of metazoan reproduction“)
27. Because they lose their hearing as they age, men over the age of twenty-five can’t hear noises higher than 17.4 kHz. Shopkeepers in the U.K. invented an alarm that plays 17.4 kHz at 100 decibels to drive away loiterers—mostly young men. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)
28. By A.D. 750, because of copying errors and general forgetting-what-he-looked-like, the image of the Roman emperor on English coins evolved into a porcupine. (“Money, art, and representation: the powerful and pragmatic faces of medieval coinage“)
29. People overestimate others’ dishonesty by about 13.6%. (“Belief versus Reality: People Overestimate the Actual Dishonesty of Others”)
30. Vultures in India and Pakistan are dying from ingesting trace amounts of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory given to cattle throughout India and Pakistan. Because of this, Zoroastrians burial rites, which require vultures, are under threat. (“‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites“)
31. The programming language C is 75.88 times more energy efficient than Python and 71.9 times faster. (“Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency“)
32. On average, spouses in the United States have genetic similarity equivalent to that between 4th and 5th cousins. (“We find that the genomes of observed spousal pairs are significantly more similar than that of opposite-sex pairs drawn from the same population. As a benchmark, the magnitude of this similarity roughly corresponds to the similarity between 4th and 5th cousins.”) (“Assortative mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans“)
33. Members of all-male groups are more prone to lying than groups comprised of both men and women. When the first woman joins an all-male group, the rate of lying plummets. (“Honesty of Groups: Effects of Size and Gender Composition“)
34. The requirement that homes be built at least 21 meters apart in parts of the UK dates back to a 1902 regulation drafted by two men who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts. (“Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design – why Britain’s homes are so hot“)
35. Men are more likely to order two hamburgers at McDonald’s when they order with a screen. When they order from a human, they tend to order only one. (Rory Sutherland)
36. A Massachusetts law requires that fortune tellers be licensed and prohibits “pretended fortune telling.” (“Massachusetts law about fortune tellers“) (via Marginal Revolution)
37. Baby simulators, originally intended to deter teenage pregnancy, actually made girls more likely to get pregnant. Girls who had a baby simulator had an 8% pregnancy rate compared to 4% for girls who didn’t. (“Efficacy of infant simulator programmes to prevent teenage pregnancy“)
38. In the 1990s, then-leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-ll, and current leader Kim Jong-Un got fake Brazilian passports and went to Disneyland in Tokyo (probably). (“North Korea and the Brazil passports: Why were they used by the Kims?“)
39. Negative TV coverage of gas prices starts when gas hits $3.50 per gallon. Each 50-cent increase in gas prices generates an additional 7.5 percentage points of coverage. Fox News covers gas prices most often. (“Bad news bias in gasoline price coverage“)
40. Car seats are not required on planes because it would reduce seat supply and raise fares, causing more families to drive. Because driving is more dangerous than flying, for every child a required car seat would save on an airplane, 60 would die in car accidents. (NTSB)
41. Each additional negative word in a news headline drives 2.3% more clicks. (“Negativity drives online news consumption“)
42. People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch. (“How long does it take to buy a house?“)
43. In 2019, the United States spent 1% of its federal budget on kidney dialysis. (“Patients vs. Profits: Who Wins in the Traditional U.S. Dialysis System?“)
44. In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger. (“Brains vs Brawn: Relative brain size is sexually dimorphic amongst weapon-bearing ruminants“)
45. The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover accidently blown off test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found. (Wikipedia)
46. Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county. (“School shootings increase NRA donations“)
47. The producers of Mork and Mindy needed censors who spoke four languages to catch all the swear words Robin Williams tried to sneak in. (YouTube)
48.The lottery for getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War wasn’t actually random. The numbers drawn came from a tub that was not thoroughly mixed, and the person drawing almost always drew from the top. (Misha Teplitskiy) Monte Carlo simulations estimate the probability the numbers were randomly drawn was 0.09%. (Understanding Probability)
49. Foreign leaders and diplomats who stay at the White House are entitled to courtesy laundry service. Most guests need only one or two items cleaned, except, apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu, who brings suitcases full of dirty laundry on each visit. (He denies this.) (“Israel’s Netanyahu brings his dirty laundry to Washington. Literally.“)
50. Waymo self-driving taxis generate 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human drivers. After driving 25.3 million miles, Waymo Driver had nine property damage claims and two injury claims, compared to 78 property damage claims and 26 injury claims from humans who drive an equivalent number of miles. (“New Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles“)
51. Among luxury brands, an increase in the size of the logo by one point on a seven-point scale results in a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci and a $26.27 decrease for Louis Vuitton. (The Status Game)
52.Bulls can’t see red. It’s not red that makes them mad. It’s “being treated like crap” that makes them mad. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)
1. Employees who use Firefox or Chrome have a 15% higher retention rate and report more satisfaction at work than employees who use Internet Explorer or Safari. This is because they’re less likely to accept the default way of doing things. (“What your web browser says about you“)
2. Doctors are 14% more likely to diagnose a child with ADHD on October 31, not because there are more kids with ADHD, but because the kids are excited to go trick-or-treating. (“Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis“)
3. It takes nine out of ten Americans to agree on a policy in order for it to have a 50% chance of being approved. (Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America)
4. When men feel their masculinity is threatened, they are 24 percentage-points more likely to want to buy an SUV. They are also willing to pay $7,320 more than non-threatened men for the same vehicle. (“Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis“)
5. Swearing improves grip strength by 9%, wall sit time by 22%, and plank time by 12%. (“Effect of swearing on physical performance“)
6. Every culture has a word for black and white. If a culture has a third word for a color, it is always red. If it has a fourth word, it is either yellow or green. (Wikipedia)
7. Walking speed on the streets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia has increased 15% since 1979. (“Shifting Patterns of Social Interaction: Exploring the Social Life of Urban Spaces Through A.I.“)
8. Indian Americans own about half of all motels in the United States. Of them, 70% have the last name Patel. (Life Behind the Lobby)
9. About 25% of the decline of casual sex among young men since 2007 can be explained by video games. (“Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?“)
10. ChatGPT caused a 2% drop in the number of freelance jobs posted on Upwork. (“The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market“)
11. AI produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions than humans! Humans emit 27g of CO2 in the time it takes to write three hundred words. ChatGPT, however, performs the same task in 4.4 seconds and produces only 2.2g of CO2. (“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“)
12. Russia fined Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking pro-Russia media channels on YouTube. The fine doubles each week it remains unpaid. After 219 weeks, Google will owe Russia a googol. (“Russia fined Google more than Earth’s entire GDP for a Millennium“)
13. For every 10% increase in missionaries to China from a Congressional district, a Congressman was 8% more likely to vote for foreign aid in subsequent decades. (“Missionaries and the Birth of International Development“)
14. In 2018, truckers in Maine received an extra $5 million in overtime pay because of the ambiguity created by the Oxford comma in a state law. (“Oxford Comma Dispute Is Settled as Maine Drivers Get $5 Million“)
15. After fluoride is introduced into a city’s drinking water, the number of dentist offices drops 9%. (“Equilibrium effects of public goods: The impact of community water fluoridation on dentists“)
16. Legalization of online sports betting generates an 8% increase in credit card debt among sports betters. The poor are disproportionately affected: low income households spend 32% more on betting than high income households. (“Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting’s Impact on Vulnerable Households“)
17. Fidget spinners do not work. (“Putting a negative spin on it: Using a fidget spinner can impair memory for a video lecture“)
18. It takes twice as long to cook a chicken today compared to 100 years ago because twenty-first century chickens get less exercise. (The Essential New York Times Cookbook)
19. American baby names trends shifted from family names a century ago to popular names a generation ago to popular endings today. A generation of people named Jason has given way to babies with -son endings: Mason, Jackson, Grayson, and Carson. Today, 48% of the top 500 baby names share only ten endings. (“The mysterious tyranny of trendy baby names“)
20. Irish peacekeepers have been in Lebanon so long that some Lebanese are developing Irish accents. (“Irish peacekeepers stood their ground in the face of an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.“)
21. In 1985, a black bear in northern Georgia died from a cocaine overdose. It was stuffed and is now at the Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky. Because of a loophole in Kentucky marriage law, it is allowed to perform legally binding weddings. (Wikipedia)
22. The Moon is part of the Diocese of Orlando, in accordance with the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which states that “any newly discovered territory was placed under the jurisdiction of the diocese from which the expedition which discovered that territory left.” (“Does the Church Have Jurisdiction Over the Moon?“)
23. Going to the moon was never popular. The only time a majority of Americans supported the Apollo program was right after the Apollo 11 landing, when 53% did. (“Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight“)
24. Women are more likely to recommend shorter haircuts to clients they believe are as attractive or more attractive than themselves. (“Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair“)
25. Heavy metal guitarists who play fast tend to have higher rates of intrasexual competitiveness, too. The main motivating factor behind becoming a heavy metal guitarist is not to impress women, but to impress other men. (“Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success“)
26. Pregnancy burns 50,000 calories. (Also, according to Claude, it also takes 50,000 calories to keep a small maple tree alive for one year; generate 12 pounds of honey; drive an electric car for 20 miles; run five marathons; heat a hot tub from room temperature to 104°; or dissipate the energy from a baseball-size meteor entering the upper atmosphere at 40,000mph. Happy Mothers Day!) “Metabolic loads and the costs of metazoan reproduction“)
27. Because they lose their hearing as they age, men over the age of twenty-five can’t hear noises higher than 17.4 kHz. Shopkeepers in the U.K. invented an alarm that plays 17.4 kHz at 100 decibels to drive away loiterers—mostly young men. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)
28. By A.D. 750, because of copying errors and general forgetting-what-he-looked-like, the image of the Roman emperor on English coins evolved into a porcupine. (“Money, art, and representation: the powerful and pragmatic faces of medieval coinage“)
29. People overestimate others’ dishonesty by about 13.6%. (“Belief versus Reality: People Overestimate the Actual Dishonesty of Others”)
30. Vultures in India and Pakistan are dying from ingesting trace amounts of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory given to cattle throughout India and Pakistan. Because of this, Zoroastrians burial rites, which require vultures, are under threat. (“‘Our culture is dying’: vulture shortage threatens Zoroastrian burial rites“)
31. The programming language C is 75.88 times more energy efficient than Python and 71.9 times faster. (“Ranking Programming Languages by Energy Efficiency“)
32. On average, spouses in the United States have genetic similarity equivalent to that between 4th and 5th cousins. (“We find that the genomes of observed spousal pairs are significantly more similar than that of opposite-sex pairs drawn from the same population. As a benchmark, the magnitude of this similarity roughly corresponds to the similarity between 4th and 5th cousins.”) (“Assortative mating at loci under recent natural selection in humans“)
33. Members of all-male groups are more prone to lying than groups comprised of both men and women. When the first woman joins an all-male group, the rate of lying plummets. (“Honesty of Groups: Effects of Size and Gender Composition“)
34. The requirement that homes be built at least 21 meters apart in parts of the UK dates back to a 1902 regulation drafted by two men who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts. (“Edwardian morals, Thatcher and bad design – why Britain’s homes are so hot“)
35. Men are more likely to order two hamburgers at McDonald’s when they order with a screen. When they order from a human, they tend to order only one. (Rory Sutherland)
36. A Massachusetts law requires that fortune tellers be licensed and prohibits “pretended fortune telling.” (“Massachusetts law about fortune tellers“) (via Marginal Revolution)
37. Baby simulators, originally intended to deter teenage pregnancy, actually made girls more likely to get pregnant. Girls who had a baby simulator had an 8% pregnancy rate compared to 4% for girls who didn’t. (“Efficacy of infant simulator programmes to prevent teenage pregnancy“)
38. In the 1990s, then-leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-ll, and current leader Kim Jong-Un got fake Brazilian passports and went to Disneyland in Tokyo (probably). (“North Korea and the Brazil passports: Why were they used by the Kims?“)
39. Negative TV coverage of gas prices starts when gas hits $3.50 per gallon. Each 50-cent increase in gas prices generates an additional 7.5 percentage points of coverage. Fox News covers gas prices most often. (“Bad news bias in gasoline price coverage“)
40. Car seats are not required on planes because it would reduce seat supply and raise fares, causing more families to drive. Because driving is more dangerous than flying, for every child a required car seat would save on an airplane, 60 would die in car accidents. (NTSB)
41. Each additional negative word in a news headline drives 2.3% more clicks. (“Negativity drives online news consumption“)
42. People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch. (“How long does it take to buy a house?“)
43. In 2019, the United States spent 1% of its federal budget on kidney dialysis. (“Patients vs. Profits: Who Wins in the Traditional U.S. Dialysis System?“)
44. In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger. (“Brains vs Brawn: Relative brain size is sexually dimorphic amongst weapon-bearing ruminants“)
45. The first human object launched into space wasn’t Sputnik 1. It was actually a manhole cover accidently blown off test shaft during a nuclear test in Nevada 38 days earlier. It reached speeds equal to six times Earth’s escape velocity and was never found. (Wikipedia)
46. Donations to the NRA increase 30% the year after a school shooting occurs in a county. (“School shootings increase NRA donations“)
47. The producers of Mork and Mindy needed censors who spoke four languages to catch all the swear words Robin Williams tried to sneak in. (YouTube)
48.The lottery for getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War wasn’t actually random. The numbers drawn came from a tub that was not thoroughly mixed, and the person drawing almost always drew from the top. (Misha Teplitskiy) Monte Carlo simulations estimate the probability the numbers were randomly drawn was 0.09%. (Understanding Probability)
49. Foreign leaders and diplomats who stay at the White House are entitled to courtesy laundry service. Most guests need only one or two items cleaned, except, apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu, who brings suitcases full of dirty laundry on each visit. (He denies this.) (“Israel’s Netanyahu brings his dirty laundry to Washington. Literally.“)
50. Waymo self-driving taxis generate 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human drivers. After driving 25.3 million miles, Waymo Driver had nine property damage claims and two injury claims, compared to 78 property damage claims and 26 injury claims from humans who drive an equivalent number of miles. (“New Swiss Re study: Waymo is safer than even the most advanced human-driven vehicles“)
51. Among luxury brands, an increase in the size of the logo by one point on a seven-point scale results in a $122.26 price decrease for Gucci and a $26.27 decrease for Louis Vuitton. (The Status Game)
52.Bulls can’t see red. It’s not red that makes them mad. It’s “being treated like crap” that makes them mad. (Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution)
Wednesday, January 01, 2025
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