Editing 11: Sam Harris - Fighting with Friends

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  So, a lot of people continued to talk to him in part because-and I think this is something that hasn't been teased out-he was supporting an older style of science, which-and this is, again, something that's gonna be super complicated-was much more disagreeable. Now the woke movement has seized on this as, "Well, that's the cowboy oppressive science of male assholes." But he was supporting a network of people who might not have been supported otherwise to somewhat break out of the mold. And because the U.S. government had stepped away from that work, in large measure, in my opinion, people were so dependent on him that they were eager to look the other way. And there was also the hint, I think, that this wasn't really Jeffrey Epstein, that this was really something else funding.

'''Sam Harris:''' Hmm. Well, I dunno about that. I mean, I think the relative penury of science is a corrupting variable and the fact that we underfund science and that it matters that when the rich guy comes into the room, right to scientists because they're so starved for money, that's just corrupting.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Look, this is, I've been on this, this is going to get us into the immigration question, which is that the - in the mid-eighties, under Reagan, the science complex, particularly the National Science Foundation under Eric Block, through the National Academy of Sciences and a subdivision called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, GUIRR, are conspired to destroy the bargaining power of American scientists by flooding the market. And what they did is they did an economic analysis with both supply and demand curves to say that the wages, which you can calculate when you have two intersecting curves, were going to go above six figures for new PhDs. And then -

'''Sam Harris:''' Let's get a lot of Indians in here and —?

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  Well, it's four, it was four countries. It was China, India, Taiwan and Korea. And China went from zero to 60 in like, no, they were sending us nobody, and then I think there were like over 25% of all graduate students. And of course, graduate students aren't students, they're workers. So there's a cryptic labor economy inside of the universities. And what the university system figured out was that in order to get this work done, we'd have to have these misclassified students who do the work, imported as foreign workers. And what we would do is we would take the economic analysis, which they secretly did in 1986, and they'd subtract off the demand curve and they'd just do a supply analysis based on the demography of the baby boom going into the baby bust, which is our generation, Gen X. And that demographic alarm was sounded to get the immigration act of 1990 passed, which has like the H1B as one of its most famous features. So that's a whole story about how the actual workings — I'm the guy who uncovered that and I chased that all the way down to the person who wrote that secret study that was never released, never dated, never authored.  

'''Sam Harris:''' Right.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That thing was the stepping away of the federal government from its commitment through the Vannevar Bush Endless Frontier agreement to fund the kickass blue-sky research that this country has done better than anyone else.

'''Sam Harris:''' But how is that distinguishable from what on his face seems to me to be a rational policy, which is why not try to attract the world's best and brightest and incentivize them to start their businesses here, settle here, you know what, once you've gotten your PhD at Harvard, you know, you, you've got a green card and you know, here's your, here's the Silicon Valley's over there. You know what I mean? So why when ...

'''Sam Harris:''' No, but no, but no, my, my point is that strikes me as a good policy, even though that would create more competition for, you know, so-called Americans —

'''Sam Harris:''' — because we're now open for the world's business. But if you actually wanted to maximize, you know, creativity and industry here, you would want to import Indians and Chinese and Taiwanese and Koreans.  

'''Sam Harris:''' You got your wife and then you want to close the border?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' What? Yeah. Well, first of all, that's how country clubs work, right? Right. So, the idea is that when you get country club, when you get into a country club, you don't instantly say, well, I don't understand. It would be immoral for me to close the country club.

''01:03:01''

'''Eric Weinstein:''' I mean, so it's a very weird thing for me that people who are very steeped in what you were just talking about, which is this interesting mimetic complex that got pushed out, don't tend to think critically about it. Of course, we want the best people in the world to come to the U.S., selfishly.  

'''Sam Harris:'''  I mean, you know, everyone doesn't, I mean, the person who has to compete with the best coming from India and Taiwan and China.  

'''Sam Harris:''' That person, let's say in, in a, you know, software engineering, that person has found, now suddenly on a much more competitive playing field.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' And yeah, this is, this is... So what I was told about this —  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  I don't even know how to go into all of the things that are like really funny and wrong about this. Like one of which is, "Well, are you afraid to compete with somebody from India?" Well, maybe I'm afraid to compete with a hundred people from India. You know, like the issue is what is your your price point...

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  When you talked about software, right, most of software is glorified for and while loops. Let's not, you know, you invoke a library, you code up a class.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' All right. Well no, it's just, I'm just saying that most of what it is you're just writing code. It's got a kind of a mystique about it because a lot of people haven't done it and it's too symbolic, whatever.  

'''Eric Weinstein:''' It's plumbing and a lot of science is plumbing. Yeah. And so, a lot of the stuff about the best is not very relevant. If you wanted to take the stuff that's really distinguished, you know, like you've got Ramanujan coming from India, you know you've got you know, Ellis coming from South Africa, whoever it is, that's really amazing, we have plenty of room for the tiny number of people who are absolutely nonhomogeneous super contributors.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  I'm not saying that, I'm saying a lot of different things. One is that people in the country have rights and they have asymmetric rights to their own labor market. That's a large part of what it means to be a citizen of a country. If I start to talk about your rights that are perhaps your most valuable economic possession, if you really think about the American workers, most valuable economic possession is asymmetric access to the American labor market. If I say, you know, your right is not an asset, but is instead an impediment, it's a barrier. And what we need to do is get rid of the red tape and I'm not going to pay you for it because it's not an asset.  I'm going to take it from you and I'm going to say that that's what the free market is. Well, that has nothing to do with the free market. I wrote a paper called Migration for the Benefit of All that pointed out you're free to securitize people's right and pay for it. And then everybody wins.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  And the funny part about it, the, the hysterically funny part about it is that no capitalists who claim that they're interested in getting rid of the inefficiency that comes from being forced to use your own labor are interested in the model in which you actually pay people for their securitized rights. Because the real thing they're interested in is not the tiny inefficiency, which is called the Harberger Triangle.

 

 

'''Eric Weinstein:'''            There's a giant structure below it called the Moorhouse Rectangle, which is what is transferred from labor to capital.  

'''Sam Harris:'''  The amazing thing is you've referenced this several times over cocktails.

'''Sam Harris:'''  In the last two years.  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  Yeah. Well, but, but my point...

'''Sam Harris:'''  This is cocktail party chatter...

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  No. But I see it, I see it differently.

'''Sam Harris:'''  ... the Weinstein family.

'''Eric Weinstein:''' Sam, I see your comment that well don't we want the best and the brightest where you don't reference wage competition. It sounds more like intellectual competition, right? When you, when you, when you open a border and selectively only in certain fields, it's like opening a window in an airplane and it specifically affects the seat at which it's opened differently than everywhere else in the plane. Right?  

'''Eric Weinstein:'''  So, the problem I have with this is that it's a large mimetic complex and get it popping back up to the Jeff Epstein issue. The entire university and scientific complex was built on this incredible embedded growth obligation, right?

'''Eric Weinstein:''' That is the thing that caused the system to have to rescue itself with immigration. So, it's really not about immigration or brown people or I don't want to compete against the best and the prizes. It, the issue was we didn't have enough people to feed into a pyramid system. And what you could do is you could, you could reference a poverty differential between Asia, which was training people acceptably well in technical subjects, but had it at a lower level, now that's changed some to fill in the bottom of the pyramid. And so that's really what it was. It was an economic X point that has nothing to do with the best and the brightest or the color of one's skin. It was just a way of saving a pyramid scheme.