Amy Wax Versus the “Midwit Gynocrats”

This conversation is too good to paywall, so I’m sharing it with the world. My last discussion with Amy Wax, which focused mostly on immigration, went viral (see podcast and video and transcript), and since she recently reviewed my book for The American Conservative we decided it was the perfect time to talk again.

We of course begin by discussing the review, which focuses on the question of how honest we should be about the sources of racial differences in achievement. At the beginning it looks like we disagree, but I came to realize that we both in practice advocate what Amy calls “soft realism,” that is, the idea that we should denounce the theory that racism is the source of group disparities while stressing that government cannot change them.

This leads to a discussion of birthrates more generally, and the problem of fewer people having babies, particularly the most accomplished among us. I bring up the issue of biotech, and it turns out that we think about these things in different ways. I don’t get the sense that Amy actually disagrees with me all that much on issues like surrogacy, but it seems that she’s much more forgiving of delusional egalitarian impulses coming from her own side, and finds reasons to give social conservatives the benefit of the doubt on assumptions that I’m pretty much willing to dismiss completely. I ask her about the possibility of getting around uncomfortable questions about group differences by putting our faith in things like genetic engineering and embryo selection, which would require supporting the left. We also discuss how the influence of Christianity on the right reinforces the left’s faith in blank slatism...

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