Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

10/12/2025

Incredible talk!

Heterodox Academy Research SymposiumHeld on February 23, 2024, at the Stanford Faculty ClubCreator of the “Risk = Hazard + Outrage” formula for risk communic...

10/12/2025

This article is absolutely fantastic!

The real question is why Koreans are so poor

05/12/2025

Building so-called "affordable housing" is not the fastest or most efficient way to bring rents down. The fastest way is to just allow more housing of all types to be constructed.

Even when luxury apartments are built, the people who move into those move out of other apartments which are typically less luxurious. There is downward pressure on the rents in the apartments they moved out of. These apartments are then filled by many new tenants who are also upgrading due to these previously unaffordable nice apartments now becoming affordable.

This process continues on down through throughout the entire housing stock in the city. This is a well known finding among economists, they even have a technical term is describe it which is "filtering." Unfortunately, this doesn't provide a hero to thank or a villain to hate, so it's not a feel good story, so it's not very well known.

02/12/2025

Fantastic interview!

In this episode of The Winston Marshall Show, I sit down with Sir Richard Evans, Britain’s leading historian of N**i Germany and the chief expert witness in ...

02/12/2025

"If native born Americans (anyone born, raised, and still living in the US) in lower income brackets do not move up nearly as often as immigrants who arrived in those same lower income brackets (the Chinese and the Cubans for example), then the question must be raised (as to) whether there are external barriers to (income) mobility blocking the rise of native born Americans, and which somehow exempt immigrants.

Such a hypothesis hardly meets even the test of plausibility! A more realistic explanation might be that (initially) low income immigrants bring a different set of attitudes and values than the attitudes and values of low income Americans.

In other words, the real question is whether there are external barriers or internal cultures that account for the difference in actual (income) movement observed, even when (income) mobility as an opportunity still exists for both.” ~ Thomas Sowell in 'Wealth, Poverty, and Politics'

21/11/2025

Lots of people I like have said that professors and scholars these days are too concerned with people's feelings. That they spend too much time focusing on feelings, especially the feelings of their students in college classes.

I have come to disagree, and I actually disagree quite strongly. In fact, I don't think social scientists talk about feelings nearly enough. As much as I hate to admit this, because I would like for it not to be true, most people are not very fond of rigorous thinking and analysis, it requires genuine effort, it sometimes results in mild headaches, and often results in feeling stupid or inadequate.

More importantly, simply indulging in fashionable dogmas that are popular around you feels good. These are the feelings I never heard discussed in any of the courses I did take which talked about feelings in college, like sociology. The professor never bothered to mention that the types of woke concepts he was teaching us were likely to make us more popular with our friends if we started repeating them. Instead, he talked as if they were dangerous and subversive ideas.

I heard a story about a philosophy professor at an Ivy League university in the US who routinely surveys his students, asking them if they would have stood up and rebelled against the N**i regime had they been living in Germany in the 30s and 40s, a majority of them said yes. That's hysterical. The majority of these students are afraid to openly go against any fashionable concept in the social environment they live in, namely, elite university culture.

Is it About You or is it About Them? You cannot truthfully claim you want to help poor people if you make no effort to learn enough Economics, statistics, and Economic/political history to be able to …

19/11/2025

When asked to consider matters of political importance, the average citizen, according the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, "is impatient of long or complicated argument," is in possession of "weak rational processes," is "not 'all there.'"

In Schumpeter's judgement, the typical citizen "drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again."

17/11/2025

A longstanding (and valid in my honest opinion I might add) reason to oppose large scale immigration is the possibility that some or possibly even many of the immigrants might go on welfare, social security, Medicaid or Medicare as soon as they are able to and "milk the system."

Another widespread concern about large scale immigration in the United States which has become prominent over the last 10 years in my experience is the possibility that they won't share our civic and political values and they will vote for the wrong candidates and destroy the positive aspects of this country that caused them to want to move here in the first place.

Fortunately, in the United States, we already have a policy solution in place to avoid both of these concerns. It is called the H1B Visa guest worker program! People who move to the US on H1B visas must work, cannot receive any state benefits (besides unemployment insurance), and cannot vote. In fact, there is not even a direct path to citizenship for H1B Visa holders.

There is an indirect path to citizenship where after 3 or 6 years, their employer can sponsor them for a green card. The processing of a green card application usually takes between 1 and 10 years. Then if they get their green card, they have to wait another 5 years before they can apply for an actual US citizenship. So if they can eventually vote, it takes about 8 - 15 years before they can.

Because of this, a priori, I would expect H1B visas to be quite popular among "conservatives" and "right wing" people. But I would be wrong. Instead, they hate them for economically confused reasons. All of this leads one to suspect that for some of them, the justifications for not liking the program may come after deciding they don't like it, not before.

16/11/2025

If you ever want to study income and/or wealth inequality over time in the United States (or any other country for that matter), do not, I repeat, DO NOT use household level data.

As a country's economy grows over time, i.e. as its people become more prosperous, young adults will become financially able to move out of their parents' places to live on their own younger and younger, which splits what would have been measured as just 1 household into 1 + however many adult children have moved out to live on their own.

The same is the case for elderly people who go from typically having to move into (one of) their middle aged children's house to not having to do that.

I should note that in many parts of the United States, there has likely been reversal in both of these trends over the last 5 - 15 years due to the housing affordability crisis.

16/11/2025

Reposting this brief article I wrote last year here because unfortunately, it is starting to feel more timely now than it did when I wrote it:

I believe it is absolutely vital that at least some proportion of the citizenry of any society obtains and maintains a solid grasp of some…

16/11/2025

Everyone who has just enjoyed a few video clips of interviews with Thomas Sowell, or even long interviews with him & shares his quotes owes it to themselves to read 2 - 5 of his books.

Edit on 4/22/2024: I just recorded myself reading this entire article and uploaded it to YouTube for anyone who is dyslexic or has ADHD or…

06/11/2025

I spent many years in my early 20s being absolutely fascinated by epistemology (the study of knowledge), philosophy of science, scientific methodology debates, and statistics. It was all because I was concerned about how hard it is to find the truth in such a complex world where everything is changing all the time, many phenomena are not directly measurable, and many events are overdetermined.

But I think a lot of that time was wasted in retrospect, because throughout it, I was working on the assumption that many or most people, or at least many or most researchers, care more about the pursuing truth than they do about feeling good or righteous or about not being perceived as going against their tribe.

Bad faith and focusing on moral blame or culpability rather causal analysis are beyond rampant. Even among economists (on Twitter), the one field of study I try to follow a bit. They just make things up and state them as facts. Or they accuse the people they disagree with as being bad at math or as being biased. It's embarrassing, I feel embarrassed for them.

They are not serious people who care more about making the world a better place than they do about certain other goals.