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Putin as the New Hitler: The Russian Political Philosophy Which Justifies Unlimited Atrocities (To Save the World)

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

When the Nazis in the mid-twentieth century carried out schemes to kill millions of people (soldiers and civilians), they did not say, “Yes, we are evil, but we have the most guns.” Rather, they espoused a political philosophy to justify their actions. According to this Wikipedia entry, the Nazis held that they were simply carrying out normal, healthy, natural selection (the strong eliminating the weak) by having the “superior” race kill and displace the inferior races of humans. Germans therefore felt justified in occupying lands in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine, to provide “living space” and agricultural production for the master race.

It seems that a somewhat similar political philosophy has taken hold among Russian elites. This became evident early on in Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when the Russians bombed a children’s shelter and a maternity hospital. Since then, there have been innumerable bombings of apartment buildings, shopping malls, etc., as deliberate murderous attacks on civilians, rather than having any direct military benefit. The Russians are killing  Ukrainians with the sort of callous abandon displayed by the Nazis towards “undesirables”. The initial Russian complaints about Ukraine joining NATO have disappeared; it is clear that Russia wants to simply erase Ukraine as an entity. It seems that this has been Russia’s plan under Putin for many years. Reportedly, Russian textbooks since around 2014 have deleted discussion of Ukraine as a separate nation.

Where did this toxic outlook come from? According to many observers, a chief architect for this view is political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. German professor Antony Mueller has summarized some of Dugin’s positions:

Russians are “eschatologically chosen.” They must stand against the false faith, the pseudoreligion of Western liberalism and the spread of its evil: modernity, scientism, postmodernity, and the new world order. This is the thesis of Aleksandr Dugin, the prominent Russian philosopher, and a mentor of the Russian president Vladimir Putin…His theory is a “crusade” against postmodernity, the postindustrial society, liberal thought, and globalization… For Dugin, America is a threat to the Russian culture and to Russia’s identity. He makes his position unmistakably clear when he declares:

“I strongly believe that Modernity is absolutely wrong and the Sacred Tradition is absolutely right. USA is the manifestation of all I hate—Modernity, westernization, unipolarity, racism, imperialism, technocracy, individualism, capitalism.”

Dugin apparently believes that the world, or at least Eurasia, can only be saved from the ravages of “modernity” and American influence by uniting under Russian leadership  and returning to the Sacred Tradition of “religion, hierarchy, and family.”

An independent Ukraine stands in the way of this grand vision. From the Guardian:

Dugin’s worldview is most clearly articulated in his 1997 publication “The Foundations of Geopolitics”, which reportedly became a textbook in the Russian general staff academy and solidified his transition from a dissident to a prominent pillar of the conservative establishment.

In the book, Dugin laid out his vision to divide the world, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through annexations and alliances while proclaiming his opposition to Ukraine as a sovereign state.

“Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness,” he wrote.

… Twenty-five years later, Russia’s president repeated some of Dugin’s views on Ukraine in his 4,000-word essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, which many saw as a blueprint for the invasion he launched just six months after it was published.

And as far as Ukrainians resisting Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions, Dugin said, “I think we should kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians], there can’t be any other talk.”

There you have it. The exact influence of Dugin on Putin is debated, but there is no doubt that Dugin’s views are influential in the circles of Russian decision makers. Many Westerners thought early on that Putin would be satisfied with conquering the Russian-speaking Donbas region in the east, and a narrow land bridge to connect that with the Russian-occupied Crimea. His attempts, foiled by heroic Ukrainian resistance, to take Kiev and to take Odessa in the southwest showed that he wants the whole enchilada.

This could be a long war.

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Addendum: Dugin’s daughter was killed by a car bomb near Moscow on August 20, 2022. Reportedly the bomb was aimed at Dugin himself, since he was expected to be in the car with his daughter. Moscow accused Ukraine of the assassination, which Kiev plausibly denies. There is also reasonable speculation that a Russian government agency (presumably with Putin’s tacit approval) was aiming to bump off Dugin, for some Byzantine reason.

Dog Cartoon Information Warfare for the 21st Century

Joy1 Comment

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has generated a lot of attention. Many people care deeply about this unfolding crisis. I wondered back in March 2022 where all this energy would end up getting channeled?

What I had in mind was not an army of “cartoon dogs”, and yet here we are. Official coverage of the #NAFO dog memes this week has come from the Economist and Politico.

The North Atlantic Fella Organisation (spellings vary) is a tongue-in-cheek label adopted by a virtual army that champions Ukraine’s cause and harangues its foes on social media. Its members don the avatar of a cartoon shiba inu dog…

When your enemy is as humorless as Putin, there is an advantage to being funny. After circulating in internet backwaters for weeks, official Ukrainian accounts have acknowledged the help offered by the movement.

The effects of #NAFO are 1) to influence the flow of information/opinions and 2) raise money for Ukraine defense.

For example, you can buy a “ticket” to a “beach party” in Crimea: https://www.saintjavelin.com/products/crimea-beach-party-early-bird-ticket-sale-1-entry

Mike posted earlier about donating to the Kyiv department of Economics.

And this is a just an aid organization that is not very funny but helps refugees in Lviv.

An explainer of a different Very Online thing is https://www.slowboring.com/p/dark-brandon-explained. Dark Brandon and #NAFO are similar in the sense that supporters are made to feel like they are part of a brotherhood of winners who share fun jokes.

Balaji Srinivasan recently released a book called The Network State suggesting that online communities of likeminded people are so powerful that they could supplant what we have known as “countries” for a few centuries. From what I can tell, families want to live in a real place that has tangible services and security. The interesting thing about #NAFO is that it’s purpose is to support an old-fashioned country defending its physical borders.

Meanwhile, in the country of Russia, as reported by the WSJ, “The chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil-and-gas giant, Lukoil PJSC, died Thursday after falling from a hospital window in Moscow, according to Russian state media agency TASS.”

The World is Watching Top Gun Maverick

Joy1 Comment

I see that you’re hurtin’, why’d you take so long

To tell me you need me? I see that you’re bleeding
You don’t need to show me again
But if you decide to, I’ll ride in this life with you
I won’t let go ’til the end

So cry tonight
But don’t you let go of my hand
You can cry every last tear

These are the lyrics to the song sung by Lady Gaga in the closing credits of Top Gun: Maverick. This song has been on the Billboard Top 100 chart for 6 weeks. The film TG:M is on its way to breaking a billion dollars worldwide at the box office this year. People (millions of people in every demographic all over the world) want to see Tom Cruise, playing himself (j/k), save the day. At the end of the movie they expect you to want to cry, and then Lady Gaga tells you to just let it out.

The only bit of acting that was hard to believe in the movie was the guy who was trying to play the arrogant jerk. The writers were trying to inject some drama with his lines, but the whole cast was so good-hearted and earnest. These folks seemed about 2 meters from heaven, and I don’t just mean because of flying at high altitudes.

After seeing TG:M in theaters this weekend, I watched the original 1986 movie (free on Amazon Prime right now) for comparison. The locker room banter in TG1 seemed more genuinely mean-spirited. That was back when bullies were bullies and no one was afraid of getting canceled?

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Thoughts for the week on podcasts and the Constitution

JoyLeave a comment
  1. Jamal Greene was the most recent guest on Conversations with Tyler. This is how Greene describes his work habits as an academic with children:

GREENE: … my most effective work habit is to use the entire day to work. I get a lot of work done late at night. Most of my time during the day is spent teaching classes or meeting with students, and all writing and reading and preparation and everything is much later. That means I don’t watch television shows. It’s a really extended workday.

I work during soccer practices. I work sitting in the car while my kids are doing something or other. I don’t segregate times of the day where I can’t work.

One thing I find personally is that if I’m doing empirical work then I really need to be inside with at least one external monitor. As much as I like the idea of working from the pool (referencing the viral video of the week) being at my office is the best set up.

2. Currently I am teaching an online asynchronous class. Considering that my students are on the move in different places right now, I decided to create a podcast assignment. This seems to have gone over well. One student had a criticism for the episode that she chose: it was not entertaining. Another student complained that his episode had too much fluff about the personal lives of the speakers. This raises the interesting question of how the experts manage to make podcasts informative without being boring. It’s an art. Talking about your personal life to break up the subject matter can work but it can also feel like a waste of time.

3. For a discussion group, I read The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

Something that stood out to me was the sheer intensity of these guys. Liberty is a serious topic, but I’ll just share something that is funny from the book.

In the middle of a long fiery speech of Patrick Henry, the book inserts a line in brackets:

What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue? {Here Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President’s enslaving Americans, and the horrible consequences that must result.}

A footnote explains that stenographer had difficulty keeping up with Mr. Henry and was occasionally reduced to recording a mere summary of his words. It’s impressive that a stenographer could have gotten as much as they did.

I came away from the book thinking that people should talk more about this moment in history, and then I started noticing when people do talk about it. In fact, Tyler was interviewing a constitutional scholar this week and explicitly addressed the idea of “federalism.”

4. The debate does rage on 200+ years later.

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Content moderation strategy

Joy6 Comments

Anyone can comment on this blog. We’d love to see more comments. Challenging our ideas is fine. Telling us that you like our work is encouraging.

If you are in the know, then you assume we have a comment moderation policy, because everyone needs one. If you have never run a website then you might think it is possible to simply have an open form that anyone could type into and get immediately published on the platform.

Comments come in every day, but most of them never get posted. We are not against free speech or silencing an opposition. Most of the comments, if you can even call them comments, are spam. Sometimes spammers try to get posted by saying that they love the site, and sometimes the text seems like AI-generated pornography. The words are not written by humans or at least not humans who have actually read our content.

I don’t think it’s smart to be 100% transparent about our “algorithm” for filtering out this spam. That would make it easier to for bad actors to accomplish what they want to accomplish.

To our human readers, please comment. Your comment will get posted, although sometimes it might take a minute or even hours to get through. We are not censoring ideas, yet we need a moderation policy or else this place would not be fun. People would not want to wade through spam.

Elon Musk buying Twitter is the big news this week. He wants to enhance free speech on the site and, according to him, make it more open and fun. Some fans are hoping that he will make the content moderation and ban policy more transparent. Maybe that’s possible. Maybe he can improve the site.

My point is that if you have not been on the admin side of an internet forum then you might not realize the challenge it presents. There are trade offs involved. I believe that there can be improvements to the current system at Twitter. However, if you want to be taken seriously be tech folk then ask for a system that is possible. A substantially better experience might be incompatible with the site being free to users.

In our case, we could improve our system at EWED. Real people who comment will not like the lag, and fixing that is a technical problem. More time and money could solve it, but this site makes no money.

The economics insight is that you get what you pay for. Studio executives make the movies they believe you will pay for. We get the politicians we bother to vote for. Journalists report what they get paid to write.

Twitter could create a paid user tier. Paid users would be entitled to speak to a human on staff at Twitter in the event that they get censored and have the option of an appeals process.

I am used to getting a lot of services for free online. New companies roll out a huge free initial offering to harvest users and data. I have spent most of my adult life in that roll out phase. Eventually the party stops and investors want to see a revenue stream. Maybe I should start paying for the internet services I value. Maybe part of the reason the conversation is so rancorous is that we are transitioning away from everything being free. Inventing social media is sort of like humans discovering fire and cocaine at the same time! We are still figuring out how to use these tools effectively and safely.

I think a bad scenario happens if we cannot transition over to a patronage model. Remaining trapped in a free stuff mentality would be worse in the long run. I hope Napster didn’t ruin me. In an ideal world, I would be willing to pay for social media and also never spend more than 2 hours a day scrolling on any open platform. We should try for that. We should supplement our online reading with content that has made it past a publisher. For now, one way to get around Twitter censorship is to buy and read books.

Musk, Twitter, and Poison Pills

Scott Buchanan1 Comment

It has been all over the financial news that Elon Musk made an offer last week to buy out Twitter for $54.20 per share, which is well above its recent stock price. And also, that the board quickly stiff-armed Musk by adopting a “poison pill” provision. What are poison pills, are they a good thing, and how does this particular one work?

Major decisions for a corporation are made by its board of directors. In theory, they are supposed to direct operations for the benefit of the company’s shareholders, who are considered the actual owners of the corporation. The members of the board are elected by the shareholders in annual meetings.

In practice, the board largely does what it wants, and has an outsized influence on who gets elected. The board sets the agenda of the annual meetings, and proposes successor directors. In theory, shareholders can propose resolutions and alternative board candidates at an annual meeting, but it usually takes a determined effort by some activist shareholder group to actually push through some measure that is not approved by the existing board. The outside board members are often executives of other companies, and so are naturally attuned to the interests of the managerial class.  Thus, the members of this Old Boys (and Girls) Club tend to vote each other generous pay:  board members are typically paid very handsomely for what is often a fairly undemanding, part-time job.

Big corporate mergers and takeovers became a thing in the 1980’s. Some outside investor would make an offer to buy up company shares for more than the current market price. Often,  management would resist this offer, since it might entail them losing their cushy jobs. The delicate matter for management in such cases was to convince shareholders that rejecting the buyout offer was in their best long-term interest.

As in so many matters, “where you stand depends on where you sit.” Management would argue that “short-termism” is bad for the company and for the nation as a whole; the “corporate raiders” would just fire people, break up the company, and sell off the pieces, and generally create misery. The outside investors would reply that their new management would “unlock value” better than the current management was doing, by making operations more efficient and competitive and innovative.

A variety of measures might be implemented by the board to make it less attractive or less feasible for a change in control. The terms of the board of directors might be staggered, so that it would be impossible for the existing board to be totally changed out in less than say 3 years, even if someone controlled 100% of the shares. A company I was associated with in the 1990’s implemented a policy that provided for generous severance packages for upper employees in the event of change of control. (Again, management looking out for themselves).

The term “poison pill” typically refers to some measure that  targets share prices, in a way to discourage a hostile takeover. The most common form is the “flip-in” approach: 

A flip-in poison pill strategy involves allowing the shareholders, except for the acquirer, to purchase additional shares at a discount. Though purchasing additional shares provides shareholders with instantaneous profits, the practice dilutes the value of the limited number of shares already purchased by the acquiring company. This right to purchase is given to the shareholders before the takeover is finalized and is often triggered when the acquirer amasses a certain threshold percentage of shares of the target company.

This is what the Twitter board has pulled on Musk. If he acquires more than 15% of Twitter shares without board approval, the company will allow any shareholder (except Musk) to purchase additional shares at a 50% discount. Yes, this dilution would tend to lower the value of the shares, but if a lot of shareholders bought into this offer, his share of control would shrink. If he tried to buy yet more shares to get back to more than 15% ownership, the company would issue yet more discounted shares to everyone except him.

Is the Twitter board acting in their own interests, or the interests of the shareholders? Investment adviser Larry Black noted, “Let me point out something obvious: If Elon Musk takes Twitter private, the Twitter board members don’t have jobs any more, which pays them $250K-$300K per year for what is a nice part-time job. That could explain a lot.”

Musk hinted at a “Plan B”, and tweeted provocatively, “Love Me Tender”. He might be considering trying to bypass the board altogether and make a “tender offer” to the shareholders at large to sell their shares to him, at some attractive price. Typical conditions for such an offer would be that he only has to make good on his purchase offer if some large plurality of the shareholders take him up on it. It turns out that in practice this approach can be messy and complicated and delayed, probably not something the fast-moving Musk might have patience with. Also, even if he captured 100% of the shares, he could not replace all the existing board members for something like three years, so they could remain sitting there,  making anti-Musk decisions all along.

Musk’s offer has now put Twitter “in play” as a takeover target. You know that lots of wealthy people and entities are consulting their investment bankers about becoming a white (or black) knight here. Anyway, it makes for great theater. Popcorn, anyone?

Truth As a Casualty of Wars

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

The saying that “The first casualty of war is the truth”  has been credited to anti-war Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918  and also to the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus. We have seen this played out dramatically with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. From the Ukrainian side have come the predictable overinflated estimates of the enemy’s losses, and perhaps understated reporting of their own casualties. Also, on the first day or two of the war there was a raunchy defiant response of Ukrainian defenders to a “Russian ship” that was demanding their surrender; as far as I know that exchange was for real, but the initial report by Ukraine that all the heroic defenders were killed was not true. Maybe I am biased here, but these sorts of excesses are stretching some core truth, not trampling over it roughshod.

On the Russian side, perhaps because there is no even vaguely legitimate justification for their invasion, the lies have been simply ludicrous. Apparently, the Russian troops have been told that they are going there to rescue Ukrainians from the current regime which is a bunch of  “neo-Nazis”.  If Putin’s thugs had a sense of humor or perspective, they might have discerned the irony of characterizing the Ukrainian regime as “neo-Nazi” when the president (Zelenskyy) is a Jew, whose grandfather’s brothers died in Nazi concentration camps.

And the Russian lies go beyond ludicrous, to revolting and inhuman. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has dismissed concerns about civilian casualties as “pathetic shrieks” from Russia’s enemies, and denied Ukraine had even been invaded.

The Associated Press snapped a picture in the besieged city of Mariupol a few days ago which went viral, showing a pregnant woman with a bleeding abdomen being carried out on a stretcher from a maternity hospital which the Russians had bombed. The local surgeon tried to save her and her baby, but neither one survived. The Russian side put out a string of bizarre and contradictory stories, claiming that they had bombed the hospital because it was a militia base (a neo-Nazi militia, of course) but also that no, they didn’t bomb it, the hospital had been evacuated and the explosions were staged by the Ukrainians, and the bloody woman in the photos was a made-up model. Ugh. I find it chilling to observe a regime in operation where there is absolutely no respect for what the truth actually is; rather, lies are manufactured to serve whatever purpose will suit the regime.

I know that some of that goes on even with Western democracies, but we are still usually ashamed of outright lying, and stand discredited when exposed. But with hardcore authoritarian regimes, there does not seem to be even this minimal respect for integrity.  

Freedom of speech becomes even more critical as cynicism about truth becomes more widespread in the world, even in our own political discourse. Putin is trying to suppress the truth within Russia, now with very harsh penalties (fifteen years in prison) for those disseminating information contrary to the party line. All he needs to do is deem such talk as “treasonous”, and into the clink you go.

I do worry about similar trends towards censorship within the West. In our case, it is not so much governments (so far) doing the censorship, but Big Tech. If Google [search engine and YouTube] / Facebook/Twitter disapprove of your content, they can label it “hate speech” or whatever, and your voice disappears from public discourse. But what gives the high priests of big tech the authority and the powers of moral discernment to rule on what discourse is permissible? Also, the algorithms of social media sites usually direct you towards other sites that reinforce your own point of view, so you rarely get exposed to why the other side believes what it does. However annoying it may be to see various forms of nonsense circulating on-line, the time-tested democratic response is to allow (nearly) all points of view to be fairly stated, and to trust in the people to figure out where the truth lies. Otherwise, the truth can become a casualty of culture wars, as it is in shooting wars.

The War on Ukraine

JoyLeave a comment

1. Read this letter from a young woman inside of Russia. Her despair is not sadder than the Kindergarten getting bombed, but it helps explain why people are resisting Russian rule. Ukrainians’ lives would be like hers except worse.

2. ‘My city’s being shelled, but mum won’t believe me’ With loyalty like this, I don’t understand why Russian state TV is bothering to cover up the shelling. Mum’s personal loyalty to Putin already transcends her love of her own daughter. Is lying itself a flex and a form of psychological warfare against the opposition within Russia?

3. Read on the End of History, and my blog about circular history.

4. Social media changes sieges.

5. President Putin speaks his truth, embraces his identity, and blocks his haters. With a trifecta like that, I have no doubt that he practices self-care. And now people are upset that they can’t get through to rattle him. Now people wonder: why can’t we reason together anymore? Yet, this is what Americans are encouraging each other to do. We are out of practice when it comes to discovering and debating The truth.

Previously I wrote about Americans blocking each other on social media. Now when we want to get through to someone on the other side, we have less channels of communication open. Americans don’t get enough practice seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. We have gotten into a bad habit of curating our sources of information to insulate ourselves from the facts and opinions that would force us to learn or argue with someone who holds a different point of view.

Also, we are seeing many people cut ties with Russians. I understand, initially, why there was a blitz on all Russian people, as we tried to get through the news of what was happening with urgency. However, this next week might be an opportunity to reach out to an economist on the inside of Russia, if you know one. Should they be protesting on the street, instead of checking emails? At this point they have already made their decision. You could start a research project with them about some banal uncontroversial topic. They are going to suffer, regardless of whether they have a foreigner to talk to or not. This opens a channel.

(The faculty at Kyiv School of Economics is probably getting behind on their research. They would probably love it if you would look up their previously published papers. )

The percent of Russians who don’t agree with the war should be a concern to the Kremlin. Most of them will not openly say what they think within the borders of Russia, so it creates uncertainty. On paper, Russia is favored to be able to inflict more casualties, but this aspect of Russian society makes the future hard to model. Any young men who are sent to the front lines will learn what is actually happening from the Russian speakers in Ukraine. How will that affect them?

Half of Deliberately Exposed Unvaccinated Volunteers in UK Study Did Not Get COVID; Why?

Scott BuchananLeave a comment

A British study by Ben Killingley and 31 co-authors recently appeared in pre-print form, where 36 (heroic) healthy young adult volunteers were deliberately exposed to the Covid virus by nasal drops. These volunteers then went into quarantine for 14 days, and logged their symptoms and were subjected to various tests for a total of 28 days.


Of the 36 subjects, only 18 (53%) became infected with the virus, as determined by PCR testing (the gold standard for Covid tests) and by direct counting of viral loads in mucus cells by FFA.

The study found that viral shedding (as estimated by mucus viral loads) begins within two days of exposure and rapidly reaches high levels, then declines. Viable virus is still detectible up to 12 days post-inoculation. This result supports the practice of people quarantining for at least 10 days after they first exhibit symptoms of infection. There were significant higher viral loads in the nose than in the throat,  which supports the practice of wearing masks that cover the nose as well as the mouth.


The cheap, fast, LFA rapid antigen test method (used in home tests) performed fairly well. Because it is less sensitive, it did not it did not yield positive results for infected individuals until an average of four days after infection, or about two days after viral shedding may have begun. But from four days onward, the LFA method was sensitive and reasonably accurate which supports the ongoing use of these quick, cheap tests.

These direct inclusions from the paper are helpful, but not earthshaking. The elephant in the room, which the paper did not seem to directly address, is why nearly half of the people who were exposed did NOT become infected. This raises all kinds of issues about what mechanisms the human body may have to naturally fight off COVID or similar viral infections. Gaining insight on this could lead to breakthroughs in preventing or mitigating this pernicious virus.

An article by Eileen O’Reilly at Axios probes these questions. There is nothing conclusive out there, but four ideas that are under investigation are:

1. Cross-immunity from the four endemic human coronaviruses is one hypothesis. Those other coronaviruses cause many of the colds people catch and could prime B-cell and T-cell response to this new coronavirus in some people.

2. Multiple genetic variations may make someone’s immune system more or less susceptible to the virus.  Some 20 different genes have been identified which affect the likelihood of severe infection, and a genetic predisposition to not getting infected is seen in other diseases where people have one or multiple factors that interfere with the virus binding to cells or being transported within.

3. Mucosal immunity may play an underrecognized role in mounting a defense.

This suggests nasal vaccines might have a chance at stopping a virus before it invades the whole body.

4. Where the virus settled on the human body, how large the particle was, the amount and length of exposure, how good the ventilation was and other environmental circumstances may also play a role.

These considerations support continuing with the usual recommendations of social distancing, wearing facemasks, and ventilating buildings, especially when caseloads are peaking. Also, the doses administered to the volunteers in the study were considered quite small by clinical standards. It was surprising that such a low dose was effective as it was in causing full-blown infections; and the particular strain used in the experiment was not necessarily one of the more recent highly virulent variants. After reading these results,  it is more understandable to me why so many reasonably careful friends and family members of mine (nearly all vaccinated, fortunately) have come down with (presumably) omicron COVID in the past two months. Just a little dab will do ya.

What Proportion of Journalists Live in NYC?

James BaileyLeave a comment

Michael’s post this week on the dangers of high-status, low wage jobs opened by citing this tweet:

Michael presents a fascinating model that applies well beyond journalism. But when his post went viral, some commenters asked how accurate Josh Barro’s claim about half of young journalists living in Brooklyn was. Clearly Michael’s post doesn’t depend on it being true, and I’m not even sure Barro meant it literally, but it got me wondering- just what proportion of all young journalists do live in NYC?

For a first pass, we can look at the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for the category “News Analysts, Reporters, and Journalists“. Their latest data (May 2020) shows 41,580 workers employed in those occupations nationwide. It also shows that the NYC metro has by far the most journalists with 5,940, more than twice as many as the second place metro (DC). This implies that 14.2% of all journalists in America live in the NYC metro. Since only 6% of all Americans live in the NYC metro, journalists are clearly clustering there, though clearly well over half of journalists still live elsewhere.

But, this doesn’t quite get at Barro’s claim, which is about journalists under 40 concentrating in Brooklyn. I don’t know of any data source that would let me really test the Brooklyn part, but I can get at the under-40 claim using Microdata from the American Community Survey, which also zooms us in a bit closer to Brooklyn since it tells us who is in NYC proper (not just the metro area).

The 2019 ACS shows that 10% of all “news analysts, reporters, and journalists” are in NYC proper, rising to 14% if I only consider journalists under 40 years old. This is quite concentrated (only 2.5% of all Americans live in NYC proper), but still a lot less that half of all journalists.

As Michael suggested, the vast majority of young NYC journalists are white (77%) with a college degree (91%), though English was only their second most common major after Communications.

The data confirm the last part of Michael’s post quite well- as journalists get older they are likely to move out of NYC and switch to more lucrative fields like PR. Only 5% of all “public relations specialists” are in NYC.