David Reich on Bronze Age Genetics

In this interview with Kash Patel, genetist David Reich says that human genetic change was fastest between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. Changes associated with the Bronze and Iron Ages seem to have been far more dramatic than those that took place during the agricultural revolution:

In this part of the world—Europe and the Middle East—we are actually in a period of accelerated natural selection. One way to see this is to look at the enrichment pattern we’re observing, where immune traits are unusually associated with these selection signals. We could compare the last 5,000 years of our time period, what’s called the Bronze Age and further onward, to the previous 5,000 years. What we see is that this intensification of selection around immune traits, and similarly the intensification around metabolic traits, has accelerated over this time period.

It’s not like natural selection has been at the same rate over all places and times. It’s increasing over the time period we’re analyzing. Plausibly the whole time period has increased compared to previous periods. We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture. Almost everyone we’re analyzing are farmers or food producers in one way or another. Farming was invented for the first time anywhere in the world in the Middle East 11,000 or 12,000 years ago. The people who invented farming exploded into Europe after 8,500 years ago, spread across the continent, and expanded rapidly.

In the Bronze Age, there was an intensification of how people lived, with much higher population densities. People were living more and more next to their animals and getting their diseases, and exchanging their diseases with the animals and with each other. This is a period of rapid change in how people are living, resulting in different biological needs of this population. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that in the context of these dramatic changes, the biology of the population might not be ideally adapted.

There might be what some people call an evolutionary mismatch, where you take a genetic variation that evolved in hunter-gatherers and put it into farmers or pastoralists, and it’s not exactly right. What you’re seeing is the DNA of this population, which descended from hunter-gatherers only 10,000 years ago, reacting to the shock of having been moved into an agricultural, Bronze Age, high-population-density, urban environment. A hypothesis is that what we’re seeing is the adaptation that occurs as a result.

One example:

One of the things we do in this work is look carefully at many of these positions in the DNA. . . . One of the things we see is that, while for the most part the signals of natural selection we detect are consistent with constant natural selection over time, in a handful of them we’re able to see that there’s been a reversal or a radical change in natural selection. Very often that occurs in the period between 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, which is the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, a period of rapid population growth and rapid movement to intensive use of many technologies that were not used that way before.

An example of this is the TYK2 genetic variant that is a major risk factor for severe tuberculosis, which is the most important infectious disease killer in the world today. If you look at this major risk factor for tuberculosis, this variant rockets up in frequency from 8,000 or 6,000 years ago to maybe 9% or 10% in this part of the world. Then it rockets down in frequency in the last 3,000 years. In both cases, there’s very clear evidence of natural selection, in the first case to increase in frequency, and in the next case to decrease in frequency.

A possible reason is the spread of tuberculosis. It maybe becomes endemic in the population 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. That’s potentially consistent with pathogen sequence data and other lines of evidence. And maybe this variant was protecting against something before then, but then tuberculosis became significant after that point, and it was so bad that it pushed in the opposite direction. That’s speculative.

An Ivory Casket, c 1350 AD

This ivory casket is in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It was made in France around 1350. The rest of the text comes from the online description.

This splendid casket is carved with scenes from romances and allegorical literature representing the courtly ideals of love and heroism. In the center of the lid, knights joust as ladies watch from the balcony; to the left, knights lay siege to the Castle of Love, the subject of an allegorical battle. 

The remaining scenes on the casket are drawn from well-known stories about Aristotle and Phyllis, Tristan and Iseult, and tales of the gallant, heroic deeds of Gawain, Galahad, and Lancelot. The box may originally have been a courtship gift. 

Corn Ethanol vs. Solar Farms

Andy Masley on Twitter/X:

My contribution to the solar/farm discourse is that solar panels capture about 100x as much usable energy from the sun as corn grown for ethanol, if you include the energy cost of growing corn.

Ethanol corn is 40% of all US corn and is literally just there to capture energy from the sun. We have a way of doing that much more efficiently now! 

Corn-based ethanol was always dumb and now it is even stupider.

A Visit to the Walters

Sunday I took a friend who had never been there to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. There I am above with a bust of Othello by Pietro Calvi, 1873.

We started in the Asian collection, wandering at random, our eyes seeking out striking objects like this hair ornament and wine pot.

Then we wandered through the medieval section, where there was much stained glass.

Love this Palmesel, or Palm Sunday Donkey (1350-1400), made to pulled through the streets of some German town in a Palm Sunday procession.

And then to the Renaissance, where the best stuff was portraits. Paolo Veronese, Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto Thiene and her Daughter Deidamia, 1552

Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani, c. 1595

Same in the Baroque section. Giuseppe Ghislandi, portrait of a nobleman, c. 1700. He looks like a television star.

Unknown artist, Portrait of the Marchioness Angela Maria Lombardi, c. 1710.

We were getting weary so we went down to the first floor to see an exhibit of jewelry by Afrofuturist Douriean Fletcher, who did a lot of work for the Black Panther films. Great exhibit, with some beautiful stuff and some stuff that was weird in interesting ways. Loved it.

And then home.

Putin is Looking for a Way out of His War

Like Trump, Putin seems to be searching for a way out of the unwinnable war he started. Reuters:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on ​Saturday that he thought the Ukraine war was coming to an end, remarks that came just hours after he had vowed victory in Ukraine at Moscow's most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years. "I think that the matter is coming to an end," Putin told reporters.

Exactly how that end would come about it unclear, since Russia still officially maintains its maximal war aims, which an undefeated Ukraine will never accept. As Noah Smith explains, this shows the limits of dictatorial wars of choice:

Ukraine never threatened Russia at all. The whole Russian cause in this war is based on the notion that Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO and the EU was threatening Russia’s “sphere of influence.” But the idea of “spheres of influence”, while sometimes a good factual description of how powerful countries operate, is not a good moral principle. The idea that countries deserve “spheres of influence” is just the claim that powerful countries ought to dominate their weaker neighbors. In other words, it’s just imperialism.

Morality doesn’t field divisions, of course…or does it? Putin can pay desperately poor people to fight in his wars, or empty his prisons of criminals, or buy mercenaries, but can he persuade regular middle-class Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg to die for the glory of the New Russian Empire? Not really, no — which is why as soon as casualties get too high to replace without general mobilization, he starts to think about ending the war.

Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.

Mother's Day Flowers

Mother's Day

Remembering my wife Lisa, mother of my children, love of my life. Lisa's eulogy is here 

Links 8 May 2026

Silver coin from the Macedonian kingdom of Syria, 305-295 BC

Why ChatGPT started talking about goblins all the time.

People are retiring later across the developed world, which will help a lot to keep pension schemes solvent.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Construction Physics explains how an oil refinery works.

Data from the General Social Survey finds that poor people who go to church regularly are happier than rich people who never go. (Twitter/X)

Interesting NY Times feature on the old Ukrainian skydiving plane that now has more than 200 drone kills (5-minute video at YouTube.)

Islands as focuses for utopian and other schemes.

Perun on the situation with the Iran war during the cease fire, one-hour video.

Why is northern Italy so much richer than southern Italy?

Study finds that banning cell phones in schools may raise student well-being but has little if any impact on academic performance.

The extraordinary jaws of the pelican eel, two short videos (YouTube, Facebook)

Noah Smith on development economics.

Remarkable Hellenistic and Roman finds in Alexandria, Egypt.

Yet another Viking hoard found; one can hardly keep up with all the discoveries.

Some of the weird stuff in the Smithsonian basement.

Exotic Pets in Roman Berenike

Berenike is an old port on the Red Sea in southern Egypt. The site had long been known, and serious archaeology began in 1994. I have a general post about the site and two others on interesting religious discoveries (statue of the Buddha, cool shrine with headless falcons). Now there is an interesting article out about the town's pet cemetery:

To date, the burial ground, located on a small sandy hill in the foreground of the city, has yielded almost 800 burials spread over an area of 127 m2. Cats (Felis silvestris catus) were by far the most dominant species, accounting for 88.2% (688 individuals). The second most abundant species in the cemetery were dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), 54 individuals (7%) having so far been recorded. The third important taxonomic “component” in Berenike were monkeys from the Cercopithecinae sub-family (35 individuals). These included two identified genera of macaque species (Macaca), and a representative of the Chlorocebus species, the grivet. Monkeys accounted for 4.5% of the total number of burials. The zooarchaeological data, that is, age at death, sex, morphology, and pathological changes, clearly indicate that the animals buried in this cemetery were companion animals: brought in, cared for, fed, and well treated.

All of the monkeys found in the Berenike cemetery were female and young, which are said to make the best pets. They came from both India and sub-Saharan Africa. The monkeys seem to have died young because of nutritional deficiencies – hard to get good food for tropical forest monkeys in the Egyptian desert – and possibly also the drinking of salt water.

Also very interesting was that many monkeys were buried with grave goods. No dogs were so honored, and only 3 percent of cats. But 40 percent of the monkeys received burial offerings that included copper and iron collars, sections of iridiscent shell, clasps that were presumably part of leather or cloth collars,, and a woven basket containing some greasy material.

And then there were combined burials, like this one:

In this case, a young grivet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops) appears to have embraced in its arms a young cat (3–6 months old). The kitten was facing the monkey and clutching its body. A wooden clasp next to the grivet’s body was most likely part of a body harness/ collar that the monkey had worn. Similar remains of collars, made of various materials, were discovered in many monkey and cat graves in Berenike.

Another monkey was buried in an iron collar, immersed in oil.

Fascinating people, the Romans.

Marta Osypińska1, Piotr Osypiński and Iwona Zych, "A centurion’s monkey? Companion animals for the social elite in an Egyptian port on the fringes of the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd c. CE." Journal of Roman Archaeology 38 (2025).

Erica Reid, "Ghost Man on Second"

My dad had too few kids to field wiffle ball, so
he introduced me to the Ghost Man. Suppose
I found myself stuck at second base
when it came my time to bat: The Ghost Man
could take my place, continuing my parade
around the bases

                            Of all the ghosts
my parents left to me, this Ghost Man
serves me best — see the hurled ball
pass right through him, watch him score
a shred of glory in my name. Long after dusk
has eaten the Midwestern backyard
barely large enough to hold this game,
years after the players have gathered
the Frisbee & pie plate bases & have gone
their separate ways, the Ghost Man runs —
is still running — through the diamond-
shaped cycle that I taught him: toward & away
from home, toward & away from home.

From Ghost Man on Second, 2024

Links 1 May 2026

Door in the Alhambra

A few more lines of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles found in an Egyptian papyrus. We remember Empedocles as a natural philosopher but he seems to have been more of a charismatic religious figure who dabbled in physics; he claimed to be a god, and legend says he threw himself into Mount Etna to prove his divinity.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Noah Smith, why shoplifting is bad.

Interesting article on Viktor Orban and American post-liberalism.

Robin Hanson on the factors that make your beliefs unreliable.

Ukrainian military innovation: problems encountered in the field can lead to engineered solutions in seven days, and "The cost per kill today is $1,000, down from around $60,000 in 2022."

An ancient tourist knickknack from Hadrian's Wall found in Spain.

The sound of science fiction.

Charlotte Perkins Gillman, The Yellow Wallpaper, a famous work of psychological horror, 36-minute audio.

An ecological and economic model of What Happened to Haiti.

Photographs of old architecture in east London by Paul Anthony Gardner.

Linocuts by Mexican artist Eduardo Robledo.

Capitalism is Not the Problem

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, via Marginal Revolution:

I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.

I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.

Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.

Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.

But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. 

I agree with this absolutely. There are issues with capitalism, but almost all the complaints I see against "capitalism" are really complaints about modern life.

More of my posts on this confusion: one, two.

Some Things Can't be Copyrighted

Publishers' Weekly:

A judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that Tracy Wolff did not plagiarize her YA fantasy series Crave, according to a report that first appeared in Publishers Lunch.

The ruling concludes a multi-year lawsuit brought against Wolff by writer Lynne Freeman, alleging the series was "substantially similar" to one of her unpublished manuscripts. Freeman also named her and Wolff's mutual agent Emily Sylvan Kim, Crave publisher Entangled Books, distributor Macmillan, and Universal City Studios—which bought film rights to the first installment in the series—in the suit.

In the ruling, Judge Colleen McMahon wrote that "Freeman’s novel and Wolff’s Crave novels are indeed similar, but only in the ways that all young adult romantasy fiction novels are similar to each other."

The court added that "hot, sexy, dangerous boys—central to virtually all young adult romance novels—cannot be copyrighted."

Post-Liberalism

But supposing the world has been "filled up," so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

– Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992

The American Gerontocracy

Representative David Scott of Georgia recently died, at 80, while running for re-election. That make five sitting Congressmen who have died this term. 

I remember back in 2008 when Obama became president I had the thought that he would probably be the last president older than me. Silly me! Instead we have had two demented presidents in a row.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg handed a crucial Supreme Court seat to the Republicans by refusing to retire in 2014 at the age of 81; and she had already had two bouts of cancer. She eventually died in office at 87.

The dominance of America by ever older politicians is starting to creep me out. When did retirement with dignity go out of fashion? Instead we have people clinging to office and power long past their mental peaks, stumbling through their official lives while those around them try to keep the state running.

But that's just one side of our gerontocracy; the other is the way government at all levels seems determined to hand ever more wealth to retirees. I already wrote here about the bizarre movement to limit or eliminate property taxes for the elderly, which has spread to other kinds of taxes as well. Social Security payments and health care (the large majority for the elderly) are the two biggest parts of the federal budget, but I still see people complaining all the time that the country has forgotten old folks. 

One factor driving this is voting, because older people just vote much more reliably than the young. According to Idrees Kahloon in The Atlantic, the median age of a general election voter in the US is 50, while for primaries it is 57.

I worry that the long-term result of all of this will be increasing hardship for people of child-bearing age, leading to ever lower birth rates, leading to more of the same in a grim spiral.

We must fight the people determined to give more and more to the old and find a way to balance our obligations and demands across all ages.

The State of Life Extension

Via Cremieux on Twitter/X:

The only rigorously proven things you can do for life extension right now are:

• Don't be fat
• Be fit
• Control your blood sugar
• Control your blood pressure
• Have low cholesterol
• Don't poison yourself

Almost everything else is speculative and dubious.

Links 24 April 2026

Francisco Goya, A Way of Flying, 1815

Writing advice from Scott Siskind, starting with "Tell the truth."

Still Uploading Chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Irish Travellers, who are genetically identical to other Irish people but live like gypsies, used to have famously large families, but a recent study finds their total fertility has fallen to around 2.5. (Twitter/X)

Major Marcel Duchamp show at the Met. (NY Times, MOMA, Frieze, 35-minute video)

"Blake Whiting" and the rise of the AI academic.

Derek Thompson on the analogy between the introduction of electricity to the economy and the rise of AI (Twitter/X)

Papyrus with a fragment of the Iliad found in a Roman-period Egyptian mummy.

Perun on the strategic implications of the fall of Viktor Orban, 1-hour video.

How to become a Daoist immortal, 25-minute video. Sadly the first steps are all about giving things up (food, sex) and there's a step in the middle where you have to find a great sage and get him to teach you his secrets.

Alex Tabarrok on Jacquard looms, Luddites, and opposition to AI.

Emotional 33-minute documentary on the Hungarian election.

mRNA vaccine for pancreatic cancer: NBC news, NY Times.

Interesting new house in India by Iki Builds.

The politics of German carnival.

Alex Nowrasteh against saying that "the culture" causes anything: "When someone says 'culture explains X,' they’re gesturing at a black box the size of human civilization and calling the gesture a theory."

Using Joel Mokyr's ideas to explain why the Roman Empire did not industrialize, 11-minute video.

Civilization and Evolution

From an excellent, fascinating interview with geneticist David Reich:

The context that lot of my work in the last few years has been focused on, and that I'm tremendously excited about right now, is to try to use genetics from ancient people to understand how people got to be the way they are today biologically. So what we've done in our research group in the last few years is that we've generated data on an absolutely huge number of people. 

The paper that we are currently publishing has data from more than 10,000 ancient people from Europe and the Middle East. These individuals are from all over and from all time depths up to 15,000 years ago. So the last 10,000 years, this is the time period when, in Europe and the Middle East, agriculture comes in. It's a very eventful period culturally, it's a period of extreme population growth, when people began to live differently. We can compare the rate of evolution at the beginning of the time period to the end of the time period and it's gotten faster. And not only has it gotten faster, but genetic variants that were under positive natural selection before in some cases switch to negative selection, so it's a period of oscillation of natural selection. 

What seems to have happened is that there's cultural change, due to differences in the way people live, with agriculture, living more densely, living with animals, urbanization, other things that are changing, and they are prompting changes in the genome that are resulting in, on average, changes in frequency of the genetic variants that might be useful for people living in these new and differently challenging environments. But if you look at the individual positions that are significant in Europe, they tend to move in the same direction in East Asia, even though the histories are completely independent in this time period.

If that is right, then cultural change, in particular agriculture and urbanization, has caused a sort of convergent evolution across Eurasia, with the same genes being favored in widely separated populations. Which is fascinating.

The Sutyagin House

According to some guy on Reddit:

The house was built by the local crime lord Nikolai Petrovich Sutyagin and his family. It was considered to be the tallest wooden house not only in Russia, but in the world. The house was 13 stories and 44 meters tall (144 feet). Nikolai was eventually arrested for a few years because of racketeering and the house deteriorated harshly because of that. In 2008 the local goverment deemed it a fire hazard and started to dismantle the building. On December 26th 2008 the top tower was pulled down and in February 1st 2009 it was ordered to be completely demolished. The rest of the remains were dismantled manually over the course of the next few months.

Most of the photographs online seem to come from the demolition phase.

Wikipedia adds:

Constructed by Mr. Sutyagin (a sawmill owner) and his family over 15 years (starting in 1992), without formal plans or a building permit, the structure deteriorated while Sutyagin spent a number of years in prison for racketeering.

Of course he was a crooked sawmill owner. Who else would build this?

The Soapbox

Crowd listening to a socialist orator, NYC, 1908

Long before cranks built followings on the internet, some of them got modestly famous by standing on soapboxes and shouting:

There is nothing in American civic life today like Chicago’s old “Bughouse Square.” From the 1890s to the mid-1960s, it was a hotspot for soapbox speakers: radicals, evangelists, cranks, poets, philosophers, and eccentrics. Anyone with a perspective outside the mainstream gathered there nightly to declaim from their improvised podiums. The ethos, as one newspaper put it, was “free speech and the louder the better.” People actually came to listen, too, in crowds.

Bughouse Square (properly named Washington Square Park) might be the most famous free-speech center, but the practice of soapboxing stretched from sea to shining sea. New York City had its own crew of “peripatetic philosophers.” Hubert Harrison, known as the “Black Socrates,” delivered his critiques of capital right in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Then there was Portia Willis, the “suffrage beauty,” who drew in crowds with her looks and kept them with her wits.

This was an intensely competitive activity; people of that era had high standards for oratory and would not listen to boring speeches. They booed and threw rotten cabbages. But this was a real channel for the spread of ideas, especially radical ideas, and many Americans learned about left-wing thought and sectarian religion for soapbox orators.

The darker side of this kind of freewheeling oratory was violence; the police regulary attacked crowds listening to socialist or anarchist speakers and sometimes the crowds attacked speakers they disliked. Which is one reason, I suppose, that all the photographs I have found today show mostly or entirely male crowds.

Links 17 April 2026

Moche disk, gilded copper, 200 BC to 600 AD. The animals are deer.

The Moche hunted deer by driving them into nets, and this net design

may symbolize a deer hunt.

Magawa, the world's most famous landmine-sniffing rat, got a big statue. (NPR, BBC, YouTube)

Excellent Tyler Cowen interview with archaeologist Kim Bowles about the Roman economy, good corrective to lots of nonsense economists have spouted about it.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

According to US government data, American women aged 40-44 now have a higher birth rate than women 15-19. The most fertile age group is now 30-34. (Twitter/X)

An economist takes a serious look at theories that say the exploitation of African slaves caused the industrial revolution.

Ukraine captures a Russian position using only air and ground drones.

Nigeria's religious censors ban most erotic writing, so local women have turned to publishing their erotic work on WhatsAp. (NY Times)

A vast gray market has emerged in GLP-1 drugs, with people using them to treat everything from addiction to concussions. (NY Times)

Being around babies makes people want babies. (Twitter/X) I suppose this is one reason why fertility decline seems to accelerate once it gets going.

Great Scott Siskind piece on Viktor Orban and the sliding scale from democracy to dictatorship. A sample: "I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from."

A claim that AI is causing the collapse of online communities for writers.

Unique circular temple of the Hellenistic period found in Egypt.

"Mirror towns" as a partial solution to Britain's housing crisis, short video on Twitter/X.

Noah Smith says it is our consumer choices that define us as individuals: "on a personal level, it seems clear to me that the standard story we grow up hearing — that your job is what makes you you, while what you consume is dictated by corporations — has it exactly backwards. Consumption shapes you into a unique individual, while your job exists at the whim of the collective." And this mighgt become even more important after AI takes your job.

The Yale Report and the State of Higher Education

Yale commissioned its own report on why trust in American higher education has declined so much. I want to emphasize, first, that trust in EVERY American institution has declined, and some polls find that higher education is not doing worse than average. But others find that universities are drawing an unusual degree of scorn. From the report:

Just a decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction. . . .

Our committee identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust. The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. The second focuses on the college admissions system—specifically, the question of who gets in and why. The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission.

And here is an important point that bears repeating: complicated, opaque schemes breed distrust. From the NY Times:

For example, Yale and many other schools now rely on a model that regularly dilutes high tuition prices with generous aid packages. Although many students pay nowhere near sticker prices, the committee wrote that the approach had exacted “a disastrous impact on public trust.”

“By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive and highly variable,” the report said. “These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it.”

The same thing has happened in American health care, with the crazy-quilt system of charges and costs driving the overall lack of trust in medicine.

Here's an interesting paragraph on the issue of free speech:

Yale’s data suggests that self-censorship is a real problem. In a 2025 survey by the university, nearly a third of undergraduate respondents disagreed with the statement that “I feel free to express my political beliefs on campus,” up from 17 percent in 2015. Students who selfidentified as conservative reported lower rates of comfort, but discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum. A recent Buckley Institute survey suggested that more than half of college students nationwide feel “intimidated in sharing their opinions, ideas, or beliefs in class.” Meanwhile, post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation.

I think this is a hard problem because here the university only reflects the broader society. We just have fewer consensus beliefs and more issues of intense political disagreement than we had when I was in college. Many professors try to create a space for disagreement within their classrooms, but on the other hand most subscribe to some limits, and where to draw the line is just hard; given the ambiguity, many students might feel silenced even when their beliefs would be widely accepted. But it never hurts to try!

But as I always say, the root of the problem is the lack of any agreement on what universities are supposed to teach, and what a university degree is supposed to mean. The range of topics taken up in the report, the authors say,

revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

Is it ever.

First Seedlings

After a hot day yesterday and a thunderstorm last night, little baby zinnias are popping up all over the garden.