One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash.

Let’s do a little of both.

The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull hook, and appeal on a day-to-day basis to a relative handful of die-hards.

But in 2011, the Living Computer Museum announced itself with the kind of slick webpage that promised computer history buffs a new wonderland.

There’s a lot to take in with this verbiage, but let’s keep going, for now.

In 2012, the Living Computer Museum opened its actual, physical doors to the public in Seattle. A year later, I visited. It was rather nice. I got a grand and lovely tour by some very polite and friendly people, some of whom I’d known for years. The rooms, well appointed, well-lit, and in the case of the machine rooms, done to a sparkling arrangement, clamored for my attention and approval.

There were computer museums for years, decades before Living Computer Museum, scattered among the United States and the world. I’ve been to many of them – sometimes as an honored guest and backstage VIP, and sometimes just because I hastily read my “find me weirdo geek stuff” Google Maps results and negotiated public transit to walk into the door and walk around like a strutting mayor to see what’s what. In that pantheon, I would put LCM in the realm of “very well appointed, especially the mainframes” but not in the realm of “nobody, ever, has ever tried anything like this”. Just off the top of my head, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View has brought not just mainframes and historical computers back from oblivion, but hosted events in which their maintainers and figures have gotten a chance to get their stories on record.

Still, one couldn’t argue with it – the LCM was a solid new outpost in Telling Computer History, and it was on my shortlist of potential homes for materials I might donate in the future. I had a lovely conversation with a member of management about how they maintained functionality and also what their contingencies were for any sort of “endgame” that might befall the endeavor. He assured me they had storage aplenty, in the extremely unlikely event they had to face a closure. Ultimately I didn’t donate my materials there, simply because I found nearer geographic or mission-aligning homes.

My next, and it turns out last, major visit to the Living Computer Museum (outside of a few drive-bys) came in 2018, when I spoke at an event being held there. This gifted me with a chance to see how things had changed in 5 years, and how they had.

Here, then, was something approaching a dream. We had the display cases of technology and the clean carpets and cathedral ceilings of available space, filled not just with computers on desks but entire computer-related environments: classroom, arcade, basement, that showed youngsters what sort of context these computers had lived in. I met Cynde Moya, who had been described to me years earlier as a hard-nosed disciplined caretaker of the materials, and who turned out to be everything they said except hard-nosed – a truly dear overseer of things physical within these walls.

This was April 2018. I lived in the world I live all the time: full of hope, equally full of expectation of doom. But hope was winning.

In October of 2018, Paul Allen was dead.

I suppose everyone has opinions on billionaries, their position in the world, what they represent, and maybe almost everyone has, spoken or unspoken, an awareness that the level of money billions represents disengages you, whether you think so or not, from humanity.

I mean, sure, they cry, laugh, stub their toe, wonder if that’s rain coming, get surprised when the killer’s revealed in a well-done noir thriller. But there’s this cloud of wealth that is ever-present and depending on how it is maintained, or manifested, it slowly bleaches out the edges of living until you realize there is a shocking serenity in their countenance, a noise-cancelling blur that surrounds them, because there are always people whose job is to be aware of them and whose job is to ensure the serenity is maintained.

And there’s the sheer spending power of a billion. I’m sure I could toss out a hundred funny examples of the sheer numerical force of a billion dollars. For example, you could have someone buy a 2025 Subaru Outback, itself the rough amount on the lower end (nationally) of a Domino’s Pizza General Manager’s yearly salary before taxes, and push it into a lake. Taking Christmas and the pusher’s birthday off, to run through a billion dollars of Subaru Outbacks would take you 61 solid years.

But that’s not even very accurate. During that 61 years of pushing Subaru Outbacks into a lake (in Neutral, of course, I’m not a monster), the remaining amount of the money not being spent to purchase lake-bound outbacks would actually be MORE. THAN. A. BILLION. You would actually be richer than you started, if you invested it in even the most brain-dead obvious multi-percent-a-year funds, or left it in any bank. That’s because time and space warp around money.

So do people.

In 2018, after getting cancer in 2009 and 1982, Allen got it again, and this third (public) bout with it ended him, at age 65. His net worth at the time of his demise is the kind that publications who make it their business to will guess at, and the guess sat around $20 billion. Everyone has kind of accepted that, but it’s not really important if it’s $50, $15 or $5 billion. It’s a lot of money.

With his billions, over the decades, Allen owned or partly owned three sports teams, at least 10 companies ranging from airplanes, scientific research, media, and space flight. He owned massive real estate, a movie theater, threw buckets of cash at schools, the arts, and ultimately, a few museums.

To manage it all, he had a company whose purpose was to manage the money, because he wasn’t going to do it himself. The company’s name is Vulcan, Inc. Even after divestment and shutdown after Allen’s death, it has 700 employees. It is one of the largest trusts in the world. It is also now called Vale Group, but I’m going to keep calling it Vulcan.

Vulcan, a company whose job is to manage money and where that goes, is still quite intensely active as an entity, even with Paul Allen’s death. His sister, Jody Allen, chairs the organization she co-founded with her brother in 1986. This company is absolutely gargantuan in its scope and range, and remember, it is a company that just manages a ton of money – that’s the company’s entire purpose.

I wish to take a short moment to not demonize Jody Allen. As the remaining sibling in charge of this company, functionally working through her brother’s holdings, many of which she clearly had no interest or extant position in, and doing so for six years and counting, can’t be anything else than the strangest mixture of pain and endless complication. The $20 billion she’s now in charge of might soften the blow, but likely not by much.

And I apologize for the whiplash here. I’m not overly interested in going down the paths of describing what Jody should be doing, or what her responsibilities are. I am not privy to whatever deep law and lore and functions buried within Vulcan’s iron heart she and her army of people are dealing with, that six years later they are still slowly divesting organizations. I know she has personally called for cullings but I am not informed about the deepest depths of how the aspects of these billions function.

I want to refocus to the fact that Vulcan is divesting itself of the Living Computer Museum.

I want to refocus to the fact that the Living Computer Museum was never a museum.

Look, don’t jump down my throat about this. I’m as shocked as you are.

I didn’t get some inkling from the phone call I had a decade before about potentially donating to Living Computer Museum. I don’t have some spidey-sense about failure or darkness – I just see it everywhere in everything and I treat every day like it’s the one before they find a lump.

If, before it closed, you had made me stand in the center of the LCM and answer whether it was a museum, I’d have happily held up my top hot and shouted “Why yes! One of the finest in all the realms!”

And for all I’d know, it was a museum. There’s no laws on what a thing can call itself regarding being a museum, exhibition, tour, or display. It’s against the law to take money to attend the museum and you get led to an empty lot, sure. But if something has the vestements and affectation of a museum, and you see the big sign saying Museum out front and you go in and there’s displays and staff and events and meetings, you would certainly think it was a museum.

Turns out it wasn’t.

The auction house Christie’s announced it was doing an auction of some of the best portions of Paul Allen’s estate, first with art, and now it would be selling off technology. To fans and studiers of the Living Computer Museum, these items seemed familiar – some of them were on display in the museum.

I found out that some of these to-be-auctioned items would be on display near where I live, so I hopped in my car, parked grandiosely illegally in front of the building, and let myself in.

On display were all sorts of computer history of the “early major days” variety, ranging from a Xerox Star to an Englebart Mouse and even a Pac-Man machine. All had descriptions, all were held out where you could get very near them assuming the guard wasn’t watching too closely, and all of it with a starry-eyed disco-ball aesthetic indicating you were in a space lounge.

So yes, items from the museum were now going to be sold to the highest bidder in a few months. These were some of them, and likely there would be more.

And then, among the relics, I found Stephen Jones.

Stephen Jones and I go a long way back. He was interviewed by me for the BBS Documentary in 2003. So that’s 20 years I’ve known the guy. At our interview session, he showed me his PXL-2000 and his Delorean, both of which I can assure you are high-end geek possessions of the time. And I found his conversation style charming, and his passion for technical subjects perfect for my film.

Stephen’s primary non-profit endeavor, the SDF Public Access UNIX system, was in full swing back then, and is still around now. “Do cool computer things, but don’t try to turn everything into a financial instrument” is not the motto, but it should be. It represents, to me, a lovely ideal of a truly living computer community, incorporating new technology as it expresses itself being something neat, or worth bringing in. Laptop Amish, if you’re stretching around for an anology, which you shouldn’t be. It’s a computer club. And he’s a big part of it.

He was also my initial “in” for the dish on the now-not-so-Living Computer Museum. We’d gone a long way, and here we were, in Christie’s in New York City, standing among offered-for-auction pieces of a gone billionaire’s museum, and maybe we needed to talk in detail, so we did. And I grilled him.

Let’s go back to that initial 2011 announcement page on the Living Computers Museum website, before it was officially an open building.

In the light of its piecemeal disassembly, a lot of this writing hits different. Here’s what I’ve picked up, from Stephen and others, and which I assume for some readers will be new information.

First, this was always intended to be an actual, non-profit, independent/independent-subsidiary museum. It never became that. It is not that. At best, the Living Computer Museum was a billionaire’s (sorry, multi-billionaire’s) collection of computers and technology.

Think of it another way: Jay Leno has a very famous garage that has many wonderful cars and vehicles in it. It is currently, as of this writing, run by a very competent manager named Bernard Juchli, who has been keeping the collection in line for over 20 years. That is, to say, that Leno has a massive collection of cars, competent staff to take care of it, facilities to show them (he has had a number of documentaries and television shows about the garage) and he could probably even open it to the public for an admission price. But you would be hard pressed to call it a “museum” in any sense beyond “it is a display people see videos about”.

As per the request in that 2011 webpage grab, people donated many computers and pieces of history to go into the museum. They expected, no doubt, that they and their children and their childen’s children could stop by displays and point and talk about the family connection to these items.

That was a mirage, a misunderstanding.

This was Paul’s collection of computers, aided by friends and fans. It was always that. The Living Computer Museum, it turns out, cost millions, over ten million a year, to operate as it was set up, and it never came close to making that amount of income from door sales and t-shirts. It never came close to even figuring out how it would.

It’s perhaps not surprising this misunderstanding could happen, and with what felt like all the time in the world, a mere five years and change of being open to the public might have seemed like a mere revving up for the grand plan of what would come next. But nothing came next. It was a collection you could walk through in a really, really nice display case.

And now it’s time to sell the collection.

Before I end up on a huge rant about what it means to be a museum, let me at least give you some relative good news.

The current rough plan is that the big-ticket items, like this Apple I, will be sold at auction. They’ll make beaucoup bucks, go into private collections or maybe even other institutions, and that’s that for the headliners. But that leaves a lot of other stuff.

SDF has a rough plan to raise funds and digitize software, documentation and other related items that are not part of these big-ticket sales (which will be relatively few) so that unique bits of history that are not headline-grabbing trinkets will, potentially, have a chance at being shared with the public.

And I’ve stepped into it. I’ve offered to take software and documentation and store it at the Internet Archive, and of course to work with SDF on ways to digitize/rip/scan materials and, also, host them at the Internet Archive.

It’s all preliminary, but my card is in the hat. Things are not going to be discarded, if I have anything to do with it. A lot can change, and we’ve already seen expectation vs. outcome with this whole experience, but rest assured, I’ve at least tried to provide one last safety net for the kind of history that easily finds itself gone because nobody steps forward. Internet Archive has stepped forward. Stay tuned to see how that works out.

But you know, what did we learn here? What did we actually come away with in the realm of lessons or teachings about what issues this whole mishegaas has churned up?

I have found, perhaps not to my surprise, that a few people in my orbit are displeased I have punched the dead billionaire, ostensibly about all the good the dead billionaire did. But I wish to point out the dead billionaire did give away all that money and yet still had 20 billion dollars at the end, money that went off and did not do as many nice things as the money given away. So much contributed, tax-free, and yet there’s even more. Perhaps this is not the best place to point out that every billionaire is, in many ways, a failure of society, but maybe we can put a pin in it when we have our first trillionaire, assuming that criticizing a trillionaire is not made illegal at that soonish juncture.

I did have some people say, in not so many words, that of course the Living Computer Museum would collapse once its Master of the House was no longer in charge, and I would take this time to point out that Gordon Bell, co-founder of the Computer History Museum, passed on in May of 2024 and yet the Computer History Museum lives and breathes in his absence. It wasn’t a hard problem.

It’s easy to call me ungrateful, but my ungratefulness comes from the narrative people weave near the power of money, like those myths formed around gods and devils, to explain why things are how they are. I appreciate life and its little whorls and eddies that capture us by surprise and we sink or swim. I do not appreciate acting like someone spending a lot of money on something that slightly amuses them earns them the greatest respect. Especially when, as I do now, I walk among a literal army of people working to clean up the mess left behind, after their march to oblivion.

I’ve been writing Go pretty casually for years – the backends for all of my playgrounds (nginx, dns, memory, more DNS) are written in Go, but many of those projects are just a few hundred lines and I don’t come back to those codebases much.

I thought I more or less understood the basics of the language, but this week I’ve been writing a lot more Go than usual while working on some upgrades to Mess with DNS, and ran into a bug that revealed I was missing a very basic concept!

Then I posted about this on Mastodon and someone linked me to this very cool site (and book) called 100 Go Mistakes and How To Avoid Them by Teiva Harsanyi. It just came out in 2022 so it’s relatively new.

I decided to read through the site to see what else I was missing, and found a couple of other misconceptions I had about Go. I’ll talk about some of the mistakes that jumped out to me the most, but really the whole 100 Go Mistakes site is great and I’d recommend reading it.

Here’s the initial mistake that started me on this journey:

mistake 1: not understanding that structs are copied on assignment

Let’s say we have a struct:

type Thing struct {
    Name string
}

and this code:

thing := Thing{"record"}
other_thing := thing
other_thing.Name = "banana"
fmt.Println(thing)

This prints “record” and not “banana” (play.go.dev link), because thing is copied when you assign it to other_thing.

the problem this caused me: ranges

The bug I spent 2 hours of my life debugging last week was effectively this code (play.go.dev link):

type Thing struct {
  Name string
}
func findThing(things []Thing, name string) *Thing {
  for _, thing := range things {
    if thing.Name == name {
      return &thing
    }
  }
  return nil
}

func main() {
  things := []Thing{Thing{"record"}, Thing{"banana"}}
  thing := findThing(things, "record")
  thing.Name = "gramaphone"
  fmt.Println(things)
}

This prints out [{record} {banana}] – because findThing returned a copy, we didn’t change the name in the original array.

This mistake is #30 in 100 Go Mistakes.

I fixed the bug by changing it to something like this (play.go.dev link), which returns a reference to the item in the array we’re looking for instead of a copy.

func findThing(things []Thing, name string) *Thing {
  for i := range things {
    if things[i].Name == name {
      return &things[i]
    }
  }
  return nil
}

why didn’t I realize this?

When I learned that I was mistaken about how assignment worked in Go I was really taken aback, like – it’s such a basic fact about the language works! If I was wrong about that then what ELSE am I wrong about in Go????

My best guess for what happened is:

1. I’ve heard for my whole life that when you define a function, you need to think about whether its arguments are passed by reference or by value
2. So I’d thought about this in Go, and I knew that if you pass a struct as a value to a function, it gets copied – if you want to pass a reference then you have to pass a pointer
3. But somehow it never occurred to me that you need to think about the same thing for assignments, perhaps because in most of the other languages I use (Python, JS, Java) I think everything is a reference anyway. Except for in Rust, where you do have values that you make copies of but I think most of the time I had to run .clone() explicitly. (though apparently structs will be automatically copied on assignment if the struct implements the Copy trait)
4. Also obviously I just don’t write that much Go so I guess it’s never come up.

mistake 2: side effects appending slices (#25)

When you subset a slice with x[2:3], the original slice and the sub-slice share the same backing array, so if you append to the new slice, it can unintentionally change the old slice:

For example, this code prints [1 2 3 555 5] (code on play.go.dev)

x := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
y := x[2:3]
y = append(y, 555)
fmt.Println(x)

I don’t think this has ever actually happened to me, but it’s alarming and I’m very happy to know about it.

Apparently you can avoid this problem by changing y := x[2:3] to y := x[2:3:3], which restricts the new slice’s capacity so that appending to it will re-allocate a new slice. Here’s some code on play.go.dev that does that.

mistake 3: not understanding the different types of method receivers (#42)

This one isn’t a “mistake” exactly, but it’s been a source of confusion for me and it’s pretty simple so I’m glad to have it cleared up.

In Go you can declare methods in 2 different ways:

1. func (t Thing) Function() (a “value receiver”)
2. func (t *Thing) Function() (a “pointer receiver”)

My understanding now is that basically:

• If you want the method to mutate the struct t, you need a pointer receiver.
• If you want to make sure the method doesn’t mutate the struct t, use a value receiver.

Explanation #42 has a bunch of other interesting details though. There’s definitely still something I’m missing about value vs pointer receivers (I got a compile error related to them a couple of times in the last week that I still don’t understand), but hopefully I’ll run into that error again soon and I can figure it out.

more interesting things I noticed

Some more notes from 100 Go Mistakes:

• apparently you can name the outputs of your function (#43), though that can have issues (#44) and I’m not sure I want to
• apparently you can put tests in a different package (#90) to ensure that you only use the package’s public interfaces, which seems really useful
• there are a lots of notes about how to use contexts, channels, goroutines, mutexes, sync.WaitGroup, etc. I’m sure I have something to learn about all of those but today is not the day I’m going to learn them.

Also there are some things that have tripped me up in the past, like:

• forgetting the return statement after replying to an HTTP request (#80)
• not realizing the httptest package exists (#88)

this “100 common mistakes” format is great

I really appreciated this “100 common mistakes” format – it made it really easy for me to skim through the mistakes and very quickly mentally classify them into:

1. yep, I know that
2. not interested in that one right now
3. WOW WAIT I DID NOT KNOW THAT, THAT IS VERY USEFUL!!!!

It looks like “100 Common Mistakes” is a series of books from Manning and they also have “100 Java Mistakes” and an upcoming “100 SQL Server Mistakes”.

Also I enjoyed what I’ve read of Effective Python by Brett Slatkin, which has a similar “here are a bunch of short Python style tips” structure where you can quickly skim it and take what’s useful to you. There’s also Effective C++, Effective Java, and probably more.

some other Go resources

other resources I’ve appreciated:

• Go by example for basic syntax
• go.dev/play
• obviously https://pkg.go.dev for documentation about literally everything
• staticcheck seems like a useful linter – for example I just started using it to tell me when I’ve forgotten to handle an error
• apparently golangci-lint includes a bunch of different linters

arXiv:2408.03492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we demonstrate how logic programming systems and Automated first-order logic Theorem Provers (ATPs) can improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) for logical reasoning tasks where the baseline performance is given by direct LLM solutions. We first evaluate LLM reasoning on steamroller problems using the PRONTOQA benchmark. We show how accuracy can be improved with a neuro-symbolic architecture where the LLM acts solely as a front-end for translating a given problem into a formal logic language and an automated reasoning engine is called for solving it. However, this approach critically hinges on the correctness of the LLM translation. To assess this translation correctness, we secondly define a framework of syntactic and semantic error categories. We implemented the framework and used it to identify errors that LLMs make in the benchmark domain. Based on these findings, we thirdly extended our method with capabilities for automatically correcting syntactic and semantic errors. For semantic error correction we integrate first-order logic ATPs, which is our main and novel contribution. We demonstrate that this approach reduces semantic errors significantly and further increases the accurracy of LLM logical reasoning.

arXiv:2408.03350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce miniCTX, which tests a model's ability to prove formal mathematical theorems that depend on new definitions, lemmas, or other contextual information that was not observed during training. miniCTX contains theorems sourced from real Lean projects and textbooks, each associated with a context that can span tens of thousands of tokens. Models are tasked with proving a theorem given access to code from the theorem's repository, which contains context that is helpful or needed for the proof. As a baseline for miniCTX, we introduce file-tuning, a simple recipe that trains a model to generate a proof step conditioned on the preceding file contents. File-tuning substantially outperforms the traditional neural theorem proving approach that fine-tunes on states alone. Additionally, our file-tuned model improves performance on the standard miniF2F benchmark, achieving a pass rate of 33.61%, which is a new state-of-the-art for 1.3B parameter models. Alongside miniCTX, we offer ntp-toolkit for automatically extracting and annotating theorem proving data, making it easy to add new projects into miniCTX to ensure that contexts are not seen during training. miniCTX offers a challenging and realistic perspective on evaluating neural theorem provers.

In the weeks since his selection as Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance’s political vision has come to be defined by a single, compact denigration of Democrats: “childless cat ladies.”

Journalists unearthed scores of clips of Vance ridiculing the left as lost souls—non-parents adrift and building a ruinous culture. The family had been abandoned, Vance fretted in 2021, by Democrats who were not real Americans but “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

Many iterations of this insult exist. Over the years, Vance has critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris’ lack of children; he’s gone after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for not having offspring. He has suggested adults with children should get extra votes.

There is a way of thinking of Vance’s mantra as strange. But, is it? Vance has uttered these “childless” epithets so much because the idea that kids are paramount—central and necessary for true citizenship in America—is not that abnormal. For years, economic policies have been, on both sides of the aisle, about helping families.

Parenthood has an exalted place in our society. People often trade away their values for the supposed necessity of protecting children (whether that leads to QAnon madness or the liberal extolling of public education right up until choosing a school for your son). Vance’s “childless” comments are simply a cruder, meaner version of what often is presented as “family values” in the United States.

As Dr. Melinda Cooper wrote in her pathbreaking work Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, many would like to cleave the idea of policy away from “the family”—but our economic order is bound up with how we conceive of the home.

A few years ago, I read Cooper’s book and it completely upended my understanding of “cultural politics“—and I am still sifting through how it rearranged my thinking. How do the economic structures of our world create systems we call natural? And what does it mean that we appeal to these myths in our politics? Her new work, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, tackles similar ideas and applies them to how the agenda of austerity developed since the 1970s. (It’s also causing me again to rethink…well, most things.)

I thought immediately of Cooper when I heard Vance’s comments. Pondering Vance and my frustrations about how we talk about his social conservatism, I reached out to her. She answered a few of the thorny concerns I had over email. Take a read of the lightly edited answers below:

Over the last week or so, journalists have resurfaced a series of clips from Vance—and other Republicans—bemoaning “childless” people. It seems like many were surprised to hear his arguments. Were you?

No. I think the wider social acceptance of homosexuality, brought about by the legalization of same-sex marriage, has shifted the line of deviance from sexuality (hetero versus homo) to reproductivity. Hetero versus homo has been replaced by the reproductive versus the sterile. Judgements around childlessness were always there. But it has become the focal point. The stigmatization is sex-asymmetric—it weighs on women in a way it doesn’t on men because of our asymmetric understanding of female bodies as bearers of family lineage. There’s a reason why there is no male equivalent to the cat lady.

It’s interesting to see that the stigmatization of trans people now often turns around issues of sterility. I would say that a few decades ago transphobia overlapped with homophobia to a much greater degree; that is, transpeople were tainted with the brush of deviant (homo) sexuality. Now the defining issue is the threat to reproduction, either through the sterilization of children or imagined pedophilia by trans adults.

A lot of your work concerns the political economy of cultural arguments like Vance’s. What do you think are some of the key things that have happened since the 1970s in our economic structure that help us understand why someone like Vance would say this?

Demographic common sense has shifted since the 1970s.

Anti-natalist arguments were dominant in the 1970s. In the Anglo-American west, there was widespread fear that the Keynesian welfare state had been too successful—that it had literally subsidized the birth of a whole generation of student radicals (the baby boomers) and empowered parts of the American population who were supposed to remain in the margins. These fears were projected onto the anti-colonial “Third World” and translated into fears of overpopulation from the global south.

For a long time now, the pendulum has shifted back in the other direction and the overriding danger is understood to be declining birth rates. This is as true of countries in the global South as it is in the global North.

Demographic fears around declining birth rates often rest on the idea that they are a key factor in economic growth. The term “secular stagnation” was coined by the American Keynesian Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s: he proposed the term as a way of describing the long-term decline in growth rates, a decline which he attributed above all to falling birth rates. The concept of secular stagnation posits a crude one-to-one relationship between women’s per capita fertility, the size of the national population and GDP growth. This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism. But in that case Keynes was also a bastard Keynesian, because he was not above attributing underconsumption crises to underpopulation. (I explored this in a paper.)

In recent years, this has become an increasingly popular explanation for faltering growth rates in Western Europe, North America, and Japan. At the turn of the century, the renowned development economist Walt Whitman Rostow published a book about the worldwide dangers of underpopulation in the 21st century. After the global financial crisis of 2008, some very mainstream economists resurrected the idea of “secular stagnation” and sometimes suggested a link between falling birth rates and declining growth rates. Every few years, the Financial Times runs a feature on the economic dangers of the “baby bust.” See this for a recent example. Matthew Yglesias’s recently reissued One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is a clear example of the genre. The argument is that America is in economic and military decline—the root cause of which is demographic decline (with a nod to Alvin Hansen’s secular stagnation). Note that much of this kind of thinking has a Keynesian lineage and is coming from the centre or liberal left.

This leads to the idea that the primary reason for lackluster growth rates and national economic decline is women’s refusal to have enough children. You could describe this as a bastardized Keynesianism.

So in some ways the most surprising thing about the new “pro-growth” pronatalism is the fact that its coming from within the Republican Party. This is driven by a resurgent right-wing economic nationalism that is protectionist and mercantilist rather than Keynesian. The anti-free trade, protectionist wing of the Republican Party was once represented by someone like Pat Buchanan, who can also be described as a far-right paleoconservative. This tradition was always very pro-natalist. In his 2001 Death of the West, Buchanan wrote that the Western world was committing “autogenocide” thanks to the refusal of overeducated, working women to have children and the “Reconquista” of their lands by non-white migrants.

I would see JD Vance as a paleoconservative economic nationalist like Pat Buchanan, so his pronatalism is hardly surprising. You have a new breed of Republicans associated with American Compass and American Affairs who make devastating critiques of the free-trade neoliberal consensus in the name of a renewed economic nationalism. Their welfarism represents a genuine break from neoliberal orthodoxy but it is also very limited and conditional. It’s a species of welfarism that supports paid parental leave or child benefits on pro-natalist rather than gender-egalitarian grounds. Similarly, their pro-labor politics doesn’t go much further than protectionism and mercantilism—tariffs and migration crackdowns.

The nativist inflections of this kind of thinking can vary in intensity. On the one hand, you have great replacement theory and fears of white extinction at the hands of migrants. On the other hand, you have someone like JD Vance who would say, I want women to have lots of children but immigration can never be a solution to declining birth rates because it says something about our moral weakness as whites if we accept this. (See this clip.) Instead of externally directed racism the accusation is turned inwards and whites are held responsible for their own extinction.

It seems to me liberals really struggle to understand the argument here from Vance, and why he would say these things. What do you think the typical Democrat misses about what he’s saying—and why it’s dangerous? There is a discomfort, it seems to me, with discussing their own understandings of family structures under capitalism.

I think the discomfort comes from the fact that some of Vance’s core assumptions are shared by liberals. Every few years liberals start beating themselves up for having abandoned the issue of family values to the right. It is happening again in the context of wider fears around declining birth rates. See this recent feature article in the New Yorker which talks about the forthcoming book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?. In an extract from the book, Berg and Wiseman begin by lamenting the self-obsession of young “people” who “spend their twenties on journeys of personal and professional self-discovery and self-fulfillment.” But the complaint very quickly narrows in onto the problem of “female empowerment” and “female autonomy.”

These narratives translate very quickly into a conservative “anticapitalism” (really an anti-neoliberalism as in economic liberalism). Typically working women, particularly working women in positions of relative power, become the symptoms of market excess in a way that working men never do. So you slide very quickly from a critique of lean-in neoliberal feminism to the idea that neoliberalism is somehow inherently feminist.

Vance is much crueler and authoritarian in his views. But the basic assumptions are shared. Vance talks about the childless left. Berg and Wiseman talk about “the left’s wariness of children.” Vance talks about people who “don’t have a stake in the future of the country.” They imagine children in exactly the same terms, as a form of secular transcendence and commitment to the future of the nation.

In the foreword to Kevin Robert’s new book, Vance writes: “Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids.” What rift between new and old right do you think he is addressing here? 

He is referring to the shift away from neoliberal economics toward economic nationalism among Republicans associated with American Compass, American Affairs, and, most recently, the Heritage Foundation (led by Kevin Roberts since 2021). He is suggesting that this move will make the Republicans more focused on “family values.” But the Republicans’ neoliberalism was always aligned with neoconservatism (the dominant current in social conservatism up until George W. Bush) as well as various religious conservatisms. So the attachment to family values is far from new. However, JD Vance and Kevin Roberts represent a shift from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism, which is much more closely aligned with the racist far right (see my “The Alt-Right: Neoliberalism, Libertarianism and the Fascist Temptation”) and the theocratic far right (I discuss this in Counterrevolution). This articulation of paleoconservative and economic nationalist positions was represented for a long time by Pat Buchanan.