Jonathan Barazzutti

My latest for @CityJournal: "About 1 percent of students skip a grade, even though between 15 percent and 45 percent of American students enter late-elementary classes performing at least one year ahead of standard academic expectations." city-journal.org/article/gifted…

@UBERSOY1 Wider faces with more rigid features. No idea why this evolved.

Why are Slavs more masculine than Westerners?

Some of the most influential ideas in modern society don’t spread because they’re true or effective, but because they signal status. @robkhenderson has captured this dynamic with his concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer prestige on those who espouse them while imposing punishing costs on the less privileged. You see it across debates on family, education, crime, and social policy, where prevailing approaches often downplay or ignore the role of norms, family and social structure, and cultural expectations, suggesting instead that groups of people are victims of forces beyond them, keeping them down in a victimhood mindset. In this @MLInstitute episode of Inside Policy Talks, Rob and I go deeper into the foundational assumptions behind his work. It’s one thing to recognize the norms ‘that work’, but to what extent do our societies depend on these cultural norms —stable families, civic trust, moral restraint—that they themselves cannot generate? Much of modern policy and social science assumes that if we get the incentives right, or apply the right techniques, we can produce good outcomes. But I suggest this technocratic framing leaves out much. It treats norms as useful instruments rather than asking whether they are grounded in something true about human nature and the good life. What’s more, people who act only for instrumental reasons, or solely to achieve particular outcomes, can never attain deep happiness. They do not know how to act for the sake of ideals themselves. Unlike outcomes, ideals are inexhaustible. Each one is embedded in a higher-order ideal, the highest of which is love. To act in relation to such ideals requires non-instrumental motivation - acting for the ideal itself, not merely for the result it may produce. These are among the deepest lessons of our civilizational inheritance: Athenian virtue and Jerusalem’s Judeo-Christian theological virtue. Rob rightly notes that the American founders said their freedom-oriented polity would not work for a people who do not promote four things: traditional marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Can a society preserve and refine its formative norms if it regards them as merely useful? I seriously doubt it. Norms endure, and remain living and vital only when they are seen as true, binding, and reflective of our human nature. In other words, you can't fake it until you make it. We can start the much-needed cultural revitalization in western democracies by imitating these ideals, but we cannot flourish at scale without sincerely believing in and practicing them. youtube.com/watch?v=po2NPX…

@UBERSOY1 Interesting, I didn’t know that. Ig it makes sense based on ppl I personally know with big social media followings. Also I liked your latest video

@JBarazzu If you are not in the top 10% then pretty much yes. Most people still prefer traditional venues ...

Bro is making thousands on social media and still complaining 🥀🥀🥀

@nobler_savage Bear in mind that rightists are more likely to personally give to charity btw

Neither of these people do these things. Social media is basically a puppet show for toddlers at this point.

@sentientist I’ve heard it described as “the ego of having no ego”

@neetu_arnold Why do you think it’s democrats this time?

New Gallup poll finds declining trust in higher ed. But this time, the steepest drop came from Democrats (61% ➡️50% confidence, 2025-2026)

"Across multiple datasets from multiple nations, people who placed more value on free speech were more likely to hold racially tolerant attitudes. This is consistent with the idea that free speech and tolerance spring from the same broader liberal ethos." stevestewartwilliams.com/p/the-ideologi…

When states in the US banned cousin marriage, it led to more people immigrating to the cities and changing into higher paying professions. More evidence for how kinship networks hold back development. 1/

I'm really looking forward to this!

@whyvert I had a class on the “anthropology of sex and gender” that was just like this. Prof had a similarly authoritative attitude when discussing the issue, and tried to employ the usual exceptional cases for why sex is bimodal. Next they’re gonna argue that humans don’t have 5 fingers.

Much of academia is prone to portraying leftist political belief as settled factual truth. E.g. President of the American Anthropological Association insists: "we know, factually... the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect". Actual biologists:

People who say they're "bad at tests" tend to just not be very smart. When they blame their low performance on anxiety instead of low intelligence, that's generally just an example of them making a poor excuse.

@charlesmurray I think it can be good to see unfair moral characterizations of you in an ironic light, particularly if you have been unfairly treated. Some level of detached amusement can be good.

Happened to run across this again and couldn't resist clicking. Rereading it reminded me that it's one of the most interesting things that's been written about me--not because of the accusations, but because of the strange mix of reasonably accurate descriptive material about me and my books alongside shock and horror at my moral depravity that doesn't seem to match up with the descriptive material. And, full disclosure, I love the headline, which I acknowledge is kind of weird and probably unhealthy. currentaffairs.org/news/2017/07/w…

From here: researchgate.net/figure/Distrib…

While historically, having a graduate degree was associated with exceptional cognitive ability, today it’s associated with being slightly above average. According to a sample of 2,593 people, the average IQ of a person with a graduate or professional degree is only 108, putting them around the 70th percentile:

@zagrebbi @jonahdavids1 Seen correlations between economic freedom and a lot of variables but never migration patterns. Thanks for this

If capitalism made countries unlivable, people would leave the neoliberal ones and pour into the socialist ones. Naturally it's the exact opposite. r = +0.60.

@CharlesFLehman @jonahdavids1 One of the few based takes I’ve seen Clav put out

I think it’s fine for Clavicular to just not express an opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

@PAHoyeck Ethics. Most ethical systems don’t meaningfully account for humans as evolved organisms which leads to an overemphasis on systematizing for its own sake (ex. Utilitarianism, deontology)

Time to settle it once and for all: What's the worst subfield of philosophy?

"Wikipedia is... not a lovely, idealistic project staffed by students, scholars, and retirees who just want to share their knowledge to benefit the world... [T]he site has manifestly been captured by a small clique of ideologically motivated bullies."