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Pre-script (I guess that's the opposite of a post-script?): One of the biggest flaws to secular ethics, to me, is why. I would appreciate any and all input on that topic, as well as feedback on the rest of this morass.

There's bound to be some pithy quote I could insert here about being a critic because that's easier than being a creator, and I'm a big fan of pithy quotes and cliches.

Perhaps a paraphrase: "Those who can teach philosophy, do; those who can't, critique those who do."

That was the longer way to say: nope, I got nothin'. Or rather, not absolutely nothing, but nothing so extensive as I would like to provide. It's one of the big projects that I chip away at slowly.

What follows is a meandering exploration of thoughts on the topic; I'm planning on starting a blog in the not too distant future and will be exploring this somewhat more systematically, and I'll link it here.

TL;DR of the below: A system that says "here's good traits, do those" is likely going to produce better long-term results than a system that says "constantly attempt impossible math to decide what to do."

I lean towards some form of virtue ethics; Kreeft's Back to Virtue was great for me. But it's also a deeply Christian approach, and I think it's possible to create an approach that works for secular and religious people more or less evenly (why I think so when people have been trying for centuries, if not millennia... I guess I'm a little more idealistic than I like to admit).

Virtue ethics (VE) (and I'd lump in Stoicism as a related topic of interest) shares at least one flaw of Scott's consequentialism (SC): how do you define good? Consequentialism enjoys it's woo-woo math about utilons or utility points, but since there's no grand utilometer, is it that different from Marcus Aurelius writing "You know what is good, do it"? You're still relying on your intuitions about what is good, which does bother me about VE still.

Part of the appeal of the virtue ethics/Stoicism approach to me is the same as Peterson phrased it: Clean your room! VE is, to me, a much more personal, human, humane ethic than SC. I think it is important to be a good person first, and that will 'ripple out' to create a better world. Scott called it Newtonian ethics, but I think that misses something; it's not that "deservingness" decreases with distance, but complications increase with geographic and cultural distance. This concentric localism reduces the "bang for your buck" compared to SC (and thus EA), but I think it also reduces the failure mode risks.

What SC says about doing good changes based on any number of factors: how you rate different kinds of suffering, what you think does the most good, what you think generates the most utilons, what time scale you're judging everything on, etc. You can be an awful, hateful person but still "do a lot of good" under SC, which depending on perspective could be good or bad, but I think that possibility leaves a lot of room for SC to burn itself out by ignoring the interpersonal effects (Organized EA seems to have recognized this and started to deal with it, although Rob Wiblin at least still acknowledges it as an integral component of the philosophy that most can't live up to).

I also think VE involves more flexibility innately, whereas flexibility of SC is contingent on a peace treaty of sorts. Scott says outright SC should lead to one answer of what is right. This should mean that everyone following SC is doing the exact same thing: we can look at EA to show this is not currently happening, which means SC is failing to provide that one obvious answer. I recognize I decried the wishy-washy "my feels" as a flaw of SC, and this is part of why- if it is supposed to provide one answer, but doesn't, is it doing its goal? The variety of missions operating under EA indicate that SC is not that good at providing answers, and that those involved aren't particularly consequentialist. VE on the other hand has the flexibility of allowing personal definitions of good: this can be abused by selfish definitions of "good" but also gives that variety without violating its ideal. Your good is not quite the same as my good, simply because we're different people in different situations, but we can acknowledge we are both being good. This only occurs in SC because of a peace treaty of accepted dissent; were it taken seriously, anyone not following your specific good is dooming the universe (a la Bostrom's calculations) (This might be my least favorite paragraph of my rambling; I think there's an important point here but the way I'm phrasing it sounds very self-serving. I'm leaving it in hopes of figuring it out eventually)

I'll stop here because my rambling isn't really clarifying anything at this point, I don't think. But I would add an excerpt from a comment on one of Scott's old blogs against virtue ethics:

>I feel like, in saying “virtue ethics is bad”, based on the specific virtue ethics you’ve encountered, you’re doing something akin to saying “consequentialism is bad” after reading consequentialist writing by Clippy. Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are not moral frameworks; they are categories of moral frameworks, or rather, categories that individual fragments of moral knowledge fall into, according to whether they do their good/bad classification on events, on actions, or on people.

>My position is that consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics are all valid, and any complete moral framework must gracefully handle fragments of moral knowledge in all three forms. I think a surprisingly large amount of our moral knowledge comes from hero/villain classifications given to us in fiction, spread across weak-evidence relations like “the goals of good people are good”.

I'd pretty much agree with that. There's useful aspects to each, and distinctly saying one is good or bad is to overlook the advantages of the others, and the flaws of the one you've picked. My second-biggest issue with Scott's ethical writings is that he handwaves over the gaps of his consequentialism without digging, in a satisfying manner, into them (digging into gaps is not the best turn of phrase, I know). He tries, sort of, but I don't find the answers even remotely solid (hence I said I dismiss them for being specific to Scott, not to the broader philosophy). The "why" question posed at the top would be the biggest. He wants to good because he wants to do good; is it a virtuous tautology and we can't answer more than that?

Minor: in case others reading your comment are confused, the actual text reads

> There is no reason to think that Aristotle would disagree with this

Anyway the immediately preceding paragraph in Justice as Fairness is instructive. Why does Rawls begin, in the section you quoted, with an allowance that his approach "may not seem to tally with tradition?" I think the answer is because it does not tally with tradition! And on my reading, he simply fails to earn his conclusion that there is "no conflict" with the tradition in the space of the quoted text. He is free, of course, to define justice as he wishes, and I appreciate that he makes his own definition relatively clear: he thinks justice is fairness. Or possibly he thinks it should be fairness; he does specify in the preceding paragraph that he wants to offer "an account of certain distributive principles for the basic structure of society" and not "a description of ordinary meanings." So when Rawls says his definition is

> designed to apply directly to the most important case, the justice of the basic structure

he is begging the question. It is surely important, for justice to be done, that society be structured in a way that allows justice to be done! So Rawls is definitely talking about something justice-adjacent. But what does it mean for the "basic structure" to have "justice?" That is--what does it mean for any structure to be "just?" This is actually incredibly confused. Structures aren't just; actions are just. This is a category mistake. Here is one thing we can say: "robbing from Peter to pay Paul would be unjust." Here is another thing we can say: "the way society is permits Pansy to rob Peter to pay Paul." But does that mean our social structures are unjust? Social structures do not rob people; Pansy robs people. And what does it mean to "permit" Pansy to perform an injustice? Does it mean Pansy faces no punishment? Does it mean Pansy is not prevented from pilfering Peter's pockets in the first place? Does it mean Pansy is poor, thus inducing her to pick Peter's pockets?

This is why I spoke of confusion in my earlier post. A Theory of Justice is a philosophical masterpiece. It's really, really good work and Rawls is really, really important. It's just that, well, it's not about justice. He's writing arguments about fairness, equality, liberty... but not justice. He leaves justice behind. Or rather, he redefines it in a way that allows him to talk about justice without addressing serious questions about what we actually owe to each other. Instead he expounds on certain ideal social structures under which he believes justice would best be done.

These are complicated matters! And this is not really the medium for careful philosophical responses to so important a philosophical figure. But to make a few small responses:

> I don't know that a division between a contemporary concept of justice which applies to society and a historical concept of justice can be easily drawn.

This is certainly true, but please don't overlook that it is Rawls who drew that division, in the very passage you quoted. He would not have addressed the division if he did not think it was at least plausibly there. Perhaps you find his explanation persuasive, and certainly if you want to explain his words to me using your own then perhaps you will do better than he did. But I am no Rawls, by any stretch of the imagination, and so I am comfortable deferring to the way he drew the apparent division, though I am not as comfortable with his apparent attempt to explain it away.

> Justice's meaning has been contested for millennia, and Rawls has a pretty well considered response to this dilemma by distinguishing between the concept itself and a conception of it.

The concept/conception distinction is certainly helpful, but I don't think it actually helps Rawls here. It seems to me that "social justice" is a confused conception of justice, rather than a (or the!) central part of any concept of justice.

> Even if Rawls' approach wasn't at all concerned with interpersonal relations, which it definitely is, I'm not sure that means we couldn't do with some account of public principles of justice.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this.

> I suspect that 'social justice', as you'd understand it, is a subsection of Rawls' justice inasmuch as it appears at all. Rawls' argument for justice does provide an account of economic justice as well as the groundwork for normative arguments for womens', LGBTQ, and racial liberation...

Contemporary "social justice" as I understand it is the pursuit of social reform to alleviate oppression. It appears to manifest as a kind of activist-Rawlsianism, though that is an oversimplification that elides a couple of intellectual generations' worth of mutation and refinement. In political terms it seems to me that Rawlsianism is the heart of the liberal Left, which exists in some tension with the identitarian/intersectionalist Left, but being political bedfellows has led to some cross-pollination that makes it difficult to disentangle the genealogy of ideas there. I suspect that the identitarian Left is actually Huemer's target, rather than the liberal Left? Which may be why he doesn't mention Rawls at all. But my reaction to his piece was to see the Rawlsian parallel as helpfully explaining some of the ways in which the liberal and identitarian Left manage to get along. That was just a good deal more than I was going to get into my initial comment! And I'm not at all certain I've given it adequate explanation even here. But as I said--complicated matters.

A high-profile prize like the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is not just about the accomplishments of the recipient; it signals what is valued in economics community. The prize committee considers not only the contributions of the nominees to economics as a field of inquiry, but also whether the economics community would benefit from a signal-boost for the approach that the nominees use, or the particular sub-field or topic the nominees research. If the prize was only awarded for big ideas and grand narratives, that would signal that those are the only kinds of contributions that really matter to economics--or, alternatively, that the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Sciences is really a niche prize dedicated to a small subset of what the economics community cares about.

I agree with you that some of the most influential economists are the ones who presented big ideas and grand narratives. Big ideas and grand narratives give a framing to an otherwise too complex world, so if along comes a well-expounded grand narrative with a core big idea at just the right time, it can take over the world--even if it's demonstrably wrong. (See: Karl Marx, "Das Kapital".)

Speaking of Karl Marx: Despite the massive misery that his works supported in the 20th century, I agree with those who say that he was actually a pretty good sociologist. He masterfully described the misery that permeated the factories of his day, and he presented a framework that attempts to explain its causes. His weakness, both as an economist and as a sociologist, is that HE DIDN'T TEST HIS THEORIES WITH A FREAKING RCT.

Sorry for finger yelling. I guess I am still raw about Karl Marx, having lived under communism.

My point is that causal relationships that appear obvious, aren't. This observation underlies the entirety of social sciences. It is also very difficult to demonstrate causal relationships. While it's possible to do so without intervention, the approach requires one to already have a good model to account for confounders, and of course measurements of all the confounders. RCTs don't. That's why they are still regarded as the gold standard of demonstrating causality.

I apologize in advance if I don't do this right, first time posting here. I think this is culture since this is part of an ongoing arguementation between "Classical Liberals" and "Liberal Conservatives" vs "Religious/Social Conservatives" to "Post-Liberals"

The True Con

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>Though Will still claims to be a conservative, he has radically changed what he means by that term. In 1983’s Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will argued that government inevitably does legislate morality, and indeed “should do so more often.” He rejected “the idea that governments should be neutral in major conflicts about social values.” He denied that “the public interest is produced by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals making arrangements in free markets.” He confessed his “deviation from laissez-faire orthodoxy,” and announced, “It is time to come up from individualism.”
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>In 2019’s The Conservative Sensibility, Will employs the same gentlemanly prose—to opposite ends. He states that government should refrain from “imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue.” He maintains that men should be “free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preference.” He concludes that the public interest can, after all, be achieved “in the spontaneous order of a lightly governed society.” He frets over the fact that the poor pay no income tax, and describes the rich and corporations as “unpopular minorities.” He champions “individualism and the rights of the individual.”
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>Will has remained remarkably consistent in his self-styling. In 1983, he lamented that America contained “almost no conservatives, properly understood.” Today, he again calls conservatism “a persuasion without a party.” His positions have changed, but his pose has not. He is still the lone True Conservative.
>
>In both, America is conflated with liberal individualism. In Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will therefore concludes that America was “ill founded.” In The Conservative Sensibility, he instead celebrates the founding as the first inbreaking of Hayek’s transcendent philosophy. In both cases, America is not so much a nation as an idea. This is Will’s one fixed point—and his fundamental error.
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>Our foundations are broader and deeper than a single “founding” moment, tendentiously identified with the views of a few deistic slavers. William Bradford was one of our founders. So was Lord Baltimore. These men were communalists, not individualists; Christians, not liberals. For Will, they might as well not exist. He has spent his otherwise incoherent career propounding what Barry Shain, a professor of political science at Colgate University, calls “the myth of American individualism”—a myth that cannot survive contact with reality … the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the founding considered the individual “radically incomplete living outside an enveloping and ethically intensive community.” They believed that “the common or public good enjoyed preeminence over the immediate interests of individuals.”
>
>These Americans believed that property was not an absolute right, but a trust received from God to be used for all. The Vermont Declaration of Rights stated that “private property ought to be subservient to public use.” Benjamin Franklin, the most commercial of the framers, believed men had a natural right to whatever property was necessary “for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species.” But he also believed that “all property superfluous to such services is property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it.”
>
>...
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>Will labors to discredit Chambers and Kirk because they challenge his claim that America is univocally liberal and ultimately secular. Like many other True Cons, he has chosen to ignore ... what Shain calls the “enduring, democratic, Christian, and communal” tradition of America.
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>...
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>Will's praise of liberalism would be more convincing if he did not claim for it the virtues of other things. He opens his book by describing the Battle of Princeton as an “illustration of the history-making role of individual agency.” The selfless deaths of American patriots are thus enlisted for the ­ideology of self-interest.
>
>He says that the universe itself is a testament to the godless miracle of spontaneous order, thereby giving his economic ideas an unearned religious sheen. He questions tradition, hierarchy, and religion, but seeks to drape their prestige around his ... philosophy

>I'm not much of a gamer in this sense, but 40K always sounded kind of interesting. Where does one start with such a vast shared universe? Even the books; there's what, a couple hundred tie-in novels at this point?

Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill's books tend to hold up pretty well as works of pulp sci-fi/planetary romance in their own right, and those are where I'd recommend you start. Abnett's Brothers of the Snake (currently free on audible) is a one-off that makes for an excellent introduction to the setting and I'm pretty sure someone has already recommended The Priests of Mars.

I expect a number of people to recommend Sandy Mitchell's HERO OF THE IMPERIUM and to be fair it is really good but it also depends a bit more on the reader having a working knowledge of the setting.

I suppose I just don't see his behavior as that of the mindless arsonist and critic. He did try to sincerely make a good game. A niche one, to be sure, and I'm quite certain it wouldn't be to my taste, but nobody makes an Atari 2600 poetry game decades after the console faded from relevance out of cynicism. Nor is the arsonist likely to write a whole book on transferring the joy of games to life. Again, I don't think that book would be thoroughly to my taste, but it strikes me as nothing if not sincere.

As he said: he liked Goose Game. He'd better like games in general, given the amount of breath he's spent praising them and the time he's poured into development. He seems to be genuinely looking to analyze what is remarkable in gaming and apply it elsewhere.

Creation is absolutely harder than destruction, and it sends a much more meaningful signal. That strikes me as a point in Bogost's favor, not against, whether for creating his first game as a labor of love, creating and then destroying a popular entire game just to make a point, or writing a positive book on games as a whole. His works aren't always my style, but they do seem to be about as genuine as creative work can get, and that's my primary request of a creator.

> I also dearly wish there were a way to encourage wealthy and educated people to fucking reproduce

Cutting education is a promising start. Not only does school directly delay family formation, but the whole premise of education is that successful people are made through an expensive, arduous training process, when all the evidence shows that genes are more important.

You can't pay a 30-year-old MA enough to settle down and have kids in the next few years, when she's just been through 25 years of school, and been brainwashed into thinking that she has to put her kids through the same, as well as act as their personal servant for decades in order to instill the "love of learning" responsible for her own success (because it definitely wasn't genetic!). You especially can't pay people with high earning potential enough to do this.

We should reassure people that their children will turn out similar to themselves, due to genetics, with no special effort on their part. See Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. And while you're agreeing with Bryan Caplan, you might also want to check out his case for open borders, especially the part focusing on IQ heritability.

But China can change that. I think you discount China's uniqueness on the world stage and compared to it's neighbors (ironically listing Hong Kong and Taiwan as analog 'other countries'). They're the potentially the biggest economy in the world; they aren't playing by the same rules Burundi has to play by.

Further, you are looking at the world through a very western lens, something our policymakers did mistakenly for decades, which is how we wound up where we are at these days. Do you know the Chinese view the 20th century as their 'century of humiliation?', do you know that they've effectively pinned the collective all of western imperialism into China onto the United States? In a world where the majority of Americans couldn't tell you what a Boxer Rebellion was, China remembers. James K Polk is a great villain in the Chinese history of the world, whereas in the US again, he's largely forgotten.

Some recommended reading, and Amazon's summary covers the central theme well:

>For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China's rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the "China Dream" is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot?

>Based on interviews with Chinese defectors and newly declassified, previously undisclosed national security documents, The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China's secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world's dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Michael Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has served in senior national security positions in the U.S. government since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, draws on his decades of contact with the "hawks" in China's military and intelligence agencies and translates their documents, speeches, and books to show how the teachings of traditional Chinese statecraft underpin their actions. He offers an inside look at how the Chinese really view America and its leaders – as barbarians who will be the architects of their own demise.

>Pillsbury also explains how the U.S. government has helped – sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately – to make this "China Dream" come true, and he calls for the United States to implement a new, more competitive strategy toward China as it really is, and not as we might wish it to be. The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.

> Trump insists that tariffs force China to pay money to the US Treasury — which just isn’t true. When a tariff is placed on a Chinese good, it is the company importing that product or a consumer buying it who pays a higher price — not China. In other words, these tariffs are effectively a tax on Americans.

This is actually complicated. If China's market were entirely free, then the tax would fall in part on Chinese businesses and in part on American consumers, in proportion with the relative elasticities, as taxes do. However, China's market is not entirely free. There are lots of (large) state-owned enterprises, and it's commonly believed that some of them are using state assets to manipulate their market positions. In one sense, this seems like a simple positive for Americans - we benefit from lower prices, some of which is coming out of the Chinese state's coffers. In another sense, the market positions of those SOEs can have geopolitical impacts. This complicates the analysis greatly. Now, the tax falls economically on all three of the American people, Chinese businesses, and the Chinese state (in proportions that are likewise complicated), as well as having even fuzzier geopolitical impacts.

I'm starting to be of the belief that this game is super complicated, and I trust almost nothing that any popular outlet has to say on the topic (especially if it seems like they're using one portion or another to try to score domestic partisan political points). The variety of expertise you need in a room to make sense of it is pretty staggering, and I feel immensely inadequate to analyze it, myself (it's not within my area of expertise; I'm just a somewhat-educated amateur on these topics). About the only thing I can do is hope that the decisions aren't being made entirely by Trump flying by the seat of his pants, and that it involves significant analysis by a combination of Treasury/Fed, State, and Defense. While specific choices may not be directly the strategy that would have been pursued by a hypothetical alternative administration, the general concerns and complications involved are pretty directly related to the things Hillary was bringing to the forefront with her Economic Statecraft push.

There is an academic who has been gaining in popularity somewhat recently for his foray into non-pc topics such as his book published for general audiences called How to Judge People by What they Look Like.
While watching a few of his videos, I was struck by an issue that he brought up in his critique of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now. I have timestamp the video, and the transcription is below. The issue is the direct opposition between the necessities for robust evolutionary selection and the "objectively good things" that individuals desire in their lives.

>He(Pinker) ultimately ends his book by saying” life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering, knowledge is better than superstition.”

>Yes that is the case at the individual level. But what he evidently fails to understand, what he willfully doesn’t want to understand, is the importance of group selection. The fact that we know that we can pass on our genes directly by having children, at the kin level by looking after our kin, and at the ethnic level by looking after our group which is an extended genotype. We know from computer models that, all else being equal, it is the more positively and negatively ethnocentric group that will triumph. And therefore if you want to preserve civilization, the only way to do that is to balance enlightenment values with these ethnocentric values which allow the more intelligent society to defend itself against the potentially more ethnocentric enemy at the gate. You have to have that balance right, or you are in serious trouble.

>At the level of group selection, life is not necessarily better than death: It is good to have an optimum number of people willing to lay down their lives for society. Health is not necessarily better than sickness: If you are under conditions of harsh Darwinian selection, and the sick are selected against, then you will become healthier including more mentally healthy and thus more likely to win the battle of group selection. Abundance is not better than want because when groups have abundance the intense Darwinian selection pressures are reduced, and they become less adaptive, less intelligent, and less able to survive in certain conditions. Freedom is not necessarily better than coercion: If everybody is free and nobody is coerced into doing anything then nobody will fight for the good of the society. Happiness is certainly not necessarily better than suffering at the group level because those who are happy can become decadent and can therefore just let things wash over them whereas to those who suffer, it can act as a motivator to great things; it can act as a motivator to genius and great art, and it can make the group less decadent and more warlike and more likely to survive the battle of group selection. Knowledge is not necessarily better than superstition if that superstition holds the group together, elevates its ethnocentrism, and makes it more likely to win the battle of group selection for that reason. And it is not better if that superstition is the thing that motivates people towards Truth.

>He ends by saying (paraphrasing) “the story of knowledge is the story of every tribe, every part of humanity.” Clearly that is not true. Clearly there are some groups who have contributed disproportionally to human endeavor, and they have done so because of the optimum combination of high intelligence, of a sort of pro-social cooperative personality that has managed to produce a society where people have impulse control and can look to the future and can plan and can discover things because it has an optimum level of genius that’s adaptive.

>It’s nonsense. This book is not a defense of science. It’s a defense of a sort of ideology, of a Christian theology without belief in God which has developed out of science. And there is a degree to which it is the enemy of science, and it is the enemy of the kind of society that would be able to sustain civilization and sustain science.


So what would the standards of such a society be? In other videos he admits that increased group intelligence inevitably leads to less superstition and less group selection which nearly always leads to social collapse and then to being overtaken by a less intelligent, more-group-selected tribe. I have not heard him give a definitive answer to this problem, but I agree with him that Pinker is mostly wrong in the above assertions.

Is there some steady state of society in which science and group selection are promoted or did the scientific revolution bring about an inherently unstable state? Is it just the nature of a civilizations to be cyclic in this way?

This all sounds correct to me.

Miller is gunning pretty hard for a particular kind of poly configuration, one with a committed primary partnership and rotating secondary partners. One problem is that this seems like a much better fit for men's average-case sexual preferences than it does for women's. In particular, this argument of Miller's does not sound like a realistic account of most cishet women's preferences to me:

>Polygyny makes it harder for lower-mate-value men to find partners, but polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.

As Regnerus observed, gay male sexuality resembles straight male sexuality, and lesbian sexuality resembles straight female sexuality. So it's not a coincidence that Miller is citing the popularity of Dan Savage's "monogamish" norm among gay men, as opposed to lesbians, as a model for straight marriage.

Got through most of it, ended around here: "BAP asserts an inherent connection between physical health, good looks, and human worth. No 'eye of the beholder' clichés here! I suppose this is the place to note that one constant in BAP’s Twitter feed is pictures of muscled, shirtless beefcake"


Celebrities tend to have predictably progressive politics. What to make of them, then? They'd balk at BAP.


Also, reminds me of this book How to Judge People by What They Look Like.

This is far from the only resource available to refute the claims you are making that life is getting worse, but it is recent and full of graphs and citations. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525427570/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_1F1CCbEF8C1QJ

When you use buzzwords like "elites" and "Goldman Sachs", it doesn't reinforce your point, it sounds neophyte.