The farther I traveled from poverty, the more fashionable it became to romanticize the conditions I had escaped. I grew up in poverty in Los Angeles and was taken from my mother when I was three. She had immigrated from South Korea, but her life unraveled amid drug addiction. I never met my father and learned only as an adult, through a genetic ancestry test, that he was Mexican. I spent the next several years moving through foster homes and chaotic circumstances. At seventeen, I enlisted in the United States Air Force. After some setbacks, I arrived at Yale at twenty-five and studied on the GI Bill. Along the way, I climbed nearly every rung of the American class ladder. I moved from poverty through working-class and lower-middle-class homes. In the military, I encountered the middle class. At Yale, I was surrounded by the upper-middle class and the wealthy. Moving through these worlds, I noticed that beliefs changed with social class. At Yale, I heard ideas I had never encountered before: abolish the police, empty the prisons, promote polyamory, dismantle traditional marriage, and decriminalize drugs. These ideas were popular among elites, but their costs often fell on communities like the ones where I grew up. I had seen addiction, abuse, neglect, abandonment, and disorder up close. At Yale and later during my Ph.D. at Cambridge, I studied research on class and social status. It helped me understand what I had witnessed and led me to some startling statistics about social class.

Muscularity is a huge predictor of romantic appeal. One study of more than 7,000 men found that muscle mass was associated with more sexual partners in the last year and more sexual partners overall. A study on males aged 18 to 59 found that muscularity is significantly positively associated with the number of total sexual partners and total partners within the past year. Handgrip strength is correlated with self-assessed happiness, health, social confidence, overall physical attractiveness, and overall number of sexual partners. To me, the most interesting finding in this line of work is that how tough a guy looks to men appears to be a much stronger predictor of mating success than how attractive he is to women. Researchers recorded short videos of 157 different men. Next, another group of men watched these videos. Researchers asked them a question about each of the men in the videos: “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely likely” to “extremely unlikely.” A group of women also viewed the videos. They responded to a question about each of the men: “How sexually attractive is this man?” They used a scale ranging from “extremely unattractive” to “extremely attractive.” Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history over the 18 months. How tough a guy looked to men predicted his reported mating success better than how attractive he looked to women. The researchers concluded, “Men with higher physical dominance, but not sexual attractiveness, reported higher quantitative mating success.”

"For every degree above 25°C (77°F), our cognitive performance declines by around two percent. And if synapses suffer, so does economic activity. At 30°C (86°F), office performance drops by almost 9%."

It’s worth reading Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down, a manifesto for the degrowth movement, to get a sense of the destructive telos of this movement. A low-growth world would be a zero-sum world; if abundance is treated as the problem, then politics invariably becomes a fight over resources and control. The humane alternative is more innovation, more agency—and more growth.

Stronger men are more likely than average to exhibit outward displays of anger. Researchers have measured men's handgrip strength, the amount of weight each participant could lift, bicep circumference, etc.—controlling for body‑fat percentage and other factors. The result was striking: stronger men were consistently more prone to anger. That pattern held not only in American samples but also among hunter‑gatherer groups in Peru and Central Africa. Anger seems to work as an effective bargaining tool for physically formidable men.

"Poise, self assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions...not coincidentally, these are the things that women find attractive."

"The Seattle increase, mandating a $20.76 hourly wage for restaurant workers, led to several closings...The owner of the Bebop Waffle Shop told the press that the mandate would cost her an extra $32,000 a year. 'Where do I make up that money?' she asked."

"You will have so many opportunities to do the wrong thing: To gossip, to lie, to cut corners, to take short cuts. It’s never worth it, because then it makes it harder to like yourself. No amount of money or fame will make you feel good if you aren’t proud of how you’ve acted."

"Wolves and dogs cycle through an elaborate sequence of warnings before a fight...The system evolved this way because violence is expensive. Even the winner often gets hurt. The architecture of threat signaling exists to make actual combat unnecessary"