Free Cities Podcast

Crémieux: Why Bad Ideas Persist

“Every country is run poorly, in my opinion. I don’t think any country is run very well. Even Singapore is not run very well. They’re too restrictive there.”

Crémieux: Why Bad Ideas Persist

Episode #180 Summary

Crémieux is a pseudonymous statistician and writer with a large following on Substack and X. He takes widely cited studies, reopens the data, and argues the conclusions don’t always hold up. His readers include Elon Musk and JD Vance.

In this episode, Timothy Allen sits down with Crémieux at Próspera in Roatán, Honduras, for a wide-ranging conversation on IQ, institutions, fertility, biotech, governance, and why every country on Earth, even Singapore, is run poorly.

The result is part interview, part real-time error-correction service. Every casual claim Timothy makes gets gently audited against the data, and the answers are usually “harsher, less equal, and less comforting than people want them to be.”

Key topics covered

  • IQ and group differences: Why most “special” immigrant groups are statistically unremarkable once you control for selection effects
  • Institutions over genetics: El Salvador’s transformation under Bukele. Same population, different outcomes
  • Honduras as case study: Severance taxes, FDI delays, and 80% informal employment as self-imposed poverty
  • Religion as social technology: The Catholic Church, cousin marriage, and the Hajnal line in European development
  • What predicts socialism?: Poor mental health, downward mobility, and resentment, with champagne socialists as a statistical deviation
  • Paul Ehrlich’s legacy: How neo-Malthusian advice influenced India’s mass sterilisation programme during The Emergency (1975-77)
  • Voice vs exit: Why Switzerland and Dubai work, and why one-world government would be a “global Honduras”
  • Privacy vs biotech: Florida’s Sunshine Genetics Act, China’s biobank race, and the data tradeoff
  • The unsolved problem at the heart of every Free City or charter city: How do you generate the agglomeration effects of San Francisco?

Episode chapters (Audio version only, includes Timothy’s episode introduction):

    • 0:00:29 – Introduction to episode
    • 0:07:26 – Start of conversation: ChatGPT, distilling a guest’s worldview, and the macro view
    • 0:09:38 – Cremieux’s philosophy: honest inquiry, good data, and harsher answers
    • 0:11:58 – The IQ question: simple models, predictive power, and conversations nobody wants to have
    • 0:13:19 – “Most things are not special”: Nigerian immigrants, group differences, and what falls apart under scrutiny
    • 0:14:01 – The macro view of the human condition: heritability, institutions, and El Salvador before and after Bukele
    • 0:16:34 – Evolutionary biology vs evolutionary psychology, and the limits of data
    • 0:20:06 – Religion as social technology: the Catholic Church, cousin marriage, and the Hajnal line
    • 0:24:48 – Jordan Peterson, abstraction, and why getting too wacky means losing substance
    • 0:26:13 – Honduras governed like a socialist hellhole: severance taxes, informal employment, and the Washington Consensus
    • 0:30:06 – Property rights, El Zonte, and the development problem in Latin America
    • 0:31:30 – Why Singapore and Israel got it right when the rest of the third world didn’t
    • 0:32:41 – What predicts socialism: poor mental health, downward mobility, and resentment
    • 0:35:55 – The champagne socialist deviation, and why hypocrisy isn’t really the point
    • 0:38:27 – Paul Ehrlich, neo-Malthusianism, and how India sterilised more people in one year than the Nazis did in twelve
    • 0:40:09 – Some people are just correct: knowing better, the data, and the difference
    • 0:42:01 – ChatGPT modelling competing polities, and the IQ correlations of political ideology
    • 0:44:46 – Why libertarians lose: bad at marketing, bad at organising, and the few good rules worth following
    • 0:47:55 – Switzerland, Dubai, and exit over voice: “voice is annoying”
    • 0:51:13 – Democracy: not a fan, but currently necessary
    • 0:52:22 – “Every country is run poorly,” even Singapore
    • 0:55:28 – Patchworks, conquest, and why one-world government would be a “global Honduras”
    • 0:56:50 – Privacy vs biotech: HIPAA, the Sunshine Genetics Act, and China’s biobank advantage
    • 1:00:10 – Why Sweden trusts its government, and the limits of giving up privacy
    • 1:03:36 – Politicians lie: Robert Moses, LBJ, and whether good leaders can be liars
    • 1:07:24 – Latin America, Chile, and why everywhere should be rich
    • 1:08:20 – On Erick Brimen and Próspera: bullish, but agglomeration is the unsolved problem
    • 1:09:08 – The unsolvable problem at the heart of every charter city: how do you build the next San Francisco?

Enjoy the conversation.

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