Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

What Neither Side Can Say About Harvard

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

Nathan Cofnas writes in the Wall Street Journal Aug. 21 that he rejects DEI in favor of treating people as individuals.

That triggered me hard, bro. It’s a lovely sentiment but it is not possible in this fallen world.

I have a rich fantasy life, but even I don’t entertain this ideal of treating people like individuals. It’s too tiring. I’m an old man. I don’t have the energy to start treating people like individuals until they become important to me, and only a small number of people become important to me. Otherwise, I rely on stereotypes, like everybody else, because they’re good enough.

Two paragraphs later Cofnas reports that under a colorblind system judging applicants only on grades and test scores, Harvard would be 0.7 percent African-American, a figure he takes from an internal Harvard study disclosed during Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

The number exists because somebody sorted applicants by race and ran the counterfactual. A man who treats people as individuals has no use for it. Later in the same piece he argues for measures ensuring meaningful representation of major demographic groups so that everyone feels a voice in collective decisions, which is a quota.

The diversity coalition says group remedy for group injury. Disparities in enrollment and hiring trace to historical exclusion, so the institution acts on the group to correct the group. Then challenge any particular hire and the answer arrives in the individual register: this scholar was assessed on the merits, cleared every bar, and the suggestion that race did any work in the file is an insult. Harvard argued both in one litigation. Race is one factor among many, never determinative, holistic. Also indispensable, since the internal simulation showed what removing it does.

Institutions typically address two audiences with one document and a lot of words about values. Public legitimacy runs on individual assessment, because a credential that anyone believes came from a group allocation is unsayable. Distribution of goodies runs on group accounting. Say the first alone and the program has no rationale. Say the second alone and every graduate carries an asterisk. So the institution says both, in different rooms, to different listeners, and never in the same paragraph. The arrangement is stable so long as nobody puts the two paragraphs side by side.

Cofnas has the same problem in reverse. He needs group data to establish mismatch and needs individualism to keep the position morally clean. He says the story was never about Arday. A man who treats people as individuals cannot use a man that way. His practice is group inference with an individual disclaimer.

The arrangement holds until reality rears its ugly head. Jason Arday was announced in 2023 as the youngest Black professor in the history of Cambridge, and the announcement did group work. It was repeated by every outlet that covered the appointment. When the record came under question, the group frame supplied no defense. The defense had to be individual, and the individual defense depended on a file that could not carry it. So the argument moved back to the group register, where it became a claim about who was scrutinizing and why. That progression looks like bad faith from outside.

An institution that cannot state its own arithmetic cannot audit its own files. Checking whether a given appointment came through the group column or the individual one requires asking a question the arrangement forbids anyone to ask out loud. So the check does not happen. Concerns reach an administrator who has no available vocabulary for evaluating them, and the safest handling is no handling. Cambridge reportedly held information about the thesis from 2023 and did nothing with it for two years, and reportedly knew about a fabricated account of a racist attack. An institution that cannot describe its own procedure has disabled its ability to inspect the results of that procedure, and it will keep discovering its errors the way this one did, from outside, at maximum cost, in the hands of people who owe it nothing.

Randall Kennedy states in For Discrimination that affirmative action is racial preference, and defends the preference on its merits. On the other side, the sayable version runs: group averages on measured traits differ, individual variation within every group dwarfs the differences between them, we therefore prohibit sorting by race in individual decisions and accept whatever distribution results. Both positions can be stated in public by a person willing to lose an argument.

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…

I reckon he’s right.

Further reading. John David Skrentny’s The Ironies of Affirmative Action (Chicago, 1996) traces how the remedy rationale gave way to the diversity rationale for reasons of coalition and legal survival. Frank Dobbin’s Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, 2009) shows personnel officers building the practice and the vocabulary at the same time. Randall Kennedy’s For Discrimination (Pantheon, 2013) is the honest defense. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s Mismatch (Basic, 2012) is the honest attack, and the two read together cover the empirical ground without either author pretending. Glenn Loury’s The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard, 2002) supplies the distinction between discrimination in contact and discrimination in contract. For the legal architecture, Powell’s opinion in Bakke (1978) and O’Connor’s in Grutter (2003), where the twenty-five-year line promises that the arrangement is temporary.

Posted in Academia, Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off

Strange Bedfellows in Cambridge and Ghent

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

Psychological Inquiry has a paper by David Pinsof, David O. Sears and Martie G. Haselton called “Strange bedfellows: the Alliance Theory of political belief systems.” Its claim is that political beliefs come out of alliance structures. People pick allies by similarity, by transitivity, and by interdependence, then support those allies with three families of propagandistic bias. The paper holds that these run symmetrically across the spectrum. Run that apparatus over the Cofnas–Arday affair and most of the commentary of the past month becomes predictable.

Start with transitivity, which the paper defines as sharing the same allies and rivals, and which it treats as the strongest force in ally selection because it heads off infighting and betrayal. Every participant in this affair knew the roster on July 20. Cofnas is a rival of the diversity coalition. Arday was an ally of it. When a rival attacks an ally, transitivity assigns everyone a position before a single citation gets checked. The enemy of my friend is my enemy, and the accusation he carries inherits his standing.

Perpetrator biases arrive next. The paper describes them as downplaying responsibility, emphasizing mitigating circumstances, embellishing good intentions, and minimizing the severity of harm, and its central finding is that people apply these to allies as they apply them to themselves. The defense of Arday runs the full sequence. Errors rather than fraud. A childhood diagnosis. Pressures placed on him by an institution that promoted him. A career of good work reduced to a citation problem by people acting in bad faith.

The instructive case is Cofnas running the same bias on the same man. His Wall Street Journal piece of August 21 says Arday was an adult and morally responsible, then says he was mostly responding to incentives created by other people, and that his punishment exceeded any wrongdoing he may have committed. Perpetrator bias applied to the man he exposed. Alliance Theory explains the switch. Arday has stopped being the rival and become the exhibit, and the rival is now Cambridge, the press, and Ghent. The bias follows the roster.

Victim biases run on both sides and produce what the literature calls competitive victimhood, where each party works to establish that it suffered the greater injustice. One side gives us an essay on institutional murder, a vigil in Trafalgar Square blaming the press, and an account in The Nation of a funded transatlantic machine. The other gives us a Journal headline about a scapegoat, an inventory of death threats and smears, a politician denouncing a man by name, and the loss of a job. Both sides raise the perpetrator’s intent to malevolence, deny mitigating circumstances, and stretch the harm. Pinsof, Sears and Haselton note that victim claims sit awkwardly with any theory about protecting one’s self-image, since they advertise weakness, and make better sense as recruitment.

This story is attribution dispute all the way down. The paper’s finding is that people credit their allies’ advantages to internal causes and their disadvantages to external ones. Ask why Arday rose. One roster answers merit, the other answers preference. Ask why he fell. One answers fraud, the other answers a racist press. Ask why Cofnas lost two posts in two years. One answers his conduct, the other answers a taboo.

Cofnas is defended by the Committee for Academic Freedom, by Jerry Coyne, by Maarten Boudry, who thinks the hereditarian program is wrong, by the British right-wing press, by anonymous accounts that would embarrass all of the above, and by the American ambassador in Brussels, who has announced a review of the government’s relationships with a Belgian university over its handling of one postdoc.

A coalition assembled around free expression now includes a state reviewing a foreign university’s personnel decisions. On the other side, a union that condemns attacks on journalists singled out for criticism the man who published a story nobody has faulted for accuracy, and a coalition built on defending scholarly standards is defending a man against a plagiarism finding. The paper predicts patchwork narratives with incompatible principles, generated by the alliance.

The theory also predicts who breaks ranks and at what cost. Its claim about loyal partisans is that they are the most willing to condone what they would otherwise condemn, which makes defection a signal of a weak alliance. Brian Leiter grants that many of the allegations were warranted and faults the manner of the exposure. Steven Pinker grants the findings and calls the research program a place not to go. Boudry defends a man whose central thesis he rejects. Each of these people holds a status base that does not depend on the coalition he is defecting from.

The frame has limits. Applied without discipline it becomes unfalsifiable, since any position can be recoded as loyalty and any evidence-following person can be described as roster-following. The discipline available here is the coding test. Take fifty commentators with a public record on affirmative action before July 21, 2026. Code that record. Then code each one’s current position on whether the plagiarism claims are substantiated, on whether the exposure was legitimate, and on whether Ghent acted properly. If prior position predicts current position at a high rate, the theory has earned its keep on a live case. If it predicts poorly, the theory has taken a hit. Run the same design on a second list: people who demanded retraction and accountability in earlier fraud cases and now call this a witch-hunt, and people who demanded due process for accused academics and now welcome a suspension delivered by administrative letter. Both lists can be built from public statements with dates.

Arday’s thesis is here. Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 thesis is here. The Cofnas post is here.

Further reading. Pinsof’s frame descends from Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban, “A Solution to the Mysteries of Morality,” Psychological Bulletin 139 (2013), which treats moral condemnation as a coordination device for taking sides. Eric Luis Uhlmann and colleagues, “The Motivated Use of Moral Principles,” Judgment and Decision Making 4 (2009), supplies the experimental core of the double standards argument. Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban’s The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind (Princeton, 2014) develops the interdependence half of ally selection. Roy Baumeister’s Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (Freeman, 1997) is the source of the perpetrator and victim bias asymmetry that Alliance Theory borrows, and its chapter on the magnitude gap is the best short account of why two parties to the same event describe two different events. For the competitive victimhood literature, Masi Noor and colleagues, “When Suffering Begets Suffering,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 16 (2012).

Posted in Alliance Theory | Comments Off

fordy, no

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

The stream is up eleven minutes and there are nine people watching, which is four more than last Sunday, when Luke went ninety minutes on Talmudic labor law and lost everyone at minute six.

He has the light right. He worked on the light. There is a lamp behind the camera bounced off a foam board he bought on Amazon, and a second lamp he keeps low so the ceiling of the apartment does not read as a ceiling. On the shelf behind his head, arranged that afternoon, sit the Steinsaltz, a Tom Wolfe paperback with the spine broken in three places, and the Big Book, angled so the title catches the key light.

Chat is quiet. Then Silent Bob. “Has Fordy reached out to Nathan to offer comfort, solace and potentially Alexander therapy?”

Luke leans toward the microphone and the chair creaks and his head goes back and down, which is the thing he has been paying a woman in Santa Monica a hundred dollars an hour to stop him doing since 2008.

“That’s a good question, Bob,” he says with only a small gasp for air and a modest tightening in his head-neck-back relationship. His throat hurts, which is the thing Alexander Technique was supposed to fix.

The email to Nathan Cofnas goes out at 12:41 in the morning. It runs eleven hundred words. Luke knows it runs eleven hundred words because after he had ChatGPT write it, he pasted it into Word, and then he trims forty words, and then adds sixty more suggested by Grok.

It opens warm. He establishes that he has followed the work. He establishes that he holds no position on the substance. He notes that he has been expelled from things, that his father was expelled from something in Colorado in 1980 and that the family ate the consequences for thirty years, and that he understands what is happening better than the people sending supportive messages.

Then paragraph four.

Bava Metzia 59b. The oven of Achnai. Luke explains that Rabbi Eliezer brings every argument in the world and the sages do not accept them. And they burn everything Eliezer ever ruled pure, and they excommunicate him, and they send the gentlest man among them to break the news so that nobody harsher does it. Luke types the phrase “which is more consideration than you got” and then deletes it, and then puts it back.

Paragraph six is the Alexander Technique.

He does not lead with the neck. He builds. He explains that most of what a man calls stress is a set of habits he cannot feel from the inside, that the head is meant to go forward and up and that under threat it goes back and down, that the pulling down is not caused by the threat but by the reaction to the threat. He uses the word inhibition and then apologizes for the word inhibition. He offers constructive rest, twelve minutes on the floor, knees up, a paperback under the skull, and says he has found F.M. Alexander’s own books unreadable and recommends starting with his own blog posts on the Technique. He offers to walk him through semi-supine over Zoom. He says the time difference is workable. He recommends silent lalalas. He had a student on Broadway who used them. He can’t mention names, but it is someone famous.

Paragraph eight is Step Four.

He says he is not suggesting Nathan has a drinking problem. He says the inventory is not about drinking. He says resentment is the number one offender, that it kills more of us than anything else, that when he lists a resentment he has to write down his own part in it, and that there is always a part, even when the other side did the greater wrong. He quotes the line about restraint of tongue and pen. He does not notice that he has now spent eleven hundred words at one in the morning writing to a man he has met once.

He attaches his essay. Of course he attaches four of his essays on Amy Wax (his magnum opus! history will vindicate him) and a further reading list including a Princeton monograph on European craft ordinances.

He reads it once more at 11:58 and cuts the sentence about his father, because it is showing, and then puts it back, because it is true, and then sends it.

The reply arrives Tuesday afternoon while Luke is writing in his gratitude journal.

“Thanks.”

That is the reply. Seven letters. Luke reads it three times.

By Tuesday night he has decided that “thanks” is warmer than it looks. He tells the stream this. Fourteen people are watching now, because the affair is hot and Luke’s name comes up in the search results next to better-known names, which is a thing he has noticed and will not mention because he’s but dust and ashes, a simple Jew.

“Nathan’s under enormous pressure,” Luke says. “A one-word reply under that kind of pressure, that’s a man conserving energy. That’s appropriate.”

Bob: “Fordy he blocked you”

Luke: “He did not block me.”

Bob: “Check”

Luke checks, on camera, and he is not blocked, he is still followed, and he says so with quiet dignity.

Live on screen he feels his back lengthening and widening. He performs mostly silent lalalalas and pulls on his red flex bar and remembers the one who got away in 1984 in Gladstone, the brunette with the twin sister. Then he takes a gulp of Crystal Light Orange Drink, zero calories.

Someone called shomer_shabbos_310 writes that Luke has now done to a stranger what the sages did to Rabbi Eliezer, and the chat runs with this for four minutes. Someone asks whether the Alexander lesson is billable. Someone asks whether Step Nine covers unsolicited emails. Someone writes that the man lost his job on a Thursday and got a reading list by Monday.

Luke laughs at that one.

Then he stops laughing and says the true thing, which is why nine people watch and then fourteen and then sometimes forty.

He says that in 1980 a committee sat in a lodge in Colorado for six days and at the end of it his father was finished, and that the thing nobody tells you is that the finding does not matter afterward. He says the men who voted knew the arguments and voted anyway, because the group needed a result more than it needed an answer, and that his father spent the next forty years being right in rooms that had stopped taking attendance. He says the loneliness of that is not the loneliness of losing an argument. He says a man cast out keeps writing letters to people who have agreed among themselves not to read them.

The chat goes still. Fourteen people, no messages, eleven seconds.

Then Luke leans in and the head goes back and down again.

“Which is exactly why the semi-supine work is so useful in a situation like this,” he says. “Twelve minutes. A paperback under the head. I could show him Thursday.”

Bob: “fordy”

Bob: “fordy no”

Posted in Personal | Comments Off

The Nathan Cofnas Suspension Letter

Posted on August 23, 2026 by Luke Ford

From Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is True:

UNIVERSITEITSDIENSTEN – BESTUUR,
JURIDISCHE ZAKEN EN COMPLIANCE
JURIDISCHE ZAKEN
REGISTERED MAIL
Nathan COFNAS
Katia Berlingieri
Head of Legal Affairs
E [email protected]
T +32 9 264 30 43
Campus Ufo – Rectoraat
Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 25
9000 Gent
België
www.ugent.be
DATE
20 August 2026
PAGE
1/7
OUR REFERENCE
TUCHT PERS 2026/0010/EN/LJ – Nathan Cofnas
Concerning: Initiation of the disciplinary procedure and decision regarding preventive suspension in the interest of the service (Disciplinary Regulations for Staff)
Dear Nathan COFNAS,
Over the past months, I have received several complaints, reports, and concerning signals from across the wider university community regarding your conduct and public actions. In particular, over the past week, additional concerns have been raised in relation to various interviews published in which you participated and the statements you made during those interviews.
In this regard I have decided to initiate a preliminary investigation as provided for in article 28 of the regulations with respect to disciplinary proceedings, the imposing of disciplinary measures, the preventive suspension in the interest of the service, and the taking of measures to ensure orderly conduct for staff members of Ghent University (hereinafter: “Disciplinary Regulations for Staff”). You can find the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff in the Codex of Ghent University via the following link: REG000237EN.
Article 3 of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff stipulates that any staff member may be subject to a disciplinary procedure in the event of:
(i) Offences that are committed in the university context. These concern either a serious breach of official/ professional duties (breach of a legal or a deontological duty as an officer), or an offence committed in the course of the performance of their duties/ the activities of Ghent University, such as (but not limited to), a breach of the internal regulations included in the Codex of Ghent University.
(ii) Offences committed in the context of private life, in so far as they are, on the one hand, criminally punishable and, on the other hand, have a negative impact on the functioning of the staff member or on the functioning of the service or have a serious negative impact on the well-being of or cooperation with other staff members or students.
(i) Offences committed within the university context
During a recent podcast interview with Winston Marshall published on 9 August 2026, you explicitly stated that you are currently continuing your work on “race realism” and the “hereditarian revolution” at Ghent University. These public claims, and the activities you describe, are fundamentally inconsistent with the contractual scope of your employment and constitute a manifest violation of your professional obligations towards this University.
Your employment contract (article 1) and the vacancy for which you were recruited (ref. LW01) define your research mandate as a study of “the future of liberalism”, specifically focusing on liberalism as a political doctrine emphasizing individual freedom and equality. The projects you publicly and repeatedly associate with your affiliation at Ghent University, most notably your ‘Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ which advocates for racial barriers and segregation, fall entirely outside the scope of your official research mandate.
Pursuant to article 4 of the Ghent University Work Regulations (Arbeidsreglement), employees are required to perform the work for which they were recruited and to execute their function in a loyal, careful, and upright manner. By publicly claiming to use your position and affiliation at Ghent University to advance research that is unrelated to your appointment, you are in breach of your professional duties and the loyalty required, as defined in article 3 §1 of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff.
Moreover, pursuant to article 1.3 of the Ghent University Code of Ethics, employees must ensure that any accumulation of activities does not entail a (perceived) conflict of interest or conflict with other standards established in the Code. Even if your work on ‘race realism’ were to be characterized as a private activity, its public association with your UGent affiliation creates a severe perceived conflict of interest and violates article 1.5 of the Code, which prohibits spreading ideas of racial superiority or inciting racial segregation.
The gravity of these cumulative breaches, involving deliberate public misrepresentation and the misuse of the University’s reputation to promote ideologies that conflict with its core values, as well as your decision to continue your research into ‘hereditary evolution’ and ‘racial realism’ at Ghent University, contrary to the terms of your employment, concern a breach of your ethical duties as a member of staff at our University and therefore qualify as a disciplinary offence committed within the university context.
(ii) Offences committed in the context of your private life
In a series of recent public interviews you made, including interviews with Winston Marshall (8 August 2026), David Starkey (9 August 2026) and Rob Montz (14 August 2026), I have established that you have made various statements in which you assert (among other statements) that racial or ethnic groups differ in intellectual ability for inherited or biological reasons.
Certain statements made during those interviews may be interpreted as advancing ideas concerning the inherent superiority or inferiority of racial or ethnic groups. However, neither freedom of expression nor academic freedom is unlimited. Both may be restricted by law where necessary to protect the rights of others and to prevent discrimination and racism. Belgian anti-discrimination legislation provides for such restrictions. Questions therefore arise as to the compatibility of your public statements with the objectives and provisions of Belgian anti-discrimination legislation, more specifically articles 20 and 21.
Furthermore, in several public interviews, you repeatedly referred to the late professor Jason Arday as being “mentally disabled” and made various other disparaging remarks concerning him, including, among others, describing him as a “worthless scholar”. In addition to the disparaging nature of these remarks, the University is deeply concerned by the way you have framed your actions.
By framing your interventions as a ‘crusade’ aimed at the systematic personal and professional destruction of colleagues, you have demonstrated that your actions extend beyond the permissible bounds of academic debate. Such behaviour strongly suggests an intentional and serious disturbance of the peace, which may fall within the scope of conduct protected against under Chapter V of the Belgian Criminal Code concerning offences against a person’s honour or reputation, including the provisions set out in articles 443 et seq.
The aforementioned findings have had a notably negative impact on the functioning of the University and on the well-being of, and cooperation with, students and other members of staff. Such statements conflict with the core of the University’s commitment to equality, inclusion and the dignity of all students and staff members and have caused serious distress and concern within the university community, particularly among students and staff members who may reasonably experience such statements as calling into question their equal standing within the academic environment.
Over an extended period of time since your appointment at Ghent University, significant concerns have been raised by members of the Ghent University community and beyond regarding your presence and activities within the institution. These concerns are not isolated or incidental in nature. They have manifested themselves through sustained and visible reactions from students and staff members alike.
In particular, students at Ghent University established the group “Students Against Cofnas”, specifically aimed at opposing your appointment at the University. Furthermore, in May 2026, a petition concerning your appointment was signed by more than 2,000 students. These initiatives illustrate that the concerns surrounding your presence at the University are widespread and have affected a substantial part of the student community.
Similar concerns have also been expressed within the academic environment in which you are employed. A public statement issued by your department in June 2026, which has been removed from public access, indicated that your presence had become a source of significant unrest throughout the workplace. This demonstrates that the concerns are not limited to students but also extend to colleagues and staff members who are required to work within the same academic environment.
In addition, the manner in which you publicly presented your role in the allegations concerning the late professor Jason Arday has reinforced concerns among the university’s community that your public interventions seem to develop into targeted campaigns of professional elimination. By framing the ‘exposure’ of a colleague not as scholarly debate but as a victorious act in a self-described ‘hereditarian revolution’, and by publicly calling to ‘purge’ institutions of those you label as ideological enemies, you have created a climate of severe psychosocial distress. As a result thereof, staff seem to perceive your presence as an objective threat to their professional standing and personal dignity.
The disturbance is further evidenced by objectified reports and files. Firstly, I have been informed that several confidential files concerning you are currently being processed through Trustpunt. Furthermore, IDEWE’s external psychosocial prevention adviser has been requested to carry out a study within the relevant department in order to objectively assess the impact of your employment on the wellbeing of staff and students.
Without prejudice to the confidentiality of those files and without anticipating their outcome, their existence and apparent recurrence provide a further indication that the concerns relating to your conduct extend beyond public debate and are also manifesting themselves within the University’s internal working environment. This reinforces the conclusion that the present circumstances have generated a level of tension and unrest that risks adversely affecting the proper functioning of the University and the psychosocial wellbeing of members of its community.
Your continued public invocation of your affiliation with Ghent University while disseminating these views creates a reputational risk. It generates a perception among external audiences that the University endorses or provides a platform for ideologies of racial superiority, which fundamentally undermines our institutional credibility and causes additional distress and uncertainty among staff and students regarding the University’s public standing and credibility. The scale of this impact is evidenced by the fact that in the past week alone, the University has received more than 100 emails expressing deep concern, and that number continues to grow.
The current unrest has therefore also given rise to concrete consequences for the University’s functioning. The University has been informed that a guest lecturer who was scheduled to teach during the forthcoming academic year has withdrawn from that commitment because of concerns relating to the University’s association with you. Furthermore, I have received information that additional consequences may arise in the context of its national and international academic relations, including discussions concerning a possible boycott of cooperation with Ghent University on account of that association. These developments demonstrate that the present unrest extends beyond internal concerns and is beginning to affect the University’s academic activities and external relationships. These examples are not exhaustive, and further reports continue to be received.
In addition to the initiation of the disciplinary investigation, as mentioned above, I have therefore also decided to suspend you as a precautionary measure in the interests of the service, in accordance with article 55 of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff. In view of the nature and seriousness of the facts, as well as the potential risk to Ghent University, I believe that this preventive suspension should be imposed as a matter of urgency in accordance with article 57(2) of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff, without hearing you prior to this decision.
The scale and persistence of the concerns expressed by students and staff, combined with the recent escalation following your public statements and media appearances, demonstrate that the current situation poses a risk to the proper functioning of the University and to the psychosocial wellbeing of members of its community.
Considering the volume and nature of the complaints, reports and expressions of concern received, the University cannot reasonably exclude the risk that your continued physical presence in the workplace would lead to confrontations, further disruption of the University’s activities, or a deterioration of the working and learning environment. Immediate intervention is therefore necessary to preserve institutional stability, safeguard the psychosocial wellbeing of staff and students, and prevent any further escalation of the unrest.
In these circumstances, waiting until after a prior hearing has taken place would not adequately protect the interests safeguarded by the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff. Deferring intervention would leave the current unrest unaddressed and create a real risk of further disruption to the University’s functioning.
The preventive suspension takes effect immediately and applies for a period of seven working days (up until and including Friday 28 August 2026).
As provided for in article 56 of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff, the preventive suspension means that you may no longer carry out any teaching, research or service activities as a member of staff at Ghent University and/or on behalf of Ghent University, nor may you participate in conferences or other activities in that capacity, unless you have the express permission of the rector. Furthermore, this preventive suspension entails a ban on contact with Ghent University staff and students, the provisional suspension of your account, and you are denied access to Ghent University’s sites and buildings.
You may submit your written response regarding the facts forming the basis of the preventive suspension by email to [email protected] by Friday 28 August 2026 at the latest. If you wish to be heard in person, you must notify us of this by email as soon as possible and no later than the aforementioned deadline. A suitable date will then be arranged.
If you wish, you may combine your written response to the facts giving rise to both the disciplinary preliminary investigation and the preventive suspension into a single letter. You have the right to be assisted in these proceedings by a solicitor, a trade union representative or an adviser of your choice. You also have the right to inspect the file and to obtain an electronic copy of it.
Following your written or oral response, I will decide whether to uphold or amend the preventive suspension in the interests of the service, or to lift it, in accordance with article 57(2) of the Disciplinary Regulations for Staff.
Should you feel the need to talk to someone, or you need psychosocial support, you can contact:
Trustpunt: an appointment can be made via [email protected];
Emergency response centre: 09/264 88 88 (24/7);
Tele-onthaal: if you need someone to talk to, telephone number 106.
Yours faithfully,
Prof. dr. Petra DE SUTTER
Rector

My favorite way of analyzing the recent anti-Israel riots on American college campuses was through the framework of business. What business would be OK with this level of disruption? None.

If we looked at the Ghent-Cofnas affair through the framework of business, we’d ask, what business would be OK with this level of disruption? We might answer none. Then a business might ask — who produced the disruption and what does our response encourage.

I agree with John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology. To me, it is Torah (meaning truth). We’re profoundly tribal. We desperately need other people. And in exchange for their help and protection, we have to obey their rules or we get tossed out (cherem as excommunication, aka what happened to Spinoza). In our evolutionary history, expulsion has often been a death sentence, which is why we find it so upsetting. Our fear and anxiety prompt us to choose behaviors to minimize this unwanted result and instead pursue the opposite, pride.

Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, posted on Bluesky on August 23, 2026 that he does not know what should get a professor fired. He then supplied a list anyway: “disinformation, false science, hate speech and harassment.” Three of those four terms describe conduct or law. The second one does the sociology.

Each item in that bundle requires a separate finding. Disinformation implies knowing deception. Hate speech is a legal category in Belgium with articles attached. Harassment requires conduct aimed at a person. Accumulate four loaded classifications and the sanction follows without any one of them being established. Cohen is exacting about evidence when the question is whether an empirical claim deserves belief. He becomes less exacting when the question is whether a disliked academic deserves institutional punishment.

Thomas Gieryn published “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science” in the American Sociological Review in December 1983. He moves the demarcation problem out of philosophy and into professional life. He says scientists draw the line in practice, in public, under contest, and they draw it with whichever attributes serve the fight in front of them. He read John Tyndall’s Belfast Address of 1874 and found Tyndall describing science one way against religion, claiming empirical rigor and cultural authority, and another way against mechanics and engineering, claiming disinterest and freedom from utility. The two portraits contradict each other. Both did their job, because each was cut to fit its opponent. Gieryn called the practice boundary-work and later called the product a map. He named the professional payoff: authority, resources, autonomy.

“False science” makes a claim about location. A charge of error invites reply, and reply costs the accuser a year of work and hands the target a citation. A charge of falseness in the demarcation sense costs one word and relieves everyone inside the fence of any obligation to read. Gieryn’s later book calls this genre expulsion, the removal of a claimant from the map so that his output can be classified without examination. The efficiency is the appeal.

The flexibility Gieryn described in Tyndall shows up here in the space of four lines. Cohen founded SocArXiv, has argued for years that the discipline needs post-publication scrutiny, and has pressed for correction and retraction of work he judges unsound. His 2025 book from Columbia, Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists, argues that scholars should reach past the boundaries of their fields and speak to public audiences. In the post, the exposure of plagiarism appears under the heading of harassment, and the ground he singles out for distaste is the researcher working past the terms of his appointment. Gieryn’s account predicts inconsistency of this kind and explains why it costs the practitioner nothing. Self-correction is the field’s proudest attribute when the target is a study the field wants gone. Collegial protection is the attribute at hand when the target is a professor and the finder came from outside. The ideology gets deployed by the episode.

Ghent’s suspension letter runs the third genre, protection of autonomy, and runs it against the university’s employee. Jerry Coyne posted the six pages on August 21. One charge holds that Cofnas performed work “inconsistent with the contractual scope of your employment.” The letter locates the mandate in his contract and in the vacancy he was recruited under, which define his research as a study of the future of liberalism. That sentence draws the line between legitimate inquiry and illegitimate inquiry with an employment contract. No epistemic criterion appears. The map gets drawn by the personnel file.

The contractual charge is the strongest thing Ghent has and it turns on a calendar. Ghent hired him knowing what he works on, after Emmanuel College removed him over the same writing, and it proceeded through a spring of objections from staff and students. An employer who knows what a man does, hires him anyway, watches the complaint arrive in writing, keeps him, and never warns him has waived the objection. If a dated file on employment scope exists from March or May, Ghent has a case. If the concern first appears in writing in August, after the petition and after a man died, the rule was assembled to fit a conflict already underway. That question can be settled with documents.

A second passage in the letter reasons from the volume and nature of complaints to the risk that his presence would disrupt the working environment. The Committee for Academic Freedom, which says it has read the letter in full, describes the reasoning as resting on the reactions of others to his appointment. Maarten Boudry calls it one long heckler’s veto. In Gieryn’s terms the count of complaints becomes the evidence of transgression.

Both sides survey by census. More than twelve hundred signatures called for his removal. More than four hundred academics have signed a letter supporting him, and one of the people circulating the suspension letter is keeping a list of who signed.

Boudry sits at Ghent and co-edited Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem with Massimo Pigliucci in 2013, the standard contemporary volume arguing that demarcation can be done, and done with criteria. He now watches his own institution demarcate by counting email. The affair contains its own literature review.

Cofnas draws maps for a living. His hereditarian writing performs expansion in Gieryn’s sense: it claims territory currently held by sociologists of race and describes the holders as captured by taboo. He has written that there is no path to success that does not involve removing the activist non-scholars, which is expulsion stated without euphemism and by a man currently being expelled. His critics run the same genre against him, describing the work as race science and eugenics, describing him as a network operative, and treating the funding trail as a finding about the claims. His defenders draw a boundary of their own, placing the plagiarism dossier inside science and the Belgian disciplinary process outside it, in politics. The US Ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, entered on August 20 with a statement about dishonest institutions and a review of American relationships with Ghent. Everyone at this table is drawing, and an analysis that finds boundary-work on one side only is doing boundary-work.

The plagiarism finding used methods nobody disputes: text set beside text, claimed credentials checked against records. Nothing in the method comes from hereditarianism, and a graduate student with a library card could have produced the same document. Retraction Watch examined the allegations independently and quoted the research-integrity specialist David Sanders saying there is no question that extensive plagiarism is present. That corroboration sits awkwardly under the word disinformation. Whatever else was in the bundle, the central factual claim held when someone inside the integrity world checked it.

The same outlet reported in July that a news organization killed an earlier story on the allegations after the professor hired a law firm. That is the jammed room, documented. Concerns existed, a channel existed, and the channel closed under legal pressure, which is the condition that sends a finding to Substack instead of to a committee.

The demarcation attaches to the man and then travels to his findings. Gieryn’s word for what is at stake in these contests is credibility, and credibility attaches to persons and places. Cambridge announced a review on August 5, hours before the resignation. Liverpool John Moores holds the doctorate. Reuters describes the Ghent action as a precautionary suspension during a preliminary investigation. Whether any of this stands will be settled by institutions that have their own maps to defend.

Cohen’s posts responded to this thread by roterote:

Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.
The second part of the UGent suspension letter to Nathan Cofnas.
Clearly he is a problem at the university and causing discord and damage to the institution. A guest speaker even cancelled because of Cofnas’s association with UGent.
He was not suspended for whistleblowing. That is a Cofnas lie.
Also it is important to highlight the letter leads with the fact Nathan Cofnas is committing academic fraud by instead of working on what he was hired to do, he is working on race science and his revolution.
A lot of people are asking me how Nathan Cofnas was hired, UGent professor Bouke de Vries invited him to UGent. Bourke and Cofnas are part of the same global network to mainstream eugenics and far right academics. Of course funded by Peter Thiel and other rich far right activists.
This network has been running for many years now and has big American money behind it. Cofnas is just one of their guys and they are all over the world.
I can highly recommend @hopenothate.org.uk‘s report Race Science Inc. as a good starting place to understand how a eugenicist like Nathan Cofnas can get hired at two prestigious universities over more qualified candidates. This is a major far right project to give the academy’s legitimacy to them.
Another question being asked to me is how can Nathan Cofnas be studying the Future of Liberalism? Well that is because he isn’t studying the future of liberalism as an ideology he is studying whether certain groups having children is compatible with the future of liberalism. He’s studying eugenics.
A final thing to consider is how Nathan Cofnas views Academic Freedom in his own words. Cofnas clearly supports purging the academy of his ideology enemies or think academic freedom matters.
“From our perspective, there is no path to success that doesn’t involve removing the activist non-scholars”
There is also a letter of support for Cofnas which has already been signed by over 425 academics from around the world.
I am keeping track of everyone who signed it in the thread below.
Two days ago the US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White also launched an attack against UGent and Belgium in defense of American Eugenicist Nathan Cofnas. This is the third time Bill White has intervened in Belgian politics. This is in line with the 2025 US National Security Policy against Europe.
Since 2025 there has been a major effort to both politically and financially support the rise of the far right in Europe. Recently millions were given to people via the US State Department like Nigel Farage to promote far right views and ideas.
This is part of the wilder Republican anti-EU project.

Notes

Roterote’s suggested links: Politico, Hope not Hate, Guardian, ByLineTimes. Read the Hope not Hate report as a source on funding and association. It makes no claim about whether a passage in a thesis was copied, and no reader should take it as answering that question.

Cohen’s post appeared on Bluesky on August 23, 2026, quoting a post about the Ghent suspension. Fourteen likes at the time of reading.

Thomas F. Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (December 1983): 781-795. The Tyndall material occupies the center of the paper. Verify page numbers against the journal before quoting.

The three genres of expulsion, expansion, and protection of autonomy come from Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (University of Chicago Press, 1999), where Gieryn also uses “cultural cartography” and “credibility contest.” The 1983 paper supplies the argument; the 1999 book supplies the vocabulary a sociologist will recognize.

Jason Arday resigned from Cambridge on August 5, 2026 and died on August 14, 2026 at age 41. Confirm his year of birth before printing dates; reports give the age at death rather than a birth year.

Nathan Cofnas published the plagiarism analysis on Substack on July 21, 2026. He left Cambridge in 2024 after Emmanuel College acted on complaints about his writing on race, and moved to a postdoctoral post in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent.

Ghent University announced a preliminary disciplinary investigation and a precautionary suspension on August 20, 2026, citing respect for human dignity and opposition to discrimination. Rector Petra De Sutter and Vice-Rector Herwig Reynaert issued the joint statement about the limits of academic freedom. Reuters reported the same day that this is a precaution during a preliminary review rather than a completed finding.

The Ghent student paper Schamper has been covering the appointment since March under a standing Cofnas dossier, including an interview with Dr. Pieter Beck arguing that the university must follow its own code of conduct, and coverage of his April 2 lecture. Anyone writing at length on this affair should read the Dutch-language record rather than the English coverage, which starts in August and misses the local argument.

Jerry Coyne posted six page images of the suspension letter at Why Evolution Is True on August 21, 2026, saying Cofnas does not object to circulation. Boudry posted excerpts on X and roterote posted the pages on Bluesky. Attribute each reproduction to the person who published it, and transcribe from the images rather than from anyone’s summary, including this one.

The contractual-scope charge and the passage on complaint volume both appear in Coyne’s reproduction. The letter also raises articles 20 and 21 of Belgian anti-discrimination legislation and articles 443 and following of the Belgian Criminal Code on offences against honor and reputation.

The Committee for Academic Freedom statement of August 20, 2026 says the committee has seen the letter in full and that the reasoning rests on the reactions of others. Boudry’s “heckler’s veto” characterization appears in his X posts of August 20 and August 21. He also claims parts of the letter were AI-generated, using the Pangram detector, and connects this to fabricated quotations in De Sutter’s inaugural speech. Detector output is not evidence. That claim is the one to verify hardest, because a fabrication charge against a rector inside a fabrication scandal is exactly the symmetry a writer wants to be true.

Bill White, US Ambassador to Belgium, posted the condemnation of Ghent on August 20, 2026 and referred to a review of American relationships with the university. Steven Pinker’s remarks about Cofnas appeared in the Wall Street Journal on August 21, 2026.

Retraction Watch reported its own examination of the allegations and quoted David Sanders on extensive plagiarism, and reported separately on July 26, 2026 that a news outlet killed an earlier story after the professor hired a law firm. Get both pieces, the dates, and Sanders’s title and institution before citing either.

The signature counts are approximate and come from partisan sources on both sides. Verify the removal petition figure and the support letter figure against the documents, and note that the support letter is being tracked publicly by an opponent, which is worth stating when you cite the number.

A limit: Gieryn’s frame, applied without discipline, explains every position as interest and leaves no room for anyone being right.

Amy Wax, Behavior Genetics, and the Origins Question

Posted on August 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

In her 2010 paper on diverging family structure, Amy Wax names the traits and stops. Discount rate, executive function, self-control, future orientation, conscientiousness, cognitive ability. She correlates them with education, occupation, and demographic group. She observes that they determine who thrives under normative deregulation. Then she declines to say where they come from. She knows what the next question is. Everyone reading the paper knows what the next question is. She writes that the source of the observed differences, whether grounded in culture or individual characteristics, warrants further investigation, and leaves the sentence to do the work of a chapter.

Prudence explains part of it. A working paper for an Elgar volume on family law cannot carry a full treatment of behavior genetics and survive as a paper about family law. Any paper that takes on the heritability of self-regulation across populations becomes a paper about that, and the local-versus-global model gets read as a vehicle rather than as a claim. Wax had already written enough to guarantee hostility. Adding the origins question would have guaranteed that nothing else in the paper got discussed.

Legal scholarship has no procedure for adjudicating this kind of empirical dispute. A law review cannot referee a quarrel among statistical geneticists. What it can do is cite, and citation in a contested field is taken as endorsement. Wax’s choices were to cite the hereditarian literature and be read as endorsing it, cite the environmentalist literature and be read as endorsing that, or cite neither. She cited neither, with two exceptions buried in footnotes: a 1981 Sandra Scarr volume on race, social class, and individual differences in IQ, and a reference to average racial and ethnic differences in personality profiles on employment screening tests.

Her argument runs: a latent distribution of self-regulatory capacity existed before 1960; strong norms masked it; deregulation revealed it; the revealed differential now compounds across generations. A theory that explains how a latent difference becomes manifest after a regime change is incomplete without a theory of where the latent difference came from. Without one, the framework risks circularity. Populations differ in outcomes because they differ in decision style; we infer the decision style from the outcomes.

Start with what the three literatures say.

The first literature, on within-population heritability of cognitive ability and personality, is about as settled as anything in social science. Twin, adoption, and sibling designs across many Western samples converge on adult heritability estimates for measured cognitive ability in the range of fifty to eighty percent, with the estimate rising through childhood and adolescence and stabilizing in adulthood. Personality traits, including conscientiousness, run lower, in the range of forty to fifty percent. These are variance-partitioning results within the populations sampled, and they do not say what any individual’s score is caused by. They are also not seriously contested by anyone who works with the data. Robert Plomin (b. 1948) has spent a career establishing them and Eric Turkheimer, who dislikes almost every use to which they are put, does not dispute them.

The second literature, on between-population differences, is where the confidence collapses. The classic point from Richard Lewontin (1929-2021) holds: within-group heritability licenses no inference about between-group causes. Two batches of seed with identical genetic variance, grown in different soils, produce mean differences that are entirely environmental while heritability within each batch stays high.

The obvious response is that molecular genetics should settle what quantitative genetics cannot. It has not. Polygenic scores for cognitive ability and educational attainment, built from genome-wide association studies conducted almost entirely in European-ancestry samples, lose most of their predictive power when applied to other ancestry groups. The loss comes from differences in linkage disequilibrium patterns, differences in allele frequencies, and confounding by population structure that within-sample controls do not remove. Comparing mean polygenic scores across ancestry groups, which several authors have attempted, is a procedure that statistical geneticists reject on the grounds that the tools currently cannot do the job.

Against the persistence of measured gaps stands the Flynn effect. James Flynn (1934-2020) documented gains in measured cognitive ability across the twentieth century of roughly three points per decade in many countries, which is to say that the environmental headroom on population means exceeds the size of the differences under dispute. Whatever produced those gains was not genetic change. Some portion of the American Black-White gap has narrowed over the same period, by amounts that vary by test and cohort. Transracial adoption studies exist on both sides of the question and all of them are small, old, and confounded.

The between-population question is open, the confidence expressed on both sides exceeds what the data support, and anyone who tells you it is settled is telling you about his coalition.

The behavior-genetic literature does contain a finding that wounds Wax’s argument. Wax’s fallback, and the fallback her sympathetic readers reach for, is the developmental loop. Family structures produce the developmental environments of children; those children acquire the traits; the traits reproduce the family structures. She writes that restraint, moderation, emotional control, trustworthiness, persistence, and sobriety develop best when children live with both biological parents in stable marital homes. The loop generates path-dependent equilibria without invoking any heritable substrate difference, which is exactly why it appeals.

The trouble is that the loop specifies a shared-environment effect, and shared environment is the component that behavior genetics has had the hardest time finding. In standard designs, the shared environment contribution to adult cognitive ability in Western samples shrinks toward zero. For personality traits including conscientiousness it is near zero at most ages. Siblings raised in the same home resemble each other on these traits at about the rate predicted by their genetic relatedness and little more. Adoptive siblings, who share the home and not the genes, correlate near zero as adults. If growing up with a married father transmitted self-command through the home environment, the designs that measure home environment should find it. They mostly do not.

The dissolution is available. Judith Rich Harris (1938-2018), in The Nurture Assumption, argued that the near-zero shared environment finding does not mean environment fails to socialize children. It means the socializing environment is the peer group. Children calibrate conduct to the group they expect to live among, and the calibration happens outside the family. From the standpoint of a twin design conducted within neighborhoods, peer influence loads onto the non-shared component, or vanishes into the residual, because siblings in the same home often occupy different peer positions and because the design cannot see variance that a whole community shares.

Harris’s account fits Wax’s framework better than Wax’s own account does. A normative regime operates at the level of a community. The pre-1960s architecture Wax describes worked because everyone in the neighborhood was following the same rule, which is what made following it cheap. That is a community-level variance component, and a twin study conducted inside a single normative environment measures nothing about it. Ask a twin design what fraction of variance in age at first intercourse is attributable to shared environment in Utah, and the answer tells you about differences among Utah families.

Shared environment estimates differ sharply by outcome. For measured intelligence and for personality traits, shared environment washes out. For behaviors like religiosity, political attitudes, smoking initiation, age at first intercourse, and fertility timing, shared environment persists into adulthood at levels that are not trivial. This is the structure Wax’s theory requires. Norms govern conduct, and conduct is the thing on which community-level environment continues to register.

Trait distribution may be substantially heritable, and the question of its cross-population structure may remain open, and neither fact touches the claim that a normative regime converts a given trait distribution into a given behavioral distribution. Wax’s argument is about a conversion. The origins question determines the ceiling on what environmental intervention might achieve.

Behavior geneticists have a name for what a strong normative regime does. Michael Shanahan and Scott Hofer call it social control, one of four types in the typology they set out in “Social Context in Gene-Environment Interactions: Retrospect and Prospect,” alongside triggering, compensation, and enhancement. Norms canalize genetically diverse people, they write, and as norms grow more effective and choices narrow, genetic differences carry less consequence. When a rule pushes everyone toward the same conduct regardless of disposition, dispositional variance stops appearing in behavior and the heritability of the outcome falls. Remove the rule and the outcome tracks the disposition. The same logic runs through the Scarr-Rowe finding, where heritability of cognitive ability comes out lower in low-socioeconomic-status American samples and shows up less consistently in European samples with stronger institutional floors.

The demographer J. Richard Udry (1928-2012) reached the same position from the other direction in “Biosocial Models of Low-Fertility Societies,” fourteen years before Wax wrote. The more freedom individuals hold over reproductive behavior, he argued, the more the variation in that behavior reflects biological differences between them.
Wax cites neither Udry nor Shanahan and Hofer. Her account of normative architecture arrives at a claim that demographers and behavior geneticists had already stated in their own idiom, and the two literatures have never met.

Where the origins question bites is on policy. If the trait distribution responds to environment, environmental intervention can compress it, and the pessimism about the post-deregulation equilibrium is overstated. If the distribution has a substantial heritable component that intervention cannot reach, the only arrangement that compensates for the differential is one that restores external rules, and the argument for restoration is arithmetic.

A paper that names the traits, correlates them with racial groups, and refuses to say where they come from leaves the reader to supply the missing term. Readers tend to supply the one that is convenient. The hostile reader concludes she means heredity and is hiding it. The friendly reader concludes she means heredity and is being brave about it. Both conclusions are inferences from a gap, and both are unfalsifiable, since she wrote nothing to check them against. Silence in a combustible field transfers authorship of the missing paragraph to whoever wants to write it.

The alternative she had available was to state the disjunction and show that her argument survives both branches. That paragraph runs about two hundred words. It says the origins of the trait distribution are contested. It says molecular methods have not settled the contest and may not for some time. It says the descriptive claim holds under either resolution, and that the policy implications diverge, with the environmental branch supporting intervention and the heritable branch supporting institutional restoration. Writing it would have cost her the accusation of hiding something and gained her the accusation of raising it. Whether that trade made sense in 2010 is a judgment about the field she was writing in rather than about the evidence, and the field has moved enough since that the calculation might come out differently now.

Nobody knows the cross-population structure of the traits Wax describes. The tools that could answer the question do not work across ancestry groups yet, and the inferential shortcut from within-group heritability is invalid. The within-population heritability of the traits is high and not in dispute. The shared-environment finding rules out the simplest family-transmission story and leaves community-level normative transmission standing, which is the story Wax needs and the one she should have told.

Her framework, stripped of the origins question, makes a prediction about cohort heritability. The reasoning is ordinary behavior genetics. When a rule carries everyone to the same conduct regardless of temperament, temperament stops appearing in the outcome. A man with a high discount rate and a man with a low one both marry at twenty-three, both stay, and both have their children inside the marriage, because the alternatives carry costs neither will pay. The dispositional variance sits there with nowhere to express. Heritability of the outcome runs low, and the community rule the siblings grew up under does the work. Remove the rule and the same two men diverge, because the outcome now tracks the disposition and nothing else is steering. Heritability rises.

The prediction has a literature, and it runs older than Wax’s paper.

Hans-Peter Kohler, Joseph Rodgers, and Kaare Christensen asked in “Is Fertility Behavior in Our Genes? Findings from a Danish Twin Study” whether genetic influence on fertility shifts across demographic regimes, and found it high for Danish women born around 1880, low through the middle of the century, and high again after 1955. They followed it with “Between Nurture and Nature,” and by 2003 Kohler and Rodgers were stating the argument outright: reduced social constraint and greater egalitarianism raise the relevance of genetically mediated differences. Felix Tropf and colleagues found the same pattern in British female twins born between 1919 and 1968, naming war and economic crisis as constraints that suppress genetic expression and “normative freedom” as what releases it.

The American version exists too. Daniel Briley, Paige Harden, and Elliot Tucker-Drob ran it on 933 twin pairs from the Midlife in the United States study, framed by the second demographic transition, in “Genotype by Cohort Interaction on Completed Fertility and Age at First Birth.” Genetic influence on both outcomes was trivial for the 1920 to 1935 cohort and rose substantially for 1936 to 1955. That is the prediction, confirmed on American data, published five years after Wax wrote.

The third cohort is where the result stops being a confirmation and starts being an instrument. For twins born between 1956 and 1970, genetic influence on completed fertility persists, and genetic influence on age at first birth falls back, with shared environment returning. The model behind this is a diffusion curve rather than a release curve. Briley and colleagues cite Rogers on the diffusion of innovations in their first footnote, and the logic follows: when a new behavior becomes available, people differ in willingness to adopt it, those differences are partly heritable, and so genetic influence peaks during the transition and falls once the new behavior settles into a norm of its own. Old norm, low dispositional expression. Norm breaking, maximum differentiation. New norm, convergence.

A hump has consequences for anyone reading the number. Any given value of the additive component is consistent with two positions on the curve, early or late, and reading it requires knowing where the cohort sits in the transition. Deregulation does not raise heritability indefinitely. It raises it while the rule is contested and lowers it once a replacement rule is in place, which means a low estimate is evidence of a settled regime without telling you which regime.

Smoking supplies the same curve from a second direction. Jason Boardman, Casey Blalock, and Fred Pampel used the same MIDUS twins in “Trends in the Genetic Influences on Smoking,” estimating heritability of regular smoking year by year from 1922 to 1968. It runs high for those born in the early 1930s, collapses to zero for those born around 1942, climbs to a maximum for those born in 1954, and falls to zero again for those born in the mid-1960s. The 1942 minimum belongs to the cohort that was in its early twenties when the Surgeon General reported in 1964. The final decline belongs to the cohorts who came of age under clean-indoor-air laws. Boardman and colleagues distinguish three accounts of what moves the number, and only two of them are causal. Social control suppresses expression. Social trigger permits it. Social push, borrowed from Adrian Raine, changes how visible genetic differences are to the observer without changing how they operate, and they assign the entire 1935 to 1954 stretch to it. The estimate rose because social smokers quit after the Surgeon General and left the physiologically dependent behind, which is a change in who is being measured.

There is a further complication, and it is arithmetic. Heritability is a ratio. Constraint that closes the behavioral margin cuts the numerator. Constraint that homogenizes circumstances cuts the denominator, and the ratio rises. Gülüm Kosova, Mark Abney, and Carole Ober built a study on exactly that in “Heritability of Reproductive Fitness Traits in a Human Population,” choosing the Hutterites because communal life assures uniform and equal access to resources, and recovering significant heritabilities for reproductive traits in both sexes. A norm that dictates family size can suppress genetically influenced variation in desired family size. A norm that forbids contraception can expose genetically influenced variation in fecundity. Both are norms, and they move the estimate in opposite directions. Constraint compresses heritability only when it closes the margin through which the dispositional variance would otherwise reach the outcome.

None of which leaves the structural rivals where a first reading places them. It looks as though Wilson should predict stable heritability or rising shared environment, since wages and sex ratios fall on neighborhoods and families and siblings share both. That does not follow. A shock reaching both twins in a pair need not register as shared environment. Reliable contraception hands individuals control over reproduction, and if people differ heritably in discount rates, sexuality, conscientiousness, or desired family size, the technology raises the additive component for the same reason a moral collapse does. Udry’s model depends on that possibility. Kohler and Rodgers give female labor-force entry as another case. The decomposition registers that a constraint fell. It does not name the constraint.

Timing, geography, and race do separate the accounts. Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz put the break between 1965 and 1973 and predict a common break everywhere, because the technology arrived everywhere at once. Wilson puts it in deindustrialization, a decade later, concentrated in the labor markets that lost manufacturing and in the populations living in them. Those come apart on a date and a map. Geronimus comes apart the same way, since weathering ties early childbearing to local mortality and health schedules. Wax and Akerlof do not come apart at all here, since a moral collapse and a contraceptive revolution ran on the same clock and reached the same people.

One comparison does separate them. Populations that kept their own norm-producing institutions while the surrounding society shed its own hold the technology and the economy roughly constant and vary the norm. Boardman’s own sources show the pattern in another domain, with Judith Koopmans and colleagues and David Timberlake and colleagues finding genetic influence on tobacco muted or absent among people raised under strict religious prohibition. Any registry carrying religious affiliation can run the family-formation version, and that comparison, rather than the raw cohort trend, is what would discriminate a normative account from a technological one.

Two design constraints govern anyone who runs it. Family structure is not one phenotype. Matt McGue and David Lykken established genetic influence on divorce risk in 1992, Victor Jockin and colleagues traced part of it to heritable personality, and Beth Jerskey and colleagues then found in Vietnam-era twins that the genetic influences on marrying and the genetic influences on divorcing are largely distinct. Marriage timing, completed fertility, nonmarital birth, and dissolution need separate decompositions, and a result on one carries nothing to another. Hans Fredrik Sunde and Philipp Dierker have since argued from 353,210 Norwegian marriages that divorce is a couple-level outcome and that conventional twin models inflate what they attribute to individuals.

The shared environment component also behaves less obligingly than the framework suggests. A national norm experienced by every twin pair does not become shared environment because everyone shares it. If it holds constant within a cohort it contributes no variance at all. It shifts the mean, or suppresses the additive component, or interacts with it. Briley and colleagues report raw variance components rather than standardized proportions for this reason, and warn that the components need not sum to one.

Which leaves the gap that matters most. Every study named here runs on white, Nordic, or British samples. Briley is MIDUS. Boardman is MIDUS. Kohler is Danish, Tropf is British, Kosova is Hutterite, Jerskey is Vietnam-era veterans. The American argument among Wax, Wilson, Akerlof, Yellen, Katz, and Geronimus is centrally about a divergence between Black and white family structure, and a heritability estimate is a within-population number that says nothing about differences between groups in either direction. Minnesota, Virginia, Denmark, Sweden, and Australia cannot answer an American question about two populations. The sibling samples in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth can, across two cohorts, which is the structure Roland Fryer used for the wage decomposition. The precedent for the population half exists: a 2009 study of cohort differences in educational attainment among African American twins read Jim Crow as an external ceiling suppressing individual differences and predicted that removing the ceiling would show up as declining similarity within pairs. Nobody has run the family-formation version.

The Minnesota, Virginia, Swedish, Danish, and Australian registries hold cohorts on both sides of the break with marital and fertility histories attached, and they will answer the European version of the question. The American version requires the sibling samples, split by race, on marriage timing and nonmarital first birth rather than on completed fertility.

Udry and Shanahan and Hofer built the theory. Kohler and Briley and Tropf calibrated it on fertility, Boardman calibrated it on smoking, Kosova established what the ratio does when the environment is homogenized, and four decades of results show what the instrument can and cannot see. It has never been pointed at the outcomes the American argument turns on, in the populations that argument is about. The experiment does not need to be invented. It needs to be imported, and the importing is the harder half.

Notes

On Wax’s own record. The paper under discussion is Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. The two footnote citations described above appear at notes 76 and 99 of that draft. The earlier statement of the demographic argument is “Engines of Inequality: Class, Race, and Family Structure,” 41 Family Law Quarterly 567 (2007). Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (Hoover Institution Press, 2009) is the book where she walks through the exogenous explanations for the test score gap and declines the hereditarian step, at https://archive.org/details/racewrongsremedi0000waxa. The paper that shows the agnosticism doing positive work is “The Poverty of the Neuroscience of Poverty: Policy Payoff or False Promise?“, 57 Jurimetrics 239 (2017), at https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1711/ and https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2888600. Her argument there turns on the point that imaging research cannot separate innate from environmental causes of brain characteristics, which she uses against interventionist optimism while asserting nothing about origins. “Educating the Disadvantaged,” National Affairs (Summer 2017), sits at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/educating-the-disadvantaged. Her faculty listing, which still carries rational choice and family structure among works in progress, is at https://www.law.upenn.edu/faculty/awax/.

On the within-population findings. Eric Turkheimer, “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean,” 9 Current Directions in Psychological Science 160 (2000), states the two propositions the essay leans on: traits are heritable, and the effect of being raised in the same family runs smaller than the effect of genes. Journal version at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8721.00084, author copy at https://uva.theopenscholar.com/files/eric-turkheimer/files/three_laws_of_behavior_8.pdf. Turkheimer’s own reading of the laws differs sharply from the use hereditarian writers make of them, and his Substack is the place to see him say so. Christopher Chabris and colleagues added a fourth law in 2015, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721415580430. For the heritability estimates and their rise with age, Robert Plomin and Ian Deary, “Genetics and Intelligence Differences: Five Special Findings,” Molecular Psychiatry (2014), at https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105, and Thomas Bouchard’s account of the age gradient at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/wilson-effect-the-increase-in-heritability-of-iq-with-age/FF406CC4CF286D78AF72C9E7EF9B5E3F.

On the shared-environment problem and its resolution. Judith Rich Harris, “Where Is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development,” 102 Psychological Review 458 (1995), and The Nurture Assumption (Free Press, 1998), carry the argument that the socializing environment is the peer group. Harris is the least-cited figure in this dispute relative to her usefulness, largely because both camps read her as conceding to the other. On the interaction between socioeconomic position and heritability, see the Scarr-Rowe literature and the failure to replicate it outside the United States: Ken Hanscombe and colleagues, “Socioeconomic Status and Children’s Intelligence,” PLoS ONE (2012), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270016/. The Dickens and Flynn model of environmental multipliers, which explains how high heritability coexists with large environmental movement in population means, sits here.

On why the cross-population question stays open. The logical point is Richard Lewontin’s, most accessibly in his 1970 reply to Arthur Jensen in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. For the technical reason molecular methods cannot currently answer it, see Alicia Martin and colleagues, “Clinical Use of Current Polygenic Risk Scores May Exacerbate Health Disparities,” Nature Genetics (2019), at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-019-0379-x, with the open preprint at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/441261v3, and the companion survey of the field’s ancestry composition at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11112-0. More recent work shows prediction accuracy falling continuously along the ancestry continuum rather than in discrete population steps, at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06079-4, which further undercuts any procedure that compares group mean scores. A recent review of the open problems in portability is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68565-3. For the skeptical case stated at full strength, Jonathan Kaplan and colleagues, “Genes, Heritability, ‘Race’, and Intelligence,” Genes (2022), at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/13/2/346.

On the theory of normative constraint and genetic expression. Michael J. Shanahan and Scott M. Hofer, “Social Context in Gene-Environment Interactions: Retrospect and Prospect,” 60 Journals of Gerontology: Series B 65 (2005), at https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/60/Special_Issue_1/65/2965138, sets out the four ideal types, of which social control is the one Wax needs. J. Richard Udry, “Biosocial Models of Low-Fertility Societies,” 22 Population and Development Review 325 (1996), at https://doi.org/10.2307/2808017, states the demographic version and is the ancestor of everything in this literature that followed.

On the cohort-heritability test, which requires the most care. Hans-Peter Kohler, Joseph Lee Rodgers, and Kaare Christensen, “Is Fertility Behavior in Our Genes? Findings from a Danish Twin Study,” 25 Population and Development Review 253 (1999), and the same authors’ “Between Nurture and Nature: The Shifting Determinants of Female Fertility in Danish Twin Cohorts, 1870-1968,” 49 Social Biology 218 (2002), at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14652919/, report that genetic influence on female fertility runs high in cohorts born around 1880, falls through the middle of the twentieth century, and rises again for cohorts born after 1955. They tie the movement to changing socioeconomic and normative conditions rather than to normative deregulation as such. Daniel Briley and colleagues, “Genotype by Cohort Interaction on Completed Fertility and Age at First Birth,” Behavior Genetics (2015), at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-014-9693-3, is the American version and the source of the diffusion model that turns the prediction into a hump. Felix Tropf and colleagues, “Genetic Influence on Age at First Birth of Female Twins Born in the UK, 1919-68,” 69 Population Studies 129 (2015), at https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1056823, names normative freedom as the moderator. The Danish twin fertility design is at https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/38/1/29/170416/Behavior-genetic-modeling-of-human-fertility, and a two-registry treatment of completed fertility at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-016-9805-3.

On the analogy and its warnings. Jason D. Boardman, Casey L. Blalock, and Fred C. Pampel, “Trends in the Genetic Influences on Smoking,” 51 Journal of Health and Social Behavior 108 (2010), at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3158572/, is free in full and is the methodological template for anything anyone runs on family structure. Their social push category, borrowed from Adrian Raine, is the one that should worry anyone reading a heritability trend as evidence of normative change, since it describes an estimate moving because the composition of the measured population moved. Their religious-upbringing sources are Judith Koopmans and colleagues at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10857244/ and David Timberlake and colleagues at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16497606/. For the arithmetic point about the ratio, Gülüm Kosova, Mark Abney, and Carole Ober, “Heritability of Reproductive Fitness Traits in a Human Population,” 107 PNAS Suppl. 1, 1772 (2010), at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0906196106, which uses Hutterite uniformity as an instrument for detecting genetic variance rather than as a constraint suppressing it.

On family structure as several phenotypes. Matt McGue and David T. Lykken, “Genetic Influence on Risk of Divorce,” 3 Psychological Science 368 (1992); Victor Jockin, Matt McGue, and David T. Lykken, “Personality and Divorce: A Genetic Analysis,” 71 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 288 (1996); Beth A. Jerskey and colleagues, “Marriage and Divorce: A Genetic Perspective,” 49 Personality and Individual Differences 473 (2010), which finds the genetic influences on marrying and on divorcing largely distinct. Hans Fredrik Sunde and Philipp Dierker, “Are Spouses Similar in Divorce? Investigating Spousal Similarity in Couple-Shared Outcomes,” Twin Research and Human Genetics (2026), argues that couple-level outcomes and assortative mating inflate what conventional twin models attribute to individuals.

Anyone running the test might want to read Michael Rutter’s skeptical chapter in Offspring: Human Fertility Behavior in Biodemographic Perspective (National Academies Press, 2003), at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK97281/, which argues that secular trends in heritability estimates have proved inconsistent across traits and countries and that the interpretive temptation runs ahead of the evidence. His example is the rise in heritability of educational attainment in Norway for males and not females over a period when opportunity widened for both. That objection applies to the argument advanced here with full force. Note also that the existing work covers fertility outcomes rather than marriage timing, marital dissolution, and childbearing outside marriage, and covers Denmark, Britain, and a largely white American sample rather than the two populations whose divergence the American argument is about. For the precedent on the population half, see “Education in Time: Cohort Differences in Educational Attainment in African-American Twins” (2009), at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2765648/, which runs the same design on Jim Crow.

Further reading. On the older quantitative-genetic critique, David Layzer, “Heritability Analyses of IQ Scores: Science or Numerology?“, Science (1974), at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.183.4131.1259, states the case against inference from heritability estimates in a form that most later criticism restates. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023), carry the descriptive picture forward from where Wax leaves it. Orlando Patterson’s writing on culture and agency, and William Julius Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report in the opening chapter of The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), supply the disciplinary context for the omission this essay examines.

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Who Repeals a Tradition: Status Hierarchy and the Selection of Normative Regimes

Posted on August 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

Amy Wax ends her 2010 account of the post-1960s family bifurcation with a description she declines to explain. Educated professionals keep bourgeois marriage and refuse to recommend it. They marry late, they marry each other, they divorce at rates that have fallen since 1980, they bear almost no children outside marriage, and they treat any public defense of the pattern as an embarrassment. Wax records the disjunction and moves on. A full treatment requires a theory of how status hierarchies select for normative regimes that benefit those at the top while imposing costs on those further down.

The theory requires three moves. The first establishes that a normative regime has an incidence, and that the incidence falls differently on populations that differ in self-regulatory capacity. The second establishes that the population selecting the regime is not the population bearing its costs, because norm production runs through institutions staffed from the upper reaches of the capacity distribution. The third establishes why the selected regime persists even when its costs become visible, and why exhortation fails as a remedy. Taken together the three moves convert Wax’s behavioral account into a political economy, and the political economy yields predictions her framework does not.

Start with incidence. Wax describes pre-1960s sexual mores as compressed heuristics, in the manner of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992): simple rules encoding long-run knowledge about cooperation that individual actors cannot reconstruct on their own. Marry before children. Stay faithful. Honor the paternal obligation. Do not divorce. The rules relieve the follower of a calculation. Wax’s insight is that the calculation the rules perform is exactly the calculation her local thinkers cannot perform for themselves. A global thinker reaches the rule’s outcome by his own route. A local thinker reaches it only if the rule carries him there.

Run the arithmetic on who gains from enforcement. For the actor with a low discount rate, high conscientiousness, and the executive function to run a thirty-day payoff schedule in his head, the old regime delivers an outcome he reaches anyway and charges him for the delivery. It forbids a premarital sexual career he can conduct without damage. It forecloses an early marriage he might exit and replace with a better one at thirty-four. It taxes his freedom and returns him nothing he lacked. For the actor at the other end of the distribution, the regime delivers an outcome his own calculus cannot reach, at a price he was never in a position to collect. The rule is progressive in incidence. It transfers from the self-regulating to the poorly self-regulating, and the currency of the transfer is conduct.

Deregulation reverses the sign. Once the rules go, the high-capacity actor collects his freedom and keeps his outcome. He runs the sexual career, marries at thirty-two, and raises children in an intact home. The low-capacity actor collects the freedom and loses the outcome. This is what Wax means by the privatization of a cognitive burden, and it is why the egalitarian impulse behind sexual liberation produced an inegalitarian result. The sexual revolution was a regressive transfer, conducted in the language of emancipation, from those with weak self-command to those with strong self-command.

The second move asks who selected it. Here the standard accounts fail in opposite directions. One holds that the revolution was a mass movement, the spontaneous preference of a whole population that got what it wanted. The other, in the manner of Nancy MacLean, holds that a small group planned it. The first cannot explain the distribution of costs. The second requires evidence of coordination that does not exist.

The needed premise is small. Norms are produced and transmitted by institutions, and those institutions are staffed from a narrow slice of the population. Universities set the terms on which family structure can be discussed. Courts write the law of divorce, custody, and illegitimacy. Publishing houses, film studios, and networks distribute the scripts. Seminaries train the clergy who decide what the churches will still call a sin. Professional associations certify the therapists, social workers, and counselors who advise the population that most needs advice. Journalists select which claims about family life can be uttered. Every one of these institutions recruits from the top of the distribution of exactly the traits Wax identifies: verbal ability, future orientation, self-command, the capacity to project alternative scenarios. The median producer of normative content sits far above the median consumer on the trait that determines whether the norm is needed.

Each producer consults his own experience and reports it. He finds the old rule unnecessary in his own life, because it is. He finds it constraining, because it is. He observes that he and his friends conduct their sexual lives with discretion and land in stable marriages, and he concludes that the rule was superstition, since the outcome survives its repeal. He generalizes from a sample of one to a population that does not resemble him on the relevant trait.

Call this the selection problem in norm production. Any normative regime is chosen by a body whose members are systematically unrepresentative on the trait that determines the regime’s value. The regime that emerges will be fitted to the capacities of the producers rather than to the capacities of the population it governs. The result resembles a legislature that sets the speed limit by consulting only professional drivers. The professionals report that they can take the curve at ninety.

The new attitude should appear first among the populations closest to the norm-producing institutions and then move down. Fred Pampel finds the pattern in General Social Survey cohorts born between 1900 and 1985. Education predicted tolerance of premarital sex, the association strengthened through cohorts born in the early twentieth century, peaked around the 1937 cohort, then flattened and ran to zero or reversed among the youngest. Pampel reads it as diffusion of an innovation from high to low socioeconomic status, which is what Judith Treas had found earlier in the education gradient on nonmarital sex. The people least dependent on the old rule abandoned it first.

Three further engines lock the regime in place.

The first is a collective action problem of the kind Mancur Olson (1932-1998) described. Enforcement is a public good. The stigma that made the old rules work required individuals to bear private costs: the awkwardness of judging a colleague’s divorce, the reputational risk of saying that a child does better with a father in the house, the social demotion that attaches to anyone who moralizes about sex. The benefit of enforcement diffuses across a population that includes almost nobody the enforcer knows. The cost concentrates on him, in the room, at the time. Every individual therefore has reason to withhold enforcement while hoping others supply it, and the equilibrium level of enforcement falls below what even the enforcers privately believe correct. Deregulation requires only that nobody wants to pay for regulation at the margin.

The new regime carries a meta-norm. The old rule punished the conduct; the new rule punishes the punishment. Do not bear children outside marriage becomes do not stigmatize those who do. Cass Sunstein (b. 1954) describes norms as systems held up by shame, reputational incentive, and cascade, and the second-order norm runs on the same equipment as the first. The sanction did not disappear. It changed target. This raises the price of enforcement above what the collective action problem alone would set, because the prospective enforcer is not declining to supply a public good in neutral territory. He is committing an offense.

The second engine is positional. Fred Hirsch (1931-1978), in Social Limits to Growth, distinguished goods whose value survives universal provision from goods whose value depends on scarcity. The pattern Wax describes among elites, selective deviation followed by conformity, belongs to the second category. It marks status because it demonstrates a capacity most people lack: the ability to enjoy the freedom without succumbing to the disorder. Publish the recipe and the marker degrades. Defend the rule in public and one equalizes the cultural permission to depart from it, which raises the cost of departure for everyone whose self-command is weaker and lowers the distinction available to those whose self-command is strong. The interest here is in keeping a distinction that only works while it is uncommon.

The family literature reached the positional result by another route without supplying the reason. Andrew Cherlin (b. 1948) describes American marriage as deinstitutionalized, losing its binding force while gaining symbolic weight, and calls it a marker of prestige and personal achievement. That is a strange thing to happen if deregulation merely freed everyone from an obsolete arrangement. It follows if the old institution supplied a behavioral technology to everybody, and the new regime leaves marriage as something achieved by those who can supply the technology themselves. A universal rule became a positional accomplishment.

The third engine is tacit. Wax notes in passing that the well-educated may be dimly aware of why their relationships succeed. The recipe is largely unarticulated. A man who has never once considered leaving his wife for a more attractive prospect does not experience himself as exercising restraint. He experiences the question as not arising. Ask him what he does that his less fortunate countrymen fail to do and he will produce an answer about education, or opportunity, or luck, because the trait that separates them operates below the level at which he can inspect it. The failure to preach the rule is therefore overdetermined: partly interest, partly the collective action problem, partly the meta-norm, and partly that the preacher cannot locate the sermon.

Each of these engines predicts elite silence on its own, and no observation available here separates them. The essay claims their joint effect and cannot apportion it.

The distributional outcome has been described for twenty years. Sara McLanahan (1940-2021) named it diverging destinies: children of the most educated mothers gaining parental time and money while children of the least educated lost both. Cherlin named the institutional change. Ron Lesthaeghe named the ideational shift toward autonomy and self-actualization that demographers call the second demographic transition. None of the three answers the question posed here, which is why a normative transformation whose costs concentrate low in the hierarchy should be selected and maintained by institutions concentrated high in it.

Now the payoff. A theory earns its place by predicting things the theory it replaces cannot. This one predicts a pattern in what elites will moralize about.

The general decline of public moralism is a fiction. Moralism about conduct is robust and growing. The educated class moralizes with enthusiasm about smoking, seatbelts, car seats, vaccination, sugar, screen time, recycling, air travel, gun ownership, and the correct handling of a child’s disappointment. What it declines to moralize about is divorce, nonmarital childbearing, sexual promiscuity, and paternal desertion. The incidence theory explains the split. In the first set of domains, elite behavior conforms to the rule the elite recommends, and the rule costs the recommender nothing he wants. He does not smoke. He buckles his children. Recommending the rule is free, and it purchases the status that attaches to public spirit. In the second set, the rule the population needs would constrain prerogatives the recommender wishes to keep. He wants the premarital career, the option of exit, the freedom to arrange his intimate life without answering to anyone. He therefore converts the domain into a zone of private discretion and calls the conversion tolerance.

Any account that explains the decline of sexual moralism by a general rise of nonjudgmentalism has to explain why nonjudgmentalism stops at the nutrition label. This account does not need to. The line falls where the cost to the recommender begins.

A second prediction concerns insulated populations. If the regime is selected by norm-producing institutions rather than by material conditions, then a subpopulation that maintains its own norm-producing institutions should retain the pre-1960s family pattern at income and education levels where the surrounding population has lost it. Orthodox Jewish communities and the Amish supply the clearest cases. Pew reports 69 percent of Orthodox Jewish adults married against 49 percent of other American Jews, and 68 percent of married Orthodox respondents wed by twenty-four against 27 percent of other Jews. A population study of more than fifty thousand Amish households finds a median female marriage age of 20.9, 87.1 percent married by fifty, and 4.3 percent of first births conceived before marriage, with divorce rare.

Conservative Protestantism complicates the picture and the complication is useful. Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak find higher divorce risk associated with conservative Protestant concentration, mediated by earlier marriage, earlier parenthood, and lower education and income. Strong norms are not sufficient. An institution can enforce early marriage successfully and thereby raise exposure to a different risk, which means the regime has to be assessed on the whole schedule of conduct it produces rather than on the strength of its enforcement.

The insulated cases carry a confound the argument should concede. These communities differ from the surrounding population in more than the autonomy of their norm production. They practice endogamy, they have different fertility, and they lose members. Amish attrition removes exactly the people least suited to the regime, which means observed marital stability is in part a survivorship result rather than a demonstration that the rules do the work. The comparison is suggestive and it is not clean.

What it does establish, against the strongest rival, is negative. If the differential in family outcomes tracked heritable capacity alone, the insulated communities should show the pattern of their nation. They do not. External rules substitute for internal capacity, and where the rules survive, the capacity differential stays submerged.

A third prediction concerns immigrant generations. Pew finds 22 percent of immigrant Latino youths married against about 10 percent of the second generation, and among Hispanic women who had recently given birth, 29 percent of immigrant mothers unmarried against 52 percent of second-generation mothers. Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn find the unusually high marriage rates of Mexican immigrant women adjusted away almost entirely by the second generation. Under a material account the direction is backward, since income rises across generations. Under the incidence account it follows: the immigrant generation arrives carrying an intact regime from a society that never repealed it, and each subsequent generation spends more of its life inside American norm-producing institutions. Assimilation changes education, age structure, partner markets, residence, and selection along with norms, so this is a prediction the theory passes rather than a test it survives alone.

The theory also generalizes past sex. The same incidence logic governs every domain where a restriction protects poorly self-regulating actors at the expense of well-regulated ones. Gambling is the current case. In Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association in 2018 the Supreme Court held that Congress could not forbid states from authorizing sports gambling, striking the federal statute on anti-commandeering grounds rather than lifting a federal ban on betting itself, and the practice has since spread through most states with the emancipatory rhetoric the sexual revolution used. The educated professional who places two hundred dollars on a playoff game twice a year gains a small pleasure and loses nothing. The costs concentrate where Wax’s model says they will. Brett Hollenbeck and colleagues, working from credit records for roughly seven million consumers, find ordinary legalization associated with a small decline in credit scores and the arrival of online betting associated with a decline of about twelve points, alongside rises in bankruptcy, collections, and delinquency. A 2026 working paper estimates a 2.1 percent fall in food sufficiency among working-age adults without college degrees, equivalent to roughly 10.5 percent among active bettors. A study published this year finds online legalization raising household credit-card debt 11.9 percent overall, 22.5 percent where the household head lacks a degree against 10.2 percent where he holds one. Marijuana liberalization, consumer credit expansion, and payday lending follow the same structure. In each case the restriction is repealed by a class that can handle the liberty, in the name of a population that cannot, and the repeal is described as a removal of paternalism.

Three objections deserve answers.

The first is that the repeal was not an elite act. No-fault divorce spread through state legislatures during the 1970s, and California’s Family Law Act, which Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) signed in 1969, passed a legislature answering to a mass electorate. Mass demand for divorce liberalization existed among people who were not norm producers. Elite institutions did not manufacture the demand. They removed the countervailing pressure, supplied the vocabulary in which the demand could be voiced as a right, and declined to defend the restriction when it came under challenge. A norm regime dies when nobody with standing defends it.

The second objection is that elites also bear costs. They do. Intensive parenting is expensive and anxious, delayed fertility carries a biological penalty that falls hardest on educated women, and the sexual market in the years before marriage is not costless to the people in it. The regime is not a free ride. The claim is comparative: elites bear smaller costs and collect larger benefits than the populations below them, and a comparative claim survives the observation that the costs are nonzero.

The third objection is that religious institutions did most of the enforcing, and their retreat has causes of its own that owe nothing to status interest. Secularization has its own long history. The answer is that seminaries are elite institutions too, that mainline Protestantism liberalized its sexual teaching through educated clergy trained in universities, and that the denominations which resisted are the ones whose clergy were trained outside the national credentialing system. The pattern of which churches held the line maps onto the pattern of which churches produced their own norms.

What follows for repair. The prescription that Charles Murray (b. 1943) offered in Coming Apart, that the upper class should preach what it practices, asks individuals to bear a concentrated private cost for a diffuse public benefit, in a domain where their status interest runs the other way, where the meta-norm makes the preaching itself an offense, and where they cannot articulate the practice they are being asked to preach.

A regime shifts when the composition of the norm-producing institutions changes, or when the incidence changes in a way the producers feel. Both have partial precedents. The recent willingness of demographers and economists to state the two-parent advantage in print, after two decades of treating it as unspeakable, suggests the professional cost of saying it has fallen. Whether that reaches the transmission belt below the journals is the question, and the answer so far is that it has not.

How the theory could be wrong. It predicts that permissive change appears first among high-education groups and diffuses down, which Pampel supports and which a domain showing the reverse gradient would damage. It predicts weaker diffusion where a population retains autonomous norm-producing institutions, which the Orthodox and Amish cases support and which the conservative Protestant divorce result partly cuts against. It predicts that deregulation does more damage where private resources for self-regulation are thinner, which the gambling numbers support. It predicts continued moralizing wherever the recommended conduct costs the recommender little, which the nutrition label supports. And it predicts that when the costs of a deregulation begin landing inside elite networks, elite attitudes toward regulation change.

That last one is a standing bet rather than a retrospective fit, and sports gambling may settle it. If addiction, adolescent betting, debt, and marital damage accumulate visibly among educated professionals and their children, the incidence shifts, and the theory says the language of liberty and anti-paternalism should weaken while respectable demands for restriction return. If the elite consensus holds while the damage stays concentrated below, the theory says the deregulation persists. Either result is observable within a decade without anyone running a study.

Wax writes that the populations bearing the costs have no individual route back to the arrangements that protected them. The deeper problem is that they have no collective route either, because the collective route runs through institutions they do not staff, in a register they were not trained to speak, on a question that the people who control the microphone leave closed.

Every actor in the story behaves reasonably from where he sits. The regime that results serves the people who sit highest, and it does so through the ordinary operation of who gets to speak.

Notes

On the diffusion signature. Fred C. Pampel, “Cohort Changes in the Social Distribution of Tolerant Sexual Attitudes,” 95 Social Forces 753 (2016), covers General Social Survey cohorts born roughly 1900 to 1985 and finds the education effect on tolerance of premarital sex rising, peaking near the 1937 birth cohort, then flattening to zero or reversing among the youngest, which he reads as diffusion from high to low socioeconomic status. The earlier statement is Judith Treas, “How Cohorts, Education, and Ideology Shaped a New Sexual Revolution on American Attitudes toward Nonmarital Sex, 1972-1998,” 45 Sociological Perspectives 267 (2002). Treas established the education gradient and the cohort succession; the specific premarital-sex curve belongs to Pampel.

On the positional result. Andrew J. Cherlin, “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage,” 66 Journal of Marriage and Family 848 (2004), is where marriage becomes a marker of prestige and personal achievement. Sara McLanahan, “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring under the Second Demographic Transition,” 41 Demography 607 (2004), supplies the distributional outcome. Ron Lesthaeghe, “The Unfolding Story of the Second Demographic Transition,” 36 Population and Development Review 211 (2010), supplies the ideational account, and Zaidi and Morgan, “The Second Demographic Transition Theory: A Review and Appraisal,” 43 Annual Review of Sociology (2017), sets out its empirical weaknesses. All three describe what happened. None asks why the institutions that produced the change sit above the populations that paid for it.

On the meta-norm. Cass R. Sunstein, “Social Norms and Social Roles,” 96 Columbia Law Review 903 (1996), treats norms as systems maintained by shame, reputational incentive, norm entrepreneurs, and cascades, which is the apparatus the second-order norm runs on. The essay’s claim is that the machinery was retained and repointed rather than dismantled.

On insulated populations. Pew Research Center, “A Portrait of American Orthodox Jews” (2015), supplies the Orthodox marriage figures. The Amish population study, covering more than fifty thousand households, is at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12909094/. The complication is Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak, “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce,” 119 American Journal of Sociology 1002 (2014), which finds conservative Protestant concentration associated with higher divorce through earlier marriage, earlier parenthood, and lower education and income. Anyone pressing the insulated-population argument further should confront endogamy, differential fertility, and attrition before treating these communities as a natural experiment.

On immigrant generations. Pew Research Center, “Second-Generation Americans” (2013), and the family chapter of the 2009 Latino youth report at https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2009/12/11/viii-family-fertility-sexual-behaviors-and-attitudes/. The econometric version is Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, “Gender and Assimilation Among Mexican Americans,” NBER Working Paper 11512 (2005).

On gambling. Brett Hollenbeck, Poet Larsen, and Davide Proserpio, “The Financial Consequences of Legalized Sports Gambling,” working from a credit panel of roughly seven million consumers. Xiaohui Guo, Lizhong Peng, and Chad Meyerhoefer, “Wagering the Bread Money: Sports Betting Legalization and Food Sufficiency,” NBER Working Paper 35305 (2026). Mustafa Enes Caliskan, “Online Gambling Legalization and Household Credit Card Debt,” Journal of Gambling Studies (2026), which carries the education split. The opinion in Murphy, 584 U.S. 453 (2018), is at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-476_dbfi.pdf; the statute at issue prohibited states from authorizing sports gambling and provided civil enforcement, and the Court invalidated it under the anti-commandeering doctrine rather than lifting a federal ban on individual betting.

Further reading. On the political economy of moral regimes, Hayek on the transmission of rules nobody designed, Olson on the undersupply of goods whose benefits diffuse, and Hirsch on scarcity as the source of value, all cited above. On the American family transition itself, Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege (2023) carry the descriptive record. On what elites practice and decline to preach, W. Bradford Wilcox and the National Marriage Project reports are the closest thing to a running count. On the underlying behavioral claim, Wax’s own “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior” remains the document this essay extends, and her Race, Wrongs, and Remedies (2009) is where she sets out why she thinks the arrangements that protected the losing population cannot be rebuilt from below.

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The Moral Economy of Contemporary Social Science

Posted on August 22, 2026 by Luke Ford

The phrase “moral economy” comes from two authors. E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) used it in 1971 for the customary expectations that governed what an eighteenth-century English crowd would tolerate from a grain market. A merchant could hold a legal right to charge what the market would bear and still violate the moral economy, because the offense lay in breaching an unwritten understanding about what people owed one another. Lorraine Daston (b. 1951) carried the term into the history of science in 1995, defining a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values that regulates practice from the inside. Such economies are historically specific, arising and dissolving with the disciplines they govern. And they live in the practitioner, who experiences them as the sense that a finding smells wrong.

Robert Merton (1910-2003) described the scientific ethos in terms of universalism, communalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. Those are rules for evaluating claims once claims are on the table. A moral economy operates earlier. It is a schedule of prices attached to hypotheses. Two explanations can carry comparable empirical support and impose sharply different costs on the scholar who advances them.

Merton’s norms were never the whole sociology of science. Ian Mitroff’s study of the Apollo moon scientists found working counter-norms running alongside them: particularism beside universalism, interestedness beside disinterestedness, emotional commitment beside neutrality, organized dogmatism beside organized skepticism. Scientists carry both codes and do not choose permanently between them. The question is which propositions activate the counter-code.

Contemporary social science has such an economy, and Amy Wax’s 2010 paper on family structure violates it. What produced the hostility was the sense that the paper was doing something illegitimate with the materials.

The central rule it broke was that responsibility flows uphill while causation flows downhill.

When certain people had bad outcomes, explanations that locate the cause in institutions, markets, discrimination, history, neighborhoods, schools, employers, or policy carry a presumption of legitimacy. Explanations that locate any part of the causal chain in genetics, behavior, norms, preferences, family organization, self-command, or cognition face a surcharge. The first class directs attention toward actors with power. The second appears to blame the victim.

The surcharge shows up as a difference in the price of evidence, and Wax’s own review of her field displays it. The marriageable-men hypothesis of William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) attributes the collapse of Black marriage to the disappearance of stable working-class employment. By the estimates of demographers across the methodological spectrum, male earning power and sex-ratio imbalance account for somewhere between five and twenty-five percent of the racial gap, with several estimates far lower. The hypothesis explains a fifth of the phenomenon at its best, and it remains the default account on syllabi. Arline Geronimus’s argument that early nonmarital childbearing constitutes an adaptive response to compressed life expectancy rests on a restricted counterfactual, comparing early nonmarital births to later nonmarital births while never comparing nonmarital to marital, on a sample unrepresentative of the population it describes. It circulated for two decades. Neither survives a week at that standard of fit if the conclusion runs the other way.

The price of evidence has been measured under controlled conditions. Henning Finseraas, Arnfinn Midtbøen, and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud gave Norwegian social scientists a description of an identical research design on contact between refugees and native-born citizens, randomizing only the reported result. When contact supposedly made attitudes toward immigration more liberal, respondents judged the design better and the research more important than when the same design supposedly made attitudes less liberal. No comparable effect appeared on a nonpoliticized control study about robots. Nothing about the evidence had changed except its implication. The price had.

Scientific racism, eugenics, and theories of inherited inferiority gave behavioral and genetic explanation a bad reputation after the Nazis. Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students displaced that anthropology by claiming culture as the explanatory unit. Boas produced evidence, including an immigrant anthropometry study covering tens of thousands of measurements whose cranial-plasticity conclusions have been contested. What the moral and political commitments of that circle shaped was the speed of the displacement and the questions the discipline pursued afterward.

The decisive American episode arrived in 1965 with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) and his report on the Black family. William Ryan (1923-2002) supplied the phrase “blaming the victim” that outgrew the controversy that produced it. To describe a behavior that contributed to disadvantage was shifting responsibility from the society that produced the conditions to the people living under them. Wilson wrote later that the controversy made liberal social scientists reluctant to describe behavior that might be regarded as stigmatizing, and that fear of the accusation discouraged investigation of the genetic, cultural and behavioral dimensions of urban poverty.

In 2010, the same year Wax circulated her paper, Mario Luis Small, David Harding, and Michèle Lamont announced in the Annals that culture was back on the poverty agenda. The new cultural sociology analyzed frames, repertoires, identities, perceptions, and meaning-making, in interaction with structural circumstances.

Culture was readmitted under conditions. It could influence how people perceived their options. It could supply repertoires that made some actions easier to imagine. It could mediate responses to structural disadvantage. What stayed hard to say was that some norms and habits produce worse outcomes than others at securing ends that nearly everyone in the population wants.

Wax published into that environment and crossed the line in four places at once. She puts characteristics of actors inside the causal model. She entertains average differences among sociodemographic populations. She describes recurring patterns of conduct as self-defeating even when the people engaged in them are poor. And she argues that traditional moral norms performed useful work because they restricted individual choice.

The fourth is the one that stings. Wax describes pre-1960s sexual mores as heuristics. Clear rules about marriage, fidelity, parenthood, and divorce reduced the foresight and self-command required to produce a stable family. Their removal transferred the burden of regulation from institutions to individuals. People who could supply their own discipline adapted. People who leaned on the external script did not.

That makes the paper more disruptive than a conventional appeal to personal responsibility. Wax asks what arrangements let ordinary people avoid solving the optimization problem at all. Her account of norms runs parallel to behavioral economics. A default enrollment rule gets people to save without requiring them to compute an optimal savings path every payday. A marriage norm does similar work. It sustains a long-term cooperative strategy.

The two paternalisms sit in different places in the moral economy. Automatic retirement enrollment gets called choice architecture and sounds technocratic. Marital fidelity gets called a social norm and sounds moralistic. Steering people away from sugar is public health. Attaching shame to abandoning one’s children is judgment. The behavioral logic is the same in each pair. Only the vocabulary and the price differ. Contemporary social science is full of paternalism. What it will not tolerate is paternalism that speaks in moral language.

A second asymmetry runs through the treatment of individual traits. Dispositional explanations of high-status outcomes are welcome, marketable, and honored. A large body of work on grit, growth mindset, and delay of gratification explains professional and academic success by traits located inside the successful, and it sells to the parents of the successful and gets taught in their schools. Angela Duckworth (b. 1970) and Carol Dweck (b. 1946) built careers on it. The marshmallow paradigm of Walter Mischel (1930-2018) circulated for four decades as a story about what self-command does for a child’s future.

Hold the variable and the measurement constant and point them at the bottom of the distribution, and the reception inverts. Self-command explaining why the children of professors do well is a finding. Self-command explaining part of a group gap is a provocation requiring extraordinary evidence. The methodological critiques of the marshmallow work that arrived after 2018 raised real questions about socioeconomic confounding, and I do not dispute their substance. What tracked the variable’s migration from one use to the other was the energy behind them.

A standard that depends on the status of the population explained rather than on the evidence is a standard of manners. And the manners run in a direction: agency is a compliment paid to people already doing well, and its withdrawal is the courtesy extended to people who are not.

Lee Ross (1942-2021) named the fundamental attribution error in 1977. Observers over-attribute conduct to disposition and under-attribute it to situation, reliably, and worse for people they do not know.

This protects subjects. Findings about populations get used, and the use is rarely gentle. Publish that a group’s members exhibit shorter time horizons and you have produced a sentence that will appear, stripped of qualifications, in the mouth of someone who wants to deny that group a loan.

And it buys access. Ethnography runs on entrée. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed a hundred and sixty-two single mothers in Philadelphia and produced a book whose empirical value survives its interpretive frame. They could not have done that work while publishing that the central obstacle was the conduct of the men these women chose. The interviews record the women saying so, at length, about infidelity, violence, drug use, and desertion. The book attributes the conduct to bad schools and absent opportunity. The gap between what the subjects said and what the authors concluded is the price of admission, paid in explanatory currency, and every fieldworker knows the exchange rate without having seen it posted.

Mancur Olson (1932-1998) argued that enforcement of a norm is a public good. The benefit diffuses across a population that includes almost nobody the enforcer knows. The cost concentrates on him, in the room, at the time: the awkwardness of judging a colleague’s divorce, the risk of saying in a seminar that children do better with a father at home, the demotion that attaches to anyone who moralizes about sex. Every individual therefore has reason to withhold enforcement while hoping others supply it, and provision settles below what even the enforcers privately believe correct. The same arithmetic governs the scholarly version. Each researcher who declines to publish the uncomfortable finding gains a private benefit and imposes a small diffuse cost on the field’s stock of knowledge. Nobody defects from the economy because defecting is expensive and the returns go to strangers.

Joanna Kempner, Jon Merz, and Charles Bosk (1948-2020) documented how the enforcement runs. They interviewed forty-one academic researchers about knowledge considered too sensitive, dangerous, or taboo to produce, and found that the constraints were largely informal and self-imposed rather than codified. What marked the boundaries were the narrative legacies of past controversies, which working scientists used to locate the lines. Researchers learned where the edges were when their own work or a colleague’s drew rebuke.

Those interviews now have a quantitative successor. Cory Clark and twelve coauthors surveyed 470 American psychology professors about conclusions regarded as taboo within the discipline. The scholars who judged those conclusions more likely to be true reported more self-censorship, not less. Almost all anticipated some social cost from stating their empirical beliefs openly, and tenure did little to remove the fear. Most respondents also opposed suppressing scholarship or punishing scholars merely because conclusions might cause harm.

The combination is the finding. A moral economy does not require a room full of people eager to censor one another. It can be sustained by pluralistic ignorance, with researchers who personally favor open inquiry anticipating sanctions from colleagues who may privately be making the same calculation. Timur Kuran (b. 1954) supplies the name. Preference falsification preserves a public equilibrium that few participants privately endorse, and it holds precisely because each participant reads the silence of the others as evidence of a consensus he alone doubts.

This is how a moral economy should operate. Graduate students observe which questions make advisers uneasy. Scholars learn which formulations require three paragraphs of disclaimer. Referees demand alternative structural accounts with more insistence when the conclusion is uncomfortable. Investigators anticipate the reaction and redesign the project before anyone has to object.

The evidence that the process begins well before peer review arrived in 2026. George Borjas and Nate Breznau examined a many-analyst experiment in which seventy-one teams containing 158 researchers received the same data and the same question about immigration and support for welfare programs, and produced 1,253 regression models. The researchers’ prior views on immigration predicted the direction of their estimates. The route ran through specification. Five ordinary research-design decisions accounted for roughly two-thirds of the difference between the pro- and anti-immigration teams. No fabrication, no falsified analysis, no gatekeeper. Research design had become endogenous to prior belief.

Two features of that result discipline the argument here. Both ideological directions showed the effect, and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores than either extreme. The claim is not that one side is uniquely capable of motivated science. It is that a politically homogeneous field converts ordinary motivated reasoning into a systematic tilt, because the specifications that feel natural to most of the room are the ones that get run.

The costs.

A class of true propositions becomes unpublishable, and a field that cannot publish a proposition cannot test or correct it. Suppression does not produce silence on a question. It produces relocation. The question migrates to writers with no data, no training, no review, and no stake in the population’s welfare, who answer it badly and loudly to an audience that has noticed the professionals declining to speak. Wilson said as much about the years after Moynihan.

Theories with poor fit survive on moral standing. A field that keeps the marriageable-men hypothesis at the center of its account while a fifth of the variance supports it has stopped optimizing for fit, and has lost the ability to tell whether it is making progress.

The economy patronizes. Powerful people get treated as agents. Disadvantaged people get treated as respondents to conditions. The employer discriminates, the landlord excludes, the school fails, the market dislocates, the neighborhood constrains, and the disadvantaged individual adapts. Sometimes that is what happened. When the grammar becomes a default theory of causation, agency itself becomes stratified: people at the top hold enough of it to cause social outcomes, and people at the bottom hold enough to experience outcomes without helping to cause them. Orlando Patterson (b. 1940) has pressed this from a position that makes it hard to wave off, arguing that the refusal to discuss culture and conduct among Black Americans amounts to a denial that they are agents in their own lives.

And morally congenial explanations have victims. Suppose a destructive behavior responds strongly to norms and weakly to the economic variable researchers prefer. A generation spent improving the economic variable while declining to investigate the normative one does not protect the affected population. It withholds a useful explanation from them. Compassion attached to the wrong causal model is not compassionate in its consequences.

The strong version of this argument does not survive every test, and the failures are worth stating. An adversarial collaboration led by Diego Reinero examined 194 psychology studies that later faced replication attempts and found that liberal versus conservative slant predicted neither replication success nor citation frequency nor effect size. What showed modest association with poorer replicability was ideological extremity in either direction. Morally congenial research is not generally false, and the claim here has never needed it to be. The economy changes which questions get asked, how much scrutiny competing explanations receive, and which conclusions impose reputational costs on the person reporting them. Those are effects on the composition of a literature rather than on the truth of any paper in it.

Where the moral economy causes the most damage is in the conflation of explanation with exculpation. Discrimination contributing to an outcome leaves open whether every person experiencing it acted wisely. Behavior contributing to an outcome leaves open whether discrimination is present. A norm proving socially useful leaves open whether those who violate it are wicked. A population differing on average in some trait leaves open where the difference came from, whether it is mutable, and what anyone owes anyone else about it. None of these propositions entails the moral conclusion habitually attached to it.

Wax’s empirical case for population differences in local and global decision-making runs far weaker than her theoretical model. She concedes that the time-discounting literature is messy, that the measurements are inconsistent, and that the evidence linking psychological traits to intimate conduct is thin. That is where to attack the argument. Are the traits measured well? Do the group differences survive controls? Which way does causation run? How much variance do they carry? Can the model outperform its rivals out of sample? Does the normative environment change conduct through the route she specifies?

Those are scientific objections. That hypothesis blames the victim is a statement about the hypothesis’s position in a moral economy.

Researchers choose subjects because some outcomes weigh more with them than others. Societies regulate experiments because knowledge is not worth every price. What a science can demand is that the ledgers stay separate.

The causal ledger asks what produces the outcome. It lets institutions, incentives, history, culture, norms, cognition, personality, choice, inheritance, developmental feedback, and chance compete for explanatory power. No variable earns immunity because its implications are unpleasant, and none earns a presumption because its implications are humane. The moral ledger opens afterward and asks what people owe one another given what turns out to be true.

Separation works because human dignity does not require causal innocence. A poor man need not be a passive product of structures to deserve help. A man who made a disastrous choice keeps his claim on compassion. A group difference is not deserved merely because behavior mediates it. An institution is not innocent merely because individuals act. A society can ask responsibility of people while recognizing that the capacity for responsibility is partly socially produced. Grant those propositions and most of the moral pressure on causal explanation drains away.

Notes

On the term. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76-136. Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2-24, at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/368740 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/301910. Daston’s definition of a moral economy as a web of affect-saturated values is the sentence the essay leans on, and her insistence that these economies are historically specific is what makes the present one a subject rather than a scandal. For the concept’s wider career, Norbert Götz, “‘Moral Economy’: Its Conceptual History and Analytical Prospects,” at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449626.2015.1054556. Robert Merton’s four norms come from “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), reprinted in The Sociology of Science (1973). For the counter-norms that run alongside them, Ian I. Mitroff, “Norms and Counter-Norms in a Select Group of the Apollo Moon Scientists: A Case Study of the Ambivalence of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 39 (1974): 579-595, at https://www.andreasaltelli.eu/file/repository/mitroff_OCR.pdf.

On the Wax paper and its field review. Amy L. Wax, “Diverging Family Structure and ‘Rational’ Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice,” University of Pennsylvania Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper No. 10-17, at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1592424. Her demolition of the structural accounts runs through the paper’s third section, and her own summary of the demographic estimates on marriageable men appears at notes 30 and 31. The Wilson hypothesis is stated in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), whose opening chapter also carries Wilson’s account of the professional silence that followed the Moynihan report. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep (2005), is the ethnography discussed above.

On the price of evidence, measured. Henning Finseraas, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, “Ideological Biases in Research Evaluations? The Case of Research on Majority-Minority Relations,” Scandinavian Political Studies 45 (2022): 370-381, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9477.12229, is the preregistered experiment in which the conclusion was randomized and the design held constant. George J. Borjas and Nate Breznau, “Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings,” Science Advances 12 (2026): eadz7173, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12757037/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41477854/, supplies the many-analyst result. Note that both papers concern immigration rather than family structure, and that neither observes the specific economy this essay describes. What they establish is that the pricing effect is real and measurable in an adjacent domain.

On how the boundaries get enforced. Joanna Kempner, Jon F. Merz, and Charles L. Bosk, “Forbidden Knowledge: Public Controversy and the Production of Nonknowledge,” Sociological Forum 26 (2011): 475-500, at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1573-7861.2011.01259.x, with an open copy here. The earlier and shorter statement is Kempner, Clifford Perlis, and Merz, “Forbidden Knowledge,” Science 307 (2005): 854, at https://science.sciencemag.org/content/307/5711/854. Their finding that most constraints are informal or self-imposed, and that memories of past controversies mark the lines, is the empirical backbone of the argument here. The quantitative successor is Cory J. Clark and colleagues, “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 20 (2025): 941-957, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12408927/ and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916241252085, whose crucial result is that belief in a taboo proposition predicts more self-censorship rather than less. For the collective-action engine, Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965). For the equilibrium it sustains, Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press, 1995).

On the trait literature and its asymmetric reception. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip Peake’s original delay-of-gratification papers ran in Science (1989) and Developmental Psychology (1990). The conceptual replication is Tyler Watts, Greg Duncan, and Haonan Quan, “Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” Psychological Science 29 (2018): 1159-1177, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661, with an open copy here. Their bivariate correlation ran half the size of the original and fell by two thirds under controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and home environment. The exchange that followed is worth reading in full, since it shows the field arguing about controls rather than about politics: Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, and Pia Pinger, “Re-Revisiting the Marshmallow Test,” here with the Watts and Duncan reply on confounding and construct clarity. Lee Ross’s “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings” (1977) is where the attribution error gets its name.

On what the argument does not establish. Diego A. Reinero and colleagues, “Is the Political Slant of Psychology Research Related to Scientific Replicability?,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2020): 1310-1328, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691620924463 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32812848/, is an adversarial collaboration across 194 studies subjected to replication attempts, and it finds no relation between ideological direction and replication success, citation, or effect size. Anyone tempted to read this essay as a claim that congenial findings are false should read Reinero first. The Borjas and Breznau result runs the same direction, since both ideological camps showed the specification effect and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores.

On Boas. The immigrant anthropometry study is Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1912). The reanalysis dispute runs through Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2002) and Clarence Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William Leonard in American Anthropologist (2003), the latter concluding that Boas’s central plasticity finding largely held. The claim in the text is about the speed of a disciplinary displacement and the questions pursued afterward, not about an absence of evidence.

On the Moynihan aftermath. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). William Ryan, Blaming the Victim (1971), supplied the phrase. Readers who want the controversy reconstructed rather than summarized should start with James Patterson, Freedom Is Not Enough (2010).

On culture readmitted under conditions. Mario Luis Small, David J. Harding, and Michèle Lamont, “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 629 (May 2010): 6-27, at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2131376, with the Harvard open copy at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lamont/files/reconsidering_culture_and_poverty.pdf and the full volume at https://archive.org/details/reconsideringcul0629unse. The volume includes a contribution from Wilson. Note the timing: this appeared the same season Wax circulated her draft, which makes the pair a natural comparison for anyone who wants to see the permitted and the forbidden versions of the same move side by side.

Further reading. Orlando Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration (1997) and Rituals of Blood (1998), argue the agency point from inside the sociology of race; his 2006 New York Times essay “A Poverty of the Mind” states it compactly. On the demographic side of the family argument, Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round (2009), Charles Murray, Coming Apart (2012), Robert Putnam, Our Kids (2015), and Melissa Kearney, The Two-Parent Privilege (2023). Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values and taboo tradeoffs supplies a psychology for the reaction described here, and readers who want it should start with “The Psychology of the Unthinkable” (2000). For a companion piece on who selects a normative regime and who bears its costs, see the essay on status hierarchy and normative selection that shares this argument’s premises.

Disruptive Papers

The strongest of these dissolve a morally convenient dichotomy rather than delivering an unwelcome result. A reader cannot neutralize them by switching political teams, which is what makes them expensive to price.

Augustine Kong and colleagues, “The Nature of Nurture: Effects of Parental Genotypes,” Science 359 (2018): 424-428. The design exploits alleles parents carry but do not transmit. Since the child never inherited them, any association with the child’s educational attainment cannot be a direct genetic effect on the child. A polygenic score built from nontransmitted parental alleles predicted the child’s educational attainment at 29.9 percent the strength of the transmitted score. They named it genetic nurture. The partition between heredity and environment stops being clean in both directions at once. A variable coded environmental can carry genetic covariance, and a genetic estimate can carry parental behavior.

Laurence Howe and colleagues, “Within-Sibship Genome-Wide Association Analyses Decrease Bias in Estimates of Direct Genetic Effects,” Nature Genetics 54 (2022): 581-592, free at PMC. 178,086 siblings across 19 cohorts. Comparing siblings strips out population stratification, assortative mating, and family-level genetic nurture. Estimated associations shrank substantially, roughly forty-seven percent for educational attainment, and many survived. Neither camp gets what it wants. Direct inheritance, indirect genetic effects, and social environment remain entangled, and nobody is granted causal innocence.

Aaron Chalfin, Benjamin Hansen, Emily Weisburst, and Morgan Williams Jr., “Police Force Size and Civilian Race,” American Economic Review: Insights 4 (2022): 139-158, free at PMC. 242 cities, 1981 to 2018, two instrumental-variable strategies. An additional officer prevents about a tenth of a homicide, and the per-capita homicide benefit runs roughly twice as large for Black residents as for white residents. More police also means fewer serious-crime arrests and more low-level arrests, with the second burden falling disproportionately on Black Americans. Both slogans about policing turn out true along different margins. The finding refuses to announce the researcher’s politics, which is the sorting device the moral economy runs on.

Michael Schaerer and colleagues, “On the Trajectory of Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis and Forecasting Survey Capturing 44 Years of Field Experiments on Gender and Hiring Decisions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 179 (2023): 104280. Preregistered, 85 field audits, 244 effects, 361,645 applications, an independent red team, and a forecasting component. Discrimination against women in male-typed and mixed jobs declined and reversed slightly after 2009. Discrimination against men in female-typed jobs persisted. Then the second catch: scientists correctly anticipated improvement for women, overestimated how much anti-female discrimination remained, and did not anticipate the anti-male effect at all. The paper measures the phenomenon and the field’s expectations about it in the same design.

The next group holds a design constant and gets an answer the field did not want.

Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, “Why Do Women Earn Less than Men? Evidence from Bus and Train Operators,” Journal of Labor Economics 40 (2022): 283-323, PDF at https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_gendergap.pdf. One unionized employer, identical posted wages, seniority-driven promotion, and still eighty-nine cents on the dollar, arising from 1.5 fewer overtime hours and 1.3 more unpaid hours off per week. Occupational sorting, managerial discretion, and negotiation are removed by construction.

Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, Jonathan Hall, John List, and Paul Oyer, “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers,” Review of Economic Studies 88 (2021): 2210-2238, PDF at https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/UberPayGap.pdf, working version at NBER 24732. More than a million workers, a sex-blind algorithm setting pay and dispatch, and a seven percent hourly gap accounted for by experience, where and when people drove, and speed. Customer discrimination explained none of it. The result does not show that gaps elsewhere are preference-driven. It shows that a substantial gap can appear where the standard suspects are absent.

Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom on Harvard admissions, principally “Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions,” European Economic Review 144 (2022): 104079, and “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard,” Journal of Labor Economics 40 (2022): 133-155, with everything collected at https://psarcidi.github.io/. Two competent teams working the same applicant-level records, with David Card running the opposing analysis for Harvard. That is the rarest thing in social science and it lets a reader watch specification choice operate in daylight. The second paper is the one that keeps it from being a partisan document: more than forty-three percent of white admits were legacy, athlete, dean’s list, or faculty children, and roughly three quarters of those would have been rejected otherwise.

Lincoln Quillian, Devah Pager (1972-2018), Ole Hexel, and Arnfinn Midtbøen, “Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time,” PNAS 114 (2017): 10870-10875, free at PMC. Twenty-eight audits, 55,842 applications, whites receiving thirty-six percent more callbacks, no decline since 1989. This one points the other way and belongs on any list that expects to be taken seriously. Correspondence audits also have the cleanest identification in the discrimination literature, which is precisely why the result is hard to price down.

The last group is about the machinery of belief rather than about any social outcome.

Patrick Forscher, Calvin Lai, Jordan Axt, Charles Ebersole, Michelle Herman, Patricia Devine, and Brian Nosek, “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 117 (2019): 522-559, preprint at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/dv8tu/. 492 studies, 87,418 participants. Implicit measures move, effects run small, behavioral effects run trivial, and changes in implicit measures do not mediate changes in behavior. Devine and Nosek built the field. The paper does not deny implicit attitudes. It removes the inference that moving a score is a demonstrated route to changing conduct, which is the inference the training industry sells.

Jeffrey Dahlke, Paul Sackett, and Nathan Kuncel, “Effects of Range Restriction and Criterion Contamination on Differential Validity of the SAT by Race/Ethnicity and Sex,” Journal of Applied Psychology 104 (2019): 814-831. 363,004 students at 107 institutions. Correcting for admissions-induced range restriction and for students taking different courses, first-year predictive validity for Black and Hispanic students was not significantly different from validity for white students, with four-year outcomes and other comparisons more complicated. The disruptive proposition is narrow and load-bearing: a group difference in average scores is not itself evidence that the instrument is biased. Disparity and measurement bias are separate empirical claims.

George Borjas and Nate Breznau, “Ideological Bias in the Production of Research Findings,” Science Advances 12 (2026), eadz7173, record at PubMed. Seventy-one teams, 158 researchers, identical data and question, 1,253 models. Prior views predicted estimates, and five ordinary design choices carried about two thirds of the difference between camps. Both directions showed it and moderate teams drew better blind-review scores. No fraud, no censorship, no gatekeeper. The dependent variable here is science, which makes it the closest thing to an experimental demonstration of a price of evidence.

Cory Clark and colleagues, “Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 20 (2025): 941-957, belongs alongside these as a companion rather than a peer. It is a survey and carries no causal design. Its value is the finding that professors who judged taboo propositions more likely to be true reported more self-censorship, which is the shape a pluralistic-ignorance equilibrium leaves in survey data.

What happens on the inside when an elite academic who regards himself as a disinterested servant of the truth reads a disruptive paper?

Claude says:

Nobody has written the scene you want. Three things come close.
Robert Putnam (b. 1941) wrote the nonfiction version about himself. His 2007 paper on ethnic diversity and social capital found that diversity depressed trust in the short run, including trust within groups, and he said in print that he had delayed publication while looking for countervailing evidence and had wanted to be able to report a remedy alongside the finding. That is a man describing his own hesitation, in a journal, with the delay itself as part of the record.
Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger, 2015, is the memoir of watching this happen from inside and then deciding to become an inconvenience about it.
For fiction, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, 2006, is the closest thing that exists. A postdoc’s result is too good, and the novel is about who wants it to be true, who is permitted to doubt it, and what doubting costs. C. P. Snow (1905-1980) is the ancestor, particularly The Affair, where a college decides what it can afford to have happened.
SCENE:
The paper comes in from a former student on a Tuesday, with no message, only the subject line: thought you’d want to see this. He opens it between the eleven o’clock and the department lunch. He reads the abstract twice.
The first thing he does is scroll to the affiliations. This is not a political act. He has done it for thirty years, because a name and a department tell him how much weight the standard errors will bear, and because he can save himself forty minutes by learning that the third author trained under someone whose work he already distrusts. The affiliations are good. Better than good. One of them is a place he has sent his own students.
So he reads the data section.
He reads it the way he reads a referee assignment, which is to say he reads it looking for the place where it breaks. This too is not political. It is the only way anyone reads anything in his field. He finds three candidates in the first pass. The sample is drawn from administrative records that exclude a population he happens to know is excluded in a nonrandom way. The controls include a variable that is plausibly post-treatment. And the main specification uses a fixed effect that will absorb more variation than the authors seem to want it to.
He writes these down on the back of a seminar announcement. He feels, writing them, the small clean pleasure of competence. He is good at this. He was good at it when he was twenty-eight and he is better now.
Then he goes to the appendix, because the appendix is where a serious team puts the robustness checks, and he wants to know whether they anticipated him.
They anticipated him. All three.
The exclusion is addressed in Table A4, with bounds. The post-treatment control is dropped in column five and the coefficient moves by four percent. The fixed effect is relaxed in three ways across two pages, and the result survives all of them, with the confidence interval widening in the direction he would have predicted and not far enough to matter.
He sits back.
What happens next takes about four seconds and he will not remember it by dinner.
He thinks: the effect size still seems large. He does not think this because he has a prior about the effect size. He has no prior about the effect size. He has never worked on this outcome. He thinks it because the number, if true, would require him to say something in a seminar that he does not want to say in a seminar, and the not-wanting has arrived before the reasoning, dressed as the reasoning, and he has no instrument that can tell the two apart.
So he looks for a fourth problem.
He finds one. The outcome is self-reported in the second wave. This is a real limitation and he is right to note it. He notes it. He notes it with more energy than he noted the first three, and he does not observe the difference in energy, because energy is not something he has ever been trained to measure in himself.
He looks at the clock. He is late for lunch.
Walking down the corridor he composes, without deciding to, the sentence he will use if the paper comes up. He is not going to attack it. He would never attack it. He is going to say that it is careful work and that he would want to see it replicated on a different population before drawing conclusions. Every word of that is true. He would want that. He wants that about everything.
He has never once said it about a paper whose result ran the other way.
At lunch a colleague mentions the paper. There is a pause of the kind that is not long enough to be called a pause. Someone says the authors are serious people. Someone else says he heard the identification is fragile, and the man who read the appendix that morning, who knows the identification is not fragile, who has the seminar announcement in his jacket pocket with three refuted objections written on the back of it, says nothing at all.
He says nothing because the room has not asked him anything. He tells himself this on the walk back, and it is true, and he is a scrupulous man, and it is the last time he thinks about the paper for six weeks.

Posted in Amy Wax | Comments Off

Ten Years of Talmud Postings: What the Job Market Bought, 2016 to 2026

Posted on August 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

I ended an earlier piece on the dating of the Talmud with a line that reads like a research proposal. Ten years of Talmud job postings would show whether the field has already settled the question. I have now run that study on both sides of the market. The sentence was wrong.

For a generation the most consequential change in academic Talmud has been geographic. Yaakov Elman (1943-2018) argued that the Bavli had to be read against Middle Persian culture, Sasanian law, and the Iranian world its rabbis lived in. Shai Secunda gave the program a book. The claim went beyond the observation that the rabbis lived under Persian rule. Iranian evidence could explain what happens inside the Talmud.

If Iranian texts explain the Bavli, somebody has to read them. Middle Persian is not something you can pick up on the way through a conventional Talmud curriculum. It has to be bought, in years, by a young person deciding what to become. That makes the question testable. Twenty years after the Persian turn began, what did the field buy?

A job advertisement is a purchase order. A department writes down the competence it wants this year, at the price of a tenure line, given the people already on its roster. A dissertation is a heavier commitment: six years of a person’s life, and the distribution of those choices across a decade is the field deciding what it will be able to do in 2040. The ad states an aspiration. The hire states a price paid. The dissertation states an investment made by someone who has to live inside it.

The document in the decade is the University of Chicago Divinity School search in rabbinic Judaism, posted in August 2019 with review opening that September. Applicants should possess broad knowledge of the rabbinic period and expertise in the languages essential to the field and relevant to their own research agenda. Then the sentence that carries the decade: strong applicants will demonstrate knowledge of the Roman, Sasanian, and early Islamic imperial contexts in which rabbinic literature developed.

In November 2019, with the search running, Chicago held a conference called Rabbinic Judaism and Its Contexts, whose description opens by saying rabbinic Judaism was born twice, in the spaces and cultures of Roman Palestine and Sasanian Iran, and that rabbinic lore and argument must be understood in relation to those contexts. Sasanian Iran had stopped being a specialist’s comparative field sitting outside Talmud scholarship. Chicago called it one of the two worlds in which the thing came into being.

Chicago left the languages to the candidate.

Six years later Binghamton supplied another test. Its 2025-26 advertisement for an assistant professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, reproduced by the Society for Classical Studies, expects Hebrew and Aramaic and prefers competence in one further relevant language. Then it supplies examples: Ancient Greek, Arabic, Latin. It also prefers a research context in the Near East or the eastern Mediterranean. Middle Persian goes unnamed.

Binghamton had reached the point of enumerating the comparative toolkit it hoped a Talmudist might carry. Greek made the list. Arabic made it. Latin made it. The department writing that sentence in 2025 had every opportunity to add a fourth item.

Hebrew University in 2016 wanted the classical corpora and full mastery of the original sources, with preference for Tannaitic literature. Its current search wants the literature of the Amoraim and the Yerushalmi in particular. UCLA in 2017 ran its frame from the Achaemenid through the Sasanian periods and put the emphasis on Aramaic, with graduate seminars in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. Penn in 2018 advertised in ancient rabbinics and wrote a period into the title of the field, first through seventh centuries, asking for mastery of Hebrew and conversation with contemporaneous cultures of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. Not one of them names Middle Persian.

Among the Talmud and rabbinics advertisements recovered for 2016 through 2026, Middle Persian appears nowhere as a required or preferred language, and one advertisement that enumerates three other desirable comparative languages omits it.

Cornell advertised the Herbert and Stephanie Neuman Professorship in the same season as the Chicago search, a tenured chair, wanting rabbinic literature and culture linked to related North African and Middle Eastern literatures and cultures. It hired Jason Sion Mokhtarian, who holds a UCLA master’s in ancient Iranian studies alongside his doctorate in late antique Judaism. Cornell’s Near Eastern Studies profile names Middle Persian among his research areas, and Cornell Law lists Old, Middle, and New Persian among his research languages. His earlier curriculum vitae records doctoral examinations in rabbinic literature, ancient Iranian religions, Hebrew, Babylonian Aramaic, and Middle Persian, and master’s examinations in Old Persian, Middle Persian, New Persian, and Sasanian history. His first book is Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran.

When a scholar possesses Middle Persian, the evidence is abundant and easy to find. Degrees, examinations, listed research languages, publications, teaching interests all point the same way.

Simcha Gross arrives at the same destination by another road. Penn hired him off the ancient rabbinics search. His Yale dissertation, “Empire and Neighbors: Babylonian Jewish Identity in Its Local and Imperial Contexts,” sat with a committee including Christine Hayes, Steven Fraade, Seth Schwartz, and Aaron Butts. His first book, Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity, reconstructs Babylonian Jewish history through Sasanian institutions, imperial structures, and the relation between Jewish communities and Persian power. He reaches Iran as a historian of empire, through Syriac Christianity and the incantation bowls. His acknowledgments thank two Iranists for foundational training.

Sarah Wolf arrives by a third. JTS hired her in 2018 off her Northwestern doctorate, “The Rabbinic Legal Imagination: Narrativity and Scholasticism in the Babylonian Talmud,” advised by Mira Balberg and Barry Wimpfheimer. Her work runs through close reading, source criticism, and the history of scholasticism. Her own account of the dissertation places late rabbinic thought inside broader Sasanian scholastic trends and reads the increasing literary complexity of the Bavli’s later legal passages as evidence of a strong and late redactorial hand. Her 2020 article in the AJS Review says the same thing independently: late rabbinic literature was composed in an increasingly scholastic context in Sasanian Persia and reflects that context in its academy, its cultural themes, and its legal processes.

Three scholars, one neighborhood, three sets of luggage. Mokhtarian carries Iranian languages and religions. Gross carries imperial and social history. Wolf carries literary development and comparative scholasticism. That is what a successful methodological change looks like from inside.

I expected the supply side to show the same asymmetry in a harder form, and I set out to establish that Middle Persian had gone unlearned. That claim broke under its own test. I searched for the language and asked who had taken it, and the answer sits in a single sentence in a university newsletter. Writing in Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies review for spring 2018, the Iranist Oktor Skjærvø describes teaching Pahlavi at Yale in 2016-17, and names two Talmudists in the room: Erez DeGolan and Miriam-Simma Walfish. DeGolan took his Columbia doctorate in 2023 on public joy in Roman Palestine. Walfish took hers at Harvard in 2022 on parents and sages in the Babylonian Talmud. Separately, Yitz Landes records coursework in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac, and Pahlavi-Middle Persian on his own curriculum vitae, and took his Princeton doctorate in 2023 on the transmission of the Mishnah.

Three scholars in one decade, two of them taught by the same man in the same year. Not one of the three dissertations announces the training. Not one of the three is a Talmudo-Iranica project. DeGolan wrote about Roman Palestine, which is the opposite end of the map from the language he had learned. The credential was invisible to every method the study had been using, and became visible only when the question was turned around and pointed at the teacher instead of the students.

The training was available the whole time.

This is the underlying dataset for Ten Years of Talmud Postings. Forty-six American doctorates awarded between 2016 and 2026 in which rabbinic primary texts are the primary or co-primary evidence. The inclusion test: would removing the sustained analysis of rabbinic primary texts materially damage a central argument of the dissertation? Degree-award year only, never defense year, deposit year, fellowship year, or expected completion. Where a field could not be established from a source, it says so. Two dissertation titles are left blank for that reason.

1. Deborah Barer, University of Virginia, 2016. A Judge With No Courtroom: Law, Ethics and the Rabbinic Idea of Lifnim Mi-Shurat Ha-Din. Adviser Elizabeth Shanks Alexander. Language record informative: CV lists ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, modern Hebrew, French, Spanish. No Middle Persian.

2. Jonathan Pomeranz, Yale, 2016. Ordinary Jews in the Babylonian Talmud: Rabbinic Representations and Historical Interpretation. Year resolved to 2016 against a 2015 adviser-CV date.

3. Rachel Scheinerman, Yale, 2016. Throughout Your Generations: The Tannaitic Passover Ritual. Year resolved to 2016 against conflicting 2017 references. Tannaitic corpus.

4. Simcha Gross, Yale, 2017. Empire and Neighbors: Babylonian Jewish Identity in Its Local and Imperial Contexts. Committee Christine Hayes, Steven Fraade, Seth Schwartz, Aaron Butts. Sasanian explanatory work: yes. Middle Persian: unknown. His acknowledgments thank Mahnaz Moazami and Oktor Skjærvø for foundational training without naming the subject.

5. Matthew Goldstone, NYU, 2017. “Remove the Beam from Your Own Eye!”: The Dynamics of Rebuke in Ancient Jewish and Christian Traditions. Adviser Jeffrey Rubenstein. Language record informative: Hebrew, Babylonian and Galilean Aramaic, Syriac, Koine Greek, French, German. No Middle Persian.

6. Hilla Alouf-Aboody, NYU, 2017. Halokh ve-daber: Elijah the Prophet as a Bearer of Wisdom in Rabbinic Literature. Adviser Lawrence Schiffman.

7. James Adam Redfield, Stanford, 2017. The Sages and the World: Categorizing Culture in Early Rabbinic Law. Language record informative: Hebrew-Aramaic plus French, German, Yiddish. No Middle Persian.

8. Nathan Schumer, Columbia, 2017. The Memory of the Temple in Palestinian Rabbinic Literature. Columbia’s alumni record gives May 2017 against a stale “expected 2015” CV entry. Palestinian corpus.

9. Rebecca Epstein-Levi, University of Virginia, 2017. Safe, Sane, and Attentive: Toward a Jewish Ethic of Sex and Public Health. Elizabeth Shanks Alexander a documented reader. Admitted on sustained analysis of Mishnah Zavim.

10. Emily Filler, University of Virginia, 2017. A Stubborn and Rebellious Bible: Modern Jewish Scripture, Troubling Texts, and the Recovery of Rabbinic Hermeneutics. Adviser Peter Ochs. Language record informative: modern, rabbinic and biblical Hebrew, Talmudic Aramaic, German, French, Spanish. No Middle Persian.

11. Joseph Dov Rosen, Graduate Theological Union and Berkeley, 2017. The Talmudic Zohar: Rabbinic Interdisciplinarity in Midrash ha-Ne’lam. Found late and outside the twenty-three-institution frame. Three chapters reconstruct Bavli modes of argument and show their adoption in Midrash ha-Ne’lam.

12. Sarah Wolf, Northwestern, 2018. The Rabbinic Legal Imagination: Narrativity and Scholasticism in the Babylonian Talmud. Advisers Mira Balberg and Barry Wimpfheimer. Sasanian explanatory work: yes. Stam categories one and two, not three. No explicit post-Amoraic date recovered from public material.

13. Daniel Picus, Brown, 2018. Ink Sea, Parchment Sky: Rabbinic Reading Practices in Late Antiquity. Adviser Michael Satlow. Degree awarded May 2018 against a 2017 adviser-CV date.

14. A. J. Berkovitz, Princeton, 2018. The Life of Psalms in Late Antiquity. Language record informative: a dedicated research-languages line giving Hebrew, several Aramaic varieties including Syriac, Greek, German, French. No Middle Persian.

15. Catherine Bonesho, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018. Foreign Holidays and Festivals as Representative of Identity in Rabbinic Literature. Jordan Rosenblum on the committee. Greek and Roman imperial comparison. Language record informative: Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, Greek. No Middle Persian.

16. Krista Dalton, Columbia, 2018. Rabbis and Donors: The Logics of Giving in the Ancient Mediterranean. Alyssa Gray on the committee. Year disputed: Columbia’s placement record gives 2018, her own site 2019.

17. Tamar Duvdevani, Hebrew Union College, 2018. Literary Aspects of Attribution in the Babylonian Talmud. Stam category one. Attribution and anonymity central, no chronology.

18. Sheila Tuller Keiter, UCLA, 2018. The Jewish Understanding of the Scriptural Solomon Narrative: Examining Biblical, Classical Rabbinic, and Major Medieval Responses. Roughly seventy pages of sustained classical rabbinic reception analysis.

19. Alex Weisberg, NYU, 2019. Before There Was Nature: Land, Ethics, and New Materialism in the Early Rabbinic Sabbatical Year Laws. Adviser Jeffrey Rubenstein.

20. Rachel Rosenthal, Jewish Theological Seminary, 2019. Rebel With a Clause: Interpretation, Pedagogy, and the Problem of the Stubborn and Rebellious Son. Alyssa Gray on the committee. Degree awarded April 2019.

21. Shulamit Shinnar, Columbia, 2019. “The Best of Doctors Go to Hell”: Rabbinic Medical Culture in Late Antiquity (200-600 CE). Adviser Beth Berkowitz. Language record informative: Hebrew, Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, French, German. No Middle Persian.

22. M. Adryael Tong, Fordham, 2019. “Given as a Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity. Degree conferred August 31, 2019.

23. Matthew Chalmers, University of Pennsylvania, 2019. Representations of Samaritans in Late Antique Jewish and Christian Texts. Admitted on sustained Mishnah, Tosefta and Bavli analysis as a major comparative component.

24. Rebecca Kamholz, Yale, 2020. Virginity in the Babylonian Talmud: Sex, Identity, and Epistemology. Christine Hayes appears in advising records. Year corrected from 2019 by Yale’s degree list.

25. Pratima Gopalakrishnan, Yale, 2020. Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household. Adviser Christine Hayes. Year corrected from 2019.

26. Shlomo Zuckier, Yale, 2020. Flesh and Blood: The Reception of Biblical Sacrifice in Selected Talmudic Sources in Comparative Context. Adviser Christine Hayes. Year corrected from 2019.

27. Andrew Massena, Boston College, 2020. Torah for Its Own Sake: The Decalogue in Rabbinic and Patristic Exegesis. Director Ruth Langer. Rabbinic and patristic corpora genuinely co-primary.

28. Michail Kitsos, University of Michigan, 2020. Speaking as the Other: Late Ancient Jewish and Christian Multivocal Texts and the Creation of Religious Legitimacy. Co-chairs Ellen Muehlberger and Rachel Rafael Neis. Language record informative and unusually full: Greek, biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Classical Armenian. No Middle Persian.

29. Shira Schwartz, University of Michigan, 2020. Yeshiva Quirls: A Textual Ethnography of Jewish Gender, Sex and Reproduction. Chair Rachel Rafael Neis. Ancient rabbinic texts and contemporary ethnography co-primary.

30. Matthew Boersma, Hebrew Union College, 2021. Law and Lore of the Adulteress, From Miqra to Mishnah: The Evolution of Adultery in Judean Texts. Advisers David H. Aaron and Dvora Weisberg. Degree awarded October 3, 2021.

31. Jesse Mirotznik, Harvard, 2021. The Bad Faith Argument in Ancient Jewish Thought. Committee Jon Levenson, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Naphtali Meshel. Language record informative: Ancient Greek documented, no Middle Persian.

32. Miriam-Simma Walfish, Harvard, 2022. Parents and Sages as Agents of Culture in the Babylonian Talmud. Adviser Shaye J. D. Cohen. Middle Persian: yes. Named by Oktor Skjærvø as one of two Talmudists he taught Pahlavi at Yale in 2016-17.

33. Meira Wolkenfeld, Yeshiva University and Revel, 2022. Putrid Fish and Citrons in the Garbage Heaps of Mata Meḥasia: Scent and Smelling in the Babylonian Talmud. Aaron Koller on the committee. Sasanian: borderline. Related work uses Middle Persian Zoroastrian material; dissertation-level explanatory evidence not recovered.

34. Aaron D. Samuels, UCLA, 2022. In Defense of Israel: The Soteriological Function of the Advocate in Early Judaism and Rabbinic Literature. Adviser Carol Bakhos. Sasanian explanatory work: yes. The dissertation uses Sasanian law, Persian legal influence and Zoroastrian concepts to establish the legal environment through which it reads the Amoraic material.

35. Sarah (Sari) Fein, Brandeis, 2022. Conceiving Motherhood: The Reception of Biblical Mothers in the Early Jewish Imagination. Degree awarded August 2022. Lamentations Rabbah one of four principal case studies.

36. Erez DeGolan, Columbia, 2023. Affect in Power: Public Joy in Roman Palestine and the Lived Experience of the Rabbis (c. 70-350 CE). Adviser Beth Berkowitz. Middle Persian: yes, named by Skjærvø. Sasanian: no. The dissertation concerns Roman Palestine.

37. Yitz Landes, Princeton, 2023. The Transmission of the Mishnah and the Spread of Rabbinic Judaism, 200 CE-1200 CE. Adviser Moulie Vidas. Middle Persian: yes. His CV records coursework in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, Syriac and Pahlavi-Middle Persian. Sasanian: borderline.

38. Hannah Roussel, University of Michigan, 2023. Mad Rabbis: The Intersection of Bodyminds with Personal, Communal, and Non-Human Relationships in the Babylonian Talmud. Adviser Rachel Rafael Neis. Hebrew documented, inventory not complete enough for the omission of Middle Persian to be informative.

39. Eliav Grossman, Princeton, 2024. The New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature between Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Degree awarded September 28, 2024, which resolves a 2024 against 2025 ambiguity. The comparison is with early Islam.

40. Elya Zissel Piazza, UC Berkeley, 2024. Stealth Stamma: Queer Time and Affect in the Babylonian Talmud. Chair Daniel Boyarin. Stam category three, the only secure case in the cohort. The dissertation glossary defines the savoraitic-stammaitic period as the redaction of the Bavli, approximately 500 to 750.

41. David Raab, Touro, 2024. Gentile Foods: Rabbinic Prohibitions and the Fear of Intermarriage. Adviser Michael Shmidman. Sasanian: borderline. Discusses the setting around Ctesiphon, but the principal explanation is halakhic development and commensality.

42. Jeremy Tabick, Jewish Theological Seminary, 2024. “Our Holy Rabbi”: A Reassessment of the Historical Evidence about Rabbi, His Role in the Rabbinic Movement and in Reconstructing Late Antique Jewish History. Adviser Richard Kalmin. Dissertation completed November 2023, degree year 2024.

43. Isaac Roszler, NYU, 2025. Legal Accretions in the Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud. Not category three. “Legal accretions” does not by itself establish a post-Amoraic chronology.

44. Avram Chaim Schwartz, University of Virginia, 2025. Not Bread Alone: The Emerging Sense of Systematicity in Mishnah Hallah and Related Texts. Adviser Elizabeth Shanks Alexander.

45. Daniel Roni Golde, Jewish Theological Seminary, 2026. Title not recovered. The degree is established by the JTS 2026 commencement program, and a conference biography describes the dissertation as arguing that rabbinic Greek should be understood as a xenophonic Greek dialect. The title is left blank.

46. Benjamin Haber Kamine, Jewish Theological Seminary, 2026. Title not recovered. The degree is established by the same commencement program. JTS says the doctorate is in Midrash and describes work on converts and minim in classical rabbinic literature. Title left blank on the same principle.

By year: three in 2016, eight in 2017, seven in 2018, five in 2019, six in 2020, two in 2021, four in 2022, three in 2023, four in 2024, two in 2025, two in 2026.

Two cases are held outside the forty-six for different reasons, and the difference matters. Audrey Rhona Korotkin took an HUC doctorate in rabbinic literature in 2018 for Supplicatory Prayer Gestures in Theory and Practice, advised by Richard S. Sarason and Mark E. Washofsky. The degree and the field are secure. What could not be recovered is dissertation-level evidence that rabbinic primary texts carry a central argument, and a program label is not a substitute for that. Madeline Wyse’s Parodies of Prophets and Patriarchs: Intertextuality and Dissent in Rabbinic and Early Islamic Literature passes the corpus test without difficulty. What could not be recovered is a Berkeley conferral record; the university still classified her among graduate students in May 2026.

Samuel Catlin’s Chicago dissertation studies the modern American reception of midrash. Patrick Angiolillo’s NYU dissertation centers Second Temple prayer. Tzvi Lamm’s Princeton dissertation runs from 200 BCE to 200 CE, ending where rabbinic literature begins. Shai Goldfarb Cohen’s 2021 Wisconsin dissertation encompasses Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash and Talmud by its own description, and its evidence is users of Sefaria and Project Zug: rabbinic texts as content being learned. Rafa Kern’s Stanford ethnography of liberal adults studying Talmud fails on the same ground.

Jae Hee Han is the most useful exclusion. He has affirmative Middle Persian training and his Penn dissertation fails the corpus rule. He sits outside the cohort while possessing exactly the credential the cohort was searched for, which is the demonstration that language and corpus are independent variables.

Two scholars sit just outside the window and function as controls on the language coding. Sara Ronis took her Yale doctorate in 2015 and lists Middle Persian on an enumerated research-language inventory. Jason Sion Mokhtarian took his at UCLA in 2011, with Middle Persian in his doctoral examinations and Old, Middle and New Persian in his master’s examinations. When a scholar has the language, the evidence is abundant.

The coded results. Sasanian or Iranian material performing explanatory work, secure: three, Gross, Wolf and Samuels. Borderline: three, Landes, Raab and Wolkenfeld. That coding moved across successive passes as the rule tightened, and I would treat three as a floor. Scholars with individualized language records informative enough that an omission means something: twelve. Affirmative Middle Persian or Pahlavi among those twelve: three. Explicit post-Amoraic dating of the anonymous stratum: one.

Where a cell says unknown, it means no affirmative evidence was recovered.

talmud-excluded-and-controls

talmud-dissertations-2016-2026

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Cofnas, Lynn, and the Control Case

Posted on August 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Arday affair left one question unanswered by everything written about it. When a man opens somebody’s footnotes and finds that the citation does not support the sentence, is he tracking truth or tracking an enemy?

His defenders said scholarship. His opponents said fraud.

Judging by the evidence, the case for plagiarism by Arday is overwhelming. The meaning of the plagiarism combined with Arday’s Cambridge status is contested.

There is a control available.

Richard Lynn (1930–2023) built the national IQ datasets that underlie a large secondary literature. With Tatu Vanhanen he published IQ and the Wealth of Nations in 2002 and IQ and Global Inequality in 2006 in 2006, and he later worked with David Becker on updated estimates. The datasets assign an average score to each country and correlate those scores with economic performance. Lynn described himself as a scientific racist. Ulster University stripped his emeritus status in 2018 after student protests.

The current status of that work is contested. The European Human Behavior and Evolution Association issued a formal statement in 2020 discouraging use of the datasets and calling them unscientific. A campaign led by Rebecca Sear has been pressing journals to retract articles built on them, and is tracking well over a hundred such studies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B retracted a 2010 paper, “Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability,” in March 2024, saying the underlying between-country IQ data had been criticized for inaccuracies and biases.

This is an essay about who is willing to check whose work.

Lynn’s conclusions are congenial to the people who defended him against the retraction campaign. If criticism of scholarship follows coalition lines, they should have defended the work along with the man. Many did not.

Nathan Cofnas is the most consequential of them, because he is the person who later checked Kevin MacDonald and then audited Jason Arday (1985–2026).

In 2024, responding to the campaign against Lynn, Cofnas argued in a comment thread under Steve Sailer’s post that the papers should not be retracted, that retraction belongs to fraud, plagiarism, or something equivalent to mathematical error, that the charge of biased practice against Lynn was true and beside the point at issue, and that the targeting was political. Then he turned on his own side. He warned that many hereditarians would feel an impulse to defend Lynn’s work, called that a mistake, and said it was what the campaigners wanted. He described the national IQ work as profoundly flawed and told his readers not to make excuses. In a 2024 essay, Cofnas said Lynn and Rushton produced flawed scholarship and often exercised poor judgment about their associations. He repeated the criticism in 2025, calling Lynn sloppy while maintaining that some of the findings survive.

Was Lynn politically targeted? In his view yes. Should the papers therefore be pulled? No. Was the work bad? Yes. Should his allies defend it because they like the conclusions? No.

That is the distinction which collapsed in the first week of the Arday affair, running in the opposite direction. There, the identity of the accuser was offered as an answer to the accusation. Here, the identity of the accusers is offered as a reason to reject the retraction while conceding the substance of the methodological complaint.

Jason Malloy is another example.

When Malloy launched Human Varieties in 2013 he described himself as a hereditarian who had spent years in that world and had defended James Watson. Then he opened Lynn’s references country by country. The Equatorial Guinea figure was the spectacular one. Lynn and Vanhanen had assigned the country a score drawn from a study of 48 subjects. The subjects had been tested in Spain. The estimate was eventually withdrawn. Working through “HVGIQ: Dominican Republic,” Malloy said the number of errors was disturbing him, found a cited UNESCO source that did not contain what it was said to contain, and questioned the inconsistent handling of achievement data and the omission of an unusually high Cuban result. He wanted a better database and set about building one.

That is the same method Cofnas later applied to Arday’s thesis, performed by a man on Lynn’s own side, thirteen years earlier.

Emil Kirkegaard was close to Lynn. Lynn helped place his first paper and invited him to a conference, and his 2023 eulogy treats Lynn as a mentor. His 2019 review of The Intelligence of Nations, “Solid numbers, missed opportunities,” raised measurement invariance, the question of whether the same test measures the same construct across very different populations, and criticized the causal analysis as making little use of the methods that would be needed to establish national-level causation. The eulogy repeats the point. He still thinks the program has been productive.

Heiner Rindermann accepts that cross-national cognitive measures track economic outcomes, and has said that Lynn and Vanhanen’s data had serious problems: unrepresentative samples, tests from different periods requiring Flynn-effect adjustment, missing countries filled by estimate, heterogeneous instruments, the Equatorial Guinea error. He then showed that international school-assessment data produced broadly similar relationships. He is a party to the retraction fight. Discover Education pulled a 2024 article of his, saying post-publication review found fundamental flaws in using student assessment data as a measure of cognitive ability. He disagrees with the retraction.

David Becker became Lynn’s collaborator and rebuilt the dataset with more standardized procedures, writing that earlier estimates contained ambiguities, errors and deviations, correcting further mistakes after publication when outside reviewers found them, and acknowledging the absence of conventional peer review.

Russell Warne’s 2022 assessment argues a middle position: enough validity to justify continued work, alongside substantial weaknesses, with the imputed scores as the worst of them. Where a country had no usable data, a figure was sometimes estimated from its neighbors, and those imputations correspond poorly to later country-specific measurements.

Steve Sailer conceded errors, questionable inclusion decisions and some personal bias, while arguing the broad findings replicate. Crémieux argues that newer datasets validate the estimates. Noah Carl reviews the dispute and states in the open that some hereditarians count among Lynn’s critics, naming Cofnas.

Behind all of it sits Jelte Wicherts and colleagues, who reviewed the sub-Saharan African literature systematically and argued, in their rejoinder to Lynn and Meisenberg, that Lynn’s inclusion and exclusion decisions were not systematic, that judgments about whether a sample was representative appeared to track the result the sample produced, and that the African estimate was therefore biased downward. Lynn and his collaborators disputed the reading. Carl, who accepts the general research program, has said that this particular criticism is valid.

So the world that produced Cofnas contains a man who audited the founding dataset and found the numbers did not match the sources, a protégé who published the causal weaknesses, a collaborator who rebuilt the file, and a spectrum of defenders running from qualified to unqualified.

What does that add to the Cofnas story?

The claim that Cofnas audits scholarship only when the audit injures political opponents is hard to hold once you have the 2024 and January 2026 material in front of you. He told his own coalition that its canonical figure was unreliable, while that coalition was under attack, at a moment when solidarity was the obvious move. Whatever else he is, he is not a man who has never paid a price inside his own tent.

Cofnas’s stated rule holds sloppiness outside the retraction threshold and plagiarism inside it. Lynn’s documented problems are selection, imputation, source handling, measurement and causal inference. The central allegation against Arday was copied text. On the face of the rule, the two positions cohere. But consistency of a stated rule and equality of its enforcement are different claims. Nobody has shown that Cofnas would spend three weeks running a right-coded scholar’s thesis through detection software, publish the passages, and press that man’s employer. In the Lynn case he declined to defend the methods while opposing any sanction. In the Arday case he initiated the process that ended in sanction. Both can follow the rule while the effort runs one way.

Find a case where a figure inside or adjacent to hereditarian circles faced a documented allegation of plagiarism or fabrication, and ask what Cofnas and the others did. If no such case exists, that absence is the finding.

Kenan Malik wrote in the Observer that Cofnas’s racial views settle nothing about whether the evidence was true. The Lynn material shows the same operation performed by the least likely people, on their own side, years earlier and out of public view. It can be done. People with strong political stakes in a conclusion have looked at the workmanship behind it and said the work was flawed. That is a higher standard than most of the commentary on Arday reached in three weeks.

The Lynn file also hands the left an argument. The strongest version of the case against the Arday coverage is that the intensity of scrutiny, the willingness to sustain it for weeks, and the choice of target were selected by politics even where the individual findings held. That argument survives even if every claim against Arday were sustained.

There is one more asymmetry. Malloy audited Lynn’s references and found errors and nothing happened to him. Cofnas told his own coalition its founder was unreliable and nothing happened to him. Cofnas audited Arday and now faces dismissal at Ghent. The difference lies in where the subjects sat. Lynn was a marginal figure whose institution had already withdrawn his title. Arday held a chair at Cambridge, a publishing contract, and the protection of a defamation firm that had already stopped one publication from running the story.

When you check the footnotes of a man the institutions have abandoned and nothing follows. Check the footnotes of a man the institutions are invested in and the consequences arrive, first from his lawyers, then from the police, then from your own employer. Whatever Ghent eventually says about its reasons, that is the pattern a young academic will read off the record.

In January 2000, Slate ran a week-long dialogue between the journalist Judith Shulevitz, the Lingua Franca editor Alex Star, and the evolutionary psychologist John Tooby (1952–2024). The subject was how to deal with fringe academics. The particular academic was Kevin MacDonald (b. 1944), whose trilogy on Judaism argued that Jews pursue a group evolutionary strategy at the expense of gentiles and that antisemitism is a rational response to it. MacDonald had just volunteered to testify for David Irving (b. 1938) in the libel case Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt.

Shulevitz’s position was that a field which welcomes all ideas cannot then ignore the bad ones. Tooby answered with a taxonomy. You can denounce an idea as immoral, show it to be untrue, or ignore it. The three are close to mutually exclusive, and each carries a cost. He then stated the principle that governs everything that followed, in this affair and in the two that came after it. Inside a truth-seeking culture, his opinion that MacDonald was wrong counted for nothing unless he showed readers the reasons. Demonstrating that a claim is false, he wrote, is the most effective possible answer to it, better than calling it immoral. He added the corollary that ought to be printed above every campus controversy of the past decade: denunciation subverts refutation, because it implies you could not win a fair fight, and therefore that something in the silenced position must be true.

Steven Pinker (b. 1954) supplied the counterweight in a closing letter. Science generates a thousand bad ideas for every good one, and doing battle with all of them is beyond mortals. Engaging one is a tacit concession that it cleared a threshold of attention-worthiness. MacDonald’s had not, for reasons Pinker listed: the argument that Jews advance hypotheses because they are Jewish is ad hominem and self-sealing, and MacDonald had already announced in advance that Pinker would reject his ideas for being Jewish; the axioms about group selection and the genetic cohesiveness of ethnic groups run against large bodies of theory and data; the theses collectively produce an invidious portrait couched in disparaging language; and the argument lacks a control group and a comparison with alternative explanations such as Thomas Sowell’s account of middleman minorities.

Then Pinker wrote the sentence that has hung over the case for twenty-six years. He had not plowed through MacDonald’s trilogy, and he acknowledged the risk that this made him unfair to the arguments and insufficiently resounding in refuting them.

Tooby chose differently. He said he had dropped everything to help Lipstadt’s defense team, and he promised a careful refutation of MacDonald’s books, to appear under the Critical Eye section of his center’s website as soon as it could be drafted. He estimated a month or two.

It never appeared. Tooby died in 2024.

In 2001 David Lieberman published “Scholarship as an Exercise in Rhetorical Strategy: A Case Study in Kevin MacDonald’s Research Techniques,” which compared MacDonald’s representations of Jaff Schatz’s study of Jewish communists in Poland against the underlying text and charged selective quotation and omission. George Michael’s 2006 survey in the Journal of Church and State describes Lieberman’s work, reports that Daniel Kriegman produced a critique of roughly fifty pages and that Ken Jacobs prepared a manuscript of some three hundred pages cataloguing alleged errors, and records that Jacobs’s manuscript was never published and that Tooby’s promised refutation had still not appeared.

Before Cofnas’s review in 2018, the audits of Kevin MacDonald existed. They were scattered, partly unpublished, and mostly invisible outside specialist mailing lists, while the reputational verdict was total and immediate.

Tooby also supplied the number that makes the triage defensible. Working from citation indexes, he found that MacDonald’s three books had been cited by anyone other than MacDonald twice in seven years, three counting one he happened to know the indexers had missed. By the ordinary measure of academic impact, the books did not exist. Pinker and Tooby were not ignoring an influential body of work. They were ignoring an uncited one.

The measure was wrong. Citations track circulation among scholars. They do not track circulation among people who are not scholars and do not care to be. Over the following fifteen years The Culture of Critique found a readership on the racialist right, MacDonald aligned himself publicly with white nationalists, and the alt-right carried the book to an audience that no citation index counts. The refusal to engage became part of the case for the book. If the professors call him an antisemite and will not answer his evidence, the reader is invited to conclude they cannot.

Nathan Cofnas (b. 1988) put that argument to Michael Schulson of Undark in 2018. He said the establishment had rejected MacDonald and declared him unrepresentative of evolutionary psychology, and asked why nobody had pointed out what was wrong with the work. MacDonald was off the radar of mainstream thinkers, he said, and influential anyway. He had been interested in the books since he was a teenager, and an academic mentor had discouraged him from writing about them.

In March 2018, Human Nature published “Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s Theory.” Cofnas granted the question. He told Undark there was nothing wrong in principle with trying to understand why any group behaves as it does, and that certain questions should not be closed because they recall a history we dislike. He said MacDonald could be rejected for scientific reasons.

Then he opened the books. The charges were misuse of sources, a double standard applied to Jews and non-Jews, and a complicated explanation preferred where simpler ones were available. On the Frankfurt School, MacDonald had repeatedly treated the absence of an explicit condemnation of Jewish nationalism as evidence of approval of it. On Boas and his students, evidence that supported ordinary explanations was converted into evidence for the elaborate one. Jewish participation in liberal movements counted; Jewish participation in conservative movements did not.

Every one of those charges is checkable by a reader with a library card. That is the difference between the two operations. A denunciation invites an argument about the man. A source comparison creates a problem he has to answer.

He answered. MacDonald produced seventeen thousand words at Unz and on ResearchGate, disputing the readings and defending the passages. He ended by suggesting that Cofnas, who is Jewish, had a motive beyond scholarship, and he said the same thing to Undark: there is an ethnic motive. Asked about the double-standard charge, MacDonald explained that when he evaluates Jews he looks to see whether they are Jewishly motivated, and that you cannot find Jewish motives in non-Jews. Pinker had identified that circle in 2000 without reading the trilogy. Cofnas produced it as a quotation from the author in 2018.

The readership was the other surprise. Papers in the field ordinarily draw a few hundred downloads. Cofnas’s drew more than thirty thousand in its first fortnight and passed fifty thousand. Jane Lancaster, the editor of Human Nature, said she was astonished, that the paper had matched a year of downloads in a month, and that the worry about legitimizing MacDonald never came up. Not responding, she said, does not make it go away.

Set that beside three citations in seven years and the attention argument fails. The demand was enormous.

Edward Dutton wrote a defense of MacDonald’s hypothesis. Lancaster rejected it as unsubstantiated. Todd Shackelford took it for Evolutionary Psychological Science, saying he wanted a journal where riskier work appeared, and that if MacDonald is wrong we should see why he is wrong. Cofnas was one of the two anonymous peer reviewers on the paper defending the theory he had just attacked, and both reviewers recommended publication.

Robert Boyd, asked to comment on Dutton’s paper, said he would not touch the topic with a ten-foot pole, that the data are poor, the priors strong, and every discussion instantly moralized. Pinker read the Dutton paper only after Undark asked him to, then wrote to the editor to say he was disappointed and that MacDonald’s theory and Dutton’s defense were both extraordinarily weak.

The MacDonald case connects to Richard Lynn (1930–2023) through Cofnas’s own biography. Undark reported that Cofnas and Dutton met at the London Conference on Intelligence and that both had ties to Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research, where Cofnas published a book in 2012 and later withdrew it. He was inside that world.

Three cases, then. MacDonald, admired in territory adjacent to Cofnas’s own, audited at the citation level and rejected. Lynn, the founder of the research program Cofnas works within, described to that program’s own adherents as unreliable. Jason Arday (1985–2026), celebrated by Cambridge and the progressive press, audited by the same method in July 2026.

The political location of the target moves through the full range. Cofnas has an auditor’s temperament, distrusts institutional reputation as a proxy for quality, and goes to the point where a claim touches its source.

Auditing MacDonald was safe in one direction, since the mainstream had already written him off, and it earned Cofnas standing with people who otherwise had no use for him. It was costly in the other, since the world that reads MacDonald concluded that a Jewish critic of MacDonald proved MacDonald’s thesis.

What the MacDonald case adds to the Arday case is the symmetry. MacDonald was classified before he was read. Arday was classified before he was read. In the first instance the classification was hostile and, on the evidence, accurate. In the second it was admiring and, on parts of the record, unearned. In neither instance did the classification tell anyone whether a given sentence matched the source it cited.

Which brings the argument to Ghent, where Cofnas was suspended on August 20 pending a preliminary disciplinary investigation, five months after rector Petra De Sutter defended his appointment on the ground that dissident opinions may exist and should be tested by other researchers.

The institution always has the same two options. Argue about the man who opened the book. Or open the book.

Posted in IQ, Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off

The Arday Affair and the Coalition Test

Posted on August 20, 2026 by Luke Ford

My quickest heuristic for figuring out how things are going in areas beyond my expertise such as the war with Iran is to check if anyone prominent has moved outside of his coalition. So far, nobody has moved, and so that teaches me that it is not clear who’s winning. That perspective is overwhelmingly contrary to the experts, who say almost unanimously that Iran was won this war.

Now I apply the same test to the Jason Arday story.

A public scandal teaches nothing when every reaction to it can be predicted from where the speaker already sits. The reactions become a census of alliances. To find out whether an affair changes anything, look for the people whose response could not have been derived from their address, and then look again six months later to see whether they apply a new rule to the next case.

By that test, the Jason Arday (1985–2026) affair has produced a small crack, most of it on the left, most of it in an eight-day window before his death.

Start with the trajectory.

Concerns about Arday’s doctoral work reached institutions long before the public knew any of it. The sociologist Martyn Hammersley wrote to Arday, to Cambridge and to Liverpool John Moores about apparent overlaps between the 2015 thesis and other scholars’ work. Two papers were corrected by their journals. Liverpool John Moores, which awarded the degree, examined the plagiarism allegations, found honest and reasonable errors, and let the degree stand. In September 2025, Jack Grove at Times Higher Education prepared a story after analyzing the thesis himself. The story did not run. Arday’s solicitors at Carter-Ruck sent a pre-publication letter, and the publication dropped it. Grove later received a call from the Metropolitan Police telling him a complaint had been made and warning him against further contact. Times Higher Education subsequently reported that the Met admitted it had been wrong to issue that warning.

On July 21, 2026, Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher then at Ghent University who describes himself as a race realist and who had lost his Cambridge position in 2024 over a blog post about race and intelligence, published his own comparison of Arday’s thesis against an earlier dissertation. The Telegraph and the Times followed with counts of copied passages and with questions about the biography: the charity totals, the endurance runs, the claim to have published a book, the account of childhood silence and illiteracy. Cambridge opened an investigation into the qualifications and honorary appointments on August 4. Arday resigned on August 5, denying plagiarism, admitting mistakes, saying he had reached the limits of what a person can endure. He was found dead at a London address on August 14. He was 41.

Novara counted 249 press articles between July 24 and August 14, most of them after the resignation. A vigil in Trafalgar Square on August 17 drew around two thousand people, including Diane Abbott (b. 1953). The Independent Press Standards Organisation is now reviewing a high volume of complaints about the coverage. On August 20, Ghent University suspended Cofnas.

Now the census.

Most of the commentary sorted exactly as an observer could have forecast in advance. Cofnas and the anti-DEI right read vindication. The Good Law Project and much of the racial-justice left read persecution. James Cleverly saw standards sacrificed to diversity. Charles Moore said Cambridge, rather than the press, was the party obsessed with Arday’s race. Richard Dawkins said what Richard Dawkins says. After the death, Quillette ran Jonathan Kay arguing the press bears no responsibility and that exposing rot is the job. Spiked argued the press did its duty and is now being punished for it.

The interesting cases arrived in a narrow band, between the resignation and the death, when compassion after a tragedy cannot explain the movement.

Afua Hirsch (b. 1981) is the strongest. In the Guardian on August 13 she wrote that Black sociologists, herself among them, had doubts about Arday which they did not voice publicly, because they knew he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and that they would all be damaged in the process. She went on to argue that the press treatment was racially disproportionate and that the affair would be used to beat back racial equality. Hold both halves in view. She surrendered a proposition her coalition had been using defensively, that the allegations came from nowhere except racial animus, and she paid for it in her own community, without crossing over to Cofnas.

Jason Okundaye wrote in the Guardian on August 6 that Arday had rightly resigned, described the progressive instinct to defend him, and argued that Cambridge had invited the public to applaud a biography instead of examining a body of scholarship. His conclusion was that the left had ceded criticism of dysfunctional diversity programs to the right and needed to reclaim it. That opens a position inside the progressive coalition which was hard to occupy before.

Priyamvada Gopal (b. 1968) helped organize the demand for an independent investigation of the appointment and said Cambridge might have got it very badly wrong. Nearly a hundred Cambridge academics signed, including senior figures with no stake in the culture war. They asked for examination of the hiring, of the handling of misconduct complaints, and of whether officials tried to deter reporting, while condemning the racism around the affair. They answered scrutiny with a demand for more scrutiny.

Kenan Malik (b. 1960) made the cleanest epistemic point. He accepted that Cofnas holds racist views and said this settles nothing about whether the evidence was true. He called some of the defenses of Arday shoddy and argued that treating allegations against Black academics as smears strengthens the people making them. That restores the distinction which collapsed early: contamination of the source substituting for evaluation of the claim.

James O’Brien (b. 1972) is the case people now cite as the cleanest, and it is the weakest of the group. He had accused the Telegraph and the Times of studied and deliberate ignominy. After the resignation he told his LBC audience he felt like a mug. Then, in the same segment, he said he felt no guilt, asked who would meet a Cambridge professor and start wondering whether the man deserved to be there, and said that a racist meeting a Black Cambridge professor might have had that thought, while he is not a racist, so it never crossed his mind. He revised the verdict on one man and restated, in the same breath, the rule that produced the error. His value to the record is documentary: because his 2023 interview survives, the concession and the refusal to update sit side by side in a single clip.

After August 14 the movement runs backward.

Aaron Bastani, who had criticized Arday a week earlier, recorded a retraction, saying what he had done was bile rather than journalism and that he wished he could ask Arday for forgiveness. Dalia Gebrial published an apology of a different kind in Novara, saying she had concluded privately that the only story of public interest was racial scapegoating, that she stayed quiet so as not to feed the circus, and that the silence was a failure. Neither is updating. Both are repair.

On the other side, one real crossing, arriving late. Matthew Syed (b. 1970), writing in the Times after the death, said he had exchanged messages with a friend of Arday’s whose fears about his mental health were escalating, that she felt Arday needed a defender in the press, and that he prevaricated in ways he now believes were cowardly, having written about the benefits of diversity programs while failing to say that attacks he thought justified at the start had become disproportionate and dangerous. That is a meritocracy columnist at the paper running the story conceding that his own side passed a line and that he knew it. Mic Wright’s objection stands with it: Syed does not say who or what he feared, and courage after the fact is a cheaper commodity. J.K. Rowling (b. 1965) told the Telegraph that Cambridge could have spared Arday by declining to appoint him and pointing out his shortcomings privately, which relocates the blame without conceding anything. Lewis Goodall supplied the best formulation available, that the press can be right in the particulars and terribly wrong in the aggregate, at no cost to himself.

So the ledger reads: four qualified crossings on the left, all before the death, none yet followed by a stated change of rule. One on the right, late, contested. Two public moves back toward the line after August 14.

There is a complication. The factual base is unsettled. The one formal adjudication of the central thesis allegation went in Arday’s favor. The counts of copied passages published by the Telegraph, and the dossier Times Higher Education assembled and then abandoned, sit alongside that finding without being reconciled. The biographical claims, the charity totals and the account of childhood, were disputed in newspaper investigations. IPSO is now examining whether some of that reporting met the accuracy standard. A person who conceded on August 6 was conceding to a body of claims that no institution had tested, part of which one institution had already rejected. Reasoning well and distancing from a liability look identical from outside. The concession alone cannot tell you which occurred. Only the next case can.

Which brings the story to Ghent.

The campaign against Cofnas at Ghent began months before Arday. In March, forty-eight members of the philosophy department, three deans and hundreds of academics objected to his appointment over his writings on race. Rector Petra De Sutter (b. 1963) defended the procedure and said dissident opinions are allowed to exist, with ideas to be tested and criticized by other researchers. By May a student petition carried more than two thousand signatures and the department had assembled an extensive internal case against the hire. Ghent held the line. Free speech organizations urged it to keep holding.

Then July 21, then August 5, then August 14.

On August 19 Ghent said it was shocked by Arday’s death, that it opposes discrimination and hatred, that academic freedom carries responsibility and can be limited to protect the rights of others, and that it took the recent public statements of a postdoctoral researcher regarding this matter very seriously. On August 20 it confirmed a preventive suspension pending a preliminary disciplinary investigation. Cofnas announced it first, saying De Sutter made the decision and that he expects to be fired, and told his readers the message is that exposing fraud by a non-White scholar will not be tolerated. He has said separately that he is under investigation for discriminating against Arday.

Three different stories hide under one headline.

If the grounds are his longstanding claims about race, then months of internal proceedings happened to culminate in the worst possible week, and Arday is incidental to a decision that was already coming.

If the grounds are particular things he said about Arday, most of them after the death, then the question is whether those statements were false, abusive or professionally sanctionable. Ghent’s language points here.

If the grounds are the investigation and its publication, then this becomes a central fact of the affair, because the man who did what a trade publication had backed away from doing would have lost his employment for doing it.

The university’s wording favors the second reading. The chronology creates an appearance problem regardless, and the appearance is what most readers will retain.

What the suspension adds is a second institution failing in the mirror image of the first. Cambridge elevated Arday as a symbol and then asked what happened to Cambridge if the symbol collapsed. Ghent defended Cofnas as a principle and then asked what happened to Ghent if he stayed. Both questions arrive before the questions a university owes: whether the man committed misconduct, and whether the employee broke an identifiable rule. The same rector stated the principle in March and acted against it in August. Whatever the finding, the record now holds an institution keeping its nerve in calm weather and losing it after a death.

It also hands Cofnas something his arguments could never earn him. Removing him from salaried academic life pushes him further onto Substack and podcasts, where the audience rewards the most inflammatory version of him and no committee can withhold anything. Universities dislike such people, remove them, and thereby strip away the restraints they wish those people showed. Then, when respectable institutions decline to examine certain subjects, the people willing to examine them are the ones who no longer have anything to lose. The Arday material surfaced through exactly that channel, after three conventional checks had stopped. If the ending is that the outsider loses his job too, the lesson taught to every academic watching is that verifying the record of a protected figure ends careers, and the next dossier waits for somebody with even less to lose and worse politics.

The forward tests can now be aimed at people who are already on the record.

In March, free speech organizations and Belgian philosophers argued that Cofnas should be answered rather than removed, while rejecting his racial claims. Whether they say the same thing today, when the emotional cost is a dead man, is the strongest available reading on whether academic freedom in Europe is a principle or an alliance. The mirror test: those who spent August insisting that Cambridge should have investigated Arday regardless of who raised the allegation now have to say whether Ghent may investigate Cofnas regardless of who filed the complaint. The consistent answer is that both proceed and both are judged against written rules.

For the progressive side, the questions are whether they examine the evidence before signing the next solidarity letter, whether they stop treating the politics of an accuser as evidence against an accusation, and whether universities stop advertising minority appointments through biography and adversity before outsiders have had a chance to read the scholarship.

For the anti-DEI side, the questions are whether they distinguish a catastrophic failure in one appointment from a claim about Black academics generally, whether they demand controls before turning one case into evidence about diversity hiring, and whether they bring the same investigative energy to an implausible white success story. A comparable case exists. A white Cambridge academic was found to have plagiarized in 2023 and drew coverage in one newspaper.

If those behaviors change, the affair changed something. If everybody folds Arday into the story they were already telling, then nothing changed.

The window for updating ran about eight days. Watch for the second one, which will open when the Cambridge inquiry reports, when IPSO rules, and when Ghent states its charge. Those are the moments when people will have to choose between the rule and the alliance again, with the emotion drained out and nothing left to hide behind.

Posted in Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas | Comments Off