‘Stereotype Threat: A Case of Overclaim Syndrome?’ (2008)
Wax published this at the height of the construct’s institutional prestige. By the time the chapter appeared, stereotype threat had embedded itself across educational psychology, feminist scholarship, diversity discourse, and university policy frameworks. Wax argues that the research culture surrounding the construct inflated its explanatory significance far beyond what the empirical evidence sustains. Her target is not a single theory within social psychology but a recurring pattern of inferential overreach in modern academic life: the conversion of suggestive laboratory findings into broad narratives about inequality, merit, institutional bias, and human potential.
The essay’s subtitle captures its animating concern. The literature, on Wax’s reading, conflates two distinct propositions. The first is modest and empirically plausible: under certain conditions, awareness of negative stereotypes may impair the performance of some individuals on some tasks. The second is sweeping and politically consequential: stereotype threat constitutes a major or primary explanation for persistent disparities in achievement between groups, particularly the underrepresentation of women in elite mathematics and science. The literature establishes the first proposition while rhetorically implying the second. Wax’s intervention seeks to restore proportionality between evidence and conclusion.
The historical background helps explain why the theory acquired such institutional reach. Claude Steele (b. 1946) and Joshua Aronson published their foundational 1995 study on Black students’ verbal performance at Stanford. Black students performed worse when a test was framed as measuring intellectual ability and substantially better when the evaluative framing was removed. The implication proved attractive to egalitarian intellectual culture. If disparities in standardized testing reflected situational anxiety induced by social stereotypes rather than durable differences in preparation, aptitude, or skill, then unequal outcomes might prove reversible through modest interventions in testing conditions and institutional environments. The theory appeared to reconcile meritocratic aspirations with egalitarian moral commitments.
Extension of the framework to gender disparities in mathematics and science carried larger institutional implications. If women’s underrepresentation in quantitative fields reflected stereotype-induced anxiety rather than differences in interests, life priorities, variability, preparation, or cognitive distributions, then the solution seemed conceptually simple. Remove threatening cues. Alter the environment. Change the framing. Disparities might diminish substantially once women no longer experienced psychological interference from culturally transmitted expectations of inferiority. Stereotype threat research therefore became attractive not merely because it identified a psychological phenomenon but because it promised a “quick fix” to longstanding inequalities.
Wax’s central complaint is that the literature never demonstrated stereotype threat to be quantitatively large enough to bear the explanatory burden placed upon it. Again and again, she presses the question the field seemed least eager to confront: how much of observed group disparity does stereotype threat explain?
The question structures the entire chapter. Demonstrating a statistically significant effect under laboratory conditions does not amount to showing that the effect explains large-scale social patterns. The distinction between existence and magnitude becomes the core of her critique. Many stereotype threat studies identify localized performance changes under experimental conditions. No study, she argues, demonstrates that stereotype threat accounts for more than a trivial portion of observed gender disparities in elite quantitative performance.
Her most powerful argument concerns the mathematics of distributions. The most important disparities in quantitative achievement do not occur around the average but at the extreme right tail, where elite scientific talent emerges. In 2006, the ratio of men to women scoring between 750 and 800 on the SAT-M was approximately 2.6 to 1. The imbalance grew larger at the highest score ranges, with mathematically gifted adolescent samples often showing ratios of five-to-one or even ten-to-one in near-perfect scores. Elite scientific and technical institutions draw heavily from precisely these populations. Any theory seeking to explain women’s underrepresentation in high-level mathematics and science must therefore account for the distributional realities at the top tail, not merely average differences near the population mean.
Wax then introduces a quantitative observation that organizes the rest of her argument. To achieve parity among elite scorers in the 750–800 SAT-M range, the percentage of women scoring within that bracket would need to rise from roughly 1.29 percent to 3.33 percent. The lowest score achieved by the top 3.33 percent of women, around 716, would need to rise to 750. To eliminate the elite-tier gender gap, stereotype threat would have to depress large numbers of high-performing women by roughly thirty-four points across an entire elite distribution. Existing research designs never establish anything close to this magnitude. Even where stereotype threat effects are statistically detectable in selected populations, no study demonstrates that removing stereotype threat might shift the female bell curve upward enough to equalize top-tail representation. Wax’s relative magnitude critique turns on this point. The literature observes local effects while rhetorically implying global explanatory power.
The problem is compounded by experimental design. Researchers often use highly selected or ability-matched populations. Female and male subjects are typically drawn from elite universities, restricted achievement bands, or narrow SAT ranges. The method is understandable. Researchers need to isolate stereotype threat effects from background differences in skill. Wax argues that the procedure creates a severe interpretive distortion.
Women selected into elite quantitative samples are far more statistically unusual relative to the broader female population than comparable men are relative to the male population. Because there are fewer women at the highest score ranges, elite female subjects represent a much more rarefied subgroup. Even if women and men in these experiments perform similarly under non-threat conditions, the result tells us little about what might happen across the broader population. The studies abstract away precisely the distributional differences that matter most.
Wax returns to the point because it exposes the central inflationary move in the literature. By matching subjects for ability, researchers isolate residual performance differences attributable to situational conditions. The procedure necessarily suppresses the larger background differences present in the population as a whole. The resulting studies cannot determine how much of the original disparity stereotype threat explains.
Her critique sharpens around what might be called the skill-baseline problem. Many stereotype threat studies adjust experimental results using SAT scores as objective measures of prior ability. The practice creates a logical contradiction at the heart of the literature. If stereotype threat depresses women’s real-world SAT performance, then SAT scores are themselves contaminated by stereotype threat and cannot function as neutral baseline measures of mathematical aptitude. If SAT scores accurately measure ability independent of stereotype threat, then stereotype threat cannot explain the original SAT gap.
The contradiction stands among the chapter’s most damaging analytical points because it exposes the literature’s unstable conceptual foundations. Researchers want SAT scores to perform two incompatible functions at once. They want SATs to be objective enough to control for underlying ability differences and socially distorted enough to support the claim that stereotype threat drives observed disparities. The literature cannot have it both ways.
The theoretical instability generates extensive conceptual waffling. Some researchers suggest stereotype threat emerges only when tasks approach the limits of a student’s abilities. Others imply that stereotype threat depresses women’s quantitative performance across the distribution. Some claim elite women are most vulnerable because they care deeply about mathematics and feel stronger pressure. Others imply stereotype threat is diffuse and ambient. The theory becomes increasingly elastic, capable of accommodating nearly any empirical pattern.
Wax’s discussion of stereotype threat as “in the air” further exposes these ambiguities. A central unresolved issue concerns whether stereotype threat is pervasive or situational. If ordinary testing environments routinely trigger stereotype threat, then experimental “threat” conditions should merely reproduce real-world testing situations, and researchers would need special interventions to remove threat. Many studies do the opposite. They actively create stereotype threat through explicit instructions, stereotypic advertisements, or reminders about gender differences.
The literature therefore oscillates between treating stereotype threat as an omnipresent background condition and as a fragile situational effect requiring deliberate activation. No coherent theory explains why women perform equally to men under no-instruction conditions in some studies but worse in others. The theory’s scope conditions remain underdeveloped despite the ambitious claims made on its behalf.
The chapter’s most sociologically suggestive section addresses pervasive disparity. Stereotype threat is routinely invoked to explain women’s underrepresentation in STEM because women allegedly internalize stereotypes of quantitative inferiority. The theory struggles to explain persistent male dominance in many elite verbal and intellectual domains where women face no comparable stereotype and often outperform men on standardized measures.
Women achieve higher grades, outperform men on many verbal assessments, and dominate educational attainment overall. Elite literary and intellectual production remains disproportionately male in numerous prestigious settings. Wax points to striking authorship disparities in publications such as Foreign Affairs and the New York Review of Books. The implication is significant. If stereotype threat were the principal driver of elite disparities, one might expect female parity or female dominance in domains where women enjoy positive stereotypes and measurable average advantages.
Male overrepresentation persists across many high-status cognitive domains regardless of whether the relevant stereotype favors or disfavors women. The observation undermines the explanatory sufficiency of stereotype threat as a general theory of achievement disparities and suggests that broader variables operate across multiple fields at once.
Wax points to temperament, competitiveness, vocational intensity, obsessive focus, variance at the tails, and divergent life priorities. The implication is unmistakable. Achievement gaps may reflect deep differences in interests, motivations, trade-offs, and distributions of extreme behavioral traits.
The chapter therefore moves beyond methodological criticism into a larger philosophical confrontation with modern egalitarian assumptions. The stereotype threat framework became institutionally attractive because it allowed disparities to be understood as externally imposed distortions rather than as expressions of differing distributions of preference, capacity, or ambition. It preserved the comforting belief that elite inequalities were remediable through environmental reform. Wax’s critique threatens that moral architecture.
The chapter operates on two levels at once. At the surface, it is a methodological review of social psychological research. Beneath that, it is a challenge to the moral and institutional incentives shaping contemporary academic explanation. Elite intellectual culture prefers theories that preserve latent equality while attributing disparities to subtle forms of social interference. Stereotype threat flourished because it satisfied the preference perfectly.
In retrospect, the chapter looks prescient. Written before the replication crisis destabilized confidence in much of social psychology, Wax anticipated later concerns about small sample sizes, publication bias, exaggerated claims, and the overgeneralization of fragile laboratory effects. Subsequent research emphasizing sex differences in interests, occupational preferences, and variance at the tails aligned in many respects with her skepticism about monocausal explanations.
The chapter is an anatomy of how modern academic culture converts morally attractive hypotheses into expansive explanatory systems before the evidence warrants such confidence. The chapter belongs to a broader tradition of skepticism toward theories that promise easy equality through environmental adjustment while minimizing the enduring complexity of human differences, distributions, and aspirations.
‘The Discriminating Mind: Define It, Prove It’ (2008)
Wax published this in 2008 as her contribution to a Connecticut Law Review symposium honoring Charles R. Lawrence III’s (b. 1943) “The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,” which appeared in the Stanford Law Review in 1987.
Lawrence’s article had become canonical among scholars who hold that anti-discrimination law must reach beneath conscious motive to address the cognitive substrate of racial inequality. Wax accepted the invitation and used it to argue that the substrate offers a poor foundation for legal liability. She came to praise Lawrence’s question and to reject most answers his successors had given.
Her central thesis is that anti-discrimination law possesses adequate doctrinal categories already. The split between disparate treatment, where a protected trait causally enters a decision, and disparate impact, where neutral criteria yield unequal results, can absorb claims of unconscious bias without modification. Anti-discrimination law has always demanded, and implicit bias scholarship often elides, causal proof. Disparities between groups do not by themselves establish that race or sex caused those disparities. Other variables, what Wax calls supply-side differences in human capital, family structure, and conduct, can produce the same patterns through neutral processes. The burden falls on the party alleging discrimination to exclude such alternatives, not on the party accused to prove a negative.
Wax challenges the inferential leap required to translate cognitive measurements into legally actionable findings of discriminatory behavior. The essay reads, in places, less like a law review article than a referee report on a draft empirical paper, demanding cleaner controls, predictive validity, and replication.
The doctrinal argument has the cleanest contours, so begin there. Wax distinguishes two senses of “intent” that have caused decades of confusion in equal protection and Title VII jurisprudence. The first sense distinguishes conscious from unconscious action. The second distinguishes action taken because of a trait from action taken despite its differential effect. Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), used the word “intent” in the second sense, refusing to find equal protection violations from neutral practices that fall harder on one group. Later commentators read the case as restricting actionable discrimination to deliberate, conscious bias, then concluded that unconscious discrimination required new doctrine to reach. Wax cuts the knot. If race causally enters a decision, the actor has engaged in disparate treatment whether or not he recognizes the influence. The text of Title VII, which prohibits adverse action because of race, says nothing of conscious awareness. The trouble lies in proof, not in coverage.
That distinction defuses the structural argument that current doctrine cannot reach modern discrimination. It also concentrates attention on the proof problem, which Wax treats as the hard question. If unconscious disparate treatment falls within Title VII, plaintiffs must still show that race played a causal role. Calling the cognitive process unconscious does not lower that burden. It might raise it, since covert influence by definition leaves no admission to point to.
Wax’s treatment of the IAT relies on the work of Hal Arkes and Philip Tetlock (b. 1954), who argued that the test measures associations of various origins, not animus in the ordinary sense. A subject might link Black faces with negative concepts because he holds prejudiced views, or because he knows that Black Americans suffer disadvantage, or because he is aware of cultural stereotypes he rejects. The test does not distinguish among these. Wax accepts the point but finds it secondary. The deeper question is predictive validity. Do IAT scores forecast hiring, promotion, sentencing, or other choices the law cares about? The studies Wax reviews, supplemented by Hart Blanton’s reanalysis of the early validity papers, return a thin and shaky yield. Many showed correlations only with intermediate behaviors of uncertain weight, such as eye contact and seating distance. Some collapsed when statistical outliers were removed. Few engaged with the kind of decisions that produce legal claims.
Time has been kind to this skepticism. Subsequent meta-analyses by Frederick Oswald and colleagues in 2013, by Patrick Forscher and colleagues in 2019, and the broader replication crisis in social psychology have left implicit bias research in a chastened state. The behavioral effects of debiasing interventions, when they appear, tend to be small and fade quickly. The institutional industry that grew up around implicit bias training expanded for a decade after Wax’s article on a foundation that has weakened. Read now, “The Discriminating Mind” looks like an early forecast of where the literature would settle.
The methodological argument shades into a sociological one when Wax turns to her hypothetical of “Floret, Inc.,” a delivery company sued by Black drivers who score lower on subjective evaluations than their White colleagues. Wax uses the hypothetical to make a point that recurs across her work. Equal credentials do not entail equal capacity. Two men with high school diplomas may differ in math and reading skills, in family background, in conscientiousness, and in workplace conduct. National Assessment of Educational Progress data show that the average Black seventeen-year-old reads and computes at the level of the average White thirteen-year-old. Family-structure differences run in parallel, with Black children far more likely to grow up apart from at least one biological parent. Wax cites Sara McLanahan (1940-2021), Frank Furstenberg (b. 1940), and others on the long-run effects of such differences for academic achievement, conduct, and labor-market performance.
The argument critique the inferential structure plaintiffs often deploy. If two populations differ on attributes that bear on workplace performance, equal evaluations would themselves call for explanation, and unequal evaluations cannot, without more, support an inference of bias. Wax presses the point with an empirical insistence that makes the essay uncomfortable to read in its time and our own. She names the variables that diversity-and-inclusion discourse routes around.
Wax insists that disparities are a starting point for inquiry. She refuses to treat the categories of disparate treatment and disparate impact as obsolete and presses for clarity about what each demands. She holds claims about cognition to claims about conduct through evidence. These positions have aged better than much of what surrounded them in 2008.
The article’s reception followed the trajectory of Wax’s career more broadly. Her later writing on cultural argument, including her 2017 op-ed on bourgeois norms, brought formal censure from her dean and a removal from teaching first-year courses. Critics of the later work sometimes treat “The Discriminating Mind” as the prelude to that trajectory, an early instance of supply-side reasoning that shades into cultural deficit framing. The reading carries some weight. The 2008 essay does treat group differences in family structure, academic achievement, and conduct as data to be reasoned about rather than facts to be quarantined. What separates it from the later work is the strict methodological discipline. The essay challenges the implicit bias literature on its own terms, asks for the kind of evidence that field would accept as decisive, and concludes that the evidence has not been produced. A reader committed to robust anti-discrimination enforcement can accept Wax’s methodological strictures and reach different substantive conclusions than she does.
Wax’s central claim, that group-level disparities cannot bear the weight implicit bias scholarship asks them to bear, holds up regardless of one’s view about the sources of those disparities. The piece reads now as a careful, occasionally tendentious, but substantively sound critique of an emerging consensus that subsequent research has done much to qualify. It deserves a place in the canon of methodological writing on anti-discrimination law. Wax has closed the case for treating implicit bias as a default explanation requiring no separate proof.
Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (2009)
The book confronts the gap between historical innocence and present responsibility. Wax argues these two need not exclude one another. A people may suffer profound wrong, hold no blame for the origins of its disadvantage, and still bear primary responsibility for clearing the obstacles that now impede its flourishing. The claim places the book against the moral grammar that governs much current discussion of racial inequality.
Its force comes from its method. Wax builds her argument through a jurisprudential frame. The governing distinction comes from the law of remedies: liability and remedy. Society bears liability for slavery, segregation, exclusion, humiliation, and racial oppression. Wax acknowledges the enormity of those historical injuries throughout, and accepts that contemporary Black disadvantage cannot be understood apart from them. Her question is not causation but remediation. What restores injured persons or groups to their rightful position? What injuries can outsiders repair, and what injuries eventually require self-directed recovery?
This split between assigning blame and engineering recovery anchors the book. Wax argues that contemporary racial discourse collapses liability into remedy. Because society caused the injury, society must possess the practical power to repair it from outside. Against this assumption, Wax offers a more tragic and limited view of social repair. The wrongdoer cannot undo some injuries because the nature of the injury makes external remediation insufficient.
Her clearest illustration is the parable of the pedestrian. A negligent driver strikes a pedestrian and leaves him unable to walk. The driver bears full responsibility. He must compensate the victim, finance treatment, and pay for rehabilitation. Yet he cannot walk for the victim. The victim’s own sustained effort becomes the rate-limiting step in recovery. The wrongdoer can create the conditions for healing but cannot perform the healing. The victim must relearn to walk through painful, repetitive effort. If he refuses rehabilitation, no compensation or moral condemnation of the driver can restore him.
Wax claims the contemporary racial dilemma resembles this category of injury. The harms that dominate today no longer take the form of legal exclusions or formal barriers. They sit inside human capital, family structure, behavioral norms, educational discipline, work habits, criminal conduct, socialization patterns, and time horizons. Outsiders cannot repair such harms directly, because they emerge from daily acts of self-governance inside families, neighborhoods, peer groups, and intimate social life. Government programs can subsidize, encourage, or incentivize certain behaviors. They cannot instill discipline, persistence, delayed gratification, marital stability, educational seriousness, or law-abiding conduct.
The frame lets Wax sidestep the exhausted polarity of racism versus culture that dominates public debate. She argues the dominant type of obstacle has shifted across history. To explain the shift, she introduces a useful conceptual pair: brick walls and hard struggles.
Brick walls are rigid external impediments no one can overcome through individual effort alone. Jim Crow segregation, anti-miscegenation laws, voting prohibitions, racially exclusionary labor markets, and formal discrimination belong here. These barriers imposed absolute constraints on Black advancement. No discipline or effort could circumvent them, because they operated through institutional exclusion backed by law and custom.
Hard struggles differ. They make success more difficult but not impossible. Poor schools, unstable family structures, criminal environments, weak socialization, low educational attainment, dysfunctional peer norms, paternal abandonment, and underdeveloped work habits belong to this second category. These conditions may originate historically in oppression and exclusion. They are no longer imposed in the same rigid and external fashion. They reproduce in part through behavioral patterns and cultural transmission. Hard struggles can be overcome, though often only through sustained individual and communal effort.
The distinction allows Wax to periodize racial inequality. The first stage was the era of direct exclusion, when legal and institutional barriers dominated Black life. The second stage carried the lingering structural aftereffects of those exclusions. The third stage, which she takes to predominate now, is the persistence of behavioral and cultural patterns that continue to reproduce disparities even after many formal barriers have fallen. Remedies that suit one stage become progressively less effective in the next. Anti-discrimination law works well against brick walls. It works less well against decentralized patterns of behavior and socialization.
Wax’s true target is not liberal racial policy. She targets remedial idealism: the belief that because justice morally requires repair, society must possess the practical means to engineer repair from outside. The belief produces what she describes as a rescue fantasy, a persistent expectation that governments, universities, philanthropies, courts, and bureaucracies can generate social equality through sufficient intervention, spending, redistribution, and administration.
The rescue fantasy rests on several interlocking assumptions Wax tries to dismantle. One she calls the myth of reverse causation. If exclusion caused inequality, inclusion should dissolve inequality. If racism produced dysfunction, anti-racism should eliminate dysfunction. If deprivation generated instability, material redistribution should produce stability. The reasoning assumes an unrealistic symmetry between causes and cures. Social systems do not reverse themselves automatically once original barriers fall. Cultural patterns possess inertia. Behaviors outlive the conditions that bred them.
This is among the book’s deepest insights. Social norms display hysteresis. The route into dysfunction differs from the route out. A collapse in family stability caused by economic upheaval may not reverse when economic conditions improve. A breakdown in educational seriousness may persist long after legal barriers to education vanish. Cultural systems have memory. Once behaviors normalize across generations, they acquire independent force.
Wax’s critique of William Julius Wilson (b. 1935) shows the point. Wilson argues that deindustrialization and the loss of urban manufacturing jobs destabilized the Black inner city by undermining male employment, family formation, and communal stability. Wax rejects the assumption that reversing the economic conditions reverses the social pathologies. Providing jobs does not guarantee that workers will perform them. Better schools do not produce disciplined students. Material opportunity does not regenerate cultural norms once those norms have eroded.
From here the book widens into a critique of modern sociological thinking. Wax argues that contemporary social science treats human beings as passive products of systems and structures. Individuals become reactors. Behavior reads primarily as a rational response to external conditions. Crime, educational failure, family instability, and dependency become predictable outputs of deprivation and discrimination.
Wax holds that this frame minimizes agency. It displaces older languages of character, virtue, discipline, and self-command with deterministic accounts of structure and environment. Modern sociology, she argues, treats the idea of self-directed reform with embarrassment or suspicion, because emphasizing agency risks sounding judgmental or morally punitive. The language of uplift, moral reform, and behavioral correction becomes taboo.
The taboo connects to the influence of William Ryan (1923–2002), whose famous critique of blaming the victim Wax treats as a defining moral framework of modern racial discourse. Ryan argued that inequality persists when society focuses on supposed defects of the disadvantaged. Wax concedes the moral force of his critique. She argues it eventually became conceptually distorting. The prohibition against victim-blaming expanded into a broader prohibition against discussing internal dysfunction at all.
For Wax, the transformation produces a dangerous intellectual paralysis. Once all disparities run through external causation, the possibility of internally generated reform becomes psychologically and politically inaccessible. Communities become trapped waiting for salvation from outside actors. The expectation of rescue weakens habits of self-governance, because responsibility migrates upward toward institutions, systems, and experts.
Here the book becomes more than a work of racial analysis. It becomes a meditation on the limits of liberal governance. Wax targets a technocratic worldview that assumes sufficiently sophisticated programs can substitute for communal discipline and cultural cohesion. In her account, modern bureaucratic states excel at removing legal barriers and redistributing material goods. They are far less effective at shaping intimate behaviors embedded in families and neighborhoods.
The family holds a central place in this analysis. Wax returns again and again to the decline of the Black nuclear family as the elephant in the room of racial discourse. She argues no serious account of inequality can ignore the downstream consequences of nonmarital childbearing, paternal absence, family fragmentation, and unstable household structures. Educational performance, criminal conduct, labor-force participation, socialization, and emotional regulation entangle with family stability.
Wax rejects the temptation to read these outcomes as purely structural or economic. Economic hardship plays a role, but cannot fully explain the persistence and scale of family breakdown. At some point, cultural norms regarding marriage, fatherhood, responsibility, and sexuality become relatively autonomous. They sustain themselves through expectations, habits, and peer culture.
The same logic governs her treatment of education. Wax argues that differences in school funding and formal access explain less of the achievement gap than current discourse assumes. She places greater weight on endogenous factors: parental engagement, attitudes toward learning, peer norms, discipline, reading habits, and willingness to defer gratification. Wax holds that institutional reforms hit diminishing returns when behavioral norms move the opposite way.
An arresting element of the book is Wax’s attention to rhetoric. She argues that modern discourse converts verbs into nouns. Family disintegration becomes a static social condition rather than millions of repeated acts by concrete people. Educational underachievement becomes an environmental outcome rather than a pattern of decisions about study, attention, discipline, and effort. The linguistic transformation removes agency from social life and relocates causality upward toward structures and abstractions.
Wax conducts a critique not only of policy but of language. Bureaucratic and sociological vocabularies describe human action in ways that obscure intention and responsibility. Passive constructions dominate. Structures produce outcomes. Systems generate disparities. Communities are acted upon rather than acting. Wax wants to restore verbs to social analysis, because verbs imply actors, choices, and agency.
Her alternative centers on internal reform. She advocates a shift from structure to culture, from institutional engineering to behavioral transformation, from material redistribution to human-capital formation. She argues communities must become willing again to criticize dysfunctional norms rather than defend them reflexively in the name of racial solidarity. Successful groups should be studied and emulated rather than resented. Self-help, discipline, and moral reform must move from the periphery to the center.
Her most provocative claim: the contemporary two-track strategy is psychologically self-defeating. Modern discourse urges self-help while preserving the expectation of external rescue. Wax argues these orientations undermine each other. So long as communities believe transformative salvation might arrive through policy, litigation, redistribution, or institutional reform, the difficult psychological work of internal reform remains weakened. Hope for rescue saps determination for self-correction.
Here the book becomes most controversial, because it challenges the moral economy of modern anti-racist politics. Much contemporary discourse depends emotionally on a frame in which external society remains the primary actor and minority communities remain acted upon rather than acting. Wax’s insistence on agency destabilizes this frame, because agency reintroduces judgment, expectation, and responsibility.
The book’s strengths produce its vulnerabilities. Wax sometimes risks understating the ongoing reciprocal traffic between institutions and behavior. External conditions and internal norms interact. Family instability can weaken schools, but weak schools can destabilize families. Crime can undermine labor markets, but labor-market collapse can intensify crime. Her framing occasionally tilts too sharply toward internal explanation in reaction against contemporary structuralism.
Group-level analysis also risks flattening immense diversity within Black America. Immigrant populations, regional subcultures, religious communities, class distinctions, and local institutional ecologies complicate any generalized account of Black culture or Black disadvantage. The same behavioral patterns do not appear uniformly across all Black populations.
There is also a risk that some readers might misuse her frame as a pretext for indifference toward continuing institutional obligations. Acknowledging the limits of policy does not make policy irrelevant. Stable institutions, competent schools, safe neighborhoods, fair policing, and economic opportunity remain indispensable conditions for flourishing even when they do not suffice on their own.
The lasting value of Race, Wrongs, and Remedies lies in its willingness to confront questions contemporary discourse avoids. The book presses past who is morally responsible for suffering toward what changes outcomes. It separates historical causation from present leverage. It recognizes that societies can remove barriers without manufacturing virtue, cohesion, discipline, or purpose from above.
Wax also restores tragedy to social thought. Modern technocratic politics assumes all social problems are administratively soluble given enough expertise and resources. Wax denies the comforting assumption. Some injuries create patterns outsiders cannot fully repair. Some forms of decline require internal regeneration. Some social capacities must be rebuilt through communal effort rather than bureaucratic design.
Whether one accepts her empirical conclusions or not, the intellectual architecture of the book holds up under pressure. Wax reconstructs racial discourse around a hard distinction between causation and remediation. The distinction lets her affirm the enormity of historical injustice and argue, at the same time, that the practical path forward runs primarily through agency, culture, family stability, and behavioral reform.
That is why the book remains unsettling. It asks readers to hold two thoughts at once that contemporary discourse strains to separate: that Black Americans suffered grievous wrongs across American history, and that no outside institution may now possess sufficient leverage to repair the remaining damage on their behalf.
Applying John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology to Race, Wrongs, and Remedies clarifies why Wax’s reliance on “self-help” and “behavioral reform” faces immense practical boundaries.
Wax argues that the most destructive legacy of racism consists of human capital deficits and dysfunctional behavioral patterns that have taken on a self-perpetuating life of their own. Mearsheimer’s framework names the structural engine behind this persistence. Because humans undergo a long childhood protected and nurtured by a specific surrounding society, they absorb an enormous, early-stage value infusion long before they develop the critical faculties to think for themselves. Therefore, what Wax calls “dysfunctional cultural practices” such as low educational attainment or nonmarital childbearing are not simply a collection of easily altered individual “choices”. They are deep-seated, non-rational preferences hammered into place by group socialization, making them fiercely resistant to standard, top-down policy interventions.
Wax recognizes that cultural reform poses a massive challenge of coordinating collective action because individuals are tightly bound by the expectations of their immediate group. Mearsheimer’s realism adds clear diagnostic weight to this obstacle. If humans are “tribal at their core” and naturally operate in social teams rather than as lone wolves, an individual who attempts a spontaneous “conversion experience” to buck group trends risks immediate social exile. For example, Wax highlights the high costs of being out of step with maladaptive patterns, such as black students being penalized by peers for “acting white” if they study hard. Mearsheimer’s anthropology shows that this is the predictable behavior of a group enforcing internal team loyalty. It demonstrates that an inward, self-help movement cannot succeed merely by appeals to individual reason; it requires an alternative group framework that satisfies the basic human urge to belong.
Wax strongly attacks the dominance of “sociological explanation” in the academy, which treats individuals as passive playthings of external structural forces. She argues that situationism downplays the critical role of personal freedom and character. If Mearsheimer is right that reason is the least important way we determine preferences and that humans are primarily driven by inborn attitudes and group socialization, then Wax’s reliance on human agency and independent self-reflection is optimistic. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that the “sociological thinking” Wax deplores is actually an accurate description of how most unguided human groups behave: they default to system-blame and external loci of control because it protects the solidarity and self-concept of the tribe.
Wax documents decades of failed public welfare and job training initiatives, concluding that it is literally impossible for government programs to alter deep-seated domestic routines or replace the role of married biological parents. Mearsheimer’s framework confirms that political liberalism is fundamentally flawed when it attempts to use the state to treat people as atomistic actors. Top-down programs that treat individuals as cold, calculating units who will automatically swap bad habits for good ones if provided with economic incentives ignore the fact that socialization runs far deeper than material self-interest. Mearsheimer’s realism adds weight to Wax’s conclusion that the state cannot manufacture stable families or sound character from above.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, it proves that Wax’s core thesis is correct: outside state intervention has reached a structural limit, and only an intense, inward group reorientation can close remaining disparities. However, Mearsheimer also reveals that this “inward turn” is far more complex than a series of personal choices. Because human nature is tribal, cultural reform cannot be accomplished by a scattered collection of atomistic actors; it requires a coordinated, group-level strategy that redefines what it means to be a loyal and respected member of the community.
‘Diverging Family Structure And “Rational” Behavior: The Decline in Marriage as a Disorder of Choice’ (2010)
Circulated in 2010 as a Penn Law working paper, this is an analytically ambitious intervention into post-1960s American family demography. Its reach extends well beyond family law. The paper integrates demographic description, behavioral economics, the psychology of choice, ethnographic interpretation, the sociology of normative regulation, and a Hayekian theory of inherited convention. Read across these registers, it amounts to a sustained challenge to the explanatory orthodoxy that dominated late-twentieth-century American social science, an orthodoxy in which structural and material variables do nearly all of the explanatory work and in which behavioral, cognitive, and cultural variables are systematically discounted as either epiphenomenal or politically suspect.
Wax’s central thesis is that demographic divergence by race and class in marriage, divorce, and nonmarital childbearing cannot be explained by economic or material conditions alone. Populations differ in the temporal frame within which they evaluate intimate choices. Some actors decide locally, optimizing the immediate payoff of each discrete choice. Others decide globally, evaluating choices as elements of an aggregated long-run sequence. So long as institutional and normative structures forced even local thinkers into globally beneficial conduct, the difference remained submerged. Once those external structures eroded after the 1960s, the difference became socially decisive. The deregulation of sexual and reproductive conduct converted a latent disparity in self-regulation into a manifest disparity in family structure.
The argument is unusual within academic legal scholarship in two respects. First, it treats the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of populations as causally serious. Second, it offers a defense of pre-1960s normative regulation that is heuristic and Hayekian. Traditional norms compressed accumulated practical knowledge about long-term cooperation into simple rules that ordinary actors could follow without performing the elaborate temporal calculations the rules encoded. Their dismantling was therefore not liberation. It was the privatization of a cognitive burden that many actors were not positioned to carry.
This review reconstructs the argument, examines the formal models that anchor it, evaluates its empirical grounding, identifies its silences, and considers what the paper’s framework implies about the post-1960s American social order more broadly.
Wax opens with a careful empirical reconstruction of the divergence she proposes to explain. The story is not the familiar one of a uniform decline in marriage. It is one of bifurcation. Marriage rates fell across the population, but unevenly. Among college-educated White women, marriage stabilized; divorce rates began declining after 1980; nonmarital childbearing remained below five percent; and continuous residence with both biological parents through childhood remained the modal experience. Among less-educated Whites, the trends moved in the opposite direction. Among Blacks, the divergence was sharpest. By the late 2000s, roughly seventy-two percent of Black births occurred outside marriage; about seventy percent of Black women’s first marriages ended in divorce; and even college-educated Black women had nonmarital birth rates several times those of similarly educated White women. Hispanic patterns occupied an intermediate position, with high marriage rates despite lower educational attainment.
The methodological function of this opening is to construct the puzzle that the rest of the paper attempts to dissolve. If the sexual revolution had liberalized everyone equally, why did some populations retain stable family formation while others did not? If economic conditions drove family outcomes, why did Black marriage rates exceed White rates during the Depression, when Black men faced unemployment and poverty rates far higher than today? If marriageability tracks earnings, why did marriage continue to decline through the wage gains of the late 1990s? If education predicts family stability through human-capital channels, why do Hispanics, with lower educational attainment than Blacks, marry at substantially higher rates? If the contraceptive shock theory of Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz captures the mechanism, why did extramarital childbearing rise sharply among some populations and barely at all among others?
These cross-cutting facts function as a series of stress tests for any candidate theory. Wax devotes substantial space to demonstrating that the leading structural accounts fail one or more of them. William Julius Wilson’s “marriageable men” hypothesis attributes Black marriage decline to the disappearance of stable working-class employment. This explains only a small fraction of the observed decline. Demographers across the methodological spectrum estimate that male earning power and sex-ratio imbalance account for somewhere between five and twenty percent of the racial gap. Arline Geronimus’s argument that early extramarital childbearing constitutes an adaptive response to compressed life expectancy among disadvantaged Black women fails because it compares early to late nonmarital births rather than nonmarital to marital births, and because the cohort she studies is unrepresentative. Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz, who treat the contraceptive revolution as a technological shock that destroyed shotgun marriage, cannot explain the differential incidence of the resulting nonmarital fertility across class and racial lines. Edin and Kefalas, working ethnographically, attribute low marriage rates among poor women to economic conditions that prevent men from meeting elevated marital standards, but Wax notices that the women in their interviews complain less about earnings than about behavior: chronic infidelity, drug use, violence, criminality, and unwillingness to discharge paternal obligations.
The cumulative effect of this demolition is to clear the explanatory field. What remains, on Wax’s reading, is the residual that structural and material variables cannot reach. That residual is behavioral and cognitive. The question becomes what causes populations facing comparable incentive structures to respond to those incentives in such different ways.
Wax’s response reconfigures the rational-actor framework. Standard rational-choice theory assumes a unitary calculus of utility maximization. Similar conditions should generate similar behavior, modulated only by differences in tastes and resources. The empirical record refuses this assumption. Populations facing comparable economic constraints exhibit radically different intimate behaviors. Either rational-choice theory is wrong, or the standard formulation has elided something important.
Drawing on Richard Herrnstein’s late work and on Gene Heyman’s Addiction: A Disorder of Choice (2009), Wax argues that the elision concerns the temporal frame of decision. Herrnstein observed that rational actors can evaluate options either piecemeal, comparing the immediate payoff of each available choice, or aggregatively, comparing entire sequences of choices over a relevant time horizon. He labeled the first method “local” and the second “global.” Both are rational in the sense that each maximizes a coherent objective function. They differ in what is being maximized and over what interval.
The distinction matters whenever choices interact dynamically — that is, whenever the value of any given choice depends on the prior pattern of choices. In such environments, local choice can systematically diverge from global choice. The locally rational sequence and the globally rational sequence will not merely differ in their outcomes; they can be exact opposites.
Heyman’s contribution was to use this distinction to reframe addiction. The disease model treats compulsive drug use as involuntary, the product of neurobiological capture beyond the reach of incentives or will. Heyman argues that the empirical pattern fits poorly with this model. Many addicts quit; many quit without medical intervention; quitting correlates with normative environments and life-stage transitions in ways that involuntary disease processes do not. Heyman’s reframing treats each discrete decision to use as locally rational — the immediate payoff exceeds the immediate alternative — while recognizing that the cumulative trajectory is globally catastrophic. Drug use erodes both the value of subsequent drug use (tolerance) and the value of subsequent abstinence (because it degrades the alternative activities of ordinary life). Aggregated across a sufficient time horizon, the value-maximizing sequence contains zero drug days. Yet the day-by-day calculus, taken in isolation, recommends drugs every day.
Wax adapts this structure to intimate behavior. The analogy is not that unstable relationships are clinical pathologies but that both involve choice environments in which local rationality and global rationality diverge sharply, and in which the divergence is mediated by the corrosive effect of present choices on the value of future ones.
The center of Wax’s argument is a set of stylized payoff models that the earlier review essay passed over too quickly. These models do most of the analytical work and deserve closer examination, because they reveal both the strengths and the limits of the framework.
The first model concerns simultaneous partnerships, which is to say, the choice to be sexually faithful or unfaithful within an existing primary relationship. Wax constructs a thirty-day decision window in which an actor in an established relationship encounters the recurring option to embark on or continue an extramarital liaison. Each day yields a payoff. The payoff schedule has two key features. First, on any given day, the payoff from infidelity exceeds the payoff from fidelity. The illicit relationship is, by construction, more locally attractive than the primary one; otherwise the temptation would not arise. Second, the payoffs are dynamic. Each episode of infidelity reduces both the value of subsequent infidelity (the affair becomes less novel, the lover more demanding, the secret harder to keep, the children of the affair more entangling) and the value of subsequent fidelity (the primary relationship has been damaged, trust eroded, jealousy aroused). The schedule is constructed so that the cumulative thirty-day payoff declines monotonically with the number of unfaithful days.
Under this schedule, the local-choice equilibrium is universal infidelity: every day, on its own merits, recommends the affair. The global-choice equilibrium is universal fidelity: the integrated payoff over thirty days is highest when the number of unfaithful days is zero. The two equilibria are not merely different. They are mirror inversions. Wax demonstrates through a series of variations (Tables 2, 3, and 4 in the original paper) that the global equilibrium remains “never cheat” even when the value of the secondary relationship plateaus or improves over time, so long as infidelity sufficiently corrodes the primary relationship.
The second model concerns sequential partnerships, which is to say, the choice to switch from a current partner to a more locally attractive new one. Wax constructs a relationship in which the daily payoff begins moderate, dips somewhat as partners negotiate early conflicts, and then rises to a stable plateau as trust accumulates. Midway through, an alternative partner appears whose initial daily payoff exceeds the current value of the existing relationship. A local thinker switches. A global thinker, who anticipates that the existing relationship will plateau higher than the new relationship’s foreseeable trajectory once initial novelty fades, stays. The model further demonstrates the destabilizing implication of repeated local choice: if the actor “resets the clock” with each new partner, treating each as a fresh trajectory, the actor enters an infinite regress in which every relationship is vulnerable to displacement by the next attractive prospect. Chronic instability, not eventual settlement, is the equilibrium.
Pre-1960s sexual norms — marry before children, remain faithful, avoid illegitimacy, honor paternal obligation, discourage divorce — functioned as compressed heuristics. They encoded long-run cumulative consequences into simple rules that ordinary actors could follow without performing the calculations the rules implicitly captured. The rules were enforced through a dense network of formal sanctions (legal disabilities for illegitimate children, restrictive divorce regimes, employment consequences for moral lapses) and informal sanctions (stigma, shame, social demotion). These enforcement structures internalized the rules into individual conscience, but more importantly, they made the rules cognitively cheap. An actor did not have to anticipate the long-term consequences of an illicit liaison; the actor merely had to follow the rule, which others around him were also following.
The sexual revolution dismantled this enforcement architecture. The dismantling was not principally about behavior; it was about the legitimacy of normative judgment. Stigma against nonmarital sex, illegitimacy, and divorce eroded across institutional venues — law, religion, education, popular culture — with remarkable speed. What replaced uniform external rules was, in Wax’s phrase, “ad hoc moral improvisation.” Each actor was now responsible for the long-run calculations that the prior regime had performed collectively. The cognitive burden was privatized.
Privatization had differential consequences because the capacity to perform the privatized calculations is itself unevenly distributed. Actors with higher executive function, lower discount rates, greater future orientation, more conscientiousness, and more cognitively demanding educational and occupational trajectories adapted to the new regime by performing the calculations themselves. Actors lacking these traits could not do so as easily. The pre-existing distribution of self-regulatory capacity, which had been masked by the uniformity of external rules, became socially decisive. What had been a difference in latent traits became a difference in manifest behavior, and that difference compounded across generations as the resulting family structures shaped the developmental environments of the next cohort.
This explains the bifurcation Wax identifies. It explains why the educated upper-middle class, despite being the cultural vanguard of expressive individualism, retained traditional family patterns. It explains why economic gains during the 1990s did not arrest the marriage decline among the working class. It explains why Hispanic immigrants, arriving from societies in which marriage norms remained intact, marry at higher rates than Blacks despite lower education. It explains why pre-1960s Black marriage rates exceeded contemporary rates despite worse economic conditions: the external normative architecture was carrying the cognitive load.
The argument also has a deep affinity with Hayek’s epistemology of tradition. Hayek argued that inherited rules and conventions encode information that no individual actor can articulate or rationally reconstruct. Their value lies precisely in their capacity to coordinate behavior on outcomes that the actors could not have computed for themselves. Wax’s account of pre-1960s sexual mores fits this template exactly. The mores were not superstitions to be cleared away by enlightened individual reflection. They were compressed solutions to coordination problems that individual reflection cannot reliably solve.
If pre-1960s norms were performing real coordinative work, then the post-1960s liberation was not costless. It was a transfer of cognitive burden from the collective to the individual, with predictable distributional consequences. The actors with the greatest self-regulatory capacity bore the smallest cost. The actors with less capacity bore the largest. The egalitarian impulse behind sexual liberation produced an inegalitarian outcome.
Educated upper-middle-class actors publicly endorse expressive individualism, family diversity, and the privacy of intimate choice. They privately maintain bourgeois marriage, intensive parenting, sequential investment in children, and remarkably low rates of nonmarital childbearing. The disjunction is sufficiently large to have generated a substantial subsequent literature — Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012) and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015) being the most prominent — that did not exist when Wax wrote.
Defending the bourgeois pattern publicly would constrain elite sexual prerogatives that elites themselves wish to exercise within bounded limits — premarital sexual freedom, delayed marriage, serial monogamy in early adulthood — even as they ultimately settle into stable marriage. Publicly defending the rule would imply that one should follow it without the discretionary departures that elites silently take. There is also a status logic at work. The pattern of selective deviation followed by eventual conformity is itself a marker of social position, in part because it requires the self-regulatory capacity to enjoy the freedom without succumbing to the disorder. Defending the rule publicly would equalize the cultural permission to depart from it, which would in turn raise the costs of departure for those whose self-regulatory capacity is lower.
Elites maintain rules privately while abandoning them rhetorically, with the private maintenance preserving their relative position and the rhetorical abandonment denying others the cultural support needed to follow the rules. The phenomenon is structural. It merely requires the aggregated effect of individual decisions to produce a coordinative regime in which one set of populations bears the costs of normative deregulation and another captures its benefits. Wax notices the pattern but does not develop its political-economy implications. A fully developed treatment would require a theory of how status hierarchies select for normative regimes that benefit those at the top while imposing costs on those further down. The paper’s framework is well-positioned to support such a theory; it does not pursue it.
The paper’s most consequential silence concerns the origins of the differential capacity for global versus local decision-making. Wax repeatedly describes the relevant traits — discount rate, executive function, self-control, future orientation, cognitive ability — and notes their correlations with educational attainment, occupational trajectory, and demographic group. She does not theorize their origins. The omission is not careless. It is strategic.
A serious theory of origins would have to engage at least three literatures that the paper studiously avoids: behavior genetics, the heritability of cognitive ability and personality, and the cross-population distributions of these traits. The empirical literature on these subjects is substantial, methodologically contested, and politically combustible. Wax’s refusal to engage it is defensible as a matter of scholarly prudence — the paper is already doing enough analytical work without taking on a separate set of controversies — but it leaves the framework with an unresolved tension.
The paper argues that the post-1960s deregulation revealed and amplified pre-existing differences in self-regulatory capacity. If those differences were purely environmental, then policy interventions targeting environments could in principle equalize them, and the pessimism about the post-deregulation equilibrium would be overstated. If they are partly heritable, then environmental interventions face a hard ceiling, and the only equilibrium that compensates for the differential is one that restores some version of the pre-1960s normative architecture. The policy implications of the framework depend critically on which side of this question is correct, and Wax does not tell us which side she takes. Her later, more controversial public statements suggest she has views; the paper does not commit them to print.
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. Wax’s framework explains how local thinking produces dysfunctional outcomes once normative deregulation takes hold. It explains less clearly why local thinking is more prevalent in some populations than in others. Without such an account, the framework risks circularity: populations differ in family outcomes because they differ in decision-making frame; they differ in decision-making frame because we observe differential outcomes.
Two responses to this problem are available within the paper’s own resources. The first is the developmental feedback loop the paper hints at: family structures shape the developmental environments of children, who then carry the resulting traits into adulthood and reproduce the family structures in which they grew up. This generates path-dependent equilibria that, once established, can be difficult to disrupt. The second is the cultural reinforcement loop suggested by Cass Sunstein’s work on norm cascades: as nonmarital childbearing becomes more common in a population, it becomes more normatively acceptable, which lowers the barrier to further nonmarital childbearing. These mechanisms can in principle generate stable group differences without invoking heritable substrate differences.
Whether they can do so quantitatively, given the magnitude of the gaps Wax documents and the speed with which they emerged, is another question. The paper does not answer it.
One reason the paper provoked the hostility it did is that it undermines what might be called the moral economy of contemporary social science. Structural explanations distribute responsibility outward, onto institutions, economies, histories, and inheritances. Behavioral explanations reintroduce the problem of agency. They imply that actors could, under different conditions, behave differently, and that the conditions in question include normative environments that the actors themselves help sustain or dissolve. This is not a comfortable conclusion for an academic culture that has spent half a century developing structural accounts of inequality.
Direct measurement of “global versus local” decision-making in intimate domains is methodologically difficult. The closest available proxies — time discounting, executive function, conscientiousness, impulsivity — have been measured across populations with mixed and contested results. The literature on time discounting, in particular, is messy: estimates vary widely with elicitation method, sample, and demographic controls. Studies in military and civilian populations suggest higher discount rates among Black respondents and respondents with lower cognitive ability.
The paper relies more heavily on an indirect form of evidence: the behavioral correlates of relationship instability identified in the ethnographic literature. Edin and Kefalas’s interview subjects describe partners whose conduct exhibits exactly the local-thinking pattern the model predicts: chronic infidelity, impulsive spending, drug use, irregular work history, criminal entanglements, and inability to defer gratification across multiple domains. The same actors, in their own self-descriptions, articulate aspirations for stable marriage and committed parenting. The disjunction between aspiration and behavior is the empirical fingerprint Wax’s framework predicts.
A further indirect evidence stream concerns the parallel rise of other behaviors that share the local-thinking signature: obesity, consumer over-borrowing, personal bankruptcy, undersaving for retirement. Each of these behaviors has shown class and racial gradients that roughly mirror the marriage gradient. Each involves a structural feature similar to the marriage decision: locally rational choices that aggregate into globally costly outcomes, in environments where the normative structures that previously constrained the local choices have weakened. The parallelism is suggestive. Whether it constitutes evidence for the unified framework Wax proposes or whether it merely indicates that several distinct local-rationality problems have become salient simultaneously is harder to establish.
The paper offers a theory of marriage as an institution for the government of time. Marriage in this account is not principally about romance, sexual exclusivity, or even reproduction. It is about the conversion of short-term actors into long-term cooperators. The institutional structure of marriage — vows, public commitment, kinship recognition, economic interlinkage, legal entanglement, religious sanction — is precisely a set of devices for raising the cost of defection in environments where the immediate temptations to defect are persistent and substantial. Marriage extends the time horizon over which actors evaluate intimate choices, by linking those choices to consequences that unfold over decades.
This reframe locates marriage within a more general category of institutions — long-term contracts, professional ethics, military discipline, religious vows, civic obligations — whose social function is to commit actors to behaviors that local rationality alone would not generate. It identifies the loss of marriage with the more general loss of institutions that perform this temporal-extension function. And it offers a diagnostic for the post-1960s American social order: an order in which institutions for extending time horizons have weakened across multiple domains simultaneously, not just in intimate life but in finance, in employment, in civic affiliation, in religion.
If this diagnosis is correct, the marriage decline is not an isolated phenomenon but a particular instance of a broader shift in the temporal architecture of American social life. The paper does not develop this implication, but the framework supports it. The retreat from marriage, the rise of consumer debt, the decline of long-tenure employment, the secular fall in religious affiliation, the fragmentation of civic association, and the collapse of intergenerational economic mobility all exhibit a common structure: institutions that previously committed actors to long horizons have weakened, and the populations that retained the cognitive and cultural resources to commit themselves without institutional support have continued to do so, while the populations that depended on institutional commitment have not.
This is the largest claim that the framework can support, and it is one that subsequent scholarship has, in various idioms, developed. The Marriage-Go-Round (Andrew Cherlin, 2009), Coming Apart (Murray, 2012), Our Kids (Putnam, 2015), The Two-Parent Privilege (Melissa Kearney, 2023), and Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) each in different registers extend the diagnosis Wax offered in 2010. The political and intellectual landscape into which her paper was received has shifted considerably in its favor in the fifteen years since. What was treated as ideologically eccentric in 2010 has become a recognized strand of mainstream demographic and political analysis.
“Diverging Family Structure” produces a careful empirical reconstruction of the post-1960s family bifurcation. It demolishes the leading structural explanations one by one. It introduces a behavioral-economic framework — the local-versus-global choice distinction — that provides a coherent alternative to those explanations. It anchors that framework in formal payoff models that, while stylized, do real analytical work. It develops a Hayekian theory of normative deregulation as the privatization of a cognitive burden that pre-1960s institutions had collectively borne. It identifies the differential distributional consequences of that privatization. It exposes, without quite confronting, the silence at the heart of the framework concerning the origins of the underlying behavioral differences. And it implicitly offers a theory of marriage as an institution for the government of time that has consequences well beyond the intimate sphere.
After Wax, structural accounts of family bifurcation can no longer be presented as if they were the only available accounts, or as if behavioral and cognitive variables were optional supplements to the real story. The paper made it intellectually disreputable to treat the demographic gap as exhaustively explicable in material terms, and it did so without resorting to the moralism that had discredited earlier behavioral accounts. That is a significant scholarly accomplishment, and one whose influence has only grown in the fifteen years since the paper appeared.
The deeper question the paper poses — whether a society that has dismantled its normative architecture for governing time can sustain the cooperative arrangements that depended on that architecture — remains open. The paper itself is not optimistic. Its analytical structure suggests that the post-1960s equilibrium is stable in the sense that it is self-reinforcing through developmental and cultural feedback loops, but unstable in the sense that the populations bearing its costs have no individual route back to the arrangements that previously protected them. Whether collective routes remain available, and whether the elite cultural establishment that benefits from the current arrangement could be persuaded to help reconstruct what it helped dismantle, is a question the paper does not pretend to answer.
What the paper does, with considerable analytical rigor, is to show why the question matters. The collapse of stable family formation across large segments of the American population is not an aesthetic preference or a moralist’s complaint. It is the visible signature of a deeper shift in the temporal architecture of American social life, and the consequences of that shift, distributed unequally across populations, will continue to compound across generations until the underlying architecture is either rebuilt or replaced. Wax does not tell us which of these is more likely. She tells us what we are looking at when we look at the family demography of the post-1960s United States, and she does so more clearly than any other single paper in the legal-academic literature.
‘Disparate Impact Realism’ (2011)
This is a sustained empirical critique of modern disparate impact doctrine in employment law. The essay forces antidiscrimination law to confront what Wax treats as stubborn facts about human capital, cognitive stratification, and labor-market selection. The article argues for replacing moralized legal fictions with actuarial realism.
The piece occupies a distinctive position in the Title VII literature because it shifts attention away from discriminatory intent and toward population-level distributions of job-relevant traits. Most critiques of disparate impact doctrine focus on constitutional tensions, administrative burdens, or normative disagreements about equality. Wax instead grounds her argument in industrial-organizational psychology, psychometrics, labor economics, and educational demography. She maintains that the doctrine’s core assumptions are empirically false and that the law’s failure to recognize this has produced a permanent conflict between meritocratic selection and racial proportionality.
The argument targets two assumptions embedded in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. and its descendants. Griggs held that facially neutral employment practices may violate Title VII if they produce statistically disparate outcomes and lack sufficient justification by business necessity. The decision emerged from a credible concern that employers in the post-Jim Crow South might preserve racial exclusion through ostensibly neutral criteria such as diploma requirements and aptitude testing.
Wax argues that the Court’s reasoning rested on two empirical premises that subsequent social-science research has undermined. First, Griggs assumed that fair and valid hiring practices generally produce workforces roughly proportional to the racial composition of the relevant labor pool. The EEOC institutionalized this assumption through the four-fifths rule, under which minority hiring rates below 80 percent of majority hiring rates create a prima facie inference of unlawful adverse impact. Second, the Court expressed skepticism about the link between aptitude testing and workplace performance, especially in lower-skill jobs. Wax shows that decades of psychometric research point the other way. General cognitive ability, conventionally denoted as g, has emerged as the single best predictor of job performance across nearly all occupational categories and complexity levels.
Wax draws on the industrial-organizational psychology tradition associated with Frank Schmidt, John Hunter, and related researchers who conducted large-scale meta-analyses of personnel-selection methods. The central finding is that cognitively loaded measures consistently outperform alternative screening devices in predicting job success, training performance, learning speed, and workplace productivity.
Much of the article’s force comes from Wax treating these findings as settled professional consensus. Her tone is that of a legal realist confronting institutional denial. She emphasizes that the predictive superiority of cognitive measures is neither marginal nor confined to elite occupations. Even low-skill jobs increasingly require learning capacity, symbolic reasoning, problem-solving ability, and adaptability to bureaucratic and technological systems. The modern economy, in her account, is cognitively stratified.
That empirical foundation leads to the article’s central conceptual contribution: the validity-diversity tradeoff. The phrase names the recurring statistical pattern by which the most predictive job-selection tools also produce the largest racial disparities in outcomes. If cognitive ability strongly predicts workplace success, and if racial groups differ in average scores on cognitively loaded measures, then employers maximizing predictive validity will almost inevitably generate adverse impact statistics.
The law demands highly predictive meritocratic selection and racial proportionality at the same time, under conditions where the first predictably undermines the second.
Wax treats the tradeoff as an actuarial fact emerging from the statistical structure of labor markets. This move sets her apart from much contemporary antidiscrimination scholarship. Many legal theorists continue to interpret disparities through frameworks of systemic exclusion or implicit bias. Wax insists that many disparities might instead reflect differential distributions of developed human capital.
That is the article’s most controversial claim. Wax argues that racial imbalances in employment are not primarily produced by arbitrary barriers or covert exclusion but by measurable differences in skills, knowledge, and cognitive performance relevant to workplace success. Such gaps appear early, persist across development, and manifest in both educational and occupational settings.
The article stages a profound shift from intent-based to actuarial models of discrimination. Classical civil-rights jurisprudence focused on identifying and preventing intentional exclusion. Wax argues that modern disparate impact doctrine has transformed statistical disparities themselves into presumptive evidence of wrongdoing. The shift has produced a regulatory framework disconnected from labor-market realities.
Because most valid selection methods produce some degree of adverse impact, employers exist in a state of chronic legal vulnerability. Even firms using demonstrably job-related criteria face uncertain litigation, ambiguous judicial standards, and costly validation requirements.
Wax’s discussion of validation procedures reveals the technocratic complexity of contemporary employment law. Courts and regulatory agencies demand varying forms of content validation, construct validation, and criterion validation. Yet judicial standards remain inconsistent. Some courts accept broad manifest-relationship tests linking hiring criteria to job tasks. Others demand rigorous statistical proof of predictive validity.
The result is a legal environment dominated by expert battles and administrative uncertainty. Employers must often prove not only that their selection methods are predictive, but that no equally valid alternative with less adverse impact exists. Wax argues that this requirement forces employers to prove a negative while operating under shifting doctrinal standards.
Faced with the threat of costly litigation, employers might adopt covert racial balancing strategies, weaken standards, manipulate cut scores, or abandon highly predictive selection tools. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1991 prohibited explicit race-norming, the structural incentives toward demographic management remain.
One of the article’s deepest insights is that disparate impact doctrine might indirectly encourage the very race-conscious behavior it formally condemns. Organizations seeking to avoid liability become attentive to racial outcomes, often engaging in informal quota-like practices under the guise of holistic evaluation or alternative selection procedures. Wax portrays the doctrine as generating institutional evasiveness.
Her treatment of public-sector hiring controversies is revealing, especially the firefighter and police examination disputes. These cases made the validity-diversity tradeoff visible because civil-service testing relied on standardized, highly measurable selection systems. Ricci v. DeStefano illustrated the doctrine’s internal tensions. Municipalities faced legal pressure from minority applicants if they used validated exams and from majority applicants if they discarded them.
Wax reads Ricci as evidence that disparate impact doctrine has entered a state of conceptual instability. The legal system struggles to reconcile competing commitments to meritocracy, procedural neutrality, and demographic diversity. Her article suggests these commitments might not be fully compatible under existing labor-market conditions.
Out of that contradiction emerges her reform model: disparate impact realism. Rather than abolishing disparate impact doctrine outright, her preferred approach recalibrates it around empirically documented labor-market distributions.
The centerpiece of this proposal is the replacement of the rigid four-fifths rule with a sliding-scale framework. Instead of assuming proportional hiring should normally occur, the law adjusts expected outcomes according to documented group performance disparities and the selectivity of particular jobs. Highly selective occupations requiring greater cognitive demands are therefore expected to produce larger demographic disparities without triggering presumptive liability.
The proposal transforms disparate impact doctrine from a moralized equality regime into a labor-economics regime. The legal baseline is no longer demographic proportionality but actuarially realistic expectations grounded in measured skill distributions.
A telling feature of Wax’s proposal is her implicit redefinition of fairness. Under her framework, a hiring system producing workers of different races who perform equally well on the job is presumptively legitimate regardless of disparities in hiring rates. Productivity parity replaces demographic proportionality as the benchmark of institutional fairness.
That marks a profound departure from the assumptions underlying much post-1960s civil-rights jurisprudence. Traditional disparate impact theory treats substantial disparities as evidence requiring justification. Wax argues that disparities might emerge naturally from meritocratic competition under unequal skill distributions. Her realism normalizes certain forms of disproportionality that conventional doctrine treats as suspicious.
She portrays disparate impact realism as an information-forcing tool that incentivizes employers to pursue maximally feasible diversity while preserving productivity. By reducing legal uncertainty and creating safe harbors tied to realistic expectations, employers might have stronger incentives to experiment with innovative recruitment and training.
Wax also offers a more radical alternative: complete abolition of disparate impact doctrine in employment law. The argument rests on the claim that racial disparities in employment are now weak evidence of discrimination because human-capital differences better explain workforce outcomes.
Disparate impact doctrine, she contends, is fatally overbroad because it subjects ordinary meritocratic practices to presumptive suspicion. Most valid personnel procedures generate some adverse impact. The doctrine therefore routinely ensnares conduct that is neither discriminatory nor irrational.
The abolitionist argument also reflects Wax’s skepticism toward the traditional defense of disparate impact theory as a tool for uncovering hidden discrimination. Defenders argue that neutral practices might function as covert proxies for racial exclusion and that disparate impact analysis is needed to smoke out stealth discrimination.
Wax challenges the premise. Title VII’s disparate treatment provisions, she argues, already supply adequate tools for addressing both conscious and unconscious bias. Disparate impact doctrine has expanded far beyond its original justificatory logic and now operates primarily as a system of demographic management.
Wax’s framework rejects outcome egalitarianism in favor of a strongly meritocratic conception of institutional legitimacy. The legitimacy of employment systems derives principally from predictive accuracy and productivity optimization rather than demographic representativeness.
Wax portrays the conflict between meritocratic efficiency and demographic proportionality as enduring. The article therefore possesses a tragic dimension absent from much contemporary legal scholarship. It suggests that modern liberal societies might face persistent tradeoffs among competing goods that cannot be fully harmonized.
The article continues to provoke debate more than a decade after publication because the tensions Wax identified remain unresolved. Employers still struggle with adverse impact liability. Institutions still seek ways to preserve demographic diversity without abandoning predictive selection systems. Controversies over standardized testing, DEI initiatives, police hiring exams, elite admissions, and algorithmic screening all turn on the same contradiction between proportionality and meritocratic sorting.
“Disparate Impact Realism” is a meditation on the limits of legal egalitarianism in a cognitively stratified society. Wax holds that employment law cannot indefinitely operate on assumptions contradicted by psychometric and labor-market evidence. Whether one accepts her conclusions, the article forces recognition that antidiscrimination law exists within a persistent and perhaps unavoidable collision between statistical reality and egalitarian aspiration.
‘Diverging Destinies Redux’ (2014)
This is an extended review of Charles Murray’s (b. 1943) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. It is a sustained empirical engagement with his thesis from inside an institution that mostly declines to engage him at all. Wax accepts much of his descriptive picture, sharpens his account where the evidence supports it, and pushes back where his data thin out. She also goes further than Murray in confronting what she takes to be the central diagnostic puzzle: why the American professional class continues to practice the bourgeois virtues it no longer dares to defend.
The review opens with a vignette. A new colleague at Penn Law asks Wax where to live in Philadelphia. The list of acceptable neighborhoods narrows almost without conscious effort: a few precincts on the Main Line, selected blocks in Mount Airy and Germantown. Wax notes that these eleven zip codes amount to about two percent of the four hundred zip codes within thirty miles of Rittenhouse Square. They are also the Whitest, wealthiest, and most credentialed precincts in the region. Her colleague does not need a map. He knows where people like him live.
The vignette sets up the central spatial claim of Murray’s book. Murray treats the upper-tier zip codes, the SuperZips, as the residential expression of a new cognitive elite, a class he describes as larger, more cohesive, and more inwardly oriented than any previous American upper stratum. Wax follows this argument carefully. She accepts the geographic concentration data. She accepts Murray’s account of how that concentration arose: meritocratic admissions at selective universities pulled smart and ambitious young people toward a small number of institutions, those institutions sorted them into overlapping professional networks, and assortative mating among graduates produced a generation of households organized around shared educational and cultural references. The effect, Wax argues, is a degree of social distance no prior American elite has achieved at this scale.
Murray’s chapter “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” presents a quiz designed to embarrass elite readers about their ignorance of working-class life. Wax presses harder. She runs her own informal version on her first-year law students, asking them to estimate the share of out-of-wedlock births to White women with a college degree. They guess wildly high. The correct figure at the time of writing was under five percent. For women with a high school education or less, the figure approached fifty percent. Few of her students could name a college-educated friend who had fathered a child outside marriage. Yet many were prepared to argue that marriage as an institution might be obsolete. The gap between the data and the ideology, Wax suggests, is not innocent. It is the cultivated product of geographic and institutional separation.
Murray’s most controversial claim is that the working-class retreat from work cannot be explained by labor-market collapse alone. Wax handles this carefully. She lays out the evidence that supports a supply-side reading. Disability claims rose during decades of improving general health. Immigrants continued filling positions that native-born men had abandoned. Wage dispersion widened among workers with similar credentials, suggesting that what economists now call soft skills, the steady habits of reliability, punctuality, and sustained effort, had come to matter more in the modern labor market. She also concedes the demand-side evidence. Industrial decline reduced the supply of secure unionized work. The composition of available jobs changed in ways that may have demoralized less-educated men. Wax’s position is not that the economy played no role. Her position is that monocausal economistic accounts cannot explain the full pattern.
Wax draws on the work of sociologists Kathryn Edin (b. 1962) and Timothy Nelson, whose ethnography of fathers in White and Black working-class neighborhoods in Philadelphia describe young men who father children with multiple partners early, drift in and out of work, and form neither stable partnerships nor stable employment trajectories. Their relationships with the mothers of their children are volatile and short. Their relationships with employers are intermittent. Wax draws the connection that the ethnographers leave implicit. The same character traits that make a man an unreliable partner make him an unreliable employee. Family fragility and labor-market fragility do not operate on parallel tracks. They feed each other.
Wax then takes up the question that Coming Apart never fully answers. Murray describes the divergence. He does not explain it. Wax offers a candidate explanation she calls moral deregulation. Through the first half of the twentieth century, sexual conduct, marriage, and childbearing fell under a strict and widely shared code. Beginning in the 1960s, the code loosened. Premarital sex became unremarkable. The stigma against delayed marriage, nonmarriage, and extramarital childbearing weakened. Different parts of American society absorbed the new permissiveness in different ways. Educated Whites took selective advantage of it. They delayed marriage and slept with more partners before settling, but still married before having children and stayed married once they did. Working-class Whites absorbed it more thoroughly, severing the sequence of marriage and childbearing while retaining childbearing.
When a clear external code prescribes the right ordering of sex, marriage, and reproduction, individuals do not need to produce that ordering themselves. They follow the code. When the code dissolves, individuals must generate the relevant restraint internally. Self-regulation in this domain is hard. It requires foresight, impulse control, and the capacity to weigh long-run against short-run rewards. Wax suggests, with some caution, that small differences in these capacities produce large differences in behavior over time, and that the differences track education and class. She does not claim that the better-educated are morally superior. She claims that they appear better equipped, on average, to navigate a moral landscape from which the rules have been removed.
Wax argues, with supporting econometrics, that marriage remains a rational financial decision even at the bottom of the wage distribution. Two minimum-wage earners pooling resources can clear the federal poverty line for a family of two. The Earned Income Tax Credit and similar programs further raise the joint return. Married-couple households have a child poverty rate of roughly six percent. Single-mother households have a child poverty rate near thirty percent. Some of the gap reflects selection into marriage, but the marriage premium persists across income levels. The decision to stay single and have children is not a rational response to economic hardship. It makes economic life worse. Wax draws the unsentimental conclusion. If the retreat from marriage cannot be explained by economics, the explanation must lie elsewhere.
Working-class Americans in earlier generations endured lower real wages, harsher working conditions, and less job security than the contemporary working class. They nevertheless married, stayed married, and raised children in two-parent households at high rates. Economic hardship does not produce family fragility on its own. Cultural expectations mediate how material pressure translates into behavior. Without that mediation, the relationship between hardship and family form becomes hard to predict.
Wax’s review reserves its sharpest passages for the educated elite, the people who staff her own institution. She charges them with what Ross Douthat (b. 1979) called marriage and historical inevitability. They live the 1950s. They love the 1960s. Privately they marry, stay married, restrict childbearing to marriage, invest heavily in their children’s education, and pass the resulting advantages to the next generation. Publicly they embrace a discourse of family diversity, expressive autonomy, and nonjudgmentalism. The result is a peculiar form of asymmetric moral governance. The behaviors that produce elite stability remain operative as the actual sorting machinery of American life. The legitimacy of articulating those behaviors as expectations is no longer available within elite institutional speech.
Wax calls this a loss of nerve. The professional class no longer believes it has the standing to articulate the conditions of its own success. Several pressures sustain the silence. The racial disparity in family structure makes any public defense of marriage look like a coded defense of White norms. The therapeutic register of contemporary public discourse treats moral exhortation as a category mistake. The rise of expressive individualism makes any prescription about the right way to live sound presumptuous. Whatever the mix of causes, the result is that the discourse most readily available to elite institutions for talking about working-class fragility is the language of structural economic injury. The behavioral diagnosis is unspeakable.
Wax’s pessimism follows. If the diagnosis cannot be uttered, the response will be misdirected. Government can transfer money and expand services. It cannot recreate norms of restraint, foresight, and mutual obligation. The institutions that historically transmitted those norms, families, churches, neighborhood associations, are precisely the institutions that have weakened in the populations most in need of them. Public policy can soften the consequences. It cannot rebuild the cultural infrastructure.
The review closes with a quotation from Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) and a citation to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (1927-2003) Defining Deviancy Down. Both moves are deliberate. Goldsmith’s couplet, “How small, of all that human hearts endure,/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”, locates the source of the problem outside the reach of government. Moynihan’s essay describes a society lowering its definition of acceptable conduct to accommodate its actual conduct. Wax suggests that the American elite has, in family matters, performed exactly this redefinition. What was once understood as deviance is now understood as diversity. The understanding has changed. The underlying behavior has changed too, and not for the better.
More than a decade later, the trends Wax describes have intensified. The marriage gap by education has widened. Geographic concentration of elite households has deepened. Male labor-force participation among the less-educated has not recovered.
‘Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture’ (Aug. 9, 2017)
The piece by Amy Wax and Larry Alexander (b. 1943) does several things at once and most of them do not survive scrutiny.
Start with the empirical claim. The late 1940s through mid 1960s did show high marriage rates, low out-of-wedlock births, and rising productivity. The piece treats this as a pure achievement of cultural script. It skips the supports. Marriage rates ran high because divorce required adultery findings or proof of cruelty in most states, and women had narrow exit options from bad marriages. Out-of-wedlock birth rates ran low partly because of shotgun weddings, closed adoptions, and back-alley abortions. Heroin moved through American cities through the 1950s. Domestic violence happened without reporting categories. The “social coherence” the authors praise rested on enforcement that has costs they decline to count.
Then the causal story. Wax and Alexander treat the welfare state and the counterculture as the breakers of the script. The script started fraying earlier than that. Agricultural labor was already collapsing. Mass migration of Black Americans to northern cities ran into restrictive housing covenants and disappearing factory work. The deindustrialization that hit inner cities in the 1970s did more to break working-class family formation than any cultural shift. Wax names culture and ignores capital flight.
The selection of targets reveals coalition signals more than it reveals analysis. Plains Indians, single-parent working-class Whites, inner-city Blacks who resist “acting White,” and Hispanic immigrants who resist assimilation. She does not name Hasidic communities that decline secular education, or affluent White progressives who marry late and medicate their children for ADHD, or the Penn law faculty’s own divorce rates. Her targets sit already low on the status hierarchy. The piece punches down and calls it tough love.
Bourgeois norms ran on tacit knowledge. They worked because nobody had to articulate them. Once you have to write an op-ed defending them, the period of background obviousness has ended and cannot return through preaching. Wax wants to restore by sermon what used to operate by silence. The form of her intervention contradicts its content.
The piece breaks the norms it praises. Civility, restraint, avoidance of coarse public attack on neighbors. Wax published three days before Charlottesville. The bourgeois style she idealizes calls for restraint. She wrote the sharp version. She wanted the noise. The piece performs anti-bourgeois rhetorical aggression in defense of bourgeois norms.
Wax and Alexander offer a hero system. Duty, work, marriage, sobriety, civility, patriotism. The critics she names offer a competing hero system built on liberation, authenticity, and identification with the marginalized. Both sides treat their script as the real one and the other as decadence or oppression. The fight runs between two immortality projects.
People who currently follow the precepts have low pathology rates. They also have higher IQs, more parental investment, more social capital, and temperaments that make script-following easier. Telling a man whose father left at four and whose neighborhood school fails to “follow the simple rules” presumes the underlying capacities are equally distributed. They are not.
What the op-ed got right. Family structure does predict outcomes. Single-parent homes do show worse outcomes on most measures even after controls. Norms do shape behavior. The cultural left spent decades treating any defense of marriage as reactionary. These points have force. Wax and Alexander could have written the careful version of this argument. They wrote the sharp version, and Wax paid the career price. Penn stripped her of her named chair in 2023 after years of escalation.
The reception tells you more than the content. The piece argued things that were mainstream a generation earlier. The intensity of the backlash measured how far the academic class had moved, and how thoroughly Wax had violated the in-group norm against ranking cultures aloud. The op-ed survives as a marker of where the line ran in August 2017.
‘How class defines success | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax’ (Aug. 29, 2017)
The conversation runs about fifty-five minutes and turns on a dispute most cultural commentary refuses to clarify. Wax wants to assess group behavior. Loury wants to know whether the assessment names a cause or labels an effect.
She and Larry Alexander wrote about “this cluster of what is termed bourgeois virtues” (2:51) and listed them: proper education, steady work, going the extra mile for an employer, no children before marriage, staying married for the sake of the children, sobriety, rectitude, patriotism, thrift, honesty, temperance (4:38–5:21). She owns the normative claim. “We are making a judgment in the piece that one set of practices or habits is better than another” (10:00). She defends ranking cultures: “some cultures are better than others in the sense that they are more suited to good functioning and success in our sort of 21st century Western modern technological technocratic society” (10:17).
Loury accepts the normative point and presses a different question. Does naming a “culture” identify a cause, or does it relabel an outcome that other forces produce? He offers two thought experiments.
The first is the gun example (19:34). One neighborhood has many shooters, another has few. An observer attributes the gap to a culture of violence. But if you anticipate that others carry, you carry. “It’s not that there was any intrinsic difference in the cultural orientations of those two communities. It’s that whatever the historical circumstances were brought about a condition” of self-reinforcing equilibrium (20:54). Wax concedes the point. “I agree with you that the black community with lots of guns or any community with lots of guns represents a dysfunctional equilibrium” (24:01). Then she retreats to the harder question. How did the equilibrium form? She cannot connect oppression to violence in any necessary way and points to Jews in the Pale of Settlement as a counterexample (24:39).
The second example is sharper. Black women face a thinner marriage market partly because White men do not marry Black women at high rates. With fewer outside options, Black women cannot exact better treatment from Black men. The pattern then gets labeled Black culture (22:00–23:29). Loury frames it carefully: “does it make sense to attribute the low marriage rate and high out of wedlock birth rates amongst blacks to something that you’re calling black culture when in fact on the hypothetical that was an outcome that involved whites” (23:12).
Wax notes that Black marriage rates fell sharply after 1960, so cross-racial marriage rates cannot be the cause (27:24). This misreads the argument. Loury never claimed cross-racial marriage caused the decline. He argued that present patterns depend on factors outside the group, and so attributing them to Black culture obscures the structural picture. Wax then offers Jews as a counterexample. Jewish men also practiced endogamy and treated their wives well (28:04). The cases are not parallel. Jewish endogamy did not coexist with mass incarceration of Jewish men, the killing fields of inner-city violence, or the labor-market collapse that removed millions of Black men from the marriage pool.
Wax does her best work in the middle of the conversation, where she draws out a class pattern. The upper middle class “talks the 60s and lives the 50s” (40:31). They marry, stay married, raise children with assiduous attention, pay for education, and self-regulate. Then she generalizes the diagnosis. Deregulation of sexual mores hurt the people at the bottom most. “Sexual mores are a great equalizer. They narrow the differences between well-off people and less well-off people” (42:59). She uses obesity to make the same point. “The people at the top catch a cold, the people the bottom get pneumonia” (44:08). This tracks Coming Apart by Charles Murray and a body of sociological work on assortative mating and class divergence.
Loury asks where norms come from. Who promulgates them? How do they hold? “Where do the norms come from that regulate behavior in a society and induce individuals to forego their momentary or sort of instinctual wants” (45:06). Wax answers that elites once saw themselves as guardians of those rules and “were not ashamed to come out foursquare in defense of them” (46:18). She names the split between private conduct and public projection. Elites can live one way and preach another (46:31). Neither of them pursues the harder question. How does a society rebuild prescriptive norms once elites have stopped projecting them? They leave it on the table.
The closing section on Black elites gets interrupted, but Loury raises the sharpest version of his concern. Black elites who might serve as moral authorities for the Black community face cross-pressure from a larger elite culture that treats prescriptive religion as reactionary (49:04). Wax notes that affirmative action has assimilated upper-class Blacks to certain White middle-class patterns of marriage and family but has also assimilated them to the elite progressive view that “we adopt our own lifestyle and we never tell other people what to do” (51:35). She calls this an abdication of leadership.
Wax’s defense of national characteristics (32:04–33:46). She lists Dutch tidiness, German precision, Italian volubility, Jewish verbalism, and asserts these traits are real and breed true. Even granting the descriptive accuracy, the move sidesteps Loury’s structural argument. National stereotypes might capture stable cultural traits, or they might capture stable institutional and material conditions that produce similar behavioral outputs across generations. Wax does not distinguish the two readings.
Her closing complaint about taboos (51:48–53:05. She says you cannot criticize affirmative action in elite academia without getting branded a racist. Six years later the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The window for criticism was wider than she thought, even at Penn.
You can describe group differences in observed behavior. You can describe cultural patterns that show up across generations. But the word culture often does double duty. It names a description and smuggles in a cause. Loury keeps pulling the two apart. Wax keeps fusing them. The fusion is what gets her in trouble, both intellectually and politically. The op-ed reads as praise for habits, and the habits are praiseworthy. The trouble starts when habits get treated as the deep explanation for outcomes that depend on more than habits.
‘The downside to social uplift | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax [The Glenn Show]’ (Sep. 11, 2017)
The conversation has two centers of gravity. The first is Amy Wax’s account of being shunned at Penn after the bourgeois-values op-ed. The second is the education argument, where she and Glenn Loury sort out what active versus passive uplift looks like.
The faculty-letter portion is the most revealing on coalition behavior. Wax describes the letter precisely: “There was a letter signed by some of my colleagues categorically rejecting all my claims condemning me no reasons were given no argument was given no rationale was given nothing to the substance of what I said” (1:46-2:02)
Signing performs solidarity. Argument would dilute the ritual. Her line lands: “Mothers don’t let your children grow up to go to Penn law school. If these professors can’t even make an argument what’s the point?” (2:32-2:43). The radio silence from signers confirms the structure. None of them speak to her. A few who declined to sign express support privately. The public-private split shows where the social costs sit.
Wax insists the op-ed did not single out one race: “in the op-ed we did not single out one race not by any means” (7:03-7:11). They named lower-class White cohorts too. Critics rewrite the piece as a racial attack so the descriptive claim never has to be addressed.
Loury’s question on the martyr complex is the best moment of the episode. He knows the territory. The risk is that the wound shapes the judgment, and the role of pariah starts to feel rewarding. Wax’s answer holds. Students supported her, one told her “it’s about truth isn’t it” (15:25), and she concedes she has a contrarian streak from her father. She has learned to separate social settings from her role as a professor.
Her line on the academic establishment is striking for 2017: “defund the Ivy League” (20:30). Loury declines to follow her there. He wants to fight from inside. They share a diagnosis but split on prescription. Wax sees a system past saving. Loury sees one worth contesting.
Wax compares two uplift models. Income integration, the Richard Kahlenberg (b. 1963) approach, is passive. The hope is that contact with middle-class kids transforms lower-income kids by osmosis. No-excuses charters, the Kipp model, are active. They prescribe behavior, drill basics, demand agency.
She names the failure mode of income integration: “the desire for equal opportunity transmogrifies into the demand for equal results” (26:53-26:59). Equal results require relaxed standards, which produces backlash and white flight, which itself includes upper-middle-class minority families leaving the school.
Her preference for the active model tracks her opening point. She invokes John Ogbu (1939-2003) on the empty-vessel myth: “we can pour learning into you we can poor achievement into you we can buy some external manipulation just by putting enough resources and money and will behind it we can make you learn and achieve I just I don’t believe that” (36:30-36:54).
The active-passive distinction is the heart of her view: “no excuses schools because that is truly something we’re going to do to people but we are going to do it with their full participation active agentic participation” (37:32-37:47).
The affirmative-action section is harder. Wax names the contradiction directly. Good people support affirmative action AND treat any suggestion of lower qualification as racist. Both at once. Her Penn Law observation is concrete: “Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half. I can think of one or two students who’ve graduated in the top half of my required first-year course.” She adds that she teaches 89 to 95 students a year and that “a lot of this data is a closely guarded secret.” (49:09-49:40)
The video drew little attention at the time. The Black Law Students Association at Penn surfaced it in March 2018, which is what led Dean Theodore Ruger to remove Wax from the required first-year Civil Procedure course on March 13, 2018. This is the sort of statement that produces faculty letters.
Loury recalls a public-health practitioner who lacked academic polish but had urban-bureaucracy skill the school did not have. Loury wants the school to expand its definition of merit, not lower a single ladder. The two paths look similar but are not. One pluralizes. The other dissolves. Wax mostly accepts the distinction and quotes Rusty Reno (b. 1959): “the decent society doesn’t have just one set of desiderata” (54:30-54:39). But she holds the line on hard-skill domains. Math, physics, oncology, appellate law. There the wiggle room is narrow.
Her closing clerkship story is the punchline. A faculty member claims discrimination because no Black students get federal clerkships. Wax demands the grade spreadsheet. “There is no group that is more grade conscious in the entire known universe than judges then federal judges left right and center” (59:18-59:30). If you want to claim bias you need the grade data first. She shut the meeting down and paid for it socially.
The whole episode is a tutorial in coalition behavior under pressure. Wax keeps insisting on the descriptive layer. Her colleagues keep refusing to engage at that layer because doing so concedes the frame. The letter is the substitute for argument.
‘Buckley Speaker Series: Amy Wax | What is Happening to the Family, and Why?’ (Oct. 26, 2017)
Wax delivered this lecture two months after the August “Bourgeois” op-ed that triggered the storm. Penn had not yet sanctioned her. The academic register is intact. She cites demographers, presents statistics by race and class, walks through competing theories, and credits her sources by name. The cultural-warrior phase is visible in outline but not yet dominant.
The data presentation is the strongest section. She runs the marriage decline numbers: men unmarried at 34 going from 34 percent in 2000 to 53 percent in the late 2010s, with the warning that “if the decline continues at this rate we will see an effective collapse of marriage as an institution in American society in the next few decades” (3:42-3:51). The class divergence is sharper. White college-graduate male marriage rates remain at 90 percent lifetime hazard. Marriage among high-school-or-less men declines steadily. The Black extramarital birth rate gets the headline number: “Now the rate for blacks is 73 percent, that is 73 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock” (8:52-8:58). The White college-graduate female extramarital rate is the counterpoint: “for female white college graduates the rate is lower still, 4 percent, a tiny figure, a remarkable figure that has bucked trends in the rest of society” (9:33-9:41).
Charles Murray’s Coming Apart organizes the structural argument. The geographical concentration data carries it: “over seventy percent of Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates from the past 20 years live in the top 15 percent most affluent ZIP codes, with forty-five percent living in the top 5 percent of zip codes” (12:41-12:48). The picture is elite reproduction inside walled neighborhoods, with the prosocial norms preserved among those who least need them and abandoned in the populations that need them most.
The Akerlof-Yellen-Katz birth-control-shock theory gets the most serious treatment. The 1996 paper by George Akerlof (b. 1940), Janet Yellen (b. 1946), and Michael Katz hypothesizes that effective contraception broke the social norm requiring virginity until marriage by giving women a defection incentive. Once the norm broke, men no longer needed to marry to obtain sex, shotgun marriages collapsed, and out-of-wedlock births rose despite the wider availability of contraception. The argument is paradoxical and elegant. Wax presents it cleanly: “effective available birth control destroyed the cartel, the social norm of virginity until marriage” (28:03-28:09).
Her own contribution extends the Akerlof line into a moral-deregulation thesis. “Pre 1960s there was a uniform and rather strict code of conduct guiding behavior for sexuality and family. This definitely limited people’s freedom but it also reduced the need for individual case-by-case judgments. People did not have to self-regulate, they didn’t need to decide how should I behave, they were told, they had a script and they mostly followed it” (30:03-30:30). The script protected the population that lacks the cognitive resources to reconstruct family stability under conditions of free choice. The script’s removal benefits the population that can reconstruct stability and harms the population that cannot. The result: “moral deregulation has actually exacerbated inequalities in society” (30:51-30:57).
The Herrnstein move is where the 2017 Wax reaches the analytic ledge that the later Wax steps off. She floats a cognitive-style hypothesis about who can navigate moral deregulation: “I posit that more educated people and non-minorities who tend to be more educated on average engage in a more prudent and global assessment of the consequences of their choices and on average greater executive function” (32:00-32:15). The hedge is visible. “I posit.” “On average.” “Could suggest a thinking style.” She gestures at the Marshmallow Test research and at military-personnel discount-rate data without committing fully. The 2026 Wax in the Brain in a Vat and Saad conversations no longer hedges. The 2017 Wax presents the cognitive argument as a tentative line of explanation that “is worth exploring.”
The line that travels best from the lecture is the elite-hypocrisy one: “they talked the 60s and they live the 50s, and as a result their lives and the lives of their children go better” (33:02-33:14). It captures her diagnostic claim about the upper-middle class with one move. The educated population endorses moral pluralism in the public square and practices conventional family formation in private. The discourse and the conduct have come apart, and the conduct is what protects the children.
Mark Regnerus (b. 1971) gets a long discussion in the second half. Cheap Sex runs the argument that contraception flooded the dating market with low-cost sexual encounters, lowered women’s price of admission, abandoned the gatekeeping role, and produced the deterioration in male behavior that the work of Kathryn Edin (b. 1962) documents. The men-without-work data carries the consequence: “the workforce dropout rate among prime age men today is higher than since the depression” (39:13-39:18). Wax accepts the diagnosis. Her summary: men get more of what they want at lower cost, women get less of what they want at higher cost, and the system is stuck because no individual has incentive to defect.
The Q&A is the richest section. The first questioner is a Trinidadian-American woman who pushes back on Wax’s lumping. The Caribbean and African Black populations show different patterns from native-born American Blacks: two-parent households, professional careers, eldercare inside the family. The questioner finds the lumping offensive. Wax concedes the splitting point: “you’re right, there there is a huge range of behavior in minority communities and there is this phenomenon of people coming as recent immigrants who display somewhat different behaviors” (45:14-45:35). She holds the lumping at the population level: “I am lumping and there’s no question about it but there is a lot of splitting to do” (46:09-46:15). The exchange shows Wax handling pushback with concession at the empirical level and resistance at the analytical level. The 2026 Wax handles the same kind of pushback differently. By the Brain in a Vat and Saad interviews she runs the categorical claims with less hedging.
The single-mother undergraduate question is the most striking moment. A Yale student from a single-parent low-income home tells Wax that he confirms her thesis from his own experience and from his mother’s kindergarten teaching observations, and that he gets attacked when he says so on campus. Wax’s response carries the political turn that the later lectures will make explicit. She calls anecdote-based defenses of single parenthood the wrong move: “Anecdote is not data… it is about other people” (1:11:54-1:12:07). Then comes the Trump reference that might surprise readers of the later appearances: “I hesitate to mention the man at the top who has so many flaws… but one thing I think that he has done is he has invited us to remember the forgotten man, right, the people we don’t live with, the people we don’t know, the people we don’t socialize with, the bottom 80 percent” (1:12:08-1:12:30). The 2026 Wax in the Brain in a Vat conversation distances herself from Trump on the antisemitism initiatives. The 2017 Wax credits him with reframing the moral attention of the country.
The closing passage on stigma is the clearest statement of her analytical position. “I don’t think that stigma is necessarily a completely negative force. I don’t think people regretting what they’ve done or feeling bad about themselves is something that we should banish from society. Regret, feeling bad about yourself, being sorry that you took a certain course rather than another, regretting your choices is and always has been considered an impetus to self-improvement, a spur to self-improvement. We have reached a point, a bizarre point in our society, where no one can ever feel bad about themselves about anything” (1:13:08-1:13:51). The argument names stigma as a public good. The contemporary refusal to apply stigma is not a mark of moral progress but the abandonment of a working corrective. The phrase “we have reached a point, a bizarre point” is the ground tone of her later critique.
The lecture sits as the analytical foundation for everything that follows. The data are detailed. The competing theories get fair treatment. The Herrnstein hedge is intact. The Trump reference is positive. The pushback from the Trinidadian-American questioner gets a real concession. The Q&A pushes the argument and Wax extends it on the floor rather than retreating to talking points. The 2017 Wax is the demographer-sociologist arguing for the moral significance of statistical patterns. The 2025-2026 Wax is the public intellectual arguing for the political program implied by those patterns. The transition between the two figures is visible in this lecture. The political claims foregrounded later are present here as analytical claims, hedged and footnoted. The work of removing the hedges and converting the analysis into a program is what the next eight years accomplish.
‘The Poverty of the Neuroscience of Poverty: Policy Payoff or False Promise?’ (2017)
This is Wax’s last academic publication with footnotes.
The paper advances a sustained critique of therapeutic environmentalism: the tendency in academic and policy discourse to explain adverse social outcomes through external deprivation while downplaying enduring differences in behavior, cognition, culture, and human capital between ancestral groups. The article entered an expanding interdisciplinary literature linking poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage to measurable neurological differences in brain structure and function. Her intervention offers an epistemological and institutional critique aimed at the inferential habits of modern expertise. Her central claim: the neuroscience of poverty has been overinterpreted by researchers, journalists, legal scholars, and policymakers who mistake correlational neuroimaging findings for actionable causal knowledge.
Wax surveys the field of deprivation neuroscience, which seeks to correlate low socioeconomic status with measurable neurological differences. Researchers have identified associations between poverty and smaller hippocampal volume, diminished gray matter, altered prefrontal cortical development, weaker executive function, impaired language specialization, heightened stress reactivity, and diminished working memory performance. Studies using MRI, fMRI, and ERP technologies attempt to map the neural correlates of childhood adversity, often emphasizing structural differences in regions tied to self-control, language processing, emotional regulation, and cognition.
These findings have produced enthusiasm inside and outside academia. Popular media often translate the research into stark moral language: poverty damages children’s brains. The framing implies a political conclusion. If poverty neurologically injures children, then aggressive state intervention appears not simply compassionate but scientifically necessary. Wax’s paper takes aim at this inferential leap.
Her central objection concerns causation. The overwhelming majority of studies in deprivation neuroscience are correlational. They establish that poor children differ neurologically from affluent children. Wax stresses that the literature cannot distinguish between environmental causation, genetic inheritance, and complex gene-environment interactions.
The field assumes that observed neurological differences arise from deprivation. Wax insists the assumption is unwarranted. Individuals with traits tied to lower executive function, weaker cognitive ability, higher impulsivity, or poorer behavioral regulation may drift into or remain in poverty at higher rates. Those traits may then transmit across generations through genetic, cultural, behavioral, or mixed channels. The observed neurological patterns may reflect selection effects as much as environmental injury.
This part of Wax’s work generates the greatest discomfort within academic environments committed to egalitarian assumptions. Her argument destabilizes a foundational moral narrative of modern liberal social science: that disparities are imposed from outside rather than reproduced through persistent distributions of human traits and behaviors. Wax discusses the complexity of gene-environment interactions and rejects simplistic binaries between heredity and environment. Because causation is complex and difficult to isolate, neuroscience cannot justify the sweeping policy conclusions often attached to it.
Wax argues that the central insight offered by deprivation neuroscience, that behavior depends on brain states, is a generic biological truism that long predates MRI technology. Every behavior corresponds to some neurological condition because all human cognition and conduct travel through the brain. If a child struggles with reading, there will be some corresponding neural pattern. Observing the pattern does not provide additional practical knowledge about how to teach the child to read.
This critique strikes at the prestige hierarchy underlying contemporary neuroscience. Brain scans command rhetorical authority in modern culture. Colorful neuroimaging appears more objective, scientific, and fundamental than behavioral observation alone. Wax challenges the assumption. The scan redescribes that evidence at a different level of analysis. A child with poor language comprehension will exhibit neural correlates of poor language comprehension. The existence of those correlates does not generate superior intervention strategies.
This places Wax within a broader critique of “neurorealism,” the tendency to treat neurological explanations as deeper or more authoritative than psychological or behavioral accounts. Her skepticism parallels concerns raised by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld (1960-2020), whose Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience warned against inflating the explanatory power of neuroimaging. Wax applies the critique to poverty discourse. Neuroscience here functions less as a source of new knowledge than as a prestige vocabulary attached to preexisting ideological commitments.
This becomes evident in her discussion of a recurring rhetorical pattern: researchers move from descriptive neuroimaging findings to progressive policy recommendations without showing any logical necessity between the two. The proposed interventions, including universal prekindergarten, nutritional support, nurse-family partnerships, enriched early childhood environments, and anti-poverty spending, all predate the neuroscience revolution by decades. The brain scans do not generate the proposals. Neuroscience supplies symbolic legitimacy for interventions already favored on moral and political grounds.
Wax analyzes how scientific prestige operates. Neuroscience converts contested political judgments into seemingly objective scientific imperatives. Once poverty is reframed as neurological injury, opposition to expansive intervention appears less like disagreement over values and more like denial of medical reality.
Wax’s skepticism intensifies around the issue of reversibility. Even if deprivation alters neurological development, removing deprivation might not reverse the alteration. She warns against what we might call the myth of reverse causation. The literature documents correlations between disadvantage and neurological differences but provides almost no evidence about how to repair those differences once established. Neuroscience has not produced a pill, protocol, or therapy capable of rebuilding synaptic structures or restoring developmental trajectories damaged by early adversity. The public rhetoric surrounding poverty neuroscience often quietly assumes reversibility without demonstrating it.
Much contemporary social policy rests on the belief that behavioral deficits are highly malleable products of environment. Wax’s paper warns against exaggerated assumptions of plasticity. Human beings are not infinitely programmable through institutional intervention. Developmental pathways may be constrained by heredity, early conditioning, cultural transmission, and irreversible timing effects that no amount of later technocratic management can fully overcome.
Wax argues that many of the causal questions central to deprivation neuroscience may remain permanently unresolved because the necessary experiments cannot ethically be conducted on humans. Researchers cannot randomly assign children to severe deprivation. They cannot perform invasive manipulations of developing brains. They cannot conduct large-scale controlled cross-fostering experiments. Human neuroscience faces structural constraints that public commentary often ignores. The constraint reflects an ethical ceiling built into the subject matter rather than a temporary technological limit.
Wax also dissects the methodological weaknesses of the field. Many studies rely on small samples, inconsistent definitions of deprivation, noisy environmental proxies, retrospective reporting, and weak statistical associations. Terms like “poverty,” “SES,” “stress,” “deprivation,” and “disadvantage” bundle together radically different conditions: low income, unstable families, inadequate parenting, poor nutrition, neighborhood violence, emotional neglect, low verbal interaction, inferior schools, and weak social capital. These distinct pathways are often treated interchangeably.
The imprecision carries consequences because policy effectiveness depends on isolating causal pathways. If researchers cannot specify which aspect of disadvantage produces a given outcome, intervention design becomes speculative. Is the crucial variable nutrition? Cognitive stimulation? Family stability? Maternal verbal engagement? Reduced stress hormones? Cultural norms? Behavioral inheritance? The literature collapses these distinctions into the emotionally charged abstraction called poverty.
Wax examines arguments that neurological evidence of deprivation should justify broader educational protections and accommodations. She responds with a reductio: if every learning difficulty corresponds to some neural variation, then the category of neurological dysfunction expands to encompass all underperformance.
The concern reflects a broader theme in Wax’s scholarship: institutional category inflation. Modern bureaucratic systems medicalize ordinary human variation by translating differences in performance into therapeutic diagnoses. Neuroscience accelerates the process because every cognitive limitation possesses some neurological correlate. The result is a tendency toward universalized disability frameworks where distinctions between pathology and ordinary variation collapse.
Wax worries about incentive effects and moral hazard. Expanding entitlement categories alters institutional behavior. Schools, families, administrators, and students adapt to new definitions of impairment and accommodation. The focus on incentives separates Wax from much contemporary developmental discourse, which treats disadvantaged individuals as passive victims of external harm rather than adaptive actors responding to institutional structures.
Certain biological explanations command cultural prestige because they appear at once compassionate and scientific. If adverse outcomes are neurologically rooted, individuals seem less morally culpable for their struggles. Yet biological framing also strengthens demands for technocratic management because neurological injury appears to require expert remediation. The result is a paradoxical politics where individual responsibility weakens while institutional authority expands.
Wax’s discomfort with deprivation neuroscience reflects her fear that the framework transforms social life into a therapeutic domain governed by experts. Once poverty becomes brain damage, inequality is medicalized. Citizens become patients. The state acquires expanded legitimacy to intervene in parenting, education, emotional regulation, nutrition, socialization, and cognition. Neuroscience contributes to the growth of what we might call the therapeutic-administrative state.
Wax asks how modern societies convert contested moral judgments into scientific imperatives. Brain scans create an illusion of direct access to causation and moral truth. The underlying ambiguities remain profound.
Wax insists that social policy cannot outrun causal knowledge. Fancy methods and moral urgency do not eliminate uncertainty about human behavior, developmental plasticity, or the limits of intervention. If behavioral science cannot already solve a problem, observing the neural correlates of that problem will not produce a solution. The observations of deprivation neuroscience, she concludes, can be no better than the behavioral measures with which they correlate.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding “toxic stress,” ACE scores, trauma-informed pedagogy, and brain-based anti-poverty interventions has continued along the trajectory Wax criticized. Neurobiological language increasingly dominates educational, therapeutic, and policy discourse. The fundamental causal ambiguities remain unresolved. The neuroscience of poverty continues to produce descriptive findings, but its practical policy payoff remains limited.
This paper functions as a methodological critique of correlational neuroscience, a sociological analysis of scientific prestige, a warning about therapeutic expansionism, and a defense of causal rigor against moralized overinterpretation. Beneath these, it offers a meditation on the limits of technocratic ambition in the face of persistent human variation and developmental complexity.
‘Low-Skill Immigration: A Case for Restriction’ (Winter, 2017)
This piece runs longer and lands more substantively than the two op-eds. It also pulls in Jason Richwine (b. 1980) as co-author. He resigned from Heritage in 2013 after Mother Jones surfaced his Harvard dissertation, which had argued for IQ-based immigration restriction. He landed at the Center for Immigration Studies and has been writing on labor and immigration since. The piece does not make Richwine’s IQ argument, but his presence as co-author signals where the project sits. Wax’s own arc would later move into similar territory in her 2017 University of Pennsylvania Law Review piece and 2019 Storrs lectures. Reading this in 2017 was reading it before that arc became overt. Reading it in 2026 means reading it through what came after.
The empirical core is the strongest part. Native prime-age male labor force dropout has risen steadily for fifty years. The trend is real and runs across data sources. Nicholas Eberstadt (b. 1955), George Borjas (b. 1950), Harry Holzer (b. 1957), and others have all documented it. The class concentration of the dropout is also real. College-graduate men work close to full-time across the cycle. High-school-or-less men work less and dropped further during and after the 2008-9 recession.
The ethnographic literature on employer preferences also does real work. After Civil Rights by John Skrentny is a serious book, and the Kirschenman-Neckerman article, Stories Employers Tell by Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, and When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson all deserve more attention than they get in immigration debates. The pattern these studies report is consistent: managers across industries prefer Hispanic immigrants for entry-level work, place Asian immigrants high too, place White natives below them, and place Black natives at the bottom. Black employers report the same hierarchy as White ones.
The deeper tension runs between two stories the piece wants to tell at once. Story one: natives have become dispositionally unemployable due to drugs, weak work habits, criminal records, and weak families, and immigrants are filling the gap. Story two: if you tighten immigration, businesses will raise wages and recruit natives, and the dropouts will come back to work. The Swift meatpacking case, the Arizona case, and the Borjas chicken-plant story all support story two. But the two stories pull against each other. If story one is largely true, story two does not work. If story two works, story one is overstated. The piece tries to hold both. The holding requires more argument than they provide. The honest version might run: a tighter labor market draws back the marginal native worker but cannot draw back the deeply dropped-out one. That is a coherent middle position. It is also a much smaller claim than the piece makes.
The list of recommended reforms reads as a Republican policy wishlist circa 2017. Some items have research support: vocational training, work requirements paired with wage subsidies, family stability promotion, criminal-justice reentry programs. Other items are cultural exhortation: re-stigmatize idleness, embrace America First, get the Gates Foundation to redirect toward vocational education. The piece bundles them and presents the bundle as a package. Not every item follows from the empirical case, and presenting the package as a single program elides which parts rest on what evidence.
The piece sits in the restrictionist project that took new form around 2017. American Affairs, founded that year by Julius Krein (b. 1986), is the post-Trump nationalist-conservative magazine looking for a respectable intellectual home. The Center for Immigration Studies, where Richwine sits, is its policy arm. Mark Krikorian (b. 1961) provides the framing the piece quotes (immigration as top-down rather than left-right). Wax provides academic-legal credibility. The piece is one document in a coordinated effort to make restrictionism intellectually respectable, separate from the cruder versions that ran on talk radio.
The labor-force dropout trend is real, the ethnographic research is underused, the employer-preference hierarchy is consistent across studies, and immigration policy has class effects that mainstream economics underreports.
‘Controversy with Amy Wax’ (Dec. 30, 2017)
The bourgeois values op-ed has just dropped. The Penn TV interview where she said people want to live in countries “ruled by white Europeans” (8:50) is the freshest grievance. The hosts are sympathetic free-speech absolutists who treat her as a brave dissenter under fire. They do not push.
What that produces, in retrospect, is the unfiltered version of the project that gets refined in 2022 and 2024. The substance stays consistent across the seven years. The presentation gets sharpened under pressure. The 2017 Wax says things she still believes but says them with less procedural care.
The seed of the later sanctions sits here, narrated as anecdote rather than offense. She tells the hosts: “I told an anecdote on blogs about my faculty members called me out for being a racist because I I said on blogging heads that I knew of no black students who were in the top quarter of the class” (37:17). That bloggingheads conversation was with Glenn Loury. The remark five years later became the central piece of evidence in the disciplinary case. The 2017 Wax presents it as evidence of academic cowardice. She does not yet know what it will cost her.
The Jason Richwine defense gives a clear view of the intellectual company she chooses. Richwine’s Harvard PhD argued that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than the native-born American average. Heritage Foundation employed him briefly and then fired him after the thesis surfaced publicly. Wax describes him as “persona non grata” (19:46) and frames his removal as panic-driven. She is co-writing an article with him on immigration and labor force participation in the journal American Affairs. The willingness to align in 2017 with figures the academic mainstream had repudiated runs more open than her later academic appearances allow.
She says “what affirmative action is really for is not to help black people it’s for the vanity of white people” (40:31). White liberals cannot tolerate the optics of race-blind admissions producing fewer Black students at elite schools. That is one frame. Her other frame, the one that drives her concrete claims, is that affirmative action harms Black students by placing them in environments where they predictably underperform. The two frames work in different registers. If White vanity drives the policy, the harm to Black students is incidental and the moral charge falls on White liberals. If Black student outcomes drive the critique, the White-vanity charge is rhetorical color. Both can be true. They cut in different directions when you press on them. She does not press.
The gratitude argument lands as the most jarring moment on rereading. She tells the hosts about her practice with Black friends. “If you could take all the souls that have ever lived on earth and put them into one of these lottery things and you could pick one at random what do you think the odds would be that you could pick a better life than the one that you’ve had one in billions” (46:13). The follow-up cuts harder. “There’s a lack of gratitude” (46:36). The argument relativizes American racial harm against world-historical suffering.
The Richard Spencer (b. 1978) gateway claim sits at 51:36. She says white supremacist movements gain traction because ordinary moderate people cannot have these conversations elsewhere. “A lot of people… we can’t talk to anybody. The only people [who] talk openly about these kind of things… are these white supremacists” (51:36). The structural claim has some force. The same shape of claim has been made about every form of extremism, including kinds Wax has condemned. The argument also routes responsibility from the gateway figure and his consumers to the censorship environment. She drops it without development.
The transgender remark at 1:01:26 is harder to place. “No matter what we do it’s always gonna be awkward to live life as transgender.” The 2024 Wax tells Loury that gayness “should on some level stay Fringe and has now invaded the core.” The 2017 version runs softer in tone but the underlying commitment carries through. Some categories of human life society cannot fully normalize, and the attempt to do so produces problems of its own. The 2017 phrasing avoids the prescriptive charge. The 2024 phrasing accepts it.
The “I was sort of born without racial guilt” line (44:41) gets offered as a piece of self-knowledge. It functions as confession and positioning at once. The host has just told her that her matter-of-fact tone about painful racial realities reads as off-putting. Her reply is that the off-putting tone reflects something native rather than chosen. The framing forecloses the question of whether the tone could be modified. It also marks her difference from the academic peers who do feel guilt and from whom she means to distinguish herself.
Loury pushes. He grants her premises and then makes her do the work of defending the next step. The 2017 hosts do not push. They agree, they extend her points, they share their own anecdotes that align with hers. The intellectual product suffers. Claims that she defends in the Loury conversations against direct challenge slide past in 2017 because the room is sympathetic. The Richwine alliance, the gratitude lecture, the White-vanity charge against affirmative action, the gateway claim about Richard Spencer: each gets developed more carefully when an interlocutor who shares her concerns about academic orthodoxy still asks for the next argument.
The two-host setup shapes what the conversation can be. The hosts are not academic colleagues. They are a comedy club owner and a friend. The conversation drifts between Wax’s prepared material and the hosts’ personal grievances. The result is a conversation that reveals her dispositions more fully than her arguments. The 2022 and 2024 conversations show a more disciplined version of the same project. The 2017 conversation shows the dispositions before discipline.
The conversation includes extended discussion of policing, Black crime rates, and the state of the Black underclass. Wax’s treatment routes through one frame consistently. “The original sin here is the black community committing too much crime” (1:08:24).
WSJ: ‘What Can’t Be Debated on Campus’ (Feb. 16, 2018)
Wax shifts ground in this piece. The 2017 op-ed was substantive cultural commentary. The 2018 piece is procedural. She no longer asks whether her cultural ranking holds. She asks whether anyone may argue it without slurs. The second question wins broader sympathy than the first. Most readers who would not endorse her cultural ranking will endorse her right to make the argument. By moving to procedure, she expands her audience.
The piece performs martyrdom. The deputy dean tells her to cease the heresy. The dean asks her to take a leave. The 33 colleagues sign a letter without engaging her arguments. She quotes the supportive reader comments and the one civil colleague who corresponded by email. She positions herself as the principled defender of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) against a mob. She composes the scene with care.
What the piece excludes tells you what the piece is. Jonathan Klick and Jonah Gelbach signed the open letter and then wrote substantive responses on Heterodox Academy. Wax mentions them in a single sentence and gives no account of what they argued. The reader cannot evaluate whether the substantive critique landed. She names her supporters in detail. She names her substantive critics by reference only. The archive runs selective.
The dog whistle exchange shows the same pattern. Her colleague says her line about migrants flocking to White European countries struck him as code for Nazism. She replies that she does not endorse Nazism and pivots to the unfalsifiability of code charges. She does not engage the historical loading of the migrant-preference argument. The flow patterns reflect colonial language inheritance, Cold War alliances, postwar economic ladders, refugee corridors, and selective immigration policy. She treats migration as a referendum on culture. Her critic was pointing at the company her argument keeps. She declined to look.
Wax appeals to civil discourse as a neutral procedure for adjudicating substantive disagreement. Civil discourse ran on tacit consensus about what belonged inside the window of debate. Once that consensus collapsed, no neutral procedure remains to which both sides assent. Her critics deny her premise that her claims belong inside the window. Procedural appeals cannot resolve a disagreement about what counts as procedure. The impasse runs structural.
Wax’s hero system requires the right to speak unpopular truths and be answered by argument. Her critics’ hero system requires that some claims be ruled out as harm to the marginalized. Neither side will concede the meta-question. Wax frames the impasse as one side abandoning reason. The frame helps her coalition and hides the symmetry.
The dean comes off badly in her telling. He told her he was a “pluralistic dean” who had to listen to all sides. The line is weak and she lets him hang on it. The institutional logic he answered to was real. A law school sells its product to students and donors. Once a faculty member becomes a coordination problem at scale, the institution responds whether the underlying claims are right or wrong. This is not exoneration of the dean. It is the part of the story her piece declines to analyze.
Her closing choice tells you the coalition. She quotes Heather Mac Donald (b. 1956) of National Review and the Manhattan Institute. She does not quote any liberal who defended her on free inquiry grounds, though several existed. The closing names the team. The procedural argument has a coalitional home, and that home runs through the institutional Right. This does not refute the procedural argument. It locates it.
Hindsight changes the reading. Penn stripped Wax of her named chair in 2023 after years of escalation that included remarks on Asian students and Black law students. The 2018 piece presents the careful debater wronged by mobs. The subsequent record shows she pressed further and gave her opponents more material. The empiricist version of Wax, the careful debater she draws here, did not survive the next few years. What survived was the figure who wanted to keep saying provocative things and to be defended on free speech grounds for doing so. Both can be true at once. The piece does not anticipate the trajectory it set up.
The piece reads well and the procedural complaint has force. The 33 who signed the letter without arguing did set a bad example. Civil discourse is the right standard. The piece would land harder if it engaged Klick and Gelbach, the historical loading of the migrant argument, and the institutional logic of her dean. It declines all three. The result is a brief that wins its narrow case and leaves the larger questions where they sat.
What she leaves out tells more than what she puts in. The original op-ed listed cultures by name and ranked them. Plains Indians, working-class whites with single-parent habits, inner-city Blacks with “anti-acting-white” rap culture, Hispanic immigrants with anti-assimilation views. The list treats White and Black populations asymmetrically. Whites get singled out as a subset within a broader White culture. Blacks get a culture-wide indictment. She does not address this asymmetry in the WSJ defense. A reader who only sees the WSJ piece might think she wrote something more neutral than she did.
The Daily Pennsylvanian interview is the other omission. There she said the tendency of global migrants to flock to White European countries indicates the superiority of some cultures. Her colleague called that “code” for Nazism. Her reply: “Well, let me state for the record that I don’t endorse Nazism!” That answers a charge no one made. The question was not whether she is a Nazi. The question was why a hierarchy claim about White European countries echoes a vocabulary other people use for darker purposes. The dismissal is clever and evasive.
Her complaint about “code” and “dog whistle” has weight. Those charges are unfalsifiable and shut down debate. She is right about that. But she does not own how her phrasing maps onto an established rhetorical register. Whether a writer should account for how words sound in a charged moment is a hard question. She treats it as no question.
The structural complaint holds. Elite faculties have become coalitions that police rather than engage. She names the cost: students learn condemnation in place of argument. The Mill (1806-1873) quote works. Her advice to dissenters not to apologize too quickly is shrewd.
The essay reads better in 2018 than it does in 2026. Her warning about the academy losing the capacity to debate has come true. Her own trajectory has come true too. She did not stay where she stood here. By 2022 she made sharper claims about average Black student performance at Penn Law that produced the formal sanctions of 2024. Anyone reading the 2018 piece now should read it knowing the sequel. The reasonable voice she presents here is one stage of a longer arc, not a fixed position.
Two things can be true at once. Penn handled her badly. And she chose, across the next eight years, to keep escalating in ways that vindicate part of what her critics suspected in 2017. The piece works as a record because it captures the moment before either thing got settled.
The strongest passage is the dean’s. He calls himself a “pluralistic dean” who must listen to “all sides.” She catches the cowardice of that formulation. A dean who treats an internal harassment campaign as one side of a pluralistic conversation has already conceded the field. The line deserves to be remembered.
‘Amy Wax returns | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax’ (Mar. 21, 2018)
The opening reconstructs the September 2017 remark and what came after. Wax sets the context. The original comment came inside a larger argument about disparities and alternative explanations. “We were talking about… some of the accusations that are made that our institutions are racist, that disparities… are due to racism, and how there are these alternative possible explanations that have to do with student achievement” (4:18). She concedes she had no data. “I don’t have the data precisely because the Law School doesn’t want to reveal it, will not reveal it” (5:19). This is the strongest defensive move available to her. Penn punished her for stating an impression while refusing to release the data that might confirm or refute it.
Loury’s first challenge is the police commander analogy (8:30). A precinct commander on local news states that most crime in his city is committed by Black offenders. The statement might be factually accurate. It still undermines the legitimacy of policing. Loury asks whether her statement, regardless of accuracy or motive, has the same effect on her grading authority. Wax answers about blind grading and the forced curve (10:38-11:25). The answer is good on its own terms but does not engage the analogy. Loury was asking about public effects, not about her grading conduct.
She makes her strongest move next. Observations about group performance often come up as a defense against accusations of racism. She gives the medical school example. “Why don’t you have a candidate for the chief of radiology who’s black? That’s your problem. And the individuals say, well, you’re accusing us of something we’re not guilty of, bigotry, we have an alternative explanation” (13:26). The pipeline is dry. To deny racism is to be guilty of racism. “If you are accused of racism, to deny racism is proof of racism” (14:13). This is a real problem. If accusations cannot be defended against by pointing to alternative causes, the accusation becomes unfalsifiable.
Loury’s response is the central exchange of the conversation (14:26-16:22). He grants the point and presses a different one. There are reasons for restraint and self-censorship. “Some things which are true and obvious… don’t get said in public because they’re hurtful of people, because they’re poisoning the well” (15:18). The maintenance of civility is not the same as the suppression of truth. He picks a sharp example. “I’ve been to that couple’s house, they’re not really in love with each other, don’t get said.” Public truth-telling on certain topics raises questions about the speaker’s motives.
Wax narrows her position once. “I’m saying the facts [are] not the only thing that mattered. I’m not saying the facts don’t matter. I’m saying other things matter too, and one needs to be circumspect” (24:18). This is where the conversation should have stayed. From here a productive disagreement might have been worked out. She drifts back to her stronger claim that facts must be discussable.
Loury introduces the MeToo parallel (19:57). Men defending themselves against accusations of misconduct by impugning the credibility of women get treated as engaged in broader derogation of women. When essential worth is on the table, people fight for their lives. “If you disparage the academic performance of blacks as a group at the University of Pennsylvania law school, who can be surprised that black alumni will mobilize themselves in defense of their reputations” (22:04). The disparagement, however accurate, threatens essential standing. Loury offers a personal example. A colleague reprimanded him for liking an article saying women dress to appeal to men. The colleague was not accusing him of misconduct. She was telling him he had a responsibility not to conduct himself in public in ways that might make junior female colleagues feel insecure.
Wax’s response to this is the weakest passage in the conversation. She retreats to “being hurt by reality is almost kind of a category mistake” and quotes Rousseau: “nature cannot be unjust” (43:24). The Rousseau line does not answer Loury’s pragmatic question. The question is not whether facts can hurt. The question is what responsibilities a speaker has when stating facts that function as more than facts.
The inferior exchange is the moment of the conversation that most rewards close attention (28:32). Loury asks directly: do you think they are inferior? Wax says, “I do.” Then she catches herself. “Let me answer this question. Do I think that their efforts are expended in the right direction? Do I think that they are doing everything that is necessary to be the best they can be? I would have to say no to that based on my experience.” She moves from capacity to effort. The slip is audible. She does not believe Black students at Penn are innately less able. She does believe they show up with less preparation and direct less of their energy at academic mastery.
The empirical heart of the conversation comes when Loury challenges the meritocracy assumption (52:06). Old boys network. Cult of smartness. The partner who made partner because of his suit. Why not relax the criteria? Wax’s answer is the most substantive thing she says in the hour (54:24-58:40). She invokes industrial-organizational psychology. Cognitive ability counts for a lot in highly analytical legal work. It does not count for everything. Then she introduces the restriction of range argument. Once you select from the top of a distribution, the variance left over has to come from traits other than the selection criterion. Yale Law students do not differ much in LSAT scores. So diligence, conscientiousness, style, and personality dominate from there. Loury picks this up and runs with it (57:50). The institution can still operate as a meritocracy at the gate. The selection of who succeeds among the meritorious can turn on other things without invalidating the meritocratic premise.
The Lubinski data at Vanderbilt is the most useful empirical content (59:04). David Lubinski tested thirteen-year-olds on the SAT, took the top 0.01%, and followed them. Even within that range from 650 to 800, higher scores predicted more degrees, more publications, more prizes, more career success. This pushes back on the threshold idea Malcolm Gladwell popularized. Above some level cognitive ability keeps paying. The data point sits at the heart of the affirmative action question. If increments at the top of the distribution still predict outcomes, then admitting people with lower scores has measurable consequences down the line.
Loury’s closing soliloquy (1:06:00-1:09:25) is the most substantive sustained argument in the conversation, and it comes from Loury, not Wax. He cites Affirmative Discrimination by Nathan Glazer, the 1975 book that raised fundamental questions about racial preference policies and got the author attacked at the time. Loury then enumerates: damage to the reputation of African Americans through the stigma of generalized presumption of preferential treatment, disincentives for striving when admission requires lower scores, injustice to others not in protected categories with Asian applicants as the clearest victims, grade inflation pressure on professors who do not want to mark down protected students, the camel’s nose of relativism about merit. He finishes with the line that gives the conversation its retrospective force. “We’re in this position where you dare not speak the truth. The thing that’s happening to you, you’re being demoted, punished somehow, sanctioned because you have an opinion, is an open invitation for people to challenge universities… show me that she’s wrong, tell me what these numbers are. I want to know, and believe me, it will not be down to the reputational benefit of african-americans for us to know those numbers” (1:08:51-1:09:25).
This is the line that ages best. The Penn data on Black student performance was protected from scrutiny because release might have embarrassed the institution. The argument from suppression cuts in Wax’s favor. The institutions claiming her assessment is wrong refuse to publish the data that might settle the question.
The conversation has a dated feature. Wax keeps describing a culture of taboo and minority students who think everyone is judging them. The descriptions are not wrong. They miss the harder structural point Loury makes about the politics of respectability. Loury reports his Black students saying back to him: “Professor, you just want us to practice the politics of respectability. I’m not living in some white person’s head. It’s not my job to make Amy Wax think I’m smart” (35:11). He laments the posture but admits he understands it. Wax never engages with the understanding. Her response is that respectability is a script of simple rules for simple people and that minorities have “ideas of reference” (37:32). She does not ask why the dispelling strategy looks unattractive to many young Black students who have watched their parents practice it. The biographical asymmetry between Wax growing up Jewish in a community that prescribed working three times as hard, and a young Black student today watching his middle-class parents code-switch their way through hostile institutions, is the asymmetry the conversation never confronts.
‘Glenn Loury & Amy Wax [The Glenn Show]’ (Apr. 5, 2018)
Glenn Loury and Amy Wax come at political correctness from adjacent angles that never quite align. Wax wants the Academy purified back into a truth-seeking institution. Loury wants the wider frame: PC as a coalition tactic visible far beyond the seminar room. They close in apparent agreement that masks the gap.
Wax opens with a sharp observation: “People who are in my mind fans of political correctness will never admit that they’re fans of political correctness they would never come out and say well you know I believe in political correctness they’ll always call it something else like civility or you know proper dialogue or even you know objectivity” (1:00)
The relabeling gives it away. PC dresses up in older virtues. Civility, objectivity, decency once served different purposes. Now they police a line.
Her three shutdown phrases. “Decisively repudiated.” “Offensive.” The bare accusation of racism. Each closes a conversation. Each marks who is inside and who is out.
Wax accepts civility as a value. She accepts private discrimination. She accepts the public-private distinction. Her complaint is narrow: “In the Academy the ostracism the boycotting the marginalization comes at too great a cost” (10:30)
Why? Because the Academy “is not a political institution. It is an institution dedicated to finding the truth.” (11:00) Loury pushes back fast: every institution is political because we’re “fallen creatures.” (11:35) Wax grants the realism and keeps the normative claim.
That gap holds throughout. Wax argues from how the Academy ought to function. Loury argues from how institutions do function. He has the empirical edge. She has the moral one. Neither concedes the other’s.
The food deserts example shows Wax at her sharpest and her weakest. Around 20:00 she takes a New York Times piece treating poor Americans’ diets as a problem of food access and casts it as a case of liberal explanatory preference. External causes get a hearing. Individual behavior does not. The diagnosis has merit. The performance does not. Wax tells a story about a Main Line dinner party where she stayed quiet to avoid making a scene with her host. The lone honest voice surrounded by conformists is its own coalition signal. It marks her as a member of a different tribe with its own rituals of self-recognition.
Loury notices the bipartisan structure of motivated reasoning: “I’ll bet that I could find as many examples to the right of the center pile politically in which people are skeptical about this or that claim that’s been advanced by the scientific research community” (23:30)
Wax half-concedes and pivots: the Left has more institutional power in the Academy, so left-coded errors get a pass while right-coded errors get dismissed. That holds. It also describes the structure of every coalition fight in every era. The dominant coalition’s errors persist longer. The losing coalition’s errors get punished faster. The asymmetry is permanent. Only the personnel rotates.
The Stephanie Grace episode at Harvard Law is the emotional center of Wax’s case. A law student writes a private email calling the evidence on racial cognitive differences inconclusive. The friend forwards it to the school. The Dean Martha Minow (b. 1954) issues a denunciation. Wax wishes Minow had said: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail and that would have been the end of it” (40:55)
That fantasy reveals what Wax wants and why she cannot have it. She wants a Dean who appeals to a shared aristocratic norm of privacy that overrides racial offense. That norm presupposes a coalition Minow was not part of and could not invoke. To do what Wax wanted, Minow would have had to defect from her coalition. Coalition members who defect lose their positions. Wax’s fantasy is of an academy run by people whose loyalties match her own. Such people exist. They are not the Deans.
Loury’s strongest move comes late: “PC policing of speech and punishing of deviance is the last resort of people who don’t have any other arguments they’re weak they’re not strong we should pay them not fear them I don’t know why anybody fears a cabal of people we have no facts in the arguments” (42:30)
The weapon-of-the-weak framing earns its place. If PC is what the weak do, fear of it is a category error. The Berkeley English department’s denunciation is a sound from a sinking ship. The country goes where the country goes. Wax counters: “I would call it lazy.” (43:15)
Lazy is moralistic. Weak is sociological. The two diagnoses point to different remedies. Lazy implies people should work harder and the system should reward intellectual courage. Weak implies the practice cures itself once the underlying coalition loses status. Loury’s diagnosis is closer to right. Wax’s is closer to actionable for someone inside the academy who wants to fight the practice rather than wait it out.
The closing minutes feature Loury widening the frame to the political mainstream: “Sarkozy came in second in that election for the President of France a high behind the guy who calls himself a socialist, whereas it is an epithet to say of anybody who is an American politician striving for high office that there are socialists” (44:55)
American political speech has a narrow corridor. Flag pins, American exceptionalism, the Israel-Palestine framing, abortion, taxes. Each candidate genuflects or loses. That set of orthodoxies is bigger than what Wax catalogues from campus and predates the Stephanie Grace incident by decades. The frame “political correctness,” coined for college, hides the more general phenomenon of coalition-policed speech in every domain of American life.
Two things stand out by what neither speaker says.
Neither addresses why the Academy generates these forces with such intensity. The college campus is a high-density status competition among young people credentialed to claim moral authority but not yet productive. Such a place might produce intense coalition policing because coalition position is the chief currency. Institutions where people produce things and earn for production have weaker PC norms because the currency differs. That structural account might explain why universities are harsher than newsrooms which are harsher than law firms which are harsher than oil companies. Neither speaker makes it.
Neither addresses the asymmetric standing of the speakers themselves. Loury can say things about Black underperformance Wax cannot say without ending her career. Wax can say things about women’s preferences Loury draws less heat for. Each uses standing the other lacks. The conversation itself is a small coalition formation. Two heterodox academics demonstrate they can disagree on margins while agreeing on the frame. The frame is the coalition. The disagreement credentials the coalition’s seriousness.
Stephen Turner might say PC operates as a set of convenient beliefs that mark coalition membership and cannot be examined from within. Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) might say the Stephanie Grace denunciation is a cultural performance whose point is the performance. Whether the email said anything true is beside the point of the ritual.
Wax cites Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind around 27:40 as a source for the idea that liberals and conservatives operate from different value sets. The citation does the work she wants without committing her to Haidt’s larger program. Readers can take the citation as a marker of where Wax stands without taking it as endorsement of how the case there gets argued.
Loury and Wax are smart people doing a thing they do well. The thing is talking around the structure of their own situation while gesturing at it from inside. The transcript holds up because both speakers are honest about the limits of their position even when they cannot quite name those limits.
Amy Wax on CSpan (Spring, 2018)
The broadcast aired weeks after Penn’s Dean stripped Wax of first-year teaching responsibilities on March 18, 2018. The trigger events are still fresh: the August 2017 Bourgeois values op-ed with Larry Alexander, the Daily Pennsylvanian interview that compounded the firestorm, the 33-faculty letter, the Glenn Loury bloggingheads clip that became the firable offense. Lamb’s gentle biographical-interview format gives Wax the most uninterrupted space of any of the five interlocutors. The polemical apparatus that hardens by the 2025 Vancouver speech is not yet present. Reading the 2018 interview against the 2025 speech tracks the development of the framework component by component.
The biographical detail at 0:36 to 17:13 is unique to this interview. Wax’s Troy New York upbringing, Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents, the Bourgeois ethos she identifies with her family of origin, the Yale-Oxford-Harvard-Columbia trajectory, the Mikva clerkship, the fifteen Supreme Court arguments at the Office of the Solicitor General. The biographical context informs the cultural-specificity argument she later develops. Wax presents herself as a beneficiary of the assimilationist meritocracy whose erosion she diagnoses. The 1:36 self-description as “working class girl certainly as a yeoman class girl” places her on the side of the people the meritocracy was supposed to elevate.
The Bourgeois values argument at 21:32 to 24:25 carries the content of the original op-ed. The virtue list is concrete and not racially coded: hard work, law-abiding behavior, trustworthiness, frugality, honesty, punctuality, restraint, prudence. The pairing with Alexander gives the piece co-authored credibility. The trigger sentence at 24:42 is the comparative claim that not all cultures are equally functional. The empirical defense Wax offers at 26:43 is migration as revealed preference: “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” The husband’s line at 27:00 names the structural reaction: “you push the Western Civ button.”
The 33-faculty-letter wound at 33:09 to 35:21 is the moment Wax names as the watershed. Thirty-three Penn law colleagues signed a categorical condemnation in the student newspaper. No argument given. No reasoning. Just bald rejection. Wax’s framing at 33:54 distinguishes free speech from academic norms: this is not a free-speech case because Penn is private and the First Amendment does not apply. The category is academic norms, which the letter violates by condemning without engaging. The personal blow is fresh in 2018. The procedural failure she names here becomes the structural diagnosis in every later conversation. The wound becomes theory.
The hostile-summer encounter at 38:32 to 39:35 marks Wax’s introduction to the new rhetorical universe. A colleague tells her that his summer was terrible “because of you” and her op-ed, which the colleague describes as “an attack on our school, an attack on our students.” Wax notes the language of attack, harm, and damage. In 2018 she finds this striking and frightening. By 2025 the same observation sits inside the Fragility frame as the structural inversion of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. The 2018 version is descriptive. The 2025 version is doctrinal.
The Loury clip at 44:29 to 45:14 is the empirical claim that became actionable. Wax states she has rarely seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of her Civil Procedure class and few in the top half. The procedural integrity of her observation gets established at 46:02 to 47:48 through Lamb’s questioning. Blind grading. Two decades of records. Multiple sections per year. The school’s refusal to release aggregate data is the institutional move that forced Wax’s anecdotal reporting into the public record. The dispute is procedural-evidentiary in 2018. By the time Cofnas takes up the question of testable empirical claims about group differences, the same dispute appears at the structural level.
The “denial as a test of moral virtue” formulation at 51:17 is the seed of what becomes the Falsehood frame. In 2018 it is descriptive: Wax names the move by which empirical questions about affirmative action become moralized into virtue tests where the answer is required and discussion of the question is forbidden. By the Vancouver speech the same move becomes the first of three structural causes of censorship. The line of development is direct.
The closing at 56:53 to 57:14 names the new rhetorical universe: opinion has been moralized, dissent counts as insult or assault. This is the 2018 version of the Fragility frame. The components are present. The systematic articulation is not. By 2025 the same observation has become the Three F’s apparatus.
The 2018 interview captures Wax before the polemical apparatus hardens. The framework that becomes the Three F’s by 2025 has only its components in place. Falsehood appears as “denial as a test of moral virtue” but does not yet carry its structural name. Fragility appears as “the language of attack of harm of damage” but does not yet link to the harm-principle inversion. Feminization is not yet present. Reading the five conversations chronologically tracks the growth of theory out of personal experience. Each framework component starts as something Wax noticed in her own case and becomes a diagnostic claim about the institutional pattern.
The biographical context the CSPAN interview supplies changes the reading of the later conversations. She is not defending an inheritance she was born into. She is defending an inheritance she earned access to and into which she assimilated. The Anglo-Protestant cultural-specificity claim is, in her own life, the assimilation pathway that worked for her. The polemical version of the argument by 2025 covers this with more general cultural claims. The personal version is here in 2018.
The Lamb format is the most important contextual fact. Lamb does not push back. He does not interrupt. He plays the controversial Loury clip and lets Wax explain. The format permits the most measured, qualified, and biographical version of Wax’s positions. The polemical sharpness of the 2022 Hanania conversation, the 2024 Gray interview, and the 2025 Vancouver speech is partly an artifact of the format and partly an artifact of the seven years between. The 2018 Wax is recognizably the same person but operating in a different register because the format and the wounds permit it.
The 33-faculty-letter passage marks something more than a personal injury. The categorical condemnation by colleagues without argument is the structural failure Wax returns to in every later conversation. The institution she trusted to operate by academic-freedom principles failed to operate by them when her own speech triggered the test. The procedural failure produces the polemical response. The 2018 Wax is wounded. The 2025 Wax is armored. Reading them in sequence shows the armoring process.
Finally, the absence of the Trump critique, the immigration-restrictionist argument, the Jewish cultural power passage, and the feminization thesis from the 2018 interview is itself analytically informative. These positions develop after 2018. The Wax of 2018 is a Bourgeois-virtues defender and a free-expression dissident. The Wax of 2025 is a civilizational-stakes restrictionist. The trajectory of seven years runs from a particular complaint about academic-norm failure to a comprehensive theory of Western institutional decline. The growth is real. So is the cost. Each addition to the framework brings new opponents and new charges. The 2018 Wax had the Penn faculty against her. The 2025 Wax has a far larger coalition opposed and a far more developed apparatus to deploy against them.
WSJ: ‘The University of Denial’ (Mar. 22, 2018)
Penn holds the grade data. Wax does not. She made a claim on the September 2017 podcast with Glenn Loury that Black students at Penn rarely graduated in the top quarter and almost never in the top 10. The claim went public in early 2018. Penn’s dean Ted Ruger denied her assertion in a public statement and removed her from the mandatory first-year civil procedure course. He did not release data.
That non-release operated as a position. The institution could have released aggregate grade distributions by reported race without compromising individual privacy. The technical means existed. Penn chose denial without disclosure. The choice ranks as part of the pattern Wax was describing.
Wax argues that universities suppress data to protect favored narratives. Penn’s response to her case demonstrated the argument. Wax made a claim. The institution denied her claim and withheld the data that might have evaluated it. The form of the institutional response confirmed the general thesis.
The piece runs stronger than a standard procedural complaint because the institution’s behavior in her own case became the demonstration of the practice she was describing. Penn could have refuted her on the merits if the data refuted her. Refutation by denial without disclosure tells you something about what the data might say.
Confidentiality norms that protect individual students also protect the institution when the aggregate data might damage institutional standing. The two purposes blur. Wax pointed at the blur. The institution’s interest in opacity coincides with the student-protection rationale and the two become hard to distinguish from outside. The coalition that runs the institution benefits from the coincidence.
The totalitarianism move at the end still runs too far. A law school declining to release data does not equate to a regime imprisoning dissidents. Totalitarian regimes prosecute speech, fabricate elections, control media. Penn does none of these. The comparison signals polemic where the empirical case had its own force. Wax weakened her piece by reaching for the analogy. The structural point about asymmetric information control did not need it.
The Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) epigraph does coalition work. Reality versus institutional concealment. Wax positions the piece in the lineage of dissident anti-totalitarian writing. The literary frame elevates a faculty grievance into something larger. She chose the frame, and the choice tells you the genre. The choice also overshoots what her case required.
Wax chose the August 2017 piece on her own initiative. The February 2018 piece answered the open letter and the Daily Pennsylvanian campaign. The March 2018 piece answered her removal from the course. The institution drove the escalation as much as Wax did. Each move and counter-move raised the public stakes.
The dean comes off worse here than in February. The “pluralistic dean” of the February piece becomes the dean who removed her from the class and denied her claim without releasing the data that might have refuted it. The institution had three options. Release aggregate data and refute her. Release aggregate data and confirm her. Decline to release and stand on the denial. Penn took the third option. The choice tells you what Penn judged the data might show, or it tells you that the institutional cost of any release exceeded the cost of the standoff. Either reading damages the institution.
Selective release of data shapes public debate. Anti-discrimination claims rest on assumed group baselines that opponents contest in private. The closing of certain conversations carries costs. Wax was making the general argument and the institution was supplying the demonstration. The two pieces of the case fit together.
‘Communitas: Continuing the Race Conversation | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax’ (Apr. 5, 2018)
This conversation pushes harder than the first. Loury is the more aggressive party here, and Wax does more retreating than she did in the bourgeois-values discussion.
The opening fight is over the category “Black America.” Wax frames her book in familiar terms. The main problems holding Black Americans back are behavioral, not external. Education, crime, family. Government programs make a small dent. The pedestrian-and-truck parable carries the weight. Even though the trucker is at fault, only sustained personal effort gets the man walking again.
“there are some things that people can only do for themselves and I think it’s the the things that people can only do for themselves that is going to make the difference to black America” (5:09-5:24)
Loury’s pushback is the most important move of the episode. He questions whether “Black America” even names a coherent thing in 2010, and whether ascribing a culture to that category holds up as analysis:
“why are we talking about black America what is here we are in 2010 you know this is not 1963 anymore what is black America” (6:00-6:10)
This is more than rhetorical. Loury wants to discipline the inference from observed group statistics to cultural cause. Wax says everyone uses the category, Blacks use it, institutions use it, so analysts have to use it. Loury concedes the political point and presses the analytical one. Using the category for description is one move. Linking it to cultural dysfunction is another.
The stereotyping fight tracks this. Wax treats the term as a conversation stopper: “I have a problem with the word stereotyping because I think like blaming the victim it’s a conversation stopper” (12:50-12:55). Loury draws the distinction that matters: “It’s not political correctness it’s social analytic correctness that’s that issue” (28:01-28:05)
He does not want the conversation stopped. He wants it disciplined. The averages can be what Wax says they are and the inference to “this is how Black people are” can still be wrong, because the population sits inside a larger American social system.
The intermarriage argument is the sharpest Loury contribution and Wax misreads it. He proposes a thought experiment. Suppose Black women had a live outside option of partnering with non-Black men. The bargaining position between Black men and Black women shifts. Black men face competition. The intra-Black gender pattern changes. So the observed pattern of low marriage and high out-of-wedlock birth rates reflects not Black culture in isolation but a centuries-long American pattern that includes White reluctance to intermarry. He brings up the mulatto descent of most African Americans to underline the point.
Wax responds with Asians and Jews, who had low intermarriage rates and did not produce family dysfunction. But this misses Loury’s structure. He is not claiming low intermarriage causes dysfunction. He is claiming that what we call “Black culture” is American culture with a racial inflection, and the historical pattern of inter-racial gender relations is part of that.
The Jewish white-collar crime exchange is the best moment of mutual handling. Loury constructs the parallel hypothetical. Would analysts usefully construct insider trading and embezzlement in Jewish versus non-Jewish categories? Wax does not dodge it. She says first ask if it is empirically true. Then note that Jews have low overall crime rates but concentrate in finance, so the crimes they commit cluster as white-collar. This is the structural answer Loury wants applied to Black America. He notices.
The historical immigrant section is where Loury lands his strongest point and Wax retreats. He invokes Ira Katznelson’s (b. 1944) When Affirmative Action Was White on how the GI Bill, labor liberalization, homeownership credit, and suburbanization helped create an American middle class out of marginal ethnic populations. Wax concedes good governance helps but holds that without human capital and proper values it does not happen. Loury’s question stands. If government activity from 1930 to 1960 mattered for Italian, Irish, Slavic, and Jewish mobility, why is the cultural-deficit account the right one for Black Americans now?
Wax cites Edward Banfield (1916-1999) on Southern Italian tribalism and persistent crime differences across European groups. She holds that some cultures are more conducive to law-abiding behavior than others, and that this is hard to verify rigorously but real.
The schools section is where Wax lands her hardest empirical point. Her kids attend a suburban Philadelphia high school that is roughly 25 percent Black, 25 percent Asian. They ask her why Black kids are not in the honors classes, are not in the AP classes, are getting in the fights. She tells them not to say this at school.
“why are the black kids never in the honors classes why are they never in the AP classes” (52:32-52:40)
This is the suburban-equivalent observation that makes the institutional-failure account of inner-city schools harder to extend universally. Same school, same teachers, same resources, persistent gaps. Loury concedes the middle-class Black underperformance is a real thing. He distinguishes it from inner-city school collapse, which he frames as institutional. Wax pushes back. She doubts teachers in failing schools are not trying. She points to Roland Fryer’s (b. 1977) entry-level cognitive gap data. The students arrive behind.
Wax closes on the size-matters point applied to Fryer’s charter school work. Even the Harlem Children’s Zone gets students to maybe 50 or 60 percent at grade level. The group gap narrows but does not close. The question of what closes it has no answer in the conversation.
The Loury-Wax disagreement is sharper here than in the first episode. In the first they shared diagnosis and split on prescription. Here they split on diagnosis. Loury wants the unit of analysis to be the American social system. Wax wants the unit to be the group with its measurable behavior patterns. Both insist they are not denying the other’s point. But the framing fight is the substantive fight.
Wax’s strongest move is the suburban-schools observation. Her kids see what they see. The political-correctness instruction she gives them is the giveaway. She is socializing her own children into the tacit silence she critiques in faculty letters.
Loury’s strongest move is the historical immigrant question. The cultural-deficit story has to explain why earlier marginal ethnic groups moved into the middle class, and the government-program story is the obvious candidate. Wax does not have a strong rebuttal beyond reasserting that human capital and norms matter.
The intermarriage argument is the most underdeveloped exchange. Loury has a real point about systemic embedding that Wax does not address. “Black culture” describes a subset of an American pattern. The descriptive language conceals where the causation runs. This connects back to the stereotyping fight at the start. Stereotyping is not only a politeness violation. It is an analytical shortcut that hides structure.
‘Does the “boys’ club” need dismantling? | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax’ (May 22, 2018)
‘Affirmative Action, Kavanaugh, and #MeToo | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax [The Glenn Show]’ (Sep. 27, 2018)
Wax and Loury play complementary roles. Loury sets up the establishment case sympathetically, often citing Bowen (1933-2016) and Bok (b. 1930), then steps back so Wax can say what he will not. At 11:20 he summarizes the Shape of the River argument that elite institutions must include Black and Latino representatives for the health of American leadership, and that the costs are minimal. Wax answers at 22:06 with the move that organizes everything else she says: “there is one and only one reason that we need it Glenn it is the elephant in the room it’s because blacks continue to lag educationally.”
That sentence is the Jurisdictional Wars cut. The diversity rationale of Grutter is a legal workaround for what Bakke said could not be done directly. Powell (1907-1998) refused to allow remediation of vague societal discrimination, so O’Connor (1930-2023) two decades later wrote the pedagogical-benefit theory, and admissions offices got carte blanche. Wax names the workaround at 26:33: “the court handed educational institutions an enormous carte blanche.” That diagnosis predicts almost everything Roberts (b. 1955) executed five years later in SFFA v. Harvard.
On the Asian-American case, Wax is right that the plaintiffs face an uphill battle under existing doctrine and right also that the empirical record creates a trail the court might follow. The personality-index point at 29:33 is the heart of it. Once admissions offices weight non-academic criteria, the criteria themselves become the discrimination. Kennedy (b. 1936) had tried in his Grutter concurrence to require schools to demonstrate the educational benefit of diversity with something concrete. Fisher I and II watered that down. Wax tracks the doctrinal slide at 33:42, where she notes that the lower courts accepted “the usual pablum” about dispelling stereotypes and preparing students for a diverse society without rigorous evidence.
Her cost argument has the shape Stephen Turner (b. 1951) names in his work on convenient beliefs. At 16:30 she says elevating people beyond their abilities forces duplicitous behavior, lies about comparative talents, and whispered private knowledge that contradicts public claims: “we are forced to engage in duplicitous behavior we are forced to lie about people’s actual comparative talents.” The system runs on what people say at lunch versus what they say in the meeting. The 25:10 line about the unnamed person who would not see a Black oncologist is the tacit knowledge surfacing where it normally stays hidden. The cost shows up not in formal speech but in informal hedge.
Her Kavanaugh and MeToo argument has a coalition structure worth noting. At 37:34 she names the conceit that “there is one sexuality and that sexuality is male” as the original sin, and at 38:25 blames radical feminists not for male behavior but for dismantling the norms that disciplined it. The asymmetry she points to around 50:15, where women are equal to men in capacity but uniquely shattered by sexual misconduct, is the coalition’s internal contradiction. The harm principle gets recruited to do work the cultural confidence to assert a gentlemanly code cannot do directly. Her point at 53:19 about presumption of innocence is the procedural cost of that recruitment: “we either have a presumption of innocence… or we have a system where the mere accusation is an indictment and a conviction.” She closes the move at 54:12 by calling the anglo-american system “a city on a hill.”
The most uncomfortable moments come when Wax extends the analysis to her own position. She has already been punished at Penn for saying out loud what she says on the show. Loury alludes to it at 20:17, when he says her earlier comments about Penn law student performance drew a response charged with humiliation. The price she pays for plain speech is the proof of her thesis about what plain speech costs. The pattern at Glacier View is playing out at Penn in real time, with a different institution and a different heresy but the same logic of insider dissent meeting institutional protection.
A few editorial notes. At 28:16 the expert witnesses are David Card (b. 1956) at Berkeley for Harvard and Peter Arcidiacono (b. 1971) at Duke for SFFA. At 46:13 the Slate writer Loury references is Dahlia Lithwick (b. 1968). Heather Mac Donald’s piece that Wax mentions at 1:00:42 is her City Journal essay defending Kavanaugh on the cost-benefit ground Wax echoes in her closing.
‘The Perilous Quest for Equal Results’ (Nov. 9, 2018)
Where the Loury podcasts have Wax in conversational mode and Loury performing the role of foil, the Heritage stage gives her thirty-seven uninterrupted minutes to narrate what the Penn institution did to her and why. Azerrad’s introduction frames the talk in religious vocabulary. He calls her a “heretic” at 2:30 and locates the modern egalitarian creed as a set of unshakable convictions held by people who used to call themselves relativists. The Strauss line he cites at 0:57, “the inescapable practical consequence of relativism is fanatical obscurantism,” anchors the introduction. The relativists became fanatics because relativism cannot hold its position once challenged from within.
Wax’s account of the Penn sequence has three movements. The August 2017 op-ed on bourgeois culture. The September 2018 surfacing of the July 2017 Loury podcast where she discussed Black law student performance at Penn. The Dean’s email banishing her from first-year teaching. The op-ed produced the public-facing punishment. The podcast produced the institutional one. The structure shows the coalition learning. The first attack failed to remove her. The second one used a podcast quote unearthed by activist students to do what the open letter could not. The progression runs from mass denunciation to targeted institutional action with a manufactured factual basis.
The Dean’s email at 14:48 repays close reading. Wax returns to it again and again. The crucial move is the phrase “may reasonably wonder.” Black students assigned to her classes “may reasonably wonder whether their professor has come to conclusions about their performance and potential,” and that wondering “will adversely affect their learning environment.” Wax notes at 15:46 that Penn law has blind grading, so any direct effect of her opinions on student grades is structurally impossible. The harm is therefore purely hermeneutic. It exists in the possibility that a student might wonder. The standard for removing a professor from teaching is now the speculative interior life of a hypothetical student. Loury at 17:02 calls this a “weapon of mass destruction” because the standard can be triggered by any unorthodox view: a Trump vote, a remark on cognitive sex differences, a position on immigration enforcement.
Her best analytical move comes at 21:39 with what she calls “the central myth of affirmative action.” The myth claims beneficiaries catch up once admitted. The myth has to hold because without it the policy stands exposed as a cosmetic remedy that perpetuates the gap it claims to close. Anyone who calls the myth false gets redescribed as attacking the beneficiaries themselves. The myth functions not as factual claim but as coalition signal. Belief in it marks one as a person of good will. Disbelief marks one as a racist regardless of evidence. That is the move that protects affirmative action from assessment. The cost shows up downstream when the promised outcomes do not arrive and someone has to take blame. Wax at 24:34 names the consequence: “we are required to tell untruth on pain of social death and ostracism.”
Two case studies sharpen the diagnosis. The Nancy Hopkins (b. 1943) story at 30:06, where the MIT biologist nearly fainted at the Larry Summers (b. 1954) suggestion of cognitive sex differences. The James Damore (b. 1989) episode at 30:42, where the Google women said his presence crippled their work performance. Wax notes that as a woman she cringes at both, because the femininity-as-fragility performance confirms the stereotype it claims to refute. That contradiction repays attention. The same women who insist they are equal to men in capacity insist also that they are uniquely shattered by male speech. The contradiction stays invisible from inside the coalition because the two claims serve the same purpose, which is the expansion of the protected jurisdiction.
Her own classroom rules at 33:01 are the practical answer. No one can be heard to say “I’m offended.” No one can accuse anyone of being racist or sexist or any identity slur. No one can complain to administrators about anything said in class. Students tell her they say things in her class they cannot say elsewhere. That is the reform she can implement at the level of the syllabus. She admits at 34:30 that she doubts the protocols can scale. The Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) couplet at 1:03:24 is the closing concession: “how small of all that human hearts endure the part that laws or kings can cause or cure.” The law professor admits at the end that the law cannot do this work.
The Heather Mac Donald (b. 1956) collaboration at 1:01:18 is the project the speech announces. “Defund the Ivies” is Wax’s exit answer, the position she had been moving toward in the Loury conversations. The path does not run through reform. It runs through redirection of donor money to vocational education, K-12 art programs, regional theaters, dental care for ordinary workers. The list at 35:33 is the most Burkean moment in the speech. Wax asks Silicon Valley billionaires to do for the unspecial American what nineteenth-century philanthropists did for cities. The redirection has analytical force because it accepts the Caplan signaling diagnosis of the elite university and acts on it. If the Ivies are HR departments for the upper middle class rather than engines of intellectual culture, donors who fund them subsidize a credentialing scheme that excludes most of the country.
A few notes on the framing. The Charles Krauthammer (1950-2018) reference at 47:12 does emotional work for a Heritage audience that knew him as a wounded man who refused victim status. Wax invokes him as the model attitude toward limitation. Her sister, who is deaf, gets the same treatment at 47:50. The Andrew Sullivan (b. 1963) line at 36:20, that liberalism is “a procedural philosophy rooted in means not a substantive one justified by achieving certain ends,” is the most useful single sentence in the whole speech for the Jurisdictional Wars argument. Procedural liberalism is the older coalition technology. Substantive equality is the newer one. The two cannot coexist for long inside the same institution because the second requires what the first forbids, which is the punishment of speech and association in the service of group outcomes. Wax names the substitution at the level of practice. Azerrad named it in the introduction at the level of theory.
‘Grievance Politics | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax [The Glenn Show]’ (Apr. 1, 2019)
The Stuyvesant opening at 2:18 sets the analytical frame. Seven Black students out of 895 in a class admitted by exam, and the press treats the result as proof of segregation rather than evidence of an academic gap. Loury at 3:16 puts the question plainly: do the headline writers know how the headline reads to ordinary people? Wax at 4:33 names the workaround. The progressive narrative “zooms right past” the test result and reverts to “structural racism legacy of racism this narrative this this way of thinking about it.” That is the Hydra image at 4:48, where the same story explains every disparity regardless of context.
Two competing accounts of why the Hydra survives sit inside the conversation. Wax at 8:33 says progressives are “weak” and “ashamed and afraid” of what people might think of them if they faced the consequences of acknowledging realities. Loury at 10:42 offers a sharper reading. Critics of the narrative are not trusted because some of them do think Black people are inferior, and the political consequences of that thought are what people fear: less concern about Black representation in the leadership tiers, less concern about disparate incarceration, the “didn’t you read the memo Black’s don’t have what it takes” trap. The shame-and-fear account is psychological. The mistrust account is closer to coalition logic. They are not the same diagnosis and Wax does not quite see that.
Her best move comes at 12:33 with Harvey Mansfield (b. 1932). Progressives, Wax says via Mansfield, have “taken a number of beliefs and areas that used to be controversial” out of politics and treat dissent as evil rather than wrong. That is the Jurisdictional Wars cut in another vocabulary. Coalitions transform contestable empirical claims into moral identity markers, and the boundary policing then masquerades as moral consensus. The climate exchange at 14:35 tests it. Loury distinguishes the empirical question from the policy question and notes that science has its own counter-incentive: a Nobel goes to the man who refutes the consensus first. Wax answers at 19:11 that medical science has already been captured. The first four articles in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine are about racism and disparities.
The Jennifer Eberhardt (b. 1965) police-webcam study at 20:33 is the methodology lesson. The study scored police rudeness toward motorists by race but did not score motorist behavior toward police. The press then reported it as proof of police bias. Wax notes the line at 22:10 where the researchers concede that young Black men might have been “confrontational or uncooperative,” and points out that the study design forecloses the comparison the data should have made. That is a clean example of how a research design carries a coalition’s preferred conclusion into the data before anyone collects it.
The university argument is where Loury and Wax diverge most. Loury at 32:16 wants to start an alternative university: 250 professors, 1000 students, $100,000 a year, billionaire backing. Wax answers at 33:51 with the little-Caitlyn problem, paired with Bryan Caplan’s (b. 1971) signaling theory from The Case Against Education. Parents pay $300,000 for the credential, not the education. The Northwestern daughter who comes home calling her father a hegemonic patriarchal racist is exactly what they paid for, and they keep paying. Wax quotes A.E. Housman (1859-1936) at 36:59: “the love of truth is the faintest of human passions.” That line does most of the work in her case. If the demand for that kind of education is small, the alternative university is a niche product, not a replacement.
Her deeper move at 43:11 is to suggest that the democratization of higher education was a mistake. She points to continental Europe, where a much smaller share of students enters academic tracks and a much larger share enters technical and vocational programs. Loury pushes back at 48:14. The University of California system, Wisconsin-Madison, and the Texas flagships are not the same as Cal State Fullerton, and the difference matters for the long-term economic health of the states and for what kind of population the country attracts and retains. He defends pure mathematics and philosophy at 54:21 against her “jobs program for half educated people” line. The disagreement is between exit and reform, between burning the institution and fighting for the turf inside it. Loury is more institutionally invested. Wax has been mugged by the institution and has the wounds to show for it.
The closing observation about Trump voters at 1:04:03 is the most useful single piece of data in the conversation. Wax has spoken to hundreds of conservative students around the country. Many will say they feel comfortable expressing conservative opinions in some form. Not one has ever said he feels comfortable admitting he voted for Trump. That line is the Mansfield diagnosis confirmed in the dorm. Some opinions have been moved out of the realm of legitimate dispute by coalition pressure, and the closure is invisible from the inside because the people who might speak the forbidden view know better than to test it.
A few smaller notes. The book Loury reaches for at 39:47 is Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck (1923-2005), garbled in the transcript as “Roger Chaddock.” The Leo Strauss (1899-1973) reference at 39:33 is Persecution and the Art of Writing. The Paul Krugman (b. 1953) section at 23:25 is the most personal moment for Loury, where his admiration for Krugman’s seminal trade and economic-geography work coexists with revulsion at what Krugman has become as a columnist. The split is itself a Jurisdictional Wars artifact. The same man can do serious intellectual work and serve as a coalition enforcer, and the second role contaminates the first without strictly invalidating it.
National Conservatism Conference (July 16, 2019)
This speech made Wax a national flashpoint. The “more whites and fewer non-whites” line came from this text. So did the Enoch Powell rehabilitation, the “magic dirt” phrasing, and the Stockbridge-versus-diverse-places litter argument from the Q&A. Reading the full transcript clarifies what she was after and where she went off the rails.
The structure is intellectually serious. She distinguishes creedal nationalism, American identity as propositional fealty to ideas, from what she calls cultural distance nationalism, the view that background culture affects assimilability. She situates the second claim in a literature: Lawrence Harrison and David Landes on cultural foundations of development, Sam Huntington on assimilation, Larry Mead on individualism as a First World trait, Daniel Pipes on European Muslim integration, Reihan Salam on what he calls punitive multiculturalism, Suketu Mehta on immigration as reparations. The reading list is real. Whatever you think of these authors, Wax is engaging with a body of scholarship rather than freelancing.
The strongest version of her argument runs: immigration policy should weigh cultural factors in selection; some source cultures produce immigrants who assimilate more readily to liberal-democratic norms than others; numbers count, and large flows from any one source create assimilation difficulties; the current family-reunification regime selects on the wrong criterion. These four claims are defensible. Caldwell makes versions of them. Salam makes versions of them. Robert Putnam’s diversity research touches on the third. Even Bryan Caplan on the open-borders side concedes the cultural argument before rejecting it on consequentialist grounds.
What turns Wax’s speech from a Caldwell-style restrictionist argument into a Wax production are the moves she makes around the strongest version.
The first move is the Enoch Powell rehabilitation. “Take Enoch Powell, a prophet without honor in the last century. He argued that a large influx of non-Anglo and non-Western immigrants would sow division in Britain and undermine its core Anglo-Protestant culture.” This sanitizes Powell. The Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 predicted “the River Tiber foaming with much blood,” meaning inter-ethnic civil war. It featured anecdotes about a White widow supposedly terrorized by non-White neighbors. Edward Heath fired Powell from the shadow cabinet within twenty-four hours. Powell never held front-bench office again. Wax presents him as a sober demographer. He was a fire-breathing rhetorician whose prediction was substantially wrong. Britain has had race riots in the 1980s, 2001, and 2011, but nothing like the apocalyptic civil war Powell forecast. London elected a Pakistani-British mayor. Pakistani-British and Indian-British MPs sit across the Commons. Calling Powell a prophet without honor treats failed prophecy as honorable.
The second move is the “magic dirt” phrasing. Wax says: “few dare to challenge a pie-in-the-sky version of what the dissident right has called ‘the dogma of magic dirt.'” The phrase comes from Steve Sailer where it serves as shorthand mockery of any claim that culture or institutions transmit across populations. Wax credits the source, “the dissident right,” and imports the vocabulary. Importing White-nationalist coinages into a National Conservatism Conference paper is a choice. It tells you something about the audience she is signaling toward.
The third move is the racial conclusion. “Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means, in effect, taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites. Well, that is the result anyway.” She tries to keep the argument cultural, then concedes the racial implication, then asks conservatives not to be spooked by it. The concession gives away the game on the cultural argument. If the cultural argument were what she says it is, applying it consistently would admit non-White immigrants from First World source countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel) and exclude White immigrants from low-trust source countries (parts of Eastern Europe, post-Soviet Russia, rural Albania). The First World is not coextensive with Whiteness. Wax’s slide from First World to White assumes a tight race-culture correlation her own framework does not earn.
The fourth move is the unfalsifiability concession dressed as candor. “We must acknowledge that there’s a lot of unknowns when it comes to culture and how it operates… it is striking how little we understand about where distinctive habits and traditions come from, how they are transmitted down the generations.” She admits the speculation, then recommends population-level policy on the basis of the speculation. The candor is supposed to disarm. It does the opposite. If you do not understand cultural transmission, you do not have grounds for policy recommendations that rest on cultural-transmission claims.
The fifth move is the Suketu Mehta inflation. Wax presents Mehta’s This Land Is Our Land as the “definitive expression” of “revenge multiculturalism” and treats it as representative of immigrant elite opinion. Mehta is a provocateur. His book is one entry in a much larger literature of immigrant writing. Inflating one provocateur into a movement turns a literary provocation into a political demographic. Mehta is real. The movement Wax claims he represents is mostly her construction.
The Q&A makes things worse. The Stockbridge litter comparison is the weakest moment in the whole transcript. “If you go up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, or Yankee territory, right? Or versus other places that are ‘more diverse,’ you are going to see an enormous difference.” Stockbridge has a population of about 1,800 and a median household income above $80,000. Comparing Stockbridge to “more diverse” places compares wealth to poverty as much as race to race. Litter rates depend on municipal services, population density, public expenditure on sanitation, and how public spaces get used as well as group differences.
The Third Worldization prediction is the speech’s apocalyptic register. “I think we are going to sink back significantly into Third Worldism. We are going to go Venezuela, and you can just see it happening.” This is Powell territory in American dress. Venezuela’s collapse came from Chavismo’s specific political and economic failures, not from demographic change. Predicting Venezuelan collapse for the United States invokes a phantom rather than an analysis. That this prediction came in 2019 and the United States in 2026 still has the world’s largest economy, deepest capital markets, and most productive technology sector should give the prediction’s author pause. It will not.
There is also a biographical tension Wax never engages. She is the granddaughter of Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island. The 1924 immigration restrictions were designed to keep her ancestors’ cohort out, on cultural-distance grounds nearly identical to those she now invokes. The arguments made against Eastern European Jews and Italians in the 1920s, that they would not assimilate, that their cultures were incompatible with Anglo-Protestant America, that their numbers would change the demographic balance, were the same arguments. Those arguments turned out to be wrong in some ways (and right in other ways, e.g., if you are right-wing and you do not appreciate the left-wing tilt of these Eastern European Jews). Eastern European Jews and Italians produced Nobel laureates, Supreme Court justices, presidents of major universities, and the Manhattan Project. Wax now applies the 1924 framework to today’s South Asians and Hispanics without addressing why the 1924 framework failed at places when applied to her own ancestors.
The 1924 immigration restrictionists were largely right about Jewish American political alignment. Jewish voters have voted Democratic at 65-80% rates for most of a century. Jewish intellectuals were central to the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the Frankfurt School, the New Left, postwar academic liberalism, and the cultural shift in Hollywood, publishing, and journalism. Brandeis, Frankfurter, Cardozo, Goldberg, Fortas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan are an unbroken Jewish presence on the Supreme Court running for over a century, and the median Jewish justice has voted with the liberal wing. The Pritzker, Soros, Steyer, and Bloomberg networks fund progressive causes at scale. If a 1924 conservative had asked “will admitting these immigrants strengthen or weaken our political coalition over the next century?” the empirical answer is: weaken. Substantially. Sustainedly.
So Madison Grant and the 1924 restrictionists were right about the political-coalitional effect. They were not right about everything. The cultural-civilizational predictions in The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant are largely wrong. Jewish immigrants did assimilate to American norms.
This distinction is what Wax loses. She conflates the two. She invokes the cultural-civilizational frame (First World versus Third World, magic dirt, decline) while what she is tracking is the political-coalitional frame (these voters vote against me). The cultural-civilizational frame is empirically weaker. The political-coalitional frame is empirically stronger. If she made the political-coalitional argument explicitly, it might have more force. By dressing it in civilizational language, she gets the worst of both: the political argument loses its directness, and the civilizational argument loses to the historical record.
The Republican Party dominated the 1920s. Jewish immigration was substantially curtailed. The descendants of those immigrants who did make it through helped build the New Deal coalition that displaced Republican dominance for half a century. From a 1924 conservative-coalitional perspective, restriction succeeded for a generation and failed over the long run because the immigrants admitted before 1924 reproduced and naturalized and voted.
This points to a structural problem with the coalitional-restriction strategy. It works only if you can keep restriction in place permanently. The 1924 act was repealed in 1965 by the same coalition that the pre-1924 immigrants had built. The political dominance the restrictionists wanted was structurally limited by the political weight of the immigrants already here. Restriction is not a one-shot move. It requires sustained political dominance to maintain itself, and the very groups it aims to exclude become more politically powerful with each generation already present.
American Jews did push the country left domestically. American Jews also built the postwar anti-Communist consensus, supported Israel, dominated the neoconservative foreign policy establishment under Reagan and Bush, contributed massively to American science and technology and finance, and supplied a significant portion of the right-wing intellectual class from Kristol and Podhoretz to David Horowitz and Ben Shapiro. Net American politics over the past century is hard to imagine without Jewish American contribution on both sides. The overall tilt is to the left. The civilizational contribution is on balance positive for the kind of America conservatives say they want to preserve (low crime rates, high contributions to the tax base, to knowledge, business and the professions).
The same multidimensionality applies to Asian Americans today. They vote Democratic. They also led the legal challenge to racial preferences in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. They support meritocratic admissions. They oppose progressive crime policies in their neighborhoods. They are heavily represented in STEM, medicine, and small business. The vote count is hostile. The contribution mix is more complex and on balance contains much that aligns with conservative civilizational concerns even when it does not align with conservative partisan ones.
Conservatives, like every group, have group interests, and those interests include a negative reaction to the politics of groups that primarily vote for the left. No group has a political essence. The Asian American population is fixed in its political alignment.
“Magic dirt” thinking claims that an immigrant from any source country, placed on American soil, becomes culturally and economically American within a generation, with no other inputs required. That claim is false. Sailer is right that no plausible theory of human behavior supports it. Source-country selection, cultural transmission within families, ethnic enclave reinforcement, and (depending on your view of heritability) genetic factors all push back against it.
The persistent Black-White outcome gap in the United States is the most stubborn challenge to the institutional-shaping thesis. African Americans have been on American soil since 1619. The Black-White gap on test scores is about one standard deviation. Median Black household income is roughly 60-65% of median White household income. Black wealth is closer to 10-15% of White wealth. Black homicide offending and victimization rates are several times White rates. Black incarceration rates are about five times White rates. These gaps have persisted across multiple generations. The institutional-shaping thesis has to account for this.
George Borjas’s work shows Mexican-American educational attainment plateaus at lower levels than other immigrant groups across multiple generations. Skill-level convergence to native-born averages takes longer for Mexican Americans than for many other groups. This shows that source-country selection and culture exert long-run effects.
Mexican-American educational attainment sits at levels far below White American averages and the gap has not closed across multiple generations. Bachelor’s degree completion rates are roughly 14% for Mexican-Americans versus 41% for non-Hispanic Whites. High school completion is around 75% versus 95%. Median household income is around $58,000 versus $77,000. Borjas’s intergenerational mobility analyses find that even by the third and fourth generation, Mexican-American educational attainment remains substantially below other immigrant groups and below White American averages.
Mexican-American English literacy rates trail Black American rates.
The Borjas and Telles-Ortiz findings on Mexican-American multi-generational outcomes show that by the third and fourth generation, Mexican-American educational attainment shows stagnation or partial reversal compared to the second generation. Telles and Ortiz in Generations of Exclusion (2008) followed Mexican-American families across four generations in Los Angeles and San Antonio. They found second-generation Mexican-Americans made educational gains over first-generation. Third and fourth generations did not continue the upward trajectory. On some measures, fourth-generation Mexican-Americans had lower educational attainment than second-generation.
Borjas’s work points the same direction at the cohort level. Each new wave of Mexican immigrants since 1965 has been on average less skilled than the previous wave. This pulls down population averages even as individual families make some intergenerational gains. The combination of cohort decline and within-family stagnation produces a multi-generational pattern where the Mexican-American gap with Whites is not closing on the timeline the assimilationist story predicted, and on some measures it is widening.
This is the strongest data point against the easy institutional convergence story. If multi-generational stagnation or regression is the pattern, then “institutional shaping plus time produces convergence” is closer to wrong than to right for this group.
On the other hand, Hispanic and Mexican-American crime rates have improved substantially over the past three decades. Hispanic homicide victimization is currently around 5 per 100,000, compared to White at 3 and Black at 25. The Hispanic-White gap is narrow. The Hispanic rate has come down from peaks in the 1990s along with the broader American crime decline. Hispanic incarceration rates remain higher than White but much lower than Black. Hispanic crime trajectories look more like working-class White trajectories than like the Black underclass trajectory.
Life expectancy is more striking. The Hispanic Paradox is a well-documented phenomenon. Despite lower average socioeconomic status, Hispanic life expectancy in the United States is higher than White life expectancy. Pre-COVID figures showed Hispanic life expectancy around 81-82 years, White around 78-79, Black around 75. The pattern has been stable in the epidemiological literature for decades. COVID hit Hispanic populations hard and narrowed the gap somewhat, but the basic paradox has reasserted itself in recent data. Mexican-American life expectancy in particular runs above Mexican life expectancy (around 75) and above American White life expectancy.
The Mexican-American story is not a uniform stagnation story. It is a metric-by-metric story.
Health and longevity: convergence and outperformance (the Hispanic Paradox).
Crime: convergence and substantial improvement.
Family structure: weakening.
Educational attainment: stagnation by third and fourth generation (Borjas, Telles-Ortiz).
Income: persistent gap with Whites.
Different metrics show different patterns. The “outcomes match home country” thesis fails on health and crime. Mexican-Americans have much lower homicide rates than Mexico (around 25-28 per 100,000) and much higher life expectancy than Mexico (75 versus 81). On these metrics, institutional shaping has done substantial work and the convergence story is intact.
The Hispanic Paradox is a counterargument to dissident-right civilizational pessimism. If Hispanic life expectancy exceeds White life expectancy in America, then “civilizational decline through Hispanic immigration” is not what the demographic data show on the longevity metric. Crime convergence cuts the same way. Hispanic Americans are not driving up the murder rate.
Where the Mexican-American data continue to support the moderate Sailer-Borjas position: educational attainment, where stagnation across generations is real and points to selection and continuing low-skill immigration as drivers.
The Black American crime rate disparity is the hardest data point against the institutional convergence story. Black Americans are about 13% of the population and commit roughly 50% of homicides nationally per FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data. The Black homicide offending rate is roughly 7-8x the White rate. The Black homicide victimization rate is similar. These ratios have been stable for decades through changes in policing, economy, drug law, welfare policy, and political administration. After 400 years of American institutional exposure, the gap is not closing.
This is the disparity the dissident right cites as the strongest evidence against the assimilationist story. They are not wrong about the data. The disparity is real, severe, and persistent.
On the other hand, Nigerian American and Ghanaian American homicide rates are much closer to White American rates than to Black American rates.
Black homicide rates in the United States were lower in the 1940s and 1950s than they became in the 1970s and 1980s. The disparity widened after the collapse of Black family structure, urban deindustrialization, and the crack era of the 1980s. If genetic factors were the dominant driver, the historical fluctuation would be smaller. That rates roughly tripled between 1960 and 1990, then halved between 1991 and 2014, then rose again after 2014, points strongly at institutional and cultural factors that change over decades.
Black single-parent rates were 25% in 1965 (Moynihan Report) and are above 70% today. Single-parent households produce much higher offending rates across all racial groups.
South Africa has homicide rates higher than Black American rates. Nigeria’s homicide rate is around 10 per 100,000, lower than Black American rates of 25-30. Kenya is around 5. The “outcomes match home country” claim works for some African countries on this metric but not others.
The Black American crime disparity is real, severe, and persistent. The institutional convergence story does not handle it well. The cultural-institutional analysis (family structure, concentrated poverty, post-1965 changes) handles more of the variance than either, but does not handle all of it. Some residual remains contested, and serious people disagree.
The conservative immigration argument has ignored Wax’s framing for obvious reasons (it is socially and politically unpalatable and empirically contested). The Trump administration’s second-term immigration agenda focuses on enforcement, deportation, the visa system, and skills-based criteria. The intellectual current that came out of the 2019 NatCon conference, with Yoram Hazony and Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule and the rest, has developed a vocabulary for restrictionist nationalism that does not need the racial framing Wax provides. The argument has moved on. Wax stayed at 2019.
Wax’s remarks about America being “better off with more whites and fewer non-whites” became the most cited line out of the whole conference. She has not appeared on any subsequent NatCon program: not NatCon Rome (2020), Orlando (2021), Brussels (2022), Miami (2022), London (2023), or Brussels (2024).
Some thoughts on what that absence tells us.
The 2019 invitation made sense for the launch event. NatCon I was casting a wide net, looking for sharp voices to define a new ideological space. Wax gave Yoram Hazony (b. 1964) and David Brog something the conference needed: a credentialed Penn Law professor saying out loud what most of the speakers wanted said but in coded form. The “cultural distance nationalism” frame was useful precisely because it dressed demographic preference in social-science vocabulary. She did the work nobody else on that program was willing to do.
Then the bill came due. The Vox piece, the BuzzFeed coverage, the Penn faculty letters, the disciplinary process at Penn Carey Law, and finally the 2023 sanctions decision turned Wax from an asset into a tax. Hazony has been building a movement that wants Senate seats, cabinet appointments, prime ministers, and Vatican respectability. Suella Braverman (b. 1980), Marco Rubio (b. 1971), JD Vance (b. 1984), Viktor Orbán (b. 1963), and Giorgia Meloni (b. 1977) cannot share a program with someone whose name in the press is glued to “white supremacist.” The cost of inviting Wax now exceeds the value of what she supplies, which is the willingness to say the quiet part loudly.
Coalitions need provocateurs at the founding stage to mark the edge of the new space. Once the space has prestige, the same provocateurs become liabilities because they signal the wrong thing to potential high-status recruits. Wax served the marking function in 2019. By 2022 the movement had attracted senators and prime ministers, and the marking function passed to other speakers who could be presented as more respectable: figures who say similar things in slightly more managed registers, or who have institutional affiliations that absorb the controversy. Christopher Rufo, Yoram Hazony himself, Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), Kevin Roberts of Heritage, and various European nationalist politicians fill the slot at lower coalitional cost.
Wax’s own situation makes her harder to invite for a second reason. The Jared Taylor invitations, the Asian remarks, the Glenn Loury podcast quotes, and the public sanctions process at Penn create a cumulative file. Each NatCon would have to defend not just the 2019 speech but everything since. Hazony is not running a debate society. He is running a coalition project that needs to climb status hierarchies, not defend its lower-status outliers.
There is also the Israel question. Wax has said things about Jews and Asians that sit awkwardly with NatCon’s strong philo-Semitic and pro-Israel posture. Hazony’s whole project depends on yoking nationalism to a defense of Jewish and Christian particularity. Wax’s “cultural distance” framework, taken seriously, applies to Ashkenazi Jews in Europe as readily as to anyone else. The 2019 speech could be contained. Her later statements made containment harder.
So the absence is a signal of how the movement triages talent under coalitional pressure. The people who broke the ground rarely get to harvest the field. Wax did the dangerous early work and now watches from outside while other figures occupy the space she helped open. Turner’s account of how convenient beliefs travel through coalitions explains the pattern. The belief Wax voiced in 2019 has spread through NatCon’s policy speeches in domesticated form: legal immigration cuts, “civilizational” framing, assimilation demands, fertility concerns. The belief survives. The believer who first said it plainly does not.
Wax has not complained publicly about the non-invitations. That silence itself is informative. She still has Claremont, the National Association of Scholars, various podcasts, and her Penn classroom with Jared Taylor as a recurring guest. She has built her own circuit. NatCon needs Senate offices and prime ministers. Wax needs neither, and the two trajectories simply diverged.
‘Immigration, Assimilation, & Western Culture | Glenn Loury & Amy Wax’ (Aug. 12, 2019)
The strongest philosophical exchange comes around 35:00. Wax uses Steve Sailer’s term “magic dirt” to brand any view that immigrants from poorly functioning societies will function well here. Loury counters with a two-equilibria argument from economics: “the fact that those two equilibria exist in two different geographical locations does not imply that the individuals who happen to be situated in those equilibria carry something with them which is imported from the bad equilibrium to the good equilibrium would ruin the good equilibrium.” The argument carries weight because it offers a non-magic-dirt theory of why immigrants might function better in their new context. People respond to the institutional environment they live inside. The Zimbabwean who could not trust his neighbor in Zimbabwe might learn to trust his neighbor in New York because trust pays here.
Wax’s reply runs: “Glen you’re saying it could be true… how do we know whether it will actually play out that way?” That is a retreat. The two-equilibria argument does not collapse under “we cannot be certain.” It places the burden on Wax to explain why people import behaviors that the new environment punishes. Wax does not engage that question. She brings up the Malaysian Airlines investigation at 39:55, which makes a separate point about which cultures produce honest investigations. The point holds, but it does not answer whether immigrants from such cultures, embedded in our institutions, produce dishonest work. Most do not.
Wax’s definition of Western culture at 27:42 deserves attention. She lists “enlightenment rights based law respecting technologically advanced meritocratic evidence and reason based accountable honest intellectually scrupulous transparent self-critical liberal democratic capitalism.” That string of features gets bundled into one thing. The conversation never asks whether those features cluster as tightly as the bundling implies. Honest empirical investigation came late to the West. Liberal democracy came later. Capitalism preceded both. Self-criticism remains uneven. The bundle works as identity flag more than analytical category. Loury could have pressed this and did not.
The agency exchange around 17:00 to 23:30 shows Wax at her most thoughtful. Loury introduces “inferiority” as the unstated subtext of disparity discourse. Wax rejects the word. Her argument: “the people who reject the victim narrative are seeing are really seeing blacks as equals and they’re willing to judge them.” That move has weight. She points at a real asymmetry in the progressive position. The Coates view treats Black behavior as response to White structure, which removes Black moral agency from the picture. Wax sees the conservative view as more respectful because it addresses Black people as moral agents. Loury’s framing of “subtext of black inferiority” gets at something she misses, but she gets at something he glosses. They are both partly right and they do not quite meet.
The obstetrics monologue at 50:42 prefigures the “Hidden Figures Part 2” bit she voiced in July 2020. “All of a sudden comes on… a handful of white guys comes along that’s what they were i Joseph Lister it not Semmelweis Jon Snow you know Virchow.” She names Joseph Lister (1827-1912), Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), John Snow (1813-1858), Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). The pattern: women managed childbirth for thousands of years and made no progress, then a small group of White men changed everything. The history has truth and rhetorical purpose. The purpose positions White men as unrecognized benefactors and current culture as ungrateful. The frame becomes a recurring move in her public speaking.
Loury’s “deep corruption” framing at 7:52 stands as the most original line in his half of the conversation. He argues that African Americans need to establish through actual performance the counter-narrative to the disparity claim, and that affirmative action sabotages this: “any compromise on that is self-defeating if you lower the bar and then try to play a game like pretend hide-and-seek I don’t see you just leave the status quo any a a differential distribution of Honor undisturbed you you you don’t get equality you don’t get any kind of justice in that there’s something very profoundly corrupt in that.” The argument builds on Richard Sander’s (b. 1956) mismatch work and the secrecy around the data. Loury treats affirmative action as a structural lie. It prevents Black Americans from winning fair contests, which he treats as the only path to honest equality.
The closing exchange at 1:08:00 has Wax claiming the voting booth as the one space progressives do not control. Loury pushes back with the gerrymandering, Electoral College abolition, voter age reduction, and border laxity arguments. Wax’s claim about Asian voting at 1:13:09 deserves notice. She quotes Reihan Salam (b. 1979): Asians vote Democratic because “they put their finger in the air and they look at where the elites are ideologically.” That reading drains the agency from Asian voters that Wax wants to grant Black ones. Black underperformance in her account requires moral agency. Asian voting against her account becomes opportunism. The category she draws around moral agency tracks her conclusions.
One last note. Wax’s claim at 1:06:09 that without tenure she would “be long gone from the University of Pennsylvania” reads as accurate. The university would have removed her if it could. That fact sits in the same territory as her substantive claims. The claim that “we cannot speak the truth” deserves separation from the claim that “the things I say are true.” Sometimes both hold. Sometimes the second fails while the first stands. Loury does not press this in the conversation, but it remains the question that hangs over Wax’s project.