Speaker

Jerusalem Demsas

Jerusalem Demsas

Journalist, formerly of Vox and currently a staff writer at The Atlantic [?exact dates of each tenure unconfirmed]. Tyler Cowen introduces her as ‘read across the entire world.’ Her reporting elsewhere runs to state- and local-level policy — she cites her own coverage of infrastructure and transit-cost comparisons (drawing on the researcher Alon Levy) as an example of the kind of cross-country policy comparison American institutions rarely undertake.

This page is necessarily thin on biography: her single wiki appearance is a books discussion, not a profile, so what the wiki holds is her arguments rather than her life. On Conversations with Tyler she is not the interview subject but a co-equal reader, arguing three books — Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Richard V. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men — opposite Tyler Cowen, and by the episode’s own word count speaks more than he does.

Core positions

Demsas describes herself as a classical liberal who holds that egalitarian ideas persist and spread because societies organised around them tend to out-compete those that are not — she ties moral progress to economic development rather than treating either as self-sustaining. Discussing Of Boys and Men, she rejects readings of male underperformance as rooted in fixed male nature, pointing to evidence that education gaps narrow for gay men and that male violence varies sharply across countries as proof that institutions and incentives, not biology, are doing most of the explanatory work. Her sharpest critique of Reeves is that he catalogues where boys fall behind without asking whether boys could be taught the same concrete cultural lessons — salary negotiation, assertiveness — that feminism has spent decades transmitting to girls.

On fiction, she reads Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as an ‘ambiguous utopia’ in which Le Guin nonetheless clearly prefers the anarchist society over the capitalist one, a reading Cowen disputes. She is more sceptical than Cowen of Gulliver’s Travels as a durable satire, and of travel generally as a reliable route to either happiness or knowledge, noting that a key insight in Le Guin’s novel comes from a character who never left home.

In the wiki