 When the New York Times launched its 1619 project last year, it sought to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. What began as a series of articles and commentaries in The Times magazine and morphed into a collection of lesson plans for elementary and high school students provoked an immediate controversy. Five of the nation's most eminent academic historians co-signed a letter to The Times describing the project as partly misleading and containing factual errors. And Northwestern University professor Leslie M. Harris revealed that she had been a fact checker on the series and that her warnings of a major error of interpretation had been ignored. But Harris also took detractors of the 1619 project to task for misrepresenting both the historical record and the historical profession, writing that the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous than The Times' avoidable mistakes. Enter Philip W. Magnus, an economic historian, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and the author of a new series of essays on the 1619 project. Though Magnus has praised aspects of the series, he says that the project's editor, Nicolle Hannah-Jones, is guilty of blurring lines between serious scholarship and partisan advocacy. And he's called for the retraction of an essay in the series by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, which was headlined, If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. I spoke with Magnus from his office in Great Barrington, Massachusetts about what The Times gets right and wrong about U.S. history, capitalism and slavery, Abraham Lincoln's legacy, and why our interpretation of American history matters in contemporary society. Phil Magnus, thanks for talking to me. Thanks for having me. Let's start at the project. It's a collection of essays that you've been writing since the 1619 project came out. You can get it at IIER's website. What's the basic nub of your critique of the 1619 project? Well, let's say the impetus for doing this project was really taking a look at the reaction that was coming out of the 1619 project when it was published back in August of 2019. And here's a very worthwhile topic that The New York Times set out to investigate with looking at the history of slavery and contextualizing that in American life all the way from, they go basically back to Jamestown, Virginia, and trace it all the way up to today, which I think is a very worthwhile story that needs to be told, and quite a bit of the content of the project did that admirably. But what immediately concerned me about it was the heavy ideological flavor that was inserted into several of the essays, and particularly the historical pieces in their discussion of slavery. That ideological flavor was almost over-the-top anti-capitalism as a... Now, so you point to the Matthew Desmond essay in particular, and that's kind of the... I wouldn't say it's the only thing, but it's a main part of what you find problematic about the series. He is... Can you explain a little bit about what is his basic argument, and what does it get wrong about the role of capitalism and slavery? Yes, so Desmond's argument is basically an origin story. He's trying to claim that the origin of American capitalism, and with that, the Industrial Revolution, everything that we've seen in terms of American economic growth from about the 19th century to the present, is derivative of and directly connected to the legacy of slavery. And most famously, he talks about how double-entry bookkeeping and accounting on the plantation gives rise almost to, I mean, literally to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, that it's all this continuous privation that is capitalist in nature, and it started on a slave plantation, and it's in office suites right now. Yeah, basically an origin story, and that's almost a direct quote from the essay. He says that we can trace from the plantation books in the early 19th century to Microsoft Excel today. Right. And among other errors, I mean, he seems to believe that double-entry accounting started in the antebellum south. What are its origins and why does that kind of detail matter in this? Yeah, so historians of accounting, I know that's a very dry subject area, but that actually goes back to late medieval Italy, the Italian city states that were some of the early banking hubs of the European market exchange started to develop these techniques as a way to do their business. And this is something that evolved over centuries of time, long before the slave trade ignites in the Western hemisphere, long before the plantations are adapting some of these techniques. But one of the points that I keep making as a criticism of the 1619 project, they're telling this origin story that links it to the plantations, but you can go to almost any society from about the late Renaissance to the modern age and you find double-entry accounting taking place. Even the Soviet Union is using double-entry accounting, and we aren't claiming that modern industrialization came out of the Soviet Union. So why the plantations? You know, I have to admit that a couple of years ago, I interviewed one of the members of Pussy Riot, and she was telling me, I was like, you know, what was your experience of, you know, communism? And she was like, we didn't have communism. We had state capitalism. And she was saying, you know, that she was a supporter of Bernie Sanders. So she was talking about how like, you know, what they had in the Soviet Union was a communism. So maybe there's some point to be said about that. You talk about the new history of capitalism, is the historical movement that Desmond and much of the part of the 1619 project, or at least the part that deals with these, with, you know, from Jamestown and the introduction of shadow slavery, of, you know, blacks through the Civil War, it rests upon this new interpretation, this new historical school. What is the new history of capitalism, and why is that important? Yeah, so the new history of capitalism was a movement that emerged out of the US history profession, mostly in the wake of the financial crisis. So you start seeing its early origins around 2008, 2009. And what these are are a group of historians mostly centered around elite Ivy League schools that have attempted to rewrite the history of the American economy and capitalism in general, from a perspective that that really draws upon a critical approach to the institution of capitalism. They play a lot of word games in the way that they even define the institution. You have records of interviews and articles that some of the historians associated with this have made where you asked them to define capitalism and they said, well, we can't really define it. But then in practice, it becomes capitalism is a stand in for anything and everything they dislike about the economy. So and, you know, one of one of the main claims of the NHC school or the new history of capitalist school, capitalism school is that slavery was absolutely the major economic activity, or rather, that the productivity of slavery accounted for 50% or even 80% of GDP in the in the pre-Civil War United States. Why is that wrong? Or how do we know that that's wrong? And what what, you know, and none of none of this is to diminish at all, obviously, the suffering and misery and just the wrongness of slavery. But, you know, what what's going on here? You know, I've referred to the new history of capitalism as the new King Cotton School of History. And that they're in a way kind of reviving an old argument that was popular at the on the eve of the Civil War. And that was that Cotton made the world's economy turn. Cotton is so centric that if you disrupt plantation slavery, you disrupt this productive process, the world economy will grind to a halt. And we know the Confederacy kind of built its foreign policy around this argument. It ends up being proven false by the war itself. Why is it proven wrong? Well, yeah, the the the central claim of it was that cotton was so essential to trade, to finance, to manufacturing, to cross Atlantic transfer of goods, imports and exports, that anything and everything that you did in those industries would be disrupted if the southern cotton supply was cut off. And you get from this some of the new history of capitalism authors in particular, there's one book by a Cornell historian named Ed Baptist called The Half Has Never Been Told. And he does this weird back of the envelope attempt to account for how much cotton production made up of GDP in the United States before the Civil War. And he comes through these these steps of calculations and basically concludes that cotton made up half of the US economy. Well, the problem is he defied all standard practices of how you do national income accounts when he came up with this, so he double and triple counts all the different stages of other types of production. So a more realistic economic historians approach to calculating cotton share of the US economy would probably put it at between 5 and 7%, as opposed to 50%. So these are guys that are basically reinventing their own proprietary form of economic methodology that's completely at odds with the field itself, coming up with this ostentatious claim that just so happens to align with this ideological depiction of cotton as the centerpiece of the world economy before the Civil War. You know, one of the one of the kind of main lines of argument in the book is that historians are not very good economists. Right. And also, and I want to get to the flip side of that, which is that oftentimes economists are not particularly good historians in a second. What is going on? I mean, it seems strange in a world of any of us who have gone through graduate school in the past 30 or 40 years knows that the, you know, the main focus or at least rhetoric and lip service is always paid to the idea of interdisciplinarity. Economics has become one of the, if not the dominant social science, one of the dominant ways of gathering knowledge. How are historians missing, you know, what's going on? What's the disconnect there? Well, that's the oddity of it. Because prior to about 2010, when this literature burst onto the scene, it was actually fairly common for historians and economists to engage each other in the debate over slavery. Economists came at it with a very empirical data driven approach to the states back to the late 1950s when econometrics or they call it cleometrics applied to history jumped into the debate. They start to attempt measurements of like how profitable was a plantation, how efficient was plantation production, and they're bringing accounting books to do this. So this form of the literature developed from the late 1950s up until the present date, it's probably one of the dominant themes of economic history. It's something that anyone that studies that field goes through very intense debates over yet at the same time there are historians that focus more on narratives and archival evidence and, you know, personal accounts of what slavery was actually like have delved into the same literature. They do engage each other and from about the 1970s to the late 2000s, this was a major recurring theme of historians versus economists. Sometimes they're on the same side, sometimes they're at heads with each other, but they're very engaged in the literature. Then this new history of capitalism comes along and one of the distinctive features is it has almost no attention paid in it to anything that existed prior to it. Even though it uses Cleobetrix or it supposedly looks at, you know, accounts payable and accounts receivable and things like that in the plantation to generate its conclusions. I see more so with cherry ticks from Cleometrix. It finds bits and pieces of data that seem to fit this pre-existing story that holds up cotton production as the centerpiece of the world economy. Right, and, you know, obviously lurking, that's not even lurking, I mean, it's openly discussed, but a book like Time on the Cross, which came out in the mid-70s and was kind of the high water mark of, I mean, it helped change the historiography of the South and of the slave experience, but at the same time, that book, which was written by Stanley Angerman and Robert Fogel, who ended up winning a Nobel Prize in Economics, it was partly done as a demonstration project to show how history could use economic analysis and economic data to kind of understand things better. Can you talk a little bit about the argument that was going on in Time on the Cross and how that kind of just gets ignored in your reading by the new history of capitalism historians? Yeah, so Time on the Cross comes out in the early 1970s and it's a culmination of a little more than a decade worth of this Cleometric work coming together. We really started about 1958. There were two economists at Harvard, Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer, that published a famous article in the Journal of Political Economy that says, let's try and measure the efficiency of the plantation. And this really challenged an older notion of plantation economics that thought of the old South as being kind of this inefficient relic of an earlier feudal stage of economic development that was bound by its inefficiency to eventually dissipate. And what these Cleometricians do and what Angerman and Fogle was they build the evidence together, they actually show that slave plantation systems were able to produce economically profitable outputs that would have sustained the institution much longer than we actually realized because of the Civil War's disruption. Right, and they were widely attacked or critiqued at the time. Their economic analysis was taken as some kind of justification for slavery or that slavery was a legitimate system. That isn't what they were saying, right? I mean, what they were trying to show is that absent some kind of massive disruption, whether it was legal or cultural or martial, slavery was not going to disappear under its own inefficiency. Yeah, and you find that in especially Fogle's subsequent work. Now, when they published Time on the Cross, it is written in a sometimes very bombastic style. And in some of the cases that were critiqued, they overstated their evidence, even though they were actually trying to bring new evidence to bear. So it's not a perfect work by any means, but what you find in their later work is a very clear acknowledgement that yes, this is a horrific institution. It's horrific economically and in its physical presence, its moral presence. But nonetheless, we have to see how it actually operates to understand the wickedness of it. So that's very clear in that literature. And I think some of the more tempered historians that engaged it realized that, and realized that even if they diverged in their own interpretations, this is a conversation worth having. But that's all flowing out the window now. Part of it though, and I guess this shows up again in the new history of capitalism crowd, is that various historians started to say, well, at least some slaves kind of envisioned themselves almost as wage laborers and a competitive, in a free labor economy. And there were stories where slaves would hold out for higher wages or better work situations and things like that. Is that part of what informs the anti-capitalist bias that we're seeing in the past 10 years of history? I think there is an element to that behind the anti-capitalist bias. Although we know from Frederick Hayek, he was writing in the early 1950s. He points out that there is a pervasive anti-capitalist bias in the history profession that existed back then. This is before Time on the Cross. This is before Cleometrics. So in some ways, I'd argue that it's a residual that's carried over just taking on a new form. What is the main reason for that? Why would historians be anti-capitalists especially? Because there's people and we both know Deirdre McCloskey for instance, an economic historian who makes a persuasive case and has her life's work has basically been to show that the rise of the industrial revolution and the liberating effects of capitalism helped free people not just from drudgery and disease and whatnot, but to be able to express themselves and live in a varied world. Like why is that kind of the bizarre outlier position as opposed to the dominant one in the history profession? Yeah, my own take on this is a combination of being detached and separated from economic methodology. These are scholars that really do not have even a basic functional understanding of what capitalism is or does and are certainly not informing themselves. We see that in the example I give with Ed Baptist and basically reinventing GDP stats. That's not an ideological question. That's a methodological question and he's just out to lunch, he doesn't know what he's doing. So there's that element, but I think it also combines with just a general left of center political disposition that's existed in the discipline for a long time of history, but has also gotten much more pronounced in recent years of historians do we lean politically to the left, so you combine that element of ignorance with an existing political bias. You start to come at historical topics in a way that confirm that existing bias. You start to look at instances of slavery. So wait a minute, that's capitalistic. Therefore slavery was capitalism. Therefore all my biases against slavery or against capitalism today are confirmed in slavery. And it's almost, you can argue, I you point out in the book that many of the many of the contemporary historians will talk about income inequality. They'll talk about the Occupy Movement or something related to the financial crisis or moments that are taking place right now and they kind of work backward to say this all started with slavery. One of the ironies you pointed out that in many ways these guys are replicating the King Cotton thesis, which was actually a function of the left. It was people defending the Confederacy, defending slavery. One of the other kind of strange ironies is that it was slave owners hated capitalism or rather slavery apologists. Could you talk a little bit about that and why that isn't coming up more as it should? Yeah, so on the eve of the Civil War probably the single most prominent defender of slavery in America was this fellow by the name of George Fitzhugh. And he wrote two books, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All in the 1850s. It's a prominent writer and devals review which is the leading Southern magazine at the time. But the recurring theme in Fitzhugh's argument is that what we would call laissez faire theory or capitalism today was an existential threat to the plantation slave system. One of the reasons he says this is he's looking overseas to the British abolition movement and seeing who's involved in this. So if you go back to the 1830s and 1840s, the leading figures of the British abolition movement are also very closely connected to the free trade movements. Richard Cobbden and John Bright, the guys that are responsible for the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 are also outspoken abolitionists. So he sees that there's a historical unity between what we would call free market or classical liberal capitalist thought at that time in anti-slavery thought. And he thinks that markets are being brought to bear to out-compete and make slavery obsolete is basically his argument. He thinks that capitalism or laissez faire theory, he even goes so far as to say is that war with the slave plantation system? Why? Because it's disrupting the social order. He even comes up with what we would call like a proto-Marxist argument that says that slavery is superior to competitive free labor because competitive free laborers are exploited and denied their surplus value of their labor by the evil capitalists. So this is writing about a decade before Marx does, he essentially comes at it from a pro-slavery angle but comes to the same conclusion. So we see this throughout Titchu's work a very pronounced explicit anti-capitalist position but it's also a pro-slavery position. Right. And that also fits in well with a kind of cultural reading of the antebellum South and actually even the post-Civil War South or the white supremacist dimension of the South. These were not people who liked cosmopolitanism, they didn't like cities, they didn't like capitalism, they didn't like trade. I mean, they didn't like a lot of things that are identified with capitalism because it was disruptive to a kind of hierarchical static society. Yeah, and the King Cotton Theory of Economics is premised on the notion of essentially like a replicated feudal estate where you have the elite on top, you have the lords of the estate which are the plantation owners and then James Henry Hammond who's the guy that coins King Cotton Theory and a famous speech before the US Senate. He announces that the proper economic social order is built upon what he calls the mudsill and the mudsill is the bottom rung of society, the labouring class that allows the elite, intellectual leaders, which he saw himself as to live the good life and to develop culture and to develop an intellectual pursuit separate and apart from the menial tasks of labour. But his premise of this economic system is you need someone to do the menial tasks and the slaves are there to do that. So it's a very structured hierarchical way of looking at the economy that diverges sharply from everything we know about free labour and competition and people choosing their own course in life, people exercising their own agency and deciding where to work. He wants a top-down directive being offered by the almost paternalistic lord of the estate, the plantation owner that tells the working class where their rung is in society and what they have to do. And you can see that in kind of proto-socialists like Thomas Carlyle. Absolutely. In certain kind of backward-looking Marxist theorists who look back at the Middle Ages, for instance, and love it because even though not everything is equal or anything like that, everybody has a place and an order and they're respected as somehow being integral to a society as opposed to a capitalist society where the machine just kind of like the wheel spin off and all kinds of weird stuff happens. You have someone like Thomas Carlyle. So Fitzhugh is a student of Thomas Carlyle, a great admirer. He takes the title of one of his book Cannibals All from Carlyle's diagnosis of the Irish lower class during the famines. He says that this is similar to the slave situation. They're like the Irish peasants, basically. So you have a disciple of Carlyle that's carrying forth his anti-market bias and we see this taking place in a dialogue across the Atlantic. So Carlyle's famous, he coins the term economics is the dismal science because economics wants to free the slaves, wants to emancipate the colonies. Well, you see someone like Fitzhugh picks that up and runs with it and says, yes, this is also true in the United States, the dismal science, the science of Adam Smith and Richard Cobden and John Bright and David Ricardo wants to liberate the slaves of the South. So in one of the most glaring passages in his book, he says, I want to displace this political economy of freedom. I want to toss Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Sey and all these great liberal economists into the fire and replace it with this paternalistic kind of futile approach to an organized society in its economy. You know, if one of the major misunderstandings then of, you know, and part of your critique of the 69 protein project is that it misunderstands the economics of slavery and the larger kind of set of issues and realities that come out of that. Another big part of it has to do with the work by the editor of the project, Nikole Hannah Jones could you talk a little bit about what her primary mistake is as you see it in that work? What was that? Right, so Nikole Hannah Jones wrote what could be considered kind of like a synthesis essay of summarizing all the purposes of the project, but she also takes on the main treatment of the American Revolution and covers basically the period from about 1775 through the Civil War. There's a big focus in her essay. And one of the claims she makes, and this is the one that got her into trouble with all these prominent historians, she claims that the American Revolution was principally fought to protect slavery against the British. And this comes about from what I would argue is a very poor misreading of bits and pieces of the evidence of what's going on in the anti-slavery scene on the eve of the American Revolution. There are two events that happened. One is in Great Britain proper, there's a famous legal case that frees a slave that's brought over from the colonies into England. Basically he's petitions for a writ of habeas corpus and the judge grants it to him on the grounds that he was being held against his will in England when there's no law on the book that establishes slavery to hold them there. So this is a major victory in the sense that it triggers the British abolition movement. This is 1772. So she says, well, wait a minute, abolition's emerging in Great Britain. That's true, but she also mistakes that for a motive in the colonists. When they revolt four years later, start to resist the crown. She makes this argument that the 1772 decision in the British courts was now seen as an existential threat being carried over to the American colonies, which is not true at all. So it's kind of like if America doesn't break free. England or of Britain, Britain is going to outlaw slavery. Exactly, exactly. So obvious. What, you know, why is that obviously wrong? Well, the first and clearest point of evidence is Britain does not outlaw slavery in its own remaining colonies for another 50 years after the American Revolution. It's not until 1830 that Britain really starts to seriously consider emancipation in its Caribbean and holdings all of its other colonies around the world. And that comes about after a 50-year legislative slog. We have the first evidence, I believe it's 1789, is the first attempt to have a serious discussion about just outlawing the British slave trade in Great Britain proper. It takes an almost 20-year battle before that bill even passes parliament. So there's very little evidence that Britain was on the precipice of abolishing slavery in the colonies and quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. Now, the Times has made a minor kind of concession on this. How did they change the language that they used to talk about that point? And what does that say about their, in your mind, their commitment to the truth? Yeah, yeah. So the original version basically stressed the preeminence of slavery as a cause of precipitating the American Revolution. And they backed down. It was just a very, very minor editing of the text that basically changed it from a preeminent cause to a cause considered by some members of American society. And that's a more tepid claim, but there's a little bit more evidence that you can say behind that. Because there are instances of resistance among the patriots, among the American colonists, when various British officials try to offer freedom to slaves in exchange for fighting in the loyalist armies. Although it's also telling in those cases, it's always, if you're fighting for the loyalists and you're being held by American patriots, we'll free you. But if you're owned by loyalists, forget it. Right, right. So this is a caveat. It's put into the famous proclamation. It's called War of Dunmore's Proclamation. It comes out in late 1775. He's the governor of Virginia. And he's basically on the run from the emerging rebels at the time. So as his last ditch effort to hold on to his rule is, he says, I will free any slave that belongs to someone in rebellion that comes over and joins my army. Oh, by the way, any loyalist slave owner is exempt from this. Right. Now, you do say, I mean, you're not just panning the 1619 project. And you say, it has a lot of good stuff in it. I want to get to that larger question in a second. But just focusing on Nicole Hannah-Jones a little bit more, you do say that her reading of Lincoln is an important one and that it brings nuance that oftentimes gets dismissed in discussions of Lincoln. Can you talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. So this is one area that I've credited the project of being more right than wrong or more right than the critics. So what Nicole Hannah-Jones does is she attempts to contextualize the American Civil War from the African-American perspective, which does chafe with kind of the more standard history that views Lincoln as the great emancipator who comes in and benevolently extends freedom to the slaves. So one of the issues she explores is what was Lincoln's thought on a post-slavery society? What would a post-slavery United States look like? And the best evidence that we have, including evidence that I've worked on as a historian directly, is that Lincoln had a very conflicted viewpoint. He is absolutely in favor of ending slavery. He absolutely sees it as a moral cause. And he acts like that in very bold ways that I think we should be forever thankful for. Yet at the same time, he's fearful that a post-slavery United States, a multiracial United States, will descend into political violence. And part of that fear leads him to start entertaining ideas such as, do we attempt to relocate the freed slaves abroad? This is the old idea of send them back to Africa, send them to Liberia. And during the Civil War, Lincoln adapts this idea. He says, well, maybe we can acquire property in the Caribbean and South America and use that as a locale to set all the freed slaves on. So Nicole Hanna-Jones pays attention to this. She brings this into greater notice than many historians have been willing to do because the standard approach to treating colonization, it's often seen as like this footnote, this aberration in Lincoln's legacy that he may be toyed around with but ultimately moved beyond an abandoned and therefore we can't really judge him or evaluate him against it. She says, no, wait a minute. This is a complexity that shows this isn't like the great white savior stepping in. This is actually a practical politician who is wrestling with some ideas and it actually took him in directions that today we consider morally fraught, even though he does generally good on the whole in freeing slaves, he's very conflicted on that. You know, part of your critique is that it's not that they're trying this, that the Times is doing the 1619 project, but that they toggle back and forth between trying to be serious scholars and they have half a dozen historians, none of the period that we're talking about from the colonial period through the Civil War, but they have real advisors going on and people contributing to this. But so on the one hand, they're making serious or they're attempting to do serious work in a popular venue. And then on the other hand, it's just kind of the worst sort of presentist advocacy. You know, and it's like, this is what I believe now and so I'm gonna rummage through the past and create a genealogy that completely authorizes everything that I believe in and I create a hero, you know, I create a pantheon of heroes and I create, you know, a cast of villains. What, you know, talk a little bit about that and about your interactions both with Hannah Jones as well as the editor of The Times Magazine. How does that make you feel? Like, I mean, are they on the up and up or are they kind of fair weather scholars? Yeah, I think they have enlisted scholarship very inconsistently across the project. And you'll notice that, you know, this is a massive undertaking. It's a magazine with like 20, 25 different articles in here from all sorts of different authors and it's only a small handful of them that have received this backlash, received this criticism. The other works in there are probably best categorized as popular representations of the author's scholarly work. It's a distillation for the New York Times readership of things that would appear in an academic journal, article, or a book. And that has not been criticized because it's probably pretty high quality representations of what those authors were arguing. But you've got these three or four pieces, the Matthew Desmond one, there's Nicole Hannah-Jones's lead essay and then one or two others that have really blended the lines between scholarship and advocacy. And this is where you start seeing claims that capitalism emerged from slavery and we see this today in the criticism of Obamacare. Or we see this today in the fact that Republicans are resistant to raising taxes for redistribution purposes. So it's a very presentist agenda that's projected onto historical scholarship. And I think very unfortunately to the project, the Times has dug in its heels behind these political and ideological insertions into the historical narrative and that's dragged down some of the quality of the other work in there. So my own interactions with Nicole Hannah-Jones, right after this is published, I was one of the first scholars to engage the 1619 project, particularly critiquing Matthew Desmond's piece. And that included both some Twitter back and forth with the Nicole Hannah-Jones and a few letters that I wrote to the editor of the Times Magazine pointing out factual mistakes and Matthew Desmond's piece. And in both cases, I found not only a willingness to adhere to kind of this ideological line, but there was almost like an encourageability to even budge in the slightest and recognizing that they had overstepped scholarly boundaries and moved into this advocacy politics in ways that really wasn't supported by the evidence. So for example, I asked the Times editor to correct a few claims in the Matthew Desmond piece, which I spell out in the book, spell it as an essay of why it should be retracted. And the response was kind of to brush it aside. It was to come up with excuses for why I would say a very clear misrepresentation of evidence that he engaged in was nonetheless permissible because it fit with the broader narrative, which they considered to be true. At the same time in Nicole Hannah-Jones's case, she very heavily relied on this new history of capitalism school. The thing I pointed out to her right off the bat when this was published was just how contentious this school of thought was among other historians and among other economic historians who have blasted it, who have been very devastating in some of their critiques. And she advanced absolutely no awareness that there was even this dialogue going on within the academic literature, which shows up. I think I counted it up. There were seven different scholars that are cited in this one article on the history of capitalism and slavery and all seven of them are connected to the new history of capitalism school. No one else from outside of that school. So you're basically cutting off the scholarly conversation and she seemed entirely unconcerned by that. You know, let's talk a little bit about Lincoln and libertarians. You know, your take on Lincoln is very nuanced. Lincoln looms large among many kind of actual economists or historians of a libertarian bent as a particularly terrible leader. You know, he's the American Caesar. I mean, it's a kind of retreat of Edmund Wilson's old attacks on Lincoln from a left-wing perspective in the 30s and 40s. Why is Lincoln singled out among libertarian historians? Or, you know, and then, you know, people at the, you know, at lurockwell.com and the Von Mises Institute, Ron Paul never has a good word to say about Lincoln. What's going on there? Yeah, my own take on Lincoln is very nuanced. I rate him kind of in the middle of the pack of the presidents. There's some very good things he did, obviously connected to emancipating the slaves. I think his governmental style is approached during the war, involves some instances of mismanagement. You know, we always hear about that the suspension of habeas corpus is something that really rubs libertarians the wrong way. And I think there are valid criticisms of Lincoln in that sphere. What I think that literature does that goes kind of off the rails in some cases or really overstates its case in some of the instances is they tend to project backwards onto Lincoln the effects of the evolution of the American state and the 150 odd years since his presidency. So there are very genuine concerns that we see in the 20th century about the erosion of federalism and the emergence of a very top-down regulatory state on the federal level. A lot of this comes from Woodrow Wilson and FDR in particular, but the claim is made that they're building on the blocks that Lincoln provided them through the course of the Civil War. So it's almost like a presentist projection backwards for the libertarian sphere as well. We're unhappy with the legacy of FDR. And one of the inclinations is to look back in history and say, where did this start? Well, there's certainly political rhetoric on the progressive left that tries to claim Lincoln as one of their own. But everybody claimed Lincoln. Exactly. I mean, everybody claimed Washington and Lincoln. And you know, what is the racial dimension there or the slavery dimension? Because, you know, one of the odd things is that when people start to talk about Lincoln and many of the same people who are arch-critics among libertarians will also say that the Civil War was not fought in any way, shape, or form over slavery. And it was really about taxes or about trade policy. And that in order to believe that you have to deny all of the evidence of the fact that southern states seceded from the Union and all of them in their documents said, we are doing this because of slavery, not because of taxes or tariffs. You know, what do you think is going on there? Yeah, and it's not just succeeding because of slavery, it's succeeding because they viewed the election of Lincoln as an existential threat to public federal subsidies to hold up the institution of slavery. You read these declarations, they're furious that Lincoln may undermine the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which is basically like this big government federal scheme to throw money into sending these slave patrols out to round up escaped fugitives. Well, and then, I mean, obviously, I'm perhaps most famously in the cornerstone speech by Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, he says, you know, slavery isn't incidental to the sound. It is the very cornerstone and like, you know, a racial hierarchy in which white, you know, smart white people are at the top, dumb white people are somewhere in between and black slaves are at the bottom, that this is the society, capitalism, industrialism, all of this is a threat to it. What, you know, do you have a theory as to what explains that weird fixation among libertarians? Yeah, again, I think it's a case of presentism and it involves almost willfully setting aside evidence, willfully setting aside historical evidence to try to rationalize or make the story fit for the explanation that they want to offer to tell why FDR was successful in implementing the New Deal, to tell why the income tax exists today or why the Federal Reserve exists today. So you have this litany of policies in the present day that libertarians, I think, with reason find objectionable and they want to find an origin story of tracing it back to the Civil War and that makes them more willing to set aside evidence that conflicts with that origin story or try to emphasize, well, maybe the Civil War was caused by tariffs. You throw on top of this and there's some complexity to it, the Confederates were very effective propagandists for their cause. They knew during the American Civil War, in Britain in particular, that a lot of the abolitionists, a lot of the people like Richard Cobden and John Bright were sympathetic to free trade. They knew that the abolitionists were sympathetic to these pro-market arguments because they had been arguing them for years. Cobden is like a pen pal with Charles Sumner, one of the abolitionist senators who's famous in that era is the leading voice of anti-slavery in the North, but the Southerners see this and they're on a quest for diplomatic recognition or trying to keep Britain either out of the war or even get it to come into the war on their side against the North. So they really play up these explanations that are saying this isn't really about slavery, this is about tariffs or taxation. So we have this historical record of what's essentially pro-Confederate propaganda that was offered to try and dupe some of the foreign powers into coming into their side during the war. And unfortunately, I think a lot of libertarians have seen that and they've taken it at face value and tried to elevate it to their own narrative. You've also written, you were a vocal and I think particularly effective critic of Nancy McClain and her book Democracy in Chains, which essentially said that libertarianism and things like school choice, the idea of school choice is a neoconfederate plot. And she picks up on a point which I think people in the libertarian movement were always kind of slow to, which is that in the 1955 essay that Milton Friedman wrote talking about school vouchers for the first time, he does mention kind of what was brewing as massive resistance in the South to create essentially a voucher program so that whites could stay in segregated schools in the wake of Brown versus Board of Education. What is the effect do you think on this kind of linking up of Confederacy in certain cases, anti-Lincoln rhetoric and the modern libertarian movement when Rand Paul announced that he was gonna run for president, which he did on the Rachel Maddow show, he immediately got embroiled in a conversation about how the Civil Rights Act was, the real problem with it was, that it meant that you couldn't have segregated lunch counters anymore or something like that. There's something, I don't know any libertarians who are racist or are apologists for a state segregated society, but it keeps coming up. Can you talk a little bit about this and how do we clarify what's going on in a way that allows libertarians to stop having to explain things that aren't actually part of their legacy? Yeah, I worry that quite a bit of this comes out of just a natural contrarianism, contrarianism against what's the official history or the standard dialogue, and quite a bit of that takes the form of trying to be too clever by half. It takes the form of, oh, I'm gonna offer an edgy take that may sound like it chafes with conventional wisdom, but it also ends up being a tone deafness to some very real struggles. My counter to that is, and I'd urge any and every libertarian listener, reader out there to investigate your own history, investigate the history of where classical liberalism came from, rediscover people like Richard Cobden or even go back to some better known names like Frederick Bosteot, go back to the lesser known works of Adam Smith, you find explicit abolitionism running throughout all of these works. That is a classical liberal cause, possibly the preeminent cause of classical liberals in the 19th century before the Civil War is ending slavery. And we've kind of, I wouldn't say jettisoned, we've just set it aside and forgotten that legacy is also part of our system of ideas too. There is, I guess there's a sociological dimension to this in that Barry Goldwater, for many people, and I know older libertarians will talk about kind of being activated into politics in the 60s by Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater. And Barry Goldwater, who by everyone's account, even his critical biographers will say, this was not a guy who was a racist or anything, but there's no question in 1964, he rolled that way. And that creates a kind of toxic junction, I think, that hasn't been fully kind of excavated and worked through, I suspect, by libertarians. Yeah, I think unfortunately, what we saw in the Goldwater movement is, you have a, he's a very intellectual candidate. He's a guy that thinks about ideas very seriously, he surrounds himself with advisors that are, we consider well-known libertarian figures today. It's Carl Hess, it's Warren Nutter, it's very prominent thinkers, intellectuals. But part of the struggle that comes out of the Goldwater movement is, if you're running for political office, you want to win. And I think, unfortunately, he tapped into a current of votes that happened to be the Deep South. It happened to be the Gulf Coast states that are involved in this, either massive resistance against desegregation or that gravitate to him, not because of the intellectual message he's put forth, but because they see him as a vehicle to fighting back against the Civil Rights Act. Yeah, you mentioned about, kind of uncovering or reading your own history and developing your own history. Talk a little bit about the benefits of the 1619 project, which is, it's interesting, I have two sons who were, one's 26, the other's 18, and all they have been taught is a kind of revisionist history, which has now the new kind of conventional history. I was taught something going to school in the 70s and 80s. I was taught, it was different than the history my parents who went to school in the 30s learned. So it's always changing. But what is one of the benefits of saying, you know what, America didn't begin in 1776 or 1789 or whatever, it begins in 1619. What's a positive outcome of that? Well, I think if it directs more readers to start to investigate the nuances and complexities of the history of slavery. I think there's been a tendency for, as long as we have been teaching history in schools to approach slavery in a very superficial level. And this is whether it's the current narrative which does focus on slavery, but focuses on it as a very simplified version of the topic, slavery was evil, which we, I think pretty much everyone acknowledges, but it doesn't go deeper than that surface to figure out what's actually going on. Whereas if you went back a few generations, there's kind of this lost cause projection on the slavery, especially in the Southern states that tried to sugarcoat or to gloss over it or minimize it. So it's again, a very superficial type of an argument, even though it's in the complete different direction. I do think that there's some benefits of something like the 1619 project, or at least in its idealized version, what it set out to do is say, let's poke a little bit deeper, let's get into some of the complexities, especially like the American Revolution. You know, my counter to something like Nicole Hanna-Jones, who offers this version that places slavery at the center of the American Revolution, I would argue we need to study the American Revolution as an engagement with slavery that cuts across both sides of the war. There are pro-slavery and anti-slavery figures on the Patriots or colonists side, there are pro-slavery and anti-slavery figures on the Loyalist side and the British side during the war. So it's not like this black and white dimension, rather it's something that is playing out in a way that cuts across both sides of the war at a time when the question of independence is being fought and hammered out. So there's not a clean history. And on the eve of kind of rise of the Industrial Revolution and what we would, I think, tend to see as a more contemporary or a modern version of free labor of the idea that a worker could choose among competing employers, that employers would have to actually strike fair bargains or be held to bargains with workers and things like that. It, for me, one of the, what I found interesting about the 1619 project as it was announced was also that I started thinking about my version of American history. And I wanna ask you about yours of like, we bring personal stories to this and in many ways my grandparents who came over in the 1910s were all immigrants from Ireland and Italy. And in a lot of ways, my American history really starts in the 1910s or at least with any kind of personal connection to it. If you're an African American, if you're black, it does start with 1619 and it is a grim history. And again and again, the contributions, much of American culture and society and wealth has been built on the backs of blacks. And it wasn't acknowledged properly. So it's interesting for me, it started me thinking about, okay, how do I conceive of America and how is my America different than somebody else's? Could you talk a little bit about your, how your personal history, your family history kind of influences your interest in various topics and also your intellectual journey. How do you, you have a PhD in, it's in public policy, is that right? Yeah, from George Mason. And George Mason is named for one of the most bizarre and interesting and kind of complicated contradictory founders. But talk a little bit about Phil Magnus, where you come from and how that informs your intellectual journey and your areas of interest. Yeah, you know, my family is probably a lot like your family story. My mother is an immigrant from Canada. Her parents came from England and Ireland. So first generation and then another first generation. My dad's family, half of it came from Mexico at the turn of the century. The other half of it has been here since the 1600s. So I've got a little bit of a stake in almost every type of story imaginable. I can't claim to be, you know, someone that's latched on to this one specific version of American history that starts in 1776. That's just not my family story. But at the same time, I'd say my approach to history diverges from quite a bit of the profession and quite a bit of the popular narratives in the sense that I don't tend to see history as like this predetermined evolving story where there's an end game where we know where we're going. Rather it's a succession of events that are unfolding in almost unpredictable ways based on the circumstance of the moment. This is where I think we start to see inputs of something like public choice theory really weighing into our understanding of the past. It's not a grand unifying theory of the universe or of the way that historical events play out. Rather it's a system of tools to understand and interpret and work our way through evidence to figure out what's going on often under the cloud of uncertainty. So Abraham Lincoln's a classic example when he ascends to the presidency in 1861 and when he's inaugurated, he probably has no idea that just in the course of two to three years he was going to be emancipating the slaves. He's going to be signing the emancipation proclamation. It's rather the course of events that unfolded before him that make that possible. So there's not like this grand arc of history that's driving toward this inevitability. Rather it's a person reacting to the uncertainties and circumstances of the moment. You mentioned public choice which brings us back to James Buchanan which brings us to among other things the Nancy McClain argument against that Buchanan was actually an agent of white supremacy which I think is untenable and has been shown to be. So whether or not that affects whether if her interpretation wins out or not is a totally separate question but it seems to me that one of the problems with a Buchanan kind of view or a public choice view is it's economics without romance. It's history without romance. It's everything without romance. And in that sense it's a very corrosive way of looking at history because you can't have kind of those grand narratives or idealism goes out the window. Do you think that that's part of the reason why certain elements of kind of libertarian thought they may end up forming a very powerful critique and certainly I read a public choice layer of my backgrounds in literary studies and I was reading Foucault and the way Foucault talks about how power operates and the way that Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and other public choice theorists do it is almost identical which is that we tell these stories and they can be stories about oh, here's a great wonderful entrepreneur who just wants to help people or here is a great public servant who just wants to help people. Here are doctors, here's a medical industry that just wants to help people. No, both Foucault and the public choice people seem to say we have to look deeper and we have to look at what's actually going on, what are the motivations and what are the effects on people. Do you think that that's one of, it just makes it harder for a libertarian narrative or a libertarian rhetoric to really become mainstream because it's a pretty punishing ideology in that sense. Yeah, I think in a way we're all arguing against the legacy of someone like Thomas Carlisle who we know his history, which is his great contribution to historical study and understanding is he posits the great man theory of history, that there are vibrant leaders that emerge over time and this could be a Napoleon Bonaparte, it could be an Oliver Cromwell. Carlisle has his own people that he does latch on to and they tend to be some pretty ugly, pretty awful tyrants of history, but there are adaptations that could go in any direction. This is why we like to tell great stories about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or FDR. We like to have history that's built around presidents that we can prop up as heroic or on the other side is defined as villains. So it's a very manatee and approach that tends to infiltrate just the basic conception of history in the public's mind. And I think we're almost at a disadvantage of having to go against that because people like to root for a leader or they like to root for a good guy or at least root against a bad guy. And as libertarians as classical liberals or I'd say even more so as good evidence-based empirical thinkers, the necessity of our approach is going to add complexity, it's going to add nuance, it's going to add ways that are not easily summarized in a grand narrative story. And that makes it automatically harder for us to carry that type of a message. It also makes us more susceptible to criticism and the fact that we're not offering an alternative to the great man that's favored by someone else whether that's on the left or the right. Yeah, and if we're being intellectually honest and serious, we're also not offering a version of Whig history or anything where, well, you know, this is the best of all possible worlds and we're just going to tell you a just so story of how we got to exactly this place and time where everything is perfect. Yeah. You know, one of your previous book before the 1619 Project Critique is Cracks in the Ivory Tower. You co-read it with Jason Brennan of Georgetown. This is, I think, very early in the book and I believe I'm quoting accurately here, you guys say, you know, this is a book about academics or academia without romance. It's a point from the truth. What's the main theory of cracks in the Ivory Tower and why is it important? Yes, so our main argument is that institutions matter and if you throw just normal people into an academic situation, they're going to respond to the institutional structures and the incentives that those create. So what that means for higher education is we have a very well-funded, vast system. It's basically a trillion-dollar enterprise onto itself. If you start looking at things like student loans that are out there and the amount of money that goes into it, it employs millions of people and affects millions of students but the incentive structures of higher ed are often misaligned from the purposes that we say we have a university system. So you ask a typical college administrator or professor, why are you doing what you're doing? It's always this public-minded high level where we're creating an educated society or we're molding better citizens or we're empowering people to tackle the world and improve themselves. So very lofty, high-minded, rhetoric and goals that I think we'd all aspire to but then you juxtapose that to what higher ed actually delivers and you see it falls short on most of these promises and often far short of some of the more extreme promises. So we basically asked the question of what's going on in the university system because we know we hear all the time that there are problems, there are budget shortfalls or tuition skyrocketing. Kids are burned with debt. There's too many students, there's not enough students. Exactly. I mean, if you study the history of the university, yeah, just in the 20th and 21st century, it's just the history of lurching from crisis to crisis. Exactly, exactly. So the standard approach that if you read the Chronicle of Higher Education, they follow these grand narratives that are built around what we call poltergeists in the book. Universities are in financial crisis right now because they're being corporatized. Universities have a student loan crisis because neoliberalism moved in. And what's a poltergeist? It's this evil malicious entity that tears up the room and makes a giant mess in its wake but poltergeists are also not real. They're spiritual entities. So it's kind of like this academia tends to latch onto concepts as scapegoats for all of its problems but if you dig beneath the surface, you find a much more mundane explanation of misaligned incentives and people just acting like rational human actors. People pursuing their own self-interest. Yeah, if you reward people for acting poorly, you shouldn't be surprised when they... When they do. Right. You know, one thing I wanted to ask you is you're an academic, you have a PhD, but you are not an academic, right? Or you're not in academia. I read a lot in a lot of my friends that I went to grad school with. You know, some of them went on to be tenure track or tenure professors. Others faded out of the industry altogether. Others were adjuncts. You know, why did you choose not to become a full-time professor? And is that a cause for tragedy? I mean, like you and I feel because I spent a lot of time earning it, I feel compelled to always bring up the fact I have a PhD whenever I can. I chose not to go into academia. My ex-wife is a full professor at Chapman University, as we speak. A lot of my friends from grad school are, you know, in academia and not in academia. I chose not to. I'm kind of happy with it. I feel like I learned a lot in it. Why didn't you become an academic and is that a failing of the university system as it currently exists? Or is it a choice on your part or is it something altogether different? I would categorize it on my own sense as a personal choice. So I spent the better part of a decade one way or another working in academia. I taught college, taught economics full-time for a while. I tell various administrative posts, adjuncted, taught part-time, did all of that game. And I think it was very fulfilling at the time. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed being in the classroom. But I also found that the way that, you know, academic hiring is structured, the way that promotions are rewarded. Someone who does the type of research that I tend to do, which I think I've been fairly successful at, at getting published, at getting meaningful contributions to a wide variety of literature out there in print. But the type of research that I tend to do is not something that is prioritized for a whole number of reasons, especially at what we would call elite research universities. So it came down to a decision whether I teach like a four-four course load, which can be very fulfilling in its own right, versus having time to do more high-end research. So I did the former for a little while and then migrated into the latter to where, so my current position is basically 100% devoted to researching the topics that I'm interested in. I'm doing that with an independent research institution. So we're very fortunate in that regard. But I have found that fulfilling, even though I do miss some elements of the classroom. Yeah, and I know that in cracks in the ivory tower, you point out that it is a vast oversimplification to say that the tenure track model is disappearing from the university or from all universities. And it is also true that if you can get a tenured position somewhere, it is an incredibly sweet gig. Not because you don't do work, but because you have so much autonomy and time to do the type of work and research that people would love to be able to do if you're intellectually blinded that way. Do you feel that the university system is in a particular era of transition now? And again, I mentioned before, if you go back and you look at pre-World War II, post-World War II, post about 1970 when women, by the early 80s women, there were more women attending undergrad institutions than men, that had a change. The levels of state funding, the desire, kind of the social desire to have more educated people, we've constantly been going through paroxysms of change, transition, et cetera. Do you think the university is in a particular, particularly strong moment of change? And if so, how does, because as, if I'm gonna mention that I have a PhD, I think I also feel that I need to say we're talking remotely because of the coronavirus and the lockdown and the quarantine, which among other things, they shut down every college in the country now. How is that gonna change higher education? But so to simplify, is the university in a particular moment of change now? That's one question. And then how do you think the coronavirus changes higher at, or maybe it doesn't? Yeah, yeah. So prior to the coronavirus, I would have said that universities are continuing to evolve on more of a path trajectory than a disruptive trajectory. So I can't predict exactly how long this is going to last and what moving everything online is going to do. But what I will say, and I think this is true of university evolution from about the post-World War II period to a couple months ago, is that there's a heavy public expenditure component that came into its own in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and has been with us. What that means from an economic perspective is that universities are basically in the business of rent seeking and rent allocation from the public sector. And what do we know about rent seeking? What do we know about fast government programs of a similar magnitude when they become entrenched? Is there very, very hard to disrupt or change course or dissipate or abolish or whatever you want to do with it? I mean, it's like trying to steer the Titanic with a rubber band. That's the situation that I consider university. So this is kind of the university as Medicare where there might be some nibbling on the edges, but by and large, we're still going to be spending a lot of money on it and it's going to affect a lot of people. Okay, so you said that is your thinking until a couple months ago. How does the coronavirus change that? And you talk about a weird trend of event that nobody saw coming, and we'll put aside the idea that there were five or six people in the federal government who could have stopped this, but the coronavirus comes in, this is a black swan or something that really is disruptive. How does that change your understanding where universities were headed? Yeah, well, I think prior to just a few months ago, the main area of what we would call for lack of a better term, budgetary bloat in the university system was all these administrative roles that are just expanding like crazy. And we see this empirically from the 1970s to the present day, administration has more than quadrupled in size. I think you have a stat in cracks in the ivory tower or something that like 20, 30 or 40 years ago, I think it was that there were four administrators for every 10 professors, 10 year track professors, and now it's that there are nine professors for every 10 administrators or something like that. Yeah, the administrators have far surpassed professors itself on campus, even though universities are basically delivering the same type of good, they're delivering a degree. So I think prior to just a few months ago, a lot of that was taking place on university campuses through rent seeking, through rent allocation off of budgets that are built around having a very large student body on campus. So administrators grew in conjunction with universities providing more, what they call student services, but student services are often a little pet projects. That was a lot easier to justify when classes were held in person and when the student body is there living in the dorm. You start to move things online. You can ask the question, what does the director of sustainability, climate change and parking lots have to do anymore? Right. So I think the longer that this type of a crisis persists, that kind of pulls back the cover on the question of whether some of these roles are necessary or whether some of these new developments of what had grown on campus is essential to the business that we're doing. I think the second thing that COVID has done is it started to expose some of the financial pressures that higher ed places on students themselves through rising tuition. It's starting to get people to ask the question, well, I'm paying full tuition, but now I'm taking kind of like this shell of a class that's now on the line, should I have to pay the same tuition rate as I would if I got the in-person experience? And I think a lot of people are gonna start asking questions and saying, no, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe there should be other discounts. So do you think, I mean, do you envision a kind of hybrid model that is somewhere between a more traditional residential college, which it's not clear what percentage of undergrads actually went to a four-year residential college and lived apart from their parents, as opposed to living near the campus with their family in an urban area or whatever. But do you think it's more likely that we'll see a kind of a hybrid model where some or at a particular school, a lot of maybe more introductory classes will be delivered via Zoom or via lecture with a couple of recitation sections or higher level classes will be all in person, but lower, you know, et cetera. How do you see this playing out? I think that there is going to be a bit of a trend to diversifying how what we would call Gen Eds are delivered. So your History 101, Math 101, English 101, standard classes everyone has to take. Under the pre-COVID model, and I guess the standard model from history is you show up freshman year and the first two years are spent talking about your Gen Eds, and then you move into your major. I think this does open up a bit of an opportunity, especially if someone wants to be entrepreneurial about it, of finding ways to deliver Gen Eds that don't require the butts and seats model sitting there in the classroom. Although, you and Jason Brennan are pretty, I mean, you are pretty big believers in the signaling model of higher education. And so that what matters, it's less that, it's less what you learn as an undergrad and it's more where you have a degree from. So you still want that piece of paper from a particular school, rather than online MOOC university, right? You want it to say Dartmouth or I don't know, wherever. So how does that factor in? Because, and I'm thinking now I know a lot of people who teach at state universities and around the country, there has been a big push to say that any state school in any state has to accept community college courses for full credit and that there was a push to try and get people to take their Gen Ed classes at community college and then you show up at the residential school where you're gonna graduate from and that way you spend less money but you get the full freight or you get the full impact of a degree from a name university. How does that intersect with what we've been talking about here? Yeah, the end goal of most students when they graduate, they want the piece of paper that says Harvard or Princeton if they're going to an elite school or maybe they want University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, like a major flagship state university. If it can be the case that you can transfer in community college credits for your Writing 101 and Math 101 course, which basically the content is more or less the same, you aren't getting much of a premium by doing that at the full four year institution you graduate from, but you can save quite a bit on cost. That is one way to alleviate one of the driving concerns right now of higher education, which is tuition skyrocketing. I think prior to COVID, there still seemed to be something of a premium of the college experience of spending all four years at the one place. I do think that some of the move online will make people a little bit more willing to venture out beyond that model, make the average students to start to think, hey, if I can knock out this course online at my community college and transfer it into UVA or University of Michigan next semester, and then I declare my major, I've got my gen eds out of the way, I've done it at like half the cost or a fifth of the cost even in some of these cases and they're taking the credits, then I go do my upper division classes at that institution. I graduate with the same degree, the same certificate that someone who spent all four years there did. All right, well, you know what? We're gonna leave it there. We have been talking with Phil Magnus. He's the author most recently of the 1619 Project of Critique. And before that with Jason Brown and he was the co-author of Cracks in the Ivory Tower, which is a pretty fascinating read about academia without romance. Phil, what else are you working on? It seems like you know, it's been 15 or 20 minutes. You could have another book project in the works. What's next for you? Oh, all sorts of things. I say historically, I'm looking more into the role of government institutions and subsidizing slavery in the 19th century, which is I think a big part of the story that's been underplayed or underrepresented in the emancipation areas. At the risk of going back into a full conversation about the 1619 Project. And a lot of the historiography of slavery, both that it kind of leans on, but also then ignores. What is fascinating is when you, and you were talking about this before, when you start to think about slavery as a complex social, cultural, political, economic system. And you understand like how could it persist? And this is where the kind of simplified versions that we get often, whether it's in history classes or in movies, just don't really do it justice. Whereas movies like 12 Years a Slave, and I am particularly, even though it's very much a movie about movies, not about history, Django Unchained, like the focus on the physical torment that was visited upon slaves was like a missing part of how slavery operated. But you're talking about how government in various ways and at various levels actually subsidized or created because there's no question that when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and it started saying to people, abolitionists, no, you have to help us hunt down freaks, escape slaves. Exactly. That's a major subsidy and that also causes more and more problems. Yeah, yeah. And I'd say even it's a project that builds on the legacy of Adam Smith or as Deirdre McCloskey says, St. Adam Smith. Right. Here's a thinker that attacks slavery on moral grounds through moral sentiments and objections to the horrors of the institution. Here's someone that also critiques the economics of the slavery and then least discussed of the elements he goes after, the political economy of the slavery, the role of state institutions in propping this up. So he has an observation. He says that the British colonies where slavery is the worst, the slave owners themselves have somehow managed to get themselves elected to the colonial assembly and they're never going to abolish or reform or do anything that works against the institution itself so long as that persists. So that element is there in the Smithian project. I see myself as updating that with 200 years of history and records to build upon but also just seeing how that plays out to add greater depth to the dimension of this project and this topic that's often just glossed over in the standard textbook histories. Well, that's a, it sounds fantastic and we'll all be looking forward to reading it. Phil Magnus, thanks for talking to reason. Yeah, thanks for having me.