Yesterday’s post on what I’ve read recently provoked two interesting comments on the title of Michael Adams’ Letters to a Young Progressive, one from ThomasH, the other from none other than David Friedman (!!).

They made me wonder: which group would be most likely to pass an ideological Turing test: young conservatives, or young progressives? I have a strong prior that young conservatives would beat young progressives, but such a test would still raise a bunch of interesting questions. How would the results differ in the rural South as opposed to the urban Northeast, for example? Would there be large campus-to-campus differences? Would we see different results at my institution–relatively conservative, Southern Baptist Samford University–versus a more mainstream institution? My prior here is that progressive students at relatively conservative institutions like Samford would do better than progressive students on a more progressive campus simply because they probably spend more time around people with conservative worldviews.

If you’re a grad student and you’re reading this because you don’t want to face the terror of the blinking cursor or because you’re not sure what to write about, there’s a paper here. Get to work, and let me know what you find post-haste!