One confounding factor is that women have been socialized away from science, and they have suffered systematic discrimination. But the same can be said for women in business, or law, or medicine. And yet those fields have seen women succeed in large numbers. It’s hard to imagine a more historically male-dominated profession than medical doctor—the source of a famous riddle about a man and his son in a car accident; upon arrival at the ER, the surgeon said “I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son.” I suspect that to many in America this riddle now only elicits a “Huh?” When nearly 50% of medical students are female, women doctors (my sister, an ophthalmologist, among them) are no longer an anomaly.

Of course, business, law, and medicine don’t have nearly 50% female participation, but they have far higher numbers than science. There’s something else going on, something more than the “high-powered job” effect identified by Summers. Sure, women are less likely to embrace the 80-hour work-week necessary to reach the top in many fields (though even that obvious assertion is controversial), but that hasn’t kept women out of the operating room. And sure enough, in his talk Summers put his finger right on it: men, at least at the extreme high end, are better at math and science than women.

The anecdotal evidence for this disparity, confirmed by cognitive neuroscience, is overwhelming, and points to a sex-linked difference in innate abstract reasoning ability—the mean ability for men is probably higher, but the standard deviation is definitely higher. In the sciences, female participation follows a predictable trend: the more abstract the field, the fewer the women. Approximately half of biology graduate students are female; there are plenty of female chemists; there are few female physicists, and most of them are less-mathematical experimentalists; there are only a handful of top-notch female theoretical physicists; despite women having higher average math grades than men, only a few top mathematicians are female. Something is going on, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist—whether male or female—to figure out that is has something to do with abstraction.

If this seems shocking, I understand. In high school one of my teachers brought in a newspaper article bemoaning the subtle, subconscious discrimination against women in math classes—discrimination not observed directly, but rather inferred from their lower performance on standardized tests. In a specious Sherlock-Holmesian process of elimination, the article argued that, in the absence of overt discrimination, the cause must be covert, unintentional bias. Challenging this inference, my teacher suggested that the disparity might be due instead to natural differences in mathematical ability. I was positively flabbergasted, and I thought my teacher’s suggestion was absurd. After all, I knew plenty of girls who were good at math.

At the time my reaction was understandable—though more heretical than average, I was still just a teenager—but I’m now embarrassed by my closed-mindedness. Any statement of possible fact, no matter how unsettling it may be, should be evaluated strictly on its merits; or, at least, if we are to suppress ideas because of their implications, let’s be honest about what we’re doing. Saying “men can’t be better than women at science—think of the implications!” confuses matters of opinion with matters of (potential) fact.

The space of Policy Xs that people propose to fix all the Problem As is vast, and rarely contains a plausible solution. Indeed, potential solutions to Problem A are often so counter-intuitive that the straightforward Policy X, rather than helping, or even merely being orthogonal to Problem A, may actively make it worse.

Of course, simply because you’ve found an effective solution to Problem A doesn’t mean that the government will do it and do it right. Government has its own internal incentives, which aren’t necessarily aligned with the goals of those who would use it to implement Policy X. Oftentimes regulated industries capture their regulators with strategic campaign donations and high-priced lobbyists. And “temporary” policies often become effectively permanent (for example, the 3% excise tax on telephone calls recently in the news was passed in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War).

Finally, even should a particular Policy X be effective, and be implemented, there is a cost that comes with any new law. Is the benefit worth the cost? It’s often difficult to say; government doesn’t really provide a framework for answering the question. And many, especially those who most passionately support government intervention, completely ignore an important intangible cost: the inevitable loss of freedom due to Policy X.

I tend to agree with principled conservatives who support small government, free markets, and individual responsibility, though I don’t think they go far enough. I do object to the fetishization of traditional moral and religious values, but this disagreement is more philosophical and religious than political—or it would be but for the power of the religious wing of the conservative movement. This influence of religious conservatives—combined with the lamentable demise of Western-style, Goldwater conservatism at the hands of Big-Government conservatism—keep me squarely out of the conservative fold.

Finally, libertarians are unique among the major political philosophies in recognizing that politics is ultimately about force; most libertarians adhere to the Non-Aggression Principle: no person has the right to initiate force against another person. While this principle is a good rule of thumb, and certainly contributes to the flourishing of humanity, it’s often too vague to be useful; there are just too many edge cases it can’t handle. Moreover, it ultimately misses the point; in my view the relevant question is not “When is force justified?”, but rather “What is the best mechanism for determining when force gets used?” Though I am uncomfortable with the dogmatic tone and consistent oversimplification that plague many libertarian arguments, libertarian is the label closest to my beliefs, so I sometimes call myself a libertarian if brevity requires it.

As a coda, let me note my sympathy for those who are apathetic about politics. In many ways we are helpless to change anything; you can make a strong case for rational ignorance of politics. Unfortunately, while you may not care about politics, politics cares about you.