How to become more conservative

'If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.'

Some arguments to be more conservative:

Economics:

Growth is really good for welfare, and GDP will continue to increase and many more people will get richer and have better lives. Big corporations are really good for growth and innovation, and thus the welfare of humanity.^[1] Europeans will probably always just do catch up growth and free ride on US efforts to push the global technology frontier, rather than really trying to catch up. It's a natural dynamic.
Sustainability: We've been making good progress on climate change, and we could have sustainable growth.^[2] There are no good arguments on there being any de facto 'limits to growth'.
Neoliberalism was pretty good:

'Progressive critics (e.g. Stiglitz) view neoliberalism as a destructive ideology that increased inequality, weakened democracy, and commodified social life. Populist and national conservatives argue that neoliberal globalization eroded national industries, undermined communities, and benefited elites over ordinary citizens. Critics mistakenly blame neoliberalism, which arose to solve real problems and largely succeeded, for unrelated complaints. Their economic critiques are flawed, and their alternative policies are unlikely to be better. Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction to global stagnation. The mid-20th century saw Western Keynesianism and Global South state-led development, marked by government regulation, capital controls, and expanded welfare states. By the 1970s, this system faltered: stagflation and fiscal crises discredited state-centered models in the West, while developing nations' debt issues forced them to seek international aid, paving the way for policy shifts. The crisis facilitated the rise of market-oriented thinkers (mainly Chicago school).'^[3]
Crucially, most reforms by Reaganites, Thatcherites etc were not undone by left wing successor governments (e.g. public services are rarely renationalized).

Tax policy: Economists mostly think corporate taxes hurt growth the most^[4] (e.g. the 2017 US tax cuts increased long-run GDP by 0.6% and also, labor income increased by ~$750 per employee.^[5]).

Left-wing politicians often advocate for taxing the very rich more, but this cannot increase tax receipts by very much because inequality is not crazy high. US billionaires 'only' own $4T, expropriating them would only fund the $7T US federal budget for about half a year. Also, consumption by western billionaires is not crazy high either… not sure if any western billionaire has spent much more than a $1B, so taxing them would just be more statism. In any case, most taxes are paid by the middle class and that's why left-wingers never campaign on lower taxes for the middle class because it's not tenable in modern welfare states.

Daron Acemoglu, a professor at M.I.T. and the most cited economist of the last decade, described U.S. presidential candidate Sanders's 'economists don't understand basic economics. They are not just dangerous, they are clueless.'

Taxes on income and corporations don't just redistribute — they can meaningfully deter innovation. Stefanie Stantcheva, who won the 2025 John Bates Clark medal partly for this work, has shown with co-authors that both personal and corporate income taxes negatively affect the quantity of innovation and shift where it happens, with surprisingly large elasticities (Akcigit et al., "Taxation and Innovation in the Twentieth Century," QJE 2022). Corporate taxes especially reduce innovation output by corporate inventors, while personal income taxes drive inventor mobility across states and borders. Her broader review of the theory and evidence ("The Effects of Taxes on Innovation: Theory and Empirical Evidence," NBER 2021) shows that targeted policies like R&D subsidies can partially offset this, but the baseline finding is clear: higher general taxation comes with a real cost to the innovation frontier. See also Akcigit & Stantcheva, "Taxation and Innovation: What Do We Know?" (2020) for a policy-oriented summary. This matters enormously if you think long-run growth — driven by innovation — is the main engine of welfare improvement.

Minimum wage: Does Economics Flip-flop on the Minimum Wage?
'Zooming out, it seems sort of like Boomers have delivered the greatest period of peace and prosperity in history: global, American, take your pick. The window of Boomer dominance, c. 1980- 2010, saw the fall of Communism, steadily rising incomes, steadily growing life expectancy, and no foreign wars bigger than Iraq (total American death toll: 4,500).'^[6]

Foreign policy:

US foreign policy of the 20th century fighting communism and spreading free market ideology and democracy in many countries was, on the whole, good:^[7]

The U.S. achieved global dominance not just by being powerful, but by skillfully aligning its foreign policy with favorable historical tides (globalization and Soviet decay). While this produced a 'neoliberal order' of peace and prosperity, the strategy was inherently messy, involving high moral costs and sowing the seeds of future threats (like terrorism) that would haunt the U.S. later (El Salvador and Nicaragua, Afghanistan blowback fueling Islamic fundamentalism, Iran-Contra).
From the late 1970s to early 1990s, U.S. policymakers recognized and exploited favorable structural trends (Soviet decline, globalization, democratization) through deliberate strategy, transforming American decline into unprecedented 'unipolarity'—dominance across military, economic, and ideological dimensions simultaneously:

Cold War victory: Reagan's multipronged offensive (military buildup, economic pressure, support for dissidents and anti-communist rebels) exploited Soviet weaknesses, then pivoted to diplomacy under Gorbachev
Democracy promotion: Pressured autocratic allies to reform (Philippines, South Korea, Chile, Latin America), supported democratic transitions
Neoliberal economic order: Managed Western coordination, used debt crisis leverage to push market reforms globally, integrated China and developing nations into US-led capitalism.

'By the late 1930s, the UK Government is engaged in a massive rearmament program. Britain enters WW2 much better prepared than commonly thought. This program was opposed in whole or in part by the British Labour party, very weirdly, given it was notionally anti Nazi.'
The Fabian society might have had a negative impact: 'The Fabian Society transformed communism from a call for bloody revolution by labor activists into the concept of incremental democratic socialism, essentially inventing the modern welfare state and the 'champagne socialist' intellectual (e.g. members included very influential people like George Bernard Shaw, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Tony Blair). Fabian principles heavily influenced the economic policies of newly independent nations like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, and Syria.^[8] India in particular had a very centralized planned economy and low growth for decades afterwards, which has kept hundreds of millions in poverty^[9] and so maybe the Fabian society has contributed to this.

Immigration

Empirically, too much low-skilled immigration too fast creates populist backlash and causes people to vote for right-wing parties.^[10],^[11],^[12] We should rather phase in migration slower to have no populist backlash and more migration under the curve (cf. David Autor).

Some arguments to become more liberal:

Redistribution might cause the biggest welfare gains: Both redistribution via transfer payments or spending on public goods have a large and robust short-term welfare effect but lower long-run growth as the money is taken away from the private sector, which is better at stimulating long-run growth. Trickle-down economics has a bad reputation, but it works (e.g. the 2017 US tax cuts increased long-run GDP by 0.6%, which is pretty good). And growth causes a lot of welfare, it's just that the effects are very delayed and by the time the trickle down effects help the poorest in society, they are no longer as poor as the poorest people now. So it can make sense to give people a lot of short-term relief now.
Minority rights: Liberals are really putting the liberal into liberal democracy and, in the grand scheme of things, seem much better than the right on social issues like minority rights. Even Tyler Cowen says that, big-picture, globally, feminism and anti-racism is very much underrated. Only very recently in historical terms, have we maybe overcorrected to be a little too woke.

Notes