During the last twenty years, I’ve lived through a series of public crises. 9/11. The Iraq War. The Great Recession. The Syrian Refugee Crisis. ISIS. Systemic sexism (“MeToo”). Systemic racism. And of course COVID-19. In each case, society’s demands have been the same.
Author: Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. He has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, and has appeared on 20/20, FoxNews, and C-SPAN.
Krugman and Growth Agnosticism
Krugman‘s apparent embrace of this growth agnosticism is doubly puzzling. After a lifetime of study, a brilliant Nobel laureate still lacks anything useful to say about fostering growth? How is that even possible?
Silence is Stupid, Argument is Foolish
Public debates aside, I now only engage in intellectual arguments with thinkers who play by the rules. What rules? For starters: remain calm, take nothing personally, use probabilities, face hypotheticals head-on, and spurn Social Desirability Bias like the plague. If I hear someone talking about ideas who ignores these rules, I take evasive action. If cornered, I change the subject. Why? Because I now realize that arguing with unreasonable people is foolish.
The Uniformity and Exclusion Movement
Out of all the major political movements on Earth, none is more Orwellian than “social justice.” No other movement is so dedicated to achieving the opposite of what its slogans proclaim – or so aggressive in the warping of language. While every ideology is prone to a little doublethink, “social justice” is doublethink at its core.
Comments on Siegel’s “Fewer, Richer, Greener”
Last week, I was part of the Cato Institute’s book forum on Laurence Siegel’s Fewer, Richer, Greener: Prospects for Humanity in an Age of Abundance. Here’s my commentary on the book.
Not Even Daycare
The most common misinterpretation of The Case Against Education is that it’s only about college. In fact, my treatise analyzes not only high school, but K-8 as well. Where there is education, there is educational signaling. Whenever I opined K-8 education, though, I made a major concession. While schools mostly waste taxpayer money and students’ time, […]
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The Diversity Lottery: Some Rough Open Borders Arithmetic
How many people want to immigrate to the U.S.? In my past work, I’ve appealed to both surveys and black market prices to ballpark the answer. Another approach, however, is to take a look at the U.S. Diversity lottery.
Coronavirus vs. the Non-Identity Problem
If Avengers: Endgame had been released a week later, coronavirus would have never happened; the movie grossed $614M in China, so it must have indirectly changed the space-time positions of a bunch of people in Wuhan. If something alters which humans are born, it can also easily alter which pathogens are born.
Firing and the Left
Over the last decade, many leftists have not just moderated their former stance against firing. They have become enthusiastic advocates of firing people they dislike. “He’s performing his job adequately, so you have no right to fire him” has strangely morphed into a right-wing view.
Krikorian’s “Category Error”
During our last debate, an audience member asked Mark Krikorian if his arguments for restricting immigration of foreigners were also arguments for restricting the child-bearing of natives. You might think that Mark would insist that native babies are somehow better than foreign adults. How hard could it possibly be to craft such an argument? However, Mark adamantly refused to compare the worths of different kinds of people. Instead, he informed the questioner that his question was based on a “category error.”