Question: Given this framing, how many readers would not leap to the conclusions that due to the influence of the Federalist Society… 1. The environment and health will deteriorate. 2. A noticeable number of businesses will refuse service on religious grounds. 3. Transgender people will on balance be worse off.
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.
Reflections from my Panama Cruise, II
Falmouth had the most lavish port shopping area; I’d compare it to Reston, Virginia. The area beyond, though thinly inhabited, was fairly poor, but with quite a few middle-class homes mixed in. Our tour guide said that many Jamaicans spend years building their own homes so they can live rent-free (but not property-tax-free) for life.
Reflections from my Panama Cruise, I
As I’ve mentioned before, cruises are in one sense a great test case for open borders. Workers from all over the world come together to run one some of the world’s most sophisticated technology and please some of the world’s most demanding customers.
The Reformer’s Plight in The Great Idea
I’m a fan of dystopian fiction, but I overlooked Henry Hazlitt’s The Great Idea (subsequently republished as Time Will Run Back) until last December. I feared a long-winded, clunky version of Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, but I gave it a chance, and my gamble paid off. I read the whole thing (almost 400 pages) on a red-eye flight – feeling wide awake the whole way.
Market Failure Theory as Reproach to Government Practice
Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is also a reproach to every existing government. How so? Because market failure theory recommends specific government policies – and actually-existing governments rarely adopt anything like them.
Rainwater’s Motivated Reasoning
If a brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholar of the 1960s could be right for such wrong reasons, the brilliant, eminent, and mainstream scholars of today could easily be mired in their own brand of motivated reasoning. Indeed, so could you. Or me. There’s no easy remedy, but the first step is being hyper-aware that we have a problem.
Banfield on the Hyperbole of Urban Bankruptcy
“When a mayor says that his city is on the verge of bankruptcy, he means that when the time comes to run for reelection he wants to be able to claim credit for straightening out a mess that was left to him by his predecessor.”
The Novikov Experiment
About a year ago, educator and start-up engineer Lev Novikov bought a dozen copies of The Case Against Education and let them circulate around his school. Last week, he let me know what happened. Reprinted with Lev’s permission.
Appeasing Robin Hanson’s Critics
Appeasement is greatly underrated. As I’ve explained before: Didn’t the Munich Agreement prove for all time that appeasement doesn’t work? Hardly. Despite its well-hyped failures, appeasement is an incredibly effective social strategy for dealing with the unreasonable and the unjust… also known as 90% of mankind. Whenever someone makes bizarre demands upon me, my default is not…
A Conservative Confession
Even though my political views are deeply unconservative, the honest truth is that if existing justices and injustices were locked in place for ever, I would personally be happier. When the world stops changing, it’s easy to accept the world as it is.