Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 18

Keyhole Solutions: The Song

When you do a Jack Stafford podcast, he writes and records an original song inspired by the interview. Are you ready for “Keyhole Solutions: The Song”?

No joke!

P.S. The actual podcast is here.

The post Keyhole Solutions: The Song appeared first on Econlib.

My Social Media Experiment: A Self-Assessment

Early last year, I foresaw the epistemic horrors of the impending 2020 election, so I made this pledge.

I am ceasing intellectual discussions on social media until March 1, 2021. I will continue blogging and promoting my own work, but will not engage until then.

Here's why:https://t.co/bPAdhuxFpg

— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) January 24, 2020

Near the end, I asked Jonathan Haidt a question on twitter, and I impulsively responded to his answer.  I’d call that a clear violation of my pledge, b...

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Book Club: Final Thoughts

In “Why I Write,” Orwell declares “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”  A curious claim.  I’ve read 1984 at least ten times and Animal Farm at least five times, plus much of his other work.   Orwell’s attack on totalitarianism is blatant, trenchant, and thorough.  His defense of democratic socialism, in contrast, is practically invisible.  So despite his self...

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Book Club Commentary, Part 6

Here are my reactions to last week’s Book Club comments, starting with a fine exchange between John Alcorn and KevinDC.

Alcorn:

1) In previous posts, you argue that totalitarian regimes can maintain power indefinitely — or at least much longer than they do — if successors would practice ruthless repression like the founders. For example, loss of nerve among rulers after Stalin, culminating in Gorbachev, explains the collapse of communism.

In your post about war, you argue that war is an efficaci...

What the Success Sequence Means

[continued from yesterday]

…This is a strange state of affairs.  Everyone – even the original researchers – insists that the success sequence sheds little or no light on who to blame for poverty.  And since I’m writing a book called Poverty: Who To Blame, I beg to differ.

Consider this hypothetical.  Suppose the success sequence discovered that people could only reliably avoid poverty by finishing a Ph.D. in engineering, working 80 hours a week, and practicing lifelong celibacy.  What would be t...

What Does the Success Sequence Mean?

If you live in the First World, there is a simple and highly effective formula for avoiding poverty:

1. Finish high school.

2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children.

Researchers call this formula the “success sequence.”  Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill got the ball rolling with their book Creating an  Opportunity Society, calling for a change in social norms to “bring back the success sequence as the expected path for young Americans.”  The highest-qu...

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Book Club, Part 6

And now it’s time to finish our critical read of TPOC.  Please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments and I’ll do an omnibus reply later this week.

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist… In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance — meaning, in effect, war and police espionage — the empiri...

From UBI to Anomie

AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky have eye-opening answers to a jarring question straight out of Richard Scarry: What do jobless men do all day?  Background:

Thanks to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have detailed, self-reported information each year on how roughly 10,000 adult respondents spend their days—from the moment they wake until they sleep.1 These surveyed Americans include prime-age men who are not in labor force (or “NILF” to social...

From UBI to Anomia

AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky have eye-opening answers to a jarring question straight out of Richard Scarry: What do jobless men do all day?  Background:

Thanks to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have detailed, self-reported information each year on how roughly 10,000 adult respondents spend their days—from the moment they wake until they sleep.1 These surveyed Americans include prime-age men who are not in labor force (or “NILF” to social...

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Book Club Commentary, Part 5

We continue our discussion of Orwell’s “War Is Peace.”

Abe:

I don’t think that Orwell did believe the Soviet system could last for a long time. In fact, I’ve always suspected that the last third of 1984 was more tongue-in-cheek than people believe; Orwell was in fact poking fun at people in his time who believed that such a society could be perpetuate itself. My reason for believing this is this essay where he reviews James Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution”:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/...