Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 37

Caplans of the Caribbean

I just returned from cruising the Caribbean on Anthem of the Seas. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Fortunately, no coronavirus panic marred our vacation, and the concluding scare at the dock turned out to be a false alarm. Though I’d seen a little of the Caribbean before, this trip was a heavy dose: after a stop at San Juan, Puerto Rico, we sailed on to St. Maarten, Antigua, St. Lucia, and St. Kitts. My social science reflections:

1. I’ve been writing about Puerto Rico for years. Its great open...

Mentoring: The Rationality of Fear

A few months ago, Lean In published the results of a survey by Sandberg and Pritchardshowing a dramatic increase in the share of male managers who fear close interaction with female coworkers. Specifically:

60%of managers who are men are uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together.That’s a32%jump from a year ago.

The survey’s creators were dismayed:

This is disastrous. The vast majority of managers and senior...

Is Bernie Sanders a Crypto-Communist? A Bayesian Analysis

The word “crypto-communist” has a paranoid, McCarthyite connotation. But during the Cold War, numerous communist intellectuals and politicians deliberately concealed their commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Why? To be more successful intellectuals and politicians. A few crypto-communists even managed to become national leaders. Fidel Castro gained power in 1959, but only announced his communism in 1961. Nelson Mandela presented himself as a reasonable democratic reformer. Yet after his death,...

My Social Media Hiatus

I’ll be travelling most of the next month, so this is a fine time to officially announce my election-year hiatus from social media.

Never fear, I will continue blogging for EconLog. I will continue promoting my work on Facebook and Twitter. I’ll still use social media to publicize social events, especially Capla-Con 2020. However, from today until March 1, 2021, I will not participate in intellectual discussions on Facebook or Twitter.

My reason is simple: People go mad during presidential...

If the Only Way You Can Get Your Great Idea Implemented…

Economics textbooks are full of clever-and-appealing policy proposals. Proposals like: “Let’s redistribute money to the desperately poor” and “Let’s tax goods with negative externalities.” They’re so clever and so appealing that it’s hard to understand how any smart, well-meaning person could demur. When critics appeal to “public choice problems,” it’s tempting to tell the critics that they’re the problem. The political system isn’tthat dysfunctional, is it? In any case, reflexively whining,...

Carow Hall Reviews Open Borders

You need a thick skin here at Carow Hall. If you’re wrong, your colleagues aren’t afraid to tell you. The upside: When you receive praise, you know it’s the real thing. So what’s the buzz here for Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration?

Tyler Cowen:

That is the already-bestselling graphic novel by Bryan Caplan andZach Weinersmith, and I would just like to say it is aphenomenalachievement. It is a landmark in economic education, how to present economic ideas, and the integration...

Profligacy for Austerity?

Suppose you strongly desire to drastically increase the amount of education that people consume. What should you do?

The obvious answer: Make education completely free of charge – and have the government pay the the entire cost.

I say this obvious answer is obviously right. As I explain inThe Case Against Education, I favor extreme educational austerity, because I think the education system is a waste of time and money. Nevertheless, given the goal of drastically increasing educational...

The Dream of Open Borders

Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream: that my four children will one day live in a world where human beings will not be judged by the nation of their birth, but by the content of their character.

My dream, in short, is that my sons and daughter will live to see a world of open borders. If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, our descendants will view the immigration restrictions we continue to casually accept with the same horror that we now reserve for Jim Crow.

I wrote ...

What Should I Ask Zach Weinersmith? What Should He Ask Me?

Next week, Zach Weinersmith and I are mutually interviewing each other.

What should I ask him?

What should he ask me?

The post What Should I Ask Zach Weinersmith? What Should He Ask Me? appeared first on Econlib.

Don’t Be a Modal Weasel

I often hear academics say things like: “It is not necessarily the case that the evidence would support that.”

Is this sentence meaningless or just trivial? I don’t know, but I am still surprised by how many otherwise reasonable people hide behind such verbiage. Other common examples of the defensive use of modal diction:

1. “It could be impossible.”

2. “It’s certainly possible.”

3. “It mustn’t be inherently so.”

4. “It must indeed be admitted both that it would require powerful arguments to...