Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 38

Say “Can’t” With Care

Suppose a student fails a math test. Casual observers will often announce, “He can’t do the math.”

Or suppose a country has a horrible corruption problem. Casual observers will often announce, “The government can’t solve this corruption problem.”

In each case, I detect a casual logical fallacy.

Namely: If person X actually does Y, we can legitimately infer, “X can do Y.” But if person X does not do Y, you cannot legitimately infer that theycan’t. Maybe they don’t do Y because they can’t do Y....

Garett Jones on Open Borders: More Endogenous Than Thou

Garett Jones faults me for treating cross-country productivity differences as exogenous. I disagree. On further reflection, though, I think he’s making an analogous error. Ponder his statement:

As you know, my key disagreement is a theoretical and empirical one: the policy of Open Borders flows fairly naturally from the view that a nation’s level of productivity—total factor productivity or TFP to be pedantic—is largely exogenous to the experiences, backgrounds, and skills of a nation’s...

Garett Jones on Open Borders: A Belated Reply

Last November, Garett Jones wrote two responses to myOpen Borders. The first was “Measuring the Sacrifice of Open Borders,” a short paper on the distributional effects of free migration. I replied here.

Soon afterward, however, Garett also wrote me this open letter. Since I didn’t want to hastily respond to serious criticism, I waited until I had time to carefully respond. Now I’m ready. Here’s my point-by-point response. This format works especially well because Garett’s letter is largely a...

The Speech of Heroes

Almost everyone loves the idea of “speaking truth to power.” Standing tall, talking boldly, consequences be damned – how heroic!

Yet on reflection, this Speech of Heroes takes two radically different forms.

The most common Speech of Heroes, by far, upholds Social Desirability Bias. Example: “Everyone should be completely equal” sounds wonderful, but no actual society follows through. Many self-styled heroic orators respond along these lines:

Equality! We all say we believe in it. We know it’...

Remember the NAIRU

Alex Tabarrok is convinced we’re at full employment:

To begin, full employment does not mean the lowest possible unemployment rate. We are at full employment when we are at the natural rate of unemployment… When the production of apples is bigger this year than last year we don’t jump to the conclusion that last year the apple market was out of equilibrium. Similarly, the fact that unemployment was lower this year than last year does not mean that we weren’t at full employment last year.

I’m...

Psychiatry and Radical Forgiveness

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. – Matthew 5: 34

I’ve been reflecting further on this passage in Scott Alexander’s critique of my perspective on mental illness:

And the others? The alcoholic who says “Yup, I’m drinking myself to death and you can’t stop me?” I agree that it is in some sense rational. It is rational because that person has so many problems that...

Scott Alexander on Mental Illness: A Belated Reply

Back in 2015, Scott Alexander wrote this reply to my 2006 Rationality and Society piece on the economics of mental illness. I never replied; to be honest, I never read it. The reason, though, is not because I do not respect Scott, but because I respect him too much. I didn’t read his critique because I knew that if I read it, I could easily spend a week reflecting – and composing a reply. I knew, moreover, that until I wrote my reply, I would think of little else.

Over the years, many friends...

My Complete Bet Wiki

By popular demand, I’ve created a publicly-viewable wiki for my Complete Bet Inventory. From now on, I’ll edit it when I make new bets or when old bets resolve.

To repeat, my track record now stands at 20/20. Twenty of my bets have come due, and I have won every single one of them. Six victories ago, I wrote:

A guy who wins one bet could easily have gotten lucky. But someone who wins 10 out of 10 bets – or, in my case,14 out of 14 bets– almost certainly has superior knowledge and judgment....

I Win My EU Bet

Happy New Year!

Twelve years ago, I was struck by the following passage in Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It:

The U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council is predicting that the EU will collapse by 2020. I think that’s a rather cautious estimate myself. Ever since September 11, I’ve been gloomily predicting that within the next couple of election cycles the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way.

Since it seemed rather...

The Social Conservatism of Hollywood

[warning: spoilers]

The new Uncut Gems is further evidence for a thesis I’ve long maintained: Contrary to popular opinion, Hollywood makesa lot of socially conservative movies. When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the message is clear: Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished.

This is most obvious for hard-boiled crime films. The lead characters in such stories engage in an array of impulsive, brutal, and parasitical behaviors. Before the...