Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 43

An Ode to Amazon

I’ve already praised Amazon to the skies: “Amazon is simply the best store that ever existed, by far, with incredible selection and unearthly convenience.”  Recently, however, Amazon managed to exceed my sky-high expectations.

Over the last few months, my Sony Blu-Ray player has been losing streaming services one after the other.  Apparently I’m such a dinosaur that Hulu can’t be bothered to update my software.  Such is the price of progress…

Last week, Amazon joined this rush for the exit, s...

Letter from a Pakistani Homeschooler

I recently received this email from Pakistani homeschooler Fasih Zulfiqar.  I advised him to seek out econ professors at the nearest universities, but he’d likely appreciate further advice.  Reprinted with his permission.

Hello Prof Bryan, Fasih here. Perhaps Prof Cowen informed you about me, but in case he did not, let me introduce myself.

I’m a student from Pakistan who has self-studied through secondary education. I decided to quit schooling when I was in grade 6, much to the consternatio...

Making a Bad Situation Worse: Where Lee’s Right and Where Lee’s Wrong

Gary Lee’s The Limits of Marriage is highly logical, wonderfully informative, and enviably written.  But is his functionalist view of the decline of marriage true?  Superficially, yes.  Fundamentally, no.

He correctly argues that most single moms would not be better off if they simply married the fathers of their children.  Why not?  To put it a little more harshly than Lee: Because the fathers of the children of single moms are rarely “father material.”  On average, they have low attachment...

Making the Best of a Bad Situation? Gary Lee on the Decline of Marriage

Tomorrow, famed sociologist Gary Lee comes to GMU.  Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to discover his excellent The Limits of Marriage: Why Getting Everyone Married Won’t Solve All Our Problems.  In this thought-provoking book, Lee freely grants that all the raw correlations favor marriage: on average, married couples make more money, enjoy better health, experience more happiness, and raise more successful kids.  But he’s skeptical about causation.  In the end, he reaches a strongly...

The Not-So-Just World Hypothesis

I’ve long been skeptical of what psychologists call the Just World Hypothesis.  A standard statement:

[T]he just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, and/or order, and is often associated with a variety of fundamental fallacies, especially in regards to rationalizing people’...

Upcoming Events

1. I’m speaking on poverty and immigration at Mercer University on Thursday, September 26.

2. Zach Weinersmith and I are doing a signing at New York Comic Con on October 4.

3. I’m doing multiple events at Florida Atlantic University on October 22.  I’ll also have free time the afternoon of October 21 if anyone in south Florida wants to meet up.

4. Zach Weinersmith and I are presenting and signing Open Borders at the Cato Institute on November 4.  Hosted by Alex Nowrasteh, with commentary fro...

Russ Roberts on CPI Bias

EconTalk‘s Russ Roberts asks us to party like it’s 1973!  Thought experiment: Would you rather spend your dollars today at today’s prices, or in 1973 at 1973 prices?  Interestingly, his comparisons use the PCE index rather than the standard CPI, but 1973 still seems bleak compared to today…

 

The post Russ Roberts on CPI Bias appeared first on Econlib.

Is That Cricket?

If I were trying to oust the Conservative Party right now, here’s what I’d do, in order:

1. Force Boris Johnson to delay Brexit, in order to (a) make hard-line Brexit supporters feel betrayed by him, and (b) humiliate him before swing voters.

2. After Johnson’s humiliation, call for new elections.

Everything in British politics over the last few months seems highly consistent with this strategy.  After all, the opposition has voted to forbid no-deal Brexit and refused to vote for an early ele...

Terrorism vs. Just War Theory

I was planning to write an original piece on this topic, but soon discovered that better work already existed.  Most notably, here’s a summary of a talk Michael Walzer delivered in 2007.  It starts with some boilerplate:

Whether terrorism is wrong is a question that is often answered badly or at least inadequately, according to Walzer, who defines terrorism as the random killing of innocent people, in the hope of creating pervasive fear. “Randomness and innocence are the crucial elements in t...

The Fault Is Not in Our Stuff But in Ourselves

Bruce Sacerdote‘s NBER Working Paper, “Fifty Years of Growth in American Consumption, Income, and Wages” provides a nice update on the measurement of CPI Bias.  The punchline should be obvious, but it’s great to hear such an eminent economist say it: “Meaningful growth in consumption for below median income families has occurred even in a prolonged period of increasing income inequality, increasing consumption inequality and a decreasing share of national income accruing to labor.”

Highlights...