Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 44

The Great Successor: Inside North Korea

I highly recommend Anna Fifield’s The Great Successor.  It’s full of information about not only the life of Kim Jong Un, but what’s happened inside North Korea since his ascent to the Red Throne.  Most readers will be shocked by her description of the North Korean hell-state, but that’s all old hat to me.  Here’s what surprised me in Fifield’s book:

1. Kim Jong Un didn’t just attend a fancy English-language school in Switzerland.  After his expat guardians – his maternal aunt and her husband...

Malevolence and Misunderstanding

Lancelot:  Your rage has unbalanced you. You, sir, would fight to the death, against a knight who is not your enemy. Over a stretch of road you could easily ride around.

Arthur:   So be it. To the death!

               —Excalibur

Question #1: How many times in your life have you lost a friend because one of you malevolently decided to hurt to the other?

Question #2: How many times in your life have you lost a friend over a misunderstanding?

I am glad to report that I have lost few friends in...

CPI Bias and Happiness

Our nominal income rises every year.  But what about our real income – our “standard of living”?  In order to answer that question, we have to accurately measure inflation.  If we understate inflation, we’re getting richer at a slower pace than we think.  If we overstate inflation, we’re getting richer at a faster pace than we think.

Most economists, sadly, just forget about the issue and pretend that standard measures of inflation are solid.  Most specialists, however, have long believed tha...

You’re All A Bunch of Socialists

A fun figure from Tetlock et al.’s “The Psychology of the Unthinkable.”  Possible level of outrage ranges from 1-7, 7 being highest.

Background:

Participants were told that the goal of the study was to explore the attitudes that Americans have about what people should be allowed to buy and sell in competitive market transactions:

Imagine that you had the power to judge the permissibility and morality of each transaction listed below. Would you allow people to enter into certain types of dea...

Monopolize the Pretty Lies

Why do dictators deny people the right to speak freely?  The obvious response is, “The truth hurts.”  Dictators are bad, so if people can freely speak the truth, they will say bad things about the dictator.  This simultaneously wounds dictators’ pride and threatens their power, so dictators declare war on the truth.

But is this story right?  Consider: If you want to bring an incumbent dictator down, do you really want to be hamstrung by the truth?  It’s far easier – and more crowd-pleasing –...

Tetlock the Prophet

The replication crisis had made it fashionable to mock social psychology, but this 2000 article on “The Psychology of the Unthinkable” by Phil Tetlock and co-authors feels prescient:

A sacred value can be defined as any value that a moral community implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, or indeed any other mingling with bounded or secular values. When sacred values are under assault… people engage in a cont...

The Domino Theory Reconsidered

Historians often casually refer to the “discredited” Domino Theory.  For example, the History Channel website tells us:

The domino theory was a Cold War policy that suggested a communist government in one nation would quickly lead to communist takeovers in neighboring states, each falling like a perfectly aligned row of dominos. In Southeast Asia, the U.S. government used the now-discredited domino theory to justify its involvement in the Vietnam War and its support for a non-communist dictat...

Last Word from Karelis

Charles Karelis has the final word in our exchange.  Here’s Charles:

Bryan, my responses to your last word.

If you think utility is well-suited to analyzing life or death choices, you should include a utility analysis of life or death choices in your book. Having read Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons on length of life vs. quality of life choices, and after thinking about it for a few decades, I came to the conclusion the problem was just too hard for me. I assure you this had nothing to do...

UBI: Some Early Experiments

The Universal Basic Income is only a tangential interest of mine.  Yet when I’ve debated it, I’ve been consistently impressed by how little the eager advocates try to teach me.*  Case in point: I learned more from reading three paragraphs in Kevin Lang’s Poverty and Discrimination than in my typical conversation with a UBI enthusiast:

Because the stakes involved in instituting a negative income tax were so high, policy analysts convinced the federal government to conduct experiments in which...

My Last Word on Karelis

In my critique of Karelis, I made the following argument against his view that giving the poor additional free money actually makes them work harder:

In any case, you don’t need empirical research to see the absurdity of Karelis’ position.  If unconditional transfers increased work effort, then current recipients of these transfers – many of whom don’t work at all – would work even less if the government cut them off completely.  Are we really supposed to believe that able-bodied welfare reci...