Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 48

The Case Against Education: Now in Paperback

The Case Against Education is now in paperback, with a new Afterword by yours truly.  Highlights from the Afterword:

My earlier work (Caplan 2007) maintains that when economists and the public disagree, the economists are usually right.  The Case Against Education, however, focuses on a rare topic where economists and the public are on the same page.  The sad result, in my view, is that economists end up rationalizing popular errors rather than correcting them.  Not all economists, of course...

“España Es Como Una Madre”

Our most memorable Uber driver in Madrid was a young Pakistani man.  We gave him twenty minutes; he gave us his odyssey.  Too bad I failed to recorded the conversation, because this would have been a great interview to broadcast on Spanish radio.

Our driver’s story: Back in Pakistan, he lived in hunger, so he left home to seek his fortune.  In popular parlance, he became part of the “European migrant crisis.”  He traveled solo, journeying from Pakistan to Iran to Turkey.  Then he zigzagged ar...

Reflections from Spain

I just got back from a five-week visit to Spain.  The first four weeks, I was teaching labor economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín while my sons took Spanish-language classes on Islamism, Self-Government, and the Philosophy of Hayek.  Then we rented a van and saw Cordoba, Seville, Gibraltar, Fuengirola, Granada, and Cuenca.  During my stay, I also spoke to the Instituto von Mises in Barcelona, Effective Altruism Madrid, the Rafael del Pino Foundation, and the Juan de Mariana Institute....

Against Tu Quoque

War crimes trials often weigh on the consciences of the conscientious.  Aren’t such proceedings mere “victor’s justice”?  The hypocrisy is usually palpable; after all, how often does either side in a violent conflict walk away with clean hands?  Unsurprisingly, then, one of defendants’ favorite legal strategies is to tell their prosecutors, “Well, you guys did the same.”  It’s called the tu quoque defense:

An argument from fairness, the tu quoque argument has an enduring appeal to the human c...

The Broader Effects of Trade and Tech

Quite a few people consciously favor “free markets, but not free migration.”  When questioned, many explain that unlike free markets in goods, free markets in labor have “broad social effects.”  At this point, I have to suppress my urge to exclaim, “Are you out of your minds?”  They’re right, of course, that free migration has broad social effects.  They’re crazy, however, to imagine that free markets in goods lack these effects.  Indeed, at least within the observed range, ordinary market fo...

Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism

History textbooks are full of populist complaints about business: the evils of Standard Oil, the horrors of New York tenements, the human body parts in Chicago meatpacking plants.  To be honest, I haven’t taken these complaints seriously since high school.  In the absence of abundant evidence to the contrary, I say the backstory behind these populist complaints is just neurotic activists searching for dark linings in the silver clouds of business progress.  When business offers new energy, ne...

Jencks on Incentives and Single Motherhood

A striking passage from Christopher Jencks’ foreword to Edin and Lein’s Making Ends Meet:

Some conservatives oppose all efforts to help single mothers balance their budgets, even when the mother works.  They argue that making life easier for single mothers will just make them more numerous.  For those who see single mothers as a major cause of the nation’s social problems, cutting their numbers is even more important than reducing material hardship.

Although liberals scoff publicly at these...

Monetize Your Anger

Critics of the economics profession often accuse us of “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  But economists also often antagonize a far larger group – ordinary people who barely realize our profession even exists.  How?  By asking about Willingness To Pay (WTP).  How much extra would you have to earn to add 20 minutes to your daily commute?  How large of a fare discount would be required to get you and your husband to sit separately on an airplane?  Part of the complain...

£s for Brexit

With my perfect betting record hanging in the balance, I follow Brexit news to the point of obsession.  Out of the many hundreds of stories I’ve read, though, I have yet to hear anyone point to the simplest path to Brexit: Let Britain buy its way out! In Theresa May’s failed deal, the UK was supposed to pay the EU about £38 billion for the “divorce.”  Yet there is nothing magical about this price tag.  It could just as easily be £40 billion, or £140 billion.  Why, then, can’t the UK just tell...

Murray on the Prevalence of “Poverty”

Charles Murray‘s Losing Ground contains a most surprising claim:

[P]overty did not simply climb upward on our national list of problems; it abruptly reappeared from nowhere.  In the prologue to this book, 1950 was described as a year in which poverty was not part of the discourse about domestic policy – indeed, as a year in which the very word “poverty” was seldom used.  The silence was not peculiar to 1950.  From the outset of the Second World War until 1962, little in the popular press, in...