Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 53

Letter from a Teachers’ Teacher

I recently received this email from Jared Lucas, who teaches a class for aspiring teachers. Reprinted with his permission.

Hello Mr. Caplan,

My name is Jared Lucas, and I teach American Government as well as a seminar class for students wanting to become future teachers. I teach at a vocational school in Newark, OH. While in college, I listened to your lecture when you came to Bowling Green State University, spoke with you briefly afterwards, and have since purchased your book. I wanted to s...

The Depression Preference

When I describe mental illness as “an extreme, socially disapproved preference,” the most convincing counter-example people offer is depression.  Do I really think people “want to be depressed” or choose depression as a bizarre alternative lifestyle?

My quick answer: These objections confuse preferences with meta-preferences.

No one chooses to have the gene for cilantro aversion.  Yet people with the cilantro aversion gene are perfectly able to eat this vegetable.  They just strongly prefer n...

Reviewing Paranoia

We often hear about “movies that are better than the book,” but rarely of “book reviews that are better than the book.” Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh has just published one such book review.  Here’s Nowrasteh on Reihan Salam’s Melting Pot or Civil War? A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders:

The gap in quality between the book described by reviewers above and the actual book Melting Pot or Civil War? is wider than in any other book that I can remember reading. Descriptions of “calm”...

The Dissident Ambassador

In a new paper, Greg Mankiw shares some thoughtful reflections on teaching and heterodoxy:

I have always thought that instructors, especially in introductory courses, are like ambassadors for the economics profession. The role of ambassadors is not to represent their own views but to act as agents for their principal. Just as ambassadors are supposed to faithfully represent the perspective of their nations, the instructor in an introductory course (and intermediate courses as well) should fai...

Guerrilla Education at Princeton: Letter from a Dad

The admissions scandal seems to have revived interest in my 2018 Los Angeles Times op-ed.  Highlight from the original piece:

Almost everyone pays lip service to the glories of education, but actions speak louder than words. Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curi...

The Missing Planks

Prominent presidential candidates are advancing proposals that frankly horrify me.  Should we dismember big tech firms?  Or just give every American adult $1000 a month?  Rather than critique these awful ideas, I’d rather ponder the Dog that Did Not Bark – moderate, common-sense proposals that no major candidate is likely to advocate.  Just a few that have been on my mind lately…

1. Stop REAL ID before it inconveniences tens of millions of American travelers.  Also, order the TSA to stop aski...

Judging Poverty

During our poverty debate, David Balan mentioned that a colleague of his was troubled by the very phrase “How Deserving Are the Poor?”  And she’s hardly alone.  Poverty analysts are far more likely to morally condemn the middle class for being judgmental than the lower class for being irresponsible.  Indeed, the more irresponsible behavior the analyst sees, the more sternly they rebuke judgmental outsiders.  Walter Miller’s 1959 article “Implications of Urban Lower-Class Culture for Social Wo...

A Signal of Corruption

I don’t support scandals, but scandals support me!  Thanks to #CollegeGate, I’m in the next issue of TIME.  Highlights:

Consider why these parents would even desire to fake their kids’ SAT scores. We can imagine them thinking, I desperately want my child to master mathematics, writing and history — and no one teaches math, writing and history like Yale does! But we all know this is fanciful. People don’t cheat because they want to learn more. They cheat to get a diploma from Yale or Stanford...

Some Men Just Want to Watch Mexico Burn

In the introduction to La Vida, famed anthropologist Oscar Lewis unfavorably compares Puerto Rico to Mexico:

But perhaps the crucial difference in the history of the two countries was the development of a great revolutionary tradition in Mexico and its absence in Puerto Rico.  Puerto Ricans sought greater autonomy from Spain during the nineteenth century, but they were never able to organize a revolutionary struggle for their freedom, and the single attempt along this line, at Lares, was shor...

Hypocrisy and Hyperbole

I teach at a public university.  Am I a hypocrite?  Bernie Sanders’ net worth is about $2M.  Is he a hypocrite?  How about vegetarians who regularly eat meat?

The right answer: It depends on the details of the speakers’ moral position!  Consider the following cases.

1. You say, “It is always morally wrong to eat meat,” but you still eat meat.  Are you a hypocrite?  Of course, because you break your own absolute rule.

2. You say, “We have a duty not to eat meat, except in extreme circumstances...