Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 57

Market Failure Theory as Reproach to Government Practice

The theory of market failure is a reproach to the free-market economy.  Unless you have perfect competition, perfect information, perfect rationality, and no externalities, you can’t show that individual self-interest leads to social efficiency.*  And this anti-market interpretation is largely apt.  You can’t legitimately infer that markets are socially optimal merely because every market exchange is voluntary.

Contrary to popular belief, however, market failure theory is also a reproach to e...

Rainwater’s Motivated Reasoning

Lee Rainwater was one of the most prominent liberal sociologists of the Great Society era.  He spent 23 years at Harvard; here‘s the Harvard Gazette‘s memorial to his work.  To be honest, though, I never heard of him until last week.  Yet after I stumbled upon his 1966 Daedalus article, “The Crucible of Identity: The Negro Lower-Class Family,” I was surprised that any academic would so candidly admit to motivated reasoning.  When I discovered that he was an intellectual leader of his generati...

Banfield on the Hyperbole of Urban Bankruptcy

As I never stop telling you, politics is nothing but an ocean of hyperbole!  But seriously, folks, I just came across a fine debunking of political hyperbole while reading Edward Banfield‘s 1974 classic, The Unheavenly City Revisited.

A great part of the wealth of our country is in the cities.  When a mayor says that his city is on the verge of bankruptcy, he means that when the time comes to run for reelection he wants to be able to claim credit for straightening out a mess that was left to...

The Novikov Experiment

About a year ago, educator and start-up engineer Lev Novikov bought a dozen copies of The Case Against Education and let them circulate around his school.  Last week, he let me know what happened.  Reprinted with Lev’s permission.

Just wanted to give you an update on what happened with a dozen copies of Case Against Education in one high school. I ended up buying every format of the book and had my staff read it and listen to it as well.

The short version is that there was a lot of interest...

Carter on The Case Against Education

I’m very pleased to have made famed author Stephen L. Carter‘s list of best non-fiction books, and even more pleased with the write-up:

I’m not sure he’s right, especially about education being almost entirely for the purpose of signaling, but goodness does he make a strong case. Agree with him or not, you’ll never look at the schools and colleges in quite the same way.

It’s not too late to buy the book, of course.

P.S. My next book (a non-fiction graphic novel co-authored with Zach Weinersmi...

Appeasing Hanson’s Critics

Appeasement is greatly underrated.  As I’ve explained before:

Didn’t the Munich Agreement prove for all time that appeasement doesn’t work?  Hardly.  Despite its well-hyped failures, appeasement is an incredibly effective social strategy for dealing with the unreasonable and the unjust… also known as 90% of mankind.  Whenever someone makes bizarre demands upon me, my default is not to argue.  Instead, I weigh the cost of compliance.  If that cost is small – and it usually is – I let the babie...

A Most Surprising Clause About “Neoliberalism”

“[T]he neo-romantic tales spun by Duneier, Anderson, and Newman at the close of the regressive nineties suggest that U.S. sociology is now tied and party to the ongoing construction of the neoliberal state…”

This is from Loic Wacquant‘s 2002 review essay in the American Journal of Sociology, one of the field’s top two journals.  That’s just a few years before researchers found that over 25% of U.S. sociology professors self-identified as “Marxists.”

How could any sociologist make such bizarre...

Yet Another Education Bet

Owen Long has bet me $500 on the same terms as Samuel Knoche.  Normally, getting anyone to bet even a dollar is like pulling teeth.  For the future of college, however, relatively large bets have been coming to me lately.  Hmm…

The post Yet Another Education Bet appeared first on Econlib.

Automation is Overrated (1996 Marxist Edition)

Here’s an amusing aside from Harvey and Reed’s 1996 “The Culture of Poverty”:

A third form of contemporary class denial seeks refuge in the promise that a technological quick fix can eliminate persistent poverty. Of course, this is not the first time a technocratic myth has promised escape from the spiraling contradictions of capital. From Fourier’s phalanxes and Bentham’s workhouses of the last century, to the dreams of leisure-based societies in the American Century, capitalist culture has...

When All Else Fails for Christmas

Don’t know what to give the nerd in your life for Christmas?  Then I highly recommend Jason Brennan’s brand-new When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice.  The book is fun, timely, and timeless.  A few highlights:

Or suppose Bane has captured Gotham City.  Now suppose Batman has a plan for defeating Bane – one that has a good chance of success, while the government’s plan is far worse.  In that case, rather than saying that Batman should defer to the government, the go...