Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 58

Who’s Afraid of Oscar Lewis?

In the 50s and 60s, Oscar Lewis could easily have been the world’s most famous anthropologist.  He wrote a whole series of painstaking ethnographies of poor families from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and India.  My 12th-grade AP Government class actually made his Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty required reading.  Only recently, though, have I realized that these books aren’t just fascinating in their own right; they’re also illuminating at the meta level.

Here’s how.

1....

Read “The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis”

Next week I’m going to blog a piece that is at once lucid, engaging, insightful, and flabbergasting: David Harvey and Michael Reeds “The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis.” (Sociological Perspectives, 1996)  As far as I can tell, there’s only a gated version, but if you want to peek inside the intra-left debate on “culture of poverty” research, this is the place to start.

The post Read “The Culture of Poverty: An Ideological Analysis” appeared first on Econlib.

Lower-Class Families and Evolutionary Psychology

A few more thoughts on Rodman’s Lower-Class Families:

1. There is little sign that the welfare state has anything to do with ubiquitous impulsive sexual behavior in Coconut Village.  Even the neediest single moms appears to receive little or no support from the government.

2. So how do the neediest single moms cope?  Rodman:

What does the woman do, however, when she has children by a man and he leaves her?  The separation may “solve” the man’s financial problem if he stops supporting the woma...

Is the “Culture of Poverty” Functional?

At last, I’m starting my next major project: Poverty: Who To Blame.  As usual, my first step is assembling and reading several tall stacks of research.

One of these stacks is the “cultural of poverty” literature, and one of the classics of this literature is Hyman Rodman’s Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad (Oxford University Press, 1971).  Rodman provides a detailed ethnography of impoverished Coconut Village (location name changed to protect subjects’ anonymity)....

A Conservative Confession

Few psychological results are as well-grounded as hedonic adaptation.  Human beings often have strong short-run reactions to even mild stimuli.  An ice cream cone can put a huge grin on our faces.  Missing a red light can make us scream with rage.  In the long-run, however, human beings’ emotional reactions to even extreme stimuli soften to a shocking degree.  If you won millions in the lottery, the thrill would soon fade.  If your girlfriend dumped you, the pain of that would soon fade, too....

Fight for 15% More Low-Skilled Jobs

As you’ve probably heard, activists around the country have been fighting to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.  While the they focus on legal minimum wages, activists also welcome private employers’ decisions to voluntarily raise hourly pay to $15.  When you read about desperate American poverty, however, the activists really seem like they’re barking up the wrong tree.  Most notably, Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer’s $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America shows that the truly...

Gratis Is Not Great

Almost every psychologically normal human is delighted to here about products everyone can enjoy free of charge.  “The school are free!”  “Health care is free!”  “Lunch is free!”

According to basic welfare economics, however, gratis goods are almost automatically inefficient.  Unless the marginal social cost of the product miraculously happens to be zero, setting a price of zero leads to socially wasteful behavior.

So what makes “free” so beloved?  The simplest explanation is that people are...

Fake Nous: Huemer Starts Blogging

Mike Huemer, my favorite philosopher, is now blogging.  Huemer’s first two posts of provide a checklist of rules for constructive debate that elegantly complement Rob Wiblin’s checklist of rules for coping with adversity.  It’s all common sense, but common sense remains uncommon.  Highlights from Huemer’s “Tips for Political Debate”:

1. Guiding principle: Your goal is to make progress toward understanding, if not agreement.

It is not to “score points”, express emotions, prove your moral or i...

“Is It Political?”

When I mention what I’m writing, my dad often suspiciously asks me, “Is it political?”

Here’s how I always want to respond.

If by “political,” you mean “emotional, innumerate, dogmatic, tribal, unfair, and dishonest” then the answer is, “Of course not.”  These negative adjectives are a fair description of virtually all popular media – including popular media that agrees with my conclusions.  But where popular media go low, I go high.  If you want to know what good thinking looks like, start w...

Wiblin’s Checklist

Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours recently shared some deeply helpful advice for coping with the vicissitudes of life.  None of it would surprise Epicurus or the Stoics, but Rob’s version is more concise and accessible.  Here’s the whole thing, reprinted with his permission.

When bad things happen in life, the thoughts we have about them have a big impact on how much they harm us. Here’s a checklist of thoughts I work down to make setbacks feel less painful, which may help you too.

It’s basically...