Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 60

Education Is a Passport to the Real Training

When I write, I doggedly search for ways to make my point compelling.  But here’s a fine slogan I didn’t hit upon until months after the publication of The Case Against Education:

Education is a passport to the real training.

The “real training,” as I’ve already explained, primarily occurs on-the-job.  By doing.  You don’t learn how to fly a plane by listening to lectures on flying theory – or deploying the “critical thinking” skills you gained by writing essays on Shakespeare.  You learn to...

Socialists Without a Plan

If I met a four-star general and he told me he was a socialist, I’d understand where he’s coming from.  After all, this is a man who lives and breathes logistics.  He leads for a living.  His job is to make master plans, then carefully monitor his underlings so they actually implement said master plans.  Location, timing, manpower, supplies, margins of error – a general takes all of them into account.  Sure, he knows the proverb that “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”  But a gen...

Inside the Moderate Mind

A progressive immigration activist recently told me that every election year, moderate Democrats urge him to shut up.  Moderate Democrats clearly consider immigration a losing issue.  But according to my source, they’re also quite self-righteous about their shushing.  Which makes me wonder: What’s going on inside the mind of the moderate Democrat?

Leading possibilities:

They care about immigration just as much as the progressive immigration activists.  But moderates live in the real world. ...

Krugman and Public Choice

A few readers have observed that Krugman’s general neglect of public choice problems is especially odd because it takes such problems very seriously in the area he knows best: trade policy.  Here’s what Paul says in his 1993 AER piece, “The Narrow and Broad Arguments for Free Trade“:

The broad argument for free trade, to which many economists implicitly subscribe, is essentially political: free trade is a pretty good if not perfect policy, while an effort to deviate from it in a sophisticated...

Optimality versus Fire

Public choice economists have long argued that conventional economists hold markets to far higher standards than they hold government.  Markets “fail” unless they’re optimal.  Governments “succeed” unless they’re on fire.  If this seems unfair, compare the standard definitions of “market failure” and “failed state.”  Market failure exists whenever markets fall short of perfect efficiency.  To be a failed state, in contrast, requires habitual disaster.

Is this a Straw Man?  I think not.  Even...

Stubborn Detachments

I’ve known Tyler Cowen for 25 years.  Straussian misreadings notwithstanding, I assure you that he has little patience for open borders and even less for my brand of pacifism.  But given the general moral theory that he embraces in his new Stubborn Attachments, it’s hard to see why Tyler doesn’t already agree with me.  At minimum, he ought to take my contrarian views far more seriously.  What else can he logically conclude, given his endorsement of the “Principle of Growth Plus Rights”?  Aft...

Meritocracy Without Borders: Sowell Edition

In recent years, Thomas Sowell has been a staunch advocate of stricter immigration policies.  Which is ironic, because this passage from his Compassion Versus Guilt has stuck with me for thirty years:

When I travel through California’s vast agricultural areas, the people I see working in the fields under the hot sun are usually Mexicans.  So are many of the people who clean the hotels.  But when I have been approached by a panhandler in San Francisco or Los Angeles, it has never been a Mexic...

Does Immigration Shrink the Welfare State?

People normally assume that immigration will expand the welfare state.  The lazy version says (a)  immigrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state, and (b) people vote their self-interest.  The better version says that immigrants’ countries of origins favor more redistribution than natives – and immigrants’ bring their political culture with them.

Both stories, however, ignore the effect of immigration on natives’ support for the welfare state.   Researchers – most of whom look kindly u...

A Fatal Flip

Suppose you receive the following option.

You flip a fair coin. If the coin is Heads, you acquire healthy immortality. If the coin is Tails, you instantly die.

The expected value of this option seems infinite: .5*infinity + 0 is still infinity, no?  Even if you apply diminishing marginal utility to life itself, it’s hard to imagine that the rest of your natural life outweighs a 50% shot of eternity… especially if you remember that many of your actual years are unlikely to be healthy.

Nevert...

Escaping Poverty

Lant Pritchett’s new working paper, “Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth” should be required reading for every Effective Altruist.  Bottom line: Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration – not redistribution or philanthropy.  The evidence will be fairly familiar to EconLog readers, but the framing is novel and powerful:

So think of two ways to help the global poor. One is for rich people (in a global sense) to give...