Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 62

Regulate the State

Sometimes an organization has overwhelming power.  “If you don’t like it, go elsewhere” isn’t a serious remedy; it’s a thinly-veiled order to shut up and submit.  In such cases, we should seriously consider breaking the overpowered organization into smaller parts to restore competition.  Until competition returns, however, regulation is a helpful stopgap.  Just because you own an essential resource doesn’t entitle you to use it however you please.

And that’s why governments should be strictly...

A Birthday Tale

A couple of weeks ago, I booked a laser tag party for my younger son, who just turned 9.  When we arrived at the venue Sunday, it seemed completely closed.  I nervously checked my confirmation, but all was in order.  Then I double-checked the hours on Yelp and discovered, to my dismay, that the firm that booked the party sold this location long ago.  Frankly, it looked like full-blown fraud.  The website was selling parties it had no ability to supply.

At that moment, anti-libertarian laughte...

The Berlin Cage: A Dialogue

I figured out a way to make my recent thought experiments on the Berlin Wall even starker.

Suppose you wake up one day and find yourself in a cage.  You see a guy on the other side and the following conversation ensues.

You: Any idea how I got in this cage?

Guy: You’re not in a cage.

You: What do you mean?

Guy: You’re outside my border wall.

You: [stunned silence]

Guy: You’re free to go wherever you want, as long as you stay out of my territory.

You: I’m in a cage; where am I supposed to go?

...

Education: The Betting Continues

Samuel Knoche, a student at Fordham University, has taken me up on an old bet:

I bet at even odds that 10 years from now, the fraction of American 18-24 year-olds enrolled in traditional four-year colleges will be no more than 10% (not 10 percentage-points!) lower than it is
today.

However, we’ve slightly modified the earlier terms.

First, the time window has shifted.  Since the most recent data is for 2015, we are betting that when the 2025 data comes out, Samuel wins if the fraction of 18-t...

The Berlin Wall: In or Out?

Last month, I returned to the Berlin Wall.  It was nearly gone the first time I saw it, but now almost every vestige of its horror has been erased.  With a key exception: the Asisi Panorama – a museum that feels like time travel back to the dark days of the Cold War.  In the atrium, you can read uplifting quotes from the likes of East German dictator Erich Honecker:

Securing the border is the sovereign right of each and every country – this includes our German Democratic Republic.  The Wall...

When Wrong Wins

In the real world, the wrong side often wins.  The Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War.  The Nazis won Germany’s 1933 election.  North Vietnam won the Vietnam War.  The Ayatollah beat the Shah.  The more history you know, the more examples you see of the Triumph of Evil (or to be more precise, the Triumph of the Greater Evil).  Question: When you witness these lamentable outcomes, what should you conclude?

Some people will reconsider their original evaluation.  When “wrong” wins, perhaps we...

Fluency, Age, and Residence

While working through the references for my non-fiction graphic novel (now titled Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration; forthcoming fall 2019), I came across a nice paper confirming our standard intuitions about language acquisition.  The piece is Gillian Stevens’ “Age at Immigration and Second Language Proficiency Among Foreign-Born Adults” (Language in Society, 1999).  Background:

When investigating second language (L2) acquisition among immigrants, sociologists and economist...

A World of Ingratitude

When I started working at George Mason University, Google, Facebook, and Twitter did not exist.  Amazon was around, but I’d yet to purchase anything from them.  The big news in the book industry was the sudden rise of Borders and Barnes & Noble superstores; if you’d claimed that Amazon was a viable competing book outlet, most people would have just furrowed their brows at your naivete.

Now the IT giants are household names.  They haven’t just transformed their own industries; they’ve transfor...

Vatican vs. Madison

When I was in 4th-grade catechism, I was issued a copy of Outlines of the Catholic Faith.  Until then, my religious education consisted almost entirely in Bible stories and ritual.  Here, at last, was an accessible work of systematic theology.  I read it with great care and interest, as you can tell by looking closely at the scan of the dog-eared cover of my personal copy.

If I recall correctly, the Outlines‘ exegesis of the Apostles’ Creed particularly engrossed me.  Subsection IX (“The Hol...

An “Anti-School” Teacher on The Case Against Education

A high school teacher just sent me this email.  Reprinted anonymously with his permission, with brief replies from me inserted in the text.

Dear Professor Caplan,

I just finished reading The Case Against Education and thoroughly enjoyed it!  I was not only impressed by the depth of your research and thought, but also appreciated your writing style and frequent use of humor.  Congrats!  By the way, I write from New York City, and whenever I was reading your book on the subway, I noticed many...