Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 94

Commentary on Captain Fantastic, by Bryan Caplan

[Warning: Packed with Captain Fantastic spoilers!]

Few movies speak to me more personally than Captain Fantastic.  It's not just a movie about homeschooling; it's a movie about natalist homeschoolers living in a nearly-airtight Bubble.  And psychologically, the movie's patriarch eerily resembles me.  Captain Fantastic raises his six kids with kindness, respect, and the power of ideas, scrupulously avoiding the parental urge to dominate youths with anger, fear, or sadness.  I say this even though the content of Captain Fantastic's ideas leaves much to be desired.  My commentary on Captain Fantastic, in no particular order:

1. On the surface, Captain Fantastic is a leftist cliche: not just a socialist living off the grid, but a cultish Chomsky fan.  But I've never met a socialist remotely like him.  He's not just amazingly open to reasoned argument; his intellectual style is perfectly calm and genuinely friendly. 

2. Captain Fantastic is a full-blown economic illiterate.  When he looks at stores, all he can see is capitalists gutting American democracy.  The idea that stores make life easier, freeing up time for more worthwhile pursuits, is alien to him.  So is the idea that modern technology makes primitive survival skills obsolete.

3. In the real world, openness to reasoned argument and economic illiteracy do not long co-exist.  Anyone as intellectual curious as Captain Fantastic would soon encounter Econ 1.  Anyone as calm and friendly as he would quickly come to appreciate the cogency of basic economic principles.  And while Econ 1 wouldn't make him a free-market radical, it would forever eradicate his socialism and primitivism.  My idea of heaven is teaching Econ 1 to Captain Fantastic and his six kids - and watching the lightbulbs turn on one by one.

4. Captain Fantastic's academic curriculum is admirable but flawed.  The chief problem: It revolves around the Great Books.  Though I've devoted years to these works, I'm no longer a big fan.  While the Great Books were impressive in their day, they're stuffed with flimsy arguments and short on credible empirics.  Rare gems aside, I hold to this grim verdict even when I largely agree with authors' conclusion.  If you want to understand modern economies, Cowen and Tabarrok's Modern Principles of Economics will teach you far more than Smith's Wealth of Nations .

5. What's the alternative?  A curriculum that revolves around not Great Books, but Basic Facts.  Learn the global and historical distribution of GDP.  Grasp the basics of intelligence and personality psychology.  Instead of reading Marx, read quick overviews of Marxism and its critics, then study the political and economic history of Marxist regimes in great detail.  I daresay that Captain Fantastic's eldest son wouldn't be an avowed Maoist if he knew the Basic Facts about what Mao really did and why.  Or to take a far less egregious case, I would have loved to see Captain Fantastic's kids test their rhetorical objections to Citizens United against the social science of campaign finance.

6. Captain Fantastic is a case study in weird collectivism.  Despite the family's bizarre counter-cultural lifestyle, their favorite slogan is "Power to the people."  How can they not realize that if they were paying attention, "the people" would view their family with antipathy - and casually crush their family's experiment in living?

7. Captain Fantastic treats his homeschooling as all-or-nothing: Either you do it his way, or you surrender to the mediocrity of the world.  One of the first lessons in Econ 1 is that this binary thinking is counter-productive drivel.  Life is permeated with endless adjustable margins - and each of these margins is an opportunity for progress.  His kids want to try hamburgers?  At least let them try one.  His kids are clueless about the Real World?  Let them spend two weeks with their suburban cousins to broaden their horizons.  Mountain climbing is too dangerous for little kids?  You can switch to something safer without sending your kids to a public school that will bore them out of their minds.

8. Captain Fantastic's love of parental candor is touching and exemplary.  He consistently answers even his youngest kids' awkward questions with clarity and comfort.  This upsets his sister, but she's simply wrong.  With very rare exceptions, kids handle the truth well.  They're also good lie detectors.  If the truth is scary enough to give a kid nightmares, don't lie; say, "I'll tell you when you're older."  Otherwise, answer their questions and reap the greatest fruit of the virtue of honesty: your children's trust. 

9. I wish Captain Fantastic had been a fan of Thomas Szasz instead of Noam Chomsky.  He tells his kids that their bipolar mom's brain "can't transmit electrical signals," but somehow that doesn't stop her from lobbying to rejoin society, helping their son secretly apply to elite colleges, or writing a Dadaist will to outrage her square parents.

10. Captain Fantastic's Chomsky idolatry barely bothered me, but it's objectively awful.  Economic illiteracy aside, Chomsky's long history of apologizing for totalitarian socialist regimes makes it absurd to treat him as a paladin of human rights.  Like Howard Zinn, Chomsky is the kind of pacifist who gives pacifism a bad name.

11. On balance, I would have hated being raised by Captain Fantastic.  I would have loved the intellectual experience and his charming personality.  But I would have grown to hate his primitivism and asceticism - and my negativity would have gradually poisoned an otherwise idyllic experience.  In slogan form: There's nothing wrong with Captain Fantastic's parenting that suburban living and Econ 1 wouldn't fix.

12. Since the 60s, radical lifestyle experiments and left-wing ideology have normally been a package deal.  When radical lifestyle experiments perform poorly, outsiders usually treat it as proof that radical lifestyle experiments are bad.  Critical reviews of Captain Fantastic tend to draw this very lesson.  But given the confounding variable of left-wing ideology, this is a rush to judgment.  Maybe the real problem is leftism, not radicalism. 

13. What would radical lifestyle experimentation without leftism look like?  Start with a heavy dose of superforecasting and the Betting Norm.  Radicalism is no excuse for wishful or unempirical thinking.  Indeed, the more radical your dreams, the more you need to test your dreams against harsh reality.

14. I've already seen Captain Fantastic twice.  Overall review: 9/10.  If it weren't fascinating on many levels, I wouldn't bother to criticize it.  I grinned through 90% of the movie.  See it!



(0 COMMENTS)

Neurotic Politics, by Bryan Caplan

Neuroticism - the tendency to experience negative emotions like anger, fear, and sadness - is a pillar of the Five Factor Model of personality.  Human beings routinely attribute their emotions to external circumstances.  For proximate causes, they're often right.  The underlying reality, though, is that some people - the highly neurotic - naturally focus on negativity. 

Which brings me to one of my pet theories: neurotic politics.  Quick version: When neurotics turn to politics, they find an infinite series of reasons to feel bad, which helps them stay one step ahead of the realization that their fundamental problem is inside their own heads and can be fixed by no one but themselves. 

In light of my pet theory, I was struck by this passage in War and Peace :

"This is what they have done with Russia!  This is what they have done with me!" thought Rostopchin, an irrepressible rage welling up in his soul against the someone to whom what was happening might be attributed.  As often happens with hot-tempered men his wrath had taken possession of him while he was seeking as object for it.

There is decent evidence that anti-market people are more neurotic, but is there a broader literature on neurotic politics I should know about?

(1 COMMENTS)

Metzger on Headline Dismay Minimization, by Bryan Caplan

Interesting reaction to Tuesday's post from my friend Perry Metzger.  Perry, with his permission:

My
biggie is the number of people who die from medical errors and bad
hygiene in hospitals. It's thousands a day globally. Unlike the global
murder problem, this one is probably quite straightforwardly fixed by
improving process. My #2 is the mosquito borne
disease problem, where something like 3000 people die a day, possibly
much more as we really don't know -- this is now easily fixed, though
anti-GMO hysteria will probably delay the fix until after literally ten
or twenty million more people have died.

(1 COMMENTS)

The Fall 2016 Public Choice Center Seminar Series, by Bryan Caplan

This academic year, I'm in charge of the Public Choice Center Seminar series.  Seminars are normally on Wednesdays from 12:00-1:15 PM, and are open to the public.  Since I am not a fan of actually-existing seminars, I'm experimenting with a new format, which I will strictly enforce:

1. Split the talk into two parts.  Part 1 is the first two-thirds of the
allotted time.  Part 2 is the last third of the allotted time.

2. During Part 1, the audience may not ask any questions.  No exceptions.

3. However, the speaker
retains the option to ask the audience questions during Part 1.  If the
speaker sees a lot of confused faces, he can query, "Are you familiar
with the efficiency case for Pigovian taxation?" and adjust his
presentation accordingly.

4. The speaker scrupulously ends Part 1 on time, then turns the rest of the talk over for questions.

The Fall speakers are Truman Bewley, John Mueller, Areendam Chanda, Jim Schneider, Mike Huemer, John Lott, Amy Wax, Gary Lucas, and Zac Gochenour.  I very much look forward to hearing them speak, and new seminar rules should ensure that they actually get to deliver their full talks!

(1 COMMENTS)

Headline Dismay Minimization, by Bryan Caplan

Evaluate this simple cynical theory of what almost every politically aware person really wants: Minimizing the negative emotions they personally experience when they read/see/hear top news stories.  In other words, the politically aware strongly care about even objectively minor problems that get a lot of coverage, but barely care about even objectively major problems that get little coverage.  And almost all their political efforts - voting, arguing, slacktivism - revolve around their ill-considered emotions.

Public obsession with terrorism but apathy about the global murder rate (over 1000 per day) is a prime example of what I have in mind.  Hideous headlines call for drastic action, but vastly greater evils the media ignores aren't worth worrying about.

Please show your work.

(5 COMMENTS)

An ITT I Cannot Pass, by Bryan Caplan

I pride myself on my ability to fairly and accurately explain views with which I disagree.  I've tried to enshrine this skill in what I call the Ideological Turing Test - the ability of non-believers to mimic believers in a blind trial.  But when I read these passages in Noah Smith's recent column, I realized I'd met my match. 

The tendency toward ideological commitment is now being tested in the
U.S., as free-market dogma -- sometimes known as neoliberalism -- is
coming under increasing attack.

Certainly, free markets haven't produced dramatic failures on the level
of the USSR or Venezuela, but "not as bad as communism" is a fairly low
bar to clear, and there's a definite sense that the reigning economic
policies have run out of steam.

The claim that "free-market dogma" is the "reigning economic policy" of the United States or any major country seems so absurd, so contrary to big blatant facts (like government spending as a share of GDP, for starters), that I'm dumb-founded.  Sure, I could defend this position with demagoguery.  But if I wanted to intelligently argue in favor of the claim that neoliberalism actually guides economic policy in any major country, I literally wouldn't know where to start.

A little help?

Or a lot of help?

P.S. Here's David's complementary take on Noah's piece.

(22 COMMENTS)

Huemer's "Relativism and Tyranny", by Bryan Caplan

The latest installment in my lost works of Michael Huemer series is his 1992 essay, "Relativism and Tyranny."  The paper begins with an infamous quote from 1984, then distinguishes nine theses moral relativists (whether self-conscious or by default) routinely equivocate between.

The following are versions of relativism:

(1) Moral values generally are established by social conventions.

(2) All cultures/value systems are equally good.

(3) Cultures/value systems cannot be compared morally.

(4) What is right is identical with what is ordained by whatever society a given agent belongs to.

All of these propositions are different, and all of them are false.  The following are not versions of relativism, at least not for the purposes of my attack on relativism in this paper:

(5) It is good to be tolerant of people with differing practices and views.

(6) Different people/cultures endorse different values.

(7) People tend to value what they are taught to value.

(8) Sometimes, when faced with a choice, there may be multiple different courses of action that are equally moral.

(9) Morals cannot be resolved by some fixed algorithm but must be judged case-by-case.

All of these propositions are to some extent true, and none of them is what I am arguing about herein.  This point can scarcely be overemphasized, that all of the above nine propositions are distinct, and that I am attacking the first four, not the latter five. Obstinate failure to take cognizance of this can lead to extensive arguments both irrelevant and exasperating.

The space Huemer spends linking relativism and tyranny is surprisingly brief, but his essay strongly influenced this essay I wrote a year later on "Hobbes' Foundations for Totalitarianism."  Me:

Moral relativism also tends to support a total state. Only if
some things are objectively right or wrong is it possible to
rationally critique the existing order. If moral relativism is true,
then it isn't wrong for the state to coerce or even kill individuals;
for the doctrine of individual rights is a moral theory, and if moral
relativism is right, then all moral theories are false or nonsense.
Overall, since most of the things that total governments do
intuitively seem immoral, a would-be total ruler must undermine
morality in order to quell protest against his policies.

If you know Huemer's mature writings well, much of "Relativism and Tyranny" will be familiar territory.  But if you know Huemer's mature writings well, you'll also know everything he writes has great epistemic value-added.  Enjoy.

(0 COMMENTS)

The Immigration/Labor Demand Elasticity Puzzle, by Bryan Caplan

While labor demand elasticity is pretty clearly negative, virtually all estimates have an absolute value less than 2.  Yet estimated effects of immigration on native wages are tiny.  Kerr and Kerr's summary is typical.

The documented wage elasticities are small and clustered near zero. Dustmann et al. (2008) likewise found very little evidence for wage effects in their review of the UK experience. This parallels an earlier conclusion by Friedberg and Hunt (1995) that immigration had little impact on native wages; overall, their survey of the earlier literature found that a 10% increase in the immigrant share of the labor force reduced native wages by about 1%. Recent meta-surveys by Longhi et al. (2005, 2008) and Okkerse (2008) found comparable, small effects across many studies.

See here for details.

How are both these results possible?  The easy answer is that "wage elasticity of labor demand" and "wage elasticity of immigration" are conceptually distinct.  Quite true, but they're also conceptually related.  Indeed, unless labor supply is fairly elastic, a low wage elasticity of labor demand seems to imply a high wage elasticity of immigration.

What gives?  Top potential reconciliations:

1. Labor supply is actually quite elastic.  Tempting, but this implausibly means immigration avoids wage effects by inducing lots of voluntary native unemployment.  Kerr and Kerr also report very little evidence of this.

2. Left-wing bias.  Within economics, labor is known as a liberal field of study.  So labor economists gravitate toward (a) low estimates of labor demand elasticity, and (b) low estimates of the economic harm to natives of immigration - despite the tension between these results.  While I find this somewhat plausible, labor economists also have offsetting publication biases in favor of statistically significant results.

3. Native and foreign labor are distinct goods, so an increase in the supply of immigrant labor barely increases supply in the labor markets where most natives actually work.  In fact, native and foreign labor are generally complementary goods, so when the supply of immigration goes up, so does the demand for most native workers.  Implausible?  Check out the weighty evidence in its favor.

Other stories?

(3 COMMENTS)

Labor Demand Elasticity: Boredom is Thoughtless, by Bryan Caplan

When workers are cheaper, employers want more.  But how many more?  Does a 1% fall in the price of labor entice .1% higher employment?  .5% more?  1% more?  In technical terms, what is labor's elasticity of demand?  So much hinges on this seemingly boring question - everything from "How pro-worker is 'pro-worker' legislation?" to "Does the minimum wage, on balance, help low-skilled workers?" to "Are wage cuts a credible solution to mass unemployment?" to "What is the effect of immigration on native wages?"

The empirical literature, as you'd expect, is vast.  But in 2015, the European Economic Review published a major meta-analysis. (Lichter et al.'s "The Own-Wage Elasticity of Labor Demand: A Meta-Regression Analysis"; ungated version here)  This edifying piece begins with the distribution of earlier findings:

















Notice: As expected, labor demand elasticity has a negative slope, with modal estimates around -.4.  But Lichter et al. naturally aren't satisfied with a histogram.  They break the results down by time period (short-run, intermediate-run, and long-run elasticity), model, dataset, and workforce characteristics.  Here's their big page of results.  Highlights (using absolute value for convenience, so "higher elasticity"="a more negative elasticity"):

Long-run elasticity is noticeably higher than short-run elasticity, a gap of .3 in the simple model and .15 in the full model.Panel data yields elasticities about .25 higher than other data.Demand for low-skilled, female, and atypical employment is markedly more elastic, an extra .21, .17. and .54 respectively.Additional result: Labor demand is more elastic in countries with less labor regulation! 

Fig. 4 plots the predicted labor demand elasticities against the country-specific OECD Employment Legislation Index. The graph shows a positive relationship between overall employment protection and the wage elasticity, with labor demand being less elastic in countries that have rather strict rules of employment protection legislation (for example, Spain and Mexico). In contrast, labor demand is more elastic in those countries that have weak rules on employment protection (for example, the UK and Canada). Differences in employment protection legislation among countries may thus contribute to the
country-specific estimates of the labor demand elasticity.

The graph:



















The authors conclude by testing for publication bias, and find fairly convincing evidence that researchers are hunting for statistical significance.  The published paper leaves it at that, but the working paper includes "publication bias corrected" estimates:

Our preferred estimate in terms of specification { the long-run, constant output elasticity obtained from a structural-form model using administrative panel data at the rm level for the latest mean year of observation, with mean characteristics on all other variables and corrected for publication selection bias { is -0.246, bracketed by the interval [-0.072;-0.446]. Compared to this interval, we note that (i) many estimates of the own-wage elasticity of labor demand given in the literature are upwardly in inflated (with a mean value larger than -0.5 in absolute terms) and (ii) our preferred estimate is close to the best guess provided by Hamermesh (1993), albeit with our confidence interval for values of the elasticity being smaller.

Who cares?  In practice, almost no one.  Twitter mentions for "labor demand elasticity" average about one per month!  No politician who yearns for victory addresses this "boring" topic.  But if people actually cared about the effects of labor market regulation on worker and human well-being, labor demand elasticity would fascinate them.  An elasticity of -.25 implies that raising wages 4% permanently depresses employment by 1%.  Considering the misery of involuntary unemployment and our hedonic adaptation to mere money, how can any thoughtful person yawn?

(0 COMMENTS)

Open Borders Philanthropy Bleg, by Bryan Caplan

Question from a reader.  Any fruitful ideas?

Dear Prof. Caplan,

I've long been intuitively in favor of open borders, but
it is only recently that I have spent a bit of time reading the literature both
for and against this case.  Perhaps
unsurprisingly, I've found a couple of your papers particularly persuasive both
morally and empirically.

My question is, what now? 
I'm currently in a situation where I have more free time than free cash
flow, and I've been looking for opportunities to volunteer for a cause that I
am passionate for, but also one where I can have a tangible impact.  Which is surprisingly hard to find.

As a long-time advocate of open borders I thought you
might have some ideas of organizations that are doing good work in this area
and need volunteers?  I'm based in New
York City, and would be happy to do work that was local, but also happy to help
online if that's what is needed.

Appreciate any information or advice that you are willing
to share.

(0 COMMENTS)