Bryan Caplan
@bryan_caplan
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GMU econ prof, NYT bestseller, father of 4, author of Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Case Against Education, and Open Borders.
Oakton, Virginia
Joined January 2011
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My new *Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation* releases May 1.
But it would be a huge favor to me if you pre-ordered it right now!
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Dear Intellectuals:
If you ever decide you've been deeply wrong for years, don't instantly re-brand yourself as a wise spokesman for your new view. Instead, publicly admit that your judgment clearly isn't very good, and stop pontificating for a few years.
Thanks,
Bryan
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When I was in high school, I dreamed of a world where people wanted to spend all day arguing about philosophy, politics, and economics.
Now we're here, and I was wrong. Wrong!
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"That's not real socialism" is a perfectly reasonable claim. For example, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway aren't real socialism. That's why they're not disasters.
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The classic mistake of the old: Thinking there are no new ideas.
The classic mistake of the young: Thinking your ideas are new.
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I don't want to crush, humiliate, frighten, silence, irritate, defeat, discredit, demoralize, delegitimize, depress, frustrate, or ostracize my intellectual opponents. I want to convert them and be friends.
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Just tried telemedicine for the first time. About 75% of the benefit - for 5% of the time cost.
This should always be legal!
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I scrupulously avoid taking offense. As a result, people speak to me with candor and humor.
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If you want to combat error, critique your in-group. You speak their language and they trust you, so you might persuade someone.
If you want to raise your status, critique your out-group. They won't listen, but your in-group will love it.
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For any scandalous story that upsets you, ask: How many such stories should we expect in a well-functioning country with 325M people? A well-functioning planet with 7.6B people?
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Took me under 5 minutes to turn a normal, smart 13-year-old against the minimum wage.
Contrary to almost everyone, the textbook argument IS intuitive.
It's just emotionally unappealing.
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Always amazed that smart people don’t abhor the French Revolution.
Europe was laid waste for a QUARTER CENTURY, and for what?!
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Communism is the ideology that was a complete disaster from start to finish, but still has millions of devoted fans.
Neoliberalism is the ideology that consistently works wonders, but never had more than a few thousand nerds for friends.
I have seen two big ideologies fall apart in my lifetime: communism and neoliberalism. When you see what was believed by so many crumble into pieces twice, you are less likely to believe that we have now found (or will ever find) the ideology to outlast all others.
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The classic mistake of the old: Thinking there are no new ideas.
The classic mistake of the young: Thinking your ideas are new.
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Economics and philosophy are almost the *only* academic disciplines where people can politely defend socially unacceptable answers to unconventional questions and remain respected scholars. Indeed, it's the contrarians who make us great.
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Can we replace "Out of an abundance of caution" with "In yet another fit of innumeracy"?
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99% of what excites people today will be forgotten in two years, but you'll never get the time you spent angry back.
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Italian TSA seized my barbells.
20 minutes later,
@Amazon
was sending me another set.
And yet I’ve seen 100x as much public resentment for
@JeffBezos
as airport security.
What’s wrong with people?
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I meant what I said five years ago. In his early 20s,
@RichardHanania
anonymously said some bad things about me.
I won him over, met him in real life, and he is now my good friend.
And I stand by my friends.
I don't want to crush, humiliate, frighten, silence, irritate, defeat, discredit, demoralize, delegitimize, depress, frustrate, or ostracize my intellectual opponents. I want to convert them and be friends.
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AI enthusiasts have cried wolf for decades.
GPT-4 is the wolf. I've seen it with my own eyes.
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Q: How come no one is saying, "GPT will let us get 10x as many academic papers as we already have, with no reduction in quality!"
A: Academic publishing is 98% about rationing dream jobs for life. Hardly anyone even wants to read the papers the humans are already writing.
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My university plans to add new required "Just Society" courses.
My public comment: "George Mason University is a public university, funded by Virginians with a wide range of political views about the nature of justice. The Just Societies Initiative is a thinly-veiled effort to…
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Capitalism is the high school nerd of economic systems: tremendously successful, terribly unpopular, and tolerated only if you can cheat off of him and take his lunch money.
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Why does anyone pay full price to attend low-ranked private colleges?
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Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating. Worth repeating.
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Anytime you see me in public, please introduce yourself.
Making friends has worked out swimmingly for me so far!
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I strongly oppose lying to children. If I don't want to tell them the truth, I simply say "I'll tell you when you're older."
As a result, all four of my children treat my word like gold.
Cost of truth? "I am often asked by parents, 'How do I talk to my child about death if I don’t believe in God or heaven?' My answer is always the same: 'Lie.' The idea that you simply die & turn to dust may work for some adults, but it doesn’t help [kids]"
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Step 1: Look at how emotional each side is.
Step 2: Assume the less emotional side is right and the more emotional side is wrong.
I first proposed this "Mellow Heuristic" three years ago, and I say it's held up well.
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I understand people who reluctantly accept democracy as the least-bad possibility.
But I am baffled by anyone who actually feels good about a system that gives you the choice between Trump and Biden.
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How much doublethink does it take to tell people their vote is really important, then announce election results before all the votes have been counted?
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Now is the perfect time for a big career switch, especially if you lack the right credentials but have a can-do attitude.
Employers are temporarily ultra-open-minded. Don't miss your big chance to bypass years of education!
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"Offer a green card to any Russian with a technical degree who wishes to emigrate to the United States."
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Econ Student: What do you think about the signaling model of education?
Econ Prof: There's not a shred of evidence in its favor.
Econ Student: What should I do to get into a top grad school?
Econ Prof: Get an A+ in Real Analysis.
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Common sense says that anti-meritocratic hiring should REDUCE productivity, so why doesn't greater commitment to DEI demonstrably hurt firm performance?
Simplest story: The most successful firms can afford to waste money, and regulation neutered hostile takeovers decades ago.
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“Paper straws are so biodegradable they turn to trash in your mouth!” -my younger son
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I'm especially baffled by suicides of highly successful people.
I'm well-aware that success often fails to make people happy. But successful people have ample financial resources to explore the numerous life paths they - by virtue of their own success - have generally taken…
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If a country is bad enough for sanctions, it's bad enough to give all its citizens asylum.
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Supporting “liberal democracy” is like supporting “benevolent dictatorship.”
Maybe you’ll get lucky, but the logic of the system works against it.
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I don't treat grad students "like" colleagues.
They ARE my colleagues.
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There are zero Republican cities of over 1M residents.
Zero.
Why?
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If you ever decide you've been deeply wrong for years, don't instantly re-brand yourself as a wise spokesman for your new view. Instead, publicly admit that your judgment clearly isn't very good, and stop pontificating for a few years.
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So if cloth masks officially don’t work now, do we get an apology for every time someone hassled us to wear one?
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I often want to ask people, "Do you find that a constructive way to talk to others?"
Unfortunately, asking that question is not a constructive way to talk to others.
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What's your preferred solution to the Fermi Paradox?
(a) We're alone.
(b) They're hard to find.
(c) They're VERY far away.
(d) Other
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University presidents should just say, “Yes, we’ve been total hypocrites about free speech and political neutrality because we’re scared of our DEI people. We repent, and we hereby fire all our DEI employees to prove it.”
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If converting your opponents sounds like a pipe dream, it's not. The West really did win the Cold War by making Communist elites realize they were wrong.
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Schools finally realized that teaching critical thinking was too damn hard, so they switched to teaching uncritical feeling.
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I have known
@robinhanson
for 20 years. He is pure human sunshine, and a model of curiosity, sincerity, and intellectual integrity. He doesn't speak to upset others, but because he yearns to understand. Robin is too good for this corrupt world, but thank goodness he's here.
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What's the opposite of trolling? My ambition is to find the magic rhetorical formula that makes all sides calm down and focus on careful arguments about timeless issues.
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Why you shouldn’t trust mainstream media.
In one sentence:
The media constantly shows rare yet horrifying events to scare and anger you in order to take away your freedom.
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Japan is full of workers who are grossly overqualified for their jobs. Typical Japanese is management material. So yes, Japan needs vast numbers of low-skilled immigrants to allow a better division of labor.
@bryan_caplan
Surely they would be improved with a billion immigrants from the third world though, as you always advocate
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We overestimate how much we can change other people.
We underestimate how much we can change ourselves.
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Neoliberalism is the great fiction whereby leftist fanatics pretend that Larry Summers is Milton Friedman.
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The irony of mandatory training videos:
If you don't have a test afterwards, no one will watch.
If you DO have a test afterwards, it has to be so easy that the lowest-IQ person in your organization can pass.
Either way, near-zero "training" occurs.
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My favorite consensuses to trust are those held by calm, high-IQ non-conformists.
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"I recognized that while I hated nuclear power, it was going to be necessary. Then I realized that everything I hated about it turned out to be a pack of lies. We were regulating it as if it were the most dangerous energy when it is actually the safest."
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"The idea that the Haber-Bosch process has “brought nothing like shared prosperity” is an absolutely wild claim. Nitrogen fertilizers are so important to human existence that by the most common estimates, about half of the entire population of Earth — 3.5 billion people — is only…
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Imagine if instead of sanctioning Venezuela, the U.S. just granted asylum to 10M Venezuelans.
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"Recommended libertarian compromise: The FDA should be shuttered out of an abundance of caution until such time as they master cost-benefit analysis and statistics." - a friend
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I’m hearing a lot of people naming “empathy” as a career-enhancing “soft skill.” I suspect “willingness to set personal feelings aside” is far scarcer and more productive!
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Which libertarian thinker is doing the most to actually improve public policy today?
I nominate
@DeAngelisCorey
.
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I'm puzzled that "cope" has become a pejorative.
Life is full of disappointment, and if you don't cope, what becomes of you?
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“The United States contains immigrants from Israel and Palestine, Serbians and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis…How often do we hear about members of these groups continuing their ancient conflict in their new homeland? The first-pass answer: ‘virtually never.’”
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"The not-real-socialism defence is only ever invoked retrospectively, namely, when a socialist experiment has already been widely discredited. As long as a socialist experiment is in its prime, almost nobody disputes its socialist credentials."
@K_Niemietz
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90% of economists who announce that they have "abandoned their free-market faith" were never fans of free markets in the first place.
It's like the Pope announcing that he's abandoned Zeus.
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"New York Times Bestselling Author"
This will be in the first sentence of my bio for the rest of my life!
Sweet.
I think
@ZachWeiner
has made the list before, so this should make him a "Multiple New York Times Bestselling Author"!
#OpenBorders
by
@bryan_caplan
&
@ZachWeiner
, a comic advocating an immigration policy thought too radical for Repubs OR Dems, which brought together a creative team from all over the political spectrum to cheerfully confront naysayers' fears, is a G-D
@nytimes
BESTSELLER today 🍾
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99% of what excites people today will be forgotten in two years, but you'll never get the time you spent angry back.
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Why do so many UK sinks have this bizarre configuration? Do they want to burn one hand and freeze the other?
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The right is too anti-intellectual to come up with anything new.
The left is too pseudo-intellectual come up with anything true.
#PoeticLicense
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"I will never apologize for politely saying or writing anything that seems reasonable to me... except under extreme duress.
"So if I ever do so apologize, please assume extreme duress."
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The near-absence of student protests against campus Covid rules is great confirmation of
@RichardHanania
's ideological cardinal preference divergence story.
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If shortages can get this bad without price controls, I shudder to picture shortages with price controls.
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Asking people to stop seeing family and friends to reduce their Covid risk?
Standard.
Asking people to lose weight to reduce their Covid risk?
Almost non-existent!
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An economist's first responsibility: telling non-economists on YOUR side when their arguments are wrong.
P.S.: If you conscientiously fulfill your first responsibility, you will never find time to ask, "What's my second responsibility?"
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The
#Nineties
: A ten-year Golden Age between the Collapse of Communism and the War on Terror. Yet I can't remember anyone calling it a "Golden Age" at the time.
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Washington, DC:
A city where you can pitch a tent on public property, but can't build a skyscraper on private property.
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The most realistic long-run path to liberty is boosting libertarians' Total Fertility Rate to 3.
I've done my part, how about you?
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The best argument against the importance of IQ is listening to a high-IQ person argue that IQ isn't important.
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A far-seeing GOP would enthusiastically welcome Venezuelan refugees, grooming them to be the next Cubans. And it would be very hard for the Democrats to openly oppose this humanitarian action.
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I'd take anti-work thinkers a little more seriously if they railed against the "grade slavery" of school half as much as the "wage slavery" of work.
School is deeply boring and meaningless for most students, and they don't even get paid to attend!
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Surprised at the near-unanimity of right-wing affection for Milei.
Maybe all libertarians need to do to become well-liked is just win?
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If you want to combat error, critique your in-group. You speak their language and they trust you, so you might persuade someone.
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You've seen federal land as a percentage of total land. Once you add in state ownership, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida look bad too.
Despite all the desert, Texas still does great!
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Democracy enthusiasts baffle me.
How can anyone get excited about a system where people you loathe rule half the time?
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My family dropped me off at college.
I blinked.
Now I’m dropping my own kids off at college.
#LifeMovesPrettyFastIfYouDontStopAndLookAroundOnceInAWhileYouCouldMissIt
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Someone at
@GeorgeMasonU
emailed our DEI office to alert them to my tweet, with the caveat "I am not making an official complaint at this time."
Remember my "I Can’t Help but Feel Like You’re Trying to Intimidate Me Into Pretending to Agree with You"?
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As a homeschooler, I save about 95% on textbooks by using slightly out-of-date editions. History, physics, and math just don't change much in a decade! Professors who care about their students will do the same.
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Leaving Krakow train station. Packed with Ukrainian refugees, well-dressed and in good spirits. Poles are practically giving them the shirts off their backs.
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George Mason owned slaves. That makes him a villain in my book.
I suggest we re-name George Mason University after a genuine champion of human freedom: Walter Williams.
Walter Williams University! It’s where I want to teach.
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Social Desirability Bias in one slogan:
People SAY what sounds good, but DO what feels good.
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For any piece of bad news, ask yourself: "Does this mean the world is bad, or does it mean the world is BIG?"
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