--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Today I have the great honor for the third time of interviewing Bryan Caplan again. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh, one of my favorite people in the world. Yeah, it's a greater pleasure every time, for me at least.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So let's talk about your book, *Don't Be a Feminist*. Is there any margin of representation of women in leadership roles at which you think there should be introduced bias to make sure more women get in, even if the original ratio is not because of bias?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: No, I believe in meritocracy. I think it is a good system. It is one that almost everyone sees the intuitive appeal of and it works. So just looking at a group and saying, "We need to get more members of group X" is just the wrong way to be approaching it. Rather, you need to be focusing on, let's try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But if there's just an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do good business? The company would just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. I mean, one can imagine that. I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. And I think that people are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really push me into starting to think, suppose that you're running a bar, would you have ladies night? Yeah, I would have ladies night in a bar because that actually works and it's good business. But if what you're doing is trying to actually get correct answers to things, if you're trying to go and make something run effectively, if you're just trying to make progress, you're trying to learn new things, the thing to focus on is what actually leads to knowledge and not focusing on just trying to get demographic representation.
--:-- And really, I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So I would actually, besides defending meritocracy on its merits, also say the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it really does actually fit the facts. And when you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Changing topics a little bit. I wonder if this gives you greater sympathy for immigration restrictionists because their argument is similar, that there's no natural shelling point for your keyhole solutions where you let tens of millions of people in, but you don't give them welfare or voting rights, that there's a slippery slope. You let them in and then eventually the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So for there, I mean, first of all, I would say maybe. Yeah. So that is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm guessing that a lot of your listeners have no idea what keyhole solutions are, Dwarkesh. So maybe we want to back up and explain that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Go for it.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Sure. So I have a totally unrelated book, *Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration*. One of the chapters goes over ways of dealing with complaints about immigration that fall short of stopping people from actually coming or excluding or kicking out people that are already there. Let me back up a little bit further. Most of the book talks about complaints about immigration and says that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, all right, fine, maybe you don't agree with that, but isn't there another way that we could deal with this?
--:-- So, for example, if you're worried about immigrants voting poorly, you could say, fine, we won't extend voting rights to immigrants or make them wait for a longer time period. I mean, that's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus non-citizen is one of the strongest ones. So I think that it actually is one that has a lot of stability. This line of "well, you're not a citizen" therefore something really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multigenerationally, at least unlikely to work. So to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. But again, at the same time, it also does say the problems that people are worrying about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. But yes, that is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of, Dwarkesh. Good for you.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So going back to feminism, doesn't over time feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men is that they had to fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs. But society over time becomes more peaceful, or at least has in our timeline, and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up. Maybe that's fair, but the implication is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up. So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily is discriminating against women, but just because of the trends in technology.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Once again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway? Because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be the political, social, economic, cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which just violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women on all those dimensions, which makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue. Feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people.
--:-- So what does distinguish them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition, I think, fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, "I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society and women are treated like goddesses." You'd say, "Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?" That doesn't make sense. Or on the other hand, for someone to say, "I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, like we're awful." That again would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. Although to be fair, every now and then there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds on that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Could it not just be maybe another way of defining feminism is just that we should raise the status of women? And that's different slightly than the fairness issue. If you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past, maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. Or if you think of somebody today who wants to raise the status of Asians in our society, they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing. Maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly, they just want to raise the status. So what would you think of that definition?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: First of all, could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, "Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher," you'd say, "Hmm, well, that's not what I think." Someone might say, "Well, I can still be a feminist and think that." But that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly, and they want to raise that and alleviate that. By definition, if you think that someone's being treated unfairly, to say "I think they're being treated really unfairly but I think that's great" is almost self-contradictory.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I was making a slightly different point. Not even that these people want to raise the actual living standards of women, it's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes, yes. But again, if someone were to say, "I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men who we treat like dogs, but I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is," you could argue that person maybe is still a feminist, but that is not what the word means. Hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about. Let me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are a libertarian, and then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. It's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine. But we think their status should be even higher. This just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, how is the word commonly used? It's not to say that logically speaking it's possible to have a different view or that two things are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is ideally you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient condition sense. But we can still say a table is not by definition something that people sit on. If someone said, "Well, you could sit on it," I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.
--:-- But why don't we actually go to your real question, which we got on this digression? The question was overall, the left tail of society...
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, yes, yes. Just, does feminism become more true over time?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: And the answer is we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. Some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. So as jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is even that is a bit more complicated. Superficially, on the surface, the immediate reaction is society is less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. But they get monetary compensation for that. So all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's reasonable to say, "Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90% of the workplace deaths?" And the answer is because they're getting 90% of the combat pay, broadly construed. It's not mostly actual combat. So anyway, that's one where you should be careful, but I can see the plausibility there.
--:-- I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. One big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result. Because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where feminism has become less true over time.
--:-- Another one that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins, I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. The way that I put it is when we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations of unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations. The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, not all men receive them, but still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women in our society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh. We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Where would you say it was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought like unbalanced things are equal now?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. One of the things I say in the book is that while there's a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, I also say there's some that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse. The main one is paternal support for children, where in 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. And now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time.
--:-- Again, just to understand, this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, "Look, I've got 20 arguments for what I'm right and everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on." This is the kind of book that I like to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. Yes, so there's a bunch of points where someone could say, "Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker." So yeah, I concede it because it's true. And then at the end, I have my overall judgment. But I will just say that the number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way, I don't write books like that. I try to write books where they are honest and self-reflective and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out. I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me. And it's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something if it's not really quite right. I should say the other thing. So I try to just write with candor.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now, would you say the feminism maybe in the United States is overcorrected, but globally it's still true in the sense that on average across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men? And if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then of course they're going to overcorrect. But overall, they're making the world a better place.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most of Europe, areas like that, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. But yeah, in the book, I do go over especially – so I start with Saudi Arabia where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and think about plausible rates of female infanticide. So those are ones where I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is.
--:-- In terms of, is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US? It's possible. Again, I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because they just don't focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India, could it even be 1% of the rhetoric? It's just not something that they care about. So I would say that there's more harm being done just by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon either small or exaggerated or just reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring – not just ignoring but by indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But let me apply the argument you make in *Open Borders* that you can affect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Couldn't American feminists make the same point that by making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say, yeah, feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to make other people feel like they are respected. Even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say and maybe we could come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenor of the elites is "we are totally right and anyone who disagrees had better watch out." So I think that there is a discrediting of it.
--:-- The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see that being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, I don't know. Actually, maybe yes, even on that subject as well. But more generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, "Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita." I feel like some other thing could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back and they adopt some of these things.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things, which is that you can go to India, have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. And pushing the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of horrible trash. Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem. You are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not even a problem at all, at the same time that anger really blinds you to an actual really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I believe it's still legal in India, or rape within a marriage is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. But yes. Let's say a feminist says, "Okay, Brian, maybe you're right. Society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women. Women are forced to have children. And also maybe they're more neurotic on average, perhaps for biological reasons. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared towards women." What do you make of this argument?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So when unfairness where there's no human being that does it, that seems like a very strange idea to me just at the get-go. It's like, well, who was unfair to you? The universe is unfair. I think the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair.
--:-- That aside, I would say it's a really interesting question: who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? In terms of demonstrator preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. This is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think still a very large majority of people just want to stay with whatever they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, whatever. But then if you say, "Okay, fine, you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity. But still, if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?" It's a tough question.
--:-- You can say women have a harder personality because of higher neuroticism. They've also got higher agreeableness, so that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. And having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life.
--:-- Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids, and I think as a woman it would have been easy to do. There is the issue of how are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids? This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. It seems like while both men and women seem to have a say on family size, women's traits have much larger effects. Men are more likely to just say, "Okay, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size." Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. So yeah, I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids and it would have been easier for me to do it. So that would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there.
--:-- Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of "women and children first," which is very pronounced. It's not just modern society, but it is a modern society that we can simultaneously have "women and children first" but also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, hmm, that's not what it looks like.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women's suffering but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think like a default character in a movie or novel, at least for me, the default is a man. And then maybe the victim is a woman. But I would rather have the sympathy of some sort of success than get empathy for suffering.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or not sympathy, but just like...
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Admiration.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Admiration, yeah. I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering and only a small share of people have any notable success. So if all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition. Whereas to have admiration for your success, that's something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit. But yeah, I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. And of course, there's also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too. But again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. But then the argument is, well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall. So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, "Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in our society." But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you just go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that is just fiction. In terms of daily life, I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented in stories than the other way around.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent, that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I would say that it's complicated. In terms of willingness to fire, I think employers are much more willing to fire men. And for defects, for insubordination, just on the list. I mean this is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. People working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. Women, on the other hand, it's like, "Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?" But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. Let's see. What was the high this summer over in Austin? I don't even want to think about it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why do you think that women have gotten less happy since the 60s, in America at least?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So the main thing I know about this is the Stevenson and Wolfers research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. So if I remember correctly, I think they find that in the 60s, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. So if something like 25% of men said they were very happy, then like 27% of women in the 60s said that they were very happy. Whereas now it seems like women have something like a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy.
--:-- It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is just going to say, "Oh, women are miserable now." And it's like, it's not that women are miserable now. We're talking like a two percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective.
--:-- In terms of what's really going on, I mean, this is one where the paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what especially Justin Wolfers would normally do. And I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, "OK, well, what will work?" I think I would on one end focus on single moms who have become much more common and their lives really are hard. So rise of single motherhood. I would guess that that is one important part of it.
--:-- And then I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that you should be unhappy because the world is unfair, and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. I don't know. It's plausible to me. I mean the main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. Right, so it's one thing to say, "Look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy." And it's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, "Oh yeah, once a year I think I'm going to hell," the rest of the time you don't think about it. On the other hand, the person that is all the time thinking "I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell," that person probably will be unhappy.
--:-- So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites who take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That will likely cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority, people say, "Yeah, I'm a feminist," moving on. I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. That raises the interesting possibility. And this is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism. So maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. And maybe a woman prefers to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up—and again, mentorship, men are less likely to give it because of Me Too—so add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism, this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men. If the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying that society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case of society is treating men unfairly and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line and say, well, I mean, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed, right?
--:-- So, foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seem to probably care less, actually. It was more of an intra-abuse, right? This is one where you could say, "Well, but still, you might say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women, right?" And I think that does actually make sense. And I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing. And in terms of what the right way to describe it would be, it's just a bit confusing. So it's one where it's useful just to say, "All right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that?" And I think I would just say we don't have any really good way of counting it and it might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you make of Hanania's argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. So Richard Hanania on his Substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. And then he generalizes this to saying a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things and people don't know what to do about it. Right, so he, if I remember correctly, he just says that a man can in a way actually enjoy an argument with another man, and even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, well, you're sort of feeling invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. He says, whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. And that just like, "What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible?" would be a more normal reaction. And he says this sort of generalizes to a lot of, not all social arguments, but ones basically involving someone being offended or angry or hurt, where he says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad and it's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism. One really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is, right? It is a conversation where women have complaints and men mostly just listen in silence, right? Or of course, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men and then men are very eager to say, "Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that," right? And a lot of it is this, what he calls women's tears, or you could also just think about the sadness but mingled with or supported by intimidation of like, "If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry and I will be fairly sad and so you should be afraid," right? That is I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, which is that people are just afraid to argue against it because you are, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos, which is if women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, "I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified." You're supposed to say, "Look, what can I do to make it better?"
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well. I don't know if it's—I mean, sort of the main difference there is that people have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar. But in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, probably Hanania is right about that, and that generalizes to bigger issues.
--:-- You have an essay about endogenous sexism.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to women? That we start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. And then the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So let me just back up and explain the argument. So the argument says this. Imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends of their own gender, which is totally true. So if I remember the essay, I think that for men, close friends, the male-female ratio is like four to one. And for women, no, I think it's the other way around. I think for men, it's like six to one. For women, it's like four to one. So most people's close friends are the same gender. So you meet these people and they're your close friends. You know them really well. And because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them.
--:-- And then the question is, all right, so then what about people of the opposite gender? And what's your interaction with them going to be like? And what I point out is that a lot of the people of the opposite gender that you hang out with will be the spouses of your friends, the partners of your friends. And on average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there's two filters there. I like you because you're my friend. And now I put up with your partner because that person is your partner, right? So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them and think less of them than they think of their friends. And on the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, "Well, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my female friends."
--:-- So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise. Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what can happen here. In terms of how much—could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society or could it lead in this way, especially if you start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world, for example? The answer is it's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find.
--:-- Again, in the data that I know of, actually the evidence of women earning less money than men while actually doing the same job is actually quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. And so again, the main one that probably has gotten worse for women is mentoring. So mentoring, partly it's based upon friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. So, I've got an essay on that in the book as well.
--:-- So, this is one where, first of all, just looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers just to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. And then I go and track down a bunch of feminist reaction to this where they basically just say, "I can't believe how horrible these guys are," right? It's like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? Because it's really hard and something that is this informal to actually scare someone into doing it. You really do need to win them over.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Tactically, that might be correct, but it seems like just as a matter of, is their argument justified? I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship, but...
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Well, so I mean, is it obvious that you want to point that out? I mean, part of what I say is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. And if you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, well, how does it seem from the other person's point of view? So most obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. That is, I think, what so much of the problem with mentorship comes down to is hypersensitivity.
--:-- So I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so lost sight of this very possibility. So there's a conflict between two people. Who's right and who's wrong? Well, it could, of course, be that one person is the conscious malefactor going "blah, ha, ha," and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny, and that does happen sometimes. But I say much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind and the inability to go and get inside another person's head, to each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong. And one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm. Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing.
--:-- This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends, right? If anytime there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong and demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right, right? And it is a foolish person who does that. If you will, the friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backwards in order to keep your friends. Realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person going out of their way to hurt you. Probably they just don't see it that way. And if you just insist, "I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing," you're probably going to be losing friends and it's a bad idea. And the same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person, and this is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, that's very wise. What do you make of the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what men like by niche things? So take computer science, for example. There's claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the thing-focused stuff, right? So the argument is, these things are not inherently, shouldn't be inherently interesting to men, they're just the way they're taught.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. The word "inherently" is so overused. And it's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?" It's like, well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backwards, move heaven and earth for it not to be so, but I guess it's not really inherent. So that is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, like, there's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way, right? On the other hand, to say, well, is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women? And that's why I say that is just an unreasonable demand.
--:-- If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin. You can say that it's just so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant. Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men. So this is one where if you had a really high bar for things are unfair unless the following rigorous conditions are met, then you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true in my definition, right? But I also just say I think these really high bars are unreasonable, right?
--:-- I mean, if you had a friend who had these kind of bars saying, "Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at like standard hours of breakfast, lunch and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can't we have half of the time be my way?" It's like, well, yeah, but like you're only one person and why should we change?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, yes. Well, I mean, it depends upon what subfield you're in as well, right? So yeah, there are actually groups of people who really like hanging out in the middle of the night, and to say, "Why do we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?" Well, you are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of doing to accommodate you, but it just seems like it is an unreasonable imposition on people who are already here.
--:-- Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not male field, sometimes people ask things like, will treat things like just acting like there's an objectively correct answer, that's a male trait, right? If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers, right? I mean, that's one where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, it's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders, right? And in a way, I do end the essay saying, yes, these are not a male monopoly, they are not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings, right? At the same time, you might say, well, but are the virtues equally represented by both genders? And say, well, that's an empirical question. We got to look at that.
--:-- We're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, that was super fun and a big challenge. So I am a professional public speaker. Stand-up comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be, how many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do stand-up comedy. I'm also just a big fan of stand-up comedy. Like if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes, right. Life is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like just using my imagination. A lot of comedy is also just imagination saying, "Look, imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?" So anyway, I did get this chance. Well, actually just to back up again. So during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea of maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. And then the Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast where they talk about serious issues, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited on that. And as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. Maybe the world.
--:-- The main thing I could say about my performance is it was me and like nine professional comedians. And I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good. It was a pretty good performance. I felt good about it. The main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there: one is importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. So normally I have some basic notes and then I ad lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time constrained debate, then I will normally write an opening statement. But otherwise I don't. And again, the thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. So that was something that I was very mindful of.
--:-- And then obviously, there's things like timing and just being able to read an audience. Being able to read an audience, that's one that I'm more used to. That was what was so hard during COVID is not being able to look at the faces, even of a live audience. It's like, okay, well, I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or the reactions of their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. Again, with comedy, it's a bit hard to do. What successful comedians actually do is they try it about a bunch of different ways and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. And they just keep tweaking it. And then finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A-B testing on a hundred different audiences and then it sounds great. But the first time, not that funny.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but that makes a lot of sense that the transfer of learning there. In both disciplines, there's a lot of hypotheticals, not extra events, putting things in strange situations to see what the result is. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, yeah. So like a lot of it is just not having stage fright, right? So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there was a little bit different because it's like—I mean honestly most of my anxiety was, "Am I going to forget something?" Right, so I'm not like, "Everyone's looking at me." And I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I can't remember if it was Robin who said this, but didn't he have a theory about like the reason we have stage fright is because in some way you're showing dominance or status. And then you don't want to do that. If you're not the most, you're making a bid, you're making a bid for status. And just remembering in the ancestral environment, when these small groups of 20, 40 people, if you go and want to speak, you're saying, "I'm one of the most important people in this band here." And if you're not, or if there's a lot of people that say that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. It's just that somebody makes a bid for status that's not deserved.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a court case, a Supreme Court case about Harvard and affirmative action. And you might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse workforces. Included Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. I mean, if those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them to all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. Right. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that tries to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible and make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations, right? They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis-a-vis their consumers or public relations vis-a-vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days it probably is more of the latter.
--:-- Although even under Reagan, actually, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that we want affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying that we are really in favor of this, we love this stuff. But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where we give you a right to go and sue us for mistreatment. I think there would still be a lot of propaganda.
--:-- I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy, sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause, right? I mean, some of you might say, "No, it's self-interest for some reason." It's like, look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low. So I don't think it's that. Basically what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. And what's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to, first of all, make the public like you, but also you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company, right? And one really striking thing about corporate philanthropy, when you look closer: normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, "Oh, we did all this philanthropy," than they actually spend on the philanthropy. So, I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away like $1,000 a year to the Girl Scouts or something like that, and she had a $100,000 salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So, I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical, without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: All right. The cost of the philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's a rounding error. The donation is the rounding error and the, "Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Okay. So this question was one that actually Tyler suggested I ask you. So in *The Myth of the Rational Voter*, you say that education makes you more free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not learning anything, why is education making you more free market?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. Well, it's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes or are involved, I think that the best story is peer effects. So when you go to college, you're around other peers who, though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects, though, is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism? Higher than normal. Yeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. Then what would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little, right? So, and then furthermore, you realize, huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were minority?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Seems quite plausible they'd be making a lot more converts over there, right? So, basically, the thing about peer effects is that if you achieve your peer effects by segregation, that is, of course, literally what college does. It takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society. Physically, when you're in school and then there's social segregation just caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circle, of your own education levels, that kind of thing.
--:-- So in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall more free market, I think it's totally unclear. Because basically, the people who go to college make each other more free market. At the same time, they remove themselves from influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But what about the argument that the people who are going to, let's say, elite universities, these are people who are going to control things, right? And so, if you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard, maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke, they make the underclass even more woke and then it's a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people coming to college. That still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they didn't go to Harvard because there's no peers there. It doesn't matter because they're not going to be an elite, right? Or it doesn't matter as much.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Could be, although what we've seen is that we now have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. And of course, it is a democracy. So if you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, "Yeah, well, what is the actual common view here?" Not just the view that is common among elites. I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study.
--:-- The other thing to remember is, wouldn't there be peer effects even without college? So if elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. You can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, "I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party." So every society has this kind of thing.
--:-- If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion—they have a prophet—what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go to Brigham Young is a good strategy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, well, there's got to be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are hard to understand.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, they're hard to understand.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So I would just say, keep a much more open mind about this. And if anyone is listening and wants to research this, that sounds cool. I'll read it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I mean, what I remember you saying is that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence elite opinion.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes. Yes. Elite opinion percolates down to the common view, right? And so in that sense, if you can set... There are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, right? So you might care very much about which particular subculture is dominant. Although notice that I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation and then I'm going to try to take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Student loan forgiveness. What is your reaction?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Oy, oy, vey. Give me a freaking break. I mean, this is one where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing or progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would favor it? It's like, because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team and we just want to go and help our team or something like that.
--:-- Obviously, what the forgiveness really means is we're going to transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population, which includes a whole lot of people that did not go to college and did not get whatever premium you got out of it. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even increasing the amount of education if you really think that's good. The only margin that this is really increasing education is it's making people think, "Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt." The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be. Although even there, you have to say, could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing demand for college and raising tuition further? There's good evidence that it does. Not at 100%, but still to a substantial degree.
--:-- Again, for me, just to back up—that can be my catchphrase—I have a book called *The Case Against Education*. My view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. And what we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically transferring to people who wasted a lot of social resources.
--:-- The story that it is on the slippery slope to free college for all—in a way, that's the best argument in favor of it, right? If you really thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this is putting us on that slippery slope. I would say, yeah, and that's terrible because the real problem with education is that we just spend way too many years in school. It is generally not socially useful. Rather, the main reason why it's going on is that it's a way of stamping people's foreheads saying that they are better than their competitors. "Don't throw their application in the trash." And the more education we get, the more you need to not have your application thrown in the trash. Credential inflation.
--:-- Since we're talking a lot about inflation these days, the central organizing idea of what's so wasteful about education in my book is credential inflation. When everyone has a college degree, nobody does. The analogy is very good. Can you make a country rich just by giving everybody a trillion dollars? You cannot. All that happens is you wind up raising prices and you cause a lot of harm in the process. I say the same thing is going on with the multiplication of credentials.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let me ask you about that. For the last 10 years, the proportion of Americans who are getting college degrees has not gone up, right? Doesn't the signaling theory imply that it should be going up as a credential gets diluted?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. So actually, if it doesn't go up, then it's not getting diluted. But here's the actual story of what's been going on during the last 10 years. I have a bunch of bets on this, and I just won the first one. When you see that the share that's going to college is going down, that's counting community college. Community college has fallen a bit, which makes sense because the signal sent by community college is barely better than nothing, except in a few disciplines like nursing. But for four-year college attendance, it's actually continued to rise. The bets that I have are all along the lines of attendance in traditional four-year brick and mortar colleges will fall no more than 10%. I have a whole series of these bets, each with 10-year maturities. I just won the first one, and I think I'm going to win a whole bunch of other ones.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Does your undefeated bet record make you more hesitant to take bets? Because getting the first one at 52 to one would be a huge loss.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, and I would be lying if I said it didn't change my emotions. I do have a record of 23 wins for 23 bets that have resolved. It is fun to be able to say that. 29 out of 30 wouldn't sound as good. At the same time, I still am totally willing to make bets. The thing about bets is that they don't just fall into your lap. You really have to aggressively seek them out because hardly anyone wants to bet. You might think that some people would want to bet me just basically saying, "Well, if I beat him, I'll be the guy that beat him. And if I lose, then who's ever heard of me anyway? Who cares?" But even that doesn't do very much.
--:-- The bet that I'm likely to lose is a global warming bet with the stand-up economist Joram Baumann. He gave me three to one odds initially, so I was expecting to lose. He very much enjoys running annual victory laps on Twitter without ever mentioning that he did give me odds. I wasn't saying that I was convinced; I was saying that I thought that other people were overconfident. But that's his right to run his victory laps.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You're like a UFC fighter who hasn't lost yet. I don't know if you know who Khabib was—he retired before he lost a single fight. His reason was, "Oh, my mother doesn't want me to fight anymore." But who wonders? Are you hopeful that maybe a right-wing government, seeing the education polarization and also seeing the loan forgiveness as a transfer of wealth towards left-wing elites, will implement education austerity?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Barely. So, yes, just to back up. The big policy reform that I push in *The Case Against Education* is education austerity: just spending less on education, making education less accessible. That's right, making it less accessible, which if I am correct, will be socially desirable because it will mean that credential inflation will be reversed and people will be able to get the jobs they're going to get anyway while spending fewer years of their lives in school learning stuff that is not very useful.
--:-- The main reason that I'm skeptical about this is even in states where the state government is very right wing, it seems that the prestige of the state university systems is sufficiently high that politicians generally don't want to challenge it. In Texas, we were both hanging out around the University of Texas campus and the state capital, just 20 minutes walk away. It seems like the governor of Texas does not want to have a throwdown with the president of the University of Texas and say, "Hey, we're sick of this stuff." And why not? Probably because the governor of Texas thinks that UT with its great football team is really popular and that he can't beat them.
--:-- You might think, "Let's pass a bill saying that all the athletics of UT are fully funded, but we are getting rid of the following departments." It's just hard to do that. The president of UT could get the football coach to say, "We stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with our Fat Studies department" or whatever. So that is the concern.
--:-- Florida is a little bit different. It does seem like DeSantis is trying to make some symbolic efforts against overwhelming left-wing bias at the University of Florida. But as far as I know, he isn't doing anything about their budgets, which is what they really care about. You can pass all the laws you want, but if you don't actually mess with their money, then I don't think they're going to care that much.
--:-- The main change that I could most plausibly see is precisely defunding the least popular departments while saying we're going to keep the total budget of the school the same. So we are slashing the budgets of the English department, Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, Sociology—basically any subject that a normal voter would laugh at when you pronounce the name of the department. Maybe they could get away with that. In a way, it just seems too strategic and requires too much attention from politicians to make them realize this. But that's the easiest thing to see.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Or making them co-sign the loan for student loans, right? That they had to pay out of their endowments.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. Again, that's one that's just so easy to demagogue and say, "Oh, so what about this poor student who couldn't do it and now no school wants to accept him because they don't want to be responsible for it?" If you go and read Lyndon Johnson's original speech in favor of student loans, it just takes the social desirability bias dial and turns it up to the absolute deafening maximum. It's like, "I believe that in America, no student should ever be denied full access to the maximum opportunities of education merely because they were born in a family that was too poor to afford it. There is no price too high, no sacrifice too great." Oh, God. That's the kind of weaponized nuclear rhetoric that politicians will deploy to defend this stuff. And yeah, it's really what I'm up against. That stuff that is good doesn't sound good.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That was more of—I was turning Lyndon Johnson into Bill Clinton. I just realized.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, they're the same. Texas or Arkansas.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, you might be giving that speech from the bathroom, LBJ. But I don't know if you've heard those stories.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, yeah.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why do you think young people are getting more anxious and have a higher incidence of neuroticism overall?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: My first pass on this is always that it's an artifact of measurement, the medicalization of society. So when you see things like...
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, yes, yes.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So that's where I would go next. But my first pass is always that it's basically just measurement. By modern measures, there was no neuroticism or psychiatric problems 200 years ago because there was no psychiatrist. If you went back 200 years ago and measured it, the number of people in psychiatry offices is zero, so it doesn't exist. Then we expand it, especially when you really go out of your way to make access super easy, to have a big center on every campus, to de-stigmatize it, and at the same time to stigmatize the traditional substitutes for psychiatry, like religion. Traditionally you have a problem, you go and talk to your priest. If you stigmatize that, that also says, "Well, I can't talk to priests. They're scumbags now. So who can I talk to? I can go to the counseling center."
--:-- Now, you're right. There are some measures where the level of neuroticism is not just measuring people going to a psychiatrist's office. We actually see this in suicide rates. Although there, I have a piece where I go over the last 60 or 70 years of suicide rates. It's really complicated, Dwarkesh.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, really?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So basically suicide rates were falling from like 1970 to 2000 and then have had a big rebound since then. If I remember, I think suicide rates now are pretty similar to what they were in the 50s. I'd have to go back and double-check those numbers, but that's what I remember. So you've got to have some really complicated theory. You could have a bunch of ad hoc theories. "Okay, well, it was World War II and the trauma of that and also being married to a veteran with trauma. That could mess women up and make them kill themselves. And then that changed and then something else happened."
--:-- The Jonathan Haidt case of keeping kids from playing outside and infantilizing them or making them really anxious—that doesn't fit with any of the stuff from the 50s. You could say, "Okay, yeah, well, in the 50s, they were really good in terms of unsupervised play, but they're really bad in terms of something else." When people talk about this stuff, what strikes me is that I felt like I learned more from just looking at the time series as far back as it goes than from every person that pontificated about what's really going on. Just to realize the numbers are complicated. No obvious story fits.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So yeah, it would be really ideologically convenient for me to say feminism is leading women to kill themselves. The numbers don't work. So wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How persistent are the harms from immigration restriction if the world is getting wealthier anyway? Does it really matter that it will take a few more decades than it would have otherwise? You can transfer them here now or you can just wait for economic growth to do its thing there.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: The answer is, does it really matter if we miss $100 trillion when people are really... During the time that people are poorer than they're probably ever going to be again? Yeah, I think it really does matter. I'll go with that.
--:-- So, just to back up. In *Open Borders*, I go over what I consider to be the most powerful argument in favor of immigration. It comes down to this. We know for a fact, undeniably, that if you take a very poor worker from a poor country and move them to a rich country, almost overnight their pay multiplies many times. This is something that you cannot deny while looking at the facts. Then the question is, why? Why is it that we can make a Haitian suddenly earn 20 times as much money just by moving into Miami? He hasn't even learned English yet, but he's still making 20 times as much money as he was back in Haiti.
--:-- The textbook economic explanation is we pay immigrants more in rich countries because the productivity is so much more than it was back home. Productivity is much higher in rich countries for everyone. Most of the reason why Haitians are poor is not that there's anything wrong with individual Haitians. Most of the reason is that there's something really wrong with Haiti. If we were to get deposited in Port-au-Prince, Dwarkesh, we'd be struggling to get by as well. What's messed up is Haiti, not Haitians primarily.
--:-- Now this is basically undeniable. The part that is debatable is, is this scalable? We can make one Haitian vastly better off just by moving them to the US, and it basically pays for itself because he's more productive. Could we move a million Haitians? Yeah. 10 million? This is where people might start saying maybe it's not really scalable. In the book, a lot of the argument really is, no, it's totally scalable, and this is just a massive missed opportunity where we really could rescue hundreds of millions of people—really billions of people—from poverty in a short amount of time. We can essentially just fast forward from right now to this future that you're talking about.
--:-- Now, how valuable is this? Well, if you're someone who thinks on million-year timescales, then not so valuable. If you're someone who thinks on the timescale of dramatically improving the lives of billions of people over the next hundred years, then yeah, it's fantastic.
--:-- On top of this, it's worth pointing out that right now we are missing some of the greatest human talent that is just trapped in some poor village in India or China and we'll never find out what their accomplishment is. If you think that we are one day going to beat death, right now it is quite likely that the guy that could have beaten death five or ten years earlier is in some poor village in India or China. By not allowing immigration, that person is not going to get to beat death. If we're going to beat death, we'll beat it eventually. But just to shave five or ten years off of that—this matters a lot for me. Those five or ten years really make a difference. If the technology is just freeze people at the age they're at, I want to get frozen really quick because I'm going downhill. But even for you, Dwarkesh, five or ten years is a big difference.
--:-- So I get it. If you are an ultra long-termist, then I guess you could say open borders is not that big of a deal. But in terms of doable policy changes that will lead to the increase of human wealth of hundreds of trillions of dollars in this century, it's the best I know of.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross have a new book about it. One of the implications of the book is if talent spotting is something that you can do pretty reliably with a 1500-word essay and a Zoom call, doesn't that imply that college is not necessarily that much about signaling? Because you don't need four years of cognitively demanding pointless work. There's a more convenient way to just get that signal and identify talent.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. This goes back to a very long-running argument I've had with Tyler. Tyler has a lot of objections to *The Case Against Education*, but his central one comes down to this: "Look, Bryan, I hire people, you don't." Since then, I've done a little bit, but basically, "I hire people, you don't, and I will just tell you as a fact that I know after a couple of months whether a worker is good or not, and therefore, signaling really cannot be very important." End of story. Pulling rank. This is the argument that Tyler has.
--:-- There are a few different responses to this. The one that is most pleasant and most flattering is to say, "All right, Tyler, you are one employer in a million. You're fantastic. You have incredible capabilities. You can do this, but you're just one person. You're not involved in hiring most people and most employers are nowhere near as good as you at spotting talent. So you're still wrong."
--:-- In terms of more fundamental arguments, the idea that with a Zoom call and a 1500-word essay you could spot talent is ludicrous.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, the essay can be forged, obviously. If a dream job hangs in the balance, people figure out a way to cheat on that. And then in terms of the Zoom call, yeah, no.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: So, I have been hiring artists. I'm admittedly an unreliable person. But what I found is that even work product is not that predictive of work product because someone that really wants to get a job can do five great pages in a timely manner and then they keep you waiting for years for what you really want out of them. So it's just not that easy. Not even close.
--:-- Now, I think the better argument is not saying that we can find talent with the Zoom call and the essay, but rather we can find talent by hiring people and watching them for a couple of months. That makes more sense. The problem with that is that it is incredibly expensive to hire people and watch them for a couple of months. You get a stack of applications, hundreds of people thick, and what you are doing is trying to figure out ways to say no as quickly as possible and narrow it down. You might do this knowing full well that there are three awesome people you've just thrown away. Because yeah, I threw three awesome people away and I also threw away 294 terrible people. And I don't have any way of finding those other people. I call this the "diamonds in the rough" problem. This is a lot of the reason why signaling matters so much: it's a way of getting out of the undifferentiated mass of people who may be good, who knows, and into this better pool.
--:-- I also say that another big error in Tyler's "I just watched him for a couple of months" story is that there is very strong evidence that for multiple reasons, hardly any employer does the strategy of hire, watch, and then fire if you're disappointing. The simplest reason is just, maybe you're at the 45th percentile of expectations and it's like, "Well, he's kind of disappointing, but it's not worth going back to the drawing board again." But there's also a lot of social and emotional problems with firing people. People do not like firing. And on top of it, of course, there's legal problems, which should not be discounted.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Isn't this just what an internship is though?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Well, remember, when you apply for an internship, does everybody get the internship? No. But you can have a lower bar for the internship and then it's like a call option on being able to hire them. So it is there. Although even there, a lot of what I say is that people are signaling not just intelligence, not even work ethic, but sheer conformity.
--:-- Here's the issue. You might say, "Why can't I just take my Harvard acceptance letter and get hired by Goldman Sachs and say, 'Hey, look, Harvard said I was good enough. Harvard has a 98% five-year graduation rate. Come on, let's just start right now.'" What I say is that it is so weird in our society for someone who gets into Harvard to say, "I don't want to go to college at all" and show up with this odd offer, that Goldman very reasonably is like, "Yeah, well, he got into Harvard, but this guy's a freak and we're worried about it." So I think it's basically the same problem.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But couldn't Goldman say, "Okay, well, maybe you don't want to hire him full time, but let's see if we can give him an internship." And in fact, internships are very common.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes. Although you want to give the internships to people that are checking all the boxes. The person who is doing the weird thing, you're nervous.
--:-- By the way, I've multiple times been on panels where there's some business leader and he'll say, "In the business world today, we don't care about credentials. We only care about hard, demonstrable skills." And then I always ask the same question: "So how many uncredentialed people have you personally hired for high-skilled jobs?" "Well, we haven't done any, but I read in the Wall Street Journal..." Aha, you're acting as if you've got some first-hand experience. You're just repeating what you read in the freaking newspaper, which writes stories about stuff that is atypical. You don't write a story about something everybody knows about. You go and dredge up some weird platypus and then show everybody and say, "Platypuses are taking over the ecosystem."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Didn't this happen at your podcast with Andreessen, by the way?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I did. That would be plausible. So he said, "We only hire on demonstrable skills." And I asked him, "So who have you hired without credentials?" And then what did he say?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I don't remember. I don't know if you asked him directly, but that was his claim. I don't know if you followed up that way.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So here's a good way of thinking about it. I have heard that top firms like Google will sometimes hire winners of contests. But when I asked people there, "How many standardly credentialed employees do you have in your programming and how many contest winners without credentials?" It's like, yeah, three contest winners, thousands of regular credential workers. So basically, you have to walk on water to get hired by these firms without having the regular credentials.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You originally traveled to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. And I took my 12-year-old son there too. A lot of people are saying, "You're crazy. What are you doing? Why would you go there?"
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I was super glad that I did. It was an incredibly exciting trip. What happened actually was that my open borders book had been translated into three Eastern European languages—Polish, Hungarian, and Czech. I also spoke in Slovakia, and they said, yeah, we can read Czech totally no problem. It's basically the same language. So I got to give talks in all four of those countries.
--:-- Especially Poland was really exciting. The whole country was pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian. You could see the enthusiasm in the streets. I was by the train station in Krakow and there was just a Polish guy screaming, "Fuck Putin, glory to Ukraine!" I was like, is that guy drunk? He's not drunk, he's just a Pole speaking his mind.
--:-- Then you went to the train stations. They are packed with refugees. What I did not realize was that the refugees were in fantastic spirits because the welcome of the Polish people—especially the Poles, they stood out—was so warm, so strong, that the people there were actually feeling good about the situation, just to look at their faces. I mean, just imagine the stress of fleeing a war zone with your kids. That's what was going on.
--:-- But I also got to learn some amazing things when I was there. Since I am the author of Open Borders, you can predict that I would say, "Oh, letting in a lot of refugees won't be a big deal." But Poland increased its population by 10% in a month. And the country looked fine. No one there was complaining. And I'm like, I can see why. This is not ideology. This is me walking around and looking at stuff.
--:-- Poland was able to do this because where there's a will, there's a way. You can have a thousand refugees from a country you don't like, you put it on the news and people say, "Oh, we just couldn't possibly absorb them. We're at our absolute breaking point." On the other hand, you can have millions of refugees come into your country, and if you like them and sympathize with them, then it's all hunky dory and it's fine.
--:-- Polish policy was also excellent. Ukrainians are allowed to work the day they show up. Normally, what you do to refugees is you say, "Well, you can come here because you'll be dead if you stay in your home country, but we don't want you getting a job." Which is, as we all know, a bad thing for a human being to do—to produce and contribute to society. Much better that we just keep you a semi-prisoner on welfare for a few years. Poland was doing the best thing: the day you show up, you can get a job here. You're totally legal to work. This is a path towards having them become productive members of society.
--:-- Just to realize how amazing what they're doing in Poland is, this would be like the US took 30 million refugees in a month. 33 million refugees in a month. Americans freak out over 10,000. So just to realize how phony and bogus the complaints are. It is just a matter of believing and seeing. If you think that refugees are bad and that immigrants are bad, you will see bad things happening. If you're supportive and have a can-do attitude, then you'll say, "Hey, this is completely doable."
--:-- Bryan Caplan: But I guess if you're skeptical that Americans will have a can-do attitude about it, then it's still—
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, the can-do attitude mostly just comes down to getting out of the way and letting them do their thing.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So that's the real problem. It's not an argument against accepting them and letting them work. It's an argument that we're not going to do it and we'll do the wrong thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I remember in The Myth of the Rational Voter, or maybe it was one of the essays in the book, you point out that a lot of times what liberal economists do is they'll defend some policy based on the optimal implementation of it. Like Paul Krugman would defend the Pigouvian tax. But then in effect, it'll be like arcane environmental regulations.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Well, that's why in Open Borders, I defend immigration as it really is. I don't go and say we have to do a bunch of other things first. I say that it's fantastic right here, right now in the real world. Of course, I do have that chapter on "Kiel Solutions" where I try to meet people who disagree halfway. But really what I learned in Poland is my view of what's doable was expanded quite a bit. I think I would have said maybe you can take in like two or three percent of your population a month without it looking really bad.
--:-- Now, I'm also the kind of person who will say the train station is going to be full of human misery. And I would have said this is still way better than trapping people in a war zone. I'm someone who always says "compared to what?" If they're here crying with their children in a train station, it's probably because back home they would have been crying over a dead body instead. This is still a big improvement and this is still what we should be doing.
--:-- But in Poland, I didn't have to make any hard argument. I could just walk through the train stations full of refugees and they're happy and the kids are playing and they've got their puppies and there's dog feeding stations for real. I don't have to convince myself through logic that this is the best thing that can happen or the least bad thing. I can just walk around and see people are happy and are adjusting to a new life.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How should decolonization have been done to increase the odds of a competent and free market government, and also avoiding a total bloodbath? Let's say you think it had to be done or it was inevitable at some point. How could it have been done so that it had the optimal outcome?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: First of all, with really high credibility. This is where you say, "Look, here's the timetable. We are going to be partitioning India over the course of 20 years. We are staying there." Even tying your hand, saying, "Look, we are issuing government securities where you have to pay us money unless we just give up in the middle of the game." You've got to pre-commit. Say, "Here is our goal. Our goal is going to be a peaceful, free, rich India. We have a plan for how we're going to do this, and we're going to stick to it. We are ready to lose a whole lot of our soldiers in order to do this."
--:-- Then we are going to find people that we are going to very gradually transition power to. They have to be reasonable people. If these are people that are inciting pogroms, we are going to get rid of them. We are not going to tolerate that kind of thing. This is going to be an orderly transition where all of Her Majesty's subjects can anticipate surviving and a future where they are in peace.
--:-- Probably a lot of people don't realize how badly the partition of India was botched. The chaos makes it hard to get accurate numbers, but there's a lot of people saying millions of people died in pogroms at the end. Some say maybe it was only 500,000. This was a complete disaster. It really came down to the British said they were never going to leave until they did really quickly. That's not what you do.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What made the denazification and the US occupation of Japan so successful?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Because they started off by completely crushing their enemies. The key thing is that in those occupations, they were pushing democracy and human rights. And they pushed human rights a lot more than democracy. They said, "Yes, we're going to have elections. And as long as you are completely committed to the denazification of Germany, you can be elected and you can have a little bit of power. And then we're going to very slowly devolve power on you while it remains completely clear that you have no Nazi sympathies, that none of this stuff is going to come back."
--:-- There's a complete crushing of what existed before and then a rebuilding where democracy is a low priority. If democracy is yielding good results, then we can turn the democracy dial up a little bit. Same thing in Japan.
--:-- Of course, there's also a whole lot of people that really bad war criminals wind up getting sentences that are quite light overall. I'm trying to remember if I remember correctly, under a thousand German war criminals got executed by the US. You just think about how many probably ought to have gotten executed—100,000 maybe. People who really had blood on their hands, people who ordered deaths of innocent people when they could have just not done it.
--:-- There's a famous book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, saying this was not primarily people murdering innocent people under duress where there's a gun at your head. The author looked at what happened to Germans who refused to participate, and hardly any of them were punished. Hardly any ethnic Germans who refused to cooperate, even soldiers, were punished other than by saying, "Oh, well, we're going to have to transfer you then if you won't go and murder innocent people. What a jerk you're being."
--:-- But basically, that's the kind of thing that should have been done. You want to do it from a position of strength. You don't wait before the fanatics have the upper hand and there's blood in the streets and then say, "Oh gee, what do we do now?" You want to jump the gun when things are peaceful. You say, "We have now in this time of complete peace and harmony worked out a plan for decolonization, and here's how it's going to work."
--:-- You never want to let it make it look like your hand being forced. You never want to let fanatics and bloodthirsty people have their status raised by standing up too successfully. You want it to all be happening over their heads so that they just look like losers and crazy people. Then you find some people that want to work for a decent, peaceful society.
--:-- And also, of course, there's people who are not complete mush heads like Gandhi. I'll just stick my neck out. Gandhi was an apostle of nonviolence, good for that. But he was also someone who was so dominated by wishful thinking, just trying to pretend like pogroms should not be expected. After the transition, they totally were reasonably expected. Just a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense that he preached. He's not himself a mass murderer, he's just a very touchy-feely person who should be nowhere near any important decision.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's what I asked you. He might have been a good therapist or something like that. Someone who had a lot of sympathy for other people but not a reasonable person.
--:-- So that's really interesting because in the book on political demagoguery, you make the point that if we were to judge political leaders by normal moral standards, we think they were monsters. The interesting thing with the Gandhi example—maybe this is a general thing—is that the people who are moral heroes in an ordinary context make the worst politicians. Do you think there's any correlation between how moral somebody is as a human and how moral the government they lead is?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Definitely not the worst people. The very worst people are people who come to power self-consciously wanting to commit mass murder. Those are the worst.
--:-- Now, if you have a very conventional moral view where the only thing that you judge people by is how caring they are, then yeah, I think those people make bad leaders. If you have an effective altruism view, however, where it's not just feeling a lot of caring emotions but being very committed to thinking clearly about the best way to get good results—those people are the heroic people in my view.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But is there a correlation between conventional virtues—honesty, being kind towards strangers—and being good in an effective altruist sense? Or are those just completely unrelated?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Kindness towards strangers. Most effective altruists are people who would like to give to homeless people, but they just realize that it's not a good use of the money. They sort of have to suppress their desire to give to the homeless.
--:-- The honesty one. A lot of politicians say you have to be dishonest to get things done. There's this whole literature on credibility saying, no, what you really want is to be honest in a very credible way such that when you say, "I'm going to do something in 20 years," people believe you. That's a lot of what you would have needed for effective decolonization—to have people there of ironclad honesty. When they say, "Look, I am not leaving just because there are terrorist attacks. I'm willing to give up 100,000 British soldiers to carry us to task before we walk out. And when I say it, I mean it." I think that is actually an important trait for leadership.
--:-- Here's an interesting thing. I don't think Tyler will in any way see this as a negative. On the one hand, he often does like to impishly say, "Oh, you have to be dishonest to get things done." And yet his own leadership style is ultra honest. It's based upon everyone not just in advance believing that something is going to be good for them, but after the fact coming away and saying, "Wow, that was real leadership. He went and actually left people feeling like things worked out."
--:-- While we can easily come up with hypotheticals where they're bad in a leader, I think the real thing is the old saying of under-promise, over-deliver. Don't promise more than you're really willing to do and then try to exceed expectations. That is a trait of a leader, but that's not dishonesty. If someone promises something and they do more for you, you say, "Liar." No, I wasn't a liar. I did what I said and I also did more.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I know in general you're not a fan of revolution, but if you had to say, what is the best revolution? The most justified or the one that had the best effects?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: There's the cheesy thing of picking something that I don't really consider a revolution and then saying other people do. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe—you could call it a revolution. I don't think it really was because it was just way too peaceful to count. If you'll count that, then that is very likely the best example of a revolution. But again, what you really want is like a bloodbath.
--:-- In terms of wars, I will say the Korean War. It basically saved two-thirds of a country and it turned out great. We have a reasonable counterfactual for how awful it would have been in North Korea. But again, North Korean propaganda might claim it was a revolution, but it was a civil war, not a revolution.
--:-- In terms of what would be the really best example, a lot of people want to do the American Revolution, but I'm not a fan of that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: On that, you could argue that Britain abolished its slave trade earlier. But one interesting argument I've heard recently is that the end of slavery was a lot more contingent, that there really wasn't a strong reason for thinking that slavery had to end then. As you told me, it was pretty profitable at the time.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: My view is that it is this British-based anti-slavery movement that's really key, which then does spread to the colonies. I think it probably would have spread stronger actually. Furthermore, the British have a much better record on getting rid of slavery peacefully. It would have cost so much more to do it in the US because there were so many slaves. So it's complicated.
--:-- I'm still trying to come back to the best revolutions. The other ones I'm thinking of are more coups than revolutions. I think a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood is not great, but still better than letting those fanatics take over.
--:-- There's the Glorious Revolution. My understanding is that it really was a real revolution and that people at the time tried to portray it as totally peaceful, but actually really was not.
--:-- If you were to go and do the first Russian revolution against the Tsar in February, the one that replaced the Tsar with the first democratic government of Russia—that one probably would have worked out okay if it hadn't been for Lenin. So it didn't work out, but it had potential.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How contingent do you think history is overall? Let's say Lenin wasn't shipped back to Russia in World War I. Does the communist takeover not happen, or was that kind of baked into the cake?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I know the details really well. I'll give like 99% without Lenin, even with all the other Bolsheviks, it wouldn't have happened. I actually know the facts. Read Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution. The whole rest of the Bolshevik Party was planning and taking part in the provisional government. Then Lenin shows up and reads the riot act. He has so much intellectual status—I don't know what he had—but the whole group was against him and he just reads the riot act and they all say, "Yes sir, Lenin, we're ready for revolution." Without Lenin, that would just not have happened.
--:-- You might say maybe some years later something similar would have happened. But if you know the facts, the whole revolution was based upon a tiny number of fanatics seizing power because they had 2,000 guys following orders in a country where no one else was following orders. If you just waited a little while, other forces would have rebuilt and there would have been no hope for this tiny minority of lunatics to take over.
--:-- Overall, I am a big believer in contingency. It does vary. Things like was economic growth going to happen one way or another starting in 1800—yeah, that I think was not so contingent. If it didn't happen in Britain, there's just too many things going on. There's a bunch of different scientific breakthroughs with obvious economic applications. There's a bunch of countries where they have a business class that's interested in making more money and trying these ideas out. That was quite inevitable.
--:-- On the other hand, for almost anything involving major wars, almost all major wars could be avoided by one side giving in.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The worry is that then that sets up a greater list of grievances for the next.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: That's what the hawks on both sides are always saying. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong. They're wrong about half the time. That argument is true some of the time, but it's just not at all reliable. Often what happens when you give in is people say, "Oh, I thought these people were completely unreasonable and we could never make a deal with them, but it turns out they're not so bad. So we can now deescalate and get back to peace." That happens too.
--:-- People say you couldn't do that with Hitler. Yeah, I know you couldn't do that with Hitler. Hitler was terrible—just to say the most controversial thing of this podcast. Hitler was not a person that you could negotiate with any long-term success. But hardly any world leaders are Hitler. Almost all of them actually can be negotiated with. Often what they want is so trivial because politics is so based upon demagoguery, which means that small symbolic concessions are often all they need to go and thump their chests and say, "Oh, I am a great leader."
--:-- Think about Indonesia. For 30 years, they refuse to give up East Timor. Half of one insignificant island. For all these decades, they're thumping their chest and saying we couldn't possibly do that. That will lead to total collapse. Endless nonsense. "All right, fine. We'll give it away." It wasn't good for East Timor. The whole thing was a disaster. But it really is the case that many conflicts can be avoided by giving another person what they want. If you say that they'll just escalate their demands infinitely, there's a few people like that, but most people do not infinitely escalate their demands. Most people will either say, "Oh, you gave me what I wanted, good, end of story." Or maybe they'll periodically tax you with another demand, which is annoying, but is still much better than losing a friend or a contact.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Given the irrationality and the demagoguery in the political system, why is it the case that the society we live in is relatively free, peaceful, and prosperous? I mean, if the average national socialist—
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Moderate national socialist, that's what I said.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: There's a few things going on. First, just remember usually we don't have this. The norm is not peaceful, prosperous societies throughout human history. The norm is impoverished and war-prone societies. If you're saying, "Gee, but things are okay now," I often think of this as the "look out the window" test. Hey, Dwarkesh, is it on fire out there? We're not going to turn the camera, but I think listeners will believe that it is not on fire. So there's that.
--:-- But still, there is the interesting question of what's going on with the exceptions. One is that rich, prosperous societies generally have less crazy electorates. The political ideology of the society is just not as terrible as in other places. You might say it seems pretty bad, but there's still not many people saying we want to go and murder half the population. You go to other societies and there's actually people like that.
--:-- A friend of mine was in India and he actually saw a pro-nuke Pakistan rally.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I assume this is not normal in India. Have you ever seen a pro-nuke Pakistan rally?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: No, but the nationalists can get pretty crazy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Like some of them celebrating, saying "nuke Pakistan." Preemptively nuke a nuclear power? Like what do you think is going to happen?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: That kind of true fanatical, sociopathic, bloodthirsty, horrible stuff is common in a lot of societies. But it does seem to be quite reduced in the better functioning societies.
--:-- Also in these better functioning societies, while people's political views are not terrible, if you go and propose something really awful, then even normal people will say, "No, I don't think that's such a good idea to go and murder all the billionaires. Maybe tax them at 90%, but murder them, that's too far." Whereas in most societies, you say that stuff and then the cackling with glee. "Let's strangle the last billionaire in the intestines of the last right-wing talk show radio host." That is more of the human attitude.
--:-- Think about how kids are. The way that kids are shows us what adults are feeling but hiding. Kids get angry and they want blood. More effective societies are ones where people are suppressing these atavistic desires to really just turn society into a total bloodbath.
--:-- Starting with public opinion, I do think public opinion matters a lot in democracies. Even most dictatorships, public opinion matters a lot. Dictators demagogue. They try to win the people over normally. It's easier because the people that would be the rivals are dead or in prison or terrified. That lets you weaponize the demagoguery. "I'm the only one that gets to say I'm anointed by God." But even dictators generally want to be liked by their population. It makes ruling easier. Then you only have to terrify 10% of the population into obedience instead of 90%.
--:-- Having a better leadership class probably matters too. There's probably a high correlation between the quality of leaders and the quality of the public, but not in every case.
--:-- And then something else: having constructive interest groups. I'm working on a book on housing regulation. My bet theory is that if we're not for lobbying from developers, basically zero things would be built in America because building things has almost no demagogic appeal. There's almost no one who emotionally gets a tear in their eye when they see a skyscraper go up or a new housing development.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Other than Ayn Rand.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yeah, it's very rare to be enthused about building stuff. And yet we need places to live, we need places to work, we need places to shop. On the other hand, there's a bunch of angry people whenever you try to build something. We call them NIMBYs. They have an endless series of complaints: traffic, parking, the character of the neighborhood, pollution—every possible complaint.
--:-- I think the main reason why stuff gets built is that there are developers who probably do not really sincerely believe that they're heroes but just come and say, "Hey, we make our money building stuff. We provide jobs, income through the community. Let us build stuff, please, please, please." That is the main reason why.
--:-- Having constructive interest groups—economists mostly talk about interest groups as being bad. But thinking about housing, I think that lobbying has very positive effects overall for housing and actually also for immigration. I think a lot of the main reason why we have as much immigration as we do is that there's a bunch of corporations that are pushing for it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: As far as developers go, why is it the case that they're not more powerful than they are? They're typical like Mancur Olson concentrated interest, right?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Because Mancur was mostly wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, really?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Say more. Public opinion is much more important for policy than interest groups, contrary to what Mancur Olson said. If you really look at what interest groups do, normally they're trying to work in the fine print. Interest groups do not go and try to pass some overall change in US tax law. They say, look, that's going to be determined by public opinion. That's not the kind of thing I can affect. Maybe I can go and get a sentence change somewhere on page 1037 of the tax code. Maybe I could get that. So I say most of the policies that we have are ones that are supported by the general public. And you really have to look at details to see cases where interest groups are getting something that is actually unpopular with the public. So even things as seemingly straightforward as farm subsidies, economists say, "Oh, obviously most people don't want to pay those, but farmers get it." Yeah. I think again, we look at public opinion, farm subsidies are actually very popular. And if you ask people that are not in farm states, like why do you want farm subsidies? Usually they just give very pro-social reasons. Like I want to make sure there's enough food. And you say, well, that's stupid. Like we only subsidize a handful of agricultural products, but they're all available. And it's like, well, that's already one step deeper than most voters ever have done or ever will do.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Do you know that Charles Mann, the author of *The Wizard and the Prophet*?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. I had him on recently and we actually talked about this because he's concerned about water shortages and shortages of food. And then, especially when they're used in inefficient ways like you give it to cattle instead of consuming it directly. I just pointed out, isn't there an obvious free market solution? The prices will rise if you're using it in an inefficient way and then it'll just go to the people who need it the most. And his claim was, ideally, yes, but the reality is if there's something that is physically necessary for people to survive, there's just not going to be a political will to put in actual pricing for water usage, for example, which solves a lot of water shortage problems.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: It seems like a silly argument because we don't have to go and raise the price of water up to the level where a few people die of thirst. You could multiply the price by a factor of 10 or 100 and people will still be drinking all the water that they want. They'll just be taking quicker showers or farming will be happening in different parts of the country, that kind of thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. But I think some of the problems are that in some regions of China where they have done this, the cost of water is—
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Ah, okay. Okay. I was thinking about the US.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a significant fraction of their income.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: But even there, can it really be that there's anywhere in China so poor that the main use of water is for drinking? Or are these farmers?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: No, no. These are actual urban residents. And then it's like a quarter of their—or was it a tenth of their monthly income just goes to paying the water?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Yes, but that's different from drinking water. No matter how poor you are, normally only a very tiny fraction of the water that you use is drunk. Most of it would be for bathing or for washing clothes, a little bit for cooking, probably even more for cooking than for actual drinking. But again, these are all things where you can go and—like I'm from California. I remember being a kid being told only three minutes in the shower. Come on. Chop, chop.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Even in India.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Hanania had an essay recently where the title was, "Why I Care More About Pronouns Than Genocide." And one of the things he pointed out is that his irrational system one part of his mind cares about things that are objectively less important if you thought about them rationally. And one of those things is pronouns in comparison to genocide. So for you, what is the irrational system one thing that you recognize is not that important in the grand scheme of things but just bothers you to no end?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: I mean, it's easier for me on the positive level. People often say, "Well, you shouldn't be talking to that guy. He's a terrible person. He said certain things." I'll say, "Yeah, but he was really nice to me." So on the positive level, just someone having good manners and being friendly with me goes a really long way. Honestly, this isn't something that I'm trying to overcome. The thing I'm trying to overcome is more being really friendly to people who are not friendly to me. So the main thing is when people are just very personally rude and unpleasant. I still think intellectually that the best thing to do is to turn the other cheek and just try to, if not win them over, at least win observers over with how much more reasonable and fair I am. But my instinctive reaction is just to yell back at them.
--:-- I will say that that instinctive reaction just gets weaker and weaker over time because I am someone who is so uncomfortable with anger. And part of it is, it's not really my personality, but a lot of it is just the feeling if I ever got angry, I just don't know where I would draw the line. I'm just worried I would completely flip out. So I probably better just keep on the sunny side of life and not even try anger because I'm just not good at it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You know that line from *The Avengers* where Captain America asks the Hulk?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I do. Yes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: "I'm always angry."
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Right. Yeah, no, I'm not always angry. Not even close. But honestly, I'll say there's almost only one thing that really makes me angry, and that's people being angry. I do have secondary anger, but I have very little primary anger.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What kind of government would you implement if you had a zero discount rate? So if you're a strong long-termist.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Since this is Lunar Society, I'll stick my neck out for anarcho-capitalism and say that this is really the best system if we can figure out a way of doing it. So there's no government. I realize I may be completely blowing all of my credibility, but you can just go and Google what I have to say about it. People sometimes say, "Brian, are you an anarchist?" And I'll say, "Well, not the crazy kind."
--:-- What I mean by this, I'm not someone who thinks if you just pressed a button and got rid of the government, things would be good. I think it would be a total disaster. Rather, what I think is that there is another equilibrium that is totally doable if people realize that it's totally doable. This equilibrium is one where we have competing police, competing legal systems, competing court systems. It's one where if I had an hour, I could not convince anyone that disagrees, but I believe if you gave me an hour, I could convince you that it's not crazy, which is what I actually do whenever I talk about this stuff. I say, "Look, I have a really radical idea now. I couldn't possibly convince a reasonable person in an hour. So I'm not going to try. What I'm going to try to do is convince you in an hour that this view, though you still will think it's wrong, is not crazy."
--:-- We don't have an hour to talk about it, but I think that this is the best, especially long-term. If we could get to this equilibrium, it's the best equilibrium to be in. It's one where it basically once and for all solves a whole lot of problems with international war. It diffuses nationalism. It does a lot to take care of root causes of human problems. It dethrones demagogues. There will still be demagogues—they'll be running cults, they'll be involved in religion, they'll be pundits—but this would be a world where there's just really no longer any government that you can get your hands on to cause horrible problems for the world. The demagogues will have lost their main line of employment and will have to get, if not exactly a real job, then at least a job that doesn't involve mass murder.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Scott Alexander had a post last night, or was it this morning, where he was making the point that he's in favor of more taxes on billionaires because the idea is even though Jeff Bezos has created a lot of consumer surplus, and he certainly hasn't absorbed all of it, it's not the case that the rewards have to be that high to get Amazon built. Somebody would have ended up building Amazon anyway even if the rewards were slightly lower. And so Jeff Bezos himself is not counterfactually responsible for Amazon. What do you make of that argument?
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Two things. One is in economics, we have something called tournament theory. This says that it can be extremely socially valuable to have seemingly unreasonably large rewards for people that do something useful because it doesn't just incentivize the winner, it incentivizes all the potential winners. Billionaires are not just an inspiration to each other. It's not just, "Oh, I can get to be a billionaire. I'll do this thing and make the money." It is something that fosters a whole culture of entrepreneurship. We've been hanging out in Austin. There's a whole bunch of people who are never going to be billionaires, Dwarkesh. But I've told people like Dwarkesh, will Dwarkesh ever be a billionaire? Probably not, but like 2%. Dwarkesh is just a mover and a shaker.
--:-- But if you—I don't know where in India your family was from actually?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Gujarat.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Is that a big city? Is it a small town?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, it was a big city.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Okay. So you probably would have gone to IIT or something like that. But imagine if your family was out in some rural village and it's the Indira Gandhi era. You don't hear about dot-com billionaires. In terms of just inspiring a generation, I think the billionaires are inspiring a generation of movers and shakers. If their earnings were greatly taxed, I think this would really put a dent in it. I think anytime people speak ill of them, that's putting a dent in it. In a way, if you want billionaires to make less money, praise them to the skies so that more people enter and it drives down the rewards for doing what they do. This tournament theory makes a lot of sense. This is a story about why do you pay the CEO so much more than all the next level down? Is he really that much better than the second best guy? It's like, look, this isn't just incentivizing the CEO, it's incentivizing everyone who's there who could plausibly tell themselves, maybe one day me.
--:-- The other thing is going back to historical contingency. I think business history is less historically contingent. But we actually do have a lot of evidence that the quality of entrepreneurship and management varies a lot from country to country, which I think does actually mean that for the really big businesses, it's not totally clear that it would have happened anyway. If you broaden it and just say, "Would e-commerce have happened?" Yeah, e-commerce would have happened. Would there be one store that was bigger than the others? Yeah. But is it possible the second best thing to Amazon would have been one-tenth as good? That actually is not crazy. To go and just say we know that that's not true seems pretty dogmatic to me.
--:-- And again, in the case of Amazon, also striking, what is the second best thing to Amazon? You can say it's a natural monopoly, not true in any other retail that I know of. So people say like Alibaba. I tried looking at that one. I'm like, what is this? It's the English language version of the site. Shouldn't they be trying to make me happy? So that is a case where it doesn't seem like in any economic sense, it's a natural monopoly based upon past experience. Think about cars. We got the big three. Why aren't there three things like Amazon? Maybe it really is the case that no one but Jeff Bezos knew how to do it. Especially when you realize part of knowing how to do something is knowing how to assemble a team. It's so easy to say, "You didn't do it. It was your team that did it." It's like, I made my team. That's what a leader does. They take people that were good in themselves and they fuse them together and they make them great. Maybe self-serving, but it's plausible.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That makes a lot of sense. Well, Bryan, I want to thank you for giving me so much of your time. And I especially want to thank you for being the first guest on my podcast. So we've come full circle with the third episode, but it would not have been possible at all without you.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Totally awesome.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The books that we've been talking about are both available on Amazon. So there is *How Evil Are Politicians? Essays on Demagoguery*. And then there is *Don't Be a Feminist? Essays on Genuine Justice*. By the time you get the podcast, both books will be available. They're real cheap, only $12. And I have not raised the price despite inflation. I've been thinking about why not and what the economic theory behind that is. And then the e-book is just $9.99.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: The difference between these two books. These books are both collections of my very best essays from 2005 to 2022. But *Don't Be a Feminist* has a totally all new lead essay, one that actually for years I was kind of too nervous to write. And then as I watched my daughter growing up, I felt like, no, no, I've got to write this essay. I'm going to do it for her. The actual first essay is called "Don't Be a Feminist: A Letter to My Daughter." That is how I frame it. This is not an angry essay. I'm not an angry person. I'm not mad at feminists. Rather, I want to especially help my daughter. But anyone who's in the same boat as her, I would be thrilled to help them as well.
--:-- This is not a typical lawyerly book where all I do is just try to come up with as many arguments in my favor as I can and ignore everything against me. This is one where I really am trying to grapple with the truth. And I can honestly say this. My dream is not to upset any reader. In my dream world, everyone on earth would read my stuff and everyone would be happy after reading it. Everyone would be smiling. Everyone would be feeling grateful. I have a saying: "I haven't really won until I have turned every enemy into a friend." That may seem quixotic. Yes, I know it's quixotic, but that is what I am trying to do. That's what's in my mind. Of course, you've got to first admit that there's a disagreement before you can begin trying to change someone's mind and make them feel good about it. But that really is my dream.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, yeah. And anybody who has read Bryan's books or met him can confirm that the books and the arguments are very good. And also they obviously come from a place of kindness and understanding about the other person's position. We all have problems. We are all imperfect, flawed human beings. But we must rise above it. So I highly recommend the books. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the Lunar Society. It is awesome.
--:-- Bryan Caplan: Thanks for coming out here. Now, this is the first time that I've actually had you right in my office while interviewing. So as great as Dwarkesh is over Zoom, he's even better in real life. So all people must try to meet Dwarkesh. Cool guy, positive person. Thank you, buddy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Thank you, Bryan.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast, so it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like. Post it on Twitter, send it to friends who you think might like it, put it in your group chats. Just let the word go forth. It helps out a ton. Many thanks to my amazing editor, Graham Bessalou, for producing this podcast, and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links. And you can find them at the link in the description below. Remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time.
