Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, we've got a great guest for the inaugural episode of the podcast. Today I'm speaking with Bryan Caplan. He's a professor of economics at George Mason University and a New York Times bestselling author. He's written *The Myth of the Rational Voter*, *Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids*, *The Case Against Education*, and most recently, *Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration*. Here's Professor Caplan.

[Discussion begins]

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, so from Twitter, Martin asks, "What are you criticized most for: being too radical or not radical enough?"

Bryan Caplan: I would say I'm definitely criticized for being too radical. Most of my colleagues are less radical than me, especially the ones that are right down the hall. In terms of people that say I'm not radical enough, that's really pretty rare. Actually, I think that I've got enough controversial statements under my belt that people focus on that. I mean, there must be a few people who are annoyed at me for not being radical enough, but I hardly ever encounter them, really.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So I think Martin's one of these people because his next question is, he disagrees with you that people wouldn't learn numeracy and literacy if not for school. He thinks that if it's so useful, people would just learn it automatically. Do you disagree?

Bryan Caplan: So I don't think I ever said that people wouldn't learn it if not for school. So is he talking about public school or any school?

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, he's talking about public, like when you say that school should, other than numeracy and literacy, they're not imparting skills that are broadly useful.

Bryan Caplan: So, I mean, that's a very different thing. It's one thing to say that school is imparting literacy and numeracy. It's another thing to say that without those schools, it wouldn't happen in some other way. So, I mean, I think what I say in my work is that the data are at least consistent with people acquiring a decent amount of literacy and numeracy in school. You might still say that they're in school and they're trying to teach it, but they're learning it elsewhere. There's probably some of that going on, but I think the point that if there were a large reduction in public spending on education that people would still learn literacy and numeracy, meaning they probably would, although I think it would be somewhat mildly reduced anyway.

Dwarkesh Patel: How so? For what reason?

Bryan Caplan: Well, at minimum, there are always some parents that just don't pay very much attention to their kids and neglect them. And of course, there are a lot of kids that especially do not like math. So put that together. You know, I would say whenever people ask me what's my main criticism of homeschooling, I have said math skills is the big problem. So of course some people learn a pile of math in homeschool, but if you do the unschooling option where you just tell the kids they can do whatever they want and the kids aren't motivated to learn math, a lot aren't, then they really don't learn very much. I have met quite a few very smart adult homeschoolers who are still very weak in math because they were unschooled. Again, I'm not saying, I think that it is a much smaller deficit than public school propaganda would have you expect, but it still is noticeable. And research does bear this out, if I recall correctly, that the most notable deficit of homeschoolers is math.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, that makes sense.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, the next question is, I read an article you wrote in 2004 called "The Idea Trap," and it begins rather ominously, given our present circumstance. It starts, "Your country is falling apart, unemployment and inflation are at sky high, world war is on the horizon, and there are riots in the streets." Maybe not so much that one. But "never fear, an election is coming up." Are we in an idea trap?

Bryan Caplan: So the only thing I would say about that idea, or the idea of the idea trap, it makes sense to me. I had some historical examples that seemed consistent with it. In terms of whether it's actually true, I'm not going to strongly say that. I think it's an interesting idea that I wish more had been done with it, but in terms of confirmation, I just haven't seen that much out there. But yeah, I would say that when conditions are bad, the pattern that at least I superficially see is that people panic and lose their heads and become very open-minded about ideas that really don't make a lot of sense. And I would consider the current one where, you know, like, so there's an unusually severe virus, so let's lock down entire countries. That to me just seems like a crazy idea. It's one where there's very little precedent for in history. And again, once you realize, especially that there's heterogeneous vulnerability to disease, it sure seems like it would have been made a lot more sense to have said, let's go and isolate people that are vulnerable and have everybody else continue on about their lives with moderate precaution. But when people were losing their heads two months ago, that idea was not on the table. So if it seems likely that we're going to see continuing shortages and possibly a return of inflation, then again I expect that there'll be renewed calls for price controls and other bad policies, very historically discredited. But nevertheless, I think that's the kind of thing that we're likely to see if inflation does kick up.

Dwarkesh Patel: Did you think that closing the border to China temporarily was a good idea?

Bryan Caplan: So I mean at the time I honestly thought that it was just an overreaction. In hindsight, what I would say is the main problem is that if only one country does it but you keep your borders open to other kinds of travel, then people can go from China to Italy and then from Italy, and then if it spreads from Italy back to the United States if you have American tourists in Italy. So I mean the main thing that I'd say about closing borders is that we already have something like 98% closed borders if you really actually look at how hard it is for people to travel internationally, especially for a country. And to have really stopped this, you'd have to have gone all the way up to near 100% closed. So I get in hindsight, if you could just do that temporarily, then I think that probably would have been a good idea. To be able to, so if we could just have two months of no international travel in or out and then things go back to normal, great. But again, that's something where if other countries on earth don't do it and they have big problems, then it's not enough just to shut down for two months. You really possibly have to shut down indefinitely. In terms of what island nations that have kept the disease out, what is their long-run plan? I don't think they really have a long-run plan.

Dwarkesh Patel: Right, yeah. So they're just going to remain isolated forever? And the countries in the Caribbean, so much of their economy comes from tourism. Without tourism, I really don't see that they've got much of anything going on.

Bryan Caplan: Actually, I was recently on one of the last cruise ships on earth. I was cruising around the Caribbean. My cruise ship actually was flagged for having coronavirus cases on it, and then it turned out that no one on my ship really had it, but that was just the luck of the draw.

Dwarkesh Patel: When was this?

Bryan Caplan: This was early February. So basically my ship and three others were all flagged, and I think all three others actually had coronavirus and mine didn't. So for those Caribbean countries to say we're going to permanently have no international travel, it would just be a crazy option for them because their whole economy is based on tourism. If you're there, you really just say, without tourism, I don't see that much of anything is going on here.

Dwarkesh Patel: Right.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, I want to understand your model of how policies change. So step one, we have a brilliant economist write a comprehensive book called *Open Borders*. Step three, we have radical immigration liberalization. What's step two?

Bryan Caplan: Right. So, I mean, I think, honestly, I just don't think that step three is likely to follow from step one alone. If you have a thousand things like step one altogether, then maybe. So, I mean, I would say I don't consider myself that persuasive. I'm highly persuasive to a very small number of people with a very specific personality type. Otherwise, I wish I were, but I just don't see much sign that I actually am all that persuasive to people. In any case, what is the path from writing to changing people's minds? If you have a large amount of writing that actually is persuasive to especially elite young people, then over the course of decades, I think that does make a difference. So there are a lot of radical ideas. We're seeing ideas that seemed radical at the time that were aggressively sold to young elites. And then when those young elites actually take over, then those ideas start to be implemented. So again, things like gay marriage or marijuana legalization, these are ideas that were sold for a long time. And finally, they did break through and became conventional wisdom among young elites, and then I think we are seeing a lot of changes in those directions. So that is my main hope. I mean, I think the main thing I would say just for my work is, I like it. I'm just one person, so it's not reasonable for me to expect myself to fundamentally change the world. All I can do is just try to put a little bit of weight on the scale and try to achieve something that way and get some comfort from the idea that if I raise the chance of this by 0.01% compared to the effort required, it was actually still a good deal. Honestly, you do have to expect to fail.

Dwarkesh Patel: I think your impact has been bigger than that. But so how do you think these ideas get into the mainstream? Is it by charismatic politicians? Or is it by media figures who endorse them?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, so there's a lot of different mechanisms. So one of them, at least for the kind of thing I do, I think that really I have trouble talking to anyone other than elites. Broadly defined, not just people that are actually leaders, but the kinds of kids that go to Ivy League schools. That's an audience that I feel like I can effectively communicate with. So you go and change their minds and then they go off and do all the different things that elites do. So some of them are working in politics. Some are in the bureaucracy. Some are think tanks. Some are working in the media. So the idea that gay marriage, that just television made a big difference for that by showing sympathetic gay characters, that's very plausible to me in terms of social science. I would be at a loss to actually have any real hard evidence there, but still it seems very plausible if you live through that time to think that just putting those images in front of people made a difference. The character of Apu on *The Simpsons*, who has now been removed because people consider him offensive, is one of the most sympathetic and beloved Indian immigrants in the world. And he's been removed. I mean, I think that character actually probably made a difference in terms of making people more pro-immigration. Again, I can't prove it. I don't have any good Apu data or anything like that. But just having lived through that period, it seems very plausible.

Dwarkesh Patel: Have you heard Eric Weinstein's arguments against more immigration?

Bryan Caplan: So I've heard a bunch of people say what his arguments are. I don't know that I've actually listened to him, but if you want to go over.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. So one of his arguments is that one of the main rights a citizen has is asymmetric access to his or her own labor market. What do you think of that?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So I would say that that is then the violation of the right of employers to hire whoever they want. So legally, of course, that is what the system is, that you've got to have permission from the government in order to work. But the idea that this is a morally defensible policy seems to me to be pretty crazy. And morally, how is this different from going back 60 years and saying one of the rights of belonging to a race is to have asymmetric access to those labor markets based on race? It's a description of what existed. But there's a black worker, a white employer wants to hire him. What business does a white competitor have to say, "No, I have asymmetric access"? I mean, to me, this is something where it really only seems acceptable because it exists. It's one where status quo bias does dull our sense of moral objection to it. But if we started in a world where everyone had access and then someone suggested, "Let's move to one of asymmetric access," people would just think it was crazy.

Dwarkesh Patel: But isn't there a difference here in the sense that with discrimination, especially when the government allows or conducts it, within the Senate, like there's a difference between the government distinguishing a certain set of citizens to give special privileges, and then the government not distinguishing between non-citizens and citizens for privileges.

Bryan Caplan: Well, what I'd say is, in a sense, the Jim Crow argument was that Blacks living in America, even if they're born there, aren't really full citizens. And as to what the answer to that is, if someone just said, "Yes, I agree, all citizens should have access, but I don't think that African Americans should be citizens." Or in fact, at that time in the South, you might say they aren't. So they're in this intermediate zone where they have limited access. And the only rationale for that, since all citizens should be treated equally, is that they aren't really citizens. And as to what the answer to that would be, I really have trouble understanding it. So again, of course, you're going to say, "Well, look, this is what we have, a people have decided." It's like, well, you've decided it and you forced it down the throats of a large number of people that would be very happy to hire immigrants. And of course, you in no way consulted the would-be immigrants in the first place. So we as a society, it basically starts off by begging the question and saying, "Well, we're the ones that get to decide this." Who's that? Well, the people that agree with this are the ones that get to decide it.

Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think the government has a special obligation to people born here and who are considered citizens under a conventional definition?

Bryan Caplan: I don't, but I consider that a much less unreasonable view than the view that it's okay to prevent foreigners from getting a job. So in other words, if you were to say, "Look, citizenship has its privileges, just like being in a family has its privileges. So just as a person in a family is entitled to get special help from his family, so too people that are citizens are entitled to get special help from the country." That argument, I disagree with it, but that seems reasonable compared to "It's okay for us to make it illegal to go and hire someone that isn't a member of the family or that isn't a citizen." So again, to me, immigration laws are a lot like going and slashing the tires of someone that's competing with your kid for a job. It's one thing to say that he's my kid so I can give him special presents on his birthday or I can let him live in my house rent free. Another thing to say it's okay for me to go and do bad things to other people that are competing. Even in something like a sporting event, if the idea that it's okay to go and tip the scales and let your kid win even though he wasn't the best because he's your kid, almost no one agrees with that. But I have said, in fact, that there is an interesting analogy between country and family. The difference is that for favoritism of family, we very broadly accept a great many norms about how far you are allowed to go with that. And it's easy for people to accept that you can go too far, do go too far. So actually slashing a competitor's tires to help your kid get a job is not okay. On the other hand, for nationalism, the idea that you might be going too far in helping a fellow citizen, where the government policy might treat non-citizens unfairly for the sake of citizens, it's one that people barely mention. So while there is an analogy, familial nepotism is just much less dangerous because we do at least accept the general idea very strongly that there are limits and people often go too far. Whereas for nationalism, you really have to get to the level of Nazism before people start saying it's getting out of control here.

Dwarkesh Patel: I think you and Eric Weinstein have a completely different framework of understanding what a free market and immigration would mean. So he thinks that when we import labor into the country, that in effect is an interference with the market because we're interfering with the labor market. How do you dispute that framework?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, so you would see obviously in a sense it's semantic. If the correct starting point is a system of tight regulation, then not enforcing the regulation is interference. I mean, I do think this is a semantic argument, whereas ordinary usage is strongly on my side. So if you say that it's interference to allow foreign goods into a market and a free market starts off having zero international products and interference is allowing international products in, that's just not the way that ordinary usage says. So in ordinary usage, there is a distinction between action and failing to act, which we generally don't have a lot of trouble applying. Of course, if you are very determined just to use words in an unconventional way or just to play off the status quo and say, "Well, since the status quo is this, anything that moves the status quo counts," then you're going to end up with his version. And I think that's just a very strange way of looking at it. I mean, especially, I have known quite a few libertarians who say, "Well, immigration's like trespass and you don't have the right to be here without permission." But you say, "All right, fine. Then how about international trade? Is that like trespass because you don't have a right to set up a store in my house unless I say so?" And allowing unpopular religions, that's also not allowed because you can't set up a satanic church in my house. So similarly, you need the permission of the American people to set up your satanic church in the country somewhere. So basically what I say is that if you think about countries as being the collective property of their citizens, then all libertarian arguments, all principled libertarian arguments will just make no sense to you. I would just say it really does not make sense to think of a country as being the collective property of the citizens. Particularly, how is this club formed? It was formed involuntarily. There was never unanimous consent. And that really is the heart of any kind of club, is when it starts, everyone involved agreed to be there. You can't start a club that includes a bunch of people that are non-consenting. And that really is what distinguishes countries from almost any other organization, is that they start without unanimous consent. Then they work on the fiction of unanimous consent in order to silence opposition. But I say really the obvious rationale for saying that countries can't do whatever they want is that they really are not like other organizations. I think you could also just say, even if they were, they have such a large market share of the monopolies. And if anything should be regulated like a monopoly, a country should be. I can say that as well.

Dwarkesh Patel: But going back to this previous question, if countries don't have special obligations to their citizens, then couldn't the president just say, "Listen, we're not going to spend any money on Social Security when we could be buying millions of malaria nets and vaccines for sub-Saharan Africa"?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I mean, I think that actually would be totally sensible. If you're going to be redistributing, you should be redistributing towards people in a way that actually gives the largest benefit.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. Yeah.

Bryan Caplan: So, I mean, the Social Security program, of course, is marketed with the idea of "We're taking money in exchange for something." But if you look at it closely, this is a fig leaf. It is highly redistributive. And of course, it's also one where you can't opt out. So it's not really like a real investment program. And partly people realize if we could opt out, then the people that are getting ripped off by the system wouldn't want to participate anymore. So, yeah, but I would say that insofar as you are doing coercive redistribution, the correct rationale would be that there are enormous gains that we can get out of this. So it's a very tiny loss to the people that are losing, enormous gain to people that are benefiting. But again, as I said, using government to asymmetrically redistribute seems much less indefensible than using it to say that you weren't allowed to get a job from a willing employer.

Dwarkesh Patel: It's funny because you are the straw man that people who aren't completely open borders or for redistribution from the developed to the developing world are charged with.

Bryan Caplan: But yeah, it does seem like that. So again, I'm not aggressively saying that we should be redistributing a lot to the third world. In fact, I say it's this whole mentality of redistribution first that I think has caused so much harm in the world. The right question to ask is, "Are we doing anything that is preventing them from taking care of themselves first?" So I'm very fond of talking about the scene at the beginning of the first *Godfather* movie where Sonny Corleone gets mad at a photographer, grabs his camera, smashes it, and then takes some money out of his wallet and tosses it on the floor and walks away. I think this is a nice symbol of the way that both economic policy and foreign aid work in the first world. Step one: you say that people aren't allowed to come to your country to get a job and work their way out of poverty. And then step two: you go, after they are looking at the ruins of their lives, you then go and chuck out a little bit of money and walk away and say, "Hey, we're even." That really is a very nice image for what goes on in the world. So foreign aid is such a rounding error. It would be far better to focus on, "Could we just open up the conditions so that people in poor countries can both work their way up out of poverty as well as send money home?" Which is not a solution for people that migrate, it's a solution for anyone that has social ties to anyone who migrates.

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, shifting gears a bit to education. I guess it doesn't make sense to me why people would be so much in support of education, if you're right, and they all have been through the system, and they all realize how wasteful it was.

Bryan Caplan: Right. Yeah. So just to back up, what I say in *The Case Against Education* is that the main reason why education pays in the labor market is not that you learn useful job skills, but rather that you get a stamp on your forehead certifying you as a high quality worker. This is in some ways a controversial idea, but I will say out of all the controversial ideas that I defend, this is the only one that normal audiences of Americans agree with when I present it. All my other ideas, I can tell that normal audiences are just barely on the edge of saying, "No, no, no." When I describe education this way, actually, even very ordinary audiences of Americans, like, "Yes, yes, of course, that's the way it works. Yes, yes, yes." And normally, the only time in these talks where I suddenly get resistance again is when I say, "Let's go and cut funding." And that's where people get very upset and say, "Yes, yes, you've convinced me this is a wasteful rat race and that we would be better off with people at less education, but I don't want to spend any less money on it. We want to keep spending all the same money."

Dwarkesh Patel: All right. What do you think that is? Why do you think that is if they realize it's wasteful?

Bryan Caplan: So here's the thing. As long as you're just talking about what's really going on, then you can get people to reflect upon their own firsthand experience and then I think people do agree with me. Once you start thinking about policy, this is where people turn off their dial of first-hand experience and turn on all the propaganda they've been hearing their whole lives about how wonderful education is and how every dollar is wonderfully well spent and how nothing's more important than our kids' education. So in my book, I talk a lot about social desirability bias. It's really a fancy psychological term for the obvious fact that when the truth sounds bad, people lie. And if you tell the lie enough, often you start believing it yourself. So I think that's really what's going on. I think that descriptively, actually, for once, this is something where there's very broad agreement with my story. But to actually change policy as a result, this is where it then starts to impinge upon people's political religion, a big part of which is nothing's more important than education and every dollar is well spent. And again, I mean, just the level of cognitive dissonance that you would expect where someone's saying, "Yeah, yes, it's totally wasteful. Let's spend less." "No, no, no, we can't do that." I've seen this many times. So I think you really have to think that there are two very different modes. There's a mode of firsthand experience where I can get people who walk with me a very long way. But then there is the area of policy, which is not based on firsthand experience. It's based upon what people are supposed to say.

Dwarkesh Patel: You don't have to tell us too, but has there ever been a prominent politician you've convinced of the case for education or open borders?

Bryan Caplan: Prominent politician, almost as far as I know, no. So for the education stuff, I've had contact from a number of lower level politicians. I actually did get to be in the same room talking to Betsy DeVos. Although the very same day that I talked to her, she said something on Twitter that directly contradicted what I was saying in my talk to her. So as to what's going on, possibly I just was totally unconvincing to her, possibly she wasn't thinking it through, possibly she was completely convinced but knew that that was not good for business. Who knows? I mean, I think what I have succeeded in doing with education is at least tipping some people with influence a little bit more in the direction of not having free college for all. So again, this even may be wishful thinking, but I think I may have tipped the scales like 0.1 percentage points against free college for all. Of course I can't even really measure that, but that seems plausible to me that I've just put a little bit of extra weight on the scales of "Let's at least not make this wasteful thing free." But again, it wouldn't at all surprise me if, say, Biden wins and then they throw free college for all as a temporary coronavirus measure and then it gets made permanent later on.

Dwarkesh Patel: Speaking of which, which of the 2020 candidates in the primaries did you prefer the most?

Bryan Caplan: Okay, so limited to major party candidates?

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Let me ask you about that. Do you vote third party generally, given how much you probably disagree?

Bryan Caplan: So, no, I mean, I don't participate in the system. It's not an absolute principle. If it actually weren't totally up to me or if there were only 10 voters, then I would vote. But the combination of knowing how objectively unlikely I am to change the outcome, with what a corrupt and disgusting system it is—those two things are enough to keep me from participating. I definitely don't condemn anyone who participates. Jason Brennan worked out the ethics of this very well in his book *The Ethics of Voting*. There's no obligation to vote, but if you do vote, you have an obligation to do so based upon common sense and common decency.

If I had to choose between the candidates that were available... There were a few alternative Republicans that never really got off the ground. Probably I would have chosen someone like Justin Amash or William Weld. Out of Democrats, Biden is actually close to my first choice just because he's so old and confused. I don't think he inspires anyone, and I do not like inspirational leaders. I like boring troglodytes. They are the least bad people.

Dwarkesh Patel: But if you want a libertarian candidate who's going to radically change the Overton window on what ideas we're considering, wouldn't you want a sort of charismatic libertarian to come along?

Bryan Caplan: Yes, if there actually were a charismatic person supporting something good, then yes, I think that would be great. I just don't see any sign of that. In the overwhelming number of cases, when there is a charismatic young leader around, it's terrible. Or even a charismatic old leader like Trump. When he first arrived, people thought, "Oh no, this is terrible, people like him." Not everybody, of course, but there is a large core of people who love him, and that's dangerous. Anytime there's a religious revival in a highly religious society, it's dangerous. It's better if people are bored.

Dwarkesh Patel: This is going to come out of nowhere, but I was curious what you were like when you were 19.

Bryan Caplan: Much worse than you. Much worse. When I was 19, I was still just a big intellectual chip on my shoulder. There was only the beginning of the internet, so if you wanted to talk about ideas, you basically had to find people in real life. I talked to you about ideas, and it was hard to find people like that. I basically just took anyone who didn't immediately say "I refuse to talk to you about this stuff" and tried to make them talk to me about ideas, but not in a friendly way. Along the lines of, "You probably think this terrible popular thing is right. You probably think minimum wage is a good idea. Well, you're wrong. Here's why."

By the time I was 19, I was already simmering down. I was at my absolute worst when I was 17. When I was 17, I was basically attempting to hijack every class conversation and say, "Let me say the terrible things you all believe, and you're all terrible for believing them, and now you're going to admit you're all wrong and agree with me, or else you're scum." That really was my attitude. The fact that all my friends didn't just purge me—I'm very grateful to them. Thank you, friends, for not completely getting rid of me, and to all the people that I alienated completely needlessly.

I'll also say I had no really good excuse. Around that same time, I did read Dale Carnegie's *How to Win Friends and Influence People*. When I read it, I knew it was true. I just didn't care. I wasn't ready to listen.

On the other hand, you probably would have liked me. Anyone who wanted to talk about ideas and was at least sympathetic to what I was saying was my immediate best friend. I'd think, "Oh, this person's great, I love this person," because they talked to me about what I wanted to talk about. That was basically my cutoff for whether any person was worthy of my time or not.

Dwarkesh Patel: But isn't there a case to be made for disagreeable people and disagreeable kids? If not for them, we wouldn't have books that change the dialogue on the issues you've written about.

Bryan Caplan: The case for them is very weak. There's no reason you can't have very controversial views and defend them in a very friendly way. Such people are generally much more effective. Every now and then there is a strangely charismatic disagreeable person who manages to have a lot of influence by being themselves. I think of Ayn Rand as a really obvious case. But even there, the reason her ideas have had influence is because she influenced some friendly people. A very unfriendly person persuades some friendly people, who then go and take the ideas to a broader audience. That can work, and there are some prominent examples. But it's such an extreme long shot that it's much better to present your ideas in an excruciatingly friendly way.

It is very hard to come up with other examples of people like Ayn Rand, especially for something good. If you want to do something awful, the highly disagreeable method is somewhat more effective. For example, if you want to have a violent revolution, you might find one or two percent of the population that are sociopaths, get them on board with your violent radicalism, form an iron-fisted unit, seize power, and start massacring everyone who disagrees with you. For that, the disagreeable approach is somewhat more effective. But only for the purpose of gaining power and creating a tyranny, not for actually making the world better.

By the way, even Hitler, a notoriously disagreeable fellow—you can see this in his speeches where he seems to be a violent fanatic, and in his writings. And yet, when people personally met him, they often described him as friendly and charming. Neville Chamberlain said, "I thought he was just going to be this lunatic, and he actually had great social graces and a good sense of humor." Even there, Hitler knew when to turn on the charm, and that was probably important for gaining power. Being a horrible monster might be a good approach for creating an awful tyranny, but for doing good things in the world, it is a very bad approach almost always, with a few exceptions.

Even Trump, who I'm not comparing to Hitler, is frequently noted as being a disagreeable person, but often people who meet him say he's completely charming in person. On the other hand, there are people that most people consider to be very charming overall, like Bill Clinton, who to me just seemed like a sleaze. That's why he's president and I'm talking on a podcast. A guy like him, I just want to take a bath. I couldn't stand listening to anything he said.

Dwarkesh Patel: I want to ask you what you think the biggest single decision failure was in human history. The one decision that had the biggest negative impact. What would you nominate?

Bryan Caplan: In terms of ones where I think we can trace the effects with most confidence, I would say any one of the major decisions right before World War I were of tremendous importance. If any one of those major countries had just backed down, I think subsequent human history would have been much improved. I am very firmly against the view that World War I was inevitable. There was a window of danger during which if two countries on opposite sides were to fight, things could spiral out of control. But I think there was a good chance they could have just gotten through that window of danger to a higher level of wealth, comfort, and satisfaction with life. That generally gives you peace.

My general story about peace is that once people no longer remember what it was like to be anything other than fat and happy, you get peace. There is this window when people have modern technology and modern economies, but the people there still remember when life was very hard and don't mind it somewhat. That's the really dangerous period. If you could have kept peace in Europe for 20 or 30 more years, I think we could have avoided both wars. I don't think it would have been that hard. It just would have required one of the major actors on either side to swallow their pride. Either for the Russians to say, "Yeah, you can have Serbia," or for the Austrians or Germans to say, "We're not going to fight a world war over this," or even for the French to say, "Sorry Russia, we're not going to have your back here." I think any one of those would have been enough to prevent World War I. Without World War I, you wouldn't have had communism or Nazism or fascism. Without those, you don't get World War II. We avoid most of the horrors of the 20th century.

Dwarkesh Patel: Under that model where peace begets peace, how do you explain the fact that after World War II, war just went drastically down? After the worst war, we had the longest peace.

Bryan Caplan: I am a big believer that nuclear weapons made a big difference. Mutually assured destruction. But with the proviso that nuclear weapons are ultra risky. It increases the chance of peace, but it gives you a much larger chance of annihilation of civilization. The Cold War could have easily ended in World War III, and we got lucky. We have enough documented close calls where nuclear weapons almost got launched and it was a fairly minor person who prevented the launch. It's very hard to say that mutually assured destruction was reliable. It worked and it has some effectiveness, but the idea that there wasn't a 5 or 10 percent chance of a full nuclear exchange during the Cold War is very naive and dogmatic.

Even there, I think there's always an element of randomness. There are a lot of people who talk like Hitler who don't actually launch world wars. A lot of people who seem like they're foaming at the mouth, but when they're actually in power, they dial it down and just do some minimal stuff. Consider Putin versus Hitler. Putin has grabbed a bunch of tiny slivers of territory, and that's it. When he grabbed Crimea and a little bit of eastern Ukraine, people said, "He's going to attack all of Ukraine." Hitler would have taken the whole thing and possibly precipitated World War II. Putin is someone who just grabs a little sliver of territory that's almost worthless just to show he can do it, to be defiant. Whereas Hitler would grab a few things, then grab some more, and it was impossible to placate him.

I've written several defenses of appeasement. When people say, "Well, it didn't work on Hitler," I say, "You know what else didn't work on Hitler? Everything." There was nothing that worked on Hitler. He was just an impossible human being to deal with. Being nice to him didn't work, being tough didn't work. Nothing worked with Hitler.

Dwarkesh Patel: So the argument would be that given we're really trying to avert the next Hitler because they have the most impact, we should tailor our policy towards that. Should we just have threats of war in every case in case the next person happens to be Hitler?

Bryan Caplan: That was basically the attitude in World War I, which then led to Hitler. The problem is that there are multiple dangers. Saying we're ready to go to the hill for any situation does create a lot of new risks. That was the case of the Iraq War. You call Saddam Hussein the next Hitler. Turns out ISIS is really the next Nazi movement, which probably would never have happened but for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The best approach is not to plan for the worst case scenario, but to look at the general patterns and see how often different situations occur, and plan for that.

Dwarkesh Patel: A lot of people are revising their opinions on China and saying the free trade approach was wrong, that we shouldn't have integrated our supply chains. It's like putting your armories inside your enemy's countries. If you're depending on your enemy for bullets, that's kind of what we've done with China. What do you think?

Bryan Caplan: I think that's pretty crazy. They're intertwined with us and we're intertwined with them. There's been a fair amount of social science on whether economic integration leads to peace, and almost everyone says that it does. The fact that it doesn't give you everything you want doesn't mean it doesn't lead to something better. Most people saying this have no notion of what was going on in China before they were integrated. It was a totalitarian hell state, just one step short of the Khmer Rouge. Integration into the global economy has done not just economic wonders for China, but it has actually greatly improved the lives and freedoms of regular Chinese citizens. There's been unfortunate backsliding, but it's easy to talk about the backsliding and say things are back to as bad as they were before. You don't know how things were before. It's crazy to say things have gone back to how they were. We've still saved 80 or 90 percent of the improvement. It's unfortunate that we've lost 10 or 20 percent, but the idea that things aren't much better is ridiculous.

Dwarkesh Patel: What's your opinion on universal basic income?

Bryan Caplan: I think this is one of the worst ideas that is getting traction. It comes down to this: we have a finite budget for government support to people in need, and let's waste almost all of it on people who don't need it. That's the whole "universal" part. We give everyone regardless of need. Bill Gates gets the money too. This is just insane. No private philanthropist would do this. If you had a billion dollars to give to charity, it would never occur to you to give 13 cents to every person on earth. That would be an idiotic way to spend the resources. You want to say, "Where can we do the most good with this money?" UBI is saying we are not going to worry about the best way to spend the money. We're just going to throw it around to everybody.

If you make the amount very small, it doesn't break the bank. But if you put it at a level that is anywhere near acceptable to most Americans, it would be an astronomical burden upon the country and would break the bank. The basic math is something like this. You first ask people, "If you have no income at all, how much money should you get for free from the government?" People usually give a number like $15,000 a person. So a family of four gets $60,000. Then you ask, "How much money should the government start taking away when you start earning money?" People usually say 25 cents for every dollar. So if a family of four gets $60,000 with no income, and you lose 25 cents for every dollar you earn, when do you start paying taxes? If you do the math, you start paying taxes once your income exceeds $240,000 a year in family income. You would be putting an enormous tax burden on a very tiny fraction of the country. It's totally innumerate and unreasonable.

I debated one guy on this who said, "All you need is a 70 percent tax rate and everything will be fine." It didn't seem to occur to him that most people think 70 percent is high. And remember, this is just funding this program alone. It's ignoring all the other government programs that exist—national defense, roads, disease prevention. It's a crazy and innumerate idea. On top of it, it's just morally awful. It's one thing to take your money without your consent to feed starving orphans. It's another thing to take your money without your consent just to help everybody. That is a really lame excuse for putting a gun to somebody's head. If you're going to make people contribute whether they like it or not, at least think very hard about what you're spending the money on. Don't spend it like a drunken sailor. The slogan of UBI should be "spending taxpayer money like drunken sailors."

Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think it's a good thing that many mid-tier colleges might go bankrupt because of coronavirus?

Bryan Caplan: I don't think it makes much difference. The students are just going to go to other places, basically larger public universities at taxpayer expense. It will probably raise the burden on taxpayers marginally. Private schools already get a fair amount of government support, but kids in private school are less of a burden on taxpayers than kids in public school. In terms of what will happen, it's really just shifting the students around. I don't think it's the mid-tier schools that are going to go out of business. It's going to be small, unselected private schools. The schools where I honestly don't understand why they ever existed. Why would you pay private school tuition to go to a small, undistinguished school? The only answer that makes sense is because your parents went there. There is something weird about it. People's loyalty to a brand that really doesn't have much to offer is surprisingly strong.

Dwarkesh Patel: Can you give us a little preview on the next book you're writing?

Bryan Caplan: The new book I'm working on is called *Poverty: Who to Blame*. The book does a few different things. First, it starts with a different perspective on poverty. It says there's this old and now unpopular distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. I say it's been discarded for no good reason. In fact, we still use it, we just don't admit it. We look at the ways governments spend money. They usually try to focus on children, the handicapped, the sick—people that are otherwise unable to help themselves. Philanthropists do this. But the distinction has fallen into such disrepute that people use it by stealth, covertly.

Part of what I really want to do is say there was never any reason to get rid of this idea. It's a very good idea. The idea that some people are in poverty through no fault of their own and are especially deserving of help makes perfect sense. The idea that other people have caused their own problem and should be at the back of the line makes perfect sense too. Furthermore, once you start looking at this way, another big question you start asking is, "What's stopping people from solving their own problem?" Are there people that are being held in poverty by someone even though they could work their way out if they were just left alone? These are the moral questions I start with.

Most people who work on poverty hate the idea of distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. They say it doesn't make sense to be focused on this. But the fact that you're making the distinction does not mean you don't care. It just means you have a principle of prioritization. In a world of scarce resources, of course you're going to prioritize. So why not do it well instead of doing it in a sloppy and covert way?

Once we take this point seriously, we get a lot of useful ideas for policy. First, once you start taking the idea seriously that people might be wrongfully held in poverty because someone is stopping them from solving their own problem, we wind up taking a harder look at bad government policies that retard economic growth, especially in the third world. I wind up using this deserving versus undeserving poor distinction to say that a lot of deserving poor are held in poverty because they're stuck in a country with an awful government like Venezuela.

In the book, I'm going to talk about the many policies governments use that actually foment poverty. We usually have a picture of either governments spending money to help the poor or they're not. I say governments do something else. They also cause poverty directly by preventing new investment, by preventing the building of new homes, which is very common all over the world. Governments really strangle the housing market. Who is it that's going to suffer when you strangle the housing market? People that are not able to afford to live in a home because of that.

I have a chapter especially on bad policy in the third world, where you could just go on all day because third world countries really do have awful economic policy. Part of that is going to be a defense of what people call neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus, which I say has been highly effective. People have complained about it for being anything less than perfect. That's not the reasonable standard.

Then the book is going to have a section on how first world governments cause horrible poverty around the world, not through the more popular accusations of imperialism or colonialism, but just by preventing immigration. This is where I tie in my work on immigration. There are a great many people on earth who are totally capable of solving their own problem of poverty if governments would just get out of the way and let them come here and get a job.

Finally, the part of the book that will be most controversial, even though I'm saving it for last, is talking about individuals' responsibilities to cause poverty. There is just an enormous amount of evidence that personal irresponsibility causes poverty. This means there are a lot of people that really are to blame for their own problem. I think that should be said as well. This part of the book draws very heavily on a lot of left-wing sociologists who work on poverty. What's striking about their work is that they have a chapter at the beginning and the end of the book saying, "Anyone who says the poor are to blame for their own problems is a dogmatic, horrible right-wing ideologue." And then all the chapters from two to N minus one carefully study the poor and describe a long list of obviously irresponsible behavior that's causing poverty.

Everything from having unprotected sex when you are having trouble supporting yourself—this is extremely common among the poor around the world, and it doesn't take any kind of genius to figure out how this leads to poverty. Also very basic things like not being in the labor force. Especially in rich countries, it's very common for the poor to have very low rates of labor participation. Not being unemployed, but just not even trying to work. Then you've got drug and alcohol abuse. There's some dispute about whether the poor actually drink a larger average quantity, but there is very good evidence that they are more prone to severe alcohol abuse. You could have a lower average but still have people who drink to excess in a way which is much more destructive of your life than having two glasses of wine every day. Then there are other things like a lack of savings. Being poor does not mean you can't save, because the point of saving is to smooth your income. Even when you're poor, you might very well want to save because there's something worse that could happen to you.

There's been a lot of very good work on this done by people that just don't want to draw the obvious implication of it. The main thrust of the book is going to be that we should focus on getting rid of government policies that prevent people from working their way out of poverty. These policies are not just some obscure small problems. They are widespread, ubiquitous, and very dangerous policies. Then at the end, I say that isn't the only thing going on. Personal responsibility matters too. That ties in with the beginning of the book. Many people say, "Personal responsibility causes a lot of poverty, but what can government do about that?" A lot of my answer is, if that's the answer, then government shouldn't do something about it. If the person is poor through their own fault, then the person who should do something is the person themselves. They should get their lives in order. It really is quite appropriate at some point to say, "This is not my problem."

Bryan Caplan: Tell them, this is your problem, you should solve it. So anyway, that's the book. It's still changing as I write it. I was working on it right before we had this podcast.

Bryan Caplan: Oh yeah, and by the way, there is actually another book that I've started too. This is another graphic novel, but this time on housing regulation. The tentative title is *To Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing*. This is one where I'm trying to take a lot of research that's gone on the last 15 years on just how horrible housing regulation is. It doesn't just raise the price of housing; it actually is a massive drag on economic growth. In earlier periods, people would migrate from poor areas of the country to rich areas of the country and then raise their own productivity by becoming part of the higher productivity parts of the United States. Nowadays, this happens in reverse. People are moving from high productivity areas to low productivity areas because the housing cost is so high in the high productivity areas. You actually are richer working at a job where you produce less. This is a new situation.

Bryan Caplan: When people have estimated how much this is impoverishing the United States, there are estimates saying the U.S. would be 10 or 20 percent richer if only the housing regulation in rich parts of the country were similar to what it is in the average parts of the U.S. So this is another thing that I'm working on. In terms of regulation that people hardly ever think about that is causing astronomical harm, this is way up there. I'd say it's probably second right after immigration restriction. In both cases, we've got policies that people just take for granted. How can you not have them? And yet we know there was a period when they didn't exist and where we saw very large gains of a free market. There really is no good reason not to return to the free market that we could have had. So that's what I'm going to be pushing for in that book.

Bryan Caplan: Again, this is one where I'm trying to take some research which is high quality and important but super boring to almost everyone. By putting it in a graphic novel format, I want to get people that otherwise would just fall asleep reading the research or hearing about the topic to say, "Oh, this is fascinating." Partly, I just want to go in this book and draw the cities that we could have but don't have, just to give people a feel for how much we really are missing and how awesome it would look. The idea that it would be bad to go and develop the California Central Coast and it would look ugly—to me, this is just crazy. When you go and look at, say, San Diego, it looks great to develop the coast. So it's not like people want to go and put an ugly tenement on the California coast. They want to go and put beautiful places there. So why stop them? We'll look better, not worse.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. But by the way, I can completely endorse the graphic novel format. *Open Borders* was not just an interesting read like other books; it was just like a binge-worthy read, like a Netflix show is.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Binge-worthy. Yeah. So if you could go write a review on Amazon, we say binge-worthy.

Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, yeah. I'll be super pleased. I don't have to, but it's well advised. I like the word.

Dwarkesh Patel: Well, I want to be mindful of your time. This seems like a good place to stop. Again, thank you so much for giving me your time. It's really nice of you.

Bryan Caplan: My pleasure. And all these books you can still get on Amazon. There's no problem getting hard copies delivered. I think in the usual Amazon Prime time window of two days. Of course, you can get the Kindle versions instantly. I think of all my books, the price is right. For *Open Borders*, my latest book, it's only $13.39 for the paperback and $9.99 for the Kindle. And by the way, *Open Borders* is a great book for kids. So if you're doing an emergency homeschool and you can't find anything your kids want to read and you want them to read something of substance, let me throw my hat into the ring and say *Open Borders* could be the book for you.

Dwarkesh Patel: Excellent. Thank you so much.

Bryan Caplan: My pleasure. Thanks a lot.

[The podcast episode appears to end here. The following text seems to be from a different recording or a separate segment, possibly a solo commentary or a different episode introduction.]

Dwarkesh Patel: Hi, everyone. I want to try something new today. I want to start something like a book club where I'll read a book from now and then and I will discuss it. Today we're talking about *Stubborn Attachments* by Tyler Cowen. He's an economist at George Mason and he's written a book, *Making the Case for Economic Growth*. Within the constraints of a rules-based system, growth is just incredibly fundamental. I think his concern for economic growth comes from taking future people seriously. He disregards the idea that their lives should be discounted or that the consequences that occur in the distant future somehow don't matter as much as the ones that are going to occur soon.

Dwarkesh Patel: He makes this argument by saying, listen, if we take any sort of discounting rate year by year—let's say consequences 10 years from now count 3% less and an additional 3% less another decade from now—eventually we're going to get to a point where a billion lives in some future year are worth one life now. These lives are no less real than the ones we have now, so it makes no sense not to think clearly about the consequences our actions have on people that will live far away from now. And if we're going to take them seriously, we've got to take economic growth seriously. Anyone who's looked at compound growth knows the power of a steady compounding return on your investment or on any sort of principal amount. In this case, the principal amount we're talking about is the wealth of a society. We're talking about the resources a civilization has, the knowledge it has, the technology it has, and what the civilization is able to do.