Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues

Dwarkesh Patel opens with Bryan Caplan’s book Don’t Be a Feminist. He asks whether there is any level of women’s representation in leadership at which bias should deliberately be introduced to bring more women in, even if the original ratio is not itself the product of bias. Caplan answers flatly: no. He believes in meritocracy, which he describes as a good system that works and whose intuitive appeal almost everyone sees.

Looking at a group and declaring that it needs more members of Group X is, in his view, the wrong approach. The right focus is the quality of the people chosen:

“Let’s try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.”

Patel presses the business case: if men hold an astounding share of certain positions, might that hurt the firm and give it a reason to rebalance? Caplan accepts that one can imagine this, but says that in the current culture the pressure runs the other way, with people more likely to try to get rid of men even though men deliver value. He grants one case where balancing is sensible, a bar’s ladies’ night, because it works and is good business. Where the goal is correct answers, effective operation or new knowledge, though, the focus should be on what actually leads to knowledge, not demographic representation.

He adds a second defense: the slippery-slope argument should not be dismissed lightly, because exceptions of this kind lead to bad places. He asserts that there is “a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts,” but cites none of it here.

Patel asks whether this slippery-slope point should make Caplan more sympathetic to immigration restrictionists. Their argument has the same shape, he says: there is no natural shelling point for keyhole solutions that admit tens of millions of people but deny them welfare or voting rights, because the civil-rights argument will eventually extend to them.

Caplan says “maybe,” and calls it one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. He explains the term for listeners. His book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration mostly argues that complaints about immigration are wrong or overstated. One chapter then concedes the point for argument’s sake and asks for ways of handling the complaints short of excluding or expelling people already present. If the worry is that immigrants will vote poorly, for example, one could withhold voting rights or make them wait longer.

Caplan thinks the citizen/noncitizen line is among the strongest focal points and has real stability. He concedes it probably would not hold across generations, since a rule keeping children and grandchildren noncitizens would be hard to maintain. His partial rebuttal is that the problems people fear, if ever severe, also dilute over time. That claim is asserted here, not demonstrated. He closes by granting the objection real weight:

“That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.”

Patel offers a structural argument. Society’s unfairness to men includes wars and dangerous jobs, but society grows more peaceful and hard jobs get automated, while gains at the very top of any discipline keep rising. If men are overrepresented at that peak, even for biological reasons, their relative gains grow. Feminism would then become more true because of technological trends, not because society discriminated against women.

Caplan first asks what feminism is. Popular dictionaries say it is the theory that women should be political, social, economic and cultural equals of men, which he calls a terrible definition that violates normal usage. Public opinion data show that an overwhelming majority of people who say they are not feminists still agree with women’s equality in all those areas. So the dictionary version cannot be what distinguishes feminists:

“That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.”

His own proposal is that the distinguishing view is that society treats women less fairly than men, or men more fairly than women. He tests it against usage: it would be strange to say “I’m a feminist” while believing women are treated like goddesses, and equally strange to say “I am not a feminist” while insisting society treats women awfully. He does not claim this is the one true definition, only that it is closer to ordinary meaning than the dictionaries, and he notes that Wikipedia’s second sentence adds the view that women are treated very unfairly.

Patel proposes another definition: feminism as the aim of raising women’s status. That differs from fairness, he argues, because a feminist historian might want to raise the standing of underrepresented women of the past without claiming they were treated unfairly, much as someone might want to raise Asians’ status without claiming they are mistreated. Caplan says such people could exist but that this is not the word’s normal meaning. The typical feminist holds that women are treated very unfairly and wants to alleviate that, and wanting to remove unfairness while thinking it great would be

“almost self-contradictory.”

Patel clarifies that he means rhetorical status, not living standards. Caplan repeats that someone who thinks women are treated fantastically yet wants their status raised might still be called a feminist, but that is not what the word means, since hardly anyone using the label holds that view.

Patel then offers an analogy: libertarians who want to raise billionaires’ status without thinking society mistreats them. Caplan answers by returning to method. A definition is tested by how the word is commonly used, and while ideal definitions give necessary and sufficient conditions, that is notoriously hard in ordinary language. Defining a table is difficult, he says, yet a table is clearly not by definition something people sit on. He does not say whether the billionaire case is a legitimate use of the label, and he steers back to Patel’s original question.

Patel restates the question: with the left tail of society compressed and the right tail expanded, does feminism become more true? Caplan says one must look at all the main measures. Some of Patel’s points make sense: as jobs become less physically dangerous, things become less unfair to men. But he says even that is more complicated. The immediate reaction is that society is unfair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs, yet they are paid for that risk, so all things considered it should probably not be called unfair. He frames it as an exchange: men suffer 90 percent of workplace deaths, but get 90 percent of the combat pay. Those percentages are part of his framing and are not sourced here, and the transcript’s closing sentence on the point is garbled as transcribed.

The book also covers change over time. One big change, Caplan says, is that people have become hyper-concerned about mistreatment of women, which makes feminism less true, since people anxious about being unfair are even less likely to be unfair. He mentions another area that “really does tip the scales,” but tells listeners to read the book, and the segment cuts off mid-sentence, so that second argument is not available in this part of the interview.

Caplan says the consideration that “really does settle it against feminism in today’s age” is the volume of false feminist accusations about unfairness. On the objective measures he sees treatment as close to a wash between the genders. But one gender must endure grossly exaggerated, hyperbolic accusations while the other gets to make them: men receive them, women make them. He qualifies this: not all women make them and not all men receive them. Judged by average fairness, this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what tips the balance.

Patel asks when the flip happened, and whether a particular decade was the point at which things became equal. Caplan answers that in some respects women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but in aspects he considers more important overall women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, he says, a mother could count on the biological father to help raise the children with odds of maybe 90 percent, whereas now it is more like 60 or 70 percent. These are his estimates, given without a source here. He says the unfairness has grown over time, and he does not name a single decade for the flip.

Caplan contrasts his book with the style in which an author argues like a lawyer, lists twenty arguments, and treats everyone who disagrees as stupid. He prefers to calm down, take each issue separately and weigh it on its merits. When readers ask why he concedes points that weaken his case, his answer is that they are true. His overall judgment comes only at the end. He wants to be the first to reveal a weakness in his own argument so that readers can trust him.

He gives a personal reason: he does not feel right saying something not quite right, and so he tries to write with candor. This is a claim about motive that the interview cannot check against the book.

Patel offers what he sees as a stronger defense of feminism. Perhaps American feminism overcorrects at home, but across the world women are on average treated more unfairly than men. If the US sits at the center of global feminism, it may overcorrect locally while making the world better overall. Caplan calls this a much better argument. He says most of Europe resembles the US. His book starts with Saudi Arabia, where it is obvious how poorly women are treated, then turns to India and China, citing plausible rates of female infanticide. He thinks it very likely that women are treated more unfairly than men in those two countries and is almost sure of it for Saudi Arabia.

On whether the US is providing a useful global corrective, Caplan says it is possible, but he sees a problem. By ignoring the really big issues, American feminism discredits its reasonable points. He estimates that American feminists spend less than 1 percent of their rhetoric on infanticide in China and India, which he says they do not care about. He concludes that more harm comes from the distraction of emphasizing small, exaggerated or reverse first-world problems while serious ones elsewhere are neglected. The percentage is his impression, not a measured figure.

Patel applies Caplan’s argument from Open Borders that radical advocacy can shift the Overton window: advocating open borders moves immigration policy slightly toward the open end. Could American feminists claim that their crazy arguments make Saudi Arabia more liberal for women? Caplan doubts that the window shifts when the arguments are crazy, since this may instead discredit the other view. He restates the book’s point that people confuse being radical with being unfriendly, and that most harm to radical causes comes from the unfriendliness.