Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas

Asked on Twitter whether he is criticized more for being too radical or not radical enough, Bryan Caplan says the first. Most of his colleagues, including those down the hall, are less radical than he is, and he rarely meets anyone who complains that he is too tame. His explanation is that he has made enough controversial statements that critics focus on those.

The next listener question challenges his education argument: if numeracy and literacy are so useful, people would learn them without school. Caplan rejects the attribution. He says he never claimed people would fail to learn these skills without school. His claim is narrower. Outside literacy and numeracy, school does not impart broadly useful skills, and the data are at least consistent with students acquiring a decent amount of reading and arithmetic there. He allows that some learning happens elsewhere, but he distinguishes the two claims sharply: school imparting skills is one thing, and nothing else being able to do so is another.

Pressed on what would happen if public education spending were cut sharply, he says people would probably still learn literacy and numeracy, though he expects a mild reduction. His reasons are practical. Some parents pay little attention to their children or neglect them, and many children dislike math in particular. He adds evidence from homeschooling. When people ask for his main criticism of it, he names math. Unschooling, where children do whatever they want and are expected to be motivated to learn, tends to leave them weak in math, and he has met several very smart adult homeschoolers in that position. He stresses that the deficit is much smaller than public-school propaganda would suggest, but he says it is noticeable, and that research, as he recalls it, identifies math as the homeschoolers' most notable shortfall.

A listener cites Caplan's 2004 article on the "idea trap", which describes a country in crisis with an election approaching, and asks whether we are in one now. Caplan says the concept makes sense to him and that some historical examples seem consistent with it, but he will not claim it is true. He finds it interesting and wishes more people would test it, yet says he has not seen much confirmation.

What he does observe, at least superficially, is that when conditions are bad people panic and become open to ideas that make little sense. His current example is the pandemic lockdown, which he calls a crazy idea with very little historical precedent. Because vulnerability to the disease varies widely between people, he argues it would have made much more sense to isolate the vulnerable and let everyone else continue with moderate precautions. He notes that this option was on the table two months earlier, when people were losing their heads. Looking ahead, he expects continuing shortages and possibly a return of inflation to bring renewed calls for price controls, policies he describes as historically discredited.

Asked whether temporarily closing the border to China was a good idea, Caplan says he thought it an overreaction at the time. In hindsight his main objection is that a single country acting alone while staying open to other travel does little: infected people can go from China to Italy and from Italy back to the United States. He points out that borders are already something like 98 percent closed, given how hard international travel is, especially from poor countries, so a real stop would require near 100 percent. If it had been possible to have two months with no international travel in or out and then a return to normal, he thinks that would probably have been a good idea. The problem is that if other countries do not do the same and suffer big outbreaks, two months is not enough and the closure may have to be indefinite.

He applies the same logic to island nations that kept the disease out. He doubts they have a long-run plan. Caribbean economies depend heavily on tourism, so permanently ending international travel would be a crazy option for them. Caplan adds a personal detail: in early February he was on one of the last cruise ships in the Caribbean, which was flagged for coronavirus cases that turned out not to exist, while he believes three other flagged ships did have cases. He calls that the luck of the draw.

The host asks about Caplan's model of policy change: a brilliant economist writes a comprehensive book called Open Borders, radical immigration liberalization follows, and the middle step is unclear. Caplan concedes that step three will not follow from step one alone, though it might if a thousand similar efforts add up. He also says he does not consider himself especially persuasive. He is highly persuasive to a very small number of people with a particular personality type, and he sees little sign of broader persuasive power.