Bryan Caplan - Discrimination, Poverty, & Mental Illness

Dwarkesh Patel opens with Bryan Caplan's book of collected essays, Labor Econ versus the World, and a blunt question: what share of the working-age population has zero or negative productivity? Caplan guesses about 3%, and immediately qualifies it. The figure is much higher if people are forced into jobs they are not suited for. A worker who is useless in one job has not been shown to be a useless person; the problem may be a mismatch, which Caplan calls a common misunderstanding. Labor markets help by firing people from jobs where they add nothing, which pushes them to search for work where they are productive.

Patel then points to labor-force participation of roughly 60%, leaving a gap of about 37% of people who could contribute but do not. Caplan gives several overlapping explanations, with family responsibility first: mothers of young children who do not want a job because they are caring for them. A small group is rich enough that no available job appeals to them, perhaps a couple of percent of the population. A larger group faces government redistribution that makes working pay little, at least in the short run, though Caplan argues that taking a job is usually better in the long run because it brings training and connections. Others are supported by parents who are either very kind or, as he puts it, suckers, or by spouses and partners.

The last group, which overlaps the others, is men who do not want to conform. They work sporadically: they get a job, are difficult, get fired, spend time unemployed and then find another. Caplan cites Promises I Can Keep, a book on single mothers, in which the women are unhappy with the fathers of their children. When asked whether the problem was that the men could not find jobs, they answered that he finds jobs all the time and has trouble keeping them. Caplan adds a measurement point: someone who says they are still looking is counted as unemployed, but someone who says they are not even looking shows up in the statistics as not trying.

Patel summarizes the book's success sequence for the United States: finish high school, work full time, and marry before having children, and you are virtually guaranteed to avoid poverty. If the steps are so easy, why do so many people skip them? Caplan first asks the reader to imagine a recipe for avoiding poverty that required finishing first in your class at MIT, winning a Nobel Prize and marrying an Academy Award winner. People could reasonably call that hopeless. The success sequence is different because it sounds easy. American high school standards are low enough that showing up and trying will usually get you through, and poor people themselves, outside very severe recessions, say getting a job is not very hard. He stresses that this is the view of poor people, not of economics professors. Waiting for marriage to have children is easy given reliable contraception, since it requires delay rather than celibacy.

Caplan considers and rejects three explanations. The first is ignorance. Parents, teachers, coaches and other authorities all tell young people to follow the sequence, and it is normal even for parents who did not follow it to urge it on their children. He says it would be strange for a single mother to tell her child that single motherhood is the only good path in life; the usual message is to look at how she messed up and wait. The second is the claim that no one in these communities has shown the path works. Caplan replies that teachers visibly escaped poverty, and that poor families usually contain a relative who followed the sequence and shows up at family events, perhaps resented as thinking she is better than the rest. People may have mixed feelings about her, but they cannot say they lack first-hand experience of someone who did it.

The explanation that makes the most sense to Caplan is impulse control, which young people are famous for lacking. Finishing high school means sitting there bored. Keeping a job often means humiliating yourself, saying yes sir to a customer who is rude for no good reason while your pride tells you to answer back. Avoiding children before you are ready also takes impulse control. Of all the poverty research he has read, he says poor sexual impulse control is the root of almost all the other problems, because it is the one where a lapse leads to long-term responsibilities. Getting fired for yelling at a customer is recoverable, since you burn some bridges and find another job. Having a child where the other parent will not help is much harder to recover from, especially for the mother, who may spend 18 years juggling complicated responsibilities.