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Bryan Caplan

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2022-10-20

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2022-10-20

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1. “Yeah, but basically that's the kind of thing that should have been done is here is the way I think about it. Like 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, this is where 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. Right? So you never want to let it make it look like your hand is 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. And 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.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “It's called Hitler's Willing Executioners. Hardly any ethnic Germans who refused to cooperate. Even soldiers were punished, cooperating genocide were punished, other than by saying, oh, well, going to have to transfer you then if you won't go and murder innocent people, what a jerk you'll be. So there's that.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “A whole lot of people that really bad war criminals wind up getting sentences. They're quite light overall, right? So trying to remember, if I remember correctly, under a thousand German war criminals got executed.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yeah, because they started off by completely crushing their enemies, completely crushing. And yes, here's the key thing is that in those occupations, there were two things that they're pushing, democracy and human rights, and they pushed human rights a lot more than democracy, right? So basically 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, right? So that is basically what happened is there's a complete crushing of what existed before and then a rebuilding where democracy is a low priority. Where it's like, is democracy yielding good results? Then we can turn the democracy dial up a little bit. Same thing in Japan. So of course there's also”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “They have to be reasonable people. And so, like, 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 here. This is going to be an orderly transition, all of her majesty subjects can anticipate surviving and a future where they are in peace. Now, again, probably a lot of people don't realize how badly the partition of India was botched and decolonization, but 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. So somebody say, oh, 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, right? So that's not what you do.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yes, first of all, with really high credibility. This is like at a long timetable. 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. Like even tying your hand saying we are issuing a pile of, let's see, we're issuing government securities where you have to pay us money unless we go and just give up in the middle of the game. So basically, you've got to pre-commit saying, look, 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, and we are ready to lose a whole lot of our soldiers in order to do this. And then we are going to go and find people that we are going to very gradually transition power to.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “And this is still actually 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 got their puppies and there's dog feeding stations for real, right? And it's like, wow, I don't have to go and convince myself through logic that this is the best thing that could happen or the least bad thing that can happen. I can just walk around and see people are happy and are adjusting to a new life.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “It'll be like arcane environmental regulations. I wonder if we're similar here where it's well. That's why an 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. Again, of course, I do have that chapter on keel 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 repopulation a month without it looking really bad. Now again, like I'm also the kind of person who will say the train stations could be full of human mystery and I would have said this is still way better than trapping people in a war zone. So I'm that kind of a person. 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. So this is still a big improvement.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yes, well, the can-do attitude mostly just comes down to, are you going to get out of the way and let them do their thing? Yeah. So that's the real problem, right? 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.”

   2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Human being to do to produce and contribute to society much better than we just keep you a semi-prisoner on welfare for a few years. That sounds like a much better thing to do, is normal. But anyway, so Poland was doing the best thing, whereas the day you show up, you can get a job here, you're totally legal to work. So 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. All right, so Americans freak out over 10,000. So just to realize how phony and bogus the complaints are. And it really is just a matter of believing a seeing if you think that refugees are bad and immigrants are bad. You will see bad things happening. And on the other hand, if you're supportive and have a can-do attitude, then you'll say,”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And the country looked fine, right? And no one there was complaining. And I'm like, I could see why. This is not ideology. This is me walking around and looking at stuff. And Poland was able to go and do this. Why? Because where there's a will, there's a way. You can, there can be 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. This is terrible. 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 with refugees is you say, well, like, 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 you.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “A pole speak in his mind here, right? And then you went to the train stations. They are packed with refugees. What I did not realize, the refugees were in fantastic experience because the welcome of the Polish people, especially really all over, but the polls stood out was so warm, so strong”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “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? I was super glad that I did. It was incredibly exciting trip. What had happened actually was that my open borders have been translated into three Eastern European languages, been translated into Polish, Hungarian, and Czech. And then I also spoke in Slovakia and I had gotten a few different versions, but the Slovakian said, yeah, we can read Czech. Totally no problem. It's basically the same language, right? So I got to give talks in all four of those countries, especially Poland was really exciting because the whole country, you could see the pro-Ukrainian anti-Russian enthusiasm in the streets. I was by the train station in Krakow and there was just a Polish guy just screaming, you know, fuck Polton, glory to Ukraine. And I think that guy drunk? No, no, he's not drunk.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “That was his claim. I don't know if you followed up that way, but yeah. So here's a good way of thinking about NCS. So I have heard that top firms, Google, will sometimes hire winners of contests. But when I ask people there, right, so how many standardly credentialed employees do you have in your programming and how many contest winners without credentials? It's like, yeah, like 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.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “That would be plausible that it would happen. So he said we only hire undemonstructural skills and I asked him, so well, who have you hired without credentials? And then what did he say? I don't remember.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yes, although you want the again, you want to give the internships to people that are checking all the boxes. Who is doing the weird thing? You're nervous. Now, by the way, so I've multiple times been on panels where there's some business leader, and he'll say the business world today we don't care about credentials, we only care about hard demonstrable skills. Then I always ask the same question, all right, so how many uncredentialed people have you personally hired for high skill jobs? Like, well, we haven't done any, but I read in the Wall Street Journal like, aha, you're acting as if you've got some firsthand experience, you're just repeating what you read in the freaking newspaper, which puts stories about stuff that is atypical. Of course, you know, write a story about something everybody knows about or that's familiar to people. You go and dredge up some weird platypus and then show.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yes, so it is there, although even there, like so a lot of what I say people are signaling it's not just intelligence, it's not even work ethic, it's just sheer conformity. So here's the issue, right? 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. And what I say is that 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 this is something where 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 what you're talking about.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Social and emotional problems with firing people. People do not like firing. And then on top of it, of course, there's legal problems, which should not be discounted.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Do this knowing full well that there are three awesome people you've just thrown away because, yeah, well, 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. So I call this the diamonds and the rough problem. And I say this is a lot of the reason why signaling matters so much is it's a way of getting out of the undifferentiated mass of people who may, who may be, are good, who knows, and into this better pool. Now, I do also say that another big error in Tyler's, I just watch him for a couple months story, is that there is very strong evidence that for multiple reasons, hardly any employer does the strategy of higher watch and then fire if you're disappointing. The simplest reason is just, well, maybe you're at like the 45th percentile of expectations and then in, 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...”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “And then in terms of the Zoom call, yeah, no, so I have been hiring artists. I'm admittedly a notoriously unreliable. But yeah, 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, right? 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 go and 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 there is trying to figure out ways to say no as quickly as possible and narrow it down. And you might.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “You're still wrong. So that is sort of the easiest thing to say. I mean, I think in terms of more fundamental arguments, again, I would just say the idea that with a Zoom call and this 1500 word essay that you could spot talent I think is ludicrous. Yeah, well, the essay can be forged, obviously. I mean, you can say, well, let's go and put them in a testing center even then. If a dream job hangs in the balance, people figure out a way to cheat on that.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, this goes back to a very long running argument I have with Tyler. So Tyler has a lot of objections to my book The Case and Education, but his central one comes down to this Look Brian, 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 a story, right? Pulling rank. So this is the argument that Tyler has right now. There's a few different responses to this. The one that is most pleasant and most flattering is to say, all right, well, look, Tyler, you are one employer in a million. You're fantastic, you've 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 at you as spotting talent.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Right now, it is quite likely that the guy that could have beaten death five or ten years earlier is in some village, some poor village in India or China. And by not allowing immigration, that person is not going to get to be death. If we're going to be death, we'll beat it eventually. But just to shave five or ten years off of that, I mean, this matters a lot for me. Those five or ten years really make a difference if the technology is just frees people at the age they're at. Like I want to get frozen really quick because I'm going downhill. But Dwar Kesh, even for you, five or ten years, it's a big difference. And so again, if you are an ultra-long-termist, then I guess that 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 the century, then it's the best I know of.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “A massive missed opportunity where we really could go and rescue a whole hundreds of millions of people, really billions of people from poverty in a short amount of time. And 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. And on top of this, worth pointing out that it is almost certain 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 our accomplishment is. If you think that we are one day going to beat death,”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Economic explanation is we pay immigrants more in rich countries because their 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. And if we were to go and get deposited in Port-au-Prince, Dorakesh, we'd be struggling to get out in existence as well. What's messed up is Haiti, not Haitians primarily. All right. So now this is basically undeniable. The part that is debatable is the scalable. We can go and make one Haitian vastly better off just by going and moving them to the US and it basically pays for itself because he's more productive. Could we go and move a million Haitians? Yeah, ten million. This is where people might start saying maybe it's not really scalable. All right. In the book, a lot of the argument really is. No, it's totally scalable. And this is just.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “If the answer is, well, does it really matter if we miss $100 trillion when people are really during it during the time that people are poorer, then they're probably ever going to be again? Yeah, I think it really does matter. Yeah, I'll go with that, right? So, I mean, again, the key thing to understand, so just to back up, right? So in open borders, I go over what I consider to be the most powerful argument in favor of immigration. And it just comes down to this. We know for a fact, undeniably, that if you go and 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 is it that we can make a Haitian suddenly earn twenty times as much money just by moving into Miami? He hasn't even learned English yet, but he's still making twenty times as much money as he was back in Haiti.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “But they're really bad in terms of something else. All right, so it's like, I mean, really, when people talk about this stuff, what really what strikes me is that I felt like I learned more from just going and looking at the time series as far back as it goes than from every person with that pontificated about what's really going on, just to realize the numbers are complicated, no obvious story fits. Yeah, so yeah, it would be really ideologically convenient for me to say feminism is leading women to kill themselves. Like the numbers don't work. So wrong.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Yeah. So basically, suicide rates were falling from like 1970 to 2000 and then started and then have had a big rebound since then. So if I remember, I think their 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 then like you've got to have some really complicated theory of, well, so either you could have just like a bunch of ad hoc theories. Okay, well, it was like 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, right? So that is, you know, so again, like the sort of the Jonathan Height case of by keeping kids from playing outside and by 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.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “So traditionally, you have a problem you go and talk to your priest. If you stigmatize that, that also says, well, I can't talk, priests, their scumbags now, I can't talk to them. So who can I talk to? I can go to the counseling center. I can do that. Now, you're right. There are some measures where the level of neuroticism, it is not just measuring people going to 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, Dorkesh.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “My first pass on this is always that it's an artifact of measurement in the medicalization society. So when you see things like yes, yes, yes. So that's where I would go next. But my first pass is always that it's basically just measurement. And so by modern measures, there was no neuroticism or there were no psychiatric problems 200 years ago because there were no psychiatrists. So if you went back to years ago and measure it and you said, well, like a number of people at psychiatry offices, zero, so it doesn't exist here. So that would, you know, and then we go and expand it. And especially when you really go out of your way to make access super easy to have a big center on every campus to destigmatize. And at the same time, to stigmatize the traditional substitutes for psychiatry like religion.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “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? You know, 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. And it's like, I believe, I can't remember Linda Johnson's accent, but let's give him this accent. 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 rhetoric that weaponize nuclear rhetoric that politicians. Will deploy”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “The main change that I could least 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 to say we are going to, in the state budget, we are slashing the budgets of the English department, women's studies department, ethnic studies departments, 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 just requiring too much attention from politicians to make them realize this, but that's the easiest thing to see.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “I mean, 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.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Have a throwdown with the president of the University of Texas and say, hey, we're sick of this stuff. So, 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. And to go, and again, while you might think, look, let's say, look, we're going to pass a bill saying that all the athletics of UT are fully funded, but we are getting rid of, we are going to go and get rid of the following departments. It's just hard to go and make that. Probably 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 go and at least 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 I think what they really care about.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “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'll basically 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. So in Texas, so we both were hanging out around on the University of Texas campus or cache. And the state capital of Texas is just 20 minutes walk away. And it seems like the governor of Texas does not want to”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “At the same time I still am totally willing to make bets. I mean, think about bets is that it's not like they just come fall into your lap. You really have to aggressively seek them out because hardly anyone wants to bet. At this point, you might think that some people 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 really do very much. The bet that I'm likely to lose is I do have a global warming bet with the stand-up economist, Joran Bauman. So that's one where he gave me three to one odds initially, so I was expecting to lose. So he very much enjoys running annual victory laps on Twitter without ever mentioning, yeah, well, you did give me odds because 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 go and run his victory lapse.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “I would be lying if I said it didn't change thy motions. Yeah. So I do have a record of 23 wins for 23 bets that have resolved. It is fun to be able to go and say that, to say I've got 29 out of 30 bets won wouldn't sound as good.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “So, actually, if it doesn't go up, then it's not getting diluted. But so here's the actual story. What's been going on during the last 10 years, so I have a bunch of bets on this, actually, 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, right? It's community college that has fallen a bit, which makes sense because the signal sent by community college is almost better, barely better than nothing, right? Except in a few disciplines like nursing, a few occupations like that. 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%. So I have a whole series of these bets, each with 10-year maturities, so I just won the first one. And yeah, I think I'm just going to win a whole bunch of other ones.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Is on the slippery slope to Free College for All? You cannot, like all that happens is you wind up raising prices and you cause a lot of harm in the process. And I say the same thing is going on with the multiplication of credentials.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “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, huh, well, but 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 on that that it does. So not at 100%, but still to a substantial degree. Again, for me, just again, just to back up, that can be my catchphrase. So 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. And that is to say, I think that the real problem with education is that 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 going and transferring to people who wasted a lot of social resources. And yeah, like that story that you are that it is.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Why then? Why is it that someone who is left wing or progressive would go and favor it? It's like, well, 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. I mean, it really is one where, look, obviously what the forgiveness really means is we're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population, right, which includes, of course, a whole lot of people that did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already done what they've already gotten the education, you're not even going and increasing the amount of education if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is it's making people think, well, maybe there'll be...”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Oi oi 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 and progressive who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage look it's a regressive transfer”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “In every society, but they're not the same, at least culture. I mean, again, although notice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and then I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation that we have, then it's much less clear.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Yeah, if you wonder, like, there's got to be, right? But as to what they, but as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are hard to understand, right? Yeah, they're hard to understand. So I would just say like, you know, keep a much more open mind about this. And if anyone is listening and wants to research on this, that sounds cool. I'll read it.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Now, again, like if you go and push the dynamics enough, but I mean, let me just put it this way. Like if you were at the, if you weren't the prophet of the Mormon religion, they have a prophet, like 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.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Be although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. And of course, you know, 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. So, but I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study, right? Now the other thing to remember is, wouldn't there be fear 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 would still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture, I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly. I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party. So like every society has this kind of thing.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Make each other more free market. Same time they remove 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.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “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 Mormonism? Probably very little, right? And then furthermore, you realize, huh, well, what if those Mormons of Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were minority? Seems quite plausible they'd be making a lot more converts over there. So basically the thing about Pure Effects is that if you achieve your Pure FX by segregation, when again 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 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 then”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Right. I'm willing to particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes, who aren't involved, I think that the best story is Pure 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 Peerifex, 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?”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Of the TV commercial surrounding air, the donation is the rounding air. And they everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic.”

    2022-10-20 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source