Bryan Caplan on Learning across Disciplines (Live at Mason Econ)

Before we start the show, a quick thank you to all of you who have participated in the listener survey. Now, if you haven't filled that out yet, there's still some time left. So if you'd like to help out the show and be entered to win a special gift from Tyler, visit mercatus.org/survey. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. I'm here today with Bryan Caplan, professor of economics at George Mason University. A very good friend of mine, a moral man. Each of his last 3 books has made a major impact, most recently the best-selling The Case Against Education. Welcome, Bryan.

Thanks so much for having me, buddy.

Let me start with a sentence you uttered to me, I guess a week ago, and you just said to me, quote, "No single paper is that good." What did you mean by that?

What I meant by that is that if you look at any individual piece in social science specifically, It's very hard to see that a reasonable person would fundamentally change their mind based upon any one of them. So, you know, people often have an idea of like there's the really good papers where you should have a mind quake and you never see the world again in the same way after that. And for me, like all of them fail to measure up to that standard. And I think the way that you really learn something is by reading a vast empirical literature. And, you know, sort of the direct cause of this was I think Noah Smith had a challenge like name the 2 or 3 papers on each topic that are really convincing. And I was thinking about that and I saw honestly I can't think of really any papers like that. I mean, unless you're going to cheat and just count a literature review as being that kind of a paper. So, you know, just realizing that the way that you actually achieve social science knowledge isn't by finding the one crucial, you know, natural experiment that shows exactly how the world works, but by assembling a wide variety of evidence and then muddling through.

So say you write an interdisciplinary chapter for one of your books. Tell us a little more how you do this and how you calibrate what you're reading against actual reality.

My procedure, which I've been pursuing more and more as I go along, is, you know, first of all, you know, like, start with the big topic, right? And then just, you know, usually using Google Scholar, just try to find, so what has anyone written on this big topic? And, you know, like, go through, like, the first 20 or 30 pages of Google Scholar views.. But then that to me just gives you a ballpark of what's really going on. And then I try to subdivide like every topic into lots of separate subtopics and then repeat that same process of going through Google Scholar just to see like, what is it that almost anyone has said about this topic? And then when I actually get the papers, then I actually will go and look at the references and see, is there more stuff that I should be looking at here? And then I get those papers and go back to Google Scholar. And, you know, eventually the process does converge. So I do have some stopping rules for, like, you know, generally don't worry too much about empirical papers written before 1980.

And you also then email the people who've done this research, right? Tell us about that.

When I'm going through and reading papers, oftentimes I'll find that there's something I just don't understand very well or something that seems questionable. And then usually, as long as the authors are living, I do try to actually reach out to them and get clarifications. But then, you know, the next thing is when I've got what I think is a good solid draft of a book, That's where I enlist my RA and say, "Get me all the emails of all the living people I've cited in the book so far." And then, you know, email all of them with two offers. One of them is an offer to show them the entire manuscript, but the other one, so that I'm not over on the far right side of the Laffer Curve, say, "Or, if you're busy, then I could just tell you the exact pages where I discuss your work, so at least you can tell me whether I'm accurately summarizing your work or not." And again, for me, like, what I do is so interdisciplinary, I'm always worried about this autodidact's curse. Where you've read a ton of stuff, but you still haven't actually talked to anyone who knows what's going on. And this is one of the things that I try to do to deal with, you know, especially like, you know, the wisdom of a field. Oftentimes there's wisdom in a field where it's known to people who have thought about it for a long time, but they just don't write it down. And of course, that's very hard for the autodidact to find out what is the wisdom in your field that you don't write down. And again, this is where I try to reach out to people. And generally I would say I get about, you know, like a 15% response rate for people saying they'll at least read something. So I feel like it does give me some good quality control.

Now, one area you've read a lot in, but I think never quite focused on, is personality psychology. Mm-hmm. What's the most interesting thing you've learned from personality psychology? Wow.

Yeah, so I do have one paper on this, you know, Stigler-Becker versus Myers-Briggs. Let's see. The single most interesting thing about personality psychology. One thing that I think might be a good answer is that cheerfulness loads on extroversion, right? Cheerfulness loads on extroversion. There's something actually very social about happiness. And then when you read this, it makes so much sense how little of happiness seems to be about material possessions and how much of it is about having good relationships with other people. And you can just think about animals. Like, when I read this, I think about animals like the animals that laugh. They're all social animals. Like, dogs laugh, chimpanzees laugh, humans laugh. It's like you never hear about like a tiger laughing, these very asocial animals. So, you know, at least that's one that I often do think about is this connection between social interaction and being happy.

So now let's go back in time a bit and just try to figure out how did Bryan Caplan come to be Bryan Caplan? So you grew up in the Valley north of Los Angeles in a town called Northridge. How did that specific location influence you and help shape what you've become?

Yeah, I know that you like to say that I'm a regional thinker, just like all people are regional thinkers. I mean, when I go back, it's easier to see what was going on. And when, you know, like, honestly, no offense to my friends out in Northridge, but when I get there, it's like, wow, this is just such an intellectual wasteland. No one wants to talk about ideas out here. There's no curiosity. It's, again, it's so insular where people just are not curious. I mean, even what's going on outside of the state of California. I mean, it's not just like we only care about America. Californians talk about California all the time. You know, like when you read the newspapers there, it's like, what's happening in California? And to me, it's a lot like when you're in Canada. It's like, what's happening in Canada? Like, well, why is that important? But, you know, just this, like, this navel-gazing aspect of Californians. And, you know, I mean, I see a lot of what I'm doing is reacting against that and just being, you know, being very intellectually curious and very interested in the world. Although, you know, not so much to me as a reaction as just like it does explain why I felt so dissatisfied growing up. And, you know, remember, this is before the internet. So, you know, just to go to the library and be able to get a good stack of books was the best that you could do in those days for intellectual enrichment. So it was really just to envy my kids for like what a cornucopia of wonder that they have if they want to feast the mind.

Michael Huemer, who is he and why is he important, especially for you, but not only?

So Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I actually met him my freshman year at Berkeley when we were both undergraduates in Paul Feyerabend's ancient philosophy class, which by the way is the only class so bad I ever just stopped attending. You know, like he just didn't talk about ancient philosophy. He only wanted to talk about action at a distance. And how is that possible? But anyway, so I met Michael Huemer there and out of all philosophers, I was thinking like he came to have the biggest influence on me. There were many issues that I was grappling with, a lot of it under the influence of Ayn Rand where the more I learned in philosophy, the more dissatisfied I became and yet I couldn't think of anything else that made any sense. And Mike Huemer as a student wrote a bunch of essays that said, "Wow, this seems like it really actually solves a fundamental problem of philosophy in a way that's just so much more satisfying than any of the others." So, you know, like he was a very big influence to me there. And then over time, like he really, you know, he really built on this. So he now has this amazing corpus of work. So, I mean, for politics, he has this book, The Problem of Political Authority, which out of all the books of libertarian philosophy, almost every single one, if there were some non-libertarian who said, you know, what's a good book to read? I'd be kind of embarrassed to give him the book because here it is, but it's like not really very convincing to someone that doesn't already agree. And again, what's great about this book, but really all of Mike's work, is he always tries to start off with premises that would— that make sense to people that don't already agree, and then try to get somewhere. And the amazing thing is he does get places, actually.

Now, a lot of people who grow up, you know, young with what you might call nerdy interests, they read a lot of science fiction. And you don't seem to have been very interested in science fiction, but you were intensely interested in learning about Joseph Stalin and history of communism. I mean, what's the fundamental feature in Bryan Caplan think that has made you, unlike most other nerds, So much more interested in Stalin than science fiction.

So I was very interested in dictatorship from a young age.

And this comes from growing up in Northridge, right?

I don't think so. So, I mean, like, I had a lot of bad attitudes as a kid.

You did?

Yeah. Like what? Well, like, I read a book about dictators, and I honestly have to say, like, I was reading it saying, oh, this is so cool, getting to be a dictator, right? And there was a lot of pent-up hostility and resentment towards the things as they were. And reading it, it's like, "If only I could be one of these bloodthirsty tyrants, then everyone—" Terrible, but that's the honest truth of it. Even in 5th grade, I read this big book. It's just like 10 biographies of different dictators. And then when I really got interested though, so let's see, I was very interested in European history when I was in 11th grade, put a lot of time reading that. But it was only later actually when I got into libertarianism that I became interested in first of all, not being a dictator. And you're like, "Oh my God, these people are actually terrible." I mean, everybody knew that, but I kind of knew it, but at the same time, you know, sort of like someone who reads true crime where like on the one hand, you know that it's terrible, but on the other hand, it's like, "Oh, but he's so clever. Oh, look, he almost got away with it." Like when I became interested in libertarianism, then became interested in the exact opposite and what that's like, and that's where Stalin is, of course, a focal figure as at least up till his time, the most totalitarian leader in human history, someone who combined an ideology, rationalizing it, with a personality that actually craved it, combined with the technology that allowed it to really be done in practice. And, you know, so that got me really excited. Now, in terms of like why that rather than science fiction, I guess for me, the main thing about most science fiction is it lacks— not all of it, you know, but like most of it, you know, lacks what I call emotional truth. Where there's just not a lot of interest in the inner lives of the characters. And to me, that's the interesting thing about any story, is the inner lives of the characters. And you love Tolstoy, right? Yeah, yeah, so I love Tolstoy because, I mean, here's a guy who not only has this encyclopedic knowledge of human beings— you say, you know, he knows human nature. Now, he knows— Tolstoy knows human natures. He realizes that there are hundreds of kinds of people, and like an entomologist, he has the patience to study each kind on its own terms. Tolstoy, you read it like, you know, "There are 17 kinds of little old ladies. This was the 13th kind. This was the kind that's very interested in what you're eating but doesn't wish to hear about your romance." And it was supposed to be contrasted with the 7th kind, which is exactly the opposite preferences. So yes, that's what's to me so great about Tolstoy. I mean, to me, like, pure genre fiction has no appeal. And especially anyone who ever tells me that science fiction is good because it's scientifically accurate. This is where, like, oh God, so that's the best you can say for it is that There's no sound in space. You know, I would much rather watch a space opera where the characters have a rich inner life and where there's drama and where the storytelling sucks you in and makes you care whether the character is disintegrated than whether the character disintegrates in a scientifically correct way.

When did you build the Museum of Communism and tell us what that is?

I did this in graduate school when I didn't want to do my real work. So I spent a lot of time, not just in undergraduate, but in graduate school, reading stuff that was totally, well, at least mostly a waste of time career-wise, but I was really interested in it, and I had a passion for it. And you have to remember, these are the very early years of the internet when all these suppressed urges that I had to go and pontificate suddenly had an outlet. I mean, if the internet existed when I was in high school, like, I might have actually failed out of high school, because I would have put so much energy into creating web pages, like, this is my take on each of these different topics. The first time that the web was working well enough where you could actually do this, at least where I had enough knowledge to make it work, was like 1993 or 1994. And then to me, I put, I think, more time into my internet projects than into my actual studies, counting class time and everything else. So the Museum of Communism, this is one where I wanted to go and put together all of my thoughts about the history of communism. Meaning I would say that it's maybe like 7% done. So, but almost all that 7% was done during my graduate school years. So I mean, the parts that actually I really completed, so I had sections on the Marxist and czarist origins of communism, which is building on rich historical literature. Obviously there's the Marxist roots, but then people saying that there's a lot of continuities with czarism, and that made a lot of sense to me in sort of thinking of Lennon as being the Marxist czar of all the Russias. And then I had a FAQ, or FAQ, frequently asked questions, where I went over what was known about the numbers at the time. So, I mean, since then I've learned quite a bit more about the numbers, especially numbers for deaths in the Gulag seem that the literature of the time overstated by quite a bit. But, you know, I've never gone back and updated. But, so, I mean, obviously that would be something that I would do is, you know, bring it up to date with better data that we've got now.

Now let's turn to your new book, "The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money." One theme you stress throughout are the costs of excess credentialism. So to be hired as a bartender, maybe it's a real advantage to have a college degree. And this encourages too many people to go to college, but at the same time, there seems to be a waste of talent and a lot of bureaucracy and paper credentials, hard to get second chances and so on. What deeper disease about our society do you think excess credentialism reflects? That is, if you try to explain it almost as an anthropologist, like, here's why we're really so screwed up to have done this. What's your answer?

At least a big part of it is what psychologists call action bias and the idea that it's just— we just ought to do something, right? So, you know, people take a look at the world and they see, look, there's a bunch of people that don't have very good jobs. There's a bunch of kids from those families. It seems like they're probably going to turn out like their parents. Let's do something about it. Let's go and create a big education system. And encourage everyone to spend as many years as possible in the system. And then in the end, of course, the hope is that this will lead to not just social mobility, but to just a whole society where almost everyone has a really good job. And yet again, like, you know, if my book is right, the main result seems to be not that everyone gets good jobs, or at least every college graduate gets a good job, but rather employers ratchet up the educational expectations to be considered worthy to be a secretary or going to be a bartender at a nice bar.

And you think in our society in general, this action bias infests everything, or is there some reason why it's drawn like a magnet to education?

Yes. Well, I think specifically it's drawn— action bias primarily drives government. So again, for individuals, I mean, I think even there, there's some action bias. But nevertheless, for the individual, there is the cost of just going and trying something that's not very likely to succeed, and the connection with the failure and disappointment. And a lot of things don't work out. There's a lot of people who would like to start their own business, but they don't try because they have some sense that it's really hard. And what I see in government is there isn't the same kind of filter because, you know, which is a big part of my work in general in politics. You don't have the same kind of personal disincentives against doing things that sound good but actually don't work out very well in practice. And again, especially probably even bigger than action bias actually is what psychologists call social desirability bias. You know, just doing things that sound good, whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice. And again, I think of this as primarily a disease of governments because it's so based upon what people say rather than trying to do a comparison between what we thought was gonna happen and what actually— how things actually turned out.

But your book on parenting, that also criticizes action bias. Parents think they need to do all kinds of things they actually don't. So it's not just government, it's like we all as human beings. So kind of the Straussian version of the Kaplanian themes is the whole world is infested with action bias. And that if you understand action bias at a deep level for decisive actions, for non-decisive actions, rational irrationality kicks in, and you have like two blades of the scissors and you put them together and you can then explain 2018? Yes? No?

That sounds oversimplified, but yeah, I mean, you are right that parents feeling like it's really important for them to do things, and they don't do things, this is gonna mess their kids up. I think, you know, I think that is a big part of what makes parenting so unpleasant in the modern US. It's the sense of, if I'm not acting all the time to go and help my kids out, then I'm a failure and my kids will be failures. There is a lot more going on than just those things. In general, my work is— unlike, say, Robin, I do have a resistance to monocausal things and explanations that seem like they're overbroad. I do try to narrow it down and think about one thing at a time. And again, my general view is that you get a better general theory of things if you work on a lot of particular issues first. And then step back like we're doing now and say, you know, are there some commonalities?

Am I correct in thinking that a lot of existing papers on the social return to education or the private return, they neglect the fact that a high percentage of students drop out?

Yeah, actually this is, you know, over 1 million years old. In fact, I'd say there's maybe about 7 papers in economics that specifically interact completion probability with the rate of return.

Out of how many would be the total pool roughly? Thousands. Only 7. Yeah. So, and what causes that bias to come about? Yeah.

So here's the, here's the key thing. There's a lot of papers on completion probability, but they are generally segregated from the rate of return. So a lot of people trying to figure out how can we get the rate of return up? How can we get the rate of return— excuse me, rather, how can we get completion probability up? How can we get completion probability up? And of course, the reason, if you say, well, why do you want to get completion probability up? For an economist, like, well, so we can get the expected rate of return up. But meanwhile, over in the realm where they're doing the rate of return, they usually do it the wrong way, which is by looking at the payoffs for people who successfully complete. The most superficial story is just that people do it because the data is constructed that way. Because normally the measure of education that economists use asks, what is the highest number of years of school that you successfully completed? And then they just run the regression and kind of forget exactly what the measure even is. But I think this does reflect a general pro-education bias, especially among people or economists who work in education, labor economists, education economists, where they just aren't looking that hard for reasons that education might be overrated.

And how much does non-completion risk lower the return to education? How much does this bias matter?

Wow. So let's see. Of course, it varies a lot by the level. So for high school, then it's modest, so maybe reducing it by something like 30%, but on the other hand, for college, though, where the completion probability is a lot lower than it is for high school, then I think it's getting at reducing it by 40%, maybe even 50%. Again, it's one where there's a nonlinearity, and so it's hard just to do the simple back of the envelope. But the key thing to remember is not only— so the on-time completion rate for full-time students doing 4-year degrees, something like 40%. And overall? And the key thing to remember is since there's also this big literature on the sheepskin effect saying that a lot of the payoff for college, most of the payoff comes from graduation year. This means that if you only get 3 years, you don't get 3/4 of the payoff. You get maybe 15% of the payoff.

And overall, if we look at higher education, just the first 4 years, or one hopes it's only 4 years, or one hopes that it is 4 years, what percentage of that time do you think is best explained by the signaling hypothesis? Yeah.

So my general best guess overall is about 80%. In the book, I actually use a constant number, at least for high school on. It's one where on the one hand, it seems like there's more obviously useless things in college, but on the other hand, you're also more likely to find a major that will tie into your actual job. So at least it's not obvious to me that the right number is different from 80%, so that's what I'll go with.

And what do you think is your single best piece of evidence for your view that it's 80%?

Hmm. So let's see.

Or just for your view that it's high, not exactly 80%.

The single best piece of evidence there is just to look at the curriculum. So there's data on how people actually spend their time in high school, broken down by course material.. And, you know, for college, there isn't the same kind of data, but there is data on just the distribution of majors. And, again, just to see the small amount of K-12 time spent on any kind of studying that seems plausibly to be future job-related, and then similarly in college to see just the rareness of majors that are plausibly vocational. Meaning, it seems like there's a lot of people saying, well, I mean, hardly anyone is doing your traditional humanities anymore. You know, like there are not many people doing history or English anymore. But again, that doesn't mean they're switching to STEM. They're switching to things more like communications where at first glance you might think it's vocational until you realize how few jobs there are in that field compared to the number of people that are graduating with that major every year.

Now let me put on the table a number of reasons why some people, including often myself, haven't agreed with you as to why signaling is so important. And I'll give you the last word in each case. So I'm just going to go through a bunch of these. If we look at, say, Singapore and South Korea, they have maintained world-leading positions for their economies, often in fairly advanced areas. Could they have done anything like this with, say, the levels of education they had in 1980? Yeah, I think that—

I don't see what the problem would have been at all. I mean, so, I mean, like, again, most of the education they're getting is stuff that they're not going to be using their jobs. They may have a higher percentage in STEM, so it may be— may not be as wasteful as what we're doing. But again, like, you know, the material that they actually are studying in school is not very related to the job. And the way that people get good at their jobs in those countries, just like almost any country, is, you know, learning by doing. So the main thing going on is that they are spending years jumping through hoops in order to finally be allowed. Normally I hate it when people go and find one news story as proof of something, but there was a recent one from South Korea so vivid where even if you say that it is cherry-picked, still, like, that such a cherry exists. Says something. So this was a story about South Korea wanted to hire 4 janitors and most of the applicants had college degrees. And in the end, they hired 4 BAs and 1 AA to be janitors there. So, you know, like this disease of credential inflation seems to be serious in countries where people think of the education as having been central to their success. I don't think so.

Now, we would all agree most workers don't go back to school. Some do, of course, but most of them don't. But wages change a lot over the course of a worker's lifetime. So if the signal from education is fixed, and then wages are changing for many decades, I mean, doesn't most of the wage story have to be human capital theory rather than the signaling theory?

Yeah, so of course, the obvious story for change is just that people are acquiring more experience. That, I mean, again, you could have a signaling— you could have a strong version of the signaling model where you have an idea about, first of all, average productivity, and then you have an idea about average productivity gain. And then there's not much connection at all. I don't think that's right. But again, what I would say is, you know, like, it is reasonable to think the signaling share goes down over time. And there is evidence this is so. However, that, you know, like, how quickly does it go down and by how much? And that's where, you know, there is a whole literature called, you know, the employer learning statistical discrimination literature, where they do try to measure this. And, you know, like, usual view there is that, you know, at minimum, you're talking about a 10-year wait before you start getting reasonable credit even for your IQ. Which is one of the easiest and most observable, most testable traits that employers value. So it makes perfect sense to me there's a lot of other traits where it may take a very long time. Furthermore, so as I say in the book, if the model of actual employment in the real world were hire someone, see if they're good, and then if they're not as good as you thought, fire them, then I think your story would make a lot more sense. But the way that actual jobs usually work is when you get someone who's disappointing, they have to be really bad to get fired unless there's a recession. And if you do want to get rid of them, it's much more common for there to be a little conspiracy between the bad employee and the employer to help the bad employee get another job someplace else. As I found doing the research for the book, there's even a special word for this in what I call the termination community, the group of people who specialize in firing. They call this de-hiring. No, we're not firing you, we're de-hiring you. We're encouraging you to find an opportunity elsewhere where you can become somebody else's problem. So, again, once you realize this is actually a big part of the modern labor market, the idea that someone could basically go from one job where they're a burden to another job where they're a burden to another one—

Let me pursue the speed of learning question because it's important. Let's say you've hired someone or you have a new colleague or you have a new co-author. How long does it take you to figure out how good they are? Yes.

Hmm. So for my own purposes, that's easy because for me, the main value of a colleague is lunch.

So it takes one lunch. For you, because I'm judging—

So one lunch is one lunch.

Steve Pearlstein started coming to our lunches. And you were telling me within a week how great he was, right? Yes. And you have not wavered since.

Yes, because I'm not— there's not a lot of inference in what I care about. On the other hand, if you're an employer running a business, it's not primarily about whether you like the person, although that's important too. It's like what they actually contribute to productivity. And again, there, there's issues with figuring out how much someone is part of a team. But again, sort of like the key thing out of this whole literature on actual firing and de-hiring is that there is— even after the employer has full information, this does not mean it's going to be reflected in wages anytime soon. That can take a lot longer because, you know, people don't like firing and they often conspire to help a worker that they don't like to get another job where once again they're overpaid. And then the way that actual pay is handled out, again, it's very unusual to do an absolute pay cut. So really, you know, very unusual to even give a person zero raise if other people are getting raises. So these are all things that really slow things down. So even after you've handled the purely intellectual problem of how good is the person, there's this other problem of, right, how quickly does the system actually react to it and how well does that information disperse throughout the system?

Talk me out of this dilemma. If the speed of learning is very quick, let's say, you know, in 3 months how good a worker is. It seems implausible that you would need 12+ years of schooling to learn the same thing. If the speed of learning is very slow, let's say you need 10 years. To figure out who's good and who isn't, then it seems educational signaling is actually highly productive because it helps you slot the better workers into the better jobs. So you can kind of pick your poison, but you've got to choose somewhere on the spectrum. And either way, it seems the cost of signaling won't quite be that high. Or am I wrong?

Yeah, you're wrong. So, you know, let's, let's just take for granted that at the end of 3 months, any employer can know the truth about any worker. There's still a big problem, which is what has to happen before you can work for someone for 3 months? You have to be hired. What has to happen before you're hired? You have to actually stand out in an interview. What has to happen to stand out in the interview? You have to get interviewed. And what has to happen to get interviewed? You have to have your resume not thrown in the trash. So, you know, I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just they're signaling to get opportunities. They're signaling to get time to actually talk to the employer and convince them that they are worthy. I mean, I sort of really much like the analogy of getting your big break in Hollywood. You know, there are a lot of actors right now, I think, who are really good, but until they actually get a chance to star in a movie, it's very hard for them to convince anyone that they have this talent. You know, they can go and show up to try to get an audition, but again, like, just to get enough of people's attention to show them and to get them to put the energy in you. And remember, like, hiring people is really expensive. You're taking the time of some of the most valuable employees at a firm who are the people who need to be there to judge whether the person's good enough. And you were distracting them. So like, you hire somebody who's a disappointment. At what percentile does someone have to be before it even is profitable just to fire them and then go back to the drawing board? I mean, obviously, somebody's at the 45th percentile of expectation, you don't want to fire them and go back to the drawing board. And maybe you want to go back to like maybe the 30th, the 25th percentile is there. So the big cost of hiring someone and just sorting them out at that stage and the fact that employers are not in the business of giving chances, they're in the business of making money. Chances are expensive to hand out.

So the other Straussian reading of Kaplan is that just labor markets work very, very poorly. Yes?

No? So, yeah, they work a lot more poorly than a lot of economists think, and they work poorly in different ways than economists think. So there's sort of a standard list that economists have of ways that labor markets are messed up. Like, the number of times people talk efficiency wages, that's the real problem. How about the problem of employers don't want to fire people who are incompetent? How about that problem? And it's not one that sounds very good, but it's one that I think is very serious. For all the talk that people have about discouraged workers and how unemployment rates understate the severity of the unemployment problem because they're ignoring discouraged workers, and I always bring up, "Right, sure, but what about the megalomaniacal workers? The workers who think they're too good for any job for which they're actually qualified for, and they keep searching around and staying in the numbers, even though it would be like me claiming to be an unemployed brain surgeon. Like, I'm not an unemployed brain surgeon. I'm not a brain surgeon at all." In general, the world's more complicated. And especially— the problem here is that the behavioral economics revolution or psychology in economics has not really entered labor economics nearly as much as it should. And especially economists, when they do psychology, they only read a few parts of psychology. And there's a bunch of other areas they just don't pay much attention to that I think also are leading to some tough results. Again, of course, this doesn't mean that you don't have government policies that are amplifying a problem. Sure, like anytime you have human beings dealing with each other face-to-face, there's going to be things that are badly screwed up.

Let me ask a very general question, trying to put together your thought as a whole. So you're saying across a lot of margins, in terms of learning, formal education doesn't matter that much, right? It matters for signaling. Also, in your book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, you're saying at least within certain margins of acceptable behavior, parenting doesn't matter that much. And you believe in both of these two views, right? Schooling doesn't matter that much. Parenting doesn't matter that much. So the way social customs are carried forward today compared to 1910 or 1950, I mean, something has changed that. And it's not parenting and it's not schools. So again, the deep Straussian reading of Bryan Kaplan, like, what is it?

So in terms of the economy, a big part of how people get good at their jobs is just by practice, like I said. And a major difference between practicing today and practicing 100 years ago is there's better kinds of practice to emulate.

But no, not good at their jobs, just like social mores, customs. Parenting and schooling, in your take, don't matter so much. So something is changing these that is mostly not parenting and not schooling. And they are changing quite a bit, right? Is it like all technology? Is the secret reading of Bryan Kaplan that you're a technological determinist? I don't think so.

In general, so, not a determinist of any kind. Much prefer— I was teasing you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But much prefer multicausal theories or polycausal theories. What's going on. I would say in terms of like why modern culture has changed these ways, the story of just people richer and that makes a big difference. I mean, I think there's a lot to that. So just the way that people are much more freaked out about taking chances with their lives, you know, that seems to me to be a big part of being a rich society where you just have a lot to lose and also you can live comfortably without risking your life. So, you know, so just being a richer society, I think that matters a lot. In terms of other things that, you know, that seem to change just You know, the much greater availability of entertainment, right? So I mean, this is something that I think has replaced a lot of things that people were doing in earlier periods. So I think the wide availability of entertainment probably explains a lot of religion's decline.

And it beats the influence of parents in some ways. Yeah, right.

And again, so like another thing is that— this is something you can get out of Judith Harris— is that it can be that individual parents don't matter, but if there's an entire generation of parents that are a certain way, that can matter a lot. And that wouldn't be picked up by the standard empirical methods. So, again, like if you had a couple of weird parents today, then you might still turn out to be a normal member of adult society. But on the other hand, if you were raised in a society where all the parents were very different, probably a very different outcome. I remember Judith Harris had an example in her book where there were some Orthodox Jewish parents who decided to move to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Because they said, "Look, as long as we're in America, we can't control our kids. We got to go to a place where all the kids are controlled by parents like this." So, we have basically blocked out the outside world.

But, the culture at large really matters a lot. Mm-hmm. Decisions hardly matter at all. So you're kind of flipping the Ayn Rand story. It's really like the big macro aggregates that persuade people as expressed through entertainment, business practices, and wealth. But individualistic efforts, they're kind of puny and, you know, they don't matter so much.

Rand's view is actually very similar to mine. Remember, she was angry about the world because she thought that most people were heavily influenced by their cultures. That outraged her, that just because you grow up in the culture of Russia, that you're a Russian. And she's there saying, no, I don't care where you are. You should be an Aristotelian. It doesn't matter what— so you're born in Moscow, or you had this background. We should all be reading the great works and the great minds, especially me, for her, of course. And your background shouldn't matter very much. But the reason she wrote about this is she looked around and saw that people are generally very conformist. Fountainhead, the second-handers, the people who form their views of what is meaningful based upon looking around at others. And she didn't write about this because she thought it was rare. She wrote about this because she thought it was normal but terrible. And very much, at least in the same ballpark for me. So while I am very individualistic, but of course, if this were the normal thing, everyone else would be doing it and then there wouldn't be anything special about me doing it. In a way, if you don't think that culture is really important, it's hard to be an individualist because then you aren't different from other people.

Now let's talk about education policy. Let's say we agree with your basic take on education. So there's educational failures, there are connected labor market failures, and the question is, what should we do about this? So what if someone came to you and said, well, take South Korea. Government there spends relatively little subsidizing higher ed, but signaling costs are high. In Germany, the whole system is more or less free. People, you know, they go on strike if they're asked to pay 10 marks or 10 euros a semester. And in Germany, a lot of the universities are mediocre, but the German economy does fine. So isn't the solution to too much signaling, in a sense, to nationalize the sector and lower quality and get people less interested in it?

Yeah. So I think this is a classic case where there's multiple omitted variables. So when someone says, look, the government funds it all, but they don't spend very much, and so the way to get spending down is for government to increase spending, I think that is one of the strangest inferences I've heard in social science. So like, you know, government spending is generally going to be piled on top of whatever other spending is there. So we see that there's countries where like the total spending is low, but government spending at all. I wouldn't say this shows that government spending reduces spending. I'd say that government is spending in countries where otherwise they're just— the private demand would have been lower on its own. You know, in terms of— but this is especially here for America. So like in the US, you know, like a fun fact, you know, it seems like the US basically spends as much as a share of GDP on Medicare plus Medicaid taking care of a small part of the population as a lot of other countries do taking care of the whole population. So you might look and say, "Wouldn't it be great if we just did what other countries did?" And I said, "Well, is what other countries do to spend in an American style for everybody or is it to go and spend in the style of other countries on everybody?" Again, so I think what would happen in the US or really almost any country that were to follow your advice is that they would just have even more spending. So, you know, like, especially like in the US, if the US had government— like, took— socialized medicine, we wouldn't even have Medicaid for all. We would have Medicare for all. Americans would be horrified at the idea of anyone getting anything less than the very best treatment. And the cry of death panels has enormous resonance here. So, general point: government subsidies increase spending, and if it seems like they don't, it's probably because you haven't looked closely enough.

Have K-12 vouchers underperformed? And in general, how do you interpret that data? I would say yes.

So this actually barely appeared in my book because it was— was not really central to any of the topics I was talking about. But my understanding of research on K-12 vouchers is a lot of people thought that they would substantially raise standardized test scores, and it's hard to see a big gain there. Now, you know, again, this is puzzling because it sure seems like there's way better ways to improve test scores, starting obviously with just teaching the test. Right? Which, you know, many people say people are teaching the test all the time. And whenever I actually look at my kids' schools, like, what are you talking about? There's like 3 practice tests. If I wanted to teach the test, there would be 100 practice tests. That's how I would handle it if you told me get test scores up. But, you know, I think the main thing that we learned from this is that most parents don't care about test scores. When you give them a choice, they aren't looking around for the school that will raise kids' test scores the most. They're looking around for other things. Again, like part of it is just convenience or location. Probably another big part of it is whether the kids are happy. So I'd say that— I think we agree this is actually one of the most undervalued benefits of school choice is just giving kids some options so that kids that are crying and miserable at one school can go and take that money and go to another school.

Tyler Cowen: Now, if there's overinvestment in education, you talk about changing or getting rid of some subsidies. Could you imagine there being a role for government in making the signal more continuous or more convexified? So for instance, You could allow federal funds for certificates rather than just degree programs. You could imagine governmental nudges to give people a 3-year option, a 2-year option. There are a lot of 1-year alternatives to colleges popping up, the way 2-year community college could be treated. There seems to be a lot we could do, but maybe aren't doing, to create or produce signaling options that waste fewer resources.

What should we do there? What I would say is, you know, like, definitely worth some experiments. And, you know, like when you're spending an enormous amount of money, you can take off 2% of it and then use standard social science random assignment to really learn something. Tyler Cowen: I mean, it's been pointed out that like a high percentage of government spending on healthcare is for medical research, but only a very small amount of education spending is for education research. Again, like the main disappointment there is despite all the education research, it seems like it's not very often actually used for any kind of education policy. Medical research, you might have a similar pessimism, but I don't think it's as bad as that, at least. It's not as bad as there being a big literature saying that highlighting is totally ineffective for improving student learning, and yet almost every kid in America still has a highlighter. It's actually on the list of mandatory school supplies for Fairfax County. You must have a highlighter. It's like, this is an item that science says you don't need, and yet everyone must have one to be at school.

Are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated? Absolutely. Okay, let's start with effective altruism?

Underrated. Why? In general, when people are thinking about charity, it's mostly about feelings and it's this very— I hate to use the word, but it's a very autistic experience where people just like, it's the warm glow. Like, what is it? Does this make me feel good? I think effective altruism is all about let's try to get some actual measures of how much good is being done and to raise the status of that. So rather than thinking of someone who asks how many lives is this going to save as being a Vulcan who doesn't really care about people, to reframe that. And no, he's someone who cares a lot. That's what you would do if you actually cared about people. I know that we talked about this, we blogged about it. I mean, I would just say that remember, like most people have never heard of effective altruism, so it's totally underrated relative to almost anyone else. I mean, if you were to go and look at the main philanthropic societies in the United States, how many of them have ever heard of effective altruism? And they think it's just like some nerdy thing out in the Bay Area. So, you know, like the general idea of trying to go and spend money in a way that does the most good and using science in order to accomplish that, that seems great. And I, you know, like the idea that this isn't a generally good approach seems very odd to me. And of course, I do think that once you start thinking in this way, it also has all kinds of other good effects. Like it makes you realize there's a bunch of things that people in politics are super concerned with that we should just never worry about again, in Triage sense, that they're just so small that we've already spent more mental energy than we ever should. And there's a bunch of other things hardly anyone worries about that we should think about a lot. Socrates, overrated or underrated? Underrated. Why? Yes, because of the dialogues. The dialogues, like, this to me is a much better kind of philosophy than— I mean, most philosophy is really just a monologue. It's just a person going and rambling on, and most of them do ramble on without really trying to listen to the audience or think about what people in the audience would already know or find a starting point. And what Socrates does is he's at least trying to go and Talk to his philosophical opponents like they're human beings and find some common ground. Let's find some premises that we both agree are at least tentatively a good starting point. Yeah, something like the Socratic dialogues out of all the stuff in ancient philosophy. I think that is, you know, something like close to the top of what I would enjoy rereading and would get something out of. Robin Hanson. Underrated, of course. But highly rated. Yes, highly rated, but still underrated. Just the sheer intellect of Robin. For me is still kind of hard to fathom. So, you know, just the way that I have told Robin stories that I've told 100 other people and only he notices a logical error in the story. I mean, that to me is super impressive. Just, you know, just the sheer intellectual enthusiasm. And, you know, like even though he's so— like the topics. Like when he gets on what I think of sci-fi topics, those are the parts where I am least happy. But again, if you just read the blog, the range of things that Robin has thought about is actually vast, right? So, you know, just in terms of breadth and depth and just, you know, just sheer curiosity. And I've said this quite a few times, like when people get really mad at me, that doesn't bother me. When someone gets angry at Robin, this is what actually outrages me. And I just want to say, look, you know, to get angry at Robin is like getting angry at baby Jesus. Like he's just a symbol and embodiment of innocence and decency. And for someone to get angry at someone who just wants to learn.

And when they get mad at me.

Yes. Okay. Can't understand that.

Camping. Overrated or underrated? Pardon? Camping.

Camping. Overrated. Why? Social desirability bias. It's getting back to nature and enjoying the great outdoors. But there's a lot of really unpleasant, uncomfortable things going on. And so, you know, you can get the good stuff out of the great outdoors while staying in a hotel. It's the kind of thing that people think will work out a lot better than it actually does in practice. So that was actually almost the only vacation I had when I was a kid was camping. And I have some good memories, but also like a lot of bad things. And again, like so much of the good, you know, the good stuff we could have kept, you know, 90% of it while cutting rid of, getting out of, getting rid of the bad stuff by staying in a hotel.

You're sent back in time to the year 527 AD, and let's assume you're good enough at learning languages. Where would you pick and why? Whoa, 527.

Hmm. Let's see. Probably Byzantium. Right? So I mean, first of all, of course, that, you know, assuming you're good at languages, but, you know, I mean, so Greek as a Western language would be easier. So I think that is actually the biggest city in the Western world at the time. It's the one where you'd still have at least a modest amount of Greek and Roman thought, which has been preserved. Really, really center of civilization by that point. So, you know, like, I think that would be the place where you're most likely to have smart people around. There's things that you can do with your mind and also, you know, you're least likely to get ripped apart by barbarians.

What would your job be? Hmm. Once you've learned the language.

Languages. I mean, like, the temptation to become a government advisor under those circumstances would be painfully high. As to whether I could actually find some role there where I would not be morally horrified, this is a tough call. You know, like, if I could get away with just being a teacher, like, that you'll say, you know, like, what I know, then, like, to actually go and found a school and teach economics. Like 1,300 years before the rise of modern economics and try to jumpstart the Industrial Revolution and economic growth and social science and everything else. Emotionally, that would have by far the strongest pull on me. Again, if that weren't available, then— so there's the Roman business, so banking, money lending, shipping. I think I could learn those. Wouldn't be thrilled, but not bad. Beats rowing an oar.

Here's a general question I have for you about what you might call a Kaplanian approach to things. And it starts with aesthetics, but maybe it doesn't end there. If I think about some of the things you like or love, I think of, say, 18th century classical music, Wagnerian opera, certain traditions within graphic novels, a number of TV shows, one would be Ali G, Chinese opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Larry David. You could add much more to the list, And it's always seemed to me there's some broadly consistent pattern behind all those tastes, but I've never been able to put my finger on what it is. And now that we're all here today, I would like for you to tell me what that pattern is. Yes, sir. What's the common theme? Right.

So for me, like, I feel like I have to start between splitting the comedy off from everything else. The comedy seems to be very different, but like for everything else, for anything that presents itself as serious art, For me, what I would say is I like what some people love. If there is something where there is a fan, where there's a group of fanatical devoted people who say this is the best thing in the world, those are the kinds of things where at least I'll say, I want to try that. I want to see what that's like. I want— and a lot of times when I do this, I'll say, wow, the people who fanatically love it are right. This is wonderful. There's just so much going on and you could spend a lifetime on this. I mean, I remember once you described some Bach oratorio as chaff, and I said Bach doesn't have any chaff. There's no piece of Bach, no oratorio, that I couldn't profitably spend a month on. So I mean, like, for me, like, anything that— especially anything that's produced by someone who is a megalomaniac, who feels like what they're doing is fantastic. I think about, you know, Wagner's term for his work, the Gesamtkunstwerk, the complete artwork. I, Richard Wagner, have composed the music, I've done the libretto, I've done the staging, I've done the casting, everything. This is all a reflection of me, "Ruchat Vachner!" Like, those are the kinds of things that pull me in. I remember once I was just wandering past opening day for The Hunger Games, which I was not particularly a fan of, but just to see a bunch of people who are in love with something, I was happy just looking at them loving this thing in a way that like when I see someone sort of half-watching a sitcom in the back, like, while doing something else, that's the kind of thing that depresses me and I just want to go and shut it off. Like, if it's worth watching, it's worth watching 100% attention. And if it doesn't motivate you that way, you need to find something else, or else you might be wasting your whole aesthetic life.

What should we infer from the fact that your sense of the comic is so segregated from the rest of your aesthetic? Hmm. If it is. Yeah.

Yeah, that one is harder. So again, like, if I were to go in and just try to list things that I like, that I like in comedy, a lot of them are very lowbrow. Like, the Three Stooges is hilarious to me. And if someone were to say, "But why is The Three Stooges better than a sitcom that you would turn your nose up at today?" I would have trouble having a really good answer. You know, like, the only thing is, look, The Three Stooges is sublimely stupid. They're taking the stupidity to a level that your mere sitcom writers aren't capable of. So, maybe you might say that it is just the extremism, or like the fact that they just take a joke and they run with the idea of a guy in a gorilla suit meeting an actual gorilla. But for me, you know, comedy, you know, it is much more idiosyncratic. So I've said like, you know, Shakespeare I love except the comedy, which just isn't very funny to me. I mean, I get the joke, but like, why especially is that funny? You know, so like you said, you know, comedy is more culturally specific and that does make sense to me. I mean, there is sort of a class of things that I almost certainly won't like, like whenever my dad emails me a thing of lawyer jokes and I do say, look, if you find it funny, good odds I won't think it's funny because anyone can understand it. But if you say, what about the Three Stooges? Like, all right, well, so that isn't really a full theory.

But that's almost becoming hermetic these days, the Three Stooges. Yeah, hopefully. I was sent this question earlier this morning, and I quote, "What are the most socially valuable delusions or shared erroneous beliefs?" Unquote.

Yeah, that is a good one. So I am tempted to say something along the lines of God will punish you for bad behavior. But again, the other problem is that's mixed in with so many things of the bad behavior is actually good behavior and the good behavior is actually bad behavior, that I'm not convinced that is actually all that socially useful. Probably a better answer is the delusion that money will buy happiness. So, you know, like there is an enormous amount of progress that is caused by people desperately going and trying to get rich. And I think the actual psychological evidence is the money won't actually lead to all that much happiness, but the things they produce are quite a bit more likely. You know, probably in terms of the most happiness-producing stuff, I think maybe actually especially in the arts, where so much of the stuff was produced by people where if they just did a reasonable XNT calculation, just would have said, "This isn't worth it." But the reason why we have it is because they ignored the odds or just overestimated themselves. So maybe that.

And a follow-up question from the same source, "Which mistaken shared beliefs would he like to see adopted?" Hmm.

Probably the idea that there would be some kind of eternal horrible punishment. For holding power and not having a very high degree of epistemic rationality. So especially if they review that God hates a politician who takes any action without calmly and studiously studying the facts, and that God will punish you in a way that voters never could. God will punish you in a way that's far worse than the simple loss of power. You know, if that were widely believed by people of power, I think there would be a lot more effort to actually double-check that what they're doing really makes sense. And again, you know, like just the Spider-Man principle, with great power comes great responsibility. If there were false beliefs in some enormous concrete sanctions for people that violated the Superman principle, I think that would be a big gain.

Our mutual colleague Daniel Klein writes to me a question, quote, "Do direct and overall liberty ever disagree?

What are the most likely or important areas of disagreement?" Yeah, so I was amazed that Dan would ask that. Of course, direct and overall liberty disagree. So, you know, like, if you could just go and kill baby Hitler, right? Kill baby Hitler, that's great for the freedom of the world, but he's just a baby, he hasn't done anything yet, right? Or, you know, more obviously, if in, you know, like, you know, say in like 1928, if the German government had just rounded up all the Nazis and, or at least all the leading Nazis and just executed them without trial, I think that would have been a big gain. I'm always impressed, there was an incident I think around 1940 when the Romanian government just took they had all the leading brass in the Iron Guard, which was the main Romanian fascist movement, they had a lot of them in jail already, and without any warning at all, they just sent them out to a forest and they murdered them all. Right, and I read that, I said, "Wow, alright, well, you know, probably a bunch of these guys hadn't done anything yet," and yet, you know, like if you know how bad things were in Romania, if you know anything about the Iron Guard, I think it very likely would have been quite a bit worse, so anytime there's, you know, like a small number of power-hungry people where there's at least a moderate risk that they're eventually going to get to do what they want, just to go and kill them preemptively, I think, like, you know, that's a tough one. You know, and the terms— and then of course, once you've got that, then if you were to go and do censorship for people like that, that's another one of the more obvious ones.

You have a famous piece called The Idea Trap. Could you outline how it might illuminate at least some parts of 2018?

Yeah, so the motivation of The Idea Trap is twofold. So first of all, I had this empirical results out of public opinion that said pretty strongly and surprisingly that people who have higher income do not think more like economists, but people who either have experienced or expect higher income growth do think more like economists. So the level doesn't matter, but the change does. And essentially, the more optimistic view seems to actually push people in this economist direction. So there is that fact in my mind. And then there was also this big literature on non-convergence, or at least for a very long time, Economists were expecting that poor countries would tend to catch up to rich countries, and then they look at the data and weren't seeing it happening. Right. And then, yeah, yeah. Then, you know, further, there's this literature saying, well, at least a lot of the reason why this is happening is that countries that are poor just very persistently have bad policies. So I took these three facts and said, let's come up with a little model. And the model will have three variables, which we'll call growth, policy, and ideas. And the model will have the following laws of motion. So like, you know, good ideas cause good policy, which is almost a tautology. And, you know, good policy causes good growth, and that's almost a tautology. And then the last thing is, how does growth affect ideas? Right? And what I said is, on the usual— on the sort of the usual view that if you have bad growth, then people realize they're making mistakes, and then ideas get better. Or on the other hand, maybe if you're having good growth, people sort of get— said, "Well, we can afford to live a bit, and we don't need to worry about this so much," so ideas get worse. So, in that model, that actually gives you growth convergence. And basically, all countries tend to be mediocre. But I said, but if we tweak the model in light of that public opinion finding, where suppose good growth actually gives you good ideas, bad growth gives you bad ideas, this actually gives you a model with multiple equilibria, where you can have one equilibrium where everything is good. You have good policy, good ideas, good growth all mutually supporting each other. Or you'd have bad ideas, bad growth, bad policy all mutually supporting each other. And in terms of 2018, At least the story you might tell in a lot of countries is there's countries that are in the bad equilibrium where they've had, say, they have like some bad growth, which then led to bad ideas, which I like, generally in the paper, I equate with populism, leading then to populist policies. 2018 is not that great just because the actual, for most countries, growth is good right now. So again, like it made a lot more sense during the Great Depression, during the Great Recession, when there was bad growth and then there were a lot of kooky ideas coming around. In a way, I would think of the last few years as cutting against my model, just because it seems like people are getting very angry and very populist when it's hard to even find what the supposed cause of it is.

Maybe it's just your model with a 10-year lag, though.

Is that possible? Yeah, I mean, so, again, my general view is once you can put a 10-year lag into a model, then you don't really have much of a model. Then you really have an unfalsifiable mess. In a way, like I did talk— the only way that— the role that lags played in the model was to say, Why is it the countries that have had good policy tend to keep it over a longer run despite this? And I said, well, so, you know, like if you have a good natural intellectual tradition, you probably have a higher chance of bouncing back to good ideas. So, you know, like a country like the US, if you have bad ideas in the '70s, just the fact that it has a better tradition makes it more likely that they will get back out of the bad equilibrium. Or like during the Great Depression, there's a revival of better ideas, you know, afterwards in a way that you wouldn't expect from a country that had never been any better.

What is it that you understand about Stalin, at least possibly, that maybe most other economists would not?

Probably the single best thing is that Stalin was, in his own way, a sincere Marxist-Leninist. The ideology is not just rationalization for totalitarianism. It's not just rationalization for him to loot the country or anything like that. Again, like all the historians who know the details of Stalin's life will say, he lived very modestly. He slept on a cot. Like he wasn't like a tin-pot despot going and building palaces for himself. So, you know, I think a lot of economists would just assume that the guy is living high. Instead, it seems very much like it is power, not any kind of conventional luxury that he cares about, and that not just the general goal, but even very small policy details seem to be heavily influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology. And again, really what you have to look for in Stalin's career are the counterexamples to this. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, I do— did actually find one counterexample where it seemed like Stalin did dump the ideology. And this was on the nuclear program because, you know, like Stalin sent Beria to go and talk to one of the leading Soviet nuclear physicists, I think it was Khrushchev. And he said, so is it true that relativity theory and quantum mechanics are idealist? Which is something where you have to know a bunch of Marxist-Leninist philosophy even to understand the question. And then the Soviet scientist says, "Well, if they're idealists, if that's bourgeois science, then nuclear weapons are bourgeois science too." And then, "All right, fine. Well, then forget philosophical objections to relativity theory and quantum mechanics. If this science lets us build a nuclear bomb, I don't care what the philosophy says. We're just gonna believe the science." But, you know, like, cases like that are fairly rare. And really, what— like, the more you study Stalin's career, you do see even like bizarre doctrinal things like the farmers are kind of revolutionary. What are you talking about? But it's like, well, like, so we have to go and set up a system based upon this. And that's very important to Stalin in a way that is— I mean, it's almost hard for almost anyone who isn't a Marxist-Leninist to really realize. Usually Westerners don't have such a shallow understanding of the philosophy. They don't realize how much of it is all part of this bizarre package. They think it's just about high levels of redistribution, and that's not the story.

Now, we started this conversation with the Bryan Kaplan production function. So we're going to close with it. We have a little bit of time left, 3 questions about you. First, how do you make yourself a good teacher? Let's see.

So, I mean, like, for me, any class begins with writing the notes. So I write extremely detailed class notes where I try to distill everything that's worth knowing about the subject at the level of the students. Once I come up with a set of notes, I don't tend to change them very much, the written parts. Then when I actually teach, you know, then I do a lot of improvisation. Often it's like whatever I was thinking about yesterday. What did you do yesterday? Works its way in the notes in terms of examples. But another big part is actually just trying to talk to the students like human beings and find anything in their experience that relates to what I'm actually talking about. The older I've gotten, the less popular culture I have in common with the students, so it does get harder. But Simpsons, fortunately, thank God, is still watched by students, so there's that. Or I'll often just start with asking them questions. So one of the main things I learned from my students for The Case Against Education was just saying, all right, so how many students here have a job? And at George Mason, I say 80, 90% raise their hand. And how many people have a job where there is a person there that everyone agrees is incompetent? And almost every hand stays up. Like, hmm, that's pretty interesting that almost everyone is at a job where they will say there's someone who's known to be incompetent. And again, that actually did get me searching. So what have researchers actually found about this?

And quite a bit. What is the Ideological Turing Test and how do you use it to improve your own knowledge and understanding of things?

Yeah, so the Ideological Turing Test. So this is an idea that I came up with something like 5 years ago. So I mean, there's the original Turing Test, which is, it's, you know, used in artificial intelligence. And basically it says that if some, if people could no longer tell the output from a computer from the output from a human being, that AI has passed the regular Turing Test. Then I was saying, so you could actually do a similar thing for a human being and you could say, Is it possible for you to successfully mimic some— the holder of view that you disagree with? So sort of jumping off of Mill's famous line of, "He who only knows his own side of a case knows but little of that." But again, the key thing about the idea is that it's a real test. So it's one where you can actually administer, and the idea is you do it blind, and then you actually show it to people that hold a view that you don't and see whether they can tell the difference between that and the real view. And I say, once you can pass that test, then you have at least indicated that you understand a view that you disagree with. Now, of course, in practice, it is hard to do this because of the cost. But yeah, but like when I am actually trying to explain a view, I do try in my mind at least to pass this. I will say, like when I am going and checking on my references with the original authors, the one thing where I basically never contradict the authors, if they say, "You misunderstood me," that's where I say, "Look, if a guy says I misunderstood him, then I almost certainly misunderstood him and I need to get better and I need to do better." Last question: What are your plans for the future? Right, so I've got a queue of books. So the one that is coming out next year, so the plan is for September, is a nonfiction graphic novel on the ethics and science of immigration. It's gonna be called All Roads Lead to Open Borders, right? So this is a genre many people aren't familiar with. So there is the general genre of the graphic novel, which is basically a highfalutin comic book. With a nonfiction graphic novel, this is one where you use the vocabulary and grammar of comic books, to talk about a nonfiction subject. So this is not a story about immigration, it is actually an extended journey through what social scientists know about immigration and what philosophers said about immigration. So this is actually in collaboration with Zach Wiener-Smith, who was, out of all cartoonists, was my first choice in the world to be my collaborator. I didn't know him when I started the project and I amazingly talked him into it, and now, you know, he's drawn 90% of the first drafts of the pages, so I'm super excited about this because this is my chance to be on the production side of a kind of product that I've long really just been in love with. So there's that. And then my big word book after that, you know, distinguished from a graphic novel, is a book called Poverty: Who to Blame? So this is going to combine social science with economic philosophy. So again, I want to begin with what I think of as one of the great neglected moral concepts in academic philosophy, which is the concept of blameworthy or the concepts of blameworthiness and desert. So I think, you know, these are concepts that almost everyone who thinks about right and wrong thinks about. And yet they are so dismissed by, you know, certainly by consequentialist philosophers, but by a lot of other philosophers implicitly dismiss them by neglect. And I want to say, actually, these concepts are very important. They're morally at least as plausible as the other stuff that people are talking about, probably more so. And I want to go and think about the actual social science of poverty through this lens of blameworthy, non-blameworthy, and semi-blameworthy poverty. So again, a lot of what I want to do in the book is to revive this old notion of the deserving versus the undeserving poor, and then take everything that social science knows about the causes of poverty to understand who actually is— you know, who actually— like, what are the main sources of blameworthy poverty? What are the main things that we're overrating? What are the main things we're underrating? And really just to change people's minds of what are the kinds of poverty that really are deeply morally problematic and we should be thinking about all the time. Which, you know, in my mind, things like poverty of people in the third world who could easily come and get a job in the first world if it were legal. People that are totally capable of solving their own problem if government would just get out of the way. Versus problems of, say, someone who, like, who is a chronic alcoholic and if they would just stop drinking, they'd be doing fine. Right? And I think those are Very different cases, and yet there's, of course, a lot more concern about the second problem than the first in terms of ink that spilled over it, and I want to go and get people to rethink that.

Bryan Caplan, thank you very much. We do have time for a few questions. Yes.

In your education book, you don't devote a lot of attention to the networks, the social networks that form in schools, yet my interactions with Bryan Caplan suggest that he finds them important. Your advice is for students to go talk to speakers, to faculty, to other students, and so on. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on how you see these networks interact with your story of signaling. Do they impact career outcomes? If they do, is it just a form of signaling, or do they actually create value by spreading beliefs and habits, connecting individuals with different characteristics? Great question. So, I do have one section on who you know, and again, this is a subject where I spent a lot of time reading sociology to find out, you know, Susan, they actually empirically study this quite a bit more than economists, at least for labor markets. So, definitely true that social networks are hugely important for the labor market. You know, a pretty commonly cited factoid is that about half of people got their job because they knew somebody, but this does not mean that the social networks that people are getting in school are very helpful because there's a couple of other key qualifiers, namely the kinds of social networks that are kind of social ties that are very helpful. Either it's people who totally love you, like close relatives, or it's people who are in your exact field. Right. So, you know, for a graduate student, then I would say that the social network is hugely important because especially if you want to be a professor, then your professors have the job you want and they know other people have that job. Those are the kinds of social networks that are great. Or similarly, like CS at Stanford, great social network because there you are studying with a bunch of people that you are very likely to be working with or for or be the vendor for, or they're going to know such people. Those are the really valuable social networks. However, the problem is that most college majors are so loosely tied to any occupation that it is phenomenally unlikely you will ever have— that you ever work again with someone that is a fellow student or the professor. So if you're an English major, The odds that you will ever get a job from a fellow student, very low. That you will do a startup with another student, low. That you will hire someone else, that your professor can get you a job, unless of course you want to be an English professor, in which case that's great. So again, I would say is that social networks in general are very important. Academic ones I think are grossly overrated. The people who usually ask this question are like Silicon Valley people. And yes, they are seeing a narrow subset of labor market where they're right.. But if you step back and just realize how non-vocational most majors are and how vast the economy is, it's just too unlikely. And you know, then there, there's other exceptions. So like there's certain fraternities that are good at getting their brothers jobs in finance. But again, so that's where they funnel them and where it's the, but these, these are very close ties. Remember a fraternity, it's, it's a brotherhood, right? So, you know, this is what really counts. And again, like, no, it's sort of like the Granovetter strength of weak ties stuff. This is what, this was like, you know, it's one of the most cited papers in all social science. And, When I started reading, it's like, wow, essentially no one believes the paper, but it's got 30,000 citations. So that's the main story you might tell for why educational social networks are good, and that's just wrong.

Next question. Robin. You do scholarship, and you know many other scholars, and you have opinions about the quality of their work. What are the biggest mistakes other scholars are making from the point of view of making the kind of scholarship you wish they would make?

Yes, Type 3 error, getting the right answer to the wrong question. That is my main view. So in most work that I read that I don't like, I don't so much think it's wrong as that it's boring and who cares. So, you know, that's honestly my reaction when I flip through a journal is, suppose you're completely right, who cares? Suppose you're completely right, who cares? And that's what I say for 80, 90% of pieces that I read. Again, you know, this does not mean that you can't write a good piece on a narrow topic, but it's got to be because you convincingly argue that it really reflects something bigger than just the topic itself. So I can really enjoy reading a book about The French Wars of Religion, because it's not just about the French Wars of Religion, it's about the nature of human religiosity and about the way that dogmatic strife tears society apart and about is religion primarily social or doctrinal or what's the interrelation between them, you know, that kind of thing. So, again, you know, to me that's the main thing is just that it's boring and who cares. I mean, you know, I think the second biggest thing is just the focus on disciplinary boundaries where people usually, if they're going to read, they only read within their field. So economists read economics, and again, even that's kind of optimistic. Usually read within your subfield of economics, your sub-subfield. What I always say is, look, don't— like, if you really want to understand something, don't read what other people in your niche are doing or have read. Read what anyone who has thought about the issue has read, and it's quite likely to learn something. And I mean, now, again, ultimately, I will say this. I think it does come down to academic incentives, because those people in the fields that people aren't reading, don't help you. They don't do stuff for you, right? And, you know, like, honestly, I think most scholars are primarily about career advancement. I don't think there is that much curiosity. I remember this is actually one of the things that disturbed me most when I became an assistant professor, when Tyler Cowen started telling me all about all these backstories about professors. So, I finally get to get behind the curtain and, like, not anyone in our department, but other departments, others, others, and just finding out, you know, the thought of someone that started off really curious and in the end They're just consumed with this pettiness over someone not citing them. And then, because I'm like, why do they care? Well, like, they, you know, like every citation translates into like a statistical $100 a year. This kind of mentality, it did horrify me at the time. I've gotten over it, but still, this is the kind of thing when I step back is, you know, like, I think you become a scholar to go and advance human knowledge on important questions. And I just don't see many people doing it or even using the methods that you would want to use, which is Step 1, go and read what anyone who's really thought hard about the question already knows.

One more question. Yes.

I know that you've been stated that there's not a lot of crossover between psychology and economics, and you'd like to see more. For somebody who may be interested in looking at that bridge there, what is some literature that you'd be recommending for them? Yeah, sure. So just at the outset, sometimes when I say that economists don't know enough about a subject, People get mad at me, and they say, oh, you've ignored everything we've done. I haven't ignored everything you've done. I'm just saying it's not enough, and there's got to be more. However much there is, I'm aware of that stuff. Economists mostly just read one sub-area of psychology called cognitive psychology, and some other areas that are all worth reading, at least for depending upon what area you're working on. So, like personality psychology. Human personality is really important. It explains a lot of things about the world. Human beings are quite different from one another. So like, you know, Becker and Stigler tried to go and come up with a model of the world where you never mentioned differences in tastes. Personalized psychologists have documented very strong differences in taste between human beings. Differences all the way— there's like human beings of everyone from someone who would kill themselves so they couldn't be a rock star with thousands of fans in front of them every night to a librarian who just— or a hermit. Like these are all human beings. This whole range of level of desire interaction is seen in the world. Right. So just realize, like, you know, like, you know, there's every— you know, there's everyone from me to someone who watches football all day, like that whole range. So just realizing that. But then, like, like in terms of like even areas that are more narrowly— so of course there's educational psychology. It's a big area in psychology where they answer questions that education economists should be interested in, like how do people learn and how much can learning really explain? I mean, one thing I noted in the book is that when I started telling economists, well, how can the human capital model be right? Given that most of what people learn in school, they never use on the job. And this is what economists who would never deign to actually read educational psychology would just say, "Well, it's like learning how to learn." Yeah. And you realize that educational psychologists have been studying this for 100 years and they think something different, right? And they don't care. And then, alas, there's industrial psychology, right? The whole field of psychology where they do things like measure job performance. How do we measure this? What predicts it? How are firms organized? How are promotions done? You know, this thing, like, you know, it is a mass of information and data that economists really, really could easily get if they would just go and take a look. Wow, they have their own journals. There's journals of industrial psychology. Shockingly, how many labor economists have ever even bothered to crack open such a journal? I don't think it's very many, but shame on us. Thank you again, Bryan.

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