Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:01)
Okay, today I had the great honor for the third time of interviewing Bryan Caplan again. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Bryan Caplan** (0:07)
I've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh, you're one of my favorite people in the world.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:11)
Yeah, it's a greater pleasure every time, for me at least. So let's talk about your book, Don't Be a Feminist.
Is there any margin of representation of women in like leadership roles at which you think there should be introduced bias to make sure more women get in, even if the original ratio is not because of bias?

**Bryan Caplan** (0:30)
No, I believe in meritocracy. I think it is a good system. It is one that almost everyone sees the intuitive appeal of, and it works.
So just looking at a group and saying, we need to get more members of group X is just the wrong way to be approaching it. Rather, you need to be focusing on, let's try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:54)
But if there's just an astounding ratio of men, and certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do good business? That the company would just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone?

**Bryan Caplan** (1:07)
Right. I mean, one can imagine that. I mean, I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. And I think that people are more likely to be trying to get rid of men despite the fact that the men are delivering value. I mean, if you really push me into starting to think, well, suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies night? Yeah, I would have ladies night in a bar because that actually works and it's good business.
But if what you're doing is trying to actually get correct answers to things, if you're trying to go and make something run effectively, if you're just trying to make progress, you're trying to learn new things, the thing to focus on is what actually leads to knowledge and not focusing on just trying to get demographic representation. And really, I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope.
So I would actually, besides defending meritocracy on its merits, also say the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it really does actually fit the facts. And when you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:12)
But changing topics a little bit, I wonder if this gives you greater sympathy for immigration restrictionists because their argument is similar, that there's no natural shelling point for your keyhole solutions, where you let tens of millions of people in, but you don't give them welfare or voting rights, that there's a slippery slope, you let them in, and then eventually, you know, the civil rights argument is gonna extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.

**Bryan Caplan** (2:35)
So for there, I mean, first of all, I would say maybe. Yeah, so that is one of the best arguments to heal solutions. I mean, I'm guessing that a lot of your listeners have no idea what keyhole solutions are, Dwarkesh, so maybe we want to back up and explain that. Go for it. Sure, so I have a totally unrelated book, Open Borders, The Science and Ethics of Immigration.
One of the chapters goes over ways of dealing with complaints about immigration that fall short of stopping people from actually coming or excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So we're just to back up a little bit further. So most of the book talks about complaints about immigration and say that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, all right, fine, maybe you don't agree with that, but isn't there another way that we could deal with this? So for example, if you're worried about immigrants voting poorly, you could say, fine, we won't extend voting rights to immigrants or make them wait for a longer time period. I mean, that's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus non-citizen is one of the strongest ones. So I think that it actually is one that has a lot of stability.
This line of, well, you're not a citizen, therefore something really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that SKELE solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, at least unlikely to work. So to go and say this is a SKELE solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. But again, at the same time, I'd also just say the problems that people are worrying about if they ever were severe are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much.