Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay, we've got a great guest for the inaugural episode of the podcast. Today, I'm speaking with Bryan Caplan. He's a professor of economics at George Mason University, and a New York Times bestselling author. He's written The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and most recently, Open Borders, The Science and Ethics of Immigration. Here's Professor Caplan.
Okay, so from Twitter, Martin asks, what are you criticized most for, being too radical or not radical enough?

**Bryan Caplan** (0:33)
I would say I'm definitely criticized for being too radical. Most of my colleagues are less radical than me, especially the ones that are right down the hall.
In terms of people that say I'm not radical enough, it's really pretty rare actually. I think that I've got enough controversial statements under my belt that people focus on that. I mean, there must be a few people who are annoyed at me for not being radical enough, but I hardly ever encountered them really.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:01)
I think Martin's one of these people because his next question is, he disagrees with you that people wouldn't learn numeracy and literacy if not for school. He thinks that if it's so useful, people would just learn it automatically. Do you disagree?

**Bryan Caplan** (1:13)
I don't think I ever said that people wouldn't learn it if not for school. Is he talking about public school or any school?

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:20)
Yeah, he's talking about public. When you say that school should, other than numeracy and literacy, they're not imparting skills that are broadly useful.

**Bryan Caplan** (1:29)
That's a very different thing. It's one thing to say that school is imparting literacy and numeracy. It's another thing to say that without those schools, it wouldn't happen in some other way.
I think what I say in my work is that the data are at least consistent with people acquiring a decent amount of literacy and numeracy in school.
You might still say that they are in school and they're trying to teach it, but they're learning it elsewhere. There's probably some of that going on. But again, the point that if there were a large reduction in public spending and education, that people would still learn literacy and numeracy. They probably would, although I think it would be mildly reduced anyway.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:07)
How so? For what reason?

**Bryan Caplan** (2:10)
Well, at minimum, there are always some parents that just don't pay very much attention to their kids and neglect them.
Of course, there are a lot of kids that especially do not like math, so put that together.
I would say whenever people have asked me, what's my main criticism of homeschooling? I have said, math skills is the big problem. Of course, some people learn a pile of math in home school. But if you do the unschooling option, where you just tell the kids they can do whatever they want and the kids aren't motivated to learn math and a lot aren't, then they really don't learn very much. I have met quite a few very smart adult homeschoolers who are still very weak in math because they were unschooled. Again, I think that it is a much smaller deficit than public school propaganda, whatever you expect, but it still is noticeable and research does bear this out, if I recall correctly, that the most notable deficit of homeschoolers is math.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:04)
Okay, that makes sense. Okay, the next question is, I read an article you wrote in 2004 called The Idea Trap, and it begins rather ominously given our present circumstance.
Your country is falling apart, unemployment and inflation are at sky high, world war is on the horizon and there are riots in the streets, maybe not so much that one, but never fear an election is coming up. Are we in an idea trap?

**Bryan Caplan** (3:27)
So maybe. The main thing I would say about that idea is, or the idea of the idea trap.
It makes sense to me, I had some historical examples that seemed consistent with it. In terms of whether it's actually true, I'm not going to strongly say that. I think it's an interesting idea that I wish more had been done with it, but in terms of confirmation, I just haven't seen that much out there. I would say that when conditions are bad, the pattern that at least I superficially see is the people panic and lose their heads and become very open-minded about ideas that really don't make a lot of sense.
I would consider the current one where, like so there's a unusually severe virus, so let's lock down entire countries. That to me just seems like a crazy idea. It's one where there's very little precedent for history. Once you realize especially that there's heterogeneous vulnerability to disease, it sure seems like it would have been made a lot more sense to have said, let's go and isolate people that are vulnerable and have everybody else continue on about their lives with moderate precaution. But when people were losing their heads, two months ago, that idea was not on the table. So if it seems likely that we're going to see continuing shortages and possibly a return of inflation, then again, I expect that there'll be renewed calls for price controls and other bad policies, very historically discredited. But nevertheless, I think that's the kind of thing that we're likely to see if inflation does kick up.