Jason Brennan > Quotes

“In real markets, agents make bad choices. They are often ignorant, misinformed, and irrational. Yet, markets tend to punish agents for making bad choices, and they tend to learn from their mistakes. For instance, if you fail to pay your bills, your credit rating declines and you have a harder time getting loans. If you fail to do research and buy an unreliable car, you suffer from repair bills. In contrast, when people in government make bad choices, the political process almost never punishes them. Studies show that voters are terrible at retrospective voting—they do not know whom to blame for bad government—and so politicians are not punished for making bad choices.”
― Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“In civil society, most of my fellow citizens are my civic friends, part of a great cooperative scheme. One of the repugnant features of democracy is that it transforms these people into threats to my well-being. My fellow citizens exercise power over me in risky and incompetent ways. This makes them my civic enemies.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was in large part a critique of imperialism. We often associate opposition to imperialism with Marxism and the Left, but Smith was an outspoken critic of imperialism long before Marx.”
― Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“The typical undergraduate microeconomics textbook describes cases where markets are unlikely to produce efficient outcomes. These textbooks often claim that, in principle, government intervention could solve the market failure. However, these textbooks also assume that government both (1) has full information about how to solve the problem and (2) has the good faith to use its power to solve the problem. It is as if the textbooks say omniscient angels can intervene to solve market failures. Thus, when undergraduate textbooks recommend government intervention, they mean intervention by idealized governments, not necessarily by real governments. In the real world, libertarians believe, sometimes the best response to serious market failure is just to suck it up and live with it.”
― Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“Professors are nerds who like to discuss nerdy things with fellow nerds.”
― Jason Brennan, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education

“We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.3”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“Since individual votes don’t matter and hating other people is fun, voters have every incentive to vote in ways that express their tribal biases.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“Each of us has our own life to lead. So long as we respect others’ rights, we must be permitted to live as we see fit.”
― Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“Democracy does not empower individuals. It disempowers individuals and instead empowers the majority of the moment. In”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“In light of all this, imagine you are a congressperson. You hear many cries for help. These cries for help only come in the form of spending requests. No one ever asks you not to spend. It is easy to believe you hurt no one by spending. The victims of overspending are unseen. So, contrary to the stereotype, libertarians do not believe all politicians are selfish. Libertarians often think that politicians are inept, counterproductive do-gooders. Still, the stereotype is partly right. Libertarians do believe government tends to attract bad people. Libertarians believe that in politics, the worst often get on top.”
― Jason Brennan, Libertarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

“When you see politicians saying dumb things, remember that these politicians are not fools. They are responding rationally to the incentives before them. They say dumb things because they expect voters want to hear dumb things. When you see that voters want to hear dumb things, remember that the voters are only foolish because they are responding rationally to the incentives before them. How we vote matters, but for each individual person, how she votes does not. Thus, most individuals vote as if very little is at stake.
”
― Jason Brennan

“your teachers and professors were paid to read your work. They generally read all of it. In the real world, though, including academia, people aren’t getting paid to read your work, even when they’re getting paid to read some work. Your research is competing with Game of Thrones, drinking craft beer, playing tennis, taking a nap, prepping classes, chatting with co-workers, revising the reader’s own research, and reading all the other research out there.”
― Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia

“Politicians are like this because they respond rationally to the incentives democracy creates.

 If voters were well-informed, dispassionate policy-wonks, then political campaigns would resemble peer-reviewed economics journals. But few voters or potential voters are like that. As I’ll document at greater length in future blog posts here, most voters are poorly informed, passionate, biased, overconfident, and tribalistic. Most non-voters are not dispassionate truth-seekers; rather, they just don’t care much at all.”
― Jason Brennan

“embargo, a diferencia de los Estados-Nación contemporáneos, en donde grupos de interés especiales compiten para lograr utilizar el aparato Estatal para abusar de los demás, estos Estados «mínimos»”
― Jason Brennan, Capitalismo, ¿por qué no?

“give us little reason to support them.17 At base, democracy is just a decision-making method.18 In politics, democracy is a method for deciding when and how to coerce people into doing things they do not wish to do. Political democracy is a method for deciding (directly or indirectly) when, how, and in what ways a government will threaten people with violence. The symbol of democracy is not just the ballot—it is the ballot connected to a gun.”
― Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting

“Una política tiene problemas de «riesgo moral» cuando induce a gente a tomar riesgos o malas decisiones porque ellas no enfrentan los costos de éstas sino que los externalizan hacia otras personas. Así,”
― Jason Brennan, Capitalismo, ¿por qué no?

“We are not disgusted by markets in kidneys, nor by markets in sex, drugs, pornography, reading, or any of a thousand other markets. We are, instead, disgusted by the fact that people are disgusted by these markets, and fail to overcome that disgust when presented with sufficient evidence that the good outweighs the bad, that a market would save or improve our lives, that we can preserve gift relationships within a market, that sacred things can be sold without undermining or challenging their sacred status.”
― Jason Brennan, Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests

“In a class I teach on political economy, I illustrate the concept of gains from trade by doing an in-class experiment. As students enter, I give each of them a different candy bar. I ask them to rate the candy they received on a scale of 1–10, with 1 meaning they hate the candy and 10 meaning they love the candy. I then add up their scores. (For instance, in a fall 2013 seminar with 19 students, the total was 103.) After, I tell them they are free to make trades with any willing partner they wish. Most students make a trade, and everyone who trades is happier with her new candy than she was with the old. After all trading is ceased, I ask them to rate the candy they now have. Usually, the total value of the candy goes up 30–50%. (For instance, in the fall 2013 seminar, the final total was 149.) I then ask students, is there some way we could have made it possible to have even higher gains from trade? Usually, they conclude that if we had even more students trading a greater variety of candy bars (or even things other than candy bars), the gains would have been even higher. And so, in 10 minutes, the students discover first hand what Adam Smith explained in the first few pages of the Wealth of Nations (1981): the greater the size of the market, the greater the potential prosperity we can all enjoy.”
― Jason F Brennan, Why Not Capitalism?

“Tortured writing is easy. Writing that seems effortless takes real skill.”
― Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia

“Consider the following topics: gun control, global warming, how to handle the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, mandatory paid maternity leave for women, the minimum wage, gay marriage, the Common Core curriculum, and flag burning. If I know your stance on any one of these issues, I can predict with a high degree of reliability what your stance is on all the others. If you think about that, it’s rather strange. The issues are logically unrelated. The arguments for and against abortion rights have almost nothing to do with gun control. Yet if you’re pro-choice, you’re almost certainly pro-gun control, and if you’re pro-life, you’re almost certainly anti-gun control.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy: New Preface

“Most academics don’t learn how to sell what they do. If you haven’t, I’m not blaming you. You may simply be copying how others in the field write. Most academics are boring, flat writers. To be clear: They succeeded despite their bad writing, not because of it.”
― Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia

“If Democrats were just unusually good at discovering the truth, that would explain why Democrats converge on one set of logically unrelated beliefs, but it wouldn’t explain why Republicans (or non-Democrats in general) converge on the opposite beliefs. We’d instead expect that Republicans would tend to have randomly distributed and disparate beliefs about most of these topics. We’d expect Democrats’ beliefs to be positively correlated with one another, but Republicans’ beliefs would have few or no positive correlations. We’d expect Democrats’ beliefs to form a cluster, but not Republicans’ beliefs. I suppose the Democrat objector might respond it’s not just that Democrats are unusually good at discovering the truth, but that Republicans are unusually inclined to form false beliefs. (Some of my academic colleagues, who are unrepentant hooligans, will laugh here and say, yes, that’s precisely it.) It’s possible that this is true. But the evidence speaks against it. If we knew that one party had high-information voters while the other had low-information ones, that fact would tend to support the hypothetical Democrat’s argument. Yet while the average Republican is slightly better informed than the average Democrat, the differences in knowledge are not staggering.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy: New Preface

“La «búsqueda de rentas a través de privilegios injustos» se refiere a las ganancias que buscan corporaciones, gremios, sindicatos o cualquier otro grupo de interés al hacer lobby frente al gobierno para que manipule las leyes o regulaciones en su favor.”
― Jason Brennan, Capitalismo, ¿por qué no?