Bryan Caplan > Quotes

“Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“The heralded social dividends of education are largely illusory: rising education’s main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation”
― Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

“Changing the people you see, changes the way you see people.”
― Bryan Caplan, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration

“What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters — specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Market fundamentalism is a harsh accusation. Christian fundamentalists are notorious for their strict biblical literalism, their unlimited willingness to ignore or twist the facts of geology and biology to match their prejudices. For the analogy to be apt, the typical economist would have to believe in the superiority of markets virtually without exception, regardless of the evidence, and dissenters would have to fear excommunication. From this standpoint, the charge of “market fundamentalism” is silly, failing even as a caricature. If you ask the typical economist to name areas where markets work poorly, he gives you a list on the spot: Public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information, and so on. More importantly, almost everything on the list can be traced back to other economists. Market failure is not a concept that has been forced upon a reluctant economics profession from the outside. It is an internal outgrowth of economists’ self-criticism. After stating that markets usually work well, economists feel an urge to identify important counterexamples. Far from facing excommunication for sin against the sanctity of the market, discoverers of novel market failures reap professional rewards. Flip through the leading journals. A high fraction of their articles present theoretical or empirical evidence of market failure.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“take the opposite approach: Voters’ lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, 'But most people don't use the Internet for spiritual enrichment' is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education's real aim isn't to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who's interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who *isn't* interested . . .

The rise of the Internet has two unsettling lessons . . . First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, remains embarrassingly scarce.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

“Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does.”
― Bryan Caplan

“Would we still have a "democracy" if you needed to pass a test of economic literacy to vote? If you needed a college degree? Both of these measures raise the economic understanding of the median voter, leading to more sensible policies. Franchise restrictions were historically used for discriminatory ends, but that hardly implies that they should never be used again for any reason. A test of voter competence is no more objectionable than a driving test.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the “right-wing” extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“First, altruism and morality generally are consumption goods like any other, so we should expect people to buy more altruism when the price is low.34 Second, due to the low probability of decisiveness, the price of altruism is drastically cheaper in politics than in markets.35 Voting to raise your taxes by a thousand dollars when your probability of decisiveness is 1 in 100,000 has an expected cost of a penny.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. “Put your money where your mouth is” turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to “stuff themselves” with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“If voters are systematically mistaken about what policies work, there is a striking implication: They will not be satisfied by the politicians they elect. A politician who ignores the public’s policy preferences looks like a corrupt tool of special interests. A politician who implements the public’s policy preferences looks incompetent because of the bad consequences.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“It is no accident that both of the substitutes for religion that Hoffer names—nationalism and social revolution—are political. Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity. Like the adherents of traditional religion, many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet critical questions with pious hostility.50 Instead of crusades or inquisitions, the twentieth century had its notorious totalitarian movements.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“In the minds of many, one of Winston’s Churchill’s most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”10 But this saying overlooks the fact that the governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Brennan and Lomasky point to the expressive function of voting. Fans at a football game cheer not to help the home team win, but to express their loyalty. Similarly, citizens might vote not to help policies win, but to express their patriotism, their compassion, or their devotion to the environment. This is not hair-splitting. One implication is that inefficient policies like tariffs or the minimum wage might win because expressing support for them makes people feel good about themselves.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“A person who said, “All the ills of markets can be cured by more markets” would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist. Why the double standard? Because unlike market fundamentalism, democratic fundamentalism is widespread. In polite company, you can make fun of the worshippers of Zeus, but not Christians or Jews. Similarly, it is socially acceptable to make fun of market fundamentalism, but not democratic fundamentalism, because market fundamentalists are scarce, and democratic fundamentalists are all around us.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

“the less education applicants have, the less applicants need to convince employers they’re worth hiring.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

“Still, one should not ignore the upside of political faith: its ability to neutralize the public’s irrationality. A leader who understands the benefits of free trade might ignore the public’s protectionism if he knows that the public will stand behind whatever decision he makes. Since politicians are well educated, and education makes people think more like economists, there is a reason for hope. Blind faith does not create an incentive to choose wisely, but it can eliminate the disincentive to do so. Whether this outweighs the dangers of political faith is an open question.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“If education causes better economic understanding, there is an argument for education subsidies—albeit not necessarily higher subsidies than we have now.62 If the connection is not causal, however, throwing money at education treats a symptom of economic illiteracy, not the disease. You would get more bang for your buck by defunding efforts to “get out the vote.”63 One intriguing piece of evidence against the causal theory is that educational attainment rose substantially in the postwar era, but political knowledge stayed about the same.64”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“[T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. —William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Out of all the wishes on the Parental Wish List, “good memories” are one of the few that clearly depend upon how you raise your child. Don’t forget it.”
― Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think

“Most voters disown selfish motives. They personally back the policies that are best for the country, ethically right, and consistent with social justice. At the same time, they see other voters—not just their opponents, but often their allies too—as deeply selfish. The typical liberal Democrat says he votes his conscience, and”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“In 1984, Science published a study of almost 15,000 Danish adoptees age fifteen or older, their adoptive parents, and their birth parents. Thanks to Denmark’s careful record keeping, the researchers knew whether any of the people in their study had criminal convictions. Since few female adoptees had legal problems, the study focused on males—with striking results. As long as the adoptee’s biological parents were law abiding, their adoptive parents made little difference: 13.5 percent of adoptees with law-abiding biological and adoptive parents got convicted of something, versus 14.7 percent with law-abiding biological parents and criminal adoptive parents. If the adoptee’s biological parents were criminal, however, upbringing mattered: 20 percent of adoptees with law-breaking biological and law-abiding adoptive parents got convicted, versus 24.5 percent with law-breaking biological and adoptive parents. Criminal environments do bring out criminal tendencies. Still, as long as the biological parents were law abiding, family environment made little difference. In 2002, a study of antisocial behavior in almost 7,000 Virginian twins born since 1918 found a small nurture effect for adult males and no nurture effect for adult females. The same year, a major review of fifty-one twin and adoption studies reported small nurture effects for antisocial attitudes and behavior. For outright criminality, however, heredity was the sole cause of family resemblance.”
― Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think