Podcasts about Yoram Bauman

Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine: Essays on Living Better by: Bryan Caplan Anaximander: And the Birth of Science by: Carlo Rovelli The Social Conquest of Earth by: Edward O. Wilson The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class by: David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by: Donald Miller The Power of Having Fun: How Meaningful Breaks Help You Get More Done by: Dave Crenshaw The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by: Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein The Little Book of Aliens by: Adam Frank

«Nos conocemos desde hace años y es la primera vez que me pides ayuda. No recuerdo la última vez que me invitaste a tomar café. Pero hablemos claro: nunca has querido mi amistad. Te asustaba estar en deuda conmigo. Tu paraíso era América. Tenías tu negocio, te ganabas bien la vida, la policía velaba tu sueño con la ley. Y no me necesitabas. Y hoy me pides, no como un amigo, que mate por dinero. ¿Qué he hecho para que me trates con tan poco respeto? Algún día, y ese día puede que nunca llegue, acudiré a ti y tendrás que servirme, pero hasta entonces, Bonasera, acepta mi ayuda en recuerdo de la boda de mi hija». Vito Corleone en la primera escena de El Padrino.Índice:0.32. El atípico modelo de negocio en Jot Down.7.37. Bazinganomics.19.30. Reglas eficientes vía instituciones culturales.27.51. Golden balls.40.44. Lecciones empresariales de Vito Corleone.51.59. «La diferencia entre la mafia y mi empresa es que la mafia está organizada».1.03.59. Todo mafioso está preocupado por su reputación.1.10.05. La inelástica demanda de crack en Baltimore.Apuntes:Corleone Business School. Guillermo de Haro.Ligonomics. Guillermo de Haro & Mache González.El espectador económico. Guillermo de Haro & Laura Blanco.Ataque a los titanes. Hajime Isayama.Los 10 principios de Mankiw, traducidos. Yoram Bauman.El reloj, el gato y Madagascar. José Luis Sampedro.Vacas, cerdos, guerras y brujas. Marvin Harris.Non-cooperative games. John Nash.Leadership strategy and tactics. Jocko Willink.Cromorama. Riccardo Falcinelli.Aprende de la mafia. Louis Ferrante.Gang leader for a day. Sudhir Venkatesh.

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and DemagoguesRelease date: 2022-10-20It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.He explains why he thinks:* Feminists are mostly wrong,* We shouldn't overtax our centi-billionaires,* Decolonization should have emphasized human rights over democracy,* Eastern Europe shows that we could accept millions of refugees.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex), Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(00:12) - Don't Be a Feminist (16:53) - Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide(19:59) - Why The Universe Hates Women(32:02) - Women's Tears Have Too Much Power(46:37) - Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!(51:09) - Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda(54:12) - Peer-effects as the Only Real Education(58:46) - The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness(1:08:49) - Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill(1:11:49) - Open Borders & the Ultra-long Term(1:15:37) - Why Cowen's Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous(1:22:11) - Surprising Immigration Victories(1:37:26) - The Most Successful Revolutions(1:55:34) - Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government(1:57:00) - Billionaires Deserve their WealthTranscriptDwarkesh PatelToday, I have the great honor of interviewing Bryan Caplan again for the third time. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Bryan CaplanI've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh. You're one of my favorite people in the world!Don't Be a FeministDwarkesh PatelIt'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 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 CaplanNo, 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. Just looking at a group and saying, “We need to get more members of Group X,” is the wrong way to approach 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 PatelIf there's an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do business well? Perhaps the company could just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone. Bryan CaplanRight. I mean, one can imagine that! I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. People are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really pushed me into starting to think, “Suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies' night?” well yeah, I would have ladies' night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business! However, 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, and if you're just trying to make progress and 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. I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So besides defending meritocracy on its merits, I would actually also say that the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts. When you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places. Dwarkesh PatelOkay. But changing topics a 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. There's a slippery slope when you let them in because, eventually, the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.Bryan CaplanFirst of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm also 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. Dwarkesh PatelGo for it. Sure.Bryan CaplanSo I have a totally unrelated book called 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 excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So just to back up a little bit further, most of the book talks about complaints about immigration–– saying that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, “Alright, 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.” That's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus noncitizen 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…” really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. However, again, at the same time, the problems people are worried about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.Dwarkesh PatelOkay, so going back to feminism. Over time, doesn't feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men includes how they fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs, but society, over time, becomes more peaceful (or at least has in our timeline), and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up fairly, but the implication still is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up, right? So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily discriminated against women, but just because of the trends in technology. Bryan CaplanOnce again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be political, social, economic, and cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on, first of all, whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, and cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women in all those mentions, which really makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.Well, feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people. So what distinguishes them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view is that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, “I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society, and women are treated like goddesses.” Then you say, “Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?” That doesn't make sense. On the other hand, for someone to say, “I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, we're awful.” That, again, just would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. So to be fair, every now and then, there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly. Dwarkesh PatelIs another way of defining feminism just that we should raise the status of women? That's slightly different from the fairness issue because if you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past. Maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. If you think of somebody today who wants to, let's say, raise the status of Asians in our society, and they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing in our society, then maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly. They just want to raise their status. So what would you think of that definition?Bryan CaplanSo first of all, it could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, “Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher.” You say, hmm. Well, that's not what I think. Somebody might say, “Well, I can still be a feminist and think that,” okay, but that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly. They want to raise that and alleviate that in a way that's almost by definition. If you think that someone's being treated unfairly, then to say, “I think they're being really unfair, but I think it's great that it's unfair.” It's almost self-contradictory. Dwarkesh PatelI guess I was making a slightly different point, which is not even that these people don't want to raise the status (the actual living standards of women) in some way. It's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.Bryan CaplanYes, but again, if someone were to say, “I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men, who we treat like dogs. But I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is.” That would be something where you could argue that “Well, that person may still be a feminist, but that is not what the word means.” Because hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about. Dwarkesh PatelLet me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are libertarians, right? And then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. Now, it's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine, but we think their status should be even higher.Bryan CaplanYeah, I mean, this just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, “Well, how is the word commonly used?” Logically speaking, it's possible to have a different view or two things that are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is that, ideally, you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient-condition sense, but we can still say, “Well, a table is not by definition something that people sit on, right?” Someone could say, “Well, I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.”But why don't we actually go back to your real question. Which was..Dwarkesh PatelOverall, the left tail of society is being compressed, and the right tail is being expanded. Does feminism become more true over time?Bryan CaplanThe answer is that we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. With some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. As jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is that even that is a bit more superficially complicated, at least on the surface. The immediate reaction is that society's less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. Although I also say, “Yeah, but they get monetary compensation for that.” So, all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's something where it's reasonable to say, “Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90 percent of the workplace deaths” and say, “Well, because they're getting 90 percent of the combat pay.” Broadly construed it's not mostly actual for combat. So anyway, that's one area where you should be careful. But I can see the possibility there. I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. What I'll say is, well, one big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where society where feminisms become less true over time. Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins…I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. When we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, “Yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations and unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations.” The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men, and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, and not all men receive them. But still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women or society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh! [laughs] We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in. Dwarkesh PatelWhen would you say was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought “unbalanced things are equal now?”Bryan CaplanYeah. So one of the things I say in the book is that there are a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but there are aspects that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. Now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time. Again, just understand this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, look, I've got 20 arguments for why I'm right. And everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on. This is the kind of book that I liked to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. There are a bunch of points where someone could say, “Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker.” Well, I concede it because it's true! Then in the end, I have my overall judgment. I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way. I don't write books like that. I try to write books that are honest and self-reflective, and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out; I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me. It's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something not really quite right. I feel like I should've always said the other thing. So I try to just write with candor. Dwarkesh PatelNow, would you say that feminism in the United States is overcorrected but that it's still true in the global sense? In the way that, on average, across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men. Because if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then, of course, they're going to overcorrect here, but overall they're making the world a better place. Bryan CaplanSo that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most areas of Europe, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. In the book, I do go over this especially. I start with Saudi Arabia, where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and just think about plausible rates of female infanticide. I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. In Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is. In terms of “Is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US?” It's possible. I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn't focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India… I don't think it would even be 1% of the rhetoric. It's just not something that they care about.So I would say that there's more harm being done by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon small, exaggerated, or reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring and indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries. Positively shifting the Overton WindowWestern Feminism Ignores InfanticideDwarkesh PatelBut let me apply the argument you make in Open Borders that you can effect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Can American feminists make the same point that through making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women? Bryan CaplanI would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may be where you discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say that feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to go and make other people feel like they are respected, where even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say, and maybe we could go and come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenure of the elites is, “We are totally right, and anyone who disagrees had better watch out.” So I think that there is a discrediting of it. The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?Dwarkesh PatelI don't know, but maybe yes. More generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, “Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita.” I feel like some of the things could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back, and they adopt some of these things.Bryan CaplanYes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things. You can go to India and have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. In fact, the pushing of the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of the horrible trash, right? Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem where you are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not only a problem, is not even a problem at all. At the same time, that anger really blinds you to an actual, really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong. Why The Universe Hates WomenDwarkesh PatelI believe rape within a marriage is still legal in India and is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. Let's say this is an interview, and a feminist says, “Oh my gosh, okay Bryan, maybe you're right that society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women.” So women are forced to have children. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared toward women. What do you make of this argument?Bryan CaplanSo unfairness, where there's no human being that does it, seems like a very strange idea to me. Just from the get-go, well, so who was unfair to you? “The universe is unfair.” Then I mean, the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair. So that aside, I would say it's a really interesting question. Who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? I mean, in terms of demonstrated preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. So this is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, or whatever. But then if you say, “Okay, yeah, right, fine. Like you, like you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity, but if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?” It's a tough question. You can say, “Well, women have a harder personality to deal with because of higher neuroticism, and they've also got higher agreeableness.” But that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. You may have noticed that having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life. That is one thing. Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. So I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids. I think, as a woman, it would have been easy to do. [laughs] So again, you know, there is the issue. How are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids? This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. While both men and women seem to have a say on family size, it just looks like women's traits have a much larger effect. Men are more likely to say, “OK, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size.” Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids, and it would have been easier for me to do it. That would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there. Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of women and children first, which is very pronounced. It's a modern society where we can simultaneously have something like “women and children first”, but then also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, “Hmm, that's not right.”Dwarkesh PatelWhat do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women suffering, but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think of a default character in a movie or a novel, at least for me, then the default is a man. Then maybe there's some victim that defaults as a woman. But I'd rather be the sympathy of some sort of success than get it for suffering.Bryan CaplanI mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or do you want admiration? I mean, I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering, and only a small share of people have any notable success. If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.” Whereas to have admiration for your success is something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit, but I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. Of course, there are also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too, but again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.But then the argument is, “Well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall.” So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, “Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in society.” But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is that billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that's just fiction. In terms of daily life. I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented stories than the other way around. Dwarkesh PatelSo what do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men. Bryan CaplanI would say that it's complicated in terms of willingness to fire. I think employers are much more willing to fire men. For defects and for insubordination. Another thing on the list is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. For women, on the other hand, it's like, “Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?”  But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. What was the high this summer over in Austin? [laughter] Dwarkesh PatelWhy do you think that women have gotten less happy since the sixties in America?Bryan CaplanRight. So the main thing I know about this is Stevenson and Wolfer's research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. If I remember correctly, they find that in the sixties, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. 25% of men said they were very happy, then 27% of women in the sixties said that they were very happy. Whereas now, it seems like women have a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now, if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy. It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is going to say, “Oh, women are miserable now.” It's not that women are miserable now! We're talking about a two-percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective in terms of what's really going on. The paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what Justin Wolfersustin especially would normally do. I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, “Okay, well, what will work?” I think I would, on one end, focus on single moms because they'll become much more common, and their lives really are hard. A rise in single motherhood is coming. I would guess that's one important part of it. Then, I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that they should be unhappy because the world is unfair and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. It's plausible to me. The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. So it's one thing to say, look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy. It's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, “Oh yeah, once a year, I think I'm going to hell.” The rest of the time, you don't think it.On the other hand, the person who is always thinking, “I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell,” probably will be unhappy. So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites and take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That is likely to cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority of people who say, “Yeah, I am a feminist. Moving on…” I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives. Dwarkesh PatelThat raises an interesting possibility. This is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism.  Maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, and part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. Maybe women prefer to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers, which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up, plus mentorship, which men are less likely to give because of #metoo. So add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?Bryan CaplanYeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism and this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men, then if the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying the society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case that society is treating men unfairly, and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line… Well actually, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed. So foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet, and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seemed to care less, actually, it was more of an intra-female abuse. This is one where you could say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women. I think that does actually make sense. I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing. When it comes to what the right way to describe it would be, it just gets a bit confusing. It's useful just to say, all right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that? I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing. Women's Tears Have Too Much PowerDwarkesh PatelWhat do you make of Hanania's argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas? Bryan CaplanYeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is. So Richard Hanania on his substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. He generalizes this by saying that a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things, and people don't know what to do about it. So he, if I remember correctly, says that a man can, in a way, actually enjoy an argument with another man. Even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, you can sort of feel invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. Whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. “What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible” would be a more normal reaction. This sort of generalizes to the majority of social arguments, specifically ones that involve someone being offended or angry, or hurt. He says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad. It's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument. Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism. You know, one really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is. It is a conversation where women have complaints, and men mostly just listen in silence. Ofcourse, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men, and then men are very eager to say, “Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that.” A lot of it is what he calls “women's tears.” It's sadness, but mingled with or supported by intimidation: “If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry, and I will be fairly sad.” So you should be afraid. I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, is that people are just afraid to argue against it because, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos. If women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, “I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified.” You're supposed to say, “Look, what can I do to make it better?” Dwarkesh PatelBut that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well. Bryan CaplanI mean, the main difference there is that there are a lot of people who have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations, and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all of the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar, but in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, Hanania probably is right about that. Then that generalizes to bigger issues. Dwarkesh PatelYou have an essay about endogenous sexism. Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to a woman? We start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. So then, the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist. Bryan CaplanSo let me just back up and explain the argument. The argument says to imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends with their own gender, (which is totally true). So if I remember the essay, I think that for close male friends, the male-to-female ratio was 6:1, and for women, it was 4:1. So most people's close friends are of the same gender. When you meet these people, and they're your close friends, you know them really well. Furthermore, because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them. So then the question is, “What about people of the opposite gender? What will your interaction with them be like?” What I point out is that a lot of the opposite gender you hang out with will be the spouses and partners of your friends. On average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there are two filters there: I like you because you're my friend, and I put up with your partner because that person is your partner. So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them less and think less of them than they think of their friends. On the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, “Wow, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my same-gender friends.” So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise. Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what could happen here. Could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society? Especially if we start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world? It's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find. In the data I know of, the evidence of women earning less money than men while doing the same job is quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. Again, the main area that probably actually has gotten worse for women is mentoring. Mentoring is partly based on friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to go and acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up, and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. I've got an essay on that in the book as well.Looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. When I go and track down a bunch of feminist reactions to this, they basically just say, “I can't believe how horrible these guys are.” But it's like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? It's really hard to scare someone into doing something this informal, so you really do need to win them over. Dwarkesh PatelTactically, that might be correct, but it seems to just be a matter of “Is their argument justified?” I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously, you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship. Bryan CaplanWell, is it obvious that you want to point that out? Part of what I'm saying is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. If you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, “How does it seem from the other person's point of view?” Obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. So much of the problem with mentorship comes down to hypersensitivity. I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so much lost sight of this very possibility. When there's a conflict between two people, who's right and who's wrong? Ofcourse, it could be that one person is the conscious malefactor and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny. That does happen sometimes. But much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind, has the inability to go and get inside another person's head. To each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong, and one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm. Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing. This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends. If any time there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong, and you demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right. It is a foolish person who does that. Friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backward in order to keep your friends, and realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person is going out of their way to hurt you. They probably don't see it that way. If you just insist, “I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing,” you're probably going to be losing friends, and that's a bad idea. The same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person. This is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.Dwarkesh PatelYeah. That's very wise. What do you make the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what males find interesting? So take computer science, for example; there are claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the “thing-focused stuff.” So the argument is these things shouldn't be inherently interesting to men. It's just in the way they are taught. Bryan CaplanThe word inherently is so overused. It's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?” Then someone says, “Well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backward and move heaven and earth for it not to be. So I guess it's not really inherent.” That is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, “There's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way.” On the other hand, maybe we should ask, “Is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women?” That's an unreasonable demand. If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, “Well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin.” You can say that it's “so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant.” Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done, or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men.So this is one where if you had a really high bar for how things are fair, then unless the rigorous conditions are met, you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true by my definition. I also just say, I think these really high bars are unreasonable. If a friend had these bars of standards saying, “Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at standard hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can't we have half of the time be my way?” You respond, “Well yeah, but you're only one person, so why should I change?” It depends upon what subfield you're in as well. There are actually groups of people really like hanging out in the middle of the night, so if you ask, “Why is it we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?” You are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of being to accommodate you, but it just seems like an unreasonable imposition on the people who are already here. Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not-male field, sometimes people will treat things like acting like there's an objectively correct answer as a male trait. If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers. I mean, that's an area where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, “It's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders”. In a way, I end the essay stating, “Yes, these are not male; not only do they not make a male monopoly, but they are also not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings.” At the same time, you could ask whether virtues are equally represented by both genders and well, that's an empirical question. We have to look at that. Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!Dwarkesh PatelWe're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience? Bryan CaplanYeah, that was super fun and a big challenge! I am a professional public speaker. Standup comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be. How many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do standup comedy? I'm also just a big fan of standup comedy– if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny. Dwarkesh PatelYes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around. Bryan CaplanLife is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like using my imagination. A lot of comedy is just imagination and saying, look, “Imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?” Well, actually, just to back up again: during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea that maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited to that, and as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. The main thing I could say about my performance is that it was me and nine professional comedians, and I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good.Dwarkesh PatelIt was a pretty good performance.Bryan CaplanI felt good about it! There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there. One is the importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. Normally I have some basic notes, and then I ad-lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time-constrained debate, then I'd normally write an opening statement, but otherwise, I don't. The thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could go and put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back-translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. That was something that I was very mindful of. Then obviously, there are things like timing and being able to read an audience (which I'm more used to). That was what was so hard during COVID–– not being able to look at the faces of a live audience. I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or reactions to their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. But with comedy, it's a bit hard to do. What successful comedians actually do is they try it in a bunch of different ways, and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. Then they just keep tweaking it, so finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A/B testing on a hundred different audiences, and then it sounds great–– but the first time? Not that funny. Dwarkesh PatelIt didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but it makes a lot of sense that there are transfers of learning there in both disciplines. There are a lot of hypotheticals, non-extra events, and putting things in strange situations to see what the result is…Bryan CaplanA lot of it is just not having stage fright. So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there it was a little bit different because it's like, “Am I going to forget something?” I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.Dwarkesh PatelI can't remember if it was Robin Hanson who said this, but didn't he have a theory about how the reason we have stage fright is because somehow, you're showing dominance or status, and you don't want to do that if you're not actually the most confident. Bryan CaplanYou're making a bid for status. In the ancestral environment, we're in small groups of 20-40 people. If you go and want to speak, you're saying, “I'm one of the most important people in this band here.” If you're not, or if there are a lot of people voicing that that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out. Affirmative Action is Philanthropic PropagandaDwarkesh PatelI wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. When somebody makes a bid for status, and it's not deserved. Okay, I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a Supreme court case about Harvard and affirmative action. You might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard, saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse work for ourselves, including Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it? Bryan CaplanIf those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them from all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that try to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible to make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations. They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis a vis their consumers or public relations vis a vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days, it probably is more of the latter. Although even under Reagan, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that they wanted affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying, “we are really in favor of this. We love this stuff.” But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where they give you a right to go and sue them for mistreatment.I think there would still be a lot of propaganda. I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause. Some people disagree and say that it's self-interest. They say, “Look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low.” So I don't think it's that. Basically, what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. What's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to go and, first of all, make the public like you, but also, you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company. One really striking thing about corporate philanthropy is when you look closer, normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, “Oh, we did all this philanthropy!” Then they actually spend on philanthropy. So I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away about a thousand dollars a year to the Girl Scouts, and she had a hundred thousand dollars salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical. I think without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability. The cost of philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial. A rounding error. The donations are a rounding error, and then they go, “Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic!” Peer effects as the Only Real EducationDwarkesh PatelOkay. So this question is one that Tyler actually suggested I ask you. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, you say that education makes you more pro-free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not really learning anything, why is education making you more free market? Bryan CaplanIt's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes are involved. I think that the best story is about peer effects. When you go to college, you're around other peers who though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism? Dwarkesh PatelHigher than normal. Bryan CaplanYeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. What would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little. Furthermore, you realize, “Huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were that were a minority?” Seems quite plausible. They'd be making a lot more converts over there. So if you achieve your peer effects by segregation (which is literally what college does, it takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society physically when you're in school, and then there's social segregation caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circles, your own education levels, etc.), in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall pro-free market, I think it's totally unclear because, basically, when people go to college, they make each other more pro-free market. At the same time, they remove the possibility of influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.Dwarkesh PatelWhat about the argument that the people who go to elite universities are people who are going to control things? If you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard (maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke), they make the underclass even more woke, and then it's a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people who come into college. Then that still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they don't go to Harvard because there are no peers there. But it doesn't matter. They're not going to be an elite, or it doesn't matter as much. Bryan CaplanIt could be, although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. Of course, it is a democracy. If you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, “Yeah, what is the actual common view here? Not just the view that is common among elites.” However, I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study. Now the other thing to question is, “Wouldn't there be peer effects even without college?” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, “I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party.” So every society has this kind of thing. Now, if you push the dynamics enough…. let's put it this way. If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion, what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go bring them young is a good strategy.Dwarkesh PatelI wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this. Bryan CaplanYeah. Well, there's gotta be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are truly hard to understand. So I would just say to keep a much more open mind about this, and if anyone is listening and wants to do research on this, that sounds cool, I'll read it. Dwarkesh PatelRight. I remember you saying that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence the common view of elite opinion. So in that sense, there are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, and therefore you might care very much about which particular subculture it is. Bryan CaplanNotice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear. The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness Dwarkesh PatelStudent loan forgiveness. What is your reaction? Bryan CaplanOh, give me a freaking break. This is one subject where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing and progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why then? Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would go and favor it? Maybe it's because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team, and we just want to go and help our team. Obviously, the forgiveness really means, “We're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population.” Which includes, of course, a whole lot of people who did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even “increasing the amount of education” if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is how it's making people think, “Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt. The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be.” Although even there, you have to say, “Huh, well, but could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing the ban for college and raising tuition further?” There's good evidence for that. Not 100%, but still a substantial degree.Again, just to back up–– that can be my catchphrase [laughter]. So I have a book called The Case Against Education, and my view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is that we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. What we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically going and transferring money to people who wasted a lot of social resources. The story that you are on the slippery slope to free college for all is, in a way, the best argument in favor of it. If you thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this puts us on th

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-project-updates         Thanks to everyone who got ACX Grants (see original grants here) and sent me a one-year update. Below are short summaries of the updates everyone sent. If for some reason you want one of the full updates, which are longer and more technical, let me know and I‘ll see if I have permission to send them to you. I've also included each grantee's assessment on a scale of 1-10 for how well they're doing, where 5/10 is “about as well as expected”. A few grantees are asking for extra help - I've included those requests in italics at the end of the relevant updates, and I've collected all of them together below. Updates   1: Discover Molecular Targets Of Antibiotics (8/10)Pedro Silva planned to use in silico screening to identify the biochemical targets of seven promising natural antibiotics, which could potentially help develop better versions of them. He says he's finished most of the simulations and determined the 5-20 most stable complexes for each antibiotic. Once he finishes this, he can start additional simulations on the best complexes to obtain better estimates of their stability and construct hypotheses on which of these is most involved in the antibiotic's efficacy. 2: Ballot Proposition For Approval Voting In Seattle (?/10)They have asked me not to discuss their progress until after the November election. 3: Software To Validate New FDA Drug Trial Designs (10/10)Michael Sklar and Confirm Solutions have gotten further funding from FTX and now have 2-3 people working full-time on the project. They are building new statistical techniques and software to help regulators quickly assess designs for clinical trials. Here is a recent conference poster on the methods. They have written proof-of-concept code and are writing a white paper to show regulators and pharma companies.  They also claim to have developed software that has "sped up their simulations for some standard Bayesian trial designs by a factor of about 1 million." They are looking for more employees and collaborators; if you're interested, contact research@confirmsol.org 4: Alice Evans' Research On “The Great Gender Divergence” (?/10)Dr. Evans has done over four months of research in Morocco, Italy, India, and Turkey. You can find some of her most recent thoughts at her blog here. Her book is still on track to be published from Princeton Press, more details tbd. 5: Develop Safer Immunosuppressants (7/10)Trevor Klee planned to continue his work to develop a safer slow-release form of cyclosporine. He realized this would be too expensive to do in humans in the current funding environment, and has pivoted to getting his medication approved for a feline autoimmune disease as both a proof-of-concept and as a cheaper, faster way to start making revenue. He recently raised $100,000 in crowdfunding (in addition to getting $200,000 from angel investors to run a feline trial, which will finish in January. He still anticipates eventually moving back to humans. Trevor wants to talk to bloggers or writers who might be interested in covering his work. 6: Promote Economically Literate Climate Policy In US States (4/10)Yoram Bauman and Climate 24x7 have written a policy paper about their ideas. They were able to get a bill in front of the Nebraska Legislature, but it died in committee. They have a promising measure in Utah, and an off chance of getting something rolling in Pennsylvania. Overall they report frustration, as many of the legislators they worked with have been voted out or term-limited. If you are a legislator or activist interested in helping with this project - especially in Utah, Pennsylvania, or South Dakota - please contact Yoram at yoram@standupeconomist.com. 7: Repository / Search Engine For Forecasting Questions (8/10)Nuno Sempere at metaforecast.org was able to hire a developer to “make the backend significantly better and add a bunch of functionality” - you can see a longer list of updates here. The developer has since left for other forecasting-related work and the project is moving more slowly. 8: Help [Anonymous] Interview For A Professorship (8/10)[Anonymous] was a grad student who wanted to interview for professorships at top schools where he might work on AI safety in an academic environment. The grant was to help make it financially easier for him to go on a long round of interviews [Anonymous] successfully got a job offer from a top school, and will be going there and researching AI safety.

It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.He explains why he thinks:* Feminists are mostly wrong,* We shouldn't overtax our centi-billionaires,* Decolonization should have emphasized human rights over democracy,* Eastern Europe shows that we could accept millions of refugees.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex), Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(00:12) - Don't Be a Feminist (16:53) - Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide(19:59) - Why The Universe Hates Women(32:02) - Women's Tears Have Too Much Power(46:37) - Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!(51:09) - Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda(54:12) - Peer-effects as the Only Real Education(58:46) - The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness(1:08:49) - Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill(1:11:49) - Open Borders & the Ultra-long Term(1:15:37) - Why Cowen's Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous(1:22:11) - Surprising Immigration Victories(1:37:26) - The Most Successful Revolutions(1:55:34) - Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government(1:57:00) - Billionaires Deserve their WealthTranscriptDwarkesh PatelToday, I have the great honor of interviewing Bryan Caplan again for the third time. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Bryan CaplanI've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh. You're one of my favorite people in the world!Don't Be a FeministDwarkesh PatelIt'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 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 CaplanNo, 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. Just looking at a group and saying, “We need to get more members of Group X,” is the wrong way to approach 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 PatelIf there's an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do business well? Perhaps the company could just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone. Bryan CaplanRight. I mean, one can imagine that! I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. People are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really pushed me into starting to think, “Suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies' night?” well yeah, I would have ladies' night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business! However, 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, and if you're just trying to make progress and 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. I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So besides defending meritocracy on its merits, I would actually also say that the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts. When you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places. Dwarkesh PatelOkay. But changing topics a 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. There's a slippery slope when you let them in because, eventually, the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.Bryan CaplanFirst of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm also 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. Dwarkesh PatelGo for it. Sure.Bryan CaplanSo I have a totally unrelated book called 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 excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So just to back up a little bit further, most of the book talks about complaints about immigration–– saying that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, “Alright, 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.” That's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus noncitizen 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…” really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. However, again, at the same time, the problems people are worried about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.Dwarkesh PatelOkay, so going back to feminism. Over time, doesn't feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men includes how they fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs, but society, over time, becomes more peaceful (or at least has in our timeline), and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up fairly, but the implication still is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up, right? So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily discriminated against women, but just because of the trends in technology. Bryan CaplanOnce again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be political, social, economic, and cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on, first of all, whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, and cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women in all those mentions, which really makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.Well, feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people. So what distinguishes them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view is that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, “I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society, and women are treated like goddesses.” Then you say, “Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?” That doesn't make sense. On the other hand, for someone to say, “I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, we're awful.” That, again, just would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. So to be fair, every now and then, there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly. Dwarkesh PatelIs another way of defining feminism just that we should raise the status of women? That's slightly different from the fairness issue because if you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past. Maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. If you think of somebody today who wants to, let's say, raise the status of Asians in our society, and they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing in our society, then maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly. They just want to raise their status. So what would you think of that definition?Bryan CaplanSo first of all, it could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, “Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher.” You say, hmm. Well, that's not what I think. Somebody might say, “Well, I can still be a feminist and think that,” okay, but that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly. They want to raise that and alleviate that in a way that's almost by definition. If you think that someone's being treated unfairly, then to say, “I think they're being really unfair, but I think it's great that it's unfair.” It's almost self-contradictory. Dwarkesh PatelI guess I was making a slightly different point, which is not even that these people don't want to raise the status (the actual living standards of women) in some way. It's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.Bryan CaplanYes, but again, if someone were to say, “I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men, who we treat like dogs. But I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is.” That would be something where you could argue that “Well, that person may still be a feminist, but that is not what the word means.” Because hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about. Dwarkesh PatelLet me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are libertarians, right? And then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. Now, it's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine, but we think their status should be even higher.Bryan CaplanYeah, I mean, this just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, “Well, how is the word commonly used?” Logically speaking, it's possible to have a different view or two things that are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is that, ideally, you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient-condition sense, but we can still say, “Well, a table is not by definition something that people sit on, right?” Someone could say, “Well, I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.”But why don't we actually go back to your real question. Which was..Dwarkesh PatelOverall, the left tail of society is being compressed, and the right tail is being expanded. Does feminism become more true over time?Bryan CaplanThe answer is that we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. With some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. As jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is that even that is a bit more superficially complicated, at least on the surface. The immediate reaction is that society's less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. Although I also say, “Yeah, but they get monetary compensation for that.” So, all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's something where it's reasonable to say, “Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90 percent of the workplace deaths” and say, “Well, because they're getting 90 percent of the combat pay.” Broadly construed it's not mostly actual for combat. So anyway, that's one area where you should be careful. But I can see the possibility there. I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. What I'll say is, well, one big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where society where feminisms become less true over time. Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins…I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. When we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, “Yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations and unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations.” The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men, and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, and not all men receive them. But still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women or society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh! [laughs] We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in. Dwarkesh PatelWhen would you say was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought “unbalanced things are equal now?”Bryan CaplanYeah. So one of the things I say in the book is that there are a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but there are aspects that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. Now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time. Again, just understand this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, look, I've got 20 arguments for why I'm right. And everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on. This is the kind of book that I liked to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. There are a bunch of points where someone could say, “Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker.” Well, I concede it because it's true! Then in the end, I have my overall judgment. I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way. I don't write books like that. I try to write books that are honest and self-reflective, and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out; I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me. It's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something not really quite right. I feel like I should've always said the other thing. So I try to just write with candor. Dwarkesh PatelNow, would you say that feminism in the United States is overcorrected but that it's still true in the global sense? In the way that, on average, across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men. Because if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then, of course, they're going to overcorrect here, but overall they're making the world a better place. Bryan CaplanSo that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most areas of Europe, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. In the book, I do go over this especially. I start with Saudi Arabia, where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and just think about plausible rates of female infanticide. I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. In Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is. In terms of “Is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US?” It's possible. I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn't focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India… I don't think it would even be 1% of the rhetoric. It's just not something that they care about.So I would say that there's more harm being done by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon small, exaggerated, or reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring and indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries. Positively shifting the Overton WindowWestern Feminism Ignores InfanticideDwarkesh PatelBut let me apply the argument you make in Open Borders that you can effect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Can American feminists make the same point that through making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women? Bryan CaplanI would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may be where you discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say that feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to go and make other people feel like they are respected, where even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say, and maybe we could go and come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenure of the elites is, “We are totally right, and anyone who disagrees had better watch out.” So I think that there is a discrediting of it. The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?Dwarkesh PatelI don't know, but maybe yes. More generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, “Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita.” I feel like some of the things could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back, and they adopt some of these things.Bryan CaplanYes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things. You can go to India and have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. In fact, the pushing of the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of the horrible trash, right? Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem where you are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not only a problem, is not even a problem at all. At the same time, that anger really blinds you to an actual, really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong. Why The Universe Hates WomenDwarkesh PatelI believe rape within a marriage is still legal in India and is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. Let's say this is an interview, and a feminist says, “Oh my gosh, okay Bryan, maybe you're right that society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women.” So women are forced to have children. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared toward women. What do you make of this argument?Bryan CaplanSo unfairness, where there's no human being that does it, seems like a very strange idea to me. Just from the get-go, well, so who was unfair to you? “The universe is unfair.” Then I mean, the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair. So that aside, I would say it's a really interesting question. Who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? I mean, in terms of demonstrated preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. So this is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, or whatever. But then if you say, “Okay, yeah, right, fine. Like you, like you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity, but if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?” It's a tough question. You can say, “Well, women have a harder personality to deal with because of higher neuroticism, and they've also got higher agreeableness.” But that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. You may have noticed that having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life. That is one thing. Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. So I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids. I think, as a woman, it would have been easy to do. [laughs] So again, you know, there is the issue. How are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids? This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. While both men and women seem to have a say on family size, it just looks like women's traits have a much larger effect. Men are more likely to say, “OK, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size.” Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids, and it would have been easier for me to do it. That would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there. Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of women and children first, which is very pronounced. It's a modern society where we can simultaneously have something like “women and children first”, but then also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, “Hmm, that's not right.”Dwarkesh PatelWhat do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women suffering, but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think of a default character in a movie or a novel, at least for me, then the default is a man. Then maybe there's some victim that defaults as a woman. But I'd rather be the sympathy of some sort of success than get it for suffering.Bryan CaplanI mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or do you want admiration? I mean, I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering, and only a small share of people have any notable success. If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.” Whereas to have admiration for your success is something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit, but I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. Of course, there are also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too, but again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.But then the argument is, “Well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall.” So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, “Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in society.” But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is that billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that's just fiction. In terms of daily life. I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented stories than the other way around. Dwarkesh PatelSo what do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men. Bryan CaplanI would say that it's complicated in terms of willingness to fire. I think employers are much more willing to fire men. For defects and for insubordination. Another thing on the list is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. For women, on the other hand, it's like, “Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?”  But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. What was the high this summer over in Austin? [laughter] Dwarkesh PatelWhy do you think that women have gotten less happy since the sixties in America?Bryan CaplanRight. So the main thing I know about this is Stevenson and Wolfer's research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. If I remember correctly, they find that in the sixties, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. 25% of men said they were very happy, then 27% of women in the sixties said that they were very happy. Whereas now, it seems like women have a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now, if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy. It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is going to say, “Oh, women are miserable now.” It's not that women are miserable now! We're talking about a two-percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective in terms of what's really going on. The paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what Justin Wolfersustin especially would normally do. I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, “Okay, well, what will work?” I think I would, on one end, focus on single moms because they'll become much more common, and their lives really are hard. A rise in single motherhood is coming. I would guess that's one important part of it. Then, I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that they should be unhappy because the world is unfair and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. It's plausible to me. The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. So it's one thing to say, look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy. It's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, “Oh yeah, once a year, I think I'm going to hell.” The rest of the time, you don't think it.On the other hand, the person who is always thinking, “I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell,” probably will be unhappy. So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites and take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That is likely to cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority of people who say, “Yeah, I am a feminist. Moving on…” I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives. Dwarkesh PatelThat raises an interesting possibility. This is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism.  Maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, and part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. Maybe women prefer to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers, which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up, plus mentorship, which men are less likely to give because of #metoo. So add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?Bryan CaplanYeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism and this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men, then if the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying the society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case that society is treating men unfairly, and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line… Well actually, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed. So foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet, and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seemed to care less, actually, it was more of an intra-female abuse. This is one where you could say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women. I think that does actually make sense. I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing. When it comes to what the right way to describe it would be, it just gets a bit confusing. It's useful just to say, all right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that? I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing. Women's Tears Have Too Much PowerDwarkesh PatelWhat do you make of Hanania's argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas? Bryan CaplanYeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is. So Richard Hanania on his substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. He generalizes this by saying that a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things, and people don't know what to do about it. So he, if I remember correctly, says that a man can, in a way, actually enjoy an argument with another man. Even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, you can sort of feel invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. Whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. “What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible” would be a more normal reaction. This sort of generalizes to the majority of social arguments, specifically ones that involve someone being offended or angry, or hurt. He says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad. It's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument. Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism. You know, one really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is. It is a conversation where women have complaints, and men mostly just listen in silence. Ofcourse, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men, and then men are very eager to say, “Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that.” A lot of it is what he calls “women's tears.” It's sadness, but mingled with or supported by intimidation: “If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry, and I will be fairly sad.” So you should be afraid. I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, is that people are just afraid to argue against it because, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos. If women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, “I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified.” You're supposed to say, “Look, what can I do to make it better?” Dwarkesh PatelBut that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well. Bryan CaplanI mean, the main difference there is that there are a lot of people who have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations, and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all of the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar, but in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, Hanania probably is right about that. Then that generalizes to bigger issues. Dwarkesh PatelYou have an essay about endogenous sexism. Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to a woman? We start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. So then, the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist. Bryan CaplanSo let me just back up and explain the argument. The argument says to imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends with their own gender, (which is totally true). So if I remember the essay, I think that for close male friends, the male-to-female ratio was 6:1, and for women, it was 4:1. So most people's close friends are of the same gender. When you meet these people, and they're your close friends, you know them really well. Furthermore, because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them. So then the question is, “What about people of the opposite gender? What will your interaction with them be like?” What I point out is that a lot of the opposite gender you hang out with will be the spouses and partners of your friends. On average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there are two filters there: I like you because you're my friend, and I put up with your partner because that person is your partner. So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them less and think less of them than they think of their friends. On the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, “Wow, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my same-gender friends.” So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise. Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what could happen here. Could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society? Especially if we start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world? It's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find. In the data I know of, the evidence of women earning less money than men while doing the same job is quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. Again, the main area that probably actually has gotten worse for women is mentoring. Mentoring is partly based on friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to go and acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up, and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. I've got an essay on that in the book as well.Looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. When I go and track down a bunch of feminist reactions to this, they basically just say, “I can't believe how horrible these guys are.” But it's like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? It's really hard to scare someone into doing something this informal, so you really do need to win them over. Dwarkesh PatelTactically, that might be correct, but it seems to just be a matter of “Is their argument justified?” I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously, you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship. Bryan CaplanWell, is it obvious that you want to point that out? Part of what I'm saying is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. If you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, “How does it seem from the other person's point of view?” Obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. So much of the problem with mentorship comes down to hypersensitivity. I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so much lost sight of this very possibility. When there's a conflict between two people, who's right and who's wrong? Ofcourse, it could be that one person is the conscious malefactor and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny. That does happen sometimes. But much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind, has the inability to go and get inside another person's head. To each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong, and one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm. Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing. This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends. If any time there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong, and you demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right. It is a foolish person who does that. Friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backward in order to keep your friends, and realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person is going out of their way to hurt you. They probably don't see it that way. If you just insist, “I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing,” you're probably going to be losing friends, and that's a bad idea. The same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person. This is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.Dwarkesh PatelYeah. That's very wise. What do you make the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what males find interesting? So take computer science, for example; there are claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the “thing-focused stuff.” So the argument is these things shouldn't be inherently interesting to men. It's just in the way they are taught. Bryan CaplanThe word inherently is so overused. It's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?” Then someone says, “Well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backward and move heaven and earth for it not to be. So I guess it's not really inherent.” That is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, “There's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way.” On the other hand, maybe we should ask, “Is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women?” That's an unreasonable demand. If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, “Well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin.” You can say that it's “so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant.” Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done, or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men.So this is one where if you had a really high bar for how things are fair, then unless the rigorous conditions are met, you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true by my definition. I also just say, I think these really high bars are unreasonable. If a friend had these bars of standards saying, “Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at standard hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can't we have half of the time be my way?” You respond, “Well yeah, but you're only one person, so why should I change?” It depends upon what subfield you're in as well. There are actually groups of people really like hanging out in the middle of the night, so if you ask, “Why is it we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?” You are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of being to accommodate you, but it just seems like an unreasonable imposition on the people who are already here. Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not-male field, sometimes people will treat things like acting like there's an objectively correct answer as a male trait. If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers. I mean, that's an area where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, “It's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders”. In a way, I end the essay stating, “Yes, these are not male; not only do they not make a male monopoly, but they are also not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings.” At the same time, you could ask whether virtues are equally represented by both genders and well, that's an empirical question. We have to look at that. Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!Dwarkesh PatelWe're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience? Bryan CaplanYeah, that was super fun and a big challenge! I am a professional public speaker. Standup comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be. How many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do standup comedy? I'm also just a big fan of standup comedy– if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny. Dwarkesh PatelYes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around. Bryan CaplanLife is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like using my imagination. A lot of comedy is just imagination and saying, look, “Imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?” Well, actually, just to back up again: during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea that maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited to that, and as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. The main thing I could say about my performance is that it was me and nine professional comedians, and I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good.Dwarkesh PatelIt was a pretty good performance.Bryan CaplanI felt good about it! There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there. One is the importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. Normally I have some basic notes, and then I ad-lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time-constrained debate, then I'd normally write an opening statement, but otherwise, I don't. The thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could go and put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back-translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. That was something that I was very mindful of. Then obviously, there are things like timing and being able to read an audience (which I'm more used to). That was what was so hard during COVID–– not being able to look at the faces of a live audience. I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or reactions to their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. But with comedy, it's a bit hard to do. What successful comedians actually do is they try it in a bunch of different ways, and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. Then they just keep tweaking it, so finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A/B testing on a hundred different audiences, and then it sounds great–– but the first time? Not that funny. Dwarkesh PatelIt didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but it makes a lot of sense that there are transfers of learning there in both disciplines. There are a lot of hypotheticals, non-extra events, and putting things in strange situations to see what the result is…Bryan CaplanA lot of it is just not having stage fright. So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there it was a little bit different because it's like, “Am I going to forget something?” I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.Dwarkesh PatelI can't remember if it was Robin Hanson who said this, but didn't he have a theory about how the reason we have stage fright is because somehow, you're showing dominance or status, and you don't want to do that if you're not actually the most confident. Bryan CaplanYou're making a bid for status. In the ancestral environment, we're in small groups of 20-40 people. If you go and want to speak, you're saying, “I'm one of the most important people in this band here.” If you're not, or if there are a lot of people voicing that that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out. Affirmative Action is Philanthropic PropagandaDwarkesh PatelI wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. When somebody makes a bid for status, and it's not deserved. Okay, I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a Supreme court case about Harvard and affirmative action. You might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard, saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse work for ourselves, including Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it? Bryan CaplanIf those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them from all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that try to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible to make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations. They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis a vis their consumers or public relations vis a vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days, it probably is more of the latter. Although even under Reagan, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that they wanted affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying, “we are really in favor of this. We love this stuff.” But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where they give you a right to go and sue them for mistreatment.I think there would still be a lot of propaganda. I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause. Some people disagree and say that it's self-interest. They say, “Look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low.” So I don't think it's that. Basically, what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. What's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to go and, first of all, make the public like you, but also, you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company. One really striking thing about corporate philanthropy is when you look closer, normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, “Oh, we did all this philanthropy!” Then they actually spend on philanthropy. So I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away about a thousand dollars a year to the Girl Scouts, and she had a hundred thousand dollars salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical. I think without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability. The cost of philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial. A rounding error. The donations are a rounding error, and then they go, “Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic!” Peer effects as the Only Real EducationDwarkesh PatelOkay. So this question is one that Tyler actually suggested I ask you. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, you say that education makes you more pro-free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not really learning anything, why is education making you more free market? Bryan CaplanIt's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes are involved. I think that the best story is about peer effects. When you go to college, you're around other peers who though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism? Dwarkesh PatelHigher than normal. Bryan CaplanYeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. What would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little. Furthermore, you realize, “Huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were that were a minority?” Seems quite plausible. They'd be making a lot more converts over there. So if you achieve your peer effects by segregation (which is literally what college does, it takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society physically when you're in school, and then there's social segregation caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circles, your own education levels, etc.), in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall pro-free market, I think it's totally unclear because, basically, when people go to college, they make each other more pro-free market. At the same time, they remove the possibility of influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.Dwarkesh PatelWhat about the argument that the people who go to elite universities are people who are going to control things? If you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard (maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke), they make the underclass even more woke, and then it's a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people who come into college. Then that still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they don't go to Harvard because there are no peers there. But it doesn't matter. They're not going to be an elite, or it doesn't matter as much. Bryan CaplanIt could be, although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. Of course, it is a democracy. If you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, “Yeah, what is the actual common view here? Not just the view that is common among elites.” However, I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study. Now the other thing to question is, “Wouldn't there be peer effects even without college?” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, “I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party.” So every society has this kind of thing. Now, if you push the dynamics enough…. let's put it this way. If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion, what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go bring them young is a good strategy.Dwarkesh PatelI wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this. Bryan CaplanYeah. Well, there's gotta be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are truly hard to understand. So I would just say to keep a much more open mind about this, and if anyone is listening and wants to do research on this, that sounds cool, I'll read it. Dwarkesh PatelRight. I remember you saying that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence the common view of elite opinion. So in that sense, there are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, and therefore you might care very much about which particular subculture it is. Bryan CaplanNotice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear. The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness Dwarkesh PatelStudent loan forgiveness. What is your reaction? Bryan CaplanOh, give me a freaking break. This is one subject where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing and progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why then? Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would go and favor it? Maybe it's because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team, and we just want to go and help our team. Obviously, the forgiveness really means, “We're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population.” Which includes, of course, a whole lot of people who did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even “increasing the amount of education” if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is how it's making people think, “Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt. The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be.” Although even there, you have to say, “Huh, well, but could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing the ban for college and raising tuition further?” There's good evidence for that. Not 100%, but still a substantial degree.Again, just to back up–– that can be my catchphrase [laughter]. So I have a book called The Case Against Education, and my view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is that we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. What we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically going and transferring money to people who wasted a lot of social resources. The story that you are on the slippery slope to free college for all is, in a way, the best argument in favor of it. If you thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this puts us on that slippery slope. It's terrible because the real problem with education is that we just spend way too many years in school. It is generally

Yoram Bauman, the world's only standup economist, and co-author, with illustrator Grady Klein, of the second edition of The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change. He also co-created cartoon introductions to economics, calculus, and digital ethics. Climate change is profoundly serious and becomes more disturbing with every report of extreme weather and record-breaking heat domes. The Cartoon Guide makes the science and politics of climate understandable and engaging.

We're celebrating Earth Month throughout April to promote environmental activism and conservation action. Today we dive into Al Gore's follow-up to his Inconvenient Truth with his 2009 book Our Choice. Learn more about how to make the connections between our conservation efforts and seeing success in our own lives by visiting me on ZooFit.net, and support our work on Patreon. Other Zoo-notables mentioned and related: Wangari Maathai Planet Palm by Jocelyn Zuckerman The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, PhD Superman's Not Coming by Erin Brockovich --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change is a well-informed and easy-to-understand look at what climate change is and isn't, how to discuss it with others, and the impact it has on the planet. We look at Big Ideas such as Living Like Americans, Tragedy of the Commons, and Finding Your Way to Make a Difference. Find this book and other influential books from Zoo-notable at your local library: https://www.worldcat.org/libraries Join the ZooFit Pride on Patreon for cool extra perks and support all ZooFit's endeavors: https://www.patreon.com/zoofit?fan_landing=true And Follow more of ZooFit online: https://www.zoofit.net/

Episode 139:

Latest Conservative Climate Change Podcast

Coronavirus Quarantine Tips (0:33)Nina Shapiro, MD, professor, UCLA, author of “Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths”So school is canceled, meetings of more than 50 people are canceled and you're working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic.  But you feel fine and so do your kids. As far as you know you haven't come into contact with anyone who has the virus. Do you and your family really need to stay locked down? The CIA's Failed Quest to Develop Mind Control (11:55)Guest: Stephen Kinzer, Author of “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control”The CIA has developed the ability to reprogram minds and wipe away inconvenient memories. At least in the movies, it can. That's what the CIA did to assassin Jason Bourne once they were finished with him. And that's where the Men in Black got their flashing pen-like “neutralizer” to erase knowledge of aliens from ordinary folks. So that's all fun and fiction, but for 10 years during the Cold War, the CIA really did have a secret mind control project. Instead of flashing pens, they were experimenting with LSD. And instead of a little harmless amnesia about aliens, the CIA was wreaking havoc on the minds of prisoners, children, sex workers and even some of their own government employees. (Originally aired 11/7/2019) Why It's Not all Doom and Gloom When it Comes to Climate Change (49:30)Guest: Alejandro Frid, Ecologist and Science Coordinator, Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance, Author of “Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene”Humans are ruining the planet. That's the key message you might take away from the steady warnings about climate change and carbon emissions. The atmosphere and oceans are warming. Droughts, wildfires and storms are getting more intense. Species are going rapidly extinct. Pollution threatens our drinking water. And basically, it's too late to reverse course. We're headed for a climate apocalypse unless the whole planet ditches fossil fuels and stops eating meat right now. I wish I were exaggerating here, but honestly, that's how dire and hopeless the situation feels. Still, marine ecologist Alejandro Frid thinks there is room for optimism. (Originally aired 12/5/2019) You Know You're a Standup Economist if...You're Yoram Bauman (1:25:41)Guest: Yoram Bauman, Standup Economist, Co-Author “Cartoon Introduction to Economics” and “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change”Yoram Bauman travels the country trying to make people laugh at college gatherings and corporate events. He introduces himself as the “world's first and only standup economist.” Jokes about economics can be tricky, but if you get the right crowd, Bauman kills. And there's enough demand for economist jokes that this has been Bauman's full-time gig for a decade. (Originally aired 12/5/2019)

Nina Shapiro of UCLA on quarantine tips. Kelly McMahon from the Motion Picture Association on movie ratings. Stephen Kinzer on “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” Jing Wang, Univ of Michigan, on a new toilet coating. Alejandro Frid on his book "Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene." Yoram Bauman, standup economist and co-author of “Cartoon Introduction to Economics” and “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change.”

How does immigration impact the environment? There are ideological arguments against open borders both right and left of center, and yes, the economic growth that would likely result from such a liberal policy would increase emissions—at first. But there is an environmental argument FOR allowing more and more people to immigrate to rich countries.   Dr. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and New York Times Bestselling author. His most recent release is a collaboration with Zach Weinersmith called Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Bryan joins Ross and Paul to discuss the thesis of his new nonfiction graphic novel and explain his view that open borders would ultimately double the productivity of humankind.   Bryan introduces us to the value of his Ideological Turing Test and practice of public betting, discussing why he likes to hold people accountable for their views in objective, quantifiable ways. Listen in for Bryan’s insight around how open borders are likely to impact the climate, the responsibility rich countries have to climate refugees, and the best keyhole solutions to social issues around immigration and the environment.   Nori Podcasts has a Patreon! Will you support the show?   Key Takeaways   [1:04] The value of Bryan’s ideological Turing test Explain view disagree with to blind audience as believer Advances dialogue past most common objections   [4:44] Bryan’s public bet with Yoram Bauman on global warming Bet on global warming pause to continue through 2030 3:1 odds   [7:35] Why Bryan engages in public betting Hold people accountable for views in quantifiable way Requires specificity + deadline, someone who disagrees   [11:32] The thesis of Bryan’s nonfiction graphic novel Open Borders Immigration restrictions should be justified Immigrants to rich countries become vastly more productive Research indicates tens of trillions/year in economic gains   [19:20] How open borders are likely to impact the climate Pollution rises in early, middle stages of economic growth Environmental Kuznets curve (richest = relatively clean) Pollution tax much better than keeping people in poverty   [27:22] Bryan’s insight on the degrowther argument  Propose rich countries cut back consumption by 50% Give surplus to poor countries for not industrializing   [30:49] The responsibility rich countries have to climate refugees Island nations sinking because of climate change Make immigration easier BEFORE disaster strikes   [34:01] Bryan’s take on the opposition to immigration Stems from fundamental human xenophobia Easy to blame outgroups for problems, justify harm   [39:56] How US opinion on immigration has evolved since 2000 Less than 10% in favor of more immigration Increase to 30% in favor today   [42:51] The idea of keyhole solutions to social problems Conceived of by economic journalist Tim Harford Advocates for cheapest, most humane way to solve issue Solutions like pollution tax or tolls based on time of day Provides incentive to innovate (e.g.: cars that pollute less)   [48:22] How Bryan thinks about adding to the human population More to consider than pollution each person generates Contribution usually outweighs harm individual causes   Connect with Ross & Paul   Nori Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori Newsletter Email hello@nori.com Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   Bryan’s Website Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith Bryan on EconLog Books by Bryan Yoram Bauman on Twitter The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society by Alan S. Blinder Naomi Klein The Simpsons’ Open Borders Meme Tim Harford Julian Simon The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet by Ramez Naam

The Shifting Politics of Trade (0:30)Guest: Sean Ehrlich, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science, Florida State University, Author of “The Politics of Fair Trade”President Trump hinted this week that the trade war with China may not be resolved until after the 2020 election next year. Meanwhile in Washington, Democrats in Congress are trying to decide if they'll approve the new trade deal President Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico. The thing is that the deal has a lot of stuff Democrats like. But do they want to give President Trump any victory heading into the 2020 election? US Immigration Policy is Outdated. Here's a New Perspective (19:30)Guest: Justin Gest, PhD, Professor of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Author of “Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change”The US immigration system is unusual among developed countries. Since the 1950s, America has prioritized family connections in deciding who gets to immigrate here. By contrast, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and the UK all use a points system to determine who gets a visa. Immigrants get points based on things like skills, education or income level.  President Trump has proposed something similar in the US. The question is just how points will be allotted to immigrants hoping for a US visa. Slick Spray-On Coating Makes Toilets Streak-free, Low-Water (37:40)Guest: Jing Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow, Mechanical Engineering, University of MichiganHow much water do you suppose it takes to flush a toilet? If it's an old toilet from before 1994, it could be more than 3 gallons. Per flush. Newer toilets still use a gallon or more per flush. And let's be honest, we sometimes flush more than once to get everything down the drain. What if the toilet bowl was so slick that nothing would stick? Imagine how much water we could save globally? Why It's Not all Doom and Gloom When it Comes to Climate Change (50:11)Guest: Alejandro Frid, Ecologist and Science Coordinator, Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance, Author of “Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene”Humans are ruining the planet. That's the key message you might take away from the steady warnings about climate change and carbon emissions. The atmosphere and oceans are warming. Droughts, wildfires and storms are getting more intense. Species are going rapidly extinct. Pollution threatens our drinking water. And basically, it's too late to reverse course. We're headed for a climate apocalypse unless the whole planet ditches fossil fuels and stops eating meat right now. I wish I were exaggerating here, but honestly, that's how dire and hopeless the situation feels. Still, marine ecologist Alejandro Frid thinks there is room for optimism. You Know You're a Standup Economist if...You're Yoram Bauman (1:26:22)Guest: Yoram Bauman, Standup Economist, Co-Author “Cartoon Introduction to Economics” and “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change”Yoram Bauman travels the country trying to make people laugh at college gatherings and corporate events. He introduces himself as the “world's first and only standup economist.” Jokes about economics can be tricky, but if you get the right crowd, Bauman kills. And there's enough demand for economist jokes that this has been Bauman's full-time gig for a decade.

Sean Ehrlich, Florida State University, on trade politics. Jing Wang from the University of Michigan on a new toilet coating. Author Justin Gest, "Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change,” on immigration. Ecologist Alejandro Frid on his book "Changing Tides: An Ecologist's Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene." Yoram Bauman, standup economist and co-author of “Cartoon Introduction to Economics” and “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change.”

Yoram Bauman is the world's first and only stand-up economist. He is co-author of the “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change” and the two volume “Cartoon Introduction to Economics,” and the 1998 book “Tax Shift,” which helped inspire the revenue-neutral carbon tax in British Columbia. He is campaign co-chair for the new Clean the Darn Air initiative, which supporters are working to get on the ballot in Utah in 2020.

Yoram Bauman is the world's first and only stand-up economist. He is co-author of the “Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change” and the two volume “Cartoon Introduction to Economics,” and the 1998 book “Tax Shift,” which helped inspire the revenue-neutral carbon tax in British Columbia. He is campaign co-chair for the new Clean the Darn Air initiative, which supporters are working to get on the ballot in Utah in 2020.

Yoram joins Matt in the studio for a chat about comedy, bipartisan climate advocacy, and Yoram’s recent move to Utah. Bauman, who has a PhD in economics, has built a living doing humorous lectures and presentations on serious topics, including economics and climate change. He also has co-written several books, including “The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change.” In Washington state, where Bauman lived until recently, he led an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to pass Initiative 732, a major carbon tax proposal. Matt and Yoram discuss that effort in Washington, carbon taxes in general, and why he thinks it’s a possible policy in conservative Utah. For more information, check Yoram out on Twitter and his website, which has info on booking him to deliver presentations and lectures. 

Yoram joins Matt in the studio for a chat about comedy, bipartisan climate advocacy, and Yoram’s recent move to Utah. Bauman, who has a PhD in economics, has built a living doing humorous lectures and presentations on serious topics, including economics and climate change. He also has co-written several books, including “The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change.” In Washington state, where Bauman lived until recently, he led an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to pass Initiative 732, a major carbon tax proposal. Matt and Yoram discuss that effort in Washington, carbon taxes in general, and why he thinks it’s a possible policy in conservative Utah. For more information, check Yoram out on Twitter and his website, which has info on booking him to deliver presentations and lectures. 

Included in this year’s state budget is $200,000 for a study on how climate change impacts Utah. Lawmakers say the research is needed to understand and better respond to issues like air quality and pollution. But the Utah Legislature has also shown reluctance to acknowledge climate change, and a campaign to enact a carbon tax is preparing to gather signatures, which could leapfrog lawmakers and put the issue directly before voters. On this week’s episode of “Trib Talk,” Tribune reporter Bethany Rodgers, Bountiful Republican Rep. Ray Ward, and Clean the Darn Air co-founder Yoram Bauman join reporter Benjamin Wood to discuss different strategies in the state for addressing air quality and carbon emissions. Listeners can also subscribe to “Trib Talk” on SoundCloud, iTunes and Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and other major podcast platforms. “Trib Talk” is produced by Sara Weber with additional editing by Dan Harrie. Comments and feedback can be sent to tribtalk@sltrib.com, or to @bjaminwood or @tribtalk on Twitter.

Rod Arquette Show Daily Rundown - Friday, April 19, 20194:20 pm: Mike Lillis of The Hill joins Rod to discuss how the results of the Mueller report poses a challenging balancing act for Democrats running for Congress in 20204:35 pm: Yoram Bauman, a member of a group of Utah residents behind a ballot initiative for a carbon dioxide tax that would hit consumers when they buy gasoline or pay their electric bill, joins the program to discuss the reasons behind the initiative5:05 pm: Stanley Kurtz, Sr. Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center joins the program to discuss what could be a turning point in the campus free speech crisis following an incident at the University of Arizona where a student could face discipline for interrupting a Career Day presentation being given by two Border Patrol agents6:05 pm: Representative Steve Eliason joins the show to discuss how the state’s suicide hotline is suffering from a lack of funding despite an uptick in calls to the hotline6:20 pm: Representative Ray Ward, a physician as well as a lawmaker, joins the program to discuss how Medicaid expansion could cover birth control for thousands more women in Utah6:35 pm - Listen Back Friday: We’ll listen back to Rod’s conversations this week with Tim Ballard of Operation Underground Railroad on how current immigration laws allow for children to be trafficked across the southern border, and (at 6:50 pm) with iHeart Media aviation expert Jay Ratliff on the latest on American Airlines canceling flights on the Boeing 737 MAX

Justice and Drew are joined by the one-and-only stand-up economist Dr. Yoram Bauman before they chat with Pete Hegseth on budget details and more.

This week, we look at the food fight over Washington Initiative 732, which would create the nation's first state carbon tax to fight climate change but which has divided environmentalists and progressives. I-732 proponent Yoram Bauman says it's great policy. Critic Rebecca Saldana argues it's a product of a "white-privileged" environmental movement. Also: why Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Seattle taxpayers lost big this week.

On today’s episode, we’re taking the “dismal” out of the dismal science by interviewing Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s only stand-up economist. Join us for a Laffer curve-a-minute romp through the humor of homo economicus. Along the way, we find the upside in the economic assumption that all human beings are selfish jerks and learn what classes would be included in the University of Comedy curriculum. We also take a look at some of the funniest economics papers of all time, including a satirical work that sparked a minor squabble among economists by trying to determine who's the better singer in the band AC/DC, plus the age-old classic: Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan. In addition, Yoram conducts the first ever stand-up routine performed over cell phone to an audience of five business journalists.

Ben Fraser shares updates about his recovery, trigger challenges, and his recent guest appearance on an internet radio talk show. He also explores the question of what tolerance might mean in porn addiction. The Brick House Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brick-House/266939153469555 News podcast: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500005/hourly-news-summary Appreciation: The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein http://islandpress.org/cartoon-introduction-climate-change Check out the musical comedy Brick House Web Series at http://www.brickhousewebseries.com Contact Ben at: http://brickhousewebseries.com/contact Also, follow on twitter @brickhousetv Or help people find it by giving a review or a rating on iTunes! http://bit.ly/1zhJnUj

Guest Yoram Bauman, Carbon Washington, speaks with Diane Horn about I-732, a measure to institute a revenue-neutral carbon tax on CO2 produced by fossil fuels and consumed in the state of Washington.

Yoram Bauman is considered the world's first and only stand-up economist and uses cartoons to explain economic concepts and theories. He has a PhD from the University of Washington and a BA in Mathematics from Reed College. Yoram lectured environmental and health economics at both Whitman College and University of Washington and was a visiting research scholar at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. Yoram has swapped the lecture hall for the comedy club and is on a mission to spread joy to the world and to reform economics education. Every year Yoram organizes the Humor Session at the American Economic Association annual meeting. Yoram is an advocate for carbon pricing and other economic approaches to protecting the environment. Yoram has written extensively on these issues but has also published numerous micro and macro books with comedy and entertainment as its central theme. They include The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change and Stand-Up Economics: The Micro Textbook. Some of these books have been translated into over 10 languages. In this interview, Yoram mentions and discusses: adverse selection, portfolio selection theory, the invisible hand, environmental economics, environmental taxes, market power, monopoly, corruption, opportunity cost, free market, revenue-neutral carbon taxes, consumption tax, tragedy of the commons, externalities, correlation, hyperinflation, population growth, economic growth, monetary base and rational expectations.   In this interview, Yoram mentions: George Akerlof, James Tobin, Adam Smith, Gregory Mankiw and Paul Krugman. Find out: about revenue-neutral carbon taxing if we should keep economics serious or is there room for comedy? why it's important to motivate people to open a textbook and how humor and comedy can  do this. how cartoons and humor can bring so much detail and understanding to economic concepts. where it all began for Yoram when writing a cartoon economics textbook. about the cartoon books written by Yoram that document the annals of economic theory. how Yoram humorously depicts why some economists have won the Nobel Prize in Economics in a simplified and memorable manner. how Adam Smith calls the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics to interview them. Spooked? Find out how. how Yoram found his true calling while reading Mankiw's economics textbook.   how Yoram uses cartoons and comedy to teach us economics and to inform us of the need for environmental taxes, something he is passionate about. and much much more. You can find more content and all the books and links mentioned on this podcast episode at www.economicrockstar/yorambauman

What’s so funny about climate change? Stand-up economist Yoram Bauman uses humor to explain carbon tax, cap and trade and the ‘Five Chinas’ theory. Yoram Bauman, PhD., Co-author, The Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change (with Grady Klein) (Island Press, 2014) Jonah Sachs, CEO, Free Range Studios This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California on July 8, 2014.