Speaker

Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan

Economist at George Mason University and author of four books that span public choice, education, immigration, and parenting. His range is unusually wide for an academic economist, and he pursues it deliberately: each book draws on a literature — psychology, sociology, history, philosophy — that most economists do not read.

His most influential works are The Myth of the Rational Voter (2007), which argues that voters hold systematically biased beliefs about economics and that democracy works not despite this but partly because of it (rational irrationality — it costs nothing to vote on the basis of false beliefs, so people do), and The Case Against Education (2018), which argues that roughly 80 per cent of the private return to a degree is explained by signalling rather than learning. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (2011) applies a similar scepticism to parenting: within a wide range of acceptable behaviour, parents have little lasting influence on children’s outcomes. At recording time he was working on a nonfiction graphic novel on immigration (All Roads Lead to Open Borders, with cartoonist Zach Weinersmith) and a book on poverty and moral blameworthiness.

Core positions

Education is mostly signalling. The degree certifies pre-existing traits — conscientiousness, conformity, intelligence — to employers who cannot observe them directly, rather than building skills. The evidence Caplan finds most compelling is the curriculum itself: almost nothing studied in school is used on the job. The sheepskin effect — most of a degree’s wage premium concentrating in the graduation year rather than accruing steadily across years attended — is difficult to explain on any purely human-capital reading.

Voters are rationally irrational. Because individual votes have no perceptible effect on outcomes, holding economically wrong beliefs is costless; social and psychological benefits of those beliefs are real. The result is systematic bias in democratic policy, not random error. This is what Caplan calls rational irrationality — irrational beliefs that are individually rational to hold given their near-zero private cost.

Interdisciplinary method and the autodidact’s curse. Caplan’s research process is explicit: sweep Google Scholar across a topic and its subtopics, follow references until convergence, then email every living author cited to check for misunderstandings. The hazard he guards against — the autodidact’s curse — is reading widely while missing the tacit knowledge that specialists share but never write down.

In the wiki