I am looking forward to your efforts while being amazed that you are signing up to be the most unpopular public intellectual of all time. Going against SDB is, perforce, inviting the opprobrium of the vast majority of people who, as per your thesis, succumb to SDB. You are a brave man.
I mean, it sort of worked for Trump? At some level, people know SDB is BS, and they appreciate a person who "tells it like it is".
I actually think Caplan could be the one who saves us from Trump, by proving that Trump isn't the only one who can win by fighting SDB in the public sphere. I suspect Trump would've been far more successful, popular, and beneficial if he fought SDB in an intellectual and principled way.
Also... have you ever listened to the song "Rich Men North of Richmond"?
I think it's a great heartfelt lament which *could perhaps* be interpreted as making basically Caplan's point, about the mundane, untold, "illegible" suffering ("silent collateral damage") that everyday people experience due to politicians chasing social desirability bias. Sometimes it helps to have an artistic explanation of an idea to go along with the academic explanation.
Note that Oliver Anthony has rejected both left and right-wing interpretations of his song. I wonder what he would think of my take.
>What exactly does brutal honesty buy us? To start, brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low. So low, in fact, that we can justifiably praise free markets because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad and criticize governments because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. “Good stuff that sounds bad” like: downsizing superfluous workers, hiring tens of millions of low-skilled foreigners, deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid to speed up drug testing, greatly curtailing end-of-life medical care, and leveling historic neighborhoods in San Francisco to build new skyscrapers. “Bad stuff that sounds good” like: free roads, free parking, free college, free health care, licensing medical workers, regulating prescription drugs, requiring building permits, banning recreational drugs, sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants, and ensuring a dignified retirement for every American.
I don't think you can take it as a given that that stuff is good or bad. People being free to make their own choices is not always best for them I think as a quick test, you can go "Would I prefer a 5 year old make their own decision on this topic, or would I want their parent to over rule them?" Would you let a 5 year old volunteer to be a covid test subject? Would you tell a five year old they're responsible for checking whether a drug is safe or if the manufacturer is lying about it? Would you tell a five year old they're responsible for their own money and if they waste it all, they're on their own in any emergency?
Many adults are not more responsible than the hypothetical five year old. Having a cautious government step in to make sure fools don't have the freedom to harm themselves can be good.
Directionally, I'd still love to see the world become more libertarian. On most issues, I'd want to take a couple steps to be more libertarian. But already there are some industries that are too permissive, like sports gambling. The whole industry generates relatively little utility, while draining massive amounts of money by preying upon the psychological weaknesses of adults. You wouldn't leave a five year old alone with a bag of Halloween candy and trust them to make the right decision, you shouldn't leave ~20% of US adults alone with a sports gambling app and trust them to make the right decision.
You should wait to see the whole book. The counterargument is that if there are Americans that act like 5 year olds when it comes to themselves, imagine how they act when voting! Imagine the incentives politicians and bureaucrats have when making decisions on how to handle people’s health care.
People don’t become magical decision wizards in government. That’s the whole point. These “five year old” people’s emotions are to a large extent what government is based upon.
I don't have any sort of specific plan in mind. Probably the method that'd be easiest to sell while having significant benefits would be to just require some sort of simple multiple choice test about structure of government. Like asking what are the three branches of federal government, and people need to choose from a list of five options. And have ten questions like that. If they can't get above 50%, their vote doesn't count
Like the literacy tests in the reconstruction south.
What’s your plan when the people administering the test decide to use that power to control the electorate and shape it to their ends?
Look, race, sex, and even property tests at least have some objective measure that is easily observable. Taxes paid is on record.
Bryan once said that he thought only the faculty of Harvard should be able to vote. Then he learned that the faculty of Harvard were a bunch of woke communists. They sure do well on exams though.
Like I said, I don't have a careful plan thought out. If I was actually in charge of changing who can vote I'd take a lot more time and research, and realistically I'd probably try to delegate it. But trying to just stop *the* dumbest and *the* most uninformed from voting is probably positive EV
How do you make the argument for poor people dying preventable deaths (because your nana’s cancer was too expensive to treat unless everybody sells their house and stuff and goes into debt) while rich people can pay for treatment? For that matter, what about kids with leukemia?
“Actually, it’s just social desirability bias making people care about their grandma and 2 year old niece” doesn’t sound right.
It seems to me that “brutal honesty” will repulse a lot of people, who then will need to be prevented from voting somehow if the brutally honest policies are to succeed.
That "market failure" crap has always annoyed me. Markets thrive on failures, that is what tells entrepreneurs where the opportunities are. It's governments which suffocate markets and block entrepreneurs and progress.
Remember when Ford motors calculated how much it would cost to leave the Pinto on the road and just pay off the victims of its propensity to burst into flames at the slightest tap, versus recalling it and making the cheap fix to prevent that from happening? I remember. Fuck your free markets; the rich will start putting meth in happy meals if they aren't prevented by regulations.
How do you define "success of Singaporean anti-drug policy"? By abolition of liberty, years in jail, number of executions? If you won't admit the costs, what do you compare the benefits to?
Singapore has a lot less people in jail for drugs then we do.
Crime happens when people view the state as weak. They think they will get away with it. In Singapore they know they won’t get away with it, so they don’t try. Deterrence works.
Even going full legalization wouldn’t solve the problem. You just end up like San Francisco where druggies harass people and commit other crimes because turns out drugs actually have negative side effects on peoples behavior.
San Francisco's problem is not legal drugs. It is de facto legalization of homeless people living on sidewalks and treating public sidewalks as toilets and dumps. "Deterrence works" to coin a phrase.
Most countries have fewer people in jail, period, than the US, whether for drugs or anything else. Singling out drugs is daft.
A big reason people are homeless is that they are junkies.
Junkie homeless are also a lot more problematic than non-junkie homeless. You occasionally see homeless in say Japan, but they aren't shitting in the street and screaming at people because they aren't high on drugs.
You're the one saying Singapore's drug policy is so bad. I think its a model to emulate.
Read my comment again and quote the exact words where I said "Singapore's drug policy is so bad". You can't. I didn't. I said, quote, "If you won't admit the costs, what do you compare the benefits to?" Your "think its a model to emulate" is pure feelz and emotions without data to back it up.
You say Singapore is free of druggies because "deterrence works". You say Japan doesn't have SF's homeless problem "because they aren't high on drugs". Those are not the same, and again, you provide no evidence; maybe in Japan, "deterrence works" by punishing homeless people who misbehave. SF doesn't seem to deter misbehaving homeless; maybe they should, since you seem to think that's the key.
Your position is akin to Prohibition, which changed drinking behavior from legal to illegal but did not stop drinking and in fact created new criminals.
You tout Singapore and Japan as comparative examples. Have you ever considered Prohibition as an example, right here at home, same country, with excellent before-during-after comparisons?
Did you know that cocaine and opiods were legal for a long time, so much that Sherlock Holmes, written by a doctor, used a "seven percent solution" of cocaine? Where do you think "Coca-Cola" got its name from?
Have you ever considered how much safer drugs would be if they were legal and subject to market place quality control and brand recognition? There's another example for you -- sailors and soldiers were well-known to brew their own booze, and also well-known for brewing the dangerous kind, because it was illegal and had no legal way to ensure quality.
Why are there so many drug-related gang shootings and other crime? Have you ever considered it might be because they cannot use the judiciary to resolve disputes? Alcohol companies didn't resolve disputes that way before Prohibition and haven't since Prohibition was repealed. That ought to be top of your list of comparative examples, but instead, you pick two foreign countries with entirely different cultures.
We had an instance of punishing a junkie who misbehaved in 2020. George Floyd. It caused a national freak out.
You want a society where people can get high all the time but police are constantly having charged interactions with junkies on the street that all just turn out OK. That isn't our experience. The system doesn't handle that well.
It's way easier to just not have junkies to deal with in the first place. Or as few of them as you can manage.
"Have you ever considered how much safer drugs would be if they were legal and subject to market place quality control and brand recognition?"
I think we would have lab designed maximally addictive crack candy marketed to children at every grocery check out if we just let people do whatever they wanted.
In every single instance where you let a vice industry min/max human weakness on a spreadsheet they go all-in.
"Have you ever considered it might be because they cannot use the judiciary to resolve disputes?"
People in Singapore can't resolve their drug related disputes with the judiciary, but they aren't shooting one another. They just don't do drugs.
I have a different view of criminals than you. I don't think they become criminals because there is a market for drugs and they want to profit. Most drug dealers don't even make good money, most less than they could make working at McDonalds.
I think most criminals are violent young men that want to participated in violent tournaments and honor culture. If it wasn't drugs it would be hoes. If it wasn't hoes it would be dice. If it wasn't dice it would be extortion. If it wasn't extortion it would be getting dissed at a party. That's what I've seen in jury duty and what the data says.
You deal with crime by convincing these dumb violent young men that there is a 100% chance they will be caught and punished severely. Those that can't get that message get locked up until they age out of it.
Drugs make people dumber and more violent. A sober person, even one that isn't that bright, can understand that crime leads to punishment and then control their actions to respond to that incentive. A junkie can't.
"Have you ever considered Prohibition as an example"
Singapore doesn't outlaw alcohol. It does tax it pretty significantly though.
I think there is a world of difference between trying to outlaw a substance with a 10,000 year + history woven into a whole society versus trying to stop new and novel hard drugs from getting a foothold in society.
We've experimented with decriminalizing hard drugs in several jurisdictions and it's been a disaster. Its being reversed everywhere.
I suspect that, unfortunately, this is already priced in.
For instance: I really *do* want cuts to welfare programs. So do my peers. DOGE, in no small measure, is simply a reflection of the fact that a lot of people really would vote for indiscriminate cuts. The Biden stimulus suggests that, no really, people will blow up the budget for state-paid tuition.
Would I say, "Ah, no, wait, this budget cut disproportionately affects the poor, hold the phone?" Maybe, if the camera was on me. But in fact, I know that e.g. education funding is a sinkhole, that sinkhole is largely justified on appeals to helping the poor, and I'd vote for it anyway.
I don't think I'm unique here. Only politicians lie about the tradeoffs! Everyone else willingly wants to embrace their preferred side of a tradeoff! Ask a Trump voter if a tariff will cause economic hardship! Ask a Kamala voter if socialized medicine will increase our deficits! So long as you are polite for long enough, it is shocking how quickly their models will align with the economic predictions!
In other words - of course we're all lying to each other, but we all know we're liars!
Of course, I like to think I spend a lot of time with the discerning internet blog community, and that this stuff is only priced in around here. But that might just be me flattering my voters!
I am looking forward to your efforts while being amazed that you are signing up to be the most unpopular public intellectual of all time. Going against SDB is, perforce, inviting the opprobrium of the vast majority of people who, as per your thesis, succumb to SDB. You are a brave man.
On the other hand, this is a market niche that cries out to be filled, and Bryan is ideally suited to fill it.
I mean, it sort of worked for Trump? At some level, people know SDB is BS, and they appreciate a person who "tells it like it is".
I actually think Caplan could be the one who saves us from Trump, by proving that Trump isn't the only one who can win by fighting SDB in the public sphere. I suspect Trump would've been far more successful, popular, and beneficial if he fought SDB in an intellectual and principled way.
Also... have you ever listened to the song "Rich Men North of Richmond"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro
I think it's a great heartfelt lament which *could perhaps* be interpreted as making basically Caplan's point, about the mundane, untold, "illegible" suffering ("silent collateral damage") that everyday people experience due to politicians chasing social desirability bias. Sometimes it helps to have an artistic explanation of an idea to go along with the academic explanation.
Note that Oliver Anthony has rejected both left and right-wing interpretations of his song. I wonder what he would think of my take.
>What exactly does brutal honesty buy us? To start, brutal honesty lets us affirm that the correlation between what is good and what sounds good is quite low. So low, in fact, that we can justifiably praise free markets because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad and criticize governments because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. “Good stuff that sounds bad” like: downsizing superfluous workers, hiring tens of millions of low-skilled foreigners, deliberately infecting volunteers with Covid to speed up drug testing, greatly curtailing end-of-life medical care, and leveling historic neighborhoods in San Francisco to build new skyscrapers. “Bad stuff that sounds good” like: free roads, free parking, free college, free health care, licensing medical workers, regulating prescription drugs, requiring building permits, banning recreational drugs, sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants, and ensuring a dignified retirement for every American.
I don't think you can take it as a given that that stuff is good or bad. People being free to make their own choices is not always best for them I think as a quick test, you can go "Would I prefer a 5 year old make their own decision on this topic, or would I want their parent to over rule them?" Would you let a 5 year old volunteer to be a covid test subject? Would you tell a five year old they're responsible for checking whether a drug is safe or if the manufacturer is lying about it? Would you tell a five year old they're responsible for their own money and if they waste it all, they're on their own in any emergency?
Many adults are not more responsible than the hypothetical five year old. Having a cautious government step in to make sure fools don't have the freedom to harm themselves can be good.
Directionally, I'd still love to see the world become more libertarian. On most issues, I'd want to take a couple steps to be more libertarian. But already there are some industries that are too permissive, like sports gambling. The whole industry generates relatively little utility, while draining massive amounts of money by preying upon the psychological weaknesses of adults. You wouldn't leave a five year old alone with a bag of Halloween candy and trust them to make the right decision, you shouldn't leave ~20% of US adults alone with a sports gambling app and trust them to make the right decision.
You should wait to see the whole book. The counterargument is that if there are Americans that act like 5 year olds when it comes to themselves, imagine how they act when voting! Imagine the incentives politicians and bureaucrats have when making decisions on how to handle people’s health care.
People don’t become magical decision wizards in government. That’s the whole point. These “five year old” people’s emotions are to a large extent what government is based upon.
I think Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter is great. I'd much sooner try to restrict a few voting rights than legalize all drugs.
Whose voting rights do you want to restrict?
I don't have any sort of specific plan in mind. Probably the method that'd be easiest to sell while having significant benefits would be to just require some sort of simple multiple choice test about structure of government. Like asking what are the three branches of federal government, and people need to choose from a list of five options. And have ten questions like that. If they can't get above 50%, their vote doesn't count
Like the literacy tests in the reconstruction south.
What’s your plan when the people administering the test decide to use that power to control the electorate and shape it to their ends?
Look, race, sex, and even property tests at least have some objective measure that is easily observable. Taxes paid is on record.
Bryan once said that he thought only the faculty of Harvard should be able to vote. Then he learned that the faculty of Harvard were a bunch of woke communists. They sure do well on exams though.
Like I said, I don't have a careful plan thought out. If I was actually in charge of changing who can vote I'd take a lot more time and research, and realistically I'd probably try to delegate it. But trying to just stop *the* dumbest and *the* most uninformed from voting is probably positive EV
How do you make the argument for poor people dying preventable deaths (because your nana’s cancer was too expensive to treat unless everybody sells their house and stuff and goes into debt) while rich people can pay for treatment? For that matter, what about kids with leukemia?
“Actually, it’s just social desirability bias making people care about their grandma and 2 year old niece” doesn’t sound right.
It seems to me that “brutal honesty” will repulse a lot of people, who then will need to be prevented from voting somehow if the brutally honest policies are to succeed.
That "market failure" crap has always annoyed me. Markets thrive on failures, that is what tells entrepreneurs where the opportunities are. It's governments which suffocate markets and block entrepreneurs and progress.
This is a VITAL mission - way beyond noble. MORE!
Remember when Ford motors calculated how much it would cost to leave the Pinto on the road and just pay off the victims of its propensity to burst into flames at the slightest tap, versus recalling it and making the cheap fix to prevent that from happening? I remember. Fuck your free markets; the rich will start putting meth in happy meals if they aren't prevented by regulations.
Has the success of Singaporean anti-drug policy made you rethink whether it was actually bad of them to ban drugs? Or their housing policy?
How do you define "success of Singaporean anti-drug policy"? By abolition of liberty, years in jail, number of executions? If you won't admit the costs, what do you compare the benefits to?
Singapore has a lot less people in jail for drugs then we do.
Crime happens when people view the state as weak. They think they will get away with it. In Singapore they know they won’t get away with it, so they don’t try. Deterrence works.
Even going full legalization wouldn’t solve the problem. You just end up like San Francisco where druggies harass people and commit other crimes because turns out drugs actually have negative side effects on peoples behavior.
San Francisco's problem is not legal drugs. It is de facto legalization of homeless people living on sidewalks and treating public sidewalks as toilets and dumps. "Deterrence works" to coin a phrase.
Most countries have fewer people in jail, period, than the US, whether for drugs or anything else. Singling out drugs is daft.
A big reason people are homeless is that they are junkies.
Junkie homeless are also a lot more problematic than non-junkie homeless. You occasionally see homeless in say Japan, but they aren't shitting in the street and screaming at people because they aren't high on drugs.
You're the one saying Singapore's drug policy is so bad. I think its a model to emulate.
Read my comment again and quote the exact words where I said "Singapore's drug policy is so bad". You can't. I didn't. I said, quote, "If you won't admit the costs, what do you compare the benefits to?" Your "think its a model to emulate" is pure feelz and emotions without data to back it up.
You say Singapore is free of druggies because "deterrence works". You say Japan doesn't have SF's homeless problem "because they aren't high on drugs". Those are not the same, and again, you provide no evidence; maybe in Japan, "deterrence works" by punishing homeless people who misbehave. SF doesn't seem to deter misbehaving homeless; maybe they should, since you seem to think that's the key.
Your position is akin to Prohibition, which changed drinking behavior from legal to illegal but did not stop drinking and in fact created new criminals.
You tout Singapore and Japan as comparative examples. Have you ever considered Prohibition as an example, right here at home, same country, with excellent before-during-after comparisons?
Did you know that cocaine and opiods were legal for a long time, so much that Sherlock Holmes, written by a doctor, used a "seven percent solution" of cocaine? Where do you think "Coca-Cola" got its name from?
Have you ever considered how much safer drugs would be if they were legal and subject to market place quality control and brand recognition? There's another example for you -- sailors and soldiers were well-known to brew their own booze, and also well-known for brewing the dangerous kind, because it was illegal and had no legal way to ensure quality.
Why are there so many drug-related gang shootings and other crime? Have you ever considered it might be because they cannot use the judiciary to resolve disputes? Alcohol companies didn't resolve disputes that way before Prohibition and haven't since Prohibition was repealed. That ought to be top of your list of comparative examples, but instead, you pick two foreign countries with entirely different cultures.
"by punishing homeless people who misbehave"
We had an instance of punishing a junkie who misbehaved in 2020. George Floyd. It caused a national freak out.
You want a society where people can get high all the time but police are constantly having charged interactions with junkies on the street that all just turn out OK. That isn't our experience. The system doesn't handle that well.
It's way easier to just not have junkies to deal with in the first place. Or as few of them as you can manage.
"Have you ever considered how much safer drugs would be if they were legal and subject to market place quality control and brand recognition?"
I think we would have lab designed maximally addictive crack candy marketed to children at every grocery check out if we just let people do whatever they wanted.
In every single instance where you let a vice industry min/max human weakness on a spreadsheet they go all-in.
"Have you ever considered it might be because they cannot use the judiciary to resolve disputes?"
People in Singapore can't resolve their drug related disputes with the judiciary, but they aren't shooting one another. They just don't do drugs.
I have a different view of criminals than you. I don't think they become criminals because there is a market for drugs and they want to profit. Most drug dealers don't even make good money, most less than they could make working at McDonalds.
I think most criminals are violent young men that want to participated in violent tournaments and honor culture. If it wasn't drugs it would be hoes. If it wasn't hoes it would be dice. If it wasn't dice it would be extortion. If it wasn't extortion it would be getting dissed at a party. That's what I've seen in jury duty and what the data says.
You deal with crime by convincing these dumb violent young men that there is a 100% chance they will be caught and punished severely. Those that can't get that message get locked up until they age out of it.
Drugs make people dumber and more violent. A sober person, even one that isn't that bright, can understand that crime leads to punishment and then control their actions to respond to that incentive. A junkie can't.
"Have you ever considered Prohibition as an example"
Singapore doesn't outlaw alcohol. It does tax it pretty significantly though.
I think there is a world of difference between trying to outlaw a substance with a 10,000 year + history woven into a whole society versus trying to stop new and novel hard drugs from getting a foothold in society.
We've experimented with decriminalizing hard drugs in several jurisdictions and it's been a disaster. Its being reversed everywhere.
Prohibition reduced drinking.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/5/18518005/prohibition-alcohol-public-health-crime-benefits
Bryan may want to revise this chapter in light of the Big Beautiful Bill.
When do you expect your book to come out?
Looking forward to reading the final version!
I'm sure you've been asked this a number of times, but do you plan on ever releasing your book on poverty?
I suspect that, unfortunately, this is already priced in.
For instance: I really *do* want cuts to welfare programs. So do my peers. DOGE, in no small measure, is simply a reflection of the fact that a lot of people really would vote for indiscriminate cuts. The Biden stimulus suggests that, no really, people will blow up the budget for state-paid tuition.
Would I say, "Ah, no, wait, this budget cut disproportionately affects the poor, hold the phone?" Maybe, if the camera was on me. But in fact, I know that e.g. education funding is a sinkhole, that sinkhole is largely justified on appeals to helping the poor, and I'd vote for it anyway.
I don't think I'm unique here. Only politicians lie about the tradeoffs! Everyone else willingly wants to embrace their preferred side of a tradeoff! Ask a Trump voter if a tariff will cause economic hardship! Ask a Kamala voter if socialized medicine will increase our deficits! So long as you are polite for long enough, it is shocking how quickly their models will align with the economic predictions!
In other words - of course we're all lying to each other, but we all know we're liars!
Of course, I like to think I spend a lot of time with the discerning internet blog community, and that this stuff is only priced in around here. But that might just be me flattering my voters!
Best of luck on the book! Can't wait to read.