I don't think you are paying attention. then, to be honest. There are activist academics who would even prevent a paper from being published in an academic journal for much less (e.g. "citation justice").
The surprising part isn't that academics would cancel someone over their ideology, its that they got canceled over their view on the welfare state and not, like, affirmative action.
I guess the academics just refuse to hire the heretics who reject affirmative action in the first place, though, so its not like many such heretics remain to be cancelled.
Even if I agree with you that the pendulum has *started* to swing back, location of the pendulum matters enormously, as well as speed of the reverse movement.
Like Wallet, I think the movement in academia is likely to be slow at best, and glacial most likely.
But regardless of our guesses on that velocity first derivative point, the pendulum has gotten SO far to the left side that in fact it would be much more surprising to see the absence of what you are discussing here than the presence.
Pardon me for entering into what must be a long debate, but isn't there some conflict between the findings of your paper, that "recipients of government assistance are not just economically disadvantaged—they are behaviorally and cognitively deficient. Correct. If you read the paper, we offer plenty of evidence in favor of these claims." and your conclusion that the solution to this problem is "we treat them like normal humans who are capable of revising their personal decisions."
Your original paper makes it clear that the members of this group are not "normal' in their abilities to make rational personal decisions. In fact, it may be this inability that has contributed to their being members of this group in the first place. Your solution "If members of your group do worse because of bad decisions, you have a straightforward solution: Make better decisions." doesn't seem to follow to me. They are members of this group BECAUSE of their inability to make good decisions. Material assistance may not be the best solution but just advising them to make better decisions is doomed to failure by the very findings of your paper.
I realize that this does not address the point of your email this morning. Plocher is wrong in trying to cancel Beaulier's candidacy because of this paper.
This is a thoughtful question, but from what I remember from reading the paper a while ago, the argument is that the poor irrationally think that they’ll be better off if they rely on the welfare state instead of taking steps to getting better. So getting rid of the welfare state helps the poor make more rational decisions. Does that answer your question?
Yes, in a way. The authors are hopeful that by limiting choice (behavioral nudges) and limiting other subsidies ( the welfare state) that the poor will be helped to make more rational decisions. I am doubtful. I think that some people have a very difficult time with being rational. It seems as likely to me that that if we limit some peoples range of decision they might continue to make bad decisions such as "no food stamps, OK, I will then just steal".
We Already know that IS exactly what is done. The economic determinants of crime have been well known for at least 50 years, but the US used poverty as a kugel to scare those of us who aren't poor, IMO.
>Material assistance may not be the best solution but just advising them to make better decisions is doomed to failure by the very findings of your paper.
I haven't read the paper. But a common point I've seen libertarians make is that while the realistic outcome of a libertarian approach will be far from the utilitarian optimal outcome, there may be little reason to believe an expansive government intervention would actually get you closer to the optimal outcome, even if the government has the best intentions.
Maybe intergenerational inequality of opportunity has a bit to do with it. Henry George pointed out in 1879 that without equal access to land inequality must result in barbarian invasion from within just like the degenerate Roman plebs no longer living independently of handouts.
The paper addresses your point by suggesting that government limit the number of options available to welfare recipients. Their paper also suggests that increasing costs on abused products like cigarettes and alcohol would incentivize different behaviors.
“Some of the policy implications are straightforward: behavioral economics provides additional reasons for less generous government assistance along a number of margins. If the people the government wants to help do not fully account for the negative long-run effects of accepting help, they are better offif the government does the accounting for them. Other policy implications are less obvious. Specifically, it is theoretically possible for government to help the disadvantaged by reducing their choice set below the laissez-faire level. The traditional conservative critique of the welfare state is fundamentally paternalist. Once you accept the idea that you can hurt people by giving them more choices, you cannot dismiss the idea that you can help them by taking some of their choices away. In practice, of course, the latter is much more costly and intrusive than the former.”
There is a curious sentence in Bryan's post: "If you take the time to actually read 'Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State,' many readers will find some of our arguments less than convincing."
It sounds like Bryan does not consider this his most well-thought-out work product.
Of course, that has nothing to do with the outrageous cancellation of Dr. Beaulier for wrongthink.
By the way, I teach many FirstGen, and they would be the most sympathetic to the Caplan/Beaulier thesis that the poor need to make better choices. It would be the privileged kids for the most part who would agree with the activist.
I feel like what is missing from this article is any evidence that he was...actually cancelled? Im open to that, but there is no link here to that claim unless I missed it. A quick google didn't pull up anything either.
He didn't get the job but there were four finalists, most candidates didn't get the job! Is there any proof this paper was important, or even really discussed, by the search committee?
I get that Bryan knows the guy so he may have heard it first hand? Hopefully an edit clarifying this can be made.
I would agree. I was at his staff interview forum and was less than impressed. Not because he doesn’t have charisma, affability, or academic knowledge, but because he lacked some serious strategic administrative knowledge and experience.
While I’m liberal (and grew up in a very conservative household) and heard the rumblings about this paper, I’d hardly say I heard anyone apoplectic over it. Perhaps the strongest opposition was from the Reverend Dr. Plocher and the pretty thin article in the Northwind, but not much else. The folks I talked to I even tempered their accusations with questions about when in his career did he write this? Had anyone (the Board, search committee) discussed with him issues about this and he was able to address his views?
Even if he did write this, academia is about people learning new stuff, sharing knowledge, having integrity to say they wrote something but can be challenged on its merits, and choose whether they still stand by it or not.
Yet, nowhere has there been credible evidence he was “canceled” from the presidency. First, that assumes he was preordained for this post, and how dare the three other qualified candidates put their hat in the ring. Second, it puts an undeserved stain on the reputation of the chosen candidate, that they somehow participated in a conspiracy to defraud Dr. Beaulier. This is trying to find a fire when the author thinks he sees smoke, when it’s really just a joker with a fog machine.
The outrage over “cancel culture” has these people ready to roll heads at not being picked, without having the character to self-analyze whether they just simply lacked the necessary credentials.
If he was so unqualified, then why did Plocher feel the need to dunk on him with such transparent lies?
I find in lots of discussions of matters of which I know little, such as climate alarmism and Project 1619 to name just a few, that one side trots out more ridiculous lies than the other. It doesn't tell me which side has the best technical arguments, but it does tell me which side has so little confidence in their own arguments that they have to lie, commit fraud, and obfuscate the facts.
My instinct is to side with those who do not resort to pounding the table.
"Dunk on him with such transparent lies" is a hyperbolic criticism for how someone in the community wants to engage in the feedback process for the presidential candidates. It's not how you would provide feedback, but Dr. Plocher is free to express his own concerns in the way he'd like as long as we're a free country, and the Board can do as they please with them. Is your proposal that he is not allowed to say something without your prior blessing? Otherwise, it seems pretty obvious in your view already, and others, that it was a weak argument against his candidacy and wasn't going to hold weight regardless. So why not let someone express their views and let them have them be dissected openly? In the grand scheme of things it was unlikely to provide a final decision for or against, and there is yet to be any evidence that Dr. Beaulier was "canceled" or the decision came down to this one old paper as a student.
I'm unfamiliar with the academic field of climate extremism. Could you explain that field with some clear examples of experts in it? I haven't heard of any doctorates being granted in it or research in the field.
“Otherwise, it seems pretty obvious in your view already, and others, that it was a weak argument against his candidacy and wasn't going to hold weight regardless.”
On what possible basis do you claim that Plocher’s argument “wasn’t going to hold weight regardless”?
Although surely you and I are the only ones who follow AK’s bromide that “we choose what to believe based on whom we believe”, while Xavier here is above such pettiness.
To be clear, I actually found his initial arguments somewhat persuasive, but they quickly - especially his comment to your comment here - devolved into attacks on the character and claims of anyone who would suggest that anything at all amiss here occurred.
After all, since there is no smoking gun proof that getting a FISA warrant based on a false dossier funded by the Democrat party affected the 2016 election, or that publishing a dishonest piece claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and telling social media companies to censor information like the true Hunter Biden laptop story caused Trump to lose the 2020 election, therefore these weren’t problems anyone should be concerned with or worried by.
This is one of the big reasons people don't trust academia anymore; they get the sense it's a partisan propaganda factory, and increasingly they're right.
It’s been in “climate science” for decades, and in medical science for a while now.
But climate science aside, if by “recently” you mean only the last 15 years, I can accept that.
Of course academia - your initial claim - is much more than just the hard sciences and much more than just research. Most of academia has been politicized for decades. And yes the degree of politicization has accelerated and gotten much worse in the last 15-20 years.
Right, that's my point, the hard sciences weren't contaminated until recently. The humanities and social sciences fell a long time ago, more or less in the sixties. I've heard philosophy holds out.
I do think the 'climate science' thing is real, though--every year I see more and more hurricanes, and the winters are milder. As Derbyshire said ages ago, some things are true *even though* the Party says so.
My father-in-law worked with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients. One of the symptoms of leprosy is the inability to feel pain. Hollywood treats this as a superpower. In reality, it’s a curse. Imagine not knowing that you’ve placed your hand on a hot stove until you smell your flesh burning. Pain is the best friend that no one wants.
Government and doting parents can create a sort of moral leprosy by severing the link between action and consequence. We do no one any favors by placing the burden of destructive and self-destructive acts on the backs of others. By doing so, we reduce the benefits of acting responsibly and the consequences of doing the opposite.
This is an assertion..."The subpar decision-making of the poor is fact; see our cites. The “consequences of structural injustice” is dogma." ...
It's not based on any proof. It's based on ignoring evidence to the contrary and elevating supporting evidence.
There is a giant hole in the minds of right wingers when it comes to human nature that allows them to confidently make claims like this.
It's a bullshit move to accuse them of canceling him because he told the truth if they genuinely believe he is wrong. And they have good reason to believe he is wrong.
The negative effects of stress and deprivation on individuals and populations when it comes to a vast array of mental and physical health issues are well known and undeniable. Included in those is decision making.
I did. Did you? It does exactly what I said... It ignores evidence to the contrary and elevates supporting evidence. It only looks at perverse incentives and says nothing about the effects of stress and deprivation.
"And if society demonstrably did so treat the poor, the rational response for the poor would be extra caution, not imprudence."
Yes, that would be the *rational* response but human beings aren't rational. More importantly, the poor in aggregate trend towards the lower end of the IQ scale. There's an argument to be made that their imprudence is a manifestation of that statistical reality, not a moral failing.
But part of the "cure" is not coddling them; not rewarding bad behavior with more welfare. You don't train a dog or cat to not pee or poop at random by petting and hugging them when they do pee or poop at random. You can't help the poor learn to be responsible by giving them welfare regardless of how they misbehave.
I realize that's the "common sense" answer, but the reality is that there is currently no effort to do much of anything to teach people how to be better outside of church. Everyone dismisses any effort to change that as not being their problem, or that its up to the parents but that's precisely the issue: in many cases these children are essentially raising themselves.
Do you have a solution? I posted my answer: stop coddling them. The government makes it too easy for the lazy and unambitious to take the government dole, then use their spare time to be obnoxious to the society that is supporting them, by shoplifting, using the streets for toilets, begging for money they use to get drunk or high, protest George Floyd, and so on.
Stop coddling them. There are charities who do take care of the truly unfortunate who do try to behave, and there are lockups for those who refuse to behave — but only if they are prosecuted.
Something got lost there. I was specifically speaking about welfare without responsibility or accountability. Nothing to do with swindles, and your last paragraph is all about what you want, nothing about what I said about coddling lazy people.
But that is exactly the argument of the paper. The poor make worse decisions for exactly the reasons you mentioned, so welfare programs should take that into account. They don't phrase it as a moral failing at any point in the paper.
There were three other impressive candidates for the job . Maybe their qualifications were better than this guy and that the objections to him were valid. It could be that simple!
If the other candidates were better, then they need not have resorted to such specious objections to eliminate the weakest candidate. Conversely, the fact that they did resort to such specious objections indicates he was the strongest candidate.
I have followed Dr. Beaulier's career and wondered whether his libertarian inclinations would at some point stall his career rise. It's disgusting but predictable that they eventually did. At most mainstream universities, dean of the business school may be your ceiling if you're identifiably libertarian or conservative, and you can hope for that only at the most tolerant of the mainstream schools, no matter how great your qualifications.
Maybe he can land a big job in Florida. He seems like a very able guy.
Like you, I would have loved to see Scott become president of NMU. I couldn't figure out, though, why you thought this one guy killed the deal and, beyond that, why Scott was the one out of the four who would have become president. Are you leaving out information?
While true, the growing economic inequality, the increasing gaps between income and luxuries such as housing, food, and medical care, as well as the insane amount of corruption makes plain the blaming of the victims for their actions while ignoring the circumstances in which they are forced to live in.
I find it suspect that too many people ignore the economic circumstances of the 1950s, 60s, even the 1970 while saying that it is irresponsible behavior that is the cause of poverty. The sheer variety of the kinds of jobs, the higher income compared to the cost of living, and companies that often trained and employed for decades, if not life, not to mention the relative ease of being hired made any foolish decision not only less attractive, but less damaging.
[Bryan, I admire your defence of a friend. As co-author do you still hold all the positions in the 2007 paper? Are you saying Olsen wasn't a good choice? Are you or Scott alleging any specific unfairness in the final selection process, forums, by the trustees, etc?]
I suspect there is another side to this, and the university may have appointed exactly the right kind of manager:
1. Scott has had past success in enrollment growth and graduation rates, launched innovative degree programs, and secured substantial private funding, so he was a worthy finalist in some respects. However, Christopher Olsen was chosen in a unanimous decision. He has 20 years of leadership in higher education, with strengths in strategic planning, enrollment management, student success, distance education, external relationships, and philanthropy. This is not academically flashy, but it's great for sustained thriving. Olsen is noted for his frequent and regular connection with students and collaboration with campus and regional leaders. All this seems like exactly what you would want for a state university! You can hardly say they chose an obviously LESS suitable candidate.
2. They had a long list of 80 candidates and Scott made it to the final four, so this was hardly contemptuous treatment! Are you saying he should get any job he applies for, or that students should have no free speech during selection? or that his past academic work should not be considered?
3. The paper was published in 2007, just before the financial crisis and wealthy banks being massively subsidised by govs - were the same critiques ever applied by Scott to the rich, or are only the poor and women responsible for bad decision-making and taking harmful subsidies?
4. Scott would have been hated and campaigned against by students, who for now still have free speech rights, at least if US citizens. He'd have become a distraction, because of the next point, and the trustees may have just decided that this wouldn't work well for the university. You want your boss to support star profs and students, and not BE a controversial star (except maybe in resisting outside pressures from funders, White House etc?)
I can see that lefty students should not be able to get profs fired for being right wing or exploratory, or censor curricula, but why would you appoint someone who isn't obviously the best suited when they will obviously be hated and controversial from the start?
If you want a right wing leader, create a right wing university - it's not like conservatives don't have money or influence!
5. From your paper [Bryan this is more for others, will be familiar to you, except the first response]
"recipients of government assistance are not just economically disadvantaged—they are behaviorally and cognitively deficient"
[This happens to be my specialism. Permanent harm to the brain in early pregnancy is caused by MATERNAL folate deficiency, anemia, malnutrition, indoor air pollution, toxins from moulds in peanuts and cornflour, if not nixtimalized into tortillas. Conditional cash transfers to women have been super successful in overcoming this in central America, and Chile did well too.]
“the poor are much more prone to engage in such activities [as drug use, crime...] than the rest of the population"
[The truth is they are much more likely to get laced drugs, get caught, get convicted and get jailed, rather than being offered harm reduction and high quality rehab]
“by giving the poor material support, we discourage them from getting jobs, acquiring experience, and eventually pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”
[This has now been disproven, especially by non US economists and UBI research. We could rehearse the arguments but I'm sure we'll still disagree, so it seems pointless.]
"Giving money to the poor reduces their incentive to enter the workforce, acquire experience, and eventually join the middle class."
[Now disproved, thanks also to UBI research and research on prevention of stunting at birth and cost-effective, empowering solutions for that.]
"what can any one individual do about structural injustice?"
[Not much - that's why we build movements and oppose trickle down economics and racist policies and injustice.]
Your framework ambiguously assumes that limiting the poor’s choices improves their welfare—an untestable proposition without data on subjective well-being or revealed counterfactuals.
Several economists note that you misapply behavioral economics.
The claim that the poor display greater “pathological” behavior is criticized as relying on outdated, correlational data. Risk aversion, time discounting, and impulsivity can result from poverty-induced scarcity rather than innate deficiency. Thus, your argument reverses causality: poverty produces behavioral anomalies, not the reverse.
Invocation of IQ as a mediating factor between policy and behavior is empirically weak.
Many interpret the paper as ideological rather than scientific. It rearticulates long-standing conservative critiques of the welfare state under a behavioral-economics veneer. Scholars argue this marriage of behavioral economics and libertarian moralism cherry-picks psychological evidence to rationalize austerity: as I suggested, when biases are found among the poor, paternalism is justified; but when biases appear among policymakers or elites, laissez-faire remains sacrosanct. This asymmetry contradicts behavioral political economy, which finds elite, bureaucratic, and voter irrationalities equally potent.
I know you addressed this, but you still seems to blame all pregnancy on bad decisions by "lower IQ women" and absolve men completely from decision-making responsibility.
"when biases are found among the poor, paternalism is justified; but when biases appear among policymakers or elites, laissez-faire remains sacrosanct."
You have this backwards, the welfare state is paternalism, getting rid of it would be laissez-faire.
As far as the latter, and your comment in #3, Caplan was pretty strongly opposed to bailouts and subsidies.
“He'd have become a distraction, because of the next point, and the trustees may have just decided that this wouldn't work well for the university.”
I won’t really comment on the rest. But you DO understand that this sentence is the “heckler’s veto” saying that universities must be forever leftist and further leftist, because… universities are leftist.
From the rest of your comment you don’t seem as either illogical or hyperpartisan as this point implies, but rather you seem like a run of the mill, well-meaning person of the ideological left.
Now perhaps my last speculation is incorrect. If so, moot since you will ignore this. But if true, you might want to consider separating whatever wheat you have in your push-poll questions from the chaff, of which my quoted sentence most surely is part.
If you have more income, for most people it reduces the incentive to acquire more.
Most “UBI” research (as opposed to what a true UBI implementation in law would be) does not give money to everyone, as it happens, due to cost. But even if it did, the relevant subjects under study here are the poor.
The U is there because the proponents believe that in a rich country everyone should get some minimal standard of consumption, regardless of capabilities, work ethic, situation they are born with, disabilities, etc., etc., etc.
It is decidedly *not* about eliminating the disincentive to work.
First, to be clear, I do *not* support a UBI, which IMO would be bad public policy even if it replaced other welfare benefits, and very bad when it would not. But I acknowledge that one could at least make a case for such a UBI.
Second, I agree with you that for a *law* or actual policy proposal to be able to be truthfully called UBI, then the benefits would indeed need to be universal. Though while you and I would agree that doing a UBI without replacing most other welfare benefits would be very unwise and a poor use of taxpayer dollars, it need not be implemented that way to legitimately be called UBI.
But you are conflating *research* about the effects of a theoretical future UBI law/program with an actual law. One can do research on the latter without having the law in effect, and said research can be reasonable if it has a proper control group which does not get the benefits to compare to the group that does get the benefits.
In terms of such research, people quite obviously and reasonably only care about whether there is sufficient positive impact on the poorest among us in order to make the obviously large expenditure for such a program worthwhile. So a trial need not give the benefits to “all”, and specifically need not bear the extra cost of giving the benefits to those with high incomes, in order to be both valid and worthwhile.
And all of that is completely separate from the OG point that no UBI proposal has ever had as its goal to eliminate work disincentives. Even its staunchest advocates understand that it has a disincentive effect; they just believe that the benefits to society of such policy outweigh the disadvantages.
> Suppose, for example, that society treated you very unjustly. The sensible reaction is, “The deck is stacked against me, so I should be extra careful,” not “Maybe I should have a non-marital birth?” or “Maybe I should heavily use alcohol?”
Depends on *how specifically* the society treats you unjustly.
For example, imagine a society that pays everyone UBI that depends on whether they are sober or drunk. Sober people get $100 a day, drunk people only get $20 a day. But the society treats *you* unjustly and gives you $20 a day regardless of whether you are sober or drunk. In such society it makes more sense for you to get drunk than for others, because your marginal cost of getting drunk is smaller.
Similarly, if the society penalizes you (or rewards you less) for being careful, then being extra careful would be the opposite of what your comparative advantage suggests you should do.
The assertion that humans live - or should live - their lives based on what the most “sensible” (subjective) choice is at any given time (whether rich or poor) is completely delusional. We have decades of research in multiple fields showing that this isn’t the case. Your idea that you are simply more “rational” than a poor person is completely irrational.
Kind of surprising that they all just said they don't like Beaulier's claims in the paper, and *not one* person addressed Bryan's point about anti-intellectualism, that rejecting his candidacy on the basis that they don't like the claims without actually arguing against them is anti-intellectual:
"[M]any readers will find some of our arguments less than convincing. But you should still be repelled by Plocher’s — and NMU’s — utterly anti-intellectual response. This really is akin to responding to arguments for atheism with, “They insult the eternal glory of God.” If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?"
Yeah, this is just "this argument supports a view I find morally wrong, therefore it's false".
Didn't expect to see it in 2025.
I don't think you are paying attention. then, to be honest. There are activist academics who would even prevent a paper from being published in an academic journal for much less (e.g. "citation justice").
The surprising part isn't that academics would cancel someone over their ideology, its that they got canceled over their view on the welfare state and not, like, affirmative action.
I guess the academics just refuse to hire the heretics who reject affirmative action in the first place, though, so its not like many such heretics remain to be cancelled.
Yes, I'm aware. What I meant by "in 2025" is that the pendulum has started to swing back.
In the rest of the U.S., yes. Not in academia, for the most part. Academia is more like Bluesky than the outside world most of us live in.
Even if I agree with you that the pendulum has *started* to swing back, location of the pendulum matters enormously, as well as speed of the reverse movement.
Like Wallet, I think the movement in academia is likely to be slow at best, and glacial most likely.
But regardless of our guesses on that velocity first derivative point, the pendulum has gotten SO far to the left side that in fact it would be much more surprising to see the absence of what you are discussing here than the presence.
“Didn't expect to see it in 2025.”
Really?
To quote Bryan, then, I’d like to find a number of things political that I can “Bet on It” with you… 😏
Hi Bryan,
Pardon me for entering into what must be a long debate, but isn't there some conflict between the findings of your paper, that "recipients of government assistance are not just economically disadvantaged—they are behaviorally and cognitively deficient. Correct. If you read the paper, we offer plenty of evidence in favor of these claims." and your conclusion that the solution to this problem is "we treat them like normal humans who are capable of revising their personal decisions."
Your original paper makes it clear that the members of this group are not "normal' in their abilities to make rational personal decisions. In fact, it may be this inability that has contributed to their being members of this group in the first place. Your solution "If members of your group do worse because of bad decisions, you have a straightforward solution: Make better decisions." doesn't seem to follow to me. They are members of this group BECAUSE of their inability to make good decisions. Material assistance may not be the best solution but just advising them to make better decisions is doomed to failure by the very findings of your paper.
I realize that this does not address the point of your email this morning. Plocher is wrong in trying to cancel Beaulier's candidacy because of this paper.
Thanks,
William
This is a thoughtful question, but from what I remember from reading the paper a while ago, the argument is that the poor irrationally think that they’ll be better off if they rely on the welfare state instead of taking steps to getting better. So getting rid of the welfare state helps the poor make more rational decisions. Does that answer your question?
Yes, in a way. The authors are hopeful that by limiting choice (behavioral nudges) and limiting other subsidies ( the welfare state) that the poor will be helped to make more rational decisions. I am doubtful. I think that some people have a very difficult time with being rational. It seems as likely to me that that if we limit some peoples range of decision they might continue to make bad decisions such as "no food stamps, OK, I will then just steal".
Possibly, but as far as I remember from the times I have looked into it, it’s rare for poverty to cause theft.
Equally poor whites commit far fewer crimes than blacks.
We Already know that IS exactly what is done. The economic determinants of crime have been well known for at least 50 years, but the US used poverty as a kugel to scare those of us who aren't poor, IMO.
https://a.co/d/a3I1a9N
Phil Gramm er
>Material assistance may not be the best solution but just advising them to make better decisions is doomed to failure by the very findings of your paper.
I haven't read the paper. But a common point I've seen libertarians make is that while the realistic outcome of a libertarian approach will be far from the utilitarian optimal outcome, there may be little reason to believe an expansive government intervention would actually get you closer to the optimal outcome, even if the government has the best intentions.
Maybe intergenerational inequality of opportunity has a bit to do with it. Henry George pointed out in 1879 that without equal access to land inequality must result in barbarian invasion from within just like the degenerate Roman plebs no longer living independently of handouts.
The paper addresses your point by suggesting that government limit the number of options available to welfare recipients. Their paper also suggests that increasing costs on abused products like cigarettes and alcohol would incentivize different behaviors.
“Some of the policy implications are straightforward: behavioral economics provides additional reasons for less generous government assistance along a number of margins. If the people the government wants to help do not fully account for the negative long-run effects of accepting help, they are better offif the government does the accounting for them. Other policy implications are less obvious. Specifically, it is theoretically possible for government to help the disadvantaged by reducing their choice set below the laissez-faire level. The traditional conservative critique of the welfare state is fundamentally paternalist. Once you accept the idea that you can hurt people by giving them more choices, you cannot dismiss the idea that you can help them by taking some of their choices away. In practice, of course, the latter is much more costly and intrusive than the former.”
Yes, this is a good question. I wondered the same thing. Hopefully Bryan can elaborate.
There is a curious sentence in Bryan's post: "If you take the time to actually read 'Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State,' many readers will find some of our arguments less than convincing."
It sounds like Bryan does not consider this his most well-thought-out work product.
Of course, that has nothing to do with the outrageous cancellation of Dr. Beaulier for wrongthink.
By the way, I teach many FirstGen, and they would be the most sympathetic to the Caplan/Beaulier thesis that the poor need to make better choices. It would be the privileged kids for the most part who would agree with the activist.
I think he’s just pointing out the trivial truth that many people won’t accept his arguments after reading it. Not that people shouldn’t accept them.
Yes, that's how I interpreted it, too.
I feel like what is missing from this article is any evidence that he was...actually cancelled? Im open to that, but there is no link here to that claim unless I missed it. A quick google didn't pull up anything either.
He didn't get the job but there were four finalists, most candidates didn't get the job! Is there any proof this paper was important, or even really discussed, by the search committee?
I get that Bryan knows the guy so he may have heard it first hand? Hopefully an edit clarifying this can be made.
I would agree. I was at his staff interview forum and was less than impressed. Not because he doesn’t have charisma, affability, or academic knowledge, but because he lacked some serious strategic administrative knowledge and experience.
While I’m liberal (and grew up in a very conservative household) and heard the rumblings about this paper, I’d hardly say I heard anyone apoplectic over it. Perhaps the strongest opposition was from the Reverend Dr. Plocher and the pretty thin article in the Northwind, but not much else. The folks I talked to I even tempered their accusations with questions about when in his career did he write this? Had anyone (the Board, search committee) discussed with him issues about this and he was able to address his views?
Even if he did write this, academia is about people learning new stuff, sharing knowledge, having integrity to say they wrote something but can be challenged on its merits, and choose whether they still stand by it or not.
Yet, nowhere has there been credible evidence he was “canceled” from the presidency. First, that assumes he was preordained for this post, and how dare the three other qualified candidates put their hat in the ring. Second, it puts an undeserved stain on the reputation of the chosen candidate, that they somehow participated in a conspiracy to defraud Dr. Beaulier. This is trying to find a fire when the author thinks he sees smoke, when it’s really just a joker with a fog machine.
The outrage over “cancel culture” has these people ready to roll heads at not being picked, without having the character to self-analyze whether they just simply lacked the necessary credentials.
If he was so unqualified, then why did Plocher feel the need to dunk on him with such transparent lies?
I find in lots of discussions of matters of which I know little, such as climate alarmism and Project 1619 to name just a few, that one side trots out more ridiculous lies than the other. It doesn't tell me which side has the best technical arguments, but it does tell me which side has so little confidence in their own arguments that they have to lie, commit fraud, and obfuscate the facts.
My instinct is to side with those who do not resort to pounding the table.
"Dunk on him with such transparent lies" is a hyperbolic criticism for how someone in the community wants to engage in the feedback process for the presidential candidates. It's not how you would provide feedback, but Dr. Plocher is free to express his own concerns in the way he'd like as long as we're a free country, and the Board can do as they please with them. Is your proposal that he is not allowed to say something without your prior blessing? Otherwise, it seems pretty obvious in your view already, and others, that it was a weak argument against his candidacy and wasn't going to hold weight regardless. So why not let someone express their views and let them have them be dissected openly? In the grand scheme of things it was unlikely to provide a final decision for or against, and there is yet to be any evidence that Dr. Beaulier was "canceled" or the decision came down to this one old paper as a student.
I'm unfamiliar with the academic field of climate extremism. Could you explain that field with some clear examples of experts in it? I haven't heard of any doctorates being granted in it or research in the field.
“Otherwise, it seems pretty obvious in your view already, and others, that it was a weak argument against his candidacy and wasn't going to hold weight regardless.”
On what possible basis do you claim that Plocher’s argument “wasn’t going to hold weight regardless”?
Particularly well expressed.
Although surely you and I are the only ones who follow AK’s bromide that “we choose what to believe based on whom we believe”, while Xavier here is above such pettiness.
To be clear, I actually found his initial arguments somewhat persuasive, but they quickly - especially his comment to your comment here - devolved into attacks on the character and claims of anyone who would suggest that anything at all amiss here occurred.
After all, since there is no smoking gun proof that getting a FISA warrant based on a false dossier funded by the Democrat party affected the 2016 election, or that publishing a dishonest piece claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and telling social media companies to censor information like the true Hunter Biden laptop story caused Trump to lose the 2020 election, therefore these weren’t problems anyone should be concerned with or worried by.
This is one of the big reasons people don't trust academia anymore; they get the sense it's a partisan propaganda factory, and increasingly they're right.
lol - *only* “increasingly”? 😏
There was a lot of politicization but it didn't hit the hard sciences until recently.
It’s been in “climate science” for decades, and in medical science for a while now.
But climate science aside, if by “recently” you mean only the last 15 years, I can accept that.
Of course academia - your initial claim - is much more than just the hard sciences and much more than just research. Most of academia has been politicized for decades. And yes the degree of politicization has accelerated and gotten much worse in the last 15-20 years.
Right, that's my point, the hard sciences weren't contaminated until recently. The humanities and social sciences fell a long time ago, more or less in the sixties. I've heard philosophy holds out.
I do think the 'climate science' thing is real, though--every year I see more and more hurricanes, and the winters are milder. As Derbyshire said ages ago, some things are true *even though* the Party says so.
My father-in-law worked with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients. One of the symptoms of leprosy is the inability to feel pain. Hollywood treats this as a superpower. In reality, it’s a curse. Imagine not knowing that you’ve placed your hand on a hot stove until you smell your flesh burning. Pain is the best friend that no one wants.
Government and doting parents can create a sort of moral leprosy by severing the link between action and consequence. We do no one any favors by placing the burden of destructive and self-destructive acts on the backs of others. By doing so, we reduce the benefits of acting responsibly and the consequences of doing the opposite.
This is an assertion..."The subpar decision-making of the poor is fact; see our cites. The “consequences of structural injustice” is dogma." ...
It's not based on any proof. It's based on ignoring evidence to the contrary and elevating supporting evidence.
There is a giant hole in the minds of right wingers when it comes to human nature that allows them to confidently make claims like this.
It's a bullshit move to accuse them of canceling him because he told the truth if they genuinely believe he is wrong. And they have good reason to believe he is wrong.
The negative effects of stress and deprivation on individuals and populations when it comes to a vast array of mental and physical health issues are well known and undeniable. Included in those is decision making.
You didn't provide any proof that you claim "right wingers" should have provided. Your claim itself is nothing but an assertion.
My proof for this is your own comment's assertive lack of proof.
LOL
You didn't read the paper did you?
I did. Did you? It does exactly what I said... It ignores evidence to the contrary and elevates supporting evidence. It only looks at perverse incentives and says nothing about the effects of stress and deprivation.
"And if society demonstrably did so treat the poor, the rational response for the poor would be extra caution, not imprudence."
Yes, that would be the *rational* response but human beings aren't rational. More importantly, the poor in aggregate trend towards the lower end of the IQ scale. There's an argument to be made that their imprudence is a manifestation of that statistical reality, not a moral failing.
But part of the "cure" is not coddling them; not rewarding bad behavior with more welfare. You don't train a dog or cat to not pee or poop at random by petting and hugging them when they do pee or poop at random. You can't help the poor learn to be responsible by giving them welfare regardless of how they misbehave.
I realize that's the "common sense" answer, but the reality is that there is currently no effort to do much of anything to teach people how to be better outside of church. Everyone dismisses any effort to change that as not being their problem, or that its up to the parents but that's precisely the issue: in many cases these children are essentially raising themselves.
Do you have a solution? I posted my answer: stop coddling them. The government makes it too easy for the lazy and unambitious to take the government dole, then use their spare time to be obnoxious to the society that is supporting them, by shoplifting, using the streets for toilets, begging for money they use to get drunk or high, protest George Floyd, and so on.
Stop coddling them. There are charities who do take care of the truly unfortunate who do try to behave, and there are lockups for those who refuse to behave — but only if they are prosecuted.
Something got lost there. I was specifically speaking about welfare without responsibility or accountability. Nothing to do with swindles, and your last paragraph is all about what you want, nothing about what I said about coddling lazy people.
But that is exactly the argument of the paper. The poor make worse decisions for exactly the reasons you mentioned, so welfare programs should take that into account. They don't phrase it as a moral failing at any point in the paper.
There were three other impressive candidates for the job . Maybe their qualifications were better than this guy and that the objections to him were valid. It could be that simple!
If the other candidates were better, then they need not have resorted to such specious objections to eliminate the weakest candidate. Conversely, the fact that they did resort to such specious objections indicates he was the strongest candidate.
I have followed Dr. Beaulier's career and wondered whether his libertarian inclinations would at some point stall his career rise. It's disgusting but predictable that they eventually did. At most mainstream universities, dean of the business school may be your ceiling if you're identifiably libertarian or conservative, and you can hope for that only at the most tolerant of the mainstream schools, no matter how great your qualifications.
Maybe he can land a big job in Florida. He seems like a very able guy.
Like you, I would have loved to see Scott become president of NMU. I couldn't figure out, though, why you thought this one guy killed the deal and, beyond that, why Scott was the one out of the four who would have become president. Are you leaving out information?
While true, the growing economic inequality, the increasing gaps between income and luxuries such as housing, food, and medical care, as well as the insane amount of corruption makes plain the blaming of the victims for their actions while ignoring the circumstances in which they are forced to live in.
I find it suspect that too many people ignore the economic circumstances of the 1950s, 60s, even the 1970 while saying that it is irresponsible behavior that is the cause of poverty. The sheer variety of the kinds of jobs, the higher income compared to the cost of living, and companies that often trained and employed for decades, if not life, not to mention the relative ease of being hired made any foolish decision not only less attractive, but less damaging.
[Bryan, I admire your defence of a friend. As co-author do you still hold all the positions in the 2007 paper? Are you saying Olsen wasn't a good choice? Are you or Scott alleging any specific unfairness in the final selection process, forums, by the trustees, etc?]
I suspect there is another side to this, and the university may have appointed exactly the right kind of manager:
1. Scott has had past success in enrollment growth and graduation rates, launched innovative degree programs, and secured substantial private funding, so he was a worthy finalist in some respects. However, Christopher Olsen was chosen in a unanimous decision. He has 20 years of leadership in higher education, with strengths in strategic planning, enrollment management, student success, distance education, external relationships, and philanthropy. This is not academically flashy, but it's great for sustained thriving. Olsen is noted for his frequent and regular connection with students and collaboration with campus and regional leaders. All this seems like exactly what you would want for a state university! You can hardly say they chose an obviously LESS suitable candidate.
2. They had a long list of 80 candidates and Scott made it to the final four, so this was hardly contemptuous treatment! Are you saying he should get any job he applies for, or that students should have no free speech during selection? or that his past academic work should not be considered?
3. The paper was published in 2007, just before the financial crisis and wealthy banks being massively subsidised by govs - were the same critiques ever applied by Scott to the rich, or are only the poor and women responsible for bad decision-making and taking harmful subsidies?
4. Scott would have been hated and campaigned against by students, who for now still have free speech rights, at least if US citizens. He'd have become a distraction, because of the next point, and the trustees may have just decided that this wouldn't work well for the university. You want your boss to support star profs and students, and not BE a controversial star (except maybe in resisting outside pressures from funders, White House etc?)
I can see that lefty students should not be able to get profs fired for being right wing or exploratory, or censor curricula, but why would you appoint someone who isn't obviously the best suited when they will obviously be hated and controversial from the start?
If you want a right wing leader, create a right wing university - it's not like conservatives don't have money or influence!
5. From your paper [Bryan this is more for others, will be familiar to you, except the first response]
"recipients of government assistance are not just economically disadvantaged—they are behaviorally and cognitively deficient"
[This happens to be my specialism. Permanent harm to the brain in early pregnancy is caused by MATERNAL folate deficiency, anemia, malnutrition, indoor air pollution, toxins from moulds in peanuts and cornflour, if not nixtimalized into tortillas. Conditional cash transfers to women have been super successful in overcoming this in central America, and Chile did well too.]
“the poor are much more prone to engage in such activities [as drug use, crime...] than the rest of the population"
[The truth is they are much more likely to get laced drugs, get caught, get convicted and get jailed, rather than being offered harm reduction and high quality rehab]
“by giving the poor material support, we discourage them from getting jobs, acquiring experience, and eventually pulling themselves up by their bootstraps”
[This has now been disproven, especially by non US economists and UBI research. We could rehearse the arguments but I'm sure we'll still disagree, so it seems pointless.]
"Giving money to the poor reduces their incentive to enter the workforce, acquire experience, and eventually join the middle class."
[Now disproved, thanks also to UBI research and research on prevention of stunting at birth and cost-effective, empowering solutions for that.]
"what can any one individual do about structural injustice?"
[Not much - that's why we build movements and oppose trickle down economics and racist policies and injustice.]
Your framework ambiguously assumes that limiting the poor’s choices improves their welfare—an untestable proposition without data on subjective well-being or revealed counterfactuals.
Several economists note that you misapply behavioral economics.
The claim that the poor display greater “pathological” behavior is criticized as relying on outdated, correlational data. Risk aversion, time discounting, and impulsivity can result from poverty-induced scarcity rather than innate deficiency. Thus, your argument reverses causality: poverty produces behavioral anomalies, not the reverse.
Invocation of IQ as a mediating factor between policy and behavior is empirically weak.
Many interpret the paper as ideological rather than scientific. It rearticulates long-standing conservative critiques of the welfare state under a behavioral-economics veneer. Scholars argue this marriage of behavioral economics and libertarian moralism cherry-picks psychological evidence to rationalize austerity: as I suggested, when biases are found among the poor, paternalism is justified; but when biases appear among policymakers or elites, laissez-faire remains sacrosanct. This asymmetry contradicts behavioral political economy, which finds elite, bureaucratic, and voter irrationalities equally potent.
I know you addressed this, but you still seems to blame all pregnancy on bad decisions by "lower IQ women" and absolve men completely from decision-making responsibility.
"when biases are found among the poor, paternalism is justified; but when biases appear among policymakers or elites, laissez-faire remains sacrosanct."
You have this backwards, the welfare state is paternalism, getting rid of it would be laissez-faire.
As far as the latter, and your comment in #3, Caplan was pretty strongly opposed to bailouts and subsidies.
“He'd have become a distraction, because of the next point, and the trustees may have just decided that this wouldn't work well for the university.”
I won’t really comment on the rest. But you DO understand that this sentence is the “heckler’s veto” saying that universities must be forever leftist and further leftist, because… universities are leftist.
From the rest of your comment you don’t seem as either illogical or hyperpartisan as this point implies, but rather you seem like a run of the mill, well-meaning person of the ideological left.
Now perhaps my last speculation is incorrect. If so, moot since you will ignore this. But if true, you might want to consider separating whatever wheat you have in your push-poll questions from the chaff, of which my quoted sentence most surely is part.
How does “UBI research” disprove the notion that giving $ to the poor, only because they are poor, “reduces their incentive to enter the workforce”?
Isn’t the point of the U in UBI to eliminate this very effect?
No, it is not.
If you have more income, for most people it reduces the incentive to acquire more.
Most “UBI” research (as opposed to what a true UBI implementation in law would be) does not give money to everyone, as it happens, due to cost. But even if it did, the relevant subjects under study here are the poor.
The U is there because the proponents believe that in a rich country everyone should get some minimal standard of consumption, regardless of capabilities, work ethic, situation they are born with, disabilities, etc., etc., etc.
It is decidedly *not* about eliminating the disincentive to work.
Thank you for clarifying. The UBI research to which you refer is, therefore, just BI research:
It neither gives $ to everyone nor removes other benefits or income that those in the sample receive only because they are poor.
First, to be clear, I do *not* support a UBI, which IMO would be bad public policy even if it replaced other welfare benefits, and very bad when it would not. But I acknowledge that one could at least make a case for such a UBI.
Second, I agree with you that for a *law* or actual policy proposal to be able to be truthfully called UBI, then the benefits would indeed need to be universal. Though while you and I would agree that doing a UBI without replacing most other welfare benefits would be very unwise and a poor use of taxpayer dollars, it need not be implemented that way to legitimately be called UBI.
But you are conflating *research* about the effects of a theoretical future UBI law/program with an actual law. One can do research on the latter without having the law in effect, and said research can be reasonable if it has a proper control group which does not get the benefits to compare to the group that does get the benefits.
In terms of such research, people quite obviously and reasonably only care about whether there is sufficient positive impact on the poorest among us in order to make the obviously large expenditure for such a program worthwhile. So a trial need not give the benefits to “all”, and specifically need not bear the extra cost of giving the benefits to those with high incomes, in order to be both valid and worthwhile.
And all of that is completely separate from the OG point that no UBI proposal has ever had as its goal to eliminate work disincentives. Even its staunchest advocates understand that it has a disincentive effect; they just believe that the benefits to society of such policy outweigh the disadvantages.
Never heard of the university. It is rather poorly ranked.
> Suppose, for example, that society treated you very unjustly. The sensible reaction is, “The deck is stacked against me, so I should be extra careful,” not “Maybe I should have a non-marital birth?” or “Maybe I should heavily use alcohol?”
Depends on *how specifically* the society treats you unjustly.
For example, imagine a society that pays everyone UBI that depends on whether they are sober or drunk. Sober people get $100 a day, drunk people only get $20 a day. But the society treats *you* unjustly and gives you $20 a day regardless of whether you are sober or drunk. In such society it makes more sense for you to get drunk than for others, because your marginal cost of getting drunk is smaller.
Similarly, if the society penalizes you (or rewards you less) for being careful, then being extra careful would be the opposite of what your comparative advantage suggests you should do.
The assertion that humans live - or should live - their lives based on what the most “sensible” (subjective) choice is at any given time (whether rich or poor) is completely delusional. We have decades of research in multiple fields showing that this isn’t the case. Your idea that you are simply more “rational” than a poor person is completely irrational.
I shared this post on the Northern Michigan University subreddit to see what they'd say: https://www.reddit.com/r/nmu/comments/1ockpmh/the_antiintellectual_northern_michigan_university/
Kind of surprising that they all just said they don't like Beaulier's claims in the paper, and *not one* person addressed Bryan's point about anti-intellectualism, that rejecting his candidacy on the basis that they don't like the claims without actually arguing against them is anti-intellectual:
"[M]any readers will find some of our arguments less than convincing. But you should still be repelled by Plocher’s — and NMU’s — utterly anti-intellectual response. This really is akin to responding to arguments for atheism with, “They insult the eternal glory of God.” If human beings can dismiss academic arguments merely because they lead to politically unwelcome conclusions, what’s the point of having academic arguments about politically-charged subjects?"