before we start the show a quick thank you to all of you who have participated in the listener survey now if you haven't filled that out yet there's still some time left so if you'd like to help out the show and be entered to win a special gift from Tyler visit marcus.org [Music] survey conversations with Tyler is produced by the MARC Center at George
Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at or cis.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations with tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with Brian Kaplan professor of Economics at George Mason University a very good friend of mine a
moral man each of his last three books has made a Major Impact most recently the bestselling the case against education welcome Brian thanks so much for having me buddy let me start with a sentence you uttered to me I guess a week ago and you just said to me quote no single Paper is that good what did you mean by that yeah what I meant by
that is that if you look at any individual peace and social science specifically it's very hard to see that a reasonable person would fundamentally Chang their mind based upon any one of them so you know people often have an idea of like there's the really good papers where you should have a mind quake and you never see the world again
in the same way after that and for me like all of them like fail to measure up to that standard and I think the way that you really learned something is by reading a very a vast empirical literature and you know sort of the the direct cause of this was I think Noah Smith had a challenge like name the two or three papers on each topic that are
really convincing and I was thinking about that so honestly I can't think of really any papers like that I mean unless you're going to sheet and just count a literature view as being that kind of a paper so you know just realizing that the way that you actually achieve social science knowledge isn't by finding the one crucial you know
natural experiment that shows exactly how the world works but by assembling a wide variety of evidence and then meddling through so say you write an interdisciplinary chapter for one of your books tell us a little more how you do this and how you calibrate what you're reading against actual Reality by procedure which I've been you pursuing
more and more as I go along is you know you first of all you like start with a big topic right and then just you know usually using Google Scholar just try to find so what has anyone written on this big topic and you know like go through like the first 20 or 30 pages of Google Scholar views but then that to me just
gives you a ballpark of what's really going on then I try to subdivide that like every topic into lots of separate subtopics and then repeat that same process of going through Google Scholars to see like you know what is it that almost anyone has said about this topic and then when I actually get the papers then I actually will go and look at the
references and see is there more stuff that I should be looking at here and then I get those papers and go back to Google Scholar and you know eventually the process does converge so I do have have some stopping rules for like you know generally don't worry too much about empirical Papers written before 1980 and you also then email the people
who've done this research right tell us about that when I'm going through and reading papers often times I'll find that there's something I just don't understand very well or something that seems is questionable and then usually as long as the authors are living I do try to actually reach out to them and get clarifications but then you know the
next thing is when I've got what I think is is a good solid draft of a book that's where I enlist my ra and say get me all the emails of all the living people I've cited in the book so far and then you know email all of them with two offers one of them is an offer to show them the entire manuscript but the other
one so that I'm not over on the far right side of the laugher curve say or if you're busy then I I could just tell you the exact Pages where I discuss your work so at least you can tell me whether I'm accurately summarizing your work or not and again for me you know like what I do is so interdisiplinary I'm always
worried about this autodex curse where you've read a ton of stuff but you still haven't actually talked to anyone who knows what's going on and this is one of the things that I try to do to deal with you know especially like you know the wisdom of a field oftentimes there's wisdom in a field where it's known to people who have thought about it for a
long time but they just don't write it down and of course that's very hard for the autoi to find out what is the in your field that you don't write down and again this is where I try to reach out to people and generally I would say I get about you 15% response rate for people saying they'll at least read
something so I feel like it does give me some good quality control now one area you you've read a lot in but I think never quite focused on is personality psychology what's the most interesting thing you've learned from personality psychology wow yeah so I do have one paper on this you know Stigler Becker versus Myers Briggs let's see the single
most interesting thing about personality psychology one thing that that I think it might be a good answer is that cheerfulness loads on extroversion right cheerfulness loads on extroversion there's something actually very social about happiness and then when you read this it makes you know makes so much sense how little of Happiness seems to
be about material possessions and how much of it is about having good relationships with other people and even just think about animals like when I read this I think about animals like like the animals that laugh they're all social animals like dogs laugh chimpanzees laugh humans laugh like you never hear about like a tiger laughing
these very asocial animals so you know that's at least that's one that's that I often do think about is this connection between social interaction and being happy so now let's go back in time a bit and just try to figure out how did Brian Kaplan come to be Brian Kaplan so you grew up in the Valley North of Los
Angeles in a town called Northridge how did that specific location influence you and help shape what you've become yeah I know that you like to say that I'm a regional thinker just like all people are Regional thinkers I mean when I go back it's easier to see what was going on when you know like honestly no offense to my friends out in North
Bridge but when I get there it's like wow this is just such an intellectual Wasteland no one want to talk about ideas out here there's no curiosity it's again it's so insular where people just are not curious I mean even what's going on outside of the State of California I mean it's not just like we only care about America Californians talk about
California all the time you know like when you read the newspapers there it's like what's happening in California you to me it's a lot like when you're in Canada it's like every like what's happening in Canada like well why is that important but you know just this like this Naval gazing aspect of Californians so and I mean I see a lot
of what I'm doing is reacting against that and just being you know being you know very intellectually curious and very interested in the world although you not so much IM me's reaction is just like it does explain why I felt so dissatisfied growing up and you remember this is before the internet so you know just to go to the library and be able to
get a good stack of books was the best that you could do in those days for intellectual enrichment so it was really just to Envy my kids for like what a cornucopia of wonder that they have if they want to Feast the Mind Michael humer who is he and why is he important especially for you but not only so Michael humer is a professor of
philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder I actually met him my freshman year at Berkeley when we were both undergraduates in Paul fire Robbins ancient philosophy class which by the way is the only class so bad I ever just stopped attending you know like he just didn't talk about ancient philosophy he only wanted to talk about action at a
distance and how is that possible but anyway the so you I met Michael humer there and U you know out of all philosophers I like he came to have the biggest influence on me there were just you know there you know many issues that I was grappling with a lot of it under the influence of Ein Rand where you know the more I learned the philosophy the
more dissatisfied I became and yet I couldn't think of anything else that made any sense and you Mike humor as a student wrote a bunch of essays that said wow this seems like it really actually solves a fundamental problem of philosophy in a way that's just so much more satisfying than any of the others so you like he was very big influenc me
there and then over time like he really you know he really buil on this so he now has this amazing Corpus work so I mean for politics he has this book the problem political Authority which out of all the books of libertarian philosophy almost every single one if if there were some non- libertarian who said you know
what's a good book to read I'd be kind of embarrassed to give him the book because here it is but it's like not really very convincing to someone that doesn't already agree and again what's great about this book really all of Mike's work is he always tries to start off with premises that would that make sense to people that don't already agree
and then try to get somewhere and the amazing thing is he does get places actually now a lot of people who grow up you know young with what you might call nerdy interests they read a lot of Science Fiction and you don't seem to have been very interested in science fiction but you were intensely interested in learning about Joseph
Stalin and history of Communism I mean what's the fundamental feature in Brian Kaplan think that has made you unlike most other nerds so much more interested in Stalin than science fiction oh so I was very interested in dictatorship from a from a young age so and this comes from growing up in Northridge right I
don't think so so I me like I had a lot of bad attitudes as a kid and you did yeah well like like I read a book about dictators and I like honestly have to say like I was reading and saying oh this is so cool getting be a dictator right and well there was a lot of pent up hostility and resentment towards the things things as they were and reading
it it's like if only I could be one of these bloodthirsty tyrants then everyone like you it like terrible but uh you know that's that's that's the that's the honest truth of it even like in fifth grade I read this big book like it's just like 10 biographies of different dictators and then when I really got interested though so let's see I like
was very interested in you know European history by when I was in 11th grade put a lot of time reading that but you know it was only later actually when I got into libertarianism that I became interested in first of all not being a dictator and like oh my God these people are actually terrible I mean everybody
knew that but so you know I kind of knew it at the same time you know you sort of sort of like someone who reads True Crime where like on the one hand you know that it's terrible but on the other hand it's like oh it's well but he's so clever oh look always he good to get he almost got away with it like when I became interested in
libertarianism then became interested in the exact opposite and what that's like and that's where stalon is of course a f focal figure as at least up till this time the mo like the most totalitarian leader in human history someone who combined an ideology rationalizing it with a personality that actually craved it combined with the technology that
allowed it to really be done in practice and you know so you that that got me really excited now in terms of like why that rather than science fiction I guess for me the main thing about most science fiction is it lack not all of it you know like most of it you know lacks what I call you know emotional Truth where
there's just not a lot of interest in the inner lives of the characters and to me that's the interesting thing about any story is the inner lives of the characters and you love T story right yeah yeah so you love tol stoy because I mean here's a guy who not only has this encyclopedic knowledge of of human beings you say you know he knows human
nature now he go he know tol Stone knows human Natures he realizes that there are hundreds of kinds of people and like an entomologist he has the patience to study each kind on its own terms tol sto you read it like you know there are 17 kinds of little old ladies this was the 13th kind this was the kind that's very interested in what you're eating but but
doesn't wish to hear about about your romance and would be contrasted with the seventh kind which is exactly the opposite preferences so yeah that's that's what me so great about tol sto I mean to me like pure genre fiction has no appeal and especially anyone who ever tells me that science fiction is good because it's scientifically accurate
this is where like oh God so that's the best you could say for it is that there's no sounded space you know I would much rather watch A Space Opera where the characters have a rich inner life and where there's where where there's drama and where the storytelling sucks you in and makes you care whether the character is disintegrated then
whether the character disintegrates in a scientifically correct way when did you build the Museum of Communism and tell us what that is I did in graduate school when I didn't want to do my real work uh yeah so I spent a lot of time not just in undergraduate but in graduate school reading stuff that was totally at least
mostly a waste of time career-wise but I was really interested in it I had a passion for it and and you remember these are the very early years of the internet when all these suppressed urges that I had to go and pontificate suddenly had an outlet I mean if the internet existed when I was in high school like I might have actually failed
out of high school so I would have put so much energy into creating Pages like this is my take on each of these different topics the first time that the web was working well enough where you could actually do this at least where I where I had enough knowledge to make it work was like 1993 or 1994 and then then to me I me I I put you know I think more
time into my internet projects than into my actual studies counting class time and everything else so we know the Museum of Communism this is one where I wanted to go and to put together all of my thoughts about the history of Communism so meaning I would say that it's maybe like 7% done so any but know like almost all that 7% was done during
my graduate school years you know I had you know so I mean the parts that actually I I really completed so I had sections on the Marxist and zaris origins of Communism you which is you building on Rich historical literature obviously there's the Marxist Roots but then people saying that there's you a lot of continuities with Zar ISM and
that made a lot of sense to me in sort of thinking of Lenin as being the Marxist Zar of all the russas and then I had you know a fact or FAQ frequently asked questions where I went over what was known about the numbers of the time so I mean since then I I've learned quite a bit more about you know about the numbers especially numbers for
death and the goog seem that then the literature of the time overstated by by quite a bit but you know I've never gone back and updated but uh so I mean obviously that would be something that I would do is you know bring it up to date with better data that we've got now now let's turn to your new book the case
against education why the education system is a waste of time and money one theme you you stress throughout are the costs of excess credentialism so to be hired as a bartender maybe it's a real advantage to have a college degree and this encourages too many people to go to college but at the same time there seems to be a waste of talent and a lot of
bureaucracy and paper credentials hard to get Second Chances and so on what deeper disease about our society do you think excess credentialism reflects that is if you try to explain it almost as an anthropologist like here's why we're really so screwed up to done this what's your answer Le at least a big part of it
is what psychologists call Action bias and the idea that it's just we just ought to do something right so you know you people take a look at the world and they see look there's a bunch of people that don't have very good jobs there's a bunch of kids from those families it seems like they're probably going to turn out like like their parents let's
do something about it let's go and create a big education system and encourage everyone to spend as many years as possible in the system and then in the end of course the hope is that this will lead to not just social Mobility but to just a whole society where almost everyone has a really good job and yet again like you know if my book
is right the main result seems to be not that everyone gets good jobs or at least every college graduate gets a good job but rather employers ratchet up the educational expectations to be considered worthy to be a secretary or going to be a bartender at a nice bar and you think in our society and general this action bias infests everything or
is there some reason why it's drawn like a magnet to education yes well so I mean I think it's specifically it's drawn you know like action bias primarily drives government so again for individuals I mean I think there even there there's some action bias but nevertheless for the individual there is the cost of just
going and trying something that's not very likely to succeed and the connection with the failure and disappointment and like you know a lot of things don't work out you know there's a lot of people who would like to start their own business but they don't try because they have some sense that it's really hard and what I see in
government is there isn't the same kind of filter because you know which is a big part of my work in general in politics you don't have the same kind of personal disincentives against doing things that sound good but or but actually don't work out very well in practice and again especially probably even bigger than actually bias actually
is what psychologists call social desirability bias you know just doing things that sound good whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice and again I think of this as primarily a disease of government because it's so based upon
what people say rather than trying to do a comparison between what we thought was going to happen and what actually you know how things actually turned out but your book on parenting that also criticize his action bias parents think they need to do all kinds of things they actually don't so it's not just government it's like we all human beings
so kind of the straussian verion of the capian themes is the whole world is infested with action bias and that if you understand action bias at a deep level for decisive actions for non- decisive actions rational irrationality kicks in and you have like two blades the scissors and you put them together and you can then explain a 2018 yes no
that sounds oversimplified but yeah I mean you you are right that parents feeling like it's really important for them to do things when they don't do things this is going to mess their kids up I think you know I think that that that is a big part of what makes parenting so unpleasant in the modern US is the sense of if I'm not acting all
the time to go and help my kids out then I'm a failure and my kids will be failures there is a lot more going on than just those things like in in general my work is you unlike say Robin I do have a resistance to like monocausal things and explanations that seem like they're over Brad I do try to narrow it down and think about you know
things one thing at a time and again my general view is you got a better General theory of things if you work on a lot of particular issues first and then step back like we're doing now and say you know are there some commonalities am I correct in thinking that a lot of existing papers on the social return to education or the private return they
neglect the fact that a high percentage of students drop out uh yeah actually this is you overwheling result in fact see there's maybe about seven papers in economics that specifically interact completion probability with the rate of return out of how many would be the total pool roughly thousands I only yeah so and what causes that bias to
come about yes so here's the here's the key thing there's a lot of papers on completion probability but they are generally segregated from the rate of return so a lot of people trying to figure out how can we get the rate of return up how can we get the rate of or rather how can we get completion probability up how can we
get completion probability up and of course the reason if you say well why do you want to get completion probability up for an economist like well so we can get the expected rate of return up but meanwhile over in the realm where they're doing the rate of return they usually do it the wrong way which is by looking at the payoffs for people
successfully complete you mean the most superficial story is just that people do it because the data is constructed that way because normally the measure of Education that economists use asks what is the highest number of years of school that you successfully completed and then they just run the regression and kind of
forget exactly what what the measure even is but you know I think this does reflect a general pro-education bias especially among people economists who work in education labor economists education economists where they aren't they just aren't looking that hard for reasons that educ a might be might be overrated and how much does
non-completion risk lower the return to education how much does this bias matter wow so let's see of course it varies a lot by the level so you know for high school then then it's modest so may maybe reducing it by something like 30 30% but you know but on the other hand for college the where the completion probability is a lot lower
than it is for high school then I think it's getting it you know reducing it by 40 maybe even 50% again it's it's it's one where it's where it's not where where there's nonlinearity and so it's hard just to do the the simple back of the envelope but the G remember is not only you so like the ontime completion rate for four for
full-time students doing four-year degrees something like 40% and overall yes and you key the remember is you know since there's also this big literature on the sheepkin effect saying that that a lot of the payoff for college most of the payoff comes from graduation year this means that if you if you only get three years you don't get three4 of the
payoff you get Maybe maybe 15% of the payoff and overall if we look at higher education just the first four years or one hopes it's only four years or one hopes that it is four years what percentage of that time do you think is best explained by the signaling hypothesis yeah so my my general best guess overall is about 80% in the book I
actually you use a constant number at least for high school on it's one where on the one hand you know it seems like there's more obviously useless things in college but on the other hand you're also more likely to find a major that will into your actual job so at least it's not obvious to me that the right number is different from 80% so that's
what I'll go with and what do you think is your single best piece of evidence for your view that it's 80% so let's see for just for your view that it's high not exactly 80 the single best piece of evidence there is just to look at the curriculum so you like there's data on how people actually spend their time in high school but you break broken down by
course material and you know for college there isn't the same kind of data but there is data on just the distribution of Majors again just to see the small amount of K through2 time spent on any kind of studying that seems plausibly to be future job related and then simil in college to see just the the rareness of
Majors that are that are plausibly vocational meum you there's a lot of people saying well I mean hardly anyone is doing your traditional Humanities anymore you know like like there not many people doing history or or English anymore but again this doesn't mean they're switching to stem and you know there they're switching things more like
Communications where you like at first glance you might think it's Vo Until you realize how few jobs there are in that field compared to the number of people that are graduating with that major every year now let me put on the table a number of reasons why some people including often myself haven't agreed with you as to why signaling is so
important and I'll give you the last word in each case so I'm just go through a bunch of these if we look at say Singapore and South Korea they have maintained World leading positions for their economies often in Fairly Advanced areas could they have done anything like this with say the levels of Education they had in 1980 yeah I think that I
don't see what the problem would have been at all I mean so I mean like again most of the education they're getting is stuff that they're not going to be using their jobs they may have a higher percentage in stem so it may be may not be as wasteful as what we're doing but you like you know you know the material that they actually are studying in
school is not very related to the job and the way that people get good at their jobs in those countries just like almost any country is you know learning by doing so the main thing going on is that they are spending years that jumping through hoops in order to finally be allowed normally I hate it when people go and find one new story is
prove of something but there was a recent one from South Korea so vivid where even if you say that it is cherry-picked still like that you there that such a cherry exists says something so this was a story about South Korea wanted to hire four janitors and most of the applicants had college degrees and in the end they hired four Bas and one
AA to be janitors there so you like this disease of credential inflation seems to be serious in countries where people think uh of the educationist having been Central to their success I don't think so now we would all agree most workers don't go back to school some do of course but most of them don't but wages
change a lot over the course of a worker's lifetime so if the signal from education is fixed and then wages are changing for many decades I mean doesn't most of the wage story have to be human capital Theory rather than signaling Theory yeah so of course you know the obvious story for change is just the people are requiring more experience
that I mean again like you could have a signal you know you could have a a strong version of the signaling model where you have an idea about first of all average productivity and then you have an idea about average productivity gain and then there's not much connection at all I think I don't think that's right but again what I would say
is uh you know like you know it is reasonable to think the signaling share goes down over time and there is evidence this is so however that you know like how how quickly does it go down and by how much and that's where you know there is a whole literature called you know the employer learning statistical discrimination literature
where they do try where they do try to measure this and you like usual view there is that you know at minimum you're talking about a 10year weight before you start getting reasonable credit even for your IQ which is one of the easiest and most observable most testable traits that employers value so you know it makes perfect sense to me there's a lot
of other traits where it may take a very long time furthermore you know so as you know as I say in the book If the model if the model of actual employment in the real world were hire someone see if they're good and then if they're not as good as you thought fire them you know then I think your story make a lot more
sense but like like the way that actual you know jobs usually work is when you get someone's disappointing they have to be really bad to get fired unless there's recession and if you do want to get rid of them it's much more common for there to be a little conspiracy between the bad employee and the employer to help the bad employee get
another job someplace else as I found doing the research of the book there's even a special word for this in what I call the termination Community the spe the group of people who specialize in in firing they call this de hiring no we're not firing you we're de hiring you we're encouraging you to find an opportunity elsewhere where you can become somebody
else's problem so again like once you once you realize this is actually a big part of the modern labor market the idea that someone could basically go from one job or there a burden to another job or there a burden to another one let me pursue the speed of learning question because it's important let's say you've hired someone or you have a new
colleague or you have a new co-author how long does it take you to figure out how good they are yes H so for my own purposes that's easy because for me the main value of a colleague is lunch so it takes one lunch because I'm I'm judging so well one lunchin started coming to our lunches and you were telling me within a
week how great he was right and you have not wavered since yes because I'm not you there's not a lot of inference in what I care about you know on the other hand if you're you know if you're employer running a business it's not primarily about whether you like the person although that's important too it's like what they actually contribute
to productivity and again there you know there there's issues with figuring out how much someone is part of a team but again like sort of like the key thing out of this whole literature on actual firing and de hiring is that there is a there there's even after the employer has full information this is not mean it's going to be reflected in wages
anytime soon that can that can take a lot longer because you know people people don't like firing and they often conspire to help a worker that they don't like to get another job where once again they're overpaid and then the way that actual pay pay his handle out and is very unusual to do an absolute pay cut so really you know very unusual to
even give give a person zero raise if other people are getting raises so these are all things that really slow things down so even after you've handled the purely intellectual problem of how good is the person there's this other problem over right how quickly does the system actually react to it and how well does
that information disperse throughout the system talk me out of this dilemma if the speed of learning is very quick let's say you know in three months how good a worker is it seems implausible that you would need 12 plus years of schooling to learn the same thing if the speed of learning is very slow let's say you need 10 years to figure out who's
good and who isn't then it seems educational signaling is actually highly productive because it helps you slot the better workers into the better jobs so you can kind of pick your poison but you've got to choose somewhere on the Spectrum and either way it seems the cost of signaling won't quite be that high or am I wrong uh yeah you're wrong
uh so you you know let's let's just take it for granted that that at the end of three months any employer can know the truth about any worker there's still a big problem which is what has to happen before you can work for someone for three months you have to be hired what has happen before you before you're hired you have to actually you know
stand out in interview what has to happen to stand out in the interview you have to get interviewed and what has to happen to get interviewed you have to have your resume not thrown in the trash so you know I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just they're signaling to get opportunities they're signaling get a time to actually talk to
the employer and convince them that they are worthy you so I mean I I mean I sort I really much like the analogy of getting your big break in Hollywood you know there are a lot of actors right now I think who are really good but until they actually get a chance to star in a movie it's it's very hard for them to
convince anyone that they have that they have this Talent you know they can go and show up to try to get an audition but again like just to get enough of people's attention to show them and to and to get them to put you put put the energy in you and remember like hiring people is really expensive you're taking the time of some of the most valuable
employees at a firm who are the people who need to be there to judge whether the person's good enough and you were distracting them so like youve hire somebody's a disappointment at what percentile does someone have to be before it even is profitable just to fire them and then go back to the go back to the drawing board I mean
obviously someone's at the 45th percentile of expectation you don't want to fire them and go back to the drawing board and maybe you want to go back you know like maybe the 30th the 25th percentile is there so the big cost of hiring someone and and just sorting them out at that stage and the fact that employers are not in the business of
giving chances they're in the business of making money chances are expensive to hand out so the other Strauss in reading of Kaplan is that just labor markets work very very poorly MH yes no so you know like they they work a lot more poorly than a lot of economists think and in different and they work poorly in
different ways than economists think so there's sort of a standard list that economists have of ways that labor markets are messed up like like the number of times people talk Efficiency wages that's that's the real problem how about you know how about the problem of employers don't want to fire people who incompetent how about that problem and
it's not one that sounds very good but it's one that I think is very serious for all the talk that people have about discouraged workers and how unemployment rates understate the severity of the unemployment problem because they're ignoring discouraged workers and I always right sure but what about the megal mancal workers the workers think
they're too good for any job for which they're actually qualified for and they keep searching around and staying in the numbers even though it would be like me claiming to be an unemployed brain surgeon like I'm not an unemployed brain surgeon I'm not a brain surgeon at all you know like in general the world's
more complicated and you like especially you know you know problem here is that you know the behavioral economics Revolution or like psychology economics has not really entered labor economics nearly as much as it should you especially like economists when they do psychology they only read a few parts of psychology and there's a bunch of other
areas they just don't pay much attention to that I think also are leading to some tough results again of course this doesn't mean that you don't have government policies that are amplifying a problem but you like you know sure like you know like anytime you have human beings dealing with each other face to face there's going to be things
that are badly screwed up let me ask a very general question trying to put together your thought as a whole so you're saying across a lot of margins in terms of learning formal education doesn't matter that much right it matters for signaling also in your book selfish reasons to have more kids you're saying at least Within certain margins
of acceptable behavior parenting doesn't matter that much and you believe in both of these two views right schooling doesn't matter that much parenting doesn't matter that much so the way social Customs are carried forward today compared to 1910 or 1950 I mean something has changed that and it's not parenting and it's not schools so again the Deep Stussy in
reading of Brian Kaplan like what is it so in terms of the economy big part of how people get go to their jobs is just by practice like I said and a major difference between practicing today and practicing 100 years ago is there's better kinds of practice to emulate but no not good at their jobs just like social Ms Customs parenting and
schooling in your take don't matter so much so something is changing these that is mostly not parenting and not schooling and they are changing quite a bit right is it like all technology right is the secret reading of Brian Kaplan that you're a technological determinist yeah I don't think so in general so know not a determinist of any
kind you much prefering yeah yeah yeah but you much much prefer you know multi-causal theories or poly causal theories what's going on I would say in terms of like why modern culture is changed these ways the story of just people richer and that makes a big difference I mean I think there's a lot to that so just the way that people are
much more freaked out about Taking Chances with their lives you that seems to me to be a big part of being a rich Society where you just have a lot to lose and also you can live comfortably without risking your life so I mean you know so just being a rich Society I think that matters a lot in terms of other things that you know that that
seem to change just you know the much greater availability of entertainment right so mean this is something that I think has has replaced a lot of things that people are doing in earlier periods so I think wide availability of entertainment is probably explains a lot of religion's Decline and it beats the influence of parents in some ways yeah
right and again so like another thing is that this is something you can get out of Judith Harris is that it can be that individual parents don't matter but if there's an entire generation of parents that are a certain way that can matter a lot and that wouldn't be picked up by the standard by stand empirical methods
so again like if you had a couple of weird parents today then you might still turn out to be a normal member of adult Society but on the other hand if you were raised in society where all the parents were very different probably a very different outcome I remember Judith Harris had an example in her book where
there were some Orthodox Jewish parents who decided to move to Israel to live on a caboots because they said look as long as we're in America we can't control our kids we got to go to a place where all the kids are controlled by parents like this so we have we have basically blocked out the outside world so culture at large really matters a lot indiv
idual cultural decisions hardly matter at all so you're kind of flipping the Ein ran story it's really like the big macroaggregates that persuade people as expressed through entertainment business practices and wealth but individualistic efforts they're kind of puny and you know H they don't matter so much rand's view is actually very similar to mine
remember she was angry about the world because she thought that most people were heavily influenced by their cultures that outraged her that just cuz you grow up in the culture of Russia that you're a Russian right and she's there saying no you like I don't care where you are you should be you know you know you should be an Aristotelian
doesn't matter what like so so what so what you're born in Moscow or you have this background we should all be reading reading the you know the great works and the great minds especially me for her of course and you know your background shouldn't matter very much but the reason she wrote about this is she looked around and saw that people are
generally very conformist Fountain Head the the secondhands the people who form their views of of of of what what is Meaningful based upon looking around at others and she didn't write about this because she thought it was rare she wrote about this because she thought it was normal but terrible right and very much they like at least in in the in the
same ballpark for me you know like you know so I you know while you know I am very individualistic but of course if this were the normal thing there be like everyone else would be doing it and then there wouldn't be anything special about me doing it you like you in a way if you don't think that culture is really
important it's hard to be an individualist because then you aren't different from other people now let's talk about education policy let's say we agree with your basic take on education so there's educational failures there are connected labor market failures and the question is what should we do about this so what if someone came to you and
said well take South Korea Government there spends relatively little subsidizing higher ed but signaling costs are high in Germany the whole system is more or less free people you know they go on strike if they're asked to pay 10 marks or 10 euros a semester and in Germany a lot of the universities are mediocre but the German economy does
fine so isn't the solution to Too Much signaling in a sense to nationalize the sector and lower quality and get people less interested in it yeah so I think this is a classic case where there's multiple mided variables so when someone says look you know the government funds it all but they don't spend very much
and so the way to get spending down is for government to increase spending you know I think that is one of the strangest inferences I've I've heard in social science so like you know government spending is generally going to be piled on top of whatever whatever other spending is there so we see that there's countries where where like the
total spending is low but government spending at all wouldn't say the shows that government spending reduces spending I'd say that government is spending in countries were otherwise they're just the private demand would have been lower on its own you know in terms of but this is especially here for America so like like in the US you know
like a fun fact you know you know it seems like the US basically spends as much as a share of GDP on Medicare plus Medicaid taking care of a small part of the population as a lot of other countries do taking care of the whole population so you might look and say wouldn't it be great if we just did what other countries did and I said well is
what other countries do to spend in an American style for everybody or is it to go and spend in the style of other countries on everybody again so I think what would happen in the US or really almost any country that were to follow your advice is that they would just have even more spending so again like especially like at the us if the US had
government like like took socialized medicine we wouldn't have we wouldn't even have Medicaid for all we would have Medicare for all Americans would be horrified at the idea of anyone getting anything less than the very best treatment and the Cry of death panels is has enormous residents here so General Point government subsidies Inc gen
increase spending if it seems like they don't it's probably because you haven't looked closely enough have K through2 vouchers underperformed and in general how do you interpret that data I would say yes so this actually barely appeared in my book because it was was not really Central to any of the topics I was
talking about but my understanding of research on K through2 vouchers is a lot of people thought that they would substantially raise standardized test scores and it's hard to see a big gain there now you know again this is puzzling because it sure seems like there's way better ways to improve test scores starting obviously with just
teaching the test right which um you know many people say people teaching the test all the time and whenever I actually look at my kids school is like what are you talking about there's like three practice tests if I wanted to teach the test there would be a 100 practice test that's how I would would handle it if you told me get test scores
up but again I think the main thing that we learned from this is that most parents don't care about test scores when you give them a choice they aren't looking around for the school that will raise kids test scores the most they're looking around for for other things you know like part of it is this convenience or location again probably another big
part of is whether the kids are happy so I'd say that I think I think we agree this is actually one of the most undervalued benefits of school choice is just giving kids some options so that kids that are that are crying and miserable at one school can go and take that money and go to another school now if there's overinvestment in education
you talk about changing or getting rid of some subsidies could you imagine there being a role for government and making the signal more continuous or more convexified so for inance you could allow federal funds for certificates rather than just degree programs you could imagine governmental nudges to give people a three-year
option A two-year option there are a lot of one-year alternatives to colleges popping up the way two-year Community College could be treated there seems to be a lot we could do but maybe aren't doing to create or produce signaling options that waste fewer resources what should we do there what I would say is you like definitely wor some experiments
right and you like when you're spending orous amount of money you can take off 2% of it and then use standard social science random assignment to really learn something there's been pointed out that like a a high percentage of government spending on healthc care is for medical research but only a very small amount is for of Education
spending is for Education research again like the the main disappointment there is despite all the education research it seems like it's not very often actually used for any kind of education policy medical research you might have a similar pessimism but I don't think it's as bad as that at least it's not as bad as you they being a big literature
saying that highlighting is totally ineffective for improving student learning and yet almost every kid in America still has a highlighter it's actually on the list of mandatory school supplies for Fairfax County you must have a highlighter it's like this is an item that science says you don't need and yet everyone must have one to be at
school are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated absolutely okay let's start with effective altruism yeah underrated why in general when people are thinking about charity it's mostly about feelings and uh you it's it's this very hate to use the word but you know it's a very artistic experience
where people just like it's the warm glow like what is it you know does this make me feel good any effective altruism is all about let's try to get some actual measures of how much good is being done and to raise the status of that so rather than thinking of someone who asks how many lives this going to save as being a Vulcan who doesn't
really care about people to to reframe that no he's someone who cares a lot that's what you would do if you actually cared about people I know that we you know we we talked about this you blogged about it I mean I would just say that remember like most people have never heard of effect of altruism so it's totally underrated relative to almost
anyone else I mean if you were to go and look at the main philanthropic societies the United States how many of them have ever heard of effect of altruism and it's just like some nerdy thing out in the Bay Area so you like the general idea of trying to go and spend money in a way that does the most good and using science in order to accomplish that that
seems Seems great and I you like the idea that this would like isn't a you know a generally good approach seems very very odd to me and of course I do think that once you start thinking in this way it also has all kinds of other good good effects like it makes you realize there's a bunch of things that people in politics are super concerned
with that we should just never worry about again INRI out sense that they're just so small that that we've already spent more mental energy than we ever should and there's a bunch of other things hardly anyone worries about that we should think about a lot Socrates overrated or underrated underrated why yes because of the dialogues the DI the
dialogues like like you this to me is a much better kind of philosophy mean most philosophies is really just a monologue it's just a person going and rambling on and most of them do r Ramble On Without Really Trying to listen to the audience or think about what people in the audience would already know or or find a
starting point and again what socres does is he at least trying to go and talk to his philosophic opponents like they're human beings and find some common ground let's find some premises that we both agree are at least tentatively a good starting point yeah you like the socratic dialogues out of all the stuff in ancient philosophy I
think that is close the top but what what I would enjoy rading and would get something out of Robin Hansen uh underrated of course but highly rated highly highly rated but still underrated just the sheer intellect of Robin for me is still kind of hard to Fathom just so you know just the way that I have told Robin stories
that I've told 100 other people and only he notices a logical error in the story I mean that that to me is super impressive just you know just just you know like the sheer intellectual enthusiasm and you like even though he's so like the the the topics like when you get someone I think of a Sci-Fi topics those are the parts where I am least
happy but again if you just read the blog the range of things that he that Robin has thought about is actually vast right so you know just in terms of breadth and depth and and and just you know just sheer curiosity and I've said said said this quite a few times like when people get really mad at me that doesn't bother me when someone gets
angry at Robin this is what actually outrages me and I just want to say look you know to get angry at Robin is like getting angry at baby Jesus like he is just a symbol and embodiment of innocence and decent and for someone to get angry at someone who just wants to learn and when they get mad at me yes okay camping overrated
or underrated pardon camping camping overrated why social desirability bias It's Getting Back To Nature and enjoying the Great Outdoors but there's a lot of really unpleasant uncomfortable things going on and so you know you can get the good stuff out of the Great Outdoors while staying in a hotel it's kind of thing that people think will work out a
lot better than it actually does in practice so that was actually almost the only vacation I had when I was a kid was camp in and I have some good memories but also like a lot of bad things and again like so much of the good you know the good stuff we could have kept you know 90% of it while cutting rid getting
out getting rid of the bad stuff by staying in a hotel you're sent back in time to the year 527 ad and let's assume you're good enough at learning languages where would you pick and why well 527 H let's see probably Byzantium right so I mean first of all of course that you assuming a good language is but you know so Greek as Western language would
be easier so I think that's that is actually the biggest city in the Western World of the time it's the one where you'd still have a at least a modest amount of Greek and Roman thought which has been preserved really really Center Civilization by that point so you know like I think you would like that would be the place where you're most likely to
have smart people around there's things that you can do with your mind and Al you know you're least likely to get ripped apart by barbarians what would your job be once you've learned the language language is I mean like the temptation to become a government adviser under those circumstances would be would be painfully high as as to
whether I could whether I could actually find find some role there where I where I where I would not be morally horrified this is tough call you like if I could get away would would just just being a teacher like that you say you like would I know than like to actually go and found a school and teach economics uh
you know like 1300 years before the rise rise of modern economics and try to jump start the Industrial Revolution and economic growth and like and social science and everything else that would be like you emotionally that would that would have by far the the strongest pull on me again if that if that weren't available then you like so there's
there's you know room in business so you know banking money lending shipping I think I could learn I think I could learn those wouldn't be thrilled but uh you know not you know it beats rowing in or here's a general question I have for you about what you might call capian approach to things and it starts with
Aesthetics but maybe it doesn't end there if I think about some of the things you you you like or love I think of say 18th century classical music vagari and Opera certain Traditions within graphic novels a number of TV shows one would be Ali G Chinese Opera Gilbert and Sullivan Larry David you could add much more to the list and it's
always seemed to me there's some broadly consistent pattern behind all those tastes but I've never been able to put my finger on what it is and now that we're all here today I would like for you to tell me what that pattern is what's the common theme right so for me the like feel like I have to start between splitting The Comedy Off from
everything else the comedy seems to be very different but like for everything else for anything that presents itself as serious art for you know for me what I would say is I like what some people love if there is something where there is a fan where there's a group of fanatical devoted people who say this is the best thing in the world those are
the kinds of things where at least I'll say I want to try that I want to see what that's like I want and a lot of times when I do this I'll say wow the people who fanatically love it are right this is wonderful there's so much going on and you could spend a Lifetime on this I mean I mean I remember once once you you described some Bach oratorio as
chaff and I said Bach doesn't have any chaff there's no piece of Bach no orator I couldn't profitably spend a month on so I mean like for me like like like anything that especially anything where it's produced by someone who is a megalomaniac who feels like what they're doing is fantastic again I think about you know V's term for his work the the G
the complete artwork you know you know I VNA composed the music I've done the lto I've done the stagings I've done the casting everything this is all reflection of me like those are the kinds of things that pull me in I remember only once I was just wandering past opening day for the Hunger Games which I was not
particularly a fan of but just to see a bunch of people who were in love with something I was happy just looking at them loving this thing in a way that like when I see someone sort of half watching a sitcom in the B like like in like while doing something else that's the kind of thing that depresses me and I just want to go and shut it off like
like if it's worth watching it's worth watching 100% attention and if it doesn't motivate you that way you need to find something else or or else you might be wasting your whole aesthetic life what should we infer from the fact that your sense of the comic is so segregated from the rest of your aesthetic if it is yeah yeah that that one is harder so
again like if I were to go and and just try to list things that I like that I like and comedy a lot of them are very low BR like The Three Stooges is hilarious to me and if someone say but why is the three sto is better than a sitcom that you would turn your nose up at today I would have a trouble having a really good answer like the only is look
the three studentes is sublimely stupid they're taking the stupidity to a level that your mere sitcom writers aren't capable of so and maybe you might say that it is just just the extremism or like the fake that they just take a joke and they run with the idea of a guy in a gorilla suit meeting an actual gorilla
but for me you know you know comedy you know it is much more idiosyncratic so I've said like you know Shakespeare I love except the comedy which just isn't very funny to me I mean I get the joke but like why why especially is that funny you so like like you said you know comedy is more culturally specific and that does make sense to me mean there is
sort of a class of things that I almost certainly won't like like whenever my dad emails me a thing of lawyer jokes and I do say look if you find it funny good odds I won't think it's funny because anyone can understand it but if you say what about the Three Stooges like all right so that isn't really a full Theory but that's almost becoming
hermetic these days the three stoes yeah hopefully I was sent this question earlier this morning and I quote what are the most socially valuable delusions or shared erroneous beliefs unquote yeah that is a good one so I am tempted to say some something along the lines of God will punish you for bad behavior but
again you know the problem is that's mixed in with so many things of the bad behavior is actually good behavior and the good behavior is actually bad behavior that I I'm not convinced that that is actually all that socially useful probably a better answer is the delusion that money will bu happiness so you know like there is an enormous
amount of progress that is caused by people desperately going and trying to get rich and I think the actual psychological evidence is the money won't actually lead to all that much happiness but the things they produce um are quite a bit more likely you know probably in terms of the most happiness producing stuff I you know I think maybe
actually in the Arts where so much of the stuff was produced by people where if they just did a reasonable XT calculation just would have said this isn't worth it but the reason why we have it is because they ignored the odds or just overestimated themselves so maybe that and a followup question from the same Source quote which mistaken shared
beliefs would he like to see adopted H probably the idea there would be you know some kind of Eternal horrible punishment for holding power and not having a very high degree of epistemic rationality so especially if they riew that God hates a politician who who takes any Act without calmly and studiously studying the facts and that
God will punish you in a way that voters never could God will punish you in a way that's far worse than the simple loss of power you know if that were widely believed by people of power I think there would be a lot more effort to actually double check that what they're doing really makes sense and again you know like just you know the Spider-Man
principle with great power comes great responsibility if there were false beliefs in some enormous concrete sanctions for people that violated the Superman principle I think that would be a big our mutual colleague Daniel Klein writes to me a question quote do direct and overall Liberty ever disagree what are
the most likely or important areas of disagreement yeah so I I was amazed that Dan would ask that of course direct and overall Liberty disagree so you like you know if you could just go and kill Baby Hitler right kill Baby Hitler that's great for the freedom of the world but he's just a baby he hasn't done anything
yet right or you know more obviously if in you know say you know like you know say like 1928 if the German government had just rounded up all the Nazis and or at least all the leading Nazis and just executed them without trial I think that would have been a big gain I'm always impressed there was an incident I think around 19 1940 when the Romanian
government just took the me like all the leading leading brass and the Iron Guard which was the main Romanian fascist movement they had a lot of them in jail already and without any warning at all they just sent them out to a forest and they murdered them all right and I read that I said wow all right well um you you probably a bunch of these guys
hadn't done anything yet and yet you know like you like how bad things were Romania if if you know anything about the Iron Guard I think it very likely would have been quite a bit worse so anytime there's like a small number of power hungry people where there's at least a moderate risk that they're eventually going to get to do what they
want just to go and kill them preemptively I think like you know it's that that that's a tough one you know terms uh and then of course once you've got that then if you were to go and do censorship for people like that that's that's another one of the more obvious ones you have a famous piece called the idea trap could you outline how it might
illuminate at least some parts of 2018 uh yeah so the motivation of the idea trap is twofold so first of all I had this empirical result out of public opinion that said pretty strongly and surprisingly that people who have higher income do not think more like economists but people who either have experienced
or expect higher income growth do think more like economists so the level doesn't matter but the change does and essentially the more optimistic view seems to actually push people in this economistic direction so there is that fact in my mind and then there was also this big literature on on non-con convergence at least for a very long
time economists were expecting that poor countries would tend to catch up to rich countries and then they looked at the data and weren't seeing it happening right and then yeah you then you know further there's a l saying well at least a lot of the reason why this is happening is that uh countries that are poor just very persistently have bad
policies so I took these three facts and said let's come up with a little model and the model will have three variables which we call you growth policy and ideas and they and the model will of we'll have the following laws of Motions like you know good ideas cause good policy which is almost a toogy and you know good policy causes good growth and
that's almost a toy and then the last thing is what how does growth affect ideas right and what I said is on the usual there sort of a usual of view that if you have bad growth then people realize they're making mistakes and then ideas get better or on the other hand maybe if you're having good growth people sort of get said well like we we
can afford to live a bit and we don't need to worry about this so much so ideas get worse so in that model that actually gives you uh gr growth convergence and basically all countries tend to be mediocre but I said but if we tweak the model so uh in in light of that public opinion finding where well suppose good growth actually gives you
good ideas bad growth gives you bad ideas this actually gives you a model with multiple equilibria where you can have one equilibrium where everything is good you have good policy good ideas good growth all mutually supporting each other or you'd have bad ideas bad growth bad policy all mutually mutually supporting each other and in terms of
2018 at least the story you might might tell in a lot of countries is there's countries that are in that are in the bad equilibrium where they've had say they had like some bad growth which then led to you know bad ideas which I like in generally in the paper I equate with populism leading inste leading then to
populist policies 2018 is not is not that great just because the ACT for most countries growth is good right now so again like it made a lot more sense during the Great during the Great Recession when there was bad growth and then there were a lot of kooky ideas coming around in a way I would think of the last few years as cutting against my
model just because it seems like people are getting very angry and very populist when it's hard to even find what the supposed cause of it is maybe it's just your model with a 10-year lag though is that possible yeah I mean so you like you my general view is once you can put a 10 year 10year lag into a model then you don't really have much of a model
then you then you really have some an unfalsifiable mess in a way like I did talk you the only way that L the role that lags played in the model was to say why is it the countries that have had good policy tend to keep it over a longer run despite this and I said well so you know like if you have a good natural intellectual tradition you
probably have a higher chance of bouncing back to good ideas so you know like a country like the us if you have bad ideas in the 70s just the fact that it has a better tradition makes it more likely that they will will will get back out of the bad equilibrium or like during the Great Depression there's a Revival of of better ideas you know
afterwards in a way that you wouldn't expect from a country that had never been any better what is it that you understand about Stalin at least possibly that maybe most other economists would not probably like the single best best thing is that Mark Stalin was in his own way a sincere Marxist leninist the ideology is not
just rationalization for totalitarianism it's not just a rationalization from delute the country or anything like that again like you know so like all like all the historians who know the details of Sal's life will say he lived very modestly slept on a CT like he wasn't like a tinpot desperate going and building palaces for himself so you know
I think a lot of economists would just assume that the guy is you know is is living High instead it seems very much like it's the it is power or not any kind of conventional luxury that he cares about and that not just the general goal but even very small policy details seem to be heavily influenced by Marxist leninist ideology and again
really what you have to look for in Stalin's career are the counter examples to this so in the myth rational voter I I do did actually find one counter example where it seemed like Stalin did dump the ideology and this was on the nuclear program because you know like Stalin sent Barry to go and talk to one of the leading Soviet nucle nuclear
nuclear phist I think it was kirkov and he said so is it true that the relativity Theory and quantum mechanics are idealist which is something where you have to know a bunch of Marcus list philosophy even understand what understand the question and then the the Soviet scientist says well if they're idealist if that's bourell science then
nuclear weapons are bourell science too and then all right fine well then then forget philosophical objections to relativity Theory and quantum mechanics if this the science lets us build a nuclear bomb I don't care what the philosophy says we we're just going to believe the science but any like cases like that are fairly rare and really
what like the more you study ch's career you do see even like bizarre doctrinal things like the farmers are kind of revolutionary what are you talking about but it's like well like so we have to go and set up a system based upon this and that's very important to Stalin in a way that it's I mean it's almost hard for
for almost anyone who isn't a Marxist leninist to really realize you like usually westerners don't have such a shallow understanding of of the philosophy they don't realize how much of it is all part of this bizarre package they think it's just about high levels of redistri ution and that's not the story now we started this
conversation with the Brian Kaplan production function so we're going to close with it we have a little bit of time left three questions about you first how do you make yourself a good teacher let's see so you know like for me for me any class begins with writing the notes so I write extremely detailed class notes where I try to distill
everything that's worth knowing about the subject at the level of the students once I come up with a set of notes I don't tend to change them very much uh the written parts then when I actually teach you know then I do a lot of improvisation often it's like whatever I was thinking about yesterday Works its way in the notes and the in terms of
examples but you know another big part is actually just trying to talk to the students like human beings and find anything in their experience that relates to what I'm actually talking about the older I've gotten the less popular culture I have I I have in common with a students so it does get harder but you know Simpsons fortunately
thank God is still watched by students so there's that or again like I often just start with asking them questions so one of the main things I learned from my students for the case against education was saying all right so how many students here have a job and George Mason I say 80 90% rais their hand and how many people have a job where there
is a person there that everyone agrees is incompetent and almost every hand stays up like H that's pretty interesting that almost everyone is at a job where they will say there's someone who's known to be incompetent and again that's actually did get me searching so what have researchers actually found about this and quite a bit what is the
ideological touring test and how do you use it to improve your own knowledge and understanding of things yeah so the ideological touring test so this is an idea that I came up with something like 5 years ago so mean there's the original touring test which is it's you used an artificial intelligence and basically it
says that if some if people can no longer tell the output from a computer from the output from a human being that that AI has passed the has passed the regular Turing test and I was saying so you could actually do a similar thing for a human being and You' say you know is it possible for you to successfully mimic some know the holder of a view
that you disagree with so sort of sort of jumping off of Mill's famous line of he who knows knows only knows his own side of a case knows but little of that but again the key thing about the idea is that it's a real test so it's one where you can actually administer and the idea is you do it blind and then you actually show it to people that that
hold of you that you don't and see whether they can tell the difference between that and the real View and I say once you can pass that test then you at least indicated that you understand a view that you disagree with now of course in practice it is hard to do this because of the cost but yeah but like when I am actually trying to explain a
view I do try in my mind at least to pass this I will say like when when I am going and checking on my references with the original authors the one thing where I I basically never contradict the author is if they say you misunderstood me that's where I say like if a guy says I misunderstood him then I almost certainly misunderstood him and I need
to get I need to do better last question what are your plans for the future right so I've got a queue of books so the one that is coming out next year So the plan is for September is a non-fiction graphic novel on the ethics and science of immigration it's going to be called all roads lead open borders right so
this is a genre many people AR familiar with so there is the general genre of the graphic novel which is basically a high flutin comic book but the non-fiction graphic novel this is one where you use the vocabulary and grammar of comic books to talk about a non-fiction subject so this is not a story about immigration it is actually a
extended journey through what social scientists know know about immigration and what philosophers said about immigration so this is actually in collaboration with Zach Zack wiers Smith who was out of all cartoonists was my first choice in the world to be my collaborator I didn't know him when I started the project and I amazingly
talked him into it and now you know he's drawn 90% 90% of the first draft of the pages so I'm super excited about this because this is my chance to be on the production side of a kind of product that I've long just just just been in love with so there's that and then my big wordbook after that you know distinguished from a graphic novel is a
book called poverty who to blame so this is going to combine social science with economic philosophy so again I want to begin with what I think of as one of the great neglected moral Concepts in academic philosophy which is the concept of blameworthy or the concept of blameworthiness and dessert so you know these are Concepts that almost everyone
who thinks about right and wrong thinks about and yet they are so dismissed by you know certainly by consequentialist philosophers but by a lot of other philosophers implicitly dismiss them by neglect and I want to say actually the you know these concepts are very important they're they're morally at least as plausible as the other stuff
that people are talking about probably more so and I want to go and think about the actual social science of poverty through this lens of blameworthy non- blameworthy and semi blameworthy poverty so again a lot of what I want to do in the book is to revive this old notion of the deserving versus the undeserving
poor and then take everything that social science knows about the causes of poverty to understand who actually is you who actually like like where what are the main sources of blameworthy poverty what are the main things that we're overrating one of the main things we're underrating and really just to change people's minds what are the kinds
of poverty that really are deeply morally problematic and we should be thinking about all the time which you in my mind things like Poverty of people in the third world who could easily come and get a job in the first world if we're legal people that are totally capable of solving their own problem if Government would just get out of the way
versus problems of say someone who who like who is a chronic alcoholic and if they would have stopped drinking they'd be doing fine right and I think those are very different cases and yet there's of course a lot more concerned about the second problem than the first in terms of ink that spilled over it and I want to go and get people to rethink that
Ryan Kaplan thank you very much we do have time for a few questions yes in your education book you don't devote a lot of attention to the networks the social networks that form in schools uh yet my interactions with Brian Kaplan suggest that he finds them important your advice is for students to go talk to speakers to faculty uh to
other students and so on so I was wondering if you could elaborate on how you see these networks uh interact with your story of signaling you know do they impact career outcomes if they do is it just a form of signaling or do they actually create value by spreading beliefs and habits connecting individuals with different
characteristics great you great question so I do have one section on who you know and again this is this is a subject where I spent a lot of time reading sociology to find out you know you know they actually empirically study these quite a bit more than economists at least for for labor markets so definitely true that social networks are
hugely important for the labor market you know a pretty commonly cited fact doid is that about about half of people got their job because they knew somebody but this does not mean that the social networks that people are getting in school are very helpful because there's a couple of other key qualifiers namely the kinds of social networks or kind of
social ties that are very helpful either it's people who totally love you like close relatives or it's people who are in your exact field right so you know for a graduate student then I would say that the social network is hugely important because especially if you want to be a professor then your professors have the job you
want and they know other people have that job those are the kinds of social networks that are great or similarly like CS at Stanford great social network because there you are studying with a bunch of people that you are very likely to be working with or for or be the vendor for or they're going to know such people those are the really valuable
social networks however the problem is that most college majors are so loosely tied to any occupation that it is phenomenally unlikely you will ever have that you'll ever work again with someone that is a fellow student or the professor so if you're an English major the odds that you will ever get a job from a sell student very low that you
will do a startup with another student low that you will hire someone else that your professor can get you a job unless of course you want to be an English professor in which case that's great so you I I would say is that social networks in general are very important academic ones I think are growly grossly
overrated the people usually ask this question are like Silicon Valley people and yes they are seeing a a narrow subset of Labor Market where they're right but if you step back and just realize how non-vocational most majors are and how vast the economy is it's just too unlikely and you know and there there's other exceptions so like there's
certain fraternities that are good at getting their brother's jobs in finance but again so that's where they funnel them and where these are very close ties remember fraternity it's it's a Brotherhood right so you know this is what really counts and again like sort of like the Gran aeter strength of week thae stuff this is what this was like
you know it's one of the most cited papers in all social science and when I started reading it's like wow essentially No One Believes the paper but it's got 30,000 citations so that's the main story you might tell for why educational social networks are good and that's just wrong next question Robin you do scholarship and you know many
other Scholars and you have opinions about the quality of their work what are the biggest mistakes other Scholars are making from the point of view of making the kind of scholarship you wish they would make yes type three error getting the right answer to the wrong question that is my main view so me most work
that I read that I don't like I don't so much think it's wrong is that it's boring and who cares so you know that's that's honestly my reaction when I flip through a Jour flip Journal is suppose you're completely right who cares suppose you're completely right who cares and that's what I say for 80 90% of pieces pieces that I read again you
know this does not mean that you can't write a good piece on an nrow topic but it's got to be because you convincingly argue that it really reflects something bigger than just the topic itself so I can really enjoy reading a book about the French Wars religion because it's not just about the French Wars of religion it's about the nature of human
religiosity and about the way that dogmatic Strife tear Society apart and about is religion primarily social or doctrinal or what's the interrelation between them you know that kind of thing so again you know to me that that's the main thing is just that it's boring and who cares mean again I think the second biggest thing is just the focus on
disciplinary boundaries where people usually if they're going to read they only read within their field so economists read economics and even that's kind of optimistic usually read within your subfield of Economics or your sub subfield what I always say is look don't like if you really want to understand something don't read what
other people in your in your in your Niche are doing have read read what anyone who has thought about the issue has read and and is quite likely they learn something and I mean now again ultimately I will say this I think it does come down to academic incentives because those people in your in the fields that people aren't reading
don't help you they don't do stuff for you right and you honestly I think most Scholars are primarily about career advancement I don't think there is that much curiosity I remember this is actually one of the things that Disturbed me most when I became an assistant professor when Tyler started telling me all about all these Back
stories about Professor so I finally I get to get behind the curtain and not anyone in our our department but other departments other other and just finding out you know the the thought of someone that started off really curious and in the end they're just consumed with this pettiness over someone not citing them and then be like why do they care well
like they you know like every citation translates into like a cyal $100 a year this kind of mentality it did horrify me in the time and I've gotten over it but still this is the kind of thing when I step back is you know like I think you would become a scholar to go and Advance human knowledge on important questions
and I just don't see many people doing it or even using the methods that you would want to use which is step one go and read what anyone who's really thought hard about the question already knows one more question yes I know that you've been stated that there's not a lot of crossover between psychology and economics and you'd like
to see more for somebody who may be interested in looking at that bridge there what is some literature that you'd be you know recommending for them yeah sure so just the outside sometimes when I say that economists don't know you know don't know enough about a subject people get mad at me and they and they and they say oh you've ignored
everything we've done I haven't ignored everything you've done I'm just saying it's not enough and there's got to be more however much you how much there is I I'm aware of that stuff IST mostly just read one sub psychology called you know cognitive psychology and you like some other areas that I that are all worth reading at least for depending
upon what area you're working on so you know like personality psychology you know human personality is really important it explains a lot of things about the world human beings are quite different from one another so like you know Becker and Stigler tried to go and come up with a model of the world where
you never mention differences and tastes person psychologists have documented very strong differences in taste between human beings differences all the way there like human beings of everyone from someone who would kill themselves so they couldn't be a rock star with thousands of fans in front of them every night to a librarian who just want a
hermit like these are all human beings this whole range of level of Desire interaction is seen in the world right so just realize like you know you know there's every you know there's everyone from me to someone who watches football all day like that whole range so just realizing that but then like like in terms of like even areas been more
narrowly so of course there educational psychology it's a big area in Psychology where they answer questions that education econom or education economists should be interested in like how do people learn and how much can learning really explain I mean one thing I noted in the book is that when I started telling economists well how can the
human capital model be right given that most of what people learn in school they never use on the job and this is what economists who would never Dain to actually read educational psychology would just say well it's like learning how to learn yeah and you realize that educational psychologist have been studying this for 100 years and they
think something different right and they don't care and then the last there's industrial psychology right the whole field of psychology where they do things like measure job performance how do we measure this what predicts it how or firms organized how are promotions done you this you like you know it's it is a mass mass of information and data that
economists really really could easily get if they would just go and take a look they wow they have their own journals there's journals of industrial psychology shockingly how many labor economists have ever even bother to crack open such a journal I don't think it's very many but uh you know shame on us thank you again Brian if you like
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