Famous Quotes & Sayings

Bryan Caplan Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 23 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Bryan Caplan.

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Famous Quotes By Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan Quotes 370005

The use of force is easy to rationalize in terms of basic economics. 'We should make them PAY for what they've done!' It's just the law of demand: raise the price of crossing us, and fewer people will cross us. Make the price another Hiroshima, and perhaps the quantity demanded will fall to zero. — Bryan Caplan

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[T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. - William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty — Bryan Caplan

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Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs. — Bryan Caplan

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Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners. — Bryan Caplan

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The serious fact is that the bulk of the really important things economics has to teach are things that people would see for themselves if they were willing to see. - Frank Knight, "The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics — Bryan Caplan

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True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the "right-wing" extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages. — Bryan Caplan

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A person who said, "All the ills of markets can be cured by more markets" would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist. Why the double standard? Because unlike market fundamentalism, democratic fundamentalism is widespread. In polite company, you can make fun of the worshippers of Zeus, but not Christians or Jews. Similarly, it is socially acceptable to make fun of market fundamentalism, but not democratic fundamentalism, because market fundamentalists are scarce, and democratic fundamentalists are all around us. — Bryan Caplan

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There is a small minority of well-educated people with relatively sensible views on economics, and an extremely tiny minority of economists with highly sensible views. Then there's everybody else ... To win, a politician needs to please the median voter. It makes little difference if a few thousand economists think you a fool. — Bryan Caplan

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Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world — Bryan Caplan

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If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about
1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you. — Bryan Caplan

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Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook - including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it - lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside. — Bryan Caplan

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There are two sources of error: Either you lack sufficient data, or you fail to take advantage of the data that you have. — Bryan Caplan

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Sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations. — Bryan Caplan

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Let us designate anarchism1 anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism2 anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it. — Bryan Caplan

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What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters - specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity. — Bryan Caplan

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In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does. — Bryan Caplan

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Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders. — Bryan Caplan

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In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics? — Bryan Caplan

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First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. "Put your money where your mouth is" turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas. — Bryan Caplan

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If education causes better economic understanding, there is an argument for education subsidies - albeit not necessarily higher subsidies than we have now.62 If the connection is not causal, however, throwing money at education treats a symptom of economic illiteracy, not the disease. You would get more bang for your buck by defunding efforts to "get out the vote."63 One intriguing piece of evidence against the causal theory is that educational attainment rose substantially in the postwar era, but political knowledge stayed about the same.64 — Bryan Caplan

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The best social insurance is to make more progress, not to make more work — Bryan Caplan

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In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right. — Bryan Caplan

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take the opposite approach: Voters' lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity. — Bryan Caplan