Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, joins the podcast to talk about his latest book, the minimum wage, betting, and much more! Is nature or nurture more important? Why should a Keynesian be against the minimum wage? What is the trillion dollar tab waiting for us to pick up? Watch this whirlwind episode, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Follow Bryan on Twitter and his Substack.
Connect with Keith Weiner and Monetary Metals on Twitter: @RealKeithWeiner @Monetary_Metals
Additional Resources
Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
The Problem of Political Authority
Podcast Chapters
02:26–05:31 Feminism and Definitions
05:31–11:35 The Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
11:25–12:32 Bastiat and Buildings
12:32–20:06 The Free Lunch and Arbitrage
20:06–24:23 Motte and Bailey and Ceteris Paribus
24:23–35:04 Peter Singer, AI, and Betting
35:04–44:37 The (Female) Minimum Wage
44:37–49:06 Global Work Cultures
49:06–52:34 Keynesians Against the Minimum Wage
59:07–1:01:12 Book Recommendations
Transcript:
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange Podcast. I’m your host, Benjamin Nadelstein. I’m joined as always, by founder and CEO of Monetary Metals, Keith Weiner. Today we are delighted to be joined by economist Bryan Caplan. Bryan is an economist whose work I personally just always love, and his interests span from your kind of usual economic genres to areas of life usually not considered economics. Bryan has books about labor economics, the harms of immigration restrictions, housing regulation, and much, much more in the field of economics. But Bryan also writes on topics like mental illness, pacifism, voting, parenting philosophy. He kind of does it all and he has a subset called Bet on It, where you’re going to have to subscribe to because that is just some of the best content you can get. It’s always out of the box and it always keeps you on your toes and it’s always relevant as well. And what I personally love about your work, Bryan, is you just have this kind of unique ability to find all these kind of what are seemingly boring or just kind of irredeemable facts, right?
Something that everyone just really agrees with and they’re often kind of neglected by economists and you add up all these kind of little tiny facts and the next thing you know you’re arguing for these really interesting big picture arguments that are really out of the box. But the more that you think about it, that you go, I think this Bryan guy, I think he’s on to something. So, Bryan, your latest work is Don’t Be a Feminist. Essays on genuine justice. We’re going to link to that in the show notes and we’re going to discuss some of your work today. So Bryan, welcome onto the show.
Bryan Caplan:
Fantastic to be here, Ben. I hope I can live up to that introduction.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I’m sure you can. Well, let’s start with something I think that is both kind of near and dear to my heart, but definitely Keith, which is the idea of definitions, right? When you’re having an argument or discussing something, you really want a tight definition. I know both Keith and you, Bryan, like Ayn Rand. And one of the kind of concepts that Iron Rand brings up is the idea of the anti concept. Right? So if it’s not even hard enough to define something, then there’s an anti concept as well. So, Bryan, why don’t you tell us what’s the idea of defining something correctly and what’s kind of like an argumentative definition that you’ve put in the book as well?
Bryan Caplan:
I would say normally I don’t like arguing about definitions. Normally, I think people understand the words they’re using if they are fluent speakers of the language. But in areas where emotions run high and where dogma is thick, that’s where we will sometimes see an effort to hijack a language in order to force a conclusion on people that isn’t really what they actually think, and especially to equivocate, to use a word in one way at one point and another way at another point. In the case of feminism, I think this is such a hijack definition where if you go to dictionaries, they will just say, feminism is the view that men and women should be treated equally politically, economically, socially. Sounds good, except there’s one big problem, which is when you look at public opinion surveys where they actually ask people, are you a feminist or not? Do you think that men and women should be treated equally politically, economically, socially? You discover, first of all, yes, feminists believe that men and women should be treated equally. Second of all, you see that almost all non feminists believe exactly the same thing, which means this is a terrible definition.
It’s like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue. Yeah, I guess they believe in the blueness of the sky. So does everybody else. Doesn’t really distinguish what it is that you are about. And that’s why, to get this essay started, I propose a different definition I think actually describes real usage, which is that feminism is the view that our society generally treats men more fairly than women. And then when you put it this way, first of all, you can say, well, almost all feminists would say, yes, well, of course we’re treating men more fairly than women. For non feminist, I think it’s more of either agnostic, I don’t know or whatever, or just, no. Then this immediately allows us to have a productive discussion. Is it really true that our society treats men more fairly than women? Why would someone think that? Why would someone think the opposite? What’s the evidence? And that’s what I do in the title essay of Don’t Be a Feminist. The title essay is called Don’t Be a Feminist: a Letter to My Daughter. And essentially it is 30 pages where I just tried to imagine talking to my daughter, who’s still too young to actually have the conversation, but I said I wanted to be ready for your daughter the day that you ask, what’s this deal with feminism?
And I said, I’m glad you asked that question. I wrote a book just for you to resolve this issue.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yeah, I wish my parents had written me a personal book, but I guess we’ll just have to wait. We all can’t be as lucky. Well, actually, let’s talk about parenting for a quick second. Bryan, you also wrote a book about parenting. Why don’t you tell us about that a little bit?
Bryan Caplan:
The book that I wrote is called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Why? Being a great parent is less work and more fun than you think. This is a book where I did get interested in writing it once my first two sons were born that are identical twins. I was well aware of twin research before I found out I was having twins. But definitely having twins of my own may be hyper aware of the meaning of the research and its relevance to understanding not just twins themselves, but understanding why human beings turn out the way that they do. Obviously, people have been arguing about nature versus nurture for thousands of years, making near zero progress. Because I think that it’s nature. Well, I think that it’s nature. Okay. But around 1960, some actual researchers said there’s a fundamental problem with resolving this question studying normal families. Because in a normal family, we combine the same level of genetic relatedness of 50% with growing up in a shared household. And so we can’t disentangle nature versus nurture. But they said, Why don’t we go and study abnormal families in order to finally get some variation which will allow us to understand what’s really going on?
They said, Why don’t we go and study kids that are adopted and compare them to biological children of the parents that raise them? Why don’t we go and compare identical twins who share all their genes to fraternal twins who only share half of their genes? Using these methods, they were able to finally get real answers to questions that had boggled the human imagination for thousands of years. Honestly, what I did in this book is say, let’s take a parent’s eye view of all this research. Let’s think about all the things that parents want to affect and see what the evidence is on how much they really do affect them. The big punchline is that especially in long run, we greatly overestimate the power of nurture, greatly underestimate the power of nature, which then I say, what does this mean for parenting? Well, as most people have noticed, there’s a very high effort style of parenting we sometimes call helicopter parenting, which is very prominent in modern Western societies. Actually, probably even more prominent in modern Eastern societies. In fact, if you know anything about Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese parenting Vietnamese, all right. But anyway, the first obvious lesson is, well, look, if it isn’t really true that even when parents are trying to have a big effect on their children’s outcomes, they succeed.
Well, the first thing to say is, if you don’t enjoy the parental effort, if it’s just nagging kids to do their homework or making them go to a type one dough class they don’t enjoy, then you can safely stop, and that’s useful in itself. And then the second thing, though, and that’s what gives the book its title, is once you cut out a lot of the unnecessary, unpleasant parenting, you might want to reconsider your family size. Around the time the book came out, there was a piece written by a mom on the theme of soccer as contraception. The piece came down to, we got two kids. They’re both in soccer practice. It’s taken up all of our time. We’re thinking about a third kid, but then there’d be three sets of soccer practices, three sets of games. We’re dying already. Could we have a third kid and not put him in soccer? No. That will lead him to be a loser. So therefore, we wanted the kid, and I basically said, let’s just go and reverse that conclusion and say, this is not really true, that you have to go and have all this unpleasantness in order to be a decent parent and give your kid a good future.
Then it makes sense to actually rethink your family size. I will say, out of all my books, that is the one book that definitely has done some good in the world, because I have good evidence there are hundreds of additional human beings born because I wrote that book. All my other stuff probably has basically fallen on deaf ears, but the kids book actually creates life.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yeah, that’s a pretty incredible accomplishment. I find that a lot of your books kind of have these simple economic principles that we know, right? Like, if something’s cheaper I know Keith and I probably discussed this a lot is like, if the price of gold goes down to a certain point, it’s just going to be me and Keith buying as much gold as we possibly can. We just love gold. Right. If you find something, something that you really like and you find that it’s cheaper than you previously expected, you’re going to want to do more of it, right?
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah. There were a bunch of people that were angry about the kids book. I got even phone calls from people saying, well, I don’t want any kids. I don’t care how easy it is. Okay, that’s cool. I think I was pretty clear that I was not trying to hassle anyone. I’m just alerting people to opportunity. But to my mind, to get angry about this book is like someone says, hey, here’s a coupon for 50% off chocolate. And you say, I don’t like chocolate. I’m allergic to a getaway. Okay? Just throw the coupon away.
Keith Weiner:
Bryan, I just have to interject here and say, we live in a society now. Where everything I don’t like has to be banned, and everything I do like, all taxpayers have to be forced to pay for it, to subsidize it for everybody. So the moment you say you like something, everyone treats that as tantamount to, oh, now I’m going to be forced to subsidize it, but actually I want to ban it. I don’t like it.
Bryan Caplan:
I mean, there is the point where you can say that you don’t favor that ten times and people just don’t listen. I’ve had to deal with that a lot. So many disclaimers I can make.
Keith Weiner:
This has been going on at least as far back as Bastiat, who said, when we say we’re against public education, then the socialists interpret it as we’re against anybody being educated. And I know this is a theme that we’re going to get to, I think, later on the show. But he had this whole disclaimer when we say we’re against the government doing this, then the socialists think that we’re against anybody doing this at their own expense, privately. And it’s a pretty famous quote, which I’m butchering right now, but it’s an old fallacy.
Bryan Caplan:
Bastiat. Great guy. Lovin. He’s a character in my forthcoming graphic novel and Housing Regulation. He gets a whole chapter actually called Bastiat’s Buildings, where I spend the whole chapter hanging out with Bastiat and talking about all the great buildings that haven’t been built.
Keith Weiner:
I was going to say, are the windows in those buildings broken?
Bryan Caplan:
I don’t think I do the broken window fallacy. The chapter begins with the demilitarization thought experiment where what do people say if you go and let a lot of reduce the size of your military and cut the military budget, and then what’s the reaction to that? And his point is, look, if you don’t need them for defense, then there’s something else useful that they could do. I actually have a really fun panel showing the French soldiers turning into cross haunt chefs. So I felt very pleased with that whole way of showing it.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Well, Bryan, I think there’s a kind of interesting intersection here. So I never really took many formal economics classes. Actually, the only formal economics class I took was a Marxist economics class where there was not a lot of economics being taught. But one of the things that I started to learn is that there’s really no such thing as a free lunch. But I wanted to talk about that.
Bryan Caplan:
Was that in the Marxist class, too?
Benjamin Nadelstein:
No, actually, that part was mysteriously missing. But I wanted to talk about that kind of concept for a second. So there’s kind of this no idea of a free lunch concept which gets thrown around. And Keith, I know you are really interested in the idea of Arbitraging, and not even just a simple, like, buy low and sell high. But Bryan, let’s talk about in your book, there’s this idea of the gender pay gap, right? And the simple idea is that, listen, men and women are paid differently. And if you look in the aggregate, women are paid less than men. And this is because the employers, these corporations are really sexist. Why don’t we talk about arbitrage here for a second? Why is that maybe not the case?
Bryan Caplan:
It’s super implausible, if you think about it, that there could be a large pay gap for equally qualified men and women. Because if it’s really true that women are paid 30% less than men who are just as good, or rather, who are no better, then why not just go and fire all your men, replace them with women, and become fantastically profitable? Labor costs are a large share of costs. So it seems like this is a real free lunch that could be easily realized. And it doesn’t require a smart person. It’s not like saying, hey, just discover a fantastic new alternative energy source that runs on water, okay? And then you’ll be rich. Okay, yeah, then I would be rich. But that sounds super hard, right? If fire all your men, replace them with women in a world where there genuinely is this pay gap, that sounds like something anymore. Gold do the idea that there isn’t anyone who wants to take advantage of this is just highly implausible, right?
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I think that kind of arbitrage theory makes sense with you. Is that right, Keith? And in a way, too, we’ve been kind of talking about the twin studies earlier and how there’s this kind of way to do science, and we talk about monetary science a lot, where you kind of have two theories, right? One goes one way and one goes the other way. And in the nature versus nurture debate, if it truly were that it was all about nature, then these identical twins with the exact same genetics, if they were born one in Spain and the other was raised in Atlanta, they should really have clearly so different. But if it’s mostly nature, then they.
Bryan Caplan:
Should look very I didn’t think you misspoke I think you meant nurture the first time around.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Oh, sorry. Nurture, yes. So in that kind of same way you’re doing true science using these kind of different variables, to which I would.
Keith Weiner:
Add that suppose you’re an accounting firm and you could have a sustainable 30% cost advantage on your CPA workforce and all the other the administrative assistants and everybody else that runs a CPA firm. Well, you could charge 30% less. You would have a sustainable competitive advantage. Then not only are you saving money, but you’re actually also taking market share from your competitors if you were to do this. And so that that argument suggests pretty strongly that if there’s a pay gap, it certainly can’t be anywhere near as big as 30% is so huge that would swamp under every market that it hit.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So the general story of the pay gap is just caused by discrimination or pure unfairness is highly implausible on its face. But then there’s actually been a lot of statistical research trying to explain why does the gender pay gap really exist? A lot of it, of course, comes down to differences and hours of work. Even if you have a man and woman who are both called full time, there’s full time of 35 hours a week and there’s full time of 70 hours a week. So you’ve got to look at people working astronomical number of hours. You’ve got to look at differences in college major, stem pays more whether you’re a man or woman for pretty obvious reasons, stem is really hard and is the basis of all of our technology and all of computer science. So if few women are going into Stem, then, yeah, like, you expect that they’re going to be paid less for that reason. There’s a great book that I reference in the essay called Why Men are More, which just goes through 25 different big differences between the jobs that men typically do and women typically do things like 90% of all workforce fatalities are male.
Men are doing the more dangerous work. The idea that women don’t want to go and do such risky work and that men are getting compensated because they do stick their necks out, this is one that you would barely even be aware is a fact if you’re just listening to popular debates. But it’s important and it’s a lot of what’s really going on. And by the way, what’s cool about this book is that it is not written to say men are more because they’re doing the harder jobs. Haha. Rather it’s saying, look, if you want to make more money, here are 25 strategies that you could use. And if once you find out what you have to do to make more money, you no longer feel like doing it, well, then don’t feel resentful about that because it means that you are making a life choice. And of course, a man could read the book and say, gee, I don’t want to go and suffer to make this extra money. It’s not that important to me. So really it’s a book that both men and women could read to get an idea about what do you have to do in order to make more money?
Or alternately, what kind of a pay cut could you accept to have a better quality of life?
Keith Weiner:
Right. But I haven’t really made much of a study of the gender pay gap. But one thing that I’ve read pretty consistently and you’re reinforcing it here in this discussion is that so you start out with some big, big, giant headline number 30% or whatever the number may be. But when you subtract out, you know things that actually aren’t equal. So if you compare a man who, let’s say two men and women are both, you know, 45 years old, the man has 24 years of experience as a software developer and the woman of the same age has 15 years experience as a teacher. So first of all, you have two different jobs and secondly, you have 15 years experience. Why does she have less experience? Well, she took some time off to have kids. In this example, when you back out those two differences and try to correct her that, then you find that if there’s still a gender pay gap, it’s a lot smaller than 30%. It kind of reminds me of the global warming argument. And they look at all these temperature stations and say, look at how much warmer things are. But then there was a whole project of asking people to go out and they published the locations of all the temperature sensors used by the big study was at NASA or whatever and go photograph what that place looks like.
And some of them are like in the middle of asphalt. There’s one next to some giant concrete building next to the heat exchanger for an HVAC for like 20 acres of factory space or something like that. And when you take those ones out that are clearly subject to some sort of urban warming effect, in the last 100 or so years, all the stuff has been grown up around where that center is. And you take that out, then suddenly most or all of the headline number for how much warmer the Earth has supposedly gotten goes away. And it’s really either measurement artifact or economists use this term setter as parabus, all of us being equal. Then you find that basically it’s not equal. And when you try to statistically correct for it, then you find that your headline number evaporates and isn’t reproducible anymore.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
That was one of my favorite moments from Thomas Soul, who I know we all enjoy reading. And one of the arguments, he said, look, let’s take a bunch of different groups here. You’ve got Jewish people, black people, Spanish people, all these different groups of people. And then you look and you say, look, they’re all making different amounts of income or wages or what have you, right? And he said, you might say, okay, my first thought is this has to do with some sort of discrimination, right? People are choosing to pay Jewish people less and whatever black people more. But he said one factor that you might want to look at and this is just one factor trying to keep everything equal is what is the average age of these different groups? So if a Jewish person on average is 55 years old, well, most people who are earning a lot of money are in their fifty s. And if the average Mexican American is 20 years old, well, how many 20 year olds do you know that earn more than 55 year old? So it’s not truly about discrimination unless you count age discrimination.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah, right. And again, of course you could always say that it is just age discrimination, but that’s one where it seems more likely that it’s differences in experience. The interesting thing about this is that when people complain about the pay gap, they almost never mentioned these alternative explanations. But if you start bringing them up, then there is a big effort to move the goalposts and say, well, the reason why women don’t have as much experience is our society is not going to provide free Universal Daycare, or something like that. And this is one where it’s like so you’re going to complain that our society is being unfair because people don’t want to go and pay for strangers to raise their own kids. Sounds like a very high standard for what’s required to have a fair society. Seems more like you just have unreasonable expectations. To say that men and women should receive the same pay for doing the same work, that’s a pretty plausible moral intuition. To say that everyone’s responsible for taking care of everyone else’s kids sounds more like an extreme philosophy that would be shared by few if you were to go and stick your neck out.
I suppose it could be true, but at least it’s one where to take that for granted without further argument seems really a big ask.
Keith Weiner:
Let’s say that, and it’s an example of one of my favorite logical fallacies, which is the Motte and Bailey fallacy.
Bryan Caplan:
You’re starting out with highly relevant you’re.
Keith Weiner:
Right, Keith, to two equal people be paid equally, and then suddenly the indefensible Bailey is that we should therefore have socialized daycare.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah.
Keith Weiner:
Wait a minute. How did you foreclose on all the logic and all the argument that leads to we should socialize everybody’s kids? Well, maybe not.
Bryan Caplan:
Anyway, or like another really extreme moving. The goalpost is to say, yeah, well, fewer women do Stem because they don’t get enough encouragement to do Stem. It only counts as enough once we equalize the shares of men and women in Stem. Why is that? The regular maybe that would require all of our free time to be constantly hounding young women. Do Stem. Do Stem. Do Stem. Stem is the only thing we’re doing. Then you might consider that to be abusive and unfair, to be so disrespectful of individuals choices and human differences, to try to filter or try to funnel every woman into the hiring fields regardless of whether they even want to do it or not.
Keith Weiner:
My first career was as a software developer. So now I have to chime in and say the best software developers are the ones who were waiting from the age of eight years old or five years old until they can get their first computer and then basically spending every waking minute on it. Yeah, first playing games or whatever. But by the age of eleven or twelve, starting to write code. By the time they went up to computer science school at age 18, they’ve already been coding and some pretty impressive things for six or seven years. And I’m going to suggest that if you take somebody who didn’t have that natural predilection and then hound them and push them and cajole them and guilt them into doing it, they’re probably not going to be as talented or earn as much money doing it.
Bryan Caplan:
And then even so, just to say you were unfair to fail to hound a bunch of strangers about what career they should be doing from an early age, why it’s none of my business. Why is that my problem? Working in the background is some kind of Peter Singer esque idea that the individual has a duty to go and fix the world. But even there Peter Singer would say, well, there’s priorities and there’s only so much one person can do. So to focus on the biggest problem in the world, like war orphans don’t go and say everyone is responsible for every problem. That should be working all the time to solve all of them. That’s just incoherent.
Keith Weiner:
Not to mention there’s a pretty strong you are your brother’s keeper kind of ethos there and I push back on that pretty hard. Keith, anybody?
Bryan Caplan:
Incidentally, I did get to debate Peter Singer a couple of weeks ago and at least he had completely had heavily backed off from his most extreme position. So I was like, all right, now it doesn’t even seem like we disagree that much. If you just say give a moderate amount to charity and try to get the most bang for your buck, I can get on board with that. Sure, why not?
Keith Weiner:
There you go.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I think probably a part of your bet on it substack is the reason that you like betting is because it kind of makes people really think about what they’re saying. Because I know I had a friend in school who said, I guarantee you Trump is going to be impeached before Christmas. And this is when he was first elected. And I was like, you guarantee it? And then that moved from, well, okay, maybe not by Christmas, but he’s definitely going to be impeached. And obviously I think this happens with a lot of discussions. We’re all going to die from global warming in ten years. We’re all going to be dead in ten years. And so Bryan, I know you have a couple of bets going. Why don’t you tell people why you like betting what you think the kind of thought process behind betting is? What’s so nice about it? Instead of just arguing back and forth and what are some of the fun bets that you have? Have you lost any bets? And are you worried about losing any bets?
Bryan Caplan:
Sure thing. When people argue about ideas, there is a frustrating quality of we just are spinning our wheels and going nowhere. Even when someone is saying something, it just seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, a person could just argue until they are blue in the face. There are some. People just have an enormous amount of patience to argue, they will just continue talking, and then it’s like, well, if I have to go eat dinner, then does that mean that I’ve lost because I stopped talking first? Betting is a really nice way of cutting through a lot of this frustration and spinning of wheels. And this is where you say, well, look, if you really believe what you’re saying, then you should be open to the following bet. If you really are certain that Trump is going to be impeached, you should be happy to give me ten to one odds. So I’ll put up my $100, you’ll put up your thousand against it, and we’ll just see what happens. We can then just suspend the conversation. We’ve talked for a while, right? You haven’t convinced me. I haven’t convinced you. Why don’t we go and have especially a public bet where we exactly specify what counts is winning and losing, and then we just wait and see what happens.
So this is an alternative to either arguing forever or just giving up in frustration. I found that it is highly effective, first of all, at just discovering do we even really disagree? Often someone will claim to have an extreme view, and then when you ask load about a bet, they only want to bet on a very moderate claim. So basically, you were just engaged hyperbole, and I was mistaking your extreme claims for literal statements when they were poetic. So that’s one thing. It’s also a great way of gauging certainty. Because of a person claim certainty, they should be happy to offer very favorable terms. Why? To get the person that doesn’t realize that the future is actually foreseeable to sign and agree to bet with them. I’ve been doing this for about 15 years. In my blog right now, for the bets that are resolved, I am at 23 wins for 23 bets. So I have to say I’m very pleased with my record so far. I came really close to losing a bet about the European Union. So you might have heard of journalist Ben Stein. Not Ben Stein. Mark Stein. Of course, Mark Stein.
In the Mid Two Thousands, he wrote a book where he claimed that the EU was on the verge of collapse. And then to get him to bet, I said, how about we bet that there isn’t a single current member of the European Union with a population over 10 million that will leave by January 1, 2020? All right? Now, as it turned out, the UK is a population over 10 million, and they wound up believing, and I believe, March of 2020. So that was one where I almost lost. I’m happy to admit that although I was still completely right to say that his original statement was ridiculous, it’s not like you still didn’t collapse. That was just a case where I offered him much better terms than his verbal, than his spoken words entitled him to in order to go and get to bet. The main problem with betting, honestly is to get most people to bet you $1 if they have a public reputation is pretty much impossible. Most people who are publicly known don’t want to bet a dollar on anything because they realize it’s not really about the dollar, it’s about credibility.
Keith Weiner:
That’s right.
Bryan Caplan:
Once I tried to get Norman Podhoretz, so John Podhoretz, the son of Norman Podhoretz, who had he made a claim saying that Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran effectively ensures that Iran will be a nuclear power within ten years, or something like that, I then said, okay, well, you say effectively ensures. How about you go and give me five to one odds for that? And he totally didn’t want to. He said he was willing to bet at even odds. I’m not even sure it was that. But anyway, I said, look, I don’t know what’s going on there, but you claim to know. So given that you claim to have this crystal ball, it seems like you should be really happy to come and take my money when I claim that something that is certain is actually uncertain. And then he did a Twitter BAWK BAWK BAWK at me, right? And I said, look, I’m not claiming to know, I’m just claiming that it’s not clear. And also, I don’t think you really know. And the fact you don’t want to make this bet is pretty consistent with you. Even you don’t believe that you really know.
There probably is a bet that I’m going to lose by 2030, which is on global warming. So there we’re just using official data. There was, as you might recall, like a 17 year pause in global warming, which I then considered by itself to be sufficient to be less than certain about global warming. There’s another economist, Jerome Bauman, who still was really confident. So he bet me at three to one odds, and it looks like he’ll win, but I’m just going to ride that one out. Probably my very favorite bet is I actually have an end of the world bet with Futurist Eliezer Yudkowsky. He runs the Myriad, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. They’re the people worrying that AI is going to take over the world and murder us. The details aren’t really that important, but anyway, he thinks this is imminent. He believes in the imminent extinction of humanity.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I think the details are important, whether.
Keith Weiner:
It’s a knife or whether it’s a gun or whether it is.
Bryan Caplan:
If you talk to these AI pessimists and you say, okay, is this the term of your scenario? The real touchy about it? No, it’s not the term of the air scenario. Don’t say that. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s not that the machines will become self aware and will murder us just out of the blue. Rather, the problem is we’re going to go and give them an objective function like maximize the brexit of staplers, and then they’re going to say humans could be turned into staplers, kill all humans and then they’ll do it. All right. Like to me, these are pretty trivial differences. And I don’t care why the machines are exterminating mankind as long as they are in the short term. And again, Eliezer, he was ready to bet on 2030. Seriously?
Benjamin Nadelstein:
That we’re all gone by 2030.
Bryan Caplan:
So he specified human beings will no longer exist on the surface of the Earth. So we might escape into a space or we might live in mine shafts, but other than that, no. All right, fine. To me, the difference between total human extinction and there’s like a few human beings in a spaceship is very slight. But anyway, most people are baffled. How can you bet on the end of the world? If it ends, what’s the point?
Keith Weiner:
It’s a lopsided vet, isn’t it?
Bryan Caplan:
What’s that?
Keith Weiner:
It’s a lopsided bet, isn’t it? Because if he’s right, he’ll never collect from you.
Bryan Caplan:
Well, the answer is that it’s a very simple way to bet on the end of the world, and that is for the optimist to immediately prepay the pessimist. So I immediately gave Eliezer some money, which he can then enjoy before the world ends. If the world does not end, however, as I say it will not, then he owes me my original payment, plus a pile of other extra money.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I’d love to see the interest rate on this. It’s a very ingenious way of betting.
Keith Weiner:
On the I’m preference. Getting back to economics, Bryan, you could.
Bryan Caplan:
Just say it’s tantamount to a mid interest loan, but again, it’s a mid interest loan with reputation on the line. So that’s why I took it seriously. To his credit, he was happy to bet. I do actually have another friend who says that Woke fanatics are going to have us all enslaved labor camps in the next few years. And he was not willing to take any kind of bet where I just prepaid him. And then if we were not in camps, he had to give me money back.
Keith Weiner:
My favorite rhetorical device, which I’ve not yet turned into a real bet. Perhaps I should internet out there beware is. I bet I offered rhetorically to bet an ounce of fine gold against a soggy dollar bill and talk about your $10.
Bryan Caplan:
Not literally, right? You’re going to lose on that?
Keith Weiner:
Well, it depends on the proposition. So the proposition we’re all going to be slaves in wool claver camps? If we are all slaves, I’ll give you an ounce of gold, but if not, then you have to give me a soggy dollar bill. Anyways, I’ve never actually turned that into real bets. Just been a rhetorical device.
Bryan Caplan:
That’s equivalent to, what, like 1000 to one odds? What does that go for these days?
Keith Weiner:
1750 to one.
Bryan Caplan:
All right. Yeah. All right. In that case, I have gotten a few people to give me ten to one bets, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten better than that.
Keith Weiner:
No, it’s me offering the other person. If you’re right, I’ll give you the gold.
Bryan Caplan:
Okay, well, that case is pretty gold.
Keith Weiner:
Because I’m pretty confident that there are certain economic laws that just are what they are.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yes, well, let’s go to economic laws for a second. I think this will be fun. I think this was your labor economics book you wrote about a thought experiment. So, okay, let’s say only women had to be subjected to the minimum wage. Do we think that we expect them to be more or less employed than men? Let’s start with you, Keith. What do you think? Only women are subject to the minimum wage?
Keith Weiner:
I was going to say I haven’t read Bryan’s book, but I have read Freakonomics, which talks about something very similar in the perverse outcome that comes of this. And what I’ve said about a minimum wage is that it doesn’t actually force a wage job. All it does is it criminalizes any bid below that magic threshold. And so anybody subject to a minimum wage is going to be less employed because there’s some people that the bid would be lower than that, but it’s criminal to make that bid, so therefore they remain unemployable.
Bryan Caplan:
Right. Usual analysis is that just like with rent control, there’s some lucky people who benefit from the law and some unlucky people who are unable to get anything at all. The reason I like this thought experiment is there is a solid core of people who claim that the textbook analysis, the minimum wage saying that the minimum wage causes employment, it’s just some kind of exotic right wing ideology. We don’t have to take it seriously. And I just have a bunch of arguments saying that is not true, it is not right wing ideology. It is common sense, so common, in fact, that even minimum wage activists actually agree with it. They just are pretending not to or refusing to really think about it. One of them is exactly this one saying, well, if you think the minimum wage doesn’t cause disemployment, how about if we just have a minimum wage for certain groups, like $50 an hour minimum wage for women? Do you think that would cause any harm to women? Or $50 minimum wage for blacks. You think that would cause any harm to blacks? And to say, okay, well, then it would. It’s like, all right, so you’re admitting this .1 of my favorite little proofs is this you give a minimum wage activist a job application that has a line that says salary requirements, and they don’t put a million dollars an hour.
Why not? Why not put a million dollars an hour? It’s because you think if you put an excessively high amount that this will cause people not to hire you. Or another one of my favorite ones is people who say that there should be employer required health care. But even these people almost always put in a part time exception. You only get the free health care if you work a certain number of hours per week. It’s like whoa gee, you hate people who only work 5 hours a week. It’s like well no, it’s that if it’s only 5 hours per week then if you have to do free health care then I think that will cause unemployment. Right? But at 30 and a half hours that’s the magic amount where it doesn’t cause any unemployment. Where do you come up with these numbers? It seems like you are making them up to make a moderate concession to reality. Another one of my favorite ones is almost all minimum wage laws have a phase in. They don’t say the minimum wage is raised up to $30 today right now. Instead they almost always say it’ll be raised by $3 and for six months and then it will be raised by another dollar 18 months after that.
Bryan Caplan:
And then the question is, well if you don’t believe in disemployment effects, why wait? Why wait? Seems like you too are worried. Seems kind of like what you’re worried is that if you do it immediately it will be totally obvious that the unemployment was caused by the minimum wage and you will be discredited. So I have at least tongue in cheek suggested look, from now on all minimum wages should kick in instantly. If you’re going to do it, it’s got to be done right away.
Keith Weiner:
Last thing they do is they say.
Bryan Caplan:
Totally clear what you’ve done and what the consequences are.
Keith Weiner:
They also say only for employers with larger than X number of people. Then in California they’re debating whether an independent operator of the franchise is really effectively counted as part of the corporate parent for purposes of wage. All of these concessions they’re forced to make to practical reality because that’s where you get the most obvious and greatest losses of jobs is for the self employed.
Bryan Caplan:
What if we get a minimum wage for the self employed? What would that mean? It’s like hey, nobody customers want to buy your product but it’s illegal for you to have less than that. So I guess you have to shut down your business.
Keith Weiner:
It would mean France. That’s what it would mean. It’s illegal to start that business in the first place. You should get a job.
Bryan Caplan:
Isn’t that true that in France that you can’t just run a business on your own?
Keith Weiner:
No, I’m not entirely somewhat tongue in cheek but there’s so many licensure laws and accreditation laws and other things that it becomes very true is that minimum.
Bryan Caplan:
Wages often cause self employment because someone who’s unemployable by any actual business can normally still go and sell little copies of the Eiffel Tower in the streets.
Keith Weiner:
Right?
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Well I think I think this kind of idea of people making concessions there’s this part in your work that I thought was really fun, where there’s this false dichotomy. I know Keith and I joke about this a lot, but there’s this false dichotomy offered, and you kind of use this in your Socratic dialogues, which have been just really hilarious. Please keep those up.
Bryan Caplan:
Thanks a lot.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
It’s one of the few times I’ve laughed out loud reading economics, but the one that I remembered, this is from The Simpsons, and Officer Wigam has this horse and he says, all right, folks, here are your options. Either the horse gets a good home or it’s going to become dog food. And it’s like, why are those the options? Why are these the only options? And the reason that you kind of bring up this point is to say, all right, guys, here’s your options. Either this worker gets to be paid a minimum wage or they’re unemployed. And it’s like, why are those the two options? And obviously, you write a lot about why unemployment is actually worse for you, as there’s a difference between zero and one, and having a job is truly something different, even if it’s a low paying job is truly something different than being unemployed.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah. This is one of the areas where psychology has a lot to teach us about human motivation. There’s even a lot of free market economists who just say, yeah, well, it’s not really a big deal if you lose a low paid job because it wasn’t that good of a job anyway. It’s like, look, a job isn’t just a paycheck. It’s also a source of meaning for a lot of people. It’s something to do with your life. It’s a feeling of being independent and self supporting. During COVID I think a lot of people suddenly who officially still had jobs came face to face with a sense of nothing really matters and there’s nothing really for me to do, and I don’t interact with other people. I don’t feel like a part of anything anymore. I would say I felt unemployed during COVID I was not really unemployed. I was still getting money, but it’s just an extremely depressing and distressing experience. There’s a lot of evidence from psychology that a lot of misery is caused by unemployment per se. Even if you make up all their earnings, still, there’s a feeling of uselessness and meaninglessness. And when people talk about it’s not a big deal if someone loses a bad job for that person, that might be a big source of meaning for them.
Never mind. Of course, the way that you get a better job normally is by starting off with a bad job and then acquiring first hand experience and then advancing super unusual for someone to continue earning the minimum wage for a long time period. Almost everyone.
Keith Weiner:
Is not minimum wage forever. I wrote an article some years back after a trip to Vienna where I just saw everybody on public transit, and a free market economist of mine told me what the percentage was of people who are living on it. We subsidized housing there and of course the socialized medicine and the article was called The Service Economy. And I said that the people are being serviced, past tense, by the government and that essentially they’re being fed, watered, transported, doctored, entertained, everything by the government. And of course that’s a really bleak, horrible there’s no way to set your own goals or advance your own goals. And so what you find is drinking is endemic in Austria. In any case, that was a problem. I was going to say the Europeans drink so much more than the average Americans and it is, in my observation, it’s so culturally green.
Bryan Caplan:
I do remember seeing data on this, my memories. The US. Is around the middle, although I could be wrong. I think we got a much bigger opioid problem than almost any European country anyway. Like the story that people in the former Soviet bloc were drinking really heavily just to because they just felt like their lives are meaningless. That makes a lot of sense to me. Now this is a case, by the way, where psychology and philosophy probably give you different answers, where philosopher might say that working as a government regulator is just as meaningless as being unemployed. But probably the regulator actually wakes up in the morning and has some sense of purpose. If you got something to do, then even if it is, objectively speaking a socially counterproductive thing. But still it’s like, well, I got to go and deny people the right to build homes today. It’s a very important job. Again, while I might say that that person actually is counterproductive but it doesn’t mean they’re going to be miserable in the same way that someone who’s just locked in a jail cell with nothing to do would be all day, I.
Keith Weiner:
Was going to say. The regulator, of course, would define it as protecting all the innocent backyards around there who don’t want that built in their backyard. Now, just in my own direct experience so when I studied under Professor Fekete, there were several courses that were in Munich and then they break for a couple of hours for lunch. And so a couple of times we went to the English or garden in the I forget what they call the big park there. And there’s a little kiosk and you can buy bratwurst on a stick and beer and whatever. So the beer came in half liter or liter sizes and there was two beers. There was the regular and there was the dunkle of the dark, which the regular was like 6.7% or something or 7.2%, and the dunkle was nine point something. And then there was a bunch of clearly factory workers, you could tell from their dress at another table that were drinking liters of the dark. And one of them at one point is a picture of picnic tables and on the ground is pea gravel. This guy tries to get up from the picnic bench trips or stumbles or whatever, ends up on his back.
It’s a big heavy guy, basically like a turtle with all the legs and arms flailing. He begins to laugh. Everybody at his table begins to laugh. And then we were laughing. And then I asked them to my table. Aren’t they going back to work after this? Oh, yeah. People come back to work drunk after lunch all the time. And it’s illegal to fire instance in Germany. I don’t know about Austria now, but I assume similar. It’s illegal to fire anybody for coming back to work drunk. I said, well, if you come back.
Bryan Caplan:
Was this Austria or Germany
Keith Weiner:
This was Germany. That would have been 2011.
Bryan Caplan:
So that was after some extensive deregulation. The German labor market, I mean, accordingly, the German speaking countries in Europe are noted for having exceptionally high worker productivity. So I’m a little surprised by that. I would think that’s probably not so representative there. If you’re talking about Russia or something like that then I’d say, yeah, that’s probably so.
Keith Weiner:
What this guy said was you can’t fire the guy. However, they give them some little job that needs to be done but that’s definitely a little bit demeaning. Like they give him a mop and say, no, you have to mop the entire factory floor, or something like that. And so it’s kind of a little bit of a punishment, but it’s kind of accepted. And anyway, I definitely saw factory workers getting drunk right there in that day. And my experience in America is that very few people will drink any alcohol at lunch, even, you know, one if they’re planning on going back to work because it just isn’t really tolerated here.
Bryan Caplan:
But I also like like my personal impression is that the German speeding countries in Europe have the very best, most competent and highly motivated workers. And then the places where you see lower motivation. Italy is where I was for seven weeks this summer and that’s quite notable. Although even their wide variance between public and private sectors, I would say if you have the stereotype of Italians don’t work hard. I rarely see anyone in America working as hard as Italian restaurant workers do. Then it is just a total cynic who say they barely do anything.
Keith Weiner:
I have a discussion with a friend of mine in Milan and he said the southern Italians, by which he definitely includes Rome lazy. All they want to do is sit around and eat all day. And I said I have had some of the best food I’ve had in my life in Rome and they absolutely work hard in the restaurants there. I will vouch for that personally. But the point isn’t to try to stereotype or paint with an overly broad brush, but rather that when people don’t have opportunity to advance. It’s depressing, it’s bleak. What are you going to do if you’re not allowed to have goals? You’re not allowed to advance your life according to your own intentions because you’re just sort of pressed under the government’s benign thumb. Well, it’s depressing and maybe some people turn to various kinds of escape, you know, hatches, and that would include alcohol, drugs or whatever. If you’re free and allowed to pursue your dreams, then it doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed not to be free of drugs, but you have less external drive towards it.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
I want to do a quick final note here on the minimum wage, but then I want to do a kind of lightning round between Bryan and Keith. This last kind of minimum wage thing. I was reading in your book and I really stopped and it made me think for a second. You wrote, shouldn’t Keynesians be against a minimum wage since it’s a government enforced rigid stop on declining nominal wages? So I had to reread it a couple of times because I’m not a very smart person. But Bryan, why don’t you break that down? Keynesian should be against a minimum wage. This goes against everything I know!
Bryan Caplan:
Right? Well, of course, there’s standard branch or approach to macroeconomics called Keynes macroeconomics. The central building block of Keynes macroeconomics is the idea that there’s nominal wage rigidity. So if there’s a fall in demand for labor rather than wages falling and full employment remaining, they predict that what happens is that wages will stay the same and there will be unemployment. And the exact details why don’t wages fall? It’s complicated. But anyway, this is the key building block of the model, is downwardly rigid wages. If you believe that’s the problem, then you would think that anything that is encouraging or reinforcing downwardly rigid wages would be something you would oppose. So, yeah, it is quite odd for Keynesians to be supportive of the minimum wage because really the whole model is based on the idea that we have persistent unemployment in depressed economies because wages don’t fall, and if they would fall, that would solve it. That’s how markets ought to work, but unfortunately they don’t. In other words, a way of thinking about it is that the Keynesian story isn’t just markets don’t work, it is a specific story saying that markets don’t work because wages aren’t flexible like they would be in the stock market, and therefore it is possible to have durable unemployment.
If that is your view, then you would think that any government law that increased the rigidity of wages would be something you’d be against.
Keith Weiner:
Yeah, Friedman would say, just devalue the currency, problem solved.
Bryan Caplan:
That is definitely something. Well, it’s something else that you can do if you’ve got something you can do instantly, if you have fixed exchange rates. If you don’t, then in order to devalue, you’ve got to print more money, which, again, is something Milton Friedman had been saying for a long time. But from this perspective, Milton Friedman would actually be one of the reasonable Keynesians, because on the one hand, he wanted expansionary policy when there’s unemployment, but on the other hand, he was very against the minimum wage.
Keith Weiner:
Did you just say reasonable Keynesian?
Bryan Caplan:
The idea that workers wages don’t fall in the same way the prices in the stock market fall, to adjust supply demand second by second, that’s a totally reasonable view.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Right. I like that.
Bryan Caplan:
And to be concerned, if someone were to say, well, we’ll just cut the money supply in half and there won’t be any problem again, I think there probably would be a severe problem, which there would not be if wages could fall just like stock prices. So that by itself is a reasonable worry. The problem is misinterpreting it and just having wrong priorities, which is what I would really fault actual Keynes for.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Well, all right, I want to get to in our last couple of minutes here, I want to get to a kind of lightning around between you and Keith. So I don’t think there’s actually a lot of disagreement between the two. I think you think in the same ways. A lot. But I want to have each of you give me, like, a one or two sentence pitch on each of the subjects as to what we’re supposed to do here. So I know Keith has been saying tweeting a lot. If you want more capital, if you want more employment, don’t make it hard to hire people. So I wanted to go through something called sludge. I know Cass Sunstein has this idea of nudge and libertarian paternalism, but let’s go to the other side, which is sludge. So let’s go through some of the top sludge that is happening in the economy right now. Let’s start with labor markets. Bryan, what is some sludge that we could get rid of in the labor markets?
Bryan Caplan:
Right now? Of course, unemployment is super low, but there’s still plenty of regulations that you can get rid of. You could get rid of mandated benefits rules. You get rid of the minimum wage. Obviously, there’s a bunch of pro union law still on the books. Probably. Actually, I would just focus on firing tons of government employees.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
All right. That’s a win.
Bryan Caplan:
Bryan, aren’t you a government employee? Yeah. That’s why you can trust me.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
All right. Government employees fired. Got it. Keith, one or two sentences. What is some sludge that we can reduce in the labor markets?
Keith Weiner:
Probably. I mean, you said the unemployment rate is low, but the people not counseling in the workforce rate is super high, and a lot of that is unemployment by another name. So I would say stop offering such generous benefits to not work. Of course, the ones I tweeted about don’t make it illegal to hire people. I e. Minimum wage and other labor regulation. Don’t make it illegal to build things, don’t make it illegal to sell products and don’t make it illegal to raise capital. All of which are illegal unless you jump through various hoops and get various permissions, which most early stage entrepreneurs really aren’t capable of doing.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yeah, I would call that sludge.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah, I forgot the most important one, which is open borders. Stop saying you need papers from the government to get a job.
Keith Weiner:
There you go.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Bryan, I really liked your kind of Socratic seminar that you had in the middle of the, of the paper with a Haitian person trying to get into the border and the border patrol, the Ice agents character is saying, yeah, you can’t get in. How did you resolve it in the book?
Bryan Caplan:
Well, in the end it turned out that the guy was only misperceived as a hate and he was actually a citizen. And the guy said, oh, in that case there’s no problem. He said, well, why are you saying no? He’s there no reason.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yeah, that seems pretty unfair, especially when you put it in that kind of dialogue. And that’s what I find so helpful about that type of that style. And let’s do the last one. What is the trillion dollar bill lying on the ground? Bryan? There’s trillion dollars lying around. What is it? Where’s this trillion dollar bill?
Bryan Caplan:
The main one I’ve talked about is open borders. Just saying let anybody take a job anywhere. There is so much human talent trapped in low productivity countries. They are ready, willing and able to move to rich countries and get jobs. But the law says they can’t do it and therefore they don’t because in a sense the law works. Immigration laws do keep out the vast majority of people that want to come in because most can never get in legally and illegally coming in costs too much money and it’s too risky.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Keith, I think our trillion dollar bill is a gold bill, so that’s going to be different. Okay. And then I guess the final thing that I wanted to get your take on Bryan, is we have this kind of war happening with Russia and Ukraine. There’s been a lot of supply shocks COVID we’ve talked about this kind of lockdown whiplash that’s been happening. We think that a lot of this inflation that we’re currently seeing is a supply shock to the system where actual goods are becoming more scarce. Obviously the latest news that we want you to comment on is that the Federal Reserve has decided to continue hiking rates. Now by the time this podcast gets put out, who knows what will actually happen? Maybe we’ll go back down to our falling rates. But what do you think? Do you think that the rising interest rates will cause lower prices, higher prices? It’s not going to affect it. What do you think?
Bryan Caplan:
I think that it will make prices lower than they otherwise would have been, so they are moves in a disinflationary direction. However, my pet theory is that all the measures so far are nowhere near enough because the real interest rate, namely the rate that you pay minus inflation, is still negative. So it’s still a fantastic deal to borrow as much as you can and spend it on stuff like you would have to raise rates a lot more to actually get the results that people are hoping for. And my pet theory is that the real rate hikes are going and the really serious disinflation is going to come in December after the election because I think that even Republicans at the Fed have turned very anti Republican. Trump really alienated them and so they are all trying to go and help the Democrats in the midterm election and they are hoping then to have the recession happen really quickly in 2023 and then be over in time for 2024 in order to keep Republicans out of office. So this is my suspicion about their motivations. This is an unusually specific prediction. I’m not ready to bet on it, so my confidence isn’t that high.
Bryan Caplan:
But still, I keep telling everyone recession starts in December.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Okay, well, you can keep your soggy dollar for now. I know Keith and I have a lot of thoughts on that as well. And then since you guys are both kind of prolific readers, I want a final list of some books that you guys can both recommend. We’ll go back and forth. Bryan, I know that you recommended The Ultimate Resource, too, by Julian Simon, which is a great read. It goes back to kind of our betting, climate change, lots of things like that. So why don’t you give us a list of two or three books that you would recommend other than your own and then Keith will head to you.
Bryan Caplan:
All right, so my favorite book of philosophy is called The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Humor. I’ve read tons of books of libertarian philosophy. Most are bad. They would not convince any reasonable person who didn’t initially agree. Mike’s book really stands out as just being so well argued and so reasonable and just trying to meet people where they start, rather than saying, here’s a whole controversial philosophy you have to accept. And then once you accept that, then my view follows. So I am a huge fan of that one. See, right now I am in the middle of a book called Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. So that is I read his previous book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which was very good. This one so far seems even better. So I’m going to recommend that one. And let’s see, to give you one more. This one will sound a bit funny, but it was actually a substantial influence on me recently. Women can’t hear what men don’t say by warren farrell. This is partly just a relationship book, but a lot of it is just pointing out all the ways that male suffering gets neglected because men rarely complained about their suffering, because when men complain about their suffering, people don’t care or make fun of them.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Well, Bryan, I know the podcast is about to end, so we can’t hear about your suffering, but anytime you can give us a call.
Bryan Caplan:
I’m doing great.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
But that’s what they want you to say. That’s what they want you to say. Keith, let’s end with you. Let’s hear some book recommendations before we all set out.
Keith Weiner:
I’ve got to recommend a couple of classics tablets, Economics in One Lesson, Bastiat’s the Law. For a deeper five Menger’s Principles of Economics. If I had to add a fourth, it would be Capitalism the Unknown Ideal By Ayn Rand, which also has an essay by Alan Greenspan about gold that shows he knew in 1966 more than he ever evaded or forgot while he was in his years in power.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Yeah, it’s very interesting how people can avoid convenient facts when it’s very convenient to them.
Keith Weiner:
Yeah, for sure.
Bryan Caplan:
Bryan, we’re going to give you since you did bring me on to talk about Don’t Be a Feminist, let me just say that the new book called Don’t Be a Feminist essays and Genuine Justice, is available as an Amazon exclusive. It is $12 for the paperback, $9.99 for the ebook, and I have not raised the price for inflation despite record setting inflation, as I bet your viewers are well aware, I’m keeping the nominal price constant. So can you afford not to buy? I think not.
Keith Weiner:
So, nominal price stickiness of economic books.
Bryan Caplan:
Yeah.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
All the candidates should be against Bryan’s book, but we already knew that from the start. Well, Bryan, thanks so much for coming on. We’re going to have a link to your books and all your work and your website and the show notes. And thanks again for coming on the Gold exchange.
Bryan Caplan:
It’s been fantastic talking to you guys, Keith and Ben. Keep up the good work! Bye bye.
Benjamin Nadelstein:
Thanks, Bryan!
Keith Weiner:
You, too. Thanks so much!
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