Bryan Caplan's Thoughts On How to Increase Fertility Rates

Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss ways to boost declining fertility rates. They analyze the role of education, long vs short time preferences, and winning over analytical men. Other topics include immigration policy levers, using AI for politics, Ron Paul's electoral success, and more ways to cultivate leaders.

Simone: [00:00:00] You're really good at being evil,

Malcolm: Simone. Thank you, Malcolm. How can we use an AI to win a local election? Yeah, this

Simone: is, this is the question that we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And of course,

Bryan Caplan: in equilibrium, the problem is other people are going to be using it too.

Malcolm: I agree with you. So the goal Is to use a short term advantage to get into the political system, then become president and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now. You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.

Bryan Caplan: Oh God..

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello again. We are very excited to have Brian Kaplan joining us for this episode of Basecamp in addition to being a New York times bestselling author of.

Simone: Quite a few really awesome books. Many of which are on some of our favorite topics. Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and extremely well informed about the positions he holds. Whereas I don't know, sometimes we just like to be a lot more

Malcolm: philosophically. If you want to go over some of the topics he writes on pronatalism advocate for.

Malcolm: Feminism [00:01:00] causing societal problems being more pro open borders government systems not working, and education systems becoming more broken.

Simone: Yeah, you're our kind of guy. We're big fans, Brian. So what we'd like to discuss today, which I think really interests me because you're at a nuanced nexus between these things is the impact of education and how to actually create a delta.

Simone: So we, we recently hosted a dinner at which people discussed fostering genius, creating world leaders who would change the trajectory of society, you know, can it be done? Can you do it? And one of the big themes that came up during that dinner was, well, you know, you can't necessarily like great man theory of history.

Simone: A lot of people were really critical of it, but they thought, well, one thing that people can do is maybe accelerate the speed at which. Really awesome things happen, you know, like maybe many things are going to happen anyway. But if you can cultivate the right kind of leader or give people the right ideas, they may do it sooner for society than rather than later.

Simone: And I thought about this as I was watching an interview with [00:02:00] you. And you said basically that you didn't expect open borders to happen in your lifetime, but that you hoped through the book that you have co published called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration, that maybe a generation would read this book.

Simone: You know, help to nudge things in a good direction. And you know, you've also written a book about, you know, the case against education which is more about why the traditional education system is not. necessarily worth all the money we throw into it and the time we threw into it.

Bryan Caplan: Delete the word necessarily. It's not worth it.

Simone: Shots fired from the professor at a university. But yes, no, totally. And so, you know, there's this sort of weird. Like nuanced area that I want to walk around with you in this discussion about well, so we can maybe nudge people in a good direction.

Simone: We can maybe speed up the rate at which really awesome things happen, which could really max out in a much more [00:03:00] meaningful way, human productivity and flourishing.

Simone: So I'm curious, Brian, what you think interventions are not necessarily traditional education interventions, but interventions in youth and in development that actually are worth investing in are effective and might actually help people either change the trajectory of society or just actively change the trajectory of people and society.

Bryan Caplan: Let's see. I'm definitely pro vocational education. Obviously, it's got, you know, there's a lot of problems too, but at least at the end, if it works, you know how to do something and are able to actually contribute more society. Whereas my big read, you can normal education is that it mostly pays just by giving you extra stamps in the forehead, which is great for an individual, but at the level society generates credential inflation, such that you need more degrees just to get the same job as your parents, grandparents, in terms of the things that can be done that work well.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Well, let's [00:04:00] see. I mean, there's the easy answers, things like vaccines or whatever. I think that the evidence for those is really good. In turn, I mean, I guess I would say that the one that matters the most is one that's near and dear to all of us, which is just having kids. So, you know, if you have a kid, I just say, look, you know that you have done something that almost certainly has great value to that person.

Bryan Caplan: The person is going to contribute to the world as well. Yes, there's a small chance that you've given worth of the next Charles Manson, but almost certainly not just the fact that if you look around the world, it's not on fire shows that most people are net contributors. They are not net destroyers.

Bryan Caplan: So, you know, in terms of what advice you can give to any one individual about how to improve the world, I would just say, have another kid, and that is a large value in terms of my own work. The only thing that I've done that I'm convinced has yielded. A large absolute value to humanity is my pronatalism stuff, because I do know hundreds of people who have had extra kids because of it.

Bryan Caplan: If you just use a standard economist 10 million value of life, [00:05:00] then that book generated billions of dollars worth of value. It still doesn't put me in Elon's territory, but still compared to my other stuff where it's not clear that it's changed anything in terms of policy, I feel very pleased with that.

Bryan Caplan: If you were to step back and say, yeah, but like causing the birth of hundreds of people that's like 0. 01% of the harm done by the one child policy. It's yeah, but that's what I've been able to pull off. It's something. I mean, at least I made things better instead of worse. So there's that.

Simone: So how much do you have that of the success that you saw through your pronatalist work was like, do you think was presenting logical arguments versus just showing people that it could be cool, that it's like desirable?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I know you guys are more to the coolness. Honestly, I'll say out of the people I persuade, they're very argument focused. I'm not claiming this is how most humans are like, this is just the people that listen to me are like that. The cases where it's most clear that I'd causally change things is when [00:06:00] there's a pre existing mom who already wanted to have a kid, there's a dad who liked me who was blocking it, and then I convinced him to stop blocking it.

Bryan Caplan: That's basically the profile of when I caused a person to exis