The Left Eats Itself? Woke Culture's Internal Struggles (With Bryan Caplan)

Description: Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone to discuss fascinating dynamics within left-wing culture. They analyze how progressive groups enforce rigid conformity, leading to constant internal conflict as people fear being "cancelled." Other topics include fertility rates across ideologies, Bryan's controversial open borders stance, and why some childless people react so angrily to his pronatalism.

Bryan Caplan: [00:00:00] I've done some fun Twitter polls of you know, are you left? Are you right? Do you worry about the left getting mad at you? Do you worry about the right getting mad at you? And one of the biggest groups that lives in fear is the left of the left,

Simone: right? Yeah. Yeah.

Bryan Caplan: Left. It's not quite like the ready body or like the Amish, but it is a weird dysfunctional subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over the shoulders

would you like to know more?

Simone: we are really excited today because we have a very special guest joining us, Brian Kaplan. He is, in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University, and a New York Times bestselling author, he's an author of not just a ton of books, including obviously some favorites of ours, like Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, like two huge obsession areas for us, but also in collaboration with the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, an awesome webcomic a book called Open Borders, the Science of Ethics in Immigration, which is [00:01:00] illustrated and there just needs to be more books out there as avid readers of comics and manga, like throughout our, like youth.

Simone: We are huge fans of this format. So like super stoked, especially when it's something about policy. Well, it's

Malcolm: wild. We actually have a Saturday morning breakfast cartoon in one of our books as well. We asked for permission. So that's but other things he's written on is the case to get don't grow up to be a feminist.

Malcolm: It's one of the books. And one of the most recent ones is on how democracies are non functional or becoming less, less optimized for good economic outcomes. So ladies and gentlemen,

Simone: if you need some good reading, basically just search Brian Kaplan's

Malcolm: name. So, the priming that I wanted to go into this interview with, because I find this very interesting, and I haven't seen your pontification on this particular angle yet.

Malcolm: When I look at all of the things that you're seeing as problems, they both seem to align with many of the things that we think about the world, and I think most people have really thought about things. So they're very sane and based takes, right? Fertility population's going to begin to decline in the developed world, which is going to have [00:02:00] major economic effects.

Malcolm: The academic system is working less and less well. There's sort of social contagions like feminism, which are causing many downstream societal effects. My question to you is realistically, where does the world go 50, 100 years from now? Do we see a beginning of a collapse of the developed world?

Malcolm: Do we see small social groups begin to gain more power? What's going on?

Bryan Caplan: My honest answer is, I always say, we'll muddle through, there's no collapse, there's no disaster. Even the idea that things will get overall worse is, I think, highly unlikely. Mostly, I think, in terms of missed opportunities, things could have been so much more than they were.

Bryan Caplan: If we get to immortality in a thousand years, what we could have done in a hundred years, well, what a horrible tragedy for nine hundred years worth of people. It's not the same thing as... The Planet of the Apes or something like that, or just a complete takeover. It's [00:03:00] just that we could have done so much better and we didn't.

Bryan Caplan: How sad.

Malcolm: So then economically, how do you think demographic collapse plays out? Do you think that it won't have that big of an effect? Do you think it will have a big... Like, how can countries adapt

Bryan Caplan: to it? It will have a huge effect relative to what could have been. That doesn't mean that we will see that living standards actually go down in absolute terms.

Bryan Caplan: I'm not going to rule that out for the most egregious cases. I do think that despite the great dysfunctionality of politics over the world, including democracies, that when things get really bad, to the level of things are actually going to get noticeably worse before your eyes, then I think normally countries get more flexible.

Bryan Caplan: It's like, all right, well, we can't have them, they actually get worse. What politics is really bad at is realizing incredible missed opportunities that people just have not gotten used to yet. For example, so if South Korea, if it really looks like they're going to be unable to [00:04:00] staff their old folks homes, they'll let in the immigrants at that point.

Bryan Caplan: It has to get bad, right? And then they will. All right, fine. We will go and prevent things from getting noticeably worse. They'll do what it takes to prevent that. But the fact that they could have had it. Thank you. Five times the GDP they have right now, if they just changed decades ago, well, that can keep going on indefinitely.

Bryan Caplan: There just isn't the same kind of pressure to realize theoretical opportunities as there is to prevent obvious disaster, where pressure is pretty high, actually. Yeah. So on the,

Malcolm: on this topic, I mean, what would be your theory of the best ways to increase fertility rates within a country? I know you wrote a book that was one theory on how to do this and it's convinced hundreds of people, which is a lot to have more kids or kids that they otherwise might not.

Malcolm: But at a government level, what do you think is the most effective

Bryan Caplan: solution? There's a myth out there that natalist policies don't work. [00:05:00] Normally, it's based upon this totally impressionistic thing of a country had falling fertility, the government adopted a program, and then fertility didn't suddenly go up.

Bryan Caplan: So, all right. Yeah, that's not really a good measure of policy efficacy. As I'm sure you guys know, the gold standard is experimental tests. There are two noted natalist actual bona fide experiments, one in Quebec, one in Austria, both of these found quite large effects of modest natalist incentives. So I would say that the very best approach is just to go and push harder on these incentives.

Bryan Caplan: My preferred one actually is specifically just something like giving people a one or two or three year complete tax holiday every time they have a kid. That is one approach. There's a lot of variations on this. Another one is just we're going to go and tie whatever retirement benefits you get to your lifetime [00:06:00] fertility, or maybe the amount of taxes that your kids pay.

Bryan Caplan: But in terms of just the simplest to adopt and the one that fits most with a lot of short term thinking, the humans exhibit is precisely have a kid you don't pay taxes that year. Maybe you don't pay them for a few years. Which again is also not to be coy it is a thinly veiled eugenic approach, which I think makes a lot of sense in terms of People that are statistically