I’m puzzled by Bryan Caplan’s hostility (1, 2, 3) to the ZMP hypothesis. It is hard to think of another idea that is more Caplanian. This is after all the man who pointed out that “the lower deciles don’t contribute that much to the economy, anyway.” Bryan’s Jock/Nerd theory of History has been so influential [...]

Tags: Caplan, Jock/Nerd theory of history, Wells, ZMP hypothesis
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Bryan Caplan writes three compelling posts on the common-sense case for pacifism. The short version of his argument is that it’s wrong to kill innocent foreigners (“collateral damage”), especially when the gain in doing so is not clearly large, as it is not in many wars. This seems like as good a prompt as any [...]

Tags: bounties, Caplan, crackpot ideas, Helland, political assassination, public choice, Tabarrok
19 Comments »

In a post about the externalities of time travel, Tyler Cowen writes, I believe no one understands the underlying science much at all. But there is some chance that the old science fiction movies are correct and that by time-traveling you alter the course of history, thereby obliterating the universe we used to have. I’ll count that as a [...]

Tags: Caplan, Cowen, Crichton, intertemporal paradox, time travel, time's arrow
2 Comments »

I am told that there will be an election next week. Actually nobody told me; it’s what I gathered from the yard signs. Elections, for me, are a spectator sport. I will probably be up all night watching the Prop 19 returns come in, but I haven’t participated since Bryan Caplan showed me the mathematics [...]

Tags: Caplan, Coase, democracy, elections, political economy
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Arnold Kling tentatively postulates that central banks can, at most, select between a low-stable inflation regime and a high-variable inflation regime. Bryan Caplan proposes a quick test, which I hereby supply. Below are some scatterplots of inflation variance versus inflation means for 176 countries. The data is from the World Bank, which gets it from [...]

Tags: Caplan, IMF, inflation, Kling, monetary policy, World Bank
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Bryan Caplan has taken a lot of heat for his argument that on net, American women were freer in 1880 than they are today. While some of the pushback has been substantive, the majority has been disgustingly personal. Bryan, who is a pacifistic sort, has written a measured self-defense in which he points this out. Bryan [...]

Tags: Caplan, cultural libertarianism, feminism, hypocrisy, incivility, intellectual freedom
6 Comments »

William D. Eggers and John O’Leary have an article in Reason to support the release of their book, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government. The premise of the article is clear from its title: “Five Reasons Why Libertarians Shouldn’t Hate Government.” The article has attracted a [...]

Tags: Caplan, deregulation, Eggers, government, Hanson, libertarianism, O'Leary, policy
7 Comments »

I very much want a Kindle, but… I am afraid of being locked into a vendor or technology. I currently buy almost all my books from Amazon.com with very little comparison shopping because I know that Amazon faces a pretty elastic demand curve. If I buy a Kindle, I will have only one source for [...]

Tags: Amazon.com, Caplan, copyright, DRM, e-books, Jock/Nerd theory of history, Kindle, miscellany, real estate
6 Comments »