Bryan Caplan is missing a brain module

Bryan Caplan is an economist at George Mason and, as he is fond of mentioning, a NYT bestselling author. We’ve been following him for a while, and have accumulated quite a pile to get off our chest. A brief point to ponder is his beautiful bubble, which our tenured self can readily identify with. Of course, one must not forget the zeroth rule of beautiful bubbles: No matter how cozy your bubble might seem, you still need to keep tabs on the outside world lest a horde of barbarians take you by surprise and rudely pop it. (That’s from 2015; they’ve gotten quite a bit feistier since then.)

But this post is not about Caplan’s beautiful bubble; rather, it’s about his batshit crazy immigration policy. You gotta hand it to the guy: he pulls no punches and really chomps down on the bullet, black powder and all. He’s been remarkably consistent on this. In a 2013 debate with Ron Unz*, the latter came across as the sane one, which is really saying something. Caplan’s basic stance is one of radical open borders. He believes that a man’s right to live wherever he damn pleases trumps any sovereign nation’s right to define its borders and constituency. Sullivan pushed him pretty hard on this in a recent podcast, but not far enough. Just where does this right to live anywhere you want end? At a gated community’s guard post? At Caplan’s own front door?

Now Bryan Caplan is a knowledgeable and intelligent man, so the quip we made about Sailer applies: he rarely completely has no point. He makes the astute observation that voting being a low-stakes activity, people’s voting patterns represent aesthetic preferences more so than actual economic interests. He keeps banging on the refrain “actions speak louder than words,” and he has a point. Caplan’s go-to example is a man who claims that religion is the most important thing in his life yet never goes to church, and we agree with his judgment that such a man is likely to be untruthful or inconsistent. If there’s one lesson we can all take away from economics, it’s that revealed preference is a much more reliable indicator than mere words.

Yet Caplan’s application of revealed preference is clumsy and inept (at least going by the podcast; we have no intention of reading the book). He repeatedly invokes the following argument: You say you don’t want immigrants around, yet your town has immigrants while the more expensive town a few miles over does not. Your unwillingness to move to the more expensive town indicates that you’ve vastly overstated the true importance of immigration on your list of priorities. I don’t even know where to begin with this. First of all, what if you can’t afford to move to the more expensive town? But more importantly, what if you view low-skilled immigration as an externality? What if you vote to restrict immigration because you don’t want to be forced in a position where you have to move over to the next town?

Sullivan asked about immigrants importing their broken political systems into the US, to which Caplan cheerfully replied that he’d happily deny them voting rights, indefinitely. He’s gone on to extol (on Sullivan’t podcast and others) Kuwait’s system of allowing poor people from India to come work for pennies and be treated like dogs and suggested with a straight face that America follow Kuwait’s example and allow the creation of an immigrant underclass with significantly less rights than citizens. Nevermind the ethics of such a proposal; the fact that Caplan believes even for a second that the American society in year 2021 would be open to such an arrangement indicates just how comically out of touch he is. His beautiful bubble has gotten far too thick — and the eventual popping will be all the more traumatic.

[Update: See this follow-up, where Caplan’s revealed preference argument gets the full thrashing it deserves.]

* Now that we’ve smeared Caplan as batshit crazy, justice demands that we call out Ron Unz for being a sick fuck.

Sorry to be crude, but when your website’s Featured Book is Mein Kampf (and you’re a Jew!), there’s really no other way to put it. (We don’t see that item among his current selection, but a quick scan will tell you all you need to know.) Then there are Unz’s own writings. Holocaust denial? Check. Blood libel? Check. Oh heck, just go peruse all of his writings and tell me they’re of a sane man.