He is very pro-natal, which you might think is inconvenient for anarcho-capitalism because it implies that children have large positive externalities and hence maybe should be subsidized (as Robin thinks).
He thinks most university degrees have significant negative externalities because of the signalling model, which would lend support to the idea that university education should be taxed.
He believes that humans are often irrational, which undercuts some perfect-competition style arguments for anarcho-capitalism.
Thanks, these are interesting examples (and if I’m commenting too much someone please tell me, I can do that sometimes I think), but I range from somewhat to very skeptical on them as counterexamples:
This is the most plausible one I think, it really does seem like it lends support for greater intervention on certain views. However, it’s hard to find a view of population ethics/population sciences that does not have some population it prefers, or that gives a good account of why incentives will produce it naturally. My impression is that most people either have quite implausible views that are completely neutral, or just, as with Caplan, think this isn’t a road we want to go down.
I think Caplan thinks education would be pretty fine if you took away the public funding/subsidies, it would just naturally become much less common (though he does make note of the issues with a market quickly optimizing “conformity” signals specifically, which might be the greatest source for market inefficiency here for him)
He seems to think humans are primarily irrational in the areas where anarcho-capitalism takes away our power and primarily rational where it would leave us power, see his arguments about for instance how much people are willing to spend in rent to live in immigrant free neighborhoods versus what they actually vote for in immigration policy, or more broadly his work on the irrational voter. His views aren’t always convenient in this area, but some amount of human irrationality is very hard to plausibly deny, and the version he believes in is pretty convenient for him imo.
I think the counterfactual, convenient view for him to hold on natalism would be to just not talk about it, which is the strategy most people adopt with inconvenient facts and allows them to simply ignore them when doing policy analysis.
Higher education is currently very subsidized, and I agree that he thinks removing these subsidies would be a big improvement. But his views imply that even with no subsidy it would still be over-consumed, because each credential imposes negative externalities on everyone else’s credential.
I don’t have much of a direct response to you, except that many left wing people seem to think “but humans aren’t perfectly rational” is a compelling objection to free market policies, and I think he should be given some credit here.
Fair, fair, and fair. I do think there are mitigating responses to all of these points as well, but I’ll concede the point that these are cases on the fringes of convenience for him. I was personally more thinking about IQ if I had to think of an example—he seems to place more importance on it than most people, but as I think he pointed out in a blog post I can’t find now, this leads just an awful lot of people to really statist and quasi or outright fascist views, so even if it doesn’t actually imply fascism, it’s an area where adopting a view closer to the average would be more convenient, provide an additional reason he could give against such people.
I’m not sure this is true.
He is very pro-natal, which you might think is inconvenient for anarcho-capitalism because it implies that children have large positive externalities and hence maybe should be subsidized (as Robin thinks).
He thinks most university degrees have significant negative externalities because of the signalling model, which would lend support to the idea that university education should be taxed.
He believes that humans are often irrational, which undercuts some perfect-competition style arguments for anarcho-capitalism.
Thanks, these are interesting examples (and if I’m commenting too much someone please tell me, I can do that sometimes I think), but I range from somewhat to very skeptical on them as counterexamples:
This is the most plausible one I think, it really does seem like it lends support for greater intervention on certain views. However, it’s hard to find a view of population ethics/population sciences that does not have some population it prefers, or that gives a good account of why incentives will produce it naturally. My impression is that most people either have quite implausible views that are completely neutral, or just, as with Caplan, think this isn’t a road we want to go down.
I think Caplan thinks education would be pretty fine if you took away the public funding/subsidies, it would just naturally become much less common (though he does make note of the issues with a market quickly optimizing “conformity” signals specifically, which might be the greatest source for market inefficiency here for him)
He seems to think humans are primarily irrational in the areas where anarcho-capitalism takes away our power and primarily rational where it would leave us power, see his arguments about for instance how much people are willing to spend in rent to live in immigrant free neighborhoods versus what they actually vote for in immigration policy, or more broadly his work on the irrational voter. His views aren’t always convenient in this area, but some amount of human irrationality is very hard to plausibly deny, and the version he believes in is pretty convenient for him imo.
I think the counterfactual, convenient view for him to hold on natalism would be to just not talk about it, which is the strategy most people adopt with inconvenient facts and allows them to simply ignore them when doing policy analysis.
Higher education is currently very subsidized, and I agree that he thinks removing these subsidies would be a big improvement. But his views imply that even with no subsidy it would still be over-consumed, because each credential imposes negative externalities on everyone else’s credential.
I don’t have much of a direct response to you, except that many left wing people seem to think “but humans aren’t perfectly rational” is a compelling objection to free market policies, and I think he should be given some credit here.
Fair, fair, and fair. I do think there are mitigating responses to all of these points as well, but I’ll concede the point that these are cases on the fringes of convenience for him. I was personally more thinking about IQ if I had to think of an example—he seems to place more importance on it than most people, but as I think he pointed out in a blog post I can’t find now, this leads just an awful lot of people to really statist and quasi or outright fascist views, so even if it doesn’t actually imply fascism, it’s an area where adopting a view closer to the average would be more convenient, provide an additional reason he could give against such people.