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 likely to have kids that are going to have a high, a lot of payoff for society.

Bryan Caplan: They're the ones that are best to go and actually encourage. Again, I am like, I am very pro other people having kids too, but in terms of bang for your buck, I think this is the one that makes the most sense. I do have a piece where I just snap together two bodies evidence, one on how sensitive is fertility to incentives.

Bryan Caplan: And the other one is what is the net fiscal effect of having another kid? And I do say that this program that I'm talking about, or policy I'm talking about of giving [00:07:00] people a, like a 1 year tax holiday for having another kid is. The holy grail of fiscal policy because it really does look like it is a tax cut that more than pays for itself, which has been otherwise pretty hard to find.

Malcolm: Interesting. So, I know your upcoming book is on capitalism and freedom economically and how that benefits everyone. And

Bryan Caplan: everyone, I never say everyone, a

Malcolm: lot of people, but probably it benefits the

Bryan Caplan: aggregate. Yeah, that's actually the kind of language that the book is aimed to crush is everyone will benefit.

Bryan Caplan: No, not everybody. Like most people. Okay.

Malcolm: Most people. But so I would love to couch this and I want to hear how you think about this problem, which is when we look at where fertility rates. Go up and where they crash. You know, when you see fertility rates begin to go below replacement rate is typically in a country when the average citizen is earning less than around five K a year and you [00:08:00] begin to see them go up again when a family is earning over half a million dollars a year.

Malcolm: At an individual level within a country and our takeaway from this has been what is actually, and we say this as like big supporters of capitalism, what actually is one of the big causers of fertility rate collapse. Yeah. Is when people begin to engage with the modern economic system, because people at both ends of the spectrum aren't fully engaging with the modern economic system, and the modern economic system does a very good job of disproportionate or dynamically pricing the value of potentially productive cultural groups and individuals within a society, but it does a very bad job at judging

Malcolm: So it will always pay somebody just enough to not spend time with their family to some extent. And so the places that are most engaged with sort of capitalistic freedom are often the places that have the lowest fertility rates. Like, how do you think about that? Or do you just reject this as a thesis?[00:09:00]

Bryan Caplan: Well, let's see. The main thing that I know is if you go and race income versus education as predictors of fertility for the United States, where I work with the data the most. So, again, just to understand statistically, this basically means that we're going to allow fertility to depend upon two variables and then see what the relative weights are.

Bryan Caplan: So, when you do it this way, actually, the big punchline is that it is education and not income that suppresses fertility. I'm back! The highest fertility subgroup out of those four possibilities. So you've got high income, low income, high education, low education. The highest fertility subgroup is actually the high income, low education group.

Bryan Caplan: So in your mind, think of plumbers.

Bryan Caplan: So really, I don't think that it is. income per se that seems to matter. I mean, I say it's more of education, even education. It's well, why would education do? And I say it's the kind of education that we are used to in Western countries, which basically, [00:10:00] even if it is not explicitly discouraged fertility, it basically gives fertility so low of a priority and just replaces it with career success is the only thing that counts.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Including perhaps for, especially for women. But that is the real story. So it's not income itself that seems to matter. And income by itself does seem to be good for fertility. Yeah. Well, I

Malcolm: mean, you could frame it as education is the lengths of time you've spent and the amount that you have personally invested in this cultural indoctrination system.

Malcolm: , that's indoctrinating people into a cultural group that values fertility very

Bryan Caplan: little. I think that does make a lot of sense. Right. And it fits with low East Asian fertility, although I also do like to think about East Asian fertility as being the best confirmation of my story that faceless internalized norms of helicopter parenting, the idea that you must go and ruin your own life in order to be a decent parent.

Bryan Caplan: I think it does produce fertility. I think East Asia where helicopter [00:11:00] parenting is most severe is also where we see the ultra low fertility does fit overall with that story at least.

Malcolm: Yeah, well, and I think East Asia is a really interesting. So one of the things, you know, it's people here who really value freedom.

Malcolm: One of the things that does concern me is typically within outside of the East. If you're looking at like Western cultural groups, typically the less freedom a group permits. The higher fertility rate it's going to have within that cultural group, but you can see that this isn't a truism because it doesn't exist within East Asia.

Malcolm: In East Asia, restricting freedoms does not increase fertility rates.

Bryan Caplan: So what would be the Western countries that that you have in mind for

Malcolm: So it's not countries, it's cultural groups. So typically if you're looking at like religious groups, so in the U S which groups have the highest fertility rates, they're the

Bryan Caplan: groups.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Yeah. Like Amish for example. So that's picking up. The,

Malcolm: the Amish, the Haraiti, the you know, and this is true within every individual cultural group. So, if I'm [00:12:00] looking at Muslims the more progressive loosey goosey Muslim is going to have a very low fertility rate, whereas the very conservative ones are going to have a very high fertility rate.

Malcolm: And this is one of the things that this, actually, Diana Fleishman was doing an interview with you and mentioned that we had this idea, and I was wondering what you think of it, which is, if only through If it is true, and it appears to be true, that within countries, the groups that remove individual freedoms, especially from women have higher fertility rates, that they will come to be more predominant mindsets in the future.

Malcolm: Do you, would you agree with that, or?

Bryan Caplan: That's pretty obvious. You essentially just have to have some massive force cutting the other way in order for that not to be true. My long term view is straight out of Jurassic Park, life finds a way. It's not possible for fertility to stay low forever. We know that there is a substantial heritable component to desired and achieved fertility.

Bryan Caplan: So in the long run, childless people are just have their genes are getting wiped out of the population and they're going to [00:13:00] get replaced by people who actually want to have kids and like doing it. So it's just a quick, you know, that may take centuries, but still, you know, the idea that we can just go down to zero, I think is pretty crazy.

Bryan Caplan: Life finds you really does. No, I agree. I mean, it's engaging and yet. We just want to think about who feels like they are, have to watch their backs and like they're under a lot of social pressure. I actually think that very left wing people in the West are some of the people who not just are, but feel like they have to really watch what they say for fear of getting kicked out of their subculture.

Bryan Caplan: 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. Right. And so, I mean, I think that they have actually managed to create, you know, it's not quite like the ready body or like the Amish, but it [00:14:00] is a weird dysfunctional subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over the shoulders every time that they go.

Bryan Caplan: Discuss what they see with their own eyes to make sure that reality is allow, you know, reality is discussable, . I, so I don't, I think of them as out of large groups. I think that they are probably one of the largest groups. That just feels a lot of internal sense of, I have to be really careful what I say.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I was kind of surprised by how open people that were responding were to this, you know, it's obviously it's a Twitter poll. You can always say, ah, people are just making stuff up. I just tend to doubt that. So I, we have the idea that like people are deliberately going and responding to anonymous polls with mischievous answers.

Bryan Caplan: Sometimes they'll do it if it's like really funny, but it's got to be funnier than I'm left wing and I'm scared of the left. That's not four out of 10 on hilarious. Yes.

Malcolm: Well, I also think it's intuitive. I mean, I think anybody who looks at that and is this isn't happening is probably lying to themselves to some extent.

Malcolm: And this [00:15:00] is if people say, what, well, what are we trying to do with this channel is. Trying to redefine what the right is to an alliance of diverse cultural groups against a homogenizing urban monoculture, which is to say that, you know, one of the things I always say is that if you look at a progressive Muslim or a progressive Jew or progressive Catholic, you know, they're going to have the same views on gender, the same views on sexuality, the same views on where we, how we should relate to the environment, the same views on the future of our species.

Malcolm: Whereas if you talk to, you know, you know, conservatives of these groups, they're gonna have wildly different takes on that. And so I think rebuilding the conservative movement as an alliance of free thought is one of the ways we can preserve and ensure that at least within one space that's possible.

Malcolm: But we still get trashed by our viewers all the time.

Bryan Caplan: You know, I mean, what you're saying makes a lot of sense. If you think about modern leftism actually is something. And everybody else is more just like people on the island of Misfit Toys. [00:16:00] Where it's I'm not that thing, but I don't know, I've got like a broken paw here.

Bryan Caplan: Okay, and meanwhile, I'm the one whose head isn't screwed on right. So, yeah, I think you've got something going on there. I don't know if you catch the reference to this classic animation. Oh, I know, yeah, the claymation, yeah. Yeah. But it is really

Malcolm: interesting that you say that. It's truthy

Bryan Caplan: rather than true, but I still like it.

Malcolm: Yeah. Well, I mean, people ask, well, you know, why are you really only interested in talking to the right? And it's because this left cultural group, while they may be the dominant cultural group in society today, they lower fertility rates so much that they really aren't part of the conversation when we're talking about the future of the species.

Malcolm: So, you know, right now we're focused on communicating with the other groups that are going to be there in the future to hope we can get along once this group is self extinguished.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, it's gonna, it will be a while, but you know, honestly, I mean, I try to talk to anybody that's curious to talk to me.

Bryan Caplan: It's just that while there's many individuals on the left that have talked to [00:17:00] me, but I basically get no institutional love from any left wing group, no matter how simpatico my themes are with what they're doing. It's just yeah, he's not right. It's not one of us. So we're not going to go on platform and we don't want to be associated with anything that we don't like.

Bryan Caplan: There's this one cartoon that I really like. It's basically just a stick figure. And the first panel says, wait, did you disagree with one of the things that I believe next panel, you have to agree with all the things I believe.

Malcolm: Yeah, we get that a lot. I love that. You know, one of the things that you said in a recent interview, and I want to hear pontification on why you think this is the case is you're saying that when people really angrily attack you. That the most common or a common trait among them, and this is for your pronatalist views, is that they have chosen not to have kids themselves.

Malcolm: Now, your pronatalist views and our pronatalist views are both that this is a choice for every individual. [00:18:00] We don't want to pressure any specific individual who doesn't want kids into having kids. Why do you think that they get so mad about this?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, normally I don't like to do this, but this is a case where I just have so much trouble resisting the simple story that you are going against billions of years of evolution and there's always a part of you that's just saying no, like we have a billion, you know, let's say you know, what would it be, say like a hundred million ancestor ancestral generations Have reproduced and you're going to stop.

Bryan Caplan: There's some sense of internal conflict. And again, this does just fit with me that, I mean, I have had, I rates people, I guess. Always women you know, just call me up and yell at me and say I am very happy to my life. I don't need kids. And I'm like, I don't think a person happy with their life calls up a stranger and yells at them.

Bryan Caplan: So just so our viewers know how insane this is. Every other day of your life is happy and this is the one [00:19:00] day you're having a bad day and I'm the person that's on the receiving end. It just doesn't sound like that to me. It sounds like you're in a lot of internal conflict. You know, you know, like I, I hate to go and sound biblical about this, but it does sound so much like the story of St.

Bryan Caplan: Paul getting kicked off his horse in the desert. It says Paul rather, you know, saw, so you still saw it. This white Saul, why does not persecute me. It is hard to kick against the pricks. So I get, I love it. Of course. It's just so entertaining. And almost like cackling to yourself with glee in the thought that, Oh, my opponent secretly agreed with me.

Bryan Caplan: But, and normally I don't have that at all, but this is what

Bryan Caplan: it's kind of fits. I don't know. I can't read minds. I'll never really know, but still, it sure seems that

Malcolm: way. What I think is really interesting about what you're saying for people who haven't read his works or seen his other interviews is you are the first to admit that statistically having kids actually [00:20:00] doesn't make you that much happier.

Malcolm: Like it makes you a little bit less happy on average. And so you're not even going out and saying oh, these people have no happiness in their lives, but that's what they're hearing because I think it's what they feel. Fear in what they, what the little devil in their head is telling them.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah.

Bryan Caplan: So probably the most irate caller. I actually had a summary of the happiness research on both marriage and parenting where I said that statistically the people to feel sorry for are not people with kids, but people who are single. And this comes down to, yeah, like the happiness gain of marriage is huge.

Bryan Caplan: There is a tiny happiness hit from being a parent. And then I said, if you combine these two things and remember that having kids is a lot of what keeps marriages together, then it seems like from that point of view, it's a net positive. But this was a childless and single woman and she was irate. And I'm just describing the results.

Bryan Caplan: Trying to do it in an amusing way, I shouldn't [00:21:00] mean to mess up your day or anything. Perhaps you are really happy, even though you're calling strangers and yelling at them in the middle of the day. But, again, probably not.

Malcolm: Well, it is interesting the way that people enforce cultural norms. Within the far progressive, the sort of like urban monoculture is through chastising either privately or publicly people who say things that deviate from those norms.

Malcolm: And that's not true for most cultural groups. Very few cultural groups publicly chastise people from other cultural groups for not following their rules, which is fascinating.

Bryan Caplan: Although perhaps given how much fear the left has of being yelled at by the left. They might not be so exceptional, actually, probably most of the energy is directed towards your in group.

Bryan Caplan: I've talked to multiple left wing professors who have said that they are scared of getting cancelled. And I'm listening, I'm squinting you, you're like, totally boring you're like, man on the left, you know, but it's [00:22:00] no, they might get me. And it is because they are just culturally so, so much closer.

Bryan Caplan: Whereas... Honestly, yeah my fear of having the left do anything bad to me is really low. It's because I'm just not that close to them culturally. And so, you know, it's oh, well, none of us left wing people will be your friend anymore. It's well, alright yeah, that's not really going to change my day that much, actually.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah,

Malcolm: well, and that's something I really appreciate about you as an intellectual is you clearly have no audience capture like you're looking at the work that you're putting out and it typically would appeal to right leaning individuals and then you put out something like we should have totally open borders.

Malcolm: Without any fear of losing your audience, but I think people who are in this sort of intellectual dissident space can afford to do that in a way that almost no other group can because your audience won't hate you for saying something that you think is true with data to back it.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I mean, probably it's true that the people that said, let me put it this way.[00:23:00]

Bryan Caplan: I've received very few death threats in my life, but I think 100% of all the death threats have come from anti immigrant people.

Simone: Wow, oh,

Bryan Caplan: they are the most psychotic people that I interact with, which does not mean that most of them are psychotic, but they do have the highest share of psychotics. As far as I can tell, but still, I'd say that the only real groups that.

Bryan Caplan: Whether that will just shun me or ones where being anti immigration is their whole thing, whereas ones where they do a lot of issues, then it's okay, maybe Brian is, we're totally bad on immigration, but we like this other stuff. And that doesn't mean that we dislike him. It's more of dissonant groups are generally just not so picky.

Bryan Caplan: And they're like, well, you know, we'll take what we can get. Where, you know, obviously, if it's a single issue group, then they do tend to be hostile to me. Yeah, of course, even that varies quite a lot by individual, but none of you [00:24:00] know, there's no immigration person who's ever threatened me or anything.

Malcolm: That's interesting. Yeah. To me, that means that these anti immigration groups probably view it as an existential threat to their culture if immigration is allowed. Yeah. Which is interesting because countries that have the strictest immigration policy, one thing we always point out is if you look at wealthy countries, the countries with the strictest anti immigration policy typically have the lowest fertility rate.

Malcolm: And they typically had these anti immigration policies before their fertility rate collapsed. So it appears to actually kill a cultural group to not have competitors

Bryan Caplan: around at least somewhat plausible, I guess, to whether it's causal or not. It's a bit hard to say, let's see. I mean, I guess I would go around thinking about, let's see here's actually.

Bryan Caplan: The East Asian economy, that's most of the open immigrants, which is Singapore. I'll be there. Not the worst of fertility, but they're not the best either. Yeah. So again, that's just one example. I mean, I mean, a lot of this, I would [00:25:00] say maybe we just don't have enough data to really know. Well, yeah,

Malcolm: in different cultural groups relate to things in different ways.

Malcolm: So it might be the East Asian groups don't increase their fertility when they have cultural competition, but Western cultural groups, like whether it's like Israel or the U S do

Bryan Caplan: yeah, Israel, there's quite a bit of possibility. And this is the case, the kind of main country where. Normal people talk about there being race.

Simone: That's

Bryan Caplan: a good point. We've got to, we've got to beat that other group. I mean, at first I people were telling me this not really true. Okay, fine. It is actually true there. It's not just something some intellectuals have superimposed on behavior. It's something that normal people use to describe what they're doing with their lives.

Malcolm: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're proud of who they are. And I think that when you were talking about education plus wealth, Israel is where it's that rings true for me. When I think of like conservative Jews who do not like variety who don't engage with the education system, but are otherwise wealthy, they have lots of kids.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I mean, also worth pointing out, they've got lots of education, but just of this bizarro kind that [00:26:00] consists in, let's argue about the meaning of dead books written by a bunch of different people and pretend they all have to agree.

Simone: No, I mean, my impression is it's not

Bryan Caplan: necessarily a shame that so much brain power goes into this completely futile intellectual endeavor.

Simone: When we talk about that, it seems to us like a bit of an IQ shredder. We're like, Oh my gosh, these are like, we were, we spoke at one point about the meritocracy system of that culture as well. Like how it really sorts for very smart people, well, smart and charismatic people, like the most informed is able to get the most power and status and influence.

Simone: And yet we're like, Oh, but these people could get us on Mars, but they're

Malcolm: as I pointed out to Moan when the cultural group abandons that, that's what the Reform Jews did, they said, oh, we'll still judge cultural status by how smart we are, but we'll have this done by some sort of external system like the university system.

Malcolm: And that just acted like a huge backdoor, which destroyed their fertility rates and was used to convert them all to the progressive urban monoculture. And so there's a reason why they do this, even though it appears unproductive. Yeah. [00:27:00] Yeah. Anyway, hold on. This has been fantastic. We're out of time, but I would love to have you back, Simone.

Malcolm: Do you have any final thoughts?

Simone: No. I just I'm very entertained that the death threats come from immigration. So Malcolm, we better watch our backs if we ever start talking about that one.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I think it's almost all cheap talk. I'm not actually worried. But

Simone: it's interesting to see like

Bryan Caplan: where it comes from.

Bryan Caplan: There's a level of fear of. Even normal intellectuals, much less dissenters, especially when there are people of tenure who say, I'm afraid to speak my mind. This was like, if you won't do it, come on, who's going to do it? You live in a war zone. If there's something that's worth saying and it won't be said, but for you, stick your neck out and say it.

Bryan Caplan: Take your rumps. There's no other way to live that's worthwhile.

Simone: Beautiful parting words. Oh, thank you so much for coming on

my

Bryan Caplan: pleasure, guys. Thank you.