Freddie deBoer on Monday

for subscribers; and a few insights from Bryan Caplan earlier this week

Freddie deBoer will join me and paid subscribers on Monday, May 15, at 8 PM. Link below. No events the following two Mondays, but Wednesday May 31 we will have Philip Wallach.

Bryan Caplan joined us this past Monday. He has a new book, Voters as Mad Scientists, which is sort of an update on his classic The Myth of the Rational Voter (MRV).

One of Bryan’s pet peeves is insincerity. In psychology, when people say that they do one thing and do another, this is called “social desirability bias.” Bryan uses that term more broadly. For example, researchers who do not study topics that might make people feel bad are suffering from a form of social desirability bias. In Bryan’s view, they also are leaving $20 bills on the ground for people like himself to pick up.

Bryan points out that students often act as if classroom learning is useless. For example, they are happy when a professor has to cancel class. But nobody says that out loud. This is an example of social desirability bias.

In MRV, he talks about voting as analogous to pollution. Just as the driver of a polluting car does not suffer much personally from his actions, a voter can make an uninformed choice and not be affected, in part because one individual’s vote almost never is decisive.

He also says that you can get people’s real convictions by seeing what they will bet on. That may differ from how they vote. His substack is called Bet on It.

Another instance of people saying one thing but acting differently is someone who leaves California for Texas because of high taxes, high housing costs, and crime, yet who continues to insist that he favors leftist policies.

Bryan pointed us to his post from a couple of years ago, Politics is Cruelty. His idea there is that people’s emotions when they think about politics combine happiness (with their own side) and anger at the other side. Putting those emotions together gives cruelty.