In addition to being a New York Times bestselling author of quite a few really awesome books, Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and extremely well-informed about the positions he holds. In this episode, we discuss: What is the role of education in society? Why is it important to have a good education? What role does it play in society How can we create a better education system?
00:00:12.700So the goal is to use a short-term advantage to get into the political system, then become president, and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now.
00:00:23.740You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.
00:00:30.440We are very excited to have Brian Kaplan joining us for this episode of Basecamp.
00:00:35.220In addition to being a New York Times bestselling author of quite a few really awesome books, many of which are on some of our favorite topics,
00:00:42.520Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and extremely well-informed about the positions he holds, whereas, I don't know, sometimes we just like to be a lot more philosophically.
00:00:53.060If you want to go over some of the topics he writes on, pronatalism advocate for, feminism causing societal problems, being more pro-open borders, government systems not working, and education systems becoming more broken.
00:01:11.040So what we'd like to discuss today, which I think really interests me, because you're at a nuanced nexus between these things, is the impact of education and how to actually create a delta.
00:01:22.560So we recently hosted a dinner at which people discussed fostering genius, creating world leaders who would change the trajectory of society.
00:01:34.020And one of the big themes that came up during that dinner was, well, you know, you can't necessarily like great man theory of history.
00:01:39.960A lot of people were really critical of it, but they thought, well, one thing that people can do is maybe accelerate the speed at which really awesome things happen.
00:01:48.140You know, like maybe many things are going to happen anyway, but if you can cultivate the right kind of leader or give people the right ideas, they may do it sooner for society rather than leader.
00:01:57.260And I thought about this as I was watching an interview with you and you said basically that you didn't expect open borders to happen in your lifetime, but that you hoped through the book that you have co-published called Open Borders, The Science and Ethics of Immigration, that maybe a generation would read this book and, you know, help to nudge things in a good direction.
00:02:17.880And, you know, you've also written a book about, you know, the case against education, which is more about why the traditional education system is not necessarily worth all the money we throw into it and the time we throw into it.
00:02:40.120And so, you know, there's this sort of weird, like nuanced area that I want to walk around with you in this discussion about, well, so we can maybe nudge people in a good direction.
00:02:53.780We can maybe speed up the rate at which really awesome things happen, which could really max out in a much more meaningful way, human productivity and flourishing.
00:03:02.160So I'm curious, Brian, what you think interventions are, not necessarily traditional education interventions, but interventions in youth and in development that actually are worth investing in, are effective, and might actually help people either change the trajectory of society or just actively change the trajectory of people and society.
00:03:28.920Obviously, it's got, you know, it has a lot of problems, too, but at least at the end, if it works, you know how to do something and are able to actually contribute more to society, whereas my bigger economic education is that it mostly pays just by giving you extra stamps in the forehead, which is great for an individual, but at the level of society, it generates credential inflation such that you need more degrees just to do the same job as your parents or grandparents.
00:03:52.380In terms of things that can be done that work well, well, well, let's see.
00:04:00.140I mean, there's the easy answers, things like vaccines or whatever.
00:04:02.840I think that the evidence for those is really good.
00:04:06.540I mean, I guess I would say that the one that matters the most is one that's near and dear to all of us, which is just having kids.
00:04:13.560So, you know, if you have a kid, I just say, look, you know that you have done something that almost certainly has great value to that person.
00:04:20.860That person is going to contribute to the world as well.
00:04:23.860Yeah, there's a small chance that you've given birth to the next Charles Manson, but almost certainly not.
00:04:28.620Just the fact that if you look around the world, it's not on fire shows that most people are net contributors.
00:04:35.320So, you know, in terms of what advice you can give to any one individual about how to improve the world, I would just say have another kid.
00:04:43.900In terms of my own work, the only thing that I've done that I'm convinced has yielded a large absolute value to humanity is my pronatalism stuff, because I do know hundreds of people who have had extra kids because of it.
00:04:56.460If you just use a standard economist $10 million value of life, then that book generated billions of dollars worth of value.
00:05:02.940It still doesn't put me in Elon's territory, but still compared to my other stuff, where it's not clear that it's changed anything in terms of policy, I feel very pleased with that.
00:05:13.460If you were to step back and say, yeah, but like causing the birth of hundreds of people, that's like 0.001% of the harm done by the one child policy.
00:05:22.320Yeah, but that's what I've been able to pull off.
00:05:28.920So how much of the success that you saw through your pronatalist work was like, do you think was presenting logical arguments versus just showing people that it could be cool, that it's like desirable?
00:05:43.480Yeah, I know you guys are more to the coolness.
00:05:46.040Honestly, I'll say out of the people I persuade, they're very argument focused.
00:05:50.260I'm not claiming this is how most humans are like.
00:05:52.520This is just the people that listen to me are like that.
00:05:54.920But the cases where it's most clear that I causally change things is when there's a pre-existing mom who already wanted to have a kid.
00:06:02.900There's a dad who liked me who was blocking it.
00:06:06.340And then I convinced him to stop blocking it.
00:06:08.880That's basically the profile of when I caused a person to exist and where it's totally clear that I did it.
00:06:29.120But honestly, closely related is that when you go into the statistics of what determines ultimate number of ultimate fertility, basically the patterns or the signs are the same for men and women.
00:06:40.440But the absolute value of the magnitudes are almost always much larger for women than men.
00:06:46.300It's with a simple story of women are just more opinionated.
00:06:49.740Men are more like, oh, you want to have one kid?
00:07:00.740It's not like it's purely something that women decide unilaterally.
00:07:04.740But nevertheless, it does look like women's characteristics are more decisive for the outcome, such that men, this is just an area where they are less set in their ways and more subject to suasion.
00:07:18.100If you are a needless woman, this is good news for you.
00:07:21.040It means that it probably doesn't, it is doable to go and change the guy's mind.
00:07:27.520If you're a guy, then I'd say mostly you've got to work on selection.
00:07:30.120You've got to find someone that agrees to the beforehand because it is just harder to go and change women's minds about these things.
00:07:36.480Yeah, women really do seem to be a major bottleneck.
00:07:38.780And one thing I wonder is in a lot of discussions of pernatalism is there's this like undertone of, well, the solution is for women to stop getting educations because that's what's ruining everything.
00:07:50.680And I mean, one of our big beefs in this space is we really want to prove that women can get high levels of education if they want it, like not necessary, but there's freedom to choose that.
00:08:02.840And you can still have high levels of, you know.
00:08:06.340Mostly just think about you've got to decouple the half-baked pseudo philosophy of most educators from the stuff they actually know and are teaching.
00:08:15.300And those are two completely different things where there is the actual knowledge of the facts of history combined with a totally ad hoc philosophy that gets superimposed onto the facts with variable thought.
00:08:29.260I mean, even at the level of the philosophy of a typical physicist is basically some watered-down woke hodgepodge.
00:08:37.420They don't really think about it very much.
00:08:39.260They're just repeating this just like other people in their culture or subculture, rather.
00:08:45.260But on the other hand, the physics, they actually know something and they probably know it forwards and backwards.
00:08:49.060So just realizing that when this authority is speaking, sometimes they have incredible knowledge and sometimes they're just making it up as they go along or just repeating it like a parrot, really.
00:09:00.440And just like be aware of the difference between those two things.
00:09:03.540One thing that is really striking is it does take an enormous amount of steely self-discipline to just hear the same propaganda every day and not believe it.
00:09:16.160If you watch the news every day, you really have to be a Vulcan to watch an hour of this stuff every day for three years straight and not start to actually think the world is falling apart and everything is terrible.
00:09:53.220So I'm a huge fan of philosopher Michael Humer.
00:09:55.260One of my very favorite posts of his is one where he says, imagine there's a school where all they do every day is teach you true things that are true, bad things that Jews have done.
00:10:47.920No, you are trying to go and get a bullhorn and then say something and then talk about the most terrible thing that happened on Earth, which inevitably produces a certain worldview among your listeners of thinking that the end is nigh and the world's collapsing.
00:11:03.700So stop telling me that you're not promoting a philosophy or that this is just facts.
00:11:09.320It is a highly selected, deeply biased worldview that you're promoting.
00:11:14.120It can be completely true and yet totally misleading at the same time.
00:11:31.380So, you know, I think that it's true that if you just look at Western education systems, they are strongly predictive of reduced female fertility.