Bryan Caplan Quotes

#1. What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters - specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.

Bryan Caplan

#2. Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world

Bryan Caplan

#3. There are two sources of error: Either you lack sufficient data, or you fail to take advantage of the data that you have.

Bryan Caplan

#4. [T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. - William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty

Bryan Caplan

#5. In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics?

Bryan Caplan

#6. Let us designate anarchism1 anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism2 anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it.

Bryan Caplan

#7. Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.

Bryan Caplan

#8. In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.

Bryan Caplan

#9. If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about
1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you.

Bryan Caplan

#10. The serious fact is that the bulk of the really important things economics has to teach are things that people would see for themselves if they were willing to see. - Frank Knight, "The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics

Bryan Caplan

#11. The best social insurance is to make more progress, not to make more work

Bryan Caplan

#12. Sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations.

Bryan Caplan

#13. Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners.

Bryan Caplan

#14. Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders.

Bryan Caplan

#15. The use of force is easy to rationalize in terms of basic economics. 'We should make them PAY for what they've done!' It's just the law of demand: raise the price of crossing us, and fewer people will cross us. Make the price another Hiroshima, and perhaps the quantity demanded will fall to zero.

Bryan Caplan