Quotes from Bryan Caplan

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

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

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

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.

Changing the people you see, changes the way you see people.

The heralded social dividends of education are largely illusory: rising education's main fruit is not broad-based prosperity, but credential inflation

In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does.

Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.

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.

It is precisely because education is so affordable that the labor market expects us to possess so much. Without the subsidies, you would no longer need the education you can no longer afford.

Brennan and Lomasky point to the expressive function of voting. Fans at a football game cheer not to help the home team win, but to express their loyalty. Similarly, citizens might vote not to help policies win, but to express their patriotism, their compassion, or their devotion to the environment. This is not hair-splitting. One implication is that inefficient policies like tariffs or the minimum wage might win because expressing support for them makes people feel good about themselves.

If voters are systematically mistaken about what policies work, there is a striking implication: They will not be satisfied by the politicians they elect. A politician who ignores the public's policy preferences looks like a corrupt tool of special interests. A politician who implements the public's policy preferences looks incompetent because of the bad consequences.

Would we still have a "democracy" if you needed to pass a test of economic literacy to vote? If you needed a college degree? Both of these measures raise the economic understanding of the median voter, leading to more sensible policies. Franchise restrictions were historically used for discriminatory ends, but that hardly implies that they should never be used again for any reason. A test of voter competence is no more objectionable than a driving test.

First, altruism and morality generally are consumption goods like any other, so we should expect people to buy more altruism when the price is low.34 Second, due to the low probability of decisiveness, the price of altruism is drastically cheaper in politics than in markets.35 Voting to raise your taxes by a thousand dollars when your probability of decisiveness is 1 in 100,000 has an expected cost of a penny.

Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to "stuff themselves" with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.

It is no accident that both of the substitutes for religion that Hoffer names—nationalism and social revolution—are political. Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity. Like the adherents of traditional religion, many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet critical questions with pious hostility.50 Instead of crusades or inquisitions, the twentieth century had its notorious totalitarian movements.

the less education applicants have, the less applicants need to convince employers they're worth hiring.

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

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

In the minds of many, one of Winston's Churchill's most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."10 But this saying overlooks the fact that the governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.

After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street—and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets' virtues relative to the democratic alternative.

Most voters disown selfish motives. They personally back the policies that are best for the country, ethically right, and consistent with social justice. At the same time, they see other voters—not just their opponents, but often their allies too—as deeply selfish. The typical liberal Democrat says he votes his conscience, and

If you do not grasp the difference between orange juice and detergent, brand names will at best help you drink the finest detergent on the market, and wash your dishes with the right amount of pulp.

Education can be glorious. At its best, to quote Roman philosopher Lucretius, it is a "voyage in mind throughout infinity.