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Text of the page (random words):
bet on it bryan caplan substack bet on it subscribe sign in home my books archive about my dwarkesh story bryan caplan may 04 2026 72 4 2 share announcement i arrive in austin for my stint at uatx on may 12 on campus gaming and karaoke begin almost immediately open to the public learn more and rsvp here in november of 2021 i wrote a piece called the upside of covid talking about all of the lemonade i squeezed out of the lemon of the pandemic but the piece never directly mentions the fact that thanks to covid i became friends with dwarkesh patel now that his podcast has millions of subscribers the new york times has done a deep dive profile in the broad scheme of things this is probably the very best thing to come out of my passage through covid hell where i enter the story mr patel recorded the first episode of the lunar society his original name for the podcast from his dorm room at the university of texas at austin in 2020 during the early months of the covid pandemic when he was 19 he was taking online classes bored and thirsty for intellectual engagement so he did what any normal college sophomore might do and cold emailed bryan caplan a member of george mason university s famously libertarian economics department in the email he described how three caplan books had shifted his perspective on immigration education and how many children to have mr caplan responded encouragingly and after a further friendly exchange mr patel asked if he could interview him for a podcast mr caplan was impressed with the result he wasn t just repeating 10 questions from everyone else he had his own close reading questions mr caplan and his sons happened to spend a couple of months that summer in austin staying at the home of steve kuhn the billionaire ex hedge fund manager mr patel had lunch with mr caplan nearly every day and joined him at mr kuhn s house for pickleball mr kuhn founded major league pickleball intellectual salons and role playing games including the mr caplan written badger and skinny pete based on two breaking bad characters aside you can play this game with me in austin new year s eve 2020 at steve kuhn s mansion a little game of secret hitler the profile goes on to explain dwarkesh s connection to steve kuhn which i already knew about and anil varanasi which i remembered nothing about mr patel s precocity was a magnet for mentors and benefactors mr kuhn offered to invest in the podcast in return for equity even at that age mr kuhn says he in some ways commanded the room in ways not many people do early on when all mr patel had to show for himself was a couple of blog posts and one podcast episode featuring mr caplan anil varanasi co founder of meter a network infrastructure company in san francisco reached out and asked how much mr patel would need to keep doing what he was doing for six months mr varanasi a former student of mr caplan s has made similar overtures to other promising young people not much said mr patel who was then living with his parents in austin mr varanasi sent him 10 000 mr caplan opened the door to other interviews including tyler cowen and other george mason economists mr cowen through his emergent ventures program himself later gave mr patel a grant dwarkesh was actually the web designer for the beta version of bet on it though i m still confused that he didn t recommend substack right off the bat one of my all time favorite tweets goes anytime you see me in public please introduce yourself making friends has worked out swimmingly for me so far when i posted it i knew that some benighted souls would predict disaster a few with anticipatory schadenfreude but as expected my happy streak continues what a privilege it is to know that i helped the great dwarkesh get his start he probably would have done just as well without me but conceivably i really was the marginal factor regardless i ve made a wonderful friend congratulations for all you have and will accomplish and become dwarkesh 72 4 2 share economics is counter emotional not counter intuitive bryan caplan apr 29 2026 39 1 2 share a few months ago a high school econ student asked me to zoom with his class i m working against a tight deadline for blockade so i was inclined to decline but the student s list of questions was so ambitious that i decided to make the time see for yourself here is the plan 5 minutes welcome introduction professor caplan thank you very much for joining us could you begin by introducing yourself and telling us how you became interested in public choice and libertarian political economy 6 minutes each 1 trade price controls and the political appeal of bad economics you have consistently defended free trade and opposed policies such as tariffs minimum wages rent control and other price controls even when they are extremely popular with students and voters why do these interventions remain so intuitively appealing despite the economic arguments against them and what trade offs do you think are most systematically overlooked when people evaluate them 2 privatization infrastructure monopoly and the role of government libertarian arguments for markets are often easiest to see in competitive industries but much more controversial in areas such as roads transit utilities and other large scale infrastructure where economies of scale and network effects are significant how far do you think privatization should go in these sectors how would such systems realistically be financed and governed in practice and what institutional framework if any remains for the state beyond enforcing property rights and contracts in that context how do you evaluate concerns about monopoly and predatory pricing in a free market and under what conditions if any is government intervention actually justified 3 welfare redistribution scandinavia and the moral status of inequality in discussions of poverty and social policy many students point to the scandinavian countries as evidence that large welfare states free or heavily subsidized healthcare and free college can work well from a libertarian perspective how should we interpret those cases and do you think the goal of policy should be to reduce wealth inequality itself or primarily to expand opportunity in that context should existing welfare programs be eliminated replaced with something like a negative income tax converted into vouchers or maintained in some limited form and how do you weigh the economic and moral trade offs involved 4 education signaling school choice and the future of k 12 your work argues that much of formal education functions more as signaling than as human capital formation what does that imply for current education policy and for government involvement in higher education more broadly do you think a fully market based k 12 system potentially replacing traditional public schools with universal school choice or government funded vouchers directed to families would produce better outcomes and how should students think about their own education in light of the signaling model 3 minutes advice to students for students who are seriously interested in economics and public policy but are encountering these arguments for the first time what is the most important habit of thinking they should develop early 3 minutes open to q a i m pleased to report that we covered the whole agenda again see for yourself 39 1 2 share the caplan khan culture convo a candid talk with the iconoclastic geneticist bryan caplan and razib khan apr 22 2026 15 1 share playback speed share post share post at current time share from 0 00 0 00 another end of the world bet with greg colburn bryan caplan apr 21 2026 58 38 5 share in 2017 i made an end of the world bet with eliezer yudkowsky despite knee jerk incredulity betting on the end of the world is easy key mechanic the optimist prepays the pessimist if the world ends the pessimist has extra spending money during the last days if the world doesn t end the optimist gets his money back plus more the central term of the caplan yudkowsky bet if there are still biological humans running around on the surface of the earth on january 1 2030 it will not have been said to be ended for eliezer as you ve probably heard ai is the expected agent of destruction and while he s got legions of disciples no one else has tried to make the same bet with me until now the brave greg colburn has just accepted the same terms as eliezer did back in 2017 i ve paid him 250 and if the world doesn t end by january 1 2030 colburn will repay me 500 inflation adjusted since i scoff at the prospect of ai driven human extinction bah this is a much better deal for me than the original bet instead of doubling my money in 12 years i ll double it in less than 4 years but since ai development since 2017 has been much faster than most people expected ai doomers should have the opposite opinion my defeat is even more foreseeable in 2026 than it was in 2017 p s i ve never met an ai doomer who claimed to be massively borrowing in order to maximally enjoy their final years but if doomers took their pessimistic view seriously they obviously would so borrow 58 38 5 share why religious beliefs are irrational and why economists should care my opening statement for my 2005 debate versus larry iannaccone bryan caplan apr 20 2026 68 44 4 share i wrote and delivered this statement in 2005 go here for full debate resources larry iannaccone and his co author rodney stark once wrote that the belief that society is getting less religious says less about empirical fact than it does about secularization faith a faith that despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary sustains the conviction of many social scientists that religious institutions must soon decay in short belief in secularization is just a religion larry s critics were unsurprisingly not pleased to tell people that their non religious beliefs are just a religion is an insult why is it an insult there isn t any nice way to answer so i ll be blunt it is an insult because the way that people form religious beliefs is so intellectually irresponsible that their conclusions are almost guaranteed to be false people accept their religious beliefs with little or no evidence accept religious beliefs that are contrary to the evidence accept religious beliefs without studying competing views are certain about religious beliefs that are dubious at best and accept their religious beliefs not because they are intellectually compelling but because they are emotionally comforting forming non religious beliefs in a religious way is irrational because forming any beliefs in a religious way is irrational now i am not one of those people who says that modern science has disproven religion if i said that it would imply that two thousand years ago there was not solid evidence against the claims that jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead but the counter evidence has always been overwhelming everyone else is born of a non virgin and stays dead it is absurd to recognize an exception without overwhelming evidence but all we have is the testimony of a few of his disciples and yet not only do christians believe these things they often claim to know them with certainty and get angry if you disagree christianity has always been irrational and of course the same goes for judaism islam greek mythology satanism and belief in santa claus larry has won a great deal of attention for his rational choice theory of religion but if you look closely he doesn t really have a rational choice theory of religion he has a rational choice theory of group membership as larry occasionally admits virtually everything that he says about religion applies just as well to fraternities chess clubs and football teams yes belonging to a fraternity has costs and benefits yes competition between fraternities leads to more efficient outcomes and both religions and fraternities have been known to use what larry calls bizarre rules such as you can t drink any alcohol or you can only drink alcohol to exclude half hearted members what larry s research strangely neglects or to use his word sidesteps is the differences between religions and fraternities the most obvious of these the 800 pound gorilla in the room is doctrine fraternities don t have much of a doctrine religions do to ignore doctrine is to ignore the very thing that makes religion special and the main reason why critics of religion consider it irrational furthermore to ignore doctrine is to sidestep the deepest objection to larry s rational choice view of religion how can you have a rational choice theory of irrational belief larry s neglect of irrational beliefs is glaring because in the last decade economists have started to take irrationality seriously behavioral economists emphasize for example that people overestimate the riskiness of air travel because plane crashes are vivid and memorable but if that s irrational how much more irrational is it to believe that someone rose from the dead because one old book says so economists who study religion know enough about irrationality to send kahneman tversky and thaler back to the minors but presumably out of respect for religion they refuse to swing their bats what would economists learn if they started paying attention to the doctrinal side of religion now is my time for shameless self promotion in a series of papers on what i call rational irrationality i try to handle the deep objection that larry sidesteps i defend a rational choice theory of irrational belief the gist of my theory is that people persistently hold wildly irrational religious beliefs because the material cost is usually very low in terms of daily life what difference does it make if the earth is 6000 years old or 6 billion so it s not surprising how readily people shut their eyes to the geological evidence in contrast when the cost of irrationality is high believers conveniently forget the teachings of their religion lots of religions promise paradise to martyrs but adherents eager to die for their beliefs are one in a million is religion rational in an important sense no the doctrines of every religion are at best extremely improbable but adherents are still very certain about them religious beliefs and standard economic models don t fit together however rather than ignoring or denying this incompatibility economists should deal with it if i m right it s not hard yes religious beliefs are irrational but they are so divorced from reality that they are rarely costly when they do become costly a few fanatics lay down their lives but the overwhelming majority of the faithful open their eyes and face the fact that it s crazy to bet your life on fairy tales larry and me 68 44 4 share loading more posts 2026 bryan caplan privacy terms collection notice start your substack get the app substack is the home for great culture this site requires javascript to run correctly please turn on javascript 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