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Bryan Caplan Quotes

Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and frequent contributor to Freakonomics as well as publishing his own blog, EconLog. He is a self-described economic libertarian. The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.



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✵ 8. April 1971
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Bryan Caplan: 8   quotes 0   likes

Famous Bryan Caplan Quotes

“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

Quoted in Elitism or Populism: Pick Your Poison http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/11/elitism_or_popu.html, by Arnold Kling (November 12, 2006)

“Magic isn't real. There has to be a logical reason explanation for the effect of Ivory Tower achievement on Real World success. And here it is: despite the chasm between what students learn and what workers do, academic success is a strong signal of worker productivity. The labor market doesn't pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays for preexisting traits you reveal by mastering them.”

Bryan Caplan

[The Case against Education, 13, https://books.google.com/books?id=Mws8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA13]
The Case against Education (2018)

“Personally, then I have no reason to lash out at the education system. Quite the contrary. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, convince me that our education system is big waste of time and money. Almost every politician vows to spend more on education. As an insider, I can't help gasping, "Why? You want to waste even more?"”

Bryan Caplan

[The Case against Education, 1, https://books.google.com/books?id=Mws8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1]
The Case against Education (2018)

“Wars fought exclusively on foreign soil do have marginally higher real output growth than peacetime periods, but real growth during all other wars is sharply below peacetime levels. Evidence for foreign and domestic wars is consistent with monetarist, fiscalist, and mixed theories of wartime booms.”

Bryan Caplan

[Journal of International Money and Finance, 21, 2, April 2002, 145–162, How does war shock the economy?, 10.1016/S0261-5606(01)00046-8]

“Through the lens of the Jock/Nerd Theory of History, the welfare state doesn’t look like a serious effort to "equalize outcomes." It looks more like a serious effort to block the "revenge of the nerds"—to keep them from using their financial success to unseat the jocks on every dimension of social status.”

Bryan Caplan

Redistribution: Blocking the Revenge of the Nerds? http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/redistribution_1.html (June 21, 2007)

“Statistical discrimination may be unfair and ugly, but it's hardly weird or implausible. Why is it any more weird or implausible to claim employers statistically discriminate on the basis of educational credentials?”

Bryan Caplan

[The Case against Education, 15, https://books.google.com/books?id=Mws8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA15]
The Case against Education (2018)

“For socialists, of course, Mussolini’s apostasy proves nothing except his supreme evil. For everyone else, though, Mussolini’s origin story puts his subsequent career in a whole new light. Outsiders can easily see what insiders deny: The apostate fruit rarely falls far from the orthodox tree.”

Bryan Caplan

The Pageant of World History vs. Wikipedia: The Case of Mussolini https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/06/the_whitewash_o.html (Jun 20, 2012)

“Bioethics is to ethics as astrology is to astronomy.”

Bryan Caplan

Bioethics: Tuskegee vs. COVID https://www.econlib.org/bioethics-tuskegee-vs-covid (Feb 16, 2021)

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