Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…When did you build the Museum of Communism? Tell us what that is. I did this in graduate school when I didn’t want to do my real work. I spent a lot of time — not just in undergraduate but in graduate school — reading stuff that was totally, at least mostly, a waste of time careerwise. I was just really interested in it. I had a passion for it. You have to remember these are the very early years of the internet, when all the suppressed urges that I had to go and pontificate suddenly had an outlet. If the internet existed when I was in high school, I might have actually failed out of high school because I would have put so much energy into creating web pages, like “This is my take on each of these different topics. ” The first time that the web was working well enough where you could actually do this — at least where I had enough knowledge to make it work — was 1993, 1994. Then to me, I put, I think, more time into my internet projects than into my actual studies, counting class time and everything else. So the Museum of Communism — this is one where I wanted to go and put together all of my thoughts about the history of communism. I would say that’s it’s maybe 7 percent done. Almost all that 7 percent was done during my graduate school years, the parts that actually I really completed. I had sections on the Marxist and czarist origins of communism, which is building on a rich historical literature. Obviously, there’s the Marxist roots but then people saying that there’s a lot of continuities with czarism. That made a lot of sense to me in sort of thinking of Lenin as being the Marxist czar of all the Russias. Then I had a FAQ, frequently asked questions, where I went over what was known about the numbers at the time. Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit more about the numbers, especially numbers for deaths in the gulag seem in the literature at the time overstated by quite a bit. But I’ve never gone back and updated. Obviously, that would be something that I would do, is bring it up to date with better data that we’ve got now. Now let’s turn to your new book, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money. One theme you stress throughout are the costs of excess credentialism. To be hired as a bartender, maybe it’s a real advantage to have a college degree. This encourages too many people to go to college. At the same time, there seems to be a waste of talent and a lot of bureaucracy and paper credentials, hard to get second chances, and so on. What deeper disease about our society do you think excess credentialism reflects? That is, if you try to explain it almost as an anthropologist, like here’s why we’re really so screwed up to have done this, what’s your answer?…

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