Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, really? Yeah. So basically, suicide rates were falling from 1970-2000 and then have had a big rebound since then. If I remember, I think suicide rates now are pretty similar to what they were in the fifties. I'd have to go back and double-check those numbers, but that's what I remember. You’d have to have a really complicated theory, or you could just have a bunch of ad hoc theories. Maybe it was World War II and the trauma of that while also being married to a veteran with trauma that could mess women up and make them kill themselves. Then that changed, and then something else happened. So the Jonathan Haidt case of keeping kids from playing outside by infantilizing them or making them really anxious doesn't fit with anything from the fifties. You could argue, “Well, in the fifties, they were really good in terms of unsupervised play, but they were really bad in terms of something else. ” I mean, when people talk about this stuff, what really strikes me is that I felt like I learned more from just going and looking at the time series as far back as it goes than from every person that pontificated about what's really going on. Just to realize the numbers are complicated; no obvious story fits. It would be really ideologically convenient for me to say feminism is leading women to kill themselves. But the numbers don't work. So that's wrong. How persistent are the harms of immigration restriction? If the world is getting wealthier by itself anyways, does it really matter if it'll take a few more decades than it would have? You could transfer them here now, or you could just wait for economic growth to do its thing there.…

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