Bryan Caplan: evaluation

Transcript context

…You think, in our society in general, this action bias infests everything? Or is there some reason why it’s drawn like a magnet to education? Action bias primarily drives government. For individuals, I think even there there’s some action bias. But nevertheless, for the individual, there is the cost of just going and trying something that’s not very likely to succeed, and the connection with the failure and disappointment, and a lot of things don’t work out. There’s a lot of people who would like to start their own business, but they don’t try because they have some sense that it’s really hard. What I see in government is, there isn’t the same kind of filter, which is a big part of my work in general in politics. You don’t have the same kind of personal disincentives against doing things that sound good but actually don’t work out very well in practice. Probably even bigger than action bias is actually what psychologists call social desirability bias: just doing things that sound good whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice. Again, I think of this as primarily a disease of government because it’s so based upon what people say rather than trying to do a comparison between what we thought was going to happen and how things actually turned out. But your book on parenting — that also criticizes action bias. Parents think they need to do all kinds of things. They actually don’t. It’s not just government. It’s like we all as human beings . . . The Straussian version of the Caplanian themes is the whole world is infested with action bias and that if you understand action bias at a deep level for decisive actions . . . For nondecisive actions, rational irrationality kicks in. You have two blades, the scissors. You put them together, and you can then explain a 2018. Yes, no?…

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