Bryan Caplan: preference

Transcript context

…Last question. What are your plans for the future? I’ve got a queue of books. The one that is coming out next year — the plan is for September — is a nonfiction graphic novel on the ethics and science of immigration. It’s going to be called All Roads Lead to Open Borders. This is a genre many people aren’t familiar with. There’s the general genre of the graphic novel, which is basically a highfalutin comic book. The nonfiction graphic novel — this is one where you use the vocabulary and grammar of comic books to talk about a nonfiction subject. This is not a story about immigration. It is actually an extended journey through what social scientists know about immigration and what philosophers said about immigration. This is actually in collaboration with Zach Weinersmith, who was, out of all cartoonists, was my first choice in the world to be my collaborator. I didn’t know him when I started the project, and I amazingly talked him into it. Now, he’s drawn 90 percent of the first draft of the pages. I’m super excited about this because this is my chance to be on the production side of a product that I have long been in love with. There’s that. Then my big word book after that, to distinguish from a graphic novel. There’s going to be a book called Poverty — Who to Blame. This is going to combine social science with economic philosophy. I want to begin with what I think of as one of the great neglected moral concepts in academic philosophy, which is the concept of blameworthiness and desert. These are concepts that almost everyone who thinks about right and wrong thinks about. Yet they are so dismissed, certainly by consequentialist philosophers, but a lot of other philosophers implicitly dismiss them by neglect. I want to say, actually, these concepts are very important. They’re morally at least as plausible as the other stuff that people are talking about, probably more so. I want to go and think about the actual social science of poverty through this lens of blameworthy, nonblameworthy, and semi-blameworthy poverty. A lot of what I want to do in the book is to revive this old notion of the deserving versus the undeserving poor, and then take everything that social science knows about the causes of poverty to understand what are the main sources of blameworthy poverty? What are the main things that we’re overrating? What are the main things we’re underrating? Really to change people’s minds of, “What are the kinds of poverty that really are deeply, morally problematic and we should be thinking about all the time?” Which in my mind, things like poverty of people in the Third World who could easily come and get a job in the First World if it were legal. People that are totally capable of solving their own problem if government would just get out of the way versus problems of, say, someone who is a chronic alcoholic, and if they would just stop drinking, they’d be doing fine. I think those are very different cases. overnment would just get out of the way versus problems of, say, someone who is a chronic alcoholic, and if they would just stop drinking, they’d be doing fine. I think those are very different cases. Yet there’s, of course, a lot more concern about the second problem than the first in terms of ink that’s spilled over it. And I want to go and get people to rethink that.…

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