Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, but NUKE Pakistan. Preemptively nuke a nuclear power. What do you think is going to happen? We don’t have that kind of just true fanatical sociopathic bloodthirsty, horrible stuff. It's common in many societies, but it seems to be quite reduced in better-functioning societies. So that's one thing. In these better-functioning societies, people's political views are not terrible; if you propose something awful, even normal people will say, “No, I don't think it’s such a good idea to go and murder all the billionaires. Maybe we can tax them at 90%, but murder them? That's too far.” Whereas in most societies, you say that stuff, and they cackle with glee. “Let's strangle the last billionaire in the intestines of the last right-wing talk show radio host. Hahaha.” That is more of the human attitude… just think about how kids are. The way that the kids are shows us what adults are feeling, but hiding. Kids get angry, and they want blood. So more effective societies are ones where people are suppressing these atavistic desires to really just turn society into a total blood bath. So there's that. I do think public opinion obviously matters a lot in democracies. Even in most dictatorships, public opinion matters a lot. Dictators demagogue, right? They try to go and win people over normally. It's easier because the people that would have been their rivals are dead or imprisoned or terrified. So that sort of lets you weaponize the demagoguery by saying, “I'm the only one that gets to say I'm anointed by God.” So there's that kind of thing, but even dictators generally want to be liked by their population. It makes ruling easier. Then you only have to terrify 10% of the population into obedience instead of 90%. Having a better leadership class probably matters too. There's probably a high correlation between the quality of leaders and the quality of the public, but not in every case. So that's another thing to look for. Something else is also just having constructive interest groups. For example, I have a pet theory. I'm working on a book on housing regulation. My pet theory is that if we're not from lobbying from developers, basically zero things would be built in America because building things has almost no demagogic appeal. There's almost no one who emotionally gets a tear in their eye when they see a skyscraper go up or a new housing development. It’s very rare to be enthused about building stuff. Yet we need places to live. We need places to work. We need places to shop. On the other hand, there's a bunch of angry people whenever we try to build something, we call them nimbies who have an endless series of complaints. Traffic, parking, quality, the character of the neighborhood, pollution, and on and on, they make every possible complaint. ld something, we call them nimbies who have an endless series of complaints. Traffic, parking, quality, the character of the neighborhood, pollution, and on and on, they make every possible complaint. So I think the main reason anything gets built is that there are developers who probably do not really sincerely believe that they're heroes, but just come and say, “Hey, well, we can make our money building stuff. We provide jobs and income through the community; let us build stuff. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.” That is, I think, the main reason why. So all of you have constructive interest groups (economists mostly talk about interest groups as being bad), but lobbying has very positive effects overall for housing and for immigration. I think a lot of the main reason why we have as much immigration as we do is that there are a bunch of corporations pushing for it. As far as developers go, why is it the case that they're not more powerful than they are?…

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