Bryan Caplan: preference

Transcript context

…Culture writ large really matters a lot; individual cultural decisions hardly matter at all. You’re flipping the Ayn Rand story. It’s really like the big macro aggregate that persuades people as expressed through entertainment, business practices, and wealth. But individualistic efforts, they’re puny. They don’t matter so much. I think Rand’s view is actually very similar to mine. Remember, she was angry about the world because she thought that most people were heavily influenced by their cultures. That outraged her, that just because you grow up in the culture of Russia, that you’re a Russian. She’s there saying, “No, I don’t care where you are. You should be an Aristotelian. Doesn’t matter you were born in Moscow or you had this background. We should all be reading the great works and the great minds, especially me,” for her of course. Your background shouldn’t matter very much. In the end, the reason she wrote about this is, she looked around and saw that people are generally very conformist — Fountainhead, the “second-handers,” the people who form their views of what is meaningful based upon looking around at others. She didn’t write about this because she thought it was rare. She wrote about this because she thought it was normal but terrible. I think very much at least in the same ballpark for me, I am very individualistic. Of course, if this were the normal thing, everyone else would be doing it. Then there wouldn’t be anything special about me doing it. In a way, if you don’t think the culture’s really important, it’s hard to be an individualist because then you aren’t different from other people. Now let’s talk about education policy. Let’s say we agree with your basic take on education: There’s educational failures. There are connected labor market failures. And the question is what should we do about this? What if someone came to you and said, “Well, take South Korea. Government there spends relatively little subsidizing higher ed. But signaling costs are high. In Germany, the whole system is more or less free. People go on strike if they’re asked to pay 10 marks or 10 euros a semester. And in Germany, a lot of the universities are mediocre. But the German economy does fine. So isn’t the solution to too much signaling, in a sense, nationalize the sector and lower quality and get people less interested in it?”…

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