Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…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? That sounds oversimplified. You are right that parents feeling like it’s really important for them to do things . . . When they don’t do things, this is going to mess their kids up. I think that is a big part of what makes parenting so unpleasant in the modern US — the sense of “If I’m not acting all the time to go and help my kids, then I’m a failure, and my kids will be failures. ” I think there is a lot more going on than just those things. In general, my work is . . . Unlike, say, Robin, I do have a resistance to monocausal things and explanations that seem like they’re overbroad. I do try to narrow it down and think about one thing at a time. My general view is, you get a better general theory of things if you work on a lot of particular issues first and then step back, like we’re doing now, and say, “Are there some commonalities?” Am I correct in thinking that a lot of existing papers on the social return to education or the private return, they neglect the fact that a high percentage of students drop out?…

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