Just being a richer society, think that matters a lot on terms of other things. I remember judith harris had an example in her book where there were some orthodox jewish parents who decided to move to israel to live on a cabootz because they said, look, as long as we're in america, we can't control our kids. We got to go to a place where all the kids are controlled by parents like this. Another thing is that it can be that individual parents don't matter, but if there's n entire generation of parents, there're a certain way that can matter a lot. That wouldn't be picked up by the standard of standard empirical methods
"No single paper is that good", says Bryan Caplan. To really understand a topic, you need to read the entire literature in the field. And to do the kind of scholarship Bryan's work requires, you need to cover multiple fields. Only that way can you assemble a wide variety of evidence into useful knowledge.
But few scholars ever even try to reach the enlightened interdisciplinary plane. So how does he do it?
Tyler explores Bryan's approach, including how to avoid the autodidact's curse, why his favorite philosopher happens to be a former classmate, what Tolstoy has that science fiction lacks, the idea trap, most useful wrong beliefs, effective altruism, Larry David, what most economics papers miss about the return to education, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.
Recorded April 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect