Bryan Caplan's Thoughts On How to Increase Fertility Rates

Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone and Malcolm to discuss ways to boost declining fertility rates. They analyze the role of education, long vs short time preferences, and winning over analytical men. Other topics include immigration policy levers, using AI for politics, Ron Paul's electoral success, and more ways to cultivate leaders.

Simone: [00:00:00] You're really good at being evil,

Malcolm: Simone. Thank you, Malcolm. How can we use an AI to win a local election? Yeah, this

Simone: is, this is the question that we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And of course,

Bryan Caplan: in equilibrium, the problem is other people are going to be using it too.

Malcolm: I agree with you. So the goal Is to use a short term advantage to get into the political system, then become president and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now. You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.

Bryan Caplan: Oh God..

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello again. We are very excited to have Brian Kaplan joining us for this episode of Basecamp in addition to being a New York times bestselling author of.

Simone: Quite a few really awesome books. Many of which are on some of our favorite topics. Brian Kaplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and extremely well informed about the positions he holds. Whereas I don't know, sometimes we just like to be a lot more

Malcolm: philosophically. If you want to go over some of the topics he writes on pronatalism advocate for.

Malcolm: Feminism [00:01:00] causing societal problems being more pro open borders government systems not working, and education systems becoming more broken.

Simone: Yeah, you're our kind of guy. We're big fans, Brian. So what we'd like to discuss today, which I think really interests me because you're at a nuanced nexus between these things is the impact of education and how to actually create a delta.

Simone: So we, we recently hosted a dinner at which people discussed fostering genius, creating world leaders who would change the trajectory of society, you know, can it be done? Can you do it? And one of the big themes that came up during that dinner was, well, you know, you can't necessarily like great man theory of history.

Simone: A lot of people were really critical of it, but they thought, well, one thing that people can do is maybe accelerate the speed at which. Really awesome things happen, you know, like maybe many things are going to happen anyway. But if you can cultivate the right kind of leader or give people the right ideas, they may do it sooner for society than rather than later.

Simone: And I thought about this as I was watching an interview with [00:02:00] you. And you said basically that you didn't expect open borders to happen in your lifetime, but that you hoped through the book that you have co published called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration, that maybe a generation would read this book.

Simone: You know, help to nudge things in a good direction. And you know, you've also written a book about, you know, the case against education which is more about why the traditional education system is not. necessarily worth all the money we throw into it and the time we threw into it.

Bryan Caplan: Delete the word necessarily. It's not worth it.

Simone: Shots fired from the professor at a university. But yes, no, totally. And so, you know, there's this sort of weird. Like nuanced area that I want to walk around with you in this discussion about well, so we can maybe nudge people in a good direction.

Simone: We can maybe speed up the rate at which really awesome things happen, which could really max out in a much more [00:03:00] meaningful way, human productivity and flourishing.

Simone: So I'm curious, Brian, what you think interventions are not necessarily traditional education interventions, but interventions in youth and in development that actually are worth investing in are effective and might actually help people either change the trajectory of society or just actively change the trajectory of people and society.

Bryan Caplan: Let's see. I'm definitely pro vocational education. Obviously, it's got, you know, there's a lot of problems too, but at least at the end, if it works, you know how to do something and are able to actually contribute more society. Whereas my big read, you can normal education is that it mostly pays just by giving you extra stamps in the forehead, which is great for an individual, but at the level society generates credential inflation, such that you need more degrees just to get the same job as your parents, grandparents, in terms of the things that can be done that work well.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Well, let's [00:04:00] see. I mean, there's the easy answers, things like vaccines or whatever. I think that the evidence for those is really good. In turn, I mean, I guess I would say that the one that matters the most is one that's near and dear to all of us, which is just having kids. So, you know, if you have a kid, I just say, look, you know that you have done something that almost certainly has great value to that person.

Bryan Caplan: The person is going to contribute to the world as well. Yes, there's a small chance that you've given worth of the next Charles Manson, but almost certainly not just the fact that if you look around the world, it's not on fire shows that most people are net contributors. They are not net destroyers.

Bryan Caplan: So, you know, in terms of what advice you can give to any one individual about how to improve the world, I would just say, have another kid, and that is a large value in terms of my own work. The only thing that I've done that I'm convinced has yielded. A large absolute value to humanity is my pronatalism stuff, because I do know hundreds of people who have had extra kids because of it.

Bryan Caplan: If you just use a standard economist 10 million value of life, [00:05:00] then that book generated billions of dollars worth of value. It still doesn't put me in Elon's territory, but still compared to my other stuff where it's not clear that it's changed anything in terms of policy, I feel very pleased with that.

Bryan Caplan: If you were to step back and say, yeah, but like causing the birth of hundreds of people that's like 0. 01% of the harm done by the one child policy. It's yeah, but that's what I've been able to pull off. It's something. I mean, at least I made things better instead of worse. So there's that.

Simone: So how much do you have that of the success that you saw through your pronatalist work was like, do you think was presenting logical arguments versus just showing people that it could be cool, that it's like desirable?

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, I know you guys are more to the coolness. Honestly, I'll say out of the people I persuade, they're very argument focused. I'm not claiming this is how most humans are like, this is just the people that listen to me are like that. The cases where it's most clear that I'd causally change things is when [00:06:00] there's a pre existing mom who already wanted to have a kid, there's a dad who liked me who was blocking it, and then I convinced him to stop blocking it.

Bryan Caplan: That's basically the profile of when I caused a person to exist and where it's totally clear that I did it.

Simone: You're the caulk unblocker. That's great. Wow. All right.

Bryan Caplan: That's really interesting. I'm not going to put that into my signature file or anything, but I'll tell you. It's a shame. Okay. But honestly closely related is that when you go into the statistics of what determines ultimate number of ultimate fertility Basically, the patterns or the signs are the same for men and women, but the absolute value of the magnitudes are almost always much larger for women than men.

Bryan Caplan: It fits with the simple story of women are just more opinionated. Men are more like, oh, you want to have one kid? Great, we'll have one kid. You want to have three kids? Fine, we'll have three kids. You want to have no kids? Okay, fine. Right. It's something that's more like that. So the men [00:07:00] do matter. It's not like it's purely something that women decided unilaterally.

Bryan Caplan: But nevertheless, it does look like women's characteristics are more decisive for the outcome such that man. This is just an area where they are. Less set in their ways and more subject to suasion. If you are a needless woman, this is good news for you. It means that you probably doesn't, it is doable to go and change the guy's mind.

Bryan Caplan: If you're a guy, then I'd say mostly you got to work on selection. You got to find someone that agrees with you beforehand. Because it is just harder to go and change women's minds about these things. Yeah,

Simone: women really do seem to be a major bottleneck. And one thing I wonder is in a lot of discussions of prenatalism is there's this like undertone of, well, the solution is for women to stop getting educations.

Simone: Cause that's, what's ruining everything. And I mean, one of our big beefs in this space is we really want to prove that women can get. High levels of education, if they want it, like [00:08:00] not necessary, but there's freedom to choose that. And you can still have high levels of you know,

Bryan Caplan: mostly just thinking about you've got to decouple the half baked pseudo philosophy of most educators from the stuff they actually know and are teaching.

Bryan Caplan: And those are two completely different things. The actual knowledge of the facts of history combined with a totally ad hoc philosophy that gets superimposed onto the facts with variable thought. You know what I mean? Even at the level of the philosophy of a typical physicist is basically some watered down, woke hodgepodge.

Bryan Caplan: They don't really think about it very much. They're just repeating this, just like other people in their culture. Their subculture, rather. But on the other hand, the physics, they actually know something, and they probably know it forwards and backwards. So just realizing that when this authority is speaking, sometimes they have incredible knowledge.

Bryan Caplan: And sometimes they're just making it up as they go along, or just repeating it like a parrot, really, [00:09:00] and just be aware of the difference between those two things. One thing that is really striking is it does take an enormous amount of steely. In a steely self discipline to just hear the same propaganda every day and not believe it.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, true. Well, I mean, I think if you watch the news every day, you really have to be a Vulcan to watch it, watch an hour of this stuff every day for three years straight and not start to actually think the world is falling apart and everything is terrible. Yeah. I mean, you know, so, so few people can do it.

Bryan Caplan: But for the most part, when you choose to watch that, you are choosing to become whatever they are spewing. And you're saying, look, I'm just too smart for mere repetition to change my mind. It's look, it's not just a matter of being smart. It's a matter of I will resist what they are saying over and over again.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm a huge fan of philosopher Michael Humer. One of my very favorite posts of his. Is one where he says, imagine there's a school where [00:10:00] all they do every day is teach you true things that are true bad things that Jews have done. Every single fact is and then there was a Jew murdered a child.

Bryan Caplan: Let's tell you let's give you every detail of the murder. And then there were some Jews that did another bad thing. And then someone says, Hey, this is an anti semitic school. And they say, how could you possibly say that everything we say is true? It's yes, you're teaching an extremely selected slanted set of facts.

Bryan Caplan: And you're using that to pretend that you are not promoting anti semitism. That's exactly what you're doing. One of this thought experiment is this is what the media is doing. It all every day. They just tell you something bad that happened on earth. And it's we're just reporting facts. No, you are trying to go and get a bullhorn and then say something and then talk about the most terrible thing that happened on earth, which inevitably produces a certain worldview among your listeners [00:11:00] of thinking that the end is nigh and the world's collapsing.

Bryan Caplan: So you're not telling me that you're not promoting a philosophy or that this is just facts. It is a highly selected, deeply biased worldview that you're promoting. It can be completely true and yet totally misleading at the same time, and it is.

Simone: So do you think that the this undertone belief that the problem is that women are getting educated is just a selection thing?

Simone: Like people are cherry picking data that suggests that? Or do you think that

Bryan Caplan: there's... No, so, you know, I think that it's true that if you just look at Western education systems, they are strongly predictive of reduced female fertility. So I think that does make sense. You know, this is not mean that it is normal for schools to go and say, girls never have babies.

Bryan Caplan: Babies are disgusting. It's just one where you only talk about other great things that people can do. And you never mentioned having kids as something that's worthwhile. It's crowded out by omission.

Simone: [00:12:00] Yeah. So in other words, it's not necessarily education at play. It's the education that exists now.

Simone: It is the industrial

Bryan Caplan: education. It is the unmistakable slant of the education. Yeah. We can see this when you look at ultra Orthodox Jews there. Oh, totally. Yeah. Because their slant is the opposite slant. It's super important. God wants you to be having tons of kids. Yeah, of

Simone: course. Yeah, and there's a ton of education.

Simone: There's

Bryan Caplan: one where women are having tons of kids, and they also offer the only ones in the family with a paying job. Yeah, that's a really good point. Supported by his wife to argue about theology all day.

Bryan Caplan: Well, so this is wow, you could knock people in anything. Yeah.

Malcolm: Okay. What you're seeing here is this a sort of urban monoculture that primarily it's like a mimetic set that is both sterilizing and because it's sterilizing its primary means of reproduction is through converting people. And that means that it has had a disproportionate motivation to gain control of the [00:13:00] means of information transfer.

Malcolm: whether that is the media or the education system. And it largely controls both right now. And so what's really interesting is there's two ways you can fight this. You know, you can have women not engaged with the education system, and then they're not, you know, forced through this grinder, which is entirely designed to grind out anything that's deviant, i.

Malcolm: e. unique or diverse. about their cultural group, or you can try to update cultural groups or create new cultural groups that can learn the utility, the efficacious things from the education system while not having what makes them deviant in some way ground out of them. But that requires just completely new invention of cultural groups because the old cultural groups didn't evolve in a context where they had to be resistant to something like this.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I really don't think that any of these ideologies are anti natal ideologies that are actually in the real world or notable are [00:14:00] engineered or designed in any sense to accomplish any of this stuff. I think it's a byproduct, you know, there's anti natalism, there's David Benatar. Now that's an engineered system, right?

Bryan Caplan: But that's something that I think is influencing a very small number of people. Whereas what you call the urban monoculture, that's one that is. It's not engineered. I think that's too conspiratorial. No. I don't think

Malcolm: it's engineered either. I think the iterations of it that focused on educational systems out competed the iterations of it that focused on other systems.

Malcolm: I think it's just completely evolution. Yeah,

Simone: The thing that grows best, cultural

Bryan Caplan: evolution, not yeah, cultural

Malcolm: evolution.

Simone: Yeah, exactly.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah, it does cooperate with the, what I think of as a medium term time horizon. Yes. So, I mean, here's the thing is, you know, it's really, it really is true if all, if a human being just has a very short time horizon.

Bryan Caplan: Then at least if she's a woman, she will have a ton of kids. Right. If you, that's just [00:15:00] how evolution works, right? Yeah. If you just said, Hey, this feels good right now, I'm gonna do it. You will have a lot of kids. I've also argued that if you have a very long time horizon, you will have a lot of kids. A lot of what schools do is they try to promote a higher time horizon, but they're only able to get it up from short to media.

Bryan Caplan: So basically we're able to get it to the level of, you don't want to have to deal with a bunch of crying kids, do you? But not to the level of, you'd like to retire, when you retire, to have a whole bunch of grandkids. That is a higher level, which we really don't see school even trying to promote. It's more of, well, you know, we've got to run before we can walk.

Bryan Caplan: We're just going to try to talk teenagers into using contraception. But it's well, but at the same time, you're talking them into delaying having kids, maybe until they're in their thirties or forties when it's not even possible. Yeah. And you know, it is a case where if there is, you know, if you get, if you don't have a linear or a monotonic response function, if the sensible thing to do, if you believe, if you have the medium point of view is different from [00:16:00] both the short and the long, then you can actually make things worse by going and promoting.

Bryan Caplan: A high intermediate increase in your time horizons. And I think that's a lot of what's going

Simone: on. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it ties in with the infantilization of humans that we really see like intrinsic in the current education system where like part of it is infantilization. Another part of it's credentialism.

Simone: Oh, you're not ready to do that yet because you're not, you know, you haven't learned this thing. You have to do all this stuff first before you're allowed to have a family

Bryan Caplan: job degrees yet. Yes, actually barely even relevant, right? Yes. No. And so yeah, over time as schools abandoned any sense of intellectual standards.

Simone: Yeah, no, exactly. Well, so here's one thing I really want to dig a little bit deeper on, because I think it's fascinating that you appear to have found where sort of your inflection point was with your pronatalist work, which is that like the change that you were making was this unblockage of.

Simone: Men who are kind of less interested in having more kids. And I'm wondering, [00:17:00] like, when it comes to open borders policy, like there may be some weird subset, like that's involved in the chain of making policy decisions that can be unblocked more easily than other parts of it, like clearly women are harder to convince on this, right?

Simone: So you weren't necessarily changing women's minds, but you were changing analytical men's minds. Like who, who that can be reached. By someone's message. Yours are someone else's on open borders. Do you think would be most likely to be the person to cave in the chain of open borders that like actually is worth targeting?

Bryan Caplan: Right. I actually have a very specific answer to this question. So there is a chapter on keel solutions. This idea of if there's, you have a complaint about immigration, narrowly tailor remedy for that exact complaint, rather than just saying no. All the things that I've said, that is the argument that I've gotten the most people emailing me saying, you changed my mind with that.

Bryan Caplan: Wow. So, you know, like for example, if you really are worried about the effect of immigrants on the welfare state, then how [00:18:00] about let them in, but limit their eligibility for benefits. Yeah. Worried about them voting poorly. How about let them in, but increased the delay for them to vote. If you're worried about them.

Bryan Caplan: How about let them in, but with an admission fee and then use that money to go and compensate natives in terms of the number of people said, this is a specific argument that I hadn't thought about before. And when I read it, it clicked and it changed my mind. Now, I'm also painfully aware that. Once again, there's only a certain narrow personality type that finds this argument convincing.

Bryan Caplan: Basically, these people tend to be on the autistic spectrum. Oh, s**t. Yes. That's a fairly large number of people. It keeps growing. It's okay, I had an argument. You answer my argument. So I changed my mind.

Simone: Honestly, Brian, this is how I had kids. This is why I had kids. I was like, I'm not having kids and Malcolm's yeah, but what if he didn't have to give up your career?

Simone: And I'm like, I'm having kids. That was it. It was that simple.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I think like they'll say [00:19:00] like the number of times that people on social media have said, you know, Brian with his ridiculous aspiness. I also have actually gone and done the aspie thing of surveying people know me in real life and say like how aspie am I really?

Bryan Caplan: The answer is among people that know me well, there's an enormous range of opinion from not at all to totally. I don't even know how to deal with that. But the main thing that I said here is for this, it is really unfair to neurotypicals to act as if they are incapable of having their minds changed by arguments.

Bryan Caplan: It is not like people on the spectrum have a monopoly on listening to arguments and changing their minds. They may be better at it, but there's, but it's really. Just selling everyone else short to think that you can't be neurotypical and be persuaded by an argument. I mean, if that were all that being neuroatypical were about, it's gee, what a wonderful thing to have.

Bryan Caplan: What about neurotypical

Malcolm: women?[00:20:00]

Simone: Well, but here's what I worry about, though, is I worry that specifically in politics, so like policymakers, maybe not like the actual like wonks that are writing policy, but like certainly the ones that are passing the bills, like the selective pressures to actually get elected are such that it's really hard for Aspie people to to get elected.

Simone: And so the people that you need to convince most are the people that are most immune to these types of logical arguments. And we even have seen this with our own policy work. Wonks within people's administrations will email us and be like, Hey, on the down low, I want to work with you. I'm going to try to inject pronatalist policy into something.

Simone: But tell no one. My representative politician can never know. So, I mean, how, what

Bryan Caplan: But there's one thing that gives me doubt, which is, if you actually watch C SPAN, you will see what incredibly low charisma most successful politicians have. No!

Simone: Isn't it just because they don't think anyone's watching? [00:21:00]

Bryan Caplan: They're super boring. They're ugly. They're troglodytes. I mean, I've talked to people who are in politics and say, like, how does this happen?

Bryan Caplan: Why isn't Hollywood taking over politics long ago? Good question. And they don't really have any good answer. The union isn't as good, probably that we have this geographically based electoral system. So it's a lot more important to be really well socially connected in some small part of the country story about how Ron Paul kept winning his district in Texas, despite having these wildly unpopular views.

Bryan Caplan: Wait, what? So Ron Paul, remember? Yeah. He kept waiting. He only remember he, that guy won multiple elections for Congress, having some views that are really out there. And the best story I've ever heard about it is, look, this guy is an obstetrician. He delivered a large share of the babies in that district.

Bryan Caplan: And it's huh, now I think it makes sense. It's like most of the people voting for Ron Paul. We're not voting [00:22:00] for crazy libertarian Ron Paul, they're voting for nice Dr. Paul that delivered my baby.

Simone: Yeah, that lovely

Bryan Caplan: gentleman. Great phrase, that lovely gentleman who delivered all my babies. And often they probably don't know anything more about him than that.

Bryan Caplan: So, you know, like you realize that you don't, like in a rural area, you don't deliver that many babies before you are the person that has delivered a large share of the babies in that district. If you don't know him, you know somebody knows him. So there is that going on.

Simone: Yeah, that's really, yeah, that would explain a lot.

Simone: It leaves me even more lost though, than I was at the beginning of okay, well, where's the pressure point I can apply here? Cause then the question is, well, how do the obstetricians, the car dealers, like the people with high name recognition in these small districts that are getting elected.

Simone: Like what we'll get through to them. I mean, theoretically, what gets through to them is like repeated harassment from their constituents and especially their donors, but like those don't wrap [00:23:00]

Bryan Caplan: up. So I am a big fan of Dale Carnegie's classic, how to win friends and influence people. Okay. It both basically begins with this truism.

Bryan Caplan: Nobody cares what you know, until they know that you care. We have the best way to persuade people is just to become their friend without any agenda. And then once you are sympathetic with each other and they like you, that's where you can have a conversation where they're listening because you are someone that they care about, someone that they feel cares about them.

Bryan Caplan: So I say that's a really big part. You know, often people have said, how can we improve our arguments? And I'll say I think the arguments are really quite good. Yeah. There's people, but the share of people that will listen to arguments purely on the basis, on that basis is really low. We've got to go and improve our marketing, improve our presentation, improve likeability.

Bryan Caplan: I don't say this because i'm so awesome at any of these things. I say this because I know that I am bad. But I've improved a lot and other people can improve too. Yeah, Simone, [00:24:00] you've got a fantastic smile. So like you are ahead of it.

Malcolm: I mask really well. We're running her for office.

Simone: I've caught in flack because in our podcast episodes, I'm always smiling because I mask.

Simone: Malcolm knows that my normal face is like completely blank, but like I do this because I've

Bryan Caplan: learned. Well, it's totally credible. But. Not in the, you know, in the same practiced way. And again, I say this just because I know I'm not great. I try to improve. So, you know, let it, let us learn from Simone.

Bryan Caplan: Great one.

Malcolm: Oh, I just keep thinking,

Bryan Caplan: there are those that are better. That's the kind of, that's the kind of negativity we do not need. I mean, honestly, you got somebody better. Show me somebody who's better, but don't go. And. Make fun of someone who's doing good.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Because sucking is the first step at getting kind of good at something as wise people have said.

Simone: But I'm also just thinking like, [00:25:00] how can I create AI's that, you know, use all the tricks. I'll just train them on how to win friends and influence people and then pretend that they're real people and have them call politicians, like just spam them, like spam their offices using all this.

Malcolm: That's an interesting idea.

Malcolm: Using AI's to change people. Policy through calling

Simone: politicians. Yeah. But like through social manipulation and like being nice and repeating their names a lot and acting really interested in them personally, you know, I'm just trying to think like, how can I be empathetic toward people without actually interacting with them?

Simone: I think this is the key, you know, we have to figure this out and bring it to scale. You're really good at being evil,

Malcolm: Simone. Thank you, Malcolm. How can we use an AI to win a local election? Yeah, this

Simone: is, this is the question that we're going to have to figure out in the coming years. And of course,

Bryan Caplan: in equilibrium, the problem is other people are going to be using it too.

Bryan Caplan: Well, not if we use it first. We can't get behind, we'll get crushed even worse than we're getting. It's you might say no, we've got the comparative advantage here. So we're going to do well here. It comes down to the problem is that. Normies are going to have the money to go and hire the people that will help them to do what they want to do.

Bryan Caplan: So Ah, [00:26:00] but in the

Bryan Caplan: long run Unfortunately, I hope i'm wrong No,

Malcolm: I agree with you. So the goal Is to use a short term advantage to get into the political system, then become president and then change us out of this abysmal voting system we have now. You know, as you have pointed out, democracies are just not very efficient.

Bryan Caplan: Oh God. Yes. I mean, I will say when you were talking about how can we go and cultivate leaders. You know, there are, there's a few kinds of leaders where again, some of its arguments, but a lot of it is ethos, classical Greek phrase. So, for example, I think that. What's the pro immigration people really need is some very flamboyant Venezuelan American politicians who take socialism, who also are pro immigration, and they can get up there and when AOC starts talking about [00:27:00] socialism, they can say, you know, I have seen socialism, I have lived under socialism, I have fled from socialism, and I will say that it is this great country which has given haven to me, like something like that.

Bryan Caplan: Yes, I mean, we those kinds of colorful personalities that Undermine negative stereotypes and that are able to go and cross group boundaries. That's the kind of thing that we need. Yes. So,

Malcolm: or I mean, our stance on immigration, we need to use immigration policy more aggressively and martially by that.

Malcolm: What I mean is when a country pisses us off, like when China does that, that BS they pulled with Hong Kong. We say, okay, everyone in Hong Kong was over a million dollars, gets an easy path to citizenship. When Russia does something that pisses us off, we say everyone in Russia was over this much money, gets an easy path to citizenship to the US.

Malcolm: And then you just remove like the entire educated class from that country, because this is one of the huge [00:28:00] advantages we have is we are a desirable place to move and we can siphon off their, a huge portion of their tax base.

Bryan Caplan: It's so smart. And yet, if we look at all actual refugee programs, none of the really big ones look anything like that.

Bryan Caplan: They go, they're based much more on, we really like these people and their suffering. So you know, so with Ukraine, there's no income cut off. It's just you know, if you're Ukrainian and your own government is not shooting you when you try to flee the country, you're totally welcome here.

Bryan Caplan: It's true for the whole EU, but also the US has no entry cap on Ukrainians. I mean, this is especially bizarre because They've already got the European Union. So like the marginal gain for Ukrainians for EU versus the U. S. is fairly modest. A lot of really, when you think about it, the main gain they have is, okay, if they already know English, they don't have to learn a new language.

Bryan Caplan: And they don't have to live in Ireland. Yeah. Also,

Malcolm: why take in Ukrainians? Who do we want them to win? I say block Ukrainians, take Russians. You hurt Russia and then [00:29:00] these people go back to the Ukraine. You make the Ukrainian visa

Bryan Caplan: short. Yeah, the problem is that it is very unusual for any country to view, to basically look at another country with anything other than a model of total collective guilt.

Bryan Caplan: It is really hard to get in the mindset of, we love the people of this country, but we're just fighting its government. This wasn't a Cold War mantra, and there was some of this attitude during the Cold War, but it is abnormal. The much more normal idea is the people and the government of a country are the same.

Bryan Caplan: And no matter how obviously wrong this is, it's really hard to go and talk people into this, no matter how strategically wise it would be. I mean, obviously what you're saying makes perfect sense. The only real objection is if you tried it, then they would re you know, the countries that you don't like would re institute emigration restrictions.

Bryan Caplan: But that is maybe not. Let's give it a whirl. See what happens. Yeah, but

Malcolm: when they start freaking out hard to get people to listen, that's when you know, you win when they forgot, you know what I would say to people [00:30:00] in the U S is if you met a Cuban, like an American Cuban, these are the most capitalistic Republican safe voting block you will ever see in America.

Malcolm: And we see this in other countries as well. Like A lot of people, you know, they're like Taiwan, like why are they able to create all these semiconductors and stuff that like no other country seems to be able to create at those levels. And I'm like, they are Chinese Cubans. And by that, what I mean is China had this period where basically they kicked out everyone who is capitalistic or smart or educated, and they all went to one little island and it became like this.

Malcolm: And that we can be that for the entire world, we can drain them of all their productive capacity.

Bryan Caplan: Now, as far as I know, Taiwan is not open to mainland Chinese immigration. No. It was at a time. I know, but striking that even Taiwan isn't trying. I mean, you think these are like, Hey, you got to get your population up people.

Bryan Caplan: Yeah. More than anyone. Population growing like gangbusters. And yet, [00:31:00] of course I don't think they're doing that. I mean, I'm pretty sure some mainland Chinese can get into Taiwan to work, but I bet that it's a pain in the neck.

Simone: Yeah. Well, I mean, as you know, all too intimately, perhaps more intimately than you know, the vast majority of the human population, nations are idiots when it comes to immigration policy, but you've given me some really great hope and inspiration and some ideas to get around that.

Simone: Like maybe there will be changes in your lifetime that will, you know, surprise you. Right.

Bryan Caplan: I mean, you know, the actual changes that are happening are generally at the level of details that are too boring for most people to even think about. Yeah. So if you look at the details of Biden's refugee programs, there are some major loopholes in there that some people I know are trying to go and take advantage of for the whether the, whether Biden even understood what he was doing is not clear.

Bryan Caplan: He did go with the original 1965 immigration liberalization. That it was not actually [00:32:00] their intent to go and increase immigration in the U. S. They just bungled it and did something great as a result of their

Simone: accident. Well, maybe that's the key or maybe that was just, you know, a secret, you know, Aspie, you know, person writing in a little, wasn't there someone on the DeSantis like campaign who like put like a Nazi symbol and like his ad and that, I mean, he got fired later, but there are lots of embedded people who would do all sorts of crazy things within politicians campaigns and work.

Simone: So who knows? Maybe we'll get some embedded supporters who

Bryan Caplan: will do amazing things with us. I still am a big believer in the don't chalk up to conspiracy. What can be attributed to stupidity?

Simone: Fair point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe it's dumb luck as they say. But I will count on that. If that's what we have to take, I will take it.

Simone: But. I don't know. I think, yeah, you've given me some ideas on, I mean, between education reform and novel experimentation in the world of policy and politics, bring more colorful figures in, leverage Dale Carnegie's timeless advice, maybe something can happen here. We [00:33:00] can do this, guys.

Malcolm: I'll put for our listeners, our video on immigration policy so they can get our positions on this.

Malcolm: And I really encourage them to go check out the rest of your books.

Simone: Yeah. Brian's books are amazing. The most recent. Yeah, the Yes.

Bryan Caplan: Free books on Amazon. They're cheap. They're easy. Get them.

Simone: And buy them. And also leave a review. They really help with expanding reach. So please leave a review.

Malcolm: Or, you know, you don't even need to buy the books.

Malcolm: Just leave lots of reviews on his books. Really positive reviews. This is the best thing I've ever read. It changed my life. Amazon doesn't check that you bought the product.

Simone: It gives extra weight, I think, but like still, yeah, this is what we live and die by

Bryan Caplan: as authors. If the Amazon spies are watching, always be honest.

Bryan Caplan: Yes. Only we have to read every

Malcolm: page. That was a joke. This is all comedic.

Simone: 100%. Yeah. Brian, thank you so much for joining us. We have had such a blast talking and hopefully we'll have you back on another day in the future. And for now, Godspeed finishing up your next book.

Bryan Caplan: My pleasure. Thank you guys very much.

Malcolm: All [00:34:00] right.