Bryan Caplan famous quotes

04-17-2025

In daily life, reality gives us material incentives to restrain our irrationality. But what incentive do we have to think rationally about politics?
-- Bryan Caplan

#Reality #Thinking #Giving
There is a small minority of well-educated people with relatively sensible views on economics, and an extremely tiny minority of economists with highly sensible views. Then there's everybody else. ... To win, a politician needs to please the median voter. It makes little difference if a few thousand economists think you a fool.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Winning #Thinking #Views
Let us designate anarchism1 anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism2 anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it.
-- Bryan Caplan

#College #Heritage #Anarchy
In a modern democracy, not only can a libertarian be elitist; a libertarian has to be elitist. To be a libertarian in a modern democracy is to say that nearly 300 million Americans are wrong, and a handful of nay-sayers are right.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Democracy #Libertarian #Modern
The best social insurance is to make more progress, not to make more work
-- Bryan Caplan

#Progress #Social
Sociotropic voters with biased economic beliefs are more likely to produce severe political failures than are selfish voters with rational expectations.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Selfish #Expectations #Political
There are two sources of error: Either you lack sufficient data, or you fail to take advantage of the data that you have.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Errors #Data #Two
Worldviews are more a mental security blanket than a serious effort to understand the world
-- Bryan Caplan

#Effort #World #Serious
The use of force is easy to rationalize in terms of basic economics. 'We should make them PAY for what they've done!' It's just the law of demand: raise the price of crossing us, and fewer people will cross us. Make the price another Hiroshima, and perhaps the quantity demanded will fall to zero.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Zero #Fall #Law
If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about 1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you.
-- Bryan Caplan

#Children #World #Nightmare

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