Episode Details

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