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The Left Eats Itself? Woke Culture's Internal Struggles (With Bryan Caplan)
Description: Economist Bryan Caplan joins Simone to discuss fascinating dynamics within left-wing culture. They analyze how progressive groups enforce rigid conformity, leading to constant internal conflict as people fear being "cancelled." Other topics include fertility rates across ideologies, Bryan's controversial open borders stance, and why some childless people react so angrily to his pronatalism.
Bryan Caplan: [00:00:00] I've done some fun Twitter polls of you know, are you left? Are you right? Do you worry about the left getting mad at you? Do you worry about the right getting mad at you? And one of the biggest groups that lives in fear is the left of the left,
Simone: right? Yeah. Yeah.
Bryan Caplan: Left. It's not quite like the ready body or like the Amish, but it is a weird dysfunctional subculture of people who feel like they've got to be looking over the shoulders
would you like to know more?
Simone: we are really excited today because we have a very special guest joining us, Brian Kaplan. He is, in addition to being a professor of economics at George Mason University, and a New York Times bestselling author, he's an author of not just a ton of books, including obviously some favorites of ours, like Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, like two huge obsession areas for us, but also in collaboration with the creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, an awesome webcomic a book called Open Borders, the Science of Ethics in Immigration, which is [00:01:00] illustrated and there just needs to be more books out there as avid readers of comics and manga, like throughout our, like youth.
Simone: We are huge fans of this format. So like super stoked, especially when it's something about policy. Well, it's
Malcolm: wild. We actually have a Saturday morning breakfast cartoon in one of our books as well. We asked for permission. So that's but other things he's written on is the case to get don't grow up to be a feminist.
Malcolm: It's one of the books. And one of the most recent ones is on how democracies are non functional or becoming less, less optimized for good economic outcomes. So ladies and gentlemen,
Simone: if you need some good reading, basically just search Brian Kaplan's
Malcolm: name. So, the priming that I wanted to go into this interview with, because I find this very interesting, and I haven't seen your pontification on this particular angle yet.
Malcolm: When I look at all of the things that you're seeing as problems, they both seem to align with many of the things that we think about the world, and I think most people have really thought about things. So they're very sane and based takes, right? Fertility population's going to begin to decline in the developed world, which is going to have [00:02:00] major economic effects.
Malcolm: The academic system is working less and less well. There's sort of social contagions like feminism, which are causing many downstream societal effects. My question to you is realistically, where does the world go 50, 100 years from now? Do we see a beginning of a collapse of the developed world?
Malcolm: Do we see small social groups begin to gain more power? What's going on?
Bryan Caplan: My honest answer is, I always say, we'll muddle through, there's no collapse, there's no disaster. Even the idea that things will get overall worse is, I think, highly unlikely. Mostly, I think, in terms of missed opportunities, things could have been so much more than they were.
Bryan Caplan: If we get to immortality in a thousand years, what we could have done in a hundred years, well, what a horrible tragedy for nine hundred
Published on 2 years, 2 months ago