Dr. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and New York Times Bestselling author. His most recent release is a collaboration with Zach Weinersmith called Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Bryan joins Ross and Paul to discuss the thesis of his new nonfiction graphic novel and explain his view that open borders would ultimately double the productivity of humankind.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com/noripodcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what the Nori-nauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com/noripodcast for what we’re offering.
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Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. We have Paul Gambill with us. Now, Paul, when’s the last time you did a [unclear]?
Paul Gambill: I’m back. I can’t remember. That was months ago.
Ross Kenyon: But dozens of episodes, perhaps. But we had to bring you back on because we have someone that has come up on the show so, so, so many times. We have Dr. Bryan Caplan, who’s a professor of economics at George Mason University, author of a couple of different books: The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and most recently Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, which was co-authored, or done in partnership with, Zach Weinersmith of SMBC, my favorite webcomic. Yeah, I’ve had people sending me these on and off for some years, so that was a very good get. Brian, thank you for being here.
Bryan Caplan: Great pleasure to be here with you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: So many times we’ve talked about the ideological Turing test. We’re going to get into climate change and immigration, which we’ve been meaning to do a show about, but the ideological Turing test has been super useful. We strive to exemplify this test on the show. What exactly is it, and to what degree did you originate this or capture something out of the ether, and why do you think it’s important?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So just for background there: once long ago there was the Turing test, from Alan Turing, and for him it was a way to adjudicate whether or not a computer actually was intelligent. And it came down to this: you have a computer in one room, a human in the other, and then there is a blind audience that doesn’t get to see what’s behind the door. And in the original Turing test, if a human audience cannot tell the difference between the computer in the one room and the human in the other room, then you say the computer has passed the Turing test.
Now, my idea was to say, well, we can think about something similar for being able to explain a view that you disagree with. And I called it the ideological Turing test. And as far as I know, I am the human being who originated the phrase ideological Turing test. And it just said, look, suppose that we get a person who sincerely believes in a view and then another person who does not, and we make it blind, so the audience doesn’t get to see who is who, and then we get to see whether people are able to tell the difference between the sincere adherent to the view and the person who disagrees. And especially, the best way of doing this is if people who actually sincerely hold the view can’t tell the difference between the person who sincerely holds it and you. Then you, the non-believer or the unbeliever, have passed this ideological Turing test.
And the motive of this was really inspired by J.S. Mill, who has this line: if you only know your own side of a case, you know but little of that. And yeah, the motive was to say, all right, of course it’s easy for an individual just to proclaim unilaterally, I understand views I disagree with incredibly well, kneel before me. But that’s not a test, that’s just self-evaluation. What’s great about that? On the other hand, a test is one where you actually put your ability to mimic a view on the line and see whether people really can, in a blind test, distinguish between you and someone who really believes it.
And if they can’t, then you have shown, not just to your own satisfaction, which is a really low bar, but to the satisfaction of people who actually hold the view, that you understand that view. Now, this by itself doesn’t show that you’re right and they’re wrong, but it is still a very reasonable first step to say, look, I understand this view that I disagree with. You can’t just simply say, I don’t get what you’re saying. I have managed to mimic you. So it’s not a matter of, I’m confused, I haven’t heard the arguments, I don’t get it. Rather, there’s got to be some deeper reason for the disagreement.
And that way it does advance the dialogue, because it gets past all of these common objections of, my critics just don’t get what I’m saying, man, it’s so subtle, it’s so difficult, so complicated. Or, of course, they are such a bunch of dummies, they’re so dishonest they could never comprehend what I’m trying to say. And the ideological Turing test is a neutral, objective way of seeing whether you actually are as good as you think you are.
Ross Kenyon: It’s such a useful heuristic, and you’re a man of your heuristics. We wanted to ask you additionally about public betting, which is something that you’ve done with scholars with whom you might have disagreements or different ways of viewing things. So Paul, why don’t you ask Brian about that.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, so I saw a reference to this on Twitter a little bit ago. You made a public bet against Yoram Bauman in 2014 regarding climate change. So for the listeners, what are the terms of the wager, and how’s it going so far?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So just let me back up a little bit. So background is, I have a whole lot of public bets, and my record right now is 20 wins out of 20 bets that have resolved. Undefeated. Until a few years ago, when there had been a 15-year pause in global warming, I told Yoram Bauman, who has written a graphic novel on, I think it’s like the cartoon guide to global warming or something like that, I said, look, I think that warming will continue, but I think you’re overconfident to think that. And I got him to give me three-to-one odds that the pause would continue for another 15 years.
So basically, I win if the pause continues, [unclear], January 1st, 2013, and he wins if the pause ends and then in the subsequent years warming resumed. All right. Now, I would say that in my view the classy thing for him to say would be, well, obviously we gave him good odds, so it’s not fair to say that he was a fool for making this bet, you know. So he, being perhaps a stand-up, you know, he literally is a stand-up comedian, so maybe he’s just doing this to be funny. But for each year, when the data comes in, he laughs at me on Twitter, right? And I would say, well, gee, I mean, you gave me three-to-one odds, so I bargained for that. I wasn’t saying that I thought that this wouldn’t happen, I’m just saying I thought you were overconfident.
Anyway, so those are the terms: that I win if that 15-year pause continues until 2030, and he wins otherwise. And right now he’s winning, and, you know, I will say, like, I regret the bet. I wish I hadn’t made it. But on the other hand, I’ve got 10 more years, so things could turn around. Probably won’t, but it would not bother me at all if in 2030 I lost my first bet, because that would mean I had another ten years of perfect betting. My guess is I’ll probably lose something before that, and it won’t actually be Yoram that ends my track record. But just stepping back, anyone can lose a bet.
All right, well, winning one bet doesn’t show very much. On the other hand, winning 20 bets out of 20, I’d say, does show a lot. It shows that you’ve got something that would be very unlikely to happen by chance.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And I connect this with your Turing test and that heuristic. The way I framed this question is because public betting in this way is a way of holding scholars, or people who run their mouths in public, accountable in some quantifiable way. Is that probably what you’re trying to do?
Bryan Caplan: Absolutely. So anyone can make vague predictions and then wait around for something to happen that’s kind of consistent with the prediction, and then go, aha, see, I’m right. I can make the prediction of, there’s going to be horrible terrorist attacks coming in the future. And then I just wait around for the next one. Aha, wasn’t I right? Wasn’t I brilliant? Didn’t I have a crystal ball? And if they don’t happen, then I just say, don’t you worry, just you wait. And then I just wait around for something to happen and I say, see, there, that’s right. So anyone could do that. It is totally cheesy, it’s pathetic, and you shouldn’t do that.
Now, what’s the alternative? The alternative is to very clearly specify what you’re saying, so to give a cutoff, you know, for like how many have to die from a terrorist attack, and also to give a deadline, so, by June 30th, 2023. All right, then you’ve said something where you can be definitively right or wrong, and then when you’re right it means something. And of course when you’re wrong, it means something. Now, even that though isn’t so great, because you could just make something that’s so likely to happen that you’re right all the time. So, yeah, I could say, here’s my prediction: in the next five minutes, there will be no terrorist attack that kills a million or more people. And then I just wait five minutes. Aha, see? So, right, right, yet again right.
Now, with the bet, you’ve got to find some other human being that disagrees, right? And then you have rationed the right to be right, so only one of the two of you can actually turn out to be correct. And when you’re doing that, you’ll find you’re not going to get a lot of people who will take the other side of a bet like, in the next five minutes, no terrorist attack that kills a million people or more. People aren’t going to want to put money on that, because, yeah, obviously that’s such a ridiculous bet, right? And so when you have to negotiate with another person who disagrees, just finding anyone on Earth who is willing to put money on the other side really does put you in a better league of prediction.
And of course, part of what you often want to do then is to negotiate odds. And then again, you can see, well, are you winning bets where you have to offer fantastic odds to get somebody else to bet? In that case, again, it doesn’t really show that much. On the other hand, if you give odds today and you win anyway, that’s impressive.
Ross Kenyon: Rationing the right to be right is such an economist way of putting that.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah. I mean, if you’re the judge in your own case, you’re right all the time. Everyone’s right all the time if they get to adjudicate it. So let’s say, out of all my bets, there’s only one where the person who lost just stubbornly said, no, I wasn’t wrong. So, you know, of course you could bet on the sunrise tomorrow and the other person could say, [unclear], it didn’t. Just like, that’s possible. The one case where my partner did not admit that he was wrong was, there’s a bet on deaths from terrorism in France, and the standard was no more than 500, and then he just counted a plane crash that no one else on Earth considered terrorism. I mean, he said, oh, that’s terrorism. And like, how is that terrorism? Well, ISIS said they were happy. So that’s your standard? So if there’s an earthquake and ISIS said, yeah, earthquake, this was Allah’s punishment to France, that would have meant that that was terrorism.
Yeah, so, like, there’s a point where some people will believe and say anything. But the nice thing about betting is someone has to really actually just baldly refuse to face facts when it’s reasonably specified that it’s not. And in the honest outcome, one side says, yes, I was wrong, here’s your money.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, that’s the beauty of making the public bet. I want to shift gears here and ask about your latest work, which is Open Borders, as the title, and it’s a graphic novel drawn by Zach Weinersmith of SMBC. We talked about him. It’s a nonfiction graphic novel, important to specify?
Bryan Caplan: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So how did that come about? What inspired you to write that? And also, just for the listeners who haven’t read it, what’s the thesis?
Bryan Caplan: All right, so in terms of the inspiration: I’m a researcher, and a lot of what I do is try to take research that is actually really important and interesting, but it’s written in a boring way and appears in journals no one ever would open voluntarily, and just to put it all together in a package, to draw it to the attention of a broader audience. That’s what I’ve done in a lot of my work, right? And in my mind it’s always, well, how can I make it even better? How can I communicate more effectively? How can I get people to pay attention?
And in my reading I noticed that there are a number of very high quality nonfiction graphic novels, most notably Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe. And when you read these works, you look at them and say, oh, this is just for kids. And then you open it up and say, no, this is not just for kids. It’s highly accurate, it’s careful, it’s just a really effective way of conveying a lot of information to the reader in a short amount of time. A well-drawn picture really is worth a thousand words. It’s not just cheap talk, that’s true, right?
So I looked at these works and said, here is this great author who has taken human history and accurately conveyed it in a highly efficient way, so that people can learn a lot in a short amount of time. And furthermore, he makes it so fun that people will keep reading. So first it increases the density, the information; you get more information per minute than you ever could from a regular book, and then it makes it so entertaining that people read the book, right? So I looked at that and said, wow, that’s a great thing that he’s done. Can I do that? And I really like books of this kind. So just the fact that Larry Gonick can do it doesn’t mean I can do it, but I said, well, why don’t I try?
And I’ve been really passionate about immigration. I’ve been blogging about it for 15 years. There’s a lot of fantastic research about it that I think if people would just listen to it and really absorb it, it would blow their minds. And I took this research and I presented it in this graphic format, and then I shopped around for artists, and I was able to get my number one choice artist in the world, which is Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Sounds like you guys know who he is. And I talked him into working on it with me, and Open Borders is the product of our collaboration.
So I wrote 95% of the words and I also did storyboards. So that means that I used Google Images and some comic software to lay out what the book would look like, and then he drew it, but then he pumped up the funniness especially. And then he also had a lot of great advice about how to change the panels to make them work better. He had great advice on just how to present the argument in a way that would be more appealing to a broader audience. So Zach is the greatest collaborator I’ve ever had. He’s just so wonderful, and such a great mentor to me in the graphic arts.
Now, in terms of what the book says, well, there’s a few things that are going on. So one of them is, I just begin with a moral perspective that says that preventing someone from moving from a poor country to a rich country is a very harsh punishment to impose on another human being. And so if you’re going to do it, you ought to have a good reason. In other words, I say that morally, yes to immigration should be our default, our presumption, right? And then the question is, all right, so why not? There are a lot of horrible things where, when you know all the facts, you can say, well, it’s terrible, but the alternative is even worse, so we should do this terrible thing.
But just flipping the presumption and saying that immigration restrictions are the kind of things that need to be justified. Once you’re doing them, you should always be asking, what is the cheapest and most humane way of dealing with the problem that the restrictions are meant to address, so we aren’t any harsher than we really need to be to deal with these severe problems, if they’re out there. So that’s where I just begin.
And then I go over all of the main complaints about immigration. Well, not all the main ones, but I try to go for the main ones. Again, I will just say, since this is this podcast, I really dropped the ball on the arguments, and I can say I ran out of space, but I could have rearranged it. And I don’t know if there could be a second edition. I’d really like to put in an environmental chapter. There’s a bit on the environment, but it’s not nearly enough, I would say, and this is my bad. But in any case, I go through the arguments that I hear most often, and I begin then with the idea that open borders would cause poverty. And there I say there is a lot of research saying precisely the opposite, that open borders is the best known way of reducing poverty or increasing human productivity.
And the research just comes down to this: when you move, let’s say, a human being from Haiti to Florida, their contribution to the world economy increases enormously, right? So obviously their earnings increase, and, you know, there’s a reason why their earnings increase, which is that a Haitian can accomplish a lot more in Florida than in Haiti. Or flipping it around, imagine that you just got shoved over to Haiti. What can you accomplish there? Not very much. All right. When you move a person from a poor country to a rich country, you don’t just make their life better, you increase their total contribution to the world.
And when you just go and do the math on this and say, well, if each individual, when they move, becomes vastly more productive, and then if a whole lot of people want to move, which other research strongly confirms, well, then when we think about what would be the effect of open borders on the well-being of mankind, it comes down to this: you’re multiplying a huge gain for immigrants times a huge number of people that want to move. And when you multiply one really big thing times another really big thing, you get the biggest thing that any economist has ever measured, right? So a very standard estimate of the economic gains of open borders is that it would double the production of mankind. Not instantly, because it takes a lot of time for people to move, but the ultimate effect would be a massive increase in the productivity of mankind.
And that for me then is, whenever you’re thinking about any other problem with free immigration, you always need to weigh whatever you’re talking about against many tens of trillions of gains per year, right? And that’s really where the book comes down to. I talk about a lot of other problems, but I’m just saying none of them are in the ballpark of tens of trillions of dollars per year. Yes, I know that trillions of dollars of gains are not going to make headlines the same way that one terrorist attack makes headlines. So yeah, that’s why I wrote the book, because the enormous benefits of open borders are not psychologically compelling, whereas the trivial harms are psychologically compelling.
So I wanted to write this book to give people a better perspective and to say, look, forget about your emotions, calm down, humble yourself before the evidence. Just realize the fact that you’re upset proves really next to nothing, and the fact that something bores you, again, doesn’t prove very much. Although along the way I try to make the gains exciting and try to make the focus on symbolic costs unappealing. And a lot of what you can do with this nonfiction graphic novel format is to try to not just get people to rethink things, but also to try to get people’s emotions to align with what a rational person would have.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed. And you are correct that in my reading, there are a lot of points and questions I wanted to ask from a climate perspective that I know you ran out of room for. There’s a lot that is covered in this book. You basically take on common right-of-center and left-of-center objections to more open immigration policy. I imagine that most people listening to the show have an understanding of right-wing objections to immigration that are about culture and integration and depressing wages of native-born citizens, and you take that on.
But I think something that might be more interesting to our listeners is that they’re worried that if we have trillions of dollars of goods and services being generated additionally every year from an open immigration policy, wouldn’t this put, you know, multiple times the amount of stress on the climate than we’re already putting on there? Isn’t that a good reason for environmentalists to be suspicious of immigration?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So I would say that if you are just suspicious of economic growth in poor countries in general, then that’s also reason to be suspicious of open borders. In both cases you’re talking about trying to give a standard of living of the developed world to the rest of mankind, who don’t currently enjoy it. I’d say when you put it that way, then it does become harder to just bite the bullet and say, yeah, we’ve really just got to prevent this, we have to go and keep most of mankind mired in poverty in order to save the planet. And it does make you think, well, is it really that bad? Or is there any other way? Good God, is there no other way to save the planet other than to keep billions of people trapped in horrible poverty?
Now, again, of course you could ask that question and then think about it for years and say, no, there’s no other way, oh, man. But on the other hand, when you start asking that question, I think that it does get your mind working in a more constructive way. So in terms of my response, I’d say, both for economic growth and for saving the planet, on restricting immigration and saving the planet, I would first of all go to something that’s called the environmental Kuznets curve. I don’t know if you guys have talked about that on this show.
Ross Kenyon: We have, but run us through it again.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So there’s a great economist named Simon Kuznets, and he noticed that if you just focus on the kinds of pollutants of industrial civilization, that when economic growth begins, then those pollutants increase, and then you get more growth and they increase further. But then, once you get to a mid-level of development, pollution per person starts to go down again. And so what this means is, the poorest countries are totally lacking industrial pollutants, and then countries that are moderately richer are worse, countries that are richer than that are even worse, but once finally the countries actually get reasonably rich, then the problem starts to go down. And then finally you go to the richest countries and see that they are pretty clean on most measures.
Now, we already see that this has happened for a lot of particulate measures of pollution, and now it seems like it is happening for countries like the US for carbon emissions, where you’re seeing that at least carbon per unit of GDP is definitely going down, and I think that actually emissions per person are starting to go down as well, as the Kuznets curve would suggest. So really what this says is that the danger zone is when you’re in the middle level of development. And so the best thing for the planet is just to fast-forward through the middle zone and get everyone rich really quick, as quick as you can. All right, so that is the Kuznets story, which I will say, at least for a lot of pollutants, it’s clearly true. And for things like particulates, it really is true that when you go to the richest countries, the air is good.
Ross Kenyon: Again, people challenge it. This is the whole decoupling argument with degrowth economics, where they’re saying that actually, the wealthier you are, there’s almost a linear relationship with how much material throughput is consumed, how many emissions come out. So I wonder to what degree it is truly decoupled. Although whenever we talk about this on the show, we get emails from one side or the other, or our guest is vociferous in their defense of their perspective. So I guess you would say that this holds true, for you and in your mind, this model for carbon emissions.
Bryan Caplan: So I’ll be honest and say, like, I’m not an expert on this. But I would say that among all of the environmental economists that I have read, and I’d say a good number, the decoupling argument seems to be accepted by people from a wide range of ideologies. So that is one of my criteria for when you can trust results: when people with very different views, who are nevertheless quantitatively skilled, agree. So that seems pretty good.
Now, you know, Kuznets curve aside, there’s this question of, are there other cheaper, more humane ways of dealing with problems of warming or environmental problems generally, than just keeping people in poverty? And there I know that there is a very nice list. So basic environmental economics says that not only can you reduce pollution by taxing it, but you can get more cleanup per dollar of cost than by any other method. And this approach has really been checked, so you can go and read, like, Alan Blinder’s Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, where he goes and talks about, this isn’t just some kind of textbook theory, we’ve actually gone and compared the abatement cost of traditional command and control to just doing taxes, and it looks like you can cut the cost down 50% by doing it through pollution taxes, right?
So there is that. And then also, I am, perhaps not surprisingly, I think that nuclear power is greatly undervalued, and that is of course a super clean, very low carbon way of getting energy, right? And I think it’s very unpopular, but I think for almost totally emotional reasons. You might say, like, the Fukushima nuclear accident: as far as I know, no people have died. And yet this leads Germany to go and start shutting down their nuclear plants and switching over to coal, which by all the estimates I’ve seen will kill thousands of people and be much worse for carbon emissions. But nuclear power is highly emotional, and coal, people are just used to it. Yeah, this is one of the many psychological facts about technology, is that bad technology that is familiar doesn’t upset people, whereas much better technology that seems spooky and unfamiliar, on the other hand, freaks people out.
Ross Kenyon: So if I could summarize, because of the Kuznets curve, I think what I hear you saying is that if open borders and more immigration would increase economic output, your argument is that, well, yes, that could in the short term potentially increase emissions, but ultimately it should cause a decrease because of the effects that we observe from the Kuznets curve.
Bryan Caplan: So right, you know, in other words, I’d say that we know the worst thing for global warming is for most of the world to just stay stuck at middle income for a long time. That’s when they’re doing the worst thing. And I think at this point it’s pretty much inevitable that almost all the world is going to be middle income, and really, actually most of it already, the majority of the world already is middle income by conventional definitions, and that’s going to continue. And if we could just very quickly zoom through middle income into rich, then it seems like that’s going to be the best scenario that’s available, right?
And of course, I do think that you should always think about what is the harm of keeping people in poverty as well. So I would say that so many of the problems with global warming can be mitigated by a rich society, whereas a poor society really is in great trouble. So I think about Bangladesh when I hear they’ve had fantastic economic growth for 10 years. And all right, well, it’s especially good for them because they’re one of the countries that is most at risk from global warming. If they were still as poor as they were in 1980, then they probably wouldn’t have the resources to cope with it. Let this economic growth continue and they’ll have the money to go and build some awesome dikes and at least avert a lot of the harm.
Ross Kenyon: So, you know, given an ideological Turing test, why are the degrowthers saying what they are? Like, given what you’re saying here, it seems to me like it’s a pretty clear case that what we want and what we should all want around the world is just massive increased economic growth as fast as possible everywhere. So why do people believe otherwise?
Bryan Caplan: Well, so I think in terms of the ideological Turing test, what I would say is: Brian, you’re offering me a false alternative between either the rest of the world gets as rich as the US, or they just stay stuck where they are and we continue doing what we’re doing. How about an alternative scenario? Rich countries just go and give a whole bunch of help to poor countries, so that they can, rather than becoming like us, just essentially get a big share of our production, and then we don’t need to actually change total emissions at all. We just go and have rich countries give away a lot of foreign aid, either charity or reparations, to poor countries, and then we don’t need to really develop the rest of the world.
So in other words, you know, I think in terms of the ideological Turing test, you can just say, well, Brian, you’re just trying to let rich countries continue being the corrupt consumption hogs that they are right now, and then go and concern-troll to say, what about all those poor people in poor countries, shouldn’t they be able to have a nice life too? And I think someone might say, hey, how about rich countries, us, cut back by 50%, which is well within their abilities. We won’t starve in the US if we cut back our consumption by 50% and then give the surplus to poor countries in return for them not industrializing. So I think that is something that you very well might say in reply. So again, if I wanted to have a good version of it, I think I probably would push on that a lot.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. Isn’t that, isn’t that incredibly selfish? Like the idea that these poor countries shouldn’t be allowed to industrialize, shouldn’t be allowed to achieve the same levels of comfort and luxury that we have?
Ross Kenyon: Well, they support redistribution. They say, like, if the economy is in a steady state or it’s in degrowth, then we are obliged basically to redistribute, because if the pie isn’t growing, that’s what justifies the myth, this is in their words, that it’s the only way to keep the system going. That the bigger the pie is, the more people it will serve, but if the pie were no longer growing, there’d be revolutions tomorrow, therefore redistribution.
Bryan Caplan: Right. So I mean, that one seems so exaggerated that immediately...
Ross Kenyon: Like, so that’s the Naomi Klein version, Brian.
Bryan Caplan: Right. Well, I mean, she’s not known for her moderation or aversion to hyperbole, right? So, you like the idea that if countries don’t have growth, this is likely to lead to revolution? Like, I really don’t see that. There’s, of course, throughout most of human history they had no growth, and revolutions were rare. So I don’t think that that makes too much sense.
So again, I mean, I would think that the caring anti-growth policy would be to say, look, we’re not saying poor countries should stay and live in misery. We’re saying that rich countries should go and make it up to them. Rich countries have already messed up the planet and they should hand over a whole lot of surplus resources they don’t really need, so that we can fix the planet and also greatly reduce the amount of poverty in the rest of the world, and really just get rich countries to appreciate that the world does not revolve around them. Just because you’re born in the US doesn’t mean you’re entitled to have a Hummer.
Ross Kenyon: One of the other cases I’ve heard for immigration coming from left-of-center circles is about adaptation. And there’s a justice claim here, which is that Western countries, or countries in the Global North, are responsible for emissions that, you know, put the small island nations of the world or Bangladesh underwater. There’s a responsibility to offer them status to immigrate very easily to some of these wealthier countries. And this is kind of a softball for you though, because you would just say, sure, that’s fine by me, right?
Bryan Caplan: Not only fine, I think it’s great. So, you know, I mean, obviously there’s a lot of people who would rather that their islands not sink and that they not have to move, but if that’s going to happen anyway, it would be terrible, of course, if no country would take them. And then what are they supposed to do, become boat people for the rest of their lives? So ultimately I think the world is not quite so dysfunctional that if an island sank the inhabitants would be stuck as boat people forever. But then again, maybe it is that bad. So yeah, I think Hong Kong kept a lot of Vietnamese boat people in [unclear], in what I doubt were their hardiest years, for decades, before they finally did forcible repatriation to Vietnam.
So yeah, then, you know, that was another thing that I didn’t do just for lack of space in the book. It’s just to have a chapter on refugees. Yeah, climate refugees. See, this is another important argument for open borders, that this is a way where people who otherwise would be suffering from the carbon emissions that are mostly produced by rich countries would be able to escape from the harm, right?
And I have blogged on this more generally, which is that within a country, if a disaster is coming, the normal thing to do is to evacuate the population before the disaster strikes. Like, so when Hurricane Katrina was on the way, the US government, Louisiana government, and all these governments all told the population, get the hell out, so that the damage is reduced, right? This is just common sense. If a disaster is coming, move the people out of the way so that all you lose are some buildings instead of human lives. Duh.
All right, and as long as the disaster is happening inside of the country, this is what countries almost always do. However, if the disaster is international, if, for example, a civil war is looming in Syria, then the normal reaction is quite the opposite, and it’s to go and say, no, no, no, you don’t know that it’s going to be a disaster, prove it, and until you prove it then we’re not going to let refugees in. All right? And as a result, you wind up keeping people stuck in disaster zones, the disaster strikes, and then often countries say, all right, well, now that 100,000 people have been massacred and there’s [unclear] going on in the streets, all right then, all right, fine, we’ll take some refugees now, right?
And this not only means the disaster is worse, but also it’s even a bigger burden to the receiving countries. Because if you let people leave before disaster strikes, they can often take care of themselves. They arrive and, the way I’d put it, they still have the money, so they’re ready to go and hit the ground running. Whereas if you wait for people to be absolutely desperate in refugee camps or worse before you say they can come, then when they arrive, they’re generally destitute. And then, of course, at this point people say, oh, well, how are we supposed to afford to take care of them? Like, well, maybe you should have thought about that before, and we wouldn’t be in this situation, people.
Paul Gambill: So, okay, if we summarize so far, you’ve made the argument that open borders increases economic growth. We’ve argued that economic growth is better for response to climate change, and you’ve also argued that it’s a little better in the long run.
Bryan Caplan: I don’t want to oversell it.
Paul Gambill: Sure, sure, sure, fair. And then also, from like a justice and equity perspective, the idea of letting in people who are most affected by climate change is also an argument for open borders. So what are the remaining arguments for it? Like, it seems like you’re addressing issues that the left might raise with immigration and the right might raise with immigration. So how much of it, in terms of opposition to immigration, how much of that do you think is just because of the nature of partisan politics, or how much do you attribute to like these actual differences?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So actually, my view is that a lot of the opposition is covertly bipartisan. So of course, in terms of US politics, Republicans will say a lot of mean things about immigrants and Democrats will try to say the opposite. But when you really press Democrats and say, okay, should we have open borders, when Republicans accuse Democrats of saying, do you believe in open borders, almost every Democrat will say, of course not, that’s ridiculous, right? And I actually want to endorse the view that almost no person who wants to get ahead in politics will endorse. So I think that it’s just a very intellectually meritorious position, and I’m not running for office, so I’m not afraid of saying things that are really unpopular.
So, you know, I think really what’s going on is there’s a very fundamental human xenophobia, just blaming things on out-groups, and having extreme pessimism about groups, and being willing to take very petty harms to natives as an argument in favor of doing great harm to out-groups. That’s something that has great human appeal, right? And I’m enough into Darwin that it seems possible to me that a lot of this has evolved. So, you know, human beings have often lived in tribes, and we just have a very built-in tribal mentality. Although I’d also say that the rise of modern society shows that we are very capable of totally redefining what our tribe is over time. So it used to be tribes of 20 to 40 people, and now Americans think that their tribe is 330 million people. All right, so we’re able to go and multiply the size of our tribe by a factor of 10 million, right?
So I say that shows that even though there’s something very xenophobic built into human nature, probably, still there’s also an incredible flexibility as to what counts as foreign. So that gives me a lot of my long-run hope, is we’ll just rethink what counts as being part of the group and not part of the group, until eventually all humans count. It would help if we discovered life on Mars, then you say, well, all humans have got to gather together, something like that, or some scenario like that.
So in terms of other things going on: what was interesting is that if you look in the 1980s, immigrants divided very evenly between Democrats and Republicans in the 1980s. So this isn’t something that is a fundamental feature of US politics. It’s something that’s arisen in the last few decades, and I think a lot of it is that there’s been a feedback loop where Republicans became more hostile to immigrants, which made immigrants more hostile to Republicans, which made Republicans more hostile to immigrants, and so on, which has brought us to the sad state that we’re at today.
But at the same time, there have been big demographic realignments before. So if you were to go, say, 50 years ago and tell Republicans, oh, you’re going to get a lot of Catholics on your side, they would just laugh and say, yeah, fat chance that’ll totally happen. So political entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to go and crack these demographic death spirals and appeal to groups that don’t currently appeal to them. It does take time, but in the long run it is very common, and it’s not nearly as hopeless as a lot of Republicans seem to think.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, Ross and I both spent our formative childhood years in Phoenix, in Arizona, and it always seemed odd to me to see, like, in the 2000s and maybe late 1990s, to see Republicans sort of spurning immigrants from Latin America, when, like, their social values are the same. They’re identical social values. I always found that very weird.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So, I mean, to me what’s really striking is you look at Indian Americans, so Americans from the country of India, and you’ll see they are now the richest ethnicity in America, and by many measures they’re also the most socially conservative in America. So in terms of their views, you would think that they would be, in terms of their whole social station, you’d think they would be very heavily Republican, and yet their Democrat-to-Republican ratio is four to one.
And this is one where there’s no way Republicans could say, oh, well, it’s just a bunch of people that want to go and wax fat off the welfare state, they don’t want to work. Obviously that just doesn’t make any sense for Indian Americans. So I mean, I think that really does leave you with, you alienated people who in terms of their issue views and their position in society would be your natural allies. And, you know, how do you do it? By just having a bad attitude, just talking to people in an unfriendly way, right? And of course, also just tolerating people in your party who do it. Because there’s just one really mean, big mouth in your party, not mentioning any names, that can make the whole party look bad.
And oddly, there’s this peculiarity of US politics: it’s really hard to kick a person out of your party, right? If you go over to the UK, they kick people out of their parties all the time, right? Whereas in the US, the Republicans couldn’t even kick out David Duke. Now, that’s right, some [unclear] as to why this happens, I’m a little confused. I haven’t talked to any lawyer on how this works. But anyway, like, you would think that that would be very important for protecting your brand. We don’t want to have horrible, monstrous, loud jerks representing us, yelling, giving our party a bad name.
Ross Kenyon: Brian, I’m surprised that you didn’t reference the Simpsons meme that I’ve seen going around, which is the old guy in the theater, and someone says, wait, no one’s saying open borders. Just say open borders.
Bryan Caplan: Oh, yeah. There you go.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, man. I’ll put that in the show notes if I can track that meme down. We’ve covered this a little bit, but do you think that predictions in the book, do you think what we’ve talked about would change the content of your book at all? Do you think any of these challenges posed new directions that you might have to address in a future edition, or does broadly your argument just hold for this as well?
Bryan Caplan: Right. So I mean, I do make a big effort whenever I write a book to make it stand the test of time. I don’t want to be super current, I don’t want to talk a lot about the scandal that happened that year that won’t register at all to people even in five or ten years, much less in 50 years. So when I wrote Open Borders, I really did try to make a lot of the content timeless. Of course the empirics are going to be superseded by later empirics that hopefully will be an improvement, probably will be an improvement. In terms of whether I’m likely to update it: if the publisher is willing, you know, then I would love to actually do an expanded version. Again, at minimum I want to have another chapter on the environment, another chapter on refugees.
So there’s a lot that I could have added even at the current length. Originally I thought I was going to keep it down to 160 pages, and then my collaborator just said, oh, well, you know, I’m happy to make it 200 pages at no additional charge. Hello, great. So that’s part of the backstory of the book. But if he’d said 300 pages, no charge, probably it would have started to get hard to be published if it were that long. But you know, the book’s been successful, so I really can see in 10 years coming back and doing the expanded version, especially if it continues to sell and there’s a lot of classes where people liked it.
And yeah, I think the issue is going to continue, right? And again, it’s hard to be sure, but my view actually is that things are going to slowly move in my direction. Although in 10 years we will still have nothing like open borders, but if we just look at US opinion, we have gone from a world where almost no one favored more immigration. So we’ve got public opinion on immigration going back to around 1970. If you look at that data, until about the year 2000 it was pretty much never the case that more than 10% of people wanted more immigration. It was just a debate between keep it the same and reduce it. And since then, the share of the population that says we should have more has gone from under 10 to about 30 percent. Okay, now, still a minority view, but this is basically something where you take a view that almost nobody held and turned it into a pretty normal view, right? And once you have a lot of people saying we should have more, then you’ll have me saying, yeah, well, how much more? How about a lot more? Why do we want to stop it at all?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s very good to know, and I look forward to that in the book. One useful tool conceptually that people might want to employ in the future is this idea of keyhole solutions. So what are they, and what might be some for the link between the environment and immigration?
Bryan Caplan: So, back in the old days, just for context, you’ve seen movies about the Civil War, whatever, surgery was truly horrifying back in the old days, there amputating. You might say, well, they didn’t have anything better to do. Well, over time we have learned, and some of the things we’ve learned is, let’s try to keep side effects, those horrible side effects, to a minimum, let’s try to reduce the collateral damage. And one thing you can do is to reduce the size of the incision. So much more common today is what’s called a keyhole incision, where we just do a very small incision and then you insert a little camera and try to just do the smallest harm to the patient in the process of helping them.
All right. Now, the economic journalist Tim Harford went and took this idea and said, well, we can use the same intuition for policy. So whenever there is a social problem and we’re thinking about designing remedies, let’s think about the cheapest and most humane way of doing it, in the same way that we have keyhole surgery. How about keyhole solutions for different social problems? And this is an idea that very much appeals to economists, right? But I’d say really to any sensible person. Yeah, if you’re going to go and try to fix a problem, try not to do a whole lot of harm along the way.
Now, there’s a whole field of environmental economics that’s really built on this idea, right? And it says things like, well, if you want to reduce pollution, why not tax it, instead of having a phone book of regulations? Right? If you want to go and reduce the amount of congestion on the roads, which of course leads to a lot of pollution, why not go and have a toll on the roads that varies by the time of day, so the traffic is moving and you don’t have people wasting time and just pointlessly going and putting out [unclear]? Why not do things like that? Why not go and charge people based upon the amount of pollution they emit, rather than just saying that there’s a fixed fee for a car, for example?
So, in other words, you try to design a policy that targets exactly the problem. So presumably the problem with cars is not that they exist, it’s that they’re driven, right? And all cars do not pollute equally. So you want to figure all these things out when you’re designing any pollution policy.
All right. So similarly, in the case of immigration, what I would say is, rather than saying people can’t come, it would make a lot more sense to think about, well, what exactly are the environmental harms that immigrants are going to increase, and then go and have special taxes that go and help you with this problem, right? And a simple thing would just be to say, all right, well, immigrants have to pay an admission fee, they have to pay extra income taxes, right, and that would probably deal with it. Although, again, just saying, well, let’s go and try to figure out exactly how much of different pollutants immigrants are emitting and then tax exactly the thing that’s the problem, right? So I assume that your listeners are very familiar with carbon taxes, so there’s that kind of thing, right?
And again, just to repeat the often misunderstood economic case for these kinds of pollution taxes, which is that a tax does two things. First of all, in the short run it encourages people to do less of the bad thing, there’s that. But it also has another important long-run effect, which is that when you start taxing the bad thing, people start trying to figure out ways to accomplish the same goal without paying the tax, namely by getting the same result in a way that isn’t harmful to society, right? So for example, if you go and put a tax on carbon emissions from cars, well, this gives car builders an incentive to try to figure out a way to make a car that doesn’t emit as much. But moreover, it gives people a reason to take public transportation, and it gives firms a reason to actually privately produce public transportation, or to go and bid for existing dilapidated public transportation, make it nice so people want to use it, right?
And again, what’s nice about this is often it’s just not obvious what the best way forward is, and incentives leave wide open the way of accomplishing the goal, while giving them an incentive to get it done.
Ross Kenyon: Seems wise to me, to be conservative in that kind of way, not trying to do everything, trying to make sure it has the smallest incision.
Bryan Caplan: Speaking of which, I really, I just, just by the way: so, you know, like Alan Blinder again, I mentioned his book Hard Heads, Soft Hearts. So he’s a very famous left-wing economist, but he has a lot of work in this book on how these kinds of incentives are way better, both in the short and long run, than traditional methods of pollution control, right? And I mean, I would just say that, like, for people that are inclined to read and say, look, someone that shares my values nevertheless thinks that we should do it in a different way, right?
I mean, I think that’s the kind of thing that really should weigh on people. And again, just to realize that it’s easy to go and tell people exactly how they have to do it, but then you are losing the advantage of creativity. Like, you know, there are so many ways that you could accomplish the same thing, and if it gives people some flexibility on how to accomplish it, then that’s much better than telling them just how to do it, because that assumes that you’ve already got it figured out. Nobody really, really does.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m very sympathetic to that personally. And I was going to say that I had recently read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, which is a previous book of yours, found it very interesting, and you address this a little bit, that some of these same climate or environmental rationales apply also to the having of children. And it works. Yeah, there’s a lot of debate. We’ve actually done episodes on natalism, and the mere fact of me mentioning it now means I’m going to receive mail about it. And given that you are a fan of Julian Simon, you think humans are the ultimate resource, they’re actually problem solvers, they’re good to have around. R.I.P. my inbox right now. So you think that these arguments against immigration apply even stronger against natalism, or having children?
Bryan Caplan: So most of them, most of them, yeah. So I mean, again, I would say that from an environmental point of view, you might say, well, allowing an immigrant, at least you’re just moving a person from one place to another, whereas having kids increases total population. So in that sense, you might say that having kids is even worse than allowing immigrants in, if you’re really worried about the environmental effects. You know, the main thing I say there is that if you look at a human being and all you can see is the pollution they’re going to make, you really are missing a lot. Human beings do a lot of things. They do a lot of good things, they do a lot of bad things, and in my view the good greatly outweighs the harm.
So, like, if a random human being drops dead, my reaction is not, oh, good. Well, they did actually produce useful stuff, but they also polluted, and it’s better to have the person be dead and the pollution not exist, you know? Again, now logically that could be true, it could just be the pollution is so bad that when people die that’s actually a good thing. But it is the kind of judgment that at least you want to double-check and say, is it really true? Is it really true that people are that bad? It’s an odd position, and my view is, no. So when people drop dead, I still think that on balance that’s a bad thing, and flipping it around, when people are not born, I think that’s a bad thing.
So, you know, at minimum, of course, there’s a person that enjoys being alive, and I think that is a reasonable thing to keep in mind, but also in terms of what people contribute to the world, I think that this, for a large majority of people, greatly outweighs whatever harm they do. Of course, not in every case. Maybe if Hitler had not existed that would have been better, maybe Charles Manson. But for a random person, I look at them and if you add up all the good they do and all the bad that they do, it still seems to be a big net positive. Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea to try to figure out how to make it more positive. And again, you know, things like pollution taxes are a very reasonable approach there.
Paul Gambill: One of our previous guests and an advisor to Nori is Ramez Naam, and Ramez has a book called The Infinite Resource, which is really about innovation, and innovation comes from the ability of humans to be creative and work together and produce more value than they spend in producing that. And so I think that that concept fits in very well with what you’re saying.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, absolutely.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s the, I mean, Ramez told us as much, that he’s been indebted to Julian Simon’s book The Ultimate Resource. So yeah, this has been a running theme of the show, I guess you could say. We tend to be optimistic too, Brian. I think you do very well to add the nuance about various timeframes, about maybe the Kuznets curve applies just farther in the future than people typically look, because it’s come under fire for those reasons. A lot of people don’t really buy that Kuznets curve argument these days, but I wonder if it is an issue of time horizons. So thanks. You’re just very good about adding caveats or limitations to your various predictions. I can see why you win bets, is what I’m trying to say.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, well, that is a big part of it, is just don’t go further than you really have justification to do, right? And, you know, I’m loath to say that’s just my personality. I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t horribly arrogant, but I’m at least aware of it and I do try to get it under control. Like, I’m not going to say by any means that I’ve actually achieved it, but I do listen to what I’m saying and say, look, is that, like, can I actually cash that check that I just wrote? And if I can’t, I’d better say, give me, give me that check here, we’ve got to postdate it. So that I can still actually pay you, or repay you. Have I got the funds in the account?
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian. If someone wanted to buy your book, what’s the most efficacious way for them to do so, what helps your numbers, and how can people keep up with your work?
Bryan Caplan: Yeah, so I would say that the best way of getting the book is Amazon. It’s only $13.39 in paperback, so it’s dirt cheap for you, and if you have Amazon Prime, free delivery, might I say. So it’s so cheap that I encourage people to buy it for every kid they like. I’ve had a lot of kids actually read the book, because unlike any of my other books, this book actually is enjoyable to people that are younger, right? So, you know, I’ve got to let you know, it’s the only book I’ve ever had where my five-year-old looked over my shoulder, was curious about what I’m doing.
Ross Kenyon: Brian, that’s how they got Socrates, though. You’ve got to be careful.
Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So, yeah, and I would say, like, they like it, and this is not because I’ve dumbed it down. So I would still say that I think the research is valid, the discussion is very careful, very accurate, well referenced, but just by combining words and pictures, you make it more entertaining and more accessible. So whereas all of my other books, I tried to make it work for everyone from research specialists all the way down to undergraduates, here I think that I can go from research specialist all the way down to approximately seven-year-olds in terms of the audience.
So, I mean, of course, you know, you should also be able to find it in physical bookstores, and, like, wherever you buy my books. In terms of my other stuff, you can go to bcaplan.com. That’s B-C-A-P-L-A-N dot com. I also blog for EconLog, usually. Whenever I’m writing a book, I just spend a lot of time talking about what’s on my mind and what part of the book I’m working on, and trying to get people’s reactions to what I’m doing.
Ross Kenyon: And then there’ll be a link in the show notes to Open Borders if you’d like to buy it. Oh, I should also say, it maybe has the most reference notes of any graphic novel that I’ve ever seen. Brian, do you think that you can claim that title for yourself?
Bryan Caplan: I think I can. So, Larry Gonick also does a good job, but I think mine are a bit denser. I mean, he’s got five volumes, so maybe if you sum all five of his volumes, he’s got more than me, but I think I’ve got more than any one of his volumes.
Ross Kenyon: Very nice. Well, thank you again for being here, Brian. That was a lot of fun, learned a lot. Thank you.
Bryan Caplan: Thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.
Ross Kenyon: If you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. Tell your friends, and thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and/or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up with Nori at nori.com, where there is a newsletter. That’s nori.com/subscribe. There’s podcasts, there’s a whole bunch else, or you can send us an email at podcast@nori.com. We are also now on Patreon at patreon.com/noripodcast, if you’d like more content, engagement and community. And thank you so much for your support.
