Bryan Caplan - Nurturing Orphaned Ideas, Education, and UBI

Caplan argues that while people could acquire literacy and numeracy outside formal schooling, schools clearly contribute, and homeschooling—especially unschooling—often produces noticeable math deficits even among smart students.

He suggests that during periods of high stress (like pandemics or inflation spikes), voters and leaders become unusually open to discredited measures such as sweeping lockdowns or price controls, because fear overrides sober cost–benefit reasoning.

Caplan sees his own work as adding tiny marginal weight to long-run shifts in elite opinion; he cites gay marriage and marijuana legalization as ideas incubated among young elites and culturally normalized via media before becoming law.

He counters arguments about citizens’ ‘asymmetric access’ to labor markets by analogizing immigration bans to race-based job exclusion or sabotaging competitors to help one’s child, emphasizing the rights of willing employers and workers.

Using back-of-the-envelope math, he argues that a politically plausible UBI would require extremely high tax rates on a small fraction of earners, squander scarce redistributive resources on the non-poor, and weakly justifies coercive taxation compared with tightly targeted aid.