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Bryan Caplan is a name I've heard off and on in rationalist adjacent spaces and with Scott's recent review of one of Caplan’s books, I decided to actually take a look at his blog.
I was very surprised to see that he is an anarcho-capitalist: something that is very much unexpected in an academic economist. He acknowledges this in his blog, where he bemoans the left-wing focus on market failures rather than on market achievement. I probably agree with him on 90-95% of his positions, though I would have a different relative rank in the importance of those positions.
Of course, this being the internet, I won't spend any time on our many agreements but will instead focus on what I perceive to be his biggest shortcoming. Despite his expertise in a social science, he seems to think of society in abstractions: certainly a requirement for good economic modeling, but one that should always be grounded in reality. While possibly tongue in cheek, his statement that "it is humanity, not my arguments, that is flawed" does seem to reflect his mentality.
Exhibit A: Immigration and UAE
Caplan extols the virtues of the UAE, calling their mass-immigration a model for Western nations. And indeed, millions of Indians and billions of oil dollars have created a gleaming technical paradise. But as Caplan notes, UAE "immigration" is not the same as Western immigration. Only native Arabs have citizenship and enjoy the (extensive) welfare that oil money can afford.
The UAE understands that you can have mass immigration or a welfare state, but you cannot have both. They also are not squeamish about transactional relationships with imported labor, which makes the UAE's approach a complete non-starter in the West. No Western nation could import hundreds of millions of (mostly brown) labor, pay them "market wages", and refuse to provide citizenship and a social safety net. Even hard-core anarcho-libertarians would find the parallels with slavery uncomfortable.
The irony is that while the UAE does not have the human capital in either its native or foreign population as most Western countries, the West wastes its superior human capital on regulations, bureaucracy, and virtue signaling while the UAE just builds. Perhaps it is not "humanity" that is flawed, but just Western elites.
Regardless, the UAE's path is not sustainable. The native elite live off natural resources and imported labor rather than their own ingenuity and effort. There is no improvement in human capital, only a descent (slowed perhaps by the prohibitions of Islam) into hedonism. Copying their approach will neuter the unique ambition of the American spirit and accelerate our destruction.
Exhibit B: Immigration and Culture
Caplan implicitly downplays the negative aspect of migration on culture and social cohesion. Most immigrants will look, smell, act, and often vote differently than the "native" population. At scale, assimilation simply won't happen. Even with current immigration in the US there are sufficient numbers of Indians and Chinese to create clannish sub-cultures within the US. Caplan clearly thinks that we can still retain (and even improve) our high standard of living despite mass immigration, but this begs the question why high living standards don't already exist in India or China. Is it lack of physical capital? Is it human capital? Or could it be culture? (Obviously, all three have some impact). Given that capital is attracted towards the highest returns, it seems likely that a lack of human capital or a culture not conducive towards economic flourishing has to be a major cause for the lower living standard. If this is the case, there would be a decrease in the quality of life for the typical resident if third-worlders are imported en-masse.
At one point Caplan hints that indeed that may be the case when he points out that the fictional dystopia of Blade Runner is actually an improvement on modern-day India. This may not be the rock-solid argument he thinks it is. I want my children to enjoy a better life than I have today, not a better life than what a typical Indian has today.
In a guest post (which does not imply Caplan's endorsement), the "worst" neighborhood in Japan is visited. It is still safe and relatively clean. The writer implies that the US can model urban policy off Japan’s success. But again, this ignores the cultural aspect. Japan has a culture of order and cleanliness (and xenophobia). If Japan imported even 5 million Brazilians the "worst" neighborhood in Japan would look quite different.
Again, Caplan misses the "human" aspect of economics.
Exhibit C: Trade Deficit and Geopolitics
Caplan is either ambivalent or in favor of a trade deficit. Caplan posits the idea that the trade deficit could be the result, not the cause, of financial inflows. Rather than a trade deficit resulting in foreign nations having excess dollars that they then spend on US investment, US securities are in such high demand that foreign nations raise the value of the dollar, causing foreign goods to be relatively cheap and leading to a trade deficit. If this argument is correct, then one would expect any economically vibrant and pro-growth country to have a trade deficit. The trade deficit indicates that the US economy and regulatory regime is more conducive to growth.
Yet much like with the UAE, Caplan doesn't seem to grasp the human side of this equation. He assumes economic output is "value free". A service-oriented economy begets a pampered paper-pusher bureaucracy, while the relocation of former blue-collar work to "higher-value" labor hasn't happened at scale. The service economy erodes the will and ability to actually build in the physical world, while the dearth of blue-collar work has led to zombie communities addicted to handouts and opiates. A country should choose to focus industrial policy on broad outcomes including domestic production. Any economy needs direction lest it degenerate. The invisible hand of the market finds local maxima, but it takes vision to push the hand towards a global maxima.
Since Caplan has a tendency to see everything through the lens of economics, he minimizes the geopolitical implications of US policy. We are in the middle of a great geopolitical reset in which protectionist policy plays a key part. The Trump administration has given up Europe as lost. The US is now competing for influence in areas where China has traditionally dominated (including the Arab states that Caplan extols). The remnants of the Bretton-woods post-war international order is being shattered. This is the main takeaway from tariff and trade policy, not the myopic economic impact.
A recommendation
Despite my criticisms, I'm glad that there is an anarcho-capitalist whose ideas have purchase in the rationalist community. A very positive change I've observed over the last decade is the steady increase in liberals acknowledging the benefit of the market and the harm of overregulation, and Caplan’s work has contributed to this change. I would like to see Caplan have even more impact.
Caplan correctly notes that the market forces good policy even where that policy has bad optics, while politicians pursue bad policy that has good optics. This provides a potential key to seeing his (good) economic ideas actually gain purchase: fight the battles that you can actually win. There is much political will to create energy abundance (natural gas and nuclear in particular) and to address NIMBYist red tape; once we are allowed to build, other "good" policies (such as mass labor importation) may become more politically viable. Indeed, even in the UAE plentiful energy preceded plentiful immigration.
I always see this line of thinking being bandied about, often about Dubai in particular, but it just isn't my experience.
I see an elite that's desperately trying everything they can to not rely on oil revenue, making massive bordering on insane investments in technology and infrastructure.
You could say this line about the Saudis, but the Emiratis? They've purposely build the most diversified economy of the region. They've been reaching for literally every single trick they can use to not rely on oil, from banking, to gaming, to diplomacy, to even colonization.
Oil is still a fourth of the GDP at the end of the day (down from a third in 06), but man I wish my elites were lazy like that.
The simplest way I can describe the problem is that they're elites trying to build the roof of a great house before the foundation and the walls: creating a future of which their own descendents will not be able to sustain. They're trying to move forward while looking back, trapped in islamist trappings: wealth without modernity. Impossible, like driving a car by looking through the rearview window. Regression to the mean is inevitable.
Is your contention that one needs a native erudite population that's somewhat locked to the land to have a sustainable industrial economy?
Let me state the contrapositive: no nation has ever succeeded by being built and operated by foreigners. Those foreigners either become like you (ideally) or your country collapses from the contradiction of misaligned interests. The Emiratis are aristocrats playing at being a nation-state, with a economy of servants to work its trappings. They have no interest in investing into a native workforce and neither do the natives have an interest in doing hard work.
So everything is done by outsiders: either at the high end (foreign expat technocrats) or at the low (Indian slave labor.)
Having a workforce that has no stake in the long-term venture of a nation-state is bad, obviously bad. There is probably no solution to it.
I see what you mean, but just for the sake of argument can you actually substantiate how that's bad? A more aristocratically minded analyst, like, say, Richelieu, might not be that keen on the virtues of education and instead argue that it destabilizes states and hands them to "quibblers".
The West has massively materially benefited from local bourgeois rule, but if we look at history, it's not that obvious to me that it is a necessary or beneficial inherently.
A lot of even Western nations have had long periods of their history being operated by foreigners actually. Periods so long those people even stopped being foreigners.
The big contention here seems to be that of industry, which makes those older kinds of customs presumably obsolete, but I'd like to see someone actually make that case if you don't mind.
You get the foederati problem in that a majority of the population is only loyal to money: they have no love of your nation and will betray it if it is in their self interest.
Now, the Qatari and UAE may not be as stupid as to man their armed forces with foreigners, but having an entirely foreign proletariat begs the question. If they strike... what are you going to do about it? Factory workers are not easily cowed like domestic servants. You can't appeal to them for love of country or a shared religion.
You can only maintain such a state of affairs through authoritarian force, which will lead to abuse... industrialization will create a class of workers that has power that the state can't easily crush. It's why it's a dead end. Miserable slaves that will never rebel are not productive workers, not for the kind of industry that matters in the modern world.
The secret to deportation is to register every single migrant entrant and have strong relationships with the origin countries of these migrants. Remittances incentivize India to cooperate with UAE in cataloging and receiving deportees so that surplus labor can continue to be exported from India. The imbalanced power dynamic is a feature, not a bug, that the domestic population actively supports.
The only breaking point is if there are illegal migrants, but the secret the UAE has is strong border agreements with neighbors who are equally if not more hostile to migrants than they are. No Ethiopian is crossing into the UAE when the Saudis shoot them on the border first. What few ever make it there have no reason to stay because imported labor keeps demand for illegal low wage labor low.
The imports will immediately overthrow the UAE rulers if they could. The calculus for the UAE is that the imports are disincentivized from doing so because the only value the UAE provides, stability (tax safety income or other), is precisely what the imports lack in the lives they came from.
Oh, the final secret: citizenship is restricted. The great mistake the Europeans and Americans made was giving citizenship and family reunification to what should have been temporary imports. The khaleeji get to be stupid and decadent, and all they have to do is endure the disrespect of seething activists.
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