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I'd acknowledge any of the people that caplan has debated with on immigration as "serious". I'd acknowledge anyone that has written a book or academic paper on the subject as "serious". Regardless of their viewpoints.
Are you "serious" about immigration? Is anyone by your standards?
When people curtail their viewpoint diversity to be within the Overton Window and then ignore obvious blindspots to legitimate contradiction then no, they are not serious. Regardless of how much they work and waffle within those parameters.
There is an entire cottage industry of academics and media that exists for little other than venerating immigration. There can exist no serious thought within that sphere when alternatives are functionally verboten. The people who exist within this sphere without acknowledging just how ridiculous the entire thing is are not serious.
Are you "serious" about immigration?
Is anyone by your standards? Is Emil Kirkegaard serious?
I honestly don't even know what you mean by the word anymore other than "if they acknowledge my objections are correct and completely agree with me". Now that I know that is what you meant, I withdraw any objections to calling Caplan "not serious".
I've spent a few paragraphs voicing exactly what my problems are. Whatever it is you are doing now, including antagonistically mischaracterizing what I write, should be beneath you. I can just as well assert that the only reason you are here is because you agree with Caplan and that your fixation on the word "serious" is the only in you have to play defense, irrelevant though it might be. But that would be a tad low brow and fruitless.
To answer your question about who is serious:
Insofar as people present reasons for why they believe things, they can be held to that standard. I gave examples where Caplan is actively ignoring contradictory information. Be that human differences between population groups or economic data from outside the US. Because Caplan is ignoring information pertinent to his own standard he can not be considered serious.
By the same token a leftist open borders moralizer is serious. They don't need to pretend that their advocacy has any locally positive economic benefits based on statistical extrapolations and human behavior. They just assert that people fleeing a country need refuge and that there is a moral duty to provide shelter. They can volunteer their time and effort to solidify the fact they actually believe this, but the argument is ultimately just moral.
I wrote this for you, but to me, these distinctions are largely irrelevant to the topic at hand. My point was about Caplan. He was presented by you and others as being something he is not. I did not argue that point by asserting that he is not serious so I don't see the relevance about some universally applicable definition of the word.
I'm nearly certain he is aware of these points, but there are certain topics he is unwilling to broach in public. He is still a professor at a public university, and tenure doesn't protect you much from student activists choosing to make your life hell.
Your descriptions of Caplan just don't ring true to me. I don't think you've really read much of his stuff. Which is fine by itself, I don't really read very widely of critics or even people on my own side. But I also don't make claims about those people or what they are saying.
And yes I do tend to nail down specific claims and hammer on them. Otherwise I face a gish gallop of arguments and none of them ever get resolved. I took your weakest argument and probed it to see how wedded you are to your ideas. Some responses might have indicated we could have a productive discussion. Not the ones you gave me. Next item would have been doing some research and finding out if caplan had actively written about the arguments you claim he had never heard of. I got ahead of myself and already looked. He has written about them, but I already got the sense of where the conversation would go from your earlier responses, you'd just pivot to different claims, or say he wasn't specific enough.
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