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How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery
Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and New York Times Bestselling author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022. How Evil Are Politicians? collects the very best of his EconLog essays on the vicious use of political authority.
How Evil Are Politicians? explores how leaders manipulate voters to amass power. Above all, successful demagogues appeal to Social Desirability Bias – crowd-pleasing absurdities like, “Victory at any price,” “If it saves one life,” and “Every American deserves the best.” Democrats and dictators, left and right: they all rely on absurd lies – and they all neglect the Spiderman principle that, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
This is clearest in wartime. Leveraging the moral precept that one should not kill innocents unless you know the gains far exceed the costs, Caplan argues that modern warfare is morally impermissible – and war-making politicians are villains. This “pragmatic pacifism” is perhaps Caplan’s most controversial view, but how is he wrong?
How Evil Are Politicians? explores how leaders manipulate voters to amass power. Above all, successful demagogues appeal to Social Desirability Bias – crowd-pleasing absurdities like, “Victory at any price,” “If it saves one life,” and “Every American deserves the best.” Democrats and dictators, left and right: they all rely on absurd lies – and they all neglect the Spiderman principle that, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
This is clearest in wartime. Leveraging the moral precept that one should not kill innocents unless you know the gains far exceed the costs, Caplan argues that modern warfare is morally impermissible – and war-making politicians are villains. This “pragmatic pacifism” is perhaps Caplan’s most controversial view, but how is he wrong?
222 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2022
About the author
Bryan Caplan
23 books333 followersBryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He received his B.S. in economics from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism and anarchism. (He is the author of the Anarchist Theory FAQ.) He has published in American Economic Review, Public Choice, and the Journal of Law and Economics, among others. He is a blogger at the EconLog blog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. He is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
Currently, his primary research interest is public economics. He has criticized the assumptions of rational voters that form the basis of public choice theory, but generally agrees with their conclusions based on his own model of "rational irrationality." Caplan has long disputed the efficacy of popular voter models, in a series of exchanges with Donald Wittman published by the Econ Journal Watch. Caplan outlined several major objections to popular political science and the economics sub-discipline public choice. Caplan later expanded upon this theme in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press 2007), in which he responded to the arguments put forward by Wittman in his The Myth of Democratic Failure.
He maintains a website that includes a "Museum of Communism" section, that "provides historical, economic, and philosophical analysis of the political movement known as Communism", to draw attention to human rights violations of which, despite often exceeding those of Nazi Germany, there is little public knowledge. Caplan has also written an online graphic novel called Amore Infernale.
Currently, his primary research interest is public economics. He has criticized the assumptions of rational voters that form the basis of public choice theory, but generally agrees with their conclusions based on his own model of "rational irrationality." Caplan has long disputed the efficacy of popular voter models, in a series of exchanges with Donald Wittman published by the Econ Journal Watch. Caplan outlined several major objections to popular political science and the economics sub-discipline public choice. Caplan later expanded upon this theme in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press 2007), in which he responded to the arguments put forward by Wittman in his The Myth of Democratic Failure.
He maintains a website that includes a "Museum of Communism" section, that "provides historical, economic, and philosophical analysis of the political movement known as Communism", to draw attention to human rights violations of which, despite often exceeding those of Nazi Germany, there is little public knowledge. Caplan has also written an online graphic novel called Amore Infernale.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 20, 2022
Worst book of his. Better to just browse the blog.
July 7, 2022
Spoiler alert: pretty evil.
August 7, 2022
How can you not want to read a book whose opening line is: "I think politicians are, by and large, evil people. I love reading Bryan Caplan because he is a great thinker (he reminds me a lot of Steven Landsburg, another economist who is both an excellent writer and incredible mind). Even if you don't agree with Caplan on everything--or indeed, anything--he's worth reading to force you to deal with the best arguments of the other side. This book is a collection of various blog posts, so it's short and easy to dip in and out of. Here are some of my favorite lines:
"Democracy hasn't turned politicians into decent human beings; it's only gilded their old-age power-lust with altruistic hypocrisy."
"Since politics revolves around sounding good rather than doing good, politicians habitually dodge hard questions."
"What's the key difference between the parties? Rhetoric. Republicans don't want to get rid of the welfare state and Democrats don't want anything like socialism. In 200 years, how big will these "huge differences" look to historians?"
Caplan has many interesting observations, such as minimum wage increases are usually phased in because proponents a sudden increase might have negative effects (or it might not). Either way, you give the demagogue a bunch of potential scapegoats for unemployment by the time the law changes. Hitler's argument for attacking other countries was very Malthusian, population growth outstripping food production.
The segment of Pragmatic Pacifism, for me, was the most challenging and interesting. I'm not a pacifist like Caplan, but I believe he makes the best arguments for the position, and it's the best arguments on the other side that you should always seek out and grapple with. His common-sense case for pacifism rests on three pillars: "1) The immediate costs of war are clearly awful; 2) The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain (some pay off, such as the Napoleonic Wars and WW II); 3) For a war to be morally justified, it's long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs--the principle of mild deontology." The arguments don't convert me, but I respect them and they should be answered before any war.
And I loved this line: "If your ideas are bad, hypocrisy makes them less bad." Too bad Hitler, Lenin, Stalin weren't bigger hypocrites.
An incredibly thought-provoking read, much like all of Caplan's books. He's one of my favorites.
"Democracy hasn't turned politicians into decent human beings; it's only gilded their old-age power-lust with altruistic hypocrisy."
"Since politics revolves around sounding good rather than doing good, politicians habitually dodge hard questions."
"What's the key difference between the parties? Rhetoric. Republicans don't want to get rid of the welfare state and Democrats don't want anything like socialism. In 200 years, how big will these "huge differences" look to historians?"
Caplan has many interesting observations, such as minimum wage increases are usually phased in because proponents a sudden increase might have negative effects (or it might not). Either way, you give the demagogue a bunch of potential scapegoats for unemployment by the time the law changes. Hitler's argument for attacking other countries was very Malthusian, population growth outstripping food production.
The segment of Pragmatic Pacifism, for me, was the most challenging and interesting. I'm not a pacifist like Caplan, but I believe he makes the best arguments for the position, and it's the best arguments on the other side that you should always seek out and grapple with. His common-sense case for pacifism rests on three pillars: "1) The immediate costs of war are clearly awful; 2) The long-run benefits of war are highly uncertain (some pay off, such as the Napoleonic Wars and WW II); 3) For a war to be morally justified, it's long-run benefits have to be substantially larger than its short-run costs--the principle of mild deontology." The arguments don't convert me, but I respect them and they should be answered before any war.
And I loved this line: "If your ideas are bad, hypocrisy makes them less bad." Too bad Hitler, Lenin, Stalin weren't bigger hypocrites.
An incredibly thought-provoking read, much like all of Caplan's books. He's one of my favorites.
November 26, 2022
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
Bryan Caplan is an economics prof at George Mason University. This is his second curated collection of blog posts from EconLog, a joint blog of libertarian economists. (He moved on to his own Substack site earlier this year.) My take on his first collection is here.
Yes, you can probably get most of the content of this book for free by wandering through EconLog archives. (For example, if you would like to get a flavor of Caplanesque argument, the title essay for the book is here.) But it's nice to have a collection, and I don't mind contributing a few bucks to the Caplan kids' scholarship fund.
Bryan is an excellent essayist, setting forth an uncompromising array of libertarian positions. Here, besides his unsparing criticism of our rulers' morality, you'll find his views on pacifism (for); socialism (against); open borders (for); demagoguery (against). And more.
There's only one small misstep I noticed: in a 2006 post, "The Mirage of Libertarian Populism", Bryan despairs that the majority of voters are unlikely to push for libertarian reform; witness the popularity of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and the ease with which demagogues turn any proposal of reform into "pushing granny off a cliff in her wheelchair" TV ad. But:
Furthermore, the public heavily supports even the least defensible infringements on personal liberty – like prohibition of marijuana.
Sixteen years later, and (uh, so I'm told) a short drive down to East Coast Cannabis will satisfy any weed craving I might have. So maybe "libertarian populism" isn't quite as hopeless as Bryan once thought.
October 15, 2022
A collection of essays by economist Bryan Caplan. True to the title, the book begins with a counterargument to the excuse that politicians “generally want to do the right thing” as follows: (i) virtuous people cannot just conform to the expectations of society, as everyone has an obligation to perform due diligence to examine whether their society’s expectations are immoral; and (ii) anyone in a position of political power has an elevated obligation to perform this due diligence. (With great power comes great responsibility.) Less sardonically, Caplan explains that bad / foolish policies prevail because the benefits of government action are more visible than the costs (citing Bastiat’s what is seen and what is not seen). Next, Caplan suggests why leftists like to milk the victimhood mentality - the feeling of helplessness supercharges the silver-tongued politician to garner more power through emotional appeal (though I would contend that populists on the right are guilty of the same exploitation). Caplan further disparages socialists by arguing: “It would make more sense that a general, or those in the military who respect the chain of command and decision making authority, be a fan of socialism. Strangely, most proponents of socialism you meet are “free spirits” and against the military. These are people who live in the moment and act from the heart (i.e., out of emotion). They’re not the kind of people who obsess over details. Although most of the people are probably nice and decent, they radiate incompetence. What on earth makes these people think they should run not only the government, but the economy? Today’s socialists are dreamers who want to lead before they learn to follow. These people first need to get their own lives in order before they think of imposing grandiose plans on the rest of the world.” Finally, my favorite essay was in regards to what Caplan has called the Ideological Turing Test (ITT): the ability to state an opposing view as clearly and persuasively as their proponent; passing the ITT demonstrates critical thought and the ability to call balls and strikes properly.
July 28, 2023
Cannot say I agree with everything he believes (seems to hate Bernie) but his main point is pretty right on point. Some get corrupted by the system and some get into the system because they are corrupted. But this does not give any answers to how to control the corruption to an acceptable quantity. It is a different manner of looking at the actions and social acceptance of whether something is moral or ethical through a different lens. I appreciated it.
May 13, 2022
Short and sweet! Funny and serious. Out of the box thinking. Caplan’s brain goes a mile a minute. Read it.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews