'POVERTY – Who’s to Blame?' - The 2019 Hayek Memorial Lecture - Professor Bryan Caplan

[Music] [Applause] [Music] you so this is actually a totally new book that I have just started I always start a book by reading I tried to be knowledgeable about my subject before I actually say something about it so I spent about the last year just doing background reading and of course so this means I try to learn a lot through the way I haven't I've only have a table of contents but these slides will give you an idea where I'm likely to go all right so first of all this book is going to a book which will be called poverty who to blame I was gonna straddle moral philosophy and social science so in the area of moral philosophy first of all I wanna threaten I want to flesh out a plausible moral theory of blame and then I want to apply this moral theory to poverty and especially course absolute poverty why is absolute poverty so important so there we have John bel Shan - for 601 I assume he's known to you here he's French but also British right any case so in the story of John bel John I guess you can go and hear it's performed over on the West End you know he's stole some bread to feed a sister son right and that seems a much more compelling moral problem than if you just didn't have money for all the channels on cable TV so that is why I talked about it even though of course you could always consider yourself impoverished you don't all the sports channels and then secondly on the social science which is where I am more specialized it's to figure out how much of global poverty can properly be blamed on anyone and these are the primary culprits that I put forward so first of all Thurber governments for bad development policies which has been going on for very long time but I also put blame on first of all governments for bad immigration policies now I know these are the primary culprits then I've also got a secondary culprit which I'm going to mention there's the one that this is the part of the talk almost all questions are about because people don't like this part but I like it so I'm gonna do it anyway so I say secondary culprits the poor themselves for a responsible behavior not in every case of course but often all right now on this blame game so suppose that person a has a problem who is to blame well you could make this into a long talk of moral philosophy but I'm not going to instead I'll just tell you my answers so and I also add in daily life these are probably your answers to even though the answers that I'm going to give you do not fit very well with many official grand moral theories the P embrace alright so starting with something obvious if a problem is literally unavoidable then no one is to blame for it right obviously secondly if there are reasonable steps that a could take or could have taken to avoid the problem then a is actually to blame for his own problem now if a could have avoided his problem by taking reasonable steps but be refused to allow a to take such steps then we can say that B is in fact to blame for a problem and then final points this one we have less time for but put it out there if he had nothing to do with a problem but could solve it at reasonable cost B probably is still not to blame for a problem philosophers call this the issue of soup irrigation going above and beyond the call of duty there is a famous story the Good Samaritan which I believe will be known in England as well although Anglicanism fell off a lot in the 1960s but nevertheless right so in the story the Good Samaritan there is a guy who was attacked by robbers he is knocked out by the side of the road and then to allegedly good people walking by and don't help him and then a third guy a Samaritan which is really a heretical sect of Jews passes by and then what does he do he puts him on his donkey he gives him wine and oil and he pays for three-day stay at a tavern and the interesting thing about the stories were still talking about this guy thousands of years later all for a donkey ride some oil some wine and a few days at a tavern right and the reason is this seems like this guy did actually go above and beyond the call of duty because the person that he helped was a stranger alright so that is the moral philosophy now problem poverty so you know all right now even today almost a billion human bit of human being still live in dire poverty below a dollar 25 a day although the good news is this is a number where every year I do the slides I do need to actually update the slides because that number is falling so quickly right now these oh absolutely poor don't just have fewer goodies so they face hunger homelessness early death now there is one good thing about all this which is that there's something called hedonic adaptation and this is the says that people get used to problems so it is not true that poor people are miserable all the time right so people who actually with hunger still smile write to the homeless still smile right so they aren't as quite as miserable as you would think but still absolute poverty is a quite awful problem and in fact it's so far from our daily experience that we need memes to remind us how silly our first of our first world problems all capital letters are by comparison so you may have seen these memes this is a very famous meme woman I don't know she is but typical first world problems you know I'm so hungry but I don't want to cook this is not a problem most people on earth would have been able to identify with throughout most of human history it's just one that like what do you mean you don't want to cook who else would cook for you right or you know mom asked what I want for Christmas can't think of anything not a problem that most people throughout history could have really identified with staying with relatives they don't know the Wi-Fi password this really requires a lot of backstory to understand what the problem even is and then you know just use my last spend or skip you know for the our next song even worse alright so these are problems which many of us will talk about and yet in perspective they are just not very serious issues all right now so who if anyone is to blame for this problem of poverty I've had many people email me and say your whole book is based upon a wrong premise because actually poverty is a natural state of mankind and I see yes I'm gonna say that on page three alright so in the pre-modern world the right answer often really was no one because dire poverty is just the natural state of mankind just like it is the natural state of almost every other animal right so even right here in London the squirrels are doing very poorly from what I can tell right and this is there just like every other animal they're living hand-to-mouth the pets are doing fine right your pets are all taken care of they're living in in a first world level actually right assume you treat your pets very well here all right now but today there is something new to say and that is the fact that many first world countries exist is what mathematicians would call an existence proof that reasonable steps to avoid absolute poverty are now here things are different yes poverty is our natural state but is no longer our inevitable States all right so then why is it that everywhere has not actually avoided poverty why isn't already over so I say primary steps that could be taken to or could have been taken in order to have largely ended absolute poverty already using this is according to the my provisional reading and I do try to actually learn as I writes I don't want to read like a lawyer I'm guessing there's some lawyers here but you know what I mean so I say you know see how step number one thurber governments should end bad development policies and again especially against a multinational business for reasons I'll explain a second step first of all government should end bad immigration policies especially against low-skilled guest workers which would be another very large step towards ending rural poverty and then there's a second step which I'm going to talk about as well step three the poor themselves should avoid irresponsible behavior especially impulsive sex which may sound like a joke but it's very true all right so just thinking about the primary responsibilities of third world governments so economic policy is a choice it's not a law of nature and third world governments have overall chosen very badly for a long time right what are some of the bad choices they've made well of course there's old world there's old-school socialism which during my stay here I found out is making a comeback here I'm not Rosso you can tell me whether that's true or not I'm still somewhat dumbfounded at this idea but all right and then there's of course just a simple expropriation you don't have to be a socialist just to grab business right it's an idea that could occur to almost anyone he's got a business I want it give it to me I take it right and then finally this autarky just cutting your country off from the world economy get another policy that's been very popular in many throwerw countries now even today after there has been a lot of improvement in which people sometimes call neoliberalism but economic freedom in third-world countries remains very low right and this very low economic freedom strongly predicts both poverty and low growth so these are some where a very commonly known charts from the Fraser Institute but I think almost any other measure will get you very similar numbers take a look and especially Africa and South America are marked heavily in red those are the countries with that have very bad policies then you've got other countries in yellow those are pretty bad and then you got green better and finally blue which comes out as the best and then you can take a look over on the right side where you've got one chart which is showing per capita income and that one is really quite clear right the freer countries of the richer countries interesting this makes sense if you think about economic freedom is the kind of thing that matters over the long run so just one year of bad policy is not going to destroy an otherwise prosperous economy and of course one year good policy is not going to change things overnight for the better either and then over on the right sore though on the lower right there we have actual economic growth rates and then you'll notice that it is the red that is really bad right the difference in growth rates between red and the other three is quite stark the other three in terms of growth are not so different but just avoiding that one that low at the lowest quartile is crucial all right now this of course is just correlational so what other better evidence is there so there's still two papers from 1895 from Saxon Warner that's or a big influence on me and I think they really have held up so what they found is that just avoiding a short and clear list of awful economic policies which basically come down to socialism expropriation in autarky right is a sufficient condition for long-run economic growth in other words avoid these policies and you will grow with virtual certainty right and in this quote they go and explain how actually out of the countries that have avoided those policies there's not a single one that failed to grow and out of poor countries of the voter voted this policy easily there's not a single country that failed to grow at least 2% then there's been some more research coming along lately also supporting this so shock therapy which was roundly denounced around the world shock therapy in the ex communist world worked it was good shock therapy was actually excellent and most of the complaints that people had about it were complaints that would have been predicted by the Advocate saying yes there's gonna be some short-run pain and people who are currently in industries of the Soviet Union where you take perfectly good lumber and turn it into worthless furniture they're going to lose their jobs right that's what shock therapy is all about all right but in the countries that reform the most did the best and again people always want to go and compare the former communist countries to how they were doing just before the crisis rather than how they rather than how the countries that were formed Morcom did to compare the countries reform lasts but again you can take a look at countries like Belarus New York rating to perform the least you can see about 30 years after the collapse of communism they've reformed little and they still have not improved very much right and someone who actually previously was occupying my position here I gave you just to give the talk of years ago bill easterly now previously expressed doubts about whether or not these policy reforms really so important but even he has a recent paper where he shows liberalization did work over the long run a lot of what's going on was that people just rejected policies on the basis of short room costs that were entirely predictable and in fact frankly advertised by the people advocating them now there's also a parallel research on managerial quality from people like bloonan Bloomington region that find very large benefits of common sense best best practices and management common sense practices like pay for performance keep track of inventories avoid nepotism right now they have a number of interesting results that I found that free-market people are almost totally unaware of so let me now share the good news with you first of all they find that government firms are very poorly managed all right you know this might not come as a surprise to use if this is very mainstream work from two people who are very mainstream economists and yet they come out and say it looks like government firms reversed poorly managed a second result the poor of the country the worse the management with one striking exception multinational corporations the very businesses that are widely Dene as being the worst kind of business in the world the ones that are ruining and pillaging the third world and yet these are the companies that actually seem to be able to take high-quality first of all management and move it to the third world and run their companies at a first-world level in countries where otherwise the management is very poor all right so that's what could easily be done by third world countries should have been done a long time ago but it's not too late to admit you're wrong and change right so you know it's one thing to have been wrong for a long time but you don't have to keep being wrong but then I want to move over to first of all government so it's true that all first of all government's heavily restrict low skilled immigration every single one right every now and then in the US there are people say the US has had 30 years of open borders and say are you out of your mind do you know how hard is to get into the u.s. from India how hard is it get in the u.s. from Mexico it's not open words it's nothing close right now a standard estimate of how much harm this regulation does says that open borders would double world production would double the production the mankind why because you are trapping so much human talent in unproductive countries countries where almost no almost anyone would have trouble actually accomplishing very much right now of course many people worry about distributional effects of immigration here's the main thing I'll say about that whenever mankind has seen a very large overall increase in production the benefits have always been widely shared I know of no exceptions right so the Industrial Revolution was not primarily beneficial for factory owners rather it spread enormous economic benefits to all the people who consume the products of those factories all the people that are consuming the steel or consuming the processed food or the clothing alright if you look at the internet the internet is not primarily benefited computer programmers vaccines have not primarily benefitted met vaccine manufacturers but rather all the people who didn't die right this is a general rule that while a small or a very targeted increase in production can be harmful for a small part of the population nevertheless when there is a large increase in production the games are always actually widely shared and so we should expect that these games would overwhelm any distributional effects now over on the right I've got estimates of the gains from various other kinds of deregulation you'll see the gains from deregulation of international trade come out to be quite small why because the regulations are already by comparison immigration restrictions very relaxed there's also some math involved which says that if you double a tariff you quadruple the harm and similarly if you make the tariff ten times bigger you make the turn of the heart actual economic harm 100 times bigger so that's figuring 2 right now what this means is that holding skill constant so in other words even if we go and compare two workers with exactly the same abilities but one happens to be in Haiti one happens to be in the United States or one happens to be in India one happens to be in the UK this drastic reduces thurber workers income often by a factor of 10 or more so now I'm not saying that immigration restrictions reduce incomes of thurber workers by 10% I'm saying that reduces the incomes of those that would like to come by a factor of 10 right now the main reaction I get from people on this other than say look that's crazy that can't possibly be say like how in the hell is this our responsibility what in the world have we ever done here right um now I would say there is a long intellectual tradition that unreasonably blames first world countries for failing to solve through a poverty and watch as the story goes they said look you're rich they're poor why didn't you give them your money you're bad right and this one it's fair to say well look you're well you could give them your money why haven't you done it and you haven't so why isn't your blaming all of us for having failed to give total strangers most of our money seems like a rather unfair accusation or a way to blame people but I say it's actually the signal tradition is actually right for the wrong reason because the while this lack of state-to-state charity is not morally culpable but draconian regulation of international the International labor market actually is right so when you say that it is illegal for people to come to another country to get a job this is not saying that you don't want to just go and give people a handout just saying that you were going to use the power of government to stop them from earning their way and working their way out of poverty through their own boot steps bootstraps rather so over on the right is a page from my graphic novel and immigration which is right here right so I've heard it's in London bookstores now so Amazon UK was a little bit slow and shipping it but hopefully you've got your copy if you did order it now up here many people are just incredulous and like you know can you really be saying listen yes actually I mean actually I'm so how can immigration restrictions cause so much poverty we can because they trap so much talent in low productivity countries right so the idea that people in third-world countries are just not capable of contributing in the modern economy is simply wrong we can see this whenever an immigrant shows up and gets a job similarly we can see that when multinational corporations are allowed to go to third world they are quite able to take local workers and train them in first world techniques and get their companies running at something very close to a first world level alright so that is the problem and then when you combine a very large number of people want to come with a very large loss to worker you come out with an enormous loss to the world which of course is not just bad for the poor themselves but is bad for all the people that would be consuming their products now I don't have time in this talk to go over all the objections and I realize that they are many so what about fiscal burden cultural harm political damage didn't immigrants cost brexit isn't really their fault so all of these are actually in my book so and when I say so these complaints are at best greatly overrated and in the new book I'm going to double tap so I don't know do you her you have the expression of double tapping here right so Zombieland to double tap this is what you do when you shoot a zombie you shoot it one more time just to make sure that it's really dead alright so this is basic rule of zombie survival so keep it in mind all right now I come to the issue where people get very feisty and even in the most right-wing and conservative audiences I've had people get very social justice on social justice he on me at this point but I'm going to stick to my guns all right so so if first third and first rule government stop causing poverty then there wouldn't be a lot of absolute poverty left all right so just going and performing these government policies would not just make a dent in global poverty but seems reasonable to say that within thirty years there barely be any left on earth but even after that happened clearly there would be some absolute poverty that would remain why one story is bad luck right and I'm someone who thinks that there's a lot of luck in the world all right so one thing goes wrong for you and then your whole life unravels it could happen sailing the ocean auto accidents you know there's all sorts of things that could go wrong right so bad luck there's always going to be that of course you could go and get insurance and try to provide for yourself but even if you plan everything out with great care still it's a very large planet and some bad things are going to happen to some people all right so that's one reason why poverty will remain but there's another one and that's irresponsible behavior you could live in the richest Society in the world and yet if you do everything wrong you can make yourself for right so I've noticed you have a lot of homeless people in London this is one of the richest countries in human history and if you were to say well how did this and how can they be so desperately poor despite being in a society that's so rich and offers so many opportunities one story is bad luck right so it's possible they are simply people were extremely unlucky about another story which most research so it confirms is that it is likely they've engaged in irresponsible behavior right now what would that be it's the kind of thing your parents would tell you not to do or if you're our parents it's the kind of thing you would tell your kids not to do right and then pursued very aggressively now flan therus have traditionally distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor right now note in terms of the language deserving poor means that you're not morally to blame for poverty and undeserving means that you are so little bit complicated but just keep that in mind no no this rhetoric has fallen very much out of favor so I'm guessing this is not being brought up during the current UK election by using conservative parties saying well what interested in helping the deserving poor yes but the undeserving well they need to buck up all right all right I I'm guessing that's not going on in the US this kind of talk is very unpopular right so it's fallen out of favor but almost all of us still actually believe it almost everyone still believes that there's a difference between deserving and undeserving poverty and treats them differently right so if there is someone who just comes to you as a friend or family member and pleads for your help you naturally want to know why do you need my help why do you need to sleep on my couch tonight right just like although I might like so terrible I can't even explain all right well explain in the morning then but I would like an explanation and there's some explanations that are much better than others there's the explanation of out of the blue my boss fired me even though I was given the Employee of the Year award just a week ago and then at Fench I walked into my wife when she is cheating on me and she actually managed to conspire with my lawyer to go and write and take my name off the lease so then and Here I am and then I was mugged on the way over in addition so I couldn't even go to hotel alright that's a really good story right down it was very compelling yes so you are an innocent victim here but on the other hand there are other stories this one might tell well it was actually my girlfriend who caught me cheating on her and she kicked me out and also she was kind of mad that I quit my job a couple weeks ago and was drinking her money away and then also my family's mad at me because I drank their money away and now can I sleep on my couch screen now can I sleep on your couch this is where you may very well say all right but it is with a very different attitude that you will welcome that person into your house or maybe not welcome them into your house all right so when someone pleads for help you naturally know why they need your help and the question your mind is going to be something like were there reasonable steps of this person could take or could have taken in the past to avoid the situation to avoid poverty all right now what are some reasonable steps I mean these are ones that think very likely everyone actually agrees with in real life although if you write a paper you might not like it but things like work full time even if the best job you can get is not fun right so if your kid is not employed and they say you know the best job I can get isn't fun no more reaction appearance is yes of course that's why they call them first jobs because they're not fun you have to go and pay your dues and work your way up and acquire experience and then if you're lucky then you can get a fun job and I remember when I was a kid I asked my dad if his job was if he was happy and if he liked his job like it's not really about being happy Brian you know god I don't want your job then dad I've got to figure out something else I could do what about being a professor that could be fun all right so work full-time even at the best job you can get isn't fine this is a very important part of avoiding poverty as it turns out a second thing spend your money on food and shelter before cigarettes in cable TV very simple point if you found if you saw someone said they were starving but they had they were smoking most three packs a day and also had a premium cable package there's a natural question well why didn't you first buy food and then not buy these other things and then not come to me for help because we've said that you came to me because you needed money for cigarettes I probably would have said now all right and then finally this one is very important use contraception if you can't afford a child there is highly effective contraception that exists and if you have a child when you can't afford one you will be in poverty no in rich countries there has been some very interesting research saying that if you just follow those last three steps I told you then all the able-bodied adults can reliably avoid pop soluti quite easily all right so people some may speak of the what we call the trifecta so you have trifectas in British bedding right so you need three things so the poverty rate for Americans who first of all finish high school second of all work full-time and three marry and wait until twenty-one to have children do those three things and the poverty rate for Americans is 2% if you do if you do none of those three things your poverty rate is 77 percent right that's a very big deal right now and by the way so much of this work has been done by people the Brookings Institution which is a while not a definitely not a far left think-tank but definitely like a very moderately right kind of think tank but assuming this is stuff that when you actually look at the numbers it really does just come right out of the data all right now if you disaggregate this a bit further you'll see is that the the proximate cause is not work so you can actually have a lot of other problems but as long as you just work full-time then again you quite reliably avoid poverty however this impulsive sex is usually actually the root cause because if you have a pulse of sex this will normally lead to pregnancies that you were not a and the birth of children that you are not prepared to take care of and to get a course normally when this is occurring the father is not someone who has a full-time job very often the father is someone who is in and out of prison and if you have a child with a man like that and he is not going to be around to help take care of the child and of course if you are a single parent then it is hard though not impossible for you to work full time so and you know now interestingly I found a lot of what I've learned about poverty during the last year comes from reading very left-wing sociologists who do what they call ethnography of poverty this is where you actually spend a lot of time getting to know people in other social situations so there are many sociologists who of course are very left-wing they go and they spend a year or two living among the extremely poor in the United States and the striking thing about these books is that the first chapter and the last chapter are all left-wing ideology all the chapters in between are hard empirical social science saying what I just told you right it's cognitive dissonance of a very high level right every now and then they'll even be some very nervous remarks say now there are some woods who would try to use this evidence to say that the poor are at least partly to blame for their own poverty yes almost any person who read this who didn't have a strong agenda would draw that conclusion of course right so you know there there is like what why don't you lose there's a pair of these books that this excellent so one is an ethnography of single mom it's called you know so promises I can keep and there's another parallel one about single dads now the only go so do we know that what's called doing the best I can write and the authors of the of a second book most of it is about how we are so we so unfairly judged single dads of oh you know unfairly judged single dads but there is one character in the books that judges them very harshly and that is the mothers of their children the mothers of their children don't take their excuses very seriously and perhaps we should not either all right now it's now these and now most of this work has been done in first world countries but in poor countries irresponsible behavior at least makes absolute behavior you're responsible behave or at least makes absolute poverty far less likely so there's been some interesting work and yeah this is not exactly a snog Rafi but this is actually keeping Diaries of how the poor and the poor how the very poorest in poor countries spend their money so here is one result from actually the recent Nobel Prize winners from their book portfolios to the poor actually now this is there's a separate you know so let's see oh yes so the for the first fact that the global spent about five percent of their of their income on alcohol and tobacco and ten percent of festivals that's from the new Nobel Prize winners and that there's a similar book by Collins and co-authors called portfolios the poor backing this up right and then there's also this interesting quote from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times I think every year he actually goes to Africa and he came back and said look this is varying comfort for me as someone who thinks of himself as a left-wing person but here's what i says he actually saw when he was in africa so he said look if the poorest family spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine cigarettes and prostitutes their children's prospects would be transformed much suffering is caused not only by low incomes but also by short-sighted private spending decisions by heads of households yes so he did actually see many villages where kids are dying of malaria and the malaria nets cost $2 and it turns out that's about how much money their dads were spending on beer cigarettes and prostitutes on a typical week so again this is something where on the one hand of course if they are in rich countries they would be able to both have all their luxuries and also not have their kids dying but it is the kind of thing where it is hard to say this is just a defensible decision all right now notice just to remind you I've discussed three blameworthy causes of poverty in this talk right but whenever I open up to questions 95% of the questions about the talk just attack the very idea of any connection between poverty and their responsibility right and the story is you know what you're doing Brian you're blaming the victim you're blaming the victim right now of course I agree yes we should never ever ever blame victims but we should also very calmly assess who is in fact the victim right so who actually is the victim now here are some quite non fanciful - non fanciful hypotheticals these are not things where I'm going to philosophy department and coming up with a poll that can stretch from the ER to the Sun or something like that these are things that actually happen quite frequently so suppose that there is a dad who spends money on alcohol and prostitutes when his kids are hungry should we blame that guy seems to me we totally should right or how about a couple who can barely support themselves routinely having unprotected sex and that seems irresponsible to me right or how about able-bodied adults who live from crime when the unemployment rate is 3.5% in these all seem like textbook cases where you could very fairly and reasonably blame someone and of course you can say and yo Brian have you ever been homeless and needed to resort to crime it's true that I haven't but even so even Sal I think that if I were in that situation I did it then I should be blamed right and then finally so if they are not to blame for their own poverty who is so what would what would count as being to blame for your own poverty so like you for example that suppose that someone were given a thousand pounds check for welfare for their own food we call the dole here anyway you're even a thousand pounds of the month and then you go and you burn it then are you responsible for your own poverty right at that point all right how about this you neuter not that time all right we give them a second check then you burn it a second time maybe you burned it accidentally the first time then are they to blame right so there is a point where I would say it's just very dogmatic to keep saying no they're totally not to blame all right now last point play matters so on a micro level almost everyone thinks the blame or lis matters right this is why people argue about blame so much right you know when they're ever there whenever something goes wrong people often say well what's this my fault or was it the other person's fault and yes there there are some biases built-in we tend to blame other people for what goes wrong rather than ourselves but then hardly shows the idea of blame is itself misguided just shows that it's another example of self-serving bias all right now Homer Simpson has this line where he says we could sit around all day arguing about and then here are some things that he might finish the sentence with we could spend all day arguing about who was drunk at work maybe it was me maybe someone else but what good does that do what good is that here or we could say we've been all day arguing about who cheated on him maybe if you dummy maybe I cheated on you but that's neither here nor there how do we go forward right or who crashed his car yes so maybe I crashed your car maybe it was crashed by somebody else maybe it was always that way why do we have to have a discussion about this let's just talk about how you're gonna get the car repaired so I can borrow it again all right these are all discussions that people have routinely but at the macro view there is this high status view that blame doesn't matter only the effectiveness of solutions there's no point sitting around talking about who's to blame for anything all we need to do is just accept the fact that we're where we are and then figure out the best way to fix it from here right so many people who are explicit utilitarians or consequentialist will have this view but also you know just other people who don't have any big moral philosophy still will say I just don't want to talk about blame I don't want to talk about blame alright so the core premise behind my book is this blame does in fact matter blame affects many things blame affects what counts as a social problem what counts as a social problem so is the fact that many people are dying of opioid overdoses a social problem at all or is it a problem for the individuals I think that's an important question and so is the Perot is the fact that some people are no cheating on theirs is that a social problem or is it a problem for the people that are in the relationship so that's one way that blame matters is just whether we even categorize this is of course in any society there are problems that are simply off the public agenda and we just accept look that something you have to deal with on your own like I don't have any friends what a society gonna do to get me friends society isn't gonna do anything to get your friends that's not a social problem well why isn't a social problem well that's a good question all right blame also affects who is morally obliged to change their behavior there are many problems that can be solved by a lot of different people and the question is who ought to do the work who ought to actually have to bear the burden of changing right so that is a crucial question so of course if there is there's two people living together one doesn't have a job and the other one says look at it's your fault that you don't have a job well in that case this is a crucial question well if I agree that it's my fault then I guess that kind of obliges me to go get a job doesn't it right and so it does matter right so if you say look it's not my fault that I can't get a job rather it's society is just an evil place where people like me are treated totally unfairly whereas society doesn't treat you that way so I think the solution where poverty is for you to work two jobs you could that could be a reasonable position if it really were true that you did not actually cause their own unemployment right or couldn't or they're reasonable steps you couldn't have taken to avoid it right but on the other hand once people agree of yes it is my fault then the next step is very good you admit it's your fault now repent repent repent you've admitted it's your fault you don't have a job now go get one I don't have to change it shouldn't I shouldn't have to change cuz I'm already pulling my end but you're not alright and then finally blame also effects who should be shame for failing to change their behavior who should be changed for who should be shamed for failing to change their behavior so in the u.s. there's much talk about opioid abuse and almost all fingers are pointed at the companies that make the pharmaceuticals or the doctors to prescribe them and very rarely to someone say maybe it should be the people that are taking them that should be blamed maybe it's their responsibility is that possible all right now final point is if blame really doesn't matter then why is this blame game actually so acrimonious but people do fight about it tooth and nail they must realize there's something worth fighting about here now here is Paul Krugman with a couple of actual quotes put into his mouth although they're one year apart so even thinkers who officially opposed blaming people bad behavior normally continue to blame at least one bad lifestyle there's one thing beyond the pale so horrible that you should actually be treated as a cool bubble agent right and for Krugman the group that should be blamed for being the way they are is from is Republicans so they are fools and knaves right now I put this up not to point out to these Apocrypha but rather to say I think that the instinct and crewmen's second quote is right it may be that he's blending the wrong people the idea that look you are doing something bad stop stop being bad it's a very reasonable thing to say even if the specifics are wrong right and then on the other hand that first quote ends with look obviously yes behavior does matter for poverty everybody knows that but look dude people are human people are human right and would you take that excuse from a boyfriend or a husband or a parent or even a child right depends on the age of the child right five-year-old does that I say look yes people are human and you're going to behave yourself you're going to act like a good human right and if it's a 25 year old child mm-hmm well clearly I haven't made my position on this very clear I did write a book about this so I am going to blame you if they if you do irresponsible things now last point this is not a book saying that these questions are easy right I don't like writing books about easy topics it's just not that fun so is what I've told you the whole story the answer is no way of course it's not the whole story you can't boil poverty down to just three things but I will say you know the meta lesson of spending the last year just reading about poverty it's just that every simple theory of power of blame is wrong right so for example right now I actually desperately wanted to talk about the e of the horrors of housing regulation but there just wasn't time but yes housing regulation also is a very large contributing factor of for poverty because a housing regulation has drastically increased the cost of housing especially in high wage areas of both the United States and the UK and as a result there are a lot of people that otherwise could be living a much better lifestyle who cannot and they're people that are in absolute poverty who wouldn't be but for this regulation so that is another kind of regulation that I say is actually cool babul blameworthy i just didn't have time to talk about it and of course there are many others still I will say that some factors do far out overshadow others three things first of all absolute poverty would be almost gone if third-world government's had adopted decent economic policies fifty years ago all right say well it's too late for that even so I just want to put the point out there right it's good for people to know this right of course partly it's good just so that people realize not to do those policies again but I think it's and it's also good to know that people who thought those policies were good ideas should not be trusted so yes I mean reading about some appalling statements by a few noted people in the labour party about the Soviet Union and and so on know something really all right that's coming back here in any case so just realizing that if country of third world countries had adopted reasonable policies or just non awful policies fifty years ago absolute poverty would already be basically a thing of the past secondly even so even if thermal governments remain just as bad as they have been absolute poverty would again be almost gone if first of all governments had allowed people to escape from four countries over this time there would have been an enormous amount of migration and not only with us have solved the poverty program problem to a very large degree for the migrants themselves but they also would have been able to send money home as remittances and thereby transform their countries just by first you of that alright and finally even so even if we keep in place not only all the bad economic policies and the bad immigration policies but even so absolute poverty would be greatly reduced if the poor live responsibly so I won't leave it there thank you very much you [Music]

Channel: iealondon

Views: 13,484

Rating: 4.7699113 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Caplan, Poverty, Lecture, Hayek Lecture, Hayek, IEA, Institute of Economic Affairs, The Myth of the Rational Voter, New York Times

Id: jAaCpyuwRIw

Length: 40min 22sec (2422 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/road_laya]

Guy got grey pretty fast. I guess that's the downside of writing a book about having more kids?

[u/jvnk]

Bryan Caplan is great, but his ideas on open borders would certainly offend the faux-libertarians who frequent these subs