https://www.econlib.org/market-forces-vs-leftist-discrimination-a-beckerian-puzzle/
In this masterpiece, the luminary economist Bryan Caplan, who somehow got tenure despite being better known for featuring in comic books than for any publication in a respectable journal, finally summon the courage to point at a question that eludes the explanatory power of even the best models (i.e. the ones in which economists ignore every result produced by any other discipline and refuse to collect data, but start from first principles, ca va sans dire): how can the vicious and endemic discrimination of conservatives persist? We were so sure that the market and profit seeking was the panacea, we told it to any minority ad nauseam: if only you let rich white men people seek profit a little bit more freely, all your problems will disappear! And, obviously, we were right in the case of those groups: life for minority is sweller than ever in the US after all, and all because of some invisible hand! However, the mechanism that did so much to solve any problem of PoCs, LGBTQ+ and women is now failing the conservatives grimly reaped by cancel culture, #MeToo, and all those dirty tricks used by cultural marxists! How is that possible?
A long and, unless you have the same sort of intellectual coprofily I have, frankly boring list of possible explanation is given. None of these convinces Caplan, so I suppose that urgent and fascinanting questions such as ” Where, though, are the firms where Republicans don’t look over their shoulders before they say they’re pro-life? Where are the firms where moderates don’t look over their shoulders before they declare that affirmative action has already gone far enough? Where are the firms where males don’t look over their shoulders before they express solidarity with the latest target of #MeToo? ” will have to wait before we can answer them.
I still think that “cultural Marxist” deserves some sort of prize for, you know, just shamelessly pushing syllables together. Fuck is that supposed to mean, anyway? “Oh, my family were all religiously Marxist back in the old country, but now it’s mostly about the culture, like leaving wine out for Elijah on Labour Day.”
The comments are great.
“Fine… I guess systemic discrimination could exist, but only because those damn green hairs on Twitter keep laughing at us”
With these kinds of
uninformed stereotypes pulled out of his assinsightful, data-supported analyses, it’s hard to see how he could possibly reach wrong conclusions.Whoo boy! Those comments on there. So many people just talking out of their asses.
The left-wing, feminist HR conspiracy must keep them up at night. Can you imagine how horrific it must be for a conservative to read an email from their CEO that talks about Earth Day, or even, shudder, expresses support for Black Lives Matter? That’s clearly 1984 or white genocide (/s).
Trump’s America is low-economic-output America. If there is a conspiracy it is to keep those parts of the country uneducated and afraid.
Clearly, liberals are just better at business than conservatives (statistically!) whether due to a correlated in born trait or as a consequence of superior education.
how did the author not realize this??
Rest assured, whatever he settles on as the answer, it will be sure to cast conservatives as hapless victims of liberals’ coldly self-interested quest for power.
I mean, that’s what his audience wants to hear at least. Nothing soothes the libertarian-capitalist’s soul like being assured that progressives are just as psychotically self-interested and egotistical as they are, and that progressive’s talk of morality and philosophy is just virtue-signalling fluff.
Fuck yeah, this is my type of sneer.
Caplan made his splash in the econ world over a decade before the comic book. He’s still a think-tanker asshole, but this is more you showing your arse a bit than a quality sneer.
You’ve also missed his point. He’s referring specifically to the insights - such as they are - of Gary Becker, who as he summarises at the top made much of his career discussing how policy design could result in government failure when tackling issues like discrimination. It isn’t about the “invisible hand” of the market, which describes how government non-intervention in the market would permit under ideal conditions the market to produce more optimal results than government interference in the market.
If anything Caplan is arguing the opposite of what you’re saying: he thinks that the reason right wing businesses are (allegedly) simply not interested in either incentivising or de-incentivising discrimination when it comes to their public-facing view on politics. Your interpretation comes out better in his last few paragraphs, but he isn’t making a normative judgement or pearl-clutching about cultural Marxism: He just thinks “right wing firms” have less to gain by publicly espousing a political viewpoint the way a “left wing firm” does.
He’s wrong, but…
lmao, eat shit caplan. too stupid to figure out that everyone who has been screaming at him his point of view is self-defeating illiterate garbage was right about him from day one.
Those companies exist where pro-life people can be bold and call a spade a spade.
However, they don’t really exist in big cities. You know, anywhere there might be some diversity.