Tucker does not lend credibility even to credible questions. He does the opposite. This is not a good time to promote your credible Q&A session with Tucker. It feels like culture war grifting. Talk to someone else if need be, but not Tucker. That’s like me talking to Kendi about the importance of equality and wondering why nobody of good faith is listening.
Not all worthwhile interviews are adversarial. And while Tucker may not be credible to you, he is credible to millions of people. It seems like your overall objection here is that you don't like Tucker.
Bryan Caplan had an entire posting session about why he should not have gone on Tucker. Like Limbaugh, Hannity, Maddow, or Lemon, Tucker is not so much a “truth teller” but an entertainer yet to your point, his viewers already believe he’s telling the truth. That’s a point that’s easily missed from my post. It’s not so much an argument as n observation. That’s why Bryan -- who has good ideas - needs to avoid culture warriors. They aren’t selling anything to anyone new. Ideas stagnate. In fact, they regress. Politics is where good ideas go to die.
I suspect ideas spread less through their original author convincing people who disagree with them and more through their original author providing those sympathetic or somewhat receptive to the ideas with better arguments. Those better arguments then solidify their own beliefs and and allow them to better persuade the people they interact with in life. But perhaps more important, controversial ideas spread through the widening of the Overton window, which allows people to take seriously their own instincts on a taboo topic. That is what cancel culture on the left is about - trimming the Overton window on the right so that what was once center is now considered far right. Caplan going on Tucker pushed back against this uni-directional tightening of the Overton window.
For example, you may say that Hanania preaching to the right wing choir about civil rights law being the root of wokeness is pointless. But he's contributed to making this issue a legitimate talking point on the right, who do still have political power if not cultural power. He's increased the probability that a Republican president will go after affirmative action.
Also, all this aside, I think it's fine if Caplan simply wants to sell his book.
Finally, and I'm not singling you out, but culture warrior is used as a pejorative as though culture is not worth fighting over. It's usually used this way by the left against those on the right who disagree. I disagree with this pejorative use. Culture is very much worth fighting for.
“Singling me out” for saying again, that Bryan will get further with his ideas (as a Libertarian) than planting them with Tucker? I’m sure AOC has promoted several left of center people with good ideas but her stink is where these good ideas go to die. To your point, culture DOES matter - Tucker is no better than AOC.
Ultimately Bryan can't just choose where he wants to share his ideas - he can only go on the shows that will have him.
Going on Tucker Carlson represents an opportunity to reach audiences that are likely orders of magnitude larger than his standard audiences.
I'm sure Bryan doesn't agree with a lot of what Tucker has to say, but so what? I think it is great that Bryan is able to reach so many new folks who may never have heard some of these arguments before. It might even motivate some of them to share Bryan's ideas, or to buy his books and be exposed to even more of these ideas.
Yes, there is some risk of Bryan's 'brand' being hurt by association with Tucker, but most people who think that way wouldn't pay attention to his ideas anyway.
Tucker spoke truth to power on Covid, blm, and many other things. He did this at the height of controversies when no other mainstream outlet would touch it, not after the hysteria died down and it was safe. He didn’t make a blog post, he got in tv in front of millions of people.
This is interesting advice. Of course, the economist's question is always "Compared to what?" Can you share with us your own media strategy, and the way it's enabled you to make a greater impact than Caplan as a public intellectual?
Need anyone be told that the 3M viewers Tucker religiously had already agreed before you showed up? What kind of success or intellectual advancement is that? Go have a truely hard conversation.
Tucker Carlson has more Democrats watching his show than most cable hosts... simply because he has such an enormous number of viewers, even if most of his viewers aren't Democrats.
No, Tucker has a much broader appeal than you're giving him credit for. Observe that Tucker's audience was vastly larger than any of the conventional conservative talking heads on Fox--not only in terms of cable TV ratings, but also in terms of the rebroadcasting of clips from his shows on the internet. Many people tuned into Tucker's show or watched clips of it on the internet precisely because they knew they would be exposed to information not available anywhere else from the corporatist media, in large part because the corporatist oligarchs and their Deep State associates don't want such information available to general audiences.
You'll also note that pro-peace/anti-censorship/anti-corporate-privilege dissenters from the left got a lot more exposure on Tucker's program than they did anywhere else too. Given Fox's long history of war-mongering, intense partisanship, and pandering to the beneficiaries of rigged markets, Tucker himself along with an important segment of the conservative base has advanced a great deal intellectually from the old Fox norm. If Fox's owner can no longer tolerate that, then I think Bryan or any professional intellectual should be proud to associate himself with Tucker and his audience over the conformist corporatist/neocon wasteland of Fox News and of other cable network outlets.
I wanted to share an observation about the topic of feminism.
I've noticed that when feminists describe the lives of women, they often attribute negative outcomes to the broad cultural forces that shape the lives of women - for example, women get paid less than men, and are afraid of negotiating for higher pay, for fear that they'll be perceived as too aggressive. This style of 'cultural attribution' reflects a relatively standard progressive way of thinking.
However, if you counter these feminist arguments with examples of bad things that happen to men, like the fact that men are more likely than women to end up in prison, suddenly these same feminists talk like right-wingers! They talk about things like personal responsibility - "if men don't want to be in prison, then they shouldn't commit crime!"
I think analysis of this sort requires both perspectives - we need the language of personal responsibility, AND we need to examine broader cultural influences and incentives. We should not, however, switch between the frameworks whenever it best suits our priors.
The prison thing is a terrible example. Women not negotiating because they’re too nice and comparing that to men going to prison because they’re violent. Like dude, that plays directly into their arguments about culture encouraging men to have toxic masculinity and women to be too nice. In reality it’s just testosterone and culture doesn’t matter as much as people want to think it does. Well, if our culture didn’t drink alcohol that would improve that stats. But men would still be more violent than women by a huge margin.
Bryan, that is indeed an interview to be proud of. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I was especially interested in how you described your background and how you rejected ideological zealotry and wound up making an open-minded pursuit of truth a part of your family life and of your friendships. Since I first became acquainted with you way back when you were at Berkeley, I know the backstory about some of the zealots you encountered back then, so from what you were telling Tucker I could easily picture how you started moving in that direction. I'm pleased that I wasn't the only one to draw such conclusions from such experiences about how to optimize one's pursuit of happiness.
Re the attraction of feminism: i think it’s very seductive to be able to explain away failures as due to misogyny or anti-semitism etc. as it allows one to avoid confronting the possibility personal character flaws.
Be careful though - just as it may be seductive to explain away failures as due to misogyny, it is equally seductive to explain away interest in feminism as a purely self-interested phenomenon. Sure, it probably is, at least some of the time, but I doubt that is true all the time.
I was disappointed that you spent so little time talking about the book, and at the end I was surprised at how you answered the question about why intelligent Republicans don’t like Trump. Was
this thinking lazy or naive? I do know there was nothing lazy about The Case Against Education—it was thoroughly researched and meticulously argued. So maybe your answer is just politically naive because of your relationship with the media and your recommendation: “Read no newspapers. Watch no television news. In plenty of cases, this would lead people to be entirely unaware of a problem . . . The rest of the time, news-free people would just base their views on first-hand experience.”
Tucker does not lend credibility even to credible questions. He does the opposite. This is not a good time to promote your credible Q&A session with Tucker. It feels like culture war grifting. Talk to someone else if need be, but not Tucker. That’s like me talking to Kendi about the importance of equality and wondering why nobody of good faith is listening.
Not all worthwhile interviews are adversarial. And while Tucker may not be credible to you, he is credible to millions of people. It seems like your overall objection here is that you don't like Tucker.
Bryan Caplan had an entire posting session about why he should not have gone on Tucker. Like Limbaugh, Hannity, Maddow, or Lemon, Tucker is not so much a “truth teller” but an entertainer yet to your point, his viewers already believe he’s telling the truth. That’s a point that’s easily missed from my post. It’s not so much an argument as n observation. That’s why Bryan -- who has good ideas - needs to avoid culture warriors. They aren’t selling anything to anyone new. Ideas stagnate. In fact, they regress. Politics is where good ideas go to die.
I suspect ideas spread less through their original author convincing people who disagree with them and more through their original author providing those sympathetic or somewhat receptive to the ideas with better arguments. Those better arguments then solidify their own beliefs and and allow them to better persuade the people they interact with in life. But perhaps more important, controversial ideas spread through the widening of the Overton window, which allows people to take seriously their own instincts on a taboo topic. That is what cancel culture on the left is about - trimming the Overton window on the right so that what was once center is now considered far right. Caplan going on Tucker pushed back against this uni-directional tightening of the Overton window.
For example, you may say that Hanania preaching to the right wing choir about civil rights law being the root of wokeness is pointless. But he's contributed to making this issue a legitimate talking point on the right, who do still have political power if not cultural power. He's increased the probability that a Republican president will go after affirmative action.
Also, all this aside, I think it's fine if Caplan simply wants to sell his book.
Finally, and I'm not singling you out, but culture warrior is used as a pejorative as though culture is not worth fighting over. It's usually used this way by the left against those on the right who disagree. I disagree with this pejorative use. Culture is very much worth fighting for.
“Singling me out” for saying again, that Bryan will get further with his ideas (as a Libertarian) than planting them with Tucker? I’m sure AOC has promoted several left of center people with good ideas but her stink is where these good ideas go to die. To your point, culture DOES matter - Tucker is no better than AOC.
Ultimately Bryan can't just choose where he wants to share his ideas - he can only go on the shows that will have him.
Going on Tucker Carlson represents an opportunity to reach audiences that are likely orders of magnitude larger than his standard audiences.
I'm sure Bryan doesn't agree with a lot of what Tucker has to say, but so what? I think it is great that Bryan is able to reach so many new folks who may never have heard some of these arguments before. It might even motivate some of them to share Bryan's ideas, or to buy his books and be exposed to even more of these ideas.
Yes, there is some risk of Bryan's 'brand' being hurt by association with Tucker, but most people who think that way wouldn't pay attention to his ideas anyway.
Actually, I’m paying attention.
What are you talking about? Caplan wrote a long article chuckling at the scolds telling him why he shouldn't go on Tucker Carlson's show (https://betonit.substack.com/p/tell-me-why-i-shouldnt-have-talked).
Tucker spoke truth to power on Covid, blm, and many other things. He did this at the height of controversies when no other mainstream outlet would touch it, not after the hysteria died down and it was safe. He didn’t make a blog post, he got in tv in front of millions of people.
I will always appreciate him for this.
This is interesting advice. Of course, the economist's question is always "Compared to what?" Can you share with us your own media strategy, and the way it's enabled you to make a greater impact than Caplan as a public intellectual?
Fuck off.
Need anyone be told that the 3M viewers Tucker religiously had already agreed before you showed up? What kind of success or intellectual advancement is that? Go have a truely hard conversation.
Tucker Carlson has more Democrats watching his show than most cable hosts... simply because he has such an enormous number of viewers, even if most of his viewers aren't Democrats.
No, Tucker has a much broader appeal than you're giving him credit for. Observe that Tucker's audience was vastly larger than any of the conventional conservative talking heads on Fox--not only in terms of cable TV ratings, but also in terms of the rebroadcasting of clips from his shows on the internet. Many people tuned into Tucker's show or watched clips of it on the internet precisely because they knew they would be exposed to information not available anywhere else from the corporatist media, in large part because the corporatist oligarchs and their Deep State associates don't want such information available to general audiences.
You'll also note that pro-peace/anti-censorship/anti-corporate-privilege dissenters from the left got a lot more exposure on Tucker's program than they did anywhere else too. Given Fox's long history of war-mongering, intense partisanship, and pandering to the beneficiaries of rigged markets, Tucker himself along with an important segment of the conservative base has advanced a great deal intellectually from the old Fox norm. If Fox's owner can no longer tolerate that, then I think Bryan or any professional intellectual should be proud to associate himself with Tucker and his audience over the conformist corporatist/neocon wasteland of Fox News and of other cable network outlets.
Hard to say whether your comment is parody or a true reflection of your thoughts (please tell me it is the former)
It was a great interview. Thanks for the link! Why couldn't you get your buddy, Tyler C to talk to him?
See my comment above.
I wanted to share an observation about the topic of feminism.
I've noticed that when feminists describe the lives of women, they often attribute negative outcomes to the broad cultural forces that shape the lives of women - for example, women get paid less than men, and are afraid of negotiating for higher pay, for fear that they'll be perceived as too aggressive. This style of 'cultural attribution' reflects a relatively standard progressive way of thinking.
However, if you counter these feminist arguments with examples of bad things that happen to men, like the fact that men are more likely than women to end up in prison, suddenly these same feminists talk like right-wingers! They talk about things like personal responsibility - "if men don't want to be in prison, then they shouldn't commit crime!"
I think analysis of this sort requires both perspectives - we need the language of personal responsibility, AND we need to examine broader cultural influences and incentives. We should not, however, switch between the frameworks whenever it best suits our priors.
The prison thing is a terrible example. Women not negotiating because they’re too nice and comparing that to men going to prison because they’re violent. Like dude, that plays directly into their arguments about culture encouraging men to have toxic masculinity and women to be too nice. In reality it’s just testosterone and culture doesn’t matter as much as people want to think it does. Well, if our culture didn’t drink alcohol that would improve that stats. But men would still be more violent than women by a huge margin.
Bryan, that is indeed an interview to be proud of. Thanks for sharing it with us.
I was especially interested in how you described your background and how you rejected ideological zealotry and wound up making an open-minded pursuit of truth a part of your family life and of your friendships. Since I first became acquainted with you way back when you were at Berkeley, I know the backstory about some of the zealots you encountered back then, so from what you were telling Tucker I could easily picture how you started moving in that direction. I'm pleased that I wasn't the only one to draw such conclusions from such experiences about how to optimize one's pursuit of happiness.
Always a pleasure to listen to you. Love your ability to go straight to the point when needed.
Re the attraction of feminism: i think it’s very seductive to be able to explain away failures as due to misogyny or anti-semitism etc. as it allows one to avoid confronting the possibility personal character flaws.
Be careful though - just as it may be seductive to explain away failures as due to misogyny, it is equally seductive to explain away interest in feminism as a purely self-interested phenomenon. Sure, it probably is, at least some of the time, but I doubt that is true all the time.
I was disappointed that you spent so little time talking about the book, and at the end I was surprised at how you answered the question about why intelligent Republicans don’t like Trump. Was
this thinking lazy or naive? I do know there was nothing lazy about The Case Against Education—it was thoroughly researched and meticulously argued. So maybe your answer is just politically naive because of your relationship with the media and your recommendation: “Read no newspapers. Watch no television news. In plenty of cases, this would lead people to be entirely unaware of a problem . . . The rest of the time, news-free people would just base their views on first-hand experience.”