Abstract

Bryan Caplan’s bold and challenging argument is weak on evidence and uses questionable assumptions. He does not prove that politicians go along with voters’ biases, nor that these biases make voters feel good, nor that they cling to these biases tenaciously. And he assumes that the public’s disagreements with professional American economists are “biases” in the sense of being incorrect, even though economists often disagree with each other, and economists in other countries may disagree even with the consensus views of American economists