{"id":6778,"date":"2022-10-28T11:54:52","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6778"},"modified":"2022-10-28T11:54:52","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T16:54:52","slug":"on-bryan-caplan-and-his-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=6778","title":{"rendered":"On Bryan Caplan and his new book"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Yesterday I attended a lecture by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan<\/a>, who’s currently visiting UT Austin, about his new book entitled Don\u2019t Be a Feminist<\/a><\/em>. (See also here<\/a> for previous back-and-forth between me and Bryan about his book.) A few remarks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(1) Maybe surprisingly, there were no protesters storming the lectern, no security detail, not even a single rotten vegetable thrown. About 30 people showed up, majority men but women too. They listened politely and asked polite questions afterward. One feminist civilly challenged Bryan during the Q&A about his gender pay gap statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(2) How is it that I got denounced <\/a>by half the planet for saying once, in a blog comment, that I agreed with 97% of feminism but had concerns with one particular way it was operationalized, whereas Bryan seems to be \u2026 not denounced in the slightest for publishing a book and going on a lecture tour about how he rejects feminism in its entirety as angry and self-pitying in addition to factually false? Who can explain this to me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(3) For purposes of his argument, Bryan defines feminism as “the view that women are generally treated less fairly than men,” rather than (say) “the view that men and women ought<\/em> to be treated equally,” or “the radical belief that women are people,” or other formulations that Bryan considers too obvious to debate. He then rebuts feminism as he’s defined it, by taking the audience on a horror tour of all the ways society treats men less fairly than women (expectations of doing dirty and dangerous work, divorce law, military drafts as in Ukraine right now, …), as well as potentially benign explanations for apparent unfairness toward women, to argue that it’s at least debatable<\/em> which sex gets the rawer deal on average.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Q&A, I raised what I thought was the central objection to Bryan’s relatively narrow definition of feminism. Namely that, by the standards of 150 years ago, Bryan is obviously<\/em> a feminist, and so am I, and so is everyone in the room. (Whereupon a right-wing business school professor interjected: “please don\u2019t make assumptions about me!”)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I explained that this<\/em> is why I call myself a feminist, despite agreeing with many of Bryan’s substantive points: because I want no one to imagine for a nanosecond that, if I had the power, I’d take gender relations back to how they were generations ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bryan replied that >60% of Americans call themselves non-feminists in surveys. So, he asked me rhetorically, do all<\/em> those Americans secretly yearn to take us back to the 19th century? Such a position, he said, seemed so absurdly uncharitable as not to be worth responding to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting about it on my walk home, I realized: actually, give or take the exact percentages, this is precisely<\/em> the progressive thesis. I.e., that just like at least a solid minority of Germans turned out to be totally fine with Nazism, however much they might’ve denied it beforehand, so too at least a solid minority of Americans would be fine with—if not ecstatic about—The Handmaid’s Tale<\/em> made real. Indeed, they’d add, it’s only vociferous progressive activism that stands between us and that dystopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if anyone were tempted to doubt this, progressives might point to the election of Donald Trump, the failed insurrection to maintain his power, and the repeal of Roe<\/em> as proof enough to last for a quadrillion years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bryan would probably reply: why even waste time engaging with such a hysterical position? To me, though, the hysterical position sadly has more than a grain of truth to it. I wish<\/em> we lived in a world where there was no point in calling oneself a pro-democracy anti-racist feminist and a hundred other banal and obvious things. I just don’t think that we do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I attended a lecture by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who’s currently visiting UT Austin, about his new book entitled Don\u2019t Be a Feminist. (See also here for previous back-and-forth between me and Bryan about his book.) A few remarks: (1) Maybe surprisingly, there were no protesters storming the lectern, no security detail, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obviously-im-not-defending-aaronson"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6779,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6778\/revisions\/6779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}