Pun Salad

This is Bryan Caplan's fifth book in his series of repackaged blog essays, most if not all from EconLog, a group blog where he posted between 2005 and 2022. (Previous titles: Labor Econ Versus the World; How Evil Are Politicians?; Don't Be a Feminist; Voters as Mad Scientists) The general (and very loose) theme here: how to survive, and even thrive, in a world where your political, economic, and other views are considerably out of the mainstream, while remaining honest and true to yourself. A daunting task!

Given that theme, this is probably Caplan's most "personal" book: lots of biography and personal anecdotes.

I'm not a fan of the format. Shoehorning together disparate blog posts accumulated over the years makes a less than coherent whole. As noted in my previous reports, hyperlinks in the original blog posts have been auto-converted to footnotes in the book's text; this is (to put it mildly) less than convenient if you're interested in following them. I would have, at least, included the posts' URLs as well. You can get reasonable results by Googling the footnote text, if you're willing to take the trouble. (I got the paperback; I don't know if the Kindle versions are easier in this regard.)

But that's kind of a quibble, and I don't mind kicking a few bucks into the Caplan kids' scholarship fund.

I wanted to point out one essay, "Purges and Schisms", which bemoans the sectarian strife between various flavors of libertarians. You'd think that a relatively minuscule movement wouldn't have room for such discord; you'd be wrong.

But, reader, Caplan's EconLog post was from 2015. Nine years ago.

And there, he says it was originally written in 1993! Thirty-one years ago! ("Still seems correct to me, and unfortunately it’s as relevant as ever.")

And just to note its continuing relevance here's Liz Wolfe at Reason from June of this year: How the Libertarian Party Lost Its Way.