Bryan Caplan on State Capacity and Monoculture Grotius

I’ve not posted in a little bit because I have been working on getting a podcast/YouTube channel started to explore the ideas at the heart of this blog. Today, I’m releasing my first episode, an interview with Bryan Caplan, one of my favorite public intellectuals.

Bryan is an economics professor at George Mason university and he’s probably well known to anyone who would be reading this blog. He’s a libertarian economist in the UChicago/GMU tradition, though as an avowed non-conformist, he would not identify as part of any movement or school. He’s incredibly productive and widely read across history, philosophy, and social science and he’s someone you can ask anything.

In this episode we talk about some essays from a recent volume of his selected works called Pro-Market and Pro-Business: Essays in Laissez-Faire. These essays cover a range of topics, but I was particularly excited to ask Bryan about his ideas on the concept of “state capacity.” Bryan is surrounded by smart economists at GMU who take this concept seriously as a driving force in history, explaining which societies developed hundreds of years ago, and maybe which societies have promising futures today. He remains firmly unimpressed by these ideas.

Produced by Helen LaGrand; Music by Yasha Mostert