Don’t Be a Feminist - by Bryan Caplan

ISBN: 9798846166653
Date read: 2025-06-30
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Don’t let the title distract you. This is not a book about feminism but a brilliant philosophy book about genuine justice. A collection of simple applicable essays applying logic, economics, and empathy to every-day situations. Clear and surprising thoughts.

my notes

If it were really true that women were paid, say, 20% less than equally productive men, every business would have a no-brainer get-rich-quick strategy:
Fire all your men and replace them with women, cutting labor costs by up to 20%.
If this strategy really worked, it would have swept the economy ages ago.
Why complain about unfairness when you can become a billionaire by counteracting it?

If a child blames his behavior on cartoons, we roll our eyes.
We should be even more dismissive of those who try to shift the responsibility for people’s career and family choices onto “society.”

Men are simply more likely to obsessively focus on success in anything.
Even though anyone can edit Wikipedia, about 90% of Wikipedia editors are male.

Feminists predictably resent women who use their “I’m not one of those feminists” attitude to bond with male co-workers and mentors.
This suggests to me that the “I’m not one of those feminists” strategy works.
Use it.

Before passing a new law, one should always ask: Can we accomplish the same end by repealing – or liberalizing – an existing law?

Left-wing grievance studies are too drenched in obscure academic jargon to reach the common man.
Right-wing grievance studies, in contrast, attempt to speak to the masses in their own language.
This sharply increases the probability that politicians will eventually make their brand of antipathy and self-pity the law of the land.

The most important policy issue on Earth: immigration.
If your idea of freedom is gleefully denying the vast majority of humanity the right to live and work where they please, I am not on your side.

All forms of political action are, selfishly speaking, a complete waste of time.
You’re one person out of billions.
Selling your soul to identity politics is astronomically unlikely to noticeably change public policy.

The time you devote to politics is time you aren’t devoting to personal advancement.

Ramping up your side’s identity politics often has the perverse side effect of inspiring rival groups’ identity politics.

Sermons on Inclusion spoke as if human beings naturally value their cultural heritage.
Lots of people turn their backs on the religion of their birth.
Lots of people never feel – or lose interest in – their ethnic heritage.
Lots of people dissent from “their” political culture.
Many refuse to be ruled by the circumstances of their birth.

Discrimination creates profit opportunities.
If most employers dislike workers in group X, depressing their wages below their productivity, employers who feel differently can profit by hiring them.
If most workers dislike workers in group X, employers can profit by giving the disliked workers “a firm of their own.”
Market forces help neutralize bigotry’s effects.
With the right incentives and strategies, intolerance can be both prevalent and impotent.

Firms that don’t hire on the basis of merit don’t last.

Prideful Worker Effect: workers who say they want a job, but refuse to do any job for which they’re genuinely qualified.

“You’ve got to keep trying”
“We all fail, but you can’t give up hope”
“There’s no harm in asking.”
These questions are the expression of a valuable social norm:
Encourage the discouraged.

Convince an employer to hire you = Convince a stranger to love you.
When the stakes are this high, failure is scary.
Discouraged Workers silently endure deep feelings of uselessness.
Discouraged Suitors silently endure deep feelings of loneliness.

Compare the selection filter you apply to potential friends to the selection filter you apply to the romantic partners of your friends.

People with low IQs are aren’t just less productive; they’re also more impulsive.
A lack of foresight, which is often associated with low IQ, raises the attractions of the immediate gains from crime and lowers the strength of the deterrents.
The threats of apprehension and prison may fade to meaninglessness, because they are too abstract, too far in the future, too uncertain.

Welfare shelters people from short-run feedback.
Welfare makes it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that are destructive in the long term.
Welfare subsidizes mistakes.
We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead.
We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

Barbers could afford to live in this neighborhood back when this neighborhood was in the middle of nowhere.
So the right question to ask yourself is:
Can barbers still afford to live in the middle of nowhere?
Thanks to developments like the Internet, today’s “middle of nowhere” is far more stimulating than the poshest neighborhoods 50 years ago.

My conservative friend is chronically angry about (a) immigration and (b) affirmative action.
The irony is that the immigration restrictions he so passionately favors are affirmative action for native-born workers.

Advocates of standard affirmative action see the low percentage of minorities that employers would hire in a free market.
They respond by bullying employers to hire more minorities.
Advocates of immigration restrictions, similarly, see the low percentage of natives that employers would hire in a free market.
They respond by bullying employers to hire more natives.

Immigration restrictions are vastly harsher than standard affirmative action policies.
The dream of standard affirmative action policies is proportionality: If blacks are 13% of the population, blacks should have 13% of every job in the country.
The dream of immigration restrictions is total exclusion: If natives are 5% of the world population, natives should have 100% of every job in the country.
(My note: that 13% vs 5% is cheating because the 13% is not of the world but in the country.)

Conservatives usually think that “oppressed minorities” should spend a lot less time complaining about unfair treatment and a lot more time improving their skills and work ethic.
Fair point, but the same holds for native-born Americans who complain that immigrants are taking their jobs.
Employers aren’t saints, but they have a strong financial incentive to hire the best person for the job.
If they don’t think that person is you, they’re probably right.

Cruise workers’ lives are hard compared to what Americans are used to.
But their lives are quite good compared to what they can expect back in their home countries.
If you stopped cruising out of moral indignation, your behavior would make it harder to get a job on a cruise ship, which means that more people will be stuck in their native countries earning one-tenth as much.

We evacuate disaster victims.
The moral and practical logic of evacuation doesn’t stop at national borders.
(Logic rarely does).
Letting people leave dangerous countries is only common sense.
The fewer people who experience a disaster, the better.
Immigration restrictions prevent refugees from saving themselves when there is still time.

Saving perfect strangers may be a matter of charity.
But letting strangers save themselves with the willing assistance of people other than yourself is a matter of justice.
The top reason countries restrict immigration is to stop native employers, merchants, and landlords from consensually trading with foreigners without government permission.

“History will judge you,” and “You are on the wrong side of history.”
The underlying assumption of these warnings is this:
What historians think in a century is a very strong predictor of what’s actually true.
This is a reasonable claim for narrow factual matters.
The passage of time doesn’t just give historians more opportunities to collect evidence.
It also cools their emotions.
This is why I’d far rather read history than news.

Christopher Columbus appeared in Lisbon in 1477 an Old World slave trade was thriving.
In his famous letter on his first voyage he informed Ferdinand and Isabella he could, with their help, give them “slaves, as many as they shall order.”
On his second voyage Columbus loaded five hundred Indian slaves aboard returning caravels.
He launched the transatlantic slave trade, at first in Indians and from west to east.
Columbus was not just a brutal slaver; he was a pioneer of slavery.

For the Americas, both North and South, the Mexican Revolution was the greatest demographic catastrophe of the twentieth century.
Exceeded only by the devastation of Christian conquest, colonization, and accompanying epidemics, nearly four centuries earlier.
Mexico is a middle-income country, but given its proximity to the U.S., gravity alone should have turned it into a peaceful, First World country by now.
Violence remains a grave problem to this day.
The legacy of the Mexican Revolution is one of the better explanations for why a peaceful, prosperous Mexico has yet to emerge.

“There’s a lot of pickpocketing in the world.
You’ve personally done nothing to stop it.
That makes you a pickpocket!”
You don’t have to crusade against pickpocketing to avoid being a pickpocket.

Skills should be practiced well beyond the point of initial mastery, leading to automaticity.
Overlearning is one of the best ways to attain true Transfer of Learning.
When you’re a novice driver, you can easily get into trouble if you have to drive an unfamiliar car.
But once you have so much driving experience that you no longer need to think about driving, your competence generalizes to almost any automobile.
Extend the idea of overlearning to moral reasoning.
People learn but fail to overlearn.
As a result, their knowledge is inert.
If you explicitly test them, they can spit out the right answer.
But they frequently forget or ignore their knowledge in relevant situations.
For example, a person may know the moral principle, “Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” yet support slavery.

Hold governments to ordinary moral standards.
It’s wrong for a private individual to physically attack other people who are behaving peacefully.
It’s wrong for a private individual to take other people’s property without their consent.
So why is it OK for government to do these things?

Generalize narrow moral principles to situations where they’re entirely inappropriate.
If you only apply moral principles when other people encourage you to do so, how much about right and wrong do you really know?

Read Mike Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority.

We almost never have ethical arguments about when it’s morally permissible for them to do terrible things to us.
I’ve never heard a debate about:
1. When is it morally permissible for them to deliberately drop a nuclear bomb on our civilians?
2. When is it morally permissible for them to launch an attack that they expect will lead to ten civilian deaths for every target killed?

Calculate the number of innocent people murdered on an average day.
Do you plan to be outraged every day for the rest of your life?
Did you think I should be upset simply because our community is temporarily fixated on this specific crime?

Familial favoritism is a deep and ineradicable part of the human psyche, thanks to many millions of years of evolution.
Nationalism – and expansive tribal identities more generally – pretends to be equally fundamental, but it’s largely cheap talk.
People happily give tons of free stuff to their children.
But you need coercion to make people surrender more than a pittance to their “fellow citizens.”
To ask people to stop favoring their own children goes utterly against human nature.
To ask people to stop favoring their countrymen is a modest, eminently do-able request.

Everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal.
Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups.
Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians?
Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads.
Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants?
Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs.”

Nietzsche was playing fast and loose with the truth.
To call him a “philosopher” is a misnomer.
He barely offered arguments and made minimal effort to anticipate or respond to thoughtful criticism.
Nietzsche was a great poet.

Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force.
Money is made possible only by the men who produce.
Is this what you consider evil?
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.
That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
Money works so long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another.

Write Your Social Desirability Bias (SDB) Autobiography:
“Actions speak louder than words” is an intellectual vaccine against Social Desirability Bias.
Voters’ Social Desirability Bias is the key ingredient that makes democracy so inefficient.
Social Desirability Bias drives a wedge between public policy and ugly truths about trade-offs and incentives.

If you really want to improve your group’s image, telling other groups to stop stereotyping won’t work.
The stereotype is based on the underlying distribution of fact.
It is far more realistic to turn your complaining inward, and pressure the bad apples in your group to stop pulling down the average.

Human beings are naturally biased in favor of the groups they identify with.
Psychologists call this “in-group bias.”
Once you recognize this human failing, your moral priority should be bending over backwards to treat out-groups justly.
No nationalism I’ve ever heard of even tries to do so.
Instead, nationalisms embrace in-group bias.

What motivates the critics to attack libertarianism time after time?
Libertarians, unlike mainstream conservatives, openly defend many unpopular views.
Intellectuals who want to loudly champion popular views have to engage libertarians because there’s hardly anyone else to argue with.
Libertarian arguments, though mistaken, are consistently clever enough to get under the critics’ skin.
The purpose of the criticism is not shielding the world from bad ideas but giving the critics some intellectual catharsis.
Libertarian arguments are good enough to weigh on the critics’ intellectual consciences.
They attack libertarians to convince themselves that we’re wrong.
And they keep attacking us because they keep failing to fully convince themselves.

If governments know they’ll have to apologize when they repeal bad policies, maybe they’ll be more cautious about adopting bad policies in the first place.
If the government justified a bad policy with hyperbole, willfully overstating the probability and severity of bad outcomes, then we deserve a giant blubbering apology.

If they deeply cared about the poor, they would give away all their extra income.
But almost no one does that.
Then almost no one deeply cares about the poor.

Ignore the news unless it affects you personally.
Dry statistics are OK, but avoid any information source that tries to engage your emotions.

Any non-oblivious person has to choose between daily misery, or personal happiness in a world of woe.
Try to be happy despite the shortcomings of society and the universe.
If you postpone happiness until society gets its act together, you’ll be waiting for a lifetime.