If France had 10 times the population with half of France's current per capita income and none of its famous attractions, I probably wouldn't want to visit it. But all things considered, why wouldn't that be a huge improvement? [You have no right to your Culture, Bryan Caplan.]
I find the quote above comprehensible, if extraordinary. In what conceivable world would a France without any French culture, far more people from all over the world in a random melange filling up the countryside, and half the per capita income, be preferable?
Caplan seems to have executed the first step in the repugnant conclusion, albeit where ‘utility’ is replaced with ‘per capita income.’ We can perform the second step by 10x’ing France’s population again, this time to 6.85 billion, and halving the per capita income, now falling to $16,500, roughly the level of Chile. And again, and again, and again: all things considered, why wouldn’t that be a huge improvement?
What is most infuriating about Caplan is that he insists this is an ordinary, commonplace intuition. He is incredibly dismissive of everyday people who claim to want: “culture, identity, community”:
Sometimes they're consciously lying. More often, they're just too intellectually lazy to check their words for accuracy. Either way, their underlying motive is to say things that sound good to yourself and other people. Why bother? To feel good about yourself and persuade other people to feel good about you. Saying what sounds noble and doing what feels pleasant. Now, that's human nature.
Caplan misses something that seems obvious to most people: humans do, in fact, care about these things deeply. They fight wars on their behalf, and often resist their destruction with every ounce of their being. It is very likely these loyalties are as hard-coded as a parent’s love of their child, or our wonder at natural beauty. They have not been socially conditioned, or deluded, or tricked, or encouraged to lie. This is just something they feel.
A friend of mine, and fan of Caplan, has suggested that although these sorts of people (assuming they exist) should not be destroyed, they should “not be optimised for.” How do you expect people to feel when you tell them this? How are you supposed to sell this to the average person? Perhaps the voter is not so irrational after all; perhaps they sense, at a level Caplan cannot, that his project will destroy things they value more than money. What did he think they were going to say in response?
The popularity of thinkers like Caplan feels like a civilizational step backwards. I thought we already established the possibility of value pluralism? Here is Isaiah Berlin writing in 1959:
Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss… I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human. [The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 1959]
What happens when you deny the validity of some people’s instincts? They grew resentful, and angry, and accumulate, and accumulate, until suddenly what was a small puddle becomes a vast wave. The central planner, in the midst of the storm, look upon the ruins of their plans. I don’t get it…
“But all things considered, why wouldn't that be a huge improvement?