Bryan Caplan on Discrimination and Labor Markets

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2006

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

Bryan Caplan and Russ Roberts discuss the economics of discrimination and government's regulation of labor markets. They talk about the role of the profit motive in reducing or eliminating discrimination and the role of government, particularly in European labor markets. When does government regulation reduce or enforce discrimination? How do other labor market regulations affect employment and unemployment? What is the impact on the European and American standard of living? Does money buy happiness? Does it depend on whether it is earned or received as welfare? These are some of the topics that come up in this wide-ranging conversation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:12.0	Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:16.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:21.0	My guest today is Brian Kaplan, a professor of economics here at George Mason University
0:26.0	and along with Arnold Kling, the host of Econ Log, the blog at the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:34.0	Brian and I are going to talk today about the economics of discrimination and government regulation of labor markets.
0:40.0	Brian, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:42.0	Thank you for having me, Russ.
0:44.0	Now Brian, the economics discrimination topic that starts in the modern era,
0:48.0	at least with Gary Becker's work.
0:51.0	And one version of Gary Becker's work is that the marketplace will punish discrimination
0:57.0	and discrimination will eventually die out because it's costly.
1:02.0	If you discriminate against workers of equal ability, whatever their race or sex, you're going to be paying a price,
1:09.0	because you're going to be missing a market opportunity, and over time that's going to cause discrimination to disappear.
1:15.0	Is an accurate representation of the way economists look at discrimination?
1:19.0	See, it's a little rosy.
1:20.0	You say that's accurate, and maybe there's a little more nuance for you.
1:24.0	What I would say is that if you had to give a very short description of how economists think differently about discrimination from non-economists,
1:32.0	that would be a good way of thinking about it.
1:34.0	However, if you go and actually look about the debates among economists themselves, there you'll have a discussion about
1:40.0	does the market actually eliminate discrimination?
1:43.0	100%, does it eliminate 90%, 80%, so the kinds of debates you'll have among economists are at the margin.
	...

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