This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 12, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Does the regulatory state fuel populism?

At the Cato Institute Conference new challenges to the free economy,

Cato adjunct scholar Brian Kaplan did his level best to answer the question

literally and comes to the conclusion that populism fuels the regulatory state.

It is thrilling to be back here at Kagan. populism fuels the regulatory state.

It is thrilling to be back here at Cato in person.

It is wonderful to see all of you here.

I haven't been here in years.

The question before us is, does the regulatory state fuel populism? Whenever someone

asked me a question I like to listen and answer the question literally.

This is one of my eccentricities. All right so just start, what is populism? Surprisingly, we've already had two other

definitions of populism. I have a different one that I like very much. In psychology,

there's a concept that I think all economists need to know much better.

It is called social desirability bias.

It is a fancy term for something we all know in real life, namely,

when the truth is ugly, people lie. Am I fat?

Oh, of course not. You look great.

Furthermore, sometimes the lies become so ubiquitous that people start believing absurd things

because they just never hear anything else. I think of populism is really the

political version of social desirability bias. It's when you evaluate policies purely on how they

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