This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Monday, June 5th, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In his new book, Voters As Mad Scientists, economist Brian Kaplan traces many ways that people deceive

themselves about politics and how the rest of us pay the price. We talked about the

book last month. You are famous, internet famous, regular famous maybe, for the myth of the rational voter,

the idea that voters are not self-interested so much as consistently biased.

So how does that play out with respect

to your sort of simplistic model of politics, the left and right.

This is a case where I deliberately put the word simplistic in the title so there is truth in

advertising I don't want to oversell it but my simplistic

theory of left and right is this the left is anti market the right is anti left

this is not mean that all leftists hate markets this is not mean that all right

wingers hate leftists hate markets. This does not mean that all right wingers hate

leftist. The word that I like to use actually is antipathy. There's just a

resentment of either markets or of the left depending upon what your

position is. The thought experiment that I have is

to imagine you just want to get leftist from all over the world for the last 200 years in a

room and see what they can agree on. Or you want to get right wingers from all over the

world for the last 200 years into a room and see what they can agree on what

would the consensus paper be for the two groups and I say the consensus paper for

the left would be a bunch of complaints about markets and the consensus

paper for the right would be a bunch of complaints about the left. Many people

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