Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

12/09/2025

You know what is funny? Lots of people who have never taken an economics course or read any economics book in their lives confidently proclaim that economists only think what they think about public policy because they are rich white guys who are right wing or conservatives.

Or that economists are paid to think what they think by corporations or billionaires or something. What's funny is that there is a version of this claim which is actually testable as a hypothesis, and economists have tested it.

It is possible to statistically isolate and estimate the effect on someone's public policy preferences while holding their political affiliation and/or party registration constant and also whole holding their socioeconomic status and their racial/ethnic identity constant.

So this critique is not an armchair gotcha, it is an actual hypothesis. But the type of person who levels this critique usually does not like to hear what the findings have been when this hypothesis has been tested lol, smh.

04/09/2025

Much of my free time is spent thinking about things I would like to know/understand or listening to a podcast about something happening in the world, history, or some theoretical, scientific, philosophical, or economics topic.

But these are all relatively surface level activities intellectually/cognitively speaking. If I listen to a podcast about the ideas of a great economist like Harold Demsetz or something, I would classify that activity as *learning about economics*, but not really *learning economics*.

Learning economics would be reading or listening to one of Harold Demsetz's papers that was discussed during that podcast. But I almost never do that part. Why? Because reading is hard, and there is usually math in those papers, and it would require a large amount of effort and frustration and feeling stupid to actually read one of those papers.

A similar thing happens with other people every time I see people on social media arguing with each other about some supposed "research finding." Usually, none of them have read the paper or papers in question, moreover, they could not understand those papers if they tried to read them.

Anyway, the difference in time and effort and background learning beforehand required to be able to learn some economics and learn about economics is monumental. The latter probably only costs 10% as much or less. The problem is, it is very easy to convince myself that what I am doing is learning economics. And I tell people I love economics.

But whenever I do download an economics paper and try to read it, I usually barely make it through the abstract and conclusion or summary before getting bored or anxious or feeling stupid that I won't be able to understand it. So the question is, am I lying or bullsh*tting when I say I love learning economics? And if so, do many or most public intellectuals also delude themselves and others in this way?

04/09/2025

My latest article:

Note: I used ChatGPT 5 to help me write this article, and ChatGPT 5 and Grok to help me flesh out the idea.

28/08/2025

Tremendous news!

My guest is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, ⁠Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)⁠ and ⁠Professor Emeritus of Health Policy at Stanford Univers...

28/08/2025

My latest article:

Note: I used ChatGPT 5 to help me write this article.

22/08/2025

Retaliating to another country imposing tariffs on goods from your country by imposing tariffs on goods from their country is the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot with a sawed off shotgun in the hopes that it hurts someone standing right in front of you more than it hurts you just because they just did that, and a little bit of the buckshot from their shotgun did hit your feet.

12/08/2025

https://youtu.be/CmiDvLlHLbM?si=eq1jfpCWJCn-dVay

Bryan Caplan talks to Harvard’s Jason Furman about his new Build, Baby, Build. Furman teaches Ec10, the famed intro econ course. What does he tell his studen...

12/08/2025

https://youtu.be/N1iU924jXM4?si=N8yfVxVcJ6Xxf6Ed

Bryan Caplan talks to UCLA’s Michael Manville his new Build, Baby, Build. Manville is one of the world’s top researchers on the psychology of NIMBYism. What ...

12/08/2025

https://youtu.be/FJCPjji7xo4?si=mvhn9acygeyyZ75_

Yale Law School professor David Schleicher talks about housing deregulation and its discontents with *Build, Baby, Build* author Bryan Caplan.

08/08/2025

https://medium.com//the-problem-with-luxury-beliefs-isnt-what-you-think-80b394ea8efb

Note: I used ChatGPT 4 to help me write this article.

08/08/2025

https://medium.com//yes-economists-do-agree-on-minimum-wages-cb10f3b9679a

Note: I wrote much or most of this article using ChatGPT, but it was only to confirm this suspicion I already had with something like 90%…

05/07/2025

Saying that the "evidence is clear" or "the studies show" or "the science is settled" or "researchers agree" that X is true is a rhetorical move unless you actually cite the research papers and/or textbooks you read and a quick summary of their methods and why you believe them.

It is a sneaky form of rhetoric pretending to be the opposite of rhetoric. It is an appeal to authority. It may be true, or it may not be true in a given case, but it is just words unless you actually say the names of the studies, their authors, and which research journals they were published in and why their conclusions are sound.