I’ve read a few of his books, this and the “open borders” one. I think the problem is it’s kind of “preaching to the choir” for people who are already ideologically aligned. As in, the solutions he advocates, despite being backed up with lots of numbers, are not actually convincing anyone who wasn’t already receptive.
So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.
The "open borders" book was recommended to me by a friend, but I passed after reading in a summary that my uninformed intuition about the bad economic effects of the policy on at least some large-ish fraction of existing citizens of rich countries was considered correct by Caplan, that he was relying on some kind of compensation to make these folks whole, in a world in which this plan was made reality. Seeing as we've rarely done a good job of this in the past, that sure looked like a great way to convince me open borders were not a good idea, from the perspective of most people already living in rich countries.
Does it make a good argument that doesn't rely on that kind of thing, or did I make the right call?
(Weinersmith's part, though I probably hold positions very similar to him on most issues, just looked... not even near the edge of being compelling, from what I could tell in the couple summaries I looked at)
Not really. If you put it all together Caplan's world would be a United States with a population of 5 trillion uneducated people. This would propel us to unimagined and unprecedented wealth somehow.
So it just gets dismissed as “not even wrong” unfairly or not.