Most cranks are.

Caplan is a radical libertarian bent on annihilating what few functioning social institutions we have left.

Inflation-adjusted wages have been at worst stagnant. Inflation-adjusting prices is necessary for these comparisons to be meaningful at all.

This is a website for engineers, you should be embarrassed to be posting these completely innumerate comments.

In other words, trans people can't use the bathrooms matching their gender identity.

> Calls for ideological diversity, not just at the campus level, "but within every field, department, school, and teaching unit."

In other words, every academic department is susceptible to ideological litmus tests defined by the state. If Trump's white house feels like your Computer Science department has too many Democrats in it, you fix that problem or you lose your funding.

> Restricts student visas to foreign students who ... "are ... supportive of, American and Western values."

In other words, another ideological litmus test, only in this case the consequence is that foreign students can be thrown out at will.

> Requires that "university employees, in their capacity as university representatives" as well as all colleges, faculties, departments, and other academic units "abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events"

In other words, tenured faculty lose their right to free speech.

That happens, you believe?

In the same vein, people do not have a right to a fair trial--in the extreme, this would lead to a contradiction with other rights (e.g. judges being forced to practice law at gunpoint).

> I have to laugh, even as a liberal myself.

Probably not as much of one as you think.

But those details are part of what make the human art interesting to contemplate. I wouldn't even think of buying an art book with reproductions of such low quality--at that point you do lose what's essential about the art work, what makes it possible to enjoy.

This is an unimaginative way of looking at things. For one thing, many people do still listen to the radio, where slots are still limited. Those who don't listen to the radio often listen to equivalents of the radio--Spotify or Apple Music playlists that are curated and quite likely involve the same kind of payola issues that the radio had.

It's the same structure: musicians reach their audience through a middleman that has an interest in promoting a particular group. Spotify is only a piece of this, you also have album promotion campaigns, brand tie-ins, and so on. (For example, did you know that the artist who plays the Superbowl half-time gets paid a pittance for it?)

> Even if you reset today's system - for argument's sake, we make everybody forget all previous musicians, and start from scratch - what would happen is that those musicians that are "good", measured in popularity, will garner more and more audience and popularity, leading to what looks like today's system (but just with perhaps a different person)

The whole premise of this is that there's a universal quality of "good" that you can assess for a particular musician. That's nonsense. Some people love Taylor Swift, others can't tolerate her. Some people find a Bartok string quartet sublime, others think it's just noise. There's no universality to appeal to here. At best you can create an average over the population--but that changes from time to time, place to place, demographic to demographic.

Popularity involves skill but also luck. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders": musicians who happen to be in the right place at the right time but are never able to repeat it. For every musician with a steady career, there are many of these.

> That's why my condition, if you wanted to equally distribute the profits of music making, is to segregate markets into small, non-overlapping segments. You will not be allowed to pay for or listen to music from another market segment. This way, no matter how good or popular a musician is, they only ever earn the maximal of their own (small) market. But i don't see why such a system is good, with the exception that some bad musicians gets to be the big fish in a small pond.

This is already the way genres work, with the difference that these segments are voluntarily chosen. There are people who listen to, for instance, modern classical and almost nothing else, or death metal and almost nothing else, etc.

I think a good system would be one that works like ours, but with more to cushion artists from the random contingencies of the market. A lot of this already exists--grants given to artists in areas that are deemed culturally valuable, for example. Laws placing minimum prices on music licensing for film, TV, etc. Probably there should be laws forcing Spotify to be more transparent about royalties and promotions as well.