Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. His major fields of interest are Public Choice, Public Finance, and Monetary Economics. Currently, his primary research interest is Public Economics. He has criticized the assumptions of rational voters that form the basis of public choice theory, but generally agrees with their conclusions based on his own model of “rational irrationality.”

A great deal of his professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism. Caplan is also well known for his criticisms of the Austrian school of economics. While he once considered himself an economist in the Austrian tradition, he has since rejected Austrian “praxeological” methods in favor of neoclassical methods. While Austrian economists have universally disagreed with his criticisms, many have praised him as one of their more knowledgeable and interesting critics.

He has published in notable journals such as American Economic Review, Public Choice, the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, Social Science Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economic, among others.

He is a blogger at EconLog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

He received his B.S. in economics from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.