(Gilmore Girls fan site)
Still watching Gilmore Girls
and still loving it

Bryan Caplan, one of my favorite living economists—seriously, folks, and not just because he watched Gilmore Girls and appreciated the “quality writing.” Bryan Caplan is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the founder and curator of the online Museum of Communism. He’s also the author of the recent book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, which I haven’t read yet but which might just explain a lot that happened during the recent election.

Apparently, he’s working on a new book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and he’s determined to work a scene from Gilmore Girls into it. It’s the scene where Lorelai and Luke are giving a career talk at Stars Hollow High, and the kids start asking Lorelai about getting pregnant at 16, and she gets flustered, because they start challenging her statement that it was a bad choice.

Every time I watch that scene, I want to shout through the TV set at Lorelai, “Don’t hem and haw! Just tell them the truth! You have no regrets! But you gave up a lot to have Rory, and you had to work really hard, and you still didn’t make it as far as you probably would have if your life had taken a different course. Life is full of hard choices, bad choices, and good choices.”

Says Bryan in a post about this “Lorelai Paradox”:

Lorelai, like most women in her situation, has deep feelings of ambivalence about her youthful choices. But if you take the students’ arguments seriously, the scene is profoundly philosophical. Its lesson: Despite any feelings of ambivalence, Lorelai and her real-world analogues have nothing to regret - and no need to make apologies to the world.

Did I mention that Bryan Caplan is one of my favorite living economists?

-TimK