Using data from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy (SAEE), Caplan categorizes the roots of economic errors into four biases: anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work, and pessimistic.

The principles of comparative advantage allow two countries to benefit a great deal from trade, even if one is worse than the other in every single way.

Caplan makes special emphasis of the movement away from farming over the past 200 years, from nearly 95% of Americans as farmers in 1800 to just 3% in 1999, as an illustrative example.

Caplan refers to the pessimistic bias as a "tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy.

The SAEE asked 1,510 random members of the American public and 250 people with PhDs in economics the same questions concerning the economy.

The answers to the questions are often different: the public often blames technology, outsourcing, high corporate profits, and downsizing as reasons for why growth is lower than it could be.

Caplan notes that the chasm between economists and the general public might arguably be due to bias on the expert's part.

"[1]: 54  In turn, if self-serving bias is unavoidable, it would likewise skew the perceptions of the non-wealthy, causing them to believe both the "'ought' claim" that government should reduce inequality of wealth and the "'is' claims" that existing inequalities of outcome are severe and are perpetuated by corporate and governmental power structures.

In standard neoclassical economics, people are assumed to be rational; the notion of systematic bias is considered to be a sloppy assumption.

In many ways, Caplan agrees: most people are rational when it comes to choosing a job, buying milk, hiring employees, and selecting a business strategy.

Caplan argues that, "Since delusional political beliefs are free, the voter consumes until he reaches his 'satiation point,' believing whatever makes him feel best.

Conventional public choice either emphasizes the efficiency of democracy (as in the case of Donald Wittman) or, more commonly, democratic failure because of the interaction between self-interested politicians or bureaucrats, well-organized, rent-seeking special interests and a largely indifferent general public (as in the work of Gordon Tullock, James M. Buchanan, and many others).

Caplan, however, emphasizes that democratic failure exists and places the blame for it squarely on the general public.

[citation needed] The book was reviewed in the popular press, including in The Wall Street Journal,[3] The New York Times,[4] and the New Yorker.

[13] Other participants in the debate, who critiqued various aspects of Caplan's thesis, included David Estlund, Loren Lomasky, and Jeffrey Friedman.

[15] Block was highly critical of Caplan's attempts to paint Austrian economics as a form of irrational free-market extremism.

He also criticized Caplan for not referencing Hans-Hermann Hoppe's book Democracy: The God That Failed that had a similar theme.