Podcast appearances and mentions of Anne Case

Episode Summary In this powerful and deeply thoughtful episode, political economist and changemaker Katherine Trebeck joins Carolyn to explore what it means to build an economy that works for people and planet. Katherine shares her journey from working with Oxfam and Rio Tinto to co-founding the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll), and how her work is reshaping the way we define economic success. Together, they unpack the shortcomings of our current growth-at-all-costs model and what's possible when we embrace a wellbeing economy — one designed with purpose, prevention, equity, and people-powered participation at its core. Katherine also reflects on the rise of Trumpism, the role of business in systemic change, and where she finds hope in uncertain times. What You'll Learn in This Episode Why GDP is an outdated and inadequate measure of progress What a wellbeing economy is — and what it looks and feels like in practice The 'four Ps' of a wellbeing economy: Purpose, Prevention, Pre-distribution, and People-powered How businesses can be powerful actors in system change Why the current economic system is driving disconnection and despair The impact of far-right populism and why it signals an urgent need for economic transformation The power of storytelling and imagination in creating systemic change Key Themes Discussed Economic system change and the rise of the wellbeing economy movement False binaries: economy vs society, business vs love Reimagining success: from growth to wellbeing Practical pathways for transforming economic structures The danger of failing systems and the opportunity they create for bold leadership Community, belonging, and the importance of connection in resilience The role of business leaders in shaping a more just and sustainable future Guest Bio Katherine Trebeck is a political economist, writer and advocate for economic system change. She co-founded the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) and WEAll Scotland, and played a key role in initiating the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) partnership. Katherine is Writer-at-Large and Co-Director of the Compassion in Financial Services Hub at the University of Edinburgh, and Strategic Advisor for the Centre for Policy Development. She also serves in advisory and governance roles for numerous progressive economic institutions around the world. Links & Resources Katherine's website Follow Katherine on LinkedIn Follow Katerine on BlueSky Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) Katherine's TEDx Talk: “Why the Future Economy has to be a Wellbeing Economy” Carolyn Butler-Madden on LinkedIn: As mentioned in the episode: Link to video of “Restaurant of Mistaken Orders” The “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” book by Anne Case and Angus Deaton More episodes of the For Love & Money Podcast

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Sam Pressler speak with Dr. Ian Marcus Corbin about loneliness as a spiritual and material crisis, agency, world making, and Restoring the Common Good.Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher in Cambridge, MA, serving on the faculties of Neurology and Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, where he co-directs the Human Network Initiative, and is a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita. He has a book on belonging forthcoming.Check out Sam's new policy framework.Works Referenced in this podcast:Radical Hope by Jonathon LearDeaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism boy Anne Case and Angus DeatonThe Loneliest Crowd by Ian Marcus CorbinWe Were Wrong About What Happened to America in 2020 by Eric KlinenbergAlienated America by Timothy CarneyHow Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century by Hahrie HanGeorge W Bush's Ownership SocietyWhy is it So Expensive to Build Stuff in America on Plain English Podcast with Derek ThompsonZero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter ThielThe Left Needs a Spiritual Renaissance. So Does America. By Ian Marcus Corbin and Senator Chris MurphyREMARKS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS, MARCH 18, 1968 by Robert F. KennedyRead about the Saguaro Seminars in this book by Robert Putnam - Better Together: Restoring the American CommunityRead about Rawlsian Bracketing here - Neutered by Neutrality: The Abiding Influence of John Rawls, Part Two by Randall Smith“A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto RíosThis episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change. 

On July 8, AEI's Brent Orrell hosted the fifth event in the “On the Front Porch” series with the Brookings Institution's Tony Pipa featuring Stanford University Professor Keith Humphreys and AEI's Sally Satel, two experts in opioid treatment and the societal effects of drug abuse in rural areas. They discuss the factors that led to the opioid crisis and the challenges in resolving it. Mentioned in the EpisodeTony Pipa (Brookings)Keith Humphreys (Stanford)Sally Satel (AEI)Pavlovian conditioningOrigins of the Opioid Crisis and its Enduring Impacts by Abby Alpert et. alDeath in Mud Lick Book by Eric EyreDr. Art Van ZeeDeaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus DeatonGolden Leaf Foundation

If you listened to our last couple of episodes, you'll have heard some pretty skeptical takes on AI. But if you look at the stock market right now, you won't see any trace of that skepticism. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the chip company NVIDIA, whose chips are used in the majority of AI systems, has seen their stock shoot up by 700%. A month ago, that briefly made them the most valuable company in the world, with a market cap of more than $3.3 trillion.And it's not just chip companies. The S&P 500 (the index that tracks the 500 largest companies in the U.S.) is at an all-time high this year, in no small part because of the sheen of AI. And here in Canada, a new report from Microsoft claims that generative AI will add $187 billion to the domestic economy by 2030. As wild as these numbers are, they may just be the tip of the iceberg. Some researchers argue that AI will completely revolutionize our economy, leading to per capita growth rates of 30%. In case those numbers mean absolutely nothing to you, 25 years of 30% growth means we'd be a thousand times richer than we are now. It's hard to imagine what that world would like – or how the average person fits into it. Luckily, Rana Foroohar has given this some thought. Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor at The Financial Times. I wanted to have her on the show to help me work through what these wild predictions really mean and, most importantly, whether or not she thinks they'll come to fruition.Mentioned:“Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity” by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (2023)“Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises” by Charles P. Kindleberger (1978)“Irrational Exuberance” by Robert J. Shiller (2016)“Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?” by Goldman Sachs Research (2024)“Workers could be the ones to regulate AI” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2023)“The Financial Times and OpenAI strike content licensing deal” (Financial Times, 2024)“Is AI about to kill what's left of journalism?” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020)“The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” by David H. Autor, David Dorn & Gordon H. Hanson (2016)Further Reading:“Beware AI euphoria” by Rana Foroohar (Financial Times, 2024)“AlphaGo” by Google DeepMind (2020)

Bloomberg Radio host Barry Ritholtz speaks to Angus Deaton, senior scholar at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. In 1976, he became a professor of econometrics at the University of Bristol and moved to Princeton as a professor of economics and international affairs in 1983. He became an emeritus professor in 2016. In 2015, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is the author of almost 200 papers and six books, including The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality; Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality; and, with Anne Case, of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sir Angus Deaton is a British-American economist, and one of the world's most eminent in his profession. He was the sole recipient of the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, principally for his analysis of consumer demand, poverty, and welfare. But he is also among the world's most famous (perhaps even notorious) economists for the work he has done to shine a light on inequality in America.He is perhaps best known for his influential 2020 bestseller, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, co-authored with his wife Anne Case, who is likewise an eminent economist at Princeton University, where both are emeritus professors. They coined the term “deaths of despair” to highlight the rising mortality rates among white non-elderly Americans, a change largely due to a rise in drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.These rising mortality and morbidity rates, Case and Deaton further documented, accompanied increasing divergences between less-educated and well-educated Americans on other indicators of well-being including wages, labor force participation, marriage, social isolation, obesity, and pain – all of which, they concluded, pointed toward a rise in despair that was linked to broad social and economic trends.In this podcast discussion, Sir Angus Deaton discusses his new book, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. He talks about his education in Britain, the work that led to his Nobel Prize, the impact of the Nobels on the economics profession, and the principal questions he has wrestled with as an economist in his adoptive country, the United States. He also discusses his theory that what has led the U.S. to become an outlier among developed countries in terms of its declining life expectancy (as well as other indications of a failure of social flourishing) rests principally with the decline in jobs for less-educated Americans. And, he posits, this decline has come about in response to globalization and technological change, exacerbated by what he calls “the grotesquely exorbitant cost of our healthcare system” as well as the country's fragmentary safety net.

When economist Angus Deaton immigrated to the United States from Britain in the early 1980s, he was awed by America's strengths and shocked by the extraordinary gaps he witnessed between people. In this conversation based on his new book, Economics in America, the Nobel Prize-winning economist explains in clear terms how the field of economics addresses the most pressing issues of our time—from poverty, retirement, and the minimum wage to the ravages of the nation's uniquely disastrous health care system—and narrates Deaton's account of his experiences as a naturalized U.S. citizen and academic economist. Deaton is witty and pulls no punches. In his incisive, candid, and funny book, he describes the everyday lives of working economists, recounting the triumphs as well as the disasters, and tells the inside story of the Nobel Prize in economics and the journey that led him to Stockholm to receive one. He discusses the ongoing tensions between economics and politics―and the extent to which economics has any content beyond the political prejudices of economists―and reflects on whether economists bear at least some responsibility for the growing despair and rising populism in America. Blending rare personal insights with illuminating perspectives on the social challenges that confront us today, Deaton offers a disarmingly frank critique of his own profession while shining a light on his adopted country's policy accomplishments and failures. Shermer and Deaton discuss: the science of science is economics • winning a Nobel Prize • what economists do, and how they determine causality • Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand • why a college education matters • meritocracy and “Just World” theory • minimum wage • healthcare • poverty • inequality • opioid crisis, alcoholism, suicide • inflation and interest rates • modern monetary theory • think tanks. Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus and Senior Scholar at Princeton University. He is the author (with Anne Case) of the New York Times bestselling book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality, and his new book Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, all from Princeton University Press.

On this episode, political economist and Watson professor Mark Blyth talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir Angus Deaton about his new book, “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.” You may not know Angus Deaton by name, but you probably know a phrase he helped to make famous: “deaths of despair.” In 2015, Deaton and his wife and research partner Anne Case published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates among white middle-aged men and women in the 2000s and 2010s in the United States. Deaton and Case attributed this to a confluence of factors, including economic stagnation, social isolation and the opioid crisis. In explaining this topic, they did something economists usually avoid doing: They told a sweeping but still complex and nuanced story about American society and economy in the 21st century.In this conversation, Mark and Angus Deaton discuss Deaton's new book, as well as its relationship to his work on deaths of despair. They also explore why the field of economics ignored the issue of inequality for so long, and why in the last decade that's started to change. This episode was originally broadcast on the Rhodes Center Podcast, another podcast from the Watson Institute. If you want to hear a longer version of this conversation, you can find it by subscribing to the Rhodes Center Podcast or by visiting their website. Learn more about and purchase “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.”Learn more about the Watson Institute's other podcasts.Transcript coming soon to our website.

In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a paper that revealed something startling: an increase in mortality rates in the United States among white middle-aged men and women between the years of 1999 and 2013. They published a book in 2020 that aimed to explain the trend, which they attributed to — among other factors — economic stagnation, social isolation, and the opioid crisis. The book, titled “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,”, caused a stir inside and outside the field of economics, as people tried to make sense of America's economy and society in the Trump years. On this episode, Rhodes Center Director Mark Blyth talks with Deaton about his newest book “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality,” which takes a broader view of the issues brought up in “Deaths of Despair.” They explore the pervasiveness of inequality in America, how it relates to the “deaths of despair” phenomenon, and why the field of economics often seems blind to the most pressing issues facing individuals and communities.Learn more about and purchase “Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality”Learn more about the Watson Institute's other award-winning podcastsTranscript coming soon to our website

In their latest research in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Anne Case and Angus Deaton show that life expectancy for adults without a BA has been on the decline for almost a decade. On this episode of the Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity, Case discusses the new findings with Carol Graham of Brookings.  Show notes and transcript The Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity is part of the Brookings Podcast Network. Subscribe and listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Send feedback email to podcasts@brookings.edu.

Angus Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, Emeritus, and the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality and, with Anne Case, of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. His most recent book is Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality.  In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Angus Deaton discuss why he thinks the core predictor of economic and social outcomes in America is not primarily race or class, but one's attainment of a four-year college degree; why America (and Scotland) are unique among wealthy, industrial nations for their increasing mortality rates; and how to best explain the growing sense of social dislocation that contributes to so-called “deaths of despair.” This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John Taylor Williams, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Angus Deaton—Scottish immigrant, Nobelist, and one of Cardiff's favorite economists—has written a new, forthcoming book titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explore the Land of Inequality. It's great, if also hard to categorize. Partly it's a memoir, about his humble origins in Scotland, where he was born; his studies at Cambridge with better-heeled peers; and his subsequent decades as a Princeton University, Nobel Prize winning economist. The book is also partly a reflection on a lifetime of practicing economics, and the good and bad of the economics profession. There's plenty of both.And finally it's a series of observations about the American economy, including a fascinating self-analysis of his own ambivalence towards the US, his adopted country—the many great things here, including the lives that he and his family have led; and also, yes, some of the devastatingly grim things about life here for so many others. Related links: Economics in America, by Angus Deaton (available for pre-order)The Great Escape, by Angus DeatonMortality and the economy, featuring Anne Case and Angus Deaton Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Links to some episodes mentioned:Being “Irrepressible” with Little Rock Nine Member Minnijean Brown-TrickeyThe Dire Threat of Global Authoritarianism with Rula JebrealAI: “An Exponential Disruption” with Kate CrawfordThe Care Economy with Ai-jen PooWhy Americans Are Dying So Young with Anne Case and Angus Deaton“A Moral Moment in America” with Sen. Raphael Warnock#WITHpod & Strict Scrutiny Crossover (2023) 

Life expectancy in the U.S. has been on the decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the COVID-19 pandemic killed more than 1 million people in America, 2014-2015 was actually an inflection point for mortality rates. What went wrong and what's behind the downward trend? Our guests this week point out that drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism have fueled an increase in what they term ‘deaths of despair.' Anne Case is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus at the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs. Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize Winner and Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department. Together, they published their groundbreaking findings in 2015 and later co-authored “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” in March of 2020. Case and Deaton join WITHpod to discuss what their findings reveal about capitalism and the U.S. healthcare system, education-related disparities in mortality, what might be done to reverse the surge in deaths and more.

La France est-elle addict à la drogue ? Pas une semaine sans règlement de compte lié au trafic, que ce soit à Marseille ou désormais dans des petites villes ou villes moyennes jusqu'ici épargnées… Alors à quoi ressemble la France de la drogue aujourd'hui ? Comment faire pour que cette “génération kalach”, qui s'entre-tue aujourd'hui, finisse par poser les armes ? Enfin, quelle est la responsabilité des uns et des autres ? Celle des pouvoirs publics mais aussi la nôtre, celle des citoyens ? On en débat avec : Johanna ROLLAND, Maire (PS) de Nantes, présidente de Nantes métropole, présidente de France urbaine (association regroupant les métropoles françaises), première secrétaire nationale déléguée du Parti socialiste Jean-Michel DÉCUGIS, Grand-reporter au Parisien Naïri ZADOURIAN, Avocate au barreau de Paris Jérôme PIERRAT, Journaliste, spécialiste du grand banditisme Camille CHAIZE, Porte-parole du ministère de l'Intérieur Choix de Laure : Morts de désespoir : L'avenir du capitalisme d'Angus Deaton, Anne Case et Laurent Bury aux éditions PUF

In This Episode:Sarah Gustafson joins the podcast to discuss the theme of her course at Harvard University, “Anxiety and Restlessness in Democratic Times”how America's “mental health crisis” is driven by the quality of American souls and affected by the American regimethe legacy of Harvey Mansfield as a scholar, public political philosopher, and intellectual giant at HarvardTexts Mentioned:Democracy in America by Alexis de TocquevilleManliness by Harvey MansfieldDeaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus DeatonBowling Alone by Robert PutnamThe Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitzgeraldConfessions by Augustine of HippoRepublic by PlatoCity of God: Against the Pagans by Augustine of HippoNicomachean Ethics by AristotlePolitics by AristotleLeisure, the Basis of Culture by Josef PieperPensees by Blaise PascalLost in Thought by Zena HitzThe Emperor's Club movieBecome a part of ISI:Become a MemberSupport ISIUpcoming ISI Events

Edward Glaeser is the chair of the Harvard department of economics, and the author of the best books and papers about cities (including Survival of the City and Triumph of the City).He explains why:* Cities are resilient to terrorism, remote work, & pandemics,* Silicon Valley may collapse but the Sunbelt will prosper, * Opioids show UBI is not a solution to AI* & much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Mars, Terrorism, & Capitals (0:06:32) - Decline, Population Collapse, & Young Men (0:14:44) - Urban Education (0:18:35) - Georgism, Robert Moses, & Too Much Democracy? (0:25:29) - Opioids, Automation, & UBI (0:29:57) - Remote Work, Taxation, & Metaverse (0:42:29) - Past & Future of Silicon Valley (0:48:56) - Housing Reform (0:52:32) - Europe's Stagnation, Mumbai's Safety, & Climate ChangeTranscriptMars, Terrorism, & CapitalsDwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Professor Edward Glaeser, who is the chair of the Harvard Department of Economics, and author of some of the best books and papers about cities. Professor Glazer, thanks for coming on The Lunar Society.Edward Glaeser 0:00:25Oh, thank you so much for having me on! Especially given that The Lunar Society pays homage to one of my favorite moments in urban innovation in Birmingham during the 18th century.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:26Oh wow, I didn't even catch that theme, but that's a great title. My first question is, What advice would you give to Elon Musk about building the first cities on Mars?Edward Glaeser 0:00:35[laughs] That's a great question. I think that demand for urbanism in Mars is going to be relatively limited. Cities are always shaped by the transportation costs that are dominant in the era in which they're created. That both determines the micro-shape of the city and determines its macro future. So cities on Mars are, of course, going to be limited by the likely prohibitive cost of traveling back and forth to the mother planet. But we also have to understand what cars people are going to be using on Mars. I assume these are all going to be Teslas, and everyone is going to be driving around in some appropriate Tesla on Mars. So it's going to be a very car-oriented living experience. I think the best strategy would be to create a fairly flexible plan, much like the 1811 grid plan in New York, that allows entrepreneurs to change land use over time and put a few bets on what's necessary for infrastructure and then just let the city evolve organically. Usually, the best way is to put more trust in individual initiative than central planning–– at least in terms of micromanaging what goes where. Dwarkesh Patel 0:01:58Gotcha. Now, since 9/11, many terrorist groups have obviously intended to cause harm to cities. But by and large, at least in Western countries, they haven't managed to kill off thousands of people like they were able to do during 9/11. What explains this? Do you think cities are just more resilient to these kinds of attacks than we would have otherwise thought? Or are the terrorists just not being creative enough?Edward Glaeser 0:02:20I don't know. There's also the question of what the objectives are. Even for the 9/11 terrorists, their end game was not to kill urbanites in America. It was to effect change in Saudi Arabia or in the Middle East more generally. We've also protected our cities better. If you think about it, two things go on simultaneously when you collect economic activity in one place in terms of defense: one of which is they become targets–– and of course, that's what we saw on 9/11; it's hard to think of a symbol that's clearer than those twin towers. But at the same time, they're also a defensible space. The origin of the urban agglomeration and use for cities and towns was the fact that they could be walled settlements. Those walls that brought together people collectively for defense are the ultimate reason why these towns came about. The walls provided protection.I think the same thing has been playing out with cities over the past 20 years. Just as New York was a target, it was also a place where post-2001, the city ramped up its anti-terrorism efforts. They put together a massive group as London had previously done. The cameras that implemented congestion pricing in London were the same cameras that used against the Irish terrorists. So both effects went on. I think we've been fortunate and that we've shown the strength of cities in terms of protecting themselves.Dwarkesh Patel 0:03:52If you look throughout ancient world history, there are so many examples of empires that are basically synonymous with their capital cities (ex. Rome or Athens, or Sparta). But today, you would never think of America as the ‘Washingtonian Empire.' What is the explanation for why the capital city has become much less salient in terms of the overall nation? Is there a Coasian answer here?Edward Glaeser 0:04:20There are specific things that went on with English offshoot colonies where in many cases, because they recognized the tendency of the capital city to attract lots of excess goodies that had been taken from elsewhere in the country, they located the capital city in a remote place. It's actually part of the story of the Hamilton musical in The Room Where it Happens. Part of the deal was about moving the capital of the US to a relatively remote Virginia location rather than having it be in Philadelphia, New York. That was partially to reflect the fact that the South needed to be protected against all of the extra assets going to New York and Philadelphia.So, whether or not this is Canberra or Ottawa, you see all of these English offshoot places without their capitals in the big metropoles. Whereas traditionally, what's happened in these places that have been around for centuries, is that even if the capital didn't start off as the largest city, it became the largest city because centuries of French leaders thought their business was to take wealth from elsewhere in France and make Paris great. I think the French Empire was as synonymous with Paris as most of those ancient empires were with their capital city. I guess the question I could throw back to you is, what are places where this is not true? Moscow, St. Peter's, and Beijing are examples. Do we think that Beijing is less synonymous with China than the Roman Empire is with Rome? Maybe a little–– possibly just because China is so big and Beijing is a relatively small share of the overall population of China. But it's more so certainly than Washington, D.C. is with the U.S. Decline, Population Collapse, & Young MenDwarkesh Patel 0:06:32That's a really interesting answer. Once a city goes through a period of decline (maybe an important industry moved out, or maybe it's had a sequence of bad governance), are you inclined to bet that there will be some sort of renewal, or do you think that things will continue to get worse? In other words, are you a momentum trader, or are you a reversion to the mean trader when it comes to cities?Edward Glaeser 0:06:54I can tell you different answers for different outcomes. For housing prices, I can tell you exactly what we know statistically about this, which is at higher frequencies, let's say one year, housing prices show wickedly large levels of momentum. For five years or more, they show very significant levels of mean reversion. It's a short-term cycle in housing prices followed by decline. Population just shows enormous persistence on the downside. So what happens is you typically will have an economic shock. Detroit used to be the most productive place on the planet in 1950, but a bunch of shocks occurred in transportation technology which made it no longer such a great place to make cars for the world. It takes a century for the city to respond in terms of its population because the housing is sticky. The housing remains there. So between the 50s and 60s, the population declines a little bit, and prices drop. They drop sufficiently far that you're not going to build a lot of new housing, but people are going to still stay in the houses. They're not going to become vacant. So, the people are still there because the houses are still there. During the 60s to 70s, the population drops a  little bit further and prices kind of stay constant, but still it's not enough to build new housing. So the declines are incredibly persistent, and growth is less so. So on the boom side, you have a boom over a 10-year period that's likely to mean revert and it's not nearly as persistent because it doesn't have this sticky housing element to it. In terms of GDP per capita, it's much more of a random walk there in terms of the straight income stuff. It's the population that's really persistent, which is, in fact, the reality of a persistent economy.Dwarkesh Patel 0:08:44Interesting. Why don't Americans move as much as they used to a century ago? So you have a paper from 2018 titled Jobs in the Heartland, where you talk about how there's increasing divergence between the unemployment rates between different parts of America. Why don't Americans just move to places where there are better economic circumstances? Edward Glaeser 0:09:04I want to highlight one point here, which is that you said “unemployment rate”, and I want to replace that with non-employment rate. That's partially what we're seeing now. It looks like America's labor force couldn't be better in terms of the low levels of unemployment, but what's happened over the last 50 years is there has been a very large rise in the share of prime-age men who are not in the labor force. So they've stopped looking for work, and those guys are miserable. It's not that those guys are somehow rather productive and happy,–– this is a very bad outcome for prime-age men. I'm separating men from women, not to say that the female labor markets aren't just as important, just as fascinating, just as critical. But labor force participation means something different for many women than it does for men. There are many women who are not in the labor force who are doing things that are enormously productive socially, like caring for their children and caring for their families.I wish it were symmetric across the genders. It just isn't true. I mean, there just are very few men not in the labor force who are doing anything much other than watching television. It's just a very different thing. So yes, there are big differences in the non-employment rate. There are some parts of America where, for much of the past decade, one in four prime-age men have been jobless. It's an enormous gap. The question is, why don't they get out?I think the answer is really twofold: one of which is the nature of how housing markets have frozen up. Historically, the differences in housing costs in the US weren't that huge across places. Most parts of America had some kind of affordable housing, and it was relatively easy to put up. At the dawn of the 20th century, these were kit helms sold by Sears and Roebuck that sprung up by the thousand. You bought the kit from Sears and Roebuck, and you just built it yourself. After World War II, it was mass-produced homes in places like Levittown.For most of the last 50 years, in places like coastal California or the East Coast, building has just become far more difficult. With the decline of mass-produced housing, it's become far more expensive, and it becomes harder and harder for relatively low-income people to find opportunities in places that have high levels of income, and high levels of opportunity. That's partially why there's not just a general decline in mobility, there's a decline in directed mobility for the poor. Historically, poor people moved from poor areas to rich areas. That's pretty much stopped. In part, that's because rich areas just have very, very expensive housing. The other thing is the rising importance of the informal safety net.So if you think about most particularly prime-aged men, they're not receiving significant handouts from the government except if they're on disability. But they will typically have some form of income, some form of housing that's being provided for them by someone other than themselves. A third of them are living in their parent's homes. That informal safety net is usually very place dependent. Let's say you're living in Eastern Kentucky; it's not like your parents were going to buy you a condo in San Francisco. You can still have your own bedroom, but you can't go anywhere else and still get that level of support. And so that's, I think, another reason why we're increasingly stuck in place.The third you mentioned, is that a third of the non-employed population of young men or is that a third of all young men? Non-employed is a third of non-employed prime aged men. So that's 25 to 54. There are a lot of 45 year olds who are living on their parents' couches or in their old bedroom. It's a fairly remarkable thing.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:49Now, we'll get to housing in just a second, but first, I want to ask you: If the fertility trends in East Asia and many other places continue, what will the impact on cities be if the average age gets much older and the possible eventuality of depopulation?Edward Glaeser 0:12:53That's a really interesting question.The basic age fact on cities is that within the bracket of the sort of high-income or middle-income, for prime-aged parents, cities tend to be relatively bad for them. Once you're in the sort of high end of the upper middle class, the distrust of our public school systems, merited or not, means that that group tends to leave. You have plenty of parents with kids who are lower income, and then you have groups who are part of a demographic barbell that like cities. So this is partially about people who don't feel like they need the extra space and partially because if they're young, they're looking to find prospective mates of various forms.Cities are good for that. Urban proximity works well in the dating market. And they've got time on their hands to enjoy the tremendous amenities and consumption advantages that cities have. For older people, it's less about finding a mate typically, but the urban consumption amenity still has value. The ability to go to museums, the ability to go to concerts, and those sorts of activities continue to draw people in.Going forward, I would have continued to expect the barbell dimension to persist until we actually get around to solving our urban schools and declining population levels. If anything, I would have thought that COVID skews you a bit younger because older people are more anxious and remember that cities can also bring pandemics. They remember that it can be a nice thing to have a suburban home if you have to shelter in place. So that might lead some people who would have otherwise relocated to a dense urban core to move out, to stay out.Urban EducationDwarkesh Patel 0:14:44You just mentioned urban schools, and I'm curious because you've written about how urban schools are one of the reasons people who have children might not want to stay in cities. I'm curious why it's the case that American cities have some of the best colleges in the world, but for some reason, their K-to-12 is significantly worse, or it can be worse than the K-to-12 in other parts of the country. Why is it that the colleges are much better in cities, but K to 12 is worse? Edward Glaeser 0:15:19So it's interesting. It's not as if, I don't think there's ever been an Englishman who felt like they had to leave London to get better schools for the kids, or a Frenchman who thought they needed to leave Paris. It's not like there's something that's intrinsic to cities, but I've always thought it's a reflection of the fact that instead of allowing all of the competition and entrepreneurship that thrives in cities and that makes cities great, in the case of K to 12 public education, that's vanished.And your example of colleges is exactly right. I'm in this industry; I'm a participant in this industry and let me tell you, this industry is pretty competitive. Whether or not we're competing for the best students, at our level we go through an annual exercise of trying to make sure we get Ph.D. students to come to our program instead of our competitors, whether it's by hiring faculty members or attracting undergraduates, we occupy a highly competitive industry where we are constantly aware of what we need to do to make ourselves better. It doesn't mean that we're great along every dimension, but at least we're trying. K through 12 education has a local monopoly.So it's like you take the great urban food, leisure and hospitality, and food industries, and instead of having in New York City by a hyper-competitive world where you constantly have entry, you say, “You know what? We're going to have one publicly managed canteen and it's going to provide all the food in New York City and we're not going to allow any competitors or the competitors are going to have to pay a totally different thing.” That canteen is probably going to serve pretty crappy food. That's in some sense what happens when you have a large-scale public monopoly that replaces private competition.Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:50But isn't that also true of rural schools? Why are urban schools often worse? Edward Glaeser 0:17:46There's much more competition in suburban schools. So in terms of the suburban schools, typically there are lots of suburbs, and people are competing amongst them. The other thing that's actually important is (I don't want to over exaggerate this, but I think it is something that we need to think a little bit about) the role of public sector unions and particularly teachers unions in these cases. In the case of a suburban school district, the teachers union is no more empowered on the management side than they would be in the private sector.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:30So in a normal private sector, you've got a large company, you've got a union, and they're arguing with each other. It's a level playing field. It's all kind of reasonable. I'm not saying management has done awful things, and that unions have done foolish things. I'm not saying that either are perfect, but it's kind of well-matched. It's matched that way in the suburbs as well. You've got highly empowered parents who are highly focused on their kids and they're not dominated.It's not like the teachers union dominates elections in Westchester County. Whereas if you go into a big city school district, you have two things going on. One of which is the teachers tend to be highly involved politically and quite capable of influencing management essentially, because they are an electoral force to be reckoned with, not just by the direct votes, but also with their campaign spending. On top of this, you're talking about a larger group of disparate parents, many of whom have lots of challenges to face and it becomes much harder for them to organize effectively on the other side. So for those reasons, big urban schools can do great things and many individual teachers can be fantastic, but it's an ongoing challenge. Georgism, Robert Moses, & Too Much Democracy?Dwarkesh Patel 0:18:35What is your opinion on Georgism? Do cities need a land value tax? Would it be better if all the other taxes are replaced by one?Edward Glaeser 0:18:41Okay. So Henry George, I don't know any economist who doesn't think that a land value tax is an attractive idea. The basic idea is we're going to tax land rather than taxing real estate values. And you would probably implement this in practice by evaluating the real estate and then subtracting the cost of construction, (at least for anything that was built up, meaning you'd form some value of the structures and you just subtract it).The attractive thing from most of our perspectives is it doesn't create the same disincentive to build that a real estate tax does. Real estate tax says, “Oh, you know what? I might want to keep this thing as a parking lot for a couple of years so I don't have to pay taxes on it.”If it were a land value tax, you're going to pay the same tax, whether or not it's a parking lot or whether or not you're going to put a high rise on it, so you might as well put the high rise on it and we could use the space. So I think by and large, that's a perfectly sensible idea. I'd like to see more places using land value taxes or using land value taxes in exchange for property taxes.Where George got it wrong is the idea that a land value tax is going to solve all the problems of society or all the problems of cities. That is ludicrously not true.One could make an argument that in those places that just have a property tax, you could replace it with a land value tax with little loss, but at the national level, it's not a particularly progressive tax in lots of ways. It would be hard to figure out how to fund all the things you want to fund, especially since there are lots of things that we do that are not very land intensive. I think George was imagining a world in which pretty much all value-creating enterprises had a lot of land engaged. So it's a good idea, yes. A panacea, no. Dwarkesh Patel 0:20:20No, that's a good point. I mean, Google's offices in San Francisco are probably generating more value than you would surmise just from the quantity of land they have there. Do American cities need more great builders like Robert Moses?Edward Glaeser 0:20:36Robert Caro's The Power Broker is one of the great biographies of the past 100 years, unquestionably. The only biography that I think is clearly better is Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, right? I mean, it's Caro is truly amazing. That being said, I would not exactly call it a fair and balanced view of Robert. I mean, it is true that Robert Moses was high handed, and it is true that there are things that he did that were terrible, that you never want to do again. But on the other hand, the man got stuff built. I mean, I think of myself as a child growing up in New York City, and whether or not it was the public pool that I swam in or the parks that I played in, or the roads that I traveled on, they were all delivered by Robert Moses. There's got to be a middle ground, which is, no, we're not going to run roughshod over the neighborhood as Robert Moses did, but we're still going to build stuff. We're still going to deliver new infrastructure and we're not going to do it for 10 times more than every other country in the world does it.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:37We're actually going to have sensible procurement policies that bring in things at a reasonable cost, and I think we need to balance a little bit back towards Robert Moses in order to have slightly more empowered builders who actually are able to deliver American cities the infrastructure they need at an affordable cost. Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:57Do we have too much democracy at the local level? You wrote a paper in 2017 titled The Political Economy of Transportation Investments and one of the points you make there is that the local costs are much more salient to people for new construction than the public benefits, and the benefits to newcomers would be. Does that mean we have too much federalism? Should we just have far less power at the city level and not universally? There are lots of good things that local control does.Edward Glaeser 0:22:25I do think we have too much local ability to say no to new housing projects. So that's a particular case that I'm focused on. I think it's exactly right that the near neighbors to a project internalize all of the extra noise and perhaps extra traffic that they're going to have due to this project. They probably overestimate it because they are engaging in a bit of status quo bias and they think the present is great and can't imagine any change.By contrast, none of the people who would benefit from the new project are able to vote. All of the families that would love to move into this neighborhood are being zoned out by the insiders who get a say. I think the goal is to make sure that we have more ability to speak for outsiders. Cities at their best, are places where outsiders can find opportunities. That's part of what's so great about them. It's a tragic thing that we make that so hard. Now I'm not sure exactly that I'm claiming that I want less democracy, but I do want more limitations on how much regulations localities can do. So I think there are certain limitations on local power that I think are fine.I would prefer to call this not a limitation on local democracy, but an increase in the protection of individual rights or the individual rights of landowners to do what they want with their land. Which in effect, is a limit on democracy. But the Bill of Rights is a limit on democracy! The Bill of Rights says that they don't care if 51% of your voters want to take away your right to free assembly. They're not allowed to do that. So in some sense, what I'm just arguing for is more property owners' rights so that they can actually allow more housing in their building.In terms of transportation projects, it's a little bit dicier because here the builder is the government itself. I think the question is you want everyone to have a voice. You don't want every neighborhood to have a veto over every potential housing project or potential transportation project. So you need something that is done more at the state level with representation from the locality, but without the localities getting the ultimate sayDwarkesh Patel 0:24:33I wonder if that paper implies that I should be shorting highly educated areas, at least in terms of real estate. One of the things you mentioned in the paper was that highly educated areas that had much higher opposition were able to foment much more opposition. Edward Glaeser  0:24:49Okay. So here's the real estate strategy, which I have heard that actually there are buyers who do this. You take an area that has historically been very pro-housing. So it's got lots of housing, and it's affordable right now because supply is good. But lots of educated people have moved in. Which means that going forward, they're going to build much less, which means that going forward, they're likely to become much more expensive. So you should, in fact, buy options on that stuff rather than shorting it. You should short if you have a security that is related to the population level in that community. You should short that because the population growth is going to go down, but the prices are likely to go up. Opioids, Automation, & UBIDwarkesh Patel 0:25:29So you wrote a paper last year on the opioid epidemic. One of the points that you made there was that the opioid epidemic could be explained just by the demand side stuff about social isolation and joblessness. I wonder how this analysis makes you think about mass-scale automation in the future. What impact do you think that would have? Assume it's paired with universal basic income or something like that. Do you think it would cause a tremendous increase in opioid abuse?Edward Glaeser 0:26:03I would have phrased it slightly differently–– which is as opposed to the work of two amazing economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who really emphasized the role of deaths of despair; we are much more focused on the supply side. WIth the demand side, meaning just the way that we handled the distribution of large-scale pain relieving medicines, we tell a story where every 30 to 50 years, someone comes up with the same sort of idea, which is we know that human beings love opioids in different forms. We also know they're highly addicted and lead to a terrible cycle. So all of a sudden comes along this innovator says, you know what? I've got a new opioid and it's safe. You don't have to worry about getting addicted to this one. It's magical.It won't work. 100 years ago, that thing was called heroin. 200 years ago, that thing was called morphine. 300 years ago, that thing was called Meldonium. We have these new drugs which have come in, and they've never been safe. But in our case, it was OxyContin and the magic of the time relief was supposed to make it safe, and it wasn't safe.Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:30There's a lot of great work that just shows that the patterns of opioid use was related to the places that just had a lot of pain 30 years ago. Those places came with a lot of tendency to prescribe various things for pain. So when opioids came in, when OxyContin came in, those were the places that got addicted most. Now it's also true that there are links between these economic issues. There are links with joblessness, and I basically do believe that things that create joblessness are pretty terrible and are actually much worse than income inequality. I push back against the universal basic income advocates who I think are basically engaging in a materialist fallacy of thinking that a human being's life is shaped by their take home pay or their unearned pay. I think for most people, a job is much more than that. A job is a sense of purpose. A job is a sense of social connection. When you look at human misery and opioid use, you look at the difference between high-income earners, mid-income earners. There are differences, but they're small. You then look at the difference between low-income earners and the jobless, then unhappiness spikes enormously, misery spikes enormously, family breakups spike enormously. So things like universal basic income, which the negative income tax experimented on in the 1970s, are the closest thing we have for its large-scale experiments in this area, which had very large effects on joblessness by just giving people money. They feel quite dangerous to me because they feel like they're going to play into rising joblessness in America, which feels like a path for its misery. I want to just quickly deviate and some of the UBI advocates have brought together UBI in the US and UBI in the developing world. So UBI in the developing world, basically means that you give poor farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa fairly modest amounts of money. This is a totally sensible strategy.These people are not about to live life permanently not working. They're darn poor. It's very efficient relative to other ways of giving.  I am in no sense pushing back on UBI with modest amounts of money in the poorest parts of the world. By all means, it's been deemed to be effective. It's just a very different thing if you're saying I'm going to give $100 to a poor Congolese farmer, or I'm going to give $10,000 to a long-term jobless person in Eastern Kentucky. You're not buying a PS5 for $100 in Congo.Remote Work, Taxation, & MetaverseDwarkesh Patel 0:29:57I want to ask you about remote work. You write in The Survival of the City, that improvements in information technology can lead to more demand for face-to-face contact because FaceTime complements time spent communicating electronically. I'm curious, what distinguishes situations where FaceTime substitutes for in-person contact from situations where it complements FaceTime complements virtual contact?Edward Glaeser 0:30:25So there's not a universal rule on this. I wrote a paper based on this in the 1990s about face-to-face contact complements or substitutes for electronic contacts. It was really based on a lot of anxiety in the 1970s that the information technology of their day, the fax machine, the personal computer was going to make face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact obsolete. That discussion has reappeared amazingly in the past two and a half years because of Zoom, and all of those questions still resonate. I think in the short run, typically these things are substitutes.Typically you don't necessarily need to meet some person who's your long-term contact. You can actually just telephone them, or you can connect with them electronically. In the long run, they seem to be much more likely to be complements, in part because these technologies change our world. The story that I tell over the last 40 years is that, yes, there were some face-to-face contacts that were made unnecessary because of electronic interactions. But it's not just that cities did well over the past 40 years–– business travel went through the roof over the past 40 years. You'd think that that would have been made unnecessary by all these electronic interactions, but I think what just happened was that these new technologies and globalization created a more interconnected world, a world in which knowledge was more important, and we become smart by interacting with people face-to-face. This world became more knowledge and information intensive and more complicated, and as things get more complicated, it's easier for ideas to get lost in translation. So we have these wonderful cues for communicating comprehension or confusion that are lost when we're not in the same room with one another. So I think over the longer time, they tend to complements, and over the shorter term, they tend to be substitutes.One of the things I think was helpful in my earlier work on this was looking at the history of information technology innovations. I think probably the first one is the book. It's hard to imagine an innovation that did more to flatten distance. Now you can read stuff that people are saying hundreds of miles away. Yet there's not a shred of evidence that the book led to less urbanization in Europe or to less connection. It helped create a totally different world in which people were passionate about ideas and wanted to talk to each other. They wanted to talk to each other about their books.Flash forward 350 years when we have the telephone. Telephones started being used more in cities, and they were used mostly by people who were going to meet face-to-face. There's no evidence that this has created a decline in the demand for face-to-face contact or a decline in the demand for cities. So I think if we look at Zoom, which unquestionably has allowed a certain amount of long-distance contact, that's very, very useful. In the short run, it certainly poses a threat to urban office markets. My guess is in the long run; it's probably going to be likely to be neutral at worst for face-to-face contact in the cities that enable that contact. Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:37I think that my podcast has been a great example for me about this. I mean, right now we're talking virtually. So maybe, in a way it's substituted, and perhaps I would have interviewed in person without the podcast. However, in another way, I've also met so many people that I've interviewed on the podcast or who have just connected with me because of the podcast in person. The amount of in-person interactions I've had because of a virtual podcast is a great anecdote to what you're talking about, so that makes total sense.Edward Glaeser 0:34:05Absolutely.Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:06Why do even the best software engineers in India or in Europe make so much less when they're working remotely from those locations than remote engineers working in America make? I mean, why don't employers just pay them more until the price discrepancy goes away?Edward Glaeser 0:34:23That's interesting. I don't fully know the answer to that question. I would suspect some of it just has to do with the nature of supply and demand. There are some things that are just very hard to be done remotely. Either because you have very precise informational needs that you have that are easier to communicate to people who are nearby or the person who's nearby has evolved in ways in terms of their mind that they actually know exactly what you want and they have exactly the product that you need. So even though the remote call center worker and the local one may be totally equivalent on raw programming talent, you may still end up in equilibrium and be willing to pay a lot more to the local one just because, right?So there's a slightly differentiated skill the local one has, and look, there's just a lot of competition for the remote ones, so the price is going to be pretty low. There's not that much supply of the one guy who's down the hall and knows exactly what you're looking for. So that guy gets much higher wages, just because he can offer you something that no one else can exactly reproduce.Dwarkesh Patel 0:35:27Let me clarify my question. Even remote engineers in America will make more than remote engineers in Europe or in India. If somebody is working remotely but he just happens to live in the US, is that just because they can communicate in English in the same way? Edward Glaeser 0:35:54I would take the same stance. I would say that they're likely to have just skills that are somewhat idiosyncratic and are valued in the US context.Dwarkesh Patel 0:35:56Are you optimistic about the ability of the metaverse and VR to be able to better puncture whatever makes in-person contact so valuable?Edward Glaeser 0:36:19No, I do not think the metaverse is going to change very much. I do think that there will be a lot of hours spent on various forms of gaming over the next 20 years, but I don't think it ultimately poses much of a threat to real-world interactions. In some sense, we saw this with the teenage world over the last three years. We saw a lot of America spend an awful lot of time, 15, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, gaming and connecting entirely virtually during the whole time of the pandemic lockdowns.Every single person that I've seen in that cohort, when you allowed them to interact with real members of their group live, leaped at the opportunity. They leaped at the opportunity of meeting and actually hanging out with real people until three o'clock in the morning and arguing over whatever it is–– whether or not it's football or Kant. I think particularly for the young, living life live just beats the alternative.Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:05That sounds like a very Harvard scenario, having to argue over football or Kant, those two topics. [laughs] Are you predicting lower taxes over the coming decades in places like California and New York, specifically because of how remote work sets a sort of maximum bar of how much you can tax highly productive people before they will just leave? Edward Glaeser 0:37:29This is a great question. It's a central issue of our day. Here's how I think about it. In part, it's why I wrote my recent book, Survival of the City. It's because I was worried about this. Two things happened simultaneously. One, as you correctly say, Zoom has made it easier to connect anywhere. I don't think that Zoom is going to cause our tech startup currently in Silicon Valley to say, oh, you know what? We're just going to go home to our Orange County suburban homes and never meet live again. I think that's a low-probability event.But what seems to be a perfectly high probability event is saying, “Oh, we can Zoom with our VCs, we can Zoom with our lawyers. Why don't we just relocate to Austin, Texas, not pay taxes, or relocate to Boulder, Colorado, so we can have beautiful scenery, or relocate to Honolulu so we can surf?” That seems like we've made the ability for smart people to relocate much easier, even if they're going to keep on seeing each other in the office three or four days a week. That collides with this very fervent desire to deal with festering social inequities at the local level. Be this limited upward mobility for poorer people, be this high housing costs, be this the rise of mass incarceration and police brutality towards particularly minority groups. There's this progressive urge which runs up against the fact that the rich guys can run away.If your model, which says, “Oh, the local governments are going to realize the rich guys can run away, so they will seamlessly lower tax rates in order to make sure that they attract those people,” that's running up against the fact that there's a whole lot of energy on the progressive side, which says, “No! Massachusetts just passed a millionaire's tax. For the first time ever, we have the possibility to have a progressive tax, which feels extraordinarily dangerous given this time period.”I think we may need to see a bunch of errors in this area before we start getting things right. We went through a lot of pain in the 1970s as cities first tried to deal with their progressive goals and rich people and companies ran away, and it wasn't until the 1980s that people started realizing this was the path to local bankruptcy and that we had real city limits on what the locality could do.Dwarkesh Patel 0:39:44You cited research on the survival of the city, which said that firms like Microsoft were much less willing to hire new people once they went online because of the pandemic. What do you make of the theory that this is similar to when industrialization first hit and we hadn't figured out exactly how to make the most use of it to be most productive, but over the long run, somebody will do to remote work what Henry Ford did to the factory floor and in fact, just make it much more effective and efficient than in-person contact just because we'll have better ways of interacting with people through remote work, since we'll have better systems?Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:17It's entirely possible. I never like betting against the ingenuity of humanity. On the other hand, you need a lot of technology to override 5 million years of evolution. We have evolved to be an in-person species, not just because we're productive and learn a lot face-to-face, but also because we just like it. A world of hyper-efficient remote work where you basically are puttering around your apartment doing things very quickly and getting things done, doesn't sound particularly joyful to me.Workplaces are not just places of productivity; they're also places of pleasure, particularly at the high end. Remember in 2019 and earlier, Google, and Yahoo, the companies that should have had the biggest capacity to do remote stuff, weren't sending their workers home; they were building these paradises for high-skilled workers, stuffed with foosball tables and free snacks and whatever else they had in these giant campuses in the Google lex. So they were certainly betting on the power of face-to-face and creativity rather than on the ability of remote work to make everything work. I think the most reasonable view, let's say that of Nick Bloom of Stanford, is that for those types of workers, 20% of your week being hybrid, maybe 40%, seems quite possible.That seems like a thing, particularly for workers who have families who really value that degree of flexibility. But fully remote, I guess that's a pretty niche thing. There's some jobs like call center workers where you could imagine it being the norm, but in part, that's just because it's just hard to learn the same amount remotely that you do face-to-face. This came out both in the earlier Bloom study on remote call center workers in China and on more recent work by Natalia Emmanuel and Emma Harrington. Both studies found the same thing, which is in these call centers, are plenty productive when they're remote, but the probability of being promoted drops by 50%.The entrepreneur may make it very efficient to do things in the short run remotely, but they're going to turn off this tendency that we have to be able to learn things from people around us, which is just much harder to duplicate remotely.Past & Future of Silicon ValleyDwarkesh Patel 0:42:29Now, I'm curious why Silicon Valley became the hub of technology. You wrote a paper in 2018 about where pioneer and non-pioneer firms locate. So, I was hoping you had insight on this. Does it stand for it? Is it where Fairchild Semiconductor is located? What is the explanation?Edward Glaeser 0:42:48So, we take it as being earlier. It is Stanford. I traced through this, I think in Triumph. Yeah, it was a company called Federal Telegraph Company that was founded by a guy called Cyril Frank Elwell, who was a radio pioneer, and he was tapped by his teacher to head this radio company. The story was, as I remember it, there'd been this local genius in San Francisco who had attracted all these investors and was going to do this wireless telegraphy company. Then he died in a freak carriage accident.These investors wanted to find someone else, and they went to Stanford's nearby factory and asked, who should we hire? It was this guy Elwell who founded Federal Telegraph. Federal Telegraph then licensed, I think Danish technology which was originally the Poulsen Telegraph Company. They then hired some fairly bright people like Lee DeForest and they did incredibly well in World War I off of federal Navy contracts, off of Navy contracts. They then did things like providing jobs for people like the young Fred Terman, whose father was a Stanford scientist. Now, Fred Terman then plays an outsized role in this story because he goes to MIT, studies engineering there, and then comes back to become Dean of Stanford's engineering program.He really played an outsized role in setting up the Stanford Industrial Park which attracting Fairchild Semiconductor. Then there's this sort of random thing about how the Fairchild Semiconductor attracts these people and then repels them because you have this brilliant guy Shockley, right? He's both brilliant and sort of personally abhorrent and manages to attract brilliant people and then repel all of them. So they all end up dispersing themselves into different companies, and they create this incredibly creative ecosystem that is the heart of Silicon Valley.In its day, it had this combination of really smart people and really entrepreneurial ethos, which just made it very, very healthy. I think the thing that many of us worry about is that Silicon Valley more recently, feels much more like it's a one-industry town, which is dangerous. It feels more like it's a bunch of industrial behemoths rather than a bunch of smart and scrappy startups. That's a recipe that feels much more like Detroit in the 1950s than it does like Silicon Valley in the 1960s.Dwarkesh Patel 0:45:52Speaking of startups, what does your study of cities imply about where tech startups should locate and what kind of organization in person or otherwise they should have? I think there's a lot to like about in person, certainly. Relying too much on remote feels quite dangerous if you're a scrappy startup. But I like a lot the Sunbelt smart cities.I sort of have a two-factor model of economic growth, which is it's about education, and it's about having governments that are pro-business. If you think about sort of the US, there's a lot of heterogeneity in this. If you think about the US versus other countries, it's heterogeneity. So the US has historically been better at being pro-business than, let's say, the Northern European social democracies, but the Northern European social democracies are great on the education front.So places like Sweden and the Netherlands, and Germany are also very successful places because they have enough education to counter the fact that they may not necessarily be as pro-business as the US is. Within the US, you also have this balance, whereas places like Massachusetts, and California are certainly much less pro-business, but they're pretty well-educated. Other parts of the country may be more pro-business, but they're less so. The real secret sauce is finding those places that are both highly educated and pro-business.So those are places like Charlotte and Austin and even Atlanta, places in the Sun Belt that have attracted lots of skilled people. They've done very, very well during COVID. I mean, Austin, by most dimensions, is the superstar of the COVID era in terms of just attracting people. So I think you had to wait for the real estate prices to come down a bit in Austin, but those are the places that I would be looking at. Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:46I don't know if you know, but I live in Austin, actually.Edward Glaeser 0:47:50I did not know that. [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:54Well, actually, I'm surprised about what you said about education because you write in the paper, “general knowledge measured as average years of schooling is not a strong determinant of the survival of a pioneer firm, but relatedness of knowledge between past and present activities is.” So I'm surprised that you think education is a strong determinant for pioneer firms.Edward Glaeser 0:48:15No, I'm a big human capital determinist. So I tend to believe that individuals, cities, and nations rise and fall based on their skill levels. Certainly, if you look over the last 40 or 50 years, skills are very predictive of which cities (particularly colder cities) manage to do well versus poorly. If you ask yourself why Detroit and Seattle look different, more than 50% of Seattle's adults have college degrees, and maybe 14, 15% of Detroit's adults do.That's just a huge, huge gap. Certainly, when we think about your punitive startup, you're going to be looking for talent, right? You're going to be looking to hire talent, and having lots of educated people around you is going to be helpful for that.Housing ReformDwarkesh Patel 0:48:56Let's talk about housing. Houston has basically very little to no zoning. Why is it not more of interesting today? Nobody goes to Houston for tourism.Edward Glaeser 0:49:07I have. [laughs] I have, in fact, gone to Houston for tourism. Although part of it, I admit, was to look at the housing and to go to the woodlands and look at that. Interesting has a lot to do with age in this country. So the more that a city has… Boston is good for tourism just because it's been around for a long time, and it hasn't changed all that much. So it has this sort of historical thing. Houston's a new place, not just in the sense that the chronological age is lower but also in the sense that it's just grown so much, and it's dominated by new stuff, right?That new stuff tends to be more homogenous. It tends to have less history on it. I think those are things that make new cities typically less interesting than older cities. As witnessed by the fact that Rome, Jerusalem, London, are great tourist capitals of the world because they've just accreted all this interesting stuff over the millennium. So I think that's part of it. I'm not sure that if we look at more highly zoned new cities, we're so confident that they're all that more interesting.I don't want to be particularly disparaging any one city. So I'm not going to choose that, but there's actually a bunch that's pretty interesting in Houston, and I'm not sure that I would say that it's any less interesting than any comparably aged city in the country.Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:35Yeah. I'm visiting Houston later this month. I asked my friend there, should I stay here longer? I mean, is there anything interesting to do here? And then he responds, “Well, it's the fourth biggest city in the country, so no.”Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:47Many people, including many economists, have said that we should drastically increase US population through immigration to a figure like 1 billion. Do you think that our cities could accommodate that? We have the infrastructure, and I mean, let's say we reformed housing over a decade or so. Could we accommodate such a large influx of people? Edward Glaeser 0:51:24A billion people in a decade? I love the vision. Basically, in my heart, I'm an open borders person, right? I mean, it's a moral thing. I don't really like the idea that I get to enjoy the privileges of being an American and think that I'm going to deny that opportunity to anyone else. So I love this vision. A billion people over 10 years is an unimaginably large amount of people over a relatively short period of time. I'd love to give it a shot. I mean, it's certainly not as if there's any long-term reason why you couldn't do it.I mean, goodness knows we've got more than enough space in this country. It would be exciting to do that. But it would require a lot of reform in the housing space and require a fair amount of reform in the infrastructure space as well to be able to do this at some kind of large scale affordability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:05What does the evidence show about public libraries? Do they matter?Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:09My friend Eric Kleinberg has written a great book about… I think it's called Palaces for the People about all the different functions that libraries have played. I've never seen anything statistically or systematically about this, but you're not going to get a scholar to speak against books. It's not a possible thing.Europe's Stagnation, Mumbai's Safety, & Climate Change Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:32Why do European cities seem so much more similar to what they look like decades or even centuries ago than American cities, even American cities that are old, obviously not as old as European cities, but they seem to change much more over time. Edward Glaeser 0:52:46Lower population growth, much tougher zoning, much tougher historic preservation. All three of these things are going on. So it's very difficult to build in European cities. There's a lot of attention to caring about history. It's often part of the nationalist narrative. You often have huge amounts of national dollars going to preserve local stuff and relatively lower levels of population growth.An extreme example of this is Warsaw, where central Warsaw is completely destroyed during World War II, and they built it up to look exactly like it looked before the bombing. So this is a national choice, which is unlikely that we would necessarily make here in the US. Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:27Yeah. I was in Mumbai earlier this year, and I visited Dharavi, which is the biggest slum in Asia. And it's a pretty safe place for a slum. Why are slums in different countries? Why do they often have different levels of how safe they are? What is the reason?Edward Glaeser 0:53:45I, too, have been in Dharavi and felt perfectly safe. It's like walking around Belgravia and London in terms of it. I think my model of Dharavi is the same model as Jane Jacobs's model of Greenwich Village in 1960, which is this is just a well-functioning community.People have eyes on the street. If you're a stranger in these areas, they're going to be looking at you, and it's a community that just functions. There are lots of low-income communities throughout the world that have this. It requires a certain amount of permanence. So if the community is too much in flux, it becomes hard to enforce these norms and hard to enforce these sort of community rules. It's really helpful if there aren't either a massive number of guns floating around or an unbelievably lucrative narcotics trade, which is in the area. Those are both things that make things incredibly hard. Furthermore, US drug policy has partially been responsible for creating violence in some of the poor parts of Latin American cities.Dwarkesh Patel 0:54:43Maybe you don't play video games enough to know the answer to this question. But I'm curious, is there any video game, any strategic video game like Civilization or Europa that you feel does a good job representing the economics of cities? Edward Glaeser 0:55:07No, I will say that when I was in graduate school, I spent a few hours playing something called Sim City. I did think that was very fun. But I'm not going to claim that I think that it got it right. That was probably my largest engagement with city-building video games.Dwarkesh Patel 0:55:12What would you say we understand least about how cities work? Edward Glaeser 0:55:18I'm going to say the largest unsolved problem in cities is what the heck we're going to do about climate change and the cities of the developing world. This is the thing I do not feel like I have any answer for in terms of how it is that we're going to stop Manila or Mumbai from being leveled by some water-related climate event that we haven't yet foreseen.We think that we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars to protect New York and Miami, and that's going to happen; but the thing I don't understand and something we really need to need to invest in terms of knowledge creation is what are we going to do with the low-lying cities of the developing world to make them safe. Dwarkesh Patel 0:55:54Okay. Your most recent book is Survival of the City. And before that Triumph of the City, both of which I highly recommend to readers. Professor Glaeser, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was very interesting.Edward Glaeser 0:56:05I enjoyed this a lot. Thank you so much for having me on. I had a great deal of fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

In today's episode, UVA Law 3Ls Reidar Composano and Bryan Blaylock join me to continue our discussion with University of Chicago Law professor, Mary Anne Case, about her forthcoming paper, Donorsexuality. The f-bomb is dropped (but for reasons relevant to the paper) and I emphasize (again) that all this Con Law talk is not welcome on my podcast. No one listens to me.  Case litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago Law School faculty. Her scholarship has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism. Mary Anne Case faculty bio: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/case

University of Chicago Law professor, Mary Anne Case, joins me and UVA Law 3Ls Reidar Composano and Bryan Blaylock to discuss her forthcoming paper, Donorsexuality. The f-bomb is dropped (but for reasons relevant to the paper) and I emphasize (again) that all this Con Law talk is not welcome on my podcast. No one listens to me. Case litigated for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and was professor of law and Class of 1966 Research Professor at the University of Virginia before joining the Chicago Law School faculty. Her scholarship has concentrated on the regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and family; and the early history of feminism. Mary Anne Case faculty bio: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/faculty/case

Last week, a panel of medical experts recommended for the first time that doctors screen all adult patients under 65 for anxiety disorders. The advisory group, called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, said the guidance was intended to help prevent mental health disorders from going undetected and untreated for years or even decades. It made a similar recommendation for children and teenagers earlier this year.Appointed by an arm of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, the panel has been preparing the guidance since before the pandemic. Its recommendation highlights the extraordinary stress levels that have plagued the United States in recent years. Lori Pbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, who serves on the task force, calls mental health disorders “a crisis in this country.”What's the answer to this extraordinary rise in stress, anxiety, and depression?Some say we need more psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists. America is “short on mental health resources on all levels,” says Dr. Jeffrey Staab, a psychiatrist and chair of the department of psychiatry and psychology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. But … wait. Maybe what people feel are valid descriptions of personal experience rather than symptoms of mental illness. Maybe we need to stop thinking about anxiety and depression as “disorders” and start regarding them as rational responses to a society that's become ever more gruesomely disordered.Who has not feared illness and loss of loved ones from Covid-19? Who isn't concerned by the soaring costs of living and the growing insecurity of jobs and incomes? Who isn't terrified by Trump's and his followers' attacks on democracy? Who doesn't worry about mass shootings at their children's or grandchildren's schools? Who isn't affected by the climate crisis? Add in increasingly brutal racism; attacks on Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Jews; mounting misogyny and anti-abortion laws; homophobia and transphobia; and the growing coarseness and ugliness of what we see and read in social media — and you'd be nuts if you weren't stressed.Studies show that women have nearly double the risk of depression as men. Black people also have higher stress levels — from 2014 to 2019, the suicide rate among Black Americans increased by 30 percent. Are women and Black people suffering from a “disorder,” or are they responding to reality? Or both? White men without college degrees are particularly vulnerable to “deaths of despair” from suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity, according to the American Council on Science and Health. Are they suffering from a “disorder,” or are they responding to a fundamental change in American society? Or both?In their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue that “the deaths of despair among whites would not have happened, or would not have been so severe, without the destruction of the white working class….” Part of the problem, they say, is that the less educated are often underpaid and disrespected, “and may feel that the system is rigged against them.”Even if we had far more mental health professionals, what would they do against these formidable foes? Prescribe more pills? If anything, Americans are already overprescribed. I'm not arguing against better access to mental health care. In fact, quite the opposite. Increased staffing and improved access to care are very much needed. (Right now over 2,000 mental health therapists, psychologists, and social workers in California are entering their second month of an open-ended strike to make Kaiser Permanente, the nation's largest nonprofit HMO, to improve access to care for its patients. The outcome will have nationwide ramifications for determining whether laws that guarantee parity for mental health care will, in practice, help patients access care that meet their needs.)But in addition to providing more and better access to mental health care, we must also try to make our society healthier… … So that the next pandemic doesn't kill a larger percentage of Americans than in any other advanced nation.… So that Americans have more job security and stronger safety nets, rather than the least economic security of any advanced nation.… So income and wealth aren't the most unequal of any other advanced nation.… So our democracy survives Trumpism and big money.… So guns and assault weapons are difficult to buy, rather than easier to get than in any other advanced nation.… So we take a leading role in ending the climate crisis.… And we do everything possible to overcome racism, homophobia, and misogyny. These goals are terribly difficult to achieve, of course. But without seeking to achieve them — without making their achievement central to what we must do as a people — no number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists, and no amount of medications, will be enough to substantially reduce the stress, anxiety, and depression so many Americans are now experiencing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

If you're someone who's a decade or two out from your high school graduation, do you ever find yourself thinking that you're just not as happy as you were back then? Of course all the positive-thinking self-talk then kicks in and you think, "Well, maybe I actually wasn't that happy before. I do like my life better now. I like the independence I have. Yeah, yeah, I really like being an adult." Yet, no matter the glass-half-full glow you try to put on things, you can't shake the feeling that your happiness has declined over the years, that at 30, you weren't as happy as you were at 20, and that at 40, you weren't as happy as you were when you were 30.Well, that feeling is more than a nostalgic hunch, and it's not unique to you. It's actually been born out by hundreds of research papers and studies and shown to be a near-universal experience. My guest today has authored many of those papers. His name is Dr. David Branchflower and he's a labor economist who not only studies the data around money and jobs, but also around human happiness. Today on the show David explains how happiness follows a U-shaped curve, and starts declining around age 18, and continues to fall into midlife, before picking back up again, and David shares the average age at which happiness hits its very lowest point. While it's not entirely clear why the U-shape of happiness occurs, we talk about some possible reasons behind it. And while the U-shape is consistent across the world, it can be lower or higher, and so we discuss how factors like gender, socio-economic and martial status, and having children affect happiness, and whether it's possible to mitigate the dip.While the fact that it won't be until your mid-60s that you feel as happy as you were at age 18 might seem depressing, David argues that it's comforting to know that the feelings of declining happiness you experience at you approach midlife are normal, and will not only pass one day, but start moving in the other direction.Resources Related to the Podcast"Is Happiness U-Shaped Everywhere?" — one of the main research papers on the happiness curve that David has authoredDavid's book Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus DeatonStudy on great apes having a midlife crisisAoM Series: The Seasons of a Man's LifeAoM Podcast #776: How to Shift Out of the Midlife MalaiseAoM Article: The Economics of HappinessConnect With David BranchflowerDavid's Faculty Page at Dartmouth (includes links to his research)

Learn how a rainbow sweater (see the actual sweater here:  Paranormal Chalet : Podcast Journal of Metaphysical, Ghostly Investigations and Unexplained Haunts: Spirit Reconnects Items to Soothe Her Son Case File 0001 ) and a gold boot bank changed my best friend's outlook on death. Over six years ago, I received two messages about my friend Don's recently deceased mom, but they made no sense to me.  I felt so torn about telling him because the items were in no way, shape or form anything of importance in my mind that would link her to them.  However, I followed my path and blurted it out anyways.  Oddly, these were only messages meant for him, We sit down almost 7 years later to talk about what happened and learn the miraculous story of how spirits can still connect to material things., this simply blows my mind and that's why I'm considering it Case File 1.    Here is a link to the picture of the actual sweater.  Paranormal Chalet : Podcast Journal of Metaphysical, Ghostly Investigations and Unexplained Haunts I have a Vintage Podcast called LIving a Vintage Life.  I also sell antiques on Etsy at RetroChalet to support the podcast hosting. I do not use my gifts for commercial use. Otherwise, I share this information in hopes to connect with someone who has had similar experiences.  I haven't always been able to embrace or understand why this kind of things is happening to me.  You can find me below. TikTokInstagramFacebook

It's this sort of persistent loss of wages, which causes things like loss of marriage, people not living with their kids anymore, disintegration of communities with all of the things in those communities whether it's churches or union halls or society, just friendship that used to be there. And those are the things that cause people to lose meaning or, if you like, lose hope in their lives.Angus DeatonA full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism  here.Angus Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Economics, and the coauthor (with Anne Case) of Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.Key HightlightsWhat are deaths of despair and what causes themHow did the Pandemic and the Great Recession affect deaths of despairWhy does a four year college degree affect life expectancy in the United StatesHow has health care policy in the United States contributed to deaths of despairAre deaths of despair an inevitable consequence of capitalismKey LinksDeaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Angus Deaton and Anne CaseNobel PrizeNational Bureau of Economic ResearchDemocracy Paradox PodcastSheryl WuDunn Paints a Picture of Poverty in America and Offers Hope for SolutionsJacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on the Plutocratic Populism of the Republican PartyMore Episodes from the PodcastMore InformationDemocracy GroupApes of the State created all MusicEmail the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.comFollow on Twitter @DemParadoxFollow on Instagram @democracyparadoxpodcast100 Books on Democracy

For our final fall episode before our winter break hiatus, Michael Borshuk sits down with Dr. Sebastian Ramirez, the Humanities Center's 2021-2022 Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities.  Sebastian speaks with us about his research on white supremacy and "white backlash" and how his scholarship builds on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Mills, and others.  Over the course of the conversation, Dr. Ramirez shows us how philosophy's disciplinary focus might contribute to anti-racism, and reminds us of the importance of conceptual clarity as we look critically at white supremacy's history and legacy.Some of the works Dr. Ramirez mentions in our conversation: Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism by Charles Mills,  Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth Anderson, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender by Himani Bannerji.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton are the authors of the book Deaths of Despair -- which is also a phrase that refers to the combination of deaths resulting from three causes: suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol. An epidemic of these deaths of despair started roughly a couple of decades ago. What Anne and Angus have found is that the increase in these deaths was entirely concentrated in people without college degrees. And they have looked at how other gaps between college and non-college folks have also become bigger and bigger in the last fifty years. They've also looked at how that societal division also interacts in important ways with other societal divisions, like racial and ethnic inequality, and geographic inequality. And crucially, how those interactions between these different trends can change over time. Or as Anne says in the chat with Cardiff, the battlefield for understanding these trends is dynamic. Anne and Angus also discuss with Cardiff the findings of their new study, which shows how Covid has affected mortality rates for people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and also for people without college degrees versus people with college degrees (which they further break down by race and ethnicity, gender, and age). Links from the episode:Case and Deaton's latest paper, Mortality Rates by College Degree Before and During COVID-19 (https://tinyurl.com/datsw4ky)Deaths of Despair book (https://tinyurl.com/7rwahs87)Cardiff and Aimee are on Twitter at @CardiffGarcia and @AimeePKeaneSend us an email! You can write to us at hello@bazaaraudio.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Matt, Dara, Jerusalem, and German use Matt's last Tuesday episode to discuss life expectancy in the US. They explore paternalistic policy decisions, the misnomer of “deaths of despair,” and the longevity of The Weeds. US life expectancy is compared to that of European and Asian nations, and the US numbers are disaggregated and examined up close.  Resources: “Why Americans Die So Much” by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic; Sep 12, 2021) “Inequality in Mortality between Black and White Americans by Age, Place, and Cause, and in Comparison to Europe, 1990-2018” by Hannes Schwandt et al. (NBER; Sep 2021) “The Great Divide: Education, Despair and Death” by Anne Case and Angus Deaton (NBER; Sep 2021) The Insider by Michael Mann (Touchstone Pictures; 1999) “Immigration and improvements in American life expectancy” by Arun S. Hendi and Jessica Y. Ho (Science Direct; Sep 2021) Hosts: Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias), Slowboring.com Dara Lind (@DLind), Immigration Reporter, ProPublica Jerusalem Demsas (@JerusalemDemsas), Policy Reporter, Vox German Lopez (@germanrlopez), Senior Correspondent, Vox Credits: Ness Smith-Savedoff, Producer & Engineer Erikk Geannikis, Producer, Talk Podcasts Sofi LaLonde, Producer As the Biden administration gears up, we'll help you understand this unprecedented burst of policymaking. Sign up for The Weeds newsletter each Friday: vox.com/weeds-newsletter. The Weeds is a Vox Media Podcast Network production. Want to support The Weeds? Please consider making a contribution to Vox: bit.ly/givepodcasts About Vox Vox is a news network that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Follow Us: Vox.com Facebook group: The Weeds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first machine age was about mechanical machines. We now live in a time of thinking machines. Erik Brynjolfsson joins Vasant Dhar in episode 18 of Brave New World to talk about the impact of AI on productivity and inequality -- and to explain why he remains optimistic about the prospects for humans in the AI era.   Useful resources: 1. The Second Machine Age -- Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. 2. Erik Brynjolfsson's website, SSRN page and Google Scholar page. 3. The coming productivity boom --  Erik Brynjolfsson and Georgios Petropoulos 4. Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox -- Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock & Chad Syverson. 5. The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies --  Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson. 6. How Should We Measure the Digital Economy? -- Erik Brynjolfsson and Avinash Collis. 7. GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods in the Digital Economy -- Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, W. Erwin Diewert, Felix Eggers & Kevin J. Fox. 8. Digital Capital and Superstar Firms -- Prasanna Tambe, Lorin Hitt, Daniel Rock & Erik Brynjolfsson. 9. Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work -- Congressional Testimony of Erik Brynjolfsson (September 24, 2019). 10. Do Digital Platforms Reduce Moral Hazard? The Case of Uber and Taxis -- Meng Liu, Erik Brynjolfsson and Jason Dowlatabadi. 11. Does Machine Translation Affect International Trade? -- Erik Brynjolfsson, Xiang Hui & Meng Liu. 12. The Economics of Superstars -- Sherwin Rosen. 13. General Purpose Technologies "Engines of Growth?" -- Timothy F. Bresnahan & Manuel Trajtenberg. 14. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism -- Anne Case and Angus Deaton. 15. Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren -- John Maynard Keynes. 16. Understanding QE in the New World -- Episode 10 of Brave New World (w Paul Sheard). 17. The Nature of Intelligence -- Episode 7 of Brave New World (w Yann LeCun). 18. Uplift the Unremarkables -- Episode 2 of Brave New World (w Scott Galloway).

Each year hundreds of thousands of Americans die as a result of drug abuse, alcoholism or suicide – and the numbers are rising. This has contributed to a fall in life expectancy in the past three years, reversing a trend towards increased life expectancy that began in 1918. In this week's episode we discuss, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton new book which has identified a culprit for these ‘deaths of despair’: capitalism – or at least some aspects of it. The debate was chaired by Francine Lacqua television anchor and editor-at-large for Bloomberg Television.To buy the book click here: https://bit.ly/3lIWlGg Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/intelligencesquared. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row—a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2020) paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America. This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/drugs-addiction-and-recovery

In 2016, the idea of ‘deaths of despair' went from a social science term to a much more widespread one as the forgotten man (and woman) played an integral part in electing President Trump. How are things now, and what comes next? The authors of 2020's https://www.amazon.com/Deaths-Despair-Future-Capitalism-Anne/dp/069119078X (Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism), https://scholar.princeton.edu/deaton/home (Angus Deaton) and https://scholar.princeton.edu/accase/home (Anne Case) joined me on this episode to talk about this problem and what needs to be done about it. 

Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:24) > We hear from two award-winning American economists about how capitalism and corporate purpose could evolve to more broadly benefit society, especially in this current time of crisis. Yuval Atsmon, a senior partner in our London office, spoke with professor Anne Case and Nobel prize winner, Angus Deaton, about their new book, ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism'. Their book, which has been short-listed for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, highlights the social and economic forces negatively impacting the working class, which they argue fosters inequality and undermines society.See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information

Read more > Listen to the podcast (duration: 30:24) > We hear from two award-winning American economists about how capitalism and corporate purpose could evolve to more broadly benefit society, especially in this current time of crisis. Yuval Atsmon, a senior partner in our London office, spoke with professor Anne Case and Nobel prize winner, Angus Deaton, about their new book, ‘Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism'. Their book, which has been short-listed for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, highlights the social and economic forces negatively impacting the working class, which they argue fosters inequality and undermines society.Join 90,000 other members of our LinkedIn community: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/mckinsey-strategy-&-corporate-finance/See www.mckinsey.com/privacy-policy for privacy information

Whether or not you've been exposed to the virus, the COVID-19 pandemic impacts everyone's sense of well-being. Three scholars in the field of global mental health look at the various ways loss, fear, anxiety—and on top of it, a massive global recession—weigh on the mental well-being of different groups. And they anticipate a surge in demand for mental health services as a result of the pandemic.Although the contemporary world has never seen the likes of such economic contraction as we have now, the recession of 2008 might be an instructive case. Vikram Patel, professor of global health and population, explains what is known about the mental health impacts stemming from that recent recession. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, a sociologist and medical anthropologist, gets inside the mind and experiences of the doctors and healthcare workers who are taking care of us (and it's not necessarily what you would expect). And psychiatrist Dr. Giuseppe Raviola gives an unflinching look at what American families and kids are struggling with during lockdown.The scholars also discuss the fraught state of mental health service delivery in the US, and advocate for adopting an approach to mental health services very different from the US's hierarchical system of licensed specialists.Finally, our guests confront the great disparities in the hardships this pandemic creates: in short, wealthy people are doing just fine and have all the advantages, while for others, the pandemic has taken away so many of the resources they once had, causing enduring stress.Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded on May 22, 2020 when the US had approximately 1.5 million positive COVID-19 cases.Host:Kathleen Molony, Director, Weatherhead Scholars Program.Guests:Vikram Patel, Faculty Associate. The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Professor, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Faculty Associate. Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Department of Sociology, Harvard University. For the past thirty years, she has cohosted the Friday Morning Seminar in Culture, Psychiatry, and Global Mental Health at the Weatherhead Center.  Giuseppe (“Bepi”) Raviola, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist, and the Director of Mental Health for Partners in Health, a Boston-based humanitarian healthcare organization that serves ten countries. Bepi is actively involved in training contact tracers in Massachusetts through Partners in Health.Producer/Director:Michelle Nicholasen, Editor and Content Producer, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.Related Links:Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus DeatonUN leads call to protect most vulnerable from mental health crisis during and after COVID-19 (UN News, May 14, 2020)“Physician Burnout, Interrupted” by Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (The New England Journal of Medicine, June 25, 2020)EMPOWER: Building the Mental Health Workforce, Global Health Institute, HarvardFollow the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs:WCFIA WebsiteEpicenter WebsiteTwitterFacebookSimplecastSoundcloudVimeo

Anne Case and Angus Deaton released Deaths of Despair this year, the culmination of their study into how your education level determines how much pain you'll experience in life, how long you'll live, and your ability to fend off addiction and despair. Basically: if you lack a college degree, you will die sooner and live harder. Anne Case joins Jessa to discuss these "forgotten" men and women. Support this podcast: http://patreon.com/publicintellectual http://jessacrispin.com

How COVID-19 is affecting Immigration Detainees (0:30)Guest:  Patrick Michels, Immigration Investigative Reporter, Reveal - From the Center for Investigative ReportingAcross the country, more than 37,000 immigrants are being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in conditions that are sometimes crowded and prime for the spread of disease. On Tuesday, ICE announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in a detainee. Immigrant rights advocates are filing a flurry of lawsuits demanding that migrants be released on humanitarian grounds. Good Neighboring in the Time of COVID-19 (20:41)Guest: Rodney Smith Jr., Founder of Raising Men Lawn Care ServiceEven in the middle of a global pandemic, Rodney Smith, Jr. is on a crusade to do good. He's been at it for four years, actually, traveling the country mowing lawns – for free – for veterans, single mothers, people with disabilities, the elderly or sick. With the quarantines, Smith is sticking to mowing lawns in Huntsville, Alabama where he lives, rather than traveling to other states. But through his nonprofit called “Raising Men Lawn Care Service” he's got an army of kids doing the same for people all over the world. Why Are So Many White, Uneducated Americans Dying Deaths of Despair? (32:36)Guest:  Anne Case, PhD, Professor of Economics, Princeton University; Angus Deaton, PhD, Nobel Prize Winning Professor of Economics, Princeton University, Co-Authors of “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”Life expectancy is falling in America. That's not supposed to happen in a developed country like ours – and it wasn't happening until about ten years ago. But not all Americans are dying younger. Mainly it's middle-aged white people dying of what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have dubbed “deaths of despair.” 2,995 Days of Disneyland (50:24)Guest: Jeff Reitz, Instagram: @disney366_The coronavirus pandemic shutdown Disneyland and with it pretty remarkable run for Jeff Reitz. He'd been to Disneyland every single day for eight years. The night the park closed, a week and a half ago, was Reitz's 2,995th consecutive day at Disneyland. Can you even imagine? Shaking Earthquake Science (1:09:41)Guest: Victor Tsai, Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Brown UniversityThere was a 5.7 magnitude earthquake in Utah last week – the strongest we've head in decades so it caused quite a bit of anxiety, though not much damage. An earthquake of similar magnitude struck the capital of Croatia on Sunday and caused, significant damage. But in California, there was a 5.3 earthquake near Eureka last week that barely made the news, since quakes of that size happen dozens of times a year in the state.  Why are some earthquakes of the same magnitudes more destructive than others? Earth's Car-Sized Second Moon Was Only Visiting (1:24:51)Guest: Bill Gray, Creator of Guide Astrometry SoftwareEarth just lost a moon. Not the moon - a second, much smaller one, about the size of a Toyota Prius. Astronomers only discovered it orbiting our planet a month ago. Now it's gone. Where did it go? Where did it come from? And could we get another moon someday?

“Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism” is a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in U.S. capitalism have dire consequences for America's working class. In this interview, authors Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton discuss why capitalism is destroying blue-collar America, laying a large part of this at the door step of the U.S. health care system. They also chart a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses.Their book was published March 17 by the Princeton University Press.

Between 1959 and 2016, life expectancy in the United States rose from 69.9 to 78.9 years. Most people know that. But did you know that since then, it's reversed course? A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association paints a portrait of a society in deep trouble. For the third year in a row, the average life expectancy in the United States has declined. The last time American life expectancy declined three years in a row, World War I and the “Spanish Flu” pandemic killed 675,000 Americans. Percentage-wise, that would be the same as losing 2.5 million Americans today. Of course, in the early 1900s there were no antibiotics. Viruses were unknown--never mind antiviral drugs. The germ theory of disease had only recently been widely accepted in the U.S., and the kind of public health and sanitation measures we now take for granted were still in their infancy then. Today, the U.S. spends a far larger share of its GDP on health care than any other nation. Yet, other wealthy nations are simply not experiencing this same reversal in life expectancy. In fact, some people in less-wealthy nations such as Costa Rica have significantly-longer life expectancies than Americans. So, whatever is causing Americans to die younger and younger has nothing to do with medical science or technology. As a recent Washington Post article describes, the causes behind this dramatic shift are things like “suicide, drug overdoses, liver disease and dozens of other causes.” These causes are summed up in the phrase “deaths from despair,” coined by researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton. In other words, we are facing an epidemic of young people who are giving up on life, sometimes before it really even starts for them. As a public health expert told the Post, “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that's leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.” As the study shows, they're giving up at a younger and younger age. The same hopelessness leading to the uptick in “deaths from despair” is also driving what I will call “acts of desperation,” that we also see in our culture. In this category, I'd put acts of mass violence, abuse, and the increasing numbers of young people willing to self-mutilate in a pursuit of their identities. This sad story brings to mind Matthew 9: 36, “When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” The Greek word that is here translated “compassion” describes a visceral reaction, not a mere sentiment. In other words, Jesus felt this one in His gut. His response to their plight was to tell his disciples to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest,” starting with themselves. Our current epidemic of dying young should elicit a similar response from us. As Chuck Colson liked to say, “it's time for the Church to be the Church.” Like our Lord, we must see the harassed and helpless around us, and we must feel their suffering as if it were our own. We must pray that God would show us how He would have us respond. If, as Paul told the Athenians, God has determined the time and place where we live, then we cannot be spectators to the unfolding tragedies of our cultural moment. God has placed us here to act. This doesn't mean we can “solve” this problem, any more than those who ran towards the plague in ancient Rome could stop it. The restoration of all things will only be complete when Christ returns in glory. But we can offer a preview of that restoration here and now. This is what we, and only we, have to offer. If we can't bring ourselves to do this, then something else is terribly wrong. This time, with us.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe recent changes in mortality trends for white non-Hispanic Americans.

The idea that workplaces could benefit from an incest taboo is not one of Chicago's best, but one of Margaret Mead's. Professor Mary Anne Case has been promoting it and explaining its relevance to Title VII enforcement long before Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement gave it new relevance and visibility. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was presented on February 21, 2018.

The idea that workplaces could benefit from an incest taboo is not one of Chicago's best, but one of Margaret Mead's. Professor Mary Anne Case has been promoting it and explaining its relevance to Title VII enforcement long before Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement gave it new relevance and visibility. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law. This Chicago's Best Ideas lecture was presented on February 21, 2018.

It's birth control's fiftieth birthday! Professor Case will be discussing what Griswold—the landmark case that began the process of invalidating legal prohibitions on the use of birth control—looks like in the aftermath of Hobby Lobby and Obergefell. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law and convener of the Workshop on Regulating Family, Sex and Gender. Presented by the Law Students for Reproductive Justice and the American Constitution Society on November 11, 2015.

It's birth control's fiftieth birthday! Professor Case will be discussing what Griswold—the landmark case that began the process of invalidating legal prohibitions on the use of birth control—looks like in the aftermath of Hobby Lobby and Obergefell. Mary Anne Case is the Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law and convener of the Workshop on Regulating Family, Sex and Gender. Presented by the Law Students for Reproductive Justice and the American Constitution Society on November 11, 2015.