Podcast appearances and mentions of deirdre mccloskey

Caleb O. Brown has hosted the Cato Daily Podcast since 2007, CatoAudio since 2008, and all told has created several thousand interviews, videos, and other pieces for the Cato Institute. On his final episode, he is interviewed by Cato's Deirdre McCloskey about the art of the interview and his pending move to head Kentucky's Bluegrass Institute. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Quale è stato l'ingrediente segreto per lo straordinario aumento della ricchezza mondiale degli ultimi secoli?Nell'intervista LeoniFiles di questa settimana, Carlo Stagnaro indaga con Deirdre McCloskey, professoressa emerita presso l'Università di Chicago e distinguished scholar presso il Cato Institute, le cause profonde e meno apparenti del progresso economico e culturale del genere umano, con un occhio di riguardo anche alla situazione attuale.Preferisci seguire su YouTube?

On this episode of the Hayek Program Podcast, Deirdre McCloskey delivers a keynote lecture at the 2022 Markets & Society conference. She argues that the "great enrichment"—a 30-fold rise in global income per capita since 1776—was driven by liberal economic ideas that champion individual freedom and equality of permission. McCloskey also critiques government intervention, emphasizing the transformative power of removing barriers to foster innovation, prosperity, and human flourishing, and more.Deirdre McCloskey is a Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History and Professor of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey is also a Distinguished Affiliated Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She has published numerous books including Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All(2019) and her trilogy “The Bourgeois Era”: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for a Commercial Society (2006), Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (2010), and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016).This lecture has been published in the Markets & Society Journal, Volume 1 Issue 1, as "Humanomics." Learn more about the Markets & Society conference and journal here.If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts.Virtual Sentiments, a podcast series from the Hayek Program, is streaming! Subscribe today and listen to seasons one and two.Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgramLearn more about Academic & Student ProgramsFollow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatusCC Music: Twisterium

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

Numa festa política aqui em Washington DC, na casa da Professora Deirdre McCloskey assistimos à eleição e ao ínicio da noite eleitoral e a professora deixou as suas expectativas e o que se seguiria em seguida. Uma festa que contou com pessoas do CATO Institute. Donald Trumo, para desgosto da professora foi eleito.

Send us a textAnti-cheat economics, web3 property rights, Deirdre McCloskey, institutional incentives, Halo UGC, and the if single player games have a natural advantage outside the West. Oh my.Dr.Jason Arentz finally guest stars, and he's bringing the econ juice, finally striking a 50/50 web3 split on the case. Zynga Car Price Experiment: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/zynga-apologizes-for-random-dlc-pricing-experiment

An old and common law on many cities' books was meant to crack down on houses of prostitution. Today those same laws are used to effectively ban boarding houses or college student housing. Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden tell the tale. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us a textGrowth is essential to human life. Always has been, always will be. From the moment we are born, we grow, and we continue to throughout our lives, whether that is physically, mentally, or otherwise. Societies grow too.But what is growth? Real growth is replicable, durable, and sustainable (and not in the sense that immediately comes to mind). Your seven-year-old doesn't shrink back down after she grows an inch. It might happen when she's ninety, but that's gravity (and don't you think she's had a good run at this point? We should accept that it's ok to have a growth recession every now and again). So how have intellectuals conceptualized the growth of societies, environments, and economies over time? And how should we think about growth? The wonderful Henry C. Clark joins us on the podcast today to answer these questions and more. He is the program director of the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth College and the author of several books including the newly released The Moral Economy We Have Lost: Life Before Mass Abundance. Go check it out!Want to explore more?Henry Clark on the Enlightenments, a Great Antidote podcast.Pierre Desrochers, From Prometheus to Arcadia: Liberals, Conservatives, the Environment, and Cultural Cognition, at Econlib.Robert Pindyck on Averting and Adapting to Climate Change, an EconTalk podcast.Sandra Peart and David Levy, Happiness and the Vanity of the Philosopher: Part1, at Econlib.Deirdre McCloskey and Economists' Ideas About Ideas, a Liberty Matters forum at the Online Library of Liberty.Never miss another AdamSmithWorks update.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó, el 22 de mayo de 2024, el diálogo «Dinámicas económicas y demográficas en perspectiva. ¿El crecimiento de la población genera una mayor o menor abundancia de recursos?» en el que participaron Marian L. Tupy, Deirdre McCloskey, Ian Vasquez y Gabriel Calzada (moderador) con motivo de la presentación del libro titulado Superabundancia de los autores Marian L. Tupy y Gale L. Pooley, editado por Deusto.

La Fundación Rafael del Pino organizó, el 22 de mayo de 2024, el diálogo «Dinámicas económicas y demográficas en perspectiva. ¿El crecimiento de la población genera una mayor o menor abundancia de recursos?» en el que participaron Marian L. Tupy, Deirdre McCloskey, Ian Vasquez y Gabriel Calzada (moderador) con motivo de la presentación del libro titulado Superabundancia de los autores Marian L. Tupy y Gale L. Pooley, editado por Deusto.

In May 2022, Alex spoke with Deirdre McCloskey in a wide-ranging conversation that addresses the economic, philosophical, and political reasons why liberalism just works. We're reposting that important conversation today on The Curious Task. 

What explains the wealth of the modern age? Was it capital? Institutions? Slave-holding? Why do some countries seem to have an economic advantage over others? Are the fears of progressives about wealth inequality worth paying attention to? Economist, historian, and prolific author Deirdre McCloskey joins us to talk about the key factor that precipitated the wild success of the modern world.(Re-Mastered for Re-Issue.)Show Notes:Deirdre's WebsiteBourgeois VirtuesThe Bourgeois DealAudio Production by Podsworth Media - https://podsworth.com

Introduction: Caleb O. BrownScott Lincicome and Deirdre McCloskey on Cato's Defending Globalization projectWilliam Ruger and Jason Sorens on the seventh edition of Freedom in the 50 StatesAmy Caiazza and Daniel Gorfine on the SEC's proposed rules on predictive data analyticsAlexandra Hudson on The Soul of CivilityExclusive: Ian Vasquez on the Human Freedom Index 2023 report Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are the teachings of Christianity compatible with libertarianism? Economist Deirdre McCloskey thinks so. At the Mont Pelerin Society conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, she sits down with Matt Kibbe to lay out her vision of a Christian libertarianism that values the individual over the collective, embraces markets, and demands that we treat each other with kindness, humility, and love. These lessons are more important than ever in a time when politics is dominated by division and hatred.

El capitalismo está bajo ataque y necesita quien lo defienda. Bajo esa premisa, el sociólogo e historiador Rainer Zitelmann ha adoptado una tarea que quizá no es muy popular: defender un sistema que hoy en día es asociado con los problemas que enfrenta la humanidad. Zitelmann, alineado con la también historiadora Deirdre McCloskey, ha venido haciendo una fuerte defensa del capitalismo, asegurando que es el principal causante del progreso de los países. El autor está en Colombia promocionando su libro “En defensa del libre mercado”, con el que busca desmontar las 10 críticas comunes del llamado anticapitalismo.

Johan Norberg's work revolves primarily around economic and intellictual history and attempting to learn lessons from past financial systems. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Johan takes us through his version of capitalism, giving an especially interesting perspective on the economic system of his home country. Johan is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of several books. His latest is The Capitalist Manifesto: In Defense of Global Capitalism, available now. In This Episode* “Capitalism” and its meanings (0:55)* The state of contemporary capitalism (2:34)* Coordination in capitalism (7:59)* The cyclical nature of economic systems (13:54)* Swedish capitalism  (16:56)* The case for capitalism (21:48)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationJames Pethokoukis: Let's begin with a little definitional work here. Capitalist Manifesto: “Capitalist” is a word people assign a variety of meanings to. What is the capitalism that you're talking about here?Johan Norberg: Yeah, it's not a great word. Quite often it's misunderstood; people think it's all about capital. It's not. We can have capital in many different economic systems. To me, free-market capitalism is about a decentralized economic system with private property where decisions are made locally, decentralized, not command and control, and the prices and wages and things are set in voluntary negotiations rather than top-down.The economist Deirdre McCloskey hates the word "capitalism." She prefers "innovism" or "trade-tested progress." Should we insist on using a different word to describe the world's dominant socio-economic system?Deirdre McCloskey is right. Capitalism is a bad word. I would much prefer “innovism” or something like that. But I've realized that in order to communicate with people, I'd better use some of the words that they are using. And I've realized that we're stuck with the word “capitalism” and the whole concept of capitalism, and if we don't fill it with meaning, those of us who like free markets and free trade, I've realized that somebody else is going to fill it with meaning, and in that case, we are losing the debate. Go to where the sinners are. That's my take.Twenty years ago, it seemed like markets had won. Capitalism was changing the world and bringing people out of poverty. President Clinton declared "the era of big government is over." China was opening its economy. What happened? Why did you feel the need to write this book in this moment?That's exactly why I wrote this book, because nowadays it seems like nobody likes free markets and free trade anymore. I've realized that, in the US, and that should be a place where people appreciate some of this, fewer people believe in capitalism than believe in ghosts nowadays. And there's this lack among politicians and governments everywhere in belief in global capitalism. There's this whole, repatriate stuff, subsidize specific businesses and sectors back home, rather than having global supply chains. So that's why I wrote this.I think this is all based on a complete misunderstanding of what has happened in the world in the past 20 years. It's not that markets have failed. On the contrary, despite the fact that we've had 20 rough years with financial crises and wars and the Great Pandemic and stuff like that, and yet we've seen, when you look at objective indicators of human living standards, more progress than ever before over these 20 years. When it comes to the reduction in poverty, more than 130,000 people lifted out of extreme poverty every day over the past 20 years. We've seen an increase in global GDP per capita of roughly a third. We've reduced child mortality by almost half, which means that four million fewer children died last year than in 2002. And this is because entrepreneurs and innovators, they keep innovating ourselves out of problems all the time — if we give them some freedom to do that. And that's what I'm worried about: that they'll have less freedom in the future if we do not keep on pounding and keep on explaining this.Those are some pretty impressive statistics. But people don't seem to notice. We keep hearing the same narrative of "late-stage, failed capitalism.” Why is that?I think the financial crisis is a very important part of this. If some capitalists do bad stuff, people lose faith in capitalism and I think we saw this in the US but also around the world. There's this sense that perhaps we shouldn't imitate what America is doing if these are the consequences. And I don't think that the financial crisis was a result of unleashed market forces. And I even wrote a book on this a couple of years back, Financial Fiasco. I think there were massive regulatory failures and central banks and ministers of finance trying to make capitalism very safe by implementing a very homogenous structure on everybody, telling everybody to go into the same way, searching for the same AAA-rated securities and stuff like that. And if everybody behaves in the same way, if that fails, there's massive disaster. We need decentralization partly to minimize risks like that. But — doesn't matter, we don't have to go into history. I think this partly explains why we're in this lack of trust in capitalism right now.But also other things. People, when they're afraid of the world, they tend to retreat. They don't want to explore. They don't want to innovate. It triggers their fight-or-flight mechanism and sometimes the societal fight-or-flight mechanism. You want to hide behind walls and tariff barriers and strong, big governments that protect you, and that is a misunderstanding of how we get out of crises. And this is what I think we've learned from these past 20 years. Yes, lots of bad stuff happened. It makes us afraid. It triggers some sort of evolutionary tendency to get away from openness and learning and discovery processes and instead we want just one instant solution to all the problems.But what we're learning is, how did we get out of the pandemic? We did it by having thousands of entrepreneurs constantly finding new ways to rebuild supply chains and find replacements for the resources they couldn't get. And innovators who were looking for new treatments and coming up with a vaccine in a record period of time. It didn't take a thousand years as it usually does, coming up with a vaccine against polio, but more like three months. But try to tell that to our reptilian brains. When we're fearful, we want one simple solution. And as H.L. Mencken once put it, there is always a solution to every problem: it is “neat, plausible, and wrong.” And it's so dangerous because it involves replacing all that discovery, all that learning and wisdom of millions with just the preferences of a few people at the top.Let me read a brief tweet by the right-wing populist writer, Sohrab Ahmari: “We are entering a new age of industrial war. The ‘California ideology,' neoliberalism, Reagan-Clintonism — whatever you want to call it, it's kaput. We're going to see close coordination between state, enterprise, labor. It took security threats to bring us here. I'll take it.” Why won't you take it?That's a scary prospect to me. There is a reason why he's talking about this Silicon Valley thing, because that worked splendidly, and one of the reasons it succeeded was that the outcomes weren't decided in advance by any kind of command-and-control thing. It was, as some criticized it in the ‘70s, it looks more like the Wild West, allowing entrepreneurs and innovators to experiment with crazy ideas, even in garages. And that's the way to … if you want to explore all possible avenues and ideas, we have to let everybody go out and look for it. I think the reason why Sohrab Ahmari is wrong is that he thinks that there is one solution to all the problems we face. Perhaps there is, but I don't know one and he doesn't know it. We have to allow more eyeballs to look at the problems and more brains to go out thinking hard about these things, and that involves not starting geopolitical divisions and nationalist temptations, but it involves having lots of people in other places helping us to find the solutions in a division of labor where we learn from what they're doing.Why has America been so successful so far? When people say that it's failing, this American, this Washington consensus thing, please keep in mind that just 15 years ago, the American economy was slightly smaller than the European one. Now it's almost a third bigger. It's not entirely broken, but some of the fixes might break it, I'm afraid, if we continue doing things like this. Why is it successful? Well, look at different areas. Look at AI. Why is America so successful? We thought that China would come up with it. Well, one reason is that the Chinese have to teach machines not just what to say, but also what not to say, but also the fact that America is learning from others. More than half of America's top AI experts have education or background in other countries and almost a third come from China. So if we want to win against China and everybody else, we also have to allow lots of Chinese to do the work for us.This notion of close coordination between state and business and labor, where does that work well? Is there a model? Is there an example of that kind of formula working elsewhere?A leading European economist just published a book called, I think it's some 50 of them, called Questioning the Entrepreneurial State, where they evaluate this whole idea that we would have this close coordination between governments and businesses, and what they say is that the history of it, at least in Europe but they look around the world as well, is that it's usually a full employment program for lobbyists and for attorneys who just reformulate everything that businesses would usually do as something that fits with this new industrial policy thing. If it was successful, you would look up stuff on the internet by using Quaero, because that's the close coordination stuff in Europe with the European and German and French governments heavily funded a “European Google.” The whole idea was that we will own the digital future by heavily subsidizing this one project. It doesn't work, because you lose some of the trial and error, you lose some of the mechanisms whereby we understand what's a success and what's not.It's okay to fail. Industrial policies fail all the time, but so does big tech. Entrepreneurial capitalism as well. But the great thing with free markets and not having the governments investing heavily in one particular model is that you replace this trial-and-error, constant experimentation and feedback and adaptation that comes when you work on markets and you're risking your own resources. Once you do that by having the government picking a winner, then, when you lose out, you spend more money on these projects instead. And you lose this learning process whereby we're constantly channeling capital and labor to more successful ones. What people would tell you is that China is the most successful place where we've had this…Yes, there seems to be a cyclical component to this belief. I mean, I'm old enough to have seen the version where Japan had figured it out. That didn't turn out so well. And then I think you have people who looked at China. If you have a natural inclination to like the idea of central planning and you eschew the kind of natural chaos of capitalism, you could point to China So that's why I wonder if this is a passing phase, because China doesn't seem like they're able to pull it off either.Yeah, but that'll keep on moving, then, and find another example where it seems to be working. Because it's always easy to find out in retrospect that something seemed to be working. And if the government is involved somewhere, they try to give it credit. But until recently, I think 49 American states tried to spend heavily to create a biotech cluster in their own state to attract businesses from other states. And if one of them succeeded, people would've said, “Look, this is because of this top-down government intervention,” but probably not, right?And it's the same thing with China. Yes, China has been tremendously successful for 30 years, but in which sectors? In the sectors that the government didn't plan for it, in places where we saw grassroots capitalism, farmers secretly privatizing their land, starting village enterprises. And then, and only then, did the Communist Party see that, “This seems to be more successful than what we've been doing recently, so allow them to continue to experiment,” experiment in export processing and stuff like that. But they wanted to keep it elsewhere so that it wouldn't spread throughout the rest of the economy. But it was so successful that it did. That's what succeeded: when people experimented. Entrepreneurs were allowed to innovate. What was it that failed? The large, state-owned enterprises. They were less productive. They were wasting cheap credit and ruining, destroying resources over the years. And once the government gets involved, there's plenty of research into this, they find less productive businesses and they become even less productive if they get access to this cheap credit and cheap land. And I think people are coming around to that now as they're seeing that China has many problems, some of them related to demography, as well. But they would need innovation, strange new business ideas, crazy people in garages coming up with new ideas. That's exactly the thing that top-down governments don't really like, and what they've been doing over the past few years is just destroying tech businesses, [education] businesses, and the gaming industry in China because authoritarians aren't good at spotting where the true potential lies.I wonder if you could clear up a question that confuses many Americans. Do you come from, and are you currently living in, a capitalist country?Yes, I am.We don't know. We're not sure. We're very confused about Sweden.Yes, I know, and that's because lots of perceptions, just like the ideas, are stuck in the 1970s. Sweden had a brief period of some 20 years when we really experimented with socialist ideas, but this was also the moment — the only moment in modern economic history — when Sweden lagged behind other countries. So up until the early 1970s, we had a very limited government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade — that made us rich. It made us so rich in Sweden that we thought that we could experiment with these ideas. Just stop thinking about how to create wealth, just spend it, redistribute it. And that resulted in an awful 20, 25 years when companies like Ikea and Tetra Pak and the greatest entrepreneurs, they just left Sweden because it wasn't possible to do business in Sweden.This is what people still remember: the 1970s. We did all these things: doubled the size of the government, jacking up taxes and so on. At the same time, it looked like a fairly successful place, it's a rich place. But it's like that old joke: How do you end up with a small fortune? Well, you start with a large fortune and then you waste most of it. And that's what we did. This is actually why, since that terrible economic financial crisis that we had in the early 1990s, Sweden has once again liberalized markets quite drastically compared to other places, and we're now back to a system which many Americans would actually think of as more free market in many ways than the US system.As you know, people think of Sweden and Scandinavia more generally as big government with a giant welfare [system], cradle-to-grave welfare, all the welfare you would ever want. So in what ways is Sweden maybe more market friendly than the United States, and perhaps some ways which would greatly surprise many Americans as well as Bernie Sanders?Yeah, I'm trying to tell the Bernie Sanders of the world that if they want to be like Sweden, they would have to do plenty of things. They would have to become more free trade-oriented in many ways. They would have to reform social security, partially privatize it with individual accounts, they would have to introduce a national school voucher system so private schools get the same funding as the public ones. They would actually have to lower taxes in many ways on the rich, and they would have to abolish taxes on property wealth inheritance and lower the corporate tax, and instead put most of the tax burdens on low- and middle-income households, because that's the dirty little secret of the Swedish welfare state. We learned in the 1970s that if you want to have a big universal welfare state that's very generous, in that case, everybody is going to have to pay for it.You have to redistribute over people's life cycle, rather than trying to get the rich to pay for it all, because we realized that the rich are too few and the economy is too dependent on them. So if we are trying to get them to pay for it all, they will flee Sweden, they will move to other places, leave their resources elsewhere, and we won't get the new businesses, the new successful ones that we all depend upon. So for 30 years, we didn't create a single net job in the private sector, the ‘70s, ‘80s, and the ‘90s. So instead, you have to move towards more taxing consumption, 25 percent value-added tax, and making sure that the poor and middle income households pay the bulk of income taxes. So, counterintuitively — and this is something that people really don't get—Sweden has a much less-progressive tax system than the United States does, less-progressive tax system than almost any other rich country because we've learned that the poor are loyal taxpayers. They don't move, they don't dodge taxes, and they don't have tax attorneys.What is the quick pitch for capitalism? If you're on an airplane next to someone who's heard a lot about inequality and wage stagnation and losing to the Chinese, how do you make the case for market capitalism?It's much, much better than you think, but it could be even better. It is much better because we can see, look at the long-term indicators and the data, and perhaps this is where I lose my fellow passenger. But wage stagnation was a phenomenon in the ‘70s and ‘80s, partly because we had to rebuild the economy because it was at risk of becoming much less competitive and we were about to lose jobs everywhere. Once we did that, from the ‘90s and onwards, we've had a tremendous increase in wages, and we can measure this in wages and total compensation and increase in 60 percent. I'd say if you look at the best indicators, but even more interesting is what can you do with those resources? And then you see that all those amenities and goods and technologies that we all considered luxuries in the ‘70 and ‘80s, we're getting close to 100 percent possession in American households.The poor people who fall below the poverty line in the US now own more amenities like that — washing machines, television sets, dryers, clothes washers, and of course cell phones and computers — than the rich did in 1970. That tells you something. If you look around the world, we've actually had the best era ever when it comes to poverty reduction, and we've even, since the turn of the millennium, reduced global inequality for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. So it's much better than the headlines. If you look at the trend lines, they're much better. Yeah, tell me about that. Give me a little of that “could be even better.” Give me a little flavor of that.Yeah. I think that we've lost — you know this and you just wrote a book on this — we've entered a period where we've thought that things cannot be better. We've tried to protect old business models and old ways of doing things, and often in a low interest rate environment, I think protected many businesses that should have been put out of their misery so that capital and labor could go to the new sectors, to the frontiers of the economy. We are seeing some of that happening now with everything from mRNA technology to the new space race to AI, but we're in a mindset and a regulatory situation where we don't want to experiment with the new weird stuff. But we have to do that because that's the only way where we'll get the new goods and services and jobs in the future. So here's to the crazy ones, as Steve Jobs would put it. And in that case, we can't be too protective of our old, safe ways of doing things. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. Over the span of her career, Deirdre has written on economic theory, history, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, law, and more. In this episode, she and Robinson discuss her political philosophy—classical liberalism. They begin by discussing her training before delving into liberalism's roots in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries as a celebration of freedom of speech and innovation, as well as its doctrine of equality under the law. They then compare it to competing views, such as conservatism, and address common criticisms of classical liberalism, such as its alleged inability to respond to crises like global warming or that the free market will concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. Why Liberalism Works: https://a.co/d/hvUAtnk Deirdre's Website: https://www.deirdremccloskey.com OUTLINE 00:00 In This Episode… 00:59 Introduction 04:09 Deirdre's Background in Economics 17:36 What is Classical Liberalism? 33:28 The Beginning of Liberalism 51:50 The Great Enrichment 01:05:43 Free Speech 01:17:31 Conservatism and Libertarianism 01:28:36 Criticisms of Liberalism 01:43:00 Climate Change and the Free Market 01:49:57 Liberalism and Queers Robinson's Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robinson-erhardt/support

What makes for good rules? Good rules are often "discovered," according to Cato's Deirdre McCloskey. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Deirdre McCloskey explains how freedom and bourgeoise dignity enriched the world.Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on TwitterThe Bourgeoise Era Trilogy Vol. 1 - The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of CommerceVol. 2 - Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern WorldVol. 3 - Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the WorldShorter summary volume: Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World, by Deirdre McCloskey & Art CardenDiscussed and Recommended: Four Essays on Liberty by Isaiah Berlin; The Conservative Sensibility by George Will; Kathleen Stock & Deirdre McCloskey Debate Issues of Sex, Gender, & IdentityProfessor McCloskey's email, website, Twitter, & author page

Pedro Bial conversa com a economista Deirdre McCloskey, professora emérita de Economia, História e Comunicação.

One of the biggest misconceptions that drives mischief in the economy is the widespread belief that entrepreneurship is easy, and if it's not easy, it's at least formulaic. Deirdre McCloskey explains why that attitude can be so destructive. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex speaks with Professor Jacob Levy about the concept of neutrality within the history of liberalism and how many historical thinkers have approached the subject within that tradition.  Episode Notes: Michael Oakeshott on “adverbial rules” https://lawliberty.org/forum/michael-oakeshott-on-the-rule-of-law-and-the-liberal-order/  John Locke's religious beliefs https://rb.gy/1yg43  Heresy of Americanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanism_(heresy)  Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues Thesis https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/bv_selection.pdf  Ronald Dworkin “Liberalism” https://www.scribd.com/document/313373358/Ronald-Dworkin-Liberalism#  Stephanie Slade, "Must Libertarians Care About More Than the State?" https://reason.com/2022/03/19/two-libertarianisms/  Alexis De Toqueville's concerns about the rising liberal democratic order https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2018/08/09/de-tocqueville-and-the-french-exception  John Stuart Mill “On Liberty” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty 

There are many competing theories that purport to explain the dramatic and sustained increase in wealth and well-being for humans these last two centuries. Cato's Deirdre McCloskey discusses why she believes liberty is the secret sauce of growing prosperity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Read a transcript of this episode.Deirdre McCloskey is probably my favorite contemporary liberal scholar. Her work ranges widely across disciplines, is always fascinating, and builds its defense of free markets and the open society in a deeply humane and compassionate fashion.I've talked with her on podcasts before, but today's a little different. Our topic isn't economics, but religion. Deirdre is a committed Anglican, and her next book sets out the case that religious faith is an important component of a thriving liberal society—and that those who think Christianity points in a more reactionary, illiberal direction get Christianity wrong.ReImagining Liberty is a project of The UnPopulist, and is produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Get full access to Aaron Ross Powell at www.aaronrosspowell.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The economic historian and Magatte Wade, Alex Gladstein, Mohamad Machine-Chian, Tony Woodlief, and Tom Palmer are challenging authoritarians everywhere.

En este episodio hablamos con Deirdre McCloskey, una destacada economista y autora de varios libros sobre la economía mundial. Además de su impresionante carrera, McCloskey es también una mujer transgénero que ha tenido que enfrentar una serie de desafíos y obstáculos en su vida personal y profesional. En esta entrevista, McCloskey comparte su perspectiva única como mujer trans en el mundo de la economía y cómo ha influido en su forma de ver y analizar los fenómenos económicos globales. Compra tus boletos para el evento de El Billetazohttps://morisdieck.com/elbilletazoSígueme en todas mis redes sociales:

When policymakers pursue “equality,” which equality should they pursue? Deirdre McCloskey believes neither "equality of outcome" nor "equality of opportunity" is a great option. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Entrevista de Pedro Almeida Jorge à economista e historiadora americana Deirdre N. McCloskey, em setembro de 2022. Transcrição para português disponível em: https://maisliberdade.pt/biblioteca/entrevista-exclusiva-setembro-2022/

In the fifth panel of the 2nd Ibero-American Congress of Cultural Liberalism - organized by Fundación Libertad and the Fundación Internacional para la Libertad - Yaron Brook, economist and writer, David Boaz, senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and Deirdre McCloskey, economist and writer, discuss the state of authoritarianism in the world and what liberals can do to counter it. Moderator: Marcos Falcone.This virtual panel was recorded on December 15, 2022 as part of the 2nd Ibero-American Congress of Cultural Liberalism - organized by Fundación Libertad and the Fundación Internacional para la Libertad 00:00 Intro01:30 David Boaz Intro10:55 Deirdre McCloskey Intro23:05 Yaron Brook Intro36:20 Are far right and left equaly threatening to liberalism?53:10 Has the US become less of an example on freedom?1:08:00 China1:16:53 Should we leave autocrats alone?1:20:40 Where should we focus our efforts? Join this channel to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@YaronBrook/joinLike what you hear? Like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on new videos and help promote the Yaron Brook Show: https://bit.ly/3ztPxTxBecome a sponsor to get exclusive access and help create more videos like this: https://yaronbrookshow.com/support-members/support-the-show/Or make a one-time donation: https://bit.ly/2RZOyJJContinue the discussion by following Yaron on Twitter (https://bit.ly/3iMGl6z) and Facebook (https://bit.ly/3vvWDDC )Want to learn more about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Visit the Ayn Rand Institute: https://bit.ly/35qoEC3

Editors' Pick:Rich: Luther Abel's piece “What Happens When a Regular Guy Mishandles Classified Information”Charlie: Douglas Murray's magazine piece “Right and Wrong on Ukraine”Jim: NR's editorial, “Biden's Transparency Claims Have Lost Credibility”Phil: Dan McLaughlin's piece “The 2022 Turnout Puzzle”Light Items:Rich: The Weirdest People on the World by Joseph Henrich, Bourgeois Dignity by Deirdre McCloskey, and Escape from Rome by Walter ScheidelCharlie: His Kansas City tripJim: A good physicalPhil: Accidental shopliftingSponsors:Dividend CafeThis podcast was edited and produced by Sarah Colleen Schutte.

Dr. Matson's lecture explored how in the British tradition, political economy, which partly emerged out of discourses in natural theology, ethics and jurisprudence, casts some light on the content of our moral obligations. Drawing on Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, he desicussed how commerce in the eighteenth century came to be depicted as a mode of cooperation—either literally with God or metaphorically with our fellow human beings—through which we serve the common good. That depiction energized the emerging authorization of commercial enterprise, helping to illustrate the virtue of what Deirdre McCloskey calls the “bourgeois virtues,” an understanding which contributed to the Great Enrichment. The depiction continues to edify business as a calling and elaborate how freedom serves the good of humankind.Erik W. Matson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center and the Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Program in George Mason University's Department of Economics. He serves as an Online Course Lecturer at The King's College, New York. Previously he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University in 2017.Subscribe to our podcastsRegister Now for Business Matters 2023Apply Now for Acton University 2023 (Early Bird Pricing) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daniel Klein is professor of economics and JIN Chair at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he co-leads a program in Adam Smith. There's been renewed interest in the role Christianity has played in liberalism since Larry Siedentop's 2014 book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Today, Dan Churchwell, Acton's Director of Programs and Education, sits down with Klein to discuss Adam Smith and his enlightenment vision. Building on Siedentop, Klein says universal benevolent monotheism, and Christianity in particular, has led to the articulation of a specific social grammar and corresponding rights—in short Adam Smith's “liberal plan.” Subscribe to our podcastsDr. Klein's faculty pageFull discussion of Larry Siedentop's book:Full set of notes on SiedentopKlein published interview on Siedentop:Klein replies to Deirdre McCloskey on Siedentop: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the proper way for Christians to engage with the world around them? Many theologians believe Christians are called upon to be socialists. Deirdre McCloskey disagrees. Her forthcoming book is God in Commerce. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“It's tough to be alive now,” the actor Timothée Chalamet recently said. “I think societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it.”It's one of those lines that got picked up by dozens of media outlets. Because those outlets know it's one of those headlines people can't resist clicking on. As the economist Deirdre McCloskey once put it, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell.”✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

Deirdre McCloskey is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and History Emerita, and Professor of English and Communication Emerita, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. We discuss the effects of liberalism on human progress, the challenges and benefits liberalism derives from innovation, whether popular economic critiques of liberalism hold water, and her unique intellectual biography that spans over 50 years in higher education in a wide variety of academic disciplines.

Deirdre McCloskey is an economist, the author of more than 20 books, and is one of America's most prominent trans academics. During our conversation, Deirdre talks about growing up in the 1940's and 1950's, knowing from an early age that she wanted to be a woman, her marriage of more than 30 years to the "love of her life" and fathering two children, and her epiphany in the 1990's, at more than 50 years of age, that she wanted to transition from a man to a woman.Deirdre also details the reaction of her family to her desire to transition, how she was twice institutionalized, progress in trans rights in America, and her disagreements with positions taken by individuals like Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce, who have publicly voiced concerns about allowing children to go through hormone therapy and insist that the majority of kids who transition later regret their decision.As I note during the conversation, I think most people are trying to form their views on this sensitive issue, to best determine what is true and what is decent. A free society should allow adults to do what they want, provided they aren't harming others. I try to understand the concerns of people on both sides of this debate around children, and no matter how one might come down on it, I admire Deirdre's courage in authentically living her life, in being true to herself, and in her commitment to free speech, to allow open and important moral conversations to happen.------------Support via Venmo------------Show notesSocial media and all episodes------------(00:00) Introduction(02:50) “Crossing: A Memoir” quote: boyhood(09:49) Early life and sexuality(14:29) Gender conversations with her ex-wife(16:53) Concealments from her ex-wife(17:44) Being sexually different in the 50s and 60s(20:23) Cross-dressing(21:31) Gender transition after decades of marriage(23:09) 50 years as a male(25:45) Her resistance towards gender change(28:10) Praying to be a woman(29:19) Lived experience as a man identifying as a woman(31:19) The moment of epiphany to transition(35:26) Clarity on the epiphany(36:33) Loved ones' reactions to the gender transition(38:54) Being institutionalized against her will(41:25) Classical liberalism and freedom(43:13) The experience of being institutionalized(45:59) Changing cultural views on gender transitions(50:09) Life post gender transition(53:50) Self-actualization and gender transition(58:25) The best part about being a female(01:01:16) Living doubt-free post gender transition(01:05:00) Freedom of speech being paramount(01:06:26) Is gender change irreversible?(01:11:41) Do children often regret gender transition?(01:16:29) Are claims of children regretting their gender change fabricated?(01:19:19) The state's involvement in personal decisions(01:23:00) Removing the state from personal decisions(01:27:47) Courage, and being a public example

This episode explores Prof McCloskey's criticism of the way the discipline of economics has unfortunately been separated from matters of ethics, the importance of liberal values for human progress, and her calls for a human-centered approach to economics called ‘humanomics'.

The role of literature in economics, Chinese totalitarianism, levelling-up and trans rights. In this fascinating IEA In Conversation, Matthew Lesh, IEA Head of Public Policy, sits down with Deirdre McCloskey to discuss all of this and much more! Deirdre N. McCloskey has been since 2000 UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard as an economist, she has written twenty books and edited seven more, and has published some four hundred articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, feminism, ethics, and law. She taught for twelve years in Economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself now as a “postmodern free-market quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian.”   FOLLOW US: TWITTER - https://twitter.com/iealondon​​  INSTAGRAM - https://www.instagram.com/ieauk/​​  FACEBOOK - https://www.facebook.com/ieauk​​  WEBSITE - https://iea.org.uk/ 

En este nuevo episodio hablamos con Axel Kaiser, (www.instagram.com/axelkaiserb) autor de "La Neoinquisición", "La tiranía de la igualdad", y "El economista callejero" entro otros. Axel es analista político, columnista para "El Mercurio", colaborador para el "Washington Post", director de la Fundación para El Progreso de Chile (https://fppchile.org/es/), y es uno de los referentes para la libertad de expresión, y la razón en latinoamerica.De los distintos temas que tratamos, hablamos sobre su admiración por la economista Deirdre McCloskey a quien destaca por encima de muchas personalidades eruditas a las que ha tenido la oportunidad de conocer, así mismo como nos explica qué hace tan especial a esta mujer. Adicionalmente, Axel nos explica qué implica realmente "pensar", y por qué algunos aunque creamos que lo hacemos, no necesariamente es así, y nos desmenuza lo que para él implica este acto.Adicionalmente, Axel nos explica la demagogia detrás del eslogan de un candidato a la presidencia colombiana, que propone a "Colombia potencia mundial de la vida"; y detalladamente nos evidencia cómo a través de la manipulación del lenguaje, nos manipulan para vendernos una realidad de la que después seremos prisioneros.En una respuesta imperdible, Axel nos articula un argumento para explicar por qué pensar se ha convertido en una acción incómoda para los movimientos identitarios de izquierda, los cuales utilizan con gran eficacia el "lenguaje inclusivo" (que está tan de moda), y al cual Axel considera además de una abominación, una arma de destrucción masiva cultural cuando se mezcla con las redes sociales; una capaz de poner fin a la civilización occidental, ya que es utilizada para ganar la superioridad moral y manipular a las masas.Si quieres aprender más de Axel te recomiendo ver esta charla haciendo click acá.Si quieres oír otras entrevistas interesantes te recomiendo:Ep.45 ¿Cómo Apoderarme De Mi Vida? / David JannaEp. 44. Cambio Climático y Tecnología / Alejandro Agag (Presidente de la Formula E)Ep. 40 ¿Cómo conseguir empleo? / Alex Torrenegra (Inversionista de Shark Tank Colombia)Ep. 38 ¿Cómo crear el hábito de lectura? / Verónica CendalesEp. 34 ¿Tengo que ser un Crack? / Oso Trava (Anfitrión de Cracks podcast)Sígueme en Instagram: www.instagram.com/andrekanayetSi te gusta el podcast deja una reseña acá, y sigue el programa para enterarte apenas salga un nuevo episodio ¡te lo agradecería enormemente! ¡Ya nos vemos!

Alex speaks with Deirdre McCloskey in a wide-ranging conversation that addresses the economic, philosophical, and political reasons why liberalism just works. 

Matt Kibbe is joined by Deirdre McCloskey, distinguished professor emeritus of economics and of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago, to talk about the language we use as advocates of free market economics. McCloskey points out that economics is essentially a series of metaphors, and that we can best explain its concepts through stories rather than the dry language of academia. Meanwhile, certain jargon or stigmatized terms like “capitalism” are doing more harm than good when it comes to helping people understand why the freedom to innovate makes life better for everyone.

Why did gross domestic product suddenly start to skyrocket just a few hundred years ago after centuries of only gradual, marginal improvements? Dr. Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics, History, English, and Communication atUniversity of Illinois at Chicago, has written extensively on why it was not the accumulation of capital that caused what she has dubbed "The Great Enrichment"—and eventually enabled the Industrial Revolution—but rather the spread of the great ideas of liberty. On today's episode of Borderless, she joins Vale Sloane to discuss how ideas changed the world and allowed the standard of living to advance so dramatically for millions and billions of people.Dr. McCloskey prefers the term "innovism" to describe the source of this enrichment, rather than the more familiar "capitalism." Innovation, enabled by institutions such as the free market and free speech, was far more important to the economic transformation of the last few centuries than capital alone. Take a deep dive into what this means for our understanding of liberalism, history, and even the future on this episode of Borderless.Stay in the know by following us on social media:https://twitter.com/AtlasNetworkhttps://www.instagram.com/atlasnetwork/https://www.facebook.com/atlasnetwork/Support the Atlas Network Mission Today: https://www.atlasnetwork.org/donate

Kevin Williamson, the Remnant's cheeriest regular, is back for another voyage through the strange realm of contemporary America. A free society is messy, and life is all about contradictions, inconsistencies, and trade-offs. But this can be an uncomfortable truth for many to face. In a conversation that will send you scrambling for your bingo cards, Kevin and Jonah explore the problem with social homogeneity. They also touch on the weaknesses of autocratic regimes, realistic climate change solutions, and Kevin's hatred of Ohio. Plus, tune in to hear Kevin give a rousing reading of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Show Notes:- Kevin's page at National Review- Kevin: “Autocracy's Fatal Flaws”- Kevin: “Make Putin Pay”- Hayek: “Why the Worst Get on Top”- Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement- Yuval Levin's The Great Debate- Kevin's The Smallest Minority- The Remnant with Brian Rield- Jonah and Deirdre McCloskey at the Cato Institute- The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk- The Remnant with Shadi Hamid- Jonah: “Rise of the Underminers”- Unintentional confession

Professor Deirdre McCloskey is one of the most interesting thinkers in economics today. In this interview, conducted at FreedomFest 2021 in Rapid City South Dakota, near Deadwood, we push past a number of frontiers and traverse an open range of topics. That’s McCloskey in a nutshell – ignore the artificial fences between academic specializations and let the conversation go where it goes. In this case it goes through such territories as: the astonishing rise in standards of living since the rise of capitalism; why capitalism shouldn’t be called capitalism; what it should be called; why Bourgeois values have enriched us (and in more ways than economically); what the difference is between virtues and values; what Christianity had to do (and didn’t have to do) with the rise of modern human betterment; why theoretical economics has been wrong to obsess over “Maximum Utility” (a sociopathic form of economic modeling); the cult of statistical significance and its addiction to the p-value, and an upcoming book on Christianity and economics. Enjoy! Timestamps:0:00 – Intro9:40 – Why “virtues” rather than “values”?14:09 – The meaning of Jesus being born in Bethlehem18:54 – Eurocentric economics, why some minorities are successful27:07 – Free speech and the rich young ruler32:11 – A party of Liberty, politics for adults40:16 – How art can affect politics43:35 – Bettering Humanomics47:48 – The new atheists50:16 – God in Mammon59:17 – The Bible on slaverySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Prof. Deirdre McCloskey has written prolifically on a wide range of topics. In this episode, she discusses her trilogy of books which attempt to explain what she coined 'The Great Enrichment' since the nineteenth century. We discuss the use of language in economics, the potentially overstated role of physical capital, how liberalism spawned innovation and fostered ideas, as well as comparing some historical living standard examples throughout.

Getting Psyched with Jimi FritzAuthor and musician Jimi Fritz has spent decades writing about psychedelics and rave culture. I wanted to get his perspective on “smart drugs” and “dumb drugs”, what it means to be an ethical drug dealer, the origins of rave culture, and why he hates God so much. He also gives me a step-by-step on how to plot out a great first trip.If you’re like me and curious about psychedelics and the culture that surrounds them, you’ll love this one.Jimi LinksHead to Jimi’s websiteBuy Jimi’s book, Confessions of an Ethical Drug DealerCheck out the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)Don’t be left out!RU TexasWant to hang out with me, Thad Russell, Buck Johnson, Scott Horton, Cody Wilson, Hotep Jesus, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jack the Perfume Nationalist? Come to Austin in October for RU Texas. You don’t want to miss it!Follow MeBe sure you’re following me on Twitter.If you watch the show on YouTube, switch to Odyssee. This decentralized platform will give you a clear conscience and make me a tiny amount of money (at no cost to you).Become a paying subscriber for bonus episodes, written content, and your very own private podcast feed.Find my other social links along with all the crypto donation options you can possibly stand at blackbirdpodcast.com/follow.(Note: I use affiliate links. By clicking the sponsored links above, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you when you make a purchase. Using my affiliate links is a great way to support the show, and I really appreciate it!) This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.blackbirdpodcast.com/subscribe

Sass and Spite From the Right with Jack the Perfume NationalistJack the Perfume Nationalist is a sassy gay cultural critic from Austin whose hobbies include old movies and ladies’ perfume. You’ve heard him on Unregistered with Thad Russell and Red Scare with whoever hosts Red Scare (I’m told I need to listen to them, but I haven’t gotten around to it). He’ll be speaking at RU Texas, which you should certainly attend.Oh yeah, and somehow he’s a right-wing (and even conservative) Republican voter.This is one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had on this show. You’re gonna love it.Jack LinksSubscribe to The Perfume Nationalist on Patreon (you can also find their free stuff on any podcast app)Follow Jack on Twitter and Instagram.Time article mentioned about the 2020 election and Pete Q and Vin Armani’s conversation about itMovie recommendations: Nymphomaniac, Bladerunner 2049, SuspiriaWatch this: Twin Peaks and the 4-hour interpretationStop Not Knowing ThingsI’ve renewed my Basic Membership to Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom so many times that I finally just sprung for the lifetime Master Membership. I recommend you do the same. You’ll get unlimited access to courses on history, economics, political theory, logic, and even literature taught by liberty-loving professors from colleges and universities around the world. It’s the antidote to the cathedral.Let’s Hang OutWant to hang out with me, Thad Russell, Buck Johnson, Scott Horton, Cody Wilson, Hotep Jesus, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jack the Perfume Nationalist? Come to Austin in October for RU Texas. You don’t want to miss it!Follow MeBe sure you’re following me on Twitter.If you watch the show on YouTube, switch to Odyssee. This decentralized platform will give you a clear conscience and make me a tiny amount of money (at no cost to you).Become a paying subscriber for bonus episodes, written content, and your very own private podcast feed.Find my other social links along with all the crypto donation options you can possibly stand at blackbirdpodcast.com/follow.(Note: I use affiliate links. By clicking the sponsored links above, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you when you make a purchase. Using my affiliate links is a great way to support the show, and I really appreciate it!) This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.blackbirdpodcast.com/subscribe

Biblical Anarchy and Libertarian Nerdery with Jacob WinogradJacob and I hung out in Pittsburgh recently and had pretty good conversations. He’s the host of a podcast called Daniel 3: Biblical Anarchy, so naturally I wanted to hear all about his faith and political beliefs and how they play together. We also get into some pretty hardcore first principles libertarian rights theory stuff and, my current favorite subject following my conversation with David Gornoski, scapegoating. Mostly we’re just new friends getting to know each other better. I look forward to our future conversations.You’ll notice my half of the interview was a little echoey. I neglected to switch over from the internal laptop mic to my external podcasting mic. I’ll wear sackcloth and ashes as penance. (Also, thanks to Chris and team at Podsworth Media for making it sound WAY better than the original, which paid subscribers were privy to, but you, oh freeloader, are not. Fix that here.)Jacob LinksWatch the Daniel 3: Biblical Anarchy vids YouTubeFollow Jacob on TwitterLike the Daniel 3: Biblical Anarchy Facebook page and join the discussionRecommended Reading: Mere Christianity, by CS LewisSponsorBeYou Enterprises invites you back to your own body. Juliet Nail teaches yoga and other body awareness techniques to help you and your employees reach their wellness goals. Get in touch with Juliet today.Let’s Hang OutWant to hang out with me, Thad Russell, Buck Johnson, Scott Horton, Cody Wilson, Hotep Jesus, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jack the Perfume Nationalist? Come to Austin in October for RU Texas. You don’t want to miss it!Stop Not Knowing ThingsI’ve renewed my Basic Membership to Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom so many times that I finally just sprung for the lifetime Master Membership. I recommend you do the same. You’ll get unlimited access to courses on history, economics, political theory, logic, and even literature taught by liberty-loving professors from colleges and universities around the world. It’s the antidote to the cathedral.Follow MeBe sure you’re following me on Twitter.If you watch the show on YouTube, switch to Odyssee. This decentralized platform will give you a clear conscience and make me a tiny amount of money (at no cost to you).Become a paying subscriber for bonus episodes, written content, and your very own private podcast feed.Find my other social links along with all the crypto donation options you can possibly stand at blackbirdpodcast.com/follow.(Note: I use affiliate links. By clicking the sponsored links above, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you when you make a purchase. Using my affiliate links is a great way to support the show, and I really appreciate it!) This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.blackbirdpodcast.com/subscribe

Creating Liberty with Matt Erickson and LB MuñizYou remember LB’s recent appearance on the show, right? We talked a little bit about Matt Erickson’s appearance on Liberty Lockdown. In case you missed it, here’s a recap: Matt, critical of political solutions to problems libertarians focus on, said something along the lines of, if you hate taxes, what you really hate is not having as much money as you otherwise could have. So the solution isn’t to shout “Taxation is theft” into the void. It’s to make enough money that taxes are irrelevant. I think that’s a fair summary.LB kinda liked that take. I kinda didn’t. Matt thought we should expand on it. After a really fruitful internal discussion on Twitter, we decided to take it public. What you’re about to hear is the result. It’s an awesome conversation, and I eagerly look forward to collaborating with these two again very soon.I think this is the most important thing in the whole episode, and it’s really simple: Liberty isn’t something you ask for. It’s something you create.Matt LinksSubscribe to Kingpilled.Follow Matt on Twitter.LB LinksYou’re obviously already subscribed to Been Awake after all my urging.Follow LB on Twitter.Don’t be left out!RU TexasWant to hang out with me, Thad Russell, Buck Johnson, Scott Horton, Cody Wilson, Hotep Jesus, Deirdre McCloskey, and Jack the Perfume Nationalist? Come to Austin in October for RU Texas. You don’t want to miss it!Follow MeBe sure you’re following me on Twitter.If you watch the show on YouTube, switch to Odyssee. This decentralized platform will give you a clear conscience and make me a tiny amount of money (at no cost to you).Become a paying subscriber for bonus episodes, written content, and your very own private podcast feed.Find my other social links along with all the crypto donation options you can possibly stand at blackbirdpodcast.com/follow.(Note: I use affiliate links. By clicking the sponsored links above, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you when you make a purchase. Using my affiliate links is a great way to support the show, and I really appreciate it!) This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.blackbirdpodcast.com/subscribe

This week we're discussing Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World, with authors and professors Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden. Since we started the podcast now more than a year ago, we've had esteemed guests from a variety of fields, but having Diedre McCloskey on is special. In my humble opinion, she's one of the best living economic historians, and a tremendous writer whose led a fascinating life. The book we're discussing today is an accessible, highly literary, and often humorous entry into her perspectives—a sort of cheat sheet version of her essential work she calls the Bourgeois Trilogy, a magisterial and highly literary set of three books aiming to explain human freedom as the driving catalyst for accelerating world prosperity in the era commencing with the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and beyond. And the addition of Professor Art Carden to this mix is also a treat—both are witty, amazingly well read, and forceful in their views, which can be at times controversial but always inviting of other perspectives. And on that note, if you like what you're hearing make sure to follow us on social media. We're on Twitter @wellreadpod and Instagram at @wellreadinvestorpod or just google the Well Read Investor to see what I'm reading, reviewing, and talking about week in and out.