Podcasts about Friedrich Hayek

Ich habe mich mit dem Thema »Fortschritt« — also was konstituiert Fortschritt in unserer Gesellschaft, wie können wir ihn beschreiben, wie wird Fortschritt kritisiert, wie unterscheidet sich Fortschritt von Innovation usw. — schon des Öfteren in diesem Podcast auseinandergesetzt. Dies ist im Kern eines der wichtigsten Themen, vielleicht sogar ein roter Faden, der durch die sechs Jahre des Podcasts läuft. Mein neues Buch: Hexenmeister oder Zauberlehrling? Die Wissensgesellschaft in der Krise ist verfügbar! Schon gelesen? In dieser Episode freue ich mich besonders, Ihnen meinen heutigen Gast vorstellen zu dürfen: Dr. Daniel Stelter. Er ist Ökonom und daher betrachten wir das Thema Fortschritt aus der Brille der Ökonomie. Dr. Stelter ist nicht nur einer der führenden deutschen Ökonomen, er ist außerdem häufiger Gast in politischen Talkshows, schreibt regelmäßig für verschiedene Medien wie etwa die Wirtschaftswoche, Cicero, Handelsblatt und andere. Er ist Autor mehrerer Bücher und hat außerdem eigene Podcasts wie Beyond the Obvious und Make Economy Great Again, letzterer gemeinsam mit dem Herausgeber der Welt, Ulf Poschardt. Links dazu wie immer in den Shownotes. Da er sich über seine Artikel sowie die eigenen Podcasts sehr ausführlich mit dem aktuellen Geschehen beschäftigt, werden wir in dieser Episode einen anderen Blickwinkel wählen. Aber steigen wir gleich direkt in das Thema ein, sozusagen: keine Details — was ist Fortschritt? »Das Leben wird vorwärts gelebt und rückwärts verstanden.«, Soren Kierkegaard Wie aber gestalten wir unser Leben vorwärts? Dazu ergänzt Milan Kundera einen wichtigen Aspekt: »Der Mensch schreitet im Nebel voran. Aber wenn er zurückblickt, um die Menschen der Vergangenheit zu beurteilen, sieht er keinen Nebel auf ihrem Weg. Von seiner Gegenwart aus, die ihre ferne Zukunft war, sieht ihr Weg für ihn völlig klar aus, gute Sicht auf dem ganzen Weg. Wenn er zurückblickt, sieht er den Weg, er sieht die Menschen, die voranschreiten, er sieht ihre Fehler, aber nicht den Nebel.« In der Rückschau wirken die Dinge oftmals klar und einfach oder werden so dargestellt. Der richtige Pfad und die Irrtümer sind doch so offensichtlich! Was bedeutet das für die Ökonomie? Dr. Stelter erläutert dies am Beispiel von Geldmenge, Inflation und Zinsen. Wie würden Ökonomen Fortschritt beschreiben, oder an welchen Indikatoren würden Sie Fortschritt festmachen? »Es gibt eine ganz eindeutige Korrelation zwischen wachsendem Einkommen und zunehmendem Glück.« Und wie ist es uns hier (global) in den vergangenen Jahren ergangen? »Eigentlich, wenn man mal guckt: die letzten 20, 30 Jahre haben wir einen unglaublichen Zuwachs an Wohlstand gesehen — weltweit — wir haben einen Rekord-Rückgang der Armut. Das ist ein ganz großer Erfolg. Wir haben einen Rückgang der Kindersterblichkeit usw.« Auch wenn es immer wieder Rückschritte gibt: »Die Menschheitsgeschichte ist eine Geschichte des Fortschritts.« Wie ist Fortschritt zu beschreiben, vor allem auch gegen den Begriff der Innovation? Wer trifft die gesellschaftlich wichtige Bewertung? Außerdem: Was wird eigentlich von den Menschen als »Neu« wahrgenommen? »Es gibt keinen Fall in der Weltgeschichte, wo geringerer Wohlstand zu mehr Glücksgefühl geführt hat.« Was aber ist schlicht »Hintergrund«, Normalität? »Wir sind zum Fortschritt verdammt.« Kann das aber gelingen? Stetiger Fortschritt, wenn auch mit kleinen Tälern, die zu durchschreiten sind? »Der Kreativität und der Intelligenz der Menschen ist keine Grenze gesetzt.« Warum haben aber unter diesen Voraussetzungen Vertreter von Kriegswirtschaft, De-Growth und anderen autoritären und destruktiven Ideen heute in der Gesellschaft dennoch eine Deutungshoheit? Oder jedenfalls scheint es so zu sein, dass diese Deutungshoheit gegeben ist? Kann der Konflikt Freiheit vs. Kollektivismus überhaupt aufgelöst werden? »Show me the incentives and I show you the outcome«, Charlie Munger Wir diskutieren dann weiter grundsätzlichere Fragen der Ökonomie, vor allem auch die Rolle, die Energie in ökonomischen Betrachtungen spielt. »Die klassische Definition der Ökonomie ist, dass sie die Lehre von der Allokation knapper Ressourcen ist, die alternative Verwendungen haben.«, Thomas Sowell und »the economic system is essentially a system for extracting, processing and transforming energy as resources into energy embodied in products and services. Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency«, Robert Ayres, zitiert in Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works Warum sind Preissignale ein wesentlicher Mechanismus freier Märkte und warum ist es so problematisch, wenn diese verzerrt werden? Welche Rolle spielt die Energie also für Fortschritt und Wohlstand? Die vormaligen Entwicklungsländer holen auf — was hat dies für Folgen? Bleiben wir stehen? Gehen wir voran oder fallen wir gar zurück? Im Augenblick trifft eindeutig Letzteres zu, aber wie kommen wir aus dieser Krise heraus? »Die Zukunft der Welt wird immer energiehaltiger sein.« Dr. Stelter erwähnt die UN-Entwicklungsziele: Es gibt 17 UN-Nachhaltigkeitsziele, aber nur eines davon betrifft den Klimawandel. Auch in weltweiten Umfragen rangiert der Klimawandel meist eher auf den hinteren Plätzen in der Beurteilung der Menschen. So ergibt etwa die globale IPSOS Umfrage vom Dezember 2025, das nur rund 13% der Menschen den Klimawandel als größtes Problem sehen. Er kommt damit auf den 10. Platz, der niedrigste Wert seit 2021. Manche für die Menschen lebensbedrohliche Probleme bleiben im Westen sogar völlig unbekannt, obwohl sie ähnlich viele Opfer wie die Covid-Pandemie verursacht haben und weiter verursachen — Luftverschmutzung in Innenräumen durch mangelnde Verfügbarkeit sauberer Energie wie Gas etwa. Wie sollen wir also mit dem Klimawandel umgehen, vor allem unter der Betrachtung, dass es sich dabei nur um eine von vielen Herausforderungen handelt? Fortschritt ist auch die Abwesenheit von Krieg — wie spielt diese Einschätzung mit den anderen genannten Faktoren und der Demographie zusammen? »Sie sehen mich — was Leute, die mich sonst hören, überraschen wird — prinzipiell optimistisch.« Was aber für die Welt gilt, muss auf absehbare Zeit nicht für Deutschland oder Europa gelten. Warum ist das so? »... weil wir freiwillig gesagt haben, dass wir uns von diesem Fortschritt verabschieden.« Das lässt ein gemischtes Bild für uns zurück: »Ich persönlich bin extrem optimistisch, was die Menschheit betrifft, ich bin leider nicht so optimistisch, was Deutschland und Europa betrifft.« Warum brauchen wir viel mehr dezentrale Entscheidungen und viel weniger Top-Down-»Management« und vermeintliche politische Lösungen von oben herab? »Dezentrale Entscheidungen sind einfach immer zentralen überlegen.« Innovation und Fortschritt sind nur mit Risiko zu haben — wir sind aber eine geradezu panische und von vermeintlicher (!) Sicherheit faszinierte Gesellschaft geworden. Dies ist eine Situation, die aber tatsächlich wesentliche Risiken nicht reduziert, sondern vielmehr dramatisch erhöht. Wie können wir das in Europa verändern? Kann ein Blick in die Geschichte dabei helfen? »Darwin was a landmark, not only in the history of biology, but in the history of intellectual development in general. He showed how-with sufficient time-nonpurposeful activity could lead to nonrandom results: he divorced order from "design." Yet the animistic fallacy would say that the absence of "planning" must lead to chaos-and the economic and political consequences of that belief are still powerful today.«, Tom Sowell Es gibt wohl die großen drei Wellen der Evolution, von denen wir aber bisher nur die erste verinnerlicht haben? Biologie (19. Jahrhundert) Ökonomie (theoretisch im 20. Jahrhundert mehrfach ausgedrückt, bis heute dennoch nicht verinnerlicht) Wissenschaft (bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts teilweise verstanden, dann wieder vergessen) »Ich bin immer fasziniert, wenn in der öffentlichen Diskussion von Neoliberalismus, der bei uns herrschen würde, gesprochen wird — und ich frage mich: bei Staatsanteilen von über 50 % wo ist da dieser Neoliberalismus.« Deckt sich die Meinung in der Bevölkerung eigentlich mit der veröffentlichten Meinung der Legacy-Medien? »Es wird immer gerne vom Marktversagen gesprochen, bei Dingen, wo man aber sagen muss, eigentlich ist es kein Marktversagen, sondern die Folgen von vorherigen Eingriffen der Politik.« Wie können wir von hier in die Zukunft blicken? Wie gehen wir mit Anreizsystemen in der Politik um? Das nicht ganz ernst gemeinte Parkinson's Law sagt: Arbeit füllt immer die verfügbare Zeit aus. Meine provokante Frage: Gilt dasselbe für Budget und Schulden? Was folgt daraus? Wie lange überlebt eine Nation, ein System, das immer weniger produktive und innovative Menschen und immer mehr Menschen hervorbringt, die im Kern von diesen produktiven Menschen leben? Das knüpft an ein früheres Buch von Dr. Stelter an und an ein neues Projekt: Acht Jahre nach dem »Märchen vom reichen Land« — wo stehen wir eigentlich? »Es ist einfach traurig. Wir sind einfach in jeder Hinsicht so viel schlechter geworden.« Warum ist die Hoffnung, dass eine Reform wie vor rund zwanzig Jahren unter Schröder wieder stattfinden und auch erfolgreich sein könnte, trügerisch? Auch die Hoffnung, die man durch einen Blick Richtung Argentinien haben könnte, ist für uns nur bedingt vergleichbar. »Argentinien ist energiereich, hat Rohstoffe und großes Potenzial in der Landwirtschaft. Die haben etwas, auf das sie aufsetzen können. Wir hingegen haben eigentlich nur das Bildungsniveau, das wir haben, und den Fleiß der Bevölkerung... […] Es kann sein, dass es irgendwann den Milei gibt, nur dieser Milei wird es dann ungleich schwerer haben, Deutschland und Europa voranzubringen, weil er eben nicht über ein paar gute Assets verfügt wie Argentinien.« Was sollen wir jungen Menschen raten, die jetzt vor der Wahl stehen, wie sie ihr Leben ausrichten? »Wir alle haben zwei Möglichkeiten, wir haben die Möglichkeit zu kämpfen oder zu gehen.« Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 141: Passagier oder Steuermann? Ein Gespräch mit Markus Raunig Episode 139: Komfortable Disruption Episode 138: Im Windschatten der Narrative, ein Gespräch mit Ralf M. Ruthardt Episode 135: Friedrich Hayek und die Beschränktheit der menschlichen Vernunft. Ein Gespräch mit Nickolas Emrich Episode 131: Wot Se Fack, Deutschland? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 130: Populismus und (Ordo)liberalismus, ein Gespräch mit Nils Hesse Episode 128: Aufbruch in die Moderne — Der Mann, der die Welt erfindet! Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger über Generationen Episode 120: All In: Energie, Wohlstand und die Zukunft der Welt: Ein Gespräch mit Prof. Franz Josef Radermacher Episode 117: Der humpelnde Staat, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Kletzer Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Dr. Daniel Stelter (eine Auswahl): Leading Minds Handelsblatt Artikel Cicero Artikel Think Beyond the Obvious Podcast Make Economy Great Again Podcast (mit Ulf Poschardt) Ausgewählte Bücher: Das Märchen vom reichen Land: Wie die Politik uns ruiniert, Finanzbuch Verlag (2018) Ein Traum von einem Land: Deutschland 2040, Campus Verlag (2021) Fachliche Referenzen Milan Kundera, Testament Betrayed, Harper (2023) Charlie Munger on Incentives: Video 1, Video 2 Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decision, Basic Books (1996) Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works, Penguin (2022) UN-Nachhaltigkeits-Ziele (SDGs) https://www.ipsos.com/en/what-worries-world

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization. James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments. To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020. Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments. Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

This episode of The Common Reader podcast is a little different. I spoke to both Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin about literature, politics, and the future of the academic humanities. Questions included: what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets? Can we leave politics out of literary discussion? Should we leave it out? If we can't leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it? What is academic Marxism? We also talked about whether Stephen Greenblatt is too ideological and why universities are necessary to literary culture, academics on Substack. Julianne writes Life and Letters. Jeffrey writes Avenues of the Americas. Here is Julianne's interview in The Republic of Letters. Transcript (AI generated, will contain some errors)Henry Oliver (00:00)Today I am talking to Jeffrey Lawrence and Julianne Werlin.Jeffrey is a professor of English literature and comparative literature at Rutgers University. He specializes in the 20th and 21st century and he writes the sub stack, Avenues of America. Julianne probably needs no introduction to a sub stack audience. She writes Life and Letters, one of my favorite sub stacks. She's a professor of English at Duke University, where as well as specializing in early modern poetry, she is interested in sociological and demographic studies of literature.and we are going to have a big conversation about literature and markets, politics, what do we mean when we talk about literature and markets, can we leave politics out of literary discussion, should we leave it out, if we can't leave it out, can we have nice friendly conversations about it, and also maybe what is academic Marxism and what should it be and why is it so confusing? Jeffrey and Julianne, hello.Julianne (00:59)Hi.Jeffrey Lawrence (01:01)Hi, thanks for having us.Julianne (01:02)Yeah, thank you.Henry Oliver (01:04)I am going to start by referencing an interview that you did, Julianne, for Republic of Letters, which everyone has been reading. And you said, I've printed it out wrong, so I can't read the whole quote. But you said something like, you joined Substack because you wanted people to talk with and because you felt a lack of debate in your academic field. There are lots of good things about scholarship being slow and careful, but it also needs to be animated by debate and conversation.and a sense of the stakes of what we're doing, and that is eroding in the academy. So I want you both to talk about that. Why is that happening? How much of a problem is it? How much is Substack or the internet more generally the solution? What should we be doing? Why don't we go to Julianne first, because it's your quote.Julianne (01:54)Sure, I mean, won't go on too long ⁓ since I have already spoken about this, but my sense within English departments is, you know, they're becoming smaller, fewer people are taking our classes, we have much less of a role in public conversation and public debate, except as kind of a stalking horse for certain types of arguments. And certainly, if you are an early modernist, it's very hard to locate a kind of a...Henry Oliver (02:14)YouJulianne (02:25)discrete set of debates within early modern literature because there is so little public salience to literary fields. And I think this is happening in all literature. It's especially pronounced if you're working in the earlier periods. So my sense in joining SUBSTAC was that perhaps there will be debates by people who are not already so deep within the particular professional and disciplinary structures of a field that they canfind new points of connection between literature and public life along different ⁓ axes that we have maybe not explored adequately within English departments and are maybe becoming harder to explore as English departments contract and recede from public life.Henry Oliver (03:04)Mm-hmm.So we're bringing Milton back to the people and also finding out why they care about him at all. ⁓ What do you think about it, Geoff?Julianne (03:16)Well, hopefully. I mean, that's the goal.Jeffrey Lawrence (03:21)Great, ⁓ so I actually restacked that specific quote from Julianne because it resonated so much with me. Yeah, I mean, my sense is that as someone who works on 20th and 21st century literature, there is more crossover there, I would say, between sort of academic scholarship and public debate. But I really wanna just echo what Julianne said there, that ⁓ I have gotten the feeling that withinlet's call it like the legacy media. There are particular arguments that come from academia that are pushed forward and that become representative of the field of 20th and 21st century literature as a whole. And those kind of come to stand in for academic debate more generally. And I think it becomes very difficult. One of the things that I was noticing so much isthat the people who had access to those legacy journals, are places like the Atlantic, the New York Times, that those began to dominate the debates and people just aren't recognizing that in scholarships. So one of the things I particularly like about Substack is that I feel like although it has some of the same problems as social media more generally about kind of like who gets to participate and algorithmic culture and all of that sort of stuff.I did feel like the ideological diversity both left and right compared to the sort of a kind of monoculture, mono, you know, sort of academic argument that I found over and over in these legacy magazines, that Substack was the place where a lot of these debates are happening. And I only joined maybe four or five months ago, but for me,⁓ sort of just in terms of my relationship to the Academy, it's really changed my sense of what can be said and what's being said by academics.Henry Oliver (05:17)feels to me like in some way humanities academia needs deregulating because there's all sorts of things people can't feel like they can't say and can't do. But it's such a tangled mess that the easiest thing is for you all to just go to Substack and do it there and just try and avoid the bureaucracy because it's gone too far. But when you're on Substack...I feel like you're often faced with people saying, these English literature academics, it's all woke BS. They don't know anything. They've killed this, right? You're simultaneously in a kind of semi hostile environment. How do you, how does that seem to you?Julianne (05:56)Yeah, mean, that's certainly true. I think that we are avatars on Substack for a kind of authority that we feel in our own lives we do not possess in any way. So we're in this position where, you know, at least I feel this, I'm responding to comments that are, you know, very much, by people who very much feel that they're attacking authority figures. And I'm, you know, I'm just a person on the internet, you know, talking with them when I'm on Substack. What I like about it is precisely that it levels any kind of authority structures insofar as they exist, which is debatable at this phase. But that's not always the reality on Substack. I also feel there's an additional thing, again, as an early modernist, where you feel like, you you don't have...Henry Oliver (06:27)Yeah.Julianne (06:52)there's not a lot of interest by people who are kind of on the left in contemporary politics in the Renaissance. It's seen as kind of a conservative, canonical thing to study. And there's a lot of pushback. even within English departments, there's a lot of pushback ⁓ surrounding the idea that people should study Shakespeare or study Milton. It's seen as kind of old and fussy and conservative. And then at the same time, you go on the internet and you're the kind of ⁓ exemplar.Henry Oliver (06:59)Mmm. Yeah.Mmm.Julianne (07:22)of woke cultural discourse. So you feel like as a Renaissance scholar, you can't win. You're nobody's idea of what people should be doing intellectually or culturally.Henry Oliver (07:25)HahahaDo you think, someone asked me this the other day about why academics write in this funny way and why no one reads their books and all this. That was the way they phrased it. And I said, I think what you're saying is like, why is there no AC Bradley today? Because Shakespeare in tragedy, so I don't remember the number, of like quarter of a million copies or something that to us just feels like an insane number.Is there some legitimate criticism there that A.C. Bradley wrote in a way that, you know, your grandmother could understand? And a lot of what comes out of the Academy today is much more cut off from the ordinary reading experience.Julianne (08:18)Yeah, I mean, think that's not debatable. think there have been quantitative studies, ⁓ DH studies that have shown that academic prose has become more difficult. I think it's much more a consequence of how literary culture has become this sort of narrow and marginalized field that is preserved within academic debate and academic structures of argument and disciplinarity. Stephen Greenblatt certainly tries to benew A.C. Bradley and he does reach readers outside of academia but his audience is you know especially as a share of the population is not A.C. Bradley's audience and I don't think that's a fault of his prose. Well that's true.Henry Oliver (08:59)might be the fault of some of his ideas.Well, Jeff, I want to come to you on that. A.C. Bradley was not politically ideological. Maybe he's a crazy Hegelian and he's insane on that level. But is the problem that Stephen Greenblatt's just obviously kind of a bit cranky in some ideological way, is this a general problem of the modern humanities academia?Jeffrey Lawrence (09:24)Yeah, I mean, I tend to see the problem as it's kind of being a dual problem. One, I think, is the fact that we are facing in a lot of the academy a kind of scarcity politics. there are very, if you look at just academic hiring since the financial crisis in 2008, there's just much less of it that's happening. And so I think, I mean, part of what I see is this sense that there are certainI mean, we could say certain ideological lines that over the past 10 years, but even let's say over the past 15 years ⁓ have been the ones that have become dominant in the academy. And I think my problem is not that people connect politics to literature. I think that that's something that we all do to a certain degree. think the part of the problem is that we are now entering a situation in whichif you deviate from a particular political line, which I have sort of identified with the Democratic Party, because I think you can follow a foul of it to the right, you can also follow a foul of it to the left, then you are seen as someone who is saying something that is not in line with the contemporary academy. And I think it used to be that when there were many jobs and many different departments that you could go to,Henry Oliver (10:28)Mm, mm.Jeffrey Lawrence (10:48)there were fewer consequences for making those types of statements that were out of sync with the dominant. And now I think it's it's become very, very punitive. And this is also reinforced again by the fact that what public scholarship we do have tends to be in line with this because the institutions that are kind of the elite, I would say Ivy league.institutions are also the ones that are feeding people into ⁓ sort of that public legacy discourse.Henry Oliver (11:23)Let's talk about politics and literature because I don't like making literature political as such. But whenever I read, Julianne's probably read the Lisa Liebes substack. I don't know if you've got to that yet, Jeff. She's like, there should be no politics at all and it's all aesthetics, which I kind of sympathize with. But then it just makes me think like, well, what about Edmund Spenser?Like there's a certain extent to which a lot of poetry is political and we have to be political when we talk about it, otherwise we're just ignoring a big part of it. ⁓ So how do we solve that problem? Like are we like badly trained in thinking about politics in the humanities academy or is it like what's going on?have we got to a point where you can say there should be no politics about explicitly political writers?Julianne (12:19)Do you want to begin, Jeff?Jeffrey Lawrence (12:20)Yeah, I mean, I can just say briefly because I mean, I teach courses, a number of courses that are about politics and literature. I actually think, I mean, I started doing this in 2016, right after Trump's election. I taught Steve Bannon's film about the financial crisis alongside ⁓ the Big Short and a couple of kind of like trying to show kind of like the left and right responses. I mean, that's not literature, that's film, but many of thethe literary works that we look at in those courses. There are conservatives, there are more classic liberals, there are Marxists. I mean, my personal feeling is that we need to talk about politics and literature, that it is a fair, it is a reasonable object of study. The problem, I think, is partially when you act as if certain...certain political writers or certain topics are simply out of bounds for study. And so there was actually a post by Dan Silver today about why I teach conservative thinkers and a response from the points John Baskin saying, who would think that you wouldn't teach conservative thinkers in a sociology course? But I do think that it's become par for the course thatHenry Oliver (13:20)Mmm.Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.Jeffrey Lawrence (13:37)teaching someone, whether you're on the right and you're teaching someone who's a Marxist or you're a Marxist and you're teaching conservatives, that somehow this is kind an ethical failure. And I think that's a real problem of not assuming that what you're teaching is kind of necessarily what you believe in or talking about politics means necessarily taking an ideological stance.Julianne (14:04)Yeah, I think that's completely right. I think there's this very pervasive confusion between ⁓ talking about the politics of literature andarticulating an authoritative political perspective on that literature. Almost everybody who studies literature, especially in a historical context or in a contemporary context, honestly, is going to be talking about politics. Spencer, course, right? Milton. ⁓ How do you talk about somebody who was a literal revolutionary who wrote in favor of regicide and not talk about politics? You have to talk about politics.Henry Oliver (14:31)YouJulianne (14:37)⁓ But then there's become this confusion where people assume that if you are talking about the politics of literature, you have not just a political, but actually an ethical ⁓ teaching that you are imparting by way of that literature. And that if you're not doing that, you're somehow not talking about literature, you're not teaching the literature. That's the confusion that has been so devastating to us and I think so devastating to literary study.Henry Oliver (15:03)So what's the alternative? What should we be doing instead?Julianne (15:07)I I think that we should be talking about the politics of literature while acknowledging that literature raises political debates, not endless debates. know, there's not any given author is going to raise, you know, a certain salient set of questions that we can talk about, that we can debate and acknowledging that people historically have had different responses to these, that it has been used in different ways in different moments and that it is still used in different ways today. That doesn't mean that as intellectuals and scholars, we won't have our own positions that may inform our scholarshipin our writing and even our teaching, it just means that our positions do not shut down conversation and do not exhaust the range of possible positions.Henry Oliver (15:48)Yeah, and we should say, we're saying about, you you should teach conservative thought and stuff. I don't think either of you would identify as being on the right or conservative. So you're saying that from a, from that position. ⁓ How do we, how do we get out of this then? How do we leave politics at the door? Because when I read modern ⁓ literary scholarship, to me, it's either like very useful because it's not political.Julianne (16:01)Yeah.Henry Oliver (16:17)Or I just, as I did with that book that we all, or that Jeff and I, sort of disagreed about. I just find it almost unreadable because it's not scholarship anymore. It's just partisanship. How do we move past this? Like, what's the solution?Jeffrey Lawrence (16:33)I mean, if I can jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that, you know, allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really meanJulianne (16:33)I mean, if I could jump in just there, I mean, I would say one of the issues is having an ideological litmus test for scholars. And I think I see this in 20th and 21st century literature in a very strong way. And so what I would say is that allowing people to occupy different political positions, and I really mean,Henry Oliver (16:36)Yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (17:03)like people who I know on the left because they're not toeing a particular line are also not welcome or are also kind of meat pushback in contemporary humanities departments that I think we need to get rid of that. And my thought about the Adam Kelly book, ⁓ the New Sincerity book is that to me, I think that what he's trying to do in that bookHenry Oliver (17:10)Yeah, yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (17:31)is to understand neoliberalism as an economic and political philosophy that has effects on culture and to try to understand how authors themselves are dealing with that in their prose.To me, that is somewhat different from the way that neoliberalism is occasionally bandied about in the academy, where it doesn't just, it isn't just another word for saying, okay, this is the Chicago school or the Austrian school, and we're gonna kind of take it seriously as a mode of thought. if just saying like, neoliberalism is like our ontological condition in the 21st century, and therefore everything is.necessarily an expression of neoliberalism and we don't need to necessarily define it. So I mean, I think that may be where the disagreement extends is that I think that ⁓ Adam Kelly is trying to sort of be precise about that politics in order to understand how contemporary writers generally on the left are using it. Whereas I think that the kind of more wishy washy version of that isHenry Oliver (18:37)Mm-hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (18:44)You know, just to say that neoliberalism is the air that we breathe. And there, I think I agree with you that it's just not super helpful.Henry Oliver (18:49)Mmm.Yeah, my problem with the book was that he would not tell you what did Hayek think or say. He would say Hayek was a cheerleader for the free market. Or he would not tell you what is the Gary Becker view of human capital. He would say human capital is an ideology that infuses itself into every aspect of your life so that you can no longer be separate from the market. And it's all this stuff, and it's like, well, that's nothing to do with Hayek and Gary Becker. ⁓Jeffrey Lawrence (19:19)Can I just,just one thing on that, is that, I mean, I did go back and I mean, he has these moments where he's talking specifically about Hayek and the road to serfdom and saying, I think that this is a worldview in which, he'll quote Hayek talking about the problem with representative democracy and say, the real moral choices are choices that are made in the market.To me, I think that that is to engage to a certain degree with the thought. It is true, I think, as often happens in scholarship that you have the people who are defining a phenomenon from the perspective that you may be interested in. So there are a number of people from the left who are criticizing neoliberalism. I see him as engaging a little bit more than you do.Henry Oliver (20:11)Mmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (20:11)in that in that direct thought and particularly compared to other humanities scholars who do I think what you're saying which is to just do that. So that's where I think I see him as doing.Henry Oliver (20:18)sure, yeah.I guess you could summy critique up as being like, if this is the good version, things are worse than I thought. Yeah. Yeah. So from here, let's go to the question of what is academic Marxism?Jeffrey Lawrence (20:27)Okay, well.Henry Oliver (20:35)Because I think a lot of people think that there's a lot of Marxism in the academy and that if they're not woke, they're Marxists or maybe they're both, right? And ⁓ personally, I spend a lot of time trying to work out what these Marxists think and it's quite confusing. And there seem to be lots of, and Julianne, you and I have talked about this, all the different, some Marxists aren't Marxists, as it were. tell us, give us a quick overview of how Marxist things really are.Julianne (21:04)Yeah, I mean it's a very complicated question to answer.because Marxism is too, well, debatably a living tradition. ⁓ And there's a huge amount of disagreement about what constitutes Marxism, ⁓ what is a legitimate form of Marxism, what is not, where do the boundaries lie, what is reconcilable with other schools of thought, what is not. But I think the big picture is that beginning, even in the 60s, Marxism moved into academia. This is a story that is told very inflectionallyHenry Oliver (21:11)youJulianne (21:37)and Perry Anderson's considerations on Western Marxism, where he argues that in the West, Marxism becomes alienated from actual political, economic, and social movements. It moves into academia. And as a result, it becomes much more philosophical, much more abstruse, much less concerned with the traditional concerns of Marxism, labor and the politics of labor and the politics and economics of labor. And that this continues and is accelerated, in fact, in the Cold War. So what you get atthe same time, you have something called the cultural turn in history and in sociology, ⁓ the rise of what is, debatably called identity politics. so Marxism remains a current within that, but it's far less of an influential current as time goes by. ⁓ And I think that many, many people...use the word Marxism and would say that there are Marxist influences in their work, but they're not viewing it as a kind of systematic approach to economics or to economic history. And so at that point, I do think you have to ask, well, what does Marxism actually mean? There are certainly people that work with, you know, ideas that they refer to as Marxist, but that have implications that to my mind are entirely antithetical to Marxism. And so I kind of feelas somebody who does work within what I would call the historical materialist tradition.⁓ in a very sort of straightforwardly economic sense, know, are markets becoming more efficient in Renaissance England? Those kinds of questions. How much does bread cost? How much do books cost? Those kinds of questions. ⁓ If you're interested in that tradition within Marxist thought, you feel that it's actually really incredibly peripheral within academia in comparison to, say, the politics of gender ⁓ or other considerations of that kind. And there's just not always sensitivityHenry Oliver (23:16)Mm-hmm.Julianne (23:35)to whether these different schools of thought actually cohere in any meaningful or deep way. What would you say, Jeff?Jeffrey Lawrence (23:44)Yeah, that's, I mean, just to pick up on that, think that that's really helpful in that trajectory, which I also, know, the Perry Anderson, a lot of people who have talked about how Marxism.moves into the academy after the 1960s, I think it is just really important to say it becomes a different thing. And I think part of the confusion, Henry, may also be that it's like, so the Christopher Ruffo version of this is it's like, it's all Marxism, it's all everywhere. But then I think that becomes, it's so broad a definition of Marxism that what we're really talking about is aof progressive politics or sort of an amalgam of different ideas that may have some roots in Marxism of previous periods, but really don't, as Julianne is saying, really don't align with like Marxist thought or Marxian thought as such. And also as someone who does take that tradition very seriously, I think a lot about Silvia Federici, who's a feminist, know, a Marxist feminist. Like these are people who are absolutely steeped.in a Marxist political tradition. And in some ways, these are figures that may be very important to the contemporary tradition. But if you actually read what they're writing, it's like, it's an extremely watered down version that we get in the academy in part, and I'll just end with this, in part because to Julianne's point, I think it like when Marxism also becomesHenry Oliver (24:59)Mmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (25:10)a kind of one discourse among many that you are using in what are often very bourgeois institutions, then it becomes a kind of intellectual tool and sometimes even an intellectual weapon, as many of these things are, where the question of how it relates to practical politics, working class politics,politics outside of the academy becomes sort of secondary. And so then really we're not talking about someone who's a Marxist as in they're like fighting for the working class. You're talking about someone who's just using Marx as a tool, which is fine, but that certainly shouldn't give them any sort of like, you know, moral high ground when speaking from the position of the left is my view.Henry Oliver (25:53)Is there some inherent aspect of literature that means it has been more amenable to Marxist study of any description than it has been to, you know, ⁓systems of thought that come more from a kind of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek tradition. Because it's very striking to me how few liberals and libertarians they're currently, publicly currently, I know a lot of them keep it to themselves, some of them have said as much to me. ⁓ But is there some good literary reason for this? Or is it just an institutional ⁓ problem?Julianne (26:33)That's an interesting question. ⁓ I mean, there are sort of traditional reasons for this in thatMarxism from, you know, in Marxist writing from very early on was interested in the relationship between culture and historical change. So there's a very, even by the time you get to the beginning of the 20th century, there's already a very well developed materialist tradition for thinking about cultural change and cultural transformation over the long run in a way that I don't think is true ⁓ of rival ideologies. Not that there isn't great literary work, but that there's not the sameHenry Oliver (27:09)Sure, sure, sure.Julianne (27:11)kind of sense of a methodological tradition. So there's a lot of momentum there.⁓ But in terms of more intrinsic reasons, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem obvious. Certainly at other times and places, we haven't had the situation that we have now. I often find myself thinking of, know, Piketty's arguments, which this does not pertain to Marxism, but this does pertain to the ⁓ difference between the political parties in the US, which is just that ⁓ education has become the means of differentiating between two rival elites, you know, not...Henry Oliver (27:27)Mm.Julianne (27:47)a difference between a working class and an elite, but two rival elites that are actually distinguished by the university itself. So as long as the university plays that structural role, it seems unlikely that its politics are going to drift to the other side, because that is actually precisely what the university has become. ⁓ I don't know, what do you think, Jeff?Jeffrey Lawrence (28:06)Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I mean, I share the sense that, I mean, I think that there is an extraordinary ⁓ Marxist literary tradition that goes back to, you know, sort of Lukacs and these debates, Adorno, Horkheimer. These are critics that are important to me, cultural studies with people like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams. I mean, they very much, I think, were, though,Henry Oliver (28:20)Mm-hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (28:30)That was a kind of insurgent force, we could say, within the academy that has now become, I would say, almost entirely dominant. I personally, mean, one of the things when I was writing my first book was on US and Latin American literature. I was very interested in a certain liberal tradition that comes from, you know, John Dewey. We would now say that, I mean, it's not the liberalism of, you know, Milton Friedman and von Hayek, but it is,Dewey, think, was for many people the most important philosopher, aesthetic philosopher of the early part of the 20th century. And he was a sort of radical liberal who thought a lot about the liberal tradition. I people like Lionel Trilling with the liberal imagination, these were, I think, writers who were very important.Henry Oliver (29:16)Mm-hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (29:19)in a particular moment. And I guess, you this is, you may see this as a dodge, I, Henry, but I definitely feel like these are books that are really important to my formation and whether or not I associate with a certain particular strain of contemporary ⁓ liberalism, I don't tend to think of myself necessarily in those terms. And so,Henry Oliver (29:26)HahahaJeffrey Lawrence (29:43)I think we really should be reading those because those types of people, people like John Dewey, people like Lionel Trilling, know, Philip Rav, these kind of mid-century intellectuals, they were really engaging in major debates and they were foundational for the field, even if now I think there may be some desire to take distance from them.Henry Oliver (30:07)It's the bigger problem that we should just get back to more for literature as literature.And once we allow a kind of methodological approach from one tradition or another, we're just no longer really studying literature. We're using literature to, like I had a professor once and they said an essay about Anglo-Saxon poetry with some Harold Bloom quote saying, none of this is any good. It's like the great age before the flood, that kind of thing. And I basically wrote an essay saying, yes, that's correct. And she did not like that. And I said, look, I bet you don't actually love anyof this poetry. I bet you don't care about any of this. You know, I just sort of... And she said, that's not the point. The point is that we can use it to impose the... You we can use it as a way of dealing with the ideas we want to deal with and having methodological... And I was just like, I'm never coming back. You know, goodbye. And that to me is kind of... Is that the more foundational problem, right? Some people want to take a kind of...Northrop Frye, Christopher Ricks, literature as literature approach, and some people want to have an extra literary methodology. Be it Freudian, be it feminist, be it identity politics, be it whatever. And that is the bigger sort of division here, and is the solution to just say Shakespeare is Shakespeare and you can keep the other stuff for your other classes.Julianne (31:33)Well, I don't know because, I mean, in terms of what actually goes into the classroom, I think that's a different question. I don't teach very much theory in the classroom. ⁓ But I don't think that we can just say that because the ability to say, you know, these are great works, this is part of a canon, it came with its own set of ideological commitments that are now...Henry Oliver (31:40)Show. Show, show, show.Julianne (31:57)sort of vanishing, right? So we need some kind of framework for making sense of why we read literary history at all, what its coherence is, what its shape is, what its structure is. A lot of those frameworks were implicit. didn't, you know, they were articulated, they didn't need to be articulated every single time because they were so woven into the whole system of education. As that becomes increasingly untrue, I think we do find ourselves in a position where we need to explain why we care about this object literature at all.in the first place. And I don't think just saying, you know, literature for literature's sake without situating it within some kind of wider account of culture really works. I don't know that situating it within some wider account of culture really works either in terms of persuading anyone, but I don't think you can say to people, look, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, we have to read him because he's great. I think you need to...Jeffrey Lawrence (32:45)Mm-hmm.Henry Oliver (32:45)HahahaJulianne (32:53)have an argument about the place that Shakespeare has in culture ought to have ⁓ because that is increasingly not true.Henry Oliver (33:02)So I mostly agree, but it is very striking to me. I mean, I sort of half agree. It is very striking to me that the just read it because it's great argument is winning a lot of ⁓ admirers on the internet, while some version of what you've just said is sort of dying in the academy. And I'm not saying that therefore that's a decisive factor and we should just do this. But in terms of getting people interested,that does see something on the internet among the new humanities culture on Substack and other places, does just seem to be resistant to these methodologies and ideology, right? Do you see what I'm saying? ⁓Jeffrey Lawrence (33:43)Can I, I mean, yeah, Imean, I would say, and we may just disagree on this, but I agree with Julianne that, I mean, the ideological context of a work, the historical context of work seems incredibly important. I saw Henry, yeah, yeah. And so I think that there, yeah, yeah, but I think that's not, I mean, I think we can't totally gloss over that because all three of us have had long educational sort of,Henry Oliver (33:58)sure, yeah. We're all historicists, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (34:11)a long educational formation that has allowed us to even have this conversation, let alone read these works. I, you you, you, I think you had a post about this on, on Austin about like, you know, sort of there, there are certain things that are helpful for you to know in order, once you're going into work. I think that that's different from the thing that you're pointing to and where I think I would agree with you, which is that when, when methodology becomes the TrumpHenry Oliver (34:15)Yes.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (34:41)card over literature. think that that is that is an important cultural shift. And I think we are now at the point in which this is my formulation for it. It's like if you're just going to read literature for, you know, for a particular political thing, for Marxism, let's say, in order to understand, you know, sort of like a Marxist conception of society, why not just read Marxism?Henry Oliver (34:42)Hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (35:11)like Marxist theory. mean, so I do think that that is a real problem and the failure, and to be fair to humanities scholars, this is, has been a big debate over the past five or 10 years. I think it's just more contested in the academic space than it is on Substack, where I think Substack is kind of demonstrating to my mind also that some of the more frank, I, I sweat, some of the more BS, yeah.Henry Oliver (35:11)Yes.Say what you want.Jeffrey Lawrence (35:39)Some of the more b******t arguments that I see about like, ⁓ well, there aren't X people, like there aren't white men who are writing and reading, and then you just see the tremendous number of people who are reading, they may just feel alienated from certain ways of doing things. And that, I think, that's a wide range of people. And I think it's a wide range of people who are turned off by certain things in the academy.Henry Oliver (35:49)yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (36:07)I think a lot of that though has to do with a general problem that we need people in literary studies who deeply care about literature, regardless of what ideological thing, you know, where they're coming from. And if you are always just interested in the methodology that you're bringing to it, as opposed to literature, then this is going to be a long-term problem because people are going to start asking, why is it that we are reading literature?Henry Oliver (36:34)To what extent is that the basic problem that the universities have right now? To me that just seems to be it's that, right?Julianne (36:39)I think that's a huge problem. Yeah, I think it's a huge problem.Yeah, it's a huge problem. guess, you know, while sort of agreeing with you and definitely agreeing with Jeff, I guess what I would say to sort of refine what I was saying earlier is, no, I don't think you should study the methodologies instead of studying literature. Of course not.⁓ But the questions that the methodologies ask are really basic to the questions that we need to ask about the study of literature. So it's not that you should be studying Marxism or feminism or this or that instead of studying literature, but I don't think you can...totally do away with the questions of, what is this thing? What is its role in culture? What does it mean? Why do we study it over long, long periods of time? ⁓ It is, it has become very hard to make that, that case. And it's not that I think making that case explicitly is going to win converts as opposed to talking about the literature itself. In the end, it's going to be the literature itself, if it's going to be anything at all. But to have an account of the meaning of what we're doing, even for our own sakes, we do need to be thinking about questions like what is this thing?and why, right, which are supposed to be questions that methods help us ask.Jeffrey Lawrence (37:53)And can I just add to that kind of the, I mean, a word that we haven't used so far is specialization. And I think to a certain degree, like what may unite us in this conversation is a sense too, that like, that literature is not just like this particular corner that you're studying and that you're interested in because it's your field. And so,Henry Oliver (38:13)Mmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (38:16)Those type of turf battles, I think, are also really important to this. The sense that your topic is the thing that you specifically focus on and the difficulty of communicating that is an issue. And also just the sense that, like, I mean, my sense is you can be interested in history and sociology. Julianne and I are both interested in that. And also literature, so that it doesn't, I mean, part of it is, I think, restoring the notion that a kind of broadHenry Oliver (38:19)Yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (38:46)like intellectual training is not a liability, but is actually something that you need in order to understand literature and that heightens your appreciation.Henry Oliver (38:57)Somewhere in one of Iris Murdoch's interviews, she talks about the state of literary undergraduates today, because obviously she was married to John Bailey and had a lot of, and this is like in the 80s or something, ⁓ and she said, well, they're not interested in just reading the literature and understanding the history of it anymore. They want to have all these crazy theories.It's very striking when you see stuff like that from 50 years ago. Did the cannon wars ever end? Did we ever change the arguments? In some ways, is this not just the Harold Bloom thing? It's still going, right? And one route out that I think you've identified is just ⁓ be broader. Just read more outside your own area.The people who everyone loves on Twitter, like CS Lewis and Harold Bloom, are the ones who weren't in their public facing work. They weren't narrow specialists. CS Lewis would do everything from some random Latin medieval writer to Jane Austen. And in a way, is that what we need? We just need to have more of that appreciation of the long history of literature.Jeffrey Lawrence (40:10)I mean, just one thing, then Julianna, I'd be curious to like from like a ⁓ 20th and 21st century perspective. Like I agree with that, but I also think that like that was Toni Morrison as well. I mean, talking about the classics, mean, part of the problem I think is that we have these readings of figures that become then sort of symbolic or totemic of.Henry Oliver (40:23)Yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (40:33)like a contemporary, you know, whatever that may be, an identity category or whatever it may be. Whereas if you actually read Toni Morrison, absolutely voracious, absolutely thinking about like, you know, the classics, you know, thinking through Greek drama, ⁓ know, Faulkner, you know, ⁓ master's thesis on the outsider in Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. I mean, I think some of this also has to dowith something that has happened very specifically in the past 10 years of also subjecting figures of the past who were interested in that more Catholic notion of culture to these kind of like very selective readings. I mean, it's true of James Baldwin. I thought about this a lot. Like a lot of these figures who just didn't want to be boxed in in a particular identity way get then taken up asHenry Oliver (41:11)Hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (41:26)kind of figures for that when actually, mean, in some ways they were, you know, I'm sure Toni Morrison and Harold Bloom wouldn't have agreed on everything, but there was actually, I mean, but really there is actually more alignment there than like the 2025 reading of them would give credit for.Henry Oliver (41:40)Yeah, yeah, yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (41:47)Yeah, don't know, Julianne, if yeah.Julianne (41:49)Yeah, no, mean, I obviously I agree so, so entirely with.everything you're saying, but especially with your comments about longer literary histories, more capacious reading, know, longer, wider. Obviously you read cross linguistically and do work cross linguistically. So both broader and longer literary histories, much more than kind of a focus on methodology. Part of the reason I'm defending methodology here is because methodology, if used well, forces you outside of disciplinary specialization or can, has that capacity. In my field, the problem is not thatpeople are adhering to big sweeping methodologies anymore. In my field, the problem is that the big questions have almost disappeared, replaced by, in many cases, extremely excellent, detailed, narrow, pointillist empiricist work. I think that work is...valuable and it's foundational, but you can't have a field that just has that. You have to have something that makes the field cohere. You have to have questions that the field coheres around. know, and increasingly, I'm a historicist. I got into this because I love this kind of like, ⁓ you know,tell me everything about this particular edition of the Fairy Queen. ⁓ I love that kind of thing. ⁓ And yet at the same time, there is part of me that is starting to wonder.Henry Oliver (43:09)YouJeffrey Lawrence (43:10)YouJulianne (43:17)is it actually more relevant even for being a Renaissance literary scholar to have read every single person writing in England in 1592 and then maybe instead of Dante or going the other way, right? Instead of...Richardson or Voltaire. Like maybe we should be reading more Voltaire instead of every non-entity. And I'm guilty of this because my whole project is every non-entity who published a book in 1592. So this is very much self-critique. But that more capacious sense, and that more capacious sense exactly as Jeff says, is very much aligned with how writers themselves, especially great writers, approach literature. I teach Toni Morrison in my Shakespeare class sometimes because she has a short play on Desdemona.Jeffrey Lawrence (43:47)If you ⁓Henry Oliver (44:06)So we're obviously all going to await your blog about the different editions of the Fairy Queen and your favorite things about each of them. Just give us some examples of what the big questions would be and what these empirical questions that people are. Just make it sort of concrete for us what you're talking about there.Julianne (44:11)Hawell i mean there are a lot of people who have big ideas ⁓that maybe make their way into their own work, that show up in the introduction of their own work, but that are not defining the field in a meaningful way. There are a few debates that think are actually happening within my field that are interesting, like the extent to which ⁓ Renaissance literature should be understood on national versus international lines. I think that's quite an active one that's very interesting. ⁓ But I think a lot of books written in the Renaissance, and I don't wantHenry Oliver (44:39)Mm-hmm.Julianne (45:03)topoint to any one book because these are all you know good books and books that I like but a lot of books will be have a very narrow date range a set there you know the typical organization of a book in literary studies is to have a sort of thematic topic not always thematics sometimes it'sbook historical or cultural, but ⁓ often it will be a thematic topic. Say a topic like ⁓ shame in Renaissance literature, right? So you'll take shame in Renaissance literature. This is fictional. This isn't anybody's book. If it is accidentally somebody's book, I apologize. Shame in Renaissance literature, okay? And then you'll have this ⁓ contextualizing introduction where you might bring in a bit of Foucault and you might bring in various other theorists.Henry Oliver (45:23)Mm-hmm.Sure, sure,Jeffrey Lawrence (45:39)YouJulianne (45:52)But you will also go very, very deeply into, say, sermons, right, the sermon literature. And then you'll have five chapters. you know, one will be like Shakespeare play, and then maybe one will be Spencer. And then maybe one will be somebody, you know, more marginal or be Ben Johnson or there'll be Webster, you know. ⁓ And then you will put them, you know, this is the method of New Hizorizis. You'll put them beside legal documents and you'll put them beside sermons and you'll put them beside other very, very contextualized and often very well contextualized.works from the period. But you won't write a book that is like, you know, literature and shame, you know, across three centuries ⁓ that would then maybe potentially think about, you know, is there a fundamentally different way that drama versus the novel represent shame? Does this help us understand long range debates about interiority? And again, it's not that nobody ever does this. It's that the feelI feel English literature used to be more aligned over around these kind of shared long-term questions and debates and they're much less aligned around them now because of specialization and because of the sort of dynamic of know decline and and narrowing of prospects that Jeff has mentioned.Henry Oliver (47:11)A lot of people complain about the administrators, the way funding is done, the way you can only get funding for certain types of work, career structures, all these structural factors that make life either difficult as an academic or just force you into certain decisions and activities. ⁓ To what extent is writing on Substack actually going to be a beneficial solution?to get around those problems and to what extent is it just going to be a sort of useful addition and is going to be very stimulating for you all but might not, you know, might not actually change things. What's your sense of that?Jeffrey Lawrence (47:54)This was something I've thought about this a lot because I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education. think Julianne and I have both write or have written for the Chronicle and something that was on the public humanities and I very specifically this is 2022 or 2023 said like, sub stack is not going to be the solution. Partially and my point there was something that I still believe to a certain extent which is thatas someone who has worked in different public humanities ⁓ programs, as someone who knows to a certain degree the publishing industry in the US and Latin America and has done work on that, I think that it's hard to ⁓ exaggerate the degree to which funding for this type of research, it's just really expensive and the existing funding models that exist for something like Substack or I mean any other sort of ⁓platform economy, even public humanities projects, it's just really hard to do. So I'm much more in favor. So I think Substack is really important as a venue. I think that as a potential model for, you know, a sustainable model for doing academic scholarship, I see a lot more limitations. And that's why I've said, I mean, I think in some ways, if the types of conversations that happen on Substack,could be then imported back into our fields. Like, I don't think we should just destroy the institutions and get rid of these departments. I think that there needs to be a sort of infusion of these types of debates that are happening on Substack in the university, because the universities have funding, you know, have funding. And I think it's partially about fighting for that, this kind of holistic thing that we've been talking about up to this point.Julianne (49:49)Yeah, I completely agree. That's my view as well. I don't think that Substack's funding model would actually be good for scholarship. I'm not saying that you couldn't get a few people making it viable, but for a scholarship as a whole, I think it would be terrible for scholarship as a whole. At the same time, for the reasons we've been discussing here, we need to be talking with other people and not just with people in our subfield of a subfield of a subfield. And Substack is great for that.Henry Oliver (50:18)I sometimes think that if you can draw a distinction between scholarship and criticism, the academy can keep the scholarship and the criticism needs to come outside. You can all still write it, right? But it needs to be done in a way that is free of all the institutional incentives and constraints and just all that problem and you can all just be free to say other things online.Jeffrey Lawrence (50:43)I mean, just very quickly on that, I mean, I do think that in my personal case, because I came to Substack partially because I had a very bad experience with a kind of ⁓ a piece that I had pitched to like a venue that was, you know, sort of like progressive venue where I felt like I was saying things about contemporary author that everyone else was saying, right? It was a kind of public secret, a kind of critique of this writer.And I felt like it was not going to be published in any of those venues and in the Academy itself, that would be a problem. And not because this was something that even, you know, sort of ⁓ departed so much from things that people would say, but just because of kind of like the power structures. And since I've been on Substack, I've had multiple people, particularly with the first Substack piece that I wrote, but with other ones as well.Henry Oliver (51:11)Mmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (51:35)people in academia telling me, thank you for saying this. And also I'm reading your sub stack as an academic right now. But I also, do think that there remains, I mean, it's changing, but I do think that there's speaking of shame, like there are people who they're just not sure as graduate students.what they can say and what they can't say. And I think that's a real issue. So I agree, criticism is important, but even for scholarships too, I think that there need to be taboos that are broken in order for scholarship, as Julianne said, to kind of like return to that more sort of vibrant feel that it once had.Julianne (52:20)Yeah, I think that's right. Obviously those taboos are less present in my field than in yours because the contemporary stakes are much less clear. ⁓ And sometimes I'm jealous of people who work in the contemporary field because there are stakes. And then I hear things like what you just said and I'm no longer so jealous. But yeah, no, do think that...Henry Oliver (52:35)YouJeffrey Lawrence (52:35)YouJulianne (52:46)People, even beyond what you would think that they would plausibly need to be, people are very cautious and graduate students especially are very cautious and even having the example of people saying things publicly is incredibly important and helpful.Henry Oliver (53:02)It's interesting how many PhD students there are on Substack. There are several English literature PhD students and I find it amazing actually that they're writing a Substack ⁓ rather than writing something academic. This to me is a very clear signal of something is changing, right? Something important is changing.Jeffrey Lawrence (53:28)I would say it's pragmatic too. I mean, I don't think that there's any reason people shouldn't graduate students. I don't think that they necessarily need to have a substack, but I also, I just think that there's a kind of recognition that, you know, especially at this moment, mean, frankly, with a lot of this does have to do with the Trump administration and kind of the way that it's been directed very specifically at, you know, sort of the humanities andHenry Oliver (53:47)Mm-hmm.Jeffrey Lawrence (53:53)So I do think that there's a kind of sense that the hiring isn't happening. And so it's like, well, why am I going to invest in this very small possibility of getting an, an academic job or even better yet, I'm going to build my own audience. I'm going to talk about these things because that's going to empower me at the moment in which I'm actually looking for jobs. So I, I, I'm like, I agree with you that I think it's just like, ⁓ it's a pretty astonishing thing.in the sense of the sort of initiative, but it also kind of makes sense given the world that exists.Julianne (54:30)Yeah, mean, you know, our graduate students are not.coming in, I'm sure yours are the same way, they're not coming in thinking they're going to get jobs ⁓ anymore. So they're coming in thinking, I have six years to build the kind of intellectual life to become the kind of writer and the kind of thinker that I want to be. And that's the priority, much more than anything sort of pragmatic about what they might do in terms of future career prospects, because most of them have absolutely no idea. It's much more about how can I find an intellectual community? How can I become the kindintellectual I want to be. And if academia is not going to be their home long term for that, it cannot be in academia. It has to be elsewhere. In addition, now that there are fewer conferences, journals, you know, are delayed by years. That was another thing that got me on Substack is I wrote a review.And I wrote the review as soon as I got the book. I wrote the review that I was asked to review. Then like, you know, six weeks, sent it back. ⁓ It took four years for the review to appear in that journal. And I was like, why, how can we possibly have a conversation when this journal has just been sitting on this copy edited review until they could find a slot for it in their, you know, in this day and age? How can that be the case? You know, so I think, you know, that's also part of what's going on.Henry Oliver (55:49)Yes.So are you running introduction to sub-stack classes for your graduate students? This is not yet, yes.Julianne (55:59)No, not yet, not yet.Jeffrey Lawrence (56:00)Yeah, yeah. I mean,interestingly, we had an event with Lincoln Michelle, who's a very popular at Rutgers, who's a very popular Substack writer. I mean, that was one of our, was a hugely well attended event. I mean, I do think, and it doesn't necessarily need to be just Substack, but I think public intellectual work, think graduate students and also undergraduates, they want to understand this because they know ⁓Henry Oliver (56:08)Mm-mm.Jeffrey Lawrence (56:29)precisely what Julianne said, that it's not gonna work for them to just stay in their lane and keep the blinders on and keep going. Even if they want a career in academia, they know that they need to be involved in these other things. so, I mean, to the extent that I think we can do that in our institutions and give them a sense of what's going on, I mean, definitely we're thinking about that at Rutgers.Henry Oliver (56:55)If the humanities goes into some sort of terminal decline and there are fewer departments and the student numbers never recover and all these blah blah blah, all these bad things, ⁓ does it matter?Julianne (57:08)Well, for what? mean...Jeffrey Lawrence (57:10)Ha ha.Henry Oliver (57:10)Well, because everyone talksabout it like, the humanities are dying, this is terrible. And I'm like, what's the problem? We had like English literature was the number one subject for undergraduates, and now it's not, right? What is the actual problem if the humanities are in this terminal decline? No, I get that it's all bad for you. Yeah, no, for all of you, of course, right? But like, what's the what's the actual problem here? Yeah.Jeffrey Lawrence (57:27)You mean besides the jobs of, mean, because part of that, right, right, Yeah, for us. But for society.Henry Oliver (57:38)Obviously when someone doesn't have a job or can't get a job, like of course, of course. But can you give us a succinct explanation of why people who are not involved in it should care about the decline of the humanities or should recognize that it's something that we don't want to happen in some way?Julianne (57:56)I mean, I think the sort of simplest thing is that we still do have, it's fading, but we still do have some shared cultural literary heritage ⁓ or basis. Yeah, I don't use the word heritage since it's a kind of nationally charged word, but some kind of shared basis that allows us to talk with each other about literature. ⁓ And most of this, think, is predicated not on the university, but on the high school canon.Henry Oliver (58:11)Sure.Julianne (58:25)is an extension of that. So I think our number one thing should be the high school curriculum. ⁓ But then our number two thing should be ⁓ ensuring that people have some kind of foundation in, you know, a...as wide a range as we can give them of literary texts that they get in university because that is the basis of a shared literary culture. I don't think you get, you know, I don't think you get a wider literary culture where people can talk about things, ⁓ you know, like 18th century books or, you know, 19th or 20th century books across the world ⁓ without having some kind of institutional basis, having some kind of shared institutional structure that people have passed through. Otherwise, what you will get is people, you know, picking up thingsyou know, a bit here, a bit there. Some of them will be so unfamiliar that they will be put off by it. Some of them maybe won't. ⁓ But you won't get anything like a common culture. And for me, that's sort of intrinsically good. But there is also this kind of idealistic ⁓ democratic aspect to this that you got in the mid-20th century in the post-war expansion of higher education and also the expansion of public education. This idea that you would have a citizenship thatbe participating in intellectual, philosophical, and political culture at a very high level. I don't see how you get that without having some kind of shared institutional basis for it.Jeffrey Lawrence (59:50)Yeah, mean, would just, yeah, I think everything and then maybe the only like word that I would use that you didn't use there is just kind of like literacy. mean, cultural literacy, but actual literacy, because I do think that beyond the culture wars, like the one thing that I think I'd like across the political spectrum is that there is this sense that a certain ability to read and to engage in civic life is declining.⁓ And so, yeah, I mean, I think that reading all sorts of texts is important and having cultural literacy is important to having an informed citizenry. So that to me seems like the reason for doing it. But as Julianne says, and maybe this doesn't totally answer the question, because I do think some of these are perhaps like for us at the college level, it's a little bit downstream of these sort of.broader issues, which is one more reason I think that making the case about why we should care about literature is also on us. It shouldn't just be assumed, as you're saying, Henry, that because we want jobs that this is good for everyone. I think we need to make that case.Henry Oliver (1:01:05)Will you be making that case on Substack?Jeffrey Lawrence (1:01:09)Yeah, mean, don't know, I mean, I think, you know, sort of more and more, I do think that, you know, that we need to be doing this. I mean, for me, everything that's happened over the past couple of years, I think the way my sense of kind of like the failure of a certain liberal project after the Trump election, you know, last year was really important to me in saying there is a way that we're going about the assumptions that we have aboutHenry Oliver (1:01:10)HahahaJulianne (1:01:11)ThankJeffrey Lawrence (1:01:38)literacy and what we should be doing and the role of academic scholarship. I mean, that I feel like was a turning point, at least personally for me. And I think engaging in places like Substack, but just generally in like public culture, to me, seems like it's just like it is the one avenue that we have. So yes, I guess.Henry Oliver (1:02:00)If your colleagues are listening and you both want to say something to them to encourage them onto Substack, what would you say?Julianne (1:02:10)Jeff, your colleagues, ⁓ do they subscribe to your Substack? Because one of the things that has happened is at first nobody, you know, I told a couple friends, but nobody else knew about this. But now more and more members of my department have subscribed to my Substack, which feels like, which does make it feel sort of high stakes in a different way. Has that happened to you?Henry Oliver (1:02:28)YouJeffrey Lawrence (1:02:32)I'm still pretty under the radar. ⁓ I have some colleagues, I know that there's some graduate students who also read it, ⁓ I mean, and colleague is a small thing. I'm more like, you my colleagues, have a great relationship with my department. I talk to them and sort of, but I think it's more like colleagues in general in terms of the academy that is important.Right? mean, and it again, I don't think it necessarily has to be sub-stacked, but it just shouldn't be Twitter. mean, I think that the long form writing that one finds in the debates for me, at least this is where it's happening right now. And so that would be my pitch is that I just think that the debates that are happening are better than they are anywhere else on the internet.Henry Oliver (1:03:18)Thank you both. I thought this was very interesting and I hope it encourages more of your peers to come and join us on Substack This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Kim Stanley Robinson discusses Real Utopian Futures. Find the feed of English episodes only here: https://www.futurehistories-international.com/ You can also import the RSS feed to your favorite app: https://www.futurehistories-international.com/feed.xml   Shownotes The reference page on Kim Stanley Robinson, his works, interviews, talks, etc. (including a discussion forum): https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/ Robinson, K. S. (2020). The Ministry for the Future. Orbit Books. https://www.orbit-books.co.uk/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/the-ministry-for-the-future/9780356508863/ Robinson, K. S. (2017). New York 2140. Orbit Books. https://www.orbit-books.co.uk/titles/kim-stanley-robinson/new-york-2140/9780356508788/ Robinson, K. S. (1988). The Gold Coast. Macmillan. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312890377/thegoldcoast/ Blumenfeld, J. (2024). Managing Decline. Cured Quail, Vol. 3. https://curedquail.com/Managing-Decline Blumenfeld, J. (2022). Climate Barbarism. Adapting to a wrong World. Constellations, 30, 162–178. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8675.12596 the quoted Kohei Saito video: https://youtube.com/shorts/WnvhD7p651M?si=SdfPftKOCJM6MS9j the lecture in which Kim Stanley Robinson talks about “futurecide” and “preemptive capitulation”: https://youtu.be/HpzXkpx29S4?si=PVlOE53Hj5-BZR5B reporting on and summary of the talk: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/article/the-war-on-science-is-here-kim-stanley-robinson-says-its-just-the-beginning/ Löwy, M. (2005). What is Ecosocialism? Capitalism Nature Socialism, 16(2), 15–24. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10455750500108237 for an overview of the history and different schools of Ecomarxist/Ecosocialist theory: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/ecology-marxism-andreas-malm/ on Anna Kornbluh: http://www.annakornbluh.com/ on Mass Extinction Events: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-mass-extinction-and-are-we-facing-a-sixth-one.html Dressler, A. (2025). You have 100 ‘Energy Slaves'. The Climate Brink. https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/you-have-100-energy-slaves on the 30 by 30 Biodiversity Goal: https://www.cop28.com/en/thought-leadership/The-30x30-Biodiversity-Goal-at-COP28 the International Maritime Organization: https://www.imo.org/ on the ‘Half-Earth Project': https://eowilsonfoundation.org/what-is-the-half-earth-project/ Wilson, E. O. (2016). Half-Earth. Our Planet's Fight for Life. Norton Books. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631492525 Pendergrass, D. & Vettese, T. (2022). Half-Earth Socialism. A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/2650-half-earth-socialism one of the many interviews/talks in which Kim Stanley Robinson talks about science fiction as the realism of our times: https://youtu.be/p1wNhc46xjE?si=hOdKuwRQhef-9tLs on the Turing Test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test on Neoliberalism attaching itself to demands of the New Left: Boltanski, L. & Chiapello, E. (2018). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. https://www.versobooks.com/products/1980-the-new-spirit-of-capitalism on Friedrich Hayek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek Williams, R. (2015). Structures of Feeling. In: D. Sharma & F. Tygstrup (Ed.), Structures of Feeling. Affectivity and the Study of Culture (pp. 20-26). https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110365481.20/html on Keynesianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics Vogl, J. (2017). The Ascendancy of Finance. Polity Press. https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-ascendancy-of-finance--9781509509294 Graeber, D. (2011). Debt. The First 5,000 Years. Melville House. https://files.libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf on Thomas Piketty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty on Gabriel Zucman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Zucman on the ‘Zucman tax': https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2025/09/23/zucman-tax-what-the-proposed-wealth-tax-would-mean-for-france_6745653_8.html on Carbon Taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax Sorg, C. (2023). Finance as a Form of Economic Planning. Competition & Change, 29(1), 17-37. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10245294231217578 Sarkar, S. (2024). The Carbon Coin. An Eco-Speculative Approach to Decarbonisation in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. Green Letters, 28(4), 297–310. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2025.2483998 A policy proposal on ‘Carbon Reward' from the same researcher whose earlier policy work inspired the ‘Carbon Coin' idea in The Ministry for the Future: https://deltonchen.substack.com/p/new-economic-blueprint-for-resolving see also: https://globalcarbonreward.org/newsletters/carbon-coin/ on Quantitative Easing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing on Carbon Drawdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration on Nicolas Stern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stern,_Baron_Stern_of_Brentford on the Democratic Socialists of America: https://www.dsausa.org/ the Network for Greening the Financial System: https://www.ngfs.net/en on COP30 in Belém: https://unfccc.int/cop30 Solnit, R. (2022). Orwell's Roses. Penguin. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607057/orwells-roses-by-rebecca-solnit/ Future Histories Episodes on Related Topics S3E47 | Jason W. Moore on Socialism in the Web of Life https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e47-jason-w-moore-on-socialism-in-the-web-of-life/ S03E44 | Anna Kornbluh on Climate Counteraesthetics https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e44-anna-kornbluh-on-climate-counteraesthetics/ S03E32 | Jacob Blumenfeld on Climate Barbarism and Managing Decline https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e32-jacob-blumenfeld-on-climate-barbarism-and-managing-decline/ S03E30 | Matt Huber & Kohei Saito on Growth, Progress and Left Imaginaries https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e30-matt-huber-kohei-saito-on-growth-progress-and-left-imaginaries/ S03E23 | Andreas Malm on Overshooting into Climate Breakdown https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e23-andreas-malm-on-overshooting-into-climate-breakdown/ S02E18 | Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese on Half Earth Socialism https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s02/e18-drew-pendergrass-and-troy-vettese-on-half-earth-socialism/ --- If you are interested in democratic economic planning, these resources might be of help: Democratic planning – an information website https://www.democratic-planning.com/ Sorg, C. & Groos, J. (eds.)(2025). Rethinking Economic Planning. Competition & Change Special Issue Volume 29 Issue 1. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ccha/29/1 Groos, J. & Sorg, C. (2025). Creative Construction - Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond. Bristol University Press. [for a review copy, please contact: amber.lanfranchi[at]bristol.ac.uk] https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/creative-construction International Network for Democratic Economic Planning https://www.indep.network/ Democratic Planning Research Platform: https://www.planningresearch.net/ --- Future Histories Contact & Support If you like Future Histories, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories Contact: office@futurehistories.today Twitter: https://twitter.com/FutureHpodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futurehpodcast/ Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories English webpage: https://futurehistories-international.com   Episode Keywords #KimStanleyRobinson, #JanGroos, #Interview, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #futurehistoriesinternational, #Utopia, #RealUtopias, #DemocraticPlanning, #Keynes, #Dystopia, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #Capitalism, #EcoSocialism, #Socialism, #GreenCapitalism, #Narratives, #ClimateCounterAesthetics, #Transition, #SocioEcologicalTransition, #SocialDemocracy, #ScienceFiction

What have the Austrians ever done for us?The answer is quite a lot, particularly regarding the importance of liberty and free markets, and how government overreach in economic matters results in long-term damage and decline.However, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and other members of the so-called Austrian School have long occupied a fringe position in conventional economic thought, and their ideas have been excluded from policymakers' toolkits, which are dominated by the Keynesian framework.But is this changing?The evidence suggests it might be. The growing interest in non-state-backed money, the rise of social media platforms such as Substack, which provide outlets for new ideas, and, significantly, the Milei Revolution, now underway in Argentina, all point to a renaissance in Austrian economics.   Javier Milei regards himself as an Austrian economist and cites, among others, Mises, Hayek and Murray Rothbard as his heroes, whose ideas changed his life. They may yet change the course of Argentina's history.So, I was honoured when Dr Mark Thornton of Auburn University and the Mises Institute agreed to join me for a discussion on the Austrian School and its growth since the early 1980s. At that time, we were both undergraduates reading works such as Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, von Mises' Human Action, and Rothbard's Man, Economy & State. And it turns out that we may have met previously, 45 years ago. It is sometimes a small world.   We had a great conversation in which Mark outlined his optimistic view of how Austrian ideas can help us understand the investment landscape, the broader significance of Milei's reform agenda, and our world where human action seeks opportunities in non-fiat money.Mark's published works include The Skyscraper Curse: How Austrian Economics Predicted Every Major Economic Crisis of the Last Century. Additionally, articles, digests, and podcasts from the Mises Institute, which provides extensive freely available content for those keen to learn more about the Austrian way of thinking and its growing relevance to our times. However, of course, none of what you are about to hear is any kind of advice but solely for your information and hopefully, entertainment. Please seek personal financial advice before investing a penny of your money in these crazy markets. With that said, please enjoy my conversation with the maverick Austrian economist, Dr Mark Thornton.Brought to you by Progressive Equity.   Hayek for the 21st Century: Essays in Political Economy/ Order a FREE copy of the book or multiple copies! Also, you can download the PDF and ePub versions using this link:  https://mises.org/library/book/hayek-21st-century-essays-political-economy 

Vivemos num tempo de paradoxos. A linguagem da liberdade, tão presente nos discursos modernos, frequentemente serve de disfarce para sistemas crescentemente controladores, tanto no campo político quanto no eclesiástico. É nesse cenário que o pensamento de Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) emerge com força profética, não por apontar uma teologia explícita, mas por diagnosticar com precisão os perigos que rondam qualquer estrutura que confunde eficiência com verdade, e controle com missão. A Igreja Adventista do Sétimo Dia, como movimento escatológico e profético, está chamada a refletir: até que ponto a centralização administrativa, o excesso de regulação e a lógica tecnocrática ameaçam a liberdade necessária à atuação do Espírito e ao florescimento do chamado apostólico?

What have the Austrians ever done for us? In terms of understanding the importance of liberty, free markets, and, particularly, how government overreach in economic matters results in long-term damage and decline, the answer is a lot. However, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and other members of the so-called Austrian School have long occupied a fringe position in conventional economic thought and have been largely excluded from policymakers' toolkits, which are dominated by Keynesian frameworks. But is this changing? The growing interest in non-state-backed money, the rise of social media, and the Milei Revolution underway in Argentina all suggest it is.   In particular, Javier Milei strongly aligns his worldview with that of the Austrian School and cites, among others, Mises, Hayek and Murray Rothbard as his philosophical heroes.I was honoured when Dr Mark Thornton of Auburn University and the Mises Institute agreed to join me for a discussion on the Austrian School and its growth since the early 1980s. At that time, we were both econ-undergraduates reading works such as Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, von Mises' Human Action, and Rothbard's Man, Economy & State.  We had a great conversation in which Mark outlined his optimistic view of how Austrian ideas can help us understand the investment landscape and the broader significance of Milei's reform agenda in Argentina. Mark's published works include The Skyscraper Curse: How Austrian Economics Predicted Every Major Economic Crisis of the Last Century.  I began by asking Mark about a former colleague of his at the Mises Institute, Roger Garrison. It turns out we might have attended the same Summer School that Roger taught 45 years ago. As they say, it's a small world. Please enjoy my conversation with the maverick Austrian economist, Dr Mark Thornton. Brought to you by Progressive Equity.    Hayek for the 21st Century: Essays in Political Economy/ Order a FREE copy of the book or multiple copies! Also, you can download the PDF and ePub versions using this link:  https://mises.org/library/book/hayek-21st-century-essays-political-economy    

There's a word that's gained a lot of popularity in the last year: “ensh*ttification”. It refers to a trajectory many see with digital platforms: they initially offer immense value to users, only to systematically degrade that quality over time in order to extract maximum surplus for shareholders. We invited the coiner of this term, science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, on the podcast to discuss whether he thinks this decline is an inevitable feature of digital markets or a consequence of specific policy failures. And, most importantly, how he thinks it could be reversed.For Doctorow, "ensh*ttification" is not simply a result of "revealed preferences", where users tolerate worse service because they value the platform, but rather the outcome of a regulatory environment that has permitted the creation of high switching costs and the elimination of competitors. Doctorow also argues that historically, interoperability acted as an engine of dynamism, allowing new entrants to lower the barriers to entry. But current IP frameworks, such as anti-circumvention laws, have been "weaponized" to prevent this, effectively allowing firms to enforce cartels and engage in rent-seeking behavior.Finally, Doctorow offers a critical assessment of the current AI boom, arguing that the sector is creating "reverse centaurs", where human labor is conscripted to correct algorithmic errors, and warns of a potential asset bubble driven by inflated revenue attribution. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Der Titel der heutigen Episode lautet: Passagier oder Steuermann? und ist ein Gespräch mit Markus Raunig. Markus Raunig ist Chairman der Startup-Dachplattform AustrianStartups und Co-Host von Österreichs führendem Tech-Podcast Future Weekly. Als Initiator der Stiftung Unternehmerische Zukunft setzt er sich für einen Kulturwandel zu mehr Unternehmergeist ein und berät politische Entscheidungsträger bei der Umsetzung einer innovationsfreundlichen Politik – unter anderem im Startup-Rat der österreichischen Bundesregierung und in der Startup Nations Alliance der EU-Kommission. Als Co-Autor des Austrian Startup Monitors und der Austrian Startup Agenda ist er einer der führenden Experten für die Entwicklung von innovativen Wachstumsunternehmen. Mein neues Buch: Hexenmeister oder Zauberlehrling? Die Wissensgesellschaft in der Krise ist verfügbar! Schon gelesen? Die heutige Episode ist ausnahmsweise sowohl sehr passend für die aktuelle Situation in Europa, besonders in Deutschland und Österreich, als auch langfristig gültig. Wir sprechen über die Frage, was Unternehmertum heute bedeutet und warum Unternehmer heute oftmals in einem so eigenartigen Licht dargestellt werden: Haben wir Angst vor Entscheidungen und vor Freiheit? Wer schafft Werte in modernen Gesellschaften und wie gelingt es uns, irreführende Narrative abzubauen? Klassenkampf wird von manchen Seiten inszeniert, aber wohl ohne zu verstehen, welcher Schaden damit angerichtet wird. Was kann man besonders jungen Menschen raten, die innovative Ideen haben und diese umsetzen wollen – ohne durch vermeidbare Fehler zu scheitern? Aber das Thema geht im Grunde weit über unternehmerische und wirtschaftliche Fragen hinaus. Was können wir tun, damit Menschen sich nicht wie Passagiere im eigenen Leben fühlen, sondern in die Lage versetzt werden, eigene, selbstbestimmte Entscheidungen zu treffen? Wie kann eine Gesellschaft strukturiert werden, um individuelle Freiheit und unterschiedliche Lebensentwürfe nicht nur auf dem Papier, sondern in der Realität zu ermöglichen? Wir beginnen das Gespräch mit der Frage, was Markus Raunig persönlich motiviert, sich so intensiv mit Wirtschaft und vor allem Unternehmertum auseinanderzusetzen.„ »Ich habe mich gefühlt wie ein Passagier im eigenen Leben.« Was ist dann passiert? Wie ist diese Erkenntnis zustande gekommen? »Jedes Problem da draußen ist eigentlich auch eine Chance, etwas selbst in die Hand zu nehmen – und es macht richtig Spaß, auch etwas aufzubauen.« Wie ist es aber mit dem Unternehmertum in Österreich, Deutschland und in Europa bestellt? Sind wir hier im internationalen Vergleich noch wettbewerbsfähig? Die kurze Antwort ist: In vielen Bereichen leider nicht. Aber was ist die längere Antwort? »Wenn man sich das Unternehmertum in der Gesellschaft ansieht, gibt es teilweise auch ein sehr verzerrtes Bild. […] So sagen 1/3 der Millennials, dass Unternehmer keinen positiven Beitrag zur Gesellschaft leisten.« Auch Universitäten leisten bei Weitem nicht das, was man erwarten würde. Was können wir ändern? »Im Jammern, im Raunzen sind wir richtig gut als Österreicher – da muss etwas gemacht werden –, aber dass wir selbst etwas beitragen können, das ist für viele Menschen nicht greifbar.« Was ist das aktuelle Bild des Unternehmertums in der Gesellschaft, wie sieht die Wirklichkeit aus? »Medial getragene Klassenkrieg-Narrative spielen eine Rolle.« Was können wir tun, um diese besser in Einklang zu bringen? Wie kann man verständlich machen, dass ein Kuchen gebacken werden muss, bevor er verteilt werden kann, und außerdem, dass jeder mehr bekommt, wenn zwei statt einem Kuchen gebacken werden? Arbeitsteilung ist eines der erfolgreichsten und fundamentalsten Prinzipien der Moderne und damit drängt sich natürlich die Frage auf, wie diese Arbeit genau zu verteilen ist und wer das »bestimmt«. »Die Komplexität hat ein Level erreicht, dass das zentral nicht mehr steuerbar ist. Ich glaube, es braucht den Markt als Ort, der diese Komplexität managbar macht.« Was ist aber der Reiz dieser zentralen Modelle, warum glauben immer noch so viele Menschen, dass zentrale Einheiten, »der Staat« oder im schlimmsten Fall gar ein »Führer« diese Herausforderungen im Sinne der Menschen lösen könnten? Warum kann hier die kurzfristige Betrachtung in die Irre führen? Wo ist das »Wissen der Welt« verortet, das wir benötigen, um unsere Welt am Laufen zu halten und weiterzuentwickeln? Wie kann man diese Komplexität und das Menschliche dahinter greifbar machen? Wie können wir das Unternehmerische auch im Bildungssystem verankern und damit früh wecken? Dazu kommt – besonders heute immer wieder betont – Menschen haben sehr unterschiedliche Bedürfnisse und Lebensentwürfe. Wer glaubt, dass diese von einer zentralen staatlichen Autorität berücksichtigt würden? Was passiert, wenn Freiheiten kollidieren? Nehmen wir Freiheit für selbstverständlich und verlieren sie daher schneller, als wir es für möglich halten? Fürchten sich manche Menschen gar vor Freiheit? Muss man Freiheit lernen? Muss man es üben, eigene Entscheidungen zu treffen? Wie kann das gelingen? Was macht Markus Raunig und seine Organisationen, um auch bei Kindern und Jugendlichen den unternehmerischen Funken zu wecken? Wie funktionieren diese Programme in der Praxis? Wie kann man daran teilnehmen? Was hat Fortschritt ermöglicht? Was hat sich seit der industriellen Revolution und ihren enormen Leistungen verändert? Stecken wir heute bei fast allen größeren Unternehmungen im Sand fest? Bringen wir nicht einmal das zustande, was unsere Urgroßväter mit wesentlich weniger Technik geleistet haben? Strukturen und Organisationen entwickeln häufig ein Eigenleben, das nicht mehr mit der initialen Mission vereinbar ist. Ist das alternativlos? Entstehen Parallelgesellschaften, protektionistische Systeme, die Macht und Geld verwalten, aber ihren ursprünglichen Zweck entweder verloren haben oder aus prinzipiellen Gründen nicht mehr erreichen können? Zwei wichtige Fragen sind noch zu diskutieren: Verantwortung und Risiko – wie geht man damit in einer komplexen Gesellschaft produktiv um? Gehen wir zu unsauber mit dem Begriff »Marktversagen« um, wenn tatsächlich ein politisches Versagen dahintersteht? Dann sprechen wir ein Risiko-Dilemma an: Wie kann man damit umgehen, dass man es als Gesellschaft einerseits möchte, dass Menschen (unternehmerische) Risiken eingehen und dafür auch die Verantwortung tragen, aber andererseits die negativen Effekte nicht so dramatisch sein dürfen, dass eben diese Risiken niemand mehr eingehen möchte? »Die Angst vor dem Scheitern ist ein sehr wichtiger Faktor, wenn es darum geht, warum viele Menschen nicht in eine unternehmerische Karriere gehen.« Nur wenige Unternehmen machen nach fünf Jahren noch das, womit sie begonnen haben. Ist das normal? »Dieses Scheitern im Kleinen, das muss kulturell viel normaler werden. […] Das gehört dazu, zum unternehmerischen Wirken.« Was ist in den letzten 25 Jahren passiert, das unsere Nationen, jedenfalls in Europa, auf den Weg in die tiefe Krise, in eine dysfunktionale Wirtschaft geführt hat? »Es gibt viele Themen, wo man aktuell unpopuläre, aber mutige Entscheidungen treffen müsste, und es gibt aus einer ganz klassischen Anreiz-Perspektive überhaupt keine Anreize für Politiker, in diese Richtung zu gehen.« Aber es ist nicht nur ein politisches Problem. Warum ist es für Startups so viel einfacher, vernünftige Finanzierung etwa in den USA zu bekommen, während in Europa dem Anschein nach kaum jemand bereit ist, diese Risiken aufzunehmen? Aber es ist nicht nur Politik und Finanzierung, auch die Kundenseite ist ein positiver oder eben (in Europa) negativer Faktor. Aber auch in den USA gibt es Bewegungen, die dem Anreiz, Talente aus Europa anzuziehen, entgegenwirken. Warum gelingt es uns trotzdem nicht, diese in Europa zu binden? »Der Ruf des Kontinents ist aktuell: Regulierung, Regulierung, Regulierung.« Wie lässt sich das Narrativ des Unternehmertums nun in der Breite, im öffentlichen Diskurs verbessern? In früheren Episoden habe ich das »Future Brunels«-Programm in England angesprochen; wären solche Initiativen auch in Österreich und Deutschland sinnvoll? Können wir uns so vielleicht von Individuen, von Personen motivieren lassen und Identifikationsfiguren schaffen? Markus Raunig erwähnt hier auch ganz konkret Programme wie etwa das Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. Zuletzt stelle ich die Frage, was man ganz konkret jungen Menschen empfehlen kann, die eine Idee haben und diese umsetzen wollen. Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 140: Mensch und Technik über Generationen — eine Reflexion mit Magdalena Molnar und Gabriel Kopper Episode 138: Im Windschatten der Narrative, ein Gespräch mit Ralf M. Ruthardt Episode 136: Future Brunels? Learning from the Generation that Transformed the World. A Conversation with Dr. Helen Doe Episode 135: Friedrich Hayek und die Beschränktheit der menschlichen Vernunft. Ein Gespräch mit Nickolas Emrich Episode 131: Wot Se Fack, Deutschland? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 130: Populismus und (Ordo)liberalismus, ein Gespräch mit Nils Hesse Episode 128: Aufbruch in die Moderne — Der Mann, der die Welt erfindet! Episode 117: Der humpelnde Staat, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Kletzer Episode 114: Liberty in Our Lifetime 2: Conversations with Lauren Razavi, Grant Romundt and Peter Young Episode 109: Was ist Komplexität? Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Marco Wehr Episode 102: Live im MQ, Verantwortung. Ein Gespräch mit Daphne Hruby Episode 74: Apocalype Always Episode 71: Stagnation oder Fortschritt — eine Reflexion an der Geschichte eines Lebens Episode 65: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 2 Episode 64: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 1 Fachliche Referenzen Markus Raunig auf LinkedIn Podcast Future Weekly Future Weekly Episode 465 (Liquid AI) Stiftung Unternehmertum Entrepreneurial Leadership Program Youth Entrepreneurship week Initiative for Teaching Entrepreneurship IFTE Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge (1944)

El sistema electoral transmite las preferencias de los ciudadanos. La tesis de Benito Arruñada, en La culpa es nuestra, es que los problemas del país no son tanto por culpa de unas élites extractivas, que sin duda existen, sino por las preferencias y la cultura de los ciudadanos. «Es habitual que se atribuyan los problemas sociales, desde la corrupción al desempleo o al derroche del presupuesto público, a los políticos y las élites. Muchos problemas sociales derivan menos de la incompetencia o el egoísmo de unos pocos que de la interacción entre preferencias ciudadanas y decisiones políticas».Kapital es posible gracias a sus colaboradores:Crescenta⁠⁠. Invierte como imaginas.⁠⁠En Crescenta son especialistas en la inversión en capital privado. EQT, Cinven, Clearlake… coinvierte con los inversores institucionales más experimentados en fondos de las gestoras más reconocidas. Crescenta selecciona menos del 3% de los fondos de Private Equity que analiza, construyendo así un portfolio concentrado, diseñado para ofrecer diversificación con una única inversión. Desde 10.000 euros hasta millones, con una propuesta adaptada a todos los inversores. Private Equity Growth, Buyouts, secundarios, activos reales. Construye tu cartera con Crescenta.* Rentabilidades pasadas no implican rentabilidades futuras. Consulta riesgos y condiciones.⁠Thenomba⁠. La escuela que te hará encontrar tu propósito.Thenomba es la escuela que nunca tuviste. Un viaje de 12 etapas para entender quién eres, cómo pensar, qué da sentido y cómo transformar el mundo. Cada día, en solo 20 minutos, te acompañan algunos de los mejores pensadores y creadores del ámbito hispano: de Prada, Higinio Marín, Izanami, Miguel Anxo Bastos, Recuenco y muchos más. En un formato revolucionario con videoclases, eventos, lecturas y comunidad, Thenomba cultiva la dimensión más olvidada de nuestra época: la cultural y espiritual. Una propuesta para quienes quieren dejar de ejecutar y empezar a crear. Descubre donde la IA jamás podrá llegar en thenomba.com.Si quieres formar parte de la primera promoción, utiliza el código KAPITAL para llevarte un 10% de descuento. Empiezan las clases el próximo lunes 8 de diciembre.Patrocina Kapital. Toda la información en este link.Índice:0:32 El AVE desde las perspectivas de Coase y Hayek.5:53 Cobrar el salario bruto es más educador.24:42 Autonomía sin responsabilidad.38:11 Nadie vendrá a rescatarnos.46:38 Estado de amiguetes, no capitalismo de amiguetes.1:02:09 Es injusto tasar gananciales en un contexto de inflación.1:17:44 Precios escondidos de la educación.1:21:44 Falsa protección de la parte débil.1:27:10 Inversión en capital humano.1:36:31 La mítica casa ochentera de Alcaraz.1:38:33 Los silencios están permitidos en este podcast.Apuntes:La culpa es nuestra. Benito Arruñada.El uso del conocimiento en la sociedad. Friedrich Hayek.La pretensión del conocimiento. Friedrich Hayek.El problema del coste social. Ronald Coase.Fiesta. Ernest Hemingway.Juan Belmonte, matador de toros. Manuel Chaves Nogales.

Stijn Schmitz welcomes Dr. Mark Thornton to the show. Dr. Mark Thornton is Economist and Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. The discussion centers on the current state of precious metals, monetary policy, and economic systems, with a particular focus on gold and silver’s role in the global financial landscape. Thornton argues that gold is fundamentally money, and governments have only recently forced their way into replacing commodity money with fiat currency. He suggests that the current precious metals market is still in its early stages, with central bank buying and distrust in the US dollar driving significant interest. The gold and silver markets are experiencing growing pains, with increasing investor attention and potential for further price appreciation. The conversation delves into the fundamental differences between Austrian and Keynesian economics. Thornton criticizes Keynesian economics as a state-controlled ideology that promotes government spending and manipulates interest rates, whereas Austrian economics advocates for market-driven monetary systems and private property rights. He highlights how central bank policies create economic bubbles and exacerbate wealth inequality by favoring asset-rich individuals. Thornton sees potential for a significant monetary transformation, potentially triggered by the current precious metals bull market. He believes the collision between Western and Eastern financial markets, coupled with the rise of cryptocurrencies, could lead to a fundamental restructuring of monetary systems. The possibility of a return to a gold standard or a gold-backed settlement currency is discussed as a potential future scenario. The economist also warns about potential economic bubbles in artificial intelligence and private equity, arguing that the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies have created unsustainable conditions across various sectors. He believes that while central banks have been able to temporarily extend economic cycles, their power is not infinite, and a significant market correction is inevitable. Thornton concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding Austrian economic principles and encourages listeners to explore the works of economists like Friedrich Hayek to gain deeper insights into monetary systems and economic dynamics. Timestamps: 00:00:00 – Introduction 00:01:19 – Gold as Money 00:04:21 – Central Bank Distrust 00:05:52 – Bull Run Early Stages 00:09:35 – Historical Parallels 1980s 00:14:15 – Return to Gold Standard 00:18:16 – Bond Markets Unraveling 00:24:07 – Austrian vs Keynesian Economics 00:31:19 – Flexible Inflation Targeting 00:33:53 – Silver Monetary Role 00:45:46 – AI Private Equity Bubbles 00:51:11 – Future Recession Outlook 00:55:41 – Concluding Thoughts Guest Links: Website: https://mises.org X: https://x.com/DrMarkThornton E-Mail: mailto:mthornton@mises.org YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mark+thornton+minor+issues Book-Hayek: https://mises.org/library/book/hayek-21st-century-essays-political-economy Dr. Mark Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and formerly held the Peterson-Luddy Chair in Austrian Economics. He hosts the podcasts Minor Issues and Unanimity and is Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. His books include The Economics of Prohibition, Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation, The Bastiat Collection, and The Skyscraper Curse. He has served on multiple editorial boards, taught economics at several universities, and worked as Assistant Superintendent of Banking and adviser to Alabama Governor Fob James. He holds degrees from St. Bonaventure University and Auburn University and has debated the “War on Drugs” at the Oxford Union. Dr. Thornton has been featured in major outlets such as The Economist, Forbes, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, along with numerous international and regional newspapers. His commentary appears regularly on the Mises Institute's platforms and on programs such as Boom-Bust, the Tom Woods Show, and the Scott Horton Show.

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Neoliberalism and Race (Stanford UP, 2025) Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the methods of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book's key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized—its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations in the works of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this original—perhaps controversial—critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse, but also directly impacted it. Lars Cornelissen is a historian of neoliberalism. His writings have been published in History of European Ideas, Constellations, and Modern Intellectual History. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Why is it okay to take the little shampoo bottles in hotels home with you but not the towels? And what stops people from taking the towels? Listen as political scientist Anthony Gill discusses the enforcement of property rights with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Backing up their observations with insights from Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and our everyday lives, they argue that the unenforced norms surrounding trust, propriety, and moral sentiments play a central role in building a flourishing society.

Terwijl het IMF en de Wereldbank bijeen waren in Washington D.C., werd in het Zweedse Stockholm de Nobelprijs voor de Economie uitgereikt, onder meer aan de Franse econoom Philippe Aghion. Macro-econoom Arnoud Boot ziet een verband: ‘Het draait uiteindelijk om de vraag hoe je een economie concurrerender kunt maken.’ Aghion deelt de prijs met Joel Mokyr en Peter Howitt. Volgens de Zweedse Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen hebben de drie wetenschappers laten zien ‘hoe innovatie de drijvende kracht is achter verdere vooruitgang.’ Wat heeft dat met de jaarvergaderingen van het IMF en de Wereldbank te maken? Bij die vergaderingen komen beleidsmakers bij elkaar: van centrale bankiers tot ministers van Financiën en academici. In verschillende sessies, online te volgen voor iedereen, werd gesproken over onder meer het slim uitgeven van geld. Daarmee wordt bedoeld investeren in onderwijs en infrastructuur, wat een economie sterker maakt. Ook werden gevaren besproken die productiviteitsgroei bedreigen, zoals kunstmatige intelligentie. En dan kom je uit bij Philippe Aghion. Een uitstekend econoom die altijd benadrukt hoe je een economie concurrerender kunt maken en beter kunt laten functioneren. Hij is ervaringsdeskundige en zegt vooral zijn thuisland Frankrijk níet als voorbeeld te nemen. Hoe moet het dan wél? Twee invalshoeken. De ene komt van de Oostenrijkse econoom Friedrich Hayek, die in 1974 de Nobelprijs voor de Economie kreeg. Hij was een groot econoom en tegenspeler van Keynes. Hayek pleitte voor ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ — laat duizend bloemen floreren. Hij bedoelde dat ideeën een kans moeten krijgen en dat je niet alleen de bestaande grote bedrijven moet beschermen met ineffectief industriebeleid. Precies waar Aghion het over heeft. De andere invalshoek kwam van de Deense minister van Economische Zaken tijdens één van de IMF-sessies. Hij zei dat de interne markt versterkt moet worden. Want 800 miljard euro uitgeven aan innovatie is zinloos als we eerst niet de barrières tussen landen opheffen. Kleinere, groeiende bedrijven hebben geen schijn van kans als de interne markt niet goed functioneert. Oftewel: het slim uitgeven van geld. Naar wie moeten we luisteren? Naar alle drie. We moeten luisteren naar Denemarken, naar Hayek, en naar Philippe Aghion, die tegen alle klippen op blijft roepen en blijft hopen op een meer glorievolle Franse economie. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

De eerste vrouw als premier van het verenigd Koninkrijk was er veel trotser op dat zij de eerste bewoner van Downing Street 10 was met een bètagraad. Margaret Thatcher is nu 100 jaar geleden geboren – op 13 oktober 1925 - maar ze blijft actueel: Japan krijgt dezer dagen de eerste vrouw als premier en zij ziet de Iron Lady als haar voorbeeld. In de iconische, polariserende politicus zat een volleerd actrice en ook een emotioneel mens. Jaap Jansen en PG Kroeger schetsen haar portret. *** Deze aflevering is mede mogelijk gemaakt met donaties van luisteraars die we hiervoor hartelijk danken. Word ook vriend van de show! Beveilig je online leven met Surfshark VPN! Ga naar Surfshark en krijg 4 extra maanden. Geld-terug-garantie van 30 dagen inbegrepen. Heb je belangstelling om in onze podcast te adverteren of ons te sponsoren? Zend ons een mailtje en wij zoeken contact. *** Margaret Hilda Roberts kwam allerminst uit het klassieke landadel of bankiersmilieu van de Tory Party. Ze hielp haar ouders in de kruidenierszaak, groeide op in een eenvoudig, vroom en liberaal nest. Politiek kreeg ze als vanzelfsprekend mee. Vader Alfred Roberts was gemeenteraadslid, wethouder en burgemeester van het stadje Grantham. Ze is een boeiend voorbeeld van de sociale mobiliteit en emancipatiegolf die de Tweede Wereldoorlog met zich mee bracht. Oude maatschappelijke scheidslijnen en beperkingen aan de rol vrouwen werden onder de grote druk van de omstandigheden gerelativeerd. Margaret kon scheikunde studeren in Oxford, werd research assistent en voorzitter van de Oxford University Conservative Association. De naoorlogse wederopbouw en de nadruk in de Conservative Party op ruimdenkender kansen voor nieuwe groepen gaven Margaret vleugels. Als jongste kandidaat voor het Lagerhuis, opvallend en doeltreffend debater en in de jaren nadat zij in 1959 gekozen werd ook jongste minister op een reeks van posten. Ze werd een generalist. En onder invloed van politiek filosoof en econoom Friedrich Hayek en haar man Denis Thatcher ideologisch behorend bij de rechtervleugel van de partij. Ze versloeg in haar partij de tragisch mislukte premier Edward Heath en als oppositieleider Labour-premier James Callaghan. Ineens stond daar een scherpe, ideologisch denkende vrouw op het wereldtoneel. Het was even wennen voor het 'old boys network'. Niet voor Ruud Lubbers, niet voor François Mitterrand, maar heel erg voor Helmut Kohl en ook af en toe voor haar soulmate Ronald Reagan. In terugblik valt vooral op hoe vaak zij geluk had op het moment dat ze dat politiek het meest nodig had. Geluk vanwege de ayatollahs die de olieprijs lieten exploderen toen zij aantrad, tot de chaos in de Labour Party in de eerste jaren van haar bewind. Vanwege de Argentijnse junta die haar populariteit op het dieptepunt naar ongekende hoogten liet stijgen tot Michail Gorbatsjov die plotseling haar rol op het wereldtoneel markeerde. Haar vroege enthousiasme voor Europa lijkt nu vergeten, want met de val van de Muur sloeg zij een pad in dat haar aanpak en houding snel marginaliseerde. Haar eigen partij zette haar ijskoud af. “Verraad met een glimlach”, noemde zij het verbitterd. Haar neoliberale koers zette de toon voor vele andere politici. Successen met de privatisering van sociale woningbouw en de telecomsector wezen de weg naar een flexibeler economie. Maar ook hier bleek dat overdaad schaadt. Haar stijl was polariserend en een eigenzinnige combinatie van zuinige huisvrouw en een Churchill-pose. Ze trad als actrice op in 'Yes, Minister' en voorspelde dat er ooit een opera over haar zou komen. *** Verder kijken Early Margaret Thatcher Interview at Start of Political Career (1960) Ronald Reagan says 'sorry' to Margaret Thatcher in private phone call (1983) Margaret Thatcher In Her Own Words (1985) Yes Minister Margaret Thatcher's Dramatic First Interview After Being Ousted From Power (1991) Margaret Thatcher: First Female Prime Minister of Britain | Mini Bio *** Verder luisteren 303 - Bijzondere Britse premiers https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/569c9e3d-2f7b-44cf-ae38-bd323c2ddafc 30 - Thatcher, Delors en Europa https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/069c4a5c-c7eb-4d7a-bc8c-18dc8192d1a0 336 - Timothy Garton Ash en Thatcher https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/8e07445e-ee8e-4a8a-9559-02f6a918909e 311 - De wereld volgens Simon Sebag Montefiore https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/caaa9aac-ea36-4633-9460-74da8adf4c2f 283 - Zinkende schepen verlaten de rat: het pijnlijke afscheid van Boris Johnson https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/c553a07b-f276-45f1-b7f9-6f356a23c001 69 – De ‘mother of parliaments’ https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/b9937667-bde3-41d5-a822-85fe60e1a7c0 32- Churchill en Europa: biografen Andrew Roberts en Felix Klos https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/72fbfe90-463b-4d38-bb87-fd0f25d8116d 71 - Caroline de Gruyter: 'Brexit maakt Europa sterker' https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/43edd541-d5b5-43dd-a574-1399b6ba05bb 45 – De liefdesbrieven van François Mitterrand https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/db3f639d-61a3-49c9-875a-3fd0f9ce521a 461 - Ruud Lubbers zag het een slag anders https://art19.com/shows/betrouwbare-bronnen/episodes/c2c97419-89bc-4f85-8316-58d1bee4efcf *** Tijdlijn 00:00:00 – Deel 1 00:37:56 – Deel 2 00:59:02 – Deel 3 01:44:53 – EindeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ " Techno-optimism is the belief that rapid technological progress is the main driver of human prosperity and should be pursued as a moral imperative. It argues that: Growth = Good: Innovation creates abundance, longer lives, and better living standards. Barriers = Bad: Regulation, caution, and pessimism slow down progress and should be resisted. Technology as Solution: Challenges like poverty, disease, and climate change are best solved by accelerating science and technology rather than restricting them. In short: Techno-optimism sees faster innovation as the surest path to human flourishing — and treats resistance to technological progress as harmful. " Here's a structured overview of the major schools of economic thought, mapped across time, followed by an estimate of which views dominate public and policy thinking today.

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

“The origin was really trying to make sense of that 2016-2017 moment and to ask whether the alt-right was, as we were being told, a return to the 1930s, a kind of awakening of the sleeping beast of white supremacy armed in the streets in the United States. There are many explanations, but I decided to take this kind of curious route in with the distorted readings and reinterpretations of the works of people like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. As a scholar of comparative literature, I wanted to write a revision based on Crack-Up Capitalism.”In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian about his new book, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. He takes a deep dive into the genesis of a weird and powerful merging of two seemingly different groups the Far Right and neoliberals. Slobodian writes, “as repellent as their politics may be these radical thinkers are not barbarians the gates of neoliberalism but the bastard offspring of that line of thought itself.” They talk about how this meshing is driven by a primitive desire to ward off egalitarianism, difference, democracy, and government that services the common good. The wide-ranging talk ends with addressing DOGE, Trump's tariffs, and yes, the Jeffrey Epstein case.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right . A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World's 25 Top Thinkers.https://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_place

In this conversation from 2023, Alex speaks with Pete Boettke about the relevancy of Friedrich Hayek in the contemporary context, what it means to be a "Hayekian" and the curious tale of how Hayek came to be the focus of his latest book "F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy" Episode Notes Pete's book “F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy“ https://a.co/d/ah7SpwW  Hayek on The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/  Introduction to Hayek's “Road to Serfdom” https://mises.org/library/road-serfdom-0  Murray Rothbard's “Man, Economy and State” retrospective https://fee.org/articles/rothbards-man-economy-and-state-at-50/  Milton Friedman's “Free To Choose” https://www.proglocode.unam.mx/sites/proglocode.unam.mx/files/docencia/Milton%20y%20Rose%20Friedman%20-%20Free%20to%20Choose.pdf  Hayek “Prices and Production” https://mises.org/library/prices-and-production-and-other-works  Introduction to economics of Lucas https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Lucas.html  Steve Horowitz on Hayek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5dR0zgC1ZI  Herbert Dreyfuss “What Computers Can't Do” https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540674/what-computers-still-cant-do/  Horowitz quote on Hayek “we have to learn to live in two worlds at once” https://www.jstor.org/stable/41560288  Hayek's “The Fatal Conceit” https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3643985.html  Kenneth Boulding “After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?” https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article-abstract/3/2/225/12381/After-Samuelson-Who-Needs-Adam-Smith “The Extended Present” (concept) https://medium.com/extended-present/about  The “Grapes vs. Cucumbers as pay for Monkeys” experiment (youtube video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg  The Constitution of Liberty - Hayek https://www.mises.at/static/literatur/Buch/hayek-the-constitution-of-liberty.pdf  Chandran Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-liberal-archipelago-9780199219209?cc=ca&lang=en&  Kind vs. Wicked learning environments. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/experience-studio/202007/experience-kind-vs-wicked   

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Capitalism is typically treated as a force for relentless commodification. Yet it consistently fails to place value on vital aspects of the nonhuman world, whether carbon emissions or entire ecosystems. In Free Gifts, Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism's persistent failure to value nature, arguing that the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn't be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven't been. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, she contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism—and how others do not. To help us do so, Battistoni recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx's critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism's relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism's own core dynamics in a new light.Battistoni addresses four different instances of the free gift in political economic thought, each in a specific domain: natural agents in industry, pollution in the environment, reproductive labor in the household, and natural capital in the biosphere. In so doing, she offers new readings of major twentieth-century thinkers, including Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, Garrett Hardin, Silvia Federici, and Ronald Coase. Ultimately, she offers a novel account of freedom for our ecologically troubled present, developing a materialist existentialism to argue that capitalism limits our ability to be responsible for our relationships to the natural world, and imagining how we might live freely while valuing nature's gifts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Breaking Battlegrounds, we kick things off with Northwestern University's Gary Saul Morson, co-author of Cents and Sensibility, joins us to explore why revolutions never truly end, Dostoevsky's warnings about nihilism, and what economist Friedrich Hayek might think about artificial intelligence. We wrap up with Satya Thallam, senior advisor at Americans for Responsible Innovation, for an inside look at the political and national security implications of AI policy, from the White House's export control changes to the GOP's divide over state regulation, and what it all means for the future of innovation in America.

https://youtu.be/uVSz93KXms4 El socialismo no ha muerto, sino que ha evolucionado su discurso para adaptarse a nuestros tiempos. Ya no se presenta con los términos clásicos de "dictadura del proletariado" o "lucha de clases", sino que se ha renovado bajo conceptos aparentemente benignos como "equidad", "inclusión" y "justicia social". Sin embargo, como advirtieron pensadores como Ludwig von Mises y Friedrich Hayek, su objetivo fundamental permanece intacto: sustituir la libertad individual por el control colectivo.Esta transformación no es solo cosmética, sino estratégica. El socialismo contemporáneo ha desplazado su campo de batalla de la economía hacia la cultura, redefiniendo conceptos morales fundamentales y torciendo el lenguaje para emborronar los límites entre lo justo y lo injusto. Al exigir "justicia social", lo que realmente se está pidiendo es que el Estado corrija las decisiones libres de los individuos, limitando así su libertad.El nuevo socialismo opera negando la validez universal de la lógica y fragmentando la sociedad en grupos identitarios. Lo que antes se dividía en clases sociales, ahora se segmenta por raza, género u orientación sexual, trasladando la lucha de clases hacia nuevas categorías. Bajo esta perspectiva, no importa la argumentación o la verdad, sino la fidelidad al dogma colectivista.Como señaló Murray Rothbard, los socialistas han ganado terreno porque piensan estratégicamente y a largo plazo. Mientras las fuerzas del libre mercado se enfocan en la producción económica, la izquierda ha infiltrado sistemáticamente la cultura, la educación y el lenguaje, redefiniendo los valores morales de la sociedad.La única forma efectiva de combatir este fenómeno no es cediendo terreno o negociando con sus premisas, sino desenmascarando su verdadera raíz moral: el autoritarismo. El socialismo, más allá de ser un modelo económico fallido, representa una sociedad basada en la sumisión, el miedo y la obediencia. Frente a esto, debemos defender una visión clara de una sociedad libre, donde nadie imponga cómo pensar, qué decir o qué elegir.La batalla cultural actual no se trata solo de criticar el colectivismo en todas sus formas, sino de promover activamente un modelo superior: una sociedad fundamentada en la libertad individual, la propiedad privada y la responsabilidad personal.****

Mrs Thatcher's first term in office was one of the great get out of jail events. She came into office intent on braking with the Keynesianism and social democracy of the postwar consensus. She drew on the ideas of the economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (both briefly discussed in this episode), with their championing of the free-market and, in Friedman's case, of monetarism. Initially, however, things didn't go well: unemployment soared, the economy shrank and even inflation, the very issue monetarism set out to tackle shot up. She maintained, however, that she had no intention of changing tack, declaring ‘the lady's not for turning'. By 1981, she was sitting on the worst favourability ratings of any Prime Minister since records had been kept.But then the economy started to come back from recession, helped by the fact that oil began to flow from Britain's North Sea fields, inflation fell, and her ‘right-to-buy' scheme allowing tenants of council housing to buy their homes proved popular. Nothing, though, helped her as much as the behaviour of two enemies.Labour kept up its drift leftwards leading to its split, with the Social Democratic Party launched by some senior figures leaving the party, most notably Roy Jenkins. In alliance with the Liberals, they represented a dangerous splitting of the anti-Tory vote.Even more helpful for Thatcher, was the invasion of the Falkland Islands – or Islas Malvinas – launched by the Argentinian junta under General Galtieri. By responding with military force, and winning, she was able to turn herself into a victorious war leader and a hero to many in Britain. Her approval rating surged to 51%.Suddenly, from someone expected to lose the next general election, she'd become a practically unbeatable leader for it.Illustration: British paratroopers entering Port Stanley – Puerto Argentino – in the Falkland Islands – las Islas Malvinas – at the end of the war against Argentina for their possession. Public Domain.Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

In this conversation from 2020, Alex Aragona chats with Pete Boettke as he dives into what the curious task of economics is and relates it back to the work of Friedrich Hayek. References from Episode 40 with Pete Boettke You can purchase Pete Boettke's book on F.A. Hayek on Amazon Canada here Check out Pete Boettke's economics blog here

The intellectual-political discussion of the so-called abundance movement typically is described as a debate taking place almost entirely on the left. But in fact many of its major themes were being discussed in right-leaning circles decades ago. Virginia Postrel, a libertarian thinker and journalist who was the former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, anticipated much of the current discourse around abundance in her classic 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. Even earlier, in 1990, Postrel was among the first to see that the most important ideological division that was emerging in American politics was not between left and right but between what she called “the proponents of economic dynamism and the advocates of stasis.” The power of Postrel's prophecy is evident from even a cursory examination of current politics, in which debates over issues like trade, immigration, housing construction, energy production, and environmental conservation inevitably produce odd-bedfellows coalitions of left and right. Postrel generally approves of center-left advocates of abundance like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson — since, as she puts it, they share “the convictions that more is better than less, and that a good society is not zero-sum.” But she recently criticized the Klein-Thompson bestseller Abundance for its essentially technocratic mindset, in which change proceeds from central planning without what Postrel regards as sufficient feedback from market mechanisms or public input. She envisions a more libertarian-inflected version of abundance characterized by what she calls “a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.”In this podcast conversation, Postrel analyzes different approaches to what she considers to be the linked causes of abundance and progress — although she notes that progress “tends to code a little right and tends to be more libertarian, more Silicon Valley people” — along with the basic political division between advocates of stasis and dynamism. She talks about her South Carolina origins and her study of the Renaissance, “when dynamism was invented.” She points out that her analysis of dynamism in some measure derived from her love of — and worries about — her adoptive state of California. She discusses some of the thinkers who influenced her analysis, including innovators like Stewart Brand, writers like Jonathan Rauch, Daniel Boorstin, and Henry Petroski, and economists including Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polyani, Mancur Olson, and Paul Romer. And she describes how her interests in dynamism and human invention relate to her interests in textiles, design, fashion, and aesthetics. 

Quinn Slobodian is a Canadian historian. His new book, Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right is a deep dive into the set of far-right ideologues currently dominating US politics. Slobodian tracks how neoliberal thought has changed since Friedrich Hayek's vision of unfettered capitalism went mainstream 50 years ago. In this conversation with […]

In this episode, we examine Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a chilling warning about how societies drift into tyranny—not through force, but through the seductive promise of central planning. Written in the shadow of fascism and communism, Hayek's argument is more relevant than ever: when the state takes control of the economy, it inevitably takes control of our lives. What begins as progress can end in oppression. This is the road to serfdom.

Join the #McConnellCenter as we welcome Dr. Abby Hall Blanco as she attempts to convince us of the importance of the book The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek! Abigail Hall Blanco's research focuses on issues related to defense, war, and peace. Blanco has authored more than 40 academic articles and book chapters. She is the coauthor of four published books including How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Elite (2024, Independent Institute), We all know we need to read more and there are literally millions of books on shelves with new ones printed every day. How do we sort through all the possibilities to find the book that is just right for us now? Well, the McConnell Center is bringing authors and experts to inspire us to read impactful and entertaining books that might be on our shelves or in our e-readers, but which we haven't yet picked up. We hope you learn a lot in the following podcast and we hope you might be inspired to pick up one or more of the books we are highlighting this year at the University of Louisville's McConnell Center. Stay Connected Visit us at McConnellcenter.org Subscribe to our newsletter  Facebook: @mcconnellcenter Instagram: @ulmcenter  Twitter: @ULmCenter This podcast is a production of the McConnell Center

As the Trump administration and Amazon/Bezos almost duked it out over the “shocking” idea of disclosing the impact to prices from taxes on imports, those of us seeking to understand economic application out of cogent economic theory were given a great chance to relearn some lessons from master himself, Friedrich Hayek. It turns out price discovery is important in economics for the same reason transparency is important in political theory -- and this ought to be a very non-partisan belief!

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced the imposition of his “Liberation Day” tariffs against most of America's global trading partners in April 2025, he seemed to harken back to a centuries-old form of economic nationalism known as mercantilism, which sought prosperity through restrictive trade practices. Opponents of mercantilism from the eighteenth century onward, such as Adam Smith and John-Baptiste Say, became known as classical liberals. In the fullness of time, classical liberalism gave rise to the political philosophy we now know as libertarianism.When most people think of libertarianism, they typically have in mind a small number of figures — including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises — who were generally associated with the American political right in the mid-twentieth century. But in fact libertarianism was born in the nineteenth century (not the twentieth), and was first developed in Britain and France (not the United States). And as Matt Zwolinski emphasizes in his monumental intellectual history of libertarianism, The Individualists (co-authored with John Tomasi), libertarianism is better thought of as a cluster of related concepts than a unitary doctrine. It's true that most libertarians historically have been concerned with the defense of individual autonomy, property rights, free markets, and personal liberty against state coercion. But the first individual to self-identify as a “libertarian” was the nineteenth-century French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque, and libertarianism as it developed often took radical and left-leaning forms, particularly through its association with the abolitionist movement in America in the years before the Civil War. In this podcast conversation, Matt Zwolinski (a philosophy professor at the University of San Diego) discusses his investigations into the intellectual history of libertarianism as well as his analysis of the longstanding tensions between radical and reactionary elements within the philosophy. He describes post-Cold War “third wave libertarianism” taking both right-wing expression (in the form of paleolibertarianism) as well as more radical forms (including left-libertarianism and “bleeding-heart libertarianism.”) And he suggests reasons why many libertarians see more potential in combating poverty through Universal Basic Income grants rather than through more traditional government-administered antipoverty programs.

Libertarianism has had a tremendous influence on American politics, but according to Andrew Koppelman, its most prominent adherents have stripped libertarian philosophy of its more humane intentions. In this episode, Andrew joins Bob and Ben for a discussion about his book, Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed (St. Martin's Press, 2022) and why he contends that libertarian philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek have been stripped of their original intent by those who have ulterior motives.   Dr. Andrew Koppelman is John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. You can learn more about his work at AndrewKoppelman.com   This is a rebroadcast of RTN #249 which originally aired on October 10, 2022. This version was edited by Ben Sawyer.

This is a fascinating episode that takes up thinkers that the podcast has covered before—the Koch brothers, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and others—but from a different angle: that of the entrepreneurial work ethic. Historian Erik Baker's superb book on the topic, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America, offers a genuinely absorbing tour of this most American of ideologies, one that has emerged again and again, in various guises and in different circumstances, to reconcile workers to the contradictions of the U.S. economy, especially the shortage of jobs that has come with its many "innovations" and changes. What are the historical and even spiritual sources of the entrepreneurial work ethic, and what ideological needs does it serve for bosses and managers? Why is it so seductive to Americans? How does it relate to deeply American impulses relating to responsibility, guilt, and shame? In what ways did the entrepreneurial work ethic serve U.S. aims during the Cold War? And how has it endured in our age of Silicon Valley tech overlords and Donald Trump, entrepreneur, being re-elected? We take up these questions and many more in this rich conversation.Sources:Erik Baker, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025)— "Fairytale in the Supermarket," The Baffler, Jan 14, 2025Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking  (1952)Sarah Jaffe, Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, (2021)Listen again:"Bomb Power" (w/ Erik Baker), Dec 19, 2023...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our premium episodes!

Jennifer Burns is a historian of ideas, focusing on the evolution of economic, political, and social ideas in the United States in the 20th century. She wrote two biographies, one on Milton Friedman, and the other on Ayn Rand. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep457-sc See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Jennifer's X: https://x.com/profburns Jennifer's Website: https://www.jenniferburns.org Jennifer's Books: Milton Friedman biography: https://amzn.to/4hfy1HO Ayn Rand biography: https://amzn.to/4afr3A0 SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Brain.fm: Music for focus. Go to https://brain.fm/lex GitHub: Developer platform and AI code editor. Go to https://gh.io/copilot LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (10:05) - Milton Friedman (24:58) - The Great Depression (39:15) - Schools of economic thought (50:22) - Keynesian economics (58:10) - Laissez-faire (1:06:00) - Friedrich Hayek (1:11:18) - Money and monetarism (1:26:03) - Stagflation (1:30:56) - Moral case for capitalism (1:34:53) - Freedom (1:39:51) - Ethics of competition (1:43:37) - Win-win solutions (1:45:26) - Corruption (1:47:51) - Government intervention (1:54:10) - Conservatism (2:00:33) - Donald Trump (2:03:09) - Inflation (2:07:38) - DOGE (2:12:58) - Javier Milei (2:18:03) - Richard Nixon (2:25:17) - Ronald Reagan (2:28:24) - Cryptocurrency (2:43:40) - Ayn Rand (2:51:18) - The Fountainhead (3:02:58) - Sex and power dynamics (3:19:04) - Evolution of ideas in history (3:26:32) - Postmodernism (3:37:33) - Advice to students (3:45:50) - Lex reflects on Volodymyr Zelenskyy interview PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips