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AIDS crossed over from chimpanzees to humans sometime in the first half of the 20th century, most likely through humans eating primate meat. The timeline of AIDS transmission keeps moving earlier as cases are discovered and medical samples tested with modern tests. AIDS was not common in the US in the 40's, but there were likely a few individuals circulating with it in port cities.

When she talks about gay marriage being white reconciliation, she's talking about a literal process where the act of getting married and making a gay nuclear family created a pathway by which white gay men who had been cut off by their families of origin could be reintegrated into the patriarchy. Put another way, before societal attitudes shifted, white gay men and lesbians that lived openly could expect to be cut off from inheritance and financial safety nets by their families, therefore they invested and participated in communities and structures that were racially and sexually diverse. After societal attitudes started shifting in the 2010s, coming out and starting a family did not necessarily mean losing inherited financial privilege.

You may not agree with her analysis—she writes at length about how inheritance is used as a tool of social control in her book Ties That Bind, and she comes from a feminist tradition that challenges the social structure of the family—but it's not a wackadoodle thing to say or something without a lot of thought or care put into it.

Have you listened to Kelton's appearance on the EKS to discuss MMT (alongside Jason Furman)?

To be honest, after hearing that episode, listening to similar discussions on other shows, and reading up on the topic, I still don't quite 'get it'. Specifically, if the arguments made by MMT are so rational / logical / obvious, why are they only gaining credence now? What has changed about our facts (or our understanding of those facts) to call our past understanding of monetary and fiscal policy into question?

Since you did such a great job articulating Mazzucato's thesis upthread, want to give MMT a shot, too? :)

The books recommended by one of the guests, Elizabeth Kolbert (Covers climate change for the New Yorker. Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Sixth Extinction) are:

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

The End of Nature by Bill Kibben

I summarised reasons given by Kolbert on why you should read these books:

https://airtable.com/universe/expCvCcCt4Oe9gt77/books-recommended-by-guests-the-ezra-klein-show

We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba. I can't say I would recommend it. It's a collection of previously published essays and interviews with the author, so it's all VERY surface level.

I have the same question.

Ezra's favorite 2016 postmortem was the book Identity Crisis [2018]. If those same authors have a 2020 recap, I haven't found it. Please share any links, tips.

Relistening to that episode was really good.

Their observation that the 2016 results matched the predicted generic ballot results (Democrat up by 2% in the popular vote) really sticks with me. So because of the electoral college, the election really comes down to handful of voters in a handful of states. (Which is so fucked up in so many ways. Preaching to the choir, I know.)

Also, how the misc candidates activate different identities in various ways, and how that shuffles their coalitions. Like how Trump's rhetoric decoupled the identities tied to race and economics, explaining the Obama/Trump crossover votes.

My first hunch (wild ass guess) about Biden's victory is that his low key strategy successfully avoiding triggering negative partisanship. Relistening to Identity Crisis, I now also wonder if his rhetoric allowed "economic identifying" voters to come back to Democrats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3s2pERqWQ

https://www.amazon.com/Identity-Crisis-Presidential-Campaign-Meaning/dp/0691174199

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Build-Community-Recommitting-Institutions/dp/1541699270 Is pretty similar to Douthats book. Then there is https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296 which is kinda business book kinda manual to Thiels philosophy which has had huge infulence this kind decedent society takes.

Either we regulate pollutants extra-constitutionally or we don't regulate pollutants.

Come on Ezra....go to the dark side....you are so close.....

The latest episode on the census is another example where after listening to the whole thing, I'm not quite sure what Matt / Jane / Dara's argument or point is. What are they trying to say?

Just that an accurate count is important and those with partisan motivations are hurting democracy by monkeying with the census? And covid adds additional complications?

That doesn't seem to require a 40 minute discussion...

This is helpful.

>So there may be more underlying suspicion of the common story out there.

There's definitely something to this. I can't really pinpoint any specific flaws of MMT, but there's always just this background notion in my head of "this can't be right". I'm not even that deeply seeped in conventional economic theory (I was a finance major in undergrad who took a few entry level economics courses), but nonetheless this thought persists. It sounds like you had a similar reaction not to MMT, but to the conventional theory.

If you'll indulge me, mind taking a look at this post I wrote in response to today's The Daily episode and tell me where I'm wrong? :)

Link Directly to Episode

I think you're right! (Or perhaps my tweet).

For everyone else, Ezra finally acknowledges this misattribution on the latest episode of the show.

FWIW, Ezra finally acknowledges this misattribution on the latest episode of the show.

FWIW, Ezra and Matt discuss this on the second half of this episode of The Weeds.

Btw, sorry the mobile view on Airtable is not great. Use this link if viewing from mobile, it shows a gallery view of the book recommendations: https://airtable.com/shrwEhc7KHAjNl9jq/tblkvoxwTaKM6iurO?backgroundColor=cyan&viewControls=on

> Part of the problem is there's not a lot of good, quality conservative media.

Back before he abandoned the faith, Francis "Franky" Schaeffer Junior, the co-founder of the Moral Majority, wrote a whole book about this, called Addicted to Mediocrity. It's really good, and I still think he's spot on.

His thesis is that up until the Protestant Reformation, and particularly up until John Wycliffe broke the taboo on translating Scripture into the common language of the country, religious belief was a matter for the priests, same as most pre-Christian religions; lay people didn't have beliefs, they had religious duties, assigned to them by priests. But with the rising tide of publication of Scripture in the laypeople's own language, policing the opinions of laypeople suddenly became really important to the clergy.

Before that, artists who hoped to get paid out of people's tithes competed entirely on quality. Only the finest master-works of the finest masters were worth of being displayed as recognized religious art. But post-Reformation, artists who hoped to get paid out of people's tithes compete on fidelity to every finicky detail of the clergy's preferred interpretation of Scripture, which is an entirely different skillset and (he said, in his experience) flatly incompatible with making great art.

You think people who have been in religious indoctrination all their lives don't' have more cultural shackles relative to a person raised secular in the same place? What? That's absurd and it's not even worth engaging

More importantly not how geopolitics works. If the Chinese had our income per capita all the alliances in the world won't save us. We'll be stuck burning our limited resources trying to match an overwhelming Chinese foe who can better afford the conflict.

We have the best land on the planet

If we want to dominate the planet we need to fill that land up to keep our lead over large developing nations who might one day catch up, in our lifetime most likely China. There is no easier lever to pull for economic growth than building the population.

Your view will see our great grand children wasting away a huge % of GDP to resist Chinese incursions into the western hemisphere. Short sighted

Everyone agrees on this but the hippies. Even the neo-liberal blob has turned on China. No one thinks us the Japanese, S Koreans, and Indians (and hopefully Russians eventually) can stand against a China that has anything approaching western levels of per capita income

We will be at best back in a cold war. At worst we will enter a Chinese age of hegemony of the planet and we'll be lucky to keep their sphere of influence off our borders. In the same way they struggle with us in 2020

edit - https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/dp/0393349276

Learn about structural realism, we certainly can breed our way out of this. That's how national power works

I find it mind-boggling that TfA is seen as a good thing. All they've done is created prestige by limiting applicants - wasn't that on a recent EK episode? And it seems so clearly to me a model with awful assumptions about education at the core. I had a classmate who went through the very small teacher training program I took at an Ivy league undergrad, he got himself kicked out of TfA for refusing to stop loudly disagreeing with their crash course summer training. At the time I thought he was being his typical arrogant self but only took me a bit of reflection to see nope, he was probably right.

Side note - yes that's right, 6 undergrads at Harvard my year who took the courses needed and did student teaching to get a teaching license. 6/1600. I don't teach math but that's a small percentage.

Wanted to tell you I LOVE IT when I see new names in education I don't know. Thank you for the recs! One of my personal faves - who I don't think would make a great guest as she's too focused on education and not policy or society - is Elena Aguilar. Read Onward!

https://www.amazon.com/Onward-Cultivating-Emotional-Resilience-Educators/dp/1119364892