The Same, but Worse

Andrew, Marshall, and Jerry get together for a Thanksgiving chat about the election.

Marshall and Andrew got together to chat about Marshall's piece on the LPE blog about higher education: https://lpeproject.org/blog/should-higher-education-ratify-privilege-or-public-service/.

Andrew and a couple of special guests go deep on the Turkish election. Sorry for the lack of content lately, it's been a busy spring for all of us.

With Marshall sidelined by actual work, Andrew and Jerry discuss the recent FTX meltdown, Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and develop a typology of billionaires. Along the way we also discuss the repudiation of expertise as a relevant aspect of decision-making and establish which games are good for dads.

We discuss the proliferation of scams of all kinds in late capitalism and the failure of regulators to come to grips with this problem. After Marshall departs, Andrew and Jerry talk about the shortcomings of localism and the most important thing in politics, owning your ideological enemies online.

Marshall, Andrew, and Jerry discuss the Dobbs decision, how we got here over the decades, and the ultimate failure of Democratic centrism to protect abortion rights. In the second half, we sketch an outline of the evolving American constitutional order and come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of global warming and world peace (must credit TSBW if implemented).

Andrew, Marshall, and Jerry take a dive into Olufemi Taiwo's book "Elite Capture" and try to figure out what diagnostic as well as prescriptive lessons it can teach us.

We welcome to the podcast Sanjukta Paul to talk about her work in untangling the ball of twine that is modern antitrust. Come for the detailed history of trucking deregulation in the 90s, stay for the debate over how and to what end we should formulate social theories.

In the absence of Marshall, Andrew and Jerry set about performing discourse surgery (spoiler: the patient died), trying to figure out why the vibes are fucked, and deploying our most sophisticated numerological tools to determine the most appropriate number of bullet points to have on your platform.

We're joined by Mike Cheyne, a genuine doctor of suburban studies, to walk us through the way that postwar sitcoms functioned as loci of formation of ideas about civic participation and citizenship, and how the TV revolution of the 70s steered into the neoliberal turn.

We welcome our first guest, Cory Haala, to talk about the populist tradition in the Midwest. We discuss its roots and legacy and whether any lessons for our present moment can be gleaned from it.

With Marshall luxuriating in the Utah mountains (probably) and thus unavailable, Andrew and Jerry formulate a programmatic and try to dig out why it is that everything feels like a shittier retread all the time.

Andrew and Jerry kibbitz about the Volcker shock, how to get from here to utopia, and whether solidarity is possible in the age of neoliberal atomization. Fun!

Marshall, Andrew, and Jerry become the dads of the entire economics profession. We discuss the mystificatory nature of economic ideology, cast a side-eye on expertise, and attempt to sow discord between Friedmannians and Hayekians.

Got My Mind on My Mannheim and My Mannheim on My Mind by Andrew Hart, Marshall Steinbaum, Jerry Vinokurov

Not quite in time for a Thanksgiving argument with your Facebook uncle, but well ahead of schedule for a Christmas argument with the same, we're pleased to bring you a breakdown of the November elections.

On this episode, we speak with writer and theater director Isaac Butler, who is the author, with Dan Kois, of a new oral history of Tony Kushner's "Angels In America," titled "The World Only Spins Forward." As always, we do a brief review of recent notable political events and then get to talking about what "Angels" accomplished and what it means today.

Welcome back, Finers! We've returned after a long, child-induced hiatus, just in time to fire up Season 2: Everything Is Still Fine, There's Nothing To Worry About, Really. On this episode, intrepid reporter Sam Thielman joins us for a retrospective on perhaps the dumbest year in American history; we discuss everything from Russian ad buys on Facebook to the Virginia governor's race, and make 100%...

Part 2 of our conversation with Alex Wellerstein. This is a re-upload because the initial version was missing non-Alex tracks.

Welcome to Episode 1.16: No Nukes Is Good Nukes, or Is It? Thanks for listening, Finers; please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app, and make sure to keep a copy of this episode in your local fallout shelter. In this two-parter, we get down into the details of nuclear weapons history with Alex Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute of Technology. We discuss various...

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.15: Contraventional Wisdom. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, we talk about Iran-Contra, a little over thirty years after Reagan’s apology to the country for the scandal in March 1987. We focus mainly on Malcolm Byrne’s conclusive 2014 book, “Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power,” which takes...

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.14: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, Judith Miller, a law professor at the University of Chicago who worked as a federal public defender, joins us to give a public defender’s perspective on our criminal justice system. We discuss some of the criminal and civil protections for police officers, including...

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.13: Mo' Prisons, Mo' Problems. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, we discuss mass incarceration and some of the injustice in our criminal justice system. We discuss Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow and Chris Hayes’ A Colony in a Nation. We briefly touch on order: police shootings, underpolicing, and the difficulty of prosecuting po...

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.12. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, we take on the state of American health care, discussing at length the recently passed Republican zombie bill, the American Health Care Act, as well as Elizabeth Rosenthal’s book, An American Sickness, which discusses health care’s broken cost structure. We discuss some of the paths forward for...

Welcome to This Is Fine episode 1.11: The New, New Marshall Plan. Thank you very much for listening, Finers. In this week’s podcast, guest Marshall Steinbaum, a senior economist and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, joins us to discuss how there is no free market to be found in the state of nature and how the United States has always had an active industrial policy, often favoring the wealthy. We...