The Gray Area with Sean Illing21 Helmi 2019

Why should we care about deficits?

Stony Brook University’s Stephanie Kelton is the most influential proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, a heterodox take on government budgets that urges a focus on inflation, rather than deficits. Jason Furman was President Barack Obama’s chief economist, and while he’s firmly in the economic mainstream, he’s been pushing his colleagues to recognize that the economy has changed in ways that make our debt levels less worrying. I asked the two of them to join the podcast together because I wanted to understand some questions at the intersection of their competing theories. Should we worry about government deficits, and if so, when? Does MMT actually offer a free lunch, or is it just a different way of calculating the bill? When can the Federal Reserve print money without triggering inflation? How would an administration that followed MMT actually diverge from what we've seen in the past? Why did so many mainstream economists make such bad predictions about deficits after the financial crisis? And does Medicare-for-all actually need to be paid for? This is a weedsy conversation about one of the most important questions in American governance. Enjoy! Book Recommendations: Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stabilityby L. Randall Wray Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists by Raghuram G. Rajan The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Lessons from Vox’s first 5 years

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25 Huhti 20191h 33min

Work as identity, burnout as lifestyle

In the past few months, two essays on America’s changing relationship to work caught my eye. The first was Anne Helen Petersen’s viral BuzzFeed piece defining, and describing, “millennial burnout.” Th...

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How social democrats won Europe — then lost it

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18 Huhti 20191h 7min

In defense of white-backlash politics

“The big question of our time is less, ‘What does it mean to be American?’ than, ‘What does it mean to be white American in an age of ethnic change?’” writes Eric Kaufmann in his new book Whiteshift: ...

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Identity, nationalism, and fatherhood

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and the author of My Father Left Me Ireland, a moving, lyrical memoir about fatherhood and identity. It’s also a stirring defense of nat...

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An ex-libertarian’s quest to rebuild the center right

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How whiteness distorts our democracy, with Eddie Glaude Jr.

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Pete Buttigieg’s theory of political change

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1 Huhti 201959min