The Gray Area with Sean Illing27 Mai 2019

Why good people are easily corrupted (with Lawrence Lessig)

I’ve been learning from, and arguing with, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig for a decade now. We have a long-running debate over whether money or polarization is the root cause of our political ills. But our debate works because we share a crucial belief: Bad institutions overwhelm good individuals. In his latest book, America, Compromised, Lessig is doing something ambitious: He’s offering a new definition of institutional corruption, then showing how it plays out in politics, academia, the media, Wall Street, and the legal system. This is a definition of corruption that doesn’t require any individual to be corrupt. But it’s a definition that, if you accept it, suggests much of our society has been corrupted. Here, Lessig and I discuss what corruption is, how to understand an institution’s purpose, whether capitalism is itself corrupting, our upcoming books about the media, how small donors polarize politics, Lessig’s critique of democracy, why good people are particularly susceptible to institutional corruption, whether we should ban private money in politics, and ways to reinvent representative democracy. So, you know, nothing too big or heady. Book recommendations: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalismby Edward E. Baptist Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Powerby Shoshana Zuboff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Episoder(766)

Adam Serwer on white political correctness

“What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth,” writes Adam Serwer, “but of power.” Serwer is a writer at the Atlantic, and he’s been looking at the identity politics and politica...

10 Des 201850min

Will Storr on why you are not yourself

“To have a self is to feel as if we are, in the words of neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith, the ‘invisible actor at the centre of the world’.” That’s Will Storr, writing in his fantastic book Selfi...

6 Des 20181h 26min

How to be a better carnivore

Here are two things I believe. First, the way we treat the animals we kill for food is shameful. Second, only a tiny percentage of the population will go vegetarian or vegan and stay that way, at leas...

3 Des 201832min

Peter Beinart on anti-Semitism in America and illiberalism in Israel

This is a conversation I’ve been putting off, if I’m being honest. I can’t hold it from the safe space of journalistic distance. It’s about the strange, vulnerable space that many Jews, myself include...

29 Nov 20181h 26min

Where Jonathan Haidt thinks the American mind went wrong

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist at New York University and the co-founder of Heterodox University. His book The Righteous Mind, which describes the different moral frameworks that animate the left an...

26 Nov 20181h 51min

The Impact: Deportation without representation

For Thanksgiving listening, I have an episode of The Impact, from my Weeds co-host Sarah Kliff. The Impact is a show about how policy shapes our lives. This season, Sarah and her team are focusing on ...

22 Nov 201832min

Molly Ball on Nancy Pelosi’s future and Paul Ryan’s failure

The midterm elections are being interpreted almost entirely as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But it was also a referendum on Paul Ryan’s speakership, which drove Trump’s domestic policy agen...

19 Nov 20181h 3min

Whitney Phillips explains how Trump controls the media

Here’s a fun fact: The best training for understanding the president’s media strategy is to have studied internet trolls for years and years. Okay, maybe that fact wasn’t so fun. Maybe it’s incredibly...

15 Nov 20181h 50min