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)

The New York Times’s lead Clinton reporter reflects on her coverage

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3 Mai 201858min

The age of "mega-identity" politics

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30 Apr 20181h 17min

Is American democracy really in decline? A debate.

Yascha Mounk’s new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, is perhaps the year’s scariest read. In it, Mounk argues that “liberal democracy, the unique mix of ...

23 Apr 20181h 53min

Special episode: The Syrian conflict, explained by a UN diplomat who saw it start

Many of you will remember the interview I did with Grant Gordon, who works on humanitarian policy innovation at the International Rescue Committee. That conversation received a huge response — some of...

20 Apr 201857min

Is modern society making us depressed?

“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In hi...

16 Apr 20181h 31min

Carol Anderson on White Rage and Donald Trump

Carol Anderson is a professor of African-American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Anderson’s book emerged from a viral op-ed she wrot...

12 Apr 20181h 34min

The Sam Harris Debate

There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, most of which is covered in this piece. The short version is that Sam Harris, the host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over a...

9 Apr 20182h 12min

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next

It’s been a tough year for Facebook. The social networking juggernaut found itself engulfed by controversies over fake news, electoral interference, privacy violations, and a broad backlash to smartph...

2 Apr 201849min