This Is Fine

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% ironclad predictions about how the following year is going to play out.

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 efforts intended to achieve nuclear disarmament, who has the authority for nuclear weapons use, what are the biggest threats facing us in the future, and what you can do to reduce your risk of perishing in a nuclear attack. This is part 1 of this episode, with part 2 coming approximately a week from today. In two weeks, we’ll return with a deep dive into post-Soviet Russian history, with a special focus on US-Russia relations. As always, the show notes can be found at: http://www.thisisfine.net/2017/07/30/episode-1-16-no-nukes-is-good-nukes-or-is-it/

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 advantage of extensive primary source documents unavailable to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during his investigation of the scandal in the late 1980s. We discuss the scandal and its parallels to the Trump administration today. As always, the show notes are available at http://www.thisisfine.net/2017/07/07/episode-1-15-contraventional-wisdom/.