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by Brink Lindsey
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- 2 weeks ago56 min
Modern faith with Ryan Avent
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Avent contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect. We have been seduced by what he calls the "Modern Faith" -- the belief that good system design and proper incentives are all that is needed to keep society running smoothly. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Avent and host Brink Lindsey discuss the Modern Faith's critical blind spots, explore the interplay of culture and institutions in shaping social change, and ponder whether anything can replace the cultural grounding provided by organized religion.
- 3 weeks ago1h 7m
AI "psychology," with Jack Lindsey
Any attempt to anticipate how social change will unfold in the coming years has to confront a major unknown: how much better is artificial intelligence going to get, and how quickly? Accordingly, getting a handle on AI's capabilities and development path is essential to understanding how broader social realities are likely to shift and over what time period. In this special father-son edition of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey wades into these questions with Jack Lindsey, leader of the "psych team" at Anthropic that investigates how large language models actually think. They discuss how large language models are trained to play a character, how models can slip out of character and into other, rogue personas, and the role of emotions in how LLMs operate. They also talk about Claude Mythos Preview, Anthropic's latest release deemed too dangerous to release to the public, and where LLMs go from here.
- Mar 26, 20261h 4m
The future of innovation, with Andrew McAfee
After years of disappointing productivity growth, are we about to experience an AI-powered breakout? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of (most recently) The Geek Way, to discuss the current state and future prospects of technological and economic dynamism. They start off by reviewing recent developments in AI and discussing whether LLMs will lead soon to superhuman machine intelligence. They then dive into the potential of current LLM technology to substitute for white-collar knowledge work, emphasizing the tortuous, trial-and-error process of technological diffusion and the distinction between eliminating tasks and eliminating jobs. Here McAfee points out how the new style of business organization he calls the "Geek Way" can accelerate this discovery process. Finally, Lindsey and McAfee review the political barriers to innovation erected by today's interest-group "vetocracy" and the daunting severity of the problem in western Europe.
- Mar 19, 20261h 6m
MAGA intellectuals with Laura Field
In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Laura Field joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss their new books. The first half of the conversation focuses on Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right, an examination of the intellectuals of American right-wing populism. They review the origins of the right's turn toward populism, the resurrection of old ideas combined with some new improvisations, and the MAGA intellectual right's strange combination of profound cultural despair with wide-eyed naivete about the possibility of renewal under populism. Field and Lindsey then switch gears and discuss the overlaps and profound differences between Lindsey's criticisms of contemporary capitalism in The Permanent Problem and the "post-liberal" bill of indictment against liberal modernity. While intellectuals of the MAGA right dismiss post-Enlightenment liberalism as profoundly misconceived and doomed to failure, Lindsey argues that liberal societies today are currently struggling with the consequences of one world-historical triumph -- the marginalization of material poverty -- and how to move on to the next great triumph: translating material plenty into mass flourishing.
- Mar 11, 20261h 3m
Defending liberalism (and how not to), with Damon Linker
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Damon Linker, author of the "Notes from the Middleground" Substack and a Niskanen Center senior fellow, to discuss the challenge of right-wing populism and how liberals should respond to it. After exploring the twists and turns of Linker's intellectual development, the two examine the rise of the populist right, debate the causes of its rise, and evaluate its intellectual defenders. They also address the cleavage within liberalism exposed by the populist uprising: the conflict between "brokenists" and "non-brokenists." The former see populism as a misguided response to real and serious problems in contemporary liberal societies, whereas non-brokenists respond that conceding the existence of serious problems is uncalled for and lends undeserved credibility to populism. Linker and Lindsey side with the brokenists, arguing that liberal democracy is undergoing a legitimacy crisis that can be defused only if we first recognize the scale of public disaffection and identify its sources.
- Jul 2, 202557 min
Abundance and the Democrats, with Jonathan Chait
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey welcomes Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic to discuss the abundance movement and the future of the Democratic Party. Chait sees a major role for abundance-based ideas in challenging the agenda-setting power of "the groups," or progressive activists, and pulling the party back toward the cultural mainstream; Niskanen, meanwhile, has been a leader in developing the synthesis of libertarian ideas (housing deregulation, permitting reform) and liberal ones (expanding state capacity, prioritizing the clean energy transition) that underlies the abundance agenda. Lindsey and Chait review the intellectual journeys that led to this convergence of perspectives -- from Lindsey's early attempts at a "liberaltarian" synthesis and Chait's sharp rejection of it, to their discovery of common ground against the backdrop of rising illiberalism on both the right and left.
- Jun 12, 20251h 4m
The prehistory, present, and future of abundance, with Steve Teles
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling new book Abundance has kicked off a new political movement -- and a vigorous internal debate on the future of the Democratic Party. Many of the policy ideas behind Abundance were developed at the Niskanen Center, recently described in The Atlantic as "the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda." On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey welcomes Steve Teles, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at Niskanen, to discuss the prehistory, present, and future of the abundance movement. They review the intellectual backstory of the movement, explain how abundance ideas transcend the traditional left-right divide, dig into the current infighting among Democrats, and look forward to possibilities for an abundance faction on the right.
- Apr 23, 202558 min
Christianity and democracy, with Jonathan Rauch
While the formal separation of church and state is a vital element of America's constitutional order, the success of our long-running experiment in self-government has always depended on a healthy interdependence between republican freedom and religious faith. So argues Jonathan Rauch in his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. "In American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall," writes. "When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too."On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss secularization and the rapid decline of organized Christianity in recent decades -- in Rauch's words, the combination of "thin Christianity" in the mainline denominations and increasingly "sharp Christianity" among self-described evangelicals. They examine the underlying causes of these developments, how they stoke polarization and undermine democratic values and institutions, and what a healthier "thick Christianity" might look like.
About The Permanent Problem
In dozens of provocative essays published on his Substack and cross-posted here, Brink Lindsey has explored what John Maynard Keynes called humanity’s “permanent problem:” the quest to “live wisely and agreeably and well” with the vast resources and powers that capitalist prosperity has bestowed upon us. That quest, unfortunately, has gone awry in the 21st century.In Lindsey’s analysis, capitalism is now experiencing a “triple crisis”: a crisis of dynamism, as economic and technological progress had slowed; a crisis of inclusion, as a deep new class divide has opened up along educational lines; and a crisis of politics, our best hope for addressing the other two crises, as the values, norms, and institutions of liberal democracy are now embattled around the world.Beginning in January 2024, Lindsey started the Permanent Problem podcast to supplement his ongoing essay series. The podcast focuses on capitalism’s triple crisis – and especially on the prospects for defusing the crisis and
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