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by Brink Lindsey
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 revitalizing social progress. Brink Lindsey, the podcast host, is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. You can access his essays on “The Permanent Problem” on his Substack and here. You can find all episodes of the podcast on his Substack, here, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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- 6 days ago1h 0m
Living near friends and family, with Phil Levin
America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness: marriage and birth rates, the number of close friendships, time spent with friends, and community involvement more broadly are all in decline. Phil Levin is helping to lead an interesting new movement away from all this self-imposed isolation and back toward social reconnection. Operating on the principle that every social problem is an entrepreneurial opportunity, Levin sees housing innovation -- in particular, making it easier for family and friends to live with or near each other -- as a promising way to help reknit the social fabric. He helped to start Culdesac, which builds car-free neighborhoods from scratch, and he is the founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people build or buy housing with people they know. And these business ventures grew out of his own experience with "co-living" arrangements in the Bay Area. Levin and Lindsey discuss Levin's personal housing experiences, the barriers facing people who want to follow his example, the factors driving growing interest in co-living, the disparate groups of people attracted to this lifestyle, and the prospects for group living arrangements to seed broader social revitalization.
- 2 weeks ago1h 3m
Liberalism's cycles of crisis and renewal, with Adrian Wooldridge
In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many imagined that we had arrived at the “end of history” now that liberal democratic capitalism had chased all ideological competitors from the field. Just a few short decades later, things look very different: autocracy is on the march around the world, and liberal democratic institutions and values are under assault in the United States and other advanced democracies. Adrian Wooldridge, my guest for this episode of the podcast, offers the consolation that we have been here before. In his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, Wooldridge relates how the centuries-old liberal political tradition has gone through repeated cycles of advance and ascendancy, decline and decadence, and self-criticism followed by renewal. Adrian and I discuss how the basic elements of liberalism — focus on the individual, tolerance of pluralism, and suspicion of power — have persisted through these cycles even as liberalism regularly has reinvented itself to deal with the novel and ever-changing challenges of modernity. We examine how a combination of staleness and overreach has brought on the current crisis of liberalism, and we look ahead to the institutional reforms and cultural shifts that can lead to liberal renewal.
- Apr 30, 202656 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.
- Apr 23, 20261h 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.
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 revitalizing social progress. Brink Lindsey, the podcast host, is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. You can access his essays on “The Permanent Problem” on his Substack and here. You can find all episodes of the podcast on his Substack, here, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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