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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.
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- Yesterday1h 5m
Fragile neighborhoods and spiritual poverty, with Seth Kaplan
Seth Kaplan had built a career as an expert on "fragile states," countries plagued by dysfunction and institutional disrepair. But as politics here in the United States plunged into its current time of troubles, Kaplan began to see surprising parallels between his home country and those struggling faraway places he studied. There, countries were still wrestling with the age-old problem of material poverty; here, a deepening spiritual poverty was emerging in the midst of unprecedented material plenty. But here again, he traced problems back to an underlying social and institutional fragility, located this time at the local or neighborhood level. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey and Seth Kaplan discuss the problem of "fragile neighborhoods" -- the importance of place, the perverse dynamics that have disconnected us from each other, how top-down bureaucratic and philanthropic solutions fall short by failing to focus on the vital relationships that make communities functional, and how investing in local capacities and encouraging local agency can turn things around.
- Aug 12, 20261h 11m
Responding to the crisis of liberalism, Jonathan Rauch
Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It's become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today's contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of extremism represents a misguided response to serious and neglected problems afflicting contemporary society, and thus that it is now imperative for liberals to move boldly to identify and address those ills. On the other side are liberals who think that their side is losing ground largely because of a failure of nerve -- a lack of confidence in their own ideals and an insufficient supply of fighting spirit. Each side thus has reasons to think the other is making matters worse: the latter fear that conceding that the extremists have a point will only add fuel to the fire, while the former believe that complacent denialism brought us to this point by creating a vacuum for extremists to fill. In today's episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to explore this internal division within liberalism and look for ways to bridge it. Their starting point is on opposite sides of the divide -- Lindsey's book The Permanent Problem offers an unsparing diagnosis of deep problems within contemporary liberal societies, while Rauch has written repeatedly on the dangers of excessive liberal self-criticism -- but throughout the conversation they probe for common ground while clarifying where they disagree.
- Aug 5, 20261h 6m
Everyday ambition, everyday abundance, with Virginia Postrel
Virginia Postrel has made a career out of seeing the extraordinary in the everyday -- from the growing importance of "look and feel" in the products we buy, to the power of glamour to arouse our sense of longing, to tracing the history of humanity through its production and use of textiles. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Postrel joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss how the unleashing of everyday ambition has given us a world of everyday abundance -- and why that world, for all its material blessings, still fails to satisfy. In a wide-ranging conversation, Postrel and Lindsey review how the early American republic transformed ambition and restlessness from traditional vices into the source of world-transforming dynamism, reminisce about the Bicentennial and compare it to the fizzle of the recent Semiquincentennial, review the wide variety of ways in which humans seek to "matter," and speculate on the coming impact of AI and the future of mass full-time employment.
- Jul 23, 20261h 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.
- Jul 15, 20261h 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.
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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.
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