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.