Tag Archives: Nixon

Ronald Reagan Vs. The Joker | Election 2020 2

The times they are a’changing! Maybe it’s just turning 40, but I really do think US politics and society are undergoing a bit of a sea change. Nobody can argue that the past three years have been fun. On the other hand, I think that, so far, this period of transition is infinitely less bruising than the one the country went through in the 1970s and 1980s. In today’s video I try to knit the New Deal and Reagan eras into a single narrative of progress and change. It is punctuated with Joker level chaos of course.

I really do believe that 2020 presents an opportunity to help the country move on to its next cycle of growth and progress. I have no idea who would best represent and shape that change. But I do know that whoever gets elected in November, even if it’s Donald Trump, will have that opportunity. I’d really rather it wasn’t Donald Trump. Today’s video sets out my general attitude to US history and the 2020 election. It’s useful viewing if you want to know my biases before this year of election madness.

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Video Transcript after the jump…

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What’s an Economy? | Markets Are Dumb 1


I feel like markets and economics have been an underpinning of what I’ve been talking about for quite some time now. It’s been a troubling thing for me. There’s always a lot of certainty when these issues come up in political discussions, but usually almost nothing backing up that certainty. The conditions we’re looking at are always changing, and the theories that people gravitate to are some of the least proven imaginable. Economics has pretensions to being a science. But the variables are immense, and there’s really only one result.

We have one world economy, and its performance at any given time is the only thing that we have to point to, to see whether our theories are working. There is no control group. Most of the figures we rely on to measure what’s going on are little better than rough estimates, and the political consensus rarely lasts a decade. I have high hopes for the profession of economics. People are doing amazing work in the field, and the move onto the internet that our species is currently undergoing provides the possibility of real measurement (and Orwellian nightmares). I’m confident that the future is bright, but I think we all need a lot more humility in talking about the economy. Which is why I made today’s video, and why I’ll be adding to the series in the coming weeks…

If you’d like to earn my undying gratitude, please click here to support this project through Patreon. Please do reach out to us through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or our e-mail newsletter.

Video Transcript after the jump…

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