Lee Vinsel’s Peoples and Things podcast, Episode 61, Twenty Years After “The New Economy”: A Conversation with Doug Henwood:
“The New Economy” was a catchphrase that became extremely popular with economists, politicians, pundits, and many others during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The phrase was thought to describe a new economic reality rooted in information and computing technologies that would give rise to an extended period of abundance and prosperity that Clinton compared to the industrial revolution. But the phrase became unpopular after the dot com bust of 2000-2002, which also marked the end of the 1990s economic expansion. Henwood and Vinsel discuss Henwood’s long career as an economic journalist and how he came to write the book as well as how studying “the New Economy” makes the technology bubbles of the 2010s feel like deja vu.
[Ed.: Henwood’s “overproduction of elites” comment ~2/3 of the way in made me wince. Painful. True. I won’t try to provide context here. Listen to their whole conversation.]
Justin E. H. Smith in conversation with Christopher Beha on the Harper’s Magazine podcast, Generation X:
Smith argues that Gen X, having come of age before the erosion of fixtures like liberal democracy and rock and roll, failed to protect postwar counterculture from commercialism and corporatization. As debates about art and politics loom large today, Smith affirms the essential link between the two while championing what he identifies as his generation’s core pursuit of artistic autonomy and human liberation. Editor of Harper’s and fellow Gen Xer Christopher Beha sat down with Smith to discuss intergenerational relations, how Smith’s essay evolved over the editorial process, and how art at its best interrogates the arguable and not the obvious.
[Ed.: Their discussion of intergenerational relations is what got my attention. Also, Smith’s distinction between “uncontested evil” and “contested evil” sticks in my mind.]
Geoff Edgers, The ‘new’ Beatles song is perfectly fine. That’s not good enough:
Please listen to it. Form your own opinion. Then, when you’re done, put on “The Red Album” or “Blue” or any of the 13 studio records the Beatles made, and you’ll maybe get a tinge of what it feels like to be 7 years old with your dad’s KLH turntable pumping the most glorious music into the living room, perfect songs that simply can’t be matched.
Dean Baker, Saving the Environment: Is Degrowthing the Answer?
There is a tendency by some anti-growthers to insist that growth means greater resource use. It doesn’t. If the argument is that we can’t continually expand out use of resources on a finite planet, that’s fine and obviously true. But why can’t our software, our entertainment, our education, and our healthcare get ever better?…
The challenge posed in [Jason] Hickel’s essay is for pro-growthers to come up with a plan that both saves the world from a disastrous rise in temperature and also to prevent the further destruction of species and habitats through the excessive use of land and other resources. Actually, it is not hard to design a set of policies in terms of taxes, subsidies, and outright restrictions that could meet this challenge and still allow growth…
If Hickel’s challenge to the pro-growthers is whether we can get this environmentally friendly agenda adopted politically in a time frame where we can save the planet, he has raised a very important question without a good answer…
Cambridge University, Medieval Murder Maps. [Ed.: Apparently poleaxe murders were a thing.]
Ending on a positive note…
Boston Walking City Trail: Hike 27 Miles Across Boston and Sister Rosetta Tharpe…