Reject Modernity Embrace Tradition

That top tax rates and general tax burdens have decreased has been much reported on, but an equally important, if less well known, trend is that American states and cities maintain deeply regressive tax systems. Yet, wealthy people in the most regressive places continue to push for further tax cuts for themselves. This is, to put it frankly, precisely backwards and the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

Trump's recent "proposal", if we can call it that, for a 50-year mortgage, is one of the worst ideas his administration has ever had that wasn't actively intending to hurt someone or some group. Megan and Clayton take you through why it is such a terrible idea and what we ought to do instead.

Recently, the Supreme Court has been making much greater use of the emergency, or "shadow", docket to make rulings which have real substantive impacts - even though the emergency docket is supposed to be used only for procedural rulings. Listen along as Megan and Clayton talk about why this is such a problem and what we could potentially do to help fix it.

A few episodes ago, Megan and Clayton talked themselves into the position that the MeToo movement hadn't actually been very successful in achieving many of its goals. Listen along as they discuss the need to move beyond cancellation into a genuine framework of cultural change.

Everybody seems to hate it when new people move to the city. Transplants are held responsible for everything from traffic to displacement. But this image of transplants as some kind of uniquely malicious force doesn't hold up to scrutiny - nor do the protestations of those who want to pull the ladder up behind them. Megan and Clayton discuss why vilifying transplants has the whole situation backwards and why passing policies that allow people to live where they want should be preferred.

Dating has become an "online first" activity these days, with the plurality of relationships beginning on the internet. This has some pretty substantial negative consequences for our social lives, our romantic relationships, and more generally for community and social connectedness more broadly. In order to remedy these problems, we need to get back to meeting people in person and in particular through friends.

Producing affordable housing is important, but our most commonly used methods for getting this housing built may be actively counterproductive. In what is perhaps the nerdiest episode of the podcast to date, Megan and Clayton take you through what isn't working, and what we should do instead.

We live a substantial portion of our public lives on social media in a way that is actually deeply unhealthy for many of us and causes us to make decisions that we would not otherwise make. Megan and Clayton talk about why we need to stop comparing ourselves to the people we see online and instead get outside and touch grass from time to time.

It's not exactly a secret that ICE are completely out of control right now. They are acting with impunity while violating people's rights all over the country. In this episode, Megan and Clayton dive into some of the most egregious examples of their behavior, and talk about some of the bare-minimum things that we can do to stop this kind of thing happening in the future.

Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act 35 years ago, we've made limited progress on disability access and even regressed in certain ways when it comes to productive public attention to the issue. Making further progress requires rejecting rising ableism and embracing accessibility.

There's been much to-do about the graying of the world. But how much of it is real, how much are millennials responsible, and is it actually a problem? Listen along as Megan and Clayton take you on a (hopefully) more lighthearted episode this week.

Recent years have seen the rise of "manosphere" content as opportunistic grifters monetize men's inability to get a date and tell them that it's all women's fault. This content is bad for men, bad for women, and bad for society in general. It serves no one but those who are making money stoking people's worst beliefs and impulses. It deserves to be summarily rejected.

Much as digital learning technologies can provide better access to education for some people, they are not, and we cannot let them be a replacement for in-person instruction. They just simply are not as effective and, with the rise of generative AI technologies, only provide more incentives for students to shirk their work and not actually learn the things that they are supposed to. In order to make sure that these technologies do not further harm students' education, we need to embrace the tried and true classroom.

The last two decades have seen a dramatic decline in local newspapers and local news more generally. This has had consequences on everything ranging from social cohesion to the quality of local elections. Megan and Clayton are joined by Sean Ewing to discuss how we got here and what we might be able to do mitigate this decline.

Levels of general knowledge are genuinely on the decline, and the distrust of experts and even reveling in one's own lack of knowledge seem to be on the rise. We all need to be more curious again, and get back to desiring and respecting more knowledge about the world around us.

The origins of Mother's Day are, dare we say, actually pretty woke. But almost immediately after becoming an official holiday, it became commercialized and went through the hallmark-ization that many holidays have gone through. On this Mother's Day though, we wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how we can help mothers and families and get back to the original intent behind the holiday.

In the wake of the Great Recession, it often feels like the only acceptable orientation towards work and life is to hustle. The goal is to work long hours, be super productive, and to always have something new in the hopper. But, it turns out that hustle culture is really really bad for us, both socially and medically. We need to reject its allure in favor of taking real, genuine time for ourselves.

We've all heard about the loneliness epidemic, and it can feel like there's not much we can do about it. But, even wholly apart from policy, there are things we can each do in our own personal lives to create more community, improve our friendships, and help the people we know feel a little less lonely. It can all start just by inviting people to hang out.

What is there to say about the Dobbs decision honestly? A calamitous choice by the Supreme Court that will have unknowable and incalculable negative consequences. Listen along as Megan and Clayton take you through a deep dive of just how badly we need to reject it in every way possible.

Term limits are incredibly popular, but just about all of the empirical evidence demonstrates that they don't work to achieve their goals, and instead result in lots of negative unintended consequences. Instead of doubling down on a demonstrably bad policy, we should look to other strategies to help improve electoral accountability.

Over the last couple decades, and especially in the Trump era, it seems like people no longer face appropriate consequences for their behavior. A certain strain of this thought essentially contends that consequences are inherently unjustified. But, as we've moved away from social censure and accountability, we've become a country of jerks where "consideration" is something others need to show you rather than something you are supposed to show others.

Simply put, cars have gotten too damn big. The size of cars these days is bad for people, for the environment, for infrastructure, for just about everything. But it's not something we can't do anything about. It's a problem largely created by policy that can be resolved by policy.

YIMBYs for Harris co-founder and co-host of the upcoming "Radio Abundance" Podcast, Nia Johnson joins us to talk about how we got to this point, where we have a practically nationwide housing crisis. Listen along as we talk about how more than a half century of bad policy led us here, and what kinds of policies we need to embrace to get ourselves out.

In the last half century, governments across the anglosphere, but especially in the United States, have become obsessed with means testing. But ultimately, this kind of program ends up being far less effective, and even more expensive, than universal programs. We know this because we still have universal programs, and those programs are just about the most popular things the government does. Listen along as Megan and Clayton talk about why we need to move away from means tested programs, and back towards universal ones.

One of the biggest reasons why it feels like government can't get anything done these days is because we have developed a complete an utter addiction to process. And those processes have been co-opted by people who would prefer that the government do nothing. In order to solve this problem, we need to reject that addiction to process, and focus on getting results.

The last 40 years have seen an almost non-stop campaign from the right wing to make government smaller and privatize its functions. Put simply, this does not work and has created problems all over the place for basically everyone. If we want to be able to do big things, then we need a government capable of putting them together.

Over the last few decades, how students get to school has changed, and in 2024, for the first time ever, the majority of students arrived to school in a private vehicle. It's all part of a broader trend where American cities and suburbs have made it all but impossible to build schools in urban environments and extremely difficult for kids to get to school in any other way than in a car.

In recent years, a commitment to safe, secure elections has given way to conspiracy theories, understaffed polls, and fights over who should get to vote in the first place. Maddie Covino from the Campaign Legal Center joins us in this episode to talk about how we need to reject this trend, and embrace working for the common security of American elections.

It seems like just about every movie in the theaters and all the shows on TV are remakes, sequels, adaptations, or reboots, and it's sucking the life out of entertainment. Megan and Clayton talk to Cormac Schambach, a writer, director, and allrounder working in the film industry about what the problem is, and what we might be able to do about it.

The Trump administration's hardline stance on immigration mirrors a sea change in public opinion on the subject in the last four years. People are more concerned about immigrants taking jobs and bringing crime than they have been in some time. The only problem with these narratives is that they are not even a little bit true. Rather than falling for falsehoods, and calling for deportations and an end to birthright citizenship, we need to embrace the fact that immigration is what made America great in the first place.

In the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires, it is easy to feel powerless in the face of climate change. But this mentality is dangerous and counterproductive. Instead, as special guest Samantha Morales Johnson Yang explains, we need to embrace active environmental stewardship and get our hands dirty.

Much of the "enshittification" of modern life can be traced to the theory of shareholder supremacy (also called shareholder primacy), which has contributed to a monomaniacal drive towards short-term profits over anything and everything else. Listen as Megan and Clayton take you through the drawbacks of shareholder primacy, and what we might be able to do about it.

The last 30 years have seen an explosion of privately run, publicly funded charter schools. Proponents of charters argue that they are a better route than traditional public education, but in reality they only serve to further weaken education and enrich their for-profit operators. Listen along as special guest Alexander Elg joins Megan and Clayton to unpack the route we ought to take instead.

Americans increasingly focus their educational attention on a small cadre of elite institutions, to the detriment of university education as a whole, and with negative consequences for students. Listen along as Megan and Clayton discuss why this focus is so damaging, and what we can do about it.

The pandemic unleashed a tidal wave of attempts to ban books in American school libraries. However, rather than reflecting too much parental involvement in education, we hope to convince you that it's not the quantity of involvement that's the problem, but the quality. The way to fix this problem is not to curtail parental involvement altogether, but to encourage productive involvement.

Car dependency is bad for us in just about every way. From the danger they pose to the pollution they cause, being dependent on cars is bad for everyone. But more than that, we simply cannot solve transportation problems in cities through cars alone. It just doesn't work. Listen along as Megan and Clayton explain why we need a more diversified approach to transportation.

We used to amend the US Constitution somewhat frequently. But over the last half century, we've largely stopped doing so. As a result, the US Constitution is stuck in place and constitutional hardball has become more prominent. In this episode, Megan and Clayton talk about why this constitutional stasis is harmful, and why we should get back to a time when we were more comfortable amending the constitution.

Progressives, and the Democratic Party more generally, are often vexed by the fact that many voters will report preferring progressive policy in issue polling, and indeed will vote for progressive policy at the polls, but will simultaneously vote for Republican candidates who oppose those very policies. Listen along as Megan and Clayton explore why we might want to take these polls with a grain of salt and what we should do instead going forward.

The last couple of decades have seen a nationwide trend towards a more overbearing style of parenting, but this "Helicopter Parenting" has a whole host of negative consequences for children and their development into young adults. Listen along and Clayton and Megan examine why we should reject it in favor of more independence for kids.

There has never been a time in American history where everyone could easily vote and there was no voter suppression. However, between 1965 and 2014, we had a powerful tool to stop it in the form of the Voting Rights Act. That is, until the Supreme Court decided we didn't need it anymore. Listen along as Megan and Clayton take you through a history of voting rights in America and explain the consequences of the country's current turn against voting rights.

Trunk or Treat is a complete and utter abomination that is ruining Halloween for everyone. On top of that, it is emblematic of the social isolation and declining social trust that have characterized the last two decades. Listen along as Clayton and Megan talk about why we need to reject it, and embrace Trick or Treat in all its glory.

Despite much of the objective economic data showing that people are largely better off today than they were in the past - at least in terms of income - many people report that they are struggling to get by and economic satisfaction is poor. Listen along and Megan and Clayton talk about why this is the case, how the modern economy has denied people economic choices, and what we can do about it.

The Supreme Court's Decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo is the latest case in a long line of judicial power grabs, and perhaps one of the most significant yet.

Purity tests in a two party political system just don't work very well. Listen along as Megan and Clayton take you through some of the research and real world examples about why embracing big tent politics is the right move.

Political Science PhD students and just all around nerds Clayton Becker and Megan Cox take you back to the good old days....just not in the way that you might be expecting.