THIS IS A BOOK AND PODCAST THAT YOU CAN’T AFFORD NOT TO PAY ATTENTION TO !

That’s a nice shirt you’re wearing and where did you get that cute little display for Halloween?  In all likelihood, both of items came from China.  While we are aware that Chinese goods are cheaper than those made in the United States, do we now why?  We might think that the standard of living is lower and the benefits paid are less.  How often have we considered that the price and pace of production there is really the result of forced labor in camps with conditions that are inhumane?  And that ethnic minorities, political dissidents and others not in step with the autocratic regime in Beijing, not criminals, are forced to work 20 hour days to make our stuff.  Amelia Pang, author of ‘Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods’ makes us consider the amazing human toll that it takes to satisfy our desire to save a few bucks at high and low end retailers alike.  She also provides ways that we can work to end these abuses one consumer at a time.  

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America loves to tell itself fables about many things.  For instance, the issue of poverty is often thought of as an issue of ‘them’ not ‘us’.  Yet over an adult lifetime, owing to divorce, job loss or health calamity, over half of us will experience poverty for a year or more.  We have so many other things wrong about poverty–its color, the reasons for it and whether as a society, we are helpless to fight it.  Going back to Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960’s we have told ourselves that it was a failure.  It wasn’t.  Without programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, for example, the poverty level of seniors in America, would skyrocket from present levels.  In their book ‘Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty’, co-authors Mark Rank, Lawrence Eppard and Heather Bullock, correct our misconceptions one by one and in empircal and convincing fashion.  Mark Rank is our guest today and will provide insights that each of us should understand about poverty, the minimum wage debate and income in equality in 2021 America.

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It may seem like marijuana laws across the country have been changing almost overnight, but according to our guest, Paul Armentano, deputy director of NORML, a group that has long sought these changes, it’s been about a fifty year process.  We are a long way from ‘Reefer Madness’ and Cheech and Chong, as we see red and blue states de-criminalize marijuana, provide dispensaries for medical marijuana and, in many cases, legalize its recreational use.  Much of this goes hand and hand with criminal justice reform as overly harsh punishments for use of marijuana are taken off the books.  Corresponding with that, many states are being to expunge the records of those who have been convicted in the past.  We talk to Paul about the impacts when states legalize pot as to driving safety, the black market and use by those who live there.  It’s high time we looked at this trend and its impact.

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 The pandemic has upended much about American life, including where we work.  The concept of ‘one person, one desk’ in a large office building may never be the norm again.  With the rise of agile working, third space working and new technological innovations, the traditional office space may no longer be the place where the greatest creativity and efficiency can be achieved.  Who better to imagine the possibilities than Chris Kane, the man who re-designed the property holdings of the Walt Disney Company and the BBC.  As the author of ‘Where Is My Office:  Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century’, he describes how form, in the manifestation of commercial real estate, must yield to the ways that the knowledge workers best perform.  The changes are fast emerging and continue to take shape in these disruptive times.

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  In medicine it is said that you only find what you’re looking for.  If you do not dig deep to find out whether, say, drinking was at the root of a medical condition, you may never know.  And the problem goes unsolved.  Money is the same way.  In a society where safety nets are scarce, startling numbers live in conditions you and I would find intolerable and trade-offs often result in short cutting better health outcomes, few doctors ever raise the issue of money with their patients.  Yet it is the cause of much stress, sleeplessness, poor diets and the delaying of necessary medical interventions.  Dr. Michael Stein is an exception.  As a primary care physician and professor of health law, policy and management, he makes it a point to find out what role money might play in his patients’ lives.  In his readable book, ‘Broke’, he lets his patients tell you what limitations their budget places on their health choices, while he reminds us that ‘America is money.  America is an invoice’.  If you cannot pay it, well you may end up sick out of luck.  He’ll explain.

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American government is broken and has been so for a long time.  In some periods of history we muddle through and use our natural advantages, like remote location from adversaries, to give us time to figure things out.  At other points, like after The Great Depression, we needed a whole new toolkit of government ideas to begin to pull us out of the morass.  Given our yawning divisions and deep mistrust of our government and each other in the wake of the pandemic and the 2020 election/insurrection, we need a moment of government effectiveness, once again, to deal with overlapping crises.  The question is whether we are constitutionally constructed to make radical change?  Checks and balances by three branches of government was a great idea in the 1700’s, but does it serve us well in the moment?  In their book, ‘Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy’, Professors William Howell and Terry Moe argue that structural changes will be needed to unlock the problem-solving capacity of a moribund government.  And those changes need to happen swiftly.  Terry Moe joins us to discuss.

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The topic we are bringing you on this podcast startled me.  My concept was that we, the medical consumer, gain protections year after year.  In fact, Harriet Washington’s chilling expose, ‘Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent’, reveals just the opposite.  It is becoming harder to avoid being part of risky medical research as the matter of consent is often not sought.  Medical consent is a right you and I take for granted, but rather than being enhanced it has been eroding over the last twenty five years.  How can this be?  Ms. Washington makes disturbing comparisons between practices in present day United States to some egregious abuses by the Nazis in WWII. It’s a comparison she was reluctant to make but felt the parallels demanded she do so.  She will explain her thinking and ways to reform a broken system of medical research overreach.

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Much of the attention drawn to QAnon of late has common from the mainstream media and not the dark corners of the internet.  The election of an adherent to Congress and a rebuke of her utterances has also shone light on a movement with some very unusual beliefs and indeterminate motives and goals.  According to a study by political scientists, Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders, while QAnon supporters are extreme they are not so in the ideological sense.  QAnon support is best explained by conspiratorial world views, dark triad personality traits and a predisposition toward other anti-social behavior.  In this podcast, Professor Enders summarizes their findings and takes a trip with me down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and discusses the type of people drawn to them.  

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It is a head scratcher to many of us that the anti-vaccination movement has taken hold in the way that it has in the 21st century given the unassailable fact that vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives.  The achievements are astounding. Vaccines have eradicated small pox, virtually eliminated polio, brought measles transmission down by 90 percent and basically wiped meningitis off the books.  And the new technology vaccines against COVID-19, the scourge of this era, show remarkable early results turning a killer disease into a mildly annoying one for those who are stricken. And yet anti-science and other social and political factors are aiding previously conquered afflications to rise again.  In his book, ‘Preventing the Next Pandemic’. Dr. Peter Hotez, a mainstay authority on cable news throughout the pandemic, describes the forces allied to make medical and vaccine diplomacy a must in the period ahead. It’s a critical topic to discuss as the world struggles with challenges that weaken public health in this moment of crisis.

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  For many of us we still scratch our heads as to how Donald Trump made it to the White House in the first place.  We have all had our theories which range from the wrong candidate opposing him, a strong reaction to the Obama presidency from disgruntled white voters in rural communities and those in the economic despair or Russian interference, or, perhaps, some combination of all the three.  Little dicussed are the large number of towns, cities and counties that flipped from twice Obama voters to Trump voters.  What is that about?  Political scientist Jon Shields and historian Stephanie Muravchik did not feel that the answers had been clear enough about that trend because no one spent the time on the ground to really study the reasons.  They did and put their findings in a book titled ‘Trump’s Democrats’, an ethnographic study of the factors involved.  Surprisingly, Trump won in those communities not primarily for reasons often put forward, but because he looked and sounded much like the Democratic party bosses who have served their local communities well for decades.  It’s a fascinating argument put forward by Ms. Muravchik in this podcast.  It’s likely this is the first time you have heard much of what she is about to say.

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