unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

The concern for human rights seems to be deeply rooted in history and based on longstanding moral concerns, but the modern human rights movement has very different motivations and concerns than previous rights-based movements. Samuel Moyn is a Professor of History and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. He is also the author of several books, the most recent of which being Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.Samuel and Greg discuss common perceptions and misconceptions about the growth of human rights doctrine, how the modern human rights movement is anti-utopian, and the role of Christianity in human rights movements. Samuel points out that governments throughout America’s history and also that of the West have used Human Rights as a rallying cry from both the left and the right to justify invasion, destruction, and violence. Samuel zooms out to talk with Greg about what morality these rights have been latched onto and where that morality has derived its authority at different times, and they talk about the current state of politics and the use of human rights as a chess piece in a very divided political landscape.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Historians’ role in imparting knowledge for progress or correcting past misunderstandings52:48: Historians can play a powerful and useful role in challenging dominant narratives, especially when they leave a lot out. And I've tried to do that in my work—not because I know what we should do, but because I wanted to disrupt a consensus that has been earned through historical myth. And once that myth is cleared away or less distortion, to rarely lie, it would be a lot easier if we could just say, "Our enemies are lying." But it's clear that history is a war in politics, and there's no way to free history from politics, although hopefully, we can have some conventions that keep our stories, at least from outright propaganda.Christianity and its connection to the human rights movement21:26: We can't say that Christianity always leads to human rights; often it leads to opposing human rights, but at various pivotal moments, there's a connection that we have to recognize.Human rights can mean a lot of things to different people48:53: Human rights can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so I wouldn't rule out that there could be some movement that says it's a human rights movement that sets the world on fire. And after all, I'm claiming that human rights 1.0 - revolutionary human rights - did so. But if we take that for granted, then we have to ask: is the current version of the idea of human rights and the movement associated with it going to have that same effect without being radically reimagined? And I think the answer is no, especially if we care more than ever about the distribution of the good things in life.Is utopia a recipe for terror?38:03: Before the human rights movement, these Cold War liberals think utopia is a recipe for terror, and it's just people didn't get the memo for a while, but in our time, I think we've kind of embedded Cold War liberalism as our kind of second nature.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Universal Declaration of Human RightsPeter Benenson Amnesty International BiographyHuman Rights Watch WebsiteThe Church of The Left by Adam MichnikWikipedia for Jeane KirkpatrickWikipedia for Daniel RocheWikipedia for Invented TraditionGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Yale UniversityFaculty Profile at Yale Law SchoolSamuel Moyn’s WebsiteSamuel Moyn on TwitterHis Work:Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented WarThe Last Utopia: Human Rights in HistoryChristian Human Rights (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Available on August 29, 2023)The Right to Have Rights Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal WorldHuman Rights and the Uses of History: Expanded Second EditionOrigins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry) Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The importance of the division between violent and non-violent crimes seems to have existed for as long as we’ve had laws, but in reality, its legal salience is much more recent. So what happened in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s that led to the increase in punishment for crimes designated as violent? And what effects has it had?David Alan Sklansky is a professor at Stanford Law School and also an author. His latest book, from earlier this year, is titled A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice.David and Greg discuss what changes the division of punishments of crimes has gone through over the years, what makes a crime violent or non-violent, and how those labels can be misleading or have shifted over time. They talk about how the stand-your-ground laws have grown in popularity, taking over from the former philosophy of duty to retreat. David discusses how violent acts are looked at differently, whether they are committed by citizens vs. officers of the law, and what that can say about a society.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The perils of distinguishing serious violence54:37: It may seem like that's not a big deal to talk about serious violence rather than violence. But I think it is because the thing about the language of serious violence is it wears its ambiguity, its subjectivity, or its vagueness on its sleeve. Nobody imagines that the line between serious and non-serious violence is clear and sharp. The very language makes it obvious that we're going to have to draw a distinction. We don't know exactly where the line is, but when we talk about violent versus nonviolent offenses, it's easy, it's natural, and it's common to think that there's a sharp line here and that anybody who's convicted of a violent offense is obviously and categorically worse, and that has huge consequence.The law draws on popular ideas about violence12:34: The law draws on popular ideas about violence, but the law also clearly reinforces those ideas by treating violence as a formal category and a category that has clear boundaries.Recognizing the gravity of violent policing04:18: There are other areas where we don't pay enough attention to the distinction between violence and nonviolent conduct, and the most important of those has to do with policing, where the law and rules that have developed for police misconduct don't treat violent police misconduct as categorically worse or really as even different than nonviolent police misconduct. And I think that's a mistake.Is violence a result of someone’s deep-seated character?17:49: Violence was thought to be the kind of thing that often happened explosively. I think over the last several decades, the way in which the law has thought about violence has shifted, and it's become much more common in many, but not all contexts to think about violence as something that is the result of somebody's deep-seated character and not the result of the circumstances in which they find themselves.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jeremy BenthamGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Law SchoolProfessional Profile on American Law InstituteContributor’s Profile on InquestDavid Alan Sklansky on TwitterHis Work:A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for JusticeEvidence: Cases, Commentary, and Problems (Aspen Casebook) Google Scholar Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It’s 2023, and women still only make 83 cents for every dollar a man makes in the U.S. While that gender wage gap has shrunk over time, why does it still persist? And what would it take to close it?Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She’s written numerous books on women in the workforce and the history of labor. Her most recent book is called Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity. Claudia and Greg discuss the history of the gender wage gap, how women’s place in the workforce has shifted over time, and what steps employers can take toward true pay and gender equity. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:What is a greedy job?24:43: The greedy jobs are the ones that pay the most for additional hours, maybe not even additional hours, but your weekends, your vacations, that demand that you be on the road, that you be up in the air. And so those are the ones that women, disproportionately and for reasons that have to do with social norms, can't take. And so, therefore, in different-sex couples, there is a decision that we're not going to have couple equity. I'm going to take the flexible job, and you're going to take the greedy job. And so, by removing the fact that we no longer have couple equity, we throw gender equity under the bus.Are people constrained by norms?56:12: Norms arise because they have a function and are often kept in place and enforced by generations of people, whom we often call our parents and grandparents. And it would be very, very good if these norms changed as fast as society is changing.The difference between norms and beliefs32:26: It's required for a norm that there be a set of arbiters outside that care about the norms and go like this when you're not following the norms. And when those people go away, then you can do whatever you want. Norms require that there be an enforcer. An arbiter, okay? Beliefs are different. Beliefs are things like religion. No one isn't necessarily enforcing that. It's something that you believe in and preferences. If we have a mental accounting of this, preferences as well do not require that there be orbiters, but norms require that there be orbiters.Reframing the way we think about leaky pipeline50:17: A better way of thinking about the pipeline is that it's not leaking. It's that it's been made so convoluted. It has twists and turns that it's impeding. It's not as if women are leaking out. They're just being impeded from going forward.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Simon Kuznets Pew Research: "Most dads say they spend too little time with their children; about a quarter live apart from them"The Rug Rat Race by Garey Ramey and Valerie Ramey Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard UniversityProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchClaudia Goldin on TwitterHer Work:Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward EquityWomen Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages The Race between Education and TechnologyThe Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth CenturyUnderstanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Where do our desires come from? Babies don’t come into this world with an inherent drive to found tech companies. How much do our environment and the people around us shape those wants? Luke Burgis is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at The Catholic University of America and is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which expands on the mimetic theory of René Girard's. He also co-authored the book, Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person, which explores how to find one’s true vocation in life. Luke and Greg discuss why so many of our desires come from imitating those around us, the difference between thick vs. thin desires, and how true vocations in life should transcend just a job. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The importance of developing the habit of being present 47:41: We need to learn that skill of being present because we're always on all the time, social media phones. And when I say on, I mean we live in a world where everything is recorded. Everything is on stage; all the world's a stage, as Shakespeare said. So stepping off that stage from time to time doesn't necessarily mean going on a silent retreat, as I have. I've been very lucky to have had the opportunity to go on those. Sometimes it just means stepping off that stage and just being alone with ourselves and the people that are close to us.The moving goalpost is a real problem for mimesis33:23: The moving goalpost problem is a real problem when it comes to mimesis, especially when we're not clear about what the objectives are.Social media and how it made all of us into internal mediators for one another26:43: Social media, it's called the town square. But in a sense, it's made all of us into internal mediators for one another. We can all interact. It's narrowed the space—the existential space—between us and just made it a lot easier to assimilate ideas. It seems like we're all kind of living in each other's heads.What does it mean to have a personal vocation that is unrepeatable?53:22: ​​A vocation is something intensely personal. And that, you know, is mine because of my unique, created nature because of my time and unique circumstances that I've been born into. My unique family, the people that I encounter on a daily basis, and my personal vocation will be different than anybody else's who's ever lived.Show Links:Recommended Resources:René GirardIgnatius of LoyolaChef Sebastien BrasI See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René GirardGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at The Catholic University of AmericaLuke Burgis' WebsiteLuke Burgis on LinkedInLuke Burgis on TwitterHis Work:Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday LifeUnrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What if the key to understanding the way other people behave is understanding your own behavior first? Author Thomas Erikson has spent decades studying how people communicate and function. Through his work, he outlines four basic behavioral types to help people understand each other better in the workplace and in life. His books include, Surrounded by Idiots, Surrounded by Psychopaths, and Surrounded by Bad Bosses. Thomas and Greg discuss the red, yellow, green, and blue archetypes of behavior, why this framework will help you understand yourself better, and the benefits and limitations of personality tests. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:On why you shouldn't forget about your soft skills01:05:09: If you forget about the soft skills, you're going to get yourself in trouble because you will need other people throughout your life to cooperate with. But to anybody who's listening, you will never make it on your own. I'm a self-made man. No, you’re not. You didn't do it completely on your own. Maybe you're the strongest driver in your life. Sure. But you didn't make it on your own. That is actually not true. You use a lot of other people. And if you know the best possible way to motivate them and bring them on board, that is what you're going to need. People skills—that’s the magic.Knowing how to keep your word is crucial to any process47:26: The difference between what you say and what you do for me is the most crucial point in any process, really, when it comes to recruiting new staff members, finding business partners, or finding investors.Motivators vs. behaviors23:14: Motivators are even more important than behaviors. Cause behaviors are what's on the surface. You can see the behavior, you can see how he talks, how he walks, what he says, what he doesn't say. You can't see the motivators. I call them even drivers. Because motivational factors drive your actions, it drives your behaviors. And deeper down that, you have the personality which is somewhere beneath the surface.How do you recognize a psychopath?59:00: If it feels bad, then it is bad because your emotions don't lie. Maybe you don't know why you feel bad when you're around this person or that person, but if it feels bad, it's bad, and then you should listen to that. Try to observe why I feel bad when I'm working with him. What is it that he's doing that makes me feel like this? That could be the only answer you need for now, and maybe then you should Show Links:Recommended Resources:Myers-Briggs TestDiSC TestBig Five Personality TraitsWilliam Moulton MarstonGuest Profile:Thomas Erikson's WebsiteThomas Erikson on LinkedInThomas Erikson on YouTubeHis Work:Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behavior and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life)Surrounded by Psychopaths: How to Protect Yourself from Being Manipulated and Exploited in Business (and in Life)Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and Not Lose Your Mind)Surrounded by Bad Bosses (And Lazy Employees): How to Stop Struggling, Start Succeeding, and Deal with Idiots at Work Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Colleges and universities, especially ivy league ones, make a point of accepting the “best and brightest” students. But what if they’re missing a whole slew of the best and brightest because of socioeconomic barriers? Evan Mandery is a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He’s a leading expert on the death penalty but has also been an outspoken critic of elite college admission practices. His most recent book, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us, looks at the social inequity created by some of these practices, like legacy admissions. Evan and Greg discuss the steps colleges could take to socioeconomically diversify their classes, why these inequities exist in the first place, and how public universities compare to their Ivy peers when it comes to admission practices. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The different buckets of college admissions27:44: The way I conceptualize college admissions is there are like these different buckets that are being filled. You have the athletics bucket, which I don't think people get this. It's huge. And you have the legacy bucket. You have the donor bucket and the children bucket, you know, children of staff and faculty. And so, what you're having is like a "fair competition" for like a third of the slots. And, that's why it's restricted. So the only way this is going to change is either they expand capacity without adding another alpine skiing team or something like that. Or they're going to have to diminish their commitment to those, to reduce the size of some of those inequitable buckets.The trade-off of increasing spending per student51:34: As we increase spending per student, we make it more expensive to let in socioeconomically disadvantaged students. This disparity is staggering.How elite colleges are selling the perception that they have the best and the brightest10:54: Elite colleges have done a great job of selling the perception that they've identified the best and the brightest. And that is a lot of what the brand is. It's very damaging because I always hasten to say that meritocracy is a double-edged sword. If you say Harvard, Yale, and Princeton students are the best and brightest, you mean everybody else is the worst and dumbest.What’s wrong about ranking?19:38: I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about rankings, but they make no effort whatsoever to measure what's actually going on in the classroom. Everything that they're measuring is a proxy for wealth.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonas SalkAntonin ScaliaThe Tortoise and the Hare with Malcolm GladwellCatharine Bond HillAcceptance: A Memoir by Emi NietfeldMilliken v. BradleyGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at John Jay College, City University of New YorkEvan Mandery's WebsiteEvan Mandery on LinkedInEvan Mandery on TwitterHis Work:Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide UsA Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America Eyes On City Hall: A Young Man's Education In New York City Political WarfareCapital Punishment: A Balanced ExaminationThe ProfessionalThe Revised Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Stories of Neurotic ObsessionQFirst Contact: Or, It’s Later Than You Think (Parrot Sketch Excluded)More scholarly articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In a society where our bodies are constantly scrutinized and judged, surrounded by filtered images and surgically-enhanced features, we face overwhelming commercial and social pressure to contort ourselves to fit into predefined notions of acceptability.But is body positivity alone sufficient to resist those societal expectations, or is there a need perhaps for a deeper cultural shift in our relationship with our bodies?Clare Chambers is a British political philosopher at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a political philosopher specializing in feminist theory, contemporary liberal theory, theories of social justice, theories of social construction, and bioethics, In her most recent publication, Intact: A Case for the Unaltered Body, Clare explores the unmodified body as a fundamental element of equality.Clare and Greg explore the detrimental impact of cultural and commercial pressures that perpetually reinforce body dissatisfaction, resulting in notable mental health challenges, while also investigating our inclination to focus on altering the physical form rather than shifting the societal viewpoint on diverse bodies and offering strategies to liberate ourselves from oppressive forces that impose body modifications.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Are we all anxious about our bodies?17:15: The message that your body is not good enough is absolutely ubiquitous. We receive that on every level about almost every body part. So each of us has a different personal history with our bodies. Each of us has a different understanding of how our bodies fit into our culture. But in talking to people about the arguments for Intact, what I have clearly seen is that everybody has a part of their body or an aspect of their embodied experience that they feel anxious about and often ashamed of. That shame is about the body is a deep and ubiquitous phenomenon, and it's actually so deep that I think if we feel we don't have that shame, we feel shame as well. There's a sense we expect people to have shame about their bodies.Is feeling bad about your body part of life?56:52: Our society, our economics, and our culture are set up in such a way as to try to make us feel bad about our bodies all the time. And so if you are feeling bad about your body as a kid, that is part of life. That doesn't mean that your body is wrong; it's something to recognize and notice but try to move past.On accepting our bodies and their limitations 38:49: The body is its limitation for all of us. There are things that our bodies will never be like and can never do. And so the language of kind of cure suggests we need to somehow get rid of this problematic body, and then we'll have fixed the problem. Whereas actually, what we need to do is deal with the social context.Trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do34:53: So trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do. Our bodies change, and we have to come to terms with them and re-inhabit them. And each time we are faced with this disruption. But it's that allowing our bodies to be normal that I think is and can be compatible with equality, rather than thinking that they must be normal in the sense of being like other bodies.Show Links:Recommended Resources: Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal by Heather WiddowsGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of CambridgeClare Chambers' WebsiteClare Chambers on TwitterHer Work:Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified BodyAgainst Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford Political Theory) Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of ChoiceMore scholarly articles Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From social media disinformation and phishing emails to grand-scale scams such as multimillion-dollar counterfeit art, Ponzi schemes or scientific fraud, our world is full of deceptions.Surprisingly, it is our own intuition that can be our worst enemy. The tendency to blindly accept what we already believe in or trust what sounds too good to be true leaves us vulnerable to deception. So how do we find the right balance between blind trust and constant skepticism?Daniel Simons is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, and the co-author of several books. His latest book, Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It, explores how our instincts lead us to fall prey to scams and how to spot deceptions. Daniel and Greg discuss how our limited attention resources result in a focus on specific tasks and potential neglect of other crucial elements, and how personally appealing information can easily lead us down the wrong path. They also talk about the need to parse the world more finely without succumbing to wholesale distrust by evaluating our assumptions and posing challenging questions.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:The problem with attention09:52: This is the general problem with attention. We tend to focus on one thing well and need to do that. We need to be able to filter out those distractions. So you want people looking for the thing that they’re supposed to find, because most of the time, that's what you want them doing, right? You want them devoting their resources to the diagnosis that's most likely. It's just that every now and then, you're going to miss something that's sometimes rare and sometimes not what you're looking for.Looking at consistency in a different way23:48: We often take consistency as a sign of deep understanding and credibility when we really should be looking for noise and should take it as a red flag.How do you know what the optimal allocation of trust resources is?10:04: We have to trust, and we have to accept that what other people are telling us is true much of the time. Otherwise, you really couldn't function if you were perpetual, cynic and skeptic about everything. You couldn't get anywhere. You'd be checking the ingredients on every box of food you buy to make sure it truly is what it says it is. You couldn't function in society and be a perpetual skeptic. And there's going to be a spectrum of people who are going to be much more trusting and much less critical and skeptical, and others who are much more skeptical. But you have to find this happy medium.Considering how we can be deceived02:26: This book is more about how our patterns of thought and the information that we find appealing and attractive can lead us down the wrong path. (02:51) The problem for most of us is that we don't typically think about how we can be deceived. So in that sense, it's probably less likely to become a tool for scammers than for users and consumers. Show Links:Recommended Resources:Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. CialdiniThinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanSelective Attention TestMax BazermanDon A. MooreDaniel KahnemanUri SimonsohnLeif NelsonDiederik StapelGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignProfessional Profile on Psychology TodayDaniel Simons' WebsiteDaniel Simons on LinkedInDaniel Simons on TwitterDaniel Simons on YouTubeDaniel Simons on TEDxUIUCHis Work:Daniel Simons on Google ScholarNobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There has been an undeniable shift in priorities throughout Higher Education during the 21st century. As schooling gets more and more expensive, the pathways to making a good return on that investment grow increasingly steeper so students prioritize prestige and certification over education. At the same time, the competition among universities to recruit the best researchers and achieve the highest rankings marginalizes the importance of teaching.William Deresiewicz is an award-winning essayist, critic, speaker, and the author of several books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, and his newest work, The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.William and Greg discuss Williams’s background, the heavy emphasis on research over teaching in Higher Education, and how one can get cut off from academia. They talk about the ways in which educational institutions are lacking and why receiving good instruction may not be a top priority for students anymore. William reveals what he thinks is at the root of the main problems in higher education and also how the invention of the smartphone has exacerbated the situation.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:Is inequality the fundamental problem in everything?45:27: The more we sort society into a few big, big, big winners, and a lot of losers, the more parents are understandably going to want to get their kids into the few schools that seem to guarantee theirs are going to be one of the winners. If we had a robust middle class, if you could support a family and send your own kids to college with one middle-class salary, I think there would be much less of this mania. So that's obviously a very big thing to do, but it would also make everything else better. To me, this inequality is the besetting sin. It is the fundamental problem of just about everything in American life, including all of our political pathologies. That's what I believe.Students aren't choosing a school based on how good they think the teachers are13:25: Students are not picking their university or college based on how good the teaching is or how good they think the teaching is. They're picking it mainly—if we're talking about selective colleges and universities—they're picking it based on the name.Can you still thrive in today’s academic world?40:02: If a student is really a seeker, cares about learning, and is less worried about accumulating credentials, they can do it. But it's harder because college costs more because everything costs more. Some people still make that choice. And are happy having made the choice, even though it's a struggle, but it's a struggle that they're willing to put up with because they can stand their lives.People are looking for humanistic education55:02: There is a tremendous hunger among young people for guidance and among adults for this kind of humanistic education. This kind of wisdom, but not wisdom where someone's imparting it to you. Wisdom in the sense of, let's open this text together and see what it has to say to us. People want that.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Jonathan Zimmerman book The Amateur HourSpecialization from Adam SmithGuest Profile:Speaker’s Profile on ABP SpeakersWilliam Deresiewicz’s WebsiteWilliam Deresiewicz on LinkedInWilliam Deresiewicz on TwitterWilliam Deresiewicz on TEDxMtHoodHis Work:The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and SocietyExcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful LifeThe Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big TechEssays in The AtlanticArticles on The American Scholar Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How do economists understand complex phenomena like selection markets and corruption? With frameworks often called toy models. These models often point toward unexpected consequences and help us to design better markets and incentives. Raymond Fisman is the Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics at Boston University and the co-author of many books, including Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office, and his new book Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It.Raymond and Greg discuss Raymond’s work and how it relates to industries trying to deal with the problem of selection through examples in the airline, film, and sports markets. Raymond also shares what he’s learned about corruption, as well as the perception of corruption and how little the difference between those may matter. They discuss the issue as it relates with examples in China, Indonesia, India, as well as the United States Congress and Supreme Court. Greg also gets Raymond’s opinion on whether there is such a thing as ‘good corruption.’ *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*Episode Quotes:A barrier to finding a solution to a democratic political system39:52: One real barrier to finding our way to a solution in the context of a democratic political system is that people see corruption; they just think, ugh, the whole system's rotten. They're all the same. And it’s made even harder by the fact that we have seen, in many instances, politicians run on anti-corruption platforms only to find out they're just as corrupt as the people they replaced. So it was very undermining to citizens' faith that they can be part of the solution.The government isn't a business48:48: The government isn't a business, and you wouldn't want to run it like a business because there are features of the government's job that are very, very different from the job of a business.What is a selection market?06:18: A market that suffers from a selection problem is one in which businesses don't just care how much they sell, but they care whom they are selling to.Do we need to spend more time convincing economists to take culture seriously?51:22: What economists push back against is not that culture matters but just using culture as a residual explanation. Once you've tried everything else and nothing else quite worked, you say, "Oh, that's just culture." That's why we get these differences across groups. As is surely almost always the case, the truth lies somewhere in the gray between the black and the white.Show Links:Recommended Resources:Explanation of Organizational EconomicsWikipedia Page for Edward LazearUnderstanding the Lemons ProblemAmerican Airlines AAirPass ProblemWikipedia Page for Jeffrey SkollWikipedia Page for SuhartoPaper on Growth Under DictatorsMonitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in IndonesiaStanford Profile of Mark GranovetterGuest Profile:Faculty Profile at Boston UniversityFaculty Profile at NYUProfessional Profile on National Bureau of Economic ResearchRaymond Fisman on LinkedInRaymond Fisman on TwitterHis Work:Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About ItThe Org: The Underlying Logic of the OfficeThe Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them-And They Shape UsCorruption: What Everyone Needs to Know®Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of NationsRaymond Fisman on Google ScholarCEPR Page of Publications Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.