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The Permanent Problem
19 episodes
Responding to the crisis of liberalism, Jonathan Rauch
Ep 20 · Aug 12, 2026 · 1 hr 11 min
Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It's become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today's contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of extremism represents a misguided response to serious and neglected problems afflicting contemporary society, and thus that it is now imperative for…
Everyday ambition, everyday abundance, with Virginia Postrel
Ep 19 · Aug 5, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min
Virginia Postrel has made a career out of seeing the extraordinary in the everyday -- from the growing importance of "look and feel" in the products we buy, to the power of glamour to arouse our sense of longing, to tracing the history of humanity through its production and use of textiles. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Postrel joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss how the unleashing of everyday ambition has given us a world of everyday abundance -- and why that world, for all…
Living near friends and family, with Phil Levin
Ep 18 · Jul 23, 2026 · 1 hr
America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness: marriage and birth rates, the number of close friendships, time spent with friends, and community involvement more broadly are all in decline. Phil Levin is helping to lead an interesting new movement away from all this self-imposed isolation and back toward social reconnection. Operating on the principle that every social problem is an entrepreneurial opportunity, Levin sees housing innovation -- in particular, making it easier for family and f…
Liberalism's cycles of crisis and renewal, with Adrian Wooldridge
Ep 17 · Jul 15, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many imagined that we had arrived at the “end of history” now that liberal democratic capitalism had chased all ideological competitors from the field. Just a few short decades later, things look very different: autocracy is on the march around the world, and liberal democratic institutions and values are under assault in the United States and other advanced democracies. Adrian Wooldridge, my guest for this episode of the podcast, offers…
Modern faith with Ryan Avent
Ep 16 · Apr 30, 2026 · 56 min
All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Avent contends that t…
AI "psychology," with Jack Lindsey
Ep 14 · Apr 23, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min
Any attempt to anticipate how social change will unfold in the coming years has to confront a major unknown: how much better is artificial intelligence going to get, and how quickly? Accordingly, getting a handle on AI's capabilities and development path is essential to understanding how broader social realities are likely to shift and over what time period. In this special father-son edition of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey wades into these questions with Jack Lindsey, leader of…
The future of innovation, with Andrew McAfee
Ep 13 · Mar 26, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
After years of disappointing productivity growth, are we about to experience an AI-powered breakout? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of (most recently) The Geek Way, to discuss the current state and future prospects of technological and economic dynamism. They start off by reviewing recent developments in AI and discussing whether LLMs will lead soon to superhum…
MAGA intellectuals with Laura Field
Ep 12 · Mar 19, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min
In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Laura Field joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss their new books. The first half of the conversation focuses on Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the New Right, an examination of the intellectuals of American right-wing populism. They review the origins of the right's turn toward populism, the resurrection of old ideas combined with some new improvisations, and the MAGA intellectual right's strange combination of profound cultural despair with…
Defending liberalism (and how not to), with Damon Linker
Ep 11 · Mar 11, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey welcomes Damon Linker, author of the "Notes from the Middleground" Substack and a Niskanen Center senior fellow, to discuss the challenge of right-wing populism and how liberals should respond to it. After exploring the twists and turns of Linker's intellectual development, the two examine the rise of the populist right, debate the causes of its rise, and evaluate its intellectual defenders. They also address the cleavage within lib…
Abundance and the Democrats, with Jonathan Chait
Ep 10 · Jul 2, 2025 · 58 min
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey welcomes Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic to discuss the abundance movement and the future of the Democratic Party. Chait sees a major role for abundance-based ideas in challenging the agenda-setting power of "the groups," or progressive activists, and pulling the party back toward the cultural mainstream; Niskanen, meanwhile, has been a leader in developing the synthesis of libertarian ideas (housing deregulation, permitting ref…
The prehistory, present, and future of abundance, with Steve Teles
Ep 9 · Jun 12, 2025 · 1 hr 4 min
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling new book Abundance has kicked off a new political movement -- and a vigorous internal debate on the future of the Democratic Party. Many of the policy ideas behind Abundance were developed at the Niskanen Center, recently described in The Atlantic as "the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda." On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey welcomes Steve Teles, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins…
Christianity and democracy, with Jonathan Rauch
Ep 8 · Apr 23, 2025 · 58 min
While the formal separation of church and state is a vital element of America's constitutional order, the success of our long-running experiment in self-government has always depended on a healthy interdependence between republican freedom and religious faith. So argues Jonathan Rauch in his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy. "In American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall," writes. "When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stres…
Symbolic Capitalists and "Awokenings", with Musa al-Gharbi
Ep 7 · Feb 19, 2025 · 1 hr 2 min
The rightward shift in public opinion that carried Donald Trump back into the White House is being widely interpreted as a backlash against the "Great Awokening" of the past decade -- a surge in radical progressive activism around social justice issues that featured a number of extreme and unpopular positions ("defund the police," "abolish ICE," support for Hamas after the October 7 attacks, etc.). In his new book We Have Never Been Woke, Stony Brook University sociologist and Niskanen Center se…
Abundance and collapse, with Eli Dourado
Ep 6 · Jul 16, 2024 · 1 hr 1 min
A new movement is taking shape around the idea of restoring "abundance." Uniting thinkers from across the political spectrum -- including "supply-side progressives," "conservative futurists," and "state capacity libertarians" -- the movement aims to jump-start technological and economic progress by removing artificial constraints on supply and improving the quality of government. On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Brink Lindsey interviews a leading analyst and advocate of abundanc…
Decoding the birth rate decline, with Tim Carney
Ep 5 · May 6, 2024 · 59 min
Birth rates are plummeting around the globe, as half the world's population now lives in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates. Total population is already falling in Japan, Italy, and China, and global population decline looks likely to begin within a few decades. Yet as American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Tim Carney points out in his new book Family Unfriendly, the United States bucked these worldwide trends until relatively recently. As of 2007, the U.S. was above replacement…
Giving gender equality a modern context, with Richard Reeves
Ep 4 · Apr 8, 2024 · 1 hr 1 min
Over the past half-century, societies around the world have made great strides in elevating the status of women and expanding their educational and employment opportunities. Much work remains to be done, but now an unexpected complication confronts us on the path toward greater gender equality: at the same time that girls and women have been advancing and making progress, men and boys -- especially those outside the socioeconomic elite -- have started to fall behind. In the U.S., the gender gap…
Rethinking our vision for the future, with Virginia Postrel
Ep 3 · Mar 6, 2024 · 1 hr 2 min
What determines our visions of the future, and how those visions change over time? How is politics shaped by conflicting visions of the future? What did the old mid-century vision of a Jetsons-style future get wrong -- and what did it get right that we are now struggling to rediscover? What are the roots of technological pessimism, and how can we encourage the growth of a culture that valorizes scientific and technological advance? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, author Virgini…
How to create the sci-fi world we were promised, with James Pethokoukis
Ep 2 · Feb 6, 2024 · 1 hr 6 min
"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Peter Thiel's famous complaint hearkens back to the middle of the 20th century, when high economic growth seemed unstoppable and the future was filled with visions of moon bases, nuclear energy too cheap to meter, and yes flying cars. But in the 1970s, economic growth slowed down and the future suddenly darkened, now menaced by threats of overpopulation and runaway pollution. Except for a few brief years during the internet boom of the 1990…
Reviving capitalist dynamism, with Tyler Cowen
Ep 1 · Jan 4, 2024 · 1 hr 10 min
Is the "great stagnation" in innovation and economic growth really over? What new technologies on the horizon are most likely to reviving broader dynamism? Does the global spread of low fertility mean that our escape from stagnation is only temporary? On this initial episode of the Permanent Problem podcast, economist and polymath Tyler Cowen joins the Niskanen Center's Brink Lindsey for a wide-ranging discussion that traces Cowen's intellectual development, assesses the prospects for a revival…
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