Ron and Ed share quotes and insights from their one-thing journals covering topics like gratitude, freedom versus liberty, systems versus human nature, and various philosophical reflections. They will discuss the concept of gratitude as a foundation for conservatism, the distinction between freedom (choice) and liberty (absence of coercion), and how perfect systems can remove the need for human goodness. The conversation will also touch on the role of dogma in education, the limitations of data-driven approaches, and the importance of oral tradition and social capital.
SHOW NOTES
SEGMENT ONE
Picking up an idea from AJ Jacobs on EconTalk, Ron and Ed lead off with what the world needs more of: gratitude. William F. Buckley Jr.: “We are basket cases of ingratitude, so many of us.” Yuval Levin goes further and says conservatism means gratitude.
Advice for every wedding card, from mentor Howard Hanson: “Enjoy learning to grow separately together.” Plus two lines to keep handy. Thomas Sowell reminds us that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences, and for anyone who says a new idea will never work: “If it made sense to the old model, it wouldn’t be a new one.”
Kevin Williamson on getting words right: if you feel nausea, you’re nauseated, and if you cause it, you’re nauseous. John Cleese says you can be funny and serious, and the best humor usually is. Asked at a Q&A whether he uses drugs, he answered: “Money.”
Seth Godin: “We don’t live in double-blind studies, but in narratives.” Even physicists explain with stories, and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” imagines a language built entirely of metaphor. Then a surprising source, Peter Drucker, argues that religion should serve as a critic of society, not a political force.
SEGMENT TWO
Two for the social media age: “Faith in the goodness of mankind was a beautiful error” (Stefanie Zweig), and, probably from EconTalk, “In the beginning was the word, in the end, there will be the emoji.”
Russian mathematician Igor Shafarevich: “Socialism is cannibalism, animated by philosophy.” Socialist agriculture has killed more people than nuclear weapons, with the Holodomor in Ukraine as the grim proof.
Russell Kirk, from The Moral Imagination: bad books may subtly corrupt, but the person who reads nothing drifts unless a community’s moral habits and oral tradition carry them. Kirk also argued that successful schooling depends on necessary dogmas, the first principles (no slavery, for one) that aren’t up for negotiation.
Russ Roberts: “Dignity is not in the data set.” Vonnegut’s Player Piano shows a world where living standards keep rising while people lose the dignity of work. Drucker warns that by the time an event at the margin becomes statistically significant, it’s already past. Tyler Cowen adds that a truly big impact doesn’t need measuring. Nobody needs a study to know J.K. Rowling’s.
SEGMENT THREE
T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from “The Rock” (1934), describes people trying to escape the darkness by imagining a system so flawless it would make personal goodness unnecessary. Milton Friedman took a different tack: design the system so that even bad people can’t do much harm.
Montesquieu: we are given liberty so we can do what we ought to will. Liberty is the absence of coercion, and freedom is the choice of what you do with it, which is why Peter Block says freedom and accountability are the same thing. Ayn Rand blurred those lines, much as she said selfishness when she meant self-interest. Stephanie Slade joins the show in two weeks to dig into it.
Horseman’s Law: tell your people one thing seven and a half times, and they’ll tell you they never heard it. The corollary from Howard Hanson: when you’re sick of talking about your mission, vision and values, you’re halfway there.
If we lose norms, habits and shame, people won’t do the right thing even when everyone is watching. Ethics is not human nature but socially constructed, as Dan Ariely’s cheating experiments and the Wells Fargo scandal show.
SEGMENT FOUR
George Gilder: “Time reveals the past, conceals the future, and constrains the present.” Money is time, not the other way around, so running out of money really means running out of time.
From the Book of Samuel, the prophet warns the Israelites that a king will take their sons, daughters, fields and flocks, and they demand one anyway. The same longing shows up in East Germans who miss predictable housing and food, which raises the question of whether the desire to be free is really universal.
Jonah Goldberg: free markets don’t guarantee optimal outcomes, but over the long haul they beat any system that assumes technocrats are smarter than the market. Still, the calls for rent control, government grocery stores and government regulation of AI keep coming. Public choice economics offers the corrective: politics without romance.
Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team: “I wasn’t trying to put greatness into anybody. I was trying to pull it out.” The show closes with gratitude. Brené Brown sets it against entitlement, G.K. Chesterton calls it “happiness doubled by wonder,” and Eric Hoffer says the hardest arithmetic to master is the kind that lets us count our blessings.
Bonus Content is Available As Well
Did you know that each week after our live show, Ron and Ed take to the microphone for a bonus show? Typically, this bonus show is an extension of the live show topic (sometimes even with the same guest) and a few other pieces of news, current events, or things that have caught our attention.
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