Claim OwnershipReject Modernity Embrace Tradition
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© Clayton Becker and Megan Cox
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Two UCLA Political Science PhD Students, Comparativist Megan Cox and Americanist Clayton Becker take you through the ways that previous generations have made the world worse by dismantling the legacy of things like the New Deal and the Great Society. From car dependency to political polarization to our over-reliance on dating apps to helicopter parenting, come along to learn about the many different ways that we should Reject Modernity and Embrace Tradition.
41 Episodes
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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.
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