Are you in Washington, D.C.? If so, we hope you’ll join us for a listener happy hour on the evening of Tuesday, June 2, the night before the WelcomeFest conference. RSVP here if you’re interested in coming, and we’ll follow up closer to June 2 with more details.
Dear listeners,
Why is Europe poor? Megan wrote about the issue this week, and Sam Bowman of Works in Progress magazine joins us from London to discuss. Americans work more and our economy is more dynamic, Sam says, though he does note there’s real value in Europe’s emphasis on leisure and he even defends not using a clothes dryer. (Sam thinks dryers will ruin your clothes and possibly burn down your house. Maybe we need a public education campaign that teaches Europeans how to choose appropriate dryer settings and clean their lint filters?)
We also talk with Sam about the ignominious unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s Labour and the post-Boris Johnson Conservatives. Labour has not delivered on its promise to build instead of block, even though Britain’s central government has all the authority over planning and zoning that Abundance advocates here dream about. Sam says Britain needs to rework its fiscal system so local people reap the benefits of local building — but the American experience suggests this probably won’t work, either.
That’s for all free listeners. Yes, the paywall is here — for paying subscribers, we also chat with Sam about Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film ‘The Odyssey,’ which Elon Musk and other conservatives are very mad about because Helen of Troy is black. Ben writes that the irate critics who haven’t even seen the movie “all have brain damage,” and we discuss why this isn’t exactly another live-action ‘Snow White.’
Ben, Megan and I also discuss the Long Island Rail Road strike, a topic about which New York Republicans have managed to get to Governor Kathy Hochul’s left, defending the god-given right of commuter rail engineers to be paid for two days’ work if they have to drive two different kinds of engines in the same day. (How conservative!)
And we discuss central New Jersey’s missing congressman, Tom Kean Jr., who hasn’t been seen since early March. His staff keeps saying the representative is dealing with an unspecified “medical issue” in a place where “there are no cameras,” and as they continue to insist he’ll be back at work real soon, they stubbornly won’t say exactly what’s wrong with him. Two and a half months seems like kind of a long time to be incommunicado at rehab. Is he in a mental institution? We discuss that possibility with Ben, who is an alumnus of America’s most prestigious mental institution, McLean Hospital. Megan thinks the congressman might be recovering from a botched Turkish hair transplant. But who knows? If he wants us to stop speculating, he can tell us what’s going on.
We hope you enjoy the episode — and if you want to hear the whole thing (and no more paywalls in the future), subscribe now.
