Policy Punchline

Trey Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor and Congressman from Greenville, South Carolina. Known for his ability to persuade, question, and debate in courtrooms and Congressional hearings, Mr. Gowdy rose to fame within the Repubican Party. He resigned in 2018 when he could no longer tolerate the hyper-partisanship and polarization of political discourse.

In this interview, Mr. Gowdy discusses the state of America’s political discourse, how both constituents and politicians should be blamed for fueling polarization, social media’s outsized role in shaping people’s beliefs, and his optimism and pessimism for this election season and beyond.

Mr. Gowdy had a stellar career as a prosecutor, achieving the highest performance rating possible for a federal prosecutor two years in a row. His recently published book, "Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Using the Power of Questions to Communicate, Connect, and Persuade," provides guidance to those who wish to become effective communicators. Mr. Gowdy talks about how politicians make up their minds before a hearing or debate even begins, making the art of persuasion pointless. How does this book relate to partisan politics or the current polarizing political environment? How can people from both sides find better ways to communicate with and convince each other?

We seem to live in an era where people can always find supporting facts for any of their beliefs. Mr. Gowdy reflects on his years as an attorney and explains what makes good facts. The mere existence of a fact doesn’t make it good per se and shouldn’t be sufficient in immediately convincing the voters. Important topics such as healthcare shouldn’t be reduced to 2-minute answers in presidential debates, nor should people rely on 140-character tweets for their opinion on science and politics. What concrete steps can we take to encourage long-form, open-minded dialogues between friends, neighbors, and politicians?

Considering how successful some one-liners are in “riling up the base” – such as many simply label progressives as “communists” or conservatives as “racists” – can we really pin the blame for polarization on the language used? Could there be more fundamental reasons for this polarization that created a political environment where such rhetoric proved more politically beneficial than genuine debate and argumentation? How much can we blame the politicians versus the voters themselves?

We also dive into some more fundamental normative questions: What is the role of government? Does the American legislative branch require foundational reforms in order to break through partisanship? If we end up entering a contested presidential election on November 4th, why is the Supreme Court unable to be seen as an independent, trustworthy institution that could help provide clarity?

Mr. Gowdy and Tiger might disagree on a number of issues, but they both believe in the power of genuine dialogue and feel passionate about creating healthy political discourse in their lives – whether it’s on Policy Punchline and The Trey Gowdy Podcast, or through writings such as "Unified: How Our Unlikely Friendship Gives Us Hope for a Divided Country." We hope this interview could open up an opportunity for you to reflect on some of these matters and spark some discussions with those around you.

Dan Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the UC Berkeley. Well-rounded in issues across the entire energy sphere, Prof. Kammen has also served in both the Obama and Trump administrations among other public facing duties, in addition to being a founder of and advisor to several private companies. 

In this interview, Prof. Kammen discusses his views on the American energy policy after Covid-19 and the elections season, and stresses that social and environmental justice are playing an ever more important role in the future of clean energy, requiring a leader like Biden to put forth bold plans.

He believes that the U.S. missed a great opportunity to push through a green stimulus package after Covid, which showed the necessity for a clean energy-style stimulus. The opportunity was capitalized upon other countries like South Korea and New Zealand, but the U.S. was stymied by partisan politics when it came down to the details.

He remains optimistic, however, when comparing his own Covid recommendations to some of the proposals on the table moving forward. More specifically, his guidance falls directly in line with Joe Biden's Clean Energy Plan, which calls for $2 trillion in spending and a focus on environmental and social justice. Prof. Kammen fully supported both the size and scope of Biden's historical climate platform – calling it one of the most comprehensive energy plans in American history with the right kind of political coalition. Prof. Kammen defends Biden's fracking stance, a policy point that has drawn criticism from many environmentalists and clean energy gurus, but also presents his own call for government intervention into sectors heavily affiliated with fossil fuel interests, such as the cruise and airline industries.

We also dive into the details of a number of emerging technologies. The carbon capture, utilization and removal technology has been garnering attention in the energy community but still faces an uncertain future. Prof. Kammen describes the future possibilities for this technology, as well as the realistic paths that the carbon capture industry could embark on in the coming decades within the greater agriculture and infrastructure sectors.

Nuclear power is a strangely controversial topic in the U.S. today – an energy-dense source that has had some safety issues in the past but is widely regarded by experts as extremely safe. Prof. Kammen describes the potential democratization of nuclear energy but also some of the significant cost and safety hurdles that potentially stand in the way for near-time success.

Finally, we touched on several topics that are currently buzzing around the energy community, such as microgrids, the progression of individuals and families becoming both consumers and producers of energy, the role of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the potential expansion of the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), and finally his optimistic vision for the clean energy future.

Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University. Her most recent book, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality," examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. "The Code of Capital" was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. She is a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, comparative law, and legal institutions.

There is no shortage of books explaining issues of inequality in 2020, but they fail to address some of the more fundamental questions about the genesis of capital: How is wealth created in the first place? And, relatedly, why does capital often survive economic cycles and shocks that leave so many others adrift, deprived of the gains they had made earlier? “The Code of Capital” seeks to uncover the relationship between capital and law and the impacts such a relationship has on inequality.

The legal code took tangible and illiquid assets, such as land, and made them into intangible and liquid assets, such as patents, copyrights, and securities. Prof. Pistor explains the essential properties of assets in order to be transformed into capital: priority, durability, universality, and convertibility. How have these modules influenced the code and the nature of capital over the centuries?

Underpinned by the wave of globalization and financialization since the 1980s, derivatives, collaterals, trusts, and many other forms of institutions and instruments emerged, and lawyers could easily pick the laws and legal systems for each specific client in order to protect their capital. The status quo legal structure engenders inequality, and reforms are desperately needed.

Insightfully, Prof. Pistor wrote that “what makes the concepts of capital and capitalism so confusing is that the outward appearance of capital has changed dramatically over time, as have the social relations that underpin it.” It’s much easier for one to understand how the physical and intangible representations of capital have transformed over the centuries, but much harder to realize that there are social relations embedded within capital.

Here, we try to define such social relations, and we go in depth explaining the views on capital and capitalism by two intellectuals – Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. Marx explained the commodification process of goods and labor, while Polanyi disagreed with Marx about classifying them as commodities.

In his famous book “The Great Transformation,“ Polanyi talked about this important concept of “social embeddedness.” He wrote the book between 1940 and 1944 and believed that the market economy had to be socially embedded. Even Piketty devoted huge paragraphs in his book ”Capital & Ideology” to explain Polanyi’s vision: “In the case of the labor market, this meant that wage setting, worker training, limits on labor mobility, and collectively financed wage supplements were all matters to be settled by social and political negotiation outside the sphere of the market.” How would Prof. Pistor characterize the legal embeddedness of markets? Or the social/financial embeddedness of the legal system?

Lastly, we also touch on digital and cryptocurrency and the political theory of money. In Prof. Pistor’s article “Facebook’s Libra Must Be Stopped,” she wrote that “Facebook has now unveiled a cryptocurrency and payment system that could take down the entire global economy.” Why does she think that one new digital currency could wreak havoc on the international economy? What’s Facebook and Libra’s plan? How can we respond to the Libra threat? Here, we also cite Georgetown Professor Stefan Eich’s fascinating works in political theory of money.

In his 2019 book "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison," Prof. Ahmet Kuru tackles the question of why Muslim-majority countries have historically exhibited high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison with the rest of the world. He rejects the two mainstream views of essentialism, which says that Islam is the root of this phenomenon, and anti-imperialism, which says that Western colonization is the reason for historical and modern problems in Muslim-majority countries.

In this interview, we discuss a broad range of topics related to Islam and democracy in the Middle East. We focused particularly on Turkey, Dr. Kuru’s home country - discussing what it was like to grow up with a father heavily involved in politics, to Erdogan’s response to the coronavirus, to Dr. Kuru’s hopes and predictions for the future of Turkey’s democracy.

We also discussed in great depth the ulema in Muslim-majority democracies, the class of religious scholars who have great public authority due to their ability to interpret sacred texts of Islam written—the Quran and the hadiths (reports about the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad). Dr. Kuru insightfully explained his view of how the ulema have grown in power and influence over the last few centuries, in many countries exerting significant influence over the political elite. Dr. Kuru sees the ulema-state partnership as one that is mutually beneficial, and we delved into what both parties can gain and lose from this sometimes contentious relationship.

Some questions we tackled were:

- Can religion and science coexist? Or is there a need for some other unifying force than Islam?

- Why does Prof. Kuru think so many scholars on the topic of Islamism have remained stuck in the camps of the essentialist approach or the post-colonial approach? Have other scholars been accepting of his new approach?

- Prof. Kuru argues that the ulema-state alliance, or the alliance between the government and the religious elite, sought to undermine the influence of the independent intellectual and bourgeois classes, which contributed to the economic, cultural, and intellectual stagnation of Muslim-majority countries. Why are the intellectual and bourgeois classes so important to social and economic development?

Full bio: Dr. Ahmet Kuru is the Bruce E. Porteous professor of Political Science at San Diego State University in California. He a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington. He is the winner of the Jervis-Schroeder Book Award from the American Political Science Association with the release of his book Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison. He has previously co-edited Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, and authored Secularism and State Policies Towards Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey.

"Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry" is the newest book by JC de Swaan, a lecturer in the economics department at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance, and a partner at Cornwall Capital, a New York-based investment fund that the movie "The Big Short" portrayed. At Princeton, Prof. de Swaan teaches classes in Financial Ethics as well as Asian capital markets.

Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, a surge of interest in the use of finance as a tool to address social and economic problems suggests the potential for a generational shift in how the finance industry operates and is perceived. Prof. de Swaan seeks to channel the forces of well-intentioned finance professionals to improve finance from within and help restore its focus on serving society. Drawing from inspiring individuals in the field, Prof. de Swaan proposes a framework for pursuing a viable career in finance while benefiting society and upholding humanistic values. In doing so, he challenges traditional concepts of success in the industry, making his work applicable to everyone in and outside of the world of finance.

In this interview, we discuss the fundamental reasons behind frequent ethical violations in the financial industry – from asymmetry of information between financial professionals and customers to flawed corporate culture that incentivizes unethical competition. We also talk about the various ways how individuals can effect positive changes within financial institutions and transform corporate culture.

We even venture to some "meta" questions about institutional and system design: it seems that in order to fundamentally disincentivize unethical behavior in finance and business, one would need to create a system of better sense-making and choice-making – a system with infinite capacity to solve problems that the current world cannot solve well. We would also need more individual ecosystems where people no longer feel the need to climb up a few corporate ladders in order to be considered as successful; and we need to have a better social architecture where one no longer needs to win at the game of power against some external force in order to not lose at the game of power… Is this a realistic vision? Do we need to fundamentally upend the current financial and regulatory regime to root out unethical behaviors?

David Pakman hosts The David Pakman Show, an internationally syndicated television, radio, and Internet political program. In 2005, at the age of 21, Pakman began hosting a local radio station as a "hobby", and by 2011 the show aired on 100 stations and outlets. He was for some time the youngest nationally syndicated political host.

In this interview, David and Tiger talk about the state of political consciousness in America, how independent media like podcasting shape socio-political discourse, some of the hot issues that both the Left and Right are concerned about, and what could go wrong in November's elections with mail-in voting.

How has the political discourse evolved given all the social turmoil and events in the past few months (Covid-19 and BLM most notably)? By discourse, we mean the general norm that dictates how people interact with each other or the way political and social issues are being talked about in public and private. Amongst all the famous podcasts hosts, for example, some say we’re in horrible chaos (Ben Shapiro); some say we’re in the middle of a revolution (Eric Weinstein); some say we’re finally making strides towards progress and equality (Ezra Klein)... What would be David's assessment? Why does he say that he agrees with Ben Shapiro that our political discourse is in chaos?

The media landscape is becoming increasingly fractured, with new platforms such as podcasts, talk radio, and social media becoming alternative sources of information for those who do not tune in to cable news. Is it a positive thing that a handful of large corporations no longer control the news, or is it a problem that people’s political information is now more personalized, which can contribute to polarization? From Ben Shapiro to Ezra Klein, from Joe Rogan to Sam Harris, to what extent has the rise of podcasting contributed positively (or negatively) to contemporary political culture?

David once said there’s a difference between getting passionate about universal healthcare and about shutting down abortion clinics, so he refuses to draw a false equivalence between the far Left and far Right. How has David arrived at his political views and beliefs? He says there are two things he find helpful when talking to people he disagrees with – one is asking the other side “how do you think I came to my position” and the other is “what evidence, if I present it to you, would bring you to my side?” So, what changes would David like to see in the Republican party and the Right?

Lastly, we discuss how likely that a potential transfer of power will even happen peacefully or smoothly. There could be so many opportunities for hiccups due to mail-in voting prompted by the Covid-19 crisis, such as potential delays due to mail in ballots, Trump preemptively declaring victory, or refusing to accept defeat. A recent study shows that short of a Biden landslide, we will likely end up with a constitutional crisis that lasts until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition. Is David optimistic? Why does he think that Biden's chance of truly winning the presidency is no more than 50-50?

This is a fascinating discussion on politics and beyond. We encourage you to visit davidpakman.com for more information about David's programs, and we hope that you may walk away from this discussion feeling the urgency to vote in this elections season.

Arvind Panagariya is Jagdish N. Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University and the former and first Vice Chairman of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). Previously, he was the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank.

In this interview recorded in the spring of 2019, Prof. Panagariya discusses India’s economic reforms and future outlook. As he explains, India and China’s per-capita income really diverged starting in the 1980s as China embarked on more ambitious economic liberation plans ahead of India. The quasi-autarky regime in India scuttled foreign trade and was anti-growth by construction.

Growth was important in India's economic policy agenda because one can do little without it. Redistribution wouldn’t have worked because if the state redistributed, everyone would’ve been below the poverty line. There was nothing to redistribute, and nothing to "trickle down" either. Growth was the priority.

In 1991, the economic reforms that India needed finally happened. Financial and trade liberalization truly happened, and with the over 7% GDP growth rate in recent years, India will likely become the world's 3rd largest economy in 7-8 years, surpassing Germany and Japan.

However, because India’s growth trajectory is quite different from those other countries, its challenges are also different. India's economy is still heavily dominated by the agricultural sector, which only grows around 4% in a good year. The transition from agriculture to industry and services has been really slow for the Indian people, and the manufacturing sector has hardly pulled anyone in.

The social revolution happened before labor revolution in India, so the system is employee friendly but not employer friendly. Not only do companies have very expensive acquisition cost, there is also very high cost for public projects (often land could make up to 3/4 of the overall cost). That’s why Prof. Panagariya proposes coastal special economic zones as a helpful solution, like China's Shenzhen model. By utilizing the ports and giving these regions the flexibility and freedom to write their own labor laws, these zones could potentially further spur economic growth for the country.

This interview with Prof. Panagariya was recorded over two separate sittings. Tiger was so fascinated by India after the interview such that six months later, he went on a three-week long yoga & meditation trip to India with Princeton’s Office of Religious Life. We will soon release some of Tiger's additional interviews conducted in India – with Hindu monks and environmental businesspeople - and we hope that you may also treat this interview with Prof. Panagariya as a gateway to learn more about India.

What does it mean to pursue an intellectual life? What are the preconditions for intellectual pursuit, and is it available to everyone? In this long interview, Zena and Tiger go through some of the most contentious debates in academia and beyond – from whether solitude and suffering are required to live out an intellectual life, to whether liberal arts educations are worthy or effective in educating young people.

Zena writes in her book that “if intellectual life is not left to rest in its splendid uselessness, it will never bear its practical fruit.” How should we define the "uselessness" of an intellectual activity? Zena explains that there are intrinsic values to intellectual pursuit itself, regardless of one indeed becomes a successful academic or uses the knowledge for any practical application or not.

A deeper implication of such belief, Zena argues, is that humanists ought to be more confident with the value of their subjects and their teaching. Instead of trying to persuade humanities majors in college that their humanities knowledge will serve them well in consulting interviews, the humanists should abandon such patronizing attitude and believe in the value of the subject and in the students' ability to genuinely seek out intellectual challenges that aren't for any vocational purposes.

Tiger brings up his contrarian viewpoint that humanities subjects often do not push students as hard as STEM subjects, and Zena talks about how humanities disciplines have failed to raise the evaluation standards and continue challenging students. Especially in today's digital age when one can easily Google excerpts and analysis for readings, fewer students are diving deep into original texts to come up with deep reflections, and the humanities subjects seem to be more threatened than ever.

This is one of the longest and most interesting interviews that Tiger has conducted, and it represents our increasing devotion to deep and long-form dialogues here at Policy Punchline. We hope this kind of slight deviation from "policy" debates could allow our podcast to offer you a more diverse range of dialogues, and we sincerely wish that you may join Zena in seeking out the hidden pleasures of an intellectual life.

Dan Berkovitz is one of the five Commissioners at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This interview touches on a wide range of matters in financial regulation. We first discuss the functions of the CTFC – how it regulates commodities, futures, and swaps which all play an important role in our markets despite sounding like abstract financial terms that are so distant to people’s lives. In 1974 when CFTC was first established, the commodities traded in the U.S. were mainly agricultural products, and the CFTC has since evolved dramatically in the past few decades, playing an ever more important role as hedge funds and institutional investors more frequently use commodities and futures contracts to speculate.

One important duty of the CFTC is to help enforce the Dodd-Frank Act. We walk through the history of the Dodd-Frank Act – how it was a law established after the 2008 financial crisis to address some of its causes – and whether there's much validity in the criticism against the legislation. Another important legacy of the Dodd-Frank Act is the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), an inter-agency regulatory framework established to help identify risks that affect the financial industry. What are the tradeoffs in creating larger and inter-agency regulatory bodies, and why are some of the rationales preventing the U.S. from further merging more regulators into a single body?

Some critics say that the CFTC has built a reputation as an “overly aggressive watchdog” of financial markets in the decade after the financial crisis, and Commissioner Berkovitz addresses this concern. His approach to shaping regulation in financial markets emphasizes “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” and he favors a data-driven approach that only makes changes to regulation when there is empirical evidence that markets are not functioning well. We dive deep in how regulators reason through their actions and receive feedback from the public.

Lastly, we go over issues in cryptocurrency – how CFTC has been actively hoping to bring about regulatory changes regarding the distributed ledger technology, and why cryptocurrency and decentralization technology fall into the regulatory realm of the CFTC. How do technological and financial innovations challenge existing regulatory frameworks? And how do regulators catch up with those new changes? Will regulators always be a step late?

Full bio: Dan Berkovitz was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2018 to be one of the five Commissioners at CFTC. Prior to that, he was a partner at law firm WilmerHale, where he got to work with special counsel Robert Mueller, which we will cover later in the interview. Commissioner Berkovitz also served as a CTFC representative to the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), and as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of Energy.

What are the SEC enforcement stories behind major cases of fraud such as the Fyre Festival and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, or famous settlements such as with Elon Musk and Wells Fargo? Stephanie Avakian is the Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. She has worked on some of the most complex and intriguing investigations, settlements, and financial regulations in recent years.


In this interview, we discuss how the SEC and the greater financial regulatory community handle complex fraud cases while putting forth policy innovations for the fintech space.

We first touch on the technical aspects for judging when a virtual currency is a security and when it’s not. It has been a poignant point of debate whether the SEC should treat cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as financial securities and thus directly regulate them. It has also become more and more difficult to regulate the cyber space at large, such as when celebrities from DJ Khalid to Floyd Mayweather touted cryptocurrencies on social media.

It’s been a long-time debate in the law community what the point of punishment is. When a financial institution commits fraud or crime, what level of punishment should the regulators seek? Do we want to hurt them, cripple them, or merely warn them? In the case of Wells Fargo’s settlement with the SEC, for example, the $500 million fine announced in Feb. 2020 was more about warning and deterring the company from further fraudulent practices than for the purpose of crippling it.

Bio: Stephanie Avakian was named Co-Director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in June 2017, after serving as Acting Director since December 2016. She was previously the Division of Enforcement’s Deputy Director, serving from June 2014 to December 2016. Before being named Deputy Director, Ms. Avakian was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where she served as a vice chair of the firm’s securities practice and focused on representing financial institutions, public companies, boards, and individuals in a broad range of investigations and other matters before the SEC and other agencies. Ms. Avakian previously worked in the Division of Enforcement as a branch chief in the SEC’s New York Regional Office, and later served as counsel to former SEC Commissioner Paul Carey. Ms. Avakian received her bachelors degree from the College of New Jersey and a law degree from Temple University’s Beasley School of Law, both with high honors.