The Reason Roundtable

"When I was in college," explains journalist, author, and speaker Virginia Postrel, "I developed the career aspiration to be the editor of Reason magazine." Just a few years after graduating, she had accomplished that goal (and much, much more), joining Reason's staff in 1986 and then running the magazine from July 1989 until January 2000.

Founded in 1968 by Lanny Friedlander (1947-2011), Reason is celebrating its 50th anniversary by hosting a series of in-depth conversations with past editors about how the magazine has changed since its founding, what we've gotten right and wrong over the years, and what the future holds for believers in "free minds and free markets."

In a wide-ranging discussion with Editor at Large Nick Gillespie, Postrel lays out how her vision of the magazine differed from her predecessors' and talks about how many of the issues that dominated her tenure—immigration reform, trade and regulatory policy, and the biotech revolution—remain front and center in public discourse.

"Government made a big mistake with the dietary guidelines," says Nina Teicholz, author of the New York Times bestseller The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. "Given the track record that they have so far, you can really make a plausible argument that they've done more harm than good."

Reason's Alexis Garcia sat down with Teicholz to discuss how decades of faulty nutrition science can be traced back to the flawed research of a Minnesota doctor named Ancel Keys.

When George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok went looking for the effect of regulation on declining rates of entrepreneurship, he had a pretty good idea of what he would find. A libertarian since his childhood in Canada, he figured that federal rules would be a major part of the explanation. To his surprise, that isn't what he and his co-author, Nathan Goldschlag, found. To his immense credit, he and Nathan Goldschlag published their paper, "Is regulation to blame for the decline in American entrepreneurship?"

Tabarrok, a co-founder of the immensely popular and influential economics blog Marginal Revolution, talks with Nick Gillespie about the thrill of being intellectually confounded and the importance of following data, not ideology, when it comes to academic research. He also talks about other possible reasons for the decline in entrepreneurship, what his recent stay in India taught him about real-world economics, and whether Donald Trump's presidency has been good for the economy.

Reason editors rate the White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump's nuclear politics, the optics of political summits, and the resuscitation of Zora Neale Hurston.

Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch rate the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the Korean peace talks, the photo optics of political summitry, and the revival of Zora Neale Hurston

On April 16, 2018, two free market economists debated a topic that has long divided libertarians. Fractional reserve banking refers to banks' standard practice of keeping only a portion of their depositors' money on hand and loaning out the rest. In The Mystery of Banking (1983), the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard called fractional reserve banking "a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts." Other libertarian economists, such as Larry White and Steve Horowitz, have argued that the practice is perfectly defensible.

At The Soho Forum, a debate series in New York City that is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, Robert Murphy debated George Selgin over the following resolution: "Fractional Reserve banking poses a threat to the stability of market economies."

On Monday, April 23, Nick Gillespie taped a live podcast with Russ Roberts at Reason's Washington, D.C., studio in front of a live audience.

An economist who taught for years at George Mason University, Washington University, and elsewhere, Roberts is the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is also the host of EconTalk, a popular, award-winning podcast that features hour-long conversations with academics, authors, and business leaders. Roberts is the author of three allegorical novels about capitalism, individualism, and classical liberalism. His most recent book is How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life.

The wide-ranging conversation, which is followed by a rowdy audience question-and-answer segment, touches on the intellectual and ideological blind spots of professional economists, the social impact of opioid abuse and economic disruption, and the insights that literature provides beyond social science. Roberts lays out a vision of libertarianism that is uncharacteristically humble, deeply social in its focus, and guardedly optimistic about the future of America.

In an age of bots, trolls, and "fake news," we need to up our media-literacy game like never before, says Michael Socolow, a journalism professor at University of Maine and the author of Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Socolow gives three easy rules that keep "smart people from spreading dumb ideas:" Don't share news that doesn't have substantiating links, be wary of stories that perfectly confirm your pre-existing biases, and (for god's sake!) always ask yourself why you're talking in the first place.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

"You go into family court and it's the same experience as at the DMV, only there are children's lives on the line," says Naomi Schaefer Riley in today's conversation with Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward. In today's podcast, we talk about parenting, policy, and what happens when the state gets entangled in the business of raising children.

Riley is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies the foster system, adoption, and religious liberty.

"There's a lot of evidence that pouring money into the system is not improving things," is a line you might hear in many Reason Podcasts, but in her work, Riley digs into the complex problem of what to do with kids who don't have parents and how to deal with the complications around religious freedom, voluntary association, private charity, drug prohibition, and welfare that arise.

Reason editors share notes on the end of the political war against marijuana, plus the latest on Trump/Russia and the "undocumented" Andrew Cuomo.