unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Contrary to popular belief – making more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be happier in life. The same can be said for societies as a whole, especially when it comes to countries with lopsided wealth distribution leading to high levels of inequality. So what are the connections between that inequality,people’s general wellbeing, and politics? 

Keith Payne is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UNC Chapel Hill. His books, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide and The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die explore the science behind inequality and the far-reaching impact it has on modern society. 

Keith and Greg discuss how inequality affects subjective wellbeing and societal outcomes, the connection between inequality and political polarization, strategies to mitigate psychological harm of inequality, and how understanding these psychological mechanisms can improve cross-party dialogues and reduce divisiveness.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why facts don’t win arguments

51:42: Starting with the goal of understanding is  important, and then when we're actually engaging with the other person, we have this tendency , as soon as they say something is true, we say, well, that's not true, and here are my facts and figures. And so we need to stop trying to bludgeon the other person into agreeing with us by citing facts and better evidence. That may sound counterintuitive, especially in the academic world where I live, because, but that's the currency, right, for argumentation. That's not where most people are coming from. I mean, they care about the facts, but only as tools to defend their social identities. And so, I think a better question to ask is, well, not why do you believe that in terms of why are you wrong about the facts, but what is believing that doing for your psychological bottom line? How is that serving your sense of identity and your group loyalties?

Status is more than your paycheck

12:50: We need to find ways to judge our status not purely in terms of wealth or income, and to make those richer kind of social connections, as a source of status. Because those are things we have more control over than how rich the 1% is.

What shapes our political beliefs

06:39:  It is perceived inequality that makes a big difference. And you have to see the wealth around you. And usually, that's not comparing ourselves to the top one-tenth of 1%, because we don't see the billionaires. Even if you live in Manhattan and are surrounded by billionaires, you still don't see it much, right? People like that live in gated communities, surrounded by privacy-insuring mechanisms and stuff. What we see is maybe the top 20% who are driving expensive cars and showing off their vacation pictures on Facebook. So, for the psychological comparisons, you do have to have some visible inequality there. But there's other ways that extreme levels of inequality affect society through non-visible means. [07:34] When it comes to the day-to-day psychological experience of living in an unequal society, the blatant visibility or invisibility of wealth has a lot to do with it.

How inequality reshapes our behavior

37:07: We found that in high inequality countries, and in high inequality states within the United States, people are engaged in more risky financial behavior — whether that's buying lottery tickets, or not investing for retirement, going to check cashing places rather than traditional banking, et cetera. So that all happens more in high inequality places, and you can see the same sort of patterns with regard to non-financial risk taking around health, like drug use, cigarette smoking — things that are high risk but immediate reward in terms of hedonic or affective reactions — are better predicted by inequality than by poverty as well.

Recommended Resources:

• Easterlin paradox
• Philip Converse
• Donald Kinder
• Nathan P. Kalmoe
• Edmund Burke
• John Stuart Mill
• Gravity Payments
• “The marketplace of rationalizations” by Daniel Williams

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

His Work:

• Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide
• The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die

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When did the idea of parenthood become less of a certainty and more of a choice? How have anxieties about the modern world impacted our desire to procreate and thus impacted the world’s population? Is that impact even a big deal?

Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Irvine and co-author of the new book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice in which she takes a philosophical approach to the question of whether or not to have children. 

Anastasia and Greg delve into the shifting motivations and anxieties influencing the choice to have children, how this question has popped up throughout history dating back to Aristotle’s time, feminism's relationship with motherhood, and the potential reasons behind declining birth rates.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

When choosing parenthood feels like losing yourself

18:53: The transformation is one that really threatens annihilation of self. It's more radical than this difficulty of doing a hedonic calculation. What you are saying about the reluctance of calculating, though, I think is really important to thematize, because we see it especially as people increasingly report a conflict between pursuing what a lot of people are able to actually articulate as, like, a family goal or desire to have children and what they can see romantic relationships to be for.

Why fewer people won't save the planet

42:39: The fantasy that depopulation is going to be a solution for climate change—it's just that: it's a fantasy. What we need is immediate global climate action, and nothing short of it will make a difference.

What are parents really responsible for?

37:07 What I think people are responsible for in being parents is not that overall wellbeing. What they're responsible for is preparing, to the best of their abilities, their children for meeting life challenges, pains, and suffering. So it's not to say that you can't fail as a parent. It's not to say that we can't say that. Some people, like, should you be a parent? I'm not sure. But it is to say that judgment is not going to be based on the likelihood of your child to just encounter suffering of any kind.

Rethinking parenthood as an avenue for self-fulfillment

30:17:  The question of whether or not motherhood is an avenue for self-fulfillment should give way to the question of whether or not parenthood is something of value in human life and how to reconcile it with other demands, moral, material, et cetera. And as we said, that's true at both the individual level. So, within a relationship, to try to overcome the thought that the liberal left thing to do is to put the burden of not just choice, but the burden of asking this question of deliberation, of assuming responsibility for the choice, squarely on the shoulders of women, and also socially, to try and find a way of both recognizing the unique burdens that parenthood places on women, especially in the early stages of parenthood, but also reminding us that this is a profound human question.

Recommended Resources:

• The “wisdom” of Silenus | The New Criterion 
• After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso (publishing July 2025)
• Melanie Klein 
• Elena Ferrante
• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of California Irvine
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on X

Her Work:

• What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice

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How is our fear of uncertainty holding us back? Could an acceptance and willingness to embrace the unknown unlock new potential and innovation?  

Margaret Heffernan is a professor of Practice at the University of Bath, an entrepreneur, and a mentor to CEOs. Her books include Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future, and most recently Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world.

Margaret and Greg discuss the importance of embracing uncertainty in business and life, the value of creative thinking, and the pitfalls of over-reliance on predictability and data models.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why dissent is the secret engine of creativity and better ideas

34:46: Our obsession with efficiency means that we may prioritize management over productivity, and critical to productivity is diversity, debate, dissent, because this is how bad ideas get turned into good ideas. I mean, as a CEO I could waltz into work one day with an idea, which I thought was fantastic. And the great gift I was given were  a lot of employees who would think, "Oh God, here she comes back with another terrible idea," and say, "Well, I don't know. What if we did it like this? So what if we did it like that?...[35:31] But at the end of a very long process, you end up with something which started with my bad idea and gradually got a lot better because of everybody else's input, and turns out to be marvelous at the end. But that dissent is absolutely fundamental to the creative process.

What's the relationship between being a noticer and being creative?

39:11:  It's impossible to be creative without being a noticer, for a start. And I think that the great value of being observant and thinking about what you see is it keeps you much more in touch with what's going on in the world.

The danger of mental models and the power of an open mind

45:55: The danger of mental models is that they will attract confirming evidence and marginalize, or disguise disconfirming data. And so, the antidotes to that are certainly about having enough time to be in different places with different people who think differently. Having a sufficiently open mind to be prepared to notice this confirmation. Having an open mind prepared to change one's mind. And having, I guess, a way of thinking that tends more towards skepticism.

Why embracing uncertainty means loosening up, not tightening down

57:32:  Engineers talk a lot about tight and loose. I think much that has gone wrong in organizational life is a function of being too tight. And it sounds very counterintuitive because it is counterintuitive, but uncertainty requires that we loosen up in order to be able to respond more flexibly. And I think you are exactly right that pertains as much to us as individuals, as it does to the largest corporations in the world.

Recommended Resources:

• Gerd Gigerenzer
• Richard S. Fuld Jr.
• The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness 
• “The role of art in difficult times” by Margaret Heffernan | Financial Times
• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Max H. Bazerman
• Patrick Kavanagh
• Seamus Heaney

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Bath
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world
• Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
• Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future 
• A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition
• Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes
• The Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters

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Why is there a need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating, building, and maintaining industrial systems? What would a rebirth of manufacturing look like in 2025? How would we go about setting up a new Industrial Enlightenment?

David A. Mindell is a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. He is also the author of several books. The title of his latest book and the primary subject of this discussion is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution.

Greg and David discuss the 18th-century industrial enlightenment and its implications for modern industrial society. They also explore the evolving relationship between technology and labor, the persistent myths around automation, and the importance of valuing industrial contributions in today's digital economy. 

Mendell emphasizes the need for a cultural and educational shift towards appreciating building and maintaining industrial systems, advocating for what he describes as a new industrial enlightenment.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The overlooked power of process knowledge

12:41: If you are working on a very advanced, cutting-edge product, like a phone, you want to know exactly where there's capacity that's left on the table to enable you to build the next form. Did you design it too conservatively here? Is there something there you could do more with? And that familiarity with process, whether it's manufacturing or maintenance or other aspects of it, is a really important source of knowledge in an industrial system that we've generally devalued in favor of the kind of product innovation. And inventing the shiny new thing. And I'm sitting on the middle of the campus here at MIT, where we spend a lot of time teaching students about what is essentially product innovation. And we have very few folks on this campus who know anything about the processes that make and maintain these systems, even though very often that knowledge is a source of really great innovation.

Is disruption really the enemy in industrial systems

11:16: Disruption is the enemy in an industrial system. Reliability, repeatability, efficiency, robustness—those are things that people care a lot about in these systems.

The untapped potential of maintenance cycles

31:59: Improving maintenance cycles is a huge source of process innovation that we have not paid enough attention to, and if you can make something that lasts longer, that's a real contribution. I'm a pilot, and people make airplanes last for 50, 60, 70 years because they're designed to be maintained and upgraded, and you replace the parts that wear out and keep them going. Why can't we do that with laptops and phones and even routers or other disposable parts of the electronic economy? And so, work is changing. Work should change. Work should always be responding to the technological changes and needs of the time.

On the myth of replacement in technology and work

45:55: The myth of replacement, as I talk about in the book, is really. It's not that technologies don't enable us to do things with fewer people. Again, that's really the definition of productivity and not a bad definition for technology in these settings. It's more that, for one, it's very rare that you see a technology replace a human job and do that job the same way. Much more common that they change the nature of the work. Either they move it to a different place, they change the kind of skills that are required. They maybe make the job higher level. Maybe they make the job lower level. And you want to ask those questions about who's doing the work, where are they? What's their background, what's their training? Why does it matter? Those things change a lot, but it's relatively rare.

Recommended Resources:

• Josiah Wedgwood
• Industrial Revolution
• Lewis Mumford
• James Watt
• Matthew Boulton
• Eric Schmidt
• Lunar Society of Birmingham
• Adam Smith
• William Thompson
• Lord Kelvin
• Dissenting Academies
• Joseph Priestley
• William Small
• Air France Flight 447
• Waymo

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at MIT
• Professional Profile at AeroAstro
• LinkedIn Profile
• Wikipedia Profile
• .Unless Profile
• Social Profile on X

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution
• Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
• The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines
• Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
• Iron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS
• Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
• War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor
• Research Gate Page

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What does it mean to learn something? While many living things have the capacity for learning, humans have taken this ability to unmatched levels. Our ability to learn and apply knowledge sets us apart from most other species, and now we’re passing that ability on to AI. 

Leslie Valiant is a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University. His latest book, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness, explores our ability to take in new information and raises questions about the broader implications of educability and artificial intelligence. 

Leslie and Greg discuss the uniqueness of human educability, how that ability differs from artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the future challenges of integrating machine intelligence in human society.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What do people miss when they think about intelligence?

02:05: Well, I think the difficulty is that we don't really know what the word "intelligence" is, and we've been using it for more than a century, and we're using it without having any note of what it means. I don't think it's been very useful, for example, in the study of artificial intelligence. So I think the context of IQ tests, I think, arose in the early 1900s in connection with potential definitions of intelligence in terms of people finding correlations between abilities of children to do various subjects at school. And they hypothesized that the children who are good at many subjects had something, and they hypothesized that what they had, this "something," was this intelligence. But that's not a definition of what intelligence is. So they didn't provide specification of how you recognize someone who's intelligent. It's a purely statistical notion.

What is the best way to understand humans?

03:00: To understand what one is doing, one has to have a definition of what one's trying to achieve. And in some sense, the successes of AI have been along those lines. So, machine learning was something which was defined in terms of what you wanted to achieve. So you had examples of things and you wanted to achieve a prediction of newer examples with high confidence, and people managed to implement this, and this became the kind of backburner of AI. So I think, in understanding humans, I think this is the way forward. We should understand what kind of things we're good at, what we do, what our functions are. And saying someone is intelligent is almost like name-calling.

How can we promote educability without also promoting vulnerability?

39:06: We already have these incredible capabilities for absorbing information, processing it, applying it, running with it. And this capability somehow exceeds our ability to evaluate information. So someone gives us some story about what happened on the other side of the world yesterday. We can't rush over to check it out. We either believe it or we don't believe it. So we find it very hard to evaluate, to evaluate everything we hear.

Recommended Resources:

• Alan Turing 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Harvard University
• Professional Website

His Work:

• The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness
• Circuits of the Mind
• Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World

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What does it take to go from a criminal prosecutor to a pioneer of the “originalism” movement and one of the top constitutional law scholars in America?

Randy Barnett is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the director of Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He has written numerous books including, Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit, and most recently a memoir called A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist. 

Randy and Greg discuss his journey from private to public law, how he discovered and furthered the originalism movement, and his influential roles in landmark cases such as the 2004 medical marijuana challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court and the 2012 Affordable Care Act challenge. They also delve into the nuances of constitutional law and the structural challenges within legal academia.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What motivates justices beyond doctrine

19:35: What really motivates these justices, apart from the doctrine, which I think doesn't really motivate them, that means the law is not motivating. And what really motivates them is what I call constitutional principle. They carry within their minds some fundamental constitutional principles. And those principles kind of dictate what they think the right answer is. And at that point, they will start marshaling doctrine on behalf of that. But it isn't merely the policy outcome of the case. That's the difference. For the legal realists, the pure legal realists. It's just, "What outcome do I like?" But for most justices, it's, "What constitutional principles do I hold dear that I want to see vindicated, or do I believe will be undermined if the other side should prevail?" That's a big difference.

What is originalism?

12:37: Originalism is the view that the meaning of the constitution should remain the same until it is properly changed by amendment.

Can contract law theory help you understand constitutional theory better?

09:46: Being able to do contract law theory and to be able to do it at all enabled me to do constitutional theory way better than people who have known nothing but constitutional law. And if I can put this more in a vernacular, constitutional law is largely bullshit.

The empty concept of activism in legal discourse

29:03: The term activism is a completely empty concept. It is more, like what you said earlier, a label to be peeled off and stuck on a decision that you don't like. And it's a sort of process objection, which allows you to avoid having to talk about the merits of the constitutional argument. You say, "Oh, this judge is overstepping their authority. They're engaged in activism," without, and without having to say, "Well, what's wrong with what they said about the constitution?" Or whatever. And so, because it's empty, anybody can hurl it.

Recommended Resources:

• “A Consent Theory of Contract” by Randy Barnett 
• Originalism 
• “The Misconceived Quest for Original Understanding” by Ben Zimmer
• Government by Judiciary by Raoul Berger
• Barry Goldwater 
• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
• Federalist Society 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Georgetown Law
• Professional Website

His Work:

• A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist
• The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law
• The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit
• Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty
• Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People 

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Why is historical awareness so important in order to form a strong personal identity? What are the risks of a culture overly centered on safety and fragility?

Frank Furedi is an emeritus professor at the University of Kent and director of the think tank MCC Brussels. Frank is also the author of several books. His latest work is titled The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History, and he has also written How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century, First World War: Still No End in Sight, Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter.

Greg and Frank discuss the disparagement of the past in contemporary culture, the influence of identity politics on historical interpretation, and the educational system's decreasing demands on students. They also discuss the decline of practical wisdom and the impacts of education on cultural values. Frank critiques the modern tendency to detach from historical legacies, highlighting the dangers of presentism and the moral devaluation of the past. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Understanding history beyond simplistic narratives

07:26: People say Martin Luther, who isn't the hero of mine, but nevertheless played an important role in the Reformation, was the antecedent of Adolf Hitler, that already in his authoritarian behavior, there were the seeds of what would happen in the 1930s and 1940s. And that kind of simplistic history means that you do not even actually understand what is unique and special about the Holocaust. What is the tragedy that we fell upon us? If you see that merely as more of the same, because then you forget about the Enlightenment, you forget about the incredible achievements of German culture. Someone like Heine, Beethoven, and some of the artistic sort of endeavors that existed there. And impoverish our own sensibility through doing something like that. And I think a mature individual learns to be critical of the horrible things that have occurred in the past whilst at the same time learned to valorize and affirm what were very positive contributions to human civilization.

The Renaissance as a positive way of viewing the past

05:01: The Renaissance is really about rebirth, and there's a very strong sense in which what they wanna do is they wanna reappropriate the best that existed beforehand. And, in the course of reappropriating it, what they want to do is to make it come alive within their own lifetime. And I think that's a really positive way of dealing with the past.

The transformative power of books

35:41: Books are important because it kind of demands an element of interaction between you and the author. And what happens is that, sort of as you're going through the pages and reading them, it has the potential to stimulate your sensibilities in a way that provides you with both an aesthetic element but also an intellectual element. I think what is really great about a book is that it is both something that stirs the emotion and, at the same time, makes you aware of the fact that there are problems with these ideas, these existentially difficult kinds of questions. Which basically means that you can, on a good day, come out a slightly different person than when you began that journey when you kind of started on the first page.

How inclusion and market forces are reshaping education

44:54: What the woke, idea of inclusion does is it fundamentally changes the culture of academic learning, because now what becomes important is the student rather than the subject. So you have what's called student-led learning, which I think is a travesty of any kind of intellectual engagement because in a real academic setting, you have a partnership between the academic and the students that have come in there. So I think it's both a cultural dilution of academic standards alongside the market-driven impulse. And it's the convergence of the two, which is why you have a situation where you have administrators, professional administrators, experts kind of becoming the best allies of the inclusion diversity merchants. It's almost like they got this unholy alliance of controlling the university through their coalition.

Recommended Resources:

• Phronesis
• Renaissance
• Dark Ages
• French Revolution
• Pol Pot
• Martin Luther
• Cicero
• Ancient Egypt
• Cleopatra
• David Lowenthal
• Thomas Hobbes
• Virginia Woolf

Guest Profile:

• FrankFuredi.org
• Professional Profile at MCC Brussels
• Faculty Profile at the University of Kent
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X
• Newsletter on SubStack

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• The War Against the Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its History
• How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century
• First World War: Still No End in Sight
• Power of Reading: From Socrates to Twitter
• What’s Happened To The University?
• Therapy Culture
• Freedom Is No Illusion: Letters on Liberty
• On Tolerance: A Defence of Moral Independence
• 100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation
• Politics of Fear
• Google Scholar Page
• The Guardian Articles

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What are the broader implications of specialized bankruptcy courts on the U.S. legal system? How are bankruptcies being used and misused by debtors and creditors today?

Melissa B. Jacoby is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She’s also the author of the book Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal.

Greg and Melissa discuss the complexities of the U.S. bankruptcy code, highlighting its impact on both individuals and corporations. Their conversation digs into the unintended and often unfair consequences of bankruptcy laws, especially concerning personal bankruptcy versus corporate restructuring. Melissa and Greg also touch on the racial disparities in bankruptcy cases, the influence of the consumer credit industry, and the role of non-bankrupt players like the Sacklers in liability discharge.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The cost of going bankrupt in America

09:35: You have to pay not to pay in America to go bankrupt. It is the kind of social insurance that requires an outlay of funds, and the bankruptcy system can't print money. It doesn't do job retraining. So the one thing it does is cancel debt, but you have to pay for that.

How bankruptcy reflects broader inequality

16:14: It's important to see how bankruptcy is in conversation with a lot of other laws and policies that create inequities outside of bankruptcy. And then, when they're brought into bankruptcy, bankruptcy piles on. 

The role of civil litigation in bankruptcy

24:27: There are areas of law that depend not as much on upfront regulation but on ex-post exploration of alleged wrongs, that the civil litigation process is not merely to reward a remedy like some people think, although again, sometimes that is what people want. It is to switch the power dynamics in the control that an injured person gets to ask someone else questions, gets to shape the process. And that doesn't mean they're going to prevail. It is possible that instead of getting 3 cents on the dollar, there will be zero. But that's not really the point here. The point here, you're losing a lot of other objectives that the law outside of bankruptcy is supposed to fill. And it becomes very easy once one spends a lot of time in the bankruptcy system. Everything is about money.

Bankruptcy can cancel debts but we've made it too hard to use

08:34: The thing that bankruptcy can do the best, or is the most equipped to do relative to other laws, is to cancel debts. So, what is going on with the consumer credit industry in its many, many years of lobbying to make the bankruptcy system more complicated and more expensive for average families to use? It doesn't seem to have been that the bankruptcy system operates more smoothly and efficiently, because, if anything, the 2005 amendments had the opposite effect.

Recommended Resources:

• Elizabeth Warren
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 13
• Corporate Personhood
• Sackler Family
• Regulatory Takings in the United States
• Douglas Baird Podcast
• United States Bankruptcy Court

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UNC School of Law
• MBJacoby.org
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X

Her Work:

• Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal
• Google Scholar Page

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What are the consequences of feminist ideals on modern women? How have they affected the work-life balance, the denigration of motherhood, and the quest for female autonomy?

Carrie Gress is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and at Catholic University. She is also the author of several books. Her latest is titled, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us.

Greg and Carrie discuss her latest book, where she argues that feminism has been detrimental to women's happiness and societal roles. Carrie explores the historical roots of feminism dating back to the French Revolution, and cites key figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and the people around her. Carrie critiques the feminist movement’s focus on autonomy, notes its influence from communism and socialism, and laments its impact on modern societal issues, including motherhood, family dynamics, and mental health. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What feminism forgot about motherhood

16:41: I think the problems really get bigger. The more you start seeing how it's not just about women going to work, but it's really an ideology that we've been fed over and over again, and told that this is really the route to happiness. Meanwhile, something like motherhood is denigrated, even though, you know, there's so much personal growth that happens from motherhood. There's so much growth in terms of just maturing. And I think that's one of the great things about motherhood — it just pulls you out of yourself. And that's what people are resistant to — you don't wanna see how impatient you are. You don't wanna see your limits. And that's what motherhood pushes you to, so that you have to surpass them and become better than what you were before. And there's nobody to take over for you at five o'clock. It just keeps going. And I think that the ways in which our virtues are really extended and can grow — but, you know, few people understand and think through that prism when it comes to motherhood.

Home solidifies who you are

20:26: Home isn't meant to just be a hotel where you check in at night, but it's meant to be a place where you really solidify who you are. You learn your gifts; you learn your connection to family. And in that rootedness, then you can go out into the world and be something.

What really is feminism?

03:51: Feminism is a way to protect ourselves against things, instead of really opening ourselves up to something more beautiful, which comes about within the family, within having children, within the home — which is not to say that women shouldn't work. I'm obviously a working mom, but I think it has to be balanced with understanding who we are. And instead of rejecting something, it's really going back to embracing ourselves — the life of womanhood as a mother and wife, and caring for others.

Recommended Resources:

• Betty Friedan
• Congress of American Women
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• William Godwin
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Margaret Sanger
• Gloria Steinem

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the Ethics & Public Policy Center
• CarrieGress.com
• Profile on LinkedIn
• Social Profile on Instagram

Her Work:

• Substack Newsletter
• Amazon Author Page
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What have we lost when the expert aesthetic judgement of professors and literary critics is replaced by the marketplace and bestseller lists? How can someone be both a critic and a creator, and do those identities improve or detract from each other?

Michael W. Clune is a professor at Case Western Reserve University and the author of several books, including the subject of this discussion, A Defense of Judgment, and the upcoming novel Pan.

Greg and Michael discuss Michael's perspective on the necessity of judgment in the study of literature and the arts, contrasting it with the modern academic trend that moves away from making definitive evaluations. Michael draws parallels between literary criticism and economics, highlighting a shift towards egalitarianism and market-driven valuations at the expense of aesthetic judgment. Their conversation delves into the historical evolution of these ideas, the importance of close reading, and the role of literary education in transforming personal taste and understanding. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Michael finds it counterintuitive and strange that there is no public standard for distinguishing great art from mediocre art.

05:18 To say that there's no public standard for judging some work’s better than the other and to say that everyone should make their own judgements and professors and critics and museum curators shouldn't try to tell people what's good and what's not, that presents as like, oh, everyone gets to choose.There's no public standard. But in fact, what you actually see happening is that it's the replacement of one standard, the judgment of those educated in the arts by another standard, which is the marketplace. And so, bestseller lists basically replace the canon that's constantly changing and there's all of complex judgments, but that's basically the displacement. So in fact, it's not really an egalitarian move in the way that many of its proponents take it to be. It's actually a disavowal of the expertise of aesthetic educators and throwing everything to the kinds of orderings produced by the marketplace.

Everyone can make artistic judgments.

03:01 There's no coherent way to do literary study or to teach art history without making judgments all the time. That's just the nature of it.

The practice of teaching literature requires tacit skills. 

20:01 When it comes down to the brass tacks of pedagogy of teaching, and this is a famous thing about literary study, let's say Moby Dick, you could imagine a version of the class where I just talk about Moby Dick and no one reads it, and I describe how great it is and how wonderful it is, and how it's surprising and strange and so forth. You could do that in chemistry. You could do something like that in economics or in physics, but in literature, the student has to encounter it for him or herself, right? It's like nothing is happening unless they're encountering for themselves, unless they have the experience in which something magical is disclosed to them. And so, the actual practice of teaching literature involves what the chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, described as tacit skills, which is really simply a kind of knowing how, without being able to say exactly what you're doing.

Aesthetic education is a vital human need and universities are failing to provide it

44:01 The desire for aesthetic education, the desire to have one's taste, be guided to know what books one should look at, how one should read those books, how one should spend one's precious time. That desire is totally out there and is very strong and is not being met by literature departments in the way that I think they should. I think it's a tragedy and a big mistake that literature in our departments are no longer fulfilling that vital human need. 

Recommended Resources:

• Democracy in America
• Léon Walras
• Carl Menger
• William Stanley Jevons
• Michael Polanyi
• In Praise of Commercial Culture
• Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
• David Hume
• Immanuel Kant
• John Keats
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Moby-Dick
• H. G. Wells
• Jane Austen
• Marcel Proust
• Helen Vendler

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Case Western Reserve University
• Profile on Wikipedia
• MichaelWClune.com

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Pan: A Novel
• White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin
• A Defense of Judgment
• Gamelife: A Memoir
• American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000
• Writing Against Time
• Harpers Magazine Articles

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