How We Deal with Wealth Without Prosperity

Look at the world today and wave of populism that is sweeping the West. Contrast this against the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos and you would think that Davos, and those that participate in it, were the enemies of peace, and global prosperity.

In fact, it just may be that the opposite it true. That it is only leaders at places like Davos that understand the architecture that has held the world together for 60 years. They see that it is growth and prosperity that must be enhanced and address in such a way so as to include more of the world in that prosperity and not by a winner take all economic protectionism.

But how to begin to sort all of this out? That where Don Tapscott comes in. The author of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World shares his views.

My Radio WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Don Tapscott:

Microdosing...Maybe the Answer to the Next Four Years?...It Was the Answer for Ayelet Waldman

Every day scientists go to work and make discovers, or at least observations, that help make the world a better place.

The ongoing expansion of our knowledge of chemistry, of physics and of biology should be the holy grail that we look to to make all of us better.

Yet as an overlay to this ideal notion of pure science there are the prejudices, constrains, shames, and social covenants, which to some seem more important than truth.

Author, lawyer and mother Ayelet Waldman recently threw off those constraints to use science and chemistry to make her life better.  She shares that story in A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.

My conversation with Ayelet Waldman:

Not Carnage, but Hope and Hard Work

Contrary to recently misplaced words from the President, cities like Detroit and other places in the industrial heartland are not places of carnage. They are and will continue to turn around. Not by dystopian rhetoric, but by the love and hard work and commitment of people like Amy Haimerl and her husband.

They took their life savings, moved from a gentrifying  expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn and bought an abandoned 1914 Georgian Revival in a troubled Detroit neighborhood. What they accomplished is the brick by brick way that Americans have always and will continue to improve neighborhood life.  Their story is America's story. Amy tells that story in Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Home

My conversation with Amy Haimerl:

Scenes From a Marriage

Amidst all the noise of politics, especially on the national stage, we forget that it's still made of up of real people with real lives; complex relationships and evolving marriages

Someone once said that the key to political success was learning how to fake authenticity. One thing we came to learn over the past eight years, is that the Obamas were very real. They were authentic, even if the nature of their lives and yes, even their authenticity changed over the first four years and perhaps even more so during the full eight years.

NY Times correspondent Jodi Kantor in her book The Obamas takes a look inside the Obama family, the Obama marriage and the complexity of a modern professional marriage inside the crucible of the White House. The book has just been updated and is now out in paperback.

My conversation with Jodi Kantor:

The Last Time the CIA Was Unhappy with a President

There are some stories that just won’t ever go away. Mostly because the threads always seem to be unraveling and new information is always arriving. Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination are the most notable contemporary examples

Attorney, author and journalist Mark Shaw has, for years, been looking at the events and people surrounding the JFK Assassination. For him, the story itself, like the layers of an onion, keep getting peeled away, only to reveal another translucent layer.

In his new book The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What's My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen, he brings into bold relief, the story and the investigation of famed journalist and TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen.

My conversation on WhoWhatWhy.org with Mark Shaw:

For more information about getting the Manhattan DA to reopen the investigation into the death of Dorothy Kilgallen, click here.

It Did Happen Here

Fear is a funny thing. In our personal life, it often holds us back from things we know we should do. In our nation's collective life, fear often makes us do crazy things...to have a kind of national emotional and moral breakdown that feeds on the sum total and power of individual fears.

Such has been the case lately in our election and in our discussions of immigrants and our fear of the other, amidst a rapidly changing world.

To better understand where we are, we need only look back to the spring of 1942. A time under FDR, when we rounded up over one-hundred thousand residents of Japanese ancestry, living along the West Coast and sent them to detention centers for the duration of the war. Each lost part of their lives and some would argue that our nation lost a part of its soul.

Richard Cahan captures the sadness of that moment in Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers.

My conversation with Richard Cahan:

Jane Jacobs Understood that Cities Have Always Reflected The Best of Us

More and more of us are moving to cities. Look at any demographic map and it’s clear we are becoming a more urban nation. Cities are the vital link in our cultural, social and economic well being. And no one knew more, or understood cities better than Jane Jacobs.

100 years after her birth, her work, her insights and her chronicle of cities is the gold standard by which we judge both the good and bad policy and planning decisions we make.

Robert Kanigel gives Jacobs the biography she has needed, in Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs.

My conversation with Robert Kanigel

Why Cities Matter...Today More Than Ever

While Rural America may have made its voice heard in our recent election, the numbers show that more and more Americans, as well as citizen around the world, are moving to cities. Look at any demographic map of the US and it’s clear that we are becoming a more urban nation. As such, cities are the vital link in our cultural, social and economic well being.

But they also are, by virtue of their density, laboratories for so many of the larger problems that face the society. Problems of inequality, education, race, class and creative disruption are all playing out in our cities.

Cornell professor William Goldsmith thinks they are also target rich in opportunities. He lays out his ideas in Saving Our Cities: A Progressive Plan to Transform Urban America.

My conversation with William Goldsmith:

We could use her comedy perspective today!

It would be very easy these days to have contempt for where celebrity culture has taken us. Nonetheless, sometimes celebrities just by virtue of their talent, their fame and their own ambition are able to make change in the world. 

Whether it's making cracks in the glass ceiling, having us look at things we might not have seen or simply modeling a very public life with lessons for us all...celebrities do sometime provide us a window into ourselves.

Such was the case with Joan Rivers. Whether in business, in comedy, or in life she was a trailblazer. And now journalist Leslie Bennetts gives her the biography she deserves in Last Girl Before Freeway: The Life, Loves, Losses, and Liberation of Joan Rivers

My conversation with Leslie Bennetts:

Why So Many Homeless Families in America?

When we talk about the homeless, especially in our major cities, we imagine those that are visible on the streets and sidewalks. We don’t see the two million plus children who are homeless. The children and families living in cars, or motel rooms, or emergency shelters. They constitute an Invisible Nation: Homeless Families in America

How did this happen in a country and in cities as rich as San Francisco, or New York or Washington? Journalist Richard Schweid takes us deep into the bottom of a homeless economy that should shame us all.

My conversation with Ricahrd Schweid:

Without The Rocket Girls, There Would Be No Hidden Figures

Long before NASA's Hidden Figures in the 1960’s space program, there were the The Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.

When Sally Ride blasted off as the first American woman into space back in 1983, she may not have know it at the time, but she stood on the shoulders of dozens of woman who, beginning in the 1940's, helped America compete in the space race and the Cold War.

Based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, these woman essentially provided the computational power that made rocketry viable. They shattered not only glass ceilings, but helped free us from what poet John Magee call the “surly bonds of earth.”

Nathalia Holt, trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, takes us back to a seminal time for woman and America in space.

My conversation with Nathalia Holt:

How Parents Must Raise A Generation That Will Save Us

Parenting has gone from something natural to something that has become a job with many specific rules, fears and requirements. In fact it’s both more than than and less than sum total of all those rules.

It should be a partnership with our kids, a kind of collaboration that makes both parent and child stronger. That a large part of the approach of Dr. Ross Greene lays out in Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child. It’s an approach that will be critical as we rely more on future generations to rescue us from our current folly.

My conversation with Dr. Ross Greene:

Religion, Sin & Identity Politics

Perhaps no modern campaigns has generated as much coverage as the 2016 Presidential election. Wall to Wall and 24/7. Everything has been covered and analyzed..or has it.

Even with the occasional hat tip to the Christian Right of the Republican Party, it seems that religion has certainly not been a tool to add further analyses to this sui generis election. And few would argue that among all the other crisis engendered by the election, that a religious crisis is part of the mix.

However that is exactly one of the conclusions reached by Georgetown University Professor Joshua Mitchell.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Joshua Mitchell:

Spy vs. Spy...Then and Now

Listening to our political discourse today, vis a vis Russia, it brings back powerful reminders of the Cold War. A time when spies and covert action existed in what Le Carre called “a moral twilight.”

And yet when we think about people like Kim Philby or Alger Hiss or Aldrich Ames, is the way that they turned on their country any different than what we are seeing today?

We look at one of these instructive Cold War stories, True Believer: Stalin's Last American Spywith best selling author, and award winning journalist Kati Marton.

My conversation with Kati Marton:

What We Can Learn from War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World

In these troubled and uncertain times, it seems that the only thing we can take comfort from is history. Civilizations, empires and nations come and go. But how it happens and why is where we find lessons that may comfort us and maybe save us.

Few periods are as instructive as Pax Romana (Latin for "Roman peace.") It was the long period of relative peacefulness and minimal expansion by the Roman military force after the end of the Final War of the Roman Republic and before the beginning of the Crisis of the Third Century.

This is the story that famed historian Adrian Goldsworthy tells in in Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World.  It’s a story particularly instructive today.

My conversation with Adrian Goldsworthy:

Understanding The Forces That Are Shaping the World

Just as the existential question of why individuals succeed and fail, vexes every aspect of both public policy and personal debate, so to with nations. History tells us of the rise and fall of nations. In so doing it gives us clues about economics, demographics, planning and even how the individual drive for success scales up to impact whole nations.

But of course, like everything else, we seek clear and precise metrics to try and make business decisions, geopolitical policy decisions, and simply anticipate the future in order to make a better world.

Ruchir Sharma, the Head of Emerging Markets and Chief Global Strategist at Morgan Stanley, tries to do this in The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World.

My conversation with Ruchir Sharma:

The Nordic Model and Why It Works

Whenever political discussion, particularly on the left, turns to what policies will really work to improve the lives of the middle class, invariably there is talk about the Scandinavian model.

Countries like Norway, Denmark, Iceland Sweden and Finland are constantly in the top tier of education, abundance of jobs, healthcare and a social safety net that is woven in the nation's DNA.

But this was not always so. Many of these countries had to work hard to achieve this and in some cases that did it from polarization as bad, if not worse than the current state of America. George Lakey takes us through this history in Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right-and How We Can, Too.

My conversation with George Lakey:

Democrats are Learning the Wrong Lessons From the False Prophet of Blue Amereica

If you listen to John F. Kennedy campaigning in the West Virginia primary in 1960, it’s amazing how so many of the same issues still haunt us. Then it was the Republicans who didn't seem to understand the plight of Appalachia and of working America.

Democrats, in the person of JFK and later Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, made the personal and policy connection. So what happened? How did their party lose touch with that part of America?

The broad answers are complicated and best left for historians. However, how the Democratic party reconnects is a very contemporary political issues.

Books are flying off the shelf trying to explain flyover country to Democrats. Books like Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land and most notably J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy.

But it’s possible that some of these books, particularly Vance's, teach the wrong lesson. Just like the 1960's, the lesson is not one of promulgating conservative culture and Horatio Alger stories, but of the failure of government to do the right thing.

Sarah Jones, in the most recent issue of the New Republic, deconstructs Vance's arguments.

My WhoWhatWhy.org conversation with Sarah Jones:

We'll always have sex?

It seems as if creative destruction and technology are changing everything...even sex.

This may be problematic given the degree to which sex is connected to everything else; marketing, relationships, essentially all forms of human interaction. As Emily Witt says, “we organize our society around the way we define our sexual relationships.”

The inflection point at which all these forces are coming together, is in part what Emily Witt writes about in her new book Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love.  Yet even in that future, as Woody Allen so aptly said..."we all need the eggs."

My conversation with Emily Witt:

Imagine If Wonder Could Replace Fear

“Children's playthings are not sports and should be deemed their most serious actions," Montaigne wrote.

Freud regarded play as the means by which the child accomplishes his first great cultural and psychological achievements; through play he expresses himself. This is true, Freud thought, even for an infant whose play consists of nothing more than smiling at his mother, as she smiles at him. He noted how much and how well children express their thoughts and feelings through play.

Why then should we assume that we outgrow the value of play? The wonder of seeing the world through joy, rather than fear. Think about all that you’ve read about the creativity of silicon valley...the atmosphere of fun that entrepreneurs try to create.

Today even education is being built around the idea of projects, of teams, of fun and of wonder.

This is the world that best selling author Steven Johnson explores in Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World.

My conversation with Steven Johnson: