![]() ![]() “Acker unwinds a complex intergenerational story of immigration, culture, family, partnership, and ethics in her skillful debut. “A rare but honest look at the way parents, children, and spouses talk to one another but don’t always hear what’s being said. The backstory of the original migration … offers fascinating insights into the social hierarchies of colonial Africa. …Acker trusts her readers to keep up with challenging ethical theorizing and to be able to handle the unvarnished truth about her characters. “Ambitious in geographical scope and philosophical engagement. Elizabeth Taylor, Th e National Book Review … novel full of characters wrestling with ethical questions has updated the immigration saga with a gaze that looks back to Kenya and carries its own urgent suspense.” Acker is a brainy writer, making associations with British colonialism and touching on philosophy at Harvard, religiosity, and morality, but she also writes with great heart. Tyler and Simon discuss the ideas in the book and on Simon’s earlier work on finance and banking, including at what size a US bank is small enough to fail, the future of deposit insurance, when we’ll see a central bank digital currency, his top proposal for reforming the IMF, how quickly the Industrial Revolution led to widespread prosperity, whether AI will boost wages, how he changed his mind on the Middle Ages, the key difference in outlook between him and Daron, how he thinks institutions affect growth, how to fix northern England's economic climate, whether the UK should join NAFTA, improving science policy, the Simon Johnson production function, whether MBAs are overrated, the importance of communication, and more.“Acker’s rich and rewarding debut novel features a generational cultural gap… but reworks the traditional narrative. Written in six months, their book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, argues that widespread prosperity is not the natural consequence of technological progress, but instead only happens when there is a conscious effort to bend the direction and gains from technological advances away from the elite. What’s more intense than leading the IMF during a financial crisis? For Simon Johnson, it was co-authoring a book with fellow economist (and past guest) Daron Acemoglu. Photo credit: Darius Bashar and Archangel Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more. ![]() His latest, The Song of Significance, explains why workplace culture has gotten so bad and what leaders can do to make it better. ![]() And yet Seth also persists to improve the culture around marketing and work, giving hundreds of talks, writing daily blog posts, and publishing 21 best-sellers. Though pieces of paper safety-pinned to runners’ chests seem obviously outdated, the bibs persist, highlighting how difficult it can be to change a culture for the better. On bad days, he thinks about the problem of racing bibs. ![]() On good days, Seth Godin thinks about all the progress we’re making on climate change. * Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more. Peter Singer is one of the world’s most influential living philosophers, whose ideas have motivated millions of people to change how they eat, how they give, and how they interact with each other and the natural world. ![]()
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