Policy Punchline

Dave Wasserman is the House Editor for The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan polling and elections forecasting group. Before joining The Cook Political Report, Dave worked as the House Editor for another widely respected polling and elections forecasting firm, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. At The Cook Political Report, Wasserman is known as one of the nation’s prominent election forecasters. He successfully forecasted the 2016 and 2018 elections, accurately suggesting that Donald Trump may win the presidency while losing the popular vote. He is actively involved in examining House races, using individual districts to key in on larger electoral trends. He collaborated with FiveThirtyEight to produce the groundbreaking “Atlas of Redistricting,” which models redistricting and gerrymandering scenarios for all fifty states. It’s a rare opportunity to have a preeminent forecaster like Dave on the show to discuss several important topics just as the elections season came to its long-awaited end. To start, we tackl

Steven Kelts is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Politics Department and University Center for Human Values. A historian of political thought, he is now teaching a seminar titled “Money, Markets, and Morals.” In this interview, Prof. Kelts explains the recent saga of GameStop trades, its connections with historical market fluctuations, and the important normative considerations about market fairness and regulation posed by great intellectuals like John Locke, Bertrand Harcourt, Milton Friedman, and Karl Polanyi. r/WallStreetBets, a forum hosted on Reddit that is described as 4chan meeting Bloomberg Terminal, was the birthplace of the Gamestop Short Squeeze. What started off as a brilliant way of organizing retail traders to drive up stock prices quickly evolved into a nation-wide political debate posed as a “proletariat revolution” by retail traders against the Wall Street establishment. We trace all the way back to works by John Locke and the Medieval times when identifiable features of modern markets

David Yamane is Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. For the first twenty years of his career, Prof. Yamane focused on the sociology of religion. Since 2011, he has researched the sociology of guns. As Prof. Yamane once explained, “there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture.” Most gun-related studies are epidemiological or criminological, and few people really study why, in many parts of the country, guns are actually a normal part of everyday life. Prof. Yamane seeks to fill this research gap. Part of the reason there is little sociological research on gun ownership is that in parts of the country with few gun owners, like in left-leaning university environments, gun ownership is particularly stigmatized. Prof. Yamane himself grew up in California and has spent his career in academia, so he was in for a surprise when he moved to North Carolina about ten years ago and found that gun ownership could be normal. It contradicted the narrative he had grown up with. Prof. Yamane realized he was like

Ewan Kingston is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton High Meadows Environmental Institute and the University Center of Human Values. He works at the intersection of political philosophy, business ethics, and environmental ethics. He has focused on climate change and global supply chains, as well as on the interplay of markets and democracy to outline legitimate and effective institutional designs to solve complex collective action problems. The long conversation between Ewan and Tiger touches on topics ranging from the justification of “joyguzzling” to consumers’ obligations to remedy their purchase of tainted goods. Ewan defines joyguzzling as “joyriding in a gas guzzler,” an activity that one emits greenhouse gases (GHGs) solely in order to enjoy oneself. Ewan and his co-author and philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argue that there is no moral requirement to refrain from joyguzzling. They acknowledge that climate change is real and needs to be addressed, but they pose a nuanced philosophical

Dr. Parminder K. Jassal is an educational researcher and reformer. While she is currently the CEO of Social Tech Inc., a public benefit corporation trying to increase educational access, her career has also taken her through the ACT Foundation, the Institute for the Future, and a number of large private corporations. Her own educational story traverses through both India as well as the American public education system where she has experienced both the 2-year and the 4-year system which have helped shape the ways in which she seeks to expand access for other learners. Throughout this interview we explore many of the broader issues in higher education. These range from the economics of offering Introduction to Microeconomics online, the demographic changes being undergone by the student body, and the unique role that community colleges have to play in the coming changes to higher ed. We do eventually focus on the underserved group she has spent the most time trying to help - working students. These students

Hey everyone. This is your host Tiger speaking. Happy new year! I hope you’ve all had a very restful holidays season with your loved ones. I’ve been doing Policy Punchline for two years now and what a journey we’ve come along. We released our 100th episode last November, and in 2020, we built two special coverages – one on the Covid-19 crisis and another on the recent elections season. We’ve really taken some deep dives into issues in policy, media, economics, political discourse… Our team and I have been extremely fortunate to have interviewed people from the highest level of policymaking to the world’s most renowned academics and business executives. Thank you for all your support in 2020. Even though we’ve come so far, part of me is still craving for more challenges. I want to have harder and longer conversations on more foundational topics – whether it’s quantum computing or bioengineering, whether it’s environmental ethics or human psychology. Rather than asking about policy and current events, I wou

Rob Henderson is a Gates-Cambridge Scholar pursuing a PhD in social psychology at Cambridge University, UK. His experience led him to develop insights on the upper class, luxury beliefs, human nature, and other topics in social psychology that we discuss in this interview. Rob’s upbringing was turbulent to say the least and shaped him to be a conservative. He bounced around foster homes and experienced the loss of his loved ones at a young age. Having graduated at the bottom of his class in high school, he decided to enlist in the US Air Force. Then, as a veteran, he subsequently enrolled in Yale University as an Eli Whitney undergraduate student. Given his working-class and military background, studying at Yale shocked him as the elite higher education culture was not anything like the army or his childhood. Luxury beliefs are those that act as status symbols for the elite. In the past, the elites showed their wealth and status by having luxury goods. However, since it’s much easier to obtain luxury item

Samuel George is a documentary filmmaker that has gone into each of his projects with the simple goal of listening. Sam describes himself as a filmmaker and analyst for the Bertelsmann Foundation focusing on the intersection of economics, politics, the digital revolution, and daily life. Filming on the ground from the Turkish – Syrian border to the factories of Juarez, Mexico, the films dive inside critical crossroads around the globe. Traveling abroad to places like Turkey, Latvia, India, Mexico, and other cities in the US, Sam captures the lives of the people on the ground, humanizing the individual experience of the public policy in a unique way that only a documentary film can capture. Sam interviews both policymakers and ordinary people to enter the lives of people that are often neglected. We start the interview with Sam’s journey towards documentary filmmaking and why he thinks it’s a powerful medium for policy discussions. Guided by a philosophy of “show, don’t tell,” Sam argues that documentary f

Sunita Satyapal is the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). She is one of the most knowledgeable experts and policymakers on the topic of hydrogen – an ever more important topic in the energy world. While usually hydrogen is overshadowed by its solar and wind peers, it is the most abundant resource in the world and may prove to be a crucial piece to decarbonizing the modern world. Having worked in academia, industry and now government, Dr. Satyapal has a unique perspective on the intersection of these different forces in helping hydrogen reach commercial status. While hydrogen has come to the attention of financiers and energy aficionados in recent weeks due to proposals by the incoming Biden administration and the success of some smaller hydrogen companies, researchers like Dr. Satyapal have spent years learning the intricacies of not just individual companies, but the micro-level processe

Bill Dudley is a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. He served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018, and as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). He was previously chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs. He previously came on our show on April 2nd, 2019 to reflect on his career, and he now returns to discuss monetary policies during Covid, the efficacy and necessity of fiscal stimulus, inflation outlook for 2021, the Fed’s switch to “average inflation targeting,” Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and some of the gravest challenges confronted by central banks today. We started the conservation with a review of the Fed’s unprecedented actions in response to Covid. With the exception of the Main Street Lending Facility, every new policy tool worked well, especially new facilities for public and municipal bond markets. The Fed successfully supported market function and financial stability. The Fed’s

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future." He is also the Co-Director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and served as senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush from 1991-1992. The dominant narrative around our national debt is all too familiar: every dollar of federal spending is bankrupting the U.S.; harsh austerity will soon be unavoidable; taming deficits means crippling cuts to crucial programs. In this episode, Dr. Gale turns the orthodoxy of fiscal responsibility on its head, offers insights into the economics of federal spending during a pandemic, and discusses his progressive approach to reducing the national debt. Our discussion centers around Dr. Gale’s most recent book, "Fiscal Therapy." We begin by examining the origin

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer and climate reporter at The Atlantic. After covering working on environmental policy and climate change for the last four years of his six years at the publication, Rob and a few of his colleagues at The Atlantic started the COVID Tracking Project in the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, accumulating case counts and death tolls when information on the virus was scarce. The COVID Tracking Project has now grown into being a leading data aggregator for the general public, other news organizations, and local, state, and even federal government-affiliated groups. Rob also is the author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet. Rob describes the somewhat accidental realization of the COVID Tracking Project and the challenges of its early days. He talks about how the virus spread undetected, and how his team at The Atlantic started from scratch in constructing a network to understand the virus – starting with their collaboration with the Seattle Flu Project, and eventually evo

Robert Barnes is a lawyer who prides himself on defending the underdog. His clients include Alex Jones and the Covington kids, and he was recently invited by President Trump to be part of the President’s legal team suiting to contend the 2020 election results. In this interview, Mr. Barnes explains why Alex Jones shouldn’t have been deplatformed, what the “Gated Institutional Narratives” and the Intellectual Dark Web are, and how the institutional media coordinated their efforts to attack Alex Jones. On the election front, Mr. Barnes dives into great detail that there was no mass, coordinated election fraud as QAnon claimed, but certain parts of the election results are indeed questionable and deserve fair trials and hearings, which unfortunately weren’t given by the courts. He describes how Trump was sabotaged by incompetent lawyers like Sydney Powell who resorted to conspiracy theories rather than evidence, which ended up distracting the legitimate effort to content the election outcome. A self-procla

Michael Hüther is the director of the German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), one of the most important think tanks in Germany based in Cologne. He previously served on the German Council of Economic Experts and was the chief economist of DekaBank. In this interview, Dr. Hüther discusses Covid’s shock on the German economy, why globalization has become “exhausted,” Germany’s “Golden Decade” in early 2000s and its implications for public investments and debt, and future of European integration. The last decade was the Golden Decade for Germany. 80%+ people were integrated into the labor market; employment rate consistently went up; the government held a balanced budget… But in some sense, it was also the “Lost Decade” for public investment. The debt break introduced to the Constitution in 2009 forced Germany to maintain a balanced budget, which has been in part achieved through reducing investments in local communities and the greater economy. With Covid-19’s impacts, the deficits in

Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, where she specializes in innovation and organizational change. Her newest book "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" examines how capitalism might be reworked so as to strive for a greener, more equitable future. "Reimagining Capitalism" was named to the shortlist of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and has received high praise from both academia and industry. Many scholars have argued that capitalism is at a crossroads, as the climate crisis and soaring inequality pose problems that the free market has proven to be incapable of solving. Professor Henderson points to Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics as the origin of these issues. As businesspeople adopted shareholder value maximization as their primary goal, and proponents of free market capitalism attacked government and regulation, capitalism spiralled out of control. How can businesses balance social responsibility

This interview marks the 100th episode of Policy Punchline. We’re truly grateful for all the support you’ve given us over the last two years and sincerely hope that we may continue to explore more exciting ideas on our journey forward! Jim VandeHei is the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. In this interview, Jim and Tiger discuss the struggles and issues of independent and legacy media platforms, the danger of ideological bubbles within journalist circles, the intellectual opportunity cost of over-analyzing Trump, the deviation from truths and facts in today’s social discourse, and a variety of urgent issues in politics and beyond. Axios, founded in 2016, has the mission is to deliver the clearest, smartest, most efficient and trustworthy experience for the audience and advertisers alike. It is on the forefront of today’s shift toward more bit-sized media with an emphasis on facts, not editorialization or the journalist’s own opinions. How does Axios

Since the race towards high-powered, destructive bombs during World War II, nuclear technologies have captured the public’s imagination in the discourse over energy and society. Large-scale nuclear fission, which involves the splitting of an atom, has been particularly crucial in the energy mix and electricity production in many Western countries over the past few decades. Nuclear fusion – where two atoms collide to create energy – has played a much lesser role in modern energy systems and is much less known than its fission counterpart. One man is hoping to change that. Sir Steven Cowley has been at the forefront for pushing frontier research and wide adoption of nuclear fusion technology. A leader in some of the most advanced nuclear projects, including the Joint European Torus and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, Sir Cowley's knowledge and passion for fusion is contagious. Now, as the head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL), the leading fusion research center in the U.S., Sir

Liam Vaughan’s newest book explores the “Flash Crash” that took place on May 6, 2010. In the span of five minutes, S&P fell 5% and a trillion dollars of valuation was wiped out. Within around 20 minutes, the markets picked back up and resumed to normalcy. The crash was later attributed to Navinder Sarao, or Nav, a London day trader who lives with his parents and trades from his bedroom. In this interview, Liam joins Tiger and Michael to talk about this fastest drop in market history, Nav’s journey and involvement in the crash, the moral-ethical implications of his arrest, and some fundamental issues of financial markets and emerging tech that allowed such havoc to unfold. Why should we care about an event that only lasted 20 minutes – shorter than 1/5 of the length of this podcast interview? Was the Flash Crash a Black Swan, perfect storm type of event, or an indicator of something larger such as an unstable trading ecosystem as we move towards automation? What are the definitions of these techniques like

How did the Indian-Americans vote in the 2020 Presidential Elections? Was the nomination of Kamala Harris a decisive factor? How different will India-US ties be in a Biden administration? How did the Narendra Modi administration in India handle the COVID-19 pandemic? What are some of the most grave challenges being confronted by the Indian democractic system? In this episode, we explore all these fascinating questions with one of the most well-reputed political economists of India – Dr. Milan Vaishnav, a Senior Fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. His primary research focuses on issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He is the author of the book "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics" and is the host of the podcast "Grand Tamasha." Being an Indian-American himself, Dr. Vaishnav offers unique insights into the electoral behaviour of the Indian-Am

A seasoned entrepreneur and financier, Tom Leyden is well versed in every aspect of the solar world. In this episode, Tom speaks about his start in the solar space, how it has evolved over the years, and what he sees as the future of the technology. Tom narrates his experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia advising companies and governments on solar projects. He explains how solar is not only as a source of power, but also an aid mechanism that will continue to be important abroad from both financial and strategic perspectives. His article "Solar Power for Peace" describes the lasting goodwill that often accompanies solar projects in developing nations. Tom also believes in a bright future for the American solar market, as some of the experienced foreign developers may continue to see high-potential business opportunities here. He also elaborates on distributed energy, net metering, the theory of "price cannibalization,” and some recent changes in NJ state energy policy.   Tom has done a great deal of wo