Writing, Economics, Education, and Other Things

A collection of good reads, listens, and watches I've appreciated lately

Hey there! First off, I’m so sorry I haven’t been writing as consistently here this fall as I intended—you probably don’t mind, and that’s okay. But I planned to write more and I feel bad for not doing it.

I’ve had some other contract writing projects that actually pay the bills, so I’ve had to prioritize those. On top of that, it’s been a tiring season on the parenting front as our littlest, Daisy, has been getting up closer to 5am than her usual 6:30am the last few weeks, so any morning writing time has been sapped, too.

I am working on some pieces I hope to publish between now and the end of the year. But I wanted to pop in this week and share some links and other things I’ve been reading and such on a variety of topics.

So, the following is a bit of a disjointed collection of recommended things for you. Take them as you will.

Paul Kingsnorth on Ross Douthat’s Podcast

I have been listening to podcasts more in the last three months than I have in the last five years. Two stand out: Derek Thompson’s Plain English and Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. I think Ross is running one of the most compelling podcast operations around today because he interviews such a varied array of people with such compelling lines of questioning.

This interview with Paul Kingsnorth around the topics in his NYT bestselling book Against the Machine is a newer episode and very good.

The Admired Leadership Newsletter

A friend of mine recently passed along an article from a newsletter on Substack called Admired Leadership. I really appreciated the article, so I subscribed to the newsletter. I am a relatively young senior leader in an organization—I serve as a director and have something like 30-40 people who report up to me—so the leadership insights in this newsletter have been helpful for me.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent piece called “Protecting the Team by Saying ‘No’ Upstream”:

Leaders above are often the source of noise and distraction. They can direct work, create unnecessary urgency, and ask for deliverables that are a waste of time.

Team members can’t really decline their requests, but strong team leaders can.

Saying “No” can delay leaders upstream, allowing the team to maintain its focus and avoid being pulled in multiple directions.

Team members appreciate a leader who is willing to stand up for them and negate anything that is not essential or sets unnecessary new priorities.

The Monks in the Casino

I mentioned above that Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English has been a favorite listen of mine lately. I’ve enjoyed Derek’s writing for a while, too, all the way back to Hit Makers, which he published back in 2018, but still holds up today.

Last week, Derek published this article, “The Monks in the Casino,” which may go down as my favorite article of the year. It’s super insightful. Here’s a bit of it for you:

The sociologist Max Weber proposed that Christian asceticism gave birth to capitalism. Today it is capitalism that is birthing a wretched asceticism, as the casino economy turns our young people monastic. The monks at the casino represent an inversion of that old Christian principle. Whereas the Protestants that Weber studied were socially giving and financially stingy—their financial prudence created savings that could be invested in new enterprises—today’s monks are risk-averse in the world of bodies and risk-chasing in the world of bets.

This inversion of risk doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the predictable result of how public policy and technological change have allocated risk and reward. Since the 1970s, America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space. To open a daycare, build an apartment, or start a factory requires lawyers, permits, and years of compliance. To open a casino app or launch a speculative token requires a credit card and a few clicks. We made it hard to build physical-world communities and easy to build online casinos. The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

This shift has moral as well as economic consequences. When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust, curiosity, generosity, forgiveness. If you want two people who disagree to actually talk to each other, you build them a space to talk. If you want them to hate each other, you give them a phone.

The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

Our daughter Maggie is in kindergarten now. She is doing well—already beginning to read with some speed—and we are grateful for how much her teacher and her school have been pushing her even in this first semester of kindergarten. I know that her school uses laptops to some degree in their education, and I have always been a bit wary about how much we’ve integrated laptops into children’s schoolwork.

This week, Jean Twenge—author of iGen—published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education.” This article is disturbing and captures the concern that many have had about the integration of laptops into education. Here’s a snippet:

Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure. It may be possible to harness the power of school devices more judiciously, with little to no device use in lower grades, and high school students given laptops strictly limited to relevant apps. We could go further, creating completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs. It would be back to the textbooks, paper and pencil of previous eras — when the most significant classroom distraction was students passing notes.

Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a 16-year-old, much less an 11-year-old, to focus in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning.

And it is fundamentally unfair to our children.

Room for Nuance with Trevin Wax

Finally, I wanted to highlight a recent podcast episode that features my good friend and mentor Trevin Wax.

I’ve been impressed by Sean DeMars’s work on the Room for Nuance podcast in the last year, and when Trevin told me back in the spring he had been interviewed on it, I was eager to watch it. Sean does a great job of getting Christian leaders to open up, and even as well as I know Trevin, I learned some new things in this interview.

If you’ve ever been blessed by Trevin’s work, I encourage to watch this interview! It’s a great peek into writing, Christian publishing, and other topics.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks for being here. I hope one or more of the above is interesting to you.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I hope to be writing more for you in the coming weeks as my schedule may open up a little bit.

-Chris