April 1, 2020

First of all, f*ck this virus. We don’t want anyone to experience pain and suffering from coronavirus, but maybe there’s a lesson to learn. In fact, even a simple story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears may have something valuable to teach us. Here at Crazy Town headquarters, we’ve been calling for pretty drastic changes to the economy to make it fair, resilient, and sustainable. But changes don’t materialize just because you want them–usually you need a crisis to get people thinking and acting differently. And when it comes to crisis, size matters: too big (think asteroids and nuclear missiles) and all of civilization is at risk, too small and nothing happens. Is there such a thing as a “just right” Goldilocks crisis? Grab a bowl and spoon and pull up a chair (not too hard and not too soft) as we talk porridge and pandemic. Bonus: join Asher, Rob, and Jason in Quarantine Corner, where you’ll appreciate the lighter side of social distancing.

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Show Notes

• The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears
• Milton Friedman’s quote: “Only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
• Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine
• Dueling asteroid/comet movies from the year 1998
• The story of the explosion on Deepwater Horizon
• Timeline of the Cuban Missile Crisis
• The Cold War: What We Saw, a podcast about (you guessed it) the Cold War
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Article from Stanford University about the political viability of universal basic income
• Article by Brian Fath et al. on the adaptive cycle and its application to social systems
• George Monbiot on the fallacy of prior investment (or sunk cost)
• Teen Vogue article on changing capitalism