here. Welcome back to the realignment. Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Apologies for the delayed

release of episodes the past few weeks. Turns out that, unshockingly, early fatherhood is not

perfectly compatible with semi-pro podcasting. That said, I've got a bunch of great ones banked,

so I'll just release a bunch of extra content this week. The news cycle has

moved so quickly the past few weeks that rather than just save these for later in February,

or even earlier in March. I just want to get them out so I can start fresh and get going now that

I'm back from the most intense part of my leave. On to today's episode, I'm speaking with Brown

University's Mark Duckleman about his new book,

Why Nothing Works, Who Codes Progress, and How to Bring It Back? I love this book, I love this

conversation because they get to the core of one of the major questions in 2020s America,

whether you're on the left, right, or center. Why is it that despite our society's

ability to identify big problems, whether they're the defense industrial base or semiconductors

or chip manufacturing, broken supply chains, infrastructure, pick whichever area of interest

you've identified, it seems as if we can't actually do the thing we want to do. The EV charging stations

are delayed. The ships for the Navy are not built. And of course, the infrastructure weeks continue

on and on and on. So in Mark's telling and in this book and conversation, he relates everything

I just said to the central idea that for the past

hundred years or so, there's been an intense debate, especially on the left-decentred

of the Democratic Party, around two different and competing instincts. On the one hand,

you have the Hamiltonian instinct, named after obviously Alexander Hamilton, the founding father, but it's very top-down.

It's focused on doing big things. It's focused on speed. It's focused on efficiency.

Think of FDR and the New Deal and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Think of Robert Moses.

...