Yesterday, I recorded a 25-minute segment on RT, along with Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland, Max Gulker, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, and host Peter Lavelle. Lavelle is based in Moscow.
The topic: Millennials and Socialism.
It wasn’t me at my best, but it was pretty good.
Warning: At about the 10-minute point, I did something uncharacteristic of me: I got a little angry when I tried to jump in, which I thought we were encouraged to do. The point I made was one I had just in read in co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s book Open Borders about what happens to average height in a room full of NBA players when a bunch of school kids enter.
A friend of mine pointed out on the phone this morning how interesting it is that a segment totally devoted to the idea that socialism is awful is shown on a station financed by the Russian government. He stated, and I think I agree, that if CNN had had such a show, the host would likely be fired.
READER COMMENTS
Steve Fritzinger
Nov 13 2019 at 5:04pm
I don’t watch RT often but when I do, it seems pretty balanced.
I would have expected this exchange on Prager University, not RT.
John
Nov 13 2019 at 5:23pm
Great segment.
As a millennial, I think that media plays a big role in why socialism is so appealing to millennial. The long form written word is more or less dead, TV is not long behind, and what we have left are twitter soundbites and clickbait articles that people only read the headline of.
In many ways, socialism is ideally positioned for such a media landscape. It offers great 1st order thinking solutions to many problems and can only really be rebutted by going deeper. But again, the media landscape doesn’t really allow for that; you can’t exactly teach someone economics 101 in a twitter thread. You’re lucky if you can even get any kind of 2nd order thinking at all.
Also, the greatly increased polarization has led to a situation where most absolutely cannot stand any form of nuanced (or non-black and white) thinking of which markets and economics are rife with. I think it once was the case that you could expect to hear many different viewpoints from your media — these days it is easy to live in your own filter bubble which leads to viewing any dissent as evil.
Phil H
Nov 14 2019 at 10:25am
Well, that was odd…
I know that media “balance” can be a bit fake, but this piece, with literally four talking heads with identical viewpoints, seemed more like a parody than anything. Perhaps the economists had some decent points to make, but the host utterly failed my sniff test: If I can’t distinguish between what you’re saying and general “the youth of today are terrible!” old man ranting, then I see no reason to listen. The host was just hitting all the red meat talking points: dumb millennials, they won’t learn because they’re anti-elitist, college professors are scam artists (I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance on that one), the middle class are the real victims…
Does this Russian platform not have basic journalistic rules like, you must have someone from the other side of the debate to reply?
Thaomas
Nov 18 2019 at 2:29pm
The Russian Government has no particular interest in promoting a SOCIALIST anti-Liberalism. The Trump position suits them just fine.
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