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Phillip Magness

Series

3 Whisky Happy Hour2 episodes

Recent Episodes

3 Whisky Happy Hour
3 Whisky Happy Hour

Marx, Neoliberalism, and the 1619 Project, with Phil Magness

Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is one of the most productive—and provocative—working scholars today (with emphasis on working, as his output is prodigious). This classic format episode features Steve Hayward and Phil in a one-on-one conversation about three of Phil's major areas of current research, starting with his co-authored article that breaks new ground in the history of Marxism, "The Mainstreaming of Marx: Measuring the Effect of the Russian Revolution on Karl Marx’s Influence," published recently in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the premier journals in economics. The article is causing heads to explode on the left, which means he must have hit a nerve. From there we talk about the history of the intellectual left's favorite epithet today, "neoliberalism," but also about how the term has been embraced with almost the same pejorative meaning by some leading thinkers on the right. Is this a good idea? Finally, as Phil has been one of the pre-eminent critics of the 1619 Project from the moment it first appeared four years ago, we catch up on the latest iterations of that popular leftist propaganda effort. Everyone should follow Phil on Twitter, @PhilWMagness, and you'll see how he lives rent-free every day inside the heads of leftists.
Hosts:
John Yoo'Lucretia'Steve Hayward
Organization
Ricochet

March 2022

3 Whisky Happy Hour
3 Whisky Happy Hour

Phil Magness on the Latest 1619 Project Absurdity

It would be easier at this point to start a list that names of everything that is not caused or tainted by racism, because it is becoming absurd. The latest from Nikole Hannah-Jones is that tipping is a legacy of slavery. No, she really said this, on Twitter last week: This brought a hearty guffaw from economic historian Phil Magness, who has more than once prompted Hannah-Jones to take down a silly tweet, as she did again in this instance. (Though not before attacking Magness, who clearly lives rent-free in her head.) But there's more to this story than Hannah-Jones going off on a flight of malicious fancy. Phil wrote: It’s not the first time that the 1619 Project has made bizarre claims that try to connect mundane aspects of everyday life to slavery. When investigating Hannah-Jones’s theory of tipping however, I soon discovered that claims linking the practice to slavery have recently become a trendy talking point of the economic far-left. I caught up with Phil over the weekend in Dallas and decided to tape a quick interview with him about this fracas, but also to catch up on his work contesting the claims of income inequality that have made Thomas Piketty and his collaborators (Saez and Zucman) rich men, and some updates on the attacks on the Great Barrington Declaration that the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER, where Phil is a fellow) produced early in the COVID cycle.
Host:
Steve Hayward
Organization
Ricochet