55 Voices for Democracy – The Podcast - Stephanie Kelton on Democracy and the Deficit Myth

Stephanie Kelton on Democracy and the Deficit Myth

09/16/21 • 24 min

Professor Stephanie Kelton explains how deficits can strengthen economies and be healthy for democracies. She argues that there are no budgetary constraints on government spending and makes the case for challenging our view of public debt. Stephanie Kelton is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and a former Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. She was named by POLITICO as one of the 50 people most influencing the policy debate in America. Dr. Stephanie Kelton advises policymakers and consults with investment banks, and portfolio managers across the globe. She is a regular commentator on national radio and broadcast television. Her highly-anticipated book, The Deficit Myth, became an instant New York Times bestseller.

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Susan Bernofsky on Translation and the Plurality of Language

Susan Bernofsky's new translation of Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain" is eagerly awaited. In conversation with Tom Zoellner, Bernofsky talks about Thomas Mann's multiculturalism and the challenges of translating between languages and cultures. In this episode, the renowned translator also shares her personal experiences as a Jewish American in Europe and talks about the rise of the global, increasingly plural English language. Susan Bernofsky is the prizewinning translator of seven works of fiction by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as novels and poetry by Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Uljana Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, and others. Her biography of Walser, "Clairvoyant of the Small", appeared in 2021. A Guggenheim, Cullman, and Berlin Prize fellow, she teaches literary translation at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

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Samuel Moyn on the idea of humane wars

In this episode, legal historian Samuel Moyn critically reflects on the pursuit of 'humane wars.' "We fight war crimes, but we have forgotten the crime of war," Moyn says. Thus, he says, the wars of recent decades have led to a fixation on the means of war, rather than a discussion of how to end them sustainably. Samuel Moyn is professor of law at Yale Law School and professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of "Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World" and "Humane. How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.“