Very Serious with Josh Barro

Inflation is the highest it’s been in decades. Why? Economist Jason Furman talks with Josh Barro about where inflation comes from, and what we've misunderstood about it in the past. Fixes to the supply chain or to COVID aren’t likely to do much about it, and Jason tells us why. Plus: what the Federal Reserve can and should do to tame inflation, and whether Congress and the Biden administration can jump in to ease economic pain, and what President Biden’s picks for the Fed are likely to do on inflation, banking and climate in years to come.

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Peter Suderman is back by popular demand to talk about cocktails for fall. We talk about Negroni variations, the right sour drinks for sweater weather, best practices for hot and room-temperature cocktails (yes, that's a thing), and Peter's recipe for homemade Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioneds that contain real pumpkin.
One note: This is the first episode of the Very Serious podcast that has a longer, premium version for paying subscribers to Very Serious. If you're already a paying subscriber, you can get that longer episode in any podcast player except Spotify. You'll only have to set this up once: go to joshbarro.com/account, click on the option to set up your podcast player, and you'll be good to go for this and any future premium shows. And if you're not a premium subscriber, you can become one by going to joshbarro.com.

Cheers!

Dear readers,

I know, I said yesterday that today’s cocktail post was only going to be for paying subscribers. But this is the first edition of the podcast where we’re actually pushing the audio through Substack’s pipes. We’re still kicking the tires on that system — and for boring technical reasons, we couldn’t find a good way to paywall the text while sending the audio to everyone who subscribes to the podcast through players like Spotify. We’re working on it! But in the meantime, that means you all get to read about cocktails. How bad could that be?

It’s almost summer. Well, it’s not almost summer, but it’s starting to feel like it might be about to be almost summer. It got up to 63° on Fire Island last Friday, which isn’t beach weather, but it’s good enough weather to write the newsletter out on the deck. And it’s going to keep getting warmer.

One of the things that makes me excited for summer is that summer cocktails are starting to make sense again.

I love sour drinks. A “sour” is any cocktail containing spirits, citrus juice, and a sweetener. The most popular sour is the margarita, but the most basic one is the daiquiri: two parts light rum, one part simple syrup, one part fresh-squeezed lime juice, shaken with ice and strained into a coupe glass. Every other sour you might drink, including a margarita, is just a variation on the daiquiri — change up the base spirit, include a liqueur as part of the sweetening, use lemon instead of lime, add bitters or an egg white; the possibilities are extensive.

But these drinks make the most sense in the summer — they’re cool, sweet drinks for a hot day. There’s a reason so many of these drinks are served at resort bars in the Caribbean and Hawaii. They feel like they belong near the beach. That said, some sours are beachier than others.

On this week’s Very Serious podcast, we did something a little different: I invited Peter Suderman, author of the Cocktails With Suderman newsletter on Substack, to talk with me about cocktails — how to approach them as an amateur at home and make them especially delicious, without doing anything extremely fussy or expensive. And Peter’s view is there’s a season within a season: late spring is for gin sours, with the rum drinks to come out later, when it’s hotter.

My favorite sour is the mai tai — light rum, golden rum, orange curaçao, orgeat (almond syrup), and lime juice, shaken, strained, and served over ice, ideally garnished with an orchid blossom. I’ve talked before about how partial I am to Hawaii, where Zach and I went on our honeymoon, and part of why I love a mai tai is it reminds me of being there. But it’s also a beautiful, balanced drink, with surprisingly complex flavors — with a high quality orgeat and orange liqueur, you can really taste those almond and orange notes punching through the otherwise-overpowering lime and rum.

But I also think Peter is right that drinks like mai tais are not quite yet in season. I wouldn’t generally serve one in April, nor would I serve one at any time of year as an aperitif. Mai tais are for the afternoon. If I want to greet guests at dinner with a sour, I’m more likely to reach for an aviation: A gin sour made with lemon juice, maraschino liqueur, and creme de violette.

Peter wrote recently about the aviation. It’s one of the great gimmick drinks, because it’s purple on account of the creme de violette, and yet it actually tastes good. I personally like the drink’s astringency — when you use the classic recipe, its balance is less sweet and more sour compared to, say, a margarita — but Peter advises to balance the drink out with a little extra sweetness from honey syrup, and a few drops of saline solution. Yes, saline solution: You salt your food, so why wouldn’t you salt your cocktails? Salt is a flavor enha...

Questions about identifying and matching talent underlie a lot of political and economic discussions in our society. Are we admitting the right people to universities? Giving them the right training? Preventing labor market discrimination? Setting policies around work and family that make it possible for people (especially mothers of young children) to do the jobs that align with their talents? Doing better on all these measures can mean not just fuller lives and better organizations but stronger economic growth. So this week, Josh spoke with economist Tyler Cowen, co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog and co-author with Daniel Gross of a new book called Talent: How To Identify Energizers, Creatives, And Winners Around The World. Tyler has thoughts about how to better identify talent that might scramble your preconceptions, given his libertarian politics. One of his arguments is that we are over-weighting both IQ and grades in assessing talent: these matter (as do the underlying traits they measure, such as conscientiousness) but not as much as you might think. So what does matter? Listen to find out.

Dear readers,

Due to the holiday weekend, this week’s schedule for Very Serious is out of order. The podcast is out today, there will be a regular issue tomorrow, and a special Fire Island edition of the Mayonnaise Clinic will be coming on Friday.

One striking fact about three-term New York mayor Ed Koch’s life in the closet — the subject of a recent New York Times feature — is that he stayed in the closet long after he could plausibly claim that he needed to.

An openly gay man would not have been elected mayor of New York City in 1977; once in office, he would have had good reason to fear he would not have been re-elected had he come out. Politicians simply didn't do that at the time. But in retirement, Koch had no reputation to protect from the knowledge that he was gay. In fact, coming out probably would have earned him sympathetic news coverage and softened his image at a time when his record as mayor was often criticized for reasons related to race relations and the AIDS crisis — including the specific allegation that he shied away from leadership on AIDS for fear that association with a “gay issue” would fan the (true) rumors that he was gay.

One theory the Times piece considers is that, after denying his sexuality for so many years in the face of detractors like Larry Kramer who wanted him outed, Koch felt coming out would be tantamount to letting them win. But if you lie about your sexuality long enough, it can simply become hard to tell the truth. A lot of people stay in the closet for expediency, but a lot of people stay there because of their own shame, and it’s sad.

And it’s sad how common the need to hide was until not very long ago.

This week’s episode of the Very Serious podcast is an interview with James Kirchick, author of the new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which chronicles the powerful roles that gays (mostly gay men) played in our federal government from World War II through the Reagan administration. Just because gays couldn’t announce themselves didn't mean they weren't around — in fact, some of them arguably sublimated their sexual desires into drive that propelled them to the heights they achieved in American government.

Jamie’s book describes the creation of the modern closet as an artifact of World War II, the Cold War, and the security state. Gays had long been considered disgusting, but with world war they came to be considered security threats, at risk of blackmail over their appalling secrets. As a concept, that this would be a risk makes intuitive sense, though Jamie notes the surprising difficulty American officials had when asked to identify any specific cases where gays in government were blackmailed over their sexual orientation. And besides, whatever security risk homosexuals posed was not really a product of their sexual orientation itself, but of the government’s and society’s reaction to their sexual orientation — if you let people freely admit they are gay, then there’s no shameful secret to threaten anyone over. Nonetheless, gays were vilified, investigated, and until 1995, prohibited from holding security clearances.

Through the decades covered in Jamie’s book, allegations of homosexuality were wielded as political weapons — true allegations and also false ones. Jack Kemp, for example, was not gay, and he was definitely not part of a right-wing gay cabal that controlled Ronald Reagan. But that didn’t stop a cadre of Republican officials — many of them moderates — from pushing that fantastical narrative to reporters in an effort to block Reagan's nomination in 1980. That madcap story is the subject of an excerpt from Jamie’s book that you can read in Politico Magazine.

The 1980s would bring in the AIDS crisis, and an aloof response to it from the Reagans, despite Nancy Reagan’s coterie of gays, ranging from her hairdresser to Merv Griffin. The AIDS crisis would also lead to the waning of the political closet as it had been established in the 1940s, with gay political figures forced out of it, often in death. The era also brought the first two openly gay congressmen who sought and atta...