Ones and Tooze - Podcast Rankings and reviews

Your podcasts are always enlightening, but the one on August 25, 2023 was outstanding, especially the analysis of the economic situation in Japan and Britain. You go a long ways towards making economics understandable and useful to those of us that never took an economics class. Thank you.

Several months ago I discovered Adam Tooze’s Chartbook on Substack and I immediately subscribed and dug in. The depth of information in it is far beyond what you can often find scanning through publications on your own, which is why I find it so valuable. So, the podcast is like dessert for me. It accompanies the Chartbook and consolidates the weekly information into what feels like a 45 minute accessible dissertation.

Recent episode on Fed Jackson Hole meeting and teacher pay reflects the best and worst of the podcast. Wonderful explanation of how the Fed meeting at Jackson Hole originated and how it became so important. Wonderful, insightful discussion that you cannot find elsewhere.

Pretty poor discussion on US teacher pay and unions as it failed to consider/discuss that pay is not based on performance just tenure and the inability to control overall costs where increases in education funding often end up increasing administrative employees rather than actual teachers. They took a very complicated situation and just took a very progressive sound bite position.

Probably my favorite liberal econ or politics pod. Adam is brilliant and eloquent on a huge variety of topics, and intellectual renaissance man. Credit to FP for sponsoring such a proudly Keynesian project, though I do find the Amazon Ring ads problematic (that is a malevolent product).

While typically a very helpful and informative podcast, Adam Tooze didn’t bring his usual rigor to the recent episode on the Red Sea. Instead, he was more interested in turning the Houthis into a sympathetic character of anti imperial resistance in service of his broader point on American or western power.

One can acknowledge the complicated, nuanced and often unsavory reality of US influence in the Middle East while not blindly accepting the political rhetoric of a brutal, cruel group like the Houthis. As someone that has enjoyed all of Tooze’s written work and listened to Ones and Tooze for years now, this came across as unprofessional and unfortunate.

Enjoy the economic and historic topics, not much his politics. It’s so obvious that he has pet peeves. But it gets worse when his biases lead him to pick and choose which facts to present to his readers and listeners. One example is his view on Columbia student protest. In this podcast, he criticizes Columbia and police for citing safety reasons, yet omitting the major escalation where protestors entering and occupying an academic building (where he taught a class earlier that day, per his newsletter).