The John Batchelor Show

Thursday 25 November 2021

Air Date: 
November 25, 2021

CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor
Thanksgiving
 
 
First Hour 
William Damon #UNBOUND (family; golf): The complete, forty-minute interview. July 3, 2021.
A Round of Golf with My Father, by William Damon.
 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Round-Golf-Father-Psychology-Exploring/dp/1599475634

Viewing our past through the eye of maturity can reveal insights that our younger selves could not see. Lessons that eluded us become apparent. Encounters that once felt like misfortunes now become understood as valued parts of who we are. We realize what we’ve learned and what we have to teach. And we’re encouraged to chart a future that is rich with purpose. 
In A Round of Golf with My Father, William Damon introduces us to the “life review.” This is a process of looking with clarity and curiosity at the paths we’ve traveled, examining our pasts in a frank yet positive manner, and using what we’ve learned to write purposeful next chapters for our lives.
 
 
Second Hour 
Nicholas Wapshott @NWapshott #UNBOUND: The complete, forty-minute interview, July 24, 2016.
Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market, by Nicholas Wapshott
https://www.amazon.com/Samuelson-Friedman-Battle-Over-Market-ebook/dp/B08589Z7M9/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Nicholas+Wapshott+%2B+samuelson&qid=1627690920&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics.
In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed “monetarism” and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy.
In Samuelson Friedman, the author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles.
Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treatises—if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today.
In Wapshott’s nimble hands, Samuelson’s and Friedman’s decades-long argument over how—or whether—to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.
 
 
Third and Fourth Hours 
Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 – March 30, 2021. Hardcover.
A panoramic history of the savage combat on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 that came to define modern warfare.
The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It has persisted in our collective memory as a tragic waste of human life and a symbol of the horrors of industrialized warfare.