Welcome today is Friday the first day in June. I'm Anastasia Glova and we've got a special

podcast for you today in two parts. New York Times columnist David Brooks and Cato's Vice President

for Research Brink Lindsay shared the podium at Cato earlier this week.

Brooks was a commentator at the forum for Brink-Linsy's new book, The Age of Abundance,

how prosperity transformed America's politics and culture. In today's podcast both commentators will have a chance to share

their views so in the first part David Brooks puts the book in the context of

his own political outlook and explains where his views diverge from Brinks.

The second part is Brinks' answer to the issues that David Brooks raises.

First off, then, David Brooks.

Let's first just dispense with the praise if you have any for the book.

Okay it's easy to dispense with as I said up there it's it's like the old great

non-fiction books of the 1950s it's like a a big subject, a lot of information you don't know,

and it's a book of synthesis, which academics don't do enough of. And so what it does is it takes

you through the last 50 years of American history, not only culturally and economically, but also intellectually.

And you see how these big things sweep through the country.

And so he's describing this big cultural change, and then it naturally gets you thinking about what

sort of cultural change are we in the middle of. Now how does your own book Bobos in Paradise

fit into the thesis in Brink-Limsy's book? There are a lot of commonalities, and the main one is that we both see this culture war that

occurred between, if you want to put it this way, hippies and evangelicals.

And we both think that culture was no longer the defining conflict. We think most

people have reached a synthesis where they take some of the ideas from the 60s and

some of the ideas from the 80s and they merge them together.

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