Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

Kay Heimowitz. She's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a longtime contributing editor of

City Journal, and the author most recently of the essay, Dr. Biden's lesson. This is a feature in the

summer print edition of the quarterly magazine, and you can find it online.

Kay, thanks as always for joining us on 10 blocks.

And as always, happy to be here.

Your story begins with the controversy ignited by Wall Street Journal column by Joseph Epstein about First Lady

Jill Biden's education degree. This was one of those controversies that have been, you

know, flaring up every few days. This was some months ago. Biden holds a doctorate in education, and she prefers to go by Dr. Biden.

Joseph Epstein wrote this column, poking fun at that nomenclature, arguing that only those

holding a medical degree should insist on being called doctor. This struck a nerve, as I mentioned, lots of outrage ensued.

But while that was, you know, just another one of these ephemeral media freakouts, you

wrote in your essay that was actually a revealing controversy, that as you write,

the first lady's education degree epitomizes today's rampant

degree inflation and meritocratic jockeying. That's a pretty powerful statement. Can you explain

what you mean by it? And, you know, try to give listeners a short version of the argument.

So the argument is that, well, to start with Dr. Biden, that she already had two master's degrees

before she got her ED, which is sort of a doctorate, a PhD in education.

And we can get to the question of ed schools if we want later.

But what was striking to me was that nobody was questioning whether these degrees were useful, whether they really

signified any expertise at all. Yet here she was, at somebody that we were supposed to admire

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