This week the Cato Institute features the best of Cato Daily Podcasts previously aired episodes.

Enjoy the reruns.

Welcome today is Friday the first day in June.

I'm Anastasia Yuglova 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-Linsy shared

the podium at Cato earlier this week.

Brooks was a commentator at the forum for Brink Lindsay'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 like the old great non-fiction books of the 1950s.

It's like a big subject, a lot of information you don't know, and it's 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-Linsie'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

...