“The Fifty-Year Project: How a Small Elite Rewrote America”
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Title: Evil Geniuses
Author: Kurt Andersen
Category: Politics & Current Affairs
What if the last fifty years of American life weren't an accident, but a project — designed, funded, and executed on purpose? Sam and Sophie open Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen with exactly that question, and it reframes the whole conversation.
The episode walks through Andersen's fifty-year timeline: the 1945-1975 anomaly when the wealth gap was narrowest, the three pillars that held it up (unions, high marginal tax rates, regulation), and the 1971 Lewis Powell memo that became the blueprint. From there it traces the Koch and Scaife-funded think tanks, the law-and-economics programs, the CEO pay ratio going from 20-to-1 to over 300-to-1, the co-opting of counterculture into consumerism, and Citizens United as the crowning achievement.
If you've ever felt like the rules were written by someone else, this episode names who wrote them and how. The takeaway: none of this was inevitable, which is the most hopeful thing in the book.
Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen. For the full written summary you can read or listen to in any language, plus infographics on many titles, head to 7minutebooks.com/app — over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles, unlimited access from $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.
Chapters
00:00The 1945-1975 Anomaly02:11The Powell Memo Blueprint02:52Think Tanks And The Long Game03:23Numbers: Inequality By Design04:57Co-Opting Counterculture Into Consumption08:04A New New Deal And Cultural Change
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