Somewhere in the last forty years, quantification stopped being one tool of economic governance among others and became the whole operating system. Inside the firm, shareholder value crowded out almost every other account of what a company was supposed to be for. In macroeconomic debate, GDP figures got promoted from diagnostic instrument to final verdict on whether things were going well (never mind what was happening to the people who couldn't afford the rent). Public agencies and universities were quietly retooled around audit regimes and key performance indicators imported from the private sector. The labor process itself now runs through dashboards that watch workers in real time and convert what they do into figures someone in a different building can rank against last quarter's. Whatever the explicit politics of the moment, almost every institution we pass through has been redesigned to produce numbers, and to be evaluated and disciplined by them.

Goodhart's Law, the 1975 observation by economist Charles Goodhart that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," was originally a narrow point about central banks losing their grip on whatever indicator they picked to control. In the half-century since, it has quietly become a more acute diagnostic of late-capitalist life. If our institutions are now built to hit numbers, regardless of whether they're still doing the things those numbers were supposed to track, what exactly are those institutions for anymore? Who benefits from rule by metric, and who gets to decide which metric counts? Once the dashboard has been built into the architecture of political economy itself, what would it even look like to push back against it?

Grab a drink and join us as we ask what our institutions were supposed to be for, before they all became scoreboards.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/goodhartslaw

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BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

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So what exactly is an asshole? Is it a settled character type, or just a way of behaving that anyone might fall into on a bad day? Why does asshole behavior provoke us as it does, and why does it seem so much harder to resist now than it once was? If assholes are produced by social conditions (and they appear to be), what conditions produce them, and which ones might produce fewer?

This episode takes Aaron James's 2012 bestseller, Assholes: A Theory, as its central provocation. James defines the asshole as someone (almost always a man) who "systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people." The HBS co-hosts work with this definition and push on it where it falls short. Bob makes the case that contemporary capitalism, supercharged by the compare-and-contrast machinery of social media, has transfigured a vice into a virtue: in our current moment, assholery is increasingly mistaken for strength. Jen draws on Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre to ask what social conditions cultivate the asshole disposition. And Leigh asks what we can do, practically, in our classrooms and in our daily encounters, to make environments less hospitable to assholes in the first place.

Grab a drink and join us as we try to figure out what makes an asshole an asshole — and what, if anything, can be done about the apparent abundance of them in our current moment.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/aholes

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SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!

What happens to a skill when you stop needing it? In this episode, we're talking about the quiet, subtle erosion that happens when technology simply takes over a task and the human capacity for it begins, almost imperceptibly, to fade. This is de-skilling: a phenomenon with deep roots in the history of labor and capitalism, newly urgent in an age of GPS, generative AI, and algorithmic everything.

The questions de-skilling raises run deeper than nostalgia for shop class or handwriting. What exactly is a skill — and is there a meaningful difference between a skill and an ability? What do we lose, as individuals and as a society, when skills atrophy not through disuse but because the infrastructure for practicing and valuing them has quietly disappeared? And when the skills at risk are not just practical ones but moral ones — the capacity for judgment, for ethical perception, for democratic reasoning — what then?

Our co-hosts trace the concept from Harry Braverman's Marxist critique of industrial labor through Aristotle's account of practical wisdom, Matthew Crawford's defense of manual knowledge, and Shannon Vallor's argument about moral de-skilling in the age of new technology. They take on education, writing, ChatGPT, and the rather uncomfortable possibility that Plato's critique of writing may be the oldest entry in the de-skilling literature.

Grab a drink and join us as we exercise a few skills that may themselves be at risk: long-form attention, nuanced argument, and the stubborn human habit of thinking things through.

Full episode notes available at this link:
https://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/de-skilling

---------------------
SUBSCRIBE to the podcast now to automatically download new episodes!
SUPPORT Hotel Bar Sessions podcast on Patreon here! (Or by contributing one-time donations here!)
BOOKMARK the Hotel Bar Sessions website here for detailed show notes and reading lists, and contact any of our co-hosts here.

Hotel Bar Sessions is also on Facebook, YouTube, BlueSky, Instagram, and TikTok. Like, follow, share, duet, whatever... just make sure your friends know about us!