Shaky Ground: Exploring the Global Turbulence of 2016

Coming up in today’s podcast:

• The world is going through a turbulent period. Are we’re currently experiencing an unstoppable shift in power from the West back to the East? Peter Frankopan, historian at Oxford University and author of “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World,” weighs in.

• Is rising inequality and the death of American manufacturing just an effect of an increasingly globalized world economy? The Takeaway checks in with Matthew McManus, a 26-year-old voter in West Virginia’s “Working Class Country,” and Branko Milanovic, an economist at the City University of New York and author of “Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization” and “The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality.”

• Why has 2016 produced an environment of extreme racial anxiety? The Takeaway speaks with Nell Irvin Painter, who argues that the rise of Donald Trump and racist ideology is a backlash to the presidency of Barack Obama.

• Selina Leem is just 19-years-old and is watching her home quietly disappear. She lives in The Marshall Islands, a place that will soon be lost to climate change. She joins The Takeaway to explain how she is saying goodbye. 

• Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at the Legatum Institute in London and the author of “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” argues that we are now living in a “post-fact” environment, where people create their own narratives, no matter what the reality of any given situation might be.

• How are all of these factors affecting American democracy, and what does the 2016 election say about where we are in terms of longterm sustainable governance? Jenny Mansbridge, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of “Beyond Adversary Democracy,” weighs in.