The Talk Policy to Me team is back for Season 3! This season, our three hosts from last year (Spencer, Reem, and Sarah) are joined by two new hosts, Colleen and Khalid. Host Spencer Bowen (MPP 2020) leads a conversation with the team about how policies we take for granted were once policy choices. Hear from all five hosts as to what “status quo” policies they can’t let go of.  

Transcript

Spencer: [00:00:10] Welcome to Talk Policy To Me. No one's ever accused public policy of being too sexy. It's complicated and tough to unpack. This podcast flips the script and introduces you to people and stories that show that policy is personal, compelling, and really powerful. We want to dig into complex issues, explore solutions, and understand what that means for people like you and me. Last year we talked a lot of policy from transportation and electric scooters.

Speaker 1: [00:00:43] It's shaking something that is really deep in people's cores, which is car culture. There's a strong desire for people to be operating in personal vehicles and to not share the space with other types of users.

Spencer: [00:00:58] To our social safety net and universal basic income.

Speaker 2: [00:01:01] The devil's in the details. The real question is how would this be implemented? We think that this is the biggest unanswered question about universal basic income.

Spencer: [00:01:12] To California's housing crisis.

Speaker 3: [00:01:14] Where rental housing is, where affordable renting housing is. What does that mean for whether you can live close to a school or a job?

Spencer: [00:01:21] This season, we're back with new stories, new voices and the same goal, talking about how public policy shapes people's lives. I'm Spencer Bowen.

Sarah: [00:01:32] I'm Sarah Edwards.

Reem: [00:01:34] I'm Reem Rayef.

Khalid: [00:01:35] I'm Khalid Khaldi.

Colleen: [00:01:37] I'm Colleen Pulawski.

Everyone: [00:01:39] And this is Talk Policy To Me.

Spencer: [00:01:41] What do we think is normal? Why do we say that's just the way it is? We assume so much is unchangeable, immovable, certain. And sometimes that's true. But we shape a lot of it. The structures and programs that make up our society were once decisions and value judgments. They were once public policy choices. Policy choices make change. These changes can be big and sweeping or small and modest, but choices shaped the communities we live in and define what we call normal. Part of why we study public policy and why we do this podcast is to remind us that these are still choices, not rules carved in stone. The status quo is a policy choice. After a summer away from the Goldman School and from talk policy to me, I asked my co-hosts, what's the policy that became the status quo that you're passionate about and why does it get you so fired up? One of our new co-hosts, Khalid, talked about how we value teaching in America.

Khalid: [00:02:54] Why do we undervalue teachers? We we definitely underpay them. There's so many jobs that we be compensated more highly than public school teachers. And they definitely don't have the same they don't contribute the same value to society. So, yeah, we undervalue them economically. But I think in our culture too, we don't appreciate them.

Spencer: [00:03:15] Sarah brought up how we calculate who is in poverty in the United States.

Sarah: [00:03:20] Our federal poverty line is based on this idea that your food budget is supposed to be a third of your total budget, like under LBJ in the sixties, and that's what we're still using today. The metric that we use to designate who gets certain services and who like quote unquote, has too much money to need services is based on a completely outdated picture.

Spencer: [00:03:42] Another new co-host, Colleen, talked about the decision to provide some stuff publicly like pools.

Colleen: [00:03:49] One day, someone just decided that we have public swimming pools and government will pay for it. And it really got me on this obsession with public option goods and just thinking about public parks and libraries and swimming pools and how these have become totally intertwined in our everyday lives. And we don't think about the fact that at some point government decided we can pay for these things.

Spencer: [00:04:15] Reem discussed roads and the choices we make about who the roads are for.

Khalid: [00:04:20] How did the street come to be for cars? Why do we now kind of build our cities around cars and making it accessible for cars to move through them quickly? And we time our traffic lights so that it's easy for cars to move quickly and we cut our sidewalks such that cars can make quick and easy turns. It's not natural or obvious that the street should be just for cars. It could and used to be just for pedestrians and then for horses. And then for carriages.

Spencer: [00:04:53] If this trailer got you excited, then this is the podcast for you. I'm Spencer Bowen. Check back soon for brand new episodes this season on Talk Policy To Me.