Podcast: Depolarizing America

In tough economic times, governments often reach for the easiest kind of progress: a new name on an old sign. Wage stagnation, inflation, crumbling roads, and rising rents are hard problems that take years and real money to fix. Renaming a street, a lake, or a strait is not. It costs a fraction as much and lets officials point to something they “did.” A new name never fixes a pothole or lowers a grocery bill. This year offered an unusually rich catalogue of the habit, reaching from a city council in Texas to a wartime waterway in the Persian Gulf.

A Concept Borrowed From the Cremation Ground

Indian philosophy has an old idea called shmashana vairagya, describing the sudden clarity a person feels standing at a cremation ground, when ordinary ambitions look small. The feeling fades once the mourner goes home. Public policy has its own version of this cycle. In the raw hours after a tragedy, a scandal, or a surge of national feeling, officials decide, sometimes within a single social media post, what belongs on a map or a sign forever. The emotion passes in hours. The bill, when there is one, stays for years.