Bernie Sanders

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pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

OCTOBER 1: Fundraising numbers come out and, astonishingly, Bernie is outpacing Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign fundraising. OCTOBER 2: Becky gets a job on the campaign as a senior advisor. OCTOBER 13: The first Democratic primary debate is held, with over 4,000 Bernie Sanders debate watch parties launched by the distributed organizing team. OCTOBER 20: Zack and Corbin pilot an early version of barnstorm meetings in Tennessee. OCTOBER 28: The national student town hall livestream is held with Bernie Sanders and members of College Students for Bernie Sanders. NOVEMBER: Zack and Becky barnstorm across Colorado and meet volunteers who are already canvassing for the March 1, 2016, caucus without access to the VAN.

An alternate title would appropriately be: How to Make the Impossible, Possible. Prepare to be inspired.” —Assemblywoman Lucy Flores “For populists who want to continue Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and win radical change, this is a book for you. In their Rules for Revolutionaries, Becky Bond and Zack Exley lay down a new marker for what mass volunteer organizing makes possible by combining emerging consumer technology and radical trust with some tried and true ‘old organizing’ tactics.” —Jim Hightower, author of Swim Against the Current “Bernie Sanders’s presidential run was a spectacular wake-up call, revealing the huge number of Americans willing to fight for radical change.

That was the subject line of the first email I wrote back in the fall of 2015 to the rapidly growing list of Bernie Sanders supporters. It was 6:00 a.m., and Zack and I were occupying the lobby of a Comfort Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. While brilliant field veterans Robert Becker and Julia Barnes were building incredible traditional campaigns on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, Zack and I found ourselves on a team of go-for-broke irregulars charged with organizing what was then a vast outpost of the Bernie Sanders campaign for president. It was our task to help organize supporters in all the states that would not be staffed until much later in the primary campaign cycle.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

CHAPTER 12: HOUSE OF GLASS, 2016 never for an election: Charlotte Alter, “Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise,” TIME, March 21, 2019, time.com/longform/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-profile/. among young voters in Iowa: Chris Cillizza, “Bernie Sanders Crushed Hillary Clinton by 70 Points Among Young Voters in Iowa,” The Washington Post, February 2, 2016, washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/02/bernie-sanders-crushed-hillary-clinton-by-70-points-among-young-people-in-iowa-but/. 78 percent of first-time voters: Eric Bradner and Dan Merica, “Young Voters Abandon Hillary Clinton for Bernie Sanders,” CNN, February 10, 2016, cnn.com/2016/02/10/politics/hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-primary/index.html. underwater by more than twenty points: Frank Newport, “Sanders, the Oldest Candidate, Looks Best to Young Americans,” Gallup, April 8, 2016, news.gallup.com/poll/190571/sanders-oldest-candidate-looks-best-young-americans.aspx.

Even at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, the all-women Wellesley College, the college kids were feeling the Bern. He was the most popular politician in America among the under-thirty set. By March, Bernie Sanders had won more young voters than Trump and Clinton combined. In April, shortly before the New York primary, Alexandria and Maria waited in lines snaking around the block to get into a Bernie Sanders rally in Washington Square Park. People were packed into the park, overflowing onto the streets, and a whiff of marijuana hung in the air. The mood was electrifying. Maria remembers it as one of the first moments when she thought something like a progressive revolution could really happen, and she and Alexandria worked even harder for Bernie than they had before.

How would they get health insurance when so many of the jobs they could get didn’t offer employer-sponsored plans? How would they afford college when the government no longer subsidized higher education the way it once did? Those were exactly the questions Bernie Sanders wanted to answer. * * * Millennials had been socialist-curious for a while, but Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign was an ideological turning point for many left-leaning young people. Sanders offered universal solutions that seemed to match the scope of the problems young people faced. Health care is too expensive? Medicare for All.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

For the present generation, the bailout of the crooks would stand as the ultimate demonstration of the worthlessness of institutions, the nightmare knowledge that lurked behind every scam that was to come. What I describe in this volume is a vast panorama of such scams—a republic of rip-offs. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal reform figure of our time, likes to say that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” but in truth we could say that about many of the designated protectors of our health and well-being. Pharmaceutical companies, we learned, jack up prices for no reason other than because they can, because it is their federally guaranteed right to do so.

After losing to Donald Trump, she blamed the news media in part for her loss. She did this even though the editorial boards of the country’s largest newspapers endorsed her over Trump by an unprecedented ratio of fifty-seven to two. But it was the news media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that best revealed the peculiar politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers. To refresh your memory, the Vermont senator is an independent who likes to call himself a democratic socialist.

In March, the Times was caught making a number of postpublication tweaks to a news story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa headline: “Hillary Clinton Made History, but Bernie Sanders Stubbornly Ignored It.” I decided to approach this question by examining the opinion pages of the Washington Post, the conscience of the nation’s political class and one of America’s few remaining first-rate news organizations. The Post’s investigative and beat reporting are some of the best in the world.


pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

As Reason magazine pointed out: Robby Soave, “Former Clinton Campaign Staffer Accuses Bernie Sanders of Failing to Mention Race, Gender in Speech That Explicitly Mentioned Race, Gender,” Reason, March 4, 2019, https://reason.com/2019/03/04/bernie-sanders-zerlina-maxwell-race-gend/. But it is the case that: See, for one: Blair L. M. Kelley, “Biden Has Black Voters’ Support Over Sanders, and It’s Not Because They’re Moderates,” NBC News, March 5, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/biden-has-black-voters-support-over-sanders-it-s-not-ncna1150576. “In every one of the 27 primaries”: John Hudak, “Why Bernie Sanders Vastly Underperformed in the 2020 Primary,” Brookings, March 20, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/03/20/why-bernie-sanders-vastly-underperformed-in-the-2020-primary/.

No doubt influenced by the country’s: Sasha Pezenik, “2020 Democratic Candidates Move to the Left, Become More Progressive as Climate Change Emerges as Campaign Issue,” ABC News, June 7, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2020-democratic-candidates-move-left-progressive-climate-change/story?id=63489543. “may make it difficult for”: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucuses, Strengthening His Primary Lead,” New York Times, February 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/us/politics/bernie-sanders-nevada-caucus.html. It was widely reported: Carol E. Lee, Kristen Welker, Josh Lederman, and Amanda Golden, “Looking for Obama’s Hidden Hand in Candidates Coalescing around Biden,” NBC News, March 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/looking-obama-s-hidden-hand-candidate-coalescing-around-biden-n1147471. 2: BPMCLM: BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE INEVITABILITY OF ELITE CAPTURE The average white American: Ember Smith, Ariel Gelrud Shiro, Christopher Pulliam, and Richard V.

Donald Trump, one of the most controversial presidents in American history, faced an emboldened progressive movement and dissent within the ranks of the party and political ideology he ostensibly led. His constant gaffes and imbroglios, including his widely criticized handling of the pandemic, helped chip away at whatever legitimacy he held as a popular-vote loser who had been elected under a cloud of controversy in 2016. Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 had energized a new generation of socialist activists, such as those in the Democratic Socialists of America, and early in 2020 it appeared that Sanders’s return primary candidacy was genuinely viable. The country was simmering. On May 25, that simmer was brought to a boil. A forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd was confronted by Minneapolis police after a store clerk accused him of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.


pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

Chapter One The Logic of American Populism: From the People’s Party to George Wallace Chapter Two Neoliberalism and Its Enemies: Perot, Buchanan, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street Chapter Three The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Chapter Four The Rise of European Populism Chapter Five The Limits of Leftwing Populism: Syriza and Podemos Chapter Six Rightwing Populism on the March in Northern Europe Conclusion The Past and Future of Populism Acknowledgments Further Reading Notes What Is Populism, and Why Is It Important? Populist parties and candidates are on the move in the United States and Europe. Donald Trump has won the Republican nomination; Bernie Sanders came in a very strong second to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

In the 2012 election, Obama borrowed from Occupy Wall Street’s rhetoric to pillory Republican Mitt Romney. And Occupy’s radicalism would recur in more organized form—when a Vermont senator would decide to run for president in 2016. The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders In an interview with the Washington Post in July 2015, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley dismissed Bernie Sanders as a “protest candidate.” “I’m not running for protest candidate, I’m running for President of the United States,” O’Malley declared. But after receiving 0.57 percent of the vote in the Iowa Caucus on February 2, O’Malley dropped out, while Sanders, who tied Clinton in Iowa, moved on to New Hampshire, where he won the primary easily and established himself as a viable contender for the nomination.

But his support is also proportional to age, and annual income rises with age, so the fact that Trump’s supporters have a slightly above average income probably reflects their age rather than their social class. 77“that are angry”: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-reince-priebus/. On Sanders’s life story, see John B. Judis, “The Bern Supremacy,” National Journal, November 19, 2015; Harry Jaffe, Why Bernie Sanders Matters, Regan Arts, 2015; Tim Murphy, “How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician,” Mother Jones, May 26, 2015; and Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “I’m Right and Everybody Else Is Wrong,” National Journal, June 2014. 79“nobody in the audience fainted”: Sanders, “Fragments of a Campaign Diary,” Seven Days, December 1, 1972. 79“Why Socialism”: Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review, May 1949. 79“I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks”: Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1981. 79“I’m a democratic socialist”: Sanders with Huck Gutman, Outsider in the House, Verso, 1997, p. 29. 80higher standard of living: Michael Powell, “Exceedingly Social, but Doesn’t Like Parties,” Washington Post, November 5, 2006. 80“two percent of the people”: Saint Albans Daily Messenger, December 23, 1971. 81“buy the United States Congress”: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC, April 15, 2015. 81“What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics:” Jonathan Chait, “What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics,” New York, January 27, 2016. 81“facile calls for revolution:” “It Was Better to Bern Out,” The New York Times, June 10, 2016. 82“eat out the heart of the republic”: George E.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style (New York: New Press, 2020). 61.Adam Geller, “Bernie Sanders’ Early Life in Brooklyn Taught Lessons, Some Tough,” Times of Israel, July 21, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-early-life-in-brooklyn-taught-lessons-some-tough/, accessed June 29, 2021; Jas Chana, “Straight Outta Brooklyn, by Way of Vermont: The Bernie Sanders Story,” Tablet, August 20, 2015, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bernie-sanders-story, accessed June 29, 2021; Mark Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html, accessed June 29, 2021. 62.Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator.” 63.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech, January 5, 2016, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-of-bernie-sanders-wall-street-and-economy-speech-2016-01-05, accessed July 19, 2021. See also Transcript of Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton Debate, March 6, 2016, New York Times, March 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/us/politics/transcript-democratic-presidential-debate.html, accessed May 31, 2021. 64.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech.” 65.Bernie Sanders, Iowa Caucuses Speech, February 2, 2021, https://www.vox.com/2016/2/2/10892752/bernie-sanders-iowa-speech, accessed June 28, 2021. 66.“Transcript of Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton Debate,” March 6, 2016; Bernie Sanders, Campaign Speech in Pittsburgh, WESA, March 30, 2016, http://wesa.fm/post/super-pacs-paid-speeches-living-wages-take-sanders-full-pittsburgh-stump, accessed June 28, 2021.

Seelye, “Warren Defeats Brown in Massachusetts Senate Contest,” New York Times, November 6, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-massachusetts-senate-scott-brown.html, accessed April 29, 2021; “Bill de Blasio Sworn in as New York Mayor,” The Guardian, January 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/01/bill-de-blasio-sworn-in-as-newyork-mayor, accessed April 29, 2021; Alan Rappeport, “Bernie Sanders, Long-Serving Independent, Enters Presidential Race as a Democrat,” New York Times, April 29, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-for-president.html, accessed April 29, 2021; Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin, eds., We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style (New York: New Press, 2020). 61.Adam Geller, “Bernie Sanders’ Early Life in Brooklyn Taught Lessons, Some Tough,” Times of Israel, July 21, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-early-life-in-brooklyn-taught-lessons-some-tough/, accessed June 29, 2021; Jas Chana, “Straight Outta Brooklyn, by Way of Vermont: The Bernie Sanders Story,” Tablet, August 20, 2015, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bernie-sanders-story, accessed June 29, 2021; Mark Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html, accessed June 29, 2021. 62.Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator.” 63.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech, January 5, 2016, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-of-bernie-sanders-wall-street-and-economy-speech-2016-01-05, accessed July 19, 2021.

., We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style (New York: New Press, 2020). 61.Adam Geller, “Bernie Sanders’ Early Life in Brooklyn Taught Lessons, Some Tough,” Times of Israel, July 21, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-early-life-in-brooklyn-taught-lessons-some-tough/, accessed June 29, 2021; Jas Chana, “Straight Outta Brooklyn, by Way of Vermont: The Bernie Sanders Story,” Tablet, August 20, 2015, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bernie-sanders-story, accessed June 29, 2021; Mark Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html, accessed June 29, 2021. 62.Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator.” 63.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech, January 5, 2016, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-of-bernie-sanders-wall-street-and-economy-speech-2016-01-05, accessed July 19, 2021.


pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). 14. Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), 23. 15. Michael Kruse, “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret,” Politico, July 9, 2015, politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927. 16. Sanders, Our Revolution, 50. 17. Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 227. 18. Symone D. Sanders, “It’s Time to End the Myth That Black Voters Don’t Like Bernie Sanders,” Washington Post, September 12, 2017, washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/12/its-time-to-end-the-myth-that-black-voters-dont-like-bernie-sanders. 19.

No, Jeremy Liked a Night in Eating Cold Beans with His Cat Called Harold Wilson, Corbyn’s First Wife Reveals,” Daily Mail, August 15, 2015. Chapter Nine: How We Win 1. Sam Gindin, “Building a Mass Socialist Party,” Jacobin, December 20, 2016, jacobinmag.com/2016/12/socialist-party-bernie-sanders-labor-capitalism. 2. Albert Hunt, “Warren Isn’t Sanders, and Vice Versa,” Bloomberg, April 29, 2018, bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-29/elizabeth-warren-and-bernie-sanders-aren-t-the-same. 3. “Americans’ Views of Immigration Marked by Widening Partisan, Generational Divides,” Pew Research, April 15, 2016. 4. “A Slim Majority of Americans Support a National Government-Run Health Care Program,” Washington Post, April 12, 2018, washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2018/04/12/National-Politics/Polling/release_517.xml?

But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change. In the second part of this book, I discuss the world today and why there are new opportunities for this better sort of socialism to take root. As we’ll see, Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and the United States’ Bernie Sanders have pursued a “class struggle” social democracy, unleashing popular energy that has revitalized the Left as a whole. I offer a tentative strategy for taking advantage of this unexpected second chance and explain why the working class can still be an agent of social transformation. Even in the bleakest chapters in this book, an urgent commitment should be clear: if there is a future for humanity—free of exploitation, climate holocaust, demagoguery, and the war of all against all—then we must place our faith in the ability of people to save themselves and each other.


pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

that examines whether the beliefs of prominent young socialists are actually consistent with the definition of socialism.15 In a speech at Georgetown University in the fall of 2015, self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders stated, “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” Um, hello? Not socialism. You’re spotting it, too, aren’t you? Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, wrote that either “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism, or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it,” and “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism.

Is this socialist movement going to work out better or worse for them than the Tea Party movement did for its participants? Kibbe: Some of my Ron Paul friends get upset about this, but I often compare Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul, because they have a similar persona. The one thing about their authenticity is they’ve been talking about the same stuff from day one. Ron Paul was always this cranky antiwar libertarian and Bernie Sanders was always this cranky socialist independent. Both were railing against both Democrats and Republicans. I think part of the attraction is their consistency, because people get tired of politicians who just say whatever you want to hear.

In an entire year’s worth of columns, only one discussed how socialism led to economic stagnation. Overwhelmingly, the Times treated us to columns about how socialism was merely an advanced form of liberalism, highlighting the allegedly green policies of “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors” and instructing us on “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” At about the same time, Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, made a strong run for the Democratic Party nomination for president, getting 43 percent of the vote in the 2016 Democratic primaries. How can so many Americans view socialism so favorably, when in practice it has led to misery and mass murder? The answer is that, like the New York Times, many people assume that socialism is merely a more generous form of liberalism.


pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Marine Le Pen: “manufacturing by slaves for selling to the unemployed” “France Election: Far-Right’s Le Pen Rails against Globalisation,” BBC.com, February 5, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/​news/​world-europe-38872335. Bernie Sanders: TPP “part of a global race to the bottom…” “Bernie Sanders on Trade,” Feel the Bern (website), accessed April 12, 2017, from http://feelthebern.org/​bernie-sanders-on-trade/. The Perils of Ceding the Populist Ground Approximately 90 million eligible voting-age Americans stayed home United States Elections Project, “2016 November General Election Turnout Rates,” ElectProject.org, http://www.electproject.org/​2016g.

National polls showed Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump than Clinton did Real Clear Politics, “Polls: 2016 Presidential Race,” RealClearPolitics.com, undated, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/​epolls/​2016/​president/​2016_presidential_race.html. Whose Revolution? Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The spectacle of a socialist candidate…” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders against Reparations?” Atlantic, January 19, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/​politics/​archive/​2016/​01/​bernie-sanders-reparations/​424602/. Michelle Alexander: “If progressives think they can win…” Michelle Alexander, interview with author. A Toxic Cocktail around the World Clinton campaign: “Love trumps Hate” MJ Lee and Dan Merica, “Clinton’s last campaign speech: ‘Love trumps hate,’ ” CNN.com, November 7, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/​2016/​11/​07/​politics/​hillary-clinton-campaign-final-day/.

And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments. We Were on a Roll It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans.


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The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

Name Responsibility Organisation Date of Interview 1 Julia Reda Activist and MEP Pirate Party 8 January 2018 2 Christian Engstrom Activist and MEP Pirate Party 3 June 2009 3 Birgitta Jónsdóttir Activist and former MP Pirate Party 13 May 2016 4 Davide Bono Activist and local councillor Five Star Movement 3 September 2018 5 Gioele Brandi Social media manager Five Star Movement 22 June 2017 6 Roberto Fico Five Star Movement activist, current speaker of the Chamber of deputies Activist, MP and president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (since 24 March 2018) 22 June 2017 7 Roberta Lombardi Activist and MP Five Star Movement 22 June 2017 8 Marco Canestrari Former employee Casaleggio Associati 22 November 2017 9 David Davros Puente Former employee Casaleggio Associati 27 November 2017 10 Eric Labuske Informatics coordinator Podemos 26 June 2015 11 German Cano Academic and activist Podemos 23 June 2015 12 Sarah Bienzobas Activist Podemos 22 February 2016 13 Alejandro Cerezo Activist and graphic designer Podemos 20 February 2016 14 Jorge Moruno Sociologist and activist Podemos 21 February 2016 15 Segundo Gonzalez Activist and MP Podemos 18 February 2015 16 Miguel Ardanuy Participation coordinator and Comunidad de Madrid councillor Podemos 7 November 2017 17 Winnie Wong Activist and communication strategist People for Bernie Sanders 16 June 2017 18 Claire Sandberg Digital organising director Bernie Sanders presidential campaign 10 December 2017 19 Emma Rees National organiser Momentum 6 October 2017 20 Adam Klug National organiser Momentum 9 October 2017 21 Aaron Bastani Media activist Novara Media 6 March 2018 22 James Moulding Activist Digital Democracy – Labour 4 October 2017 23 Antoine Léaument Social media coordinator France Insoumise 15 January 2018 24 Guillaume Royer Platform coordinator France Insoumise 15 November 2017 25 Adria Rodriguez Activist Barcelona en Comù 22 February 2016 26 Alejandra Calvo Martínez Activist Ahora Madrid 20 March 2015 27 Eugenia Quilodran-Briones Activist Rede Sustenabilidade Brazil 21 October 2014 28 Richard Bartlett Founder and developer Loomio 25 October 2017 29 Andreas Nitsche Developer and director Association for interactive democracy 6 October 2017 30 Yago Bermejo Abati Developer and activist Medialab Prado 12 July 2017 Notes 1.

It self-describes as an organisation that wants to ‘build on the energy and enthusiasm from the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign, to increase participatory democracy, solidarity, and grassroots power and help Labour become the transformative governing party of the 21st century’.7 Momentum has been widely applauded for its effective use of social media, and has recently established My Momentum, an online platform that allows members to participate in discussions and make decisions. Some trends of the digital party can also be seen in related phenomena, such as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, which, while not adopting digital democracy tools, has been innovative in its use of digital organising tactics, empowering the rank and file to organise the campaign locally. It is fairly obvious that, at the stage at which the internet is on the point of becoming, if it has not already become, more influential than TV, all parties are compelled to ‘go digital’.

Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive performance in the 2017 UK general elections was propelled by an avalanche of youth vote. In a post-election survey conducted by YouGov,113 it was found that Labour share of votes was inversely proportional to voters’ age. Labour scored 66 per cent among those ages 18–19; it only had 19 per cent of support among those aged over 70. Finally, the typical voter of Bernie Sanders was said to be below 45 years of age. The sympathy of young people, especially those living in urban areas, towards digital parties is unsurprising for a number of reasons. First, young people enjoy higher than average levels of internet access, which means they are more likely to buy into the techno-utopian idea of the digital revolution as a positive change.


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Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Russell, “America’s Forever Wars Have Finally Come Home,” Responsible Statecraft, June 4, 2020. 76. J. Iadarola, “What if Bernie Has Already Won This Thing?” The Hill, February 23, 2020. S. Hamid, “The Coronavirus Killed the Revolution,” Atlantic, March 25, 2020. 77. G. Ip, “Businesses Fret Over Potential Bernie Sanders Presidency,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2020. B. Schwartz, “Mike Bloomberg Prepares Media Onslaught Against Democratic Front-Runner Bernie Sanders,” CNBC, February 24, 2020. 78. A. Tooze, “ ‘We Are Living Through the First Economic Crisis of the Anthropocene,’ ” Guardian, May 7, 2020. 79. The best compact introduction is C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, trans.

If there was to be a new social contract, who would make it? There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amid the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial.

Nor, as we shall see, were the major voices of corporate America afraid to spell out the business case for doing so, including shareholder value, the problems of running companies with politically divided workforces, the economic importance of the rule of law, and astonishingly, the losses in sales to be expected in the event of a civil war. This alignment of money with democracy in the United States in 2020 should be reassuring, up to a point. But consider for a second an alternative scenario. What if the virus had arrived in the United States a few weeks sooner, the spreading pandemic had rallied mass support for Bernie Sanders and his call for universal health care, and the Democratic primaries had swept an avowed socialist to the head of the ticket rather than Joe Biden?76 It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the full weight of American business was thrown the other way, for all the same reasons, backing Trump so as to ensure that Sanders was not elected.77 And what if Sanders had in fact won a majority?


Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side by Simon McCarthy-Jones

affirmative action, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Extinction Rebellion, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, p-value, profit maximization, rent-seeking, rewilding, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks

J. Gaughan, “Was the Democratic Nomination Rigged? A Reexamination of the Clinton-Sanders Presidential Race,” University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 29 (2018): 309–358. 21. Bernie Sanders, “This is not the time for a protest vote,” Facebook, September 17, 2016, www.facebook.com/berniesanders/photos/a.324119347643076/1157189241002745/?type=3. 22. W. Blitzer, “Interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders,” CNN, July 6, 2016, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1607/06/wolf.01.html. 23. J. G. Voelkel and M. Feinberg, “Morally Reframed Arguments Can Affect Support for Political Candidates,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 9, no. 8 (2018): 917–924. 24.

Data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which surveyed around fifty thousand people, as reported by D. Kurtzleben, “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump,” NPR, August 24, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds?t=1586332242609. 29. Nearly half of Sanders supporters who voted for Trump believed that whites were not actually privileged in America; see Kurtzleben, “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump.” 30. M. Krieger, “‘Bernie or Bust’: Over 50,000 Sanders Supporters Pledge to Never Vote for Hillary,” Liberty Blitzkrieg, March 3, 2016, https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/03/03/bernie-or-bust-over-50000-sanders-supporters-pledge-to-never-vote-for-hillary/. 31.

.… There is going to be some kind of change and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change. People are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.6 Similarly, a Bernie Sanders supporter stated, “Honestly, I want to vote for Trump—not because I agree with anything he says but because I’d rather have it all burn down to the ground and start over again.”7 We may not agree with this sentiment (indeed, it is hard to understand how anyone with even the slightest familiarity with history could get close to supporting a “Nazi-type change”), but we may recognize it.


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A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney

1960s counterculture, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bond market vigilante , book value, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate personhood, Corrections Corporation of America, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, operation paperclip, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Snapchat, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

“Scott Walker has tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of credit-card debt.” Business Insider, 3 Aug. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/scott-walker-has-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-worth-of-credit-card-debt-2015-8. 48. Topaz, Jonathan, and Kristen East. “Bernie Sanders’ Wife Accounts for All His Reported Assets.” Politico, 16 July 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-wife-accounts-for-reported-assets-120261; Gaudiano, Nicole. “Credit Card Debt a Regular Feature on Sanders’ Finance Reports.” USA Today, 12 June 2015. 49. McIntire, Mike. “Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race.” New York Times, 13 Jan. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/politics/ted-cruz-wall-street-loan-senate-bid-2012.html. 50.

“The Federal Reserve’s Dual Mandate.” www.chicagofed.org/publications/speeches/our-dual-mandate. 26. US Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors. “Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet.” www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm, Aug. 2007–Dec. 2015. 27. Sanders, Bernie. “Transcript: Bernie Sanders Meets with the Daily News Editorial Board.” New York Daily News, 4 Apr. 2016, www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. 28. US Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors. Statistical table 8. “Table 8. Initial margin requirements Under Regulations T, U, and X” (as percentage of market value). 29. New York Stock Exchange, “FRB Initial margin requirements—percent of total value required to purchase stock,” http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?

Forbes. www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/05/20/wal-mart-cleans-up-on-poor-america-with-25-of-u-s-grocery-sales/#31fa4f262bea (alternative metrics have 90 percent of Americans living within 10 miles of a Wal-Mart; the effect is the same). 25. Sanders, Bernie, and Daily News Editorial Board. “Transcript: Bernie Sanders meets with News Editorial Board.” New York Daily News, Opinion, 4 Apr. 2016, www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. 26. Fuglie, Keith, et al. “Rising Concentration in Agricultural Input Industries Influences New Farm Technologies.” US Department of Agriculture, 3 Dec. 2012, www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012-december/rising-concentration-in-agricultural-input-industries-influences-new-technologies.aspx#.Vxf2yzArKM8.


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Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

somehow became a common news feature assignment after a fraud-ridden financial services sector put millions in foreclosure and vaporized as much as 40 percent of the world’s wealth. More recently, we’ve cycled through a series of unconvincing responses to Why do they hate us?—themed stories like Brexit, the Bernie Sanders primary run of 2016, and the election of Donald Trump. We’ve botched them all, for reasons that range from incompetence to willful blindness. The Trump story in particular was an industry-wide failure that exposed many of our greatest weaknesses (I was part of the problem, too) and remains a serious concern heading into 2020.

Not challenging power?) The Washington Post, for fuck’s sake, actually ran a Behind the Music–type feature about how it settled on its new “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan. Around the same time that Bacquet and Baker were holding their televised discussion about journalism’s future, I was interviewing Bernie Sanders about the lessons of the 2016 race. He didn’t use this language, but one of the big takeaways for Sanders from his run was that nobody out there gave a shit about Meet the Press. What politics passes for now is somebody goes on Meet the Press and they do well: “Oh, this guy is brilliant, wonderful.”

Even after the Trump fiasco, the product of such unholy unions—“electability”—is still running loose. A summer 2018 piece in the New York Times about the likely Democratic field echoed ancient articles about the likes of Mitt Romney and John Kerry. We were told to be wary of extremists like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and go with something tamer and nearer to the “center”: For all the evident support for Mr. Sanders’s policy ideas, many in the party are skeptical that a fiery activist in his eighth decade would have broad enough appeal to oust Mr. Trump… Mr. Sanders’s generational peer, Mr. Biden, 75, is preparing to test a contrasting message this fall… Mr.


Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, declining real wages, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass immigration, meta-analysis, obamacare, open borders, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, post-industrial society, post-materialism, precariat, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, War on Poverty, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

How could such a polarizing and politically inexperienced figure win a major party’s nomination – and then be elected President? Many observers find it difficult to understand his victory. He has been sharply attacked by conservatives such as George Will, establishment Republicans such as John McCain, Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren, and socialists such as Bernie Sanders. He has been described by some commentators as a strongman menacing democracy, by others as a xenophobic and racist demagogue skilled at whipping up crowds, and by yet others as an opportunistic salesman lacking any core principles.1 Each of these approaches contains some truth. We view Trump as a leader who uses populist rhetoric to legitimize his style of governance, while promoting authoritarian values that threaten the liberal norms underpinning American democracy.

These typically use populist discourse railing against corruption, mainstream parties, and multinational corporations but this is blended with the endorsement of socially liberal attitudes, progressive social policies, and participatory styles of political engagement. This category includes Spain’s Podemos Party and the Indignados Movement, Greece’s Syriza, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Party in the Netherlands, and Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S). In the Americas, Libertarian-­Populist leaders are exemplified by Bernie Sanders, as well as the Peronist tradition followed by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.32 Arguably, there are also centrist-­populist leaders, such as President Emmanuel Macron in France who campaigned as an outsider, criticizing the established parties although governing more like a moderate. 12 Understanding Populism Even in nations where Authoritarian-­Populist parties hold few parliamentary seats, they can still exert ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and shape the policy agenda.33 In Britain, for example, the UK Independence Party won only one seat in the May 2015 general election, but its rhetoric fueled rabid anti-­European and anti-­immigration sentiment, pressuring the Conservatives to call the Brexit referendum, with massive consequences.34 Similarly, in the September 2017 elections to the Bundestag, the nationalistic, anti-­Islamic, and pro-­family values Alternative for Germany (AfD) won only 12.6 percent of the vote, but they gained 94 seats in the aftermath of the refugee crisis, entering parliament for the first time and thereby hindering Angela Merkel’s negotiations to form a Grand Coalition government, leaving the government in limbo for four months.35 Mainstream parties can seek to co-­opt minor parties in formal or informal governing alliances, and they can adopt their language and policies in the attempt to steal their votes.

Libertarian populists combine support for socially liberal policies with a sweeping critique of the failure of mainstream parties to address corporate greed, economic inequalities, global capitalism, and social injustice. Campaigning as outsiders, this appeal is likely to mobilize Labour Party members favoring Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders supporters in Democratic primaries, voters for Jean-­Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement in Rome, and community activists engaged in Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos in Spain.28 Political parties usually attract older voters, but by adopting digital tools, some like the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, have succeeded in attracting a relatively young membership.29 At the same time, levels of youthful enthusiasm are rarely translated into equivalent levels of voting turnout at the ballot box.30 The Millennial generation in the US and Europe are more likely than their elders to participate in direct protest politics, community volunteering, new social 44 The Cultural Backlash Theory movements, and online activism, but they are usually far less engaged through conventional electoral channels such as voting.31 Libertarian-­ Populist parties seeking the support of younger, college-­educated voters therefore face stiff competition from social movements championing the progressive agenda on issues such as environmental protection and climate change, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, Black Lives Matter, the ‘Me-­too’ movement against sexual harassment, gun control, immigration rights, human rights and democracy, international development, and social justice.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

Conclusion KATIE FAHEY WAS A TWENTYSOMETHING MICHIGANDER WHO WAS puzzled by Michigan’s response to the 2016 election. Initially a Clinton supporter, she was surprised when the state voted for Bernie Sanders. And then, she was surprised again when a state that had gone for Obama in 2012 (54 percent versus 45 percent) voted for Donald Trump. “What’s going on?” she asked herself. And then, as she described to me afterward, she tried to answer her own question. “Okay, what do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common that maybe Hillary Clinton didn’t have.” I really do think it was kind of like this: Bernie Sanders was all about the political revolution, and Donald Trump was about “drain the swamp.”

There is a constant fight against “closed primaries” by citizens who believe that it violates equality to deny any citizen the right to participate in critical primaries. There is a regular and serious fight within the parties about the power of party leaders within mixed systems of nomination: In 2016, early in the primary season, Bernie Sanders supporters were upset that “superdelegates” would have the power to vote independently of party primaries. Later in the season, his supporters were upset that “superdelegates” did not exercise their independent power to vote for Sanders, contrary to the votes in the party primaries. And finally, there is the unavoidable and undeniable effect of primaries that I have already described when discussing gerrymandering—that given the low participation by citizens less interested in politics, primaries bend unmistakably to the extremes within either party.

Obama put the kibosh on that, when he became the first candidate for president since Nixon to turn down public funding. But most people didn’t seem to notice, and most politicians didn’t seem to care. Since 2008, every major candidate for federal public office has relied on private funds to fund his or her campaigns. At the presidential level, this might not matter much. Candidates like Bernie Sanders have found it possible to raise ungodly amounts of money in small contributions. Yet no one thinks Sanders is beholden to anyone—except maybe to the millions who contributed to him, which, in a democracy, isn’t a terrible thing. And while Donald Trump certainly exaggerated his reliance on his own money obscenely, it is also true that the SuperPACs—political action committees that can accept unlimited donations—didn’t get him to where he got.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

But the systemic critique of the status quo that Occupy inspired, and the digital-analog model it fostered, lived on and blossomed. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, and the more recent Sunrise Movement of young people united against global warming are three recent embodiments of a growing progressive upsurge. Like BLM and Occupy these political constellations seamlessly blend digital and analog actions and organizing; their simultaneously on-the-ground and in-the-cloud existence are written into their DNA. Bernie Sanders crisscrossed the country making speeches; his supporters spent countless hours making phone calls and spreading the word.

These ties are visible in the movements’ networks of support and inspiration. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders were both vocal supporters of the Standing Rock protests. Young members of Sunrise cite Occupy, BLM, March for Our Lives, and United We Dream, a youth-led immigration justice organization, as sources of inspiration.41 Congresswoman Alexandria OcasioCortez of New York was inspired to run for elected office by a visit to the Standing Rock camp and is a champion of Sunrise. She worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign and is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that went from a sleepy five thousand members in early 2016 to more than sixty thousand today.42 The shared networks of people and supporters that undergird these movements are also increasingly connected by a critique of capitalism.

In 2015, 76 percent of Americans had never heard of Sanders or had no opinion of him; by October 2018, more than half of Americans had a positive opinion of him, largely because of social media.39 Millions followed the Dakota Pipeline protests, a movement started by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a Sioux elder, after two attention-grabbing videos were posted online: the well-known progressive author Naomi Klein’s interview of Tokata Iron Eyes, a cofounder of ReZpect Our Water, and Democracy Now! cohost Amy Goodman’s footage of protesters being pepper-sprayed and bitten by attack dogs at the protest camp.40 The digital nature of these movements also mitigated traditional constraints on organizing, such as age and resources. Bernie Sanders was the first candidate in American history to run a serious presidential campaign with zero contributions from big business. One enthusiastic supporter even used her Tinder account to ask men to text a donation to Bernie. Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer was just thirteen and Tokata Iron Eyes twelve, yet they were key organizers in the Dakota Pipeline movement.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

CBPP, “Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 6, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/economy/chart-book-the-legacy-of-the-great-recession. 7. Dean Baker, The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2018), cepr.net/images/stories/reports/housing-bubble-2018-09.pdf. 8. Eric Levitt, “Bernie Sanders Is the Howard Schultz of the Left,” Intelligencer (Doylestown, PA), April 16, 2019, nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/bernie-sanders-fox-news-town-hall-medicare-for-all-video-centrism.html. Chapter 1: Don’t Think of a Household 1. US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html. 2. Other entities may create other financial instruments—for example, bank lending creates bank deposits, which can function like government currency in some instances—but only the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve can manufacture the currency itself.

Politicians love to trot out this myth, proclaiming that by running deficits we are ruining the lives of our children and grandchildren, saddling them with crippling debt that they will eventually have to repay. One of the most influential perpetrators of this myth was Ronald Reagan. But even Senator Bernie Sanders has echoed Reagan, saying, “I am concerned about the debt. It’s not something we should be leaving to our kids and our grandchildren.”8 While this rhetoric is powerful, its economic logic is not. History bears this out. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), the national debt was at its highest—120 percent—in the period immediately following the Second World War.

Even the most progressive candidates fear that they’ll be eaten alive if their proposals add to the deficit, so borrowing is almost never an option. To show that their policies won’t add to the deficit, they hunt for ways to squeeze more tax revenue out of the economy, usually targeting those who can most easily afford to pay more. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders insists that a financial transactions tax will cover the cost of making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and Senator Elizabeth Warren claims that a 2 percent tax on fortunes above $50 million would raise enough revenue to wipe out student debt for 95 percent of students and also pay for universal childcare and free college.


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Millennials are supposed to be all about the new—new technologies, new career paths, new sexual mores, new culture. Yet some of us have adopted as political heroes old fogeys (not even young enough to be Baby Boomers in some cases, such as Bernie Sanders, who was born in 1941) espousing very old ideas about politics and economics. It seems downright bizarre. Millennials who are perpetually glued to our smartphones also are in thrall to a nineteenth-century economic philosophy. But before there was Bernie Sanders in 2016, there was Ron Paul in 2012—and Paul, an aging and eccentric (to put it mildly) libertarian, also attracted Millennial support during his own quixotic primary run for the Republican presidential nomination.28 Maybe Millennials are not exactly embracing socialism so much as desperately looking for explanations for what has gone wrong in our economic lives over the past decade.

For instance, a common argument about Social Security reform is that all we need are relatively modest tax increases—perhaps another 2 or 3 percentage points added onto the payroll-tax rate,¶ and an increase in the level of income subject to the tax, perhaps to include all wage income rather than just the first $128,000—and the system would return to balance.41 The Congressional Budget Office figures an immediate payroll-tax increase of around 4.5 percent could make Social Security solvent for seventy-five years, if you believe it’s possible to make accurate forecasts over such a long span.42 More plausible plans tend to focus on balancing the books for shorter terms of only a few decades. Alternately, maybe to solve all our fiscal problems we only need to increase general income taxes on the rich or on corporations. In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders proposed a top personal income-tax rate of 54.2 percent.43 Those plans don’t come close to the answer Millennials need. None of these tax increases would generate enough revenue to begin to cover the sort of gap generational-accounting estimates have revealed. In practical terms, most Boomers would be exempt from most of the consequences of a payroll-tax hike.

Anyone who thought US zoning and construction woes are only a small part of our housing difficulties should look at what has happened in Britain as those problems have been allowed to fester. German Zeroes If only we could raise taxes a bit more, Americans are often told, we’d be able to balance our budget and continue providing social benefits to the poor and the elderly. Many of the Millennials who flock to politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believe it’s true. Not so fast. It turns out a European country is helpfully offering an experiment in how to manage taxing, spending, and borrowing for maximum fairness and responsibility. That country is Germany, and how is that experiment working? Not well. Germans will bristle at that characterization, because their budget balance has become legendary in recent years.


pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way by Steve Richards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, falling living standards, full employment, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon

Given that the build-up to the election in the US was so similar to the Brexit campaign, the result was always going to be the same, too: victory for those on the outside. Yet each time the pattern is confirmed, we are amazed once again. Trump’s victory was much the biggest contribution to the contours taking shape across large parts of the democratic world, but his triumph is the latest in a line of unorthodox developments. In the US, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpected fright from the left, in the battle for the Democrats’ nomination, a shock that stirred her into being a little less cautious. He partially forced her to break free of self-imposed chains, but not in a way that liberated her from a perception that she was part of an elite which had failed to deliver.

Some propose economic policies that are rooted in an analysis framed by the 2008 financial crisis. Respected economists are often part of their entourages. Quite often, in their radical distinctiveness, they bring the cautious mainstream left to a semblance of political life. Hillary Clinton might have lost the US presidential campaign more decisively, if Bernie Sanders had not forced her to become a little more daring. And the UK’s Labour Party risked dying of boredom, before Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy in 2015 brought a soporific leadership contest to life. In Greece and Spain mainstream left parties were languishing, before movements to the left of them forced a rethink of sorts.

How do I win the presidential election? They are towering questions, but are less bound by the disciplines of holding together a party in non-presidential democracies. In 2016 the US staged its first presidential election campaign that was shaped by outsiders. One of the candidates for the Democrats’ nomination, Bernie Sanders, opened the year with a series of TV interviews in which he outlined a programme that was well to the left of any Democrat candidate since John McGovern in 1972 and, in terms of economic policy, more radical than even McGovern’s progressive proposals. Echoing Corbyn, Tsipras and the Podemos leadership, Sanders’ overwhelming theme was that since the financial crash there had been a huge bailout for Wall Street.


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

So it appears also in struggles for racial justice; the Movement for Black Lives, for instance, uses cognates of cooperative forty-two times in the Economic Justice portion of its official platform, which insists on “collective ownership” of the economy, “not merely access.” Upstart politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the United States, have put co-ops in their platforms as well.19 This isn’t new. The Scandinavian social democracies grew from the root of widespread co-ops and folk schools. The US civil rights struggle of the 1960s mobilized the self-sufficiency black farmers had already built through their co-ops.

In Cleveland, a group of local “anchor institutions” like hospitals and universities helped create worker-owned laundry and green-energy co-ops; the allied Democracy Collaborative used this and other examples as the basis for national-scale transition plans. Madison, Wisconsin, voted to fund worker co-ops in late 2014; Oakland, Austin, Minneapolis, Newark, and other cities got on board in various ways. By 2017, Bernie Sanders was leading a group of Democratic senators and representatives to propose federal legislation on behalf of worker-owned businesses. Some embattled labor unions seemed ready to turn back to their roots with a newfound interest in co-ops, too. Alongside the NCBA and other older co-op organizations, these efforts tended to coalesce around the youthful, intersectional, diverse umbrella of the New Economy Coalition—founded around the time of the 2008 crash.

She remembered her whole village waking up to the wailing of families who had lost a child to malaria. Kazadi figured that she could claim at least seven hundred signatures of the 158,831 collected by more than five hundred fellow volunteers, along with paid help, between April and October that year. Bernie Sanders rallies at the beginning and end of the process provided especially sympathetic crowds, as did Pride and Juneteenth. The campaign needed 98,492 signatures to get the issue on the ballot; the secretary of state’s office deemed 109,134 valid in the end. Thanks to people like Kazadi, medical coverage for all was a choice before Colorado voters in November 2016.


pages: 98 words: 27,609

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It) by Michael R. Strain

Bernie Sanders, business cycle, centre right, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, income inequality, job automation, labor-force participation, market clearing, market fundamentalism, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, working poor

This message is fueled in large part by an effort to understand and react to the emergence of populism in both political parties. Let’s look at a few quick examples, of many. President Trump has been arrestingly clear on this point, stating directly, in June 2015: “Sadly, the American Dream is dead.”3 In May 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “American workers are some of the most overworked yet our standard of living has fallen. For many, the American Dream has become a nightmare.”4 In a December 2018 essay in The Atlantic, Senator Marco Rubio wrote, “There was once a path to a stable and prosperous life in America that has since closed off.

The core argument that progressives are making is precisely that work is deeply honorable and valuable, and that increasing social mobility—meaning the capacity to get ahead through effort and creativity—should be a central goal of public policy. In presidential politics, those making the case for what Senator Sherrod Brown has called “the dignity of work” include everyone from both the left (among them, figures Strain might call “populist”) and the center-left: from Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Julian Castro to Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, and Michael Bennett. What they are arguing is that for Americans in large numbers, the rewards from work are not what they should be. Far from being “utopian,” they all stand in the practical tradition of American social reform going back to the New Deal.

No one on the left may be saying that “absolutely nothing good has happened” since 1970. But it would be difficult to listen to the leading voices on the left in the last three or four years and not to walk away with the conclusion that economic outcomes for the majority of Americans have been declining rapidly over the past several decades. (Bernie Sanders: “For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.”) Dionne himself refers to “the long story of the decline of the American Dream” in his essay. My purpose in this book is to argue that there is not a long story of decline. Dionne criticizes my argument that some on the progressive left deny the importance of personal responsibility, the value of work, and the benefits of technological innovations.


pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

He could easily be hanging out with cooler people than Peterson, Shapiro, Harris, or the Weinsteins, and he sometimes does hang out with cooler people. While he’s provided an uncritical platform for some people who truly suck—including several who I’ve written about in this book, he’s recently sat down for interesting and in-depth interviews with Bernie Sanders and Cornel West. His show has exposed a lot of people to left-wing ideas they wouldn’t have heard anywhere else. It would be foolish to dismiss the appeal of Rogan’s personality and platform, a mistake to ignore that he represents the most genuinely heterodox mash-up of politics and influences in the IDW.

Similar considerations apply to programs ranging from tuition-free public college to state-sponsored childcare schemes to reducing the workweek to 3 or 4 days. The recent reemergence of social movements around the world, from Haiti to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan and the noble effort of Jeremy Corbyn and the powerful force and potential election of Bernie Sanders to the presidency, attests to the widespread appeal of this vision. It’s important to emphasize, though, that while social democracy is an immensely valuable step in the right direction—especially in a world ravaged by decades of neoliberalism and US-led militarism—for two reasons it ultimately won’t be enough.

The need to build transracial and transnational solidarities is important for both strategic and moral reasons. When it comes to the struggle to enact even relatively modest social democratic gains in the United States—what the historian and activist Harvey Kaye calls completing the New Deal—the electoral math makes the strategic calculation straightforward. Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary in 2016 because he won the Arab-American vote in Dearborn. Going back to the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton lost—despite winning the national popular vote—because traditional Democratic constituencies in places like Detroit, Flint, and Milwaukee weren’t inspired by her message and didn’t come out to vote.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The compromising information covered internal communications from January 2015 to May 2016 and was made available to the public just three days prior to the Democratic National Convention. Media coverage of the convention became distracted by conflict and conspiracies. The emails pointed to DNC suppression of the Bernie Sanders campaign, creating a third theme that Russian troll networks reinforced: that the Democratic Party was corrupt and Bernie Sanders got a raw deal, never having a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton. Revelation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s private remarks showing her favoring Clinton over Sanders led to her resignation, and the mainstream media ran wild with the leaked information.

Only 10,700 votes in Michigan and 22,700 votes in Wisconsin separated the two candidates.6 Prior to the general election, Hillary Clinton struggled in these two states, losing both primaries to Bernie Sanders. These losses made Michigan and Wisconsin voters ripe for all three of the principal themes Russia pushed leading up to the election: Clinton’s emails, her corruption and potentially poor health, and narratives of Bernie Sanders getting a raw deal from the Democratic National Committee. A minor theme pushed by Russia’s social media operations sought to encourage Jill Stein supporters to make it to the polls, even though she had no chance of winning.

Aggressive anti-Clinton rhetoric from state-sponsored outlets, amplified by their social media trolls, framed Clinton as a globalist, pushing democratic agendas against Russia—an aggressor who could possibly bring about war between the two countries. The trolls’ anti-Clinton drumbeat increased each month toward the end of 2015 and going into 2016. The Kremlin spotted a new, more likable alternative among the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, whose challenge to Clinton was growing each day and whose message rang with socialist themes. Meanwhile, Trump’s brash barbs against his opponents were working unexpectedly well. Kicking off 2016, the troll army began promoting candidate Donald Trump with increasing intensity, so much so their computational propaganda began to distort organic support for Trump, making his social media appeal appear larger than it truly was.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

.: Evidence from survey-linked administrative data,” Equitable Growth, September 7, 2016, https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/the-decline-in-lifetime-earnings-mobility-in-the-u-s-evidence-from-survey-linked-administrative-data/. 24 Mona Chalabi, “The world’s wealthy: where on earth are the richest Guardian, October 9, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/oct/09/worlds-wealthy-where-russia-rich-list; Andrea Willige, “5 charts that show what is happening to the middle class around the world,” World Economic Forum, January 12, 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/5-charts-which-show-what-is-happening-to-the-middle-class-around-the-world/. 25 Anna Ludwinek et al., Social Mobility in the EU, Eurofound, 2017, http://www.praxis.ee/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Social-mobility-in-the-EU-2017.pdf; Adam O’Neal, “Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-bernie-sanders-is-wrong-about-sweden-11566596536; Liz Alderman, “Europe’s Middle Class Is Shrinking. Spain Bears Much of the Pain,” New York Times, February 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/business/spain-europe-middle-class.html. 26 “Germany: the hidden divide in Europe’s richest country,” Financial Times, August 17, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/db8e0b28-7ec3-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928. 27 David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: Penguin, 2017), 149–51, 183. 28 Yvonne Roberts, “Millennials are struggling.

srnd=premium. 44 “Socialism ‘More Popular Than Capitalism’ With Brits, Germans, US Youth,” Sputnik News, February 24, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201602241035283984-socialism-popularity-britain-germany/. 45 Marco Damiani, “The transformation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon: From radical outsider to populist leader,” London School of Economics and Political Science, April 22, 2017, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/22/the-transformation-of-jean-luc-melenchon/. 46 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, “Election 2017: 61.5 per cent of under-40s voted for Labour, new poll finds,” Independent, June 14, 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-2017-labour-youth-vote-under-40s-jeremy-corbyn-yougov-poll-a7789151.html; Jim Edwards, “Bernie Sanders and the youth vote: Stats and history suggest he may doom the Democrats,” Business Insider, March 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-sanders-reliance-on-youth-vote-could-doom-democrats-2020-3. 47 Ben Knight, “Why the German urban middle class is going Green,” New Statesman, July 17, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/07/why-german-urban-middle-class-going-green. 48 Sohrab Ahmari, “Making the World Safe for Communism—Again,” Commentary, October 18, 2017, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/making-the-world-safe-for-communism-again/. 49 “More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined,” Washington Post, June 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/20/more-young-people-voted-for-bernie-sanders-than-trump-and-clinton-combined-by-a-lot/?

srnd=premium. 44 “Socialism ‘More Popular Than Capitalism’ With Brits, Germans, US Youth,” Sputnik News, February 24, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201602241035283984-socialism-popularity-britain-germany/. 45 Marco Damiani, “The transformation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon: From radical outsider to populist leader,” London School of Economics and Political Science, April 22, 2017, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/22/the-transformation-of-jean-luc-melenchon/. 46 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, “Election 2017: 61.5 per cent of under-40s voted for Labour, new poll finds,” Independent, June 14, 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-2017-labour-youth-vote-under-40s-jeremy-corbyn-yougov-poll-a7789151.html; Jim Edwards, “Bernie Sanders and the youth vote: Stats and history suggest he may doom the Democrats,” Business Insider, March 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-sanders-reliance-on-youth-vote-could-doom-democrats-2020-3. 47 Ben Knight, “Why the German urban middle class is going Green,” New Statesman, July 17, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/07/why-german-urban-middle-class-going-green. 48 Sohrab Ahmari, “Making the World Safe for Communism—Again,” Commentary, October 18, 2017, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/making-the-world-safe-for-communism-again/. 49 “More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined,” Washington Post, June 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/20/more-young-people-voted-for-bernie-sanders-than-trump-and-clinton-combined-by-a-lot/?utm_term=.60f572274c06. 50 Joel Kotkin, “Moderation’s Limits,” City Journal, March 6, 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/biden-victories-democrats-leftist-future. 51 Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 2019 Annual Poll, https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/2019-annual-poll; Jade Scipioni, “Half of millennials would give up their rights to get out of debt,” New York Post, September 14, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/09/14/half-of-millennials-would-give-up-their-rights-to-get-out-of-debt/; Clay Routledge, “Why Are Millennials Wary of Freedom?”


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

A major consequence of labor unrest during the pandemic was that, against great odds, essential workers helped to transform the political conversation about work in America. They even influenced the Democratic Party’s established preference for austerity in ways that were unimaginable before the pandemic arrived. Why did Joe Biden—who had built his entire career on not being Bernie Sanders—on the eve of his election promise to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen”? Why did he come out in support of Amazon workers in what was the most hotly debated union election in recent history? Or why did he immediately create a task force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment and pursue the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, groundbreaking legislation that would recast American labor law in workers’ favor?

“Instead of protecting workers and the communities in which they work, however, Amazon seems to be more interested in managing its image.… This is not about me. This is about all of us.”3 Chris’s firing and the leaked memo attracted widespread condemnation from activists and politicians, including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called the firing “disgraceful.”4 It also engendered support from other social movements. Smalls, who is Black, soon became not only a leader of a national worker movement but also key in building the bridge from the workplace to the streets as a Black Lives Matter activist. By the time I caught up with Smalls, he had been unemployed for several months yet was busier than ever.

Attempts to copy the legislation elsewhere have always been defeated by powerful private hospital lobbies. National Nurses United was one of the first unions to officially endorse a national single-payer healthcare system. Such a system, embodied in the Medicare for All legislation introduced by Representative Pramila Jayapal and Senator Bernie Sanders in 2021, seeks, among many things, to establish safe staffing levels for healthcare workers across the country. No one knows better than nurses what they need to adequately staff hospitals, so the union has also pressured lawmakers to ensure that any political reform includes training, education, and collective bargaining rights for nurses.


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, there was a scramble to attach culpability to the pollsters, the pundits, the Russians, the FBI, WikiLeaks, sexism, and Hillary Clinton’s egregious campaign. What mattered is that when Trump told voters things were awful, they believed him. Trump hardly was alone in being all negative all the time. In the same year, Bernie Sanders came out of left field and nearly upset heavily favored insider Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party via a campaign that relentlessly described contemporary America as foundering on the rocks. The United States, Sanders contended, has been “destroyed” except for the wealthiest few.

The New York University professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven Altman have shown that in 2016, the year Trump declared “total devastation” caused by imports, 84 percent of goods and services consumed by American citizens were produced inside the United States. Trump went on to declare that Japanese cars “just come pouring into the country.” This statement was true in the 1980s, a period that both Trump and Bernie Sanders have extolled as a golden age—even though in the 1980s education levels and living standards were lower while disease rates, crime, and pollution were higher. By 2016, two-thirds of Japanese-marque cars sold in America were built in US factories staffed by US workers earning about $50 an hour in pay and benefits, about the same as UAW members for Detroit marques.

The young have an easier time reaching the polls than seniors, but the latter group is the one that makes the effort. By not voting, the young allow the old to demand extra subsidies, with the invoices handed to their juniors; years along, saddled with other people’s debts, those now young will rue their mistake. The top three of the 2016 presidential race—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—were Social Security recipients. In that year those serving in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, and on the Supreme Court had their highest average and median ages ever. One reason American politics is gridlocked is that elderly leaders restage disputes that are decades out of date, like high school reunion couples arguing about who should have gone to the prom with whom.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Elsewhere, parties have either emerged from nowhere or chased electability from the political fringes – Podemos, Ciudadanos and the Junts pel Sí Catalonian separatists in Spain, Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Finns Party, the Hungarian Jobbik party, the Dutch Party for Freedom and the French Front National. Meanwhile, in 2016, having won the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican platform, Donald Trump was eventually propelled, seemingly against the odds, all the way to the White House. And, for the Democrats, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money by appealing to younger voters with an offer of free college places to be funded by heavy taxes on the rich, alongside considerable opposition to free trade. In effect, the financial crisis uncovered an inherent paradox in the structure of late twentieth-century Western societies.

In the 2016 US presidential contest, the choice ultimately came down to an increasingly grudging supporter of globalization – Hillary Clinton – and those who had always favoured an isolationist approach. Donald Trump, channelling one version of isolationism, adopted a protectionist manifesto, whilst Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival Democrat, was openly against globalization and its linkages with the ‘elite’. Throughout the campaign – and doubtless a reason behind her eventual defeat – Clinton struggled to convince people that she understood their concerns. An email scandal didn’t help, and nor did her many speeches to Wall Street bankers.

POPULISTS AND RENEGADES Some argue that the problem represents no more than a growing divide between the traditional right and left. Yet a simple ‘right/left’ narrative does not work terribly well. Those on the left argue that the right thrives by exploiting divisions in society, yet the left itself is divided between those who support globalization (Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair) and those who do not (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn).2 Meanwhile, those on the right too often misinterpret economic arguments in order to push their ‘free-market’ agendas. Ricardian comparative advantage, for example, works a lot less well in the modern era: contemporary globalization is driven more by the heightened cross-border movement of capital and labour than by trade flows.


pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess by T. R. Reid

accelerated depreciation, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, game design, Gini coefficient, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial robot, land value tax, loss aversion, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, Tesla Model S, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

(Of course, the tax burden falls on the living heir, not the decedent, but those who campaign against the “death tax” ignore this nuance.) Supporters of the tax have come up with politically charged labels of their own; they call the estate tax the “lucky rich kids’ tax” or the “Paris Hilton tax”; in his stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic contender Bernie Sanders used to remind his audiences that “Paris Hilton never built a hotel.” Under George W. Bush, opponents of the “death tax” won a temporary victory. Bush’s 2001 tax-reform plan phased out the estate tax over the following decade so that the rate fell to zero in the year 2010. For budget reasons, though, the death of the “death tax” was short-lived; the zero rate lasted only one year.

For decades, economists and politicians from left and right have attacked the carried-interest rule as a distortion of the basic capital gains proposition. “Why should someone who does not put any of their own money at risk pay the lower tax rate that Congress intended to reward those who do win such risky bets?” argues the business professor Peter Cohan, himself a former hedge fund manager. In the 2016 presidential campaign, politicians from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the left to Donald Trump and Jeb Bush on the right called for termination of this loophole. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”13 One smart line of investment that the hedge fund guys make every year is their contribution to members of Congress.

Yes, your corner drugstore would like to take your co-pay, bill your Medicare policy, and then pay its taxes in Switzerland,” Lewis wrote. Under withering attacks from politicians, the press, and its customers, Walgreens had second thoughts and announced that it would retain its corporate presence in the United States. — ALL OF THE FIRMS cited here, and countless others, have been attacked by critics ranging from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. They have been called “corporate traitors” and “Benedict Arnold companies” for shifting their tax burden out of the United States. They’ve been called outlaws and criminals for setting up such intricate structures to get around the tax code. In response to this calumny, the corporations reply that they are engaged in perfectly legal activity.


pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

What’s problematic is unfair inequality, when we are forced to compete under different ground rules.3 During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders forcefully advocated the renegotiation of trade agreements to reflect better the interests of working people. But such arguments immediately run up against the objection that any standstill or reversal on trade agreements would harm the world’s poorest, by diminishing their prospect of escaping poverty through export-led growth. “If you’re poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said,” ran a headline in the popular and normally sober Vox.com news site.4 But trade rules that are more sensitive to social and equity concerns in the advanced countries are not inherently in conflict with economic growth in poor countries.

These gains came at the expense of other countries. 3. Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” Nature: Human Behaviour, vol. 1, April 2017: 82. 4. Zack Beauchamp, “If You’re Poor in Another Country, This Is the Scariest Thing Bernie Sanders Has Said,” Vox, April 5, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11139718/bernie-sanders-trade-global-poverty. 5. Dani Rodrik, “Growth Strategies,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, P. Aghion and S. Durlauf, eds., vol. 1A, North-Holland, 2005: 967–1014. 6. Dani Rodrik, “Mexico’s Growth Problem,” Project Syndicate, November 13, 2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mexico-growth-problem-by-dani-rodrik-2014-11?

In addition, more than five hundred bilateral and regional trade agreements were signed—the vast majority of them since the WTO replaced the GATT in 1995. The difference today is that international trade has moved to the center of the political debate. During the most recent US election, presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made opposition to trade agreements a key plank of their campaigns. And, judging from the tone of the other candidates, standing up for globalization amounted to electoral suicide in the political climate of the time. Trump’s eventual win can be chalked up at least in part to his hard line on trade and his promise to renegotiate deals that he argued had benefited other nations at the expense of the United States.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Facebook ads linked to Russia cost $46,000, or 0.05 percent of the $81 million that the Clinton and Trump campaigns themselves spent on Facebook ads.6 Is it possible that the Russian memes, although mere drops in the ocean of advertising by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, were disproportionately effective in influencing American voters because of their unique sophistication? One anti-Clinton ad on Facebook attributed to Russian trolls showed a photo of Bernie Sanders with the words: “Bernie Sanders: The Clinton Foundation is a ‘Problem.’” A pro-Trump meme, presumably targeting religious conservatives, showed Satan wrestling with Jesus. Satan: “If I win Clinton wins!” Jesus: “Not if I can help it!”7 To believe the Russia Scare theory of the 2016 US presidential election, we must believe that the staff of Russia’s government-linked Internet Research Agency and other Russian saboteurs understood how to influence the psychology of black American voters and white working-class voters in the Midwest far better than did the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns.

As manufacturing jobs disappear overseas, disproportionately affecting the livelihoods of the working class in the heartland, more and more disaffected Americans look to leaders who promise to change the trade balance, economic orthodoxy be damned. In 2016, according to the economists David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, voters in US regions exposed to Chinese import competition were more likely than others to support the outsider candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: “Trade-exposed [congressional] districts with an initial majority white population or initially in Republican hands became substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican, while trade-exposed districts with an initial majority-minority population or initially in Democratic hands also became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat.

These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.14 Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American.


pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

As recently as 2007, future Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders opposed the Kennedy-McCain immigration reform as too likely to undercut American workers’ wages. The parties hardened their positions on these core issues only after 2008, a sign of the post-recession era’s ultra-polarization. The consequence has been the frustration of both parties’ highest hopes. The Democrats did enact the Affordable Care Act in 2010, but they have not been able to protect it from Republican sabotage at the federal and state level. Nor have they themselves clutched the program to their hearts. Through 2019, insurgent Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren criticized the Affordable Care Act almost as savagely as any Republican.

At the second of the two Democratic debates in Miami in June 2019, co-moderator Savannah Guthrie challenged the candidates on stage: “This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide [health-care] coverage for undocumented immigrants.” Michael Bennet, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Bernie Sanders, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang all signaled “yes.”3 In twelve years, the Democrats—including supposedly the most moderate of them, Vice President Joe Biden—had shifted from “no to driver’s licenses” for illegal aliens to “yes to government health coverage” for illegal aliens.

Donald Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 by his own efforts. But the election can be thrown away by people who will not meet voters where they are. Trump and his supporters appreciate the potentially destructive power of the ultra-progressive Left better than anyone. When Steve Bannon praises Bernie Sanders and when Fox & Friends promotes Tulsi Gabbard, they are not expressing sincere admiration. They are grasping the life vest that can save them from the shipwreck. One credible poll has found that 12 percent of those who supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016 switched to Trump in the general election.23 If the ultra-progressives are thwarted from foisting an unelectable candidate upon the Democratic Party from the inside, perhaps they can be coaxed and manipulated to boost a Trump-rescuing third-party candidacy from the outside.


pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climategate, collapse of Lehman Brothers, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, immigration reform, microaggression, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, obamacare, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, source of truth, systems thinking

Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 27, 2019, chronicle.com/article/this-professor-compared-a/247013. 37 Stephens, “Dear Millennials.” 38 mediaite.com/news/bret-stephens-backs-out-of-public-debate-with-bedbug-professor-because-public-event-wouldn’t-be-closed-to-the-public/. 39 Klein, “White Threat.” 40 Matthew Yglesias, “The Great Awokening,” Vox, April 1, 2019, vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020. 41 Klein, “White Threat.” 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Aaron Zitner, Dante Chinni, and Brian McGill, “How Clinton Won,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016, graphics.wsj.com/elections/2016/how-clinton-won. 45 “Issues: Racial Justice,” Bernie 2020, berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice. 46 Bernie Sanders. Interview by Ezra Klein, Vox, July 28, 2015, vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation. Chapter 6—The Media Divide beyond Left-Right 1 Markus Prior, “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 577–92. 2 James Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3 Ibid. 4 Douglas J.

” The other problem is that the conversation about, and the experience of, a browning America will not be driven by demographers and social psychologists; it will be driven by politicians looking for an edge, by political pundits looking for ratings, by outrageous stories going viral on social media, by cultural controversies like Gamergate and Roseanne Barr getting fired. It will absorb even figures who might prefer not to talk much about race. Bernie Sanders is a good example here. In 2016, he centered his campaign on class and was criticized for a tin ear on race. Ultimately, he won slightly more white votes than Clinton, but was swamped by her 50-point margin among African Americans.44 In 2020, Sanders has run a more race-conscious campaign, emphasizing his past as a civil rights activist.

After all, you can’t win a caucus on a rainy, cold night in January unless you have supporters willing to go out in the wet and spend hours caucusing for you. We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters. Put differently, neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders would’ve had a prayer in the 1956 presidential primaries, but one of them won and the other nearly won the 2016 presidential primaries. Threaded through that change is a strange fact in American political life: we consider party officials exercising influence over party nominating processes as illegitimate.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

“No one working for the wealthiest person on Earth”: Tami Luhby, “Amazon Defends Itself from Bernie Sanders’ Attacks,” CNN Business, August 31, 2018. A single parent: Ryan Bourne, “In Bernie Sanders vs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Only Workers Lose,” USA Today, September 16, 2018. If the family incurred medical costs: “Policy Basics: Introduction to Medicaid,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/policy-basics-introduction-to-medicaid. One could imagine a scenario: Ryan Bourne, “In Bernie Sanders vs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, only workers lose,” Opinion contributor, USA Today, September 16, 2018.

In the days and weeks that followed, Bezos responded swiftly, drawing on his competitive spirit and displaying a series of aikido-like public relations moves that not only mitigated the damage but also, in one way, at least, turned a fraught situation to his advantage—as he’s done so many times in his career. The first shot came from Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic socialist from Vermont, who targeted Amazon’s CEO as a bad corporate actor. On September 5, 2018, Sanders introduced a bill called the Stop BEZOS Act, which stands for Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies. The law would require big companies like Amazon that employ people who are on federal welfare such as Medicaid and food stamps to pay back the government for the massive costs of those programs.

Amazon’s warehouses that use these robots: Ananya Bhattacharya, “Amazon Is Just Beginning to Use Robots in Its Warehouses and They’re Already Making a Huge Difference,” Quartz, June 17, 2016. Even after installing all these robots: Author interview with Amazon’s Ashley Robinson, April 29, 2019. James Bloodworth is a British: James Bloodworth, “I Worked in an Amazon Warehouse. Bernie Sanders Is Right to Target Them,” The Guardian, September 17, 2018. He describes a workplace: Ibid. It opened its Andover: “A 360° Tour of Ocado’s Andover CFC3 Automated Warehouse,” Orcado Technology video, posted on YouTube May 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMUNI4UrNpM. Under each square: James Vincent, “Welcome to the Automated Warehouse of the Future,” The Verge, May 8, 2018.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

And in Iowa only 171,517 Iowans participated in the 2016 Democratic caucuses. This was only 5.4 percent of the 3.1 million people in the state. You could assume that the number would grow somewhat in 2020, but the field would also be much more crowded. So my projection was that if I got approximately 40,000 Iowans on board I could win. (Indeed, Bernie Sanders wound up getting the most votes, with 45,652, so my working assumption was pretty close.) Our system of electing a president operates such that each Iowan was worth his or her weight in gold. I started saying that every Iowan was worth a thousand New Yorkers or Californians, which was essentially true.

Eventually, if you’re a candidate, you see each other’s stump speeches over and over again. Late in the cycle, I’d come to joke that Democratic fundraisers should have us draw names from a hat and deliver another candidate’s speech. Donors would pay big money to see it. By the end, I thought I could do a decent rendition of Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders giving their go-to stumps. I can imagine someone parodying my stump: “The robots are coming, we’re doomed, give everyone money right now.” In the Surf Ballroom, I heard my name called and jogged up to the stage. I talked about how our economy was transforming before our eyes, and why Iowans needed to lead the country in a new and better direction.

After a few days, we got a response saying that they’d consider the commitment contingent on Mike’s winning the whole race and becoming president. Talks died down at that point. Joe’s momentum continued. He did well on Super Tuesday and also in the following week’s primaries. He won Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho; most important, he won Michigan, a state that Bernie Sanders had won in 2016 and needed to win again. I was sitting at a CNN studio in Washington, D.C., that night offering commentary, and it was clear to me that Joe was going to be the nominee based upon the results of that night. It also hit me that we should unify behind him as quickly as possible; I love Bernie, but I didn’t see a path to victory for him.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Levin, Plunder and Deceit (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 87, 88. 31 Alana Mastrangelo, “Top 10 Craziest Attacks on Campus Conservatives of 2019,” Breitbart, January 1, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/01/01/top-10-craziest-attacks-on-campus-conservatives-of-2019/ (April 22, 2021). 32 Spencer Brown, “Conservative Voices Once Again Excluded from Commencement Season,” Young America’s Foundation, June 16, 2020, https://www.yaf.org/news/conservative-voices-once-again-excluded-from-commencement-season/ (April 22, 2021). 33 Anya Kamenetz and Eric Westervelt, “Fact-Check: Bernie Sanders Promises Free College. Will It Work?” NPR, February 17, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/02/17/466730455/fact-check-bernie-sanders-promises-free-college-will-it-work (April 22, 2021). 34 Lilah Burke, “A Big Budget from Biden,” Inside Higher Education, April 12, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/12/bidens-proposed-budget-increases-funding-pell-hbcus-research (April 22, 2021). 35 Stuart Shepard and James Agresti, “Government Spending on Education Is Higher than Ever.

We can assume, therefore, that the real number of people motivated by Marxist ideas among social science professors is higher—anything up to double the Gross and Simmons number, but certainly a good deal more than one in five.”68 Ellis declares that “[i]t is safe to say that self-identified Marxists are no more than a tiny fraction of the general public of the United States, which means that there is a huge discrepancy between this very small group in the population and the very large one found among social science professors.”69 This helps explain why the Democratic Party generally, and Sen. Bernie Sanders in particular, push for free college and the cancellation of student loans. The more young people who are processed through America’s colleges and universities, the greater the chance for their revolution. CHAPTER FOUR RACISM, GENDERISM, AND MARXISM The foundational question: what is Critical Theory, from which these other Critical Theory/Marxist movements sprang?

Cory Booker (D-NJ) puts the cost of such a program at $543 billion in its first year. Though the costs thereafter would fall, the cumulative expense over ten years would come to some $2.5 trillion. The goal of developing a universal, single payer health-care system would, according to an MIT-Amherst study of a similar plan put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders, come to about $1.4 trillion a year.”69 “Just these six of AOC’s long list of aspirations,” states Ezrati, “would then roughly cost some $2.5 trillion a year. Since Washington’s 2018 budget put spending at $4.5 trillion, the Deal would effectively increase federal spending by a touch over half again.


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A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

“Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World,” Oxfam International, January 16, 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017–01–16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world. 3. Lauren Carroll and Tom Kertscher, “At DNC, Bernie Sanders Repeats Claim That Top One-Tenth of 1% Owns as Much Wealth as Bottom 90%,” Politico, July 26, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/26/bernie-s/dnc-bernie-sanders-repeats-claim-top-one-tenth-1-o/. 4. Sean Gorman, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs Are Wealthier Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,” Politico, March 14, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/mar/14/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-walmart-heirs-are-wealthier-bo/. 5. A number of experiments in developing new, better ways to measure economic growth are already under way.

When we get to the point where one person controls a huge portion of a country’s wealth, what is to prevent that person from imposing his will on the nation? Implicitly or explicitly, his wishes will become the law of the land. It could easily happen in a low-income country like Bangladesh. But we now realize it can also happen in a wealthy country like the United States. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders frequently pointed out that the richest 0.1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent—a claim supported by solid research data from sources like the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.3 He also pointed out that the Walton family of Walmart has more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the US population—another claim that research by unbiased fact-checkers has supported.4 It is dangerous for a country to allow so much wealth and power to be concentrated in a few hands.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Just before the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, roughly twenty thousand emails from the DNC suddenly appeared on WikiLeaks. The emails showed DNC leaders playing favorites among the Democratic nominees for president. Most notably, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared to be pushing for Clinton over Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont. The emails made front-page headlines, and Wasserman Schultz4 was forced to resign. Another batch of emails, this time from Clinton campaign head John Podesta, were released just as the Trump campaign was suffering one of its worst embarrassments, an Access Hollywood tape that showed then–reality star Trump speaking disparagingly about kissing, groping, and grabbing women without their consent.

Wherever there was a “seam line issue,” a divisive position that could turn Americans against one another, there was the IRA. Gun control, immigration, feminism, race—the IRA ran accounts that took extreme stances on each of these issues. Many of their pages supported the Trump campaign and conservative groups across the United States, but they also ran pages in support of Bernie Sanders. “It was a slow, slow process, but what we found that summer, the summer of 2017, it just blew us away,” recalled one member of Facebook’s security team. “We expected we’d find something, but we had no idea it was so big.” While over the years some Facebook employees had speculated that the IRA was focused on spreading disinformation in the United States, no one had thought to go looking for a professional disinformation campaign run by the organization.

Inside were about twelve images printed on standard 8-by-11 paper that the company representatives described as indicative of the kinds of ads they had found. The sampling suggested that the ads targeted Republican and Democratic candidates in equal measure. There were negative and positive ads on Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The committee staff were incredulous. In their own investigation, they had seen that the Russians appeared to be pushing Trump as their candidate of choice. Mauer and O’Neill pointed to an ad featuring Clinton with a woman in a hijab; “Muslims for Clinton” appeared below the photo in a font meant to mimic Arabic script.


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

The prize-backed challenges of the eighteenth century were tremendous engines of progress, but those engines were not powered by kings or captains of industry. They were fueled, instead, by peer networks. — The premiums of the RSA are experiencing a remarkable revival in the digital age. In May 2011, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced two bills in the Senate: for the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act and for the Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS Act. Like the Longitude Prize, the bills proposed by Sanders target a specific problem with vast economic and personal implications, namely, the cost of creating breakthrough pharmaceutical drugs.

Each year, billions of dollars would be available to institutions that release their findings into the public domain, or at least grant royalty-free open access to their patented material. The Sanders bills set incentives that reward not just finished products but also the processes that lead to breakthrough ideas. They make open collaboration pay. — Bernie Sanders’s colleagues in the Senate may not be ready to grasp the creative value of prize-backed challenges, but RSA-style premiums are proliferating throughout the government, on both the federal and the local level. Software-based competitions—such as Apps for America or New York City’s BigApps competition—reward programmers and information architects who create useful applications that share or explain the vast trove of government data.

In effect, the prize-backed challenge approach greatly increased the productivity of the taxpayer dollars spent: by promoting change in school districts that ultimately didn’t receive a dime of new funding, and through the free publicity generated by the competition itself. The $5 billion was slightly more than 1 percent of the overall education budget, yet Race to the Top has generated far more attention than any other Obama education initiative to date. Like Bernie Sanders’s medical-innovation bills, Race to the Top was an attempt to create market-style rewards and competition in an environment that was far removed from the traditional selection pressures of capitalism. While the federal government served as the ultimate judge of the competition (effectively playing the role of the consumer in a traditional marketplace), both the problems and the proposed solutions emerged from the wider network of state and local school systems.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

“An old world has sunk”: Noel Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 147. The CDU offered a clear vision: Geoffrey Pridham, Christian Democracy in Western Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 21–66. a “Christian” society: Ibid., p. 32. “The close collaboration”: Quoted in ibid., pp. 26–28. Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates: Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats,” New York Times, July 6, 2017; Bernie Sanders, “How Democrats Can Stop Losing Elections,” New York Times, June 13, 2017; also see Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Penn and Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats.”

Party gatekeepers were shells of what they once were, for two main reasons. One was a dramatic increase in the availability of outside money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. Now even marginal presidential candidates—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders—could raise large sums of money, either by finding their own billionaire financier or through small donations via the Internet. The proliferation of well-funded primary candidates indicated a more open and fluid political environment. The other major factor diminishing the power of traditional gatekeepers was the explosion of alternative media, particularly cable news and social media.

Such broad involvement is critical to isolating and defeating authoritarian governments. In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps. And it might help foster more crosscutting allegiances in a society that has too few of them.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Today there is probably more anti-business sentiment, most of all among young people, than at any other time since the radicalism of the 1960s.7 Bernie Sanders Supporters Although he did not win the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, Bernie Sanders arguably was the candidate who generated the second-highest amount of enthusiasm in that election cycle. As I write, he is one of the leading candidates to win the party’s nomination in 2020, though he will be seventy-eight years of age. And as the Democratic Party responds to the excesses of the Trump administration, Sanders’s progressive ideals are proving highly influential. Bernie Sanders epitomizes the anti-business left. A self-described socialist, he has called for breaking up the big banks and for the establishment of more worker-owned cooperatives.

He blames the stagnation in living standards on the rapacious nature of American business. I think you can plausibly argue that an actual Sanders presidency might not be nearly as radical as some of his rhetoric; consider, for example, that he uses the word “socialist” in varying and often pretty generic ways. Still, ask yourself a basic question: Has Bernie Sanders said much of anything good about business in general or big business in particular? If not, why is he so unwilling to appreciate one of the most beneficial and fundamental institutions in American life? The Media (and Social Media) The media are perhaps the biggest villain when it comes to criticizing business, but it’s not mainly about newspapers or TV stations being too left-wing.

Had banking and financial innovation not been allowed to proceed, the Western world would be a far less developed, creative, and indeed happy place. A few hundred years from now, our descendants probably will look back and say the same. But since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, attitudes have swung in the other direction and critics have hit the financial sector with virulent attacks. The 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, which got much further than almost anyone expected, focused like a laser on banking and finance, as has Senator Elizabeth Warren. It’s remarkable how many intellectuals, internet forum contributors, and even working-class Americans profess a strong dislike for the banks, or at least for what they think the banks stand for.


pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, bonus culture, business cycle, call centre, central bank independence, centre right, commodity super cycle, computerized trading, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, full employment, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, late capitalism, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, negative equity, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, too big to fail, trade liberalization, urban planning, web of trust, zero-sum game

These policies proved to be so valuable that they became accepted across the central range of the political spectrum. Political parties of the centre-left and centre-right alternated in power, but the policies remained in place. Yet, social democracy as a political force is now in existential crisis. The last decade has been a roll-call of disasters. On the centre-left, mauled by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump; the Blair–Brown British Labour Party has been taken over by the Marxists. In France, President Hollande decided not even to seek a second term, and his replacement as the Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon, crashed out with merely 8 per cent of the vote.

This approach is popular because everyone believes in their own values and assumes that they are the right ones on which to build shared identity. The problem is that an astonishingly diverse range of values can be found within any modern society; it is one of the defining features of modernity. If we require shared values, we end up with something powerfully exclusionary: ‘if you don’t share our values, get out.’ Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both Americans, but I defy you to find any values that they both hold, but which differentiate America from other nations. The challenge could be repeated – with appropriate substitutions of political leaders – in most Western societies. The only values that everyone in a society adheres to are so minimal that they fail to distinguish a particular country from many others, and so do not define a viable domain within which reciprocal obligations might be built.

Populism offers an alternative bypass: charismatic leaders with remedies so obvious that they can be grasped instantly. Often, the two fused, becoming yet more potent: once-discredited ideologies refurbished with impassioned leaders peddling enticing new remedies. Hail to the herald: from the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; from the nativists, Marine Le Pen and Norbert Hofer; from the secessionists, Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond and Carles Puigdemont; and from the world of celebrity entertainers, Beppe Grillo and Donald Trump. Currently, the political battlefield is seemingly characterized by alarmed and indignant Utilitarian and Rawlsian vanguards under assault from populist ideologues.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world. On the left, meanwhile, two trendsetters have been Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-described “socialists.” They have been joined by energetic newcomers on the political scene such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems just as comfortable with the label. And in several polls, Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine show significantly higher support for socialism than their elders.

These leaders implemented democratic versions of Lenin’s vision of a socialist economy, one in which the state sat atop “the commanding heights” of the economy. But when you ask what people mean by socialism now, it is not really that system at all. Today’s self-professed socialists want greater government investment, new and expanded safety nets, a “Green New Deal” to address climate change, and higher taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders himself makes clear his dream country is not Cuba but Denmark. You can see how amorphous the label is by the fact that Elizabeth Warren supports many of the same policies as Sanders, but has also called herself “a capitalist to my bones.” Any program that can be described as both capitalist and socialist probably lies somewhere in between.

You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” Bernie Sanders could not have said it better. Ideologies gain appeal because they seem to address the crucial problems of the moment. In the 1930s, capitalism had run aground, causing financial panic, collapse, and mass unemployment—and it seemed unable to right itself anytime soon. Along came Franklin Roosevelt, who let the government step in where the market was failing and got the country moving again.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Americans had come together to create cultural shifts like the legalization of gay marriage, gender equity in the workplace, minimum wage hikes, and, yes, even Trump’s election. More recently, Biden fought for a bill that centered on “human infrastructure,” a term popularized by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to describe benefits that help ordinary folks, like welfare programs and other kinds of people-centered offerings. Even though much of it has been opposed at every turn in the Senate, his has been one of the most progressive presidential agendas in recent history, from attempting to address climate change to proposing childcare tax credit and free community college.

(I think of what Bloomberg did on that stage as “rich mouthing,” the opposite of the idiom “poor mouthing,” where one flexes one’s own wealth, erasing the contributions of those who got you where you are—followed by the expectation of applause. It’s a surprisingly common move.) Luckily, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was alert to this strategy and as a result was well prepared to take Bloomberg down at that debate, retorting: “Mr. Bloomberg, it wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well.” Sanders knew to publicly puncture the gospel of individual success by those at the top of the income gradient.

Toward this end, Magee directs those seeking enlightenment and relief to reflect on “microaggressions—to hold them with some objectivity and distance” and consider them with a degree of detachment, all without denying the pain they may cause and internalizing it. In YouTube videos, Magee suggested that we openly discuss this topic. It was David Forbes who led me to Magee. Forbes described himself, in a high-pitched Bernie Sanders–like Brooklyn accent, as a “professor of contemplative education,” but his more worldly title is associate professor in the school counseling program at Brooklyn College’s School of Education. He suggested that I check out the New Mindful Deal. That was his own invention, geared toward institutions that are teaching mindfulness to teenagers, police officers, soldiers, and other stress-prone groups.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Facebook wasn’t a place where you’d figure out the details of what, if anything, was in those emails, or where you’d lend a sympathetic ear to Clinton’s explanations that after years of unfair scrutiny by Republicans, she’d wanted a little privacy. But Hillary sure could drive engagement. Another data set in April showed Clinton blowing away even Bernie Sanders by the measure of how many people were talking about her. The problem was that it was mostly unfavorable. But so far, she was the only candidate anyone really seemed to be talking about at all. That changed on June 16, when Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. His staff had planned remarks, but what dominated media coverage was what he said when he strayed from them: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said.

And he told me he was puzzled by BuzzFeed. Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, he told me, based on the candidate’s political views. Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it. BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement. Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie? he asked me. Jonah had sometimes asked the same thing. He, too, saw that the energy was on the militant left, and that our staff’s sympathies—and his own—mostly leaned the same way. But our journalistic scruples, the impulse toward fairness and away from propaganda, sometimes handcuffed our drive for traffic.

Our news operation had gone from being scorned and yoked to the social web to being well regarded among journalists, and even winning the occasional prize—but we were spending more and more money on journalism to maintain the same level of traffic, and though he and I didn’t talk about it much, Jonah and I both knew that our existing approach to news depended on the rest of the business remaining strong. But Jonah had bet on me and on that style of news, and so Jonah let me win the occasional skirmishes with our publisher, Dao Nguyen, when he eyed the traffic that a breathless Bernie Sanders fan post might get. I told Bannon that we came from a different journalistic tradition, and we valued it. That answer didn’t satisfy any of us much. After Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, and as he battled it out with Hillary Clinton for the White House, BuzzFeed published another post that stuck in Jonah’s mind, one that he thought kind of explained the whole thing.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Taxpayer costs: Matt O’Brien and Spencer Raley, “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers,” Federation for American Immigration Reform, September 27, 2017, www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers. 37. Latino voters for Bernie: Lauren Gambino, “‘He’s Working for It’: Why Latinos Are Rallying Behind Sanders,” The Guardian, March 3, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/bernie-sanders-latino-voters.; cf. esp. Wilhelm Urbina Meierling, “Latinos Know Bernie Sanders’s Type,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/latinos-know-bernie-sanderss-type-11583447697. 38. Census: Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “The Impact of Legal and Illegal Immigration on the Apportionment of Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020,” Center for Immigration Studies, December 9, 2019, https://cis.org/Report/Impact-Legal-and-Illegal-Immigration-Apportionment-Seats-US-House-Representatives-2020; “Exit Polls 2016,” CNN, November 23, 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls.

They perhaps logically make the necessary political adjustments or cultural exegeses to mask the reality of their own pessimistic economic expectations and existing financial realities. All of the above is a fair stereotype of thousands of young people in Antifa-inspired demonstrations who hit the streets to commit acts of violence in spring 2020.19 The ascendance of conservative outsider Donald Trump and socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016 is a testament to dissatisfaction with the establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties. These populist outsiders accused both conservative and liberal elites of indifference or outright hostility to the traditional concerns of the middle classes, whether by, respectively, favoring the rich or strangling the citizen through larger and grasping government.

Nonetheless, a number of studies have tried to assess at least some of the costs to US taxpayers of the millions who enter and reside in America illegally, as offset by contributions in payroll and sales taxes paid to the government. Some studies put the direct costs of illegal immigration at well over $110 billion per year to the treasury.36 In the 2020 Democratic primaries, once front-runner but ultimately failed candidate Bernie Sanders, the avowed socialist, apparently won the majority of Latino votes in early primary races. A number of analysts were confused as to how a seventy-eight-year-old, northeastern, white-male, socialist candidate could appeal to Latinos, many of whom, or their parents, had fled from impoverished countries mismanaged by statist, neosocialist, or communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Central America and, in some cases, would later vote in the 2020 election in sizable numbers for Donald Trump.


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

Geert Wilders, ‘Let the Dutch vote on immigration policy’, New York Times, 19 November 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/opinion/geert-wilders-the-dutch-deserve-to-vote-on-immigration-policy.html. Capitalist Donald Trump wants to ‘declare independence from the elites’. Arch-socialist and Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders, thinks Americans are ‘sick and tired of establishment politics and economics’. Daniel Marans, ‘Sanders calls out MSNBC’s corporate ownership—in Interview on MSNBC’, Huffington Post, 7 May 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-asks-who-owns-msnbc_us_572e3d0fe4b0bc9cb0471df1. 4. Ingrid van Biezen, Peter Mair and Thomas Poguntke, ‘Going, going… gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe’, European Journal of Political Research 51:1 (2012), pp. 24–56.

It’s not the slow, informed and careful politicians who have thrived online; it’s the populists from across the spectrum. It’s the people with the simple, emotional, shareable messages. It’s people like Beppe. Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, who’s compared the Qu’ran to Mein Kampf, is the most followed politician on the Dutch social networks. Bernie Sanders was propelled to within an inch of the Democratic Party nomination with help from his online #feelthebern fans and online donations. But the biggest shock of all (to pollsters and mainstream newspapers anyway) took place in 2016 when billionaire magnate, ur-populist, professional simplifier and Twitter addict Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States.

Most reached for the 1930s—naturally, since that after all is the only history most of us are taught in schools—and duly noted the similarities: a period of extreme economic difficulties, rising nationalism and the collapse of the moderate centre. This account implies that right-wing populism—nationalism, xenophobia and anti-elitism—is irrevocably on the march. But there are many other types of radical ideas and movements also on the move. Trump surprised almost every seasoned Washington watcher, but so did openly socialist Bernie Sanders’ close run for the Democratic Party candidacy. Jeremy Corbyn was also re-elected as leader of the UK Labour Party, promising democratic revolution and a strong left-wing agenda. In Spain the left-wing anti-austerity Podemos party, founded in January 2014 by a long-haired bearded professor, won 21 per cent of the vote in the year’s national elections, effectively ending the two-party system.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Congressional bills that would prohibit state and local governments from banning municipal broadband are periodically introduced, so far without success; for example, the Community Broadband Act of 2017 (S. 742) and the Community Broadband Act of 2019 (H.R. 2785). 48, Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren … Warren plan: Elizabeth Warren, “My Plan to Invest in Rural America,” August 7, 2019. Sanders plan: Bernie Sanders, “High-Speed Internet for All,” December 2019. 49, Municipal governments also have … The DC network is called DC-Net, while the program that serves community nonprofits is called DC Columbia Community Access Network (DC-CAN); see “About DC-Net,” dcnet.dc.gov, and “DC-CAN FAQs,” dcnet.dc.gov.

Merely removing roadblocks will hardly level the playing field, however. Even if they were no longer hamstrung by hostile state legislatures, community networks would still be going up against large firms with extensive resources at their disposal. Playing defense is not enough. Networks will not only need to be defended but extended. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put forward plans for doing so during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. Warren proposed giving $85 billion in federal grants to cooperatives, local governments, nonprofits, and tribes to build infrastructure for “high-speed public broadband.” Sanders called for $150 billion in both grants and technical assistance to municipalities and states “to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.”

Shapiro, even found that polarization—defined here as a composite of eight measures, from how ideologically consistent someone’s views are to how rarely they split their votes across the two parties—has “increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media,” which is to say, people older than sixty-five. The polarization frame has a further problem: it evokes a false equivalence between Left and Right. It is certainly true that left-wing movements have benefited from social media. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the candidacies of Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t have reached the scale they did without Twitter and Facebook. The power shift from traditional media to the more distributed informational worlds of social media has created more room for social- democratic, socialist, and abolitionist ideas to circulate. But the Right has immeasurably more resources with which to exploit this shift.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

See also Michelle Boorstein and Julie Zauzmer, “WikiLeaks: Democratic Party Officials Appear to Discuss Using Sanders’s Faith Against Him,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2016. “I told you a long time ago”: Hayley Walker, “Bernie Sanders Calls for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign in Wake of Email Leaks,” ABC News, July 24, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/bernie-sanders-calls-wasserman-schultz-resign-wake-dnc/story?id=40824983. toothpaste back in the tube: Elizabeth Jensen, “How Should NPR Report on Hacked WikiLeak Emails?,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/10/19/498444943/how-should-npr-report-on-hacked-wikileaks-emails.

Fancy Bear is a nickname for the computer hacking unit of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—literally, Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, Russia’s military intelligence agency). Fancy Bear wanted the password to Billy’s Gmail account. It hoped to fish out sensitive communications from the Clinton campaign about rival candidate Bernie Sanders. Billy gave Fancy Bear his password, got dressed, and went to campaign headquarters. Billy was not a Russian mole in the Clinton campaign. Nor was he the only staffer to provide his password. Rather, Billy had fallen for a ruse. The email sent by Fancy Bear looked just like a message from Google.

., WikiLeaks announced the release of “1,062 documents and spreadsheets” with an accompanying link to a searchable database, so that journalists could hunt for the most damaging revelations. Most of the material was mundane campaign business. There were no major bombshells, but some messages betrayed a pro-Clinton bias, and a few even suggested ways of undermining Bernie Sanders. The most incendiary scoop was heavily promoted by WikiLeaks. The chief financial officer of the DNC had sent an email inquiring into whether the DNC might question Sanders on his atheism ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia contests. “For KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God?


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

As luck would have it, I had one contact in Louisiana—Sally Cappel, the mother-in-law of a former graduate student of mine. It was Sally who would introduce me to the white South and, through a friend, to the right within it. A Lake Charles–based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in the 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally’s very dear friend and a world-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley Slack was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both women had joined sororities (although different ones) at Louisiana State University. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other’s houses.

And in that fight, did the entire federal government seem to them on the wrong—betraying—side? Maybe this was the main reason Mike was later to tell me, in reference to the 2016 presidential election and only half jokingly, that he could never bring himself to vote for the menshevik (Hillary Clinton) or the bolshevik (Bernie Sanders). As I leave, Mike hands me the jar of peaches that had been on the table when I arrived. I drive back up Crawfish Street, past tilting yards, onto the potentially sinking only exit route, and wonder what news of Bayou Corne, federal regulations, handouts, and much else he received from church or from his favorite television channel—Fox News. 8 The Pulpit and the Press: “The Topic Doesn’t Come Up” In the first ten minutes after meeting Madonna Massey for coffee at the Lake Charles Starbucks, I notice how many people seem happy to see her.

And again, Obamacare, global warming, gun control, abortion rights—did these issues, too, fall into the emotional grooves of history? Does it feel like another strike from the North, from Washington, that has put the brown pelican ahead of the Tea Partier waiting in line? I wondered. When I talked to Cappy Brantley in Longville about the 2016 presidential election, he commented with a gentle smile, “Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders—they’re from the North.” A Different Costume “From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugarcane plantations border both sides of the river all the way . . . standing so close together, for long distances,” Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.”


pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left by Owen Jones

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, call centre, capitalist realism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, European colonialism, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Floyd, gig economy, green new deal, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, market fundamentalism, Naomi Klein, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, open borders, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, short selling, The Spirit Level, War on Poverty

This helped to spawn Donald Trump in America; the resurgence of France’s National Front (now, National Rally); the German AfD; Britain’s UKIP and Brexit Party; Spain’s Vox party; Italy’s Lega Nord; Austria’s Freedom Party. This era also saw the ascendancy of left movements which, rather than blaming social crises on the most vulnerable, realized that responsibility lay instead with elite vested interests, and championed a radical redistribution of wealth and power. So rose the Bernie Sanders movement in the United States; the anti-austerity Podemos party in Spain; Syriza in Greece; the Left Bloc in Portugal; La France Insoumise (loosely translated as ‘France Unbowed’); Ireland’s Sinn Fein; and, of course, Corbynism. The Corbyn insurrection, then, was just one manifestation of a broader wave of political unrest across the Western world – albeit a very British one.

Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias was ‘one of the best orators you’ve seen, had an excellent answer to every question, constantly strategizing, never slipped up, surrounded by a clique who had driven a political project for a decade, done PhDs in political communication, had built a machine. And you’d look at Bernie Sanders in the United States and see this amazing orator.’ Then there was Corbyn, who ‘came here by accident, surrounded by a fairly motley crew’. In short, Walker concluded, ‘I wasn’t sure he was up to this.’ In British politics, holding a general election was no longer – as it used to be – in the gift of the prime minister.

‘We’d been told for decades that we didn’t want to win, that we were just purists,’ he says. ‘Actually they just defended safe seats. We wanted to win and we fought for supposedly safe Tory seats – because if we were going to win, we needed to do just that.’ In all this, the Corbyn camp looked for inspiration to Bernie Sanders’s insurgent left-wing candidacy for the US Democratic presidential nomination, and how mass rallies had spurred on his campaign, creating a buzz beyond existing core supporters, and impacting both social media and mainstream media coverage. ‘Obviously having indoor events became impossible very quickly, there weren’t enough big spaces in Britain,’ says one aide who accompanied Corbyn across the country throughout the campaign.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked people which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, the leaders of the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton to be their candidate, and the leaders of the Republican Party favored Jeb Bush to be theirs. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.” In the following year, Sanders—a seventy-four-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary—came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered more than 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

As political analyst Ruy Teixeira and his coauthors put it in The American Prospect, “The Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of the status quo—a status quo perceived to be elitist, exclusionary, and disconnected from the entire range of working-class concerns, but particularly from those voters in white working-class areas. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.” In 2016, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. In other words, racism and xenophobia were proximate causes of Trump’s 2016 victory, and they continue to contribute to his support.

Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the insights of many people I’ve had the privilege to know and to work with over the years, among them Bob Edgar, Karen Hobart Flynn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Gabrielle Giffords, Tom Glynn, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Ted Kennedy, Bill Moyers, Richard Neustadt, Michael Pertschuk, Bernie Sanders, Martha Tierney, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Wellstone, Fred Wertheimer, and Tracy Weston. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, for fostering the intellectually courageous community that is my home, and to four decades of hardworking and eager students at Berkeley, Brandeis, and Harvard, who have taught me more than I ever taught them.


pages: 268 words: 76,709

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, low interest rates, McMansion, medical malpractice, old-boy network, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

In most other communities, a disaster of that magnitude would have sparked demands for immediate improvements in zoning laws. But it changed absolutely nothing in Immokalee, where one-quarter of the residences are substandard, according to county housing officials. After touring Immokalee in 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the housing conditions there as “deplorable” and said that the shacks and trailers would never have passed a safety inspection in Burlington, the small Vermont city where he had once been mayor. To give them credit, community leaders who want to improve housing in Immokalee find themselves in a catch-22.

A typical one read, “The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders pockets… They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story To bad the people protesting don’t have a clue regarding the facts. A bunch of fools!” In a reply to a story in the Naples News that covered a visit to Immokalee by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), surfxaholic36 wrote: “The CIW is an attack organization and will drive business out of Immokalee while they line their own pockets. They make money through donations by attacking large companies and have attacked Yum, McDonald’s and now Burger King to get money for there own organization.

“You can imagine yourself trying to make an honest presentation of how we saw the issues, when the rest of the table knew for sure that I was the devil incarnate, including the senators, all Democrats. There was not a friend in that hearing room. It was no good to be falsely accused and so defamed as an industry for something that we weren’t doing. But Senate hearings are an art—almost like bull baiting.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) presided over the hearing. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were also present. All of them had reputations for being vehemently prolabor. In their opening statements, the senators focused on wages, honing in on two claims that the Tomato Exchange had made.


pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Candidates are also debating various methods to dramatically expand government subsidy of higher education, the importance of paid family leave, a universal $15/hour (or higher) minimum wage, and similarly aggressive left reforms. The ultimate source of this leftward tilt from Democrats, so recently a thoroughly neoliberal/centrist party, is of course Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy for the presidential nomination galvanized a new generation of young progressives who refuse to accept the thin gruel so often offered by Democrats. For many of these young people, the Great Recession was the fire that forged their radicalism, as some of the wealthiest people and institutions in the world were bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars while regular people lost their jobs by the millions and received no help from Washington at all.

That’s simply welfare-state liberalism, though the nationalization of the health insurance system is arguably a socialist goal. But single-payer care has the advantage of already working in several other developed countries and would meet far less resistance than nationalizing the entire medical industry. In 2017, Bernie Sanders unveiled a plan with a name that had already been popularized by health care activists: Medicare for All. Tying support of single-payer care to an established, effective, and popular program, the plan calls for an ambitious expansion in the positive rights of all Americans. The plan would ensure that everyone has access to quality health care without going bankrupt from accessing it.

(Some tedious people point out that total higher education spending has risen in the past decades, but this is obtuse. Between 2000 and 2017 undergraduate enrollments grew by almost a third.16 Of course total expenditures went up as dramatically more people were going to school; what matters for the lives of individual students is the level of per-student support, which has indisputably declined.) Bernie Sanders has presented a plan to fix this, too. He argues that public school tuition should be free. The dollar figure he puts on this is $75 billion, which he proposes to pay for with a tax on Wall Street speculation. (Some critics, unsurprisingly, predict the cost would be far higher.) There are a few tricky aspects to this; for one, if the federal government guarantees adequate tuition dollars for every public university student, what’s to stop some states from slashing funding for state colleges, given that the feds will cover the rest?


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“they belong to a class”: John Berger, “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” International Socialism 1st series, no. 34 (Autumn 1968): 11–12. “maybe somebody who doesn’t look kinda like you”: Bridget Read, “The Bernie Rally Felt So Much Bigger Than Bernie,” The Cut, October 21, 2019; Bernie Sanders, “Bernie’s Back Rally with AOC in New York,” Bernie Sanders channel on YouTube video, October 19, 2019, at 2:47:27. “all the possibilities”: Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 143. Freud’s essay was originally published in 1919. “If you have never believed”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, conversation with author, October 17, 2022.

He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats—most of it white, but not all of it.

Many conservatives, meanwhile, oppose this kind of techno fetishism for different reasons; they see it as an affront to God’s plan. Bannon recognized similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma. Drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left; they’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against. But aside from some grumbling, there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering from the pandemic, and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed—but, once again, via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than the real scandals.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Contrary to what the advocates of market liberalization would predict, the Bretton Woods system provided the most stable period in the history of capitalism and also its fastest growing. Source: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009). What has changed since the crisis is the opposition to capitalism. Whether it comes in the form of grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street, the rise of the populist left through figures like Bernie Sanders in the US or Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, or the anti-globalization backlash from the supporters of Brexit and Trump, there is a growing sense that the last four decades of Western history under liberal capitalism have been a disappointment. Particularly since many of the laissez-faire policies applied during this period promised to “democratize” the economy by reigning in the state and offering opportunity and choice But it is fortunate for the defenders of laissez-faire that an alternative to capitalism has remained elusive in mainstream discourse.

Much like the North Koreans, the defenders of liberal capitalism have threatened their critics that any major systemic changes to the economic status quo will result in unbearable economic dislocation and massive destruction of wealth for rich and poor alike. Not a day seemingly goes by without the right-wing and centrist media reminding its viewers that the economic policies espoused by “radical” left politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably turn their countries into Venezuela. Or that socialist and redistributive policies may work in countries like the Nordics but, for unexplained reasons, not in countries like the US (universal healthcare being the most egregious example). These arguments preclude an honest comparative discussion of economic models in mainstream discourse, which further reinforces the fear factor when policies that go against the prevailing orthodoxy are proposed.

One that is entirely unwarranted since asset managers are using other people’s money against their interests, particularly on social and environmental matters.15 Stock Issuance This method involves forcing companies of a certain size to issue a small percentage of their equity each year as shares into an employee-ownership fund. Such a scheme is has been proposed by the UK Labour Party at 1% a year for ten years, and Bernie Sanders in the US later proposed 2% a year.16 It should be observed that businesses already do this whenever they need additional financing or when employees (usually executives) paid with stock options decide to exercise them. The downside to issuance is share dilution: existing stock owners will see their shares in the company diluted in proportion to the amount of new shares.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

They fit the standard description of cosmopolitan and usually take an interest in the cultures of other countries, though, ironically, many of them have become sufficiently insulated from hardship and painful change that they are provincial in their own way and have become somewhat of a political target (from both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the recent campaigns). Because they are intelligent, articulate, and often socially graceful, they usually seem like very nice people, and often they are. Think of a financier or lawyer who vacations in France or Italy, has wonderful kids, and donates generously to his or her alma mater. I think of these people as the wealthiest and best educated 3 to 5 percent of the American population. 2.

The underlying constitutional issues have yet to be adjudicated, but the on-the-ground reality is that Brookfield Properties and the City of New York ended up getting their way. Eventually the weather became colder, and Occupy Wall Street is now a kind of misty nostalgic footnote to history. If the ideas of that movement do take off, it likely will be through the educated and quite peaceful supporters of candidates like Bernie Sanders, not through public violence.12 Or consider the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As you might expect, there were numerous would-be demonstrators. They ended up being confined to a “Demonstration Zone,” which one federal judge described as analogous to one of Piranesi’s etchings of a prison.

Good matches are lots of fun, but in a country with so much social stagnation and extremely good matching, eventually we become aware that we too are most of the time being turned away at the gate. 8. POLITICAL STAGNATION, THE DWINDLING OF TRUE DEMOCRACY, AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AS PROPHET OF OUR TIME Anti-establishment insurgent campaigns were the talk of the 2016 presidential campaign, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were legitimate anti-establishment candidates. But a peek beneath the surface reveals that much of the fear and anger that drove their campaigns was based not on a hope for change in Washington but on a hope for a return to the past. Trump’s rhetoric about “making America great again” was, when you looked at the fine print, mostly a promise that in electing him, voters could avoid the forces of change that are sweeping over the rest of the world, whether it be the loss of manufacturing jobs, an increasing dependence on immigrants, or the loss of the political and cultural dominance of white men.


pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval by Jason Cowley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, liberal world order, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, technological determinism, University of East Anglia

And this is why Bernie Sanders was able to have far more success than anyone imagined. He was originally thought to be a fringe candidate who would maybe get five, ten per cent of the vote. And yet he fought Hillary Clinton almost to a draw in many of the Democratic primaries. No one would have imagined that. The mainstream of the Democratic Party had so embraced the financial industry that it was unable to provide an effective counterweight when it came to the financial crisis or to the aftermath, the regulatory debate. And oddly enough, Trump from the right and Bernie Sanders from the left have a good deal of overlap.

Progressive forces, if they’re not coming at this from a strong centrist position, are likely to find themselves just enough off-centre on the debates around culture and identity, never mind the economy, where they’re going to be defeated by a populism of the right. And if you put a populism of the left against that, which is where some people want to go – it’s where the British Labour Party’s gone [and] many Democrats argue that, really, if we’d had Bernie Sanders, we’d have done better – if we go down that path, we’ll just get beaten bigger.’ * * * Is this the beginning of Tony Blair’s second act in British public life? Will enough people be prepared to listen to him, or is the stain of the Iraq misadventure and subsequent pursuit of personal wealth too pronounced?

What he said was this: the Tories would call a snap general election in the early summer of 2017; Labour would be ready for the election and, because of the party’s hundreds of thousands of new paying members, it would have the funds to contest it well; the party would exploit its social media expertise; and Jeremy Corbyn would campaign as a Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump-style anti-establishment populist. He said Corbyn and the party would confound expectations. I remember thinking: ‘Good luck with that strategy, sir!’ Yet much of what Milne forecast happened after Theresa May called the snap election that destroyed her authority and resulted in an extraordinary surge of support for the Labour Party, which had begun the campaign adrift by more than twenty per cent in some polls (Corbyn, after a dynamic campaign and popular left-wing manifesto, delivered the biggest increase in Labour’s general election vote share since 1945, from thirty per cent in 2015 to forty per cent in 2017).


pages: 91 words: 24,469

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

If that is your approach to fishing, you had better become a vegan. * To repeat: nothing I say here about citizenship should be taken to imply anything about who should be granted it or how noncitizens should be treated. I am interested here only in what citizenship is. * Consider this statement Bernie Sanders made not long after the 2016 election: One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics. I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American head or CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of his country and exploiting his workers, doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot if he’s black or white or Latino. . . .

” * American progressives’ single-minded focus on economics owes more to Marxism than to the original Progressive movement. If they want to become a major force in American politics again, it would be wise for them to look back to the movement’s founders and their generous view of the country and its destiny, rather than to the latest books from Verso Press. Teddy Roosevelt should be required reading for all Bernie Sanders voters today (though they will have to skip over the jingoistic bits). * One of the small ironies of life in the Reagan years is that conservatives, seeing that they were locked out of the university, created a parallel intellectual universe, funded by rich patrons, complete with magazines, publishing houses, student newspapers, campus organizations, and summer schools where enthusiastic committed cadres were educated and integrated into networks that are still a powerful force in Washington.


pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Laura Bear, “Capital and Time: Uncertainty and Qualitative Measures of Inequality,” British Journal of Sociology vol. 65 no. 4 (2014): 639–649; Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2015). 12. Jim Tankersley, “The Thing Bernie Sanders Says about Inequality that No Other Candidate Will Touch,” Washington Post, July 13, 2015, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/, accessed July 17, 2015. 13. Leslie McCall, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity and Redistribution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 48. 14.

Historian Steven Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence (2015) compared the modern American public unfavorably with Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were not afraid to call out class warfare against the working poor when they saw it.11 Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013) reached a wide audience, with an accessible message: the prosperity of the United States hinges on the middle class having an income to spend. After all, a multimillionaire can only drive one car at a time, wear one change of clothing at a time, sleep on one or two pillows at a time. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made economic inequality one of the cornerstones of his unexpectedly popular campaign: “Unchecked growth—especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent—is absurd … Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for our people.”

Others issued a vague call for tax restructuring, or job growth through the formation of local cooperative movements using environmentally sustainable practices.41 English professor and Occupy participant Stephen Collis advocated expansion of public transit and free education and health care.42 Some form of reviving collective bargaining, although perhaps not through a traditional union movement, was also suggested.43 A slow movement overly focused on democratic process at the best of times, Occupy was open to being portrayed by the press as increasingly dirty, dangerous, unfocused, or even Marxist and laughable.44 The Occupiers were so enamored of direct democracy that they celebrated divisions within the movement rather than making progress toward some common goal.45 Nonetheless, the Occupy movement brought sustained public attention to the issue of inequality and the degree to which American politics had been captured by the wealthiest 1 percent. Awareness of the issue among young people arguably fueled Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s popularity during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. DISSATISFACTION WITH THE STATUS QUO: THE TEA PARTY A right-wing protest movement emerged a year before the Occupy movement. It was, in its own way, also a protest movement against inequality, but it defined the major issues differently.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

He called climate change: Peter Sasso, “Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch: Global Warming Skeptic,” mrc NewsBusters, July 3, 2008, https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/peter-sasso/2008/07/03/former-general-electric-ceo-jack-welch-global-warming-skeptic. “While some of America’s”: Gryta and Mann, Lights Out, 137 “General Electric was created”: Bernie Sanders meets with the Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News, April 1, 2016, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. “GE has been in business”: Jeffrey Immelt, April 6, 2016, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ge-ceo-bernie-sanders-says-were-destroying-the-moral-fabric-of-america-hes-wrong/2016/04/06/8499bc8c-fc23-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html. “the imperial CEO”: James Stewart, “Metaphor for G.E.’s Ills: A Corporate Jet With No Passengers,” New York Times, November 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/business/ge-corporate-jets.html.

The dividend had been cut. Stalwart businesses like plastics and appliances had been sold off. And no matter what, the stock wouldn’t rise. With the news out of GE only getting worse, Nelson Peltz, one of the original corporate raiders, bought a minority stake in the stock and began agitating for change. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who was running for president, had Immelt in his sights as well. In an interview with the New York Daily News, the senator said greedy companies were “destroying the moral fabric of the country.” When asked for an example, he cited GE. “General Electric was created in this country by American workers and American consumers,” Sanders said.


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Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Cambridge Analytica, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, lifelogging, low skilled workers, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, tech bro, the built environment, urban planning, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’. Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explaining that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’85 In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’,86 while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.87 The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism.

Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs.5 A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.6 In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does. On the other hand plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her.

This is not a groundbreaking opinion. From Anne Applebaum (‘Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary, irrational, overwhelming ambition’8), to Hollywood mogul, democratic donor and ‘one-time Clinton ally’9 David Geffen (‘God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?’10), via Colin Powell (‘unbridled ambition’11), Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager (‘don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions’12), and, of course, good old Julian Assange (‘eaten alive by her ambitions’13), the one thing we all seem to be able to agree on (rare in this polarised age) is that Hillary Clinton’s ambition is unseemly.


pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Interestingly, Donald Trump has been resetting our policy of credible deterrence quite well. When he killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in January of 2020, many media elites and Twitter warriors proclaimed this was the beginning of World War III. As of this writing, the war has yet to break out. Bad news for MSNBC, good news for the rest of the world. Bernie Sanders and his socialist buddies love to say that they’d avoid military action at all costs, but they ignore the fact that we’re the world’s last remaining superpower. Does Bernie know that if we constantly say we are anti-war that it might actually bring war upon us? Perhaps he should try taking a Psych 101 class once he makes college free for everyone, including old socialists.

Captain America, The Hulk, and Luke Skywalker are all members of the hypocritical superelite. Ironically, those who do flee America are usually rich people wanting to escape being taxed to the hilt by greedy politicians and the IRS. Something that’s only going to get worse when future president Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren executes Order 66 to eliminate the remaining billionaires scattered across the galaxy. And that’s the suspicious thing about the left’s self-loathing. The worst offenders tend to be the most successful—the ones who’ve benefited most from Western values and institutions such as capitalism and pluralism.

Instead, they amplified the feelings of Democrat senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who didn’t wait to hail the incident as “a modern-day attempted lynching.” Unsurprisingly, the hits kept coming from Democrats on Twitter, who now had an incident that could tell a story they so deeply wanted to be true. Bernie Sanders hailed it as proof of the “surging hostility towards minorities around the country.” Nancy Pelosi called it “an affront to our humanity.” And congresswoman Maxine Waters said she was “dedicated to finding the culprits and bringing them to justice.” Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said: “New York State calls this attack on Jussie Smollett exactly what it is—a hate crime.”


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-debuts-political-campaign-show-1454015686 Schroeder, Stan. “Snapchat Positions Itself as Breaking News Platform with San Bernardino Coverage.” Mashable, December 3, 2015. http://mashable.com/2015/12/03/snapchat-san-bernardino/#COriFAOfl5qR Shields, Mike. “Bernie Sanders Is Running a 9-Day Snapchat Ad Campaign in Iowa.” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-is-running-a-9-day-snapchat-ad-campaign-in-iowa-1453806001 Vincent, James. “Ted Cruz Trolled Donald Trump with a Snapchat Filter at Last Night’s Debate.” Verge, January 29, 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/29/10867830/ted-cruz-donald-trump-snapchat-filter Wagner, Kurt.

“Think of the primaries like The Hunger Games—but with much less attractive people,” Hamby explained in the pilot episode. The result was an interesting hybrid of the professionally produced Discover and the user-generated Live Stories. Users were soon submitting photos and videos taken behind the scenes, often at events closed to the press. Hamby interviewed a cast of characters, from a canvasser for Bernie Sanders to Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie to an Iowa high schooler who registered “Deez Nuts” as a candidate. The format had its drawbacks. Hamby’s segments were shot on high-resolution cameras and allowed to run longer than ten seconds, the limit Snapchat traditionally imposed. But user-submitted snaps were shot on smartphones and subject to the normal limitations of the app, so it was often difficult to hear exactly what a candidate was saying.

Soon the candidates started using Snapchat’s geofilters as well, paying to have custom filters at debate halls and rallies. In January 2016, Ted Cruz mocked Donald Trump’s absence at the final Republican debate with a filter asking, “Where is Ducking Donald?” accompanied by a yellow duck sporting a Trump haircut. Bernie Sanders’s campaign ran a different geofilter every day for nine straight days leading up to the Iowa caucus. Most urged voters to “Feel the Bern” and get out to vote on caucus night. In May 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign placed a geofilter at the Anaheim Convention Center, the site of a Trump rally.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

At the outset of the snap general election, he cheerfully reminded critics of this fact before confounding their expectations yet again. Everything Corbyn, his allies, and his supporters have achieved has been against the odds – against all odds. August 2017 Introduction: Against All Odds There’s Something about Jeremy Early 2016, and Tony Blair is ‘baffled’. What with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and Bernie Sanders in the United States, he sighs: ‘I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.’1 His confusion is to be expected. He had warned Labour, to no avail: ‘if your heart is with Jeremy, get a transplant’. His former confederate Peter Mandelson joined in, telling that bastion of Labour values the Financial Times that: ‘The Labour Party is in mortal danger.’

What is at stake here is a generational change that, though it has been seen in other countries first, is now intersecting with Britain’s democratic decline to produce this challenge to the status quo. From the first ruptures of the anti-capitalist movement to Occupy; from Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela to Spain, Portugal and Greece; Leftist success has been propelled in large part by new movements of the young. Even in the United States, hardly a typical case in other respects, Bernie Sanders’s support is overwhelmingly concentrated among the under thirties.36 Much is written, not wholly incorrectly, of how these activists are shaped by ‘post-materialist’ values – support for peace and gay rights, for example. But far more fundamentally, this generation is the one to suffer the most from the consolidation of neoliberalism, as they are paying more for access to higher education, have far less access to diminished public services and welfare, and suffer far higher rates of unemployment.

Television and online news coverage of the Labour Party in crisis’, Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck University of London, July 2016; Jane Martinson, ‘BBC Trust says Laura Kuenssberg report on Corbyn was inaccurate’, Guardian, 18 January 2017; Justin Lewis, ‘Newspapers, not BBC, led the way in biased election coverage’, The Conversation, 15 May 2015; Tom Mills, ‘The General Strike to Corbyn: 90 years of BBC establishment bias’, Open Democracy, 6 May 2016; Tom Mills, ‘Post-democratic broadcasting’, LRB blog, 18 May 2017; Stephen Cushion, ‘The Tories are the big winners in the TV airtime war’, The 650, 12 May 2017; ‘Media coverage of the 2017 General Election campaign’, Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Loughborough University, April–June 2017. 12Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017. 13‘Newspapers: daily readership by age’, State of the News Media 2016, Pew Research Centre, 15 June 2016; Jasper Jackson, ‘National daily newspaper sales fall by half a million in a year’, Guardian, 10 April 2015; Roy Greenslade, ‘Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall’, Guardian, 27 May 2016; Roy Greenslade, ‘Popular newspapers suffer greater circulation falls than qualities’, Guardian, 19 January 2017; David Bond, ‘UK newspapers team up to combat falling revenues’, Financial Times, 23 October 2016; Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017; Peter Preston, ‘TV news faces a threat familiar to newspapers’, Guardian, 17 April 2016. 14Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017; Peter Kellner, ‘The problem of trust’, YouGov, 13 November 2012; James Grierson, ‘Britons’ trust in government, media and business falls sharply’, Guardian, 16 January 2017. 15Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, Verso: London, 2016 16Matti Littunen, ‘An analysis of news and advertising in the UK general election’, Open Democracy, 7 June 2017; Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook only want to share pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory news stories’, Buzzfeed, 7 May 2017; Giles Turner and Jeremy Khan, ‘U.K. Labour’s savvy use of social media helped win young voters’, Bloomberg, 11 June 2017. Introduction: Against All Odds 1David Smith, ‘Tony Blair admits he is baffled by rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 23 February 2016. 2‘Tony Blair: If your heart’s with Jeremy Corbyn, get a transplant’, Guardian, 22 July 2015; Peter Mandelson, ‘The Labour Party is in mortal danger’, Financial Times, 27 August 2015; Rowena Mason and Josh Halliday, ‘Gordon Brown urges Labour not to be party of protest by choosing Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 17 August 2015. 3Robert Mendick, ‘Tony Blair gives Kazakhstan’s autocratic president tips on how to defend a massacre’, Telegraph, 24 August 2014. 4Tony Benn, Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–72, London: Arrow, 1989. 5Tony Benn, speech to the Engineering Union, AUEW Conference, May 1971.


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The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

., Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (St. Louis: Modern View Press, 1941), 42. 7. Brookings Institute, “An Economic Agenda for America: A Conversation with Senator Bernie Sanders” (February 9, 2015), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20150210_sanders_economic_agenda_transcript.pdf, accessed July 28, 2018. 8. Franklin Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress” (January 11, 1944). 9. Bernie Sanders, “Speech at Syracuse, New York” (April 12, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3W9SthxzsI, accessed July 30, 2018. 10. Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure of the United States at Mid-Century,” National Bureau of Economic Research (August 1991). 11.

Indeed, by the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodied had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics saw him as an abomination. Perhaps he was. Yet he was also very much a man of his time. Bernie Ignites But we begin with the candidate who was in some respects Trump’s polar opposite and in others his doppelgänger. Like Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders was born in New York City in the 1940s. Biographical similarities pretty much end there. Sanders, after all, became a Vermonter, a self-professed socialist, and a career politician. In his contribution to the politics of 2016, Sanders reprised the role that former vice president and inveterate New Dealer Henry Wallace had played back in the election of 1948.


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Conservative right is about to discover that, for multinational corporations located in Britain, there is one thing worse than being regulated by Brussels, and that is not being regulated by Brussels. Secondly, there are those uber-elite individuals who still dwell in Blair’s fin de siècle bubble of a single open global society, including Blair himself. Blair has said that he cannot understand the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.8 Presumably he is even more flummoxed by the Brexit vote, and especially by how it sucked in quasi-Blairites such as Michael Gove. Blair’s myopia has many possible explanations. But one is that people like him do genuinely now inhabit a borderless global space, in which laws, regulations and policies are only ever things to be viewed from above, and never things one is forced into accepting.

It will all come out anyway. It is also telling that these successful populists are significantly older than your average 1990s ‘Third Way’ politician. Where the latter was a man in his early forties (now re-enacted by Emmanuel Macron), in recent years we have witnessed the unforeseen rise of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump, the oldest man ever to become president. These men have lurked on the margins of public life for decades, and a stockpile of images and stories has accumulated around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive archive, appearing in photographs as young men being manhandled by police as they protested against racial segregation.

Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Verso, 2014. 6 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014. 7 ‘Consultants reap rewards of Whitehall’s Brexit scramble’, Financial Times, 7 June 2019. 8 ‘Tony Blair admits he is baffled by rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 23 February 2016. 9 Esther Addley, ‘Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories’, Guardian, 23 November 2018. 10 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 2006. 11 H. Jones et al., Go Home: The Politics of Immigration Controversies, Manchester University Press, 2017. 12 H.


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We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

Perhaps the opposite. Offering a different vision, Bello ran for the Philippine Senate in 2016, demanding justice for low-wage workers and small landholders. American observers, noting the impassioned rhetoric and the devotion of his young supporters, compared him to Vermont’s democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, then running for president of the United States. Though both were ultimately unsuccessful, supporters believe that their campaigns sowed seeds that continue to sprout.8 In Mexico, rebellion against the damages of globalization and neoliberalism has been ongoing since the 1990s. Historian Iain Boal compared the breakup of Mexico’s ejido common lands and the displacement of millions of Mexican peasants in the 1980s and 1990s to the industrialization of England four centuries earlier, when enclosures of “the commons” sparked decades of rebellions, land occupations, and the rise of early labor unions.9 The Zapatistas weren’t quite the machine-smashing Luddites, but they offered indigenous community and traditional knowledge as resistance and solution.

Sixty percent of Latinx workers in the US earned less than $15 an hour in 2016. Half of African American workers did.3 With so many working people living at, or just above, the poverty line, the speed with which the living-wage movement caught fire in the 2010s should not have surprised anyone. Nor should the growing appeal of populist politicians from Bernie Sanders, Walden Bello, and Jeremy Corbyn on the left to Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen on the right. Bleu Rainer and Keegan Shepard insist that broad coalition-building represents the only real solution. For we are all fast-food workers now. CHAPTER 14 DAYS OF DISRUPTION, 2016 NOVEMBER 29, 2016: Picketers appeared with the first light.

On April 5, 2017, they delivered a petition signed by twelve thousand faculty, students, New Haven residents, and elected officials calling on the university to negotiate. Messages of support came in from New Haven’s mayor, both of Connecticut’s US senators, numerous state representatives, and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Yale appealed the NLRB decision, bargaining that board members appointed by Trump would reverse the ruling.20 Comparative literature student Julia Powers refused to budge. “As contingent and replaceable workers . . . we’re very vulnerable,” she said. She was fasting to show that this was a communal struggle.


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Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

I had first become seriously concerned about Facebook in February 2016, in the run-up to the first US presidential primary. As a political junkie, I was spending a few hours a day reading the news and also spending a fair amount of time on Facebook. I noticed a surge on Facebook of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. The images were deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton. It was impossible for me to imagine that Bernie’s campaign would allow them. More disturbing, the images were spreading virally. Lots of my friends were sharing them. And there were new images every day. I knew a great deal about how messages spread on Facebook.

Anyone can start a Group, and there is no guarantee that the organizer is the person he or she claims to be. In addition, there are few limits on the names of Groups, which enables bad actors to create Groups that appear to be more legitimate than they really are. I hypothesized to Senator Warner that some of the pro–Bernie Sanders Groups I encountered in early 2016 may have been part of the Russian campaign. We hypothesized that the Russians might have seeded Facebook Groups across a range of divisive issues, possibly including Groups on opposite sides of the issue to maximize impact. The way the Groups might have worked is that a troll account—a Russian impersonating an American—might have formed the Group and seeded it with a number of bots.

In a world where web traffic anywhere can be monetized with advertising and where millions of people are gullible, entrepreneurs will take advantage. There had been widespread coverage of young men in Macedonia whose efforts to sell ads against fabricated news stories mostly failed with Clinton voters but worked really well with fans of Trump and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders. On its face, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is unbelievable. A pedophilia ring associated with the Democratic Party at a pizza parlor in DC? Coded messages in emails? And yet people believed it, one so deeply that he, in his own words, “self-investigated it” and fired three bullets into the pizza parlor.


pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

Right before the Iowa caucuses, something ominous happened. Pollster Ann Selzer, who was legendary in the polling world for producing the most accurate polls of her home state, withheld the results of her final Iowa poll because an interviewee complained that former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg was not given as an option. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s supporters speculated that the poll had been killed because it showed him ahead. The results were later leaked to Twitter, showing Sanders in the lead with 22 percent, followed by Warren with 18 percent, Buttigieg with 16 percent, and Biden with 13 percent. The last days of campaigning in Iowa were intense.

One of Acronym’s founders, Tara McGowan, was married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle. Further, Shadow had recently been paid to do work for both the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns. Even setting aside these suspicious relationships and the vote-counting failures, the undeniable fact was that Bernie Sanders had emerged from Iowa with the most votes and somehow ended up with fewer delegates that would count toward securing the nomination. Sanders’s supporters were understandably grumbling that the fix was in. “It was like we were back in 2016,” one of Sanders’s Iowa campaign volunteers told Rolling Stone.

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo backed President Trump’s suggestion that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, the New York Times was upset and said that “intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue.”181 But despite a growing pattern of evidence that China needed to be held to account for unleashing a deadly virus on the world, Democrats remained laser-focused on blaming the Trump administration. Bernie Sanders made it clear: “There are legitimate questions we must ask about the Chinese government’s inability to contain the virus. But Pompeo’s incitement is a blatant effort to distract us from questions about Trump’s own disastrous failure.”182 * * * Unlike the Chinese government’s unduly praised pandemic response, the Trump administration’s effort to produce a vaccine was already evaluating mRNA technology that looked promising.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

., “Final Words of Advice,” Address made to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the SCLC, Atlanta, on August 16, 1967. Richard Nixon, August 1969: Richard Nixon, “324—Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” American President Project, August 8, 1969. Milton Friedman, 1980: “Brief History of Basic Income Ideas,” Basic Income Earth Network, 1986. Bernie Sanders, May 2014: Scott Santens, “On the Record: Bernie Sanders on Basic Income,” Medium, January 29, 2016. Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Answers to Stephen Hawking’s AMA Are Here,” Wired, July 2015. Barack Obama, June 2016: Chris Weller, “President Obama Hints at Supporting Unconditional Free Money Because of a Looming Robot Takeover,” Business Insider, June 24, 2016.

Richard Nixon, August 1969: “What I am proposing is that the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family… that cannot care for itself—and wherever in America that family may live.” Milton Friedman, 1980: “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash—a negative income tax… which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely.” Bernie Sanders, May 2014: “In my view, every American is entitled to at least a minimum standard of living… There are different ways to get to that goal, but that’s the goal that we should strive to reach.” Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Partisanship pop quiz time.75 See if you can identify the bleeding-heart liberal who said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Bernie Sanders? No, it was that unrepentant lefty five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent.76 Yet today, while America’s economy sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate.77 Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”

Because fees account for 39 percent of credit card issuers’ revenue, the banks will keep dreaming up new ways to trick us that are not covered, or even contemplated, by existing laws.65 And the new law doesn’t prevent banks from gouging their credit card customers with sky-high interest rates.66 Senator Bernie Sanders, whose attempts at capping credit card interest rates have been voted down by his colleagues, says, “When banks are charging thirty percent interest rates, they are not making credit available.67 They are engaged in loan sharking”—also known as usury. Throughout history, usury has been decried by writers, philosophers, and religious leaders.

Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas, 8 May 2010, www.defense.gov. 54 Cramdown legislation, facing intense opposition: Arthur Delaney, “Durbin Considers Cramdown-Related Amendment as Part of Wall Street Reform,” 17 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 55 Some, including Bank of America and Citigroup: Shahien Nasiripour, “Bank of America Now Supports Cramdown, Giving Judges Authority to Modify Home Mortgages,” 13 Apr. 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 56 We should also make it mandatory that homeowners and lenders: Arlen Specter, “Nation’s Economic Repairs Must Include Homeowners,” 24 Oct. 2008, www.philly.com/inquirer. 57 Currently, many homeowners don’t even talk: Margo Irvin, “Homeowners Seeking ‘Making Home Afforable’ Loan Modifications Frustrated by Inefficiency,” 22 Jun. 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com. 58 “I’ve been to the City Hall courtroom where the mediation …”: Bob Casey, in conversation with the author, 16 Feb. 2009. 59 Judge Annette Rizzo, who has been working hard: Dan Geringer, “The Miracle of Courtroom 676: Saving Lives, One Address at a Time,” 28 Jan. 2009, www.philly.com/dailynews. 60 The foreclosure prevention program has worked: Ibid. 61 Until we do, we’ll need to rely on officials: Michael Powell, “A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style,” 30 Aug. 2009, www.nytimes.com. 62 For example, the new law still allows promotional teaser: Max Alexander, “Credit Card Tricks and Traps,” Mar. 2010, www.readersdigest.com. 63 As Elizabeth Warren sees it: “That’s exactly …”: “Elizabeth Warren on Credit Card ‘Tricks and Traps,’ ” NOW, 2 Jan. 2009, www.pbs.org. 64 According to the new law, the credit card issuer: Max Alexander, “Credit Card Tricks and Traps,” Mar. 2010, www.readersdigest.com. 65 Because fees account for 39 percent: Ibid. 66 And the new law doesn’t prevent: Ibid. 67 Senator Bernie Sanders, whose attempts at capping: Jeff Plungis, “Senate Nears Completing Credit Card Bill, Blocks 15% Rate Cap,” 14 May 2009, www.bloomberg.com. 68 Aristotle called usury the “sordid love of gain”: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Minneapolis: Filiquarian, 2007), 87. 69 Thomas Aquinas said it was “contrary to justice”: St.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

But in the last few years, these same sectors have been emerging as militant and organising successfully — the UK alone has seen actions in defence of pay and conditions by workers at Deliveroo, Greggs, Picturehouse Cinemas, McDonald’s and Wetherspoons. Responses to the pressures and exploitation of precarious and gig-economy work, by the workers directly affected by it, show the potential for positive change — even in conditions where ordinary people seem relatively powerless. Similarly, the unprecedentedly high support in the US for Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism, for the Corbyn project in the UK, and the general political volatility that has seen established centrist parties lose ground across Europe, show that people are actively seeking alternatives to business as usual. The fact that the Sanders and Corbyn “moments” did not result in conclusive electoral success for either figurehead does not negate the significance of the movements behind them and the popular support they inspired.

Corbynism’s offer of an alternative to the status quo allowed Labour to galvanise the unfocused resentment and dissatisfaction that had built up over past decades, but it was also able to identify working-class issues of austerity, low wages, job insecurity and the underfunding of public services as priorities, rather than focusing on the strawman of race and immigration pushed both by the Conservative government and during the previous year’s referendum on EU membership. Corbyn’s leadership saw Labour membership grow to over 500,000, bringing back many lapsed members, as well as resonating with younger first-time voters and with those who considered themselves disenfranchised by mainstream politics.4 As Bernie Sanders failed to secure his party’s nomination as a presidential candidate, it is impossible to say how well he would have fared against Donald Trump. But, like Corbyn, what was remarkable about Sanders was his unapologetic democratic socialism — something unprecedented in recent history for mainstream US politics — even though in contexts outside the US his radicalism would be regarded as mild.


pages: 296 words: 78,112

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Black Lives Matter, business climate, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, coherent worldview, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate raider, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data science, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, hype cycle, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Jim Simons, junk bonds, liberation theology, low skilled workers, machine translation, Michael Milken, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, obamacare, open immigration, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, urban planning, vertical integration

The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded, while acknowledging that no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.” The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound: the percentage of Americans who thought she was “untrustworthy” shot up into the 60s. Worse for Clinton was that the Democratic primary offered an attractive alternative. Bernie Sanders was an anti–Wall Street, good-government populist whose liberal purity put Clinton’s ethical shortcomings into sharp relief. For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated his personal theory about how conservatives had overreached the last time a Clinton was in the White House and what they should do differently.

Bannon disagreed, and, as always, had a historical analogy to explain why. What he was really pursuing was something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he was trying to disillusion Clinton’s natural base of support. Bernie Sanders’s unexpected strength suggested to him that it was working. He was sure that Sanders’s rise was destined to end in crashing disappointment. Having thrilled to his populist purity, his supporters would never reconcile themselves to Clinton, because the donors featured in Clinton Cash violated just about every ideal liberals hold dear.

“Trump,” Bannon proclaimed, “is the leader of a populist uprising. . . . What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.” Bernie Sanders had tried to warn them, but the Democrats hadn’t listened and didn’t break free of crony capitalism. “Trump saw this,” Bannon said. “The American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.” For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

And so Toh Han Li, like Gary Reback, is waiting for Margrethe Vestager to take the lead. Where she goes, they will follow. What she accomplishes, therefore, will help fix the future not only in Europe, but also in the United States and Singapore. In a memorable exchange in their October 2015 Democratic Party presidential primary debate, Bernie Sanders told Hillary Clinton that America had much to learn from Scan-dinavian societies. “We should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn what they have accomplished for their working people,” Sanders argued. “We are not Denmark,” Clinton lectured Sanders with the kind of tone-deaf arrogance that may have cost her the 2016 election.

“In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family . . . In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite. The government says give me a popular mandate and I will solve all society’s problems.”27 Bernie Sanders, you’ll remember, was more complimentary about this style of socially responsible government. And in contrast with Singapore, which became independent only in 1965 and thus had fewer legacy institutions or traditions, Europe—and specifically Scandinavia—developed a social welfare system in the late nineteenth century.

And the so-called Scandinavian model, as it evolved, featured relatively high levels of public expenditures, high-quality public services, and a significant level of direct state participation, including interventionist politicians like Margrethe Vestager unashamedly working for the common good. Before we tar all American tech entrepreneurs with the same utopian laissez-faire free market brush, it’s also important to remember that there are some who agree with Bernie Sanders about the role of government in stimulating innovation. For example, Steve Case, the founder of AOL and the most celebrated internet entrepreneur of the 1990s, now believes in what he calls a “Third Wave” of innovation, in which government needs to play a much more central role in the digital economy.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Venezuela, the authoritarian populist Hugo Chávez and his disciple Nicolás Maduro initiated a similar policy of massive spending, corruption and nationalization. The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’36 On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire.

That’s why it’s so frustrating every time someone says that successful entrepreneurs have to ‘give something back to society’ in order to compensate for their profits. The fact that they have made profits is a sign that they have given something to society. In a free market, you make a profit if you have given others something they want, whatever it may be. Sure, I am a millionaire, the slightly embarrassed left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders told The New York Times: ‘I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.’4 Profits are not something you take from others, but a small share you get to keep of the value you create for others. How small a share? Nobel laureate and economist William Nordhaus has studied the profits that innovators and entrepreneurs make in addition to the normal return on investment when they introduce new goods, technologies and methods into the economy.

Khandelwal, ‘Measuring the unequal gains from trade’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol.131, no.3, 2016. 4. In defence of the 1 per cent 1. Ung Vänster, Facebook, 28 January 2018. 2. Jagdish Bhagwati, Essays in Development Economics: Wealth and poverty, MIT Press, 1985, p.18. 3. August Strindberg, Tjänstekvinnans son II, Bonnier, 1919, chap.9. 4. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Bernie Sanders, now a millionaire, pledges to release tax returns by Monday’, The New York Times, 9 April 2019. 5. William D. Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7.


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Matthew Stephenson, “Taming Systemic Corruption: The American Experience and Its Implications for Contemporary Debates,” Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 20-29, 23 October 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3686821. 41. Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 42. Alex Ward, “Read: Bernie Sanders’s Big Foreign Policy Speech,” Vox, 21 September 2017, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/21/16345600/bernie-sanders-full-text-transcript-foreign-policy-speech-westminster. 43. Bernie Sanders, “Sanders Speech at SAIS: Building a Global Democratic Movement to Counter Authoritarianism,” 9 October 2018, https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-speech-at-sais-building-a-global-democratic-movement-to-counter-authoritarianism. 44. 

Combined with new anticorruption legislation, increased election finance transparency, pro-transparency reforms in the lobbying sector, and beefed-up regulatory oversight bodies, the U.S. lurched from the bog of the Gilded Age into a more equitable—and more transparent—time. One that we now know as the Progressive Era. Toward the end of the 2010s, the calls for a New Progressive Era became impossible to miss. In the U.S., the calls manifested themselves in a revitalized left, fired by the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and a new roster of congressional leaders. While Sanders’s campaigns eventually flamed out, his imprint on broader policy will long outlast him. An entire slate of policy proposals, all centered on rising wealth and income inequality, have glommed on to American political discourse, and have proved impossible to dislodge.


pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, asset light, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, business process, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, crony capitalism, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, obamacare, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, the payments system, young professional

So their willingness to work together was, in itself, seen by Capitol Hill insiders as a sign that the issue was gathering momentum. Kennedy’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—called HELP—was stocked with some of the Senate’s leading liberals, including Iowa’s Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born Vermont senator who called himself an independent but caucused with the Democrats. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, had more moderate Democrats, such as Baucus and North Dakota’s Kent Conrad. Among the many reasons the Clinton healthcare reform push had died on Capitol Hill in 1993 was that the Finance Committee, then chaired by New York centrist Democrat Pat Moynihan, had stiff-armed Kennedy and his HELP Committee.

The group Kennedy’s staff assembled, mostly HELP Committee staffers and friendly healthcare reform policy advocates, were all Democrats. But they had been directed by Kennedy to come up with a package that could pass a Senate with Republican votes. Democrats had only fifty-five votes in 2008, even assuming the support of their most conservative members, plus the presumed vote of independent Bernie Sanders. Getting something through the Senate would require a sixty-vote margin to survive a filibuster. At the same time, Fowler and her staff—pushed by Baucus in meetings that seemed to happen every other day or so—charted a more public course. As Baucus had instructed, they organized witnesses to testify at Finance Committee hearings in the late spring.

That kind of bill enabled a Senate process called budget reconciliation. Under Senate rules, budget reconciliation bills required only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to override a filibuster. The November 2008 elections had just boosted the Senate Democratic vote tally to 58 (including the independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Still, 58 was not 60, and two Senate Democrats, Kennedy and Robert Byrd, were now so ill they soon might not be able to get to the floor for a vote. Reconciliation was not an ideal way around a Republican roadblock because much of the envisioned healthcare reforms might not pass the financial issues–only smell test.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Republican Representative Richard Pombo might be the worst recent offender in the country; he used his office to funnel money to all sorts of family and friends. Not to pick only on Republicans, Democratic Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to four of her relatives and two of her top aide's children.Even Bernie Sanders has paid family from campaign donations, and he's a socialist. It's not all big government, either. One study of Detroit libraries found that one in six staffers had a relative who also worked in the library system. And Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was sued in 2011 by shareholders for nepotism when it bought his daughter's company

Technology aids in both of those: travel technology to allow people to move around, communications technology to allow better coordination and cooperation, and information technology to allow information to move around the organization. The fact that all of these technologies have vastly improved in the past few decades is why organizations are growing in size. (17) Senator Bernie Sanders actually had a reasonable point when he said that any company that is too big to fail is also too big to exist. (18) The people who use sites like Google and Facebook are not those companies’ customers. They are the products that those companies sell to their customers. In general: if you're not paying for it, then you're the product.

Representative Richard Pombo League of Conservation Voters (2005), “Rep. Richard Pombo's Family & Friends Network.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson Todd J. Gillman and Christy Hoppe (28 Aug 2010), “Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson Violated Rules, Steered Scholarships to Relatives,” Dallas Morning News. Even Bernie Sanders Vermont Guardian (21 Apr 2005), “Nepotism Crosses Party Lines,” Vermont Guardian. one in six staffers Christine MacDonald (6 May 2011), “Nepotism Rampant at Detroit Libraries: 1 in 6 Staffers Have Relatives Who Work in Strapped Department,” The Detroit News. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Mark Sweney (17 Mar 2011), “Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Sued Over ‘Nepotism’ in Buying His Daughter's Firm: Investors Allege Group Is Overpaying in $675m Deal to Acquire Elisabeth Murdoch's TV Production Business Shine,” The Guardian.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Meanwhile, new movements are popping up, from Brazil to Ukraine to Hong Kong, as hopeful communities flood the streets in protests and occupations. Some protests have even transformed, at least partially, into electoral forces, like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the surprisingly strong effort to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party nominee for president in the United States, supported by many members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like all human stories, the evolution of modern protest has deep historical and cultural roots. But studying it also requires new ways of understanding the fragility of the power of these new movements.

Even that most horizontal form of organization was seen as too hierarchical by many protest participants. Like protesters in Gezi, Occupy protesters were also unable to advance a next-phase agenda after the Zuccotti Park protest was forcibly expelled. The movement largely dispersed until an external event—the 2016 presidential election—mobilized many of them in support of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. Sanders’s campaign ultimately fell short, but, as a testament to the power of movements once they do get moving, what started as a quixotic effort by a senator from a small U.S. state turned into a campaign that mounted a significant threat to an otherwise institutionally strong candidate, Hillary Clinton.

There were a few other attempts that grew out of Occupy, like a debt collective that undertook creative acts to bring together student or medical debtors to “strike” against unjust debt. These, however, remained relatively small compared to Occupy’s original reach.37 Occupy’s most direct engagement with the electoral sphere would come many years later, in 2016, after Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont, would launch a seemingly-quixotic challenge for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. His bid was not successful, but it re-mobilized many people who had been part of the Occupy movement earlier, showing the fact that the underlying energy and the legitimacy of the demands had been there, though not matched by proportional electoral or institutional capacity in the 2011 incarnation.


Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Ivan Penn, “The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam into a Giant Battery,” New York Times, July 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com. It describes a specific pumped-hydroelectric proposal of the type that would be repeated on a massive scale in Jacobson’s plan. 15. In a Guardian column in 2017, Professor Mark Jacobson and U.S. senator Bernie Sanders announced new energy legislation based on Jacobson’s work. Bernie Sanders and Mark Jacobson, “The American People—Not Big Oil—Must Decide Our Climate Future,” The Guardian, April 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com. 16. Christopher T. M. Clack, Steffan A. Qvist, Jay Apt et al., “Evaluation of a Proposal for Reliable Low-Cost Grid Power with 100% Wind, Water, and Solar,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 26 (June 27, 2017): 6722–27, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1610381114.

And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment. And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don’t need nuclear. Consider the case of climate activist Bill McKibben. Along with Vermont senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, he urged Vermont legislators in 2005 to commit to reducing emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency.32 Vermont’s main electric utility helped customers go “off-grid” with solar panels and batteries,33 and the state’s aggressive energy efficiency programs ranked fifth best in the nation for five years in a row.34 But instead of falling 25 percent, Vermont’s emissions actually rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015.35 Part of the reason emissions rose in Vermont is that the state closed its nuclear power plant, something McKibben advocated.

The water would be stored as long as necessary, and then released to flow downhill back through turbines to produce electricity when needed.14 Jacobson’s studies and proposals became the basis of the energy plans of many American states, as well as that of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders.15 But in 2017, a group of scientists pointed out that Jacobson’s proposal rested upon the assumption that we can increase the amount of instantaneous power from U.S. hydroelectric dams more than ten-fold when, according to the Department of Energy and other major studies, the real potential is just a tiny fraction of that.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

In 2011, years before progressives started talking about free college, Thiel was warning about rising tuition prices, calling the higher education industry a bubble more troubling than the one in real estate. He helped to jumpstart the backlash against big tech in 2014 when he called Google a monopoly—years before Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would. And then, of course, came his destruction of Gawker and the election of Trump. In 2018, I started interviewing former employees, business partners, and other associates—in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere—to try to understand how this had happened. Thiel had come to the tech industry with little in the way of money and no engineering ability to speak of.

By the end of April 2019 there were twenty declared candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, including several front-runners who seemed especially eager to rein in Facebook. In May, Kamala Harris, the California senator who’d previously been seen as friendly to the tech industry, told CNN that Facebook was “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated, and as far as I’m concerned that’s gotta stop.” Bernie Sanders had promised “vigorous antitrust legislation in this country,” singling out Facebook. “We deal with it every day,” he said. “They determine who we can communicate with. They have incredible power—over the economy, over political life in this country—in a very dangerous sense.” Radical as these ideas might have sounded during the Obama presidency, neither candidate was the most hawkish about Facebook in the presidential field.

Facebook allowed it, with Zuckerberg explaining that although he disagreed with the president, “I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open.” He continued to speak regularly with Jared Kushner, and Thiel continued to emphasize, publicly and privately, that Facebook was less bad than its competitors. By early March 2020, the plan seemed to be working. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris’s campaigns had crashed, Bernie Sanders had sputtered, and Joe Biden, whom Thiel regarded as weak, seemed poised to win the nomination. Trump was seen, especially among conservatives, as likely to win reelection, and Thiel’s influence on the right was more pronounced than it had ever been. It would take something totally unexpected—apocalyptic even—to throw off the plan he’d set in motion at Facebook four years earlier.


pages: 301 words: 90,362

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 90 percent rule, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, game design, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Khan Academy, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TED Talk

Consider the case of a feverish political rally that could have been so much more. On April 6, 2016, Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, held a massive rally in Philadelphia. The line to get into the Philadelphia “Future to Believe In” Rally wrapped around the block. For security reasons, many people were in the stadium for close to three hours before the candidate ever appeared. When I hear that, I think: What an incredible gathering opportunity—three hours of ushering that could have been used not only to gear people up for the rally that day but also to build the Bernie Sanders movement. Only it wasn’t. Instead, thousands of people sat in the 10,200-seat arena and waited.

Having worked with organizers, I can imagine exactly why these ones left this time unfilled: In their mind, the event hadn’t started yet. This time probably wasn’t on their “run of show.” It was time outsourced to the security people, not the hosts. So let us imagine what could have been done with that time. A few thousand fans of Bernie Sanders, a few hours, no candidate on-site. They could have had some volunteers work as facilitators to get people to sit in groups, or turn to a stranger, and talk about why they were there, what they believed the country most needed, and why they believed Sanders was the answer. They could have set up story circles where clusters of eight sat and shared their own experiences of being on the wrong end of America’s economic divide.


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

“I don’t want it to be onerous where you block low-income people, but I don’t want them to buy too many lottery tickets.” Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev and Citadel’s Ken Griffin both were asked at the February 18 congressional hearing whether free trading would be jeopardized if a 0.1 percent financial-transactions tax were instituted. Both demurred but said they didn’t support such a measure. Politicians such as Bernie Sanders who have proposed such a tax seem more interested in wielding it as a way to redistribute wealth rather than to discourage excessive speculation or rein in a stock bubble. Critics have pointed out that it would be a drag on the likes of pension funds.[22] But costs could be capped, and an individual would have to buy about $7,000 worth of stock to pay the $7 commission that was typical before Robinhood appeared.[23] That hardly seems egregious compared with what individual investors paid before Mayday.

“On the face of it, it seems to favor a handful of rich, influential players at the expense of ordinary citizens and ordinary traders,” he later said to reporters.[8] Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well: “It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street. This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!”[9] Back on the left, Bernie Sanders told an ABC morning talk show that weekend that the incident confirmed his dim view of high finance: “I have long believed that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. I think we have to take a very hard look at the kind of illegal activities and outrageous behavior on the part of the hedge funds and other Wall Street players.”[10] Robinhood explained in tweets and blog posts the technical details of why it had to act, stressing that it faced a huge increase in regulatory capital requirements.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Jordan Fabia, Erik Wasson, and Daniel Flatley, “Ocasio-Cortez Urges Scrutiny of Robinhood Curbs on GameStop,” Bloomberg, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Kathryn Krawczyk, “Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Agree on This 1 Thing,” The Week, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Egberto Willies, “Senator Bernie Sanders and Politics Done Right Agrees: The Business Model of Wall Street Is Fraud,” DailyKos, February 1, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Josh Hawley, “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff,” RealClear Politics, February 3, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Mohamed El-Erian, interview by Sara Eisen, Closing Bell, CNBC, February 2, 2021.


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Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Since their workplace is located in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets, at least a third of them were undertaking hour-long commutes.15 In the wake of the report, stories emerged of workers living in their cars; almost inevitably, news circulated that one of them had died in her vehicle, undetected for several days.16 Bernie Sanders and other high-profile politicians jumped on the report, excoriating Disney for paying starvation wages as it was raking in more than $12 billion in annual profits and rewarding executives with stratospheric salaries. Worker testimony was heartbreaking. “Since I started working for Disney, because my wages are so low, I had to move my 16-year-old daughter out of the house,” an employee at Disney’s Grand California Hotel recounted.

Subsidies typically carry a sunset provision allowing units to revert to market-rate rents after ten, fifteen, or twenty years, so they are only temporarily affordable.15 Nonetheless, talk about national rent caps and government housing was in the air even before the pandemic. New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed such a cap in 2019, and national rent control was on the campaign platform of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, along with promises to build ten million new units of public housing through his and Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal for Public Housing. Other presidential candidates, while less ambitious than Sanders, also proposed a variety of programs aimed at reducing some of the housing cost burdens, ranging from universal housing allowances and stronger tenant rights to reparations for residents of redlined neighborhoods.

By Night, an Uneasy Sleep in a Car,” New York Times, February 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/disneyland-employees-wages.html; Paulina Velasco, “Cinderella Is Homeless, Ariel ‘Can’t Afford to Live on Land’: Disney Under Fire for Pay,” The Guardian, July 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/17/disneyland-low-wages-anaheim-orange-county-homelessness. 17.  Bernie Sanders, “Disneyland Workers Face Ruthless Exploitation. Their Fight Is Our Fight,” The Guardian, June 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/07/disneyland-workers-living-wage-disney-inequality. 18.  Gabrielle Russon, “Disney World Workers Endure Tourists Who Scream, Punch and Even Grope Them,” Orlando Sentinel, September 23, 2019, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-bz-disney-employees-abuse-20190923-zy7o3lka3fhmhfeohjicftx74a-story.html. 19.  


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

And soon, as Guccifer 2.0 promised, WikiLeaks began to dribble out tens of thousands of emails and other stolen goods, which were immediately picked up by the Guardian, the Intercept, Buzzfeed, Politico, the Washington Post, and my colleagues at the Times. The Russians saved their most damaging revelations for the days ahead of the Democratic National Convention, when party members were due to come together, leaking emails that showed the DNC had secretly favored Hillary Clinton over her primary opponent Bernie Sanders. Party officials had deliberated how best to discredit Sanders. Some questioned Sanders’s Jewish faith and argued that painting the candidate as an atheist “could make several points difference” this late in the primaries. Others proposed publicizing an incident in which Sanders’s staff allegedly stole Clinton’s campaign data.

Trump’s “build the wall” hard-liners seized on one speech in which Clinton advocated for “open borders.” Each leak was disseminated, maligned, and hashtagged by Russia’s IRA troll army, who aimed the leaks at an already cynical American populace. Months after Sanders ended his campaign and endorsed Clinton, several activists who ran Facebook pages for Bernie Sanders began to note a suspicious flood of hostile comments aimed at Clinton. “Those who voted for Bernie will not vote for corrupt Hillary!” they read. “The Revolution must continue! #NeverHillary.” “The magnitude and viciousness of it,” one Facebook administrator told my colleague Scott Shane, suggested that this was the work of a cold-blooded adversary with an agenda, but the sheer idea that any of this was a Russian campaign still struck many Americans as crazy Cold War–speak.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, made it clear that he would not sign onto any bipartisan statement blaming the Russians; he dismissed the intelligence, admonished officials for playing into what he wrote off as Democrats’ spin, and refused to warn Americans about efforts to undermine the 2016 election. Into the void stepped candidate Trump. “I love WikiLeaks!” Trump declared at one of his rallies. He promoted Russia’s hacks at every opportunity. “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders … Really vicious. RIGGED,” he tweeted. In another tweet, he joked that he hoped the DNC hackers had breached Clinton’s personal email server as well. All the while, Trump refused to call out the Russians by name. At rally after rally, he expressed doubts that Russia was involved. In a September interview with the Russian television network RT, Trump said it was “probably unlikely” that Putin had ordered the DNC hacks.


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“It is common for staffers to get more and better information from blogs, and for hearings to be driven by the conversation online, than from the Congressional liaison group at the Fed.”19 Ultimately activists ranging from followers of libertarian Ron Paul on the right to supporters of Grayson and Senator Bernie Sanders on the left also succeeded in 2010 in forcing Congress to adopt a new law requiring the Federal Reserve to detail all the recipients of bailout funding during the banking crisis. 82 MICAH L. SIFRY That last victory was substantial. The Wall Street Journal editorial page praised the results of the Federal Reserve’s new transparency, writing: Lender of last resort indeed.

The Federal Reserve pulled back the curtain yesterday on its emergency lending during the financial panic of 2008 and 2009, and the game to play at home with the kids is: who didn’t get a bailout? If you can find a big financial player who declined the Fed’s cash, you’re doing better than we did yesterday afternoon. The documents aren’t another WikiLeaks dump but are due to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who insisted that the Dodd-Frank financial bill require more transparency about how the Fed allocated capital during the panic. The release of this data on some 21,000 Fed transactions over the last three years is one of the rare useful provisions in Dodd-Frank, but kudos to our favorite Socialist for demanding it.


pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Then governments continue just as before, blithely making claims about growth, the number of jobs or ‘balancing books’, blaming their predecessors, disputing the statistics or just ignoring the findings. If protests erupt, a blast of condemnation comes from defenders of the status quo, dismissing the victims or protestors as lazy, irresponsible and inadequate. As ever more evidence on the deleterious impact of inequality is produced, we are in danger of becoming immune to the shock. When Bernie Sanders started to gain support in the US presidential primaries by focusing on inequality, Hillary Clinton dismissed him as a ‘one-issue’ candidate. Yet establishment politicians have done nothing about it, instead aligning with financial institutions that are at the heart of the problem. As Sanders reminded his audiences, Clinton had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Goldman Sachs just for speaking.

From 2008 to 2012, $4.6 trillion was spent in bailing out nearly 1,000 banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, while guarantees from the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other agencies totalled $16.9 trillion. Europe followed. In 2012–13, the ECB lent €1 trillion to Eurozone banks to avert a funding crisis. At its peak, UK government support to prop up ailing banks totalled £133 billion in cash and £1 trillion in guarantees and indemnities. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who campaigned for the presidential nomination in 2016, listed twenty profitable corporations that had received taxpayer bailouts while operating subsidiaries in tax havens to avoid taxes and even receiving tax rebates. Bank of America received $1.9 billion as a tax refund in 2010, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits.

Disaffection with old parties is shown by the steady decline in voting, especially by youth and the precariat in general. Over a third of the US electorate does not vote in presidential elections, and in most democracies winning parties have been gaining little more than a third of the votes cast. When even flawed but well-meaning options become available, such as Bernie Sanders in the USA, a surge of enthusiasm occurs. Timid establishment types will not succeed, but bolder souls should take heart. Energies can be turned into re-engagement. RIGHTS AS DEMANDS ‘They don’t call it class warfare until we fight back.’ Occupy Wall Street poster Rights always begin as class-based demands, made against the state.


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We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

(During one of our interviews, I noticed a sign in Bascom’s office from those protests that said PLEASE SAVE OUR HEALTH CARE SO WE CAN STOP MAKING PHONE CALLS. ) Many Democratic candidates consulted autistic self-advocates like Ne’eman and Bascom along with other disability rights advocates during their campaigns. Bascom said she was consulted by candidates ranging from mainstream Democrats, like Senator Cory Booker and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, to progressives, like former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. This level of inclusion was a culmination of years of work by autistic people to be accepted as legitimate by the larger disability rights movement. In the early years of ASAN, Ne’eman said the organization focused on ending restraint and seclusion on students, not only because it was an important issue for autistic people but because it established ASAN as an advocacy organization that could represent the needs of autistic people in political discourse.

Ironically, despite Biden’s frequent invocations of his time as Barack Obama’s vice president, many of the most vocal advocates, like Ne’eman—and other disability rights advocates, like Rebecca Cokley and Maria Town—were alumni of the Obama administration. Biden finally released a disability policy platform in June 2020, long after his biggest opponent, Bernie Sanders, had dropped out of the race. Like many of Biden’s other policies, his plans were not as aspirational as Warren’s, Sanders’s, or Castro’s. But his approach did support phasing out subminimum-wage labor and asking the U.S. Justice Department to review guardianship laws and promote alternatives like supported decision-making.

Benham has won their endorsement: Hannah Lynn, “Pittsburgh LGBTQ Political Advocacy Group Announces Primary Election Endorsements,” Pittsburgh City Paper, February 10, 2020, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-lgbtq-political-advocacy-group-announces-primary-election-endorsements/Content?oid=16731149. she won her primary: Julia Terruso, “Bernie Sanders Is Done but His Fans in Pa. Keep Winning Primaries,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 16, 2020, https://www.inquirer.com/news/nikil-saval-rick-krajewski-progressive-2020-pennsylvania-primary-harrisburg-20200616.html. 2. “In My Mind, I’m Going to Carolina” about the decline of the coal industry: Kris Maher, “In Pro-Trump West Virginia Coal Country, the Jobs Keep Leaving,” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-pro-trump-west-virginia-coal-country-the-jobs-keep-leaving-11572269967.


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Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

“threat of displacement”: Michael Hankinson, “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 3 (2018): 473–93. just begun surging: Joe Garofoli and Lizze Johnson, “Bernie Sanders to Campaign for Jane Kim in SF,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 14, 2016, www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bernie-Sanders-to-campaign-for-Jane-Kim-in-SF-9972390.php. a 157-unit project: Joe Rivano Barros, “In Stunner, City Strikes Down Major Mission Project,” Mission Local, November 16, 2016, https://missionlocal.org/2016/11/in-stunner-city-strikes-down-major-mission-project/.

Jane Kim was a member of the local progressive faction who was in favor of the moratorium as well as cooler than Scott Wiener. She did Tae Kwon Do in her campaign commercials, used to play bass in an indie band called Strangely, and was a former community organizer who’d earned a reputation for extracting affordable housing from for-profit developers. The Kim campaign even got Bernie Sanders, whose national reputation had just begun surging, to fly to California and campaign for her. Wiener had more money and better local endorsements, but the Bernie surge was real, and his multipoint lead shriveled, allowing Kim to eke out a win in the summer primary. That would have been it for Scott Wiener in a lot of states, but California has an open primary system in which all voters, not just Democrats and Republicans, vote in the election’s first round.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

At the end of the day, you will realize that I am an optimistic at heart. I sincerely believe that we will all learn, evolve, and come together as a species and do amazing things. With that, let the journey begin. PART ONE The Here and Now 1 A Bitter Taste of Dystopia The 2016 presidential campaign made everybody angry. Liberal Bernie Sanders supporters were angry at allegedly racist Republicans and a political system they perceived as being for sale, a big beneficiary being Hillary Clinton. Conservative Donald Trump supporters were furious at the decay and decline of America, and at how politicians on both sides of the aisle had abandoned them and left a trail of broken promises.

The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google-bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government. We have seen violent protests in Paris and elsewhere against Uber drivers. What sorts of protests will we see when the Uber cars no longer have drivers and the rage is directed only at the machine itself?


pages: 198 words: 52,089

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, knowledge economy, land value tax, longitudinal study, meritocracy, mortgage tax deduction, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, positional goods, precautionary principle, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working-age population, zero-sum game

This frustrated, discontented class has spent a decade with their noses pressed up against the glass, watching the winners grab more and more for themselves, seemingly at the upper middle class’s expense.9 Hayes may be right about the frustration and discontent. Much of the political energy behind both the Bernie Sanders left and the Tea Party right came from the upper middle class. But Hayes is wrong to imply that the frustration is warranted, or that the very rich are gaining “at the upper middle class’s expense.” As the 2016 election helped us to see, the real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

They are created and destroyed in our communities, relationships, and institutions. Individual success relies on collective investments. The individualist ethos frustrates many on the American left, but I see little sign of it losing its grip on the collective imagination. Many liberals wish America were more like Europe—and often specifically Scandinavia. Bernie Sanders, after all, was effectively the Danish candidate for president. But America’s problem is not that we are failing to live up to Danish egalitarian standards. It is that we are failing to live up to American egalitarian standards, based on fair market competition. The main challenge is to narrow gaps in human capital formation, especially in the first two decades of life.


pages: 182 words: 53,802

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks by Ann Pettifor

Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, The Chicago School, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail

While politicians try to persuade electorates that ‘there is no money’, something quite different happened under the guise of quantitative easing. Central bankers created trillions of dollars ‘out of thin air’ and did so essentially overnight to bail out the banking system. And I mean trillions. The American senator Bernie Sanders directed the US Government Accountability Office to undertake an audit of the amount of ‘state money’ created by the US Federal Reserve and supported by governments during the crisis. The conclusion was that $16 trillion ‘in total financial assistance’ had been mobilised for ‘some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world’.2 Please note that not a cent of these trillions of dollars was raised by taxing Americans, although the liquidity created by the Federal Reserve is backed by US taxpayers.

Private and public debts accumulate, and deflationary forces bear down on advanced economies. In these contemporary contexts, emerging authoritarianism is rationalized by many as reflecting the weakness and ineptitude of western democracy in the wake of this terrible crisis. With the exception of campaigns like that of US Senator Bernie Sanders’ bid for the US presidency in 2016, the immensity of the power of the finance sector – Wall Street the City of London – has not been contested to any material extent by either the wider Left, social democratic parties, or indeed even by the reactionary forces in society. Keynes today The power of Keynes’s ideas is of a scale that has no precedent.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In the 1988 primary, Jesse Jackson ran as a full-on leftist, calling for single-payer healthcare, free community college, a big federal jobs program, and the cancellation of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich—and by sweeping the black South and winning everywhere among voters under thirty, he beat Joe Biden and Gore and came in second to Dukakis, but…he was never going to be nominated. A Vermont mayor who’d endorsed him, Bernie Sanders, was elected to the House in 1990 as a socialist, cute, but really, so what? He was a quirky retro figure, some Ben & Jerry’s guy who didn’t realize the 1960s were over and was channeling Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas from the ’20s and ’30s. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas.

Of course, in any real-life version of this fantasy, payments would be adjusted up and down depending on the size of the household and how many adults and children each one had, and so on. It’s an illustration of how rich the country is, not a plan. During a Democratic primary debate in 2015, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders the only Democrats who had a chance, Sanders was asked by the moderator if calling himself a socialist was politically wise. Well, he replied, he thought the United States “should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished” with their economies.

At that moment as well, the star economist Thomas Piketty, French rather than Austrian, was starting to focus people’s attention on the very rich—“transforming the economic discourse,” Krugman has said, especially after his remarkable 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In the 1970s the right coined (and still repeats endlessly) the genius term unelected bureaucrats to focus populist antigovernment blame. The economic left did something similar with the 1 percent (and unelected billionaires) in the 2010s. In 2016 Bernie Sanders came close to winning the Democratic nomination, and in 2019 the CEOs of the Business Roundtable felt obliged to issue a new “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” more or less disavowing their adoption of the Friedman Doctrine decades before. The force awakened. And now? Perhaps the pandemic and/or the resulting recession and/or the protests against racist policing will become triggering crises.


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

After about a week of spying on the DCCC, on April 18, the GRU got lucky: they intercepted the log-in and password credentials of another DCCC employee, who was also authorized to log in to the network of the Democratic National Committee.11 The GRU could now pivot directly from the DCCC network over to the DNC. The GRU finished the design of its DCLeaks logo on April 20, 2016. Once inside the DNC, the intruders again searched for particularly interesting machines that held files related to the hotly contested presidential campaign. Bernie Sanders had just won the Wyoming caucus, and Hillary Clinton was about to prevail in the New York primary. Back in Moscow, the officers were working the DNC from the inside, equipping thirty-three machines with a customized X-Agent tool kit. The attack seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s internal and external communications.12 The clandestine intruders also accessed the DNC’s telephone systems, giving the military intelligence officers access to phone calls and even voice mail inside the Democratic headquarters, all while an election campaign was in full swing.13 Just one day after compromising the DNC, on April 19, the GRU registered yet another website, DCLeaks.com, using the same Romanian hosting company, and paying for the new site out of the same pool of bitcoin.

They searched for “worldwide known,” “some hundred sheets,” “think twice about,” and “company’s competence,” among other phrases. The Russian intelligence officers were googling for “dcleaks,” probably to check whether anybody had already picked up their clumsily surfaced site from a week earlier.2 Nobody had. Agitated by leaked emails, Bernie Sanders supporters protest against the DNC and Hillary Clinton. (John Minchillo / AP) Late on June 15, just after 7:00 p.m. Moscow time, a post by “Guccifer 2.0” went online. The rambling text dismissed the conclusions reached by the “worldwide known” company CrowdStrike. Instead, Guccifer 2.0 insisted that the DNC had been “hacked by a lone hacker.”

“Ok … i see,” responded the GRU, clearly not following Assange’s reasoning. The WikiLeaks founder slowed down, and explained some of the intricacies of U.S. primary politics. Assange understood that Hillary Clinton would become the nominee in about three weeks, and that she then would have to reach out to intra-party opponents who had supported her main rival, Bernie Sanders, “so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting,” Assange explained. Some of the first file transfer attempts had failed. Another week later, on July 14, Guccifer 2.0 finally sent an email to WikiLeaks that included an attachment with detailed instructions, titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.”


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

q=ruppersberger+rogers+bipartisan+best&sxsrf=ALeKk02awWc7vASdOuVbEEOxGqLztTLM6A:1600720489909&ei=aQ5pX_-IN4jz-gS665fYDw&start=0&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwi_4b3BjPvrAhWIuZ4KHbr1Bfs4ChDy0wN6BAgMEC0&biw=1397&bih=701. 130. Morell, Intelligence Matters. 131. Interview by author, August 12, 2020. 132. Saxby Chambliss, Lawfare podcast, March 23, 2019. 133. Gregory Krieg, “Bernie Sanders: GOP Senator James Inhofe Is a Friend,” CNN, March 13, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/13/politics/bernie-sanders-james-inhofe-friends/index.html. 134. See, for example, Chambliss, Lawfare podcast. Another key difference is the role of the vice chairman. In the House, the majority party always runs the show. If the chairman cannot run a hearing, the next most senior majority party committee member serves in her absence.

In the Senate, you have to compromise and build relationships across the aisle; the incentives for bipartisanship are greater. Senators know they have to work together to get anything done, and the Senate’s slower campaign tempo enables them to do it. “You become friends,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA).132 When Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was asked who his favorite Republican was, his answer was surprising: conservative Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe. “Jim is a climate change denier. He is really, really conservative, but you know what, he is a decent guy and I like him,” said Sanders, who joked that revealing their friendship might ruin Inhofe’s career.133 Committee rules both reflect and reinforce these differences.

In 2020, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s telephone metadata program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may have been unconstitutional. United States v. Moalin, 973 F.3d 977 (9th Cir. 2020). 33. “Edward Snowden did this country a great service. Let him come home,” Guardian, September 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/14/edward-snowden-pardon-bernie-sanders-daniel-ellsberg (accessed April 22, 2020); Michael German, “Edward Snowden Is a Whistleblower,” ACLU, August 2, 2013, https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/edward-snowden-whistleblower (accessed April 22, 2020). 34. PBS NewsHour, Former Def. Sec. Gates Says Edward Snowden Is a Traitor, January 14, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


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Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

But I also spent a lot of my time daydreaming about Tommy, whom I saw pretty much everywhere and in everything. Every time I looked at Sen. Bernie Sanders, I thought about Tommy, because Tommy loved telling the story of how he had left work one day at the Friends Committee on National Legislation and passed the senator, who was walking alone on the street. Tommy waved and greeted him with a compliment: “Hey, Bernie, great job. Stop the war in Yemen,” and Bernie gruffly said, “Uh, yeah.” Tommy’s Bernie imitation was priceless. I think he had a lot of affection for Bernie Sanders and the way his famously brusque demeanor one-on-one masked a true universal commitment to the welfare of humanity.

“We may object to Trump’s condescending rhetoric and galling outbursts about so-called ‘shithole’ countries, but at the end of the day, we share in his general indifference to the preventable horrors that befall many inhabitants of those countries,” he wrote in one essay. “Following our lead, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other leftist heroes highlight the struggles of American students and low-wage workers—as they should—while saying very little about the millions of afflicted foreigners who will die this year in the absence of wealth transfers from the West.” Tommy simply refused to take the easy way out by equating Trump with unprecedented presidential evil and his progressive critics with moral virtue and political perfection.

Catherine Cortez-Masto a kind of visionary and dreamy look, as if she could imagine a day when all of this would be just a dismal memory and democracy would be riding high again. Certain people caught my eye as we waited for the vote to begin: Senator Gillibrand; the two new senators from Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who had a glow of destiny around them; Elizabeth Warren; and even Bernie Sanders looked connected. I thought about Tommy and Hannah and Tabitha. I thought about Sarah. I thought about my parents, neither of them with us for so long now. I was flooded with feeling. I began to think of all the more comprehensive things I had not said because I had been improvising at the end and not following any of my various scripts and drafts still floating around—about the practice of nonviolence and democracy; the demagogic disrespect for the primacy of Congress; and all of Michael’s finer points about taking adverse inferences seriously when a witness skips town.


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The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Like David Cameron’s ill-fated Remain campaign in the UK, Clinton eventually settled on ‘Stronger Together’. But she failed to articulate why. It seemed more like a game of demographic addition than a reason to govern. Meanwhile, much of her presumed base – the college-educated millennials – had defected to Bernie Sanders. One widely shared meme crystallised their view of Mrs Clinton. It showed a fake poster comparing the two candidates on the issue of whether they would dine at Olive Garden – a soulless restaurant chain that is popular in the suburbs. ‘Only when I’m high,’ says Sanders’s caption. ‘An authentic Italian restaurant for the whole family!’

Jones, ‘In US, new record 43% are political independents’, Gallup, 7 January 2015, <http://www.gallup.com/poll/180440/new-record-political-independents.aspx>. 16 Mair, Ruling the Void. 17 Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Routledge, New York, 2014 (ebook)). 18 Müller, What Is Populism? 19 Quoted in Ford and Goodwin, Revolt on the Right. 20 Edward Luce, ‘Tony Blair warns US Democrats against supporting Bernie Sanders’, Financial Times, 23 February 2016, <https://www.ft.com/content/9c70cae8-da55-11e5-98fd-06d75973fe09>. 21 Julia Carrie Wong and Danny Yadron, ‘Hillary Clinton proposes student debt deferral for startup founders’, Guardian, 29 June 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/28/hillary-clinton-student-debt-proposal-startup-tech-founders>. 22 <https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/>. 23 William H.


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Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 3 Advertising and Its Discontents Back in November 2017, a year after the election of Donald Trump, Americans got a first look at the ads that Russian groups had bought on Facebook in order to sow the political discontent that may have tipped the election in Trump’s favor.1 They made for sickening viewing. Russian-linked actors had created animated images of Bernie Sanders as a superman figure promoting gay rights, and pictures of Jesus wrestling with Satan along with a caption that had the Antichrist declaring that “If I win Clinton wins!” There were calls for the South to rise again emblazoned on a Confederate flag, and yellow NO INVADERS ALLOWED signs protesting a supposed onslaught of immigrants at the border.

“I first became seriously concerned about Facebook in February 2016 in the run-up to the first U.S. presidential primary,” he told me in 2017, which is around the time he began work on Zucked, his book about the topic. As a political junkie, McNamee “was spending a few hours a day reading the news and also spending a fair amount of time on Facebook,” he writes. “I noticed a surge on Facebook of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. The images were deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton. It was impossible for me to imagine that Bernie’s campaign would allow them. More disturbing, the images were spreading virally. Lots of my friends were sharing them. And there were new images every day.”9 McNamee was becoming increasingly concerned about the effect of social media on election outcomes.

CHAPTER 13 A New World War In 2018, I experienced something quite odd during a day of reporting on the growing U.S.-China trade and technology conflict. I was talking to a variety of politicians and advisers in Washington to get a better sense of how various political factions felt it should be dealt with. I spoke to, among others, a former Bernie Sanders staffer who was now advising a new crop of progressives like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I also spoke to a high-level Defense Department official. Their views—that China was indeed an existential threat, and that America needed to ring-fence some of its supply chain and prepare for what might be a long-term tech and trade war—were oddly similar, given the divergent political factions that they represented.1 Both sources recommended the same book to me: Freedom’s Forge, which lays out the way in which the U.S. auto industry helped the country during the Second World War.2 The industry, including not just big automakers but also their suppliers, had been marshaled by government officials to ramp up production and aid in the war effort, creating synergies across supply chains that were later leveraged to great effect in the postwar period, when American industry was dominant relative to Europe and Asia—for at least a couple of decades.


pages: 241 words: 63,981

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

If there are no longer opposing sides to a debate on how to run a country, there can be no democratic choice. The electorate has come to realise this, with surprising results. In every quarter of the West there has been a rise in political expression further removed from the political centre-ground. Donald Trump for the Republicans and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats offer evidence of this trend in the United States and it is notable that both came from outside their current parties to challenge the prevailing thinking of each of them. The Austrian presidential election run-off of 2016, which included no representative of either of the parties that had ruled that country, without interruption, since 1945, provides similar evidence for that country.

This perception has largely been fuelled by a very clear-eyed, and accurate understanding that those elites have been using tax havens to hide their wealth, while the companies that they control have been using them to avoid tax. If there is a political movement towards the extremes as a consequence – as represented, for example, by the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, the UK vote to leave the European Union, and the growth of far-right parties in a number of European countries – then the role of tax havens in disguising the activities of elites has had a significant role to play. The fact that many of the politicians who have exploited these situations have explicitly embraced anti–tax haven positions provides some indication of the power of this narrative.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

It’s one thing to make an unpopular move knowing you’ll have to explain yourself in a congressional hearing a few months later, quite another to know that investigators will soon subpoena every document that was created in the course of reaching that decision. To Paul, Audit the Fed was just a way to add a bit more democracy to an antidemocratic body. Three hundred twenty of 435 representatives—nearly three quarters of the House—eventually signed on as cosponsors of the Federal Reserve Transparency Act. Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, the lone socialist in the U.S. Congress, took up the cause in the Senate, and by the spring of 2009 the effort to audit the Fed was picking up momentum. • • • With the Fed under attack, the man at its helm was called to become a politician himself. It wasn’t a natural fit. Ben Bernanke wasn’t born to be a Washington operator.

In a tense meeting, the more liberal members of the party, and even some of more middle-of-the-road temperament, were livid that at a time when voters were furious about the economy and Wall Street bailouts, legislators were being asked to confirm a guy who was responsible for both. “Massachusetts was kind of a wake-up call to many Democrats,” said Bernie Sanders that week. “People are disgusted and furious with Wall Street and with the state of the economy, and a number of Democrats have been scratching their heads, saying, ‘Why do we want to reappoint a guy who was a member of the Bush administration?’” Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, no liberal bomb thrower, came out in opposition to Bernanke.

Their tone was warm and friendly, free of the vicious anger that had characterized discussions of the Fed over the past year. The message, the reserve bank presidents concluded, had finally gotten through. • • • Audit the Fed may have passed overwhelmingly in the House, but in the Senate finance reform bill that Chris Dodd put forward, it was nowhere to be found. Bernie Sanders wanted to change that, drafting an amendment that largely tracked with Ron Paul’s. Bernanke and Geithner both saw dire consequences if it was enacted: There would be intense new political pressures on the Fed’s monetary policy, which would inevitably make policymakers more reluctant to make hard but necessary decisions.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Kennedy (1925) Cesar Chavez (1927) Walter Mondale (1928) Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) Sandra Day O’Connor (1930) Ted Kennedy (1932) Diane Feinstein (1933) Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Gloria Steinem (1934) Ralph Nader (1934) Geraldine Ferraro (1935) John McCain (1936) Antonin Scalia (1936) Madeleine Albright (1937) Colin Powell (1937) Nancy Pelosi (1940) Dick Cheney (1941) Jesse Jackson (1941) Bernie Sanders (1941) Joe Biden (1942) Mitch McConnell (1942) John Kerry (1943) Angela Davis (1944) Athletes and Sports Figures Arnold Palmer (1929) Mickey Mantle (1931) Roberto Clemente (1934) Wilt Chamberlain (1936) Jack Nicklaus (1940) Muhammad Ali (1942) Arthur Ashe (1943) Joe Namath (1943) Billie Jean King (1943) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Harper Lee (1926) Hugh Hefner (1926) Erma Bombeck (1927) Maya Angelou (1928) Barbara Walters (1929) Neil Armstrong (1930) Tom Wolfe (1930) Toni Morrison (1931) Dan Rather (1931) Susan Sontag (1933) Philip Roth (1933) Joan Didion (1934) Charles Kuralt (1934) Carl Sagan (1934) Phil Donahue (1935) Ken Kesey (1935) Judy Blume (1938) Peter Jennings (1938) Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Jerry Rubin (1938) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1939) Tom Brokaw (1940) Anthony Fauci (1940) Sue Grafton (1940) Ted Koppel (1940) Ed Bradley (1941) Nora Ephron (1941) Martha Stewart (1941) Michael Crichton (1942) Erica Jong (1942) John Irving (1942) Bob Woodward (1943) Carl Bernstein (1944) The Equality Revolution Trait: Pioneers in Civil Rights Imagine hopping into a time machine and stopping at two different times, just seven years apart: 1963 and 1970.

Silents were getting by, just as they have always done—a clear example of generational differences winning out even as the generation faced down a killer virus. The 2020s will see the last of the Silent generation retire from business, entertainment, science, and politics. If they are still alive, by 2029 Warren Buffett (b. 1930) will be 98, Mitch McConnell will be 86, Bernie Sanders (b. 1941) will be 87, Nancy Pelosi will be 88, and Anthony Fauci will be 89. By the end of the decade, the elder statesmen and women will be almost exclusively Boomers—in 2029, the oldest Boomers will turn 83, and the youngest will be 65. Figure 2.17: Percent of U.S. adults with significant anxiety, Silents vs. younger generations, 2019–2022 Sources: National Health Interview Survey (2019) and U.S.

In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary races, the Gen X contenders—Cory Booker (b. 1969), Julián Castro (b. 1974), Kirsten Gillibrand (b. 1966), Beto O’Rourke (b. 1972), and Andrew Yang (b. 1975)—all dropped out by the end of February, leaving two Millennials (Pete Buttigieg, b. 1982, and Tulsi Gabbard, b. 1981), two Boomers (Amy Klobuchar, b. 1960; Elizabeth Warren, b. 1949) and four Silents (Joe Biden, b. 1942; Michael Bloomberg, b. 1942; Bernie Sanders, b. 1941; and Bill Weld, b. 1945). Of course, the presidency is one office—in scientific terms, a low sample size. If we want to document generational shifts in political leaders more comprehensively, we should probably look elsewhere, like at the U.S. Senate. In 2005, when the average Boomer was 50 years old, 46 of the 100 U.S. senators were Boomers.


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We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, crack epidemic, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fear of failure, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, jitney, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, moral panic, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, phenotype, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight

“We know from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison.” As we enter the 2016 presidential-election cycle, candidates on both sides of the partisan divide are echoing Bush’s call. From the Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders (“To my mind, it makes eminently more sense to invest in jobs and education, rather than jails and incarceration”) to mainstream progressives like Hillary Clinton (“Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty”) to right-wing Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz (“Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes have contributed to prison overpopulation and are both unfair and ineffective”), there is now broad agreement that the sprawling carceral state must be dismantled.

“These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in 2006: Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy. Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but not so much because of racism but for reasons of geography and job sector distribution. This rendition—raceless anti-racism—marks the modern left, from New Democrat Bill Clinton to socialist Bernie Sanders. With few exceptions, there is little recognition among national liberal politicians that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions. III In 2016, Hillary Clinton offered more rhetorical support to the existence of systemic racism than any of her modern Democratic predecessors.

And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a trans-class, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident. From Joe Biden, vice president: They’re all the people I grew up with….And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. To Bernie Sanders, senator and candidate for president: I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from. To Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times: My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, and so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate. Corporate welfare In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only Independent member of Congress, wrote, “If we’re serious about balancing the budget in a fair way, we must slash corporate welfare.” You’ve said you’re very uncomfortable with the term corporate welfare. Why? I like Bernie Sanders, and that was a good column, but I think he starts off on the wrong foot. Why should we balance the budget? Do you know a business—or a household—that doesn’t have any debt?

See also India Bermuda Bernard, Elaine Bernstein, Dennis “bewildered herd,” Bible, intellectuals in biblical prophecies biotechnology birth control bishops’ conferences Bitter Paradise black market in India blacks, US. See racism Blowback BMW B’nai B’rith (Anti-Defamation League) Boeing Bolivia Bolshevik coup Bolshevism Bombay slums. See also India book publishing Bosch Bosnia Boston Boston City Hospital Boston Globe Bernie Sanders op-ed in on East Timor May Day headline in Schanberg op-ed in on semiconductors on Vietnam War Boulder (CO) Boutros-Ghali, Boutros Boyer, Paul Bradley Foundation Brady, Robert brainwashing at home Brazil brutal army of capital flight from “economic miracle” in economy fine, people not favelas films in Nova Igauçu (Rio favela) foreign debt of IMF impact on independent media in Landless Workers’ Movement left journal in loans made to media in military coup in more open-minded than US racism in rich out of control in rural workers in US domination of Workers’ Party breast cancer Bretton Woods system Bridge of Courage Brière, Elaine British East India Company Egypt invaded by in India in Ireland in Israel merchant-warriors opium trafficking by British, continued protectionism British Columbia Brown, Ron Bryant, Adam Buchanan, Pat budget, balancing the federal Buenos Aires “buffer zone,” Bundy, McGeorge bureaucrats, pointy-headed Burma Burnham, Walter Dean Burundi Bush administration attitude toward biotechnology Baker Plan Gulf war during Haiti policies of human rights abuses during Joya Martinez silenced by National Security Policy Review of Panama invasion during pro-Israel bias of protectionist policies reliance on force by unemployment during war on drugs by Bush, George antisemitic remarks by Bosnia and Somalia compared by “Bou-Bou Ghali” mistake Japan visit by “linkage” opposed by “new world order,” OSHA weakened by personality type of Somalia and “what we say goes,” business.


On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

One was Roger Stone and the other Alex Jones, prince of the conspiracy theorists, who believes, among other things, that 9/11 was a put-up job, the federal government planted the Oklahoma City bomb that killed 168 people in 1995, the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren in 2012 was an elaborate hoax, and that elements of the moon landing were faked for some dark bureaucratic purpose. That scene summed up the weirdest of conventions. Hillary Clinton’s, by contrast, was a traditional affair. Her nomination, however, had involved another street fight, this time with the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, determined to push the Democrats leftwards. He stirred up a movement that had spirit, beating Clinton in New Hampshire and announcing that he’d see it through to the end, which he did, although it became clear early on that he would not be nominated. He played a similar role to Clinton’s own in 2008, when she refused to concede the nomination to Obama until the end.

So you go do the leadership around the world stuff, and I’ll save the economy.” ’ You might describe that as a straightforward brief. When her turn came to run, four years after the end of her term as secretary of state, she believed she had found the language that Democrats needed. But then came, first, Bernie Sanders from the left, with an assault on ‘the system’ and then Donald Trump from the right, with the opposite solutions but the same complaint that the economy and society more broadly were rigged against the powerless. An imbalance epitomised in the halls of Congress. For Clinton, the conundrum she’d wrestled with all her adult life: how to distil the liberal case to its essence.

Hardly anyone in the hall would have walked down the block to hear Cruz, and the senator wouldn’t have regarded that campus as a place where he was likely to prosper. However, O’Rourke was still a striking lanky figure, an apparently fresh face. There was nothing particularly radical about his politics – he comes across as a centrist and could never be mistaken for a devotee of Bernie Sanders – but he was skilled in taking on the orthodoxy of the right. He spoke about a revival of community, about finding connections that had once been strong but were severed. Around that time, there was circulating on social media a video of his encounter with a group of veterans, who were infuriated by the ‘taking a knee’ protest being staged by many African American football players, led by Colin Kaepernick, demonstrating against police brutality by refusing to stand to attention for the national anthem when it was played before every game.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

In some countries, inequality is at such extreme levels that these taxes could raise enormous sums in aggregate. For example, US senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a US wealth tax targeted at the 75,000 US households with over $50 million in assets, which would raise $275 billion a year for ten years.28 Senator Bernie Sanders would raise $435 billion annually from 180,000 households.29 Each of these plans could fund important social programs. By contrast, if the Sanders plan’s $435 billion were simply divided up among all 333 million Americans, they would receive an annual basic income of about $1,300. This would certainly improve the finances of many households—particularly those with children—but would not be a serious candidate for actually replacing occupational income.

Ofcom, “Children and Parents: Media Uses and Attitudes Report: 2018,” January 29, 2019, 11, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/134907/children-and-parents-media-use-and-attitudes-2018.pdf; Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, “The Impact of Social Media on Children,” Pediatrics 127, no. 4 (2011): 800, 802. 84. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a plan that would aid colleges in such a digital transition by directing funds away from sports and toward “activities that improve instructional quality and academic outcomes.” College for All Act of 2019, S.1947, 116th Cong. (2019). 85. Todd E. Vachon and Josef (Kuo-Hsun) Ma, “Bargaining for Success: Examining the Relationship between Teacher Unions and Student Achievement,” Sociological Forum 30 (2015): 391, 397–399.

Elizabeth Warren United States Senator for Massachusetts, “Senator Warren Unveils Proposal to Tax Wealth of Ultra-Rich Americans,” press release, January 24, 2019, https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-unveils-proposal-to-tax-wealth-of-ultra-rich-americans. 29. “Tax on Extreme Wealth,” Issues, Friends of Bernie Sanders, accessed May 13, 2020, https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-extreme-wealth/. 30. Karl Widerquist, “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations,” Basic Income Studies 12, no. 2 (2017): 1–13. 31. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 32.


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Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

DataSetCode=TUD>. 88 Ben Tarnoff, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 89 Irina Ivanova, ‘Amazon Picks Twitter Fight with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren amid Union Campaign’, CBS News, 26 March 2021 <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-union-vote/> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 90 Bethan Staton, ‘The Upstart Unions Taking on the Gig Economy and Outsourcing’, Financial Times, 18 January 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 91 ‘Table 5.

This was still true as we entered the Exponential Age: the workforces of the digital superstars were completely un-unionised. The tech industry has been anti-union since its inception – Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, declared that ‘remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies’.88 Today’s biggest companies have arguably picked up this mantle. American senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have long accused Amazon of heavy-handed attacks on workers who try to unionise.89 Throughout the last decade, workers at tech companies who try to organise have run into many obstacles – in some cases because they didn’t get the widespread support that they needed, and in others because of active interference by their employers.


pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Chelsea Manning, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, East Village, Edward Jenner, ending welfare as we know it, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, informal economy, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, means of production, medical bankruptcy, moral panic, Naomi Klein, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, peak TV, pill mill, QR code, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, social distancing, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

Even when tens of millions had no income, we largely accepted that rent had to be paid to landlords (and when financial government assistance came in the United States, it often just passed through those in distress to landlords and holders of debt). And even when the right to health care was more obvious than ever in America, during the 2020 Democratic primary, voters did not rally behind Bernie Sanders, the candidate who’d championed Medicare for All; they chose Joe Biden, who does not believe in universal health care. Mr. Kim may have killed his boss in Parasite, but he also became locked in the basement as a literal member of the underclass, living beneath yet another wealthy family. Usually, being suspended in a state of false consciousness allows the ruling class to run off with the car keys and leave the underclass holding the bag

A self-described “former hot-metal printer and former newspaperman” who’d “destroyed both industries,” Ward wrote in his Twitter profile that “Every day I try to write part of Trump’s obit.” In early 2020, he posted critically and daily about his nation’s president, his state’s governor, and the unfolding coronavirus crisis. His penultimate post was a retweet of Senator Bernie Sanders: “When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine 65 years ago, he understood its tremendous benefit to all of humanity and he refused to patent it.… Any coronavirus treatment must be made free for everyone.” An Oklahoma native, Ward lived just outside New York City’s outer boroughs, on Long Island, not far from where COVID-19 had recently taken the life of Lorena Borjas.

Mbembé and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40, muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. 9: Disability as Disposability “write part of Trump’s obit”: Ward Harkavy (@WHarkavy), “Former Hot-Metal Printer and Former Newspaperman: Destroyed Both Industries,” Long Beach, NY, joined July 2009. “be made free for everyone”: Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders), “When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine 65 years ago, he understood its tremendous benefit to all of humanity and he refused to patent it. Today, we must put human life above corporate profit. Any coronavirus treatment must be made free for everyone,” tweet, Twitter, March 25, 2020, 7:28 a.m., https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1242820633412722690.


pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Shortly after I was asked to strategically edit my response to the ICO, I’d gotten a message on LinkedIn from someone named Paul Hilder. Paul had an impressive résumé. He was a writer, a political organizer, and a social entrepreneur who believed that Big Data could be used to power grassroots movements. Though British born, he had spent much of 2016 embedded in the Bernie Sanders campaign, and he had found me, strangely enough, via a video in which I made a brief and impromptu cameo and which someone at Cambridge had posted online. The video was part of a strange phenomenon: one of our data scientists had been keeping a vlog on YouTube, chronicling his life, including his work at Cambridge, for 365 days.

The video would later become rather infamous because, in it, one of my colleagues toasted Alexander, saying of him that he was the sort of person “who could sell an anchor to a drowning man,” a less-than-complimentary comment that would outlive even the company, but what Paul had noticed was something else. The video was filmed during the company’s involvement in the Cruz campaign, and at one point that afternoon someone on the Cambridge Cruz team had yelled out, “Who’s going to win the election?” and I had been the lone voice that called out Bernie Sanders’s name. That’s how Paul had found me. He’d likely googled the SCL Group, because he was in the midst, like so many other people, of trying to understand what had happened in the United Kingdom and the States and to chart a way forward. He had long been an advocate of the left’s use of social media as a means to organize and had founded something called Crowdpac, a grassroots alternative to super PACs.

And I explained to Lewis how I had given up my vote and contributed in no small part to the general lack of support for Hillary in the primaries and even the animosity toward her in the general election—all of which had led ineluctably to her defeat. I had flown to Chicago expressly to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Then, in November, I told myself I was too busy to fly back there again for the general. I had just been there to see my father. I hadn’t had time to get an absentee ballot. Besides, Illinois wasn’t a swing state. It hadn’t occurred to me to register to vote in Virginia, which was not only a swing state but also where our Cambridge Analytica “DC” apartments had been.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Democratic senators talked up Hillary’s accomplishments and speakers like Khizr Khan—the Gold Star father of a fallen Muslim army captain—excoriated Trump.22 When Hillary made a surprise appearance to embrace Obama, the convention hall erupted in cheers.23 There was a video showing all the presidents, followed by Hillary symbolically “breaking” a glass ceiling.24 Yet there was also a disconcerting undercurrent. Just a few days before the Democratic convention, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks dumped a number of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, some of which seemed to show the DNC’s preference for Hillary over her main primary rival, Bernie Sanders.25 The emails fueled intraparty feuds at a moment when the Democrats most hoped to be coming together. The WikiLeaks dump merged with the media’s merciless, seemingly 24/7 discussion of “Hillary’s emails,” the controversy over Hillary’s decision to use a private email account and server while secretary of state.

For a conservative user, the opposite is true.16 Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist of technology at the University of North Carolina, has documented how YouTube’s “recommender” algorithms serve up increasingly extreme content. She found that after viewers watched videos of Trump rallies, YouTube’s “Up Next” feature often began to suggest and autoplay White supremacist content. Bernie Sanders videos often led to left-wing conspiracy theories. Tufekci’s worrying conclusion is that YouTube—and by extension many of the algorithms that govern our online lives—“may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”17 Thanks to social media, it has become easier than ever to connect with the people who share our views.

Forty percent of the IRA’s Instagram accounts were what marketers consider “micro-influencers” (over 10,000 followers), while twelve accounts—including ones like “blackstagram” and “American.veterans”—were full-blown “influencers” (more than 100,000 followers).44 The Russians were even on Pokémon GO, the popular mobile game that uses augmented reality to enable players to collect fantastical creatures.45 On each of these platforms, Putin’s digital combatants sought to sow division and doubt. The trolls posted about Black Lives Matter and Confederate history, about feminism, immigration, and Syria. They heckled and harangued, pitting Christians against Muslims; Bernie Sanders and third-party candidate Jill Stein against Hillary; Hillary against Trump.46 When there were opportunities to elevate WikiLeaks or tear down James Comey, they seized them. Mostly, the trolls were assholes. But they were assholes with an agenda. As remarkable as the scale of the Russian effort was its sophistication.


pages: 50 words: 15,155

Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard

Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, feminist movement, glass ceiling, knowledge economy, Saturday Night Live, wikimedia commons

A notorious recent case was the silencing of Elizabeth Warren in the US Senate – and her exclusion from the debate – when she attempted to read out a letter by Coretta Scott King. Few of us, I suspect, know enough about the rules of senatorial debate to know how justified this was, formally. But those rules did not stop Bernie Sanders and other senators (admittedly in her support) reading out exactly the same letter and not being excluded. But there are unsettling literary examples too. 9. Photographed in 1870, when she was over seventy, Sojourner Truth is here made to look anything but radical – instead, a rather sedately venerable old lady.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

As Nigel Farage, a figurehead for the Brexit movement, triumphantly declared on the night, ‘This is a victory for ordinary people, for good people, for decent people … the people who’ve had enough of the merchant bankers.’ Yet even the shock of Brexit paled in comparison to events just a few months later when Donald Trump, a well-known businessman and reality TV star, was elected president of the United States. Winning the Republican primary earlier that year had already caused a shock – and with Bernie Sanders pushing Hillary Clinton close for the Democratic nomination, the signs were there for an upset. Which was precisely what ensued as Trump took previously democrat-held ‘Rust Belt’ states on his way to the White House. The President-elect’s victory speech was reminiscent of Farage’s, as he told ‘the forgotten men and women of our country’ that they would be ‘forgotten no longer’.

Britain now displayed both key features of the new political landscape: massively increased polarisation, and uncertainty as to whether the politics of the left or right would ultimately prevail. While they might not share much politically, Trump and Corbyn, along with Brexit and the emergence of Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Syriza, indicate the era of capitalist realism is over. And yet there is also a deeper story at play, one which remains largely unremarked upon. While the events of the last several years are both historic and unexpected, they are a response to an economic crisis, beginning in 2008, which itself only represents the first stage of a prolonged period of global disorder.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

When workers’ wages fall short of expectations, people often express their discontent by turning to populist solutions.13 Figure 2.7: Debt in US Households is Still Rising Steadily Notes: This is total household debt per capita in US dollars. Student loan debt was not included until 2003. Data sources: New York Federal Reserve Bank and World Bank. The rise of populists like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump speaks to the depth of public dissatisfaction. Political polarization extends beyond the 2016 election in both time and space. The US Congress is nearly synonymous with dysfunction, in large part due to ever-increasing polarization. In Europe, both far-left and far-right parties are ascendant.14 The shrinking importance of moderate political groups likely generates several costs: more policy variability, more policy uncertainty, more difficulty enacting policy, and more extreme policies.

Chinese imports account for about 1 million of the 5.8 million (net) job losses in manufacturing over the period 1999 to 2011—and if indirect effects on other industries are included, the number of job losses attributable to trade with China is twice as large.5 As it turns out, these intense “China shock” zones overlap heavily with the voting precincts that most heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. This election followed a long campaign season in which Trump (and Bernie Sanders, competing for the Democrats’ nomination) frequently lambasted Hillary Clinton for promoting international trade through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA)—given her affiliation with former President Clinton, who brought NAFTA into force in 1994—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated by the Obama administration she served as Secretary of State.


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Going in, the CEOs recognized that public support for the capitalist system was waning. Brexit had just passed in the UK over the objections of nearly every business leader. Donald Trump had triumphed after a campaign attacking the globalization that these companies had driven. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, had nearly been defeated for the Democratic nomination by Bernie Sanders, who openly embraced democratic socialism. Polls showed that among young people, a majority did not favor capitalism. Clinton later told me she thought that declaring she was in favor of capitalism might have hurt her in the primary campaign. Pope Francis himself was also a symbol of the rising discontent.

The 2008 shakeup led to a cascade of events, including Brexit—a bold and potentially disastrous rejection of corporate and political common sense—and the advent of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who flouted centuries of conventional wisdom without replacing it with any stable alternative. And just as real was the backlash on the Left, personified in the United States by Bernie Sanders. Sanders launched two presidential campaigns that, while ultimately unsuccessful, harnessed the impressive energy and influence of the younger population and pulled the Democratic party in his direction. Corporations were viewed as bastions of privilege, with CEOs who were paid hundreds of times more than their average worker.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

In February 2017, the then Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the 2016 federal policy to phase out the use of private prisons.34 This set in motion the start of new bidding processes for additional facilities in private immigrant detention centers.35 A memorandum sent by the Federal Bureau of Prisons followed. It noted that to alleviate overcrowding “and to maximize the effectiveness of the private contracts,” federal prisons should send low-security (and the higher-profit margin) nonviolent inmates to private prisons.36 Commenting on the reversal, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Private prison companies invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and today they got their reward.”37 Other senators were similarly dismayed.38 Part of the change may be attributed to successful lobbying from the leading for-profit operators who, naturally, were not willing to give up on a multibillion dollar sector without a fight.

Over time we learn more how Russia used Facebook, Google, and Twitter to “sow discord in the US political system.” According to an internal Russian document, the operatives were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except [Democratic Primary Candidate Bernie] Sanders and [Republican candidate Donald] Trump—we support them).”146 Russia’s campaign likely reached 126 million people on Facebook, 20 million more on Instagram, and countless more on YouTube.147 Yet, we cannot negotiate better terms, because the Gamemakers are so powerful.148 What can we do? Tell Google and Facebook to stop tracking us across our devices and Internet?

“Unless you have scale and power in the marketplace and with the consumer, you’re just out there scrambling on your own,” an executive at AT&T Inc. said after the federal court allowed it to acquire media conglomerate Time Warner.9 The alignment between big government and big business will continue as long as money and corporate help with reelection remain top-of-mind concerns for so many government officials. This means that we can expect many governmental policies to remain skewed toward helping the wealthy and powerful under the façade of competition, and against regulation in the name of freedom. Writers and thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have inveighed against this state of affairs, which they describe as socialism for the rich (meaning government policy that sees to it that most resources go to the rich, their powerful corporations, and our financial institutions) and capitalism—or as King put it, “rugged individualism”—for the poor (meaning that they are left to struggle on their own).


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

This is not to say that Betsy DeVos is a religious zealot or a billionaire simply because her family members are, but it has to make it more difficult to really understand the plight of American families that are struggling to make ends meet and desperately depend on the government to provide adequate schooling for their children. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked her about working to provide free college tuition to all Americans during her confirmation hearing, she described it as a nice idea, but she was unsure how that cost would be paid for. When Senator Sanders proposed that reducing the tax breaks currently granted to millionaires and billionaires would easily cover the tuition costs, she simply tried to change the subject.

The Clinton Foundation and the recently defunct Clinton Global Initiative, an enterprise that was shut down the day after the 2016 election when it became clear to the world that the influence-peddling was no longer an option for the second-place finisher in the American election, have been described by Ortel as the largest criminal enterprise on the planet, and that is really saying something considering the drug cartels, mafia, and the CIA are in competition.178 Did the media question the flimsy story of the death of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer that was allegedly murdered during a robbery, even though his wallet, his phone, his watch, and his gold necklace were all left by the thief? It does not take a seasoned FBI investigator to realize that the story simply did not add up, especially once one factors in the reality that he was the leaker that provided Kim Dotcom with information from the DNC that proved that Bernie Sanders’ nomination was suppressed by Hillary Clinton and others in the Democratic National Convention.179 This information was sent to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and leads to another story that lacked in substance, but was universally portrayed to be of a legitimate origin: the narrative that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

Michael Hastings wrote a scathing article about General Stanley McCrystal that got him fired from running the Iraq War, then his car blew up after hitting a tree at 100 mph on San Vicente Blvd at 4 am in Los Angeles, only hours after he told his friends that he had to get out of town to lay low. There was the alleged robbery and murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee analyst that provided proof that the DNC conspired to suppress votes for Bernie Sanders so that Hillary Clinton could be the nominee. He downloaded information to a thumb drive that was given to Kim Dotcom, who in turn made the information available to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He was murdered in an alleged robbery in a park in Washington D.C., except that the robbers forgot to take his wallet, his watch, his gold necklace, or his cell phone.


pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific by David Bianculli

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, fake news, feminist movement, friendly fire, global village, Golden age of television, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, period drama, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship

And as the presidential campaigns of 2015 and 2016 kept imploding or succeeding unexpectedly, the Kings had to adjust not only their stories, but their visuals, accordingly. Green-screen TVs were used on set so their images could be inserted in postproduction, which allowed for some subsequent replacement of what was planned to be on the TV screens in political back rooms and TV control rooms. Reflecting real-life events, that meant less Ted Cruz, more Bernie Sanders. As for the freedom offered by writing and presenting the political satire of BrainDead during the presidential campaign year of 2016, Michelle says, “You only feel as though you can never go too extreme. Nothing is off the table.” Robert King concludes, with a chuckle, “If it ends up being where we want it to be, it’s somewhere between Paddy Chayefsky and Roger Corman.”

LANDMARK TV SERIES: Saturday Night Live, 1984–85, NBC; Seinfeld, 1989–98, NBC; Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2000–, HBO. OTHER MAJOR CREDITS: Broadway: Writer and star, Fish in the Dark, 2015. Movies: Woody Allen’s Radio Days, 1987, New York Stories, 1989, and Whatever Works, 2009. TV: Clear History, 2013, HBO; Saturday Night Live (guest starring as Bernie Sanders), 2015–16, NBC. Larry David’s television debut was as a founding member of the repertory company of Fridays, a late-night variety sketch series broadcast live by ABC in 1980. That’s a surprisingly high board from which to dive into TV for your first experience—a live, national TV show—and even David himself was surprised to be there, or to be a part of the entertainment world at all.

David did a bit from the audience, talking with Seinfeld, who was taking questions from the stage, and managed to poke fun at his own short run at Saturday Night Live while noting his subsequent success—much to the delight of the studio audience. “I was actually surprised by the reaction to it,” David admitted. Here, too, there was one final twist ending. After that SNL special, later in 2015, Larry David returned to play the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders—a live sketch comedy role bigger, better, and more warmly received than anything he’d done on Fridays or Saturday Night Live. It became a recurring role, and as the real Sanders maintained his presence deep into the primary season, so did his comic alter ego. Each time David appears as Bernie, he’s greeted by a rousing ovation before he even begins speaking.


pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series) by James Bloodworth

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, cognitive dissonance, Downton Abbey, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, income inequality, light touch regulation, meritocracy, precariat, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, zero-sum game

One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called Bernie Bros – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who ‘seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously’.102 The sexual assault allegations that embroiled the British Socialist Workers’ Party in 2013 paints an even grimmer picture of self-proclaimed egalitarians who see no contradiction in using their power as men to belittle and abuse women.


Basic Income And The Left by henningmeyer

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, eurozone crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, land value tax, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, precariat, quantitative easing, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, the market place, Tobin tax, universal basic income

Second, technological developments imply that the number of jobs will be significantly reduced, Broad Constituency Of Support Lined up behind the idea are a large number of internationally renowned political philosophers, but also sections of many Green and left-wing political parties in Europe as well as a not insignificant number of internationally prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and, surprisingly, several high profile IT entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The proposals about the size of this unconditional universal basic income vary, but if it is going to be at all possible to live on this income, suggestions of around £800 per month have been put forward: what you can get from a student loan to pay for living expenses .


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

More often than not, the distinction didn’t even matter: as we’ve seen, all sources look the same on social networks, and clickbait headlines combined with confirmation bias acted on conservative audiences in much the same way that YouTube algorithms responded to ‘Elsa Spiderman Finger Family Learn Colors Live Action’ strings. Repeated clicks just pushed such stories higher in Facebook’s own rankings. A few brave teens tried the same tricks on Bernie Sanders supporters, with less impressive results. ‘Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,’ said one. ‘They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.’16 For a few brief months, headlines claiming that Hillary Clinton had been indicted or that the Pope had declared his support for Trump brought a trickle of wealth to Veles: a few more BMWs appeared in its streets, and more champagne was sold in its nightclubs.


pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality by Laurence Scott

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, Apollo 11, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, colonial rule, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, deepfake, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, Internet of things, Joan Didion, job automation, Jon Ronson, late capitalism, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, Neil Armstrong, post-truth, Productivity paradox, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, SoftBank, technological determinism, TED Talk, Y2K, you are the product

In 1944 he wrote that ‘the really frightening11 thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the objective concept of truth’. Today, because the ‘story’ carries such central cultural importance, the role that storytelling plays in political dissimulation is especially vivid and alarming. The corrupt deployment of inaccurate stories is now talked about with explicit, often helpless cynicism. In an interview with Bernie Sanders following the passing of the 2017 US tax-reform bill, CNN’s Chris Cuomo said that the media’s correcting of the facts ‘doesn’t matter’ because Donald Trump has ‘won the narrative of a big tax cut that is going to help everybody’. Politically we have moved past putting a spin on the truth to telling the best story.

., ‘Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism’, PNAS, 108 (4), 25th January 2011; ‘It should be …’, see Xiaolei Xu et al., ‘Oxytocin biases men but not women to restore social connections with individuals who socially exclude them’, Scientific Reports, No. 40589, 12 January 2017. 11 ‘the really frightening …’, George Orwell, column in Tribune, 4th February 1944; ‘doesn’t matter’, Chris Cuomo interview with Bernie Sanders, Cuomo Prime Time, CNN, 11th January 2018. 12 ‘built into the …’, see Lily Rothman, ‘Margaret Atwood on Serial Fiction and the Future of the Book’, www.entertainment.time.com, 8th October 2012. 13 ‘were like dreams …’, Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986). 14 ‘They cannot see …’, ‘Trompe l’Oeil’, Westworld, dir.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Consider the innovation remarks of Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company that in 2015 dramatically raised the price of an old drug it had acquired. Asked Shkreli of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who had criticized him, “Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” See David Nather, “Bernie Sanders Rejects Donation from Drug Company CEO,” Boston Globe, October 15, 2015. Another good example of this sort of thinking can be found in a 2003 speech by Sidney Taurel, then the CEO of Eli Lilly, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Sort of, but one that’s more analogous to school shootings than to the political clashes of the 1930s or the 1960s, in the sense that it involves disturbed people appointing themselves as knights-errant and going forth to slaughter, rather than organized movements with any kind of strategy or concrete goal. Internet-era political derangement is obviously partially responsible for all kinds of horrors, from the white supremacists talking one another into shooting sprees on the extremist website 8chan, to the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to massacre Republicans at a congressional baseball game in 2017. But these cases are terrible and also exceptional; they have not yet established a pattern that looks anything like the Year of our Lord 1969, when there were more than three thousand bombings across the continental United States.

This would require accepting that the postwar boom isn’t coming back, accepting that the space race was mostly just Cold War posturing, accepting that we’re an aging society that can’t afford vast socialist experiments or growth-chasing supply-side fantasies, accepting that we aren’t going to spread democracy by force of arms—accepting, in other words, that the discontents motivating idealists of the center and populists of the right and left are just differing forms of nostalgia, which can be managed but never satisfied, and which are ultimately just impediments to achieving contentment in our civilization’s old age. I think it’s fair to see this view, however underarticulated, as one of the important premises of the last American presidency’s policy making. Like Trump and Bernie Sanders eight years later, Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 as a critic of decadence, as a yes-we-can idealist promising a return to the 1960s New Frontier, and he certainly made forays into liberal utopianism during his eight years in office. But his real temperament was technocratic and managerial, and the management of decadence—a “Don’t do stupid shit” approach to everything from financial capitalism and globalization, to China and the Middle East—was an essential feature of Obaman governance.


pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

For outlets like Fox News, the ability to spend a summer saying ‘Hillary Clinton’ in proximity to the word ‘emails’ was enough – it could imply a connection to Clinton operating her own email server, even though that was nothing to do with this hack.39 The fact of the emails made news again in the race when the FBI declared it would check disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop for classified emails40 – again creating a false connection in people’s mind with Clinton’s leaked emails.41 The very fact of the email leaks was significantly damaging to the Clinton campaign, and so hugely helpful to Trump. The trouble was that once you looked closely, there wasn’t really anything all that interesting in their contents. The DNC emails raised questions for Bernie Sanders supporters as to whether they’d shown bias in favour of Clinton in the primaries, but didn’t reveal any secret crimes.42 The Podesta emails revealed even less of interest. Other people’s emails – even when they work for presidential candidates – are nearly as boring as our own, it turns out. Yet this was a huge cache of online documents, published by a reputable but thoroughly anti-establishment outlet, about perhaps the ultimate US establishment insider, Hillary Clinton.

Tim became a believer in the ‘birther’ conspiracy – the idea that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, rather than Hawaii, and so was ineligible to be president, a conspiracy heavily boosted by Donald Trump throughout Obama’s presidency. As the 2016 election approached, Karen thought her brother would get behind Bernie Sanders as an anti-establishment candidate, only to find him supporting Trump. Soon, he was volunteering strange ideas such as that Australia had, years before, been ‘sold’ to the USA – a trope quite common in QAnon circles and affecting multiple different countries.15 Tim even, according to Karen, came to believe the David Icke theory that the Queen of England was secretly an alien lizard – and that there were pictures to prove it.


pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Barack Obama: “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” February 12, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address. Bernie Sanders: “We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty by increasing the minimum wage to a living wage.” Bernie Sanders, Facebook, November 10, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/berniesanders/photos/a.324119347643076/927934470594891/. 18. See discussion in Cass Sunstein, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 37–38. 19.

While conservatives sought to frame and deride the EITC and the concept of refundable tax credits as “welfare” for “lucky duckies,” Clinton was able to frame the case for the EITC expansions by rooting it deeply in the values of a two-way social compact of contribution.15 He pledged to “ensure that no one with a family who works full-time has to raise their children in poverty.”16 In doing so, he was essentially asking middle-class voters to see a shared value in the struggles and aspirations of lower-income families, disproportionately of color, that would motivate middle-class support for a big EITC increase even though it went by definition to lower-income workers. Clinton’s frame has also been used by progressives from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders, and had lasting benefits.17 Beyond the EITC battles of the 1990s, winning the definition of the EITC as tax relief connected to work and caring for family has dramatically reduced the partisan attacks on it, set the frame for expansion of refundable relief in child tax credits, and even led to some Republican policymakers now embracing at least targeted expansions.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

“What I teach and preach inside Amazon is [that] when you’re criticized, first look in a mirror and decide, are your critics right?” he said in an onstage interview in Berlin in 2018. “If they’re right, change. Don’t resist.” Amazon employed this strategy in late 2018, when another of its loudest critics, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, extended his ongoing criticism of Bezos’s wealth by unleashing a blistering critique of Amazon’s compensation of its warehouse workers. He then unveiled what he theatrically called the “Stop BEZOS” bill (for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies”), which proposed a new tax on companies based on the number of their employees that relied on public assistance programs such as food stamps.

His colleagues knew all too well though that Bezos wasn’t really leading but reading—in this case, the rising criticism of the company by politicians and the press over what they characterized as penurious wages for warehouse workers. Bezos’s habit of only responding on an issue when public protests mounted would soon repeat itself. After the pay raise was announced, Bernie Sanders tried to get Bezos on the phone to thank him. When the senator was routed to Carney instead (“a frequent disappointment, I’m afraid,” Carney said), he thanked the S-team member and quizzed him on reports that some tenured workers might end up making less in the new compensation scheme. Carney assured him that no employees would emerge worse off.

reports that some tenured workers: Krystal Hu, “Some Amazon Employees Say They Will Make Less After the Raise,” Yahoo! Finance, October 3, 2018, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-employees-say-will-make-less-raise-174028353.html (January 25, 2021). returning to Twitter to harangue the company: Bernie Sanders, Tweet, December 27, 2019, https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1210602974587822080 (January 25, 2021). “Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise”: “Amazon ‘Getting Away with Murder on tax’, says Donald Trump,” Reuters, May 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/amazon-getting-away-with-on-tax-says-donald-trump (January 25, 2021).


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

The scorn is increasingly bipartisan; while liberals take them to task for amassing monopoly power and for the poor labor conditions at their companies, conservatives accuse them of political bias and censorship. For every Elon Musk fan, there’s a critic trying to bring him back to earth. Twitter threads and op-eds and a growing cohort of politicians, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left, and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis on the right, bemoan the outsized power of the tech monopolists. As it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the anger is especially acute toward those running the new factories. FEAR FACTORIES REDUX Christian Smalls March 2020 At the beginning of March 2020, an assistant warehouse manager named Christian Smalls at Amazon’s JFK8 facility noticed that more and more of his fellow employees were showing up to work pale and fatigued.

Yet out of everyone who walked out from the Staten Island facility that day, he was the only employee terminated. “It’s a shame on them,” Smalls told Vice News. “This is a proven fact of why they don’t care about their employees, to fire someone after five years for sticking up for people and trying to give them a voice.” The firing set off a ripple of outrage. Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and New York State’s attorney general, to name a few, all spoke out in support of Smalls and called for a National Labor Relations Board investigation into the termination, which seemed retaliatory. Much like Uber and the rideshare companies, Amazon seems intent on finding out just how hard it can push its increasingly distressed workforce before those workers decide to fight back, in ways perhaps more forceful than organizing walkouts.

“And this is not easy… when your opponents are using weapons of mass destruction, like using $200 million to our $12 million.” There was little wallowing. Moore was right; Uber, Lyft, InstaCart, and DoorDash had outspent them 20-to-1, embraced deeply suspect and misleading campaign tactics, like sending out mailers insinuating that Bernie Sanders supported Prop 22, and blanketed billboards, mailboxes, and YouTube with pro–Prop 22 advertisements. “I look around and I see warriors,” Moore continued, and a pulse returned to the Zoom. “Some of the hardest-working warriors I know. And know I can’t turn my back on anyone in this room. We went out there and fought and proved that we could get in the streets.”


pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

She had a visceral disgust for the anxious competitiveness of other middle-class mothers on the playgrounds and in the preschools. “Who cares what skills my kids have mastered?” she told me. Over the years I watched as this modest oppression politicized Bellamy. Now forty-five and the mother of an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, she had become an intense Bernie Sanders supporter during the 2016 election, going to his rallies in the Bronx, scrambling to pay for day care for her hours working for the campaign, phone banking for the candidate, going door to door. “He’s been saying things I’ve been feeling for so long that no one else will really say,” she explained as she pushed her daughter in a swing on a Harlem playground.

Would she be able to pass on the social class standing she had created for herself? Would they even be able to get the same fine education she’d gotten as a bright and dedicated young woman, vaulting into the Ivy League after growing up deeply religious and attending an equally devout college? Still a Bernie Sanders supporter a year after the election, Bellamy bristled at the memory of the 2016 primaries. She was now researching her new book project, “Jyeshtha, the Hindu God of Misfortune.” Misfortune was indeed a subject that for her would seem apropos for our times. THERE ARE BOTH SMALL AND LARGE REMEDIES FOR THE PLIGHT OF the hyper-educated working poor—those earning around $36,000 a year, with kids, and just getting by, only a few false moves away from the poverty line.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

Instead of violence, however, the modern regime depends on the English-speaking countries’ political commitment to open markets. This is a choice, but in democracies, the people have the option to change their mind. We may already be starting to see this. In the 2016 election, all of the major U.S. presidential candidates disavowed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Bernie Sanders warned that it would “make it easier for corporations to throw American workers out on the street” and would “reward some of the biggest human-rights violators in the world.” Hillary Clinton was concerned the agreement failed to address the problem of currency manipulation and gave too much protection to pharmaceutical patents.

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin, 2014); Nicholas Crafts, “Walking Wounded: The British Economy in the Aftermath of World War I,” VoxEU, August 27, 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/walking-wounded-british-economy-aftermath-world-war-i; Barry Eichengreen, “The British Economy between the Wars,” in The Cambridge History of Modern Britain, ed. Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 314–43. Conclusion 1. Bernie Sanders, “Sanders: Party Platform Still Needs Work,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2016; “Hillary Clinton Says She Does Not Support Trans-Pacific Partnership,” PBS News Hour, October 7, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/hillary-clinton-says-she-does-not-support-trans-pacific-partnership; Larry Summers, “A Setback to American Leadership on Trade,” Financial Times, June 14, 2015. 2.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Raghav Rao, “Information Control and Terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Through Twitter,” Information Systems Frontiers 13, no. 1 (2011): 33–43. 64 Indian government had said: Busari, “Tweeting the Terror.” 64 “Die, die, die”: Ibid. 64 begging for blood donations: Noah Schatman, “Mumbai Attack Aftermath Detailed, Tweet by Tweet,” Wired, November 26, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/11/first-hand-acco/. 64 spread word of tip lines: Tamar Weinberg, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web (O’Reilly, 2009), 127. 64 to work collectively: Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/. 65 $218 million: Clare Foran, “Bernie Sanders’s Big Money,” The Atlantic, March 1, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-fundraising/471648/. 65 “to crowdfund their war”: “Why an Ordinary Man Went to Fight Islamic State,” The Economist, December 24, 2016, https://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21712055-when-islamic-state-looked-unbeatable-ordinary-men-and-women-went-fight-them-why. 65 fundamentalist donors: Elizabeth Dickinson, “Private Gulf Donors and Extremist Rebels in Syria” (panel presentation, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, December 19, 2013). 65 “financial jihad”: Lisa Daftari, “Hezbollah’s New Crowdfunding Campaign: ‘Equip a Mujahid,’” The Foreign Desk, February 9, 2017, http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/hezbollahs-new-crowdfunding-campaign-equip-mujahid/?

Sometimes, crowdsourcing might be about raising awareness, other times about money (also known as “crowdfunding”). It can kick-start new businesses or throw support to people who might once have languished in the shadows. It was through crowdsourcing, for instance, that septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders became a fundraising juggernaut in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, raking in $218 million online. Of course, like any useful tool, crowdsourcing has also been bent to the demands of war. A generation ago, Al Qaeda was started by the son of a Saudi billionaire. By the time of the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS, the internet was the “preferred arena for fundraising” for terrorism, for the same reasons it has proven so effective for startup companies, nonprofits, and political campaigns.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Both parties were split in their support of the candidates: First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and insurgent political newcomer, reality TV star, and real estate mogul Donald Trump for the Republicans. Clinton had engaged in a bitter primary competition with a self-declared socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who usually functioned as an independent in Congress and was something of a populist himself. Donald Trump had never been part of the Republican Party and had once been registered as a Democrat in New York. He was the last man standing from a huge field of seventeen candidates representing the Republican Party’s mainstream.

As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton was particularly outspoken about Russian foreign and domestic policy and critical of Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year term as prime minister. Russia’s operation sought to weaken her. Russian propaganda efforts promoted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as well as third-party candidates like Jill Stein of the Green Party. Russian operatives from the military intelligence services, the GRU, were later revealed to be behind efforts to penetrate Clinton’s personal emails and the “hack and release” of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails.

“No politician in history”: Lauren Gambino and Tom McCarthy, “Trump: ‘No politician in history has been treated more unfairly,” Guardian, May 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/17/donald-trump-presidency-media-coverage-russia-scandal. This was “socialism”: David A. Graham, “Trump’s New Red Scare,” Atlantic, February 20, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trump-socialism-venezuela-bernie-sanders-ocasio-cortez/583135/. top-down approach: Katie Lobosco, “Employers commit to train 3.8 million workers under Trump executive order,” CNN, July 19, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/19/politics/trump-executive-order-job-training/index.html. ephemeral: Brooks Jackson, “Trump’s Numbers January 2020 Update,” Factcheck, January 20, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/01/trumps-numbers-january-2020-update/.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

This general approach to change jibed with what Clinton had stood for while in power: the championing of globalization, the embrace of markets, compassion, the declared end of labor/capital conflict, the promise of the rich and poor rising together—the insistence that loosened regulations good for Wall Street would also be good for Main Street; the marketing of trade deals craved by large corporations as being ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism. Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort.

He said this as though it were impossible to imagine how the opportunity to earn tens of millions of dollars after a presidency might affect a president’s fight-picking decisions while in office. In our present age of anger, so many people seemed to intuit that their leaders becoming fellow travelers of billionaires and millionaires did have some effect on what they believed. That intuition had hamstrung his own wife’s campaign. It had helped Bernie Sanders’s unlikely primary challenge, and then Donald Trump’s unlikely election victory—made all the stranger by the fact that Trump incarnated the very problem he named. Was it inevitable that the leaders of a democracy should affiliate mostly with plutocrats after their time in public office? Was that not related to the problems of mistrust and alienation and social distance that lurked behind the anger now confronting elites?


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

On the far right, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has called for tech giants to be regulated like public utilities since they have become so essential to 21st-century life; while Democratic Party leaders pushed for a wider antitrust crackdown in 2018 as part of their ‘Better Deal’ economic platform. ‘We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce and I think it is important to look at the power and influence Amazon has’, said Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders in 2018.3 Khan argues that predatory pricing and vertical integration are highly relevant to analysing Amazon’s path to dominance – and that current doctrine underappreciates the risk of such practices. The playing field has been tilted since day one, from the moment that Bezos convinced his early investors that a growth-over-profits strategy would yield results in the long run.

Available from: http://www.startribune.com/best-buy-and-amazon-partner-up-in-exclusive-deal-to-sell-new-tvs/480059943/ [Last accessed 2/11/2018]. 2 Khan, Lina (2017) Amazon’s antitrust paradox, Yale Law Journal, 3 January. Available from: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5785&context=ylj [Last accessed 7/7/2018]. 3 CNN (2018) Sen. Bernie Sanders: Amazon has gotten too big, YouTube, 1 April. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxDWoR_zaQ&feature=share [Last accessed 8/7/2018]. INDEX Note: Chapter notes are indexed as such page numbers in italic indicate figures or tables Ackerman, D (CNET senior editor) 218 Ahrendts, A (SVP of Apple Retail) 187, 199–200 AI and voice: the new retail frontier (and) 147–64 AI’s ability to improve ROI instore/online 161 supply chain complexity (and) 150–53 Amazon Go 152–53 ‘Just Walk Out’ technology system 152 the untapped potential of voice (and) 153–63 see also Alexa competitive landscape 160–63 first-mover advantage 154–55 retail technology smarts 158–60 voice as the next frontier 155–58 the value of recommendation 148–50 AI (artificial intelligence) 23, 133, 136, 139, 148–50, 161, 175, 237 AI-powered concierge GWYN (Gifts When You Need) 179 Aldi 33, 51, 122, 203 Alexa (and) 14, 20, 23, 32, 71, 77, 96, 97, 102, 136, 143, 147, 153–58, 160–61, 213, 217 see also research ‘Ask Peapod’ skill for 157 -based store customer service system (HIT Sütterlin) 180 in BMW and Toyota cars 161 Home Skills API 158 International 10, 19 see also McAllister, I prioritizes search results 125–26 top Alexa-enabled commands 155 voice-enabled Connected Home ecosystem 237 Alibaba (and) 39, 46, 63, 75, 76, 111, 135, 136, 230, 234–35 see also Alipay Ant Financial Services 183 Buy+VR mall 71 in China 150 China Smart Logistic Network (Cainiao) 234 food delivery app Ele.me 238 food delivery drones for China 238 Hema Supermarkets 183, 191 its market share in China 234 leases containers on ships 234 Logistics 234 ‘Singles Day’ shopping festival (2016) 150 AliPay 183, 214 AlixPartners 53 and underreported costs of trading online 72–73 Amazon (and) 63, 179–80 see also Alexa; Amazon Books; Amazon flops: Amazon’s grocery ambitions; Prime 2.0; Prime ecosystem; a private label juggernaut and WACD 3D printer patents 231–32 acquires Kiva Systems 229–30 acquires Quidsi 97 acquires Ring 237 acquires Whole Foods Market 3, 37, 82, 103, 235–36 advertising 124 ‘Amazon Prime Delivers More’ 216 AI development 237 AI framework DSSTNE 149 Air 231 Amazon.com 224 Amazon Remembers 173 ASOS: creating versions of trying before you buy 198 AWS 11, 14 Basics range 123 Body Labs 128 Business (Amazon Supply 2012–15) 232 Cash 39 Cash (US)/Amazon Top Up (UK) 39 checkout and payment strategy 215 China: ocean freight services 231 Cloud Cam security camera 237 cloud computing/storage services (AWS) 19 customer touchpoints – Alexa and Dash 96, 97 Dash 153 Dash Buttons 143–44, 147, 213 Dash replenishment scheme 96 Destinations 10 Echo 11, 14, 37, 71, 112, 121, 153–54, 237 Echo Look 128 Effect 5, 39, 46–47, 65, 212 see also retail apocalypse Elements brand 128 Family (Mom) 97 Fire 121 Fire Phone 140–41, 154, 173 Firefly app 140–41, 173 Flex 74, 223–24 Flex Android-based app 224 Flow (camera search feature) 173 Fresh 94–95, 124, 219, 223, 226, 227 and Solimo 124 Fresh Pickup 237 fulfilment strategy 235 Go 68, 152–53, 166, 182, 214 at inflection point 3 Instant Pickup 237 ‘Just Walk Out’ technology 152, 182 Key In-Car 237–38 Key in-house and in-car deliveries 237 Kindle 14, 20, 37, 140, 237 Fire HD device 173 Kohl’s, partners with 81, 233 Leadership Principles 9, 135, 137 leasing patterns 228 Local 10 Lockers 70, 77, 80, 208–09, 216, 237–38 see also lockers/collection lockers in UK and Europe 209 Logistics 224 logistics warehouse investment facilities 228–29 Maritime, Inc. and US Federal Maritime Commission operating licence 231 market share 234 Marketplace 142 the middleman 232 as number one destination for online product search 66 Pantry 219, 223 Pay 232 Pay with Amazon service 142–43, 147 Payments (online payments gateway) 213 Prime see subject entry refunds 234 Restaurants 219 returns process 233 Robotics 230 ‘SLAM’ line (scan, label, apply, manifest’ 223 Stellar Flex 232 Studios 20 Subscribe & Save 96 Super Saver 210 sues Barnes & Noble over ‘1-click’ patent 141–42 testing delivery drones in UK (Prime Air) 151 third Leadership Principle – ‘invent and simplify’ 136 top-performing clothing brands 127 see also reports Treasure Truck 236–37 truck drivers, first app for 231 as ultimate disruptor 21 Vine 125 Wand 213 working conditions 229 Amazon Books (and) 80–81, 80, 169–70 criticisms of store 169 its objective 170 pricing 81, 169, 213 utilitarian look and feel of 169 ‘The Amazon Effect’ 5 Amazon flops Amazon Destinations 10 Amazon Local 10 Amazon Wallet 10 Fire phone 10 Amazon Web Services (AWS) 135 an Amazon world – notes 1–4 Amazon’s grocery ambitions (and) 86–106 see also Amazon factors correlating to online grocery adoption and profitability 88 food: the final frontier and importance of frequency 90–92 2022: the online grocery tipping point?


Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

“It’ll sure be ironic if the reason our correspondence lands on the government’s radar,” one group member emailed Andreessen, was because “their algorithms were triggered by our sarcastic use of the word ‘junta.’ ” * * * — IN EARLY SUMMER OF 2016, the Russia narrative started bubbling up. In mid-June, Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A week later, just three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen emails, opening rifts between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned almost immediately. And, of course, Nix eventually began asking around about Clinton’s emails at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, eventually offering Cambridge Analytica’s services to WikiLeaks to help disseminate the hacked material.

We settled on an alternative plan—a trip to Berkeley for a conference focused on data and democracy, where we could aim for a discreet chat with a couple of White House officials who we knew would be there. The other person I had talked to extensively about all this was Ken Strasma, Obama’s former targeting director. I had met with Strasma in New York and told him about Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting. Since his firm had just provided microtargeting services for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, naturally he was interested. After Clinton clinched the nomination, in late July, Strasma called me and said, “Now that we’ve lost, I’m going to see if I can talk with Hillary’s data team.” He asked whether I’d be interested in meeting with them to outline my suspicions about what was happening with the Trump campaign.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

The United States has been much more hostile to private labor unions than other countries have been, with fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers now in a union—one reason almost half of American jobs pay less than $15 an hour. Consider this sentiment: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Was that said by Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders or another socialist? Actually, it was said by Abraham Lincoln, in his first State of the Union address. Yet in recent decades, the political system has become more pro-business and suspicious of labor. “This country is the cesspool of labor relations,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told us.

Conservative writers like Charles Murray and David Brooks have explored these chasms, with Brooks arguing that “the central problem of our time is the stagnation of middle-class wages, the disintegration of working-class communities and the ensuing fragmentation of American society.” On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats have made similar arguments. Remarkably, this pain in white working-class America helped account for the rise of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. What went wrong? For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States had pioneered efforts to create opportunity. The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, were a self-help program that gave American families 160 acres of land each if they farmed it productively or improved it over five years.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

They decided that the best move was to toss the pieces in the air and see where they might land. The move might not win the game, but it might start a new one with different rules. Americans and the British wanted change, even if it meant a leap into the unknown. If Trump had not won, it might well have been Bernie Sanders, an antiestablishment candidate who beat Hillary Clinton in dozens of states. He was a socialist most of his career. In America, according to Gallup polls, being a socialist is right beneath atheism and Islam as a disqualifying trait in a political candidate. In Britain, the Labour Party had voted for a far-left-wing leader.

He had once demanded the “complete rehabilitation” of Leon Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary. Once Corbyn became Labor leader, he declared, “The people who run Britain have rigged the economy and business rules to line the pockets of their friends. The truth is the system simply doesn't work for most people.” Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump couldn't agree on anything, but they both told their followers that the US economy was rigged, and voters loved them for it. On the campaign trail Trump said, “It's not just the political system that's rigged, it's the whole economy,” President Trump told voters while campaigning.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

His moral voice muted, Obama placated rather than articulated the seething public anger toward Wall Street. Lingering anger over the bailout cast a shadow over the Obama presidency and ultimately fueled a mood of populist protest that reached across the political spectrum—on the left, the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders; on the right, the Tea Party movement and the election of Trump. The populist uprising in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe is a backlash directed generally against elites, but its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and center-left political parties—the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany (whose share of the vote reached a historic low in the 2017 federal election), Italy’s Democratic Party (whose vote share dropped to less than 20 percent), and the Socialist Party in France (whose presidential nominee won only 6 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2017 election).

It is a potent ingredient in the volatile brew of anger and resentment that fuels populist protest. Though himself a billionaire, Donald Trump understood and exploited this resentment. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who spoke constantly of “opportunity,” Trump scarcely mentioned the word. Instead, he offered blunt talk of winners and losers. (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders, a social democratic populist, also rarely speaks of opportunity and mobility, focusing instead on inequalities of power and wealth.) Elites have so valorized a college degree—both as an avenue for advancement and as the basis for social esteem—that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate, and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college.


pages: 116 words: 34,937

The Life of a Song: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Songs by David Cheal, Jan Dalley

1960s counterculture, Bernie Sanders, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Kickstarter, Live Aid, millennium bug, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, side project

On the album, ‘Dark Was the Night’ is sung by Rickie Lee Jones. She reinstates the words to the hymn, written in 1792 by English clergyman Thomas Haweis; it’s haunting. David Cheal 40 THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND When he joined members of Vampire Weekend on stage in Iowa in January 2016 to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Bernie Sanders (mercifully off-mic) was following in a long political tradition. The Vermont senator might be surprised to learn, however, that Woody Guthrie’s song – widely regarded as an alternative national anthem for the US – has been co-opted by Republicans as well as Democrats since the bard of the Great Depression first put pen to paper in February 1940.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The documents, now with WikiLeaks’ stamp of credibility, began to be picked up by news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept. The revelations were very real: It turned out the DNC had secretly favored the candidate Hillary Clinton over her opponent Bernie Sanders as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, despite the committee’s purported role as a neutral arbiter for the party. DNC officials had furtively discussed how to discredit Sanders, including staging public confrontations about his religious beliefs and an incident in which his campaign’s staff allegedly accessed the Clinton campaign’s voter data.

In other words, as the controversy around Russia’s role in his election victory began to grow, it seemed that Trump had no interest in discussing any sentence that contained the words “Russian” and “hacker,” no matter the context. (The White House never answered my multiple requests for comment on Lee’s description of those events.) If Trump sensed the news could be used against him politically, he was right. In late June 2017, eighteen Democratic senators and Independent Bernie Sanders signed a letter to the president, citing Dragos’s work and demanding Trump direct the Department of Energy to conduct a new analysis of the Russian government’s capabilities to disrupt America’s power grid. They also asked for an exploration of any attempts the Kremlin had already made to compromise America’s electric utilities, pipelines, or other energy infrastructure.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Top Statutory Personal Income Tax Rates,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, accessed July 21, 2020, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I7. Nordic governments also generate: Elke Asen, “Insights into the Tax Systems of Scandinavian Countries,” Tax Foundation, February 24, 2020, https://taxfoundation.org/bernie-sanders-scandinavian-countries-taxes/. The corporate tax rate in each of the Nordic states: “Corporate Tax Rates Table,” https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/tax-rates-online/corporate-tax-rates-table.html; Asen, “Corporate Tax Rates around the World, 2019,” https://taxfoundation.org/publications/corporate-tax-rates-around-the-world/.

Morgan, June 24, 2019, https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/lost-in-space-the-search-for-democratic-socialism-in-the-real-world-and-how-i-ended-up-halfway-around-the-globe-from-where-i-began.pdf. Companies are permitted to hire and fire: Fareed Zakaria, “Bernie Sanders’s Scandinavian Fantasy,” Washington Post, February 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html; Matt Bruenig, “Fareed Zakaria Is Completely Ignorant about the Nordics,” People’s Policy Project, March 2, 2020, httxtps://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/02/fareed-zakaria-is-completely-ignorant-about-the-nordics/.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

The Fed’s actions “are a major reason why the US economy is now outperforming those of other advanced nations,” he said. He pointed to the fact that other central bankers were now following “some of the same bold steps undertaken much earlier by the Fed.” The more conservative and populist Republicans in Congress, together with left-wing detractors such as Bernie Sanders, didn’t share Powell’s positive appraisal. They pushed proposals to give a government-oversight authority the power to review the Fed’s monetary-policy decisions—something the Fed feared would simply give its critics another way to drum up opposition to its policies. As the lone Republican on the board, Powell became a forceful defender of the Fed’s approach—a reprise of his role in the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011.

But no one knew that at the time, and the story drew thousands of responses on social media. “This is bullshit,” wrote Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democratic congresswoman.1 The CARES Act was proving especially unpopular with progressive Democrats, who were upset that the Senate had unanimously approved the measure. “The almost pervasive refusal to hold either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren accountable for supporting the worst bill in 25 years is a great example of what is broken on the American left,” wrote one prominent progressive commentator on Twitter.2 After the CARES Act passed, Warren asked Mnuchin and Powell to tie strings to the programs. Her requests went far beyond what Congress had required and included maintaining 95 percent of a firm’s pre-pandemic workforce, providing a $15 minimum wage, and giving a seat on the board of directors to workers.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Four years later Obama was out of the picture and the Republican field was wide open. As a result, the presidential race of 2016 turned out to be more about the financial crisis of 2008 than 2012 had been. The upshot was explosive and unpredictable. I The most obvious mark of the financial crisis of 2008 on the election of 2016 was the fact that Bernie Sanders was a serious contender for the Democratic Party nomination. Sanders wasn’t even a member of the party. He was a self-declared democratic socialist. He was a confirmed foe of Wall Street. In 2008 he had voted against TARP. He called for the big banks to be broken up. He wanted bankers jailed and a return to New Deal–era banking regulations.

For conventional commentators it was jaw-dropping. Did the president-elect not understand that the success of American business depended precisely on their ability to deploy labor and capital globally? As several commentators remarked, his threatening tone was “more like the populism of Hugo Chavez than even something Bernie Sanders would say. It’s the kind of threat that would find its ultimate expression in currency controls—that favored instrument of economic dictators around the world.”49 Had a left-winger engaged in such provocation, barring intervention by the Treasury and the Fed, the markets would surely have plummeted.

No one in the West was sure that they knew how to read Beijing.16 In December 2015, on the basis of America’s own improving jobs market, the FOMC went ahead and raised rates. It was the first rate increase since 2006.17 Yellen’s announcement made clear that the Fed intended to set a signal that the recovery had consolidated. But on both wings of American politics it was hotly contested. Bernie Sanders supporters rallied outside the New York Fed building demanding to know “What Recovery?” Millions of Americans were still a long way from where they were in 2008. On the other hand, conservative opinion, eventually joined by Donald Trump, was irate that Yellen had not moved sooner. The message from the markets was similarly mixed.


pages: 113 words: 37,885

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

But if they are pressed, their instinct would likely be to agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, who once said that “finance” is “a slave’s word,” while the profession itself is nothing more than “a means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block.” The modern-day equivalent of this sentiment can be found in the musings of Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate, whose stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign condemned Wall Street relentlessly. “Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016.


pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

While the alt-right regard these and the Guardian, BBC and CNN as the media of ‘the left’, espousing ‘Cultural Marxism’, it became obvious when the possibility of any kind of economically ‘left’ political force emerged that liberal media sources were often the most vicious and oppositional. Liberal feminist journalist Joan Walsh called Bernie Sanders’s supporters ‘Berniebot keyboard warriors’, while Salon was one of the main propagators of the Berniebro meme with headlines like, ‘Bernie Bros out of control: Explosion of misogynist rage…’ and, ‘Just like a Bernie Bro, Sanders bullies Clinton…’ Meanwhile Vice, a magazine that made its brand on the most degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression, published things like ‘How to spot a brocialist’.


pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman

American ideology, Bernie Sanders, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, gig economy, high net worth, income inequality, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, mental accounting, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, plutocrats, precariat, school choice, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

In 2014 French economist Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book on inequality became a bestseller in the United States. Strikes by fast-food workers and prominent debates about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour also put the spotlight on low-wage workers in this period. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, despite their differences, kept outrage about economic disparities in the public eye. The language of class, especially the “working class,” appeared in political discourse often in the period both before and after Trump’s election. Public opinion critical of inequality has increased since 2000 as perceptions of the possibility of upward mobility have grown gloomier.27 INVESTIGATING AFFLUENCE Given these contradictory ideas about wealthy people, how do the beneficiaries of growing inequality feel about and manage their privilege?

Rowling is a billionaire—regardless of how she came by her fortune, how she spends it, or whether she gives it away—just on the basis of the idea that such wealth is inseparable from extreme inequality, which is both pernicious to society and itself immoral? To some extent recent public discourses critical of inequality emerging from the Occupy movement, the Fight for Fifteen struggle for a $15 minimum wage, and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign have raised exactly these questions. As we have seen, the people I talked with sometimes responded quite negatively to these critiques, interpreting them as personal judgments, as when high earners reacted defensively after President Obama advocated repealing high-wage tax cuts.


pages: 423 words: 118,002

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

But for those outside, information can be tough to come by. This veil of secrecy has fallen only one time, and the snapshot of the investors and traders setting energy prices in the summer of 2008 showed that McClendon and several close associates were among the largest participants. US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, pulled the curtain back when he released a confidential list of futures market speculators compiled by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a disclosure that sent futures traders into conniptions. The list of who held the natural gas contracts was a who’s who of global capitalism and energy.

For more information about Arnold, see “The Reckoning of Centaurus Billionaire John Arnold,” by Leah McGrath Goodman in the February 1, 2011, edition of Absolute Return. Some of McClendon’s quotes about Chesapeake having four main inputs and the number of leasing transactions come from an interview he gave on January 5, 2012, to my Wall Street Journal colleagues Daniel Gilbert and Ryan Dezember. Senator Bernie Sanders, in August 2011, released a snapshot of participants in natural gas and oil futures markets. The information was made available on his Senate website, www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=e802998a-8ee2-4808-9649-0d9730b75ea4. (Last accessed August 2013.) I downloaded the data, put it into spreadsheets, and analyzed it to come up with the rankings of largest natural gas market participants.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

It was clear that morning that the hack was not simply about campaign intelligence gathering. It was intended to be the cyberattack equivalent of broadcasting the conversation about Ukraine between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. There was only one explanation for the purpose of releasing the DNC documents: to accelerate the discord between the Clinton camp and the Bernie Sanders camp, and to embarrass the Democratic leadership. That was when the phrase “weaponizing” information began to take off. It was hardly a new idea. The web just allowed it to spread faster than past generations had ever known. Anyone who had followed the Russian hacking groups knew that there was little chance that Guccifer 2.0 was simply a savvy, lone hacker.

And not coincidentally, the deluge started just days after our interview with Trump, and right before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The most politically potent of the emails made clear that the DNC leadership was doing whatever it could to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination and Bernie Sanders did not. To anyone watching the nomination process, that was hardly surprising; while the DNC was supposed to be neutral, it was understood in the Democratic leadership that this was Clinton’s turn. She had the name recognition and the money and the experience, and many in the party felt she had been denied her chance when Obama came along in 2008.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

., mid-tier grocers like A&P have been driven to bankruptcy, squeezed by Walmart, Costco, Aldi, Amazon, and others entering the grocery business on the lower end, and Whole Foods, Wegmans, and others on the higher end. Politicians often face a two-front war in which they are fighting on both sides of the political spectrum, with attacks from both the political right and left. A recent example is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 U.S. presidential candidacy, where she faced a tough primary fight on the left from Bernie Sanders, and then in the general election she was still fighting for those voters while at the same time courting more-centrist voters. You should be wary of fighting a two-front war, yet you probably do so every single day in the form of multitasking. When discussing intuition in Chapter 1, we explained that there are two types of thinking: low-concentration, autopilot thinking (for saying your name, walking, simple addition, etc.) and high-concentration, deliberate thinking (for everything else).

As we explored in Chapter 8, a person in just the right role can produce amazing results, and an organizational strategy attuned perfectly to its culture can be a quick and resounding success. Similarly, a message can strike just the right tone for a specific audience such that it will deeply resonate. You see this phenomenon repeatedly in politics when certain candidates hit a nerve with a segment of the population, as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump did in the U.S. 2016 presidential election cycle. A model that captures these phenomena is resonant frequency. This model comes from physics and explains why glass can break if you play just the right note: Each object has a different frequency at which it naturally oscillates.


pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

But had the predominantly liberal Fed leadership not facilitated the bad behavior of the elite by encouraging them to borrow at virtually no cost, their wealth and power would never have become as concentrated as it is today. The ostentatiousness with which the so-called one percent has flaunted its wealth has fueled the rise of anger and extremism, leading to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. And politicians wonder about the genesis of a deeply divided and dispirited populace. Central bankers have invited politicians to abdicate their leadership authority to an inbred society of PhD academics who are infected to their core with groupthink, or as I prefer to think of it: “groupstink.”

And finally, the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF). These Fed-created facilities put a floor under the shadow banking system and finally checked the run. (These didn’t include the various programs created by the FDIC, the Treasury, or Congress.) The loans the Fed made were secret. Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who in 2015 launched a run for president as a Democrat, later sponsored legislation that compelled the Fed to disclose financial details of its extraordinary efforts to save Wall Street. Released in late November 2011, the data, which covered twenty-one thousand Fed emergency loans totaling $3.3 trillion, revealed for the first time how close some of the biggest names on Wall Street came to the brink of disaster.


pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

For our purposes, what jumps out is Wauquiez’s politicization of the term ‘taboo’, a frequent refrain of conservative politicians going back to Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and William Hague in Britain in the early 2000s. This is true even on the left, where some, like David Blunkett in Britain and Bernie Sanders in America, have criticized political correctness. Taboos are underpinned by both negative and positive liberalism. While negative liberalism delimits a narrower scope for the anti-racism taboo focusing on verbal attacks on minorities, positive liberalism seeks to expand the definition of racism to protect symbolic policies such as multiculturalism and large-scale immigration.

‘I will assess the facts plainly and honestly,’ promised Trump in his acceptance speech: ‘We cannot afford to be so politically correct any more.’ Whenever opponents questioned his outrageous remarks on gender or race, Trump was able to deflect these as examples of political correctness. The Democratic contender Bernie Sanders agreed that Trump won in part because of this. ‘[Trump] said he will not be politically correct,’ said Sanders. ‘I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric. I think some people believe he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.’43 Sanders was subsequently criticized for these remarks by many in the media and his own party and forced to recant.

Thiel, The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, Oakland, Calif., 1995: The Independent Institute; N. Glazer, We are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, Mass., 1997: Harvard University Press. 43. Aaron Colton, ‘The problem with political correctness is not the content – it’s the delivery’, Paste Magazine, 30 November 2016; Brandon Morse, ‘Bernie Sanders explains why anti-political correctness helped win Trump the election’, The Blaze, 13 December 2017. 44. Ryan Maloney, ‘Most Canadians say political correctness has gone “too far”: Angus Reid Institute Poll’, HuffPost (Canada), 29 August 2016. 45. Tom Clark, ‘Free speech? New polling suggests Britain is “less PC” than Trump’s America’, Prospect, no. 264 (February 2018). 46.


Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now by Guy Standing

basic income, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, decarbonisation, degrowth, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Extinction Rebellion, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, labour market flexibility, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, open economy, pension reform, precariat, quantitative easing, rent control, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Appendix B: Why a job guarantee would be no alternative The claim made in this book is that a basic income would promote social justice, freedom and basic security while combating the eight giants, in ways that other possible policies would not. Among the policies advocated as alternatives is a job guarantee for everyone, or for everyone ‘able to work’.1 In the United States, several prominent Democrat senators and possible candidates for the 2020 presidential election have said they support the idea, including Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. In Britain The Guardian has endorsed it unequivocally as ‘a welcome return to a politics of work’.2 The Guardian claimed that a job guarantee policy ‘would secure a basic human right to engage in productive employment’. Throughout history, the vast majority of people would have found that a very strange ‘human right’.3 Having a job is to be in a position of subordination, reporting to and obeying a boss in return for payment.


pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

It may also allow some populists in democracies to grab some unjustified powers. But it will not convince the people of the West to give up on elections. The bigger question is what will those people now vote for—and we fear the answer is larger, more nationalist governments. THE EVEN GREATER SOCIETY The Coronavirus arrived just as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the two most left-wing people in the Anglosphere’s recent history, were bowing off the political stage. Having seen their ideas comprehensively rejected by voters in Britain’s general election and the Democratic primaries, and knowing their parties had chosen pragmatic leaders, you might have imagined the old firebrands would be a bit downcast, even humbled.


pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

In the United States, the first inkling of discontent came in 2014 with the shocking unseating of the House majority leader Eric Cantor by the Tea Party in the Republican primary ahead of the congressional elections by a relatively unknown economics professor named Dave Brat. Then the drift of blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party to the right and the appeal of nonestablishment candidates like Bernie Sanders to younger voters became new political trends. We can now say, without controversy, that Americans have lost faith in politics and politicians. For example, Gallup polls show that Americans rate members of Congress at the very bottom of professions (only 7 percent believed members of Congress had high ethical standards), just above car salespeople and well down in the ranking from nursing, the top profession.44 It is also worth mentioning that in the United States, according to Gallup, nearly 45 percent of voters now identify themselves as independents, and two groups of close to 25 percent each identify with the Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

La République En Marche, formed in 2016 as the political vehicle for now-president Emmanuel Macron, is a centrist, liberal party that now dominates the French Assemblée nationale. And the far-right euroskeptic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), founded in 2013, after surviving a number of leadership changes, now has 12 percent of the seats in the German Bundestag. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and the appeal of Donald Trump are also manifest proof of the demand for new political forces. A countervailing, generally more positive and more recent trend is the emergence of new political candidates. One powerful case is the rise in the number of women entering politics in the United States (in 2018, 23 percent of the candidates contesting congressional primary elections were women, mostly Democratic and many of them political novices).


Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, classic study, declining real wages, deindustrialization, full employment, invisible hand, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, land reform, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, union organizing, Washington Consensus

For Beverly, the outcome is largely irrelevant, since discovery demands alone severely damage Professor Bronfenbrenner and her university, and may have a chilling effect on other researchers and educational institutions. 14. White House letter, January 20, 1998. I am indebted to congressional staffers, particularly the office of Representative Bernie Sanders. 15. Jane Bussey, “New Rules Could Guide International Investment,” Miami Herald, July 20, 1997; R.C. Longworth, “New Rules for Global Economy,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1997. See also Jim Simon, Seattle Times, “Environmentalists Suspicious of Foreign-Investor-Rights Plan,” Seattle Times, November 22, 1997; Lorraine Woellert, “Trade Storm Brews over Corporate Rights,” Washington Times, December 15, 1997.


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order (Roseville: Forum, 2001), 581. 5.Ibid., 575. 6.Eric Hoffer, “Notable & Quotable: The Young,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017. 7.Mike Isaac, “Upstarts Raiding Giants for Staff in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, August 19, 2015. 8.John Tamny, “Fear Not, Millennials Are Not Embracing Bernie Sanders Style Socialism,” Forbes, August 3, 2016. 9.Adam Shell, “In Quest for Millennials, Financial Firms Try to ‘Crack the Code,’” USA Today, May 10, 2017. Chapter Seven: My Story 1.Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then (New York: Crown Books, 1999), 200. 2.Mark Bechtel, “Farewell,” Sports Illustrated, December 28, 2015. 3.Steve Forbes, “Powerful Antiterror Weapon,” Forbes, October 6, 2006. 4.George F.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Taylor had seen a similar dynamic in his work for the Obama campaign that year, which had him up in the Canton area, in charge of organizing supporters in Alliance and Minerva. But in 2016, something else was happening. Taylor saw a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for Obama’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton. In the primaries, he noticed Democrats drifting to Bernie Sanders. And as time went on, he saw more and more people who had voted for Obama drifting in a more unfathomable direction, to Donald Trump. Taylor Sappington was appalled by this drift, but also understood why it was happening. He saw the ugly veins that Trump was tapping into. But he also saw what else Trump was tapping into—the sense that this part of the country had been left far behind the rising islands of prosperity.

And it was a pay level that the company was already approaching in many parts of the country as it struggled to find workers in a tight labor market. “Aren’t you excited? Come on, clap!” an HR manager said after announcing the raise at one of Amazon’s many warehouses in the San Bernardino Valley. In response, workers started a slow clap. But the announcement undermined efforts by Bernie Sanders, among others, to force the company to raise wages through legislation, and it signaled to consumers that they could continue to buy goods cheaply online with a clean conscience. So did the announcement nine months later that the company, which already offered tuition assistance for employees seeking vocational or associate’s degrees on the side, would now also retrain 100,000 employees by 2025 to help them advance to higher-level work at the company.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

Between 2003 and 2008, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, reportedly much of the $40 billion in cash sent to Iraq for the reconstruction and restructuring of government services was stolen, misappropriated, or mysteriously lost.71 It is because of these travesties that the 2011 deficit-reduction debate and the fallout over increasing the nation’s debt ceiling—which left Congress in a state of paralysis for months—were such shams. House Speaker John Boehner’s $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan included no cuts in Afghanistan and Iraq war spending but drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that help the economically vulnerable and desperately poor. As progressive Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued in a blistering July 2011 Wall Street Journal editorial, the plan offered by Democrats rendered almost as much harm to the poor as Boehner’s proposal: “The plan by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which calls for $2.4 trillion in cuts over a 10-year period, includes $900 billion in cuts in areas such as education, health care, nutrition, affordable housing, child care, and many other programs desperately needed by working families and the most vulnerable.”


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Political leaders evolve, albeit slowly and imperfectly, to fit the medium through which they reach the people. The latest iteration, and the first bona fide politician of the social media age, is Twitter addict and world-class simplifier Donald Trump. He is the leading act in a new cast of populists who have found the internet a revelation for their style of politics, including Nigel Farage, Bernie Sanders, Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, Italian comedian and Five Star Movement founder Beppe Grillo and others. Some of them are left wing, some are right wing, but all are ‘system one’ leaders who became popular by promising easy solutions to complicated questions. Trump is the strong man, the tribal leader who trades on outrage.


pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

He’s a socialist leader who wants to fundamentally change society so that wealth and power rest with the majority and not with the elite. Anyone who thinks that is always going to get shitcanned. I don’t think you can have a conventional leadership strategy for an unconventional leader.’ Trickett’s colleagues would have preferred him to brief the Guardian that Corbyn was seeking to emulate Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist who ran Hillary Clinton close for the Democrat nomination, rather than Trump. They were also annoyed that Trickett had placed the notion of a relaunch in the public domain when the process had been intended to be gradual. ‘There wasn’t ever the idea for a full-blown relaunch, let alone a Donald Trump relaunch,’ one colleague said.

With hundreds outside unable to get into the packed church, he declared, ‘Hope that it does not have to be like this, that inequities can be tackled, that austerity can be ended … This is the new mainstream, and we have staked it out and made it our own, together.’ One of his aides said, ‘We have hugely shifted the centre of gravity of politics in this country.’ The enthusiasm Corbyn generated was given more practical effect because Momentum arranged for organisers from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for the US Democratic nomination to hold training sessions for volunteers, drafting in Bostonian Erika Uyterhoeven, Sanders’ national director for outer-state organising, among others. ‘The right can throw money at elections – we throw people,’ Uyterhoeven said.8 Adam Klug said, ‘They delivered short talks and training on canvassing techniques.

v=slBGDqCjE5M, Copa90, 31 May 2017 2. Election 2017: What Just Happened?, BBC2, 12 June 2017 3. The Inside Story of Election ’17, Radio 4, 26 July 2017 4. Ibid. 5. Inside Corbyn’s campaign team, Influence, 13 July 2017 6. Ibid. 7. Election 2017: What Just Happened?, BBC2, 12 June 2017 8. The US Bernie Sanders campaigners lending Jeremy Corbyn a hand, Guardian, 30 May 2017 9. Ibid. 10. Inside Corbyn’s campaign team, Influence, 13 July 2017 11. Hamish McFall: Tellers’ work wasted. Invaded privacy. Computers that spewed gibberish. How CCHQ bungled this election campaign, ConservativeHome, 16 June 2017 12.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

They and Bill Clinton’s labor secretary Robert Reich and most university faculty members insist that today’s technological innovation is little more than the fruit of some obscure 1950s research program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Bernie Sanders wants to quadruple tax rates on investment, taking 90 percent of the yields of innovation. Hillary Clinton wants to double the capital gains tax. Most Democrats see robotics and other advancing computer technologies as job killers rather than job creators, as if more workers would be employed if they were less productive.


pages: 172 words: 54,066

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

Many grassroots libertarians are wary of the Fed, often because they view it as an instrument of Wall Street banks. Progressives can find allies among libertarians for at least some actions related to the Fed, most importantly measures that increase accountability. In the last session of Congress, Ron Paul, one of its most conservative members, and Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, two of its most progressive, introduced bills requiring greater disclosure of the Fed’s lending practices. Despite the opposition of the Democratic leadership, the Paul-Grayson bill won the support of the majority of the House, as most Republicans and about one-third of Democrats signed on as co-sponsors.


pages: 157 words: 53,125

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, chief data officer, cloud computing, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, low interest rates, machine readable, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Bannon, tail risk, the new new thing, uranium enrichment

The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race—Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job hadn’t been handed to someone who actually knew something about government.


End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

That’s what the spontaneous tea parties organized around the country are all about. This is not a conservative or liberal issue; it’s not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is pervasive, across the political spectrum. I introduced a Federal Reserve audit bill, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, which Progressive/Socialist (and friend) Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced in the Senate. I’m convinced that if we had an up-or-down vote on this bill in the House, very few would vote against it. That is a reflection of the concerns the American people hold and how the members of Congress are starting to get the message. Although it may appear that Congress ignores the people, when the people speak loudly and clearly enough, the political animals in Washington respond.


American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

It seceded from Britain in 1777 and took its time joining the United States. It played off Canada and the Continental Congress for better terms, and only joined the United States in 1791. Not even Texas was independent for a longer period of time. Vermont isn’t much like the rest of the country. It’s rural but liberal, and it sends Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy to Washington. It’s the least religious state in the country, and also the whitest. The Vermont secession movement gathered steam when George W. Bush was president. In 2004, Kirkpatrick Sale drafted a “Middlebury Declaration” that was positively anti-American. “The national government has shown itself to be clumsy, unresponsive, and unaccountable,” it said.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

Early in the campaign, I spent time with a group of white and Black steelworkers in a town near Canton, Ohio. They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders (one of the workers was reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). No one even mentioned the two establishment favorites, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. A steelworker named Jack Baum told me that he was supporting Trump. He liked Trump’s “patriotic” positions on trade and immigration, but he also found Trump’s insults refreshing, even exhilarating.


pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

You and I think they can be dramatically improved, but the evidence is overwhelming that in competitive, deregulated, developed economies, printing money to stave off deflation and prevent recessions is costless in terms of inflation. MARK: That’s a very strong claim and sounds similar to some of the ideas held by a number of US economists who advised Bernie Sanders and known as modern monetary theory (MMT). They argue for aggressive fiscal spending given structurally low inflation. ERIC: In the absence of inflation, it is true that we have a great deal more fiscal and monetary flexibility. MMT economists don’t have a credible explanation of why inflation is dead.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

After watching jogging videos, she found the recommendation algorithm suggested increasingly intense workouts, such as ultramarathons. Vegetarian videos led to ones on hard-core veganism. And in politics, the extremification was unsettling. When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.” At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system.

Even the ad networks of social media were used by foreign actors looking to monkey-wrench American politics. In the spring of 2018, US special investigator Robert Mueller revealed that “Russian entities with various Russian government contracts” had bought social-network ads for months, attacking Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, her primary rivals. But it wasn’t hard to understand why they’d find this route useful. Google, Facebook, and Twitter’s ad tech is designed specifically to help advertisers microtarget very narrow niches, making it the perfect way to reach the American citizens they wanted to hype up with conspiracies and disinfo: disaffected, angry, and racist white ones, as well as left-wing activists enraged at neoliberalism.


pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“But, you know,” I said, “like you, we need people to break for the safer choice.” * * * — BACK HOME, AN ANTSY Obama had to wait until the end of a bitter Democratic primary before he could get out and start campaigning—like a basketball player waiting by the scorer’s table to check into a game. Bernie Sanders had come to meet him after Clinton clinched the race, and I got some inkling of the challenge she had faced: The steps of the EEOB were filled with young Obama White House staffers, craning their necks, trying to get a glimpse of their populist hero. Our first rally with Clinton was in Charlotte, and the crowd was familiar: Obama people, thousands of them, a sea of white, black, and brown faces, waiting to erupt into applause when he walked on stage.

But just before the Democratic convention, Wikileaks dumped thousands of DNC emails into the public domain in an effort to sow discord within the Democratic Party. This was new, something of far greater scale and consequence than releasing intercepted phone calls in Ukraine. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had resigned as chair in the face of outrage from Bernie Sanders supporters who saw, in the emails, that she’d shown favoritism for the Clinton campaign. The leaks continued throughout the summer, a steady release of the kind of gossipy emails designed to draw attention from the political press, popping up on platforms with names such as DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

‘Social media’ is a pallid catch-all phrase which equates in most minds to the ephemeral postings on Twitter and Facebook. But ‘social media’ is also empowering people who were never heard, creating a new form of politics and turning traditional news corporations inside out. It is impossible to think of Donald Trump; of Brexit; of Bernie Sanders; of Podemos; of the growth of the far right in Europe; of the spasms of hope and violent despair in the Middle East and North Africa without thinking also of the total inversion of how news is created, shared and distributed. Much of it is liberating and inspiring. Some of it is ugly and dark.

Paul Lewis, by now based in the US, pronounced himself aghast at the conspiracies and fake news people relayed to him as fact – Sandy Hook was a hoax; Obama’s parents were CIA agents; the Clintons secretly murdered one of Bill’s accusers; Muslims controlled Europe; climate change was a fraud; three million Bernie Sanders votes were suppressed; there were Chinese sleeper cells spread across America. These fictions had gone mainstream. When it came to the really important news, what would the wisdom of the crowd look like? Were the multitude of Facebook users more interested in dispassionate facts or in promoting versions of the world that support their prejudices?


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Due perhaps to Poe’s law of online ambiguity, there was no telling whether this content was mocking or earnest (one Reddit community manager believed it was begun as the former and quickly transformed to a den only welcoming to ardent Trump supporters). Growth was slow initially, which made sense—Bernie Sanders had seemed to be Reddit’s candidate of choice early in the 2016 election cycle. In December 2015, r/The_Donald was still a mostly mild place, though infused with some of the wall-building rhetoric spouted by the candidate himself. Its extensive set of rules, maintained by the moderators, forbade most bigotry and racism, with the exception of Islamophobia, which it expressly permitted.

While most of the accounts’ efforts were ineffective, a few were successful; one posted a sex video that falsely claimed to include Hillary Clinton, and it received more than one hundred thousand upvotes. As the 2016 campaign season wore on, Donald Trump’s big tent on Reddit was his largest online supporter group, and it included a constituency of: racists; the 4chan migrants, largely in it for the keks; alt-righters; Gamergaters contributing sexism and conspiracy theories; some former Bernie Sanders supporters; Russian propagandists; and anyone lured by the promise of a place that tolerated Islamophobia. R/The_Donald was their clubhouse, a thriving “safe space” that blossomed into one of the most absurdist and influential communities in all of Reddit. With all this in mind, perhaps it makes sense that by mid-2016, The_Donald had become a two-hundred-thousand-strong community producing a steady stream of far-right talking points, coded racism, casual misogyny, Islamophobia, and the now-well-established alt-right “free speech” and hatred of the mainstream media.


pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

Colgan and Keohane summed it up well: Working-class Americans didn’t necessarily understand the details of global trade deals, but they saw elite Americans and people in China and other developing countries becoming rapidly wealthier while their own incomes stagnated or declined. It should not be surprising that many of them agreed with Trump and with the Democratic presidential primary contender Bernie Sanders that the game was rigged. (2017, 40) People Compare Themselves to Others Some social scientists, prominently the economist James Duesenberry (1949) nearly seventy years ago, argued that human beings care mainly about relative, rather than absolute, income. In a well-known essay my Dartmouth colleague Erzo F.

In a new Gallup poll taken in February 2018 an astonishing 48 percent of Americans support this idea. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a surprise primary election in New York and called for a universal jobs guarantee, under which the federal government would provide a job for every American. This has support from Bernie Sanders. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has introduced legislation that would see a three-year pilot project set up to guarantee jobs in fifteen regions of high unemployment. Among the bill’s co-sponsors is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who tweeted in support of the policy in April. The premise, as Laura Paddison notes, is that everyone should be entitled to a good job, one that pays at least $15 an hour and comes with health and other benefits.53 These would potentially improve the lot of ordinary working folk, but unless there is a major move to the left these plans have little chance of being implemented.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Indeed, Americans who live in the top-income counties enjoy on average twenty years more of life than those living in the poorest counties, wrote Senator Bernie Sanders, and that is at least partly due to what he termed “grossly unequal access to quality healthcare.” B. Sanders, “Most Americans Want Universal Healthcare. What Are We Waiting For?,” Guardian, August 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/14/healthcare-a-human-right-bernie-sanders-single-payer-system. 22. In fact, the Patient Factor lists at the top of the world’s health care systems (courtesy of the World Health Organization) the following countries: (1) France, (2) Italy, (3) San Marino, (4) Andorra, (5) Malta.


The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence. This too has taken on a life of its own. 3 The public politics of climate change is itself an illustration of the ways in which the moral-political can produce paralysis.


pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration by Aviva Chomsky

affirmative action, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, call centre, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, European colonialism, export processing zone, full employment, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, invisible hand, language acquisition, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, mass incarceration, new economy, open immigration, out of africa, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, thinkpad, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Or was the working class a multiethnic and multiracial entity that had been failed by Democrats’ corporate and neoliberal path in recent decades? Analysts were still trying to sort it all out in mid-2017, but a few facts are clear and complicate the notion that working-class racism and anti-immigrant sentiment were the major force behind Trump’s victory. First, Bernie Sanders’s economic populism had mobilized significant portions of the Democratic base, but the higher-ups in the Democratic Party recoiled from this approach. Second, people of color in general, and immigrants in particular, are over-represented in the working class, so any analysis of the working class must take its diversity into account.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Indeed, ancient planning was at the service of an economic system created for the benefit of a small coterie of elites who were motivated to maintain their wealth and power. Sound familiar? Despite the persistent inequalities that stretch back to the Ancient World, there are nevertheless reasons for hope today, including the millions whose curiosity has been piqued by references to socialism by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primary, and more recently by a series of contenders for political office across the United States. In the UK too, as of this writing, an unabashed socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, heads Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. As the political debate becomes more polarized, young people on the whole, even in the Anglo-American center of the capitalist order, now view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism.


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

On the other hand, tertiary costs stemming from inefficient and ineffective governance structure of too big and unruly banks could be socialized. There are other kinds of financial support that banks are structurally positioned to gain from the state. A report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), released in late 2017 in the US under pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders, details the extent to which America’s largest banks have benefited from the de facto ‘free money’ supplied by the Federal Reserve during the meltdown. Altogether, the Fed lent more than $3tn to financial institutions, on very generous terms, in exchange for taxpayer-backed loans; junk-rated securities were pledged as collateral.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Most tellingly, Stiglitz observed, “In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places,” and asked of the popular uprising, “When will this come to America?” The Occupy Wall Street protesters were eventually cleared out of their encampments, but the questions they asked continue to resonate through our politics. Will the future provide opportunity for all of us? Or will it crush most of us even further underfoot? “The 1%” was a key feature of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump rode the message of blowing up the incumbents all the way to victory over Hillary Clinton’s defense of the status quo. By all appearances, though, President Trump has little in the way of a policy solution to the fundamental problem that Stiglitz outlined, that the 1%, or more properly, the .01%, have translated their financial power into political power, turning what was once a vibrant democracy and a vibrant economy into a staggering colossus, a platform that no longer works for the benefit of its participants.

Top managers in the company go along with this plan because their compensation is also tied to that rise in stock price and because they will lose their jobs if they don’t deliver on it. This is a forced wealth reallocation from one set of stakeholders in the company to another. That’s why there is so much anger at Wall Street from the followers of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, populists of the right and of the left. The system is rigged. Companies are forced to eliminate workers not by the market of real goods and services where supply and demand set the right price, but by the commands of financial markets, where hope and greed too often set the price. Most people unthinkingly use the term the market to refer to these two very different markets.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The democratization of Iraq released ethnic tensions that, however brutally, had been held in check by Saddam Hussein. In Britain, this disaster turned centrist Tony Blair’s reputation toxic and transformed Jeremy Corbyn from a marginal crank into the leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. In America, the Iraq debacle helped to promote both the Democratic left and the nationalist right, energizing Bernie Sanders’s campaign, embarrassing Hillary Clinton’s and empowering the Trumpists. For all their faults, the neoconservatives had been the flagbearers of both intellectualism and global engagement in the Republican Party. Their collapse helped to propel the rise of both anti-intellectualism and nativism.

The post-Brexit Conservative Party continues to be more of a working-class than a middle-class party: a Survation poll in December 2019 showed that 50 per cent of degree-holders supported Labour, compared with 28 per cent who supported the Conservatives while 30 per cent of people with no qualifications supported Labour, compared with 45 per cent who supported the Conservatives. The Trump presidency also radicalized the left to a degree that hasn’t been seen since the late 1960s, with Bernie Sanders making a prolonged bid for the Democratic nomination and young radicals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to set the tone of the Congressional Democratic Party. The killing of an unarmed African-American, George Floyd, by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, on 25 May 2020 provoked angry riots across America, particularly in the big cities, and turned Black Lives Matter into one of the most powerful forces in the country.


Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

In response to a question from ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, HHS Secretary Alex Azar would state, “Well, we’ve already tested over 3,600 people here in the United States. I’m not sure what he meant when he said there’s no lab kit, because we, with historic speed, the CDC developed a lab test.” See ABC, “‘This Week’ Transcript 3-1-20: Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Alex Azar,” March 1, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-20-joe-biden-sen-bernie-sanders/story?id=69320081; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Previous Testing Data Aug 27, 2020”; and Knvul Sheikh, “U.S. Plans ‘Radical Expansion’ of Coronavirus Testing,” New York Times, March 3, 2020. 14.Anne Schuchat, “An Emerging Disease Threat: How the U.S.


pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

A key example of the enduring influence of one firm would be on display in March 2009, when Obama picked former Goldman partner Gary Gensler for the position as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the position once held by Brooksley Born, the stalwart consumer watchdog back in the Clinton years who had stood for regulation of the derivatives that would humble the world’s economy. Gensler was confirmed but only after jumping over a hurdle constructed by Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, an independent in spirit as well as party label. Sanders placed Gensler’s nomination on hold. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but the senator was right. Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was pushing for deregulation in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

In the recent election, though, we witnessed the broad public embrace of a very different explanation of rising inequality—namely, that the powerful have rigged the economic game in their favor. Elites have conspired to hoard opportunity, manipulating the rules and their control of the political system to generate wealth for themselves, even as living standards for everyone else stagnate or decline. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump owed the unexpected strength of their insurgent campaigns to the appeal of this classically populist message. This folk theory of inequality should not be dismissed as the ranting of ignorant rubes. As with much popular wisdom, the specific mechanisms of elite self-enrichment that the public has latched onto—immigration and trade in the case of Trump supporters, campaign finance for supporters of Sanders—are not well chosen.


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”49 Drawing on Marx’s writings about armed revolution, Lenin suggested a revolutionary terror, to be followed by “true democracy”—a dictatorship of the proletariat. Sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders, Lenin wrote in 1917, “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.” Instead, Lenin sought on the one hand “immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags,” and on the other hand, “a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.


pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

This increasingly unmolded political culture then sets raw partisanship loose upon society. In the 2016 presidential election, for instance, both parties saw genuine outsiders—candidates who had not even been members of the party in the very recent past—pursue their presidential nominations. The Democratic Party was barely able to hold back such a challenge from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and the Republican Party handed its nomination to Donald Trump. In both cases, most party elites wanted badly to resist the incursion, but found themselves in a situation in which it seemed almost illegitimate for the party to insist on its prerogatives as an institution—leaving it instead to accept its altered role as an open platform for democratic expression.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The account describes her male colleagues calling her “Airbags” because of her breasts and guzzling £800 bottles of wine over lunch. A decade later, another woman in the firm’s New York office would publicly blast the frat-boy culture she endured—including a boss who told her to “be respectful” when she complained of a colleague who shit in her Bernie Sanders coffee mug. None of this, though, seemed to impair Cantor Fitzgerald’s reputation as an A-list banking and brokerage firm for many of the world’s wealthiest and most sophisticated companies. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has designated it as one of a handful of firms to act as a market maker for federal securities, which means acting as Uncle Sam’s bond broker.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all employ sizable numbers of contractors, with many working as hard as full-time employees but without the same benefits and salaries. These contractor armies are growing fast, and advocates are starting to take note and push for better terms: Google’s employee walkout, for instance, made improving contractor treatment core to its protest. Bernie Sanders took on Amazon’s lack of transparency regarding its contractors as he pushed the company toward a fifteen-dollar-per-hour wage floor. And in February 2019, The Verge’s Casey Newton exposed how Facebook was paying some contract moderators $28,000 per year while paying its full-time employees $240,000 on average (Facebook subsequently raised its moderator wages).


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

With this abundance, they said, the government could do much more. Perhaps most important, they argued, the government could and should offer a job to any American who wanted one. If inflation starts to rise, the government can cool things off by raising taxes to take money out of the system. In 2015, Stephanie Kelton’s work caught the eye of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Sanders didn’t seem that interested in the details of MMT. But he liked the idea of the government being able to spend lots of money on things like a jobs guarantee. Kelton became Sanders’s economic advisor and started telling reporters about MMT. The theory got another boost when Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives two years later, and a newly elected congresswoman drew on MMT to suggest that maybe the government could start doing lots more stuff without worrying about how to pay for it.


pages: 212 words: 68,649

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Bernie Sanders, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, pink-collar, pre–internet, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, white picket fence

A different study found that 78 percent of Trump’s vocabulary was made up of monosyllabic words, and that his most frequently used lexical items included (in the following order) I, Trump, very, China, and money. Those reports aren’t exactly flattering; then again, it’s not as if the folks likening Clinton’s laugh to a witch were conducting empirical studies. Not to mention, there are countless men in power besides Trump—men whose eccentric speech styles are surely worth a look (Bernie Sanders, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, John Oliver)—who have largely escaped the careful attention paid to so many female public figures. (And when attention is paid, it’s often in the form of praise for their “passionate” delivery.) The subject of attention leads to the fundamental reason why Clinton’s and Thatcher’s voices are as repellent to many listeners as Scarlett Johansson’s is sexy.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Even though one of his districts swung Republican in 2016 after losing nineteen thousand manufacturing jobs, he is wary of speaking the language of class struggle. “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich,” Ryan told moderate Democrats in 2018, distancing himself from socialists like Bernie Sanders. “I want to be rich!”21 If he were to run for president, Ryan would prefer to speak to yoga practitioners, who are estimated to number tens of millions. He might find this turns workers off. For now, he’s trying to sell himself to both. “I think once you meet me, you realize I’m not necessarily some soft yoga guy,” he says.


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

While I genuinely thought the company’s ever-improving treatment of its hourly employees hadn’t gotten the attention it deserved, and this book would be a way to rectify that, I wasn’t going to pull any punches. I told the company that I’d be reaching out to its staunchest antagonists, including United for Respect, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, who’d introduced a bill that would prevent large companies from buying back their own stock (often to bid up the price) unless they paid all of their workers at least $15 an hour. The name of the legislation: the Stop WALMART Act. This would be no corporate hagiography. I set some other parameters, as well.


Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

It was a “close reading” of these emails, a creative take on their “hidden messages,” that led to Pizzagate, the conspiracy Joe Biggs is best known for promoting. In the summer, just before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails about Clinton, some of which showed the DNC pushing for Hillary over Bernie. There was for instance an email suggesting the DNC go hard against Bernie Sanders’s faith. (“Does he believe in a God,” asked a party official. “This could make several points difference with…my peeps.”) Fans of the DNC would have liked to believe the party was neutral, but the emails made that difficult. The Democrats’ response was to drive attention away from the embarrassing content of the emails, which hurt the candidate they’d been revealed to prefer, to the motivation for the leak.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Or, alternatively, suppose we consult an eminent proponent of globalization analysis, Saskia Sassen, prognosticating “The End of Financial Capitalism”: “The difference of the current crisis is precisely that financialized capitalism has reached the limits of its own logic.”17 David Harvey more tentatively and cautiously asked whether it was “really” the end of neoliberalism.18 Some members of the faculty at Cambridge and Birkbeck declared, “The collapse of confidence in financial markets and the banking system . . . is currently discrediting the conventional wisdom of neo-liberalism.”19 Various politicians temporarily indulged in the same hyperbole: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia openly proclaimed the death of neoliberalism, only to succumb to his own untimely political demise at the hands of his own party; Senator Bernie Sanders prognosticated that as Wall Street collapsed, so too would the legacy of Milton Friedman. Yet, unbowed, the University of Chicago solicited $200 million in donations to erect a monument in his honor, and founded a new “Milton Friedman Institute.”20 “Wakes for Neoliberalism” were posted all about the Internet in 2008–9; a short stint on Google will provide all the Finnegan that is needed.

Indeed, as time passes, it begins to appear that Bernanke presides over little more than a cabal of bankers using public funds to keep themselves in power and riches. Simon Johnson has highlighted the role of Jamie Dimon as benefiting tremendously from the forced and subsidized purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan while he was on the Board of the New York Fed, which was orchestrating the deal. Senator Bernie Sanders has released a list of eighteen other Fed directors who received substantial funding from the Fed during the crisis.59 It appears that “saving the economy” was tantamount to flooding their own banks (and pockets) with liquidity. As more details are leaked, it appears Bernanke provides a thin veneer of academic imprimatur to what can only be regarded as a vast morass of insider dealing.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In America and Europe, the major political parties have been locked in backward-looking agendas developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Cold War, civil rights movements, and the early information technology revolution. Their current coalitions and internal compromises may not be able to deal with the age of accelerations. The crack-up has already begun within the Republican Party, which, among other things, denies even the reality of climate change. But Bernie Sanders’s success in attracting many young Democrats suggests that the Democratic Party will not be immune to fracture, either. The same process is under way in Europe. The United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw from the European Union has opened deep cracks in both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and the rising challenge of immigration from the World of Disorder is stressing other long-established parties everywhere on the continent.

So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating demanded by the age of accelerations.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Such “emergent democracy” can be seen in certain aspects of the Arab Spring that roiled Middle Eastern authoritarian governments in 2011, though it sadly failed to move beyond the coup to the creation of a government. The hacktivist group Anonymous—highly potent, yet completely leaderless—may be the purest expression of emergent democracy. Elements of emergent democracy were a prominent feature in the 2016 presidential campaign; one could easily sense that neither Bernie Sanders nor Donald Trump “led” their respective movements so much as surfed them, hoping and praying the electorate’s collective id would eventually lead safely back to shore. The science writer Steven Johnson, whose book Emergence introduced many of these ideas to a general audience, compares the evolution of new ideas to slime mold—a single-celled organism that gathers together to form a kind of super-organism when food is in short supply.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

With all these experiments bubbling up, the concept of UBI has become a favourite media topic, but it is controversial. Many opponents – especially in the US – see it as a form of socialism, and the US has traditionally harboured a visceral dislike of socialism. (The strong performance of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, in the race to become the Democratic Party's candidate in the 2016 Presidential election is a striking departure from this norm of US politics.) This concern is what seemed to leave Martin Ford somewhat dispirited at the end of his book “The Rise of the Robots”.


pages: 280 words: 73,420

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino by Jim McTague

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, computerized trading, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, housing crisis, index arbitrage, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market bubble, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, naked short selling, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, technology bubble, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K

When Hillary Clinton made a run for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008, Gensler became her chief fundraiser. When she lost, he joined the Obama campaign and later became head of the president-elect’s SEC transition team. President-elect Obama named Gensler CFTC chairman in December 2008. But the appointment was not a slam dunk. A Senate floor vote on the nomination in March 2009 was blocked by Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist who most often votes with the Democrats. Senator Sanders was steamed about Gensler’s opposition to regulation of the collateralized debt securities (CDS) market all those years ago. He stated, “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy.”


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

It is becoming more diverse. It is by some measures becoming more unequal. And on the left, support has grown dramatically for huge redistributive and universal programs. Gone are the careful means-testing proposals and incremental boosts of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, where the wonks reigned. Bernie Sanders is pushing for Medicare for All. The Center for American Progress, arguably the most influential think tank on the left, is pushing for a federal jobs guarantee. Seeing the tides changing, Hillary Clinton’s team was even quietly at work on a proposal to turn welfare into a kind of UBI for kids.


pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Free university education, for example, might seem like an unaffordable economic sacrifice, but if you were measuring the stock of wealth rather than the flow, all those additional educated people might look like an increase in your nation’s wealth, not a diminishment of its growth. The same goes for investing in infrastructure, say high-speed rail, in anticipation of future returns on investment. How one accounts for these things matters. In the US independent senator Bernie Sanders and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, both want to increase public funding and scrap student fees. Their policies look less radical—and therefore more plausible—from a wealth-accounting perspective. The second reason for counting assets is that today’s actions have an impact on future generations.


pages: 260 words: 79,471

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea by Richard Phillips, Stephan Talty

Bernie Sanders, friendly fire, Neil Armstrong, two and twenty

That’s when Lea decided to speak to the press herself. There was a constant flow of people through our house. Letters and postcards from strangers poured into our mailbox. The Boy Scouts came by and cleaned up our yard, without anyone asking them to. Vermont’s two senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, called, along with our local representatives and town officials. Even Ted Kennedy left his number and asked if there was anything he could do. Everyone was extremely supportive, including a couple from the local Somali community who came by to hand-deliver a note saying they were praying for Andrea and our family.


pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

It is unlikely that Mullin ever imagined Corbyn would be the person who might put his fiction to the test. Both men were acolytes of Tony Benn, who was for many years the British left’s best hope. Benn never came that close to becoming prime minister. As I write, the prospect of a Corbyn prime ministership is very real. Something like it will happen somewhere eventually. Bernie Sanders came close in the 2016 US presidential election. Jean-Luc Mélenchon came close in the French presidential election of 2017. At some point a President or Prime Minister Leftist will win an election in a leading democracy and challenge the political establishment to do its worst. When that occurs, will we get a very American, a very French or a very British coup?


The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg) by Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, buy low sell high, call centre, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, low interest rates, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, urban sprawl

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Gensler also inherited the CFTC during the early stages of what would become one of the biggest Escape to London 71 investigations into financial malfeasance ever undertaken by a government agency: Libor. Not everyone backed him to do a good job. Of the 30 presidential appointees put before the Senate that year, Gensler was the last to be approved. His selection as head of the CFTC was blocked for months by Democrat Maria Cantwell and independent Bernie Sanders, who questioned whether he was the right person to help “create a new culture in the financial marketplace” after the crisis. It wasn’t just Gensler’s background in banking that provoked skepticism. As an undersecretary to Rubin, Gensler had played a prominent role in pushing through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which exempted over-the-counter derivatives such as interest-rate swaps and credit default swaps from regulation.


pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

The American Bankers Association slammed the inspector general’s report, dismissing postal bank loans as the “worst idea since the Edsel.” But the cause of postal banking — dubbed “a central bank for the poor” — has gained ground among influential progressives. It could become an issue in the 2020 election campaign, since it’s being championed by a number of potential Democratic presidential contenders, including Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand.28 If the notion of the Canadian government running a successful bank sounds overly ambitious, it shouldn’t. Not only do we have the example of the ATB in Alberta, but our federal government also already owns and operates a number of successful banks for special purposes.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

Confirmed cases outside China have tripled over the past week and officials today locked down all of Italy, where the virus is currently killing more people than anywhere else. We now know it’s a mysterious pathogen capable of harming the body in a myriad of unexpected, and sometimes lethal, ways. And more bad news for Bernie Sanders. Biden swept him last night in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho. This is a serious blow to Bernie, and Biden now has the momentum. Bernie didn’t even make a speech at the end of the night. He headed to his cabin in Vermont to hide out. Not a good sign. It seems just yesterday that Bernie was hitting jackpots in Vegas, and now he’s on the ropes, and Vegas is closed for business.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

By comparison, virtual reality goggles, curing death, laying fiber, self-driving cars, and other business opportunities represent much longer odds. If people make it clear, with their clicks, likes, and postings, that they hate certain things and love others, those people are easy to sell to. Clear as day. Easy as oil in Arabia. If I go into Facebook and click on an article about Bernie Sanders and “love” one about Chuck Schumer, the machine, expending almost no energy, can throw me in a bucket of liberal die-hards. If it wants to devote a little more computing energy to the process, just to be extra sure, it can see that I have the term Berkeley in my bio. So, it delivers me, with great confidence, into the tree-hugger bucket.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

For a doppelganger search to be truly accurate, you don’t want to find someone who merely likes the same things you like. You also want to find someone who dislikes the things you dislike. My interests are apparent not just from the accounts I follow but from those I choose not to follow. I am interested in sports, politics, comedy, and science but not food, fashion, or theater. My follows show that I like Bernie Sanders but not Elizabeth Warren, Sarah Silverman but not Amy Schumer, the New Yorker but not the Atlantic, my friends Noah Popp, Emily Sands, and Josh Gottlieb but not my friend Sam Asher. (Sorry, Sam. But your Twitter feed is a snooze.) Of all 200 million people on Twitter, who has the most similar profile to me?


pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Restricting migration and putting up trade barriers will ultimately hurt the very people the populists claim to represent. That could open up new political possibilities for basic income. So far, Third Way timidity has held up thinking. For example, defeated Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking before the US presidential election, said she was ‘not ready to go there’ on basic income. By contrast, Bernie Sanders, whom she defeated for the Democratic nomination, said he was ‘absolutely sympathetic’ to the idea. Meanwhile, Donald Trump steamrollered his way to the presidency by promising to bring jobs back to the US and stop American firms from transferring jobs abroad. Yet with the introduction of protectionist measures, production costs will rise, automation will accelerate, and the next scapegoat will be the robots ‘taking American jobs from American workers’.


pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy by Peter Temin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, full employment, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, invisible hand, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, mortgage debt, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, price stability, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, white flight, working poor

The poor whites were unnoticed collateral damage until this campaign, but their anger dominated meetings where Trump spoke. Violence may have been stimulated when the candidate alluded to the majority minority oxymoron and assured the audience they were better than African Americans and Latino immigrants. Bernie Sanders, an insurgent Democratic candidate, appealed to another branch of the low-wage sector, those who were trying to move into the FTE sector. As described in chapter 4, they more often did not make it and had to deal with massive student debts. Only time will tell how these attempts to wake this sleeping giant will affect America.2 The FTE sector makes plans for itself, typically ignoring the needs of the low-wage sector.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

But goddammit I drew the line at fascists. It was not as though all the tech dudes in Silicon Valley—or even a double-digit minority of tech dudes—would’ve cheered along at that fascist rally I stumbled across. Indeed, rank-and-file tech company workers, like many in their age cohort, proved to constitute an important base for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. But as heartening as it was to see the youthful peons of Google and Apple kicking in $25 or $100 to support an avowed democratic socialist, a harrowing countercurrent was gaining force. Indeed, as I discovered from months of deep and unsettling research into the seedier corners of the internet, a nerdy sociopathic cabal of reactionary insurrectionists, some in positions of influence, groused that Hitler got a bad rap and dreamed of goose-stepping jackboot parades along the Embarcadero.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Russia also had a substantial presence in Anonymous. In retrospect, it is interesting that some Anonymous members would later go on Moscow’s payroll. One of them, Cassandra Fairbanks, moved from real-world Anonymous demonstrations, to attending and writing about Black Lives Matter protests, to avidly supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. With more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers, she then took a job at the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik and switched to full-throated support for Trump through the 2016 general election and afterward. Just before the November vote, she appeared on Alex Jones’s YouTube conspiracy channel, saying it was “pretty likely” that emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s Gmail account contained coded references to pedophilia.


pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, G4S, high net worth, information asymmetry, Kim Stanley Robinson, license plate recognition, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, old-boy network, public intellectual, satellite internet, six sigma, Social Justice Warrior, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit

It takes a lot of talented, dedicated people to make a book, and it’s always a leap of faith. Thanks for inspiration to Matt Taibbi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alex Steffen and the outquisition, and everyone who fights for justice: #blacklivesmatter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Erika Garner, Bernie Sanders, and the millions in the streets. This isn’t the kind of fight you win, it’s the kind of fight you fight. About the Cory Doctorow CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger–the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books: most recently In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, the award-winning, bestselling sequel to the 2008 YA novel Little Brother.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

On the contrary, young people use online communication to launch campaigns on specific issues – such as environmentalism, vegetarianism, gay rights, sexism and sexual harassment – and to organise real-life demonstrations.10 While very few people are actively blogging about CCTV cameras or widescreen TVs, there are lots of very sincere people writing about politics. On the left-wing, campaigns like Momentum within the Labour Party in the UK and Bernie Sanders’ presidential 2016 campaign are built through online communities. On the right, nationalists organise protests and share their opinions online. You or I might not agree with all of these opinions, and the bullying and abuse that occurs on Twitter is unacceptable, but most of the posts that individual people make relate to how they genuinely feel.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

It’s hard to imagine, during a conversation or train ride, repeatedly pulling out one’s smartphone and irritably navigating to the Ello app to check the notifications. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. There are democratic potentials in the internet. Even if it is in essence a commercialized system of surveillance and controls, there have always been ways of writing against the grain. Radical movements, from Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the United States to the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, have used professional social media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies. Even in the People’s Republic of China, the spread of online communications technologies has created new enclaves outside of the state’s and companies’ control.


pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The committee would set a one-year deadline to create an industrial plan to address climate change, decarbonize the economic infrastructure within ten years, create new business opportunities, and employ millions of disadvantaged workers in an emerging green economy—a bold “aspirational” proposal far beyond anything yet put forward by America’s cities, counties, and states.5 In the new term, congressional leadership equivocated on the proposal and ultimately established a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis with little power to act. Meanwhile, on February 7, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Ed Markey in the Senate introduced a Green New Deal resolution. One hundred and three members of Congress have already cosponsored it, including several of the major presidential contenders within the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand.6 Democratic presidential hopefuls Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke have also lent their support to a Green New Deal. So have former vice president Al Gore and three hundred state and local government officials from across the country, including South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, another Democratic presidential aspirant.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

National reporters generally focus on the presidential race plus key state races. Regardless, the system lets you select which races and candidates you care about. These are shown in the favorites list when you log in. Figure 11.1 shows what a reporter sees if she has favorited 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. Clicking one of the names takes you to a page that shows a candidate. Each candidate files a series of financial reports with the FEC. A reporter can use Bailiwick to scroll through and read the individual financial reports or see the financial report totals organized in a convenient way. Figure 11.1 Bailiwick splash screen customized to show three 2016 US presidential candidates.


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Democratic contender Senator Elizabeth Warren made a net wealth tax a flagship policy of her campaign. She has proposed that Americans with more than $50 million in net worth pay an annual 2 per cent tax on the amount of their net wealth above this threshold, while billionaires would pay an extra 1 per cent on their wealth above their first billion. Her rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, followed her with a net wealth tax proposal of his own. This rekindled interest is unusual. The lack of familiarity with net wealth taxes and their abandonment in many countries make them a hard sell. But I will argue here that they are a central part of the tax reforms needed for a new economy of belonging.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

This principle was institutionalised in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, which decreed that debts should be automatically cancelled every seventh year.46 Indeed, debt cancellation became core to the Hebrew concept of redemption itself. There are dozens of proposals for how we might do this in today’s economy. The US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders laid out a clear plan for cancelling student debts, which in 2020 stood at a staggering $1.6 trillion. Academics at King’s College London have published a plan for how governments could write off not just student debts but also other unjust debts: mortgage debts created by housing speculation and quantitative easing, old debts whose lenders have been bailed out by governments, and unpayable debts that are devalued on secondary markets.47 We know it’s possible.


pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Western governments and Western businesses cannot ignore these developments, nor can they ignore the growing impatience in Western democratic countries themselves, as evidenced by the opinion polls noted above. It would be wrong to underestimate the degree to which US public support for the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020 was due to the forthright anti-corruption views of these candidates. I believe the voices of impatient citizens will be heard and that an increasing number of politicians in Western democracies will listen and recognize that they must respond with more than the old rhetoric.


pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

The argument put forth by the new intersectional coalition—the argument that any failures within the American system are due to the inherent evils of the system, not to individual failures within that system—now predominates throughout instruments of politics, government, and law. Joe Biden’s unity agenda with Bernie Sanders pledged, “On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.” By anti-racist policy, of course, Biden means policy designed to level all outcomes, no matter the individual decision making at issue.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

They flooded users and drivers with pro–Proposition 22 notifications; paid off prominent figures to support the ballot measure, including the leader of the California branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who later resigned over conflicts of interest; and sent out fake mailers making it seem as though Proposition 22 was supported by progressive groups associated with Senator Bernie Sanders. As a result, the initiative passed with more than 58 percent support—but in the weeks that followed, many voters said they were misled into believing it would help drivers, not deny them employment rights. Within a few months of the vote, the companies had raised their prices, despite claiming they would not have to do so if Proposition 22 passed, and workers said their pay had actually fallen.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

This goes even deeper: as Sebastian Junger points out in his book Tribe, we are the first modern society in human history where people live alone in apartments and where children have their own bedrooms. The gradual decline of trust in societal institutions over the years, meanwhile, from business to government, accelerated in the wake of the Great Recession, making people more receptive to a “fringe” idea than they might otherwise have been (see Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump). Add on a growing sense of unease over geopolitical risk and the sense that horrible and unpredictable things are happening in the world, and the urge to connect with others becomes an unarticulated desire in all of us. Whatever you think about “belonging,” these forces really were a large part of what made people more open to trying this new, quirky, affordable travel experience.


pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

It is critical that we get this right. 10 URBANISM FOR ALL When was the last time you heard a national politician talk thoughtfully about cities and urban policy or make them an integral part of his or her agenda? Former president Barack Obama grew up in cities and clearly cares deeply about them, but even his administration failed to make any substantial moves on urban policy. The 2016 Democratic primary featured two former mayors, Bernie Sanders from Burlington, Vermont, and Martin O’Malley from Baltimore; and a third, former Richmond mayor Tim Kaine, eventually joined the Democratic ticket as Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Aside from O’Malley’s invocations of urban policy, which I helped craft, cities and urban policy were rarely, if ever, mentioned during the 2016 primaries or presidential campaign.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

The first is to increase government spending on R&D: spending more on university research, public research institutes, or research undertaken by businesses. Paying for research is one of the least ideologically controversial types of investment a government can make to promote growth: it is popular with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders on the left, Peter Thiel on the right, and a significant number of politicians and pundits in between. The rationale harks back to one of our four S’s of intangibles: spillovers. Because returns on R&D are not always captured by the person or business investing in it, businesses do less R&D than is optimal for the economy as a whole, and therefore government has a legitimate role in stepping in, either funding research in universities or institutes or paying firms to do R&D with grants or tax breaks.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Three years later, the actual president,6 Barack Obama, joked about the event at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, saying: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen. Bernie [Sanders] might have let her go. Not us.” If the President of the United States is moved to comment on the event, and Elon Musk is claiming it’s central to Silicon Valley culture, then perhaps there’s more going on than just a weeklong party. And that’s the second thing to explore in our assessment—why so many creative and talented people go so far out of their way to congregate there once a year.


pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, interest rate swap, laissez-faire capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, medical malpractice, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachmann has a few dumb ideas doesn’t mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that this belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders. Getting ordinary Americans to emotionally identify in this way with the political wishes of their bankers and credit card lenders and mortgagers is no small feat, but it happens—with a little help. I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

To develop better approaches to accountability and to create laboratory schools for new approaches to learning, teacher training, and assessment, we must have a massive investment in educational R&D. The U.S. federal budget is awash in spending on research and development. In fiscal year 2013, we spent $72 billion on military R&D. With the exception of Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, you can’t find a politician in our country at the national level who doesn’t assert, “State-of-the art military technology is vital to our long-term national security.” As a side note, our military spending outpaces the second most aggressive nation, China, by a 4.1-to-1 ratio.


pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson

23andMe, Airbnb, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, feminist movement, Firefox, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, retail therapy, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft

Just a few weeks prior, I was all “hell to the no” about seeing him in Portland, yet there I was hunched over a trash can, trimming my pubes because I didn’t want to be hanging out with #BritishBaekoff while in a swimsuit that’s showing off my wild, down-there hair looking like it’s doing its best Bernie Sanders/Doc Brown cosplay. #IHopeMyParentsHaveStoppedReadingThisBookByNow. Long story short, #BritishBaekoff and I had such a magical weekend in Portland that he flew to NYC to be with me until I left for Belgrade, Serbia. And by the end of the New York trip, he DTR aka defined the relationship, and we officially became boos.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right. The hard-left Jeremy Corbyn shook the British establishment by taking control of Britain’s Labour party, but he has not been able to wrest control of the government from the Tories. Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist senator from Vermont, mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, yet ultimately fell short of the mark. Some radical left parties have done somewhat better. The anti-austerity leftists of Greece’s Syriza party, for example, won control of parliament in early 2015 and attempted to win a reprieve from the austerity policies imposed on Greece by its European creditors (who were, in their defence, helping to finance Greece’s unaffordable debts).


pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye darling.” 4 DAYS OF SLAVERY Immokalee, Florida In America today we are seeing a race to the bottom, the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing. What I saw in Immokalee is the bottom in the race to the bottom. —SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS Hoping for work in the La Fiesta parking lot, Immokalee, Florida. RODRIGO ORTIZ, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD FARMWORKER—A SHORT man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are too long—stands forlornly in the half-light in front of the La Fiesta Supermarket on South 3rd Street in Immokalee, Florida.


I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business climate, corporate governance, East Village, fixed income, glass ceiling, income inequality, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, six sigma, VA Linux, Y2K, zero-sum game

And apparently Madoff cornered the market on Swiss Miss—bought up the prison’s entire supply—and was gouging his fellow prisoners if they wanted it, because he had it all. The guy can’t stop! * * * Capitalism gets a bad rap these days. Madoff didn’t help; the financial crisis didn’t help. When Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency in 2016, I’m afraid he got a lot of college kids to believe that capitalism is bad and that America is headed, or should be headed, toward something that, in my mind, resembles socialism: Guaranteed income. Free college tuition. Single-payer health care. I disagree.


We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

Even though he was David Duke, a man whose name is synonymous with the KKK, the logic cited for him losing the election by a nose was along the same lines as in 2016: a working-class post-recession revolt, an angry message from the disenfranchised to the elites of Washington. No one seems to ask why this anger can only be expressed by voting for a KKK grand wizard or a man who wants to ban Muslims or build a wall around Mexico, as opposed to, say, Bernie Sanders. This is the excepting of group white behaviour from its obvious animus – racial entitlement – and ascribing benign, even sympathetic, qualities to it. And the left-behind story again is, simply, not true. Duke picked up the majority of the white vote, and the middle class was split evenly between him and his opponent.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

One can start, of course, with Paul Manafort, whose entire career was dedicated to the pursuit of blood money, including his years in the 2010s spent working as an operative in Ukraine alongside GOP consultant (and now convicted felon) Rick Gates in order to benefit a pro-Kremlin candidate, while doing the bidding of Russian oligarch Deripaska on the side. Manafort was not the only campaign manager from the 2016 election to engage in this activity. Multiple political operatives from both sides of the aisle have worked for Kremlin allies, oligarchs, and mobsters, including Bernie Sanders’s chief strategist Tad Devine, liberal lobbyist Tony Podesta (the brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta), and Lanny Davis, a family friend of and former consultant for the Clintons. In 2018, Davis, an attorney, was simultaneously representing oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who has been indicted on racketeering and worked with Mogilevich, and Michael Cohen, who is linked to Mogilevich through his family’s business connections.40 Then there is the FBI.


pages: 285 words: 91,144

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream by Michael Sayman

airport security, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, data science, Day of the Dead, fake news, Frank Gehry, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Googley, hacker house, imposter syndrome, Khan Academy, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, microaggression, move fast and break things, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, the High Line, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

I said that there were a million students in the country competing to be the best at the same things—from Presidential Physical Fitness Tests to the SATs—and that I’d long ago decided instead to be the best at my own thing. Between gulps from my fifth bottle of water, in a conference room with bright purple chairs, a man in his fifties—a Bernie Sanders type with wild white hair—asked me the weirdest question: “What will be the solution to the VR problem twenty years from now?” “Which problem is that?” I asked, leaning forward in my chair. “Obviously,” said the man, “the problem will be the world itself. How would you design it better?”


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

“It is not a conversation. You’re telling jokes, and they’re laughing or groaning or walking out. It’s a democratic art form where you really get a sense of how people are thinking or feeling.” Friedman told me a story from her last tour before the pandemic, in 2019, when she was heckled onstage by a Bernie Sanders supporter, who didn’t like a joke she made about his hero. Friedman got mad, first slinging insults at the Bernie Bro, but then she expertly diffused the situation by predicting they’d hook up after the show, which got big laughs from the whole room, including the aggrieved bro. Later, back at her hotel, Friedman went online and saw that a video of the exchange was circulating on social media, and the conversation around it grew heated and crazy.


pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

“Class traitors” such as George Soros, Nick Hanauer, and Paul Tudor Jones have warned of the potentially dramatic consequences of inequality and suggested measures to reduce it. Even Asher Edelman, the real-life Gordon Gekko on whom the movie Wall Street’s ruthlessly greedy protagonist was partly modeled, has turned dissident, arguing for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders as the best option for the U.S. economy.18 The economic discontent has led to unprecedented political polarization, pitting the “have-nots” against the “haves,” the proletariat against the intellectual elite, and the young against the old. People are acutely aware of the democratic deficit resulting from the undue collusion of the financial, corporate, and political sectors, and many feel that the system has been hijacked and rigged by special interests.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Her research expertise is in Federal Reserve operations, fiscal policy, social security, international finance and employment. She is best known for her contributions to the literature on Modern Monetary Theory. Her book, The State, The Market and the Euro (Edward Elgar, 2003) predicted the debt crisis in the eurozone. She served as Chief Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee and as an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. She was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the top-ranked blog ‘New Economic Perspectives’ and a member of the TopWonks network of America's leading policy thinkers. She consults with policy-makers, investment banks and portfolio managers across the globe, and is a regular commentator on national radio and broadcast television.


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

In 1999, Garret John LoPorto had a plan to save the world via Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.53 When word got out that founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were facing an acquisition by the international conglomerate Unilever, LoPorto, then a 23-year-old tech upstart, decided to fight back. His “Save Ben & Jerry’s” grassroots campaign, involving Vermont governor Howard Dean, Congressman Bernie Sanders, and thousands of other activists, used the mantra “Don’t Sell Out” and protested against the bullying by globalization and capitalism of a small Vermont-based company that (at least in their view) should stay that way.54 Cohen and Greenfield didn’t want to sell. Founded in Burlington, Vermont in 1978, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream operated locally and under a wider philosophy of social responsibility, environmental awareness, and bohemian sensibilities.


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Conflict Given that leftists have long criticized “trickle-down economics,” it would be natural to expect a leftist populist backlash to stagnequality and a subsequent move to redistribute income. To some extent this prediction has been confirmed by recent events, as summarized in table I.1. Bernie Sanders nearly won the US Democratic primary despite identifying as a socialist earlier in his life and running for president as a social democrat. In the UK, Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader of Britain’s Labor Party with a serious chance of victory since World War II, and left-wing movements in France and Italy have achieved unusual political success.


pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

A razor-tongued former Trotskyist, with a taste for revolutionary-style Mao jackets and a weakness for Latin American autocrats, he advocated a top income-tax rate of 100 per cent during the 2017 campaign, described America as a ‘dangerous power’, and called for a ‘Bolivarian’ alliance alongside Venezuela and Cuba. This seemed to be just what young people wanted to hear, and the 65-year-old Mélenchon turned into a sort of French Bernie Sanders. He also dug deep into the Socialist vote, securing working-class support in industrial cities and areas that were losing jobs. The seven million votes that Mélenchon drew in the first round of the 2017 presidential election were only 600,000 short of Marine Le Pen’s score. Between the pair of them alone, they scooped up a massive 41 per cent of the first-round vote.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

Political scientists crunching the polling data said that the Kochs’ two signature laws (the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful tax “reform” package) were the “most unpopular pieces of major domestic legislation of the past quarter-century,” the journalist Michael Tomasky points out. Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model. Denmark and Sweden and Norway, of course, are what this “balance” I’ve been describing looks like in practice: a market system with a strong commitment to social justice, the lowest levels of inequality on the planet, and, by most measures, the happiest citizens, people leading private lives, but not leaving others behind.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Based on the judgment of the second AI, the first one goes back and makes tweaks to its process. This happens again and again, until the first AI is automatically generating all kinds of images of Kim Jong-un that look entirely realistic, but never actually happened in the real world. Pictures that show Kim Jong-un having dinner with Vladimir Putin, playing golf with Bernie Sanders, or sipping cocktails with Kendrick Lamar. Google Brain’s goal isn’t subterfuge. It’s to solve the problem created by synthetic data. GANs would empower AI systems to work with raw, real-world data that hasn’t been cleaned and without the direct supervision of a human programmer. And while it’s a wonderfully creative approach to solve a problem—it could someday be a serious threat to our safety.


pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

The Republican Party was born in the late 1850s in reaction to the inability of the existing parties to deal with the issues that led to the Civil War. But that was 150 years ago. Since then we have had dozens of attempts to breach the Democrat-Republican political duopoly. From time to time populist, socialist, and, more recently, the Green Party win local elections, and independents, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, win election to Congress. Nationwide, some third parties have made a difference in presidential elections. In 1912 Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote and elected Woodrow Wilson. In 1992, Ross Perot drained votes from George H. W. Bush to give the election to Bill Clinton.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

Karpathy, “What I Learned from Competing Against a ConvNet on ImageNet,” Sept. 2, 2014, karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing-against-a-convnet-on-imagenet. 18.  S. Lohr, “A Lesson of Tesla Crashes? Computer Vision Can’t Do It All Yet,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 2016. 6: A Closer Look at Machines That Learn   1.  Readers who followed the 2016 U.S. presidential election will recognize the pun on Bernie Sanders’s supporters’ tagline, “Feel the Bern.”   2.  E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review, July 2017.   3.  O. Tanz, “Can Artificial Intelligence Identify Pictures Better than Humans?,” Entrepreneur, April 1, 2017, www.entrepreneur.com/article/283990.   4.  


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

It’s easy to be cynical about the potential for the private sector to play a role in driving systemic change. Indeed one interpretation of the German experience is that we need the equivalent of a world war to change business attitudes. Fortunately the Danish experience suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Denmark: Business Responds to National Weakness Bernie Sanders’s championing of Denmark has led many business leaders to roll their eyes. But Denmark is not a socialist country, if by socialism is meant state ownership of the means of production. Its economy is a strongly pro-business system in which business, labor, and government work closely together to sustain economic growth—within a structure that was championed by the private sector.


pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Even though they were actually a small part of the establishment of the country, only 8 percent of the general population, the kibbutzim made a huge impact both on the ethos of the country to be and its industry. They paved the way for the basic economic system under which Israel still operates today—capitalist yet also a light social democracy. Like Warren Buffett spiced with a dash of Bernie Sanders. The kibbutzim also paved the path for Herzl’s vision of gender equality. In the Zionist movement, women got equal voting rights to men by the Second Zionist Congress in 1898; however, in the early days of the kibbutz, the men were certain that they would be able to transfer the Old World misogynistic way of living to the New World and leave the gals to cooking, cleaning, and childcare.


pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following by Gabrielle Bluestone

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, cashless society, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, financial thriller, forensic accounting, gig economy, global pandemic, growth hacking, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Kevin Roose, lock screen, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Mason jar, Menlo Park, Multics, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post-truth, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Russell Brand, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech bro, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork

* * * The Bloomberg campaign kicked off in February 2020 with a meme-and influencer-based approach that offered anyone who wanted to get involved $2,500 a month to promote Bloomberg online and directly to friends and family. The organizers did not discriminate in its selection of its “deputy field organizers,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the group included among its ranks “a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter,” “a Chicagoan with zero followers on Twitter,” and “a dozen registered Republicans.”226 Many of the Twitter accounts backing Bloomberg’s bid had been opened within the past two months, triggering Twitter’s fraud alerts as hundreds of uninspired human users began tweeting like bots by using copied and pasted messages like “A President Is Born: Barbra Streisand sings Mike’s praises.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Disadvantaged community members were unable to fight prolonged battles with government bureaucrats and insurance agents to secure medical care and housing. But even as utopian dreams seemed impossible for impoverished people on the margins of society, lofty ideals were gaining ground on a national level. When Bernie Sanders began championing “Medicare for all” in his 2016 presidential campaign, chronically ill HIV patients throughout the country began hoping for a national policy fix that would guarantee their access to medical care. While many looked to political leaders to solve difficult problems, local health care advocates like Jay Johnson continued to work tirelessly to translate social justice principles into reality


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

“Globally, demand for fossil-based power has declined while demand for renewable power has risen.” Few were as unsurprised by the accelerating shift as Bob Litterman. Indeed, he’d bet millions on it. In April 2021, Litterman once again faced ranks of lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The venue this time was the Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Litterman was testifying beside Nobel Prize−winning Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz and author David Wallace-Wells, whose 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth spelled out in hair-raising fashion the extreme risks posed by a changing climate. “In my view, we are living through a pivotal moment not only in the history of our country, not only in the history of the global community, but in the history of humanity,” Senator Sanders said in his opening statement.


pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

But it’s not. Twitter is not America. Frequent social media use can put distance between the most online among us and an accurate perception of the world. A common refrain that began on Twitter in 2016 and saw another spike in the run-up to the 2020 election was that supporters of politician Bernie Sanders were largely white, aggressive, male “Bernie bros”—a narrative that erases that in the 2020 Democratic primary season Sanders had a broader range of support from young, working-class people of color than any of the other candidates, who largely had whiter, wealthier bases. Yet the “Bernie bro” perception itself is a result of the internet’s problem of proportion.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

It is more efficient for the state to pay the worker $30,000. The net to the worker is the same, and an inefficient pretense of private salaries and public taxation is eliminated. Schumpeter’s suggestion has found new life in policy proposals for a Basic Guaranteed Income championed in various forms by Bernie Sanders on the left and Charles Murray on the right. The expansion of food stamps, disability payments, Obamacare, Medicare, and the earned income credit are all forms of government income maintenance, evidence of a movement toward true socialism. Schumpeter said democracy was not an ideology in which the will of the people was fulfilled.


pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

People might find the reposted articles less interesting, and if so, there are fewer clicks, making for a less attractive product. (I speculate that the third reason might be the most important.) It is entirely reasonable for Facebook to take these points into account. But we should not aspire to a situation in which everyone’s News Feed is perfectly personalized, so that supporters of different politicians—Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, someone else—see fundamentally different stories, focusing on different topics or covering the same topics in radically different ways. Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if every person’s News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

It was as if those at the very top simply assumed that the government could do all these things, without ever asking whether that assumption made any sense. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 281 8/12/08 1:56:13 AM 282 REMI X What made this all the more weird was that the very people who were operating upon this vision of regulatory omnipotence were the same people who, in a million other contexts, would have been most skeptical about the government’s ability to do anything. We’re not talking about FDR here. Or even the socialist member of the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders. We’re talking about people who don’t believe the government can run a railroad. But if a government can’t run a railroad, how is it to run a whole society? What possible reason is there to think that we had anything like the capacity necessary to do this? For though many predicted resistance, the presumption behind our government actions was that force could always quell resistance.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Back in June, the Hillary Clinton campaign issued its official Spotify playlist, packed with on-message tunes (“Brave,” “Fighters,” “Stronger,” “Believer”). Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” along the trail. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million friends on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.” And then there’s Donald Trump. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

The Uber example, for Sheff, represents how this evolution in various types of relationships can lend cover for a new type of sexual harassment. “That’s not polyamory; that’s fucked up,” she told me when we discussed Fowler’s story. “It’s just inappropriate to put people in that position in the workplace. You may think you’re Steve Jobs, but really you’re Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.” Even a woman who is nonmonogamous herself could have problems. “If a woman is known to be polyamorous, then there is this assumption, like, of course she’ll date,” Sheff says. “And if she won’t engage, then she’s a frigid bitch. Women can be at a double disadvantage around this because they still get the sideways looks from other women and from men who think, ‘Well, you’re slutty—why don’t you fuck me?’”


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

In 2016 the World Bank’s top inequality expert, Branko Milanović, published new data showing that inequality between countries – corrected for population – had declined dramatically over the past few decades, from a Gini index of 63 in 1960 down to 47 in 2013, with a precipitous drop beginning in the 1980s.44 The story ricocheted through the media. Just days after Milanović’s data was released, conservative commentator Charles Lane wrote a celebratory column in the Washington Post. He criticised Pope Francis and US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for making such a big deal about inequality at the time. Yes, the world’s richest 1 per cent have seen their incomes skyrocket, but that’s OK, he argued, because the very system that is delivering them their extraordinary wealth is also reducing inequality globally. The US model of free-market globalisation isn’t causing inequality, as its critics claim – on the contrary, it is reducing it.


pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

When former Labour leader Ed Miliband debated the notion on his podcast, it was subtitled ‘Free Money for All!’ and he called it ‘a trust fund for all’. Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

In what follows, I will leave the lump sum idea to one side and instead analyze payment of a regular income. Basic jobs But before we get to the main issue, there are two other variants to consider, namely the idea of a basic jobs guarantee (BJG), and the provision of “universal basic services” (UBS). In the USA Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have pressed for a BJG to be trialed. This idea aims to head off one of the criticisms of UBI but immediately undermines one of its key appeals. Clearly, the proposal responds to the critique that a UBI would reduce the supply of labor and undermine the work ethic (which I will discuss in a moment).


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

This meeting commenced with a report on BofA’s finances. Bank profits rose from $4 billion in 2014 to $16 billion; the bank’s liquidity was four times as large as in 2008. But this good news was drowned out by the background noise of an angry presidential campaign where expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her challenger, Bernie Sanders, and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, vied to criticize big banks. Surveys reveal that support for banks dropped five points, Finucane said. “My concern is Bank of America should not be a focus of the conversation when the talk is about Dodd-Frank.” Pollster Joel Benenson said Sanders enjoyed broad support when he declared, “We have a rigged economic system.”


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

That much is simple enough. But crony capitalism 2.0 is far trickier. It uses a different playbook from that used by version 1.0—one that’s designed to escape public notice. In January 2020, when David Solomon, first issued the Goldman’s diversity proclamation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was at a time when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the biggest critics of the US government’s 2008 bailout of Goldman Sachs, were presidential frontrunners. Having supplicated to the swamp uni-party of crony Republicans and centrist Democrats for decades, the moment had arrived for Goldman Sachs to begin placating the identity-politics-obsessed far left, just as that wing of the Democratic party had begun to accrue greater political power.


pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

So here’s my challenge to you: allow me to be the first Volunteer to take a seat at the table with you guys to advocate for a cause that has affected everyone at MSD regardless of race. After all, as has been previously stated in the media, ‘these parkland kids are eloquent and outspoken,’ and just like you, I fall into that category.” She tagged various cable news anchors, Bernie Sanders, and several of the MSD kids. It drew a lot of responses and nearly four hundred retweets. Five days later, Tyah-Amoy joined a group of eight African American Douglas students conducting a press conference outside the school to chastise both MFOL and the media for ignoring them. “I am here today with my classmates because we have been sorely underrepresented and in some cases misrepresented,” Tyah-Amoy said.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Between that first encounter and mid-August 2016, when he took over the Trump campaign, Bannon, beyond a few interviews he had done with Trump for his Breitbart radio show, was pretty sure he hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in one-on-one conversation with Trump. But now Bannon’s Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were suddenly receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Planned Parenthood had given him a rating of 100 percent, as did the AFL-CIO, Citizens for Tax Justice, the NAACP, the National Education Association, the Children’s Defense Fund, PeacePac, and the National Organization for Women. Summing up Obama’s voting record, National Journal had given him a “composite liberal score” of 95.5 percent in 2007—the highest score of any senator that year, including Bernie Sanders, the Socialist from Vermont. Meanwhile, Obama had gotten consistently low marks from conservative groups. Some of his lowest ratings were from business and antitax organizations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculated that Obama had voted against its interests 67 percent of the time in 2007, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses said that he had been against that organization 88 percent of the time.


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

“The growing array of derivatives and the related application of more sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risks had been key factors underlying the remarkable resilience of the banking system, which had recently shrugged off severe shocks to the economy and the financial system.” Now Greenspan was turning his back on the very system he had championed for decades. In congressional testimony in 2000, Vermont representative Bernie Sanders had asked Greenspan, “Aren’t you concerned with such a growing concentration of wealth that if one of these huge institutions fails it will have a horrendous impact on the national and global economy?” Greenspan didn’t bat an eye. “No, I’m not,” he’d replied. “I believe that the general growth in large institutions has occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically—I should say fully—hedged.”


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Consider a typical Tea Party supporter who somehow squares an ardent faith in Jesus Christ with a firm objection to government welfare policies and a staunch support for the National Rifle Association. Wasn’t Jesus a bit more keen on helping the poor than on arming yourself to the teeth? It might seem incompatible, but the human brain has a lot of drawers and compartments, and some neurons just don’t talk to one another. Similarly, you can find plenty of Bernie Sanders supporters who have a vague belief in some future revolution, while also believing in the importance of investing your money wisely. They can easily switch from discussing the unjust distribution of wealth in the world to discussing the performance of their Wall Street investments. Hardly anyone has just one identity.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, attributes some of the discontent to globalization: Globalization combined with technology combined with social media and constant information have disrupted people’s lives in very concrete ways – a manufacturing plant closes and suddenly an entire town no longer has what was the primary source of employment – and people are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world … There is no doubt [this] has produced populist movements both from the left and the right in many countries in Europe … When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders – very unconventional candidates who had considerable success – then obviously there is something there that is being tapped into: a suspicion of globalization, a desire to rein in its excesses, a suspicion of elites and governing institutions that people feel may not be responsive to their immediate needs.1 So, is globalization in trouble?


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, attributes some of the discontent to globalization: Globalization combined with technology combined with social media and constant information have disrupted people’s lives in very concrete ways – a manufacturing plant closes and suddenly an entire town no longer has what was the primary source of employment – and people are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world … There is no doubt [this] has produced populist movements both from the left and the right in many countries in Europe … When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders – very unconventional candidates who had considerable success – then obviously there is something there that is being tapped into: a suspicion of globalization, a desire to rein in its excesses, a suspicion of elites and governing institutions that people feel may not be responsive to their immediate needs.1 So, is globalization in trouble?


pages: 407 words: 116,726

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

It conveys the right idea that these numbers are qualitatively different, even though they are neighboring powers of ten. Anyone who appreciates the difference between a five-figure and a six-figure salary knows that one extra zero can matter a great deal. When the words for powers of ten sound too much alike, we are led astray. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders frequently railed against the exorbitant tax breaks going to “millionaires and billionaires.” Whether you agreed with him or not about the politics, he unfortunately made it sound like, in terms of wealth, millionaires and billionaires were comparable. In fact, billionaires are much, much richer than millionaires.


pages: 450 words: 114,766

Milk! by Mark Kurlansky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, clean water, Donner party, double helix, feminist movement, haute cuisine, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

It is central to the Cornell philosophy that “larger herds are indicative of better managers.” They even encouraged economic policies to help ease small-scale farmers out of dairying, which would completely undo the rural culture, even the landscape, of a number of states such as New York and Vermont. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders wrote in 2012, “There is something very wrong when large processors reap large profits, and family farmers … can barely survive, or must sell their farms.” Between 1970 and 2006, about 573,000 dairy farms in the United States closed, but there was not a corresponding drop in U.S. milk production.


pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

It was a further blow to Hoffman’s relationship with the Democratic Party when it came out that another political organization he cofounded, called Investing in US, had contributed to a Russian-style campaign on Facebook that deliberately disseminated misleading information to help elect a Democrat from Alabama named Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate. At one of Hoffman’s meetings with Obama, the president had warned him that the middle of the country was feeling disenfranchised. The 2016 campaign provided a demonstration: the main surprise was that in both parties, the most populist candidate—Trump in the Republicans’ case, Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’—did far better than anyone had expected by tapping into that feeling in very different ways. Even before the campaign, there were warning signs about the lack of general enthusiasm for the economic future that seemed to be emerging. One of Hoffman’s Silicon Valley friends, Mike Maples, Jr., who runs a venture capital fund and is, like Peter Thiel, one of the Valley’s rare Republican conservatives, went to Dallas to talk with Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk-show host, whom he admires.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

WikiLeaks promised to distribute it with a higher profile and impact than Guccifer could. On July 6, the group reached out to Guccifer again, highlighting the upcoming Democratic convention and asking for any information related to the Clinton campaign. Time was of the essence, the message said, because the damaging material had to leak before Hillary Clinton could win over Bernie Sanders supporters in her run toward the general election.32 On July 14, the GRU provided WikiLeaks with a large encrypted batch of hacked files in an email with the subject “big archive” and the message “a new attempt.”33 After all the discussion, Assange delivered for the GRU. On July 22, just three days before the Democratic convention that would officially nominate Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks posted the largest and most significant trove of DNC files.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

drawn from the dystopic: Serge Kovaleski, Julie Turkewitz, Joseph Goldstein, and Dan Barry, “An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas,” New York Times, December 11, 2016. “Contrary to what”: Todd Gitlin, “What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?,” American Prospect 28, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 23. all were forced to apologize: See the discussion about the three—Hillary Clinton, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley—in Wesley Lowery and David Weigel, “Democrats Struggling to Connect with Black Activists,” Washington Post, July 23, 2015. One of them: Chris Moody, “O’Malley Apologizes for Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ at Liberal Conference,” CNN, July 19, 2015. Online at cnn.com.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

It would take families hiking, to the movies, to fitness clubs and sporting events. Imagine it has as one of its missions the mixing of different classes. For example, in sponsoring cruises it would allocate cabins based on a lottery, without reference to social status. This is not a utopian proposal of Bernie Sanders; it was actually accomplished by KdF, the leisure organization of the German Labor Front. KdF had more than seven thousand paid employees and 135,000 volunteers by 1939, and had sent about 25 million Germans on vacations. The initials stand for “Kraft durch Freude,” which means “strength through joy.”


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In March and April, Russia hacked the accounts of people in the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign (and tried to hack Hillary Clinton personally). On July 22, some 22,000 emails were revealed, right before the Democratic National Convention was to be held. The emails that were made public were carefully selected to ensure strife between supporters of Clinton and her rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders. Their release created division at the moment when the campaign was meant to coalesce. According to American authorities then and since, this hack was an element of a Russian cyberwar. The Trump campaign, however, supported Russia’s effort. Trump publicly requested that Moscow find and release more emails from Hillary Clinton.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

And there he was, deepening his long-standing ties to the Democratic Party politicians for whom he had long been a major fund-raiser. All year, he’d been part of the brain trust around Hillary Clinton. “I’m probably telling you what you know already, but that needs to be silenced,” he emailed Clinton’s staff, about messaging from Bernie Sanders’s competing campaign to Latino and African American voters. “This article gives you everything I discussed with you yesterday,” he said in another message, sending a column critical of Sanders and pressing for negative campaigning. “About to forward some creative. Took your idea and ran,” Clinton’s campaign manager responded.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

This isn’t surprising when in the United States 93 percent of congresspeople and 99 percent of senators hold at least bachelor degrees, compared to a national US average of 32 percent, and more than 90 percent of British MPs are graduates, up from less than half in the 1970s. Politicians of all stripes make the same point. In his celebrated speech about inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama said that “a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.” Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

“But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” he added. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” He briefly ticked through the ways in which the other candidates had tried to fuse an adequate critique of what had gone wrong with an affirmative expression of national identity. Some, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were closer on the critique. Others, like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, were better at offering a vision of national unity without speaking as directly to the dislocation people felt. This was through no fault of their own; it wasn’t an easy thing to do. “What Bobby Kennedy was doing,” he said, searching for a historical analogy and landing on this brief 1968 campaign, “had that spiritual component.”


pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

“We have the votes,” he curtly decreed, but Alexander insisted, “We have a constitutional duty to hear the case.” “The House managers had prepared as if it was the trial of their lifetime, and the president’s lawyers hadn’t prepared at all,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat of Colorado, lamented. “It was overwhelmingly depressing.” Like three other senators in the room—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar—Bennet was still running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kamala Harris had dropped out of the race in early December, followed by Cory Booker in January. For the remaining candidates, impeachment created havoc, coming as it did right before the Iowa caucuses.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), 1707-91. 14.Lou Cornum, “Burial Ground Acknowledgements,” The New Inquiry, October 14, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/burial-ground-acknowledgements/. 15.Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Fastest Growing Occupations,” September 4, 2019, www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm; Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff, “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America,” New York Times, April 18, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/coronavirus-women-essential-workers.html#click=https://t.co/oaw9tHAwiE. 16.Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 109. 17.Seraj Assi, “Why Kibbutzism Isn’t Socialism,” Jacobin Magazine, August 20, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-bernie-sanders-ben-gurion. 18.Rosa Vasilaki, “How Greece Became Europe’s “Shield” against Refugees,” Jacobin Magazine, March 10, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/greece-refugees-european-union-migrants-turkey-border. 19.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 179. 20.Donald Trump quoted in Josh Boak, “AP Fact Check: Trump Plays on Immigration Myths,” PBS, February 8, 2019, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-trump-plays-on-immigration-myths. 21.Caroline Mortimer, “Brexit Campaign Was Largely Funded by Five of UK’s Richest Businessmen,” Independent, April 24, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-eu-campaign-arron-banks-jeremy-hosking-five-uk-richest-businessmen-peter-hargreaves-a7699046.html. 22.Matthew Goodwin and Catlin Milazzo, “Taking Back Control?


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

I haven’t really been following the election—keeping up with the news lately feels even more like work than my shame-pile of unread books. It’s on mute, but Republican front-runner Donald Trump appears to have issued a Christmas tweet demanding credit for an Obama initiative to deport hundreds of families who’d fled violence in Central America. In other news, Bernie Sanders called Trump vulgar for saying Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. God, 2016 is really going to suck, I think. I recognize Akasha the instant she walks in. She sometimes led stretches at standup; I’d mentally nicknamed her Happy Goth. She looks much younger than her age, thirty-eight, and the best description I can come up with is that she almost certainly owns a Harley Quinn costume.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

After months of hemming and hawing over the Keystone XL pipeline, in September 2015 she finally came out against it, saying it was a distraction from other issues. Six months later, she did the same on fracking. “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” Clinton said in a debate against Bernie Sanders. “My answer is a lot shorter. No. I do not support fracking,” Sanders responded.22 It signaled an extraordinary retreat from reality—the reality of lower energy prices; of all the jobs, incomes, and GDP generated by fracking; of the transformation of America from hydrocarbon importer to exporter; of the geopolitical advantage America has gained over Russian president Vladimir Putin and the downgrading of the importance of the Persian Gulf; and of a prodigious achievement of American capitalism.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

It took no time at all for me to feel this urgently, for my own life to feel quite pale and un-thought-through in comparison to what was going on here, despite how foreign and alienating it felt to me. Laura and Dorothy started to talk vaguely about politics: they were devastated by Donald Trump’s election, but skeptical that Bernie Sanders would be able to successfully campaign against him in 2020 or that there was anyone else who might run in his place. “And we just couldn’t support Hillary,” Dorothy clucked, but didn’t say why. The only media they referred to having recently read, though, were books published by Plough, and Plough magazine.


pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

The protest targeted owners of the Harlan, Kentucky–based Blackjewel Coal Company, after it closed without notifying its workers or paying them wages owed. Paychecks bounced. People were on the verge of losing their homes. Prosperino and fellow activists supplemented the work of union officials and evangelical preachers alike, supplying the miners with food and organizing donation campaigns. Then-candidate Bernie Sanders sent pizzas. Eventually, after it seemed like the miners would really pull it off, even Mitch McConnell lent support. Local musicians set up and played songs, including the old labor tune written for another Harlan labor battle nearly a century before: Until the battle’s won, which side are you on?


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Rachel Louise Ensign, “No One Wants to Hire the Fired Wells Fargo Branch Staffers,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-one-wants-to-hire-the-fired-wells-fargo-branch-staffers-11568453400. 25. Julie Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. 26. Bradley Thomas, “Why Bernie Sanders’s Universal Job Guarantee Is Fool’s Gold,” Foundation for Economic Education, Oct. 25, 2019, https://fee.org/articles/why-universal-job-guarantees-are-fool-s-gold. 27. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Penguin, 2019). 28. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Mar. 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment. 29.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

The program’s principal benefactor is David Rubenstein, a white male billionaire who made his fortune as the cofounder and CEO of Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Rubenstein is known for his charitable giving but also for his fierce resistance to closing the carried interest loophole, which enables Rubenstein and other finance moguls to avoid $180 billion in taxes every decade. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all campaigned against the loophole, but efforts to close it were defeated by the American Investment Council, a lobbying organization that was chaired at the time by one of Rubenstein’s lieutenants.1 The measure died three votes short of the majority it needed in 2010—and the loophole advantage hasn’t been seriously challenged since then.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

To take a random example, the famous March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: demands included not just antidiscrimination measures but also a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase” (Touré F. Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin 8.22.2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/), accessed June 10, 2017. 9. David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” Nation, June, 26, 2006. 10. Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employees who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice1 Here’s a quirk about American politics: the majority of white Americans vote for Republicans for president, unless they were born after 1981 or between 1950 and 1954. Why those who were born after 1981 vote differently is easy to understand. They are Millennials or iGen; they lean left on most social issues and many economic ones (as Bernie Sanders discovered). They are less religious than previous generations, and the Republican Party turns them off in a variety of ways. But what’s the story for those born from 1950 to 1954? They strongly favored Democrats through the 1980s and have been roughly evenly divided since then, with a slight lean overall toward the Democrats.


pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

Democrats were thus torn between the inclinations of their older leaders and many big donors to support any act of the Israeli government, and the party’s rank and file, which began pushing hard for a change. This was evident in the unconventional positions on Israel and Palestine taken by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary campaign and in floor fights over the party platform at the convention that year. The split was on display as well in the party leadership struggle that followed the 2016 elections, with the front-runner, Representative Keith Ellison, subjected to smears and innuendo in part because of his outspoken position on Palestine.


pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities by Michael Shellenberger

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business climate, centre right, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark triade / dark tetrad, defund the police, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, gentrification, George Floyd, Golden Gate Park, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, Housing First, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, mandatory minimum, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peoples Temple, Peter Pan Syndrome, pill mill, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, South of Market, San Francisco, Steven Pinker, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, walkable city

By 1971, African Americans were two-thirds of all people arrested for homicide and robbery, despite being less than 10 percent of the population.26 In 1975, black people were murdered at a rate nearly seven times higher than white people.27 The Congressional Black Caucus worked with then-senator Joe Biden, President Bill Clinton, and Senator Bernie Sanders to pass the 1994 crime bill.28 “[H]ow racist can a law be which the Congressional Black Caucus vigorously supported and even considered too weak?” asked Columbia University professor John McWhorter. “If we had asked these black congresspeople in 1986 why they supported these laws, they would have said that they were aimed at breaking the horror of the crack culture, which had turned inner cities into war zones by the mid-1980s.”29 Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic.* Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.30 Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019).31 The overdose crisis is worse in San Francisco than in other cities.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

“What are they going to do? They can’t fire me, I don’t have a job anymore.” Her first media interview took an hour, and she said she “was very tearful. It was very, very raw.” The same organizer from United for Respect then wrote her to ask if she’d like to come to Washington, DC, and meet with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She called her friend MJ, who had moved to Texas from New York and had also worked at Toys “R” Us. “She said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’ve spoken to them on the phone twice. I have to trust my gut instinct.’ She said, ‘Tell her to call me.’” On the basis of Reinhart’s gut, she and MJ went to DC with United for Respect.


pages: 513 words: 141,153

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich

Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Downton Abbey, eat what you kill, electricity market, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, performance metric, profit maximization, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, tulip mania, work culture , zero-sum game

Gensler’s nomination encountered stiff resistance from liberal senators. “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy,” Senator Bernie Sanders said as he announced his intention to block Gensler’s appointment. Gensler, fifty-one at the time, knew what he had to do: Cleanse himself of his now-toxic centrist credentials. He launched an offensive to convince his doubters that, if confirmed, he would embrace a tough-on-Wall-Street approach, transforming the sleepy CFTC into a force to be reckoned with.


pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party by David Kogan

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Brixton riot, centre right, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, falling living standards, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, open borders, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War

The longer people watched the video the less overlap there was. Momentum also added to the official campaign by creating apps to direct people to different constituencies and training new recruits in canvassing techniques. The guru for this was Beth Foster-Ogg: During the general election, I brought in four Bernie Sanders organisers, and we did the persuasive conversations training. My job was to get it done in as many marginals as possible. So, I had to coordinate these four Americans, one of whom had never left the US before, going around the country. Every day we trained a different large group in a marginal, then came back, gave feedback and sent them out again.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Some say this is a process that has also been going on in the Democratic Party, but there are fundamental differences. The extremists in the Republican Party have managed a takeover of the party. In the House, the Tea Party has been sufficiently strong to block legislation that it opposed. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are mainstream “social democrats,” little different (and in many cases slightly to the right) of European social democrats. 39.As political scientist Russell J. Dalton and his coauthors have pointed out, there is a long history of disenchantment with the party system, but the reality is that it is essential to the functioning of American democracy.


pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

“I thought that our employees and most importantly, our investors, needed to see me as a strong leader believing one hundred percent in what our company stood for,” he said.1 Indeed, the caution he expressed to Swanson proved fleeting. Both McClendon and Tom Ward were so bullish that by June each controlled nearly identical wagers on natural gas derivatives worth around $2.3 billion, according to trading data later disclosed by U.S. senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and later reported by Reuters. Among three hundred banks, hedge funds, energy companies, and other traders identified by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, only four held bigger gas bets than McClendon and Ward. McClendon held additional contracts on oil worth another $240 million, according to the data.2 McClendon had vowed to rein in the company’s spending, but a buzz was growing about two new plays.


pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Every Senate Democrat rejected this resolution, which would have invalidated the regulations, and from the outside, you would have concluded that the caucus favored the principles of Internet freedom and rejected corporate profiteering of the World Wide Web. This actually represented an advance; Senate Democrats weren’t always explicitly on board with net neutrality, and to hold the entire caucus, from Bernie Sanders to Ben Nelson and everyone in between, is quite a legislative feat on anything of consequence. But at the exact same time as Senate Democrats voted down net neutrality repeal, many of them were scheming to bring so-called anti-piracy legislation to the floor. The two bills coming up at the same time represents a common, devious tactic: make a big show of solidarity with a community or interest group on one bill, while selling them out on the side.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Brexit Party found themselves in limbo, unable to find any allies in the European Parliament with whom to work: first they were a tragedy, and now they are a farce. Immediate commentary on political events quickly dates. By the time you read this, Jeremy Corbyn will certainly no longer be U.K. Labour Party leader. And if you live outside of the United Kingdom you may not have heard of him. If so, imagine that Bernie Sanders had become the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the United Kingdom in 2017 this was said by political progressive outriders who supported Corbyn, whose unexpected electoral success denied the Conservatives a working majority: “Let’s face it, we’ve all been on a high but looking at the shifting Overton window shows that we’ve been hallucinating new possibilities into existence.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Loneliness and the politics of distrust As early as 1992, researchers began to pick up on a correlation between social isolation and votes for the far-right Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.23 In the Netherlands, researchers crunching data gathered from over 5,000 participants in 2008 found that the less people trusted that those around them would look after their interests and not deliberately do them harm, the more likely they were to vote for PVV, the Netherlands’ nationalist right-wing populist party.24 Across the Atlantic, a 2016 poll by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy asked 3,000 Americans whom they would turn to first if they needed help with challenges ranging from childcare to financial assistance, to advice on relationships, to getting a ride. The results were revealing. Donald Trump voters were significantly more likely than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to have replied not with reference to neighbours, community organisations or friends, but simply with ‘I just rely on myself’.25 They were also more likely to report having fewer close friends, fewer acquaintances and to spend fewer hours a week with both. Other researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute investigating the traits of Republican supporters in the final stages of the Republican primaries in 2016 found that supporters of Donald Trump were twice as likely as those of his main opponent, Ted Cruz, to have seldom or never participated in community activities like sports’ teams, book clubs or parent–teacher organisations.26 The corollary also holds true.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Just as the Romans made a desert and called it peace, the stasists make a plan and call it progress. Often the lines blur completely. Sometimes the grand plan for the future is entirely backwards-looking, trying to recreate an imagined better and more stable past, and is supported by both the stasist Left and Right. Bernie Sanders has said that he ‘would be delighted to work with’ Trump on implementing trade barriers to reduce the restructuring of the economy. Nationalist Fox TV host Tucker Carlson praises Elizabeth Warren’s interventionist plan for the economy, saying ‘she sounds like Donald Trump at his best’.28 Their common enemy is ‘market fundamentalists’ and ‘libertarian zealots’, who don’t know what the solution is but think the chance to find it increases if millions, not just a few people at the top, are looking for it.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

It is not clear what will happen to Americans’ trust in democracy if the 2020 election is a more convincing, more determined rerun of 2016. What is clear is that the 2020 election is being targeted. In February, intelligence officials informed the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that Russia was intervening to support President Trump’s reelection. In March, the FBI informed Bernie Sanders that Russia was trying to tip the scales on his behalf. Intelligence officials have warned that Russia has adjusted their playbook toward newer, less easily detectable tactics to manipulate the 2020 election. Rather than impersonating Americans, they are now nudging American citizens to repeat misinformation to avoid social media platform rules against “inauthentic speech.”


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

But posts in which an out-group member says something objectionable reliably grab their attention. Frequently, they’ll rebroadcast those posts as proof of the other side’s depravity. A Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2016 Democratic primary, for example, might not even notice most tweets from Bernie Sanders supporters. Until one crosses a line. “Bernie bros are so sexist,” the user might tweet, attaching a screenshot of a twenty-three-year-old barista calling Clinton “shrill.” People, as a rule, perceive out-groups as monoliths. When we see a member of an opposing clan misbehave, we assume this represents them all.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

Once again, the insurgent heart of the city has a beat. And so, as I write this in unstable and uncertain January 2017, I dare to hope. Today’s violent convulsions may be signs that the New Gilded Age is thrashing in its death throes. Over the past few years, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders have energized a new generation of activists. The mainstream media finally started talking about economic inequality. Even the International Monetary Fund, a major champion of neoliberalism, admitted that free-market policies hinder growth, concluding, “The evidence of the economic damage from inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution.”


pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

People in power didn’t like the Fed, and at least some especially didn’t like Bernanke’s version of it. The idea that the Fed needed to be “audited” went from crackpot suggestion to rallying cry, with Representative Ron Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, repeatedly introducing bills that would review central bank monetary policy decisions. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent, championed the movement on the political left. The Fed’s financial statements were already audited, but the movement to subject its monetary policy decisions and other internal deliberations to review captured the deep ill will. In a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation, one version of the bill passed the House in 2014 with votes from both parties—333 lawmakers voted for it, 106 of them Democrats.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

So we looked to social media. We had little idea of its eventual power. After we won Iowa, all of us on the team looked at one another and thought—maybe we can win this thing.” Eight years later the trend toward “connected campaigns” would continue on both sides of the political spectrum. One presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, raised more money per month and in total through $27 donations from people connected through social media than rivals who took in the $2,700 maximum per-person donation. Donald Trump didn’t wait for news outlets to cover him—he called them, and tweeted at a prodigious rate. Sanders’s donations exceeded $200 million; Trump’s earned-media coverage exceeded $4 billion.


pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

However, by 1970—the year before the U.S. would fall into what would become a perpetual and growing trade deficit—the unions’ position had jelled into outright opposition to the Kennedy Round of trade liberalization. In May 1970, the AFL-CIO circulated a paper around Washington that read like a 2016 Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders speech. “The United States position on world trade deteriorated in the 1960’s, with an adverse impact on American workers, communities, and industries,” the union paper declared. Citing “managed [foreign] national economies with direct and indirect government barriers to imports and aid to exports,” a “skyrocketing rise of investments by U.S. companies in foreign subsidiaries and the spread of U.S.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

This is also the environment, something we all enjoy, and society should be ready to pay for it, just as it is willing to pay for trees. SMART KEYNESIANISM: SUBSIDIZING THE COMMON GOOD In 2018, a very different approach based on subsidizing work is gaining ground in the US Democratic party. In 2019, presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren have all proposed some kind of federal guarantee, whereby any American who wanted to work would be entitled to a good job ($15 an hour with retirement and health benefits on par with other federal employees, childcare assistance, and twelve weeks of paid family leave) in community service, home care, park maintenance, etc.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Climate became a major issue in the Democratic primaries. Some candidates called for a ban on fracking. Climate now polled as a major issue, especially for millennial voters. During the primary campaigns, candidates vied over climate action plans. Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion program and Elizabeth Warren’s $4 trillion paled next to Bernie Sanders’s $16.3 trillion. Sanders’s long list of would-be initiatives included $35 billion for people to reforest their front lawns or turn them into “food-producing spaces” as well as “ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground” and ban both exports and imports of oil. But how you ban imports and exports of oil and at the same time ban domestic production of oil—and still have a functioning economy and society—was left unexplained.


pages: 492 words: 152,167

Rikers: An Oral History by Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, COVID-19, crack epidemic, housing justice, Saturday Night Live, social distancing

Meanwhile, on June 27, 2019, a twenty-seven-year-old transgender woman, Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, died alone in a solitary confinement cell in the woman’s jail on Rikers after an epileptic seizure. She was being held on $500 bail. Her death highlighted a series of systemic failures and spurred calls from people like the U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to end solitary entirely. — MARCUS GRICE, detained multiple stints, 1994 to 2017: My first time incarcerated in Rikers Island, I was fifteen. I was not supposed to hit Rikers Island, but they sort of finagled it, so I didn’t go to juvenile. I spent a year there.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve. As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies.


pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality by Blake J. Harris

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, airport security, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, call centre, Carl Icahn, company town, computer vision, cryptocurrency, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, financial independence, game design, Grace Hopper, hype cycle, illegal immigration, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, sensor fusion, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, unpaid internship, white picket fence

“That’s crazy . . .” Talk of the First Amendment soon segued into talk about the Second (which Luckey strongly believed in for constitutional reasons; Chen, too, for grew-up-in-Texas reasons), and then eventually the conversation spiraled into the upcoming presidential election. “Am I correct to assume that Bernie Sanders is superpopular these days over at the Commune?” Chen asked. Luckey laughed. “Yes, you would be correct.” “And you?” “Well,” Luckey began, “I think there’s a lot to like about Bernie. But personally, I’m pretty jazzed about Donald J. Trump.” “Wait. What?!” Joe Chen asked, taken aback. “Did you say Trump?”


pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

The opposition crossed party lines, with 85 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans, and 81 percent of independents saying Citizens United was wrongly decided. Even five years after the ruling, an overwhelming majority of Americans polled, 78 percent, said the ruling should be overturned. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the two main Democratic candidates in the 2016 presidential race, both said that overturning Citizens United would be a litmus test for their Supreme Court nominees—a level of opposition known to only a handful of notorious cases in American history, such as Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision.69 Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the public reaction to the Citizens United decision came in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, a series of populist political protests against income inequality and the role of money in politics that began in New York and, according to the Washington Post, quickly “spread like wildfire around the country.”


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At the risk of caricature, left-wing populists tend to see everyone other than the dominant elite as the oppressed. Their aim is not to overturn the system, but to get a greater share of the benefits for the masses. They do not seek revolution, only a reorientation of the system, with the government typically doing more and the market less. A left-wing populist leader like Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016, saw free trade as hurting the American people. He wanted less of it. He also campaigned for universal health care and free public college education, and for more humane treatment of immigrants. Left-wing populists do not distinguish among people in the country; they typically want a better deal for all the oppressed.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

In other post-crisis environments, the electorate may demand something more like retribution, rather than reform, if they are angry over rising inequality or fearful of foreign threats. That is the mood in many countries now, the United States included. To an extent not seen in many decades, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has been dominated by populists, led on the right by the real estate billionaire Donald Trump and on the left by Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a political revolution against the “billionaire class.” The language of class warfare rarely bodes well for an economy, especially if it pushes mainstream candidates to adopt more radical positions. Many of the Republican presidential candidates are vying with Trump to stake out the most hard-line positions on issues such as immigration, which could undermine the advantage the United States enjoys as a magnet for foreign talent.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Social media undoubtedly became an important channel that allowed the Trump campaign to tap into people’s discontents, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal bears witness, but it was not in itself the cause of people’s concerns. The New Luddites Globalization has moved to center stage of the political debate. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made blistering assaults on trade agreements a main theme of their campaigns. Trump’s win was in part attributable to the adverse impacts of trade on parts of the labor market, and it stands to reason that his campaign promises to renegotiate trade deals, which he claimed had benefited other countries at the expense of American workers, appealed to those who felt that they had lost out to globalization.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

As if to make sure that he stoked enough controversy, Watson added that gene-editing could also be used to enhance people’s looks. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”2 Watson considered himself a political progressive. He supported Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders. His advocacy for gene editing, he insisted, was because he wanted to improve the lot of the less fortunate. But as the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel noted, “Watson’s language contains more than a whiff of the old eugenic sensibility.”3 It was a whiff that was particularly odious wafting from Cold Spring Harbor, given the lab’s long history of fomenting that eugenic sensibility.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

But none of the instalments of American pandemic relief put climate spending at the centre. When President Biden finally got around to it, the total outlay was only in the hundreds of billions of dollars – a far cry from the 5 per cent of GDP suggested by Michael Bloomberg and Hank Paulson, no climate radicals, and even further from proposals championed by Senators Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders. What was perhaps most striking about this failure was that, for the first time, it was enacted by politicians who were at least speaking the language of climate alarm, and asking to be judged – in forum after forum, conference after conference – by its existential standards. By those standards, of course, they have failed, letting the 1.5°C target slip further and further from reach, watching emissions stockpile in the atmosphere year after year as they give ever more heated speeches about the stakes of inaction.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

Around that time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid—the only politician I knew who could match my clipped brevity on the phone—invited me to attend the regular lunch of the Senate Democratic caucus, our supposed allies on the Hill. But liberal populists dominated the room, and they didn’t display much affection toward me. I remember Senator Bernie Sanders, the lefty firebrand from Vermont, yelling about how the President had only Wall Street people around him. I listed some of the progressive economists on the President’s team, including Christy Romer, Jared Bernstein, Gene Sperling, and Alan Krueger, my chief economist at Treasury. I explained that I had never worked on Wall Street.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Wealth Taxes. Wealth taxes, imposed on those above a certain wealth threshold, have started to gain traction over the last decade. For example, in 1989 President Mitterrand introduced a tax in France on wealth levels above €1.3 million, which was reduced in scope by President Macron in 2017. In the US, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both ran for president in 2020, have proposed wealth taxes. Sanders’s 2020 plan was to impose a 2 percent wealth tax on households with wealth in excess of $50 million, rising gradually to 8 percent for those whose wealth exceeds $10 billion. Warren’s most recent proposal is to impose a 2 percent wealth tax on households with wealth above $50 million and a 4 percent tax on those with wealth in excess of $1 billion.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

After the Second World War, every additional dollar of borrowing produced around 50 cents of new investment. In recent decades, investment has fallen to below 10 cents for every dollar borrowed. 38. Cited by Foroohar, Makers and Takers, p. 145. 39. Transcripts of the Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, 12–13 September 2012, pp. 178–9. 40. Data cited by Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, ‘Schumer and Sanders: Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks’, New York Times, 3 February 2019. An article in The Atlantic claimed that total stock buybacks over the previous decade totalled $6.9 trillion; see Nick Hanauer, ‘Stock Buybacks are Killing the American Economy’, The Atlantic, 8 February 2015. 41.


pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, confounding variable, corporate governance, cosmological principle, CRISPR, crony capitalism, dark matter, declining real wages, democratizing finance, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, land tenure, low skilled workers, means of production, mega-rich, Network effects, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, universal basic income, very high income, working-age population, zero-sum game

These sentiments are widely shared. Within eighteen months of its publication in 2013, a 700-page academic tome on capitalist inequality had sold 1.5 million copies and risen to the top of the New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list. In the Democratic Party primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders’s relentless denunciation of the “billionaire class” roused large crowds and elicited millions of small donations from grassroots supporters. Even the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has publicly acknowledged the issue by endorsing a report on how to “reform the system of income distribution.”


pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”200 Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton. Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

As Clinton’s campaign got off the ground and her press pack grew, Cramer got a rare opportunity to spend time with the candidate alone for a profile. “I walked into a pin factory in New Hampshire with her, and the other reporters saw me and they hated me,” she said. BuzzFeed’s correspondent would have to make the most of that shot, because soon after, when Bernie Sanders won the Iowa primary, the Clinton campaign abruptly cut off access. They deemed the risk of bad press worthwhile only if the interview was going to be on TV. Cramer had hoped to cover Clinton as her father had covered the 1988 presidential candidates in his classic book What It Takes, considered by many the best campaign narrative ever written.


pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

I come from a middle-class background; my dad’s in the military. I went to college to get a job, not to get an education. As a freshman, I was already trying to find a place to work. In New York, I’d covered Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. When I was in Vermont, I’d covered a gubernatorial race, as well as Bernie Sanders running for the House of Representatives. I had mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional races under my belt. Dave Sirulnick was interested in having serious news, so I suggested we cover the presidential campaign. He said, “I’d have to have people who are really passionate about doing it.” And I said, “That would be me.”


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

The Romney-Ryan ticket that Obama defeated to win reelection presented the country with alternatives that, familiar partisan disagreements aside, could hardly have been more congenial to the incumbent ruling class. In all these ways, Barack Obama’s 2012 victory set a high-water mark for American meritocracy. The crisis had not passed, however, and meritocracy’s redemption proved illusory. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—openly populist candidates who campaigned aggressively against the status quo—seized the initiative in both primaries leading up to the 2016 presidential election. When defensive political insiders dismissed the populist uprisings as a “summer of silliness,” they betrayed their own wrong-footed confusion.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

If so, the explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human welfare. Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade.


pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

active measures, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, death from overwork, death of newspapers, desegregation, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, friendly fire, full employment, God and Mammon, Herman Kahn, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, jobless men, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Another disabled Vietnam veteran, a professor of history and political science at York College in Pennsylvania named Philip Avillo, wrote in a local newspaper: “Yes, we need to support our men and women under arms. But let’s support them by bringing them home; not by condoning this barbarous, violent policy.” In Salt Lake City, hundreds of demonstrators, many with children, marched through the city’s main streets chanting antiwar slogans. In Vermont, which had just elected Socialist Bernie Sanders to Congress, over 2000 demonstrators disrupted a speech by the governor at the state house, and in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, 300 protesters walked through the downtown area, asking shop owners to close their doors in solidarity. On January 26, nine days after the beginning of the war, over 150,000 people marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., and listened to speakers denounce the war, including the movie stars Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.


Lonely Planet Ireland by Lonely Planet

bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Bob Geldof, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, classic study, country house hotel, credit crunch, Easter island, G4S, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacquard loom, Kickstarter, land reform, reserve currency, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, young professional

They're run out of Dalkey Castle & Heritage Centre. oDalkey Book FestivalLITERATURE (www.dalkeybookfestival.org; hmid-Jun) Salman Rushdie is an acknowledged fan, which must help its organisers, Sian Smyth and David McWilliams, to always draw some big award-winning names – in 2017 Louis de Bernières, Marlon James and Bernie Sanders were speakers. 5Eating & Drinking Dalkey's culinary credentials are excellent, mostly because its affluent population wouldn't stand for anything else. There's a good choice of everything from healthy cafe bites to fine dining. oSelect StoresHEALTH FOOD€ ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.selectstores.ie; 1 Railway Rd; mains €4-12; h8am-6pm, closed Sun Oct-Apr; dDalkey) This long-established food emporium has been transformed into a one-stop shop for all things good for you: the award-winning kitchen rolls out veggie burgers, fresh juices, salads and, in the mornings, a range of healthy breakfasts.


Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business climate, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, death of newspapers, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equal pay for equal work, facts on the ground, feminist movement, financial deregulation, full employment, global village, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, land reform, low interest rates, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, oil shock, open borders, Peoples Temple, Phillips curve, Potemkin village, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, three-martini lunch, traveling salesman, unemployed young men, union organizing, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, wages for housework, walking around money, War on Poverty, white flight, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

He called twenty phone numbers randomly, asking the recipient to fill in the blank: “The presidential election campaign so far has been mainly _______.” Sixty percent used the same word as Commoner’s commercial. The Citizens got even fewer votes than the Libertarians. Though in the college town of Burlington, Vermont, a Marxist gadfly with a thick Brooklyn accent named Bernie Sanders won an unlikely mayoral victory. Although, on the other side of the country and the ideological spectrum, the new state senator from the western San Fernando Valley would be Ed Davis—the sheriff of Los Angeles County who published a pro–death penalty open letter declaring “all-out war against you who have been literally getting away with murder,” proposed “hang ’em at the airport” as a solution to hijacking, and complained that the “federal government was out to force me to hire four-foot-eleven-inch transvestite morons” when he was sheriff of Los Angeles County