Climategate

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pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

New York Times, December 5, 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06pubed.html?scp=54&sq=climategate&st=nyt. 70. Richert, C. Inhofe Claims That E-Mails “Debunk” Science Behind Climate Change. Politifact.com, December 11, 2009. http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/dec/11/james-inhofe/inhofe-claims-cru-e-mails-debunk-science-behind-cl. 71. Henig, J. “Climategate”: Hacked E-Mails Show Climate Scientists in a Bad Light but Don’t Change Scientific Consensus on Global Warming. FactCheck.org, December 10, 2009. www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate. 72. Borenstein, S., et al. Review: E-Mails Show Pettiness, Not Fraud.

Review: E-Mails Show Pettiness, Not Fraud. Associated Press, December 12, 2009. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34392959/ns/us_news-environment. 73. McClatchy Washington Bureau. Commentary: “Climategate” Is a Lesson in the Politics of Science. McClatchy Newspapers, December 15, 2009. www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/12/15/v-print/80663/commentary-climategate-is-a-lesson.html. [opinion] 74. Sensenbrenner, F. J. Sensenbrenner Urges IPCC to Exclude Climategate Scientists. Letters from the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, December 8, 2009. http://republicans.globalwarming.house.gov/Press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=2749. 75.

BBC News, December 5, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8387737.stm. 81. US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff. “Consensus” Exposed: The CRU Controversy. Washington, DC: US Senate, 2010. 82. Laing, A. “Climategate” Professor Phil Jones “Considered Suicide over Email Scandal.” Daily Telegraph, February 7, 2010. www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7180154/Climategate-Professor-Phil-Jones-considered-suicide-over-email-scandal.html. 83. Schneider, S. Science as a Contact Sport. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2009. 84. Fogarty, D. Climate Debate Gets Ugly as World Moves to Curb CO2.


pages: 217 words: 61,407

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald

Bakken shale, carbon tax, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means of production, Medieval Warm Period, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, peak oil, price discovery process, rising living standards, sceptred isle, South China Sea, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

And their moral bankruptcy in promoting the notion of global warming using apparently fraudulent statistics is reprehensible; hopefully they will be duly punished, in this world or the next. The history of the global warming fraud has been detailed in a number of books published recently, including a number on the Climategate emails alone. One good analysis of the malfeasance of the climate scientists is The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, published by Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise in 2011.18 One of the earliest Climategate emails shows how the results of research were tailored to a political agenda. On July 29, 1999, Adam Markham of WWF (a non-government organization formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund) wrote to University of East Anglia climate scientists Mike Hulme and Nicola Sheard about a paper that Hulme and Sheard had written about climate change in Australasia: “I’m sure you will get some comments direct from Mike Rae in WWF Australia, but I wanted to pass on the gist of what they’ve said to me so far.

Humlum, “The Long Sunspot Cycle 23 Predicts a Significant Temperature Decrease in Cycle 24,” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, May 2012. 6.James Delingpole, “Lovelock Goes Mad for Shale Gas,” Telegraph, June 16, 2012, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100165783/lovelock-goes-mad-for-shale-gas/. Chapter 2: A Less Giving Sun 1.John Costella, ed., The Climategate Emails (Melbourne, Victoria: Lavoisier Group, March 2010), http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf. 2.Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, “Variation of Cosmic Ray Flux and Global Cloud Coverage—a Missing Link in Solar-Climate Relationships,” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 59 (1997): 1225. 3.Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen, “Length of the Solar Cycle: An Indicator of Solar Activity Closely Associated with Climate,” Science 254 (1991): 698–700. 4.C.

The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things. If all that is true, you will ask, how is it that the United Nations–derived Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came up with its ice cap–melting prediction of a 6°C increase in average global temperature by the end of this century? The notorious Climategate emails,1 released on November 20, 2009, appear to show scientists manipulating data to produce the answers they desired, bullying those who disagreed with them, plotting against scientific journal editors, and deliberately concocting misleading figures, among other apparent acts of willful malfeasance.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

[95] The Climategate Emails, John Costella, ed., (The Levoisier Group, March 2010), http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf. [96] Ibid., 10. [97] Ibid., 30. [98] Ibid., 34. [99] Ibid., 33. [100] Ibid., 34. [101] Ibid., 12. [102] Ibid., 144. [103] Ibid., 89. [104] Ibid., 57. [105] Ibid., 129. [106] James Delingpole was the author. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/ [107] “Colleague defends ‘ClimateGate’ professor,” BBC, December 4, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi /8396035.stm

Innosight Executive Briefing, Winter 2012. http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whips-through-corporate-america_final2012.pdf. “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.” r/Politics, no date. http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/kv84b/this_is_the_declaration_of_the_occupation_of_new/. Delingpole, James. “Climategate: The final nail in the coffin of ‘Antropogenic Global Warming’?” The Telegraph, November 20, 2009. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/. Dollar, John. “The Man Who Predicted an Earthquake.” The Guardian, April 5, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/laquila-earthquake-prediction-giampaolo-giuliani.

Coverage of the CRU emails played out in an erratic manner typical of the global information sphere. Mass media, uncertain what to make of the story, at first shied away from it, but the content of the emails exploded across the blogosphere, beginning with the vital community around Climate Audit. On November 20, The Telegraph published a tendentious column titled “Climategate: The final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change?’”[106] With that, the incident received its permanent, if unimaginative, name. The news media now rushed in, with the slant of coverage wholly dependent on the source’s editorial line on man-made climate change. CRU scientists, just as unimaginatively, insisted they had been taken out of context, and that the episode unmasked a campaign of “character assassination” conducted by “skeptics.”[107] The consequences were uncertain.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

<https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-barstow-susanne-craig-and-russ-buettner-new-york-times> ‘About Us’. Spaceship Media. n.d. <https://spaceshipmedia.org/about/> Abramson, Jill. Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. Adam, David. ‘“Climategate” review clears scientists of dishonesty over data’. The Guardian, 7 July 2010. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/07/climategate-review-clears-scientists-dishonesty> Adam, David. ‘Confidence in climate science remains strong, poll shows’. The Guardian, 11 June 2010. <https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jun/11/confidence-climate-science-poll> Addison, Adrian.

‘Offshore secrets: UK property purchases – interactive map’. The Guardian, 26 November 2012. <http://www.theguardian.com/uk/interactive/2012/nov/26/offshore-secrets-uk-property-purchases-interactive-map> Leiserowitz, A., E. Maibach, C. Roser-Renouf, N. Smith and E. Dawson. ‘Climategate, Public Opinion, and the Loss of Trust’. American Behavioral Scientist, 13 September 2012. <https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/climategate-public-opinion-and-the-loss-of-trust/> Lemon, Jason. ‘Over 70% of Americans Prefer a National Quarantine as Trump Eyes Lifting Restrictions by Easter, Poll Shows’. Newsweek, 25 March 2020. <https://www.newsweek.com/over-70-americans-prefer-national-quarantine-trump-eyes-lifting-restrictions-easter-pollshows-1494174> Leopold, Jason, Emma Loop, Zoe Tillman, Anthony Cormier and Ellie Hall.

NPR Special Series: The Coronvirus Crisis, 17 March 2020. <https://www.npr.org/2020/03/17/816680033/poll-americans-dont-trust-what-they-re-hearing-from-trump-on-coronavirus> Morello, Lauren. ‘“Climategate” Scientist Admits “Awful E-Mails,” but Peers Say IPCC Conclusions Remain Sound’. The New York Times, 2 March 2010. <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/03/02/02climatewire-climategate-scientist-admits-awful-e-mails-b-66224.html?pagewanted=1> Mullin, Chris. ‘We’ll All Be Murdered in Our Beds: The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain by Duncan Campbell – review’. The Observer, 23 May 2016.


pages: 258 words: 77,601

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

Environmental Protection Agency over its ruling that carbon dioxide and other global warming gases are a threat to human health and welfare. Many Republicans, some of whom also reject the science of evolution and believe the earth was created six thousand years ago and that humans and dinosaurs walked together, have followed his lead. As for the so-called Climategate brouhaha (where more than one thousand emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia were stolen or leaked by hackers), a fifth investigation, this time led by Republicans in response to a request from one of their own, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, again found no “evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s] understanding of climate change science.”

The world’s largest oil company had admitted that it funded these efforts but promised in 2008 it would stop giving money to groups that lobbied against the need to find clean-energy sources. It’s also an embarrassment for those who, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, deny the existence of climate change—or admit that it’s happening but say we can’t and shouldn’t do anything about it. Of course, they will continue to repeat the same discredited points about “Climategate” and medieval warm periods and CO2 as plant food, and they’ll continue to take the advice of climate-change denial PR people like Tom Harris to bombard the media with opinion articles, letters to editors, and comments under online articles. Some people rightly point out that we should look at the science and not at who is paying for the research.

Meanwhile, evidence that our fossil-fuel addiction contributes to dangerous climate change and harms the environment in other ways mounts every day, with oil spills, pipeline leaks, and other events. Let’s take a look at some of what we are now learning. Six independent investigations have found that the unimaginatively named Climategate was anything but the scandal or “nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming” that deniers claimed. After the illegal theft and release of emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, some reports found that the scientists could have been more open about sharing data; however, their science was rigorous and sound.


pages: 407 words: 108,030

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

Here’s the Problem,” Washington Post, January 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/01/29/ted-cruz-keeps-saying-that-satellites-dont-show-warming-heres-the-problem/; Lauren Carroll, “Ted Cruz’s World’s on Fire, but Not for the Last 17 Years,” Politifact, March 20, 2015, https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/20/ted-cruz/ted-cruzs-worlds-fire-not-last-17-years/. 62. Jeremy Schulman, “Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said about Global Warming,” Mother Jones, December 12, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/trump-climate-timeline/. 63. Kate Sheppard, “Climategate: What Really Happened?” Mother Jones, April 21, 2011, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2011/04/history-of-climategate/. 64. “What If You Held a Conference, and No (Real) Scientists Came?” RealClimate, January 30, 2008, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/what-if-you-held-a-conference-and-no-real-scientists-came/comment-page-8/; Brendan Montague, “I Crashed a Climate Change Denial Conference in Last Vegas,” Vice, July 22, 2014, https://www.vice.com/en/article/7bap4x/las-vegas-climate-change-denial-brendan-montague-101; https://climateconference.heartland.org/.

Notably, even when this was debunked, they continued to make the claim.61 Conspiracy Theories Of course. President Trump has made numerous claims over the years about how climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to hurt American manufacturing, that the scientists are politically biased, etc.62 During the 2009 Climategate debacle, deniers seized on some inappropriate emails sent by scientists at the University of East Anglia, and tried to use them to show that there was a worldwide conspiracy of climate scientists.63 Reliance on Fake Experts Here the issue is a tad more subtle. Some of the work cited by climate skeptics has been done by actual scientists (some with credentials in climate science), but their work has been cherry-picked with great preference for preexisting views that are hostile to climate change.

Kate Yoder, “Russian Trolls Shared Some Truly Terrible Climate Change Memes,” Grist, May 1, 2018, https://grist.org/article/russian-trolls-shared-some-truly-terrible-climate-change-memes/; Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, “These Provocative Images Show Russian Trolls Sought to Inflame Debate over Climate Change, Fracking and Dakota Pipeline,” Washington Post, March 1, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/01/congress-russians-trolls-sought-to-inflame-u-s-debate-on-climate-change-fracking-and-dakota-pipeline/; Rebecca Leber and A.J. Vicens, “7 Years Before Russia Hacked the Election, Someone Did the Same Thing to Climate Scientists,” Mother Jones, January/February 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/climategate-wikileaks-russia-trump-hacking/. 26. Carolyn Y. Johnson, “Russian Trolls and Twitter Bots Exploit Vaccine Controversy,” Washington Post, August 23, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/08/23/russian-trolls-twitter-bots-exploit-vaccine-controversy/; Jessica Glenza, “Russian Trolls ‘Spreading Discord’ over Vaccine Safety Online,” Guardian, August 23, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/23/russian-trolls-spread-vaccine-misinformation-on-twitter. 27.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, more and more information is revealed about public figures, to the point where it becomes virtually impossible to judge them on the basis of their public words alone. Social media archives and email leaks allow the world to view and criticize their behavior, whether or not it is obviously relevant to their public status and credibility. The email hacking scandal known as “Climategate” saw thousands of emails being leaked from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in 2009–11, aimed at undermining both the authority of climate science but also the neutrality and objectivity of climate scientists themselves. This form of trolling follows the logic of encryption and interception, and harnesses them as weapons of cultural war.

A/B testing, 199 Acorn, 152 ad hominem attacks, 27, 124, 195 addiction, 83, 105, 116–17, 172–3, 186–7, 225 advertising, 14, 139–41, 143, 148, 178, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 aerial bombing, 19, 125, 135, 138, 143, 180 Affectiva, 188 affective computing, 12, 141, 188 Agent Orange, 205 Alabama, United States, 154 alcoholism, 100, 115, 117 algorithms, 150, 169, 185, 188–9 Alsace, 90 alt-right, 15, 22, 50, 131, 174, 196, 209 alternative facts, 3 Amazon, 150, 173, 175, 185, 186, 187, 192, 199, 201 American Association for the Advancement of Science, 24 American Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 American Pain Relief Society, 107 anaesthetics, 104, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 87 Anthropocene, 206, 213, 215, 216 antibiotics, 205 antitrust laws, 220 Appalachia, 90, 100 Apple, 156, 185, 187 Arab Spring (2011), 123 Arendt, Hannah, xiv, 19, 23, 26, 53, 219 Aristotle, 35, 95–6 arrogance, 39, 47, 50 artificial intelligence (AI), 12–13, 140–41, 183, 216–17 artificial video footage, 15 Ashby, Ross, 181 asymmetrical war, 146 atheism, 34, 35, 209 attention economy, 21 austerity, 100–101, 225 Australia, 103 Australian, 192 Austria, 14, 60, 128, 153–75 Austria-Hungary (1867–1918), 153–4, 159 authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 108, 114, 118–19, 211–12 autocracy, 16, 20, 202 Babis, Andrej, 26 Bacon, Francis, 34, 35, 95, 97 Bank of England, 32, 33, 55, 64 Banks, Aaron, 26 Bannon, Steve, 21, 22, 60–61 Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Beck Depression Inventory, 107 Berlusconi, Silvio, 202 Bernays, Edward, 14–15, 16, 143 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud), 110 Bezos, Jeff, 150, 173 Big Data, 185–93, 198–201 Big Government, 65 Big Science, 180 Bilbao, Spain, 84 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 127 Birmingham, West Midlands, 85 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 Blackpool, Lancashire, 100 blind peer reviewing, 48, 139, 195 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 blue sky research, 133 body politic, 92–119 Bologna, Italy, 96 bookkeeping, 47, 49, 54 Booth, Charles, 74 Boston, Massachusetts, 48 Boyle, Robert, 48–50, 51–2 BP oil spill (2010), 89 brainwashing, 178 Breitbart, 22, 174 Brexit (2016–), xiv, 23 and education, 85 and elites, 33, 50, 61 and inequality, 61, 77 and NHS, 93 and opinion polling, 80–81 as self-harm, 44, 146 and statistics, 61 Unite for Europe march, 23 Vote Leave, 50, 93 British Futures, 65 Brooks, Rosa, 216 bullying, 113 Bureau of Labor, 74 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 77 Bush, George Walker, 77, 136 cadaverous research, 96, 98 call-out culture, 195 Calvinism, 35 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 85 University, 84, 151 Cambridge Analytica, 175, 191, 196, 199 Cameron, David, 33, 73, 100 cancer, 105 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 74 capital punishment, 92, 118 car accidents, 112–13 cargo-cult science, 50 Carney, Mark, 33 cartography, 59 Case, Anne, 99–100, 102, 115 Catholicism, 34 Cato Institute, 158 Cavendish, William, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, 34 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Center for Policy Studies, 164 chappe system, 129, 182 Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 34, 68, 73 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Chelsea, London, 100 Chevillet, Mark, 176 Chicago School, 160 China, 13, 15, 103, 145, 207 chloroform, 104 cholera, 130 Chongqing, China, 13 chronic pain, 102, 105, 106, 109 see also pain Churchill, Winston, 138 citizen science, 215, 216 civil rights movements, 21, 194 civilians, 43, 143, 204 von Clausewitz, Carl, 128–35, 141–7, 152 and defeat, 144–6 and emotion, 141–6, 197 and great leaders, 146–7, 156, 180–81 and intelligence, 134–5, 180–81 and Napoleon, 128–30, 133, 146–7 and soldiers, number of, 133–4 war, definition of, 130, 141, 193 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 Climate Mobilization, 213–14 climate-gate (2009), 195 Clinton, Hillary, 27, 63, 77, 99, 197, 214 Clinton, William “Bill,” 77 coal mining, 90 cognitive behavioral therapy, 107 Cold War, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 180, 182–4, 185, 223 and disruption, 204–5 intelligence agencies, 183 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 nuclear weapons, 135, 180 scenting, 135–6 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 space race, 137 and telepathy, 177–8 colonialism, 59–61, 224 commercial intelligence, 152 conscription, 127 Conservative Party, 80, 154, 160, 163, 166 Constitution of Liberty, The (Hayek), 160 consumer culture, 90, 104, 139 contraceptive pill, 94 Conway, Kellyanne, 3, 5 coordination, 148 Corbyn, Jeremy, 5, 6, 65, 80, 81, 197, 221 corporal punishment, 92 creative class, 84, 151 Cromwell, Oliver, 57, 59, 73 crop failures, 56 Crutzen, Paul, 206 culture war, xvii Cummings, Dominic, 50 currency, 166, 168 cutting, 115 cyber warfare, xii, 42, 43, 123, 126, 200, 212 Czech Republic, 103 Daily Mail, ix Damasio, Antonio, 208 Darwin, Charles, 8, 140, 142, 157, 171, 174, 179 Dash, 187 data, 49, 55, 57–8, 135, 151, 185–93, 198–201 Dawkins, Richard, 207, 209 death, 37, 44–5, 66–7, 91–101 and authoritarian values, 92–4, 101–2, 211, 224 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 and Descartes, 37, 91 and Hobbes, 44–5, 67, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 life expectancy, 62, 68–71, 72, 92, 100–101, 115, 224 suicide, 100, 101, 115 and Thiel, 149, 151 death penalty, 92, 118 Deaton, Angus, 99–100, 102, 115 DeepMind, 218 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Delingpole, James, 22 demagogues, 11, 145, 146, 207 Democratic Party, 77, 79, 85 Denmark, 34, 151 depression, 103, 107 derivatives, 168, 172 Descartes, René, xiii, 36–9, 57, 147 and body, 36–8, 91, 96–7, 98, 104 and doubt, 36–8, 39, 46, 52 and dualism, 36–8, 39, 86, 94, 131, 139–40, 179, 186, 223 and nature, 37, 38, 86, 203 and pain, 104, 105 Descartes’ Error (Damasio), 208 Devonshire, Earl of, see Cavendish, William digital divide, 184 direct democracy, 202 disempowerment, 20, 22, 106, 113–19 disruption, 18, 20, 146, 147, 151, 171, 175 dog whistle politics, 200 Donors Trust, 165 Dorling, Danny, 100 Downs Survey (1655), 57, 59, 73 doxing, 195 drone warfare, 43, 194 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 74 Dugan, Regina, 176–7 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 e-democracy, 184 Echo, 187 ecocide, 205 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (Mises), 154, 166 economics, 59, 153–75 Economist, 85, 99 education, 85, 90–91 electroencephalography (EEG), 140 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 embodied knowledge, 162 emotion and advertising, 14 artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and crowd-based politics, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 21, 23–7 Darwin’s analysis, 8, 140 Descartes on, 94, 131 and experts, 53, 60, 64, 66, 90 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Hobbes on, 39, 41 James’ analysis, 140 and markets, 168, 175 moral, 21 and nationalism, 71, 210 pain, 102–19 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 and war, 124–6, 142 empathy, 5, 12, 65, 102, 104, 109, 112, 118, 177, 179, 197 engagement, 7, 219 England Bank of England founded (1694), 55 bills of mortality, 68–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 civil servants, 54 Civil War (1642–51), 33–4, 45, 53 Elizabethan era (1558–1603), 51 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 hospitals, 57 Irish War (1649–53), 59 national debt, 55 Parliament, 54, 55 plagues, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 127 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 208, 218 tax collection, 54 Treasury, 54 see also United Kingdom English Defense League, ix entrepreneurship, 149, 156, 162 environment, 21, 26, 50, 61, 86, 165, 204–7, 213–16 climate change, 26, 50, 165, 205–7, 213–16 flying insects, decline of, 205, 215 Environmental Protection Agency, 23 ether, 104 European Commission, 60 European Space Agency, 175 European Union (EU), xiv, 22, 60 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit and elites, 60, 145, 202 euro, 60, 78 Greek bailout (2015), 31 immigration, 60 and nationalism, 60, 145, 146 quantitative easing, 31 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 Exeter, Devon, 85 experts and crowd-based politics, 5, 6, 23, 25, 27 Hayek on, 162–4, 170 and representative democracy, 7 and statistics, 62–91 and technocracy, 53–61, 78, 87, 89, 90 trust in, 25–33, 63–4, 66, 74–5, 77–9, 170, 202 violence of, 59–61 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, The (Darwin), 8, 140 Exxon, 165 Facebook, xvi, 15, 201 advertising, 190, 192, 199, 219, 220 data mining, 49, 185, 189, 190, 191, 192, 198, 219 and dog whistle politics, 200 and emotional artificial intelligence, 140 as engagement machine, 219 and fake news, 199 and haptics, 176, 182 and oligarchy, 174 and psychological profiling, 124 and Russia, 199 and sentiment analysis, 188 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186 and Thiel, 149, 150 and unity, 197–8 weaponization of, 18 facial recognition, 13, 188–9 failed states, 42 fake news, 8, 15, 199 Farage, Nigel, 65 fascism, 154, 203, 209 fear, 11–12, 16–22, 34, 40–45, 52, 60, 142 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 feeling, definition of, xii feminism, 66, 194 Fifth Amendment, 44 fight or flight, 111, 114 Financial Times, 15 first past the post, 13 First World War, see World War I Fitbit, 187 fixed currency exchange rates, 166 Florida, Richard, 84 flu, 67, 191 flying insects, 205, 215 France censuses, 66, 73 conscription introduced (1793), 127 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92 Hobbes in (1640–51), 33–4, 41–2 Le Bon’s crowd psychology, 8–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 38 life expectancy, 101 Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), see Napoleonic Wars Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Paris Commune (1871), 8 Prussian War (1870–71), 8, 142 Revolution (1789–99), xv, 71, 126–9, 141, 142, 144, 204 statistics agency established (1800), 72 unemployment, 83 Franklin, Benjamin, 66 free markets, 26, 79, 84, 88, 154–75 free speech, 22, 113, 194, 208, 209, 224 free will, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 14, 44, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 114, 139 Friedman, Milton, 160, 163, 166 Front National, 27, 61, 79, 87, 92, 101–2 full spectrum warfare, 43 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 140 futurists, 168 Galen, 95–6 Galilei, Galileo, 35 gambling, 116–17 game theory, 132 gaming, 193–4 Gandhi, Mohandas, 224 gate control theory, 106 Gates, Sylvester James “Jim,” 24 Gavotti, Giulio, 143 geek humor, 193 Gehry, Frank, 84 Geller, Uri, 178 geometry, 35, 49, 57, 59, 203 Gerasimov, Valery, 123, 125, 126, 130 Germany, 34, 72, 137, 205, 215 gig economy, 173 global financial crisis (2007–9), 5, 29–32, 53, 218 austerity, 100–101 bailouts, 29–32, 40, 42 and gross domestic product (GDP), 76 as “heart attack,” 57 and Obama administration, 158 and quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 and securitization of loans, 218–19 and statistics, 53, 65 and suicide, 101 and unemployment, 82 globalization, 21, 78, 84, 145, 146 Gonzales, Alberto, 136 Google, xvi, 174, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192 DeepMind, 218 Maps, 182 Transparency Project, 198 Government Accountability Office, 29 Graunt, John, 67–9, 73, 75, 79–80, 81, 85, 89, 127, 167 Great Fire of London (1666), 67 great leaders, 146–8 Great Recession (2007–13), 76, 82, 101 Greece, 5, 31, 101 Greenpeace, 10 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 Grillo, Beppe, 26 gross domestic product (GDP), 62, 65, 71, 75–9, 82, 87, 138 guerrillas, 128, 146, 194, 196 Haldane, Andrew, 32 haptics, 176, 182 Harvey, William, 34, 35, 38, 57, 96, 97 hate speech, 42 von Hayek, Friedrich, 159–73, 219 health, 92–119, 224 hedge funds, 173, 174 hedonism, 70, 224 helicopter money, 222 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 heroin, 105, 117 heroism and disruption, 18, 146 and genius, 218 and Hobbes, 44, 151 and Napoleonic Wars, 87, 127, 142 and nationalism, 87, 119, 210 and pain, 212 and protection, 202–3 and technocracy, 101 and technology, 127 Heyer, Heather, 20 Hiroshima atomic bombing (1945), 206 Hobbes, Thomas, xiii, xvi, 33–6, 38–45, 67, 147 on arrogance, 39, 47, 50, 125 and body, 96, 98–9 and Boyle, 49, 50, 51 on civil society, 42, 119 and death, 44–5, 67, 69–70, 91, 98–9, 110, 151, 184 on equality, 89 on fear, 40–45, 52, 67, 125 France, exile in (1640–51), 33–4, 41 on geometry, 35, 38, 49, 56, 57 and heroism, 44, 151 on language, 38–9 natural philosophy, 35–6 and nature, 38, 50 and Petty, 56, 57, 58 on promises, 39–42, 45, 148, 217–18 and Royal Society, 49, 50, 51 on senses, 38, 49, 147 and sovereign/state, 40–45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 60, 67, 73, 126, 166, 217, 220 on “state of nature,” 40, 133, 206, 217 war and peace, separation of, 40–45, 54, 60, 73, 125–6, 131, 201, 212 Hobsbawm, Eric, 87, 147 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 221 holistic remedies, 95, 97 Holland, see under Netherlands homeopathy, 95 Homer, xiv Hungary, 20, 60, 87, 146 hysteria, 139 IBM, 179 identity politics, 208, 209 Iglesias Turrión, Pablo, 5 imagined communities, 87 immigration, 60, 63, 65, 79, 87, 145 immortality, 149, 183–4, 224 in-jokes, 193 individual autonomy, 16 Industrial Revolution, 133, 206 inequality, 59, 61, 62, 76, 77, 83, 85, 88–90 inflation, 62, 76, 78, 82 infographics, 75 information theory, 147 information war, 43, 196 insurance, 59 intellectual property, 150 intelligence, 132–9 intensity, 79–83 International Association for the Study of Pain, 106 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 64, 78 Internet, 184–201, 219 IP addresses, 193 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 Ireland, 57, 73 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 43 “Is This How You Feel?

., Roger, 24, 25 Piketty, Thomas, 74 Pinker, Stephen, 207 plagues, 56, 67–71, 75, 79–80, 81, 89, 95 pleasure principle, 70, 109, 110, 224 pneumonia, 37, 67 Podemos, 5, 202 Poland, 20, 34, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 163 political anatomy, 57 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 58, 59 political correctness, 20, 27, 145 Popper, Karl, 163, 171 populism xvii, 211–12, 214, 220, 225–6 and central banks, 33 and crowd-based politics, 12 and democracy, 202 and elites/experts, 26, 33, 50, 152, 197, 210, 215 and empathy, 118 and health, 99, 101–2, 224–5 and immediate action, 216 in Kansas (1880s), 220 and markets, 167 and private companies, 174 and promises, 221 and resentment, 145 and statistics, 90 and unemployment, 88 and war, 148, 212 Porter, Michael, 84 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 111–14, 117, 209 post-truth, 167, 224 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 power vs. violence, 19, 219 predictive policing, 151 presidential election, US (2016), xiv and climate change, 214 and data, 190 and education, 85 and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 79, 145 and inequality, 76–7 and Internet, 190, 197, 199 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and Russia, 199 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 prisoners of war, 43 promises, 25, 31, 39–42, 45–7, 51, 52, 217–18, 221–2 Propaganda (Bernays), 14–15 propaganda, 8, 14–16, 83, 124–5, 141, 142, 143 property rights, 158, 167 Protestantism, 34, 35, 45, 215 Prussia (1525–1947), 8, 127–30, 133–4, 135, 142 psychiatry, 107, 139 psychoanalysis, 107, 139 Psychology of Crowds, The (Le Bon), 9–12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25 psychosomatic, 103 public-spending cuts, 100–101 punishment, 90, 92–3, 94, 95, 108 Purdue, 105 Putin, Vladimir, 145, 183 al-Qaeda, 136 quality of life, 74, 104 quantitative easing, 31–2, 222 quants, 190 radical statistics, 74 RAND Corporation, 183 RBS, 29 Reagan, Ronald, 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 real-time knowledge, xvi, 112, 131, 134, 153, 154, 165–70 Reason Foundation, 158 Red Vienna, 154, 155 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 33, 61 refugee crisis (2015–), 60, 225 relative deprivation, 88 representative democracy, 7, 12, 14–15, 25–8, 61, 202 Republican Party, 77, 79, 85, 154, 160, 163, 166, 172 research and development (R&D), 133 Research Triangle, North Carolina, 84 resentment, 5, 226 of elites/experts, 32, 52, 61, 86, 88–9, 161, 186, 201 and nationalism/populism, 5, 144–6, 148, 197, 198 and pain, 94 Ridley, Matt, 209 right to remain silent, 44 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 160, 166 Robinson, Tommy, ix Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 52 Royal Exchange, 67 Royal Society, 48–52, 56, 68, 86, 133, 137, 186, 208, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 132 Russian Empire (1721–1917), 128, 133 Russian Federation (1991–) and artificial intelligence, 183 Gerasimov Doctrine, 43, 123, 125, 126 and information war, 196 life expectancy, 100, 115 and national humiliation, 145 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 and social media, 15, 18, 199 troll farms, 199 Russian Revolution (1917), 155 Russian SFSR (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 155, 177, 180, 182–3 safe spaces, 22, 208 Sands, Robert “Bobby,” 43 Saxony, 90 scarlet fever, 67 Scarry, Elaine, 102–3 scenting, 135, 180 Schneier, Bruce, 185 Schumpeter, Joseph, 156–7, 162 Scientific Revolution, 48–52, 62, 66, 95, 204, 207, 218 scientist, coining of term, 133 SCL, 175 Scotland, 64, 85, 172 search engines, xvi Second World War, see World War II securitization of loans, 218 seismology, 135 self-employment, 82 self-esteem, 88–90, 175, 212 self-harm, 44, 114–15, 117, 146, 225 self-help, 107 self-interest, 26, 41, 44, 61, 114, 141, 146 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 sentiment analysis, xiii, 12–13, 140, 188 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 shell shock, 109–10 Shrecker, Ted, 226 Silicon Fen, Cambridgeshire, 84 Silicon Valley, California, xvi, 219 and data, 55, 151, 185–93, 199–201 and disruption, 149–51, 175, 226 and entrepreneurship, 149–51 and fascism, 203 and immortality, 149, 183–4, 224, 226 and monopolies, 174, 220 and singularity, 183–4 and telepathy, 176–8, 181, 185, 186, 221 and weaponization, 18, 219 singularity, 184 Siri, 187 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 slavery, 59, 224 smallpox, 67 smart cities, 190, 199 smartphone addiction, 112, 186–7 snowflakes, 22, 113 social indicators, 74 social justice warriors (SJWs), 131 social media and crowd psychology, 6 emotional artificial intelligence, 12–13, 140–41 and engagement, 7 filter bubbles, 66 and propaganda, 15, 18, 81, 124 and PTSD, 113 and sentiment analysis, 12 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 weaponization of, 18, 19, 22, 194–5 socialism, 8, 20, 154–6, 158, 160 calculation debate, 154–6, 158, 160 Socialism (Mises), 160 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 South Africa, 103 sovereignty, 34, 53 Soviet Russia (1917–91), 132, 133, 135–8, 177, 180, 182–3 Spain, 5, 34, 84, 128, 202 speed of knowledge, xvi, 112, 124, 131, 134, 136, 153, 154, 165–70 Spicer, Sean, 3, 5 spy planes, 136, 152 Stalin, Joseph, 138 Stanford University, 179 statactivism, 74 statistics, 62–91, 161, 186 status, 88–90 Stoermer, Eugene, 206 strong man leaders, 16 suicide, 100, 101, 115 suicide bombing, 44, 146 superbugs, 205 surveillance, 185–93, 219 Sweden, 34 Switzerland, 164 Sydenham, Thomas, 96 Syriza, 5 tacit knowledge, 162 talking cure, 107 taxation, 158 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 technocracy, 53–8, 59, 60, 61, 78, 87, 89, 90, 211 teenage girls, 113, 114 telepathy, 39, 176–9, 181, 185, 186 terrorism, 17–18, 151, 185 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 emergency powers, 42 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 suicide bombing, 44, 146 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Thames Valley, England, 85 Thatcher, Margaret, 154, 160, 163, 166 Thiel, Peter, 26, 149–51, 153, 156, 174, 190 Thirty Years War (1618–48), 34, 45, 53, 126 Tokyo, Japan, x torture, 92–3 total wars, 129, 142–3 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 34, 53 trends, xvi, 168 trigger warnings, 22, 113 trolls, 18, 20–22, 27, 40, 123, 146, 148, 194–8, 199, 209 Trump, Donald, xiv and Bannon, 21, 60–61 and climate change, 207 and education, 85 election campaign (2016), see under presidential election, US and free trade, 79 and health, 92, 99 and immigration, 145 inauguration (2017), 3–5, 6, 9, 10 and inequality, 76–7 “Make America Great Again,” 76, 145 and March for Science (2017), 23, 24, 210 and media, 27 and opinion polling, 65, 80 and Paris climate accord, 207 and promises, 221 and relative deprivation, 88 and statistics, 63 and Yellen, 33 Tsipras, Alexis, 5 Turing, Alan, 181, 183 Twitter and Corbyn’s rallies, 6 and JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x and Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x and Russia, 18 and sentiment analysis, 188 and trends, xvi and trolls, 194, 195 Uber, 49, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192 UK Independence Party, 65, 92, 202 underemployment, 82 unemployment, 61, 62, 72, 78, 81–3, 87, 88, 203 United Kingdom austerity, 100 Bank of England, 32, 33, 64 Blitz (1940–41), 119, 143, 180 Brexit (2016–), see under Brexit Cameron government (2010–16), 33, 73, 100 Center for Policy Studies, 164 Civil Service, 33 climate-gate (2009), 195 Corbyn’s rallies, 5, 6 Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 119 education, 85 financial crisis (2007–9), 29–32, 100 first past the post, 13 general election (2015), 80, 81 general election (2017), 6, 65, 80, 81, 221 Grenfell Tower fire (2017), 10 gross domestic product (GDP), 77, 79 immigration, 63, 65 Irish hunger strike (1981), 43 life expectancy, 100 National Audit Office (NAO), 29 National Health Service (NHS), 30, 93 Office for National Statistics, 63, 133 and opiates, 105 Oxford Circus terror scare (2017), ix–x, xiii, 41 and pain, 102, 105 Palantir, 151 Potsdam Conference (1945), 138 quantitative easing, 31–2 Royal Society, 138 Scottish independence referendum (2014), 64 Skripal poisoning (2018), 43 Society for Freedom in Science, 163 Thatcher government (1979–90), 154, 160, 163, 166 and torture, 92 Treasury, 61, 64 unemployment, 83 Unite for Europe march (2017), 23 World War II (1939–45), 114, 119, 138, 143, 180 see also England United Nations, 72, 222 United States Bayh–Dole Act (1980), 152 Black Lives Matter, 10, 225 BP oil spill (2010), 89 Bush Jr. administration (2001–9), 77, 136 Bush Sr administration (1989–93), 77 Bureau of Labor, 74 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 3, 136, 151, 199 Charlottesville attack (2017), 20 Civil War (1861–5), 105, 142 and climate change, 207, 214 Clinton administration (1993–2001), 77 Cold War, see Cold War Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 176, 178 Defense Intelligence Agency, 177 drug abuse, 43, 100, 105, 115–16, 131, 172–3 education, 85 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 137 Federal Reserve, 33 Fifth Amendment (1789), 44 financial crisis (2007–9), 31–2, 82, 158 first past the post, 13 Government Accountability Office, 29 gross domestic product (GDP), 75–7, 82 health, 92, 99–100, 101, 103, 105, 107, 115–16, 158, 172–3 Heritage Foundation, 164, 214 Iraq War (2003–11), 74, 132 JFK Airport terror scare (2016), x, xiii, 41 Kansas populists (1880s), 220 libertarianism, 15, 151, 154, 158, 164, 173 life expectancy, 100, 101 March For Our Lives (2018), 21 March for Science (2017), 23–5, 27, 28, 210 McCarthyism (1947–56), 137 Million-Man March (1995), 4 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 23, 175 National Defense Research Committee, 180 National Park Service, 4 National Security Agency (NSA), 152 Obama administration (2009–17), 3, 24, 76, 77, 79, 158 Occupy Wall Street (2011), 5, 10, 61 and opiates, 105, 172–3 and pain, 103, 105, 107, 172–3 Palantir, 151, 152, 175, 190 Paris climate accord (2015), 205, 207 Parkland attack (2018), 21 Patriot Act (2001), 137 Pentagon, 130, 132, 135, 136, 214, 216 presidential election (2016), see under presidential election, US psychiatry, 107, 111 quantitative easing, 31–2 Reagan administration (1981–9), 15, 77, 154, 160, 163, 166 Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” speech (2002), 132 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), 180, 182, 200 September 11 attacks (2001), 17, 18 Tea Party, 32, 50, 61, 221 and torture, 93 Trump administration (2017–), see under Trump, Donald unemployment, 83 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 World War I (1914–18), 137 World War II (1939–45), 137, 180 universal basic income, 221 universities, 151–2, 164, 169–70 University of Cambridge, 84, 151 University of Chicago, 160 University of East Anglia, 195 University of Oxford, 56, 151 University of Vienna, 160 University of Washington, 188 unknown knowns, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 192, 212 unknown unknowns, 132, 133, 138 “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek), 161 V2 flying bomb, 137 vaccines, 23, 95 de Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, 73 vehicle-ramming attacks, 17 Vesalius, Andreas, 96 Vienna, Austria, 153–5, 159 Vietnam War (1955–75), 111, 130, 136, 138, 143, 205 violence vs. power, 19, 219 viral marketing, 12 virtual reality, 183 virtue signaling, 194 voice recognition, 187 Vote Leave, 50, 93 Wainright, Joel, 214 Wales, 77, 90 Wall Street, New York, 33, 190 War College, Berlin, 128 “War Economy” (Neurath), 153–4 war on drugs, 43, 131 war on terror, 131, 136, 196 Watts, Jay, 115 weaponization, 18–20, 22, 26, 75, 118, 123, 194, 219, 223 weapons of mass destruction, 132 wearable technology, 173 weather control, 204 “What Is An Emotion?”


pages: 558 words: 168,179

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

But instead of using Monica Lewinsky’s telltale garment to impeach Bill Clinton, they would use the words of the world’s leading climate scientists to impeach the climate change movement. If edited down and taken out of context, their exchanges could be made to appear to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming was real. Dubbing the alleged scandal Climategate, they went into overdrive. The web of organizations, funded in part by the Kochs, pounced on the hacked e-mails. Cato scholars were particularly energetic in promoting the story. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar alone gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal.

The only genuinely negative disclosure from the e-mails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold, rather than share, their research with some of their critics, whom they disparaged. Given the harassment they had been subjected to, their reasoning was understandable, but it violated the customary transparency expected within the scientific community. Other than that, the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one. It took no time, nevertheless, for the hacked e-mails to spur a witch hunt. Within days, Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State, where he was by then a tenured professor.

One posted a report: Marc Sheppard, “UN Climate Reports: They Lie,” American Thinker, Oct. 5, 2009. “A miracle has happened”: The Web site on which the contrarian wrote was Climate Audit. “The blue dress moment”: Chris Horner, “The Blue Dress Moment May Have Arrived,” National Review, Nov. 19, 2009. “a crucial tipping point”: Tim Phillips was speaking about the Climategate leaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 26, 2010, as reported by Brad Johnson, Climate Progress, Nov. 27, 2010. Phillips did all he could to exploit the situation, staging an Americans for Prosperity protest in Copenhagen outside the United Nations conference on climate change, where he declared, “We’re a grassroots organization…I think it’s unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families…want to send unemployment rates in the United States to twenty percent.”


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

May 2, 2010; HANSEN: William Lajeunesse, “NASA Scientist Accused of Using Celeb Status Among Environmental Groups to Enrich Himself,” Fox News, June 22, 2011; Christopher Horner, “A Brief Summary of James E. Hansen’s NASA Ethics File,” American Tradition Institute, November 18, 2011; VINDICATED: David Adam, “ ‘Climategate’ Review Clears Scientists of Dishonesty over Data,” Guardian, July 7, 2010; FUELED: James Delingpole, “Climategate: The Final Nail in the Coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?” Daily Telegraph, November 20, 2009; James Delingpole, “Climategate: FOIA—The Man Who Saved the World,” Daily Telegraph, March 13, 2013; BILLBOARD CAMPAIGN: Wendy Koch, “Climate Wars Heat Up with Pulled Unabomber Billboards,” USA Today, May 4, 2012. 27.

It is intolerable and deeply offensive. Those preaching this doctrine have to be resisted and indeed denounced.”25 And denounce they do, the more personal, the better—whether it’s former Vice President Al Gore for his mansions, or famed climate scientist James Hansen for his speaking fees. Then there is “Climategate,” a manufactured scandal in which climate scientists’ emails were hacked and their contents distorted by the Heartlanders and their allies, who claimed to find evidence of manipulated data (the scientists were repeatedly vindicated of wrongdoing). In 2012, the Heartland Institute even landed itself in hot water by running a billboard campaign that compared people who believe in climate change (“warmists” in denialist lingo) to murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

., 349 clear-cutting, 296, 304, 310 Climate Action Network, 149 climate change, 73, 110, 165, 176, 177, 230, 249 acceptable risk and, 335 astronaut’s-eye view of, 284–90, 296 centrist organizations and, 198–201 community and, 364–65 computer models of, 270–71 corporate deregulation and, 20 defining of, 210 democracy and, 363–64 developing world on, 75 disasters and, 2–3, 17, 102–3, 154, 406, 465 fracking and, 199 as transformative force, 7, 8, 152–60 Indigenous rights and, 380–84, 385 individual vs. corporate conservation in, 116–18 marine infertility and, 433–35 mitigation of, 134 negotiations on, 11 past and future generations in, 158–59 as planetary emergency, 6, 7, 15, 17, 18, 449–50, 459–60 planetary exodus as solution to, 288–89 and power relation between humans and earth, 175 as result of cumulative emissions, 21, 40, 56, 175, 409–10, 416 roots of, 159–60 sacrifice zones and, 310–11, 315 “safe” limit of, 12–13 tipping points for, 14, 412 2 degrees Celsius boundary in, 87–88, 89, 150, 354, 456 wealth creation and, 46–52 weather patterns and, 269 climate change denial, 2–5, 26, 43, 91, 119, 282–83, 394, 407, 451 economics as factor in, 3, 45–46, 59–60 extractive industries’ funding of, 44–45, 149, 198 increase in, 35 partisan approach to, 35–36 right-wing, 31–63, 154, 178 socioeconomic privilege and, 46–52 technological miracles and, 3 Climate of Corruption (Bell), 33 climate debt, 5, 7, 457 owed to developing world, 5, 7, 40, 387, 408–18 owed to Indigenous peoples, 387, 388–99, 408 seen as politically toxic, 414 Climate Depot, 32, 45 Climategate, 41 climate justice, see climate debt climate manipulation, see geoengineering climate movement: coming of age of, 11–12 deregulated capitalism and, 20 economic justice and, see climate debt growing power and interconnectedness of, 451–52 historical precedents for, 452–57, 459–61 Keystone XL protests and resurgence of, 139–40 lack of sustained and populist, 157 moral imperative in, 336, 386–87, 464 and need for viable economic alternatives to extraction industries, 349, 398, 399, 400–401, 403, 413–18 origins of, 73–75 see also Blockadia climate science, 46, 59, 127, 152, 158 climate treaty negotiations, 11, 77–80, 411 see also emission reduction Clinton, Bill, 83–85, 213, 231–32 Clinton administration, carbon trading proposed by, 218 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting of 2006, 231 Clodumar, Kinza, 165 Clorox, 356, 357 cloud brightening, 258 cloud seeding, 279 Club of Rome, 185–86 CNN, 45 Coal & Climate Summit, 200 coal, 102, 128, 143, 159, 176, 214, 224 capitalism and, 175, 176 collapsing U.S. market for, 319–20 exporting of, 144n, 301, 320, 322, 349, 352, 362, 374, 376 lignite, 136 as “portable climate,” 174 rail transport of, 234, 362, 389, 397 water power vs., 171–73 coal-fired power plants, 3, 67–68, 81–82, 83, 97, 136–39, 141, 200, 208, 236, 247–48 global campaign against, 319–20, 348–49, 350–52, 365 public utilities and, 100, 196 coal industry, 197, 300–301 opposition to, see anti-coal movements political and economic power of, 316, 321 see also extractive industries coal mining, 145, 398 in Appalachia, 309, 353 in Montana, 320, 342–43, 346, 370, 388–93, 395, 397, 445 mountaintop removal in, 2, 303, 309, 310, 329, 353 water supply contamination from, 332 coal-powered economies, 88 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 415 Cobenais, Marty, 318–19, 332 Cochabamba, Bolivia, 444n Cohen, Nick, 156 Cold War, 15, 42, 43, 74, 261 collective action, 36 collective sacrifice, 16–17 colleges and universities: divestment movement and, 354–55, 401 renewable energy investment by, 401–2 Colombia, 202, 348, 376–77 colonialism, 154, 370, 414–16 coal and, 173, 176 extractivism and, 169–70 Industrial Revolution and, 171, 175, 457 Scientific Revolution and, 170–71 Colorado, 52, 357n Colorado School of Public Health, 428 Combes, Maxime, 304n, 317–18 Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, 45 Common Sense (Paine), 314 communism, 20, 39, 42, 44, 177 communities, 106 building of, 92 climate change and, 364–65 renewable energy in, 131–32, 133 see also worldview, communitarian Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, 405 compassion, 62–63, 462 Competitive Enterprise Institute, 32, 45, 411 complexity, 267, 290 composting systems, 108 computer models, of climate change, 270–71 Conant, Lionel, 380 Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, 319 Conference Board of Canada, 145 Congo, 220 ConocoPhillips, 226, 227–28, 246 Conservation Fund, 196, 205 Conservation International, 84, 189, 196, 205–6, 209, 211–12 Conservative Party (Canadian), 36 Constitution, Canadian, 371 construction, green, 90 consumer lifestyles, 2, 75, 116–17 consumption, 116 decrease in, 90 excess, 85, 91, 92, 93, 210, 412, 413 green, 211–13, 252 container ships, 76, 79 Conway, Erik, 42 Cook, James, 266 Cook, Katsi, 419 coolants, 219–20 “Cool Dudes” (McCright and Dunlap), 46–47 Coon, David, 374 co-ops: energy, 130, 131–32 worker-run, 122–23, 133 Coos Bay, Oreg., 349 Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009, 11–14, 34, 150, 262, 451 copper, 91n, 296 coral, coral reefs, 301, 348, 434 Corexit, 432 Cornell University, 143, 217, 317 corn ethanol, 239, 240 corporate donors, 83, 210n corporations, 25 centralization under, 179 crisis exploited by, 8 democracy vs., 7 deregulation of, 19, 20, 72, 142, 154, 210 disaster prevention at, 51–52 environmental groups’ cooperation with, 196, 206–11 freedom from regulation for, 19 free speech for, 151 goals of private, 129–30 ideology of, 75 impact of climate change on, 49 Indigenous peoples vs., 221–23 natural world vs., 60–61 political power of, 199, 124–26, 141–52 right-wing think tanks funded by, 44, 50 taxes avoided by, 115 USCAP and, 226–28 Correa, Rafael, 180–81, 410–11 corruption, of government regulators, 333–34 Cosbey, Aaron, 70 Costa Rica, 348 Coste, Torrance, 363 “Cowboys and Indians alliance,” 302, 318–19, 322–23, 346 crash of 1929, 88 Crawford, Julia Trigg, 361 Crompton, Tom, 60 crops, 9, 34, 57 crowdfunding, 198 Crow Reservation, 389, 397 Crutzen, Paul, 261–62 Cuadrilla, 130 cultural cognition, 36, 44–45, 59, 63, 186 Culture of Narcissism (Lasch), 117 Czechoslovakia, 178 Czech Republic, 42–43, 144, 348 Dai, Aiguo, 272, 275 Daily Mail, 5454 Dallas, Tex., 329 Daly, Herman, 173 dams, 180, 183, 202 Daniel, Patrick, 331–32 dark money, 44 Darling, Jay Norwood “Ding,” 185 Dauphin Island Sea Lab, 433–34 David, Ned, 247 Davis, David Brion, 463 Dayaneni, Gopal, 448 Day One, 391 DDT, 185, 201, 203, 207 de Boer, Yvo, 87 decade zero, 24, 143 Dediu, Doina, 344 deep ecology, 75 deepwater drilling, see offshore drilling, deepwater Defense Department, U.S., 113 deforestation, 202 degrowth strategies: selective, 93–95 for wealthy nations, 88, 89 Delaware River Basin, 346 Delgamuukw v.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

Climate scientists have reacted to this challenge in a variety of ways, some involving themselves more in the political debate and others keeping it at arm’s length. Michael Mann, who is director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, was once at the center of a controversy. “Climategate” concerned the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia,103 which produces the temperature record that the UK’s Met Office uses. Skeptics alleged that Mann and other scientists had conspired to manipulate the CRU’s temperature record. The pertinent facts are that the scientists were cleared of wrongdoing by a panel of their peers,104 and that the CRU’s temperature record is quite consistent with the others105—but Mann and other scientists in the hacked e-mails demonstrated a clear concern with the public relations elements of how the science would be perceived.

In practice, the model underestimates the error slightly—and therefore somewhat underestimates the chance of a cooling decade—because the exact amount of CO2 is an unknown, as well as because of any specification uncertainty in the model. 103. “Climatic Research Unit E-Mail Controversy;” Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy. 104. Henry Chu, “Panel Clears Researchers in ‘Climategate’ Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/15/world/la-fg-climate-data15-2010apr15. 105. Including those from satellite records processed by private companies. 106. “Climate of Fear;” editorial in Nature, 464, 141 (March 11, 2010). http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7286/full/464141a.html. 107.

., 223–24, 225, 228, 230, 432 Chicago, University of, 227 Chicago Cubs, 63, 104 Chicago White Sox, 88 Chile, 144, 438 China, 189, 209, 400 chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), 375 Christchurch, New Zealand, 174 Christianity, 490 CIA, 51, 467 terrorism prevention by, 273, 424, 426, 433, 443, 510 CIBC Oppenheimer, 352 cigarette smoking, 254–55, 258 Cinema Rex theater, 425n Cirque du Soleil, 318 Citizens Bank Park, 286 Civil Aeronautics Administration, 123n Civil Protection Department, Italy, 143 Clarke, Richard, 425 Clauset, Aaron, 427, 431, 432, 437, 441, 442, 511–12 Clean Air Act, 400 Cleveland, Grover, 334 Cleveland Cavaliers, 239–40, 257 Clift, Eleanor, 48, 49, 50, 56 climate change, use of term, 376, 377n see also global warming Climategate, 408 Climatic Research Unit (CRU), 408 climatology, 131, 132, 370–411 Bayesian reasoning in, 371, 377–78, 403, 406–7, 407, 410–11 models of, 371, 380, 384–85, 401–6, 402 signal vs. noise in, 371–73 uncertainty in, 389–93, 390 Clinton, Bill, 55, 56, 433, 510 Clinton, Hillary, 59, 60, 252 clouds, 385, 386 CNN, 217 coal, 410 cognitive psychology, 227 Cole, USS, 422, 423 comets, 447 commerce, 10 Commerce Department, U.S., 123n commercial lending, 187 commodity prices, 186n, 202 common sense, 451 communism, 51 community cards, 299 compartments, in disease modeling, 220–21, 223 competition, 1, 16, 97, 106, 128, 189 in poker, 313 in the stock market, 313, 352, 364 in weather forecasting, 127–28, 131–37, 132 competitive advantage, 313–14 competitiveness, 97 complexity, of global warming forecasting, 382 complexity theory, 172–73, 368–69, 386 chaos theory vs., 386ncomputer age, 7–8 computers: chess played by, 261–62, 287–88; see also Deep Blue; Deep Thought; Fritz poker played by, 324 predictions and, 292 weather forecasting by, 116–18, 123–25, 289 condom fatigue, 222–23 cone of chaos, 139 Conference Board, 187 confidence, 46 accuracy and, 203 see also overconfidence confidence interval, see margin of error Congress, U.S., 19, 123n, 207, 408 low approval rating of, 188 see also House of Representatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.


pages: 285 words: 86,174

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

., “Shadow Banking,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 458 (July 2010): p. 65. 36 “As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn”: Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets,” New Yorker, June 7, 2010. 37 “We deplore WikiLeaks”: Quoted in Jim Garamone, “Pentagon Prepares for Possible WikiLeaks Publication,” Armed Forces Press Service, October 22, 2010. 38 “We’re not in the mess we’re in, in the world, because of too many leaks”: Video and transcript available at http://www.ellsberg.net/archive/daniel-ellsberg-on-colbert-report, accessed January 19, 2012. 39 “What we want people to do is fight with the truth”: See “WikiLeaks on ‘Climategate,’ ” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=w17dw_aJEWU, accessed April 5, 2012. 40 “It doesn’t matter what we think”: Ibid. 41 “If your gut said”: Cited in “Beck’s ‘Brand-New Reality’ on Climate Change Relies on Distorting Apparently Stolen E-Mails,” Media Matters for America, November 23, 2009. 42 “rigour and honesty”: Cited in Justin Gillis, “British Panel Clears Scientists,” New York Times, July 7, 2010. 43 “long after the damage is done, revealed as utterly bereft of substance”: See David Roberts, “What We Have and Haven’t Learned from ‘Climategate,’ ” Grist, March 1, 2011. 44 In the UK, a quarter of the population is “unconvinced” that the planet’s temperatures are warming: Cited in Steve Doughty, “Global Warming Skepticism Doubles in U.K.,” Daily Mail, January 29, 2011. 45 “In the United States, roughly two-thirds of the population are unconvinced that global warming is “a very serious problem.”: See “Energy Update: 30% Say Global Warming a Very Serious Problem,” Rasmussen Reports, January 7, 2012, http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/environment_energy/energy_update, accessed January 20, 2012. 46 “At no other time in U.S. history were the news media more influential”: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 7. 47 “there is no doubt”: Ibid., p. 6. 48 “We’re marching over the cliff”: See interview with Noam Chomsky in “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate,” Videonation, www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

“Similarly we don’t have to be 100% certain that dangerous climate change will occur to take action to cut emissions.”7 Of course climate deniers, and those who see the world’s attempt to control climate change as a threat to their business interests, will continue to unleash their armies of lobbyists to water down policy, spread bogus science, and block innovations that might threaten their business models. But the best way to counter backroom lobbying and misinformation is not to hunker down as some climate scientists have in the wake of the climategate scandal (see chapter 9), but to foster greater transparency and open debate around the risks of not acting now. For instance, Palmer suggests that everyone concerned about the climate change issue, particularly those who are skeptical, ask themselves exactly how large the probability of serious climate change should be before we should start cutting emissions: 0.1 percent?

From decisions about whether to regulate a new technology, to the ongoing need to assess the impacts of urban development on the local ecology, objective scientific analysis is often central to the formulation of effective public policies. As the intermingling of science and public policy intensifies in an era of new global risks, questions about how scientists relate to the public and how the public relates to science are becoming critical. Nothing illustrates the challenges better than the recent “climategate” scandal in which a large stash of e-mails from and to investigators at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia provided more than enough evidence for concern about the way some climate science is done. The science discussed in the e-mails is mostly from one small area of climate research—the taking of raw temperature data from thermometers, satellites, and proxy measures of historical climate such as tree rings and turning it into usable information on temperature trends.

The situation came to a head when the e-mail records of prominent climate scientists were stolen and then published, exposing years of heated and often unfortunate exchanges between climate researchers and the bloggers who were hounding them. Depending on your perspective there are two competing analyses of what “climategate” means, says Fred Pearce, an environment writer who led a major investigation into the controversy on behalf of the The Guardian.6 Climate scientists tend to see it as the mob storming the lab—the story of a malicious attempt to disrupt, cross-question, belittle, and trash the work of mainstream scientists.


pages: 337 words: 103,273

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World by Paul Gilding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, BRICs, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, data science, decarbonisation, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fear of failure, geopolitical risk, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, new economy, nuclear winter, Ocado, ocean acidification, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, systems thinking, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, University of East Anglia, warehouse automation

There is organized skepticism, but it comes primarily from small groups that have banded together specifically for the purpose of promoting uncertainty, as opposed to the scientific bodies that are structured to apply their expertise objectively across a scientific discipline. These organized groups leap on any mistake, such as those detailed in the so-called Climategate e-mails, and pretend it has some greater significance regarding the whole process and conclusions, even though numerous independent reports and investigations concluded the Climategate e-mails did nothing to question the science of climate change.7 So it is important to separate the two types of skepticism. On the one hand, we have the scientific process, where outliers have a healthy role to play in challenging dominant views and seeking to find holes in consensus positions.


pages: 369 words: 98,776

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

Copycat think tanks and ideologues, again almost exclusively on the libertarian political right, quickly sprouted up in other countries too. Indeed, climate denialists became so successful in 2009 that they managed to dominate the media agenda via a series of manufactured scandals that engulfed much of the climate-science community. Deniers promoting the so-called “Climategate” affair took a few out-of-context quotes and superficially embarrassing private slips by leading scientists from some leaked emails and nearly managed to publicly discredit not only the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia but several other leading institutes too. Vociferous promoters of a subsequent scandal took a single mistake about Himalayan glaciers, buried deep in the second weighty tome of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, and used it to attack the entire IPCC process, and the role of Chair Rajendra Pachauri in particular.

cadmium calcium carbonate Calcutta Cambrian explosion Canada Cancún, UN climate change meeting, 2010 “cap and trade” programs carbon: cycle; offsetting/markets capture and storage (CCS); price; politics of; black carbon dioxide emissions: planetary boundary for Carbon Trade Watch cars see vehicles Cartagena Dialogue Cato Institute CFCs Cheatneutral.com Chernobyl Chesser, Robert China 21 coal power in; nuclear power in; dam construction; “night soil” industry; meat eating in; demand for fossil fuels; alternatives to high carbon aviation; hydroelectricity; virtual water and; pollution incidents; aerosol pollution; black carbon and; transport pollution; emissions standards; CFC production; Copenhagen summit and; population growth; vehicle ownership, growth in emissions; food production; investment in low-carbon technologies Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning Climate Action Network Climate Action Partnership climate change: carbon offsetting/markets and; deniers; extinction and; boundary see climate change boundary; tipping points; methane and; agreements/negotiations; nitrates worsen; solar radiation management and; see also carbon dioxide emissions, China, individual agreement/negotiation name, nuclear power, population, renewables under individual event and area name climate change boundary; 350: current evidence; 350: modeling evidence; 350: past evidence; toward a technofix?; technologies for new technologies for the future; politics of carbon; sea level rise; Arctic thaw and; destabilization of Atlantic Ocean circulation; models Climate Fix, The (Pielke Jnr) “Climategate”, 2009 Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia Clinton, Bill Club of Rome coal power Cochabamba, Bolivia Collapse (Diamond) Colorado River Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas Condit Dam Congo Basin Forest Fund Congress, US Convention on Biological Diversity, Nagoya, 2010 Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution, 1979 COP15 of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Copenhagen Accord Copenhagen climate summit, 2009 coral reefs Corporate Watch Costa Rica Costanza, Robert Cretaceous Period Crookes, William Crutzen, Paul Current Opinion in Plant Biology Cyclone Nargis Da Silva, Luiz Inácio Lula Dai, Aiguo Daly, Herman Dampier, William dams, removing unnecessary; hydroelectric; Chinese construction of; fishery collapse and; tidal barrages; block natural flow of water; threaten species; affects water temperature; water trapped behind loses most of its sediment load; current water use; where water is taken from Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty DDT Dead Sea dead zones deep-sea floating turbines deforestation Delta smelt “demographic transition” Dhaka Diamond, Jared diesel engines Dinorwig, Wales DuPont Earth: goldilocks state; self-regulating; “snowball”; ice-albedo feedback; see also carbon: cycle “earthshine” East Antarctic Ice Sheet Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity, The (TEEB) report, 2010 Economist Ecuador Edwards Dam Egypt electric vehicles Endangered Species Act, U.S.


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

., “Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University, August 16, 2017, cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud. 12 Rush Limbaugh, “Climategate Hoax: The Universe of Lies versus the Universe of Reality,” Rush Limbaugh Show, November 24, 2009, rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/11/24/climategate_hoax_the_universe_of_lies_versus_the_universe_of_reality/. 13 Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, “How Information Became Ideological,” Inside Higher Ed, October 11, 2016, insidehighered.com/views/2016/10/11/how-conservative-movement-has-undermined-trust-academe-essay. 14 David Roberts, “Donald Trump and the Rise of Tribal Epistemology: Journalism Cannot Be Neutral Toward a Threat to the Conditions That Make It Possible,” Vox, May 19, 2017, vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology. 15 David Roberts, “Donald Trump Is the Sole Reliable Source of Truth, Says Chair of House Science Committee: ‘Better to Get Your News Directly from the President,’ said Rep.


pages: 446 words: 117,660

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

That kind of conspiracy theorizing has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling the evidence for global warming—evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists—a “gigantic hoax.” What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails. The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university, prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in 2016. (All we learned from those emails was that scientists are people—occasionally snappish, and given to talking in professional shorthand that hostile outsiders can willfully misinterpret.)

., 276, 381 and election (2000), 387 on health care, 47 as movement conservative, 299, 301 and national security, 306 and taxes, 215–16, 229, 299 Bush, Jeb, 60, 381 Bush (W.) administration: authoritarianism of, 301 bait-and-switch tactics of, 378–79, 387 compared to that of Trump, 9, 13 corruption of, 343 disdain for rule of law, 301 dishonesty of, 9, 25, 26–27, 93, 343, 377–78, 389 functions outsourced by, 299–300 general incompetence of, 300 and income distribution, 271 and Iraq war, 13, 26, 27, 299, 343, 381 reliance on elite consensus, 14 on Social Security privatization, 14–15, 22–24, 25–27, 28–29, 32, 302, 306, 361, 377, 378 tax cuts by, 16–17, 20, 26, 50 torture authorized by, 300 voting rights curtailed by, 300 business decisions, 227–28 California: health care in, 77 housing bubble in, 84 taxes in, 216, 229 Canada: health care in, 36, 45, 47, 48–49 imports from, 253, 255 unions in, 290 Cantor, Eric, 302–4, 386 cap-and-trade system, 339 Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), 135–36 capital gains: on houses, 87, 274 and income inequality, 273–74 inflation component of, 273 capitalism, voter confusion about, 320 capital market, 228 Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op, 137–38 carbon emissions, tax on, 339 Carter, Jimmy, 276 Cato Institute, 22, 23, 317, 320 caution, risk of, 104, 106, 107, 116–17 Cavuto, Neil, 44 Census data, 262–65, 263 capital gains omitted from, 264 Current Population Survey, 263, 264 and income distribution, 265–66, 266 top-coding, 264, 265 Center for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), 193 central banks, 103–4, 124, 128, 133, 181, 182, 409–10 centrists, 308 belief in symmetry between left and right, 28, 29, 309 double standards of, 208–9 influence of, 28 and public opinion, 298, 306 Century Foundation, 22 CEOs, compensation for, 259, 262, 265 Chandler, Raymond, The Simple Art of Murder, 327 Charity Watch, 388 Chávez, Hugo, 324 Cheney, Dick, 300, 381 Chicago School, 131, 143–44 child care, proposals on, 210, 211, 212 Chile, retirement system in, 22, 23 China: economy of, 324 U.S. trade with, 252, 254, 255 cholera, 81 Civil Rights Act (1964), 53 civil rights movement, 346 classless society, myth of, 285 climate change, 327–28 and alternative energies, 340 and corruption, 337 deniers of, 329–31, 332–34, 335–37, 365 and fossil fuels, 333, 336 global temperatures in, 330 greenhouse gases as a cause of, 330, 335, 339–40 and Green New Deal, 328, 338–40 “hockey stick” graph on, 328, 336 politicization of, 4 positive incentives in, 340 transition industries in, 340 and tropical storms, 330 Climategate, 336 Clinton, Bill: Gingrich’s attacks on, 362 and health care (1993), 35, 37, 50, 378 and income inequality, 271 smear tactics against, 380 and taxes, 7, 215 Clinton, Hillary: and election (2016), 376, 388–89 and health care, 50, 51–52 and income inequality, 291 smear tactics against, 380 Trump vs., 336, 343 Clinton Foundation, 388 “Closing the Skills Gap” (Dimon and Seltzer), 166–68 Coal and Steel Community (1952), 175 coal-fired power plants, 331 coal mining, 289, 340 Cochrane, John H., 131, 138, 143 cockroach ideas, 329 Cohen, Michael, 359 Cohn, Jonathan, 300 coins: gold and silver, 411, 412 college graduates, earnings of, 282, 283 Collins, Susan, 360 Comey, James, 336, 343 Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Murray), 285–86 Commission on Economic Security (1934), 26 Common Market (1959), 175 Commonwealth Fund, 48 competition: imperfect, 400 perfect, 402 “confidence fairy,” belief in, 158, 160, 161 Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 19, 29, 54, 59, 195–96 budget and economic outlook of, 115–16 Green Book of, 265 and income inequality, 265–66, 266, 272–74, 285 and Ryan plan, 201, 202 Conscience of a Conservative, The (Goldwater), 300 conservatism: ambition of practitioners, 151 bad faith of, 7, 8, 10, 75, 149–51, 332–33 and bipartisanship, 198 compassionate conservatism, 378 confusion about socialism in, 323 democracy rejected by, 369 disinterest in good government, 300 and income inequality, 261–62, 266, 271–75 and Keynesian economics, 124 moral and intellectual decline of, 262 movement conservatism, 8, 297–98, 299–301, 302–4, 307, 343, 368 Orwellian instincts in, 281 permanent rule by, 13 Republican, see Republican Party taking credit for growth, 275–76 uses and abuses of statistics by, 262 wing-nut welfare as safety net for, 303 conservative professional economists, 149–51 conspiracy theories, 150, 337, 343, 345–46, 365 Constitution, U.S., 301 containerization, 289 Cornyn, John, 346 corporate profits, 228, 232–33 corporate taxes: avoidance vs. evasion of, 349 cuts in, 201, 202, 218, 221, 222, 227, 229, 230, 231–33, 232, 351 and stock buybacks, 227, 230 corporations: “bringing money home,” 230 cooking their books, 228, 230–31, 231 global, 231–32 profits to foreign nationals, 232–33 and trade war, 371 unrestricted power for, 318 corruption: and Bush administration, 343 and climate change, 337 in Europe, 358 in financial services, 92, 93 in highly unequal societies, 283, 324, 349–50, 358 and Republican Party, 335–37, 338, 343, 358 in trade policy, 246, 247, 254, 255 of Trump administration, 70, 246, 331, 338, 343, 349, 350 “Cost of Bad Ideas, The” (Krugman), 123–25 Council of Economic Advisers, and CEA calculation, 271–72 Cox, Christopher, 93 credit, 89, 90, 104 “Cruelty Caucus, The” (Krugman), 65–66 Cruz, Ted, 57, 225 Cruz amendment, 69 cryptocurrencies, 411–14 Crystal, Graef, 265 In Search of Excess, 262 Cuccinelli, Ken, 336 currency, 412–14 fiat, 412, 414 optimum currency areas, 177 Customs and Border Protection, 371 debt: and austerity policies, 97–99, 163–65, 203–4, 207–8 fear of, 107, 116 and G.D.P., 154, 204–5, 205 interest rates on, 204, 211 magic threshold of, 158, 385 overrated as issue, 194, 206, 208 problematic, 153 and sustainable growth rate, 153–54, 204 and taxes, 154, 222–23, 224–26 tipping point of, 165 and total wealth, 154 Trump’s SOTU on, 207–9 winter of, 203–6 “debt scolds,” 204, 205, 206 “deficit scolds,” 194, 207, 209 deficit spending, 153, 218 deleveraging, 97 DeLong, Brad, 131, 143–44, 270, 316, 407 democracy: threats in Europe to, 188, 189, 344, 346, 358, 359 threats in U.S. to, 366, 367–69 Democratic Party: basic values of, 366 center-left position of, 28, 306, 310 and civil rights, 310 future plans for, 338 and Green New Deal, 338–40 and health care, 36, 55, 77, 78 House majority of, 338 impact in state governments, 77, 78 as loose coalition of interest groups, 297, 368 and midterm elections, 76, 194, 338, 344, 367 policy analysis by, 73 social democratic aspect of, 313–14, 321 and Social Security, 29, 30 subpoena power of, 338 De-Moralization of Society (Himmelfarb), 285–86 Denmark, economy of, 184, 239, 313, 317, 319–21, 323 deregulation, 370, 371, 409 derivatives, 135 “Developing a Positive Agenda” (Krugman), 35–37 Dew-Becker, Ian, 283 Diamond, Peter, 234–35, 236 diminishing marginal utility, 235 Dimon, Jamie, 166 dishonesty, power of, 324 “Dismal Science, The” (Krugman), 393–94 Dixit, Avinash K., 396–98, 405 dollar, international value of, 228 Donors Trust, 333 “Don’t Blame Robots for Low Wages” (Krugman), 260, 288–90 dot-com bubble, 90 double talk, political, 222, 225–26 Dow 36,000 (Gleason and Hassett), 84, 86 Draghi, Mario, 181–83 dumping, and tariffs, 252 Duncan, Greg, 277 economic analysis, importance of, 383–84, 386, 400 economic freedom, 317–18, 317 economic geography, 398–99, 400, 403 economic growth: (1982–1984), 215 long-term, 275–76 post–World War II, 219, 234 so-so, 315 taking credit for, 275–76 and taxes, 236–37, 236 economic models: Arrow-Debreu model, 402 CAPM, 135–36 Heckscher-Ohlin, 400–401, 403 importance of, 400 as metaphors, 400, 402 minimalist, 403 monopolistic competition models, 396–98 and neoclassical theory, 140 purposes of, 112 economic policy, failure of, 407 economics: behavioral, 146 easy questions in, 6 golden era of, 130–31 Keynesian, see Keynesian economics mathematics in, 131 monetary, 176 “neoclassical,” 132, 133, 139–40, 147 and politics, 149–51 “positive” vs.


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

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning reportedly wrote Lamo. “Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.” The recipient of these leaks, Manning told Lamo at one point in the transcript: “a crazy white haired aussie who can’t seem to stay 32 MICAH L. SIFRY in one country very long.” Later he made it explicit: “Crazy white haired dude = Julian Assange.”14 (Despite this apparent statement, as of late January 2011 government investigators had reportedly not yet found a way to connect Manning directly to Assange.)15 Why did Manning allegedly do it?


pages: 322 words: 99,066

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks by The "Guardian", David Leigh, Luke Harding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, air gap, banking crisis, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, drone strike, end-to-end encryption, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, friendly fire, global village, Hacker Ethic, impulse control, Jacob Appelbaum, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, machine readable, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, operational security, post-work, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Levy, sugar pill, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

“Everywhere there’s a US post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed. Iceland, the Vatican, Spain, Brazil, Madagascar: if it’s a country, and it’s recognised by the US as a country, it’s got dirt on it. It’s open diplomacy, world-wide anarchy in CSV format [a simple text format]. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying, and it’s important that it gets out. I feel for some bizarre reason it might actually change something. I just don’t wish to be a part of it, at least not now … I’m not ready. I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.


pages: 400 words: 94,847

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

[42] Hyunyoung Choi and Hal Varian. Predicting the present with Google trends. Google Research blog, April 12, 2009. http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html. [43] Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers. The extended mind. Analysis, 58:10–23, 1998. [44] “Climategate” exposed: Conservative media distort stolen emails in latest attack on global warming consensus. Media Matters, December 1, 2009. http://mediamatters.org/research/200912010002. [45] Robert P. Colwell. The Pentium Chronicles. Hoboker, NJ: IEEE Computer Society, 2006. [46] Seth Cooper, Firas Khatib, Adrien Treuille, Janos Barbero, Jeehyung Lee, Michael Beenen, Andrew Leaver-Fay, David Baker, Zoran Popović & Foldit players.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Glenn Kessler and Scott Clement, “Trump Routinely Says Things That Aren’t True. Few Americans Believe Him,” Washington Post, December 14, 2018. 48. Rush Limbaugh, “The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up,” transcript of syndicated radio broadcast of April 29, 2013. Accessed via RushLimbaugh.com. 49. Rush Limbaugh, “ClimateGate Hoax: The Universe of Lies Versus the Universe of Reality,” transcript of syndicated radio broadcast of November 24, 2009. Accessed via RushLimbaugh.com. 50. Quoted in “Hacks at Work,” The Economist, February 23, 2008. 51. Alex Clark, “Breitbart’s Boyle: ‘Our Goal Is the “Elimination of the Entire Mainstream Media,’ ” Breitbart News, July 19, 2017. 52.


pages: 541 words: 109,698

Mining the Social Web: Finding Needles in the Social Haystack by Matthew A. Russell

Andy Rubin, business logic, Climategate, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, folksonomy, full text search, Georg Cantor, Google Earth, information retrieval, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, NP-complete, power law, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, sparse data, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, text mining, traveling salesman, Turing test, web application

@n2vip You've obviously never read an ebook on the iPhone. It's a great reading ... @n2vip I wasn't suggesting that insurance was the strange world, just that you ... @n2vip In high tech, there is competition from immigrant workers. Yet these two ... @n2vip How right you are. We really don't do a good job teaching people ... @n2vip The climategate stuff is indeed disturbing. But I still hold by what ... @n2vip FWIW, I usually do follow links, so do include them if appropriate. Thanks. @n2vip I don't mind substantive disagreement - e.g. with pointers to real info ... @n2vip Totally agree that ownership can help. But you need to understand why ...


pages: 426 words: 118,913

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet by Roger Scruton

An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, corporate social responsibility, demand response, Easter island, edge city, endowment effect, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, food miles, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, hobby farmer, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, market friction, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The report was published as The Economics of Climate Change, Cambridge, 2007. The report forms the background to the wide-ranging discussions in Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn, eds., The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, Oxford, 2010. 55 See www.climatedepot.com, where information concerning what is fast becoming known (alas) as the ‘climategate’ scandal is triumphantly blazoned. 56 BBC News, 5 February 2010. Pachauri (who is also director of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute) has responded to criticism in Yale Environment 360, 20 April 2010. 57 See Richard S. Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, ‘On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data’, Geophysical Research Letters, 36.16, August 2009, and Roy W.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

., PepsiCo, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, and Xerox Corporation.41 However, by late 2009 the rush of corporations to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership had slowed, following the failed climate treaty conference at Copenhagen, some dumb e-mails circulated among a clique of climate scientists (the so-called Climategate scandal, a scientifically minor but politically devastating public-relations fiasco), and a moribund cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate. By 2010 ConocoPhillips, BP America, Caterpillar, and Xerox had pulled out. Gas molecules are impervious to politics, so all of this is really just the beginning.


pages: 326 words: 48,727

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth by Mark Hertsgaard

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, business continuity plan, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, defense in depth, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, food miles, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, peak oil, Port of Oakland, precautionary principle, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, the built environment, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, two and twenty, University of East Anglia, urban planning

Bottom line: the AP found zero evidence of fraud, a conclusion later shared by two official investigations by British government bodies. In the words of the AP's headline, "Science Not Faked, but Not Pretty." But by the time that AP story was published, the rest of the media had embraced the deniers' framing of the controversy as "Climate-gate," thus implicitly endorsing the notion that evil deeds were afoot and amplifying the underlying suggestion that climate science was bunk. A few weeks later, news outlets again advanced the deniers' agenda when they repeatedly devoted ominous headlines to a handful of inaccuracies discovered in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, including the mistaken assertion that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

And given the meltdown on Wall Street, some were hardly enthusiastic about creating a vast new financial market in trading carbon. After the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 2010, a climate legislation became even less likely. “THE HEALTH OF THE HIMALYAS” More or less concurrent with Copenhagen was a chipping away of the credibility of the IPCC itself. In what became known as climategate, somebody hacked into the e-mails of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, which was one of the main research centers supporting climate research and the work of the IPCC. To many climate scientists and activists, the e-mails were being taken out of context and grossly misconstrued.

climate activism, rise of climate change Agassiz and biofuels and Callendar and Cancún meeting and carbon and cars and China and company green credentials and Congress and Copenhagen conference and Earth Summit and Gleneagles summit and global cooling and Great Britain and hot box and hot summer of 1988 and the White House effect and ice ages and International Geophysical Year and IPCC and Keeling and his curve and Kyoto Protocol and large-scale geophysical experiment and markets and, see market-based solutions Montreal Protocol and as new energy question Nobel Prize and ozone hole and renewables and Revelle and S. Arrhenius and Sassure and science meets policy and shale gas and as strategic threat Sundsvall meeting and Thatcher and twenty-one questions and Tyndall and Venus and Woods Hole meeting and see also global warming Climate Change Science Program “climategate,” Climate Science Technology Program Clinton, Bill climate change and in election of 1992 Iran policy and renewables and Clinton, Hillary Club of Rome Club of Rome Report (1972) CNN effect CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation) CNPC, see China National Petroleum Corporation coal carbon and disappearance of for electricity as fuel choice high vs. low sulfur Kelvin’s fears about lignate Mitchell’s views on oil made from pollution from reduction in use of Royal Navy’s move to oil from synfuels from see also specific countries coal gas (town gas) Coalition Provisional Authority Coase, Ronald Cocconi, Al Coda Cold War end of Cole, USS Colorado Columbus, Christopher combined-cycle gas turbines “Coming Ice Age, The” (Friedan) command-and-control regulation commodity index funds Commonwealth Edison communications electricity and international Communist Party, Chinese computers cyberattack and Comsat concentrated solar power Congress, U.S.


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

“media darling”: Naomi Wolf, “The Last Stage of a Tyrannical Takeover—Interview with Naomi Wolf,” interview by Joseph Mercola, June 1, 2022. “I never thought I would be talking to you”: Tucker Carlson, “Naomi Wolf Sounds Alarm at Growing Power of ‘Autocratic Tyrants.’” one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers: James Delingpole, “‘Climategate Was Fake News,’ Lies the BBC…,” Breitbart, July 11, 2019, posted on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. “This is so unlikely”: James Delingpole, “Naomi Wolf,” The James Delingpole Podcast, May 3, 2021, 0:25–1:04. “I spent years thinking you were the devil”: Steve Bannon, host, “Not Science Fiction … Dr.


pages: 631 words: 177,227

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

However, cultural transmission with limited memories favors breaking things down—compositionality—in ways that are easy to remember (Brighton, Kirby, and Smith 2005). Maybe the process was something like how “-gate” in “Watergate Hotel” got broken off and redeployed to mean “scandal,” as in Monicagate and Climategate. Individuals who begin breaking things down in ways that are easily learnable for others will be more successful and be more likely to be imitated. Languages with compositionality (words) will persist and outcompete noncompositional languages. 32. See Kirby, Christiansen, and Chater 2013, Smith and Kirby 2008, Kirby, Cornish, and Smith 2008, and Christiansen and Chater 2008. 33.