Live Aid

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pages: 613 words: 151,140

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

, was played as the soundtrack to a searing video of a child weakened by hunger and struggling to stand up on thin legs. By nightfall, Live Aid had raised £30m, three times what had been expected. The worst that could be said about that extraordinary day was that most of the people in the crowd had very little idea of the scale and complexity of Africa’s problems; £30m was an astonishing sum to raise from one charitable event, but it was nowhere near enough to impact on world affairs. As a comparison, two months after Live Aid, the British government sealed an arms deal with Saudi Arabia that was worth £43 billion, or more than 1,400 Live Aid concerts. The slush fund that the British contractor BAE set aside in Swiss and Panamanian bank accounts to pay commissions, or bribes, to various middlemen involved in the arms deal is thought to have been more than three times the amount raised by Live Aid.6 Geldof, to his credit, was quick to realize that if he was to take famine relief seriously he would have to immerse himself in the politics of world trade, because all the energy and goodwill of that summer’s day hardly made a ripple on Africa’s problems.

The slush fund that the British contractor BAE set aside in Swiss and Panamanian bank accounts to pay commissions, or bribes, to various middlemen involved in the arms deal is thought to have been more than three times the amount raised by Live Aid.6 Geldof, to his credit, was quick to realize that if he was to take famine relief seriously he would have to immerse himself in the politics of world trade, because all the energy and goodwill of that summer’s day hardly made a ripple on Africa’s problems. Even so, Live Aid was one of the greatest displays of generosity that Britain has ever seen, and it is the single most lasting image of Britain in the 1980s – which might seem odd, because the decade is not thought of as a charitable one.

Where the strike was divisive, Band Aid united; everybody, whether they were for or against the miners, or undecided, could be against letting African children starve. After Live Aid, there was less overtly political rock music, as if the industry had done its bit and could go back to singing about love, sex, despair and the other staples. Many of the best bands to emerge in Britain in the decade were not invited to perform at Live Aid, either because it was before their time or, in the case of the Eurythmics, because they seemed to have passed Geldof by. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had used a bank loan to set up a small eight-track studio in Chalk Farm, north London, in 1982.


pages: 296 words: 94,948

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny by Nile Rodgers

Bob Geldof, delayed gratification, East Village, gentrification, haute couture, Live Aid, nuclear winter, Pepsi Challenge, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Stephen Hawking, the High Line, urban renewal

With all due respect to the great poet and musician, he was wrong. In the searing summer heat of 1985, a televised event called Live Aid, a music-superstar-driven, dual-stage concert to help save Africa, became the largest pop event of all time—and I was part of the core band. Live Aid certainly felt like revolution, kind of, sort of, or at least what passed for a revolution in 1985. It was definitely a huge moment in my life—proof that everything I’d devoted my career to truly had the power to change the world. The good news for me was that Live Aid wasn’t exactly a call to arms or a demand for any personal sacrifice. Since I was now over thirty, developing a little paunch, and getting high daily on toot and common store-bought grog, it’s probably all the revolution I could handle.

I could only assume she must have. How long had I had the number? Since the Palladium party? Who knew? At some point during the day, I called her and we spoke about our upcoming gig—Live Aid. Despite my increasingly foggy mind, I was still in good enough shape to work all the time. My latest project was with the Thompson Twins. I was surprised by how pumped up Madonna was about the gig—she was close to obsessed. Live Aid, as most people know, was the second phase of the charity project that recorded the song “We Are the World.” Six months earlier the newly dubbed Material Girl had been snubbed from the original project, even though the “We Are the World” organizers chose participants from American Music Awards attendees, which included Madonna.

Eventually I’d have many occasions to question my path toward garden-variety alcoholism, but July 13 wasn’t one of them. Live Aid was the payoff for a lifetime of hard work. I was practically tripping over music legends—Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Phil Collins, Lionel Richie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Ashford & Simpson, Tom Petty, Hall & Oates, Teddy Pendergrass, Duran Duran, and Madonna—all gathered together like a walking collection of Rolling Stone covers. I’d admired almost every artist here since I was a teen. Now I was a peer, which was hard for me to believe. LIVE AID SHOULD HAVE REPRESENTED the highest peak in my professional life, but for some reason I kept pressing on, in search of a higher mountaintop.


pages: 218 words: 67,930

Me! Me! Me! by Daniel Ruiz Tizon

Bob Geldof, death of newspapers, gentrification, housing crisis, Live Aid, Stephen Hawking, young professional

Just a month later, following on from ‘Wear Purple Friday’ and ‘Bake a Cake Friday’, but just before ‘Do Something Nice Friday’, there was another World Food Day. My suspicions were confirmed. It was not official. This was coming from within. How could you have two World Food Days in the space of a couple of months, I asked my manager. It would be like Live Aid staging another Live Aid before 1985 was even out. At least Bob Geldof had the decency to wait 20 years before inflicting Chris Martin and Live 8 on the world. Having a second World Food Day so soon after the first devalued the original day, which, as my manager reminded me, I’d excused myself from in addition to refusing to turn out for the office’s mixed sex soft ball team.

If you can remember what you were doing the day your managers were born, I think it’s fair to say your career hasn’t gone according to plan. I didn’t find taking orders from them easy. There were days where I had to fight the urge to say, “Whoa, hold on; I remember watching Live Aid. I even posted my first love letter the morning of Live Aid about two years before your parents even met.” But it all counts for nothing. It should. But it doesn’t. After this latest miserable, nine to five experience, under the strengths and skills section on my rather gappy CV, I’m considering sticking “able to work for very young bosses”.

I’m not ashamed to be working class but the all too often limited ambitions and dreams of my own community, coupled with my coolness towards the middle classes because of the opportunities that come their way all too easily, have made me something of a loner. I’ve long felt I’m caught between two worlds. The one I belong to, and the one populated by the gatekeepers who decide whether my work will sell, more often than not these days, born the wrong side of Live Aid. As I’ve moved into my forties, whilst I feel I’ve managed to iron out some of the flaws that brought down my dad, in another significant way, I believe I have morphed into him. My dad, I can see now, had never really fully embraced the always-insular Spanish community in southwest London, and around this time of his life, became something of a loner.


pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

Working relentlessly, using persuasion, negotiation, guilt, and manipulation, he organized Live Aid, a daylong concert held in London and Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, and broadcast around the world. In the U.S. Live Aid was broadcast live on ABC and MTV, whose VJs hosted the event—quite badly, almost ineptly. ABC’s audience was much larger than MTV’s, so the VJs’ inexperience was seen by millions, including TV critics who hammered the fives faces of the network. “The MTV video jockeys should hide their heads,” USA Today wrote. Live Aid raised close to $300 million, and Geldof was knighted, but the countdown began on the MTV careers of Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, Mark Goodman, and J.J.

So I talked to Garland and explained that if we made some sort of commitment to give them inventory on the air, we could get the exclusive on the video. And that led to us broadcasting the Live Aid concert. I did that deal. About six weeks before the broadcast, Gale Sparrow and I left to form a new company. CURT SMITH: We’d been touring for a year, really hard work. We had five days off and planned a holiday in Hawaii. Then Bob Geldof announced that we were playing Live Aid. He never asked us. Geldof thought he was so powerful that if he announced it, we’d have to say yes, or we’d look like bad people. I was pissed off. Whether we played or not wasn’t going to make a difference to the amount of money raised.

But their free programming was selling a zillion records. After the mid-’80s, MTV knew they had the power. That’s when the record companies said, “Please play our record!” instead of “Why should we give you our record?” Chapter 20 “DON’T BE A WANKER ALL YOUR LIFE” “DO THEY KNOW IT’S CHRISTMAS?,” “WE ARE THE WORLD,” AND LIVE AID BOB GELDOF LEARNED ABOUT THE DISASTROUS famine in Ethiopia while watching TV, and he resolved to raise money to feed starving Africans. Geldof was not a music star—his band, the Boomtown Rats, is remembered mostly for the crazy-assassin ballad “I Don’t Like Mondays”—but he knew England was full of pop phenoms, and he gathered them to record a song he cowrote, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”


pages: 233 words: 75,477

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

When a British aid worker in Khartoum told a middle-class Sudanese woman that millions of Sudanese were close to death due to a famine in the far west of the country, she exclaimed, “My God, are those khawajas going to have a crisis on their hands!” As the woman's reaction indicated, the famine was a crisis of conscience for the West only. The famine certainly wasn't a crisis for the Eastern bloc. Not a single ruble was collected for Live Aid, of which Dr. Anatoly Gromyko, head of the USSR's Africa Institute, said he never heard. (Moskovskii Komsomolets, a widely read Soviet youth publication, described Live Aid as a “tele-cosmic concert” on behalf of peace; the paper never mentioned the word famine.) But from interviews I conducted in fall 1985 and spring 1986, it became clear to me that the famine did not prick the conscience of many Africans who were not starving.

Keating, Robert. (July 1986). Spin “Live Aid: The Terrible Truth.” Keating, Robert. (September 1986). Spin “Sympathy for the Devil.” Legum, Colin. May 20, 1986. International Herald Tribune, “Ethiopia: A Regime of Torture.” Matthews, Christopher J. January 21, 1985. The New Republic, “The Road to Korem.” May, Clifford D. September 29, 1985. The New York Times, “War Rivals Drought in Africa's Hunger Crisis.” Merritt, Giles. October 1985 International Herald Tribune, “Americans May be Hooked on Africa.” Owen, Richard. July 23,1985. The Times, “No Roubles in the Live Aid Fund.” Puddington, Arch. (April 1986).

Villagization went on unabated and thereby paved the road to the next famine by uprooting the way of life of the country's most successful group of farmers. In 1987, foreign donors were helping to make up cereal deficits in twenty-two of thirty-nine regions of Hararghe, which prior to villagization traditionally had registered surpluses. Thus, large amounts of Western aid were subsidizing communism, albeit indirectly, while charities such as Live Aid were serving to buttress a ruling elite that had destroyed the lives of more of its own people than had any other government in this decade, with the sole exception of Iran's, and that consistently had refused to negotiate a truce in a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Clay's frequent assertion that Western aid in the long run could kill more people than it saved in the short run was neither farfetched nor unfair.


pages: 401 words: 115,959

Philanthrocapitalism by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green, Bill Clinton

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, business process outsourcing, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital divide, do well by doing good, don't be evil, family office, financial innovation, full employment, global pandemic, global village, Global Witness, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Dyson, John Elkington, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, lone genius, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market bubble, mass affluent, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Singer: altruism, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working poor, World Values Survey, X Prize

Its roots extend back to the Band Aid record of 1984 and Live Aid concert of 1985, organized by Irish rock musician Bob Geldof and featuring Bono. As well as raising lots of money, these had generated massive publicity about the problems of developing countries and turned a generation into activists. A newly elected backbench MP called Tony Blair founded the Band Aid cross-party Parliamentary committee. Eventually, encouraged by British activist Jamie Drumond, Bono and Geldof became involved in another campaign, Jubilee 2000, built on the fact that the interest owed by Ethiopia each year on its debt dwarfed the money raised by Live Aid—and that many other poor countries were in a similar position.

This particular evening, in September 2007, the Colombian pop star is singing her latest hit, “Hips Don’t Lie,” at a debate-cum-party, screened live on MTV, at the end of the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Since the former president, now as much a celebrity as a politician, first held this annual giving fest in 2005, it has become a must-attend event for philanthrocapitalists eager for recognition at what the Economist has christened “the Philanthropy Oscars.” At least since the Live Aid concert in 1985, celebrities and philanthropy have become ever more entwined. Now, movie and rock star “celanthropists” are serious partners with the superrich. Rock star and activist Bono and Bill Gates—who, with Melinda Gates were named Time magazine’s “People of the Year” in 2005—have “had a common cause” ever since their first meeting in New York in 2002, says Gates: “He’s been great.”

Around the same time, Arlo Guthrie performed benefit concerts for Chilean freedom fighters, and Brigitte Bardot campaigned to protect seals. In 1971, George Harrison of the Beatles organized the pioneering awareness and fundraising Concert for Bangladesh, then in the grip of famine. This was the precursor of the Live Aid concert in 1985, which raised over $140 million for the people of Ethiopia and inspired a whole generation of celebrity activists, not least Bono. Today, the number of celanthropists, and the seriousness with which they approach their good work, is unprecedented. Angelina Jolie has scaled up her philanthropy over time, starting in 2001, when she gave $1 million to help Afghan refugees.


pages: 225 words: 61,388

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, belling the cat, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Live Aid, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, moral hazard, Multics, Ponzi scheme, rent-seeking, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

The Nigerian humanitarian catastrophe of Biafra in 1971 (the same year as the Beatle George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh) had demanded that the world respond to human catastrophe. Consciousness was raised several notches with Bob Geldof’s 13 July 1985 Live Aid Concert where, with 1.5 billion people watching, public discourse became a public disco. Live Aid had not only been triumphant in bringing Africa’s plight to the wider public; it also trumpeted an era of morality. In the run-up to the new millennium, crusades like the Jubilee Debt Campaign capitalized on people’s desperate desire to be a part of something that would give aid and development policy another dimension.

D. 46 Heavily Indebted Poorest Country debt relief programme (HIPC) 53 HIV–AIDS pandemic 4–5, 7, 71–2 Hu Jintao 104, 108 Human Development Report (1994) 52 Hungary 85–6 IMF (International Monetary Fund) aid warning 47 appointment of Irwin Blumenthal 53 debt crisis 18–19 and foreign capital 63 inception 11–13 and Malawi 55–6 and ‘nit-picking’ 108–9 Structural Adjustment Facilities 21 In Search of Prosperity (Rodrik) 34 India 112, 117, 123, 132, 134, 137–8 India–Africa Forum 112, 123 Indonesia 34, 56 Industrial and Commercial Bank (China) 106 inflation 61–5 innovation 139–40 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development see World Bank International Development Association (IDA) 37–8 International Development and Food Assistance Act (US 1975) 16 International Peace Research Institute (Stockholm) 59 International Remittance Network 136 International Trade Organization 11 investment bonds 77–83, 87–96 borrowing costs 84–5 credit ratings 78, 83, 87–8 emerging markets 79–81, 85 portfolio diversification 80–82 Ireland 37, 125 Israel 134 Italy 125 Ivory Coast 109–10 Jamaica 136 Japan 99, 102–3, 112, 125 Johannesburg Stock Exchange 4 John Paul II, Pope 26 joint liability 129 Jubilee Debt Campaign 26 Kagame, President Paul 27–8, 148–9 Kanbur, Ravi 54 Kariba dam 15 Kenya and EBA 118 and exports 62 favourable view of China 109 fragile democracy 72 HIV prevalence rates 3 and long-term debt 87–8 money transfer systems 136 population 124 and rampant corruption 48 stake in the economy 152 trade-oriented commodity-driven economy 146 turbulent elections 2008 33 Keynes, John Maynard 11 Kibaki, Mwai 33 Kiva 130 Kurtzman, Joel 51 Lambsdorff, Graf 51 Landes, David 33–4, 147 least-developed countries (LDC) 123 Lensink, R. 136 Lesotho 118 life expectancy 5 Lin Yifu, Justin 153 Live Aid 26 Lumumba, Patrice 14 Lundin, Lukas 98 M-Pesa (money transfer system) 136 Mahajan, Vijay 132 McLiesh, Caralee 101 McNamara, Robert 16, 17 maize scandal (Malawi) 56 Malawi 55–6, 106, 117, 145 Mali 71–2, 94, 109–10, 116 Maren, Michael 60 Markit (data/index firm) 91 Marshall, George C. 12 Marshall Plan 12–13, 35–8 Mauritania 120 Mauritius 34, 89 Maystadt, Philippe 107 Mengistu Haile Mariam 14, 23 Mexico 18, 82, 84, 117, 132, 144, 151 micro-finance 126–32, 140 middle class 57–8 Millennium Challenge Corporation aid campaign (US) 40, 56 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 45, 96–7 Mkapa, President Benjamin 26 Mobutu Sese Seko, President 14, 22–3, 48, 53, 108 Monterrey Consensus 2002 74 Moody’s Investors Service 83 morality 150 ‘More Aid for the Poorest’ (UK white paper) 16 mosquito net producer (example) 44–5, 114, 122, 130–31 Mozambique 117, 134 Mugabe, Grace 146 Mugabe, Robert 108, 146–7 Mwanawasa, President Levy 53 Mystery of Capital, The (de Soto) 137–8 Na’m, Moisés 107 Namibia 89, 93 ‘negative corruption’ 57; see also corruption Netherlands 63 New York City 151; see also United States New Zealand 121 Nicaragua 151 Nigeria and AGOA duty-free benefits 118 aid from World Bank 107–8 assets looted 48 banking sector 4 beneficiary of FDI 105 and the bond index 92 and corruption 23 cotton revenues 116 favourable view of China 109 humanitarian catastrophe 26 independence 71 and long-term credit ratings 88 Maiduguri money find 137 many tribes 32 natural-gas reserves development 112 rebuilding colonial-era railway 106 remittances 133 ‘No Donor Money, No Loans’ policy 128 North, Douglass 41 Norway 73 ODA (official aid) 25 Odinga, Raila 33 oil 17–18, 48–9, 82, 105–6, 108–9, 120 oil crisis 1979 17–18 Olson, Mancur 41 Olympics 2008 108 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 115 Oxfam 117 Pakistan 34, 124 Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund (PAIDF) 95 Paris Club of creditors 108 PEPFAR (AIDS Relief) 7 Peru 151 Peters Projection Map 121 Pew Report 2007 109 Philippines, the 135 PIMCO (bond investment organization) 91 Poland 8–6 Ponzi schemes 130 ‘positive’ corruption 56, 59; see also corruption Private Equity investments 4–5 programme aid 21 Protestantism 31 Przeworski, Adam 43 Raiffeisen, Friedrich 131 Rajan, Raghuram G. 142 Ramalho, Rita 101 Ramesh, Jairam 123 Reagan, Ronald 20, 22 Reichel, R. 46 remittances 133–6 Resource Flows to Africa (UN) 133 Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone) 59 Rodrik, Dani 34 Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul 39 Ruiz-Arranz, Marta 136 Russia 84, 87, 112 Rwanda 27, 32, 148 Sachs, Jeffrey 96–7 Sani Abacha, President 48 São Tomé and Principe 106 savings 137–40 Schulze-Delitzsch, Herman 131 Scottish Banks 139–40 Second Conference of Chinese and African Entrepreneurs 114 securitization 96 Sen, Amartya 42 Senegal 109–10 Short, Clare 56 Sierra Leone 59 Singapore 152 Singh, Manmohan 123 small/medium enterprises (SMEs) 125 social capital 58–9 Somalia 60, 118, 133 South Africa abandoning foreign aid 144 and AGOA duty-free benefits 118 and bond issues 89, 92–3 and credit league tables 82 1997 stock market fall 84 not reliant on aid 150 and PAIDF 95 remittances 133 setting an example 78 South Korea 45, 82, 87 Sovereign Wealth Funds 112 Spain 86 Spatafora, N. 133 stabilization programme 20 Standard & Poor’s rating agency 83, 87–8 Standard Bank 106 sterilization 64–5 stock market liquidity 4 Structural Adjustment Facilities 20–21 Subramanian, Arvind 142 subsidies 115–16 Sudan 105–6, 108, 120 sugar production 116–17 Svensson, J. 39, 52 Swaziland 5, 106 Sweden 73 Tanzam Railway 103–4 Tanzania 26, 56, 97, 103–4, 110, 124, 131 taxation 52, 66 Thailand 57 Thatcher, Margaret 20, 67 Togo 94, 116 Tokyo International Conference on African Development 112 Toxopeus, H. 136 trade 17, 19–21, 38–40, 62, 64, 112, 114, 117–24 Transparency International 51, 56, 71 Turkey 93, 112, 117 Uganda aid-fuelled corruption 53 and bonds 65, 97 favourable view of China 109 and HIV–AIDS 71 improved economic growth 101 plunderers and despots 108 population 124 remittances 134 trade-oriented commodity-driven economy 146 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 102 United Kingdom 108, 120 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 25 United Nations Human Development Report 5 United States and African Growth and Opportunity Act 118 aid history 12–17, 40 bond comparisons 80 diplomatic ties with Zimbabwe 108 Energy Information Administration 103 Food For Peace budget 45 freer trade access for African countries 149 influence compared to China 109–10 and Malawi 56 public’s desire on aid 74 Soft Banks 139 and subsidies 115–16 trading partner status 119 2006 foreign aid 99–100 US Farm Security and Rural Investment Act 2005 115 USSR 14, 19, 24 Venezuela 86 venture capital (VC) 139 Wade, President Abdoulaye 149 Washington Consensus 21–2 Wealth and Poverty of Nations, The (Landes) 33–4, 147 Weber, Max 31 Weder, Beatrice 52 Wen Jibao 104, 114 West African Economic and Monetary Union 88 What makes Democracies endure?


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

If the country wants a modern, aspirant and representative economy, then it needs to understand that equality, aspiration and economic growth feed off each other. A positive attitude towards repeated failure is the secret to success. This is the substance of Chapter 8, which explores our enduring concept of mutuality. Britain is the nation of Wilberforce, Leonard Cheshire and the NHS. It was the cradle of the anti-slavery movement, the Paralympics and Live Aid. The sense of duty that drives us towards each other is at the heart of Britain. The concept of different people working towards a unified goal is the foundation of the United Kingdom, and we should never forget it. This is not just about gender, ethnicity, disability or class background. Our NHS is about equality of health.

For many others this was Britain’s key quality: ‘When you travel around the world, you realise that it’s the combination of the democratic traditions, culture and respect for fairness and justice that most characterises Great Britain.’ As evidence for this, panel members cited the actions of the British people as least as much as they talked about government policies: ‘the Live Aid concert, the actions to free Nelson Mandela and the Make Poverty History campaign’ and more. One panellist said, ‘It’s remarkable that in the historical records of social change it is the legislative and political parties’ role that is emphasised. The public agitation is ignored and yet this was often the most crucial part of the social changes that occurred.’

By focusing solely on our own needs, we are directed inwards, but St Augustine pointed out that at the heart of man there existed a ‘God-shaped hole’, a desire for fulfilment that no amount of money, food, sex and drugs could ever fill. If we were to go looking for true leaders, they would not be those acting for personal gain; they would be those acting in service. Why does Britain have so many charities? Is it compassion? Empathy? Guilt, even? What was it that motivated Sir Bob Geldof to found Live Aid? The cynical mind might accuse him of career opportunism, but that would not have sustained such an enterprise. The notion that artists in a notoriously competitive and cut-throat industry would cooperate was ridiculed. But it worked. It was a big idea and it grew bigger. The resulting concerts raised £150 million for those in need in Ethiopia.28 This sort of cause unifies; it brings people together for a higher reason; it motivates and it removes division.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Remove the microphone and amplifier from the toolbox of twentieth-century technology and you remove one of that century’s defining forms of political organization, from Nuremberg to “I Have a Dream.” Tube amplification enabled the musical equivalent of political rallies as well: the Beatles playing Shea Stadium, Woodstock, Live Aid. But the idiosyncrasies of vacuum-tube technology also had a more subtle effect on twentieth-century music—making it not just loud but also making it noisy. It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.

., 112–13 “I Have a Dream” speech, 114, 231 Koch, Robert, 141–42 Kramers, Jan, 43 Kruesi, John, 211 Labrador, 68, 70, 71, 72, 253 Lagos, 83 Lancet, The, 140 Lasers, 30, 38–39, 100, 158, 232–37 Las Vegas, 226, 227, 228–31 Latitude, 168 Lawrence Livermore Labs, 235 Leal, John, 142–46, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156, 158, 160 Learning from Las Vegas (Brown and Venturi), 230, 231 LEDs, 205, 250 Led Zeppelin, 115 Lenses, 2, 6, 8, 10, 30, 31, 41, 156, 251 camera, 25, 27, 42 lasers and, 235 microscope, 22–24, 34, 141–42 of spectacles, 2, 4, 20, 22, 27 telescope, 24–25, 34, 38 Leonardo da Vinci, 31, 34, 252 Libyan Desert, 13–14, 43 “Lightbulb moments,” 72, 198 Lightbulbs, 2, 8, 41, 103, 198, 200–201, 205–15, 218, 228 fluorescent, 200, 205 lasers and, 232–33 LED, 205, 250 neon, see Neon lights Lighthouses, 118 Limelight, 217, 225 Lippershey, Hans, 25, 38 Listerine, 151, 152 Live Aid, 114 Liverpool, 110 London, 83, 104, 127, 134, 138, 152, 154, 181, 241, 246 cholera in, 140, 141, 147 Clockmakers’ Museum in, 173 underground in, 133, 135 Longitude, 168, 172 Long Now Foundation, 192–93 Clock of, 192, 193 Los Angeles, South Central, 110 Louis XIII, King of France, 138 Louisiana, 67 Lovelace, Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of, 241–42, 243, 244–46, 248, 250–52, 255 Lovelace, William King, Earl of 241–42 MacFarlane, Alan, 34, 36 Macintosh computers, 254 Madagascar (ship), 45 Madras, 55 Magna Carta, 2 Malaria, 62 Manila, 83 Marconi, Guglielmo, 106 Mariana, Queen of Spain, 32 Marrison, W.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

This issue has since taken on far greater dominance and is becoming central to policy and politics, particularly in Europe, where legal commitments to decarbonisation may, in part, change the nature and structure of our economies in the years to come. The wave of new technologies in this period facilitated many other social changes in the mid-1980s when I entered the workforce. In July 1985, just before my first job started, the Live Aid concert had taken place, staged both in London's Wembley stadium and the JFK stadium in Philadelphia. New communications technology meant that, for the first time, a concert could be beamed around the world in real time. Using 13 satellites, the live concert reached a global audience of over one billion people in 110 countries; it was a triumph of both organisation and technology.3 There were, of course, strong elements of the past that featured in the concert: when Bob Dylan sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind' together with Rolling Stones members Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, it could have been Woodstock 16 years earlier, but the sheer technological scale of this endeavour made it feel like a new world; perhaps Dylan's ‘The Times They Are a Changin’ ’ might have been more appropriate.

Index 100 year bond 34 1920s, United States 148, 154, 157, 160 1945-1968, post-war boom 129–131 1960s ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 130–131, 233, 235 structural bear market 130 1970s Dow Jones 131 equity cycle 56 oil crisis 108 1980s bull markets 131–133 Dow Jones 15–16, 131–132 equity cycle 56–57 Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 technology 12–15 1990s 16–17 Asia crisis 108, 133 equity cycle 57 S&P concentration 114 technology bubble 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 2000-2007 equity cycle 57 2007-2009 financial crisis 169–174 emerging markets 171–173 forecasting 19–21 growth vs. value company effects 94–96 impact 169–170 phases 171–174 quantitative easing 173–174, 178–179 sovereign debt 170, 171–173 structural bear market 110, 118–119 A accounting, bubbles 163–165 adjustment speed 74, 89–90 Akerflof, G.A. 23 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) 154, 225, 235–236, 238 Asia crisis, 1998 108, 133 ASPF see Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds asset classes across phases 66–68 contractions and expansions 63–65 cyclical 83–89 defensive 83–89 diversification 42, 45–47, 178–179 growth 83–84, 90–96 and inflation 65–66, 70 levels of yield 74–76 relationship through cycle 68–76 returns across cycle 63–79 speed of adjustment 74 structural shifts 76–79 value 83–84, 90–96 see also bonds; commodities; equities Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds (ASPF) 77 AT&T see American Telephone and Telegraph austerity 239 Austria, 100 year bond 34 B bank margins 214–215 bear markets 49, 99–125 1960s 130 characteristics 100–106, 117–118 cyclical 105, 106–107 deflation 109, 113 duration 100–101, 106–111, 117 employment 121–124 event-driven 105, 107–109 false negatives 119–120 financial crisis 118–119 growth momentum 122–123 indicators 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 inflation 101–103, 109, 121–122 interest rates 106, 111–113 prior conditions 121–124 private sector financial balance 124 profitability 115–117 recovery 101 risk indicator vs MSCI index 124–125 S&P 500 103–105 structural 105 triggers 101–105, 106, 108, 111 valuations 123 yield curve 122 behavioural factors 5, 22–25 Berlin Wall, fall of 133 Bernanke, B. 133 betas 65, 85 ‘Big Bang’ deregulation 12 Bing 237 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 Black Wednesday 16–17 ‘bond-like’ equities 96 bonds, 100 year 34 bond yields across phases 66–68, 72–76 current cycle 95–96, 191–193, 201–220 cyclical vs. defensive companies 87–88 and demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 72–76, 206–208 and growth companies 92–94 historical 43, 202 and implied growth 210–215 and inflation 65, 70 quantitative easing 173–174, 202–205 and risk asset demand 217–220 S&P 500 correlation 72–73 speed of adjustment 74, 89–90 ultra-low 201–220 and value companies 92–94 vs. dividends 78–79 vs. equities 43–45, 68–76, 78–79 Bretton Woods monetary system 102, 130–131 broadcast radio 154, 225 Bubble Act 147, 157 bubbles 143–165 1920s US 148, 154, 157, 160 1980s Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 accounting 163–165 canal mania 152 characteristics 145–146 deregulation 157–159 easy credit 160–161 famous 145 financial innovation 158–159 government-debt-for-equity swaps 151–152 Mississippi Company 147, 151 ‘new eras’ 150–157 personal computers 155 psychology 144–145 radio manufacturing 154 railways 148, 152–154, 157, 160, 163 Shanghai composite stock price index 156 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 structural bear markets 113 sub-prime mortgages 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 technology, 1990s 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 tulip mania 146–147 valuations 161–162 bull markets 49, 127–142 characteristics 127–141 composition 138 cyclical 134–136 disinflation 131–133 duration 136–138, 139–141 equity performance 135–136 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 non-trending 138–141 post-war boom 129–131 quantitative easing 134 secular 127–134 United States 136 C canal mania 152 CAPE see cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio capital investment, Juglar cycle 3 CDO see collateralised debt obligations characteristics bear markets 100–109, 111, 117–118 bubbles 145–146 bull markets 127–141 cyclical bear markets 106–107 event-driven bear markets 108–109 structural bear markets 111 China 15, 156 Cold War 14–15, 133 collateralised debt obligations (CDO) 159 commodities across phases 66–68 Kitchin cycle 3 composition of bull markets 138 concentration structural bear markets 115 and technology 238–240 contractions asset performance 63–65 mini cycles 60 see also recessions Cooper, M. 162 corporate debt 65, 110, 114, 160–161 corporate profitability bear markets 107, 115–117 current equity cycle 185–186 monetary policy 239 credit crunch 78–79, 170, 171 crowds, psychology of 21–22, 144–145 cult of the equity 77–78 current equity cycle 57–58, 167–240 bank profitability 214–215 bond yields 191–193 demographic shifts 215–217 drivers 179–180 earnings per share 195–196 employment and unemployment 183–185 equity valuations 206–208 ‘first mile problem’ 226–227 future expectations 246–247 global relative performance 193–196 growth momentum 174–178, 182–183, 227–231 growth and value companies 190–196, 239–240 implied growth 210–215 inflation 180–182, 203–205 interest rates 180–182, 239–240 Japan, lessons from 196–200 lessons from 244–245 market and economy incongruence 174–178 monetary policy 178–179, 201–205 opportunities 230–231 profitability 185–186 quantitative easing 202–205 returns 174–179 risk asset demand 217–220 structural changes 76–79, 93–96, 169–200 technology 189–190, 221–241 term premium collapse 204–205 ultra-low bond yields 201–220 valuations 233–235 volatility 187–189 cycles 1970s 56 asset returns 63–79 cyclical vs. defensive companies 85–89 equities 49–62 growth vs. value companies 90–96 investment styles 81–96 long-term returns 29–47 riding 11–27 sectors 83–85 valuations 53 cyclical bear markets 105, 106–107, 117, 118 vs. event-driven 109 cyclical bull markets 134–136 cyclical companies bond yields 193 inflation 88 sectors 83–84 vs. defensive 85–89 cyclical growth 83–84 cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio (CAPE) 37–38, 44–45 cyclical value 83–84 D DDM see discounted dividend model debt levels bubbles 160–161 structural bear markets 110, 114 decarbonization 13 defensive companies 63–65 bond yields 193 inflation 88 Japan 198 sectors 83–84 vs. cyclical 85–89 defensive growth 83–84 defensive value 83–84 deflation bear markets 109, 113 Volker 102, 131 delivery solutions 226–227 demographics and zero bond yields 215–217 deregulation 12, 132–133, 157–159 derivative markets 158–159 design of policy 25–26 despair phase 50–52, 53, 55–56, 60, 66–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86, 88 growth vs. value companies 92 Dice, C. 161 Dimitrov, O. 162 discounted dividend model (DDM) 36, 69 discount rate 68 disinflation 131–133 disruption 1980s 12–15 current equity cycle 189–190, 221–241 electricity 226 historical parallels 222–227 printing press 223–224 railway infrastructure 224–227 telecoms 225–226 divergence, and technology 238–240 diversification 42, 45–47, 178–179 dividends asset yields 38–41, 69 reinvestment 38–40 value of future streams 209 vs. bonds 78–79 Dodd, D. 163, 164 domain registrations 12–13 dominance of technology 231–233 dotcoms 12–13, 33, 93–94, 102, 161, 237 Dow Jones 1970s 131 1980s 15–16, 131 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 Draghi, M. 17, 173 drivers of bull markets 138 current equity cycle 179–180 duration bear markets 100–101, 106–111, 117 bull markets 135–138, 139–141 cyclical bear markets 106–107, 117, 118 cyclical bull markets 135–136 dominance of technology 231–233 event-driven bear markets 108–109, 117–118 non-trending bull markets 139–141 structural bear markets 109–111, 117 term premia 204–205 DVDs 227 E earnings per share (EPS) bear markets 115–117 historical 189 since pre-financial crisis peak 195–196, 209–210 easy credit, and bubbles 160–161 ECB see European Central Bank Economic Recovery Act, 1981 132 efficient market hypothesis 4 electricity 226 email 13 employment 121–124, 183–185 Enron 164 environmental issues 13 EPS see earnings per share equities across phases 66–68 ‘bond-like’ 96 and bond yields 72–73, 74–76, 206–208 bull market performance 135–136 CAPE 37–38, 44–45 dividends 38–41, 69, 78–79, 209 and inflation 65–66, 70 mini/high-frequency cycles 58–61 narrowing and structural bear markets 114–115 overextension 36–37 phases of investment 50–58 quantitative easing 173–174, 178–179 S&P 500 historical performance 42 valuations and future returns 43–45 vs. bonds 43–45, 68–76, 78–79 equity cycle 49–62 1970s 56 1980s 56–57 1990s 57 2000-2007 57 current 57–58, 76–79 historical periods 56–58 length 49 mini/high-frequency 58–61 phases 50–56 structural shifts 76–79 equity risk premium (ERP) 35–38, 69–72, 210 ERM see exchange rate mechanism ERP see equ ity risk premium ESM see European stability mechanism Europe dividends 39–40 exchange rate mechanism 16–17, 111 Maastricht Treaty 17 market narrowing in 1990s 115 privatisation 132 quantitative easing 17, 204–205 sovereign debt crisis 170, 171–173 European Central Bank (ECB) 17, 171, 173 European Recovery Plan 129–131 European stability mechanism (ESM) 173 event-driven bear markets 105, 107–109, 117–118 vs. cyclical 109 excess see bubbles exchange rate mechanism (ERM) 16–17, 111 exogenous shocks 108 expansions, asset performance 63–65 F false negatives, bear markets 119–120 fat and flat markets 128, 139 features see characteristics Federal Reserve 16, 102, 131, 134, 150–151, 157, 203 financial crisis, 2007–2009 169–174 forecasting 19–21 growth vs. value company effects 94–96 impact 169–170 structural bear market 110, 118–119 financial innovation 158–159 ‘first mile problem’ 226–227 Fish, M. 19 fixed costs 84–85, 173–174 fixed income assets 35, 65, 69–70, 205 flat markets 138–141 see also non-trending bull markets forecasting 2008 financial crisis 19–21 bear markets 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 behavioural aspects 22–25 difficulties of 18–22 future growth 211–212 neuroeconomics 24–25 and policy setting 25–26 recessions 20–21 and sentiment 21–25 short-term 17–18 weather 18–19 France Mississippi Company 147, 151 privatisation 132 Fukuyama, F. 15 future expectations 246–247 G Galbraith, J.K. 160 GATT see General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 129 Germany Bund yield 207 fall of Berlin Wall 133 wage inflation 185 Glasnost 14 Glass-Steagall Act, 1933 132 global growth 182–183 globalisation 14–16 global relative performance 193–196 global sales growth 212 global technology bubble 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 Goetzmann, F. 151 ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ 129–131 Gold Standard 130 see also Bretton Woods monetary system Goobey, G.R. 77 Google 237 Gorbachev, M. 14 Gordon Growth model 209 government-debt-for-equity swaps 151–152 Graham, B. 161, 163, 164 Great Britain South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 see also United Kingdom Great Depression 4 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 Greenspan, A. 16, 113, 150–151 gross domestic product (GDP) cyclical vs. defensive companies 87 labour share of 185, 238–239 phases of cycle 52–53 profit share of, US. 186 growth bear markets 122–123 current equity cycle 174–178, 182–183, 227–231 technology impacts 227–231 and zero bond yields 208–210, 210–215 growth companies bond yields 92–94, 191–193 current cycle 190–196 definition 90–91 since financial crisis 94–96 interest rates 92–94 outperformance 239–240 sectors 83–84 vs. value 90–96 growth phase 50–52, 54–56, 67–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 92 Gulf war 102 H herding 21–22, 144–145 high-frequency cycles 58–61 historical performance 10 year bonds, US 43 bonds 43, 202 equities cycles 49, 56–58 S&P 500 38–39, 42 trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 Holland, tulip mania 146–147 hope phase 50–52, 53–54, 55–56, 66–67 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 92 housing bubble, US 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 Hudson, G. 163 I IBM 13, 155, 236 IMAP see Internet Message Access Protocol IMF see International Monetary Fund impacts of diversification 42, 45–47 financial crisis, 2007-2009 169–170 technology on current cycle 221–241 ultra-low bond yields 201–220 Imperial Tobacco pension fund 77 implied growth 210–215 income, Kuznets cycle 3 indicators bear markets 106, 108, 109–110, 119–125 cyclical bear markets 106 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 109–110 industrial revolution 224–226 industry leadership, S&P 500 232–233, 237–238 inflation asset performance 65–66, 70 bear markets 101–103, 109, 121–122 current equity cycle 180–182, 203–205 cyclicals 88 Volker 102, 131 Institute of Supply Management index (ISM) 59–61 bear markets 123 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86–87 interest rates bear markets 106, 111–113 current equity cycle 180–182, 239–240 growth vs. value companies 92–94 structural bear markets 111–113 and yield 69, 74–76 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 129 internet 12–13, 225–227 search 237 see also dotcoms Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) 13 inventories 84–85 Kitchin cycle 3 investment, Juglar cycle 3 investment cycle bear markets 122–123 current 57–58, 76–79 historical periods 56–58 lengths 49 mini/high-frequency 58–61 phases 50–56 structural shifts 76–79 see also cycles ISM see Institute of Supply Management index J Japan bubbles 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 defensive companies 198 dividends 39–40 lessons from 196–200 John Crooke and Company 160 Juglar cycle 3 K Kahneman, D. 22–23 Kennedy Slide bear market 102 Keynes, J.M. 22 Kindleberger, C.P. 22 Kitchin cycle 3 Kondratiev cycle 3 Kuznets cycle 3 L labour share of GDP 185, 238–239 land and property bubble, Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 laptop computers 13 largest companies S&P 500 237–238 technology 234–237 light touch regulation 157–159 see also deregulation Live Aid 13–14 Loewenstein, G. 21–22 long-term returns 29–47 M Maastricht Treaty 17 Mackay, C. 21 market forecasts short-term 17–18 see also forecasting market narrowing structural bear markets 114–115 and technology 238–240 markets current equity cycle 174–178 psychology of 21–25, 144–145 see also bear markets; bubbles; bull markets market timing 41–43 market value of technology companies 234, 235–238 Marks, H. 6–7 Marshall Plan 129–131 MBS see mortgage-backed securities Microsoft 12, 236–237 mini cycles 58–61 Mississippi Company 147, 151 monetary policy 157–159, 178–179, 201–205, 239 austerity 239 European Central Bank 17, 171, 173 Federal Reserve 16, 102, 131, 134, 150–151, 157, 203 quantitative easing 17, 70–71, 119, 133–134, 173–174, 178–179, 202–205 Montreal Protocol 13 mortgage-backed securities (MBS) 159 MSCI indices 91 N narrow equity markets 114–115, 238–240 NASDAQ 149–150, 161 negative bond yields 201–220 demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 206–208 and growth 208–210 implied growth 210–215 monetary policy 201–205 quantitative easing 202–205 risk asset demand 217–220 neuroeconomics 24–25 ‘new eras’ 113–114, 150–157 ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 233 non-trending bull markets 138–141 nudges 26 O oil 108, 226 opportunities, technology 230–231 optimism phase 50–52, 54–56, 67–68 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 growth vs. value companies 91–92 output gaps 4 Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) 171, 173 overextension 36–37 ozone layer 13 P pension funds 77, 218–219 Perestroika 14 Perez, C. 159 performance bull markets 134–136 current equity cycle 174–179 and cycles 53–56 diversification impacts 42, 45–47 dividends 38–41 equities vs. bonds 43–45 factors 41–45 historical trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 interest rates 69, 74–76 long-term 29–47 market timing 41–43 risks and rewards 35–38 valuations 43–45 volatility 30–31 personal computing introduction 12–13, 155 phases 2007-2009 financial crisis 171–174 asset classes 66–68 bear markets 123 cyclical vs. defensive companies 86 of equities cycle 50–56 growth vs. value companies 91–92 Phillips curve 182 Plaza Accord, 1985 148–149, 158 PMI see purchasing managers’ index policy, design of 25–26 population decline 216 post-financial crisis see current equity cycle post-war boom 129–131 prediction see forecasting price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) 53–56 printing press 223–224 prior conditions to bear markets 121–124 private sector debt 65, 110, 114, 160–161 private sector financial balance 124 privatisation 132 productivity growth 227–230 profit labour share of 185, 238–239 share of GDP, US. 186 profitability banks 214–215 bear markets 107, 115–117 current equity cycle 185–186 property and land bubble, Japan 114, 148–149, 155–156, 158, 160–161, 162, 164 psychology bubbles 144–145 of markets 21–25 policy setting 25–26 public ownership 132 purchasing managers' index (PMI) 59–61, 86–87, 89–90 Q QE see quantitative easing Qualcom 149–150 quality companies 193 quantitative easing (QE) asset returns 70–71, 119, 178–179 bond yields 173–174, 202–205 start of 17, 133–134, 171 United Kingdom 17, 204–205 United States 134, 171, 202–204 R radio, expansion of 154, 225 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) 154 railways bubbles UK 148, 152–153, 157, 163 US 153–154, 160 infrastructure development 224–227 Rau, P. 162 RCA see Radio Corporation of America Reagan, R. 14, 131–132 real assets 68 real estate bubble, US 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 recessions bear markets 101–103 current equity cycle 174–178 forecasting 20–21 recovery bear markets 101 current equity cycle 174–178 reinvestment of dividends 38–40 return on equity (ROE) 43–45 returns bull markets 134–136 current equity cycle 174–179 cycles 53–56 diversification impacts 42, 45–47 dividends 38–41 equities vs. bonds 43–45 factors 41–45 historical trends 29–31 holding periods 31–34 interest rates 69, 74–76 long-term 29–47 market timing 41–43 risks and rewards 35–38 valuations 43–45 volatility 30–31 reverse yield gap 77 risk assets, demand for 217–220 risk-free interest rate 68 risk indicators bear markets 119–125 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 110–111, 113–114 risk premia equity 35–38, 69 neuroeconomics 25 term premia 204–205 ROE see return on equity Rouwenhorst, G. 151 Russian debt default, 1997 108 S S&P 500 bear markets 103–105 and bond yields 72–73 concentration in 1990s 115 dividends 38–39 historical performance 38–39, 42 industry leadership 232–233, 237–238 and ISM 60 largest companies 237–238 US Treasury yields 206 sales growth 212 savings, current equity cycle 182 Schumpeter, J. 150 search companies 237 ‘search for yield’ 217–220 secondary-market prices 229–230 sectors across the cycle 83–85 dominance 231–233 secular bull market 127–134 disinflation 131–133 Great Moderation 133–134, 187–189 post-war boom 129–131 secular stagnation hypothesis 181 sentiment 5, 21–25 see also bubbles Shanghai composite stock price index 156 Shiller, R.J. 4–5, 23 short-term market forecasts 17–18 skinny and flat markets 139–140 smartphones 226, 229–230 Solow, R. 229 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 sovereign debt crisis 170, 171–173 Soviet Union 14–15, 133 speed of adjustment 74, 89–90, 122–123 Standard Oil 235 structural bear markets 105, 109–115 1960s 130 bubbles 113 debt levels 110, 114 deflation 113 duration 109–111, 117 financial crisis, 2007 118–119 interest rates 111–113 narrow equity markets 114–115 ‘new eras’ 113–114 risk indicators 110–111, 113–114 triggers 111 volatility 105, 115 structural changes 6 1980s 12–15 current equity cycle 76–79, 93–96, 169–200 sub-prime mortgage bubble 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 Summers, L. 181 Sunstein, C.R. 26 ‘super cycle’ secular bull market 127–134 see also secular bull market T technology 1920s America 154 bubble in 1990s 33, 93–94, 149–150, 156–157, 158–159, 161, 164 current equity cycle 189–190, 221–241 and disruption in 1980s 12–15 dominance 231–233 and growth 227–231 historical parallels 222–227 industrial revolution 224–226 Kondratiev cycle 3 largest companies 234–237 market value 234, 235–238 opportunities 230–231 personal computers 12–13, 155 printing press 223–224 railway bubbles 148, 152–154, 157, 160, 163 railway infrastructure 224–227 and widening gaps 238–240 telecommunications 13, 154, 225, 235–236, 238 telegrams 225 term premium collapse 204–205 TFP see total factor productivity growth Thaler, R.H. 26 Thatcher, M. 14, 132 Tokkin accounts 158 ‘too-big-to-fail’ 133 total factor productivity (TFP) growth 238–240 triggers bear markets 101–105, 106, 108, 111 cyclical bear markets 106 event-driven bear markets 108 structural bear markets 111 tulip mania 146–147 Tversky, A. 22–23 U ultra-low bond yields 201–220 demographics 215–217 and equity valuations 206–208 and growth 208–210 implied growth 210–215 monetary policy 201–205 quantitative easing 202–205 risk asset demand 217–220 UNCTAD see United Nations Conference on Trade and Development unemployment 121–124, 183–185 unexpected shocks 108 United Kingdom (UK) Black Wednesday 16–17 bond yields, historical 202 canal mania 152 deregulation 132 exchange rate mechanism 16–17, 111 privatisation 132 quantitative easing 204–205 railway bubble 148, 152–153, 157, 163 South Sea Company 147, 151, 153 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 129 United States (US) 10 year bond returns 43 Black Monday 16, 102, 148 bull markets 136 credit crunch 78–79, 170, 171 disinflation 132 dividends 38–39 Dow Jones 15–16, 131 equities in current cycle 207–208 housing bubble 70, 102, 118, 133, 145, 159 labour share of GDP 185, 238–239 market narrowing 114 NASDAQ 149–150, 161 ‘Nifty Fifty’ 114, 130–131, 233, 235 post-war boom 129–131 profit share of GDP 186 quantitative easing 133–134, 171, 202–204 radio manufacturing 154, 225 railway bubble 153–154, 160 stock market boom, 1920s 148, 154, 157, 160 vs.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

In July 1985, one of the biggest events in rock history, the Live Aid concert, was held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. The concert was attended by 160,000 fans while another 1.5 billion watched it on television or listened on the radio in 130 countries. The two simultaneous all-day concerts involved pretty much anybody who was anybody in the rock-and-roll world, and Phil Collins caught the supersonic Concord to play in both cities on two different continents. Hundreds of thousands of people raised their voices together to end the show by singing, ‘‘We are the World.’’ The Live Aid concert raised over $80 million in foreign aid that went to seven African nations: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.

See also Bitburg fiasco Korean Airlines Flight 007, 54 Koresh, David, 154 Kosovo, 189–91 Kuwait, 125–26, 128–29, 131, 134, 137 Lebanon: Iran-Contra scandal, 89–90; 1983 involvement, 59–62; TWA 847 hijacking, 88–89 Lennon, John, 72 leveraged buyout, 67 Lewinsky, Monica, 193–96 Lieberman, Senator Joe, 208–9, 233–34 Live Aid concert, 73 Los Angeles riots, 170–72 Luce, Henry, ‘‘The American Century,’’ Life magazine, 76 280 Index MAD (mutually assured destruction), 52 Madonna, 73 McCain, John, 205–7 McFarlane, Robert ‘‘Bud,’’ National Security Advisor, 88–89 McVeigh, Timothy, 176–78 media, 194; campaigns, 81–82, 146, 149, 188; domestic affairs, 172–74, 177, 203; foreign affairs, 131, 134, 160; politics, 140, 194–96 media markets, 31–32, 86, 113, 150, 188, 196, 207, 209, 237– 40 Medicare, 121, 185, 187 Microsoft, 163–64 Middle East, 14, 129, 141, 175, 224, 237, 243 Middle East Peace Accord, 155–57 midterm elections, 79, 129, 157, 204, 224 Milken, Michael, 67–68 Milosevic, Slobodan, 189–91 misery index, 27 modernism, 71–72 Mogadishu, 156 Mondale, Walter, 80–82 ‘‘Morning in America,’’ 83, 85, 187 MTV, 72 1980s, 25, 31–32, 35–36, 46– 47, 65–66, 69–70, 72, 77 1990s, 32, 131, 141, 152, 163, 165, 169, 176, 180–81, 196, 199–200 Nixon, Richard, 4, 17 ‘‘No Child Left Behind,’’ 213, 237 noblesse oblige, 112 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 118–19 North, Oliver, 89–92 nuclear: freeze, 55, 56; prospect, 96; war, 55–57 Nader, Ralph, 208 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 142, 161 Nagin, Ray, 243– 44 NASA, 93, 95 NASDAQ, 162 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 189–91 Nelson, Prince Rogers, ‘‘Prince,’’ 72 New Democrat, 145, 157, 184 New Orleans, 243– 45 New Right, 28, 29 New York City, 220.


Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star by Tracey Thorn

Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, East Village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Live Aid, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, University of East Anglia, young professional

I would later see the decade reviled, and then revived, but in a manner that bore almost no relation to the years I had lived through. Events which many of us had shied away from, or sneered at, or at least had reservations about, from the Royal Wedding to Live Aid, have now become the unchallenged and unchallengeable iconic moments of the period. It’s not possible to say that you watched not a second of the wedding, and that you were dismissive of Live Aid, without sounding like a complete killjoy outsider, but many of us simply lived an entirely different set of experiences, which seem to have gone unrecorded and unwritten about, so that it’s as though they never happened.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

In other places, public demonstrations of empathy with those suffering replace more finely tuned analysis, resulting in hasty or misplaced action – or none at all. While politics always has a relationship to emotion and sensation (to hope or anger, fear or outrage), when taken as the primary mode of politics, these impulses can lead to deeply perverse results. In a famous example, 1985’s Live Aid raised huge amounts of money for famine relief through a combination of heartstring-tugging imagery and emotionally manipulative celebrity-led events. The sense of emergency demanded urgent action, at the expense of thought. Yet the money raised actually extended the civil war causing the famine, by allowing rebel militias to use the food aid to support themselves.6 While viewers at home felt comforted they were doing something rather than nothing, a dispassionate analysis revealed that they had in fact contributed to the problem.

Index 1968, 16–7, 63, 188n33 15M, 11, 22 abstraction, 10, 15, 36, 44, 81 additive manufacturing, 110, 143, 150, 182 affect, 7–8, 113–4, 140–1 afro-futurism, 139, 141 AI (artificial intelligence), 110, 143 alienation, 14–5, 82 algorithmic trading, 111 Allende, Salvador, 148, 149 alternativism, 194n95 Althusser, Louis, 81, 141–2 anti-globalisation, 3, 159, 162 anti-war, 3, 5, 22, 162 Apple, 146, Arab Spring, 131, 159 Argentina, 37–9, 173 authenticity, 10–1, 15, 27, 82, 180 automation, 1–2, 86, 88–9, 94–5, 97–8, 104–5, 109–17, 122, 127, 130, 143, 150–1, 167, 171–4, 181–2, 203n15, 212n121, 214n161, 215n9, 218n45 banking, 43–6, 61, 147 Beveridge Report, 118 big data, 110, 111 Bolshevik Revolution, 131 Bolsheviks, 137 Russian Revolution, 139 Brazil, 75, 119, 147, 157, 169 Bretton Woods, 61–2 Brown, Michael, 173 care labour, 113–4 Chicago School, 51, 59–60 Chile, 52, 62, 148, 149, 150 China, 87, 89, 97, 170 class, 14, 16–7, 20–1, 25, 53, 64–5, 87, 91, 96–102, 116, 120, 122–3, 126–7, 132–3, 155–62, 170, 173–4, 189n1, 206n44, 233n119, 233n4, 233n5, 234n18 Cleaver, Eldridge, 91–2 climate change, 13–4, 116 colonialism, 73, 75–6, 96–7, 225n3 common sense, 9–11, 21–2, 40, 54–5, 58–60, 63–7, 72, 131–7 communisation, 92, 225n5 competitive subjects, 63–5, 99, 124 complex systems, 13–4, conspiracy theories, 14–5 cosmism, 139 Critchley, Simon, 72 cryptocurrencies, 143, 182 Cybersyn, 149–150 debt, 9, 22, 35–6, 94 demands, 6–7, 30, 33, 107–8, 130, 159–62, 167 no demands, 7, 34–5, 107, 186n3 non-reformist demands, 108 transitional demands, 215n5 democracy, 31–3, 182 direct democracy, 27–9, 31–3, 164, 190n8 direct action, 6, 11, 27–9, 35–6 education, 64, 99, 104, 141–5, 165–6 Egypt, 32–4, 190n21 energy, 2, 16,19,41, 42–43, 116, 147, 148, 150–51, 164, 171, 178, 179, 182, 183 Engels, Friedrich, 79 Erhard, Ludwig, 57 ethics, 42 work ethic, 124–6 evictions, 8, 12, 36 feminism, 18–21, 122, 138, 161 Fisher, Antony, 58–9, 196n34 food miles, 42–3 fracking, 8 France, 17, 62, 149, 167 free time, 80, 115–6, 120–1, 167, 219n50 freedom, 63–5, 120–1, 126–7, 180–1 negative freedom, 79 synthetic freedom, 78–83 Friedman, Milton, 56, 59–61 full employment, 98–100 future, 1, 71–5, 175–8, 181–3 G20, 6, 94 gender, 21, 41, 90, 122 Germany, 45, 56–7 ghettos, 95–6 Gramsci, Antonio, 132, 165 Graeber, David, 33 grand narratives, 73–4 Great Depression, 46, 65, 99–101, 114–5 Harvey, David, 135 Hayek, Friedrich, 54–6 Holzer, Jenny, 175, 178 horizontalism, 18, 26–39 housing, 8, 28, 35, 48, 77, 80, 95, 96, 148, 159, 167, 168, humanism, 81–3, 180–1 hyperstition, 74–5, 138–9 Iceland, 34, 164 idleness, 85–6 immediacy, 10–1 immigration, 101–2, 161 India, 87, 97–8, 130 inequality, 22, 80, 93–4 informal economy, 95–8, 203n10, 206n44, 210n95 Institute of Economic Affairs, 58–9 Iranian Revolution, 131 Jameson, Fredric, 14, 92, 198n10 Japan, 147 Jimmy Reid Foundation, 117 jobless recovery, 94–5 Jobs, Steve, 179 Johnson, Boris, 172 Kalecki, Michał, 120 Krugman, Paul, 118 labour, 2, 3,9, 17, 20, 21, 33, 38, 48, 52, 58, 61–3, 74, 79, 81, 83, 85–143, 148, 150, 151, 156–8, 161, 163–181, 182 Laclau, Ernesto, 155, 159 Lafargue, Paul, 115, language, 81, 132, 160, 164–5 leisure, 85–6 Leninism, 17, 131, 188n33 Live Aid, 8 localism, 40–6 locavorism, 41–2 Lucas Aerospace, 147 Luxemburg, Rosa, 15 Lyotard, Francois, 73, 74 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 58, 59 marches, 6, 30, 49 Marikana massacre, 170 Marinaleda, 48 Marx, Karl, 73, 79, 85, 86, 92, 115, 119, 121, 122, 132, 142, 156, 158, 180 Mattick, Paul, 92, 118 media, 2, 7–8, 31, 36, 52, 58, 60, 63, 67, 88, 118, 125–6, 129, 133–5, 163–5, 176, 182 Mirowski, Philip, 66 modernity, 23, 63, 69–85, 86, 131, 176, 181 modernisation, 23, 60, 63, 137, 174 Mont Pelerin Society, 54, 86, 134, 164, 166 MPS, 55, 56, 58, 66, 67, 134 Move Your Money, 44 Murray, Charles, 59 Musk, Elon, 179 National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, 172 negative solidarity, 20, 37 neoliberalism, 3, 12, 20–3, 47, 49, 51–67, 70, 72, 108, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 134, 141, 142, 148, 156, 176, 179, 183 neoliberal, 7, 9, 14–16, 20, 21, 37, 47, 49, 73, 93, 99, 118, 126, 127, 129, 131–2, 134, 135, 162, 169, 174, 176, 181 New Economics Foundation, 117, 144 new left, 18–22 New Zealand, 151 occupations, 5, 7, 10, 11, 29–31, 34, 49, 94, 172 Occupy Wall Street, 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 22, 26, 29–38, 126, 133, 158, 159, 160, 162, 189n1 ordoliberals, 54, 57 organic intellectual, 165–6 Overton Window, 134, 139 Partido dos Trabalhadores, 169 parties, political, 2, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 30, 34, 39, 46, 59, 105, 116, 118, 124, 129, 162, 164, 168, 169 personal savings, 94 Piketty, Thomas, 140 Plan C, 117 planning, 1, 15, 56, 141, 142, 149, 151, 182 Plant, Sadie, 82 Podemos, 159, 160, 169 police, 6, 30, 33, 36, 37, 102, 133, 161, 168, 171, 173 postcapitalism, 17, 38, 130, 143, 145, 150, 151, 158, 168, 178, 180 postcapitalist, 12, 15, 16, 32, 34, 83, 109, 115, 126, 136, 143, 145, 150, 152, 153, 157, 179, 180 Post-Crash Economic Society, 143 post-work, 23, 69, 83, 85, 86, 105, 107–127, 129, 130, 138, 140, 141, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 167, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Pou Chen Group, 170 power, 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 18–21, 26, 28–30, 33, 36, 43, 46, 48, 49, 59, 61, 62, 65, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 93, 100, 108, 111, 116, 120, 123, 127, 130–5, 146, 148, 151, 153, 155–74, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182 precarity, 9, 86, 88, 93, 94, 95, 98, 104, 121, 123, 126, 130, 156, 157, 166, 167, 173, 174 precarious, 2, 64, 117, 129, 167 Precarious Workers Brigade, 117 premature deindustrialisation, 97, 98 primitive accumulation, 87, 89, 90, 96, 97 prison, 90, 102, 103, 119, 133 incarceration, 102, 103, 104, 105, 161 productivity, 74, 88, 97, 110–17, 125, 150, 167 progress, 21, 23, 46, 71–5, 77, 107, 114, 115, 120, 126, 131, 138, 179, 180 protests, 1, 7, 18, 22, 28, 31, 37, 49, 66, 153, 164 psychopathologies, 64 radio-frequency identification, 110 race, 14, 31, 90, 102, 103, 140, 156, 171, 172 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 62, 66, 70 Republican Party (US), 135 resistance, 2, 5, 12, 15, 30, 35, 46–8, 49, 69, 72, 74, 83, 114, 124, 134, 158, 173, 181 Rethinking Economics, 143 Robinson, Joan, 87 Roboticisation, 110, 209n69 mechanisation, 95, 101 Rolling Jubilee, 9 Samuelson, Paul, 142 second machine age, 111 secular stagnation, 143 self-driving cars, 110, 111, 113, 173 shadow work, 115 slavery, 74, 90, 95, 103 slow food, 41, 42 slum, 86, 96–8, 102, 104 social democracy, 3, 17, 46, 66, 70, 167, 176 social democratic, 10, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 47, 57, 72, 80, 98, 100, 108, 123, 127, 168 social media, 1, 8, 182 South Africa, 119, 157, 170 Spain, 12, 22, 34, 35, 45, 159, 164 stagflation, 19, 27, 61, 65, 100 Stalinist, 17, 18, 137 strategy, 12, 20, 26, 49, 56, 67, 117, 127, 131–3, 136, 148, 153, 156, 163, 164 strategic, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 35, 49, 52, 55, 66, 70, 77, 108, 116, 131, 135, 157, 162, 163, 164, 170, 171, 173, 174 strikes, 9, 10, 28, 36, 37, 116, 120, 157, 167, 170–3 suicide, 94 surplus populations, 40, 86, 88–94, 96–97, 101–3, 104, 105, 120, 130, 166–7, 173, 203n10 Syriza, 159, 160 tactics, 6, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 26, 28, 39, 40, 49, 157, 164, 171–4 Tahrir Square, 32, 34 Taylorism, 152 technology, 1, 3, 72, 81, 88, 89, 98, 109, 110, 111, 129, 136, 137, 145–8, 150–3, 178, 179, 182 Thatcher, Margaret, 59, 60, 62, 66, 70, 72, 100 think tanks, 16, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 117, 134, 135, 165 trade unions, 10, 27, 47, 59, 61, 62, 71, 105, 116, 117, 124, 129, 148, 162, 166 labour unions, 16, 171 unions, 17, 18, 20, 27, 30, 44 UK Uncut, 126 unemployment, 20, 56, 60, 79, 86–98, 99, 100, 101, 101, 102, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 147, 159, 161, 168, 170, 173, 207n44 United Automobile Workers, 170 United Kingdom UK, 8, 20, 40, 42, 45, 52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 92, 93, 94, 117, 118, 126, 144, 147, 151, 172 United States, 8, 18, 29, 36, 44, 45, 59, 62, 78, 92, 95, 103, 114, 118, 123, 133, 135, 138, 167 America, 6, 16, 30, 38, 47, 56, 62, 76, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 110, 164 universal basic income, 108, 118, 123, 127, 140, 143 basic income, 80, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143, 164, 165, 167 universalism, 69, 70, 75–8, 83, 119, 132, 175, 197n1, 199n40 USSR, 62, 63, 79, 139 Soviet Union, 57, 70, 74, 139 utopia, 3, 28, 32, 35, 48, 54, 58, 60, 66, 69, 70, 72, 108, 113, 114, 132, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 146, 150, 153, 177, 179, 181, 182 vanguard functions, 163 Venezuela, 169 wages, 2, 71, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 111, 120, 122, 125, 156, 166, 167 welfare, 14, 38, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 73, 90, 100, 101, 103, 105, 118, 119, 122, 124 Wilde, Oscar, 182 withdrawal, 11, 47, 48, 69, 131, 182 exit, 47, 48, 181 escape, 3, 9, 11, 38, 69, 107, 114, 139, 165, 178 work, 1, 2, 16, 17, 23, 32, 36, 41, 44, 47, 64, 71, 85, 86, 90–6, 98, 100, 101, 103–5, 108, 109, 110–7, 120–7, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 152, 157, 163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 181 wage labour, 74, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 103, 104, 105, 120, 136, 141, 180 job, 2, 38, 41, 47, 48, 63, 64, 79, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 114–23, 124, 125, 126, 129, 147, 148, 161, 166, 167, 171 worker-controlled factories, 38, 39 workfare, 59, 100, 104 World Trade Organisation, 6 World War II, 46, 54, 56, 57, 115, 156 Zapatistas, 11, 22, 26, 35 zero-hours contracts, 93 Žižek, Slavoj, 140 Zuccotti Park, 31, 32


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Here are a few notable examples: Bangladesh George Harrison and his sitar mentor, Ravi Shankar, led two landmark benefit concerts in 1971, and produced a live album and a documentary film for Bangladesh that eventually raised $12 million in humanitarian aid for the new nation, which was overwhelmed by war, natural devastation, and millions of refugees.35 “We Are the World” A charity song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones in 1985 that raised over $60 million for humanitarian aid in Africa and the United States. A star-studded cast of more than forty singers appeared on the recording.36 Live Aid Benefit Concerts A pair of concerts organized by the Irish and Scottish musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise funds for humanitarian relief for Ethiopia, which was suffering a famine at the time. Over $200 million in donations was raised.37 Countless artists have supported social causes.

See Ben Cosgrove, “Concert for Bangladesh: Photos from the First-Ever Rock ’n’ Roll Benefit Show,” Time, Jul. 30, 2013. 36. See Amy Robinson, “Michael Jackson ‘We Are the World,’ ” The Borgen Project, Jan. 27, 2014, https://borgenproject.org/​michael-jackson-world. 37. See Catherine McHugh, “Live Aid 30th Anniversary: The Day Rock and Roll Changed the World,” Biography.com, Jul. 12, 2015. 38. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 39. Larry Fink, BlackRock, “A Sense of Purpose,” annual letter to CEOs, 2017. 40.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

These scientists did not work for the Burroughs Wellcome Company. They were doing investigator-initiated research, which required resources and reprogramming from other important projects, in response to a public health emergency. Indeed, one of the key obstacles to the development of AZT was that Burroughs Wellcome did not work with live AIDS virus nor wish to receive samples from AIDS patients. Presented with a working drug, the result of several decades of research, Burroughs Wellcome had merely carried out the final set of clinical trials to win approval for use from the regulator, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And even here, they received assistance.


pages: 116 words: 34,937

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

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

In June 2016, after a colourful trial during which Jimmy Page was quizzed as to whether the Mary Poppins song ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ might have influenced ‘Stairway’, a jury in California rejected the claim. For years after the dissolution of the band in 1980, Plant refused to perform the song, although he was pressed into it for Live Aid (1985), along with Zeppelin colleagues Page and Jones, backed by the drummers of Genesis and Chic, as well as for the 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion that marked the death of their record company boss Ahmet Ertegun. Both renditions were ramshackle. Unlike other Zeppelin warhorses, it is not part of his current set with Plant’s band, The Sensational Space Shifters.


State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century by Francis Fukuyama

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, centre right, corporate governance, demand response, Doha Development Round, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, Hernando de Soto, information asymmetry, liberal world order, Live Aid, Nick Leeson, Pareto efficiency, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

The dominant trend in world politics for the past generation has been, after all, the critique of “big government” and the attempt to move activities from the state sector to private markets or to civil society. But parix x preface ticularly in the developing world, weak, incompetent, or nonexistent government is the source of severe problems. For example, the AIDS epidemic in Africa has infected more than 25 million people and will take a staggering toll of lives. AIDS can be treated, as it has been in the developed world, with antiretroviral drugs. There has been a strong push to provide public funding for AIDS medicine or to force pharmaceutical companies to permit the marketing of cheaper forms of their products in Africa and other parts of the Third World.


pages: 487 words: 132,252

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography by Stephen Fry

Alistair Cooke, back-to-the-land, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Live Aid, loadsamoney, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Winter of Discontent

It was a glorious summer’s day, and, as we all wanted to watch television, Richard unwound an extension cord and put the set on a wooden chair in the shade of an apple tree. We sat on the grass and watched Live Aid all the way through to the end of the American broadcast from Philadelphia. ‘We should do something similar,’ Richard said. ‘How’s that?’ I wasn’t sure what he could mean. ‘Comedians can raise money too. Look at what John Cleese did for Amnesty with those Secret Policeman’s Balls.’ ‘So you mean a Comedians’ Live Aid show?’ Richard nodded. He had already been germinating Comic Relief in his head for some time. Now, almost twenty-five years later, he has devoted six or seven months of his time every other year to an organization that, love or loathe the enforced custardy jollities of its biennial television pratfest, has raised hundreds of millions of pounds to comfort those who have sorely needed it.


pages: 553 words: 153,028

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

Piggybacking off of Beatlemania, the album of the concert sold a million copies and won a Grammy, raising nearly $10 million. It became the model for dozens of other aid concerts that followed. Ever since, celebrity activists have tried to use their brand to amplify worthy causes. To name just two, Bono and Bob Geldof called the concert an inspiration for Live Aid, the world’s second major aid concert aimed at raising money for the 1985 Ethiopian famine victims. But the aftermath of the Concert for Bangladesh had a darker side. Money that was supposed to go to UNICEF sat in a lawyer’s bank account for twelve years awaiting an IRS audit into tax evasion and improper nonprofit registration.

., 350–351 Le Gourmet, 47–48 Lennon, John, 288 Liberation War Bay of Bengal submarine ploy, 348–351 at Chargram, 337–342 covert mission to bomb Dacca orphanage, 344 Grand Hotel as press headquarters, 349 in Karachi, 358 Operation Chengis Khan, 328–329, 331–333, 354 USS Enterprise, 346, 347–349, 362–364, 368 Yahya celebrations during, 346 Line of Control, 18 Live Aid, 410 Machado, David, xviii, xxii Madhur Café, 12–13 Mahajagmitra (ship), xvii–xxii, 104 Mahmud, Malik capturing Tonir, 372–374 election results reactions, 146–150 Hai and, 58, 106, 304–308, 323–325 joining Manpura regiment, 236 joining the resistance, 240–243, 256–262 military training of, 304 mission assigned to, 305–308 post-liberation, 412 on reconnaissance missions, 320–321 return to Manpura Island, 304 on Tonir as a razakar, 323–325 at Tonir’s trial, 375–376 at weapons handover ceremony, 394–397 Majhar, Tanvir, 300–302 Manpura Island.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

They formed a thirty-strong ‘supergroup’ to make a fundraising Christmas single, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ It raised £65 m and Geldof managed to persuade Margaret Thatcher to waive VAT for the famine victims. This success was followed by Live Aid, a linked global concert held in London and Philadephia in 1985. It was watched by an estimated 1.5 billion people in 160 countries, making it by far the biggest world television event to that point. Geldof continued to campaign on Africa, joining the Commission for Africa. Having sworn he would never try to repeat Live Aid, Geldof did so in 2005 with a host of rock stars, including U2 and the (briefly) reformed Pink Floyd, breaking more records for global audience numbers.

Tennant Ltd ref1 Hobson, Harold ref1 holidays ref1 Holidays with Pay Act ref1 Holtham, Gerald ref1 Holy Loch ref1, ref2 Home, Alec Douglas- ref1, ref2, ref3 homosexuality ref1, ref2 legalization of ref1 purge of ref1 in the theatre ref1 see also AIDS Horizon ref1 Hornby, Lesley ref1 housing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 see also council houses; tower blocks Housing Action Trusts ref1 Howard, Michael ref1, ref2 Howe, Geoffrey ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 on the Eurodollar ref1 and North Sea oil ref1, ref2, ref3 and privatization ref1 Howell, David ref1 Howells, Kim ref1 Hulanicki, Barbara see Biba human rights ref1 Hume, John ref1 humour ref1 Hunter, Anji ref1 hunting ref1 Hunt Saboteurs Association ref1 Hurcomb, Cyril ref1 Hurd, Douglas ref1, ref2, ref3 Hussein, Saddam ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Hutton Enquiry ref1 Hutton, Len ref1 Hyman, Peter ref1 Hyndley, Viscount ref1 ICI ref1 ID cards ref1, ref2 IEA (Institute for Economic Affairs) ref1 Iki, Lieutenant ref1 IMF (International Monetary Fund) ref1 immigration ref1, ref2, ref3 Indians ref1 Kenyans ref1 Pakistani ref1 Powell on ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ugandan Asians ref1, ref2 West Indian ref1 see also asylum seekers; multi-culturalism immigration and nationality department (IND) ref1 India immigrants from ref1 independence ref1 industry ref1, ref2, ref3 see also car industry; coal; rail system inflation ref1, ref2 Ingham, Bernard ref1, ref2 Ingrams, Richard ref1, ref2, ref3 Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) ref1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) ref1 internet ref1, ref2 IQ tests ref1 IRA (Irish Republican Army) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Iraq ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Iran, Shah of ref1 Ireland, Republic of ref1 see also Northern Ireland Irish ref1 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Irvine, Derry ref1, ref2 Islam, militant ref1 Isle of Skye bridge ref1 Israel, and Suez ref1 Issigonis, Alec ref1 Ivanov, Yevgeny ref1 Jagger, Mick ref1 Jam, the ref1 James Bond ref1 jazz ref1 Jenkins, Roy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 as Chancellor ref1 and Europe ref1, ref2 on immigration ref1 and the SDP ref1 Jenkins, Simon ref1, ref2, ref3 Jews ref1, ref2, ref3 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali ref1 Johnstone, Tom ref1 Jones, Clem ref1 Jones, Jack ref1 Jordan, model ref1 Joseph, Keith ref1, ref2 Joseph Rowntree Trust ref1 Kaufman, Gerald ref1 Keeler, Christine ref1 Kelly, David ref1 Kemp, Alex ref1 Kennedy, Charles ref1, ref2 Kennedy, John F. ref1 Kennedy, Ludovic ref1, ref2 Kenya ref1 immigrants from ref1 Kenyatta, Jomo ref1, ref2 Keynes, John Maynard ref1, ref2 Khrushchev, Nikita ref1, ref2, ref3 Kilmuir, Lord ref1 King, Cecil, and Wilson ref1 King, John ref1 Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, The (The Kinks) ref1 Kinks, the ref1, ref2, ref3 Kinnock, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 leadership election ref1 and the militants ref1 and the miners’ strike ref1 and Scargill ref1 and unilateral nuclear disarmament ref1 on Welsh devolution ref1 Koestler, Arthur ref1 Korean War ref1 Kosovo Liberation Army ref1 Kuanda, Kenneth ref1 Labour Party ref1, ref2, ref3 achievements ref1, ref2 conference, 1945 ref1 and devolution ref1 internal conflict ref1 public spending ref1 reform of ref1 see also New Labour; Scottish Labour Party Lady Chatterley trial ref1 Lamont, Norman ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 landowners ref1 Laski, Harold ref1 Lawson, Nigel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and the economy ref1, ref2, ref3 and North Sea oil ref1, ref2, ref3 and the poll tax ref1 and privatization ref1, ref2, ref3 Leach, John ref1 League Against Cruel Sports ref1 League of Empire Loyalists see NF league tables, police ref1 Leathers, Lord ref1 Lee, Jennie ref1 Lend-Lease ref1, ref2 Lennon, John ref1, ref2 lesbianism ref1 Levy, Michael ref1 Lewis, C. S. ref1 Liberal Democrats ref1 Liberal Party ref1, ref2 and the SDP ref1 Liddle, Roger ref1 LIFFE ref1 Lilley, Peter ref1 Limehouse Declaration ref1 Litterick, Tom ref1 Littlewood, Joan ref1 Live Aid ref1 Live8 ref1 Live and Let Die (Fleming) ref1 Liverpool City Council ref1 Liverpool Parks and Cemeteries ref1 Lloyd, Selwin ref1, ref2 London ref1 terrorist attacks on ref1 London Stock Exchange ref1 Look Back in Anger (Osborne) ref1, ref2 Lovelock, James ref1 LSD ref1 Lubetkin, Berthold ref1 Maastricht Treaty ref1, ref2, ref3 MacArthur, Douglas ref1 Macaulay, Sarah ref1 MacColl, Ewan ref1, ref2 Macdonald, Ian ref1 MacDonald, Margo ref1 MacGregor, Ian ref1 MacGregor, John ref1 Maclean, Donald ref1, ref2 Macleod, Iain ref1, ref2, ref3 Macmillan, Harold ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 on Africa ref1 attitude to spies ref1 on decolonization ref1, ref2 and de Gaulle ref1 and the economy ref1 and Europe ref1 and nuclear weapons ref1 and Powell ref1, ref2 social class ref1 mad cow disease ref1 Major, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and the ERM ref1 as Prime Minister ref1 and Thatcher ref1 wars ref1 majority verdicts ref1 Make Poverty History ref1 Malawi see Nyasaland Malaya ref1 Manchester, Moss Side ref1 Mandelson, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 manufacturing ref1 Mao Tse-tung ref1 marches ref1 Marcuse, Herbert ref1 Marples, Ernie ref1, ref2, ref3 Marshall Plan, the ref1, ref2 Mates, Michael ref1 Mathew, Theobald ref1 Matrix Churchill ref1 Matthews, Stanley ref1 Mau Mau rebellion ref1 Maxwell Fyfe, David ref1, ref2, ref3 Mayer, Louis B. ref1 McCartney, Paul ref1, ref2, ref3 McCullin, Don ref1 McGahey, Mick ref1, ref2 McGuinness, Martin ref1, ref2 McMahan Act ref1 McLaren, Malcolm ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 McNulty, Graeme ref1 McNulty, Tony ref1 means-testing ref1 Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) ref1, ref2 Melody Maker ref1 Meyer, Anthony ref1 Microsoft ref1 Middle East ref1 Middlemass, Keith ref1 migration, Jewish ref1 Migration Watch UK ref1 Mikardo, Ian ref1 Milburn, Alan ref1, ref2 Miliband, David ref1 Militant Tendency ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 military ref1, technology ref2 Millennium Dome ref1, ref2 Miller, Arthur ref1 Miller, Jimmie see MacColl, Ewan Milligan, Spike ref1, ref2 Millington, Ernest ref1 Milosevic, Slobodan ref1 miners, strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Mini-Minor ref1 minimum wage ref1 mini-skirts ref1 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food ref1 Ministry of Economic Expansion see DEA Ministry of Production see DEA Mitchell, George ref1 Mittal, Lakshmi ref1 Mitterand, François ref1 mobile phones ref1, ref2 Mods ref1 Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich ref1 monarchy ref1 Monckton, Walter ref1, ref2 Monday Club ref1 monetarism ref1, ref2 Montagu, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3 Montgomery of Alamein ref1 Moore, Jeremy ref1 Moore, Jo ref1 morality ref1 Morris, Estelle ref1 Morris Minor ref1, ref2 Morrison, Herbert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Morrison, Van ref1 mortgages ref1 Morton, Andrew ref1 Morton, H.


pages: 219 words: 61,334

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Freddie Mercury, the camp lead singer of Queen, whose whole life might be interpreted as a rejection of narrow, British masculine conventions, occupies 58th place. James Connolly, one of the Irish revolutionaries who led the 1916 Easter uprising, is 64th. The occultist and drug addict Aleister Crowley is 73rd. Bob Geldof, the pop singer who gained world fame by organizing Live Aid, is 75th. John Lydon (‘Johnny Rotten’), the lead singer of the Sex Pistols, is 87th – one place ahead of Montgomery of Alamein. Bono, the lead singer of u2 and activist for world peace, is number 86. Marie Stopes, the campaigner for women’s rights who was vilified in her day for advocating birth control, is 100th.


pages: 251 words: 76,868

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Frankly, history couldn’t care less what you or I say tonight. History only cares what we do when we leave, in the weeks, months, years even, that follow.”2 Corporate funding to combat AIDS has grown year after year. Bono’s sometimes partner in crime, British ex-rocker Bob Geldof, is known for a less subtle approach. At Live Aid in 1985, he simply screamed into the microphone, “Give us the fucking money!” As far as the people of destitute villages are concerned, it doesn’t matter if the person bringing freshwater, food, or vouchers is bug-eyed Bono or a stiff man in a suit—it’s what he delivers that matters. Even absent an “Actors Without Borders” organization, the celebrity-diplomat model has rapidly spread from West to East.


pages: 255 words: 77,849

Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Donald Trump, ghettoisation, Live Aid, mail merge, period drama, Rubik’s Cube, wage slave

I’ll have to go to China so I’ll miss the school trip to Dungeness Power Station, but that won’t matter because I’ll get famous from my panda charity and I’ll be able to go back there in the autumn as a celebrity. I think that David Van Day will be involved with my panda charity. And if we’re doing the pandas and rainforests then we might as well do Africa as well. We can have a big concert like Live Aid, David Van Day can sing a song, and I can sing the bits I learnt for my choir audition, and it can be at Wembley. I imagine people will want to make a film about it, so I’ll have to be careful with contracts etc. If it wins an Oscar I’ll need to look nice for the Oscars, so I must get Mum to buy me that purple shirt from C&A.


pages: 312 words: 78,053

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

Burning Man, call centre, Drosophila, Higgs boson, hive mind, index card, Large Hadron Collider, Live Aid, Magellanic Cloud, McJob, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

Maybe a quarter-mile away from the farm, I saw the first souvenir stand: a mobile home with some folding card tables out front, manned by an astonishingly fat woman wrapped in a blue shipping blanket and cuddling a pug. She was so odd-looking that I didn’t register the T-shirts at first: enlarged screen snaps of me naked. What the . . . ? There was another stand, then another, and then a small improvised community of people who’d been camping in tents like the farm was Live Aid 1985. There were also tailgate-partying tourists along the roadside who reminded me of the crowds who used to go to the old space shuttle launches in Florida. Nobody was paying any attention to my Mexican’s truck or to me. At the lane that leads to my place, a pair of armed guards stood before a long, man-high helix of razor wire.


My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

airport security, banking crisis, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, credit crunch, dark matter, David Attenborough, Jon Ronson, Live Aid, out of africa, pez dispenser, Russell Brand, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, traveling salesman, urban planning

What they’re trying to do is make their kids less attractive to paedophiles. What they’re forgetting is that they’re making it more difficult for them to run away. In Vegas I once saw an incredibly fat man on one of those little mobility scooter things, except he’d driven it onto a moving walkway, so he didn’t even have to drive. Now that’s lazy. Live Aid was a huge thing at school. I think it’s fair enough for kids to get excited about something like that. But the adults who bought it should have really been embarrassed. ‘The Christmas bells that ring there are…the clanging chimes of doom?’ Did that really happen? Even at 12, I’d had a host of sexual nightmares that were less weird than the video to that song.


Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

air freight, Live Aid, plutocrats, RAND corporation, telemarketer

Afew pieces of okay jewelry—her husband's taste? Later that week, Susan caught a snippet of her memorial ser-vice on Entertainment Tonight, with Chris Thraice, flown in fromGermany to lead well-wishers at the Westwood MemorialChapel in a painful, rockified version of "Amazing Grace" thatsounded like a Live Aid hugging anthem. She was ashamed of the shallow, pathetic tribute arranged by God only knowswhose people—Chris's probably—but then realized that itwould have been the PR people for her action-adventure movie,masterminding some contorted variation of a pity fuck to getpeople into the theaters and pump up the third weekend's gross.


pages: 288 words: 90,349

The Challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, deliberate practice, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, sustainable-tourism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

They prick our consciences, and may move many of us, including those with money or power, to try to help. Indeed, it was pictures of this kind beamed by the BBC from Ethiopia in 1984 that so disturbed the singers Bob Geldof and Midge Ure that they wrote the pop single “Do They Know It's Christmas?” to support Ethiopian famine relief. Their efforts grew into the fund-raising concerts Live Aid and, twenty years later, Live 8. It also inspired the launch of UK-based Comic Relief, a charity dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa and elsewhere, and with whom the Green Belt Movement works in Africa. A set of images has dominated the world's view of Africa for centuries, some intended to excuse injustice against the peoples of the continent, others to elicit compassion and wonder.


pages: 279 words: 91,148

Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler by Ethan Brown

barriers to entry, crack epidemic, Donald Trump, forensic accounting, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mandatory minimum

Released on January 15, 1985, King of Rock quickly outsold its predecessor, making RUN-DMC one of the first hip-hop acts to have a track record in the album format; at the same time, the success of the group on the road proved that hip-hop could draw arena-sized crowds. With RUN-DMC’s career taking on a historical importance in the hip-hop scene thanks to first-of-its-kind appearances at the massive benefit concert for African famine relief Live Aid and on American Bandstand and with LL Cool J’s “I Need a Beat” followed up with hits from the Beastie Boys and Jimmy Spicer, Simmons and Rubin were being courted by major labels to sign a distribution deal for Def Jam. The pair signed with CBS/Columbia during the fall of 1985 and though the label—whose roster included established R&B singers like Gladys Knight and Bill Withers—had little experience marketing hip-hop acts, few majors at the time did.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Recent research has suggested that conflict is 50 percent more likely to break out in an African nation in a year in which drought has led to food shortages—further reason to fear the impact of climate change.14 Images of starvation in Africa have been familiar to Western television viewers since the mid-1980s at least, when the Live Aid concerts of 1985 mobilized popular concern about the Ethiopian famine. But for the world’s rich nations, the fate of the “bottom billion” should now provoke not just compassion, but fear. In a globalized world, the suffering of the poor is not always going to be walled off from the West. The world population is growing rapidly.


pages: 364 words: 101,193

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, Climatic Research Unit, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Garrett Hardin, hindcast, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Medieval Warm Period, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, price stability, South China Sea, supervolcano, Tragedy of the Commons

Ghost rivers of the Sahara Far to the north of Kilimanjaro, in the Sahel, another drought-stricken area could by this time be experiencing some blessed relief. The Sahelian region of North Africa has long been synonymous with climatic disaster: during the 1970s and 80s famines struck the area with such severity that they sparked massive humanitarian relief efforts like Band Aid and Live Aid. Reporting from Ethiopia's refugee camps in 1984, the BBC's Michael Buerk spoke of a ‘biblical famine’ as the camera swept slowly over the dead and dying. Over 300,000 people perished during earlier famines in the 1970s. The Sahel is an immense area, stretching in a wide belt east to west across northern Africa from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to Somalia on the Indian Ocean.


pages: 556 words: 95,955

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted by Daniel Sokatch

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, indoor plumbing, Live Aid, lockdown, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, one-state solution, Salesforce, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, traveling salesman, urban planning, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Peres’s longtime rival for Labor leadership, Yitzhak Rabin (hero of the Six-Day War), would serve as defense minister. . . . OPERATION MOSES In the mid-1980s, a horrific famine ravaged Ethiopia, ultimately resulting in 1.2 million deaths. Images of the suffering shocked the world, including teenaged me. I was one of 1.9 billion people around the globe who watched the 1985 Live Aid concert and who donated what they could to try to end the suffering. (Still, in my opinion, the greatest act of musical social justice of all time, the concert raised tens of millions of dollars for famine relief, and Queen, in particular, put on a show for the ages.) Strange as it sounds, the famine in Ethiopia also played a significant role in my love affair with Israel.


How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, global pandemic, Live Aid, medical residency, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, sugar pill, trickle-down economics

Though timidly, the dominant: All by Lawrence K. Altman, “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials,” NYT, May 11, 1982; “Clue Found on Homosexuals’ Precancer Syndrome,” NYT, June 18, 1982; and “Five States Report Disorders in Haitians’ Immune Sytems.” See also David W. Dunlap, “Having Claimed 558 Lives, AIDS Finally Made It to the Front Page,” NYT, October 30, 2014. My friend Andy Mosso: Andy Mosso, email to author, January 4, 2016. Ermanno Stingo: See Ermanno J. Stingo Papers, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. A courtly figure: Bruce Kogan, email to author, May 13, 2013.

Within a few weeks: JS, email to author, March 25, 2014. Upon his return: JS, email to author, July 16, 2013. “Too embarrassing”: Intv. JS, July 28, 2009. “When I am asked”: Intv. MK, March 25, 2011. “the kingdom of the sick”: Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3. It took two years: David W. Dunlap, “Having Claimed 558 Lives, AIDS Finally Made It to the Front Page,” NYT, October 30, 2014. The progressive Village Voice: Stephen Harvey, “Defenseless: Learning to Live with AIDS,” VV, December 21, 1982; and James Kinsella, Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 29. I know he saw the first: NBC News did the first report, a brief piece on June 17, 1982, featuring BC images; CBS News followed with another brief BC report, on December 26, 1982.


pages: 341 words: 111,525

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

airport security, blood diamond, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, failed state, Live Aid, Livingstone, I presume, Scramble for Africa, transatlantic slave trade

The analysis was as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status. Things had been different when I was younger. I grew up in Britain in the 1970s and collected milk-bottle tops so that my Blue Peter children's television heroes could dig wells for Kenyan villagers. My last day at school in 1985 was the day when the Live Aid concert rocked the world for victims of the Ethiopian famine. And as a student in the late 1980s I did my bit to bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa, boldly refusing to use my cashpoint card in British banks linked to the white-only government. But by the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability.


pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions by Jason Hickel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Attenborough, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, degrowth, dematerialisation, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, European colonialism, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Zinn, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Watt: steam engine, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, Money creation, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration

We encounter it everywhere we turn: in the form of charity shops like Oxfam and Traid, in TV ads from Save the Children and World Vision, in annual reports published by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and every time we see the world’s nations ranked by GDP. We hear it from rock stars like Bono and Bob Geldof, from billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros, and from actors like Madonna and Angelina Jolie, khaki-clad and mobbed by eager African children. We get it in the form of Live Aid concerts and celebrity fundraising singles like ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, which somehow manages to crop up every year. Every major university offers degree programmes in development, and a whole class of professionals has emerged to staff the thousands of NGOs that have sprung up over the past few decades.


pages: 327 words: 112,191

War Doctor: Surgery on the Front Line by David Nott

Desert Island Discs, Kickstarter, Live Aid, no-fly zone, Skype

Many countries are riven with civil war because colonial national boundaries were drawn with little regard for local ethnic or tribal history, and the ‘strongman’ in Africa developed an often justifiable reputation for greed and corruption. Every now and then the West does sit up and take notice of Africa and its problems – perhaps most famously as a result of the reporting of the unfolding famine in Ethiopia in 1984, which led to the Band Aid, Live Aid and USA for Africa charity initiatives, raising millions of pounds. Some twenty years later the conscience of the West was pricked again, this time by a growing humanitarian disaster in a province in the west of Sudan known as Darfur. Sudan is enormous, covering a million square miles from its Red Sea coastline in the east to the vast desert wastes of the Sahara in the north and west of the country.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

And when you subjected him to any kind of rigorous discussion of reporting, he’d squint at you and look confused. But Griffin did become passionate when a business interest was on the line. Once, while I was co-hosting a charity concert called the Global Citizen Festival—a big, earnest, low-rent Live Aid—I interviewed the concert’s headline act, No Doubt. One of the festival’s goals that year was promoting vaccination, even as the anti-vaxxer movement in the United States was producing adherents and measles outbreaks. I asked Gwen Stefani if she vaccinated her kids, and how she felt about the anti-vaxxers.


pages: 401 words: 119,043

Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, British Empire, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ted Sorensen

Afterward, a Stasi report complained that the country had been double-crossed by the western authorities but that a wind traveling from east to west had mitigated much of the effect. At the very least, it all illustrated there was a huge appetite in East Germany for the kind of large-scale gigs that now occurred regularly around the globe since the heady days of Bob Geldof’s all-day concert to raise money for famine relief in Africa, Live Aid. That event had signaled to many governments and politicians the power of popular music to reach a global audience, and how if promoted correctly it could shed light on causes, people, and perhaps even countries. The Tunnel of Love Express tour wasn’t in the tradition of Bruce’s previous tours of visiting numerous cities and venues across many months.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

More liminally, it engages in shallow but pervasive political campaigns that are vaguely liberal and empowering though often countercultural and sometimes even scandalizing (as with black rap and hip-hop), but finally as vapid as the vacuously tendentious lyrics of its most scandalous songs.22 “Rock the vote,” it shouts, wrapping Madonna in a flag and urging youth to register. Live Aid, Free Your Mind, Choose or Lose—rock musicians flexing underdeveloped political muscles in the name of causes so safe and universal that the campaigns can do little harm though scarcely much good either. Political content, to be sure, is hardly a matter of carefully deliberated principle on MTV; more a question of aesthetics, taste—call it hip-hop whimsy.


pages: 443 words: 131,268

Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

A Pattern Language, Colonization of Mars, double helix, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, Live Aid, scientific worldview, Zeno's paradox

INVISIBLE OWLS I remember our night on the ridge I had seen a nook some years before Flat sand and shrubs in broken granite Right on the crest so I thought I could find it And you were game for anything We hiked up in late afternoon Carrying water in our packs Up in the shadow of the Crystal Range Up shattered granite all patched with grasses Until we stepped back into the light We found the nook and pitched the tent Between two gnarly junipers The sun set in the big valley's haze The light leaked out of the sky We leaned against rock cooking our supper And in the last electric blue The richest color in all the world We jerked at a flash in the air above And jerked again as out of the night Black shapes dove at both our heads In the dark we could barely see them Their quick dives made no sound at all Too big for bats too quiet for hawks We ducked it seemed at an onslaught of owls Out hunting in a little pack A strange disjunction of the senses Wings baffled to damp their noise So we heard nothing except the stove Yet saw the steep black strobe approaches The braking the sharp glides turning away Then one came close we sensed the talons I picked up the stove and held it aloft A Bluet canister with blue flames burning Bright in the dark blue expanse of space Beyond it black wings flitting away We laughed with just a touch of a shiver Actually to be considered as food Above the stars popped out all over Netted in the Milky Way And afterimages of blue flame Then we lay in our blue tent The moon rose and our air turned blue A blue still in us It will always be with us All the color of the twilight sky All the time and space we travel The years pass so many now Falling asleep owls twirl overhead I feel the granite under our bodies We soar in blue without a sound TENZING Tenzing did not speak much English Hungry food tired rest Paragraphs from a power in the land Teahouse to teahouse he led us Across land scored deep Rivers in mountains no end to them He arranged our food He arranged our sleep He showed us the way Up the gorge of the Dudh Khosi Green leaves leeches everything wet Always within the monsoon clouds One evening they cleared and there Above the peaks above the clouds Another range above the world We walked up there Namche Bazaar perched in space Thyangboche Pengboche Pheriche Up glacier canyons up their walls Over ice and rock to Gorak Shep Dead Crow the last teahouse Dawn struggle up Kala Pattar Sit on the peak necks craned up To look at Everest Massive slab bright in the sky Sargarmatha Chomolungma Mother Goddess of the World Tenzing pointed at South Col Fabled last camp littered with gear Terrible stories corpses Tenzing had been there four times Portering up and down Khumbu Icefall The sidewalk over the white abyss Where any moment the world could crash And end it all a place in other words Like any other place we stand Beside Tenzing we do not yet know The world and the icefall are the same We see it in his face's Himalaya Gleaming like ice in the sun Windy he said South Col very windy He was fifty-four Later that morning Lisa got sick He led her down by the hand Offering tea sips of water And brought us down to Pheriche Helped run the teahouse while Lisa recovered Helped the Sherpani who cooked all day Led us to the ancient monastery Showed us the wall of demon masks Took us to Thyangboche in the rain Made sure we saw the monks' mandala Five men in red sitting and laughing Over a circle of colored sands Rubbing funnels with sticks To free trickles of red green yellow blue Intent then a joke and we three Sitting with them through a dark rainy day We sit there still in some inner space He led us back down into the world Down to Namche down down to Lukla The little airstrip hacked into the wall Of the gorge an outpost of everything Led us into the Sherpa Co-op at dusk Everyone in there watching TV Powered by the Honda generator out back A video of the Live Aid concert Everyone stunned at the sight Of Ozzy Osborne chewing up the stage Tenzing the man who led us Who took care of us who taught us Finished eating and crossed the room Crouched beside me gestured at the TV America? he said No I said no that's England A REPORT ON THE FIRST RECORDED CASE OF AEROPHACY for Terry Bisson On my forty-third birthday I was nearly done With Mars the drafts were in a shambles Beauty in a novel (as in everything) is An emergent property emerging Late in the process and before that all Is chaos and disorder but my hopes Were high I felt that it was coming Together I wanted the final push to be The convergence of everything I wanted Unreasonable things I had in my possession Some bits of Mars a gram or two of the SNC Meteorite that fell on Zagama Nigeria In October of 1962 after thirteen million years In space little gray chunks of rock Mounted in a necklace given to my wife I unscrewed the casing took out a chunk Climbed onto my roof at sunset A clear day crows flying back From the fields the coastal range dark To the west gilt clouds above it The vault still blue the wind fresh From the delta and there I was On the roofbeam of my house in the middle of My life in the open air about to eat a rock That if not fraudulent a piece of Jersey Was an actual chunk of the next planet out It felt odd even in the performance I have never been able to explain Myself but can only note that in the Attempt to imagine Mars I came to see Earth more clearly than ever before This beautiful world now alive With the drama of an everyday sunset Black birds sailing east in lines Under my feet my home the sun Touching the coastal range I put the rock in My mouth all went on as before No electric shiver that the sunset itself did not Provide no speaking in tongues I bit down It was too hard to break in my mouth Tongued it side to side tasted no taste Ran it over my teeth a little rock Most of it would pass through me But the stomach's fierce acids would Surely tear at the surface of the rock And some few atoms I hoped would stick As carbon incorporated into my bones For their seven-year cycle or For good perhaps and so I sat Digesting Mars and the view the sun Ablink through the Berryessa gap The wind rising each life has its trajectory Up and down in the shimmer of ordinary moments Sudden euphoria stab of grief the pattern dustdevil Funneling down spiraling up in most Exquisite sensitive dependence On unknown factors that dusk nothing of the sort Happened it was a matter of will a Meditative discipline exerted day after Day for years to make a world Transparent in me and my mind at home And as I swallowed parts of another world This one wheeled about me like a veritable California THE REDS' LAMENT They never got it right not any of them not ever never on Earth by definition nor hardly ever on Mars itself the way it was back in the beginning the way it was before we changed it The way the sky went red at dawn the way it felt to wake under the sun light in the self rock under boot .38 g even in our dreams and in our hopes for our children The way the way always came clear even in the worst of the gimcrack chaos Ariadne's thread appearing or not in the peripheral moment lost lost then found and walking on a sidewalk through the shattered land The way so much of it had to be inferred through the suits we walked in cut off from the touch of the world we watched like pilgrims in love from afar alight with fire in the body itself felt as a world the mind apulse in a living wire of thought tungsten in darkness the person as planet the surface of Mars the inside of our souls aware each to each and all to all The way we knew the way had changed and never again would remain the same long enough for us to understand it The way the place was just there the way you were just thinking stone there The way everything we thought we knew in the sky fell away and left us standing in the visible world patterned by wind to a horizon you could almost touch a little prince on a little world looking for The way the stars shone at noon on the flanks of the big volcanoes poking through the sky itself out into space we walked in space and on the sand at once and knew we knew we were not at home the way We always knew we were not at home we are visitors on this planet the Dalai Lama said on Earth we are here a century at most and during that time we must try to do something good something useful The way the Buddha did with our lives the way on Mars we always knew this always saw it in the bare face of the land under us the spur and gully shapes of our lives all bare of ornamentation red rock red dust the bare mineral here of now and we the animals standing in it TWO YEARS We were brothers in those days you and I Mom off to work ten hours a day No child care no friends no family So off we went on our merry way To a nearby park walled by city streets Where Jamaican nannies watched us play One eye on their charges all stunned by the heat Kids here and there mom following daughter Me following you so cautious and neat Hands gripped as you rose on the teeter-totter Intent as you stepped on the bouncy bridge Then tossed your head back burbling laughter When you reached solid ground and stood on the edge Looking back at the span you had crossed without falling Plop on the grass to eat our first lunch You tease as we eat your laughter upwelling Pretend to refuse your apple juice Knock it aside and laugh at its spilling And laugh again at the flight of a bluejay Off to used bookstores' dim musty aisles Retrieving the books you have pulled out and used To toss on the ground and collect people's smiles Until I stop you and you throw a fit And so into the backpack off hiking for miles Your forehead snug on the back of my neck Home then to microwave Mom's frozen milk So that when you wake ravenous for it I'll have tested the temperature with a lick And can lay you out in my elbow's nook And watch you suck to the last squick squick And then you nap again I write my book And for an hour I am on Mars Or sitting at my desk lost in thought as I look Down at the perpetual parade of cars Your cry wakes us both from this dream And we're back at it the movement of the stars No more regular than our routine Untellable tedium not just the diapers The spooning of food the screams But also the weekly pass of the street sweeper The hours together playing with blocks I set them up you knock them down nothing neater And all the time you learning to talk Glossolalia peppered with names Simple statements firm orders Let go walk Telling me to do things a game That made you laugh also knowing When things were in different ways the same Blue truck blue sky your face glowing With delight as your language grew Till description became a kind of telling Power I spit out the sun I sky the blue Sitting in that living room together Each in his own world surprised by new Things spaced out lost to each other Used to each other like Siamese twins Confined to the house by steamy weather Me watching volleyball on ESPN Listening to Beethoven reading the Post You moving your trucks around babbling when You felt like it absorbed focused lost In your own space so fully that watching you I forgot my many selves collapsed to one and was most Happy the past is gone David I asked beloved of God do you remember Bethesda The way my mother would have Asked me Do you remember Zion And David looked at me curiously and said No Dad not really I know how the house looked but all That comes from pictures in Mom's albums you know Yes my first memory is not of Zion but California the Christmas I was three a brown Trike put together by my dad next to the tree but My dad tells me he bought the trike assembled How can we say what did or did not Happen David watching you I tremble You know the world are sophisticated You say you do not remember That time and now you know so much of hate Of anguish of death Will you ever again be so elated By the sight of swans swimming under the wharf Shrieking with laughter as they dove for tossed bread I hope we are these moments deeper than self Deeper than memory always connected Inside each other hoping This helps hope stave off dread Brother of mine boy receding I will try to remember for us The time when you could be so purely happy I SAY GOOD-BYE TO MARS Hiking alone in the Sierra Nevada I stopped one evening in Dragon Basin Above treeline by a small stream Trickling down a flaw in the granite On the floor of this crack were Lush little lawns green moss Furring the banks krummholz bonsai Clustering over low black falls Transparent water glossed on top Standing there I looked Over the fellfield basin a cupped Hand of stone catching rocks Inlaid with a tapestry of plants Lichen sedge and saxifrage Tippling green the pebble all bare Under jagged ridges splintering the sky Beside the rill I made my camp Ground cloth foam pad sleeping bag Pack for a pillow stove at my feet In the failing light my dinner steaming To the gurgle of water and the sky And the stars popping into existence Over the crest of the range still Alpenglow pink spiking indigo The line between the colors pulsing As they faded to two shades of black the number Of stars amazing the Milky Way perfectly Articulating my fall up and into sleep And was never tired Dreamed the same dreams And heard the rockslides rattle and thunder In the throats of these living mountains Something woke me I put on my glasses I lay looking up at stars and the Perseids Meteors darting across the starry black Every few heartbeats every direction Fast slow long short far near White or some a shade of red some Seeming to hiss slow down break up Firing great sparks away to the sides In their wakes I watched held by granite Entrained to a meteor shower beyond Any I had imagined possible the stars Still fixed in their places lighting The great shattered granite walls Of the basin all pale witness Together to fireworks one Plowing the air right over the peaks Fizzing sparks over Fin Dome One shot down just overhead Wow I cried and sat up to look As a great BOOM knocked me into A dark land sparked by fire Fires burning My God I cried oh my God oh my God Struggling to get out of bag into boots On my feet out stumbling around a smell Like autumn leaves burning the past I took up my water bag and crashed about Quenching fires that reignited As I ran to the next oh my God And ran to the stream and stopped thinking That here was the action of my life Putting out fires where there was no wood Vision crisscrossed with afterimages Of the final fall green bolts In every blink of the eye finally I stood in the dark understanding There was no need to hurry I came to a chunk of vivid orange A stone standing alone on a slab A meteorite still glowing with heat I sat down before it I calmed my breathing Cross-legged I watched it glow I put my hand out to it I could feel its heat some distance Away the pure color of fire Films feathering on its surface Incandescent in the night Illuminating the glacial polish Of the slab reflecting in that black Mirror the night quiet the air still Slightly smoky the stars again Fixed in their places the meteor Shower past its peak the stream Chuckling as it had all along Oblivious to the life in the sky A companion of sorts as I watched The burning visitation warm My hands as it filmed over Darkening in its orange Brilliance until it was both orange And black I went to get my sleeping Bag to drape me in my vigil Sleep gone again so many nights Like that but this time justified by My visitor cooling aglow black flakes Crusting over growing Orange darker underneath The moon rose over the jagged peaks Bathed the basin in its cool light Flecked the water in the stream Dark air holding invisible light The meteorite now black over orange Still warm still the center Of all that basin dark on its slab Of polished pale granite In the dawn the rock was purest black Of course I took it home with me And put it on mantelpiece as a Memento of that night and a mark Of where we stand in the world but I will always remember how it felt The night it shot down out of the sky And it glowed orange as I sat beside it And it warmed me like a little sun Purple Mars He crawls out of troubled dreams half-stunned and begging for coffee.


The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Edward Glaeser, end world poverty, European colonialism, failed state, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Live Aid, microcredit, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, TSMC, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair put the cause of ending poverty in Africa at the top of the agenda of the G8 Summit in Scotland in July 2005. Bob Geldof assembled well-known bands for “Live 8” concerts on July 2, 2005, to lobby the G8 leaders to “Make Poverty History” in Africa. Veterans of the 1985 Live Aid concert, such as Elton John and Madonna, performed, as did a younger generation’s bands, such as Coldplay. Hundreds of thousands marched on the G8 Summit for the cause. Live 8’s appeals for helping the poor and its dramatizations of their sufferings were moving, and it is great that rock stars donate their time for the needy and desperate.


The Rough Guide to Prague by Humphreys, Rob

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, centre right, clean water, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, Johannes Kepler, land reform, Live Aid, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peace of Westphalia, sexual politics, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile

The 1980s In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the inefficiencies of the economy prevented the government from fulfilling its side of the social contract, as living standards began to fall. Cynicism, alcoholism, absenteeism and outright dissent became widespread, especially among the younger (post-1968) generation. The Jazz Section of the Musicians’ Union, who disseminated “subversive” Western pop music (such as pirate copies of “Live Aid”), highlighted the ludicrously harsh nature of the regime when they were arrested and imprisoned in the mid-1980s. Pop concerts, religious pilgrimages and, of course, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion all caused regular confrontations between the security forces and certain sections of the population.


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

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

“Billions of people are going to die.” “Life on Earth is dying.” And, “Governments aren’t addressing it.”2 By 2019, Extinction Rebellion had attracted the support of leading celebrities, including actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, pop stars Ellie Goulding and Thom Yorke, 2019 Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, Live Aid producer Bob Geldof, and Spice Girl Mel B. While Extinction Rebellion may not have been representative of all environmentalists, nearly half of Britons surveyed told pollsters they supported the group.3 And the British were not alone. In September 2019, a survey of thirty thousand people around the world found that 48 percent believed climate change would make humanity extinct.4 But by the fall of that same year, public support for Extinction Rebellion, including the sympathy of journalists, rapidly declined after the organization shut down streets and public transit throughout London.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

While many people were probably drawn to the same idea, in 1994 a British producer named Charlie Parsons pitched the idea of mixing The Real World’s documentary format with a 1950s game show structure and dramatic competition. The idea was called, fittingly, a “documentary game show.” As part of a production team, including Bob Geldof, onetime lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and later the founder of Live Aid, Parsons pitched the new format to Swedish public television. Originally named Castaway and later Expedition Robinson, the show, set on a remote desert island, staged an ongoing physical competition under constant surveillance. The sixteen contestants were divided into two “tribes,” who would live on the island for about a month; at the end of each episode, one player would be voted off the island by the others.19 The show was a hit in Sweden, and when Parsons sold it elsewhere it was renamed Survivor.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

Bono, for one, has been a whirlwind in recent years, guest editing an issue of Vanity Fair on Africa, creating programs to raise awareness through highly identifiable “red” products that raise money for African causes, and pressing government leaders for debt relief for developing nations. Geldof has done likewise, helping to organize massive worldwide concerts like the Live Aid events, which harnessed the power of multiple pop stars to bring attention to the plight of the world’s poorest. How informed are these celebrity ambassadors? Are entertainers suited for policy work and grounded in the substance of the issues? Said one former top official of a multilateral development agency, “I’ve seen these guys in action and their commitment is impressive.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

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

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

Here and elsewhere, desertification acts as the trigger; climate change and population growth act as amplifiers; interethnic and tribal conflicts are the political by-product, and WhatsApp provides both an alluring picture of where things might be better—Europe—and a cheap tool for hopping a migration caravan to get there. “In the old days,” says Barbut, “we could just give them a Live Aid concert in Europe or America and then forget about them. But that won’t work anymore. They won’t settle for that. And the problem is now too big.” No walls will permanently hold them back. I interviewed twenty men from at least ten African countries at the International Organization for Migration aid center in Agadez—all had gone to Libya, tried and failed to get to Europe, and returned, but were penniless and unable to get back to their home villages.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

So he didn’t say anything—and he rejected aid being offered to him by organizations and NGOs, insisting it wasn’t necessary. When there was no longer any choice but to admit what was happening, a million people had already died. There were campaigns, festivals, collections for Ethiopia. A new personality then joined these campaigns: Bob Geldof, Bono, and Live Aid; that’s when the conscientious rock star was invented, our current version of a Voltairean intellectual, a person who takes advantage of the fame they have achieved through a cultural endeavor to help the disadvantaged. And, in this case, a person who doesn’t propose to change the global system but rather to use their access to it, a person who hangs out with the nice powerful people in the world to support his cause—because his cause doesn’t question those powerful.


Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

active measures, air freight, airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, clean water, computer age, Exxon Valdez, false flag, flag carrier, Live Aid, old-boy network, operational security, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent control, rolodex, superconnector, systems thinking, urban sprawl

He pulled down the three-inch thick door, locked it in place, and punched the ignition button. He could hear the gas jetting it and lighting off from the sparkler things inside, followed by the usual voosh. There was nothing unusual about this. Horizon Corporation was always disposing of biological material of one sort or another. Maybe it was live AIDS virus, he thought. The company did a lot of work in that area, he'd read. But for the moment he looked at the papers on his clipboard. Three sheets of paper from the special order that had been faxed in from Kansas, and every line was checked off. All the containers specified were now ashes. Hell, this incinerator even destroyed the metal lids.


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

As had happened in the American Midwest during the 1930s, overfarming was producing dust bowls, rendering the once fertile, feral lands nonarable wastelands.130 But African leaders knew that the world wasn’t much interested in their drought and famine. The crisis began in the late 1970s, but drew little global interest until 1985, when African journalists finally managed to get film of the Ethiopian disaster broadcast on British television and a group of rock-and-roll performers subsequently staged a seventeen-hour benefit concert, called “Live Aid,” that was simulcast in 152 countries, raising $70 million for African relief. African leaders were less than pleased about the attention their AIDS situation was garnering, particularly as they had no idea exactly how serious it really was. Few, if any, of them believed in 1985 that AIDS could possibly match the severity of the drought and famine, or of the region’s malaria epidemic, or of its general economic woes.